ABSTRACT
Telegraphy brought countries closer together, but it also drew attention to residual problems of international communication. It is no coincidence that the age of the telegraph was also the age of invented languages – Esperanto most famously, but also dozens of others. At the same time, it was widely claimed that non-verbal forms of communication were naturally universal, and that certain patterns in art recurred over eons and across different cultures because they appealed to a fundamental aesthetic faculty. This essay attends to the range of universalisms at play in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a view to reopening the discussion about universal visual languages. It examines a set of examples which appealed to the common properties of nature, particularly those of the human body: the phonic alphabet known as Visible Speech, which was published by Alexander Melville Bell in 1867; the art theories of Wassily Kandinsky and Walter Crane; and the dance and movement systems promoted by François Delsarte, Margaret Morris, Edward Gordon Craig and Isadora Duncan.
