ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates feedback loops between late-nineteenth-century oral and print culture, examining how public speech events, omnipresent in all cultural fields from politics to higher education and rational recreation, traveled through the medium of print in order to resurface in different oral performances. More specifically, it explores transmedia practices in late-Victorian popular lecturing culture with a special view to the (increasingly more frequent) accounts of female public speaking. It argues that the participatory practices of nineteenth-century periodicals, their remodeling of audience engagement via editorials, letters to the editor, or write-in competitions, converged with the interactivity of lecture performances and their specific temporalities. Popular lectures responded to, and helped to condition, wider changes in British society and culture. The second part of the chapter links the narrative about increasing female participation to the dynamics of late-nineteenth-century media change, i.e. the decline of lecturing culture during the later 1890s. On the cusp of modernism, forms of technophobia (or -skepticism) occasionally camouflaged conservative prevarications about a more inclusive society and women’s political participation. Narratives of female – and indeed human – agency are thus submitted to scrutiny in this example of (pre-)modernist skepticism about presence, immediacy, and individual political impact in an increasingly technologized and transmedial world.
