I remember a funny dinner at my brother’s, where, amongst a few others, were Babbage and Lyell, both of whom liked to talk. Carlyle, however, silenced every one by haranguing during the whole dinner on the advantages of silence. After dinner, Babbage, in his grimmest manner, thanked Carlyle for his very interesting Lecture on Silence.
(Charles Darwin, Autobiography)
Scatterbrain London
L
ATE IN OCTOBER 1864, during a dinner with family and friends, Charles Dickens received a telegram that read simply “LEECH DEAD.” Marcus Stone, a guest at the dinner, later recalled, “silence fell upon us. . . . No one said a word. What was there to say?”1 In the following weeks, as Dickens struggled to complete another monthly installment of Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), he made an unusual confession to John Forster: “I have not done my number. This death of poor Leech (I suppose) has put me out woefully. Yesterday and the day before I could do nothing; seemed for the time to have quite lost the power; and am only by slow degrees getting back into the track to-day.”2 Dickens’s biographers have described these lines as a “cry of personal lamentation,” a sign that Dickens felt “desiccated, unable to work” after the death of John Leech, his close friend and, more famously, his illustrator for A Christmas Carol (1843) and other Christmas stories.3 As the words of the novelist and Stone indicate, however, Leech’s death caused Dickens more than “personal” pain. It brought on a professional crisis, for it reduced the characteristically prolifi c author to an unfamiliar state of nonproductivity. Leech’s death, if only temporarily, stopped Dickens’s hand and silenced him.That the passing of Leech brought such silence is ironic, since what precipitated his death was noise. Clanging bells, cracking whips, clattering carriages, clamoring
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hawkers and cabmen, roaring crowds, barking dogs—these sounds regularly accosted Leech and other Londoners, but scattered about the streets stood the worst offenders of all: the itinerant musicians, in Dickens’s words, those “brazen performers on brazen instruments, beaters of drums, grinders of organs, bangers of banjos, clashers of cymbals, worriers of fi ddles, and bellowers of ballads.”4 Driven nearly mad by street music over his fi nal years, Leech allowed this to exacerbate what already was for him a serious heart condition and nervous temperament. His fi nal words to his fellow artist and future biographer William Powell Frith indicate the depth of his misery: “‘Rather, Frith,’” Leech bitterly commented the month of his death, “‘than continue to be tormented in this way, I would prefer to go to the grave where there is no noise.’”5 Days later, he got his wish, bringing him the quiet he felt he had been unjustly denied in life.
In his antipathy toward street music in Victorian London, Leech had plentiful company. Throughout the city, artisans, academics, musicians, clergy, and doctors and their patients shared Leech’s suffering and railed against what an author of a leading article from a May 1856 Times called “the noisy, dizzy, scatterbrain atmosphere of London.”6 As tempers fl ared, the fi ght against the oppression of street noises mounted in print and Parliament. With predictable indignation, another Times leader em-phatically declared for the exasperated many, “there is no London nuisance equal to that of out-door music! . . . O for a little quiet in London!”7 Anger and disgust among the middle classes soon found its outlet and target. The prolonged war of words and images that ensued not only resulted in new legal restrictions upon music-makers but also accelerated what Peter Bailey has identifi ed as “a continuing struggle between refi nement and vulgarity.”8 For the battle revealed a midsection of later Victorian society in the process of making one of its more elaborate, fi erce efforts toward collective action and self-defi nition.
What can loosely be considered the anti–street music movement represents a critical aspect of the context in which much if not most of the major artwork and literature of the period developed. The infl uential urban historian H. J. Dyos was among the fi rst to suggest the specifi cally acoustic nature of this context. He observed that in cities of the modern era, silence had become a commodity of precious value, while the impact of sensory overstimulation remained unclear: “What is less certain [than the modern value put upon silence],” Dyos wrote, “is whether the combined assault on the senses of a profusion of sights, smells, noises, crowds, moving objects, changing levels, constraints, commands, is an important source of disturbance to people.”9 Without doubt—with urgency, in fact—the excessiveness of one of the urban qualities Dyos mentioned, noise, evolved into “an important source of disturbance” during the latter half of the Victorian age. On a larger scale than before, noise began in this period to alter the agents, subjects, and conditions of artistic and intellectual occupations as well as much other professional employment.
Beginning at midcentury, advocates for silence on the streets waged a battle to impose the quiet tenor of interior middle-class domesticity upon the rowdy terrain outside. Thomas Carlyle’s renowned attack on noise served as a kind of overture to those that followed. Carlyle’s long-standing aversion to noises of all kinds, ranging from piano-playing neighbors to crowing roosters and chickens, is legendary; Thea Holme, among others, relates the facts in amusing detail.10 By 1853, nearly two
T H E S O UN D PR O O F ST U DY 143 decades after moving to Cheyne Row in Chelsea, the “UNPROTECTED MALE,” as Carlyle referred to himself, had had enough of “Demon Fowls” and other disturbances to issue bloodthirsty responses in defense of his territory: “Those Cocks must either withdraw or die. That is a fi xed point;—and I must do it myself if no one will help: it is really too bad the ‘celebrated man,’ or any man, or even a well-conditioned animal (of any size) should be submitted to such scandalous paltrinesses.”11 He reserved special venom for his nemesis, a “vile yellow Italian” organ grinder: “The question arises, Whether to go out and, if not assassinate him, call the Police upon him, or to take myself away to the bath-tub and the other side of the house? Of course, I ought to chuse the latter alternative,—and do, for the wretch’s organ is a horse one, I hear;
drawn by a horse; and, one w[oul]d think, played by one!”12 “All summer I have been more or less annoyed with noises, even accidental ones, which get free access thro’ my open windows . . . henceforth I hope to be independent of all men and all dogs, cocks and household or street noises.” he wrote later that year, as his limited patience reached its end.13 For Carlyle, to rest, but more important to work, depended upon denying outdoor commotion “free access” to interior professional space.
Carlyle’s solution to the problem made spatially evident the complications that many Victorian intellectuals in London faced as they struggled for both professional differentiation and quiet. Carlyle sought to create a personal space that outside sounds could not infi ltrate, a sanctum in which he would go on to write Frederick the Great (1858–65). Although the idea of a soundproof attic study had occurred to him at least a decade earlier, events of 1853 revived his hope in it: “Masons (who have already killed a year of my life, in a too sad manner), are again upon the roof of the house,—
after a dreadful bout of resolution on my part,—building me a SOUNDLESS ROOM!
‘The world, which can do me no good, shall at least not torment me with its street and backyard noises.’”14 The construction of Carlyle’s study provided an intriguing juncture for a number of Victorian concerns. With new double walls, skylights, and slated roof with muffl ing air chambers beneath, the room signifi ed what Carlyle referred to as his “glorious conquest”: a professional seizure of urban space, and an architectural tactic by which to expel the threat of the noisy rabble and thereby preserve an authorial career.15 Yet it was also a tactic that encapsulated the oddly positioned existence of silence-seeking professionals whose living and working spaces overlapped.
In her formative study of the Victorian home, Jenni Calder writes of the drive of the middle classes to escape urban realities and attain a degree of separateness and self-defi nition within the home: “Society itself was ugly. The aspect of the urban world was not nice to look upon. There was dirt, there was noise, there was human excrement, there was starvation, there was crime, there was violence, all on the surface, all very close to the senses of all who ventured beyond their front doors. . . . To have an interior environment that enabled such things to be forgotten was a priority of middle-class aspiration.”16 In one sense, then, Carlyle’s plan for the soundproof study was another—even the defi nitive—step toward self-identifi cation with members of the professional class, whose emerging sense of group identity directly confl icted with the problem of street noise. Carlyle’s construction of a room specifi cally designed to keep out city noises provided a spatial reinforcement of a vocational identity, even as it kept the threats of the base distractions of society at bay.
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At a cost of some £200 to construct, however, the silent space did not come cheaply.
Such a price lends support to Dyos’s observation about the gradual commodifi cation of silence in urban areas. At the same time, Carlyle’s soundless room demonstrates how that shift could manifest itself domestically, or, in more general terms, territorially, as a phenomenon particular to an emerging stratum of professionals who sought through silence to localize, even spatially contain, noise.
Changing productions and conceptions of noise have tended to be overlooked or, more precisely, underheard in standard social and literary histories, but there are signs this is starting to change, as scholars have begun reconstructing “auditory landscapes” of the past to discern “the elaboration of collective and territorial identities.”17 Along similar lines, Jacques Attali’s politicized history of music remains a provocative study of the relations between sound and power, and it offers a theoretical perspective from which to consider the street music problem. Attali writes that “all music, any organization of sounds is then a tool for the creation or consolidation of a commodity, of a totality . . . [and] any theory of power today must include a theory of the localization of noise and its endowment with form.”18 Noise, Attali goes on to claim, “indicates the limits of a territory and the way to make oneself heard within it, how to survive by drawing one’s sustenance from it” (6). If Attali is correct to see throughout history an ongoing confl ict between makers of music and those of noise, then the events under scrutiny in this chapter provide an especially suitable opportunity for testing the resonance of his claims. It follows that the anti–
street music movement can be considered an urban territorial campaign, a confl ict for control between regions of harmony and those of dissonance. That confl ict often manifests itself in legal action, for “the institutionalization of the silence of others assure[s] the durability of power” (8). Noise, then, in a defi nition quite relevant to this discussion, “is violence: it disturbs. To make noise is to interrupt a transmission, to disconnect, to kill. It is a simulacrum of murder” (26). Attali’s claim captures the underlying message in Leech’s fi nal words to Frith, in which the ailing artist expressed his belief that he was being violently driven to the only quiet place left him. And in Attali’s terms, Carlyle’s soundproof chamber institutionalized silence to “assure the durability” of the author’s literary ability and power.19
While Attali offers a compelling theory of the relationship between sound and silence, that theory only represents a starting point for what follows. Later nineteenth-century Londoners’ deliberations over street music served as a gauge of an urban community’s explicit demands and entrenched biases. During the period under discussion, fi ghts for silence repeatedly emerged as regional struggles against street music, insofar as they attempted not only to protect literal neighborhoods and city blocks from intrusive noises but also to defend more abstract regions of identity, those critical domains of nationality, professionalism, and the body. Hence, these ongoing battles over sounds were concretely as well as conceptually territorial. Even as those opposed proclaimed as their principal goal the removal of music from the streets throughout the City and West London, including Belgravia, Kensington, and Chelsea, they endeavored to maintain clear boundaries in three principal areas that necessarily interrelated and at times overlapped: fi rst, defending the purity of English national identity and culture against the taint of foreign infi ltration; second, upholding economic and social divisions between the lower classes and middle-class professionals;
T H E S O UN D PR O O F ST U DY 145 and third, protecting the frail, affl icted bodies of (English, middle-class) invalids from the invasive, debilitating effects of (foreign, lower-class) street music. What might have seemed a harmless entertainment thus came to represent a rallying point for the large numbers of Londoners, including Carlyle, Leech, and ultimately even Dickens himself, who heard in street music the strains of a powerful threat.
“Blackguard Savoyards and Herds of German Swine”
Seedy Savoyard, wherefore art thou grinding?
Rough blows the wind, thy pipes are out of order, Old is thy tune, thy monkey is a nuisance, So is thy organ.
(“Friend of tranquillity,” in The Owl)
To refer to the anti–street music attacks as such is perhaps misleading, for generally speaking, they were directed less against all outdoor music and performers than at certain types of music and particular players. Isolated published indictments of London street musicians appeared as early as the fi rst decade of the nineteenth century, but the frequency of the reports rose signifi cantly in the 1840s, when the Times began to print complaints against street noise on a regular basis. Scholars have noted that “the decibel count seemed to have increased from mid-century on” in London streets, in part from higher rates of immigration and commercial growth, and that street trading in the middle decades of the century was “augmented by a rare audibility.”20 In London Labour and the London Poor (1861), Henry Mayhew described the array of nationalities of what he estimated were upward of one thousand street musicians in London during the period, including English violin-players, street bands, and a harpist, Irish and Scotch pipers, a German brass-bandsman, a French hurdy-gurdy player, a host of Italian street entertainers, and numerous percussionists and minstrel-singers from England, India, and the United States.21 The increasing number and variety of musicians throughout the 1850s brought an escalation of published letters of attack and one of the fi rst appearances, in an 1851 Times headline, of the phrase “organ nuisance” to designate the larger problem of noisy street music.22 This move by the Times allowed the press and public to simplify a larger problem by singling out a particular type of performer upon which to place blame for the interruptions of daily life. As a consequence, the street music nuisance of the 1840s resolved itself, through synecdoche, into the “organ-grinding nuisance” of the 1850s and 1860s. The Italian organ grinders came to be seen as the repulsive source of virtually all noise in the city, and their eradication the task of every “Friend of Tranquillity.”23
This development was complicated by the fact that a number of the outraged had legitimate grievances against those street musicians who in essence used extortion to make their living. To get certain organ grinders to stop playing or go elsewhere, a noticeable segment of the complainants regularly had to pay them off, and this understandably only fueled the anger against them. Street music had few defenders, and these could do little to offset the quantity of outbursts of the incensed majority.
In his London (1841), Charles Knight published an early defense in response to the
146 J O H N P I C K ER
1839 Metropolitan Police Act, which attempted to legislate street noise. Knight openly sympathized with the musicians; street music, he wrote, “ought now to be left alone, if it cannot be encouraged by the State.” Over two decades later, during the 1864 street music debates in Parliament, aristocratic MPs spoke out on behalf of the working classes, paternalistically claiming that doing away with organ grinders would deprive the poor of one of their few forms of entertainment. Also that year, the journal Good Words published a short article and illustration sympathetic toward the organ grinders, claiming they were “discoursing the best music of the day, and educating the ear of hundreds for a few halfpence.”24 Minor and infrequent as defenses such as these were, they failed to counteract the prevailing hostility toward street music. Perhaps of greater signifi cance, the grinders, many of whom had only a rudimentary command of English, were for the most part not able to speak, let alone publish, for themselves. With the possible exception of interviews by Mayhew and some scant police reports, the words and sentiments of the musicians, when noted at all, were presented by intermediaries whose antipathy, fear, and ignorance shaped their depictions.
The noise itself was a very real and potent concern to those who felt the force of it. An early article by Charles Manby Smith that analyzed the problem echoed Mayhew (or perhaps foreshadowed him) by imposing external order in the form of nine separate “classes” upon the seemingly jumbled collection of “Music-Grinders of the Metropolis.” One of the fi rst authors explicitly to single out the organ grinders for their particular brand of disturbance, Smith used terms that other critics soon adopted when he described them as “the incarnate nuisances who fi ll the air with discordant and fragmentary mutilations and distortions of heaven-born melody, to the distraction of educated ears and perversion of the popular taste.”25 Smith’s groupings of the grinders included “hand organists,” “monkey-organists,” “blind bird-organists,”
“fl ageolet-organists,” and “the horse-and-cart organists.” Under this last heading, Smith provided one of the most colorful of the many descriptions of the jarring sounds of organs during the period:
The piercing notes of a score of shrill fi fes, the squall of as many clarions, the hoarse bray of a legion of tin trumpets, the angry and fi tful snort of a brigade of rugged bassoons, the unintermitting rattle of a dozen or more deafening drums, the clang of bells fi ring in peals, the boom of gongs, with the sepulchral roar of some unknown contrivance for bass, so deep that you might almost count the vibrations of each note—these are a few of the components of the horse-and-cart organ, the sum total of which it is impossible to add up. (199)
While the performances of smaller organs did not approach the magnitude of these
While the performances of smaller organs did not approach the magnitude of these