Roger Parker - London Voices, 1820–1840: Vocal Performers, Practices, Histories

Edited by Roger Parker and Susan Rutherford

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2019 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2019

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-67018-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-67021-8 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226670218.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Parker, Roger, 1951 editor. | Rutherford, Susan, editor.

Title: London voices, 18201840 : vocal performers, practices, histories / edited by Roger Parker and Susan Rutherford.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019016539 | ISBN 9780226670188 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226670218 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: MusicEnglandLondon19th centuryHistory and criticism.

Classification: LCC ML286.8.L5 L65 2019 | DDC 780.9421/09034dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019016539

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

London Voices 18201840: A Luminous Guide

Roger Parker and Susan Rutherford

How the Ballad Singer Lost Her Woice

Oskar Cox Jensen

The Traffic in Voices: The Exchange Value of Italian Opera in Giuseppe Mazzinis London

Mary Ann Smart

Interpreting the Italian Voice in London (and Elsewhere)

Claudio Vellutini

The Castrato as Creator: Vellutis Voice in the London Sheet-Music Market

Sarah Fuchs

The Essence of Nine Trombones: Luigi Lablache and Models of Masculinity in 1830s London

Sarah Hibberd

Adelaide Kemble and the Voice as Means

Matildie Thom Wium

On Tongues and Ears: Divine Voices in the Modern Metropolis

James Grande

From Dissent to Community: The Sacred Harmonic Society and Amateur Choral Singing in London

Wiebke Thormhlen

Foreign Voices, Performing Frenchness: Jenny Colon and the French Plays in London

Kimberly White

Singer for the Million: Henry Russell, Popular Song, and the Solo Recital

Susan Rutherford

Vessels of Flame: Letitia Elizabeth Landon and the Improvisers Voice

Melina Esse

Silver Fork Novels and the Place of Voice

Cormac Newark

Voice Boxes

Ellen Lockhart

Roger Parker and Susan Rutherford

The Luminous Guide in our title comes from a publication whose frontispiece deserves, even demands, its own indented space:

Leighs New Picture Of London; Or, A View Of The Political, Religious, Medical, Literary, Municipal, Commercial, And Moral State Of The British Metropolis; Presenting A Luminous Guide To The Stranger, On All Subjects Connected With General Information, Business, Or Amusement. To Which Are Subjoined A Description Of The Environs, And A Plan For Viewing London In Eight Days.

Assembled and published by the bookseller Samuel Leigh in 1839, this volume was the latest (and last) in a series of travel guides to London first published in 1818. As the spectacularly loquacious title suggests, it set out to provide a painstakingly comprehensive introduction to the city for the tourist or other temporary resident: places to go, people to see, experiences to be savoured. Above all, the book promised its readers a way to make sense of the cityliterally to make newly legible a space that was becoming notoriously bewildering even for those who considered themselves natives. Leighs publication was, in other words, a practical way of counteracting the overwhelming sense that Thomas De Quincey had identified some years earlier in a famous essay. Encased in a coach flying towards the metropolis, De Quincey had figured London as some kind of monstrous planet, an attracting body, gathering to it the infinite means needed for her infinite purposes; he concluded that the coming metropolis forces itself upon the dullest observer, in the growing sense of his own utter insignificance... a poor shivering unit in the aggregate The sense of a gathering storm, even of an approaching quasi-biblical apocalypse, is palpable: small wonder that Leigh needed to proclaim, and loudly, the all-inclusiveness of his luminous approach.

In some respects, the present collection attempts a feat similar to Leighs, if with no claim to his compendiousness. But the first part of our title establishes a very different metaphorical ground. While Leighs ways of understanding the metropolis are, in common with old Enlightenment terms, resolutely concerned with the visual, we want instead to understand by means of sound, and particularly by means of voice. Such a concentration is in one sense obviously liberating, as would be any sense of clearing the metaphorical air; but such beckoning freedoms as always come with certain constraints. It is clear, for example, that our idea of London voices carries with it some ambiguity. Most obviously, it suggests voice as a noun, thus gesturing to the multitudinous voices that were heard in countless contexts and venues in the city during two tumultuous, disorientating decades in the first half of the nineteenth century. These were years in which the citys population expansion was at a height, and when, as a result, different classes were placed in dangerous butat least to later eyesculturally fruitful proximity; in which ideas of political and social Reform were constantly in the air, but barely managed to keep in check the forces of unrest that had periodically erupted in Londons great rival capital across the Channel; in which Londoners ignored or even stubbornly resisted the infrastructural changes (in local government, in sanitation, in transportation regulation) that were being proposed with increasing urgency and that would, a few decades later, mark the beginning of a more efficiently networked, more ruthlessly rationalized metropolis. To put this more simply, it would be vain to assume that those London voices could ever sing in mutually reinforcing harmony, let alone in a resounding unison.

Equally important for us, though, is that the idea of London voices can also embrace a more active sense: the notion that envoicing a city might be an important step, following an increasing trend in the humanities, towards understanding through attention to sounding communication rather than our habitual visual metaphors. According to this usage, London during these two decades might be supposed, through its inhabitants, its visitors, and its institutions, to voice itself, to proclaim its cultural identity, its sonic apprehensions of existing traditions and the stirrings of modernity. We might, that is, perceive its reluctant but gradual embrace of sounding difference. Wordsworths famous sonnet of 1802, Composed upon Westminster Bridge, is interesting in this regard. The poet famously anthropomorphized the city:

This City now doth, like a garment, wear