Getting that Victorian Sound

With the Industrial Age booming – literally – all around them, Victorian writers were the first to discover the potential of sound and silence in literature. A new book explores how the 19th-century's high-tech boom changed the nature of listening.

It was during the Victorian era that humans got noisy. Factories and steam engines, clanging machines and ringing metal made their debut during the industrial revolution that swept England in the mid-1800's.

In a recent interview in Harvard magazine, literature and language professor John Picker, who wrote the book "Victorian Soundscapes," said "up until then, nobody really bothered to pay attention to noise. It was just something in the background."

However, he claims, the rapid development of science and era's technology changed people's perceptions of sound, and how they listened. "On a larger scale than before, noise began... to alter the agents, subjects, and conditions of artistic and intellectual occupations." In other words, everything from grinding machines and train whistles were penetrating everyone's heads, homes and hearts.

Later, the development of the phonograph and telephone added to their new perception of sound, as well as caused new ways to be misunderstood.

Dickens was enamored of the idea of the permanence of sound waves. Charles Babbage declared, "the air itself is one vast library." George Eliot mused on the new science of acoustics, and incorporated its imagery in "Middlemarch."

Read the Harvard magazine article, or browse Picker's book at Amazon.com