'Voicing the text – 'speakers', speakers, and the performative anthology
March 2025
| Journal article
| 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century
A speaker, as the first edition of the OED confirmed, was ‘a title of books containing pieces adapted for recitation or reading aloud’. William Enfield’s Speaker; or, Miscellaneous Pieces Selected from the Best English Writers, first published in 1774, was used to verify its date of first use. Nevertheless, as this article explores, Enfield’s work — like that of the many imitations, adaptations, and appropriations produced across Britain from the late eighteenth century onwards — was defined by its innovative structural hybridity rather than the textual features of its title. Setting up a type of performative anthology in which orality and literacy effectively combined, the assembled ‘pieces’ were, importantly, prefaced by elocutionary instruction that inculcated delocalized and ‘standard’ norms of speech. Popular educational texts, ‘speakers’ thereby present a notably under-investigated resource, able to illuminate the tensions between diversity (and literary inclusiveness) as set against the forces of spoken anglicization and the hegemonies of supra-local speech, as well as the arresting means by which such practical standardization was intentionally to be achieved.
transnationalism, recitation, pronunciation, education, William Enfield, Thomas Sheridan, elocution
