Sound, Space and Civility in the British World, 1700-1850

Peter Denney, Bruce Buchan, David Ellison, Karen Crawley, Peter Denney, Bruce Buchan, David Ellison, Karen Crawley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317052500
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this collection, the essays examine the critical role that judgments about noise and sound played in framing the meaning of civility in British discourse and literature during the long eighteenth century. The volume restores the sonic dimension to conversations about civil conduct by exploring how censured behaviours and recommended practices resonated beyond the written word. As the contributors show, understanding changing perceptions and valuations of noise and sound allows us to chart how civility was understood in the context of significant political, social and cultural change, including the development of urban life, the extension of empire and the consolidation of legal procedure. Divided into three parts, Sound, Space and Civility in the British World demonstrates how both noise and sound could be recognized by eighteenth-century Britons as expressions of civility. The essays also explore the audible implications of uncivil conduct to complicate our understanding of the sonic range of politeness. The uses of sound and noise to interrogate British colonial anxieties about the distinction between civility and incivility are also investigated. Taken together, the essays identify the emergence of civility as a development that radically altered sonic attitudes and experiences, producing new notions of what counted as desirable or undesirable sound.

Part I

Sound, conversation and civility

1 John Locke on sound and conversation

Richard Yeo

Pleasures invade both Eye and Ear,

So fierce the transports are, they wound,

And all my senses feasted are,

Tho’ yet the Treat is only Sound.¹

John Locke (1632–1704) was an English physician and Fellow of the Royal Society of London. He became famous as the author of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Two Treatises of Government (1690), and henceforth was regarded as a ‘philosopher’ and the reputed founder of English ‘empiricism,’ a term he never used. In this chapter, I suggest that by recognising that Locke was not only a philosopher, but also a physician, traveller and scientific virtuoso, we may deepen our understanding of his attitude to sound, in these ways – as one of the five senses; as a negative presence, in ‘noise’; and as the medium of civil conversation.

In 1656, the young Locke witnessed the arraigning of the radical preacher James Nayler (1618?–60) and other dissident Quakers at Westminster Hall, London. He wrote to his father, saying that:

Nailer one man more and 3 or 4 women of the tribe all with white gloves and the womens heads in white baggs. their carriage was strange to me, one of the women made a continued humming noise longer then the reach of an ordinari breath without motion either of lips or breath that I who stood next her could perceive. [they did not answer questions put to them] or did it with a great deale of suttlety besides the cover and cunning of that language which others and I beleeve they them selves scarce understand.²

Although the Quakers were a small, tight sect, Locke came to see them as exemplifying a more general feature of human nature: namely, that individuals bound together by strong sympathies influenced each other, often in deleterious ways. In October 1659, in a letter to a friend, he declared that ‘we are all Quakers here and there is not a man but thinks he alone hath this light within and all besids stumble in the darke.’³ In Locke’s estimate, the Quakers were ‘enthusiasts’ who felt sure in their breasts that they were guided by an inner light direct from God. He added a separate chapter on ‘Enthusiasm’ to the fourth edition of the Essay.⁴ For Locke, intelligible conversation relied on spoken words acting as signifiers of ‘Ideas.’⁵ The link between word and idea was conventional and hence required a social contract. Such a contract might well be limited to two persons, or to the members of a sect like the Quakers, but this could be dangerous. At the encounter in London in 1656, Locke noted that some human sounds, apparently serving as communication, could appear as mere incoherent mumbling, or noise, to those outside the circle of initiates.

The senses

The question of what Locke thought about ‘sound’ can be approached by considering his answer, in the Essay, to the question of how individuals acquired knowledge. He considered the five senses as the avenues by which information of the world reached the mind. By his account, this took place via a sequence of sensations, perceptions, formation of simple ideas, comparative reflection by the ‘Judgment’ on these, combinations of such ideas as complex ideas and the retention of ideas in memory.⁶ To some extent, this model of mental processing was the Aristotelian one, as elaborated by subsequent thinkers, including the Scholastics. It was taken as a starting point by Locke and his contemporaries, such as Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes.⁷

One consequence of this model was that knowledge produced in the mind depended on input from the senses, which themselves might be weak or faulty. Accordingly, there was fascination with the notion of augmenting the senses – for example, by taking drugs, or by the use of instruments such as spectacles, telescopes and microscopes or, in the case of hearing, by the attachment of various ear trumpets. Another speculation was that the senses could be bypassed altogether. John Evelyn, diarist, virtuoso and Fellow of the Royal Society of London, told of someone who contended that ‘if a hole could dextrously be boar’d through the Skull to the Brain, in the midst of the Fore-head, a man might both see, & hear, & smell without the use of any other Organs.’ This person was ‘one Tom Whittal, a student of Christ-Church’ (incidentally, Locke’s college at Oxford).⁸ Yet, however input to the brain was delivered, Locke maintained that the cognitive outcome depended on analysis and reflection conducted by the reason or judgement, often referred to simply as ‘the mind.’⁹

In his Essay, Locke offered a rigorous account of the distinctive input from the various senses. He regarded specific ideas as dependent on information from specific senses:

But all that are born into the World being surrounded with Bodies, that perpetually and diversely affect them, variety of Ideas, whether care be taken about it or no, are imprinted on the Minds of Children. Light, and Colours, are busie at hand every where, when the Eye is but open; Sounds, and some tangible Qualities fail not to solicite their proper Senses, and force an entrance to the Mind; but yet, I think, it will be granted easily, That if a Child were kept in a place, where he never saw any other but Black and White, till he were a Man, he would have no more Ideas of Scarlet or Green, than he that from his Childhood never tasted an Oyster, or a Pine-Apple, has of those particular Relishes.¹⁰

And a little further on:

The same inability, will every one find in himself, who shall go about to fashion in his Understanding any simple Idea, not received in by his Senses, from external Objects, or by reflection from the Operations of his own mind about them. I would have any one try to fancy any Taste, which had never affected his Palate; or frame the Idea of a Scent, he had never smelt: And when he can do this, I will also conclude, that a blind Man hath Ideas of Colours, and a deaf Man true distinct Notions of Sounds.¹¹

What later became known as the ‘Molyneux problem’ involved a separation of sensations delivered by two of the senses, sight and touch. On 2 March 1693, Locke’s friend, the Irish politician and philosopher William Molyneux (1656–98), wrote from Dublin about a question stimulated by a passage in the Essay:

I will conclude my tedious lines with a Jocose Problem, that, upon Discourse with several concerning your Book and Notions, I have proposed to divers very ingenious Men, … tis this: Suppose a Man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his Touch to Distinguish between a Cube and a Sphere (Suppose) of Ivory, nighly of the same Bignes, so as to tel, when he felt One and tother, which is the Cube which the Sphaere. Suppose then, the Cube and Sphaere placed on a Table, and the Blind man to be made to see. Quaere whether by his sight, before he touchd them, he could now Distinguish and tel which is the Globe which the Cube. I answer, Not; for tho he has obtaind the Experience of How a Globe, how a Cube affects his Touch. Yet he has not yet attaind the Experience, that what affects my Touch so or so, must affect my Sight so or so; or that a Protuberant Angle in the Cube that presd his hand unequally, shall appear to his Eye as it does in the Cube. But of this enough; perhaps you may find some place in your Essay, wherein you may not think it amis to say something of this Problem.¹²

In adding his response to this problem in the fourth edition of the Essay (1700), Locke said:

I agree with this thinking Gent. whom I am proud to call my Friend, in his answer to this his Problem; and am of opinion, that the Blind Man, at first sight, would not be able with certainty to say, which was the Globe, which the Cube, whilst he only saw them: though he could unerringly name them by his touch, and certainly distinguish them by the difference of their Figures felt. This I have set down, and leave with my Reader, as an occasion for him to consider, how much he may be beholding to experience, improvement, and acquired notions, where he thinks he has not the least use of, or help from them.¹³

Locke did not use this thought experiment to show the greater power of one sense over another; rather, his point concerned the inability of one sense, in the short term of this scenario, to supply information to another.¹⁴ However, such comparison and ranking of the different senses was common in his day.

The hierarchy of the senses

With many of his contemporaries, Locke often privileged the sense of sight, referring in the Essay to ‘that most instructive of our Senses, Seeing,’ and calling ‘Sight, the most comprehensive of all our Senses.’¹⁵ This judgement had a long past. In 1585, Giovanni Battista Benedetti (1530–90), a court mathematician to the Duke of Savoy, summarised Aristotle’s view that vision, more than any other sense, leads to knowledge; from this perspective, we think by recalling visual images stored in memory.¹⁶ This opinion is found in Richard Braithwaite’s Essaies upon the five senses (London 1620), in which the order of the senses, treated in individual chapters, is given as seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling.¹⁷ Well into the seventeenth century, as Stuart Clark has shown in his Vanities of the Eye (2007), the dominant judgement was that vision was the premier sense: it was closest to the all-seeing ‘watchfulness’ of God; for Saint Augustine, it provided an analogue for ‘spiritual vision’; and in the long-standing account of how sensations were transformed into knowledge, mental replicas of things in the world were seen by the ‘eye’ of the mind. (This view was maintained in spite of the increasing doubts about whether sight ensured veridical pictures of the external world.)¹⁸ In these discussions, hearing was usually the main comparison, in keeping with its status as second in the hierarchy of senses. However, there was a minority positi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Listening to civility
• Part I Sound, conversation and civility
• Part II Sonic spaces of civility and incivility
• Part III Sound, noise and the incivility of the crowd
• Part IV Civil and uncivil sounds of empire
• Index