‘Mechanic art and elocutionary science’: speech production in British literature, 1770s-1820s

This thesis argues that studies of speech, whether physiological, political, or poetic, saw increased attention and took on new significance in British literature in the politically turbulent period from the 1770s to the 1820s. I focus on Erasmus Darwin, John Thelwall and Percy Bysshe Shelley, three writers whose work encompassed science, politics, and poetry, and drew charges of radicalism and materialism. From a speaking machine built by Darwin in 1770, to the work of Thelwall, whose career as orator, poet and finally speech therapist was punctuated by the 1795 ‘Gagging Acts’, to Shelley’s poetry, voiced by revolutionary volcanoes and inhuman spirits alike, speech production becomes a focal point for radical writers to explore politically and philosophically unorthodox ideas. In this thesis, I argue that through their specific engagements with the mechanics of speech production these writers are able to present utterance as a form of physical and effective action. This in turn implicates their writing in politically-loaded contemporary debates about materialism and what I suggest was a developing and similarly politicised conception of Literature and Science as distinct modes of thinking and writing.