| This dissertation examines public life in nineteenth-century Britain through the production and consumption of public speech. Central to this study are the material and structural factors that promoted the expansion of public speech, and created the contexts for speakers and hearers: the education and training of public speakers, the typologies and traditions of public speech, the spaces for oratory, the printing and reading of speeches, and the experience of both speaking and hearing.; Chapter 1 describes how the Oxford and Cambridge Unions, founded around 1820, embodied and promoted a new conception of public speech in public life. Chapter 2 examines the changing conventions and functionality of speeches in the House of Commons from the eighteenth-century "golden age" of parliamentary oratory to the era of Gladstone and Disraeli. Chapter 3 discusses the rise of preaching "stars" in the second half of the nineteenth century, moves to improve the quality of preaching, and the remarkable expansion of space for religious oratory. Chapter 4 explores legal reforms that enlarged the oratorical functions of barristers in the courtroom, the creation of debating societies for law students, heightened anxieties over the morality of barristerial speech, the increased popularity of the Victorian courtroom as a kind of "oratorical theater," and the oratorical contributions of barristers in Parliament. Chapter 5 analyzes the development, techniques, and experience of extra-parliamentary speech-making, and how the platform became the major locus for the delivery of important political addresses in the nineteenth century, as well as a major arena for political combat.; Among the public speakers discussed in detail are John Bright, Joseph Chamberlain, Lord Randolph Churchill, John Duke Coleridge, Benjamin Disraeli, Charles James Fox, Henry Parry Liddon, Roundell Palmer, Peel, William Pitt the Younger, Lord Salisbury, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and Archibald Campbell Tait. Particular attention is devoted to the oratorical career of Gladstone, the period's most prominent public figure and most prolific public speaker. |
