Public Speech and the Culture of Public Life in the Age of Gladstone

by Joseph Meisel

Overview

By the last decades of the nineteenth century, more people were making more speeches to greater numbers in a wider variety of venues than at any previous time. This book argues that a recognizably modern public life was created in Victorian Britain largely through the instrumentality of public speech. Shedding new light on the careers of many of the most important figures of the Victorian era and beyond, including Gladstone, Disraeli, Sir Robert Peel, John Bright, Joseph Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Lloyd George, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and Canon Liddon, the book traces the ways in which oratory came to occupy a central position in the conception and practice of Victorian public life. Not a study of rhetoric or a celebration of great oratory, the book stresses the social developments that led to the production and consumption of these speeches.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231505826
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	12/06/2001
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
Lexile:	1620L (what's this?)
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Joseph S. Meisel is Program Officer for Higher Education at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Table of Contents

List of Tables
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Schools for Public Speaking
2. The House of Commons
3. Religion
4. Law
5. The Platform
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

This is an extremely welcome book, which will enlighten its readers on a quite scandalously neglected aspect of ninteenth-century British culture... [T]his is a book which should be read by all who are interested in the cultural history of nineteenth century Britain.

European Review of History - Martin Hewitt

Imaginative and well-researched... pioneering.

Choice

This is an interesting study and raises many valuable points.

History

Informative and well written.

English Historical Review

So good that it is extraordinary that it has not been written before.

1500-1900 Studies in English Literature

This is an extremely welcome book, which will enlighten its readers on a quite scandalously neglected aspect of ninteenth-century British culture... [T]his is a book which should be read by all who are interested in the cultural history of nineteenth century Britain.

— Martin Hewitt

European Review of History

So good that it is extraordinary that it has not been written before.

Studies in English Literature 1500-1900