Speakers, Listeners, and the Power of the Platform

Abstract

Studies of this period have tended to focus on the influence of written ‘journalese’ in a rapidly expanding popular press. However, there was also much contemporary comment about spoken language, as the newly educated and enfranchised working classes took to the ‘platform’ in the democratic cause. The 1880s and 1890s were a period of noisy oratory, riots, and strikes in London; this chapter focuses on literary representations of crowd sounds, including the speeches of the populist ‘workman orators’. The sound impressions of novels such as Gissing’s Demos and Harkness’s Out of Work reveal how writers responded to social progress and democratization at a revolutionary time in the city’s history.

You should have seen him [Richard Mutimer] addressing a crowd collected by chance in Hackney or Poplar. The slightest encouragement, even one name to inscribe in the book which he carried about with him, was enough to fire his eloquence; nay, it was enough to find himself standing on his chair above the heads of the gathering. His voice had gained in timbre; he grew more and more perfect in his delivery, like a conscientious actor who plays night after night in a part that he enjoys. And it was well that he had this inner support, this brio of the born demagogue, for often enough he spoke under circumstances which would have damped the zeal of any other man. The listeners stood with their hands in their pockets, doubting whether to hear him to the end or to take their wonted way to the public house.

George Gissing, Demos (1886) ¹