Phonographic Etiquette; or, “The Spirit First Moves Mister Knowles”

Nearly forty wax cylinder phonograms made in London during 1888 and preserved at Thomas Edison National Historical Park were transferred to audiotape in 1995, rendering their content available for listening and study (Gracyk 32–35). These had originally been recorded through the initiative of George Gouraud, the agent whom Edison had entrusted with promoting the phonograph in England, and several of them have attracted interest as specimens of the speech of famous individuals, notably Sir Arthur Sullivan and William Gladstone. Gouraud had announced his intention of compiling a “‘Phonogramic Album’ of the voices of the great of all nations; to include alike, some day, the voices of the living and the dead” (“First Interview”), and latter-day commentators have usually framed his spoken-word recordings in terms of that project, as fruits of an effort to document historic voices for posterity. At the time of their making, however, these recordings were anchored to novel social events designed to impress the merits of the phonograph upon contemporaneous audiences, and this aspect of their significance has not received due attention. While it is often noted that Sullivan spoke his recorded lament “that so much hideous and bad music may be put on record forever” during a dinner party at Gouraud’s home on 5 October 1888, for example, the innovative way in which this event incorporated phonography is generally overlooked: pre-recorded speeches were played to coordinate live after-dinner toasts, after which Sullivan and other prominent guests conveyed messages to Edison via phonograph in response to a final toast to the inventor’s health. A transcript sent to Edison along with the cylinders is headed “The Phonograph’s first appearance in the ‘role’ of Toast-master and Speech-maker.”¹ The focus of the event, then, was not the mediation of voices into the distant future, but the viability of introducing phonographic talk into all levels of contemporary social life.

Gouraud’s motive for orchestrating such events has sometimes been questioned. One visitor advised Edison that Gouraud was “pushing” the phonograph “more for his own private ends socially and otherwise, than anything else” (Verity), and Peter Copeland characterizes him as “a social climber, who found the phonograph a perfect excuse to fraternize with high society in England” (45). But whatever truth might lie in these assertions, his phonographic soirees did arguably serve a purpose beyond personal aggrandizement. In 1887, Gouraud had written to Edison that “the value of such [phonographic] correspondence as may be carried on socially across the seas will, as an advertisement, be incalculable.” To promote the phonograph in this way, he needed to contrive social contexts in which eminent persons would feel obliged to speak messages into the phonograph for dispatch to America. “Gouraud’s favourite technique,” writes Walter Harris, “was to invite an interviewee to dinner, relax him with a sufficiency of wine, and present him with the recording aperture of the phonograph comfortably within reach of his mouth” (8). And yet there was more to the strategy than this, as one surviving phonogram reveals.² Gouraud opens it as follows:

Queen Ann’s Lodge November the twenty-second, eighteen hundred and eighty eight. Gouraud to Edison. As this is the first occasion—on which the phonograph—has appeared and performed—in a private house— in the great city of London, it would seem—meet and right that our host—Mister Knowles—and our hostess—and their daughters, together with the guests, should mark the event by—letting you hear, in their own voices, their own particular names. Now listen to their voices and to their names, beginning with Mister Knowles.

(Queen Ann’s)

These words were recorded after a dinner at the home of James Knowles, editor of the Nineteenth Century, after his guests had listened to a selection of pre-recorded content. Gouraud represents the proposition that everyone present should speak into the phonograph not as a self-interested innovation on his part, but as something that “would seem meet and right,” as though the impulse were natural or grounded in long-standing tradition. Some guests were...