Transatlantic Traffic and (Mis)Translations

2. The Transatlantic Larynx in Wartime: John Gough’s London Voices

45 chapte r two The Transatlantic Larynx in Wartime John Gough’s London Voices Tom F. Wright M T he most profound societal and cultural shifts are often audible. Of the many Anglo-American exchanges that energized the period covered by this collection, one of the more notable took place within the throat, through incremental but significant divergence of accent. Through the Revolution both nations inhabited relatively parallel acoustic worlds, and into the 1790s, New York naval officers reported difficulties in distinguishing American and English sailors.1 By the middle of the next century, however, resemblance had given way to discord. In the popular imagination transatlantic distinctions in accent became a matter of fascination and comment . During the 1860s, the American temperance reformer and celebrity orator John B. Gough toured Union lecture halls playing these distinctions for laughs, in a series of impersonations of voices from “Street Life in London.” Packed audiences across the Civil War North were reportedly transfixed by his outlandish vocal fluctuations, how his manipulations of his vocal tract and articulators became resonant shorthand for recognizable places. Audiences were transported to Regent Street and Pall Mall by Gough’s soft bilabial fricatives (“vewy good”) and aspirate onset (“horator ”); his dropped consonants (“’appiness”) delivered them to the slums of St. Giles and Bethnal Green. In these impersonations, Gough’s throat operates as a space of transatlantic exchange: questions of affinity and dissonance were made audible in performances that thrilled wartime crowds seeking respite from harsher realities beyond the auditorium. 46 tom f. wright Gough represented the popular lecturer as metaphysical interpreter. From the 1840s on, his speeches on the evils of drink managed to “hold audiences breathless on both sides of the Atlantic for nearly half a century.”2 Blending emotional testimony about his own dissolute youth with dramatic simulations of states of drunkenness, his flamboyant performances afforded genteel audiences a confrontation with the threatening physicality of intoxication . They served to bridge chasms of experience and render comprehensible distinct psychological and social states: sobriety and inebriation; respectability and destitution; propriety and scandal. During the second half of his platform career, Gough also embodied a more tangible bridging of states. Kent-born but Massachusetts-raised since age 10, he took pride in his transatlantic affiliations, and in 1860 began to directly address this dual identity in his performances. That year, he returned to the United States after several years’ residence in Great Britain, where he had toured widely as an advocate of the temperance movement. Upon his return, his career as a public speaker took a new and surprising turn. As his 1894 biographer recorded: “The professional season of 1860–61 witnessed a new departure on Gough’s part. Until now he had spoken invariably upon temperance. He was suffering, in body and mind, from this ‘harping on one string.’ He realised the need of variety in his labours if he would preserve his health and continue his usefulness.” “After prolonged consideration,” the account continues, “Mr. Gough consented to prepare a lecture on ‘Street Life in London’—a taking caption , and a topic upon which he could speak con amore.”3 Equipped with this new lecture, Gough presented his fresh material at the New Haven Library Society on 21 November 1860, and the following spring began to speak on “London” throughout the cities of the northeast. He had initially been skeptical of such an idea. “Many friends,” he declared later, “were desirous that I should present in a lecture some experiences of London life,” though he himself “had little ambition . . . to take rank upon the literary lecturers of the day.”4 Nonetheless, from the outset, his lectures on his British experiences proved a great success. Reporting on the Pennsylvania debut of this material in February 1861, the Philadelphia Press recommended that “everybody should hear this celebrated temperance champion in his new role.”5 The following month, the New York Times recorded that his performance Transatlantic Larynx in Wartime 47 “laid an Atlantic cable from the ‘streets of London’ . . . to New York, and established a telegraph office in the heart of every listener.”6 In doing so, he went from an interpreter of mental states to an interpreter of geography and place, in an act that centered on his most potent possession : his liminal transatlantic larynx. During the decades that followed, Gough delivered these British-themed lectures hundreds of times throughout the northeast, midwest, Canada, and California.7...