Conversation: Curiosity and Talking in the Nineteenth Century (review)

The relaunched Nineteenth-Century Seminar of the London Institute of English Studies started with a roundtable discussion opening the autumn season of Saturday afternoon seminars dedicated to the theme Curiosity and Wonder, organized and convened by Josephine McDonagh and Clare Pettitt (both King’s College London). Six literary and historical scholars working in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came together to explore crosscurrents between eighteenth and nineteenthcentury ideas about conversation. The structure of the session – every speaker presented a ten-minute talk before the general discussion was opened up – encouraged lively conversation and dialogue among speakers and audience.

At the end of the eighteenth century conversation, understood as rational public discourse, was widely celebrated as a stimulus to curiosity and a means of knowledge acquisition and dissemination. As Jürgen Habermas has argued, conversation, the exchange of ideas of free individuals in certain designated social spaces such as the coffee house or the salon, was crucial in the formation of the eighteenth-century bourgeois public sphere. However, the practices and functions of conversation in the nineteenth century appear to be much more problematic. In Conversation: a History of a Declining Art (2006) Stephen Miller argues that conversation breaks off in the nineteenth century and only restarts with the Bloomsbury group at the beginning of the twentieth century. While Miller’s argument remains disputable, elegies on the ‘lost’ art of conversation do proliferate in the nineteenth century and the earlier century starts to be styled nostalgically as the age of conversation. Received explanations for a shift in the prominence and forms of conversation at the beginning of the nineteenth century, such as the rise of domesticity or the growth of mass media, are not entirely satisfactory. They do not account for the new spaces of conversation which emerge in the nineteenth century and admit new social groups to public conversations often previously closed to them, for instance for reasons of class and gender.

The papers and subsequent discussion addressed the extent to which nineteenth- century cultures of knowledge and enquiry were shaped in the context of eighteenth-century conversational culture: Does conversation continue to be a stimulus for curiosity and improvement in the nineteenth century? Or does it disappear, and if so, when, for what reasons, and with what is it replaced?

Jon Mee (Warwick) looked at consensus and dissent in late eighteenthcentury ideas of conversation, especially in William Godwin’s oeuvre. Mee contradicted David Simpson’s utopian view of consensual eighteenth-century conversation by pointing to the vigorous culture of conversational dissent before 1795. Taking Mary Wollstonecraft’s writing as an example, Mee argued further that women writers especially were acutely aware of the potential dangers which conversation as an interface between the public and the private spheres could hold for less powerful interlocutors.

The antinomy Mee described between consensus and dissent in eighteenth-century practices of conversation was taken up and renegotiated in the talk by Larry Klein (Cambridge). Klein stressed the importance of collision in polite conversation as a technique of mediating difference and argued that up to the 1850s conversation worked as means of mediating differences – of gender, education and class among others. The eighteenth-century prestige of conversation, according to Klein, was intricately linked with the rise of civil society. As many social and economic developments shaping the growth of civil society spanned the end of the eighteenth as well as the beginning of the nineteenth century, conversation naturally continued to play an important role in cultural discourse.

Different genres of conversational writing were explored by Elizabeth Eger (King’s College London), Jenny Bourne Taylor (Sussex) and John Stokes (King’s College London). Eger investigated the literature emerging from the ‘bluestocking’ circles of the eighteenth century which promoted self-improvement and education through polite conversation. She addressed the importance of admitting less well-established literary forms, such as the dialogues produced by many bluestocking women writers, into the canon of literary studies. What Eger pointed out as particularly fascinating about these dialogues...