The Soundproof Study: Victorian Professionals, Work Space, and Urban Noise

I

Late in October 1864, during a dinner with family and friends, Charles Dickens received a telegram that read simply “LEECH DEAD.” Marcus Stone, a guest at the dinner, later recalled: “[S]ilence fell upon us. [. . .] No one said a word. What was there to say?” (qtd. in Kaplan, Dickens 450). In the following weeks, as Dickens struggled to complete another monthly installment of Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), he wrote to John Forster: “I have not done my number. This death of poor Leech (I suppose) has put me out woefully. Yesterday and the day before I could do nothing; seemed for the time to have quite lost the power; and am only by slow degrees getting back into the track to-day” (Letters 10: 447). Dickens’s biographers have described this passage as a “cry of personal lamentation,” a sign that Dickens felt “desiccated, unable to work” after the death of John Leech, his close friend and, more famously, his illustrator for the 1843 A Christmas Carol (Johnson 2: 1017; Kaplan, Dickens 451). But as the letter to Forster indicates, the death of Leech caused Dickens more than “personal” pain, for it also brought on a momentary professional crisis. Leech’s death temporarily stopped Dickens’s hand and silenced him.

That the passing of Leech brought such silence is ironic, since what precipitated his death was noise. The sounds of the city—clanging bells, cracking whips, clattering carriages, clamoring hawkers and cabmen, roaring crowds, howling dogs—all these regularly accosted Leech and other Londoners, but the worst of all offenders scattered about the streets were the itinerant musicians. Dickens called them “brazen performers on brazen instruments, beaters of drums, grinders of organs, bangers of banjos, clashers of cymbals, worriers of fiddles, and bellowers of ballads” (Letters 10: 388). The cacophony of such street musicians nearly drove Leech mad, interrupting his work at home and exacerbating his already serious heart condition and nervous temperament. His final words to fellow artist William Powell Frith indicate the depth of his misery: “Rather, Frith, than continue to be tormented in this way, I would prefer to go to the grave where there is no noise” (qtd. in Frith 2: 297). Days later, Leech got his wish, bringing him the quiet he felt he had been unjustly denied in life.

In his antipathy toward street music in Victorian London, Leech had plentiful company. Throughout the city, artisans, academics, musicians, clergymen, and doctors shared Leech’s suffering and railed against what one author of a leading article from a May 1856 Times called “the noisy, dizzy, scatterbrain atmosphere of London” (9). As tempers flared, the fight against the oppression of street noises mounted in print and Parliament. With predictable indignation, another Times leader declared for the exasperated many that “there is no London nuisance equal to that of out-door music! [. . .] O for a little quiet in London!” (2 July 1860, 8–9). The prolonged war of words and images that ensued not only prompted new legal restrictions upon music-makers, but also accelerated what Peter Bailey has recently identified as “a continuing struggle between refinement and vulgarity” (“Breaking” 206). This battle revealed a segment of the Victorian middle classes in the process of making one of its more elaborate, forceful efforts toward collective action and self-definition.

Beginning at mid-century, advocates of the anti-street music movement waged a battle to impose silence upon the terrain outside. But against the more typical objections to street music as a domestic disturbance, the complaints of a distinct segment of the middle classes stood out: those who worked inside their homes. Street music presented a specific challenge to this burgeoning professional caste—to “[t]he writer, the artist, the calculator, the comparative anatomist, the clergyman composing his sermon, the scientific man his treatise” (Collins 180). Urban street culture posed a particular threat to these workers because, unlike members of the more established professions, they lacked a separate, official workplace that affirmed their vocational status. Indeed, their fierce assault on musical nuisances during this period represented more than merely...