Media and/as History in Eighteenth-Century Literature

In 2016, a relatively innocuous question posted on Twitter took off as a viral meme. "Without revealing your actual age," music publicist Eric Alper asked, "what [is] something you remember that if you told a younger person they wouldn't understand?" On its face, this question is not about media technology. But as the eventually more than thirty thousand responses began to pour in, users interpreted the prompt through a media-historical lens. One answer: "Mimeographed handouts at school." Another: "Not being able to be on the Internet and landline phone at the same time." Or, more generally, "Technology that isn't easily portable." To a remarkable degree, the commenters understood memory as shaped by technology and history as a process of technological progression.

In her new book The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 2017), Paula McDowell shows how this modern theory of the intertwined trajectories of history and of media technologies first emerged in eighteenth-century responses to changes in print. Developments in the marketplace for print both led to theorizations of what we now call "oral culture" and projected that culture into the past—even though orality and printing remained inseparable. As McDowell writes, "Eighteenth-century Britain witnessed the emergence of a tremendously influential cultural narrative of orality and literacy that remodeled a reciprocal, living relationship as a nostalgic historical fiction of 'then' and 'now' " (26). The newly omnipresent status of print, which was often received with ambivalence rather than valorization by contemporaries, threw into relief the particular characteristics of the spoken word: "Heightened reflection on oral discourse was part of a historic coming-to-terms with the power and spread of print" (26). Our now-intuitive idea of "new" media displacing the "old" first appeared, McDowell argues, in eighteenth-century discussions of the relationship between speech and print.

In other words, the eighteenth-century version of the know-your-age Twitter meme would be Daniel Defoe's claim about the 1660s in the opening of A Journal of the Plague Year (1722): "We had no such thing as printed News Papers in those Days, to spread Rumours and Reports of Things. . . . But such things as these were gather'd from the Letters of Merchants, and others, who corresponded abroad, and from them was handed about by Word of Mouth only."¹ This passage is the backbone of McDowell's reorienting analysis in chapter 3 of Defoe's "contributions to emergent, developmental narratives of media shift still with us today: particularly, the model whereby an orality that is in fact coexistent with and inseparable from print is ideologically relegated to the past" (98). With her characteristic attention to the non-elite figures who are often written out of literary history, McDowell shows how Defoe, in working to shore up the printed bills of mortality on which plague statistics were based, erased the "women searchers" who were the first line of reporting in cases of plague. These often old, often illiterate women represented the problematic orality that disseminated both potentially deadly rumors and the plague itself, since, "like most of his contemporaries, Defoe believed that plague effluvia were spread by breath" (109). Although Defoe likely knew that his claim about the lack of newspapers in the 1660s was inaccurate, and although he was unable to completely obscure the reliance of printed genres on oral reporting, his ongoing comparisons between media of transmission "set up a key structuring binary of the text: the opposition of a backward past associated with orality to a new, print-oriented modernity associated with the collection and reproduction of accurate statistics and true report" (97). For McDowell, Defoe becomes "as much a theorist of print as a propagandist for it" (98), positioning the medium as not only more reliable than speech but also more modern.

While most studies of eighteenth-century "oral culture" have focused on the later eighteenth century, with its rise of debating clubs, open-air preaching, and the elocutionary movement, McDowell thus begins in the late seventeenth century with theological debates between Protestants and Catholics about the status...