Aspects of Platform Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Abstract

Provides background to the essays in this special issue of Nineteenth- Century Prose, calling attention to the continued neglect of the nineteenth- century platform, and especially the lecture; claims the extent to which oral performance underpinned written text in the Victorian period is still too little understood. Attempts a chronological survey designed to emphasize the significance of public speech in the era before the 1860s. Offers a context for a number of the key themes in the essays, arguing for the importance of the platform for transatlantic cultural exchange and suggesting that despite the pressures, women were not completely banished from the mid-century platform as has sometimes been suggested.