Reading aloud? Elocution manuals and reading practices (1750-1800)
Keywords: sermons
spouting
thomas sheridan
history of reading
oratory
miscellanies
elocution
parliamentary oratory
eighteenth century
history of the book
elocution manuals

This thesis examines eighteenth-century elocution manuals: instructional works concerned with the practice of reading aloud. The term 'elocution manual' is a retrospective one, but it is useful in identifying instructional texts designed to aid the performance of reading aloud in social settings. The instruction such books provide is not limited to practical instruction in reading aloud, as outlined by the tenets of the elocution movement; elocution manuals also concerned themselves with broader issues related to the value of reading literature in English, sociability and politeness, and the relationship between print and various types of theatrical and oral performance. In particular, works offering elocutionary education were highly sensitive to the limitations of print in instructing oral performance.
By offering close-readings of elocution manuals alongside other forms of contemporary evidence of elocutionary practice, the thesis proves that the eighteenth-century understanding of the relationship between print and orality was more complicated and sophisticated than has been acknowledged by previous scholars. Elocution manuals had to navigate the internal contradiction inherent in their form: these are texts which argue for the superiority of oral performance over the written text, whilst being printed texts themselves. Oral performance, these texts argue, cannot only be taught through books. Elocution manuals give material form to the intersections between literacy and orality, as their professed purpose was to direct oral reading performances. As historical artefacts, they offer alternative ways of thinking about the relationships between print and performance. Elocution books in particular function as sites of aurality (a combination of the written and the oral) by fostering practices of reading aloud where the reader uses their voice to produce a version of the text from print. Writing, then, can function to produce a voice, as well as to represent one. This thesis explores some of the complexities of this dynamic between print and orality, acknowledging that eighteenth-century readers and writers were sensitive to its intricacies.
This thesis emphasises the importance of understanding reading, and reading aloud, as a historical practice. It contributes to the history of reading by considering the historical specificity of the theoretical, idealised readers constructed by elocution books in the mid- to late-eighteenth century. Doing so reveals much about the assumptions about reading that went into producing books for a growing literate readership and illustrates the role of the material book in understanding social forms of reading. Elocution manuals attempted to shape eighteenth-century oral reading practices and were also shaped by them. Such books were written, edited, compiled and sold into a culture where reading was often conducted in company. Studies of eighteenth-century literary culture have tended to underestimate the significance that contemporary forms of reading, especially those less familiar to modern readers, had on the construction and reception of literary texts. It is possible to learn more about the ideals and assumptions underlying reading in the past by analysing literature that offered models of instruction on how to do it. This is what this thesis offers.