The Scene of Aural Recognition

In a number of early nineteenth-century English literary texts, we encounter a scene that is so simple it may pass our notice: someone (a character, a narrator, an autobiographical witness) hears something (a song, a melody, a sequence of words) which they believe they have heard at least once before.² In itself it is an unexceptional event. But the scene of aural recognition, as I will call it, draws our attention because invariably it is one on which much else within the text hinges: the development of a character; the installation of a regime of feeling; and, in some cases, the entire plot. These scenes are deployed in different contexts and to various effects, yet their consequences are usually in excess of the intrinsic interest in them as events in themselves.

In this essay I explore some versions of this scene in texts that were published in the 1810s and 1820s.³ Their operations and associations vary according to the genre of the text in which they occur. For instance, we will see that, in the novel, the scene has a peculiar charge where it is associated with the psychological development of characters. But this is not an element of the scene that is registered in theatrical renditions, where, in contrast, it functions as a prelude to musical spectacle. Despite such differences, the recurrence of similar scenes across a range of literary texts allows us to consider it as a trope that has its own conventions of representation and patterns of allusion. One common feature, however, is that in different ways, the scene always depends on travel. That is to say, either the instances of hearing it presents, which provoke all-important and consequential memories of the past, have taken place at different locations, perhaps in different countries, and even on different continents from those in which they are published and assumed to be read; or else they trigger memories for a protagonist who has travelled abroad and returned home.⁴

I suggest that the larger significance of these scenes may lie ultimately not in the formal work that each carries out within their respective texts, but rather in the fact that the condition of their possibility lies in the extreme mobility of the text’s protagonists.⁵ Indeed, these scenes are intelligible in the context of the regimes of human movement that characterize these decades, when, responding to changes in the world economy, people across the world moved in larger numbers and spanned greater distances than ever before. It is against the backdrop of the fraught and often brutal contexts of early nineteenth-century mobility, therefore, including the new schemes for settler colonies through which thousands of Britons would travel to far distant destinations, sometimes displacing others as they went, that scenes of listening are imbued with meaning. Here I examine examples from various genres – a novel, a play, a travel narrative, a short story, a slave narrative, and a settler narrative – and ask how these seemingly simple scenes of attentive listening create such a complex and varied field of meaning.

Take, for example, an intriguing episode in chapter 41 of Scott’s popular novel Guy Mannering (1815), in which sound and the memories that it triggers come to the fore. The protagonist, Harry Bertram, who was kidnapped as a small child, and who spent the intervening years in Holland and India, has by a series of unlikely coincidences returned to a spot where there are an ancient castle, a house, and an estate which, unbeknown to him, are both the place of his birth and the property that he should rightfully inherit. His captors have purposefully eroded his knowledge of this to the extent that he does not even know his true name. At this point, however, lost memories start slowly to return. As he regards the scene, and muses on the few scraps of knowledge about his early life that he retains, he stumbles on the villain Glossin, the current owner of the estate, who is also responsible for Bertram’s father’s death. Bertram overhears Glossin in discussion with a land-surveyor about renovations to the estate, which include plans to demolish the old castle. In a conversation which then ensues, Bertram begins a process of recovery, provoked by all the things that he hears: soundings of texts and songs.⁶

It begins when he reads out loud a motto on a coat of arms inscribed on the castle: ‘Our Right makes our Might.’ A faded recollection from childhood of ‘an old prophecy, or song, or rhyme, of some kind or other’ causes him to reach back into his memory, and recite:

As he struggles to complete the verse, rhyming words trigger recollections: ‘Light … right … might’, lead him to ‘height’, and eventually to ‘Ellangowan’s height’, the name of the estate that is the place of his birth. Rhyme is a mnemonic, and, as such, a clue in a puzzle.

There are three points to note in this episode, each of which has significance beyond its immediate context. First is the way the scene foregrounds and frames the sense of hearing, or aurality, as no less than a proof of identity. Even though he has travelled thousands of miles, even though he has no idea from where he came, the fact that Bertram can remember a tune from his infancy confirms his true identity and authorizes his inheritance. It suggests that in a time of extreme travel, the memories that reside in one’s sense of hearing will prevail, and provide essential continuity. The second point has to do with the particular nature of the sounds that trigger Bertram’s memory. They are the organized sounds of music and poetic language: not the sounds of nature, or even the intonations of a particular voice, but rather purposeful and intentional sounds of a melody, a song, a metrical pattern or a rhyme; sounds, we might further observe, that can be transcribed, and written down. Their transcribability is crucial. The sounds that are presented here, on which so much attention is poured, are mediated by writing and the conventions of orthoepic transcription.⁷ Third, and here perhaps most important in this particular scene, is that the recognition of sound is necessary for representing the processes of cognition: for remembering, knowing, and working out, both for the protagonist and for the reader. As becomes increasingly apparent as the scene proceeds, the revelations of both plot and character are presented to us as readers, and to Bertram as protagonist, as riddles in which organized sounds – in this case the sounds of words – supply clues to lost or hidden meanings.⁸

As we engage alongside Bertram in solving the sound-puzzle of his origins, we share with him the hermeneutic pleasures of reading and listening. ‘There are other rhymes connected with these early recollections’, Bertram declares, much to his antagonist’s annoyance. Alluding to one such rhyme, he remembers a ballad that ‘I could sing … from one end to another, when I was a boy’ (Scott, Guy Mannering, p. 247). Despite the attempts of his captors to suppress his remembrances of childhood, Bertram recalls that ‘I preserved my language among the sailors, most of whom spoke English, and when I could get into a corner by myself, I used to sing all that song over from beginning to end – I have forgot it all now – but I remember the tune well’ (Scott, Guy Mannering, p. 248). This is a cue for a song, the melody of which he performs on his flageolet – the flute he has brought from India and which he has already played in earlier scenes. Here, by another apparent coincidence, it initiates a musical reaction: ‘the tune awoke the corresponding associations of a damsel, who close beside a fine spring about half-way down the descent … was engaged in bleaching linen. She immediately took up the song.’ The term ‘damsel’ is an ironic reference to Meg Merrilies, the now elderly gypsy who supplies the song’s lyrics: ‘Are these the links of Firth, she said, Or are they the crooks of Dee, Or the bonnie woods of Warroch head That I so fain would see?’ (Scott, Guy Mannering, p. 248). The words present a gazetteer of the Solway Firth, the estuary of the border region in which the Ellangowan estate is located, in ballad metre. The places that ‘I so fain would see’ are the places that Bertram now can see, the places that he rightfully owns, and which will be restored to him in the projected future of the novel.

It is an artful scene of listening and performance, presented as though it were a duet or an accompanied song; protagonists hear, recall, and respond. In earlier scenes in which Bertram plays his flageolet, music has a similar function of revealing him to others. In one, his playing reveals him to his lover, Julia Mannering, whom he met in India, but who is now, like he, returned to Britain. On a clandestine visit to her lakeside retreat, he plays a ‘Hindu tune’ (Scott, Guy Mannering, p. 89) on his flageolet in a ritual of illicit love making. The tune he plays identifies him to her, but it is also overheard by her guardian and reveals their secret assignation. Eavesdropping is a recurrent event in this novel; sounds breach the boundaries of intimacy and give people away. Overheard sounds help to move the plot along. The scene of flageolet playing discussed earlier, when ‘a damsel’ overhears Bertram playing not a Hindu tune but the Scottish ballad, establishes a connection between him and both his estate and the gypsy singer who cared for him when he was a baby. It confirms the secret knowledge of the narrative – that this is the same stolen infant Harry Bertram, now an adult. For him, it is a moment of awakening consciousness; for Glossin, an intimation of his imminent defeat; and for readers, a pleasurable moment in the revelation of the plot.

The multiple functions of sound in the novel are thus showcased in scenes of aural recognition. Listing them makes it clear that sound is decisive in many of the fundamental elements of the novel. First, the novel’s plot relies on the recognition of sounds. These are generally the sounds of music or poetry, the patterns or sequences which enable the narrative to perform hermeneutic tasks. Mysteries are presented – and solved – in aural form, as rhymes; or by the connections revealed by eavesdropping. Second, as a repository of memory, sound is a constituent in the formation of mobile characters who are psychologically consistent, even as they traverse continents. Finally, sound is constitutive of the narrative’s setting. The experience of sound as it is represented here gives spatial dimensions, and material form, to the relationships between people. Intimate relationships are sealed through listening to sounds that hover on the threshold of public audibility; overheard sounds pose dangerous threats to person and property. The fragile limits of privacy are at once established and transgressed by sound; sound is an arena fraught with vulnerability, a danger zone. Sound creates the space of the novel’s adventure.⁹

The extent to which the novel cedes its primary narrative functions to the operations of sound is remarkable. Of course, music and poetry are not literally sounded in the novel, but only presented as though they were. But the fascination with the possibility of hearing things places particular stress on the way in which the sense of hearing mediates between the internal psychology of characters – their capacities to hear, recognize, and remember – and the external sources of sound that stimulate them. The heard environment is all, and hearing the primary sense of navigation for the radically mobile subjects, like Harry Bertram, who inhabit the novel’s world.

Staging Aural Recognition

Scott’s renovations of the novel genre were widely, and internationally, appreciated, and the extreme popularity of his novels, serving new readerships across the globe, was, as Anne Rigney has shown, a worldwide phenomenon at a time of expanding transnational connection.¹⁰ Guy Mannering reflects this experience of transcontinental travel in its plot, which relies on episodes that took place in India in the past. Its readership was equally dispersed in its locations. Indeed, the emphasis that Scott places on aurality, and its capacity to provide continuity in people’s lives in the midst of extreme movement, may well have appealed to the thousands of early nineteenth-century migrants who were also enthusiastic readers of Scott’s novels.

The particular and highly stylized forms in which he presents sound and hearing in Guy Mannering, however, seem to have their roots in the theatrical culture of the time. For Scott there was a strong affinity between novels and the performance cultures of the theatre. Passing references in the novel to actors and plays, and the inclusion of so many self-consciously theatrical scenes, indicate the closeness of these two media, the fact that for Scott, novel and stage co-existed in shared, or at least overlapping, representational cultures.¹¹

The clearest expression of this was the common practice of transferring novels to the stage. All of Scott’s novels were adapted for theatrical performance almost immediately after their publication, and Guy Mannering was no exception.¹² The novel’s emphasis on sound and hearing, music and song, seems to have made it particularly amenable to adaptation, and it is noteworthy that virtually all the stage versions were musical performances, sometimes referred to as ‘operas’, with song, dance, and orchestral accompaniment as integral parts of the production.¹³ The first adaptation, Guy Mannering; or The Gypsy’s Prophecy, a musical drama authored by Scott’s friend the well-known actor-playwright Daniel Terry, opened in London less than a year after the novel’s publication. Many other adaptations followed, most of them based on Terry’s script. In line with the practices of the day, touring theatre companies performed Guy Mannering in metropolitan and provincial theatres up and down the country, and it was also produced in continental Europe and America. Philip Bolton’s meticulous research reconstructs the performance record of the play, suggesting that it contributed to the international dissemination of particular styles of performance and modes of consuming music.¹⁴

The capacious archive of texts that Terry’s Guy Mannering generated – playbills, reviews, printed scripts, prints of scenes and characters, and sheet music¹⁵ – provides plenty of evidence, if any were needed, of how closely print and performance were entwined at this moment. Yet within their shared terrain, the differences between the novel and the play are profound, and many of these are connected to the very different sensory environments in which they participated. In the drama the novel’s plot is pared down, the cast of characters shrunk, and the settings reduced to a single and confined geographical spot. Instead of presenting a complex plot, detailed conjuring of sense of place, and psychologically convincing characters, as the novel, Guy Mannering on stage entertained its audiences with a proliferation of music and dance, and a mélange of melodrama and farce. The play served a different purpose: it sought to stimulate its audience by constantly bombarding the senses through a quickfire succession of music and spectacle. And the print commodities that it inspired gave audiences the added promise that, with a script and score in hand, the pleasures of sensory stimulation might be prolonged in home performances.

Scenes in the novel that dramatized performance and listening, such as the scene of aural recognition discussed above, are drawn into the stage adaptation, yet take on a new significance. While the novel derives drama from the possibility that intimate scenes of listening might be overheard, here, in the theatre, overhearing is the baseline activity in which the audience is involved. In the musical drama, listening in is what the audience does. When the drama is performed on stage, therefore, the breaching of privacy through eavesdropping is a peculiarly self-reflexive event, and although for the most part it passes unnoticed as simply part and parcel of the conventions of theatrical representation, sometimes there is a frisson around it, which draws attention to its ironies.¹⁶ In the theatrical adaptation of Guy Mannering, as we shall see, moments in which private listening is breached tend to be followed by either the performance of songs or episodes of farce, which dispel, or distract attention from, the tension created by the intrusion of intimacy, through added music and laughter.

To understand this process, I turn to Terry’s adaptation of Scott’s scene of aural recognition discussed above. Terry retains the detail of Harry Bertram’s musical memory as an element in the plot, but presents this not through a performance by Harry himself (as in the novel), but as relayed as a piece of information by Harry’s long-lost sister, Lucy. The element of discovery associated with its revelation, which is key to the novel’s rendition, is absent; rather than a clue in a puzzle to be solved through listening, Harry’s memory is presented as a fact already known, a piece of information necessary for the onward motion of the plot. We might see this (evoking Roland Barthes) as a distinction between the hermeneutic (in the novel) and the proairetic (in the dramatic adaptation).¹⁷

Recently bereaved of her father, and now the guest of Guy Mannering and Julia, Lucy Bertram sings a ‘lovely air’ (‘O Tell Me Love’) which, she explains in her preamble, has been sung by her family ‘from a very ancient period, … to soothe the slumbers of the infant heir’. ‘[L]ittle Harry … tho so young, … could sing it quite well.’ What is more, this is not a secret, but common knowledge, for ‘there is not a milk-maid on the estate, once ours, but can chant it, and knows its history’ (Terry, Guy Mannering, p. 39). This prepares us for a later scene, in which Harry, finding himself with Meg Merrilies in the gypsies’ haunt, hears exactly the same tune, performed not by Lucy but by a ‘gypsy girl’. The familiarity of the song puzzles Harry (‘why those sounds thus agitate my inmost soul – and what ideas they are that thus darkly throng upon my mind at hearing them’, he asks Meg), yet there is little mystery for members of the audience, who already know why. The significance of Harry’s aural recognition is toned down. Now it is a cue for Meg’s rhyming incantation: ‘Listen, Youth, to words of power / Swiftly comes the rightful hour …’, which ends with the couplet taken directly from the episode in the novel, ‘When Bertram’s right, and Bertram’s might / Shall meet on Ellangowan’s Height’ (Terry, Guy Mannering, p. 61). It is a moment of high drama in the text, in which the performance of the actress, often the widely admired Sarah Egerton (who was not a singer – hence the oral incantation rather than musical performance of the lines), was frequently remarked by reviewers.¹⁸

By removing the riddle format, and the cognitive revelation that it provokes, the theatrical adaptation lays stress instead on the performance of song and poetry. The remembered song (‘Oh Rest Thee Babe’) is performed twice by different performers, the first time as a lullaby, the second time (according to the stage directions) ‘much more wildly’ (Terry, Guy Mannering, p. 60), perhaps as a dance.¹⁹ Scenes of intimate listening therefore in the stage version serve principally as occasions for performances of more music, song, dance, and spectacle. This is a generative environment in which one song invariably triggers another. For example, the scene that directly follows Lucy’s performance of Harry’s lullaby involves a meeting of Julia and Harry, whom she recognizes by the sound of his Indian flageolet. This is another scene of aural recognition, and a provocation for more performance. Hearing ‘the very air [her lover] taught [her]’, Julia breaks out into song: ‘Oh Tell me, love, the dearest hour’ (Terry, Guy Mannering, p. 42), to which Harry replies from off stage before he enters her bedroom through the window, singing. The scene retains elements of the episode in the novel it adapts: a clandestine meeting between the lovers, introduced by the flageolet. But now the flageolet music is the prelude to a performance of what turns out to be not just one but a series of duets, including, in some productions, the appropriately named ‘Echo’ duet.²⁰ If it were not for the untimely interruption of Lucy’s bizarre language tutor, Dominie Sampson, the duets, we assume, would continue.

Musical performances were among the main attractions of the drama, the principal commodities in a complex network of marketable items that clustered around the play and circulated nationally and internationally. The songs themselves were often extracted and their scores printed as single pieces of sheet music, as well as in compendia of song. For example, both songs mentioned above appear in The Universal Songsters; or Museum of Mirth (London: Jones, 1829), a popular song collection of the time.²¹ When published as sheet music, the songs promoted the actors who performed them, above their composers. ‘Oh Rest Thee Babe’, for instance, appeared with the long subtitle ‘the celebrated ballad, sung by Miss Stephens, at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, in Guy Mannering to which is added the stanza, sung by Miss Carew, in the scene of the Gypsies’ haunt, in the same play’, their names preceding that of its composer, John Whittaker. The naming of the two actresses suggests that it is the performances of the song that are notable, perhaps for their virtuosity or the appeal of star actresses.²² Members of the cast often added to the performance new songs by different composers, which sometimes had little or nothing to do with the play itself.²³ The play thus enabled performers to display their talents and to experiment in musical technique. When the famous tenor John Braham took the part of Harry Bertram at Covent Garden in December 1817, a reviewer in The Ladies Monthly Museum noted that he ‘introduced a new style of singing’: ‘all those displays of rapid execution which used to dazzle and astonish, were entirely laid aside; the songs were sung without ornament, and two of them unaccompanied by the orchestra’,²⁴ an innovation that was generally admired. The play foregrounded performance styles, and as each rendition of the play provided opportunities for singers to adapt the musical score, it helped to create a repertoire of popular songs and to establish a common musical taste, across the many venues in which it was performed, both in Britain and abroad.

The play thus participated in producing and disseminating a particular style of musical culture. As the sale of musical scores and scripts suggests, the consumption of music included amateur performance, a component of the fabric of friendly sociability and leisurely pastimes. But the play’s concern with hearing extended also to the differentiations of sound created by spoken languages, familiar and foreign. This is a theme in the stage versions of the play. The reduced cast of characters meant that in stage adaptations, the language tutor, Dominie Sampson, a relatively minor character in the novel, has a more prominent role.²⁵ In both, he is a comic figure, notable for his ungainly appearance and absurd mode of dress, but on stage his importance is enhanced. In the scene recounted above, Harry and Julia’s proliferating amorous duets are brought to an abrupt halt by the sound of his footsteps. To conceal his illicit presence in Julia’s bedroom, Harry disguises himself in the unlikely costume of an Indian pundit, there ostensibly to teach Julia oriental languages. His exotic persona mirrors that of Dominie: both are eccentric language tutors, and Harry’s outlandish Indian outfit matches Dominie’s outré appearance in its comic strangeness. The scene is a farce, in which the jokes revolve around the perceived comedy of obscure languages – the very idea of Indian languages is a joke in the play – and the sexual frisson created by the sight of Sampson’s cumbersome body, accentuated by his ugly clothes (he is the only character in the play to be allowed a change of costume), and Harry’s now racialized body in a pretty white woman’s bedroom.

Believing that he has disturbed an Indian scholar hidden in Julia’s chamber, Dominie Sampson addresses the disguised Harry, saying, ‘Expound unto me, most learned Pundit, whether we shall confer in the Sanskrit of Bengali, in the Telinga, or in the Malaya language? Praise to the blessing of heaven of my poor endeavours, I am indifferently skilled in these three tongues.’ In reality, Harry, of course, knows none of these languages, and so comedy is created by the thought that the gullible Sampson, assuming otherwise, might break out in a language that, to Harry as well as the audience, is ‘Moorish gibberish’.²⁶ Harry’s linguistic ignorance, his inability to speak, will give him away and reveal his true identity as Julia’s suitor.

What is at stake in this scene is the idea of aural misrecognition. Not only will Harry not understand an oriental language of address, but in not understanding it, he will reveal himself to be a sexual interloper in a lady’s bedroom.

This is a reversal of the scene of aural recognition. Just as Harry proves his licit identity by recognizing the gypsy’s ballad, here, in not recognizing the sounds of Indian languages, he threatens to reveal his illicit identity as the illegitimate suitor of Julia. It is thus a key moment in the play’s comedic structure. Just as the scene of aural recognition is disinvested of the psychological complexity that it is given in Scott’s novel to become instead a trigger for producing the pleasures of theatrical consumption, so too this farcical scene of aural misrecognition produces theatrical effects – nervous laughter – making it an intrinsic element of the comedy.

The Scene of Aural Misrecognition: Unintelligible Sounds

One consequence of this reversal is that it establishes a distinction between intelligible and unintelligible language sounds. Indeed, all the various stages of these comic intersections depend on the assumption that no one – bar Sampson, and even he improperly – will understand an oriental language. While words and phrases in European languages are dotted liberally throughout the play to everyone’s edification, Asian languages are irredeemably unintelligible, mere ‘Moorish gibberish’. In asserting this, the play establishes a border between sounds that can be understood and those that simply cannot; a boundary of audibility and intelligibility that in this case also establishes the limits of legitimate intimacy, which both tutors of unintelligible languages threaten to exceed.

In the literary culture of the early nineteenth century, in a number of different kinds of texts, we start to see a soundscape emerge in which the boundary between intelligible and unintelligible sounds is accentuated and invested with social and cultural significance. In this formulation, it is not just that a distinction is made between sounds that are intelligible and those that are unintelligible, but that the difference between them, and the possibility of moving between them – crossing a kind of auditory boundary as it were – are identified as an event of special and intense psychological investment. It produces a particular ecology of sound in which humans oscillate between, on the one hand, understanding sound and being in the world, and on the other hand a peculiar state of estrangement derived from failing to understand sound and disassociating from the world.

One particularly clear example of this is found in a work by the Scottish novelist John Galt. Galt achieved fame in the 1820s for his regional novels set in Scotland, writing – in Ian Duncan’s phrase – in Scott’s shadow.²⁷ In a volume of short stories entitled The Steam-Boat (1822), Galt included a story, ‘The Dumbie’s Son’, which explored the profoundly eerie effects that sounds produce for a subject to whom they are unintelligible. The eponymous Dumbie’s son is the hearing-able child of deaf and dumb parents, who has been brought up in an environment in which, because of his parents’ disabilities, sounds have no conventional meanings. Not only is he unable to understand spoken language, but he is equally confounded by the sounds of nature and the environment. Living in a sounded world that at the time he cannot interpret, even though his own aural faculties are fully intact, the child fails to understand the sounds of the most fundamental of social activities, and as a consequence, he is haunted by unintelligible sounds. The climax of the story is his account of his parents’ funeral, in which the sound of soil falling on their graves is amplified to uncanny effect, a sonic sign of the profound isolation experienced by the uncomprehending child.

In Galt’s case, the fascination with a sound world organized around concepts of intelligibility was likely to have been based in contemporary discourses around hearing and hearing disabilities.²⁸ In his short story, the effects of not understanding sounds are internalized by the protagonist, and are projected onto readers, to become a source of uncanniness and fear. Yet the haunting effects are in part achieved through the story’s retrospective frame: the narrator is the protagonist’s adult self, so that his subsequent acquisition of language is assumed. The story explores an uncanny realm between understanding and not understanding sounds. As in the aesthetic of the sublime, it is the oscillation between these two states that is the cause of such profound uneasiness.²⁹ In Terry’s drama, the oscillation between intelligible and unintelligible sounds is treated more lightly, as a moment of comedy, yet it is nevertheless the same transition that is the source of unease.

In Terry’s drama, it is a comedy of foreign languages, and the jokes are to do with race. In the bedroom scene discussed above, intelligible sounds are those in English; unintelligible ones are marked as foreign, mere ‘Moorish gibberish’. Disguised as an Indian, Harry is silent, and that is part of the joke. But the intriguing character of Dominie Sampson, whom the disguised Harry mirrors, also seems strangely foreign. Indeed, it is notable that the actor most frequently associated with the part in the 1810s and 1820s was the celebrated comic actor John Liston, familiar to audiences from a previous role as Henry Augustus Mug in George Colman’s popular abolitionist play The Africans (1808). Liston’s presence on stage, especially in a scene in which Dominie Sampson is mirrored by a pretend Indian, for many may have recalled the earlier play, which was known for the way it drew attention to the racialized otherness of enslaved people, particularly through Liston’s character, Mug, a white man who had been enslaved.³⁰ The concept of racialized foreignness is extended in Terry’s Guy Mannering, through the character of Dominie, to become associated principally with unintelligible languages, or ‘gibberish’ that can never be understood.

The jokes about oriental language learning were more topical and precisely local than may at first be apparent. On Leicester Square, in the close vicinity of Covent Garden theatre where John Liston played Dominie Sampson in eight performances of Guy Mannering between September 1818 and July 1819,³¹ stood the London Oriental Institute, an educational establishment for young men preparing for a career in the East India Company. The institute’s director was John Borthwick Gilchrist, a Scot by birth and an experienced orientalist scholar and educational entrepreneur, who in 1818 was contracted by the East India Company to teach oriental languages to company officials.³² Gilchrist was by then well known as the author of an array of instructional books on Indian languages used widely by British travellers to India. These included Gilchrist’s Guide, which in 1820, in its third edition, went under the full title of The Stranger’s Infallible East-Indian Guide, or Hindoostanee Multum in Parvo, as a Grammatical Compendium of the Grand, Popular, and Military Language of All India. (Long, but Improperly Called The Moors or Moorish Jargon).³³ The long-winded title, its Latin terms, and its pedantic correction of the ‘improper’ name ‘Moorish Jargon’ (echoing Bertram’s term ‘Moorish gibberish’), recall Guy Mannering’s comedy linguist, Dominie Sampson. We might speculate that among the audience of Guy Mannering were students from the Oriental Institute, who might have found the farcical scene in Julia’s bedroom involving a fake tutor of Indian languages who considered oriental languages to be ‘Moorish gibberish’, and the inappropriate appearance of a pompous language teacher, Dominie Sampson, in a young lady’s boudoir, especially funny.

Hindustani was the language that served as a lingua franca in the context of extreme multilingualism in India. According to Gilchrist, in a land where spoken languages were so many and diverse, and written languages doubly difficult because of their multiple writing systems, ‘Hindoostanee’, in his spelling, was the ‘common medium by which natives in general, and many persons of various foreign nations settled in Hindoostan, communicate their wants and ideas orally to each other’ (Gilchrist’s Guide, p. xi). He saw it as a language of mediation, even among natives: ‘where a native of Hindoostan wishes either to compose or to dictate anything to be translated from his own to another tongue, he constantly arranges his ideas, and explains his meaning in Hindoostanee’ (Gilchrist’s Guide, p. xiv). Gilchrist’s Guide served as an introduction to the Indian experience of European travellers, providing a frame of reference and a vocabulary for everyday interaction. This particular edition included a ‘simpler form’ of instruction, a set of principles and exercises, grammatical charts, and glossaries, together with instructions on pronunciation, of words transliterated (Gilchrist’s Guide, p. iii) into Roman script, because ‘[t]o insert the oriental letters’ would be ‘discouraging’ to language learners for ‘the intricacy of its characters’ (Gilchrist’s Guide, p. iv). Gilchrist had developed his linguistic expertise while serving in the British army in India, when he noticed the problems created by the inability of British officers to communicate with Indian soldiers. For him, Hindustani was the language of colonial command.³⁴ Thus in his guide he gives only English words in (transliterated) Hindustani translation, because, he reasons, a ‘reversed vocabulary would rather prove embarrassing’ for those ‘whose ears cannot discriminate sounds’ (Gilchrist’s Guide, pp. iii–iv). The use of the term ‘embarrassment’ is interesting here, as it suggests the acute discomfort and awkwardness (rather than inefficaciousness) of not understanding words: a kind of bodily shame, perhaps, that takes a sexual turn in Terry’s play. In any case, a command required no verbal response, only action. For the British man in India, barking orders in Hindustani, there would be no shame in being simply unable to hear. This was a language for pronouncing, not listening; for commanding, not conversing; and India was a place imagined as a soundscape of gibberish overlaid with the semi-articulate sounds of Anglicized Hindustani command. Terry’s jokes about Indian unintelligibility, and his soundscape that drew boundaries between intelligible and unintelligible sounds, were no whimsical invention.

Musical Recognition: Reginald Heber in India

A traveller who used Gilchrist’s Guide en route to taking up an appointment in India was Reginald Heber, the Bishop of Calcutta. Heber refers to the Guide in the introduction to his extremely popular travelogue Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India from Calcutta to Bombay 1824–25. (With Notes upon Ceylon.) An Account of a Journey to Madras and the Southern Provinces, 1826, and Letters Written in India, published posthumously in 1828.³⁵ On the voyage out, during the long hours on board ship, with Gilchrist’s Guide at his side, Heber translated St John’s Gospel into Hindustani and corrected and improved Gilchrist’s translations of Indian poetry by introducing more complex metrical forms. As a gifted linguist, poet, and writer of hymns, Heber took an approach to language acquisition that was probably more sophisticated than that of the generality of Gilchrist’s users. His account of his Indian travels after he has arrived is strewn through with constant remarks about the complexity of the linguistic environment he encounters, the many different languages that he hears, and the opportunities for mistranslation, deceit, and corruption that he fears they present.³⁶ In this context, music offers Heber a welcome retreat from complex problems of unintelligible words, a way of understanding sound that transcends the cultural particularities of language.

At a striking moment, Heber records hearing some begging boys singing songs that are like English ballads. From this episode we can see the way in which music and language interact for him: music is intelligible and reminds him of home, but the words in this case are unintelligible. As a whole, the Narrative presents a mix of ethnographic observation and nostalgia for home and family. India is always seen through a haze of memories: rivers that remind him of the Thames, or mountains that are like Snowdonia. These memories are often filtered through literary examples, especially those taken from Scott’s novels. But at this moment it is music that reminds him of home. This is a scene of aural recognition in the mode of Scott, but its valences in the alien landscape of India are somewhat different.

‘A number of little boys came to the side of the river and ran alongside our vessel’, he writes. They were

As in the scene in Scott’s Guy Mannering, hearing this familiar tune stirs Heber’s emotions. But in what might have been a moment in which a familiar tune soothed him, now its familiarity unsettles him even more. Everything he hears ‘reminds me that I am a wanderer’, itinerant, alone, foreign. In this instance, therefore, the scene of aural recognition is simultaneously one of misrecognition: the songs are like English songs, yet not them, and this ambiguity opens up a space of discomfort that is affecting for readers as well as for the author himself.

What is equally striking about this scene is the abundance of detail that it presents. The songs the boys sing resemble particular songs, which Heber names: ‘My Love to War Is Going’ was a popular anti-war ballad from 1790 by Amelia Alderson (Opie), with music composed by Edward Smith Biggs; ‘My Boy Billy’, a traditional ballad. The precision with which Heber records his observations delineates two parallel sonic worlds. While his sense of loneliness resides in the gap between them, the possibility of their coordination also serves as an aid to his cognition, helping him to understand when his language competency fails him. The idea that there might be such coordination between songs of Asia and Europe extended the philological orthodoxies of the day, which sought to find comparisons across languages and mythologies to music.³⁸ Here Heber’s comparative method enables him to understand the stories that the boys are singing: the Bengali story of Radha, he claims, ‘corresponds’ to the story of Apollo and Daphne in ancient Greece and Syria, and compensates for his inability to understand Bengali. Even though the ‘Bengalee’ words were incomprehensible to him, his knowledge of comparative mythology allows him to surmise the narrative of the songs that they sing, supplying knowledge through association rather than translation. In this extract, too, the stories and songs to which he alludes contribute to its effects. Apollo’s frustrated love for Daphne is fitting because it resonates with his own feelings of acute loneliness, and reflects his experience of cultural dissonance. The reference to ‘My Boy Billy’, a courtship ballad in which in many renditions the woman is too young to marry Billy, fills the background with more references to frustrated connubial love. Throughout his prose, therefore, the sound of the songs and their associations wrap together complex indices of difference and similitude, which his narrative attempts to measure.

In Heber’s variation on the scene of aural recognition, therefore, hearing the familiar song is both a means through which Heber can express the melancholy of travelling and a technique through which, as a comparativist scholar, he purports to understand the unfamiliar culture in which he is immersed. The sound of the song serves as a kind of pivot around which cultural differences and similarities turn. In this case, sound is like a doorway between two cultures. It acts as a threshold of equivalence, provoking Heber’s memories of the past and of home and opening to him a strange culture through the familiar strains of home. As such it may be more like a trick door, in which entry into a new terrain is only imagined, a projection of his own culture. Likewise, the extent to which he is ever able to hear the sounds of India as they were heard by, for instance, the Indian beggar boys is definitely in question. While his ear is not ‘embarrassed’ by the sounds of languages that he does not understand, as Gilchrist fears to be the case, neither is it clear that he is able to ‘discriminate’ their sounds. Ultimately, it seems, Heber cannot ‘hear’ India.

In the radically alienating context of India Heber evokes sound as a way of making sense of the environments that he encounters. To do so, he draws on the scene of aural recognition as an available technology with which to do so. Like Harry Bertram in Scott’s Guy Mannering, he finds that the music of the ballad recalls to him memories of his past. It also helps him to understand the culture in which he finds himself through the methods of comparative mythology. But the insistence throughout on his foreignness, evoked especially by the unintelligible sounds of the Bengali language, layer over his attempts at cognition the overwhelming sense of despair at his own displacement. This is a complex soundscape which weaves together the two different regimes of hearing and cognition.

Sound and Moving

Heber provides us with the clearest example among those that I have presented of the way in which the scene of aural recognition and its corollary, the scene of aural misrecognition, are techniques within each text’s formal apparatus for imagining worlds in which its protagonists have crossed oceans and continents. What often seem to be casual events of hearing things are invested with associations that link them to the experience of transcontinental travel – whether in the context of international trade, colonialism, settler emigration, missionary endeavour, or even slavery. Within the complex dynamics of sounding, listening, remembering, feeling, hearing, not hearing, singing, laughing, making sense and nonsense that each text presents, we find compressed ways of thinking about a world in motion and the different people who traverse it. The recurrence of these scenes highlights the extent to which within these early decades of the century, literary culture had recourse to sound as a way of encoding a response to a world at a moment of incipient globalization.

This was, after all, a time of new demographic mobility, in which the movement of people was happening on a scale previously unknown.³⁹ In part, this was because new technologies, especially ships and printing presses powered by steam, began to speed up and extend transport and communications networks. But there were other factors too. The cessation of military hostilities following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 diminished barriers to international trade and stimulated the global traffic in raw materials and artefacts. Moreover, in Britain, returning veterans, and a postwar economic depression, provoked the British government for the first time actively to encourage the emigration of Britons to colonial settlements abroad. Together with the hundreds of thousands of independent migrants from Britain to America, emigrants to British colonies were part of a new trend of transnational movement that affected people in all corners of the world. Driven by new labour markets, people were compelled to move huge distances across oceans and continents, sometimes in the pursuit of new and better lives and often because they had no choice.⁴⁰ In the midst of this massive demographic reshaping, sound played an important role. No matter how poor or how constrained, travellers of all kinds carried music, poetry, and song in their heads; the very language that they spoke and the songs that they sang were bonds with the places from which they had come. By hearing an accent, a migrant could recognize a fellow countryman; a ballad or a song could identify the region from where someone had come. Alongside the oral transmission of sounds, moreover, printed texts – books, newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, and printed scores – tracked and amplified the movement of language and music within migratory flows.

Voice is expressive of more than a migrant’s origins. In the fraught scenarios of migration, poetry and music were means through which travellers expressed the gamut of their emotions, from elation to despair. When a group of Gallic-speaking Scottish migrants arrived in Venezuela in 1825, for example, they danced a reel on board their ship, we assume to the shrill tune of a pipe.⁴¹ But they quickly realized that their pipe would be drowned out by a cacophony of strange languages and musical instruments, and the unfamiliar and threatening sounds of the creatures of the tropical zone they had entered.⁴² In the most extreme contexts of forced migration, the voice was the most poignant means of expressing human suffering. In slave narratives, the most brutal of all regimes of involuntary movement, human cries and shrieks provide an unremitting soundtrack to horrors endured. Mary Prince, the West Indian enslaved woman who published the narrative of her life in 1831, recalls that she was initiated into the extremities of slavery not when she was abused herself, but when she overheard the agony of her friend. She heard ‘the cracking of the thong, and the house rang to the shrieks of poor Hetty, who kept crying out, “Oh, Massa! Massa! me dead. Massa have mercy on me, – don’t kill me outright.” This was a sad beginning for me.’⁴³ This is a different scene of aural recognition from those discussed so far, for sure, but one in which the knowledge and feelings conveyed by sound are no less profound. For Prince, the sound of slavery awakened her to the realities of her situation. Yet sound also helped to comfort her in the extremity of her pain. As a mobile medium for both expressing and soothing suffering, as well as articulating collective endurance, resistance, and possibilities for transcendence in the afterlife, enslaved people developed complex styles of music and performance. Ironically this made the transatlantic slave trade the basis of the most influential music migration of the modern era.⁴⁴

Sound also operated as a means of conveying the violence involved in subduing subject people in accounts of settler colonialism. John Galt, the author of ‘The Dumbie’s Son’, who was also an active colonist involved in a commercial colonization company which assisted British emigrants to Canada, heard in the sounds of the North American forests all the dangers that colonists faced: inclement weather, wild animals, a perilous terrain, and hostile natives, the dangers of which are intimated in the eerie soundscape of the forests. Silence is suddenly broken by ‘deafening claps’ of thunder, the ‘whistling of a ball’ of a gun, the ‘piercing cries of a hawk’ or the ‘drumming of the partridge and the tapping of the woodpecker’, the roaring of the distant waterfall. No wonder that he should present the process of colonial settlement as one that necessarily involved a kind of acoustic occupation: a regulation of the sound sphere through the pealing of bells, the singing of ballads, and the accents of Scottish speech.⁴⁵ For Galt, recognition of regional voices was a means to establish networks of influence across continents, a tool in the arsenal of devices necessary for building and governing a colony. Hearing a Scottish voice for him was a scene of aural recognition not unlike Scott’s scene in Guy Mannering with which this essay opened. It indicates the wider applications of what appeared at first to be a simple literary trope. In this highly mobile world, sounds are fraught with emotions regarding the past and the future: fear, anxiety, pain, subjection, hope, nostalgia, rapacity, and a will to power.

In these decades, the movement of people was always a sonic event. As a consequence, the global distribution of musical styles and languages served as evidence of patterns of human migration.⁴⁶ Beyond this, however, attending to scenes of listening within literary texts reveals the way in which sound is caught up in a complex range of responses to the strangeness of place, the displeasures of displacement, and modes of relinquishing and grasping power in situations of colonization. I suggest that the significance of the scene of aural recognition in this phase of literary production is that it transfers to the literary domain an aural environment which has heightened significance in the migratory culture of the time. In the 1810s and 1820s, when the prospect of large-scale settler emigration was considered as something of a novelty, it marks a phenomenon that within the culture seems particularly troubled and unstable. By the late decades of the nineteenth century, when the spread of anglophone culture was taken by many to be a sign of the imperial triumph of, in Charles Dilke’s term, ‘Greater Britain’,⁴⁷ the more fragile and changeable acoustic ecology of these decades would be a sound of the past.