The Art of Speech: Elocution, Speech Training, Speech Therapy, and the Performative Limits of Class in Mid-twentieth-century Britain

Abstract

Abstract This article argues that elocution, speech training, and speech therapy—three professions concerned with the voice—were intimately bound up with a shifting politics of class in early- and mid-twentieth-century Britain. The last two, in particular, attempted to stake new claims in the changed landscape of the post-1945 welfare state. Proponents of speech training distinguished themselves from elocutionists and saw their role to improve children’s speech, but they performatively disavowed class as an organizing category within it. This was paralleled by speech therapy, which emerged as a formal profession in Britain in 1945 through the unification of two separate (and often rival) halves of the profession under a single regulatory college, and which found itself having to justify where its pathologizing of vocal production ended and elocution’s focus on the aesthetics of accent began. I argue that these disavowals provide a useful framework through which to read class dynamics and consider the performative dimensions of class identities at this time. Mobilising select writers and speech experts—who straddled the boundaries of elocution, speech training, and speech therapy—this article shows how a variety of different categories, from gender to geography, were employed as proxies to allow for the problematization of dialect but not accent and to efface ‘class’.