The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Paula McDowell

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Paula McDowell Jennifer L. Airey (bio) Paula McDowell. The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. Pp. 353. $45. We are living in a moment of profound cultural change, as the movement from print to online culture has fundamentally shifted the ways in which we access and process information and monetize written content. Set in this context, Paula McDowell’s The Invention of the Oral: Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-Century Britain is an especially timely work, one that draws parallels between the developing technologies of the eighteenth century—in this case, the movement from oral to print culture—and our own. It is only in retrospect, McDowell argues, that we can fully understand the implications of such a monstrous cultural shift, but similarities have already emerged between eighteenth-century reactions to technological change and our own: concerns over what is being lost, fears about the democratization of access to content, and uncertainty about how to monetize new modes of information transmission. According to McDowell, the concept of the “oral” came into being in the eighteenth century as an umbrella term for a series of often unrelated concepts. Encapsulating at once beliefs about religious tradition, appropriate gender roles, and social class divides, reactions to the concept of orality in the eighteenth century offer insight into a wide variety of social and cultural attitudes. In drawing connections between the development of [End Page 494] eighteenth-century print culture and the emergence of the digital, McDowell’s book is both important and timely. As a work of scholarship on the eighteenth century, it is a masterful and often enlightening work, offering new interpretations of well-known works by authors such as Defoe, Johnson, and Swift, and engaging with previously understudied voices such as those of the Billingsgate fishwives and John “Orator” Henley. McDowell begins in her first chapter with a nuanced analysis of the concept of oral tradition as it emerged in the eighteenth century. While the word “tradition” is now used in predominantly secular ways, it had important religious resonance in the early modern period. For Catholics, who placed emphasis on the importance of priestly intercession between the individual and God, “the tradition of the church is of equal authority with scripture” (28). For Protestants, by contrast, who privileged Biblical text and the individual’s relationship with God, the concept of tradition was much more fraught. Protestants positioned scripture—and by extension writing—as “the most reliable method of preserving and communicating knowledge” (29). Of particular interest in this chapter is McDowell’s reading of Dryden; prior to his conversion, she argues, Dryden linked orality with the vulgar rabble. As a Catholic, however, he became more supportive of oral tradition, arguing in The Hind and the Panther that the Catholic Church “by Tradition’s force upheld the Truth” (39). The battle between print and oral authority was central to other eighteenth-century debates. English common law, for instance, was composed of many unwritten laws, and thus “seventeenth-century proponents of the Ancient Constitution appealed to the authority of an ancient, unwritten tradition of laws and customs to further their own political goals” (45). Meanwhile antiquarians lamented the loss of oral culture (including lower-class slang, popular ballads, and the oral poetry of the Scottish Highlands) resulting from the growth of print. Not all forms of oral transmission were viewed positively, however; the concept of old wives’ tales, for instance, reflects the disrespect in which women’s speech was consistently held. McDowell turns in chapter 2 to Swift’s treatment of speech in A Tale of a Tub. As a clergyman himself, Swift understood well the importance of dynamic oratory in the pulpit, and he suggested that Dissenters were dangerous precisely because they knew how to perform for largely illiterate audiences. Swift associated the physicality and emotion of the spoken sermon “with popular unrest and gender subversion from below” (67). Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year is the subject of McDowell’s third chapter. As...