Fairness and fluency: the political audibility of ‘newcomers’ in Victorian debating clubs and public meetings, 1870–1910

ABSTRACT

The turn of the twentieth century saw a significant change in the accessibility of political debate: various reforms made the Second Chamber open to religious, ethnic and gendered ‘others’. These newcomers would eventually contribute to changes in political practice. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, however, their gradual inclusion in political speech in extra-parliamentary spaces was also marked by a process of assimilation and negotiation. Like the elite men who already enjoyed exclusive access to political decision-making, these newcomers had to abide by the ‘rules’ of debate, and therefore needed to learn how to behave and how to speak in a manner that would make them politically audible in a system that was largely underpinned by ideologies and ideals of free debate and rational, individual speech. This article argues that embodied practices of speech had an important role to play in the process of inclusion, assimilation and rebellion of newcomers in political debates and parliamentary politics . Taking the appearance of colonial ‘others’ and women in debating clubs as its point of departure and leaning on sources documenting the ideals and practices of various debating clubs in and beyond Victorian Britain, this article aims to show how the often implicit rules of political debate and behaviour were taught and instilled in the second half of the nineteenth century. Assumptions and normative expectations about what constituted legitimate and effective, or ‘fluent’, political speech worked to exclude numerous speakers, but also provided various historical actors with opportunities to make themselves heard.

In 1878, Reginald Palgrave, Clerk of the House of Commons, published a Chairman's Handbook. Detailing not only the difficulties one could encounter when chairing a meeting, but also the formal and implicit norms of proper behaviour in meetings, the handbook was one of many publications of the time that aimed at helping middle-class men fulfil the public roles they often were expected to take up in society. Engaging in debate, whether it was on a parish council, a school board, or a public meeting, was a common enough event for most, in an increasingly democratic society. According to Palgrave and other authors of such manuals, these debates were to be carried out in accordance with a clear set of rules: those of parliamentary debate. The relevance of the procedures and rules of the House of Commons in other spheres was self-evident to Palgrave, and possibly also to his audience:

As the sound usage under which the House of Commons regulates deliberation is the result of English common-sense acting with precision and uniformity for at least three centuries, it might be presumed that an explanation of the merits of a usage so in harmony with our national cast of thought would be almost unnecessary.¹

This special issue demonstrates to what extent procedural order has shaped parliamentary debate in modern history. In this article, I aim to extend that conversation on parliamentary procedure a bit further: into the schools, clubs, village halls and colonial colleges in which parliamentary-style debates were held, often by people who had no access to the literal practice of parliamentary representation, but nevertheless subscribed to its ideals of fairness, and applied its rules. Or, as another author of a similar manual phrased it, I will be looking at norms of debate From parliament downward,² and from Victorian Britain outward, including practices elsewhere in the Empire.

Although focusing on these different sites of debate cannot tell us much about parliamentary practice in Westminster, they offer a particularly useful vantage point from which to analyse the wider meaning and impact of parliamentary rules and procedures. Debating clubs, in particular, alongside (mostly elite) schools afford us an insight into how the ideals of transparency and fairness in debate were construed and how they were understood in Victorian society at large. Moreover, by seeking out extra-parliamentary spaces, delving into debating procedures as they were spelled out for clubs, unions or other institutions we can find out how parliamentary outsiders engaged with these norms of debate, and throw light on the means they had and strategies they employed to make themselves politically audible – either by taking part in extra-parliamentary political discourse or, as political representation widened, by eventually entering the parliamentary arena themselves. Focusing on women's and colonial Indian engagements with and interpretations of parliamentary norms for debate, I aim to demonstrate that these rules, and the manuals and rulebooks in which they were gathered and explained – could serve both as means to exclude outsiders and as tools to facilitate the eventual inclusion of newcomers in parliamentary practice. As one New Zealand-based commentator put it:

The principal benefit that societies such as these offer (to those who take part in the debates) is that they afford opportunities for cultivating the art of speaking in public and addressing large audiences of people. For the acquirement of any other art, men expect to have to serve a long apprenticeship, to study it carefully and laboriously.³

Learning the art of speaking well played a large role in the education offered in these manuals, as it did in many spaces of elite schooling, and therefore made up an important part of the emancipatory potential of learning to take part in debate. Coming to understand and apply the rules of propriety and good speech, as represented in rulebooks and manuals, can therefore be understood as the acquisition of a certain ease or facility with speech. Additionally, the practice grounds afforded in debating clubs and school debates also held the potential to think creatively about debating procedure and political speech. In The Art of Extempore Speaking, Victorian elocutionist and Shakespeare-scholar Harold Ford noted that ‘to speak with fluency and ease is one of the constituent elements of extempore speaking’.⁴ In this article, I will examine the construction of fluency in Victorian parliamentary-style debating, and its entanglements with ideas of fairness in three sections. First, I will focus on the rules of engagement that were at play in places like debating clubs, societies and public meetings, focusing on how these rules sought to discipline speech and embodied behaviours. Second, I will turn to the attempts of (young) women to mobilize the rules of proper speech and fair debate and thirdly, I will turn my attention to how the rules of democratic debate were bent and reinterpreted by colonial subjects of the crown. Both these groups of newcomers, I will argue, showed that they were conversant with the formal rules of parliamentary debate and interpreted them in ways that were adapted to their status as relative outsiders, as well as to their particular bodies and the societal roles ascribed to them – they thereby engaged in innovation alongside a process of assimilation.

Rules of engagement

Debating clubs loom large in the history of British politics. Often based at elite institutions of schooling, these clubs were – and in some cases still are – understood as the breeding grounds for future leaders of the nation and the empire, or ‘A Nursery of the Commons’ as Simon Kuper recently put it.⁵ Outside of the rarified sphere of Eton, Oxford and Cambridge, debating societies could also fulfil the role of spaces of democratization. By the end of the eighteenth century, London alone boasted several convivial debating clubs like the Robin Hood Society or the Society of Cogers, where members exchanged opinions, but also learned how to take part in debate and how to weigh in on political decision-making.⁶ As Madeleine Hurd has shown, men of the labouring classes were well aware of the importance of behavioural assimilation if they wanted to capitalize on their political representative rights.⁷ Research on the debating societies of Britain and elsewhere in Europe and the US has demonstrated their important role in the development of civil society, political practice and the cultivation of rhetoric.⁸ Jaap van Rijn's study of the development of public debate in Britain and the Netherlands, for example, finds the roots of political styles in the debating clubs of the nineteenth century in both countries.⁹ Taru Haapala's research on Political Rhetoric in the Oxford and Cambridge Unions in the nineteenth century, in particular, shows the influence debating societies could have on shaping parliamentary culture and its procedural character.¹⁰

The histories of Victorian debating clubs have been well-documented – both by their members and in scholarly work.¹¹ In both cases attention has been paid to the clubs' often illustrious members, their contributions to the clubs' organization and debates, and their further careers. Through these histories, we are also unusually well-informed about the daily practice within these clubs. Debating societies abided by strict rules of debates, which were written, published and enforced (evidently with variable degrees of success) by its presidents. The rulebooks and manuals produced for these societies often show minute attention to procedural detail within parliamentary debate – explaining at length, for example, how amendments to motions could be proposed and voted upon. By and large, a large section of these rules was concerned with the practicalities of speech. The rules dictated where members could speak from and how, who decided the order of speakers, how they were to communicate their wish to speak, how long one could speak, and so on. A slim handbook on ‘how to form a debating society’ phrased the most common rules in their simplest form, encouraging founders of debating groups to demand, for example:

XXI: That 20 minutes each shall be allowed for Mover and Opposer of motion, and 10 minutes for subsequent speakers, and the mover be allowed 10 minutes for reply.

XXII In a public debate no member except the mover, who shall have the privilege of reply, shall speak more than once, except on a question of adjournment or of order. It shall be allowable, however, for a member to rise again, during the debate or after the reply of the mover, for the purpose of explanation; but in this no fresh matter shall be introduced.¹²

Such rules were considered to be a matter of polite consideration for one's audience: ‘No speaker is justified in thrusting himself, or his idea, on an unwilling audience for any longer time than is reasonably necessary.’¹³ But they were also thought to be intrinsic to a good and, above all, fair debate. The almost obsessive attention given to the order of speeches and the taking of turns was rooted in a wish to avoid giving (unfair) advantage to one opinion over another.

Such rules were organized around a thoroughly binary understanding of debate, and on the implicit understanding that to speak implied a certain level of influence or authority. As almost all manuals for debating societies explained, the person holding the floor was understood to ‘have the House’. At that point, he was to be listened to in silence and without interruption, temporarily clothed with more power than his audience. It was also understood that this power would have to be relinquished within a certain timeframe, to be passed on to the next speaker. As all handbooks stressed, it would be highly irregular to speak twice on a motion, even if the inconvenience of such a rule was recognized:

It is a general rule in all discussions, that except in the case of a mover summing up by way of a reply, no speaker is entitled to speak twice. The advantage of such a rule is obvious; but it must be frankly confessed that its disadvantages are often equally obvious.¹⁴

The debate was further regulated by the fact that members were allowed to speak only about the motion at hand, and were expected to argue either in favour or against. To that end, motions were constructed along highly regulated lines, following a set pattern of phrasing that suggested a statement of fact (‘That … is … .’). They could be amended – their wording or precise meaning changed – but would always retain an inherently binary flavour. This was the case even for the most frivolous motions put forward in debating clubs. In 1889, the motion ‘That the English are a nice people, but too fat’, was lost by 20 votes to 1 in the Haileybury Debating society, for example.¹⁵ Debate was thus constructed as a competition between two sides.

The minutes, reports and histories of debating societies therefore reveal far more than the political careers they helped forge; they also throw light on the meaning of ‘debate’ in Victorian Britain and its performative nature. As such, they indirectly tell us about the perception of parliamentary procedure outside of parliament proper and the influence of political performative practices on public life more generally. Recent work on the rituals and performances of parliamentary work has shown that the ‘core claim and practice of liberal democratic parliaments’, representation, is shaped by the embodied practices and experiences of representatives as much as it is by ideologies of democratic transparency or fairness.¹⁶ Anthropological and sociological studies of contemporary practices in the Houses of Commons and Lords such as those by Emma Crewe and Shirin Rai have demonstrated that these chambers of representation have their own cultures and subcultures, the result of long histories of community-building through repeated ceremonial practice.¹⁷ Likewise, cultural histories of parliament have shown that nineteenth-century parliamentary politics were a space of (sometimes theatrical) performances: performances of gender, of power, of democracy, of citizenship and so on.¹⁸ Focusing on the practicalities of debate and the practices of speech that were associated with parliament even away from its benches shows that, additionally, political, regulated debate was also a site of performative fluency.

I am borrowing this notion of fluency from scholars in dysfluency studies, and more specifically from Joshua St. Pierre, whose work on Cheap Talk has demonstrated the extent to which ableist notions of good speech have political value in modern liberal democracies: while the ‘commodification’ of speech in a world replete with talking heads produces ‘cheap talk’, this process also accords value to some types of speech (and not to others). If good, fluent speech is currency, it can be used to distinguish between those rich and poor in speech.¹⁹ St. Pierre's focus is on the exclusionary character of fluency with reference to categories of health and norms of able bodiedness. These categories are relevant for the case of Victorian debating norms as well. As mentioned above, the rules of debate insisted on a particular type of turn-taking that required speakers to be able to organize their thoughts and speech immediately into a structure recognizable as political speech, which excluded both speakers who lacked the training to produce such narratives, and neurodiverse speakers for whom such linearity poses challenges. As St Pierre notes ‘habituated expectations of what sort of speech is appropriate and useful within given contexts solidify into unspoken communicative rules embedded in the social fabric, rules that exclude certain voices and behaviours as disorganizing forces’.²⁰ These charges of disorganization are levelled at disabled speakers, but for the context of political speech, I would argue for a broader definition of fluency as a particular performance, one that is entangled not only with ableist norms of healthy speech, but also with linguistic and cultural expectations – in which an accent, a (mis)understanding of idiom or a (mis)judgment of tone could have a significant influence on one's audibility within the rigidly defined limits of ‘proper’ debate.

I am therefore concerned not only with embodied speech in debate as a practice that was heard as an externalization of health and ability, but also with speech as a sounding activity carried out by bodies marked by gender, class and race. As the minute attention to speech turns, places from which to speak, and so on, demonstrate, managing debate in the Victorian debating club – as in parliament – was also a matter of managing acoustic order. In some cases quite literally: the Speaker of the House or President of the Assembly was tasked with maintaining the kind of ‘order’ that would allow the parliamentary clerks to clearly hear one voice at a time.²¹ Being politically audible required speakers to be heard as signal, and not as noise or silence. Scholars in sound studies have used these distinctions between meaningful sounds (signal) and ‘sounds out of place’ (noise) as a way to conceptualize how sound can express and shape power (im)balances. ‘Noise’, in such a conceptualization, ‘is used as a descriptor for deviant sonic behaviour, highlighting societal norms and delineating what is acceptable and what is not’.²² In other words, being labelled as noisy rather than articulate lowered one's audibility, but conversely, by attending to noise, we can also find out more about the acoustic and procedural order these noises were heard to interrupt. In the following two sections of this article, I will examine two examples of unlikely participants in Victorian debate, speakers ‘out of place’ who mobilized different forms of fluency (not always successfully) in order to be heard as voice rather than noise in the framework of organized debate, to make themselves audible.

When the rules don't fit

It is somewhat of a truism to state that the norms and expectations regarding political audibility and access to political debate in the nineteenth century were exclusively designed for men. Women gained suffrage only in 1902 in Australia (the first country in the British Empire to grant them the vote), and the first woman representative in the British House of Commons took her seat in Parliament in 1919. The only female voice heard in Victorian Parliaments, one could argue, was that of Victoria herself.²³ However, women's absence from the benches did not equate to an absence from representative politics entirely: as research on the galleries demonstrates, women showed a keen interest in parliamentary debates. Even if they were barred from contributing to parliamentary speech directly, their presence in the House was felt.²⁴ Moreover, women were by no means silent about politics either: throughout the British Empire, Victorian women took to the platform and to the pulpit to make their opinions heard.²⁵ Temperance movements, in particular, provided women with opportunities to practise public speech and make their views audible,²⁶ while multiple magazines not only represented the voice of women on the page but also served as the starting point for private and public discussions in real life.²⁷ And much like men, they felt the need to develop and cultivate their skills in oral delivery to do so. Throughout the Empire, but perhaps particularly in Britain's (former) colonies, this work of cultivating oratory and good speech was connected to ideals of ‘civilization’ that were of particular salience to women, and were both embraced and distrusted in the practices of public speech connected to women's political advancement.²⁸

Although women were not included in the practices of debating clubs like the Oxford and Cambridge Union or the Etonians' Pop,²⁹ they acquired some of their skills in fluency in similar structures. As Helen Sunderland has shown, young women of both working-class and more prosperous backgrounds could gain knowledge and experiences of representative politics in school: they engaged in school debates and mock elections, visited parliament, and in a general sense received ‘an apprenticeship in the organizational practices and committee work central to women's public roles in the period’.³⁰ Some of these girls would go on to enter women's colleges where they not only continued to develop their skills within their segregated colleges, but also became a presence in the male homosocial Unions. Female students could attend debates, even if they were not welcome to participate in them until the 1960s, and much as in the House of Commons, their presence at the Unions was felt. Additionally, issues related to women's rights and character became a recurring subject of debate and an object of often sharp discourse within the Union and in reports of its meetings. In 1896, for example, the Arnold Society, a debating club based at Balliol College, Oxford, discussed the question ‘Woman: Angel or Idiot?’.³¹ More common topics for debate were the question of female higher education, female suffrage, and women's increasing claims to public life and freedom. The ‘new woman’ that appeared in university debates and newspapers was largely a figment of male students' imagination, but the educated young women who had been raised to take part in all-female activities of debate as well as more long-standing practices of political conversation and commentary (like the salon) and practices of political influence would continue to be politically active once they left formal education.³²

The nineteenth century therefore also saw the foundation of at least some elite women's debating clubs – after the model of the many clubs and societies for men across Victorian towns and universities. These clubs, too, engaged in publishing their own histories, and enforcing their own rules, which were mostly similar in nature to men's clubs. They formulated debating topics in the same manner and applied the same procedural rules, to mostly the same ends. The Ladies' Edinburgh Literary or Debating Society, for example, ‘became a training school for women to fit them for public speaking of a high standard of excellence’, according to their own historiographer.³³ Although these clubs were not made up entirely of suffragists – and therefore did not simply or only serve the purpose of preparing their members for the representative roles they might hope for – they did provide women with opportunities to become familiar with the rules, regulations and tacit expectations of parliamentary debate. And they gave them a space in which they could develop strategies to interpret the rules in accordance with the gendered norms that made a direct application of ‘fluency’ as it was understood in male homosocial spaces impossible.³⁴ The clubs were therefore not only a training ground, but also a place to re-define the very same rules its members were learning to understand and apply.

To put it more simply: even in circles where female participation in debate was tolerated or encouraged, women were expected to speak and behave differently in an effort to adhere to the same procedural rules as men. The knowledge that the rules would be applied differently to them was made clear to women from a young age, and for many already communicated in school. In 1912, Katherine Hayes wrote and published a school play, exemplifying the gendered norms of fluency shaping debate. The play features two debating clubs, one male and one female. The opening scene immediately sets the tone. The stage is empty, and three girls walk on, one in the lead:

Susan: Hail all! Make way for me. Here comes a militant suffragette!

Jane: Susan, you are so noisy.

Susan: Of course I am. I have to make myself heard. How could I get a hearing otherwise?³⁵

This is a space where female participation in debate was central, but also one where, in order to take part in debate, women carefully managed their (and each other's) voices. Susan, giving voice to the thoughts of a movement that was heard as improper in its tactics and demands, is immediately admonished to not be ‘noisy’, thus drawing an immediate distinction between the noise of political protest and rebellion on the one hand, and the rational voice required for debate on the other. Or, to put it in the terms of the acoustic aspects of fluency, designating some utterances as proper and others as ‘sound out of place’. Susan, the play suggests, has not quite understood what ‘getting a hearing’ entails, conflating loudness with audibility, and she is instantly corrected by her friend.

The play goes on to dramatize exactly the kind of debate that one would expect in an early twentieth-century debating club: the ‘rival clubs’ discuss whether women should have the vote – or that is, at least, what the girls address. According to the boys, the question is rather simpler and did not require much discussion:

Tom: A debate on a brand new subject in our meeting tonight. ‘Resolved that the memory of the male is superior to that of females’

Sam: Why of course it is. Who ever doubted it for a moment?

Tom: Yes, but I've got to prove this to a committee of females.³⁶

The plot subsequently turns to the boys hatching a plan to rig the debate, and the girls all speaking in favour of female suffrage, causing the boys to despair over their unwillingness to engage in the kind of competition debating clubs – according to them – are designed for. The play puts on a humorous display of gender stereotypes and silly subterfuge, and in the end the boys succeed in fooling the girls and denying them victory. While the play represents the female students as able speakers, it also casts them as unable to really enter into the spirit of rivalry, demonstrating that while women might be intellectually gifted and should have a right to education, men are more suited to the actual practice of political debate. The play's seeming conclusion, that young women could be intelligent and independent but were not quite ready to be politically active, was likely to be an acceptable stance for the majority of its audience. To gain a hearing, women would first have to learn how to wield the tools of democracy – as well as the sometimes underhanded tactics of politics – more ably.

Women's debating clubs – both fictional and real – therefore had one important function that seems to differ from elite male clubs: rather than enforcing the rules to elicit the desired mode of oratory, they also creatively interpreted them for different voices, launched from different throats. The perceived noisiness of the female voice, a ‘sound out of place’ in political debate by its very nature, required careful management in order to become politically audible. Young fictional Susan may have been naively unaware of the subtle gendered layers of ‘getting a hearing’, but her author Katherine Hayes clearly was not. She could draw on the long experience of female elocutionists, preachers and temperance activists to know precisely how female voices resounded in public across the Victorian world. When, in 1885, Krishnabhabini Das published her accounts of her experiences as A Bengali lady in England, she too made note of the importance and value accorded to (parliamentary) debate in Britain. Describing it as one of the most visible expressions of the ‘independence’ she considered so central to British life (in contrast, of course, to the subservience of the colonized Bengali people), she astutely observed which voices could be heard in political debate in England, and which one could not, and drew clear connections between disenfranchised people within Britain, and her fellow countrymen and – women seeking an independence of their own. Political representation, to Das, seems to have chiefly struck her as a chaotic and noisy affair, and entry into it appeared difficult, but necessary:

The English women are now struggling to become members of parliament, are creating a lot of commotion and trying very hard to win power for themselves. In a similar manner, if we could strike at the heart of each Indian and ask for women's liberation, if we did away with our docile and tender nature, and instead of keeping all our sorrows confined within our hearts, could shout and create a commotion in front of them, probably the Bengalis would lend ears to our pain and suffering. But by remaining subservient for a long time, we have lost all our power and strength for an independent life and that is why we are incapable of being equal to men in all respects as the English women are attempting to be.³⁷

Breaking the rules, gaining independence

The search for an independent life, from the perspective of the Empire's subaltern inhabitants, required a lot of shouting. Conversely, procedural rule-breaking was perceived (or perhaps expected) from racialized others within political spaces, and particularly from the inhabitants of colonies who were slowly gaining access to political debates in the colonial centres.³⁸ The first speakers to British political audiences from the South Asian subcontinent – dubbed ‘the voice of India’ or even ‘the trumpet voice of India’³⁹ would come to prominence only in the early twentieth century, but young Indian men were taking part in parliamentary style debates before that, for example in the debating societies of British universities.⁴⁰ If the reports of the debates in the university papers are anything to go by, they acquitted themselves quite well in these spaces, even if it took some of them some time to realize the importance of what must have looked like a peculiar extra-curricular activity. Mian Fazl-I-Hussain, who would eventually join the Cambridge Union and the Majlis, and become quite visible as a debater in the pages of the Granta, started out with very little interest in practices of socializing, according to his biographer:

During his first year at Cambridge, Fazl-i-Husain successfully maintained the resolution made in India not to take part in the activities of the University, and concentrated on his academic work. But during the Michaelmas term 1900, he threw himself whole-heartedly into the busy life of the University. He began by participating in the College Debating Society.⁴¹

He became an influential and rather successful debater at the university, alongside a number of other South Asian students. Nevertheless, their interventions in debates were occasionally dismissed as being of an ‘Oriental’ style – an over-exuberant, over-abundant verbosity that was in keeping with the rules proper but somehow struck the British ear as ‘wrong’ despite seemingly fulfilling the implicit demands of fluency and rhythm.

A (rather lengthy) speech entitled ‘How to be a great orator’, delivered in 1910 at the founding of the College of Eloquence in Kolkata, by its director Amrita Lal Bose shows just how such an interpretation of the rules of debate and good speech could arise.⁴² Bose was rather passionately convinced of the connection between representative politics and good speech, in a manner that chimes – if somewhat uncomfortably – with the sentiments expressed in parliament and English debating clubs:

Superior men can lead a nation. Writers and speakers are superior men. Therefore writers and speakers can be the leaders of a people. Therefore we want speakers and writers. A College of Eloquence can make good writers and speakers. Therefore we want a College of Eloquence.⁴³

As a result, he pleaded for the education of young elite Indian men to include the basic tenets of rhetoric which, for the purpose of political debate, were somewhat different from the rich oratorical tradition in which these young men would have been raised.⁴⁴ Nevertheless, Bose saw multiple connections between ancient Indian modes of speech and the rhetoric needed to interact with an Empire with democratic claims for its centre:

In every free country where the Government is carried on by the people, that is, under democratical forms of Governments and in countries where the Government is administered by the representatives of the people, that is, under representative forms of Governments people are always expected to be called upon to express their opinions on certain grave and important matters. In a dependent country where everything is to be clearly explained in order to bring the matter home to the Foreign Government most of the people must be good speakers, otherwise the people will have to bear the brunt of all the mistakes of the foreign rule.⁴⁵

In order to be able to get a hearing, to be politically audible in public discussions, Bose believed that learning about the rules of good English speech was of crucial importance to Indians. The education towards good speech he proposed to offer in the College of Eloquence consisted of three aspects: ‘I think that an Orator consists of three things, namely I. Language, II: Thought and III Voice.’⁴⁶

All three of those aspects were ultimately geared towards the sort of speech that Bose associated with the rules of English debate – and which he articulated in rather more direct terms that any English debating club. To speak well and politically audibly, to him, was to speak quickly and loudly, in good English. In other words, he, too, was interested in ‘fluency’. Bose's ideas about speed, volume and linguistic quality may very well have been a bit idiosyncratic. His speech is peppered with English idioms to underline what he understood to be the difference between ‘living’ English and its written form (he even offered to circulate a handy list of ‘idioms’ which he believed to enliven spoken language). His admiration for speed seems to have rested on similar assumptions about the particular value and effectiveness of spoken language. ‘You can speak volumes within half an hour, but you cannot write half as much in that time. Therefore speaking is superior to writing.’⁴⁷

As for the acoustic vocal quality required for good speech, Bose condensed what was often couched in woolly metaphorical language and careful subtlety into a simple rule: the voice was to be loud, clear and sweet:

By Voice in Oratory, I mean a loud, clear and sweet voice. There are many rapid speakers whose command over the language and rapidity of thoughts are astonishing and wonderful. But in spite of their superior skill in the two essentials of oratory, viz. Language and Thought they are not regarded as good orators for the want of the third element – namely Voice. Voice is absolutely necessary. Without a good, clear and loud voice no orator can excite correspondent emotions in others, which is the main object in oratory.⁴⁸

It is easy to dismiss Bose's attempt to articulate the tacit rules of good English political speech as a simple misinterpretation of a practice that he had insufficient experience of to fully understand. It seems more interesting, however, to listen to his speech before the College of Eloquence as a narrative of how Indian political actors grappled with the complicated reality of being ruled undemocratically by a power that identified itself with, and prided itself on, its principles of transparency and fairness in democratic debate. It also showed that, at the latest from the late nineteenth century onward,⁴⁹ Indian men made it their business to become good speakers in the context of what would become a modern post-colonial nation. Mere years before Bose's speech on the need for good oratory, in 1905, Rash Behari Ghosh gave a rather less naïve-sounding speech in response to viceroy Lord Curzon's convocation speech at the University of Calcutta. He, too, seems to have understood the tacit rules of good English speech, but rather than blunderingly (over)articulating them in an attempt to copy, he mercilessly exposed the tacit assumptions of political speech by English participants in the governance of India for what he considered to be their real nature, namely the means to obscure the supposedly transparent workings of political rule, and to exclude unwanted interlocutors:

In one of his numerous speeches – there are very few brilliant flashes of silence – Lord Curzon said ‘You will never rule the East except through the heart’. Is the Convocation speech of His Lordship likely to win our affection? And yet it is easy enough to touch our hearts, as easy, say, as it is to pass a Validating Act through the Viceroy's council.⁵⁰

Conclusion

The cases of young Susan and Amrita Lal Bose – or of women and subalterns engaging in parliamentary-style debate more generally – show both the possibilities and the challenges inherent in using the largely normative sources documenting aspects of debating procedure. On the one hand, the fact that so many aspiring participants in politics across the Empire were at least somewhat familiar with the rules of debate that reigned in parliament shows their far-reaching influence on people's conceptions of sovereignty, representation and citizenship and indeed on their lives. The ideals of fairness and fluency established in these procedures filtered through to numerous arenas of discussion, where debate became the norm and a touchstone for how one could productively exchange opinions. On the other hand, these examples of extra-parliamentary debate also show to what extent these rules, despite their claims of universality and fair transparency, worked to centre very particular types of speakers, and to exclude others almost as a matter of course. The cultural work carried out by these others in interpreting, transliterating, and adapting these rules to their own bodies, social identities and citizenship status and so on, shows that the rules and regulations are therefore not only normative (and therefore limited in what they can tell us about historical practice), but that they were also productive of practices that were not included in or intended by the rules or the publications that documented and explained them.

Skills of fluency, acquired in a range of formal and informal contexts, were mobilized to allow expressions of opinion that creatively engaged with procedural norms by all speakers, but particularly those for whom the rules did not ‘fit’. As Brenda Jo Brueggemann has remarked, the fluency required for rhetoric, as it is commonly understood, assumes that the responsibility for effective speech resides with the speaker, who is tasked with moving an audience presumed to be able-bodied and neurotypical.⁵¹ The speaker is therefore expected not only to exhibit literal fluency of pronunciation, but also an ability to fluently interact emotionally with the collective he or she addresses. Cultural historians and social linguists alike have long known that various forms of rhetorical skill have played a role in the emancipation of various underrepresented groups.⁵² What the case of the imperfect vocal practice of speakers like Susan, Bose or Fasl-i-Hussain shows is that these skills were, firstly, not merely discursive but extended into performance and delivery. Second, they show that cultural and political fluency did not consist of assimilation into existing procedural or rhetorical norms, but of their translation into modes that suited the particular situation and speaker. As dysfluency scholars have pointed out, ‘scholarly approaches to the history and culture of voice still rely on powerful assumptions that link voices to personal or collective agency’, and similar remarks could be made about the histories of rhetorics and political debate. Focusing on those speakers who developed different strategies of fluency can help to ‘provincialize’ common assumptions about what constituted a proper debate. Excessive, disruptive and idiosyncratic practices of speech – like a stutter – can have ‘the potential to perform the work of critically encountering […] fantasies of straight-talk or fluent/rational/homogenous communication’.⁵³ The vocal and discursive gymnastics of young, female, colonized speakers in the debating clubs and colleges of the Victorian British Empire could therefore both have the effect of putting common assumptions about fairness and fluency in debate into sharp relief, and of gradually effecting change in what counted as a proper contribution to a political debate.

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This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Josephine Hoegaerts

Josephine Hoegaerts is Professor of European Culture after 1800 at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her work focuses on histories of vocal health and propriety as well as different modes of political speech in the nineteenth century. Recent publications include ‘Voices that Matter? Methods for Historians Attending to the Voices of the Past’ in Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 47, (2021) and (with L. Marionneau) ‘Throwing One's Voice and Speaking for Others: Performative Vocality and Transcription in the Assemblées of the long nineteenth century’, Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies 6, (2021).

Notes

1 R. Palgrave, The Chairman's Handbook (London, 1878), p. 2. This premise has survived, in some ways, into the twentieth century. In their handbook on the analyses of debate and rhetoric, Claudia Wiesner, Taru Haapala and Kari Palonen approach parliamentary as an ‘ideal type’ against which other forms of debate are measured. C. Wiesner, T. Haapala and K. Palonen, Debates, Rhetoric and Political Action. Practices of Textual Interpretation and Analysis (London, 2017), p.29.

2 J.W. Smith, Handy Book on the Law and Practice of Public Meetings from Parliament Downward with Hints to Shareholders, Vestrymen and Others (London, 1873).

3 F.B. Gibbons, On Debating Societies. Their Use and Value, Political and Educational Being an Inaugural Address to the University Debating Society (Otago and London, 1887), p. 4.

4 H. Ford, The Art of Extempore Speaking (London, 1896), p. 16.

5 S. Kuper, ‘A Nursery of the Commons: How the Oxford Union Created Today's Ruling Political Class’, The Guardian, 19 April 2022.

6 D. Andrew, ‘Popular Culture and Public Debate: London 1780’, The Historical Journal 39, (1996), pp. 405–23.

7 M. Hurd, ‘Class, Masculinity, Manners, and Mores: Public Space and Public Sphere in Nineteenth-Century Europe’, Social Science History 24, (2000), p. 75, 110.

8 See, for example, A. Martin-Frugier, ‘La formation des élites: les ‘conférences' sous la Restauration et la Monarchie de Juillet’, Revue d'Histoire Moderne et Contemporairne 36, no. 2 (1989), pp. 211–44; C. Woods, Debating Women: Gender, Education, and Spaces for Argument, 1835–1945 (East Lansing, 2018); M. Bartanen and R. Littlefield, Forensics in America: A History (Lanham, 2013).

9 J. van Rijn, De eeuw van het debat. De ontwikkeling van het publieke debat in Nederland en Engeland 1800–1920 (Amsterdam, 2010).

10 T. Haapala, Political Rhetoric in the Oxford and Cambridge Unions, 1830–1870 (London, 2016).

11 For example, C.L. Ferguson, A History of the Magpie and Stump Debating Society, 1866–1926 (Cambridge, 1931); S.M. Toyne, History of the Haileybury College Debating Society (Oxford, 1912); D. Andrew (ed.), London Debating Societies: 1776–1799 (London, 1994); M. Thale, ‘London Debating Societies in the 1790's’, The Historical Journal 32, (1989), pp. 57–86.

12 The Reverend A. Goldberg, How to Form a Debating Society with Notes for the Use of Members, (Newport, s.d).

13 G.F. Chambers, Handbooks for Public Meetings (London, 1878), p. 47.

14 Chambers, Handbook for Public Meetings (1878), p. 25.

15 S.M. Toyne, History of the Haileybury Debating Society (Oxford, 1912).

16 R.E. Johnson and S.M. Rai, ‘Introducing Democracy in Practice: Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament’, in S.M. Rai and R.E. Johnson (eds), Democracy in Practice. Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament (London, 2014), p. 8.

17 E. Crewe, Lords of Parliament. Manners, Rituals and Politics (Manchester, 2005); E. Crewe, The House of Commons. An Anthropology of MPs at Work (London, 2015); S. Rai, M. Gluhovi, S. Jestrovic and M. Saward (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance (Oxford, 2021).

18 See, for example, B. Griffin, The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity, Political Culture and the Struggle for Women's Rights (Cambridge, 2012); H. Te Velde, ‘Parliamentary “Theatre”, Dignity and the Public Side of Parliaments', Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory 22, (2019), pp. 35–50; L. Marionneau, ‘The Chambre Is Stronger than the Rules’: The Performance and Parliamentary Practices in the Nineteenth Century French Chambre des Députés des Départements’, European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire 29, (2022), pp. 745–62.

19 J. St Pierre, Disability and the Politics of Communication (Ann Arbor, 2022), p. 7.

20 St Pierre, Cheap Talk, p. 52.

21 D. Morat, ‘Parlamentarisches Sprechen und politisches Hör-Wissen im deutschen Kaiserreich’, in Netzwerk Hör-Wissen im Wandel (Hrsg.), Wissensgeschichte des Horens in der Moderne (Berlin, 2017); D. Gardey, ‘Scriptes de la démocratie: Les sténographes et rédacteurs des débats (1848–2005).’ Sociologie du travail 52, (2010); L. Marionneau and J. Hoegaerts, ‘Throwing One's Voice and Speaking for Others: Performative Vocality and Transcription in the Assemblées of the Long Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies 6, (2020), pp. 91–108.

22 H. Pickering and T. Rice, ‘Noise as “Sound Out of Place”: Investigating the Links between Mary Douglas’ Work on Dirt and Sound Studies Research', Journal of Sonic Studies 14, (2017).

23 J. Hoegaerts, ‘The Sound of Sovereignty: Royal Vocal Strategies in the Victorian House of Lords’, in A. Gilleir and A. Defurne (eds), Strategic Imaginations: Women and the Gender of Sovereignty in European Culture (Leuven, 2020).

24 See, for example, P. Seaward, ‘Parliament Observed: The Gallery of the Old House of Commons’, in E Chalus and P. Gauci (eds), Revisiting the Polite and Commercial People: Essays in Georgian Politics, Society and Culture in Honour of Professor Paul Langford (Oxford, 2019); A. Sparrow, Obscure Scribblers: A History of Parliamentary Journalism (London, 2003), pp. 66–67.

25 T. Wright (ed.) Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes (Edinburgh, 2020).

26 C. Mattingly, Well-Tempered Women. Nineteenth-Century Temperance Rhetoric (Carbondale, 2000).

27 Anne-Julia Zwierlein, ‘Viktorianische Zeitschriften als multimediale, polyvokale und außerparlamentarische Plattformen’, in S. Fazli and O. Scheiding (eds), Handbuch Zeitschriftenforschunged (Bielefeld, 2022), pp. 273–88.

28 J. Damousie, Colonial Voices. A Cultural History of English in Australia, 1840–1940 (Cambridge, 2010), p. 15, 179.

29 Women were notably included in the more popular debating societies founded in the eighteenth century, and topics were even chosen to particularly entice women (possibly because the managers of debate felt the need to attract large audiences to increase the income from the events they organized). See, for example, Thale, London Debating Societies in the 1790's, p. 60.

30 H. Sunderland, ‘Politics in Schoolgirl Debating Cultures in England, 1886–1914’, The Historical Journal 63, (2020), pp. 935–57, 936.

31 Records of the Arnold Society, held at Balliol College Historical Collection.

32 As recent research on the history of suffrage and citizenship has shown, personal involvement in politics (including representative and electoral politics) was not solely dependent on formal access to debates and the vote, and various forms of more informal ‘influence’ in elections and representation were available particularly to women. See, for example, K. Lauwers, ‘Negotiating French Social Citizenship in Early Twentieth-Century Letters to a Representative for the Rhône Department’, Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory 24, (2022), pp. 42–59.

33 M. Rai, Ladies in Debate. Being a History of the Ladies' Edinburgh Debating Society 1865–1935 (Edinburgh, 1936), p. 22.

34 The related issue of gendered discourse, and particularly women's cultural work in using language to navigate the gendered imbalances of power both in private and in public, has been a long-standing topic in socio-linguistics. See, for example, Robin Lakoff, edited by Mary Bucholtz, Language and Woman's Place, Text and Commentaries (Oxford, 2004).

35 K. Hayes, Rival Debating Clubs. Playlet for Grammar School Pupils (New York, 1912).

36 Hayes, Rival Debating Clubs, p. ii.

37 S. Mandal (ed.) A Bengali Lady in England by Krishnabhabini Das (1885), (Cambridge, 2015), p. 167.

38 See, for example, A. Goodrich, Henry Redhead Yorke, Colonial Radical. Politics and Identity in the Atlantic World, 1772–1813 (London, 2019), M. Fisher, The Inordinately Strange Life of Dyce Sombre, Victorian Anglo MP and Chancery ‘Lunatic’ (London, 2010).

39 See, for example, A. Bajpaj, Speaking the Nation. The Oratorical Making of Secular, Neoliberal India (Oxford, 2018), s.n. The Trumpet Voice of India. Speeches of Babu Surendranath Banerjea, delivered in England 1909, (Madras, 1909).

40 J. Hoegaerts, ‘Learning English at the Expense of the Union The (colonized) voice as a vehicle of knowledge and political transfer’, Ennen ja nyt, 4, (2019).

41 A. Husain, Fazl-I-Hussain, a Political Biography (London, 1946), p. 27.

42 The precise background, practice and trajectory of Bose or his college of eloquence are difficult to discover, and it seems unlikely that the College was a great success. However, as Anindita Ghosh's work on the rich print culture of nineteenth-century Calcutta and the oral culture it competed and interacted with shows, various modes of oratorical performance developed in the city in this period, and were documented in satire, pamphlets and other cheap prints. For example, A. Ghosh, ‘Literary Traditions in Pre-print Bengal and their Legacy in an Age of Print’, in I. Banerjee-Dube and S. Gooptu (eds), On Modern Indian Sensibilities: Culture, Politics, History (London, 2017), pp. 234–58; A. Ghosh, Power in Print : Popular Publishing and the Politics of Language and Culture in a Colonial Society, 1778–1905 (Oxford, 2006).

43 Bose, How to be a Great Orator, pp. 25–26.

44 See P. Dutta, The Microphone Men. How Orators Created Modern India (Mumbai, 2019).

45 Bose, How to be a Great Orator, pp. 12–13.

46 Bose, How to be a Great Orator, p. 52.

47 Bose, How to be a Great Orator, p. 24.

48 Bose, How to be a Great Orator, p. 60.

49 And in some measure earlier in the century, as the leading figures of what would become the ‘Bengali Renaissance’ started forming and spreading their ideas.

50 R.B. Gosh, ‘The Sins of Lord Curzon’, in B.K. Ahluwalia (ed.), Indian Oratory. Vivekananda to Indira Ghandi (New Delhi, 1977), p. 67.

51 B.J. Brueggemann, Lend Me Your Ear: Rhetorical Constructions of Deafness (Washington, DC, 1999).

52 See, for example, H. Quanquin, Men in the American Women's Rights Movements 1830-1890: Cumbersome Allies (London, 2020); L. Abrams, ‘Whores, Whore-Chasers, and Swine: The Regulation of Sexuality and the Restoration of Order in the Nineteenth Century German Divorce Court’, Journal of Family History 21, (1996), 267–80; E. Nina, ‘Politeness, Power, and Women's Language: Rethinking Study in Language and Gender’, Berkeley Journal of Sociology 32, (1987), pp. 79–103.

53 D. Martin, ‘George Catlin's Shut Your Mouth, the Biopolitics of Voice, and the Problem of the Stuttering Indian’, in J. Hoegaerts and J. Schroeder (eds), Ordinary Oralities. Everyday Voices in History (Oldenbourg, 2023), p. 77.