The Victorian rise of mass print media competed against persisting cults of orality: lectures
political speeches and other oral formats were omnipresent. Still cultures of lecturing and
public speaking have remained surprisingly invisible in Victorian literary and cultural
studies. These two anthology volumes explore this important cultural practice tracing
representations and fictionalisations of ephemeral oral performances through print and
sometimes manuscript. From manuals of rhetoric via journalism and autobiography to fiction
the sources have been selected introduced and annotated with care some of them are published
here for the first time (and most of them for the first time since the Victorian era). Both
volumes combined also show how the vibrant scene of lecturing became increasingly more
diversified popularised and socially inclusive. Vol. 1 thus addresses the problem of 'mixed
speaking' (before both men and women) while vol. 2 is concerned centrally with the active
participation of women in the cultures of lecturing and public speaking from the early
nineteenth century to the suffragettes. Vol. 1: The Art of Public Speaking - Speaking
Techniques and Voice Production - Gesture and Attitude - Relationship with the Audience -
Chairmanship - Managing Lectures and Lecture Tours - Public Reading and Reciting - Penny
Readings - Humorous and Satirical Approaches. Vol. 2: Women and Elocution: Reading and Reciting
- Women's Debating Clubs - Satirizing Women Speakers - Conversion to Suffragism and 'First
Speech' - Training and Professionalising Women Lecturers.
