Historians have often debated why so much energy was poured into efforts to reform working-class leisure and cultural pursuits in nineteenth-century Britain. This article uses a case-study of singing classes established in the early 1840s for industrial workers by local employers in the Manchester region to provide fresh answers to this question. It criticises a tendency to cast middle-class reformers as the primary agents of change in working-class leisure activities, arguing instead that many supposed innovations had been developed already by the Chartists, whose extensive transformation of working-class culture is increasingly recognised by scholars. The strike wave of 1842 permitted a dramatic manifestation of these cultural achievements, as the sounds of factory machinery were replaced by highly organised Chartist bands and choirs broadcasting radical messages. The establishment of a network of singing classes in the aftermath of the strikes was thus a belated attempt by the region’s middle classes to counter the dangerous eloquence of Chartist sonic culture. However, the subjective nature of musical experience meant working-class participants could derive quite different meanings from their massed singing than those their middle-class benefactors intended. In short, this article seeks to ascribe the central place to the Chartists, rather than middle-class reformers, in our explanations of why working-class leisure pursuits changed in the way they did, and to contend that the early Victorian singing-class mania, far from representing the reconciliation of middle and working classes in a shared liberal culture, might just as easily have furthered a radical cultural agenda.

The entrance of women into the male-dominated spheres of the professions and the arts has been a major theme of women's and gender history in nineteenth-century Britain. In general, historians have located this development primarily in the second half of the century and depicted it as an important corollary to the political aims of the wider women's movement. In contrast, this article contends that an overlooked earlier context for the formation and emergence of ideas of female professionalism and artistry were the debates surrounding female singers in the press between c. 1820 and 1850. In this era, writers in newly emerging specialist music periodicals increasingly advocated a view of female singers as both professionals and artists. Such views did not dominate discourse, however. There remained a great deal of ambivalence even in specialist publications about just how far female singers should pursue the lifestyle of the professional artist, while in the mainstream press very different attitudes towards female singers prevailed. Although female musical professionalism and artistry therefore remained contested concepts, this article highlights the significance of these debates about female singers as an important source for the new ideas about women's professional and artistic work emerging in nineteenth-century British society.

Charles Dibdin (1745–1814) was one of the most popular and influential producers of late Georgian culture. The huge diversity of his work and career defies simple categorization. He was, often at one and the same time, an actor, lyricist, composer, singer-songwriter, comedian, theatre-manager, journalist, and author of novels, historical works, polemical pamphlets, and guides to musical education. Consequently, he is important to many different fields for often quite dissimilar reasons. This means that a sense of his overall accomplishments—never mind the powerful reverberations of his influence—across numerous areas and in different periods may only truly be appreciated from the multiple perspectives that an interdisciplinary collaboration can offer. The chief aim of this volume is to illuminate the breadth and depth of Dibdin’s impact, and in the process offer fresh insights into previously hidden aspects of late Georgian culture. Dibdin’s importance lies in his ability to make visible the connections between various kinds of cultural production; he provides a model for thinking about late Georgian culture as a system of interconnected parts. This book illustrates the variety of Dibdin’s cultural output as characteristic of late-eighteenth-century entertainment, while also addressing the challenge mounted by specialization in the early nineteenth century. What emerges is not the elimination of miscellany, but rather the establishment of new cultural hierarchies in which a specialized elite culture increasingly defined itself against a continuing and vibrant culture of miscellany.

This book examines the uses and meanings of women’s voices in British society and musical culture between 1780 and 1850. As previous scholars have argued, during these decades patriarchal power increasingly came to rest upon a particular understanding of the essentially different nature of male and female physiology and psychology. As a result, this book contends, the female voice—believed to blend both physical and mental attributes—became central to maintaining, and challenging, gendered power structures. The book argues that the varying ways women used their voices—the sounds that they made, as much as the words they spoke or sang—were understood by contemporaries as aural markers of different kinds of femininity. Consequently, contemporary divisions over feminine ideals were both expressed and contested through women’s use of their voices and audiences’ responses to them. Following an introduction that lays out the book’s theoretical frameworks and main arguments, the first three chapters explore how contemporary responses to different styles of female vocality were shaped by class, religious, and national discourses, through an exploration of conduct literature, letters, diaries, life-writing, and music criticism and reportage in newspapers and periodicals. Two case studies then extend the argument further through detailed analysis of the use and meaning of women’s voices on the part of both amateur and professional female singers respectively. A closing epilogue draws together the book’s major themes and discusses their implications for the gender history of this period.

This chapter explores the meaning of the professional female voice through the experiences of three singers from the 1830s and ’40s: Adelaide Kemble, Clara Novello, and Marianne Lincoln. It continues the argument of Chapters 2 and 3 by exploring how contemporary divisions over the sound of femininity affected the ways singers chose to use their voices. Their letters and diaries show how they were caught between a desire to develop their professional technique and artistry, and an equally strong anxiety that, in doing so, they might contravene feminine norms expected by important sections of the public and even by family and friends. These case studies thus expose the ongoing tensions between the ideals of the professional singer and of femininity in British musical life, but they also indicate that, through complex, sometimes agonising negotiation, it was increasingly possible for these women to develop successful careers as professional female musical artists.