“‘Hah!’ Finally, a book that makes sense of the city of London through its manifold voices. The cast of characters is motley—from ballad singers to prima donnas—and the repertoire a cosmopolitan mix. Through voices musical, political, metaphorical, anatomical, and mechanical, these essays not only amplify our understanding of nineteenth-century London, they show why voice mattered then as much as it does now.”

Laura Tunbridge, University of Oxford

“This innovative and important collection of essays tracks the politics of the musical ‘voice’ as it travels across classes, spaces, and boundaries in early nineteenth-century London. London Voices,1820–1840 attends to the sounds of song that rose above the clatter and noise of the fastest-growing city in the world. Usefully disturbing the boundaries between elite and popular, this book argues for the power of the idea of ‘voice’ for diverse interest groups and initiatives at a time of political and social upheaval. London Voices, 1820–1840 offers a whole new way of hearing the period.”

Clare Pettitt, King’s College London

“The volume in your hands begins as a riotously evocative guide to a resonant aural world and ends as the most intelligent meditation I know on the historical consolidation of voice as an index of modern political life. There is no more convincing account of the moral and commercial importance of voice. Moving deftly from ballad singers to celebrity divos, from improvising singer-actresses to silver-fork novelists, from singing-class movements to castrati, from ‘organ boys’ to reform-minded music critics, this impressive collection makes the case for voice, showing why its use, representation, and regulation became so definitive of London’s metropolitan order. The sheer proliferation of discourse—the range of voices heard and unheard—turns out to be the point. Read on!”

James Q. Davies, University of California, Berkeley

"Parker and Rutherford have assembled a fine collection of essays, by respected scholars, devoted to voices of London in the broadest sense."

Choice

"These are exciting times for musicologists and historians of music, as is cogently demonstrated by Roger Parker and Susan Rutherford’s new edited collection, London Voices, 1820-1840: Vocal performers, practices, histories. By 'means of sound, and particularly by means of ‘voice,'' this volume puts the sonorous, specifically the vocal and musical, at the centre of its historical analysis. . . . What London Voices does so well, is to explore these themes through the voice, especially those musical, providing a model of what musicologists have to contribute to broader social-cultural histories. It is not just that this book mobilizes wider contexts to explore vocal culture, but it shows how 'the voice' played an active role in shaping social, political, and religious history."

Revue de Musicologie

"This wide-ranging collection suggests fruitful new avenues for research."

Victorian Studies

"The present volume seems. . . to offer a picture of unprecedented vivacity and variety. . . . Never before has a collection of essays managed to resound so vividly and yet so clearly, also proving in an irrefutable way the importance of the voice as a historical, moral, commercial, and political object and definer. Hopefully, the interdisciplinary character and breadth of approaches presented in this collection will inspire new projects aiming at exploring not only the sonic history and character of a specific location, but also the complex interplay between soundscape, musical production, and market."

Opera Quarterly