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 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 an author himself, Defoe insisted upon the superior reliability of print. Still, printed information about the plague is not always accurate in the Journal, reflecting the hidden "oral underpinnings of modern print culture" (102). In one of the most compelling parts of her analysis, McDowell describes the role of women searchers during outbreaks of plague. Usually older women living on the charity of the parish, women searchers were forced to inspect the bodies of the dead for evidence of plague. Often illiterate, they would transmit their findings to parish officials orally, and their (sometimes inaccurate) findings would then be enshrined in print. Interestingly, Defoe does not mention the women searchers in A Journal, reflecting one of the many ways in which women's voices, so prominent and central to oral culture, were silenced in print.

Chapter 4 examines the life and work of John "Orator" Henley, now a marginal figure whom McDowell has recentered. Henley became famous for opening a public oratory under the guise of a church. Although Henley was mocked widely--including by Alexander Pope--he believed in universal education and the importance of public speaking and debate. His oratory, which he envisioned as an "educational institution" (117), was open to the public, and for a small fee, anyone, male or female, upper class or lower, could attend, listen to public lectures, and take part in spirited communal debate. Despite being imprisoned several times, Henley and his oratory survived for decades, and were central to "the formation of the 'secular' public sphere that we associate with modernity" (161). Chapter 5 turns from Henley to the broader elocution movement that he initiated. The late eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of advice about effective public speaking, and Thomas Sheridan became famous for traveling the country and training people in public speech. Sheridan insisted that eloquence, not literacy, was the mark of the gentleman, and he lamented the decline in public speaking ability that accompanied the spread of print. McDowell concludes the chapter by discussing the effectiveness of elocutionary movements. The chapter ends with a fascinating recontextualization of Mansfield Park, in which Edmund takes for granted the importance of eloquence in the pulpit.

Chapter 6, in my opinion the most compelling of the book, examines depictions of Billingsgate fishwives, who were synonymous in the period with lower-class feminine speech. To my knowledge, no other critic has examined the fishwives in any detail, and McDowell offers insights into both their business practices and the ways in which they functioned as cultural shorthand for unruly, vulgar, and incontinent female speech. As fishwives were known for their use of figurative language and metaphors while hocking their wares, educated gentlemen were encouraged to be plain spoken in contrast to these verbally incontinent women.

As the century progressed, McDowell writes in chapter 7, "commentators increasingly posited a distinct 'oral tradition' of balladry that was anti-thetical to and threatened by commercial print" (233). Ballads, which were increasingly sold in print, had replaced an older tradition of minstrelsy, leading authors such as Thomas Percy and Joseph Ritson to compile and preserve older oral ballads. William Motherwell in particular treated older ballads as high art worth preserving, "in opposition to the 'trash' of the print marketplace" (246). The vogue for printed ballad collections enabled the preservation of these obscure works, and thus paradoxically "print may have done as much to preserve oral tradition as to destroy it" (249).

McDowell's final chapter takes a brief glance at Macpherson's Ossian poems before turning her focus to Samuel Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, reevaluating Johnson's anti-Scottish snobbery through the lens of the development of oral culture. Throughout his career, Johnson evinced a profound suspicion of oral culture, one rooted both in Protestant distrust of oral tradition and in the belief that literacy was necessary to combat poverty. Johnson's trip to the Highlands, however, forces him to recognize that poverty is caused not by illiteracy alone, but by English policies set in place after the Battle of Culloden.

Despite a few instances of unnecessary repetition that could have been culled by a heavier editorial hand, The Invention of the Oral is on the whole a breathtakingly original, compellingly researched, and deeply learned volume. It should be of interest to all scholars of eighteenth-century cultural studies.

Jennifer L. Airey

The University of Tulsa