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Williams describes Charles Babbage as he neared the end of his life: living on Dorset Street in Marylebone alongside an old Difference Engine and an incomplete Analytical Machine, one working automated dancer (purchased from the remnants of Merlin’s Mechanical Exhibition, and restored), and – by Babbage’s own furious account – many hundreds of noisy and disruptive street performers. Williams posits a connection between what he calls “Babbage’s favored geriatric occupations”: continued work on the Difference Engine, and a campaign for increased legal restrictions on “foreign” street musicians. Drawing on early designs for the Difference Engine, which required its operator to count the pealing of multiple bells, but also upon Babbage’s pamphlet “On Street Nuisances” and his assertion that itinerant musicians had destroyed “one-fourth part of [his] working power,” Williams supplies a chapter in the history of listening that emphasizes the labor value of silent audition. The author examines governmental measures to regulate street music for the furtherance of an “industrious” political economy, and assesses the role of audile technique in the development of disciplinary notions of mental labor and artificial intelligence.

This chapter takes up the topic of sound itself by examining the acoustic environment of The Years (1937), from musical allusions, to traffic noises, to new sound technologies like the telephone. Focusing on the recurring figure of the barrel organ player, about which Woolf first wrote in her early essay “Street Music” (1905), the chapter argues that Woolf's concern in The Years was the regulation and definition of domestic, urban, and national space by sound, whether defined as noise or music. All of her choices speak, in various ways, to the construction of national identity through sound as well as space.

This chapter explores how migrants have contributed to the evolution of music in London. Despite episodes of xenophobia in the London musical scene, xenophilia became stronger, partly driven by the fact that both music and musicians inevitably migrate. This is so that, while national traditions of music may emerge, the process of cultural transfer involving both sound and people mean that such traditions cannot remain sealed off from external influences, even if they may develop national-level identities, at least in the short run. While music and musicians crossed European boundaries, during the twentieth century both performers and their tunes have increasingly spanned global and consequently racial divides. The German assertion that nineteenth-century Britain constituted a ‘Land ohne Musik’ (land without music), while an exaggeration, partly explains the arrival of foreign musicians to Victorian London and the eras before and since. The constant settlement and visits by musicians to the British capital since the early eighteenth century meant that London did not become a city without music, even if the tunes and those who played them often originated from abroad.

This chapter discusses how most of Woolf's essays are pedagogical in style, even when they are not so in content. Virginia Stephen's home schooling taught her about gender isolation and its impact on learning; her work at Morley College taught her about class exclusion and its impact on teaching; and her years as a reviewer taught her about different audiences and their impact on writing. Thus Virginia Stephen's struggle to educate herself shaped Virginia Woolf into an essayist who teaches, and that in Virginia Woolf's hands, the essay becomes a classroom. The chapter shows that between the time Virginia Stephen wrote “Street Music” in 1905 and Virginia Woolf wrote “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” in 1927, hallmarks of Woolf's pedagogical style emerge: a questioning, conversational, and inclusive attitude and a stance that recognizes difference, clarifies position, and emphasizes process.

Street Songs, based on the Clarendon Lectures for 2016, is about the use made by poets and novelists of street songs and cries. Karlin begins with the London street-vendor’s cry of ‘Cherry-ripe!’, as it occurs in poems from the sixteenth to the twentieth century: the ‘Cries of London’ (and Paris) exemplify the fascination of this urban art to writers of every period. Focusing on nineteenth and early twentieth-century writers, the book traces the theme in works by William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Walt Whitman, George Gissing, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust. As well as street cries, these writers incorporate ballads, folk-songs, religious and political songs, and songs of their own invention into crucial scenes, and the singers themselves range from a one-legged beggar in Dublin to a famous painter in fifteenth-century Florence. The book concludes with the beautiful and unlikely ‘song’ of a knife-grinder’s wheel. Throughout the book Karlin emphasizes the rich complexity of his subject. The street singer may be figured as an urban Orpheus, enchanting the crowd and possessed of magical powers of healing and redemption; but the barbaric din of the modern city is never far away, and the poet who identifies with Orpheus may also dread his fate. And the fugitive, transient nature of song offers writers a challenge to their more structured art. Overheard in fragments, teasing, ungraspable, the street song may be ‘captured’ by a literary work but is never, finally, tamed.