Articulate Sounds

This book will be available open access upon publication.

Articulate Sounds uncovers the complex relationship between music, literature, and religious dissent in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. While collective song was central to Dissenting identities and culture, James Grande shows how many aspects of music were viewed with suspicion or even hostility by Nonconformist writers. Throughout the Romantic period, Dissenters debated questions of musical meaning and the connections between music and the written word, as well as the vaunted power of music over the emotions and changing ideas about listening, lyric, sound, and voice. Individual chapters focus on a range of canonical and less well-known authors, including Blake, Godwin, Iolo Morganwg, Amelia Opie, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt. This book follows their careers across Britain but is grounded in the ‘world city’ of Romantic London, revealing a history of cosmopolitan cultural exchange. Tracing the Dissenting response to a rich variety of musical forms, from opera to oratorio, and from the symphony to popular ballads and hymns, Articulate Sounds demonstrates how Dissenters’ deep ambivalence towards music shaped the literary culture of Romanticism. The neglected history of music and Dissent offers a new understanding of both the evolution of Protestant Nonconformity and the contested place of music in nineteenth-century Britain.

Author Biography

James Grande is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture at King’s College London. He was previously a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the European Research Council-funded project, ‘Music in London, 1800-1851’, directed by Roger Parker. His publications include William Cobbett, the Press and Rural England: Radicalism and the Fourth Estate, 1789-1835 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), William Cobbett, Romanticism and the Enlightenment: Contexts and Legacy (with John Stevenson; Pickering & Chatto, 2015), William Hazlitt: The Spirit of Controversy and Other Essays (with Jon Mee; Oxford University Press, 2021), Sound and Sense in British Romanticism (with Carmel Raz; Cambridge University Press, 2023) and Scripture and Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain (with Brian H. Murray; Bloomsbury, 2023). He is a trustee of Keats-Shelley House, Rome and editor of the Keats-Shelley Review.