| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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Chapter 1
Introduction
Spoken language is not so much a thing that a person uses as it is a representation of the way a person is. Speech is to the mind as skin is to the body. It is the way a person comes to be a definite and expressive creature. Speech is as inseparable (even though distinguishable) from a person's thoughts and feelings as skin is from bones and muscles. And just as bodily movements are fluid, passing, and largely instinctive, so is spoken language.
—Albert Borgmann
The purpose of my analysis is to employ Charlotte Brontë's Shirley (1849), Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1854), and George Eliot's Felix Holt (1866) to evidence how the growth of capitalist production and the development of new technologies of industry within the early to mid-Victorian periods inspired the prioritization of the printed word over oratory and speech as a