The Age of Noise in Britain

Hearing Modernity

James G Mansell

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780252082184, 9780252040672
• eBook ISBN: 9780252099113
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Sound transformed British life in the "age of noise" between 1914 and 1945. The sonic maelstrom of mechanized society bred anger and anxiety and even led observers to forecast the end of civilization. The noise was, as James G. Mansell shows, modernity itself, expressed in aural form, with immense implications for the construction of the self. Tracing the ideas, feelings, and representations prompted by life in early twentieth century Britain, Mansell examines how and why sound shaped the self. He works at the crux of cultural and intellectual history, analyzing the meanings that were attached to different types of sound, who created these typologies and why, and how these meanings connected to debates about modernity. From traffic noise to air raids, everyday sounds elicited new ways of thinking about being modern. Each individual negotiated his or her own subjective meanings through hopes or fears for sound. As Mansell considers the different ways Britons heard their world, he reveals why we must take sound into account in our studies of cultural and social history.

1Modernity as Crisis

Noise and “Nerves”

[T]he noise goes on, and it goes on getting louder and louder, and more and more prolonged. And, by malignant fate, one individual after another is, as it were, picked out from the crowd for special attention by this modern fiend.

—Dan McKenzie, “The Crusade against Noise” (1928)

By the turn of the twentieth century, Britain had experienced over a century of dizzying transformation. The beginning of the new century was marked by widespread anxiety about the ongoing pace of change. This took the form, among other cultural trends, of concern about modern life’s impact on the health of the human body.1 Both within and beyond the medical profession, commentators worried that “modern civilization” had overtaken the body’s innate capacity to adjust and predicted that the human mechanism would buckle under the strain.2 The shattered nerves of the soldiers who returned from the trenches of the Great War epitomized the most extreme clash between humanity and technologized modernity, but on the streets of all towns and cities the exhausting influence of rush and sensation was increasingly apparent.3 Being modern became increasingly synonymous with being “nervous” in early-twentieth-century culture.4 Modernity was overstimulating, energy-draining, concentration-sapping, an assault on the senses and the nerves. It was cast as pathogenic, especially by those who wished to stifle its momentum.

Georg Simmel, canonical sociologist of early-twentieth-century modernity, influentially identified visual overstimulation as the predominant characteristic of modernity’s nerve-wracking influence. He argued that cities bombard their inhabitants with optical information—adverts, buildings, traffic, crowds of people—and that they become “blasé” as a result.5 This visual preoccupation has been maintained by philosophers of modernity from Walter Benjamin to Michel Foucault.6 However, it was, in fact, more common in early-twentieth-century Britain for sound to be identified as the source of mental alteration in urban populations. Urban noise tended to be heard not as one among many pathological features of the modern age but as the preeminent manifestation of an unhealthy paradox at the heart of modernity: the more it progressed, the unhealthier it became. Noise was heard as an aural signifier of progress—industrial, technological, and social—but also as its potential undoing due to its nefarious influence on health. The constant hum and vibration of the sonic city was identified by medical experts as a key factor in the worsening mental state of its inhabitants. Often, as in McKenzie’s description in the epigraph to this chapter, noise was described not just as a product of the modern age but, implicitly, as the vibrational embodiment of modernity itself.7

Towns and cities had long been thought of as noisy places, and people had long complained about street and neighbor noise.8 As John M. Picker has shown, Victorian intellectuals, including the mathematician Charles Babbage and the writer Charles Dickens, campaigned against street noises in the mid–nineteenth century on the grounds that their “brain work” was being made impossible by urban cacophony.9 Yet noise-sensitive Britons of the early twentieth century were adamant that their urban soundscape was more threatening to health than anything that had come before it. They identified new technologies, including, in particular, motor traffic and the loudspeakers of gramophone and wireless sets, as the source of this threat. Oxford University magazine, the Isis, insisted that nineteenth-century man had not been “reduced to a bundle of nerves by the incessant din of motor cars, barrel organs, electric trams, pianolas and gramophones, and all the hundred and one inventions of his Satanic Majesty which make our life a torment!”10 Marking out early-twentieth-century noise critique from that which had come before it was the sustained expert medicalization of noise as a social problem—a crisis of “nerves”—and the deliberate attempt to pathologize modernity itself through this process.11

A firm consensus about noise as a public health crisis emerged at the end of the 1920s following a noticeable increase of motor traffic in urban centers. It was in this middle part of the interwar period that the noise problem was formalized in medical terms and a systematic response to it emerged in the shape of organized noise abatement campaigns. Following a report on noise and public health published by the British Medical Association in 1928, a national Anti-Noise League, led by prominent medical men, was established in London in 1933. Similar organizations sprung up in many of Europe and North America’s major cities, often led, as in Britain, by medical experts.12 These organizations lobbied national and local governments to take action against “unnecessary noise.” While the solution to the problem of noise lay with engineers and architects whose expertise could be turned to creating quieter urban environments, doctors defined the nature of the problem itself in Britain and elsewhere. They dramatized it as a peculiarly modern problem and set the parameters within which other sound experts worked. This chapter deals, for that reason, with the role of medical experts in transforming the early-twentieth-century soundscape into a sociomedical problem.

Historians of noise Emily Thompson and Karin Bijsterveld have demonstrated the importance of understanding the interplay between cultural and scientific constructions of sound in the past. My aim in this chapter is to build on their investigations of early-twentieth-century noise abatement campaigns by focusing sustained critical attention on the medical foundations of these campaigns. While Thompson and Bijsterveld center their attention on the desire to control noise through scientific and technical mastery or through public education programs, this chapter focuses on the original medical basis, relating to claims about “nerves,” through which noise was transformed into a public health crisis in the interwar period. This process, like the ones Thompson and Bijsterveld describe, depended on cultural as well as medical ideas about the sensate body in modernity.13 My argument is that noise’s medicalization in this period is deserving of attention in its own right. By analyzing this process, I argue, we can come to better understand why and how noise entered into the channels of public debate in the years after 1914, why the noise abatement campaign took the form that it did in the 1930s, and why it failed to achieve as much impact in legislative terms as its leaders would have liked in the period up to 1945.

Bijsterveld observes that “public problems need convincing drama” in order to be constituted as such. In the case of Britain’s interwar noise abatement campaign it was the drama of “nerves” that played the pivotal role.14 Medical supporters of noise abatement such as McKenzie argued that noise causes constant, arhythmical, vibration of the body’s nervous system and that this physical onslaught leads to fatigue, exhaustion and, finally, to complete nervous breakdown.15 At the intermediate stage, sufferers from overexposure to noise were likely to be distracted, jumpy, and incapable of sustained and productive work—key signs of nervousness, or neurasthenia as it was described in specialized medical texts. Supporters of noise abatement warned that neurasthenia would become an epidemic in Britain unless action was taken against noise. Although this drama of nerves may have been convincing to public audiences familiar with popular narratives of nervous illness circulating in literary, self-help, and news discourse at the time, in official circles it held less sway. This was because the theory of neurasthenia, dependent as it was on a late-nineteenth-century physiological explanation for nervous breakdown, was rapidly losing ground to a new psychological paradigm in the study and treatment of mental illness. Given that medical historians such as Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra have argued that the First World War “marked the more or less final retreat of neurasthenia” as a credible diagnostic category, it is all the more surprising that it should have remained so prominent in the noise abatement campaign during the 1930s.16 My argument in this chapter is that, despite its increasingly outdated status in scientific terms, the neurasthenic paradigm remained useful to supporters of noise abatement because it allowed them to categorize noise as a physical health hazard equal to smoke or dirty water in its damaging health effects. Psychologists, in contrast, were beginning to locate mental illness in the mind rather than in the body, and to replace the language of neurasthenia with the language of psychoneurosis. For supporters of noise abatement, it remained useful to draw upon older somatic rather than the newer psychosomatic explanations for noise’s effects. As Chapter 3 points out, the new professional psychologists of the early twentieth century identified noise sensitivity as a symptom rather than as a cause of mental illness and, in doing so, reduced sound’s significance as a concern in public health. The desire to develop medical justification for noise abatement was, this chapter argues, one of the reasons for the extension of the neurasthenic paradigm into the psychological age.

There were other, cultural, reasons for the noise abatement campaign’s adoption of the neurasthenic model in their medicalization of city sounds. From its origins in the 1870s, neurasthenic theory had been intertwined with a critique of what writers on the topic referred to as “modern civilization.” Supporters of noise abatement drew on this critique as much as they did the medical elements of neurasthenic theory. The interwar noise abatement campaign defined modernity as a crisis of human civilization, the solution to which, short of turning back the clock on technological revolution, was the preservation of quiet spaces of auditory refuge and sanctuary. These spaces were necessary because supporters of noise abatement equated selfhood with quietness and with the possibility of mental separation from the sensory conditions of urban mass society. Neurasthenia offered them a useful counter-model: the nervous patient was one who could not hold him/herself together, whose inner self was endlessly susceptible to the noises and sensations of the modern world. Nervousness, a term used interchangeably with neurasthenia, had come to be described as a paradigm of modern selfhood, as a modern state of being, in novels and in other forms of writing, including early examples of self-help publishing. Summed up by American self-help writer, Robert S. Carroll, as “a life of emotional intoxication and superficial judgments in the nerve-exhausting struggle” of the modern city, the nervous self was said to be addicted to “diversion and pleasure” due to the constant stimulation it received in the modern urban environment.17 Self-help writers warned against this state of being and sought to find ways of returning people to calmer times. Rejecting this advice, avant-garde artists sometimes embraced neurasthenia as a state of selfhood allied to their embrace of the modern.18 Most people were somewhere in between, neither fully embracing of modern flux nor entirely averse to its pleasures. Either way, cultures of nervousness encouraged processes of self-imagination in which the boundary between the inner self and the external sensory world was constructed as hazardously porous. The nervous self was situated in, and constituted by, the experience of living in the modern urban environment.

This was a model of selfhood that supporters of noise abatement vehemently sought to resist, for in some ways little had changed since Dickens’s day. Noise abatement remained the cause of a particular class of people who believed, above all, that noise was a threat to the quiet thought and self-reflection necessary for intellectual leadership. While they attempted to cast noise as a threat to all kinds of people, the founders of the Anti-Noise League were particularly concerned about its effect on “the intelligent section” of society.19 They tended to point to the professional classes whose day-to-day working life, they said, depended on peace and quiet. This chapter thus extends Picker’s argument about the centrality of noise antipathy to Victorian professional identity.20 The growth of modern urban noise represented, to supporters of noise abatement, a crisis of quiet intellectuality in the twentieth-century city in which the mental isolation necessary for thought to take place and for intellectual selfhood to form was destroyed by the intrusions of sound. This intrusive sound was the product of a mass modernity, typified by the motor car and the gramophone loudspeaker, which they saw as emanating from classes of people whose work and selfhood did not depend on quiet thought. “The world over there is an absence of quiet thought,” wrote one prominent British noise abatement leader, paraphrasing Shakespeare, “and in its place much ‘sound and fury’ which often signifies nothing but sound and fury.”21

This chapter examines the way in which supporters of noise abatement developed medical arguments in support of their fear that the urban soundscape was eroding the conditions for quiet, individual selfhood and examines the cultural politics inherent in this process of medicalization. It traces the evolution of neurasthenia, the medical theory from which the category of nervousness emerged, from its origins in late-nineteenth-century neurology to its structuring influence on interwar noise abatement discourse. Neurasthenia, it will be argued, was a theory in which medical and cultural critique intermingled. It was used not only to diagnose the effects of noise on health but also to characterize modernity, and the modern city in particular, as unhealthy and in terminal decline. The theory’s pessimistic outlook on modernity led supporters of noise abatement to the conclusion that only reduction of noise and of the cultural forces that brought it into being could...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Modernity as Crisis: Noise and “Nerves”
• 2. Re-Enchanting Modernity: Techniques of Magical Sound
• 3. Creating the Sonically Rational: Modern Interventions in Everyday Aurality
• 4. National Acoustics: Total Listening in the Second World War
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index