New College English Professor to Present Research at International Law and Governance Conference

What does a little-known circle of writers in 1790s England tell us about political and legal speech today – like the testimony in the Treyvon Martin case, or the posturing over Affordable Care Act?
Miriam Wallace, professor of English at New College of Florida, says the lesson is in how the acceptability of the speaker affects the credibility of what is being said. In the Martin case, the testimony of his friend Rachel Jeantel was perceived as ineffective because her tone was at times combative, at other times too soft, and too often not in “proper English.”
“It seemed to me a pretty clear case of what kind of American spoken English is considered authoritative and appropriate,” Wallace said.
It also was hardly a new problem. Wallace’s latest research – which takes her this month to an international conference, “Law and Governance in Britain,” at University of Western Ontario – looks at how the less-educated middle and working class became capable of engaging in political speech.
Wallace is the only scholar at the conference form outside the field of history. It is the result of Wallace bringing her training in linguistic expression and figurative language to the study of popular accounts of legal trials, trial records, political speeches and rhetorical training.
Wallace has studied 1790s writers like William Godwin’s friend, Thomas Holcroft, who were using fiction to disseminate radical political ideas into the broader community. Holcroft, the self-educated son of a shoemaker, was among 13 members of a popular debating society who were arrested and indicted for treason in 1794. The case against him was eventually dismissed, after the three lead defendants were acquitted in a famous trial that held London rapt.
Her research resulted in Wallace’s 2010 journal article, “Writing Law and Speaking Justice in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain,” which explored how reformers used print publications to stimulate public debate of the role of representational government, the place of women in society and the concept of merit, rather than birthright or property ownership, as the proper basis for citizenship.
Wallace argues that apparently “neutral” kinds of writing, like early children’s literature, dictionaries, and handbooks of elocution, continued the political education of the debating societies that were shut down by new parliamentary laws prohibiting “seditious meetings.”
She continued her examination of the intersection of literature and political speech in a 2012 essay, “Thomas Holcroft and the Gordon Riots: Romantic Revisionings,” focused on the 1780 anti-Catholic riots that unsettled Londoners for five days. Holcroft, writing under a pseudonym, used his dramatist talents to weave multiple depictions of the sprawling riots into a single eyewitness account. He even testified at the trial of one of the rioters—in the man’s favor. Charles Dickens used Holcroft’s piece as a source for his novel “Barnaby Rudge.”
In the essay, Wallace argues that given their beginnings in presenting a petition to Parliament and targeting prisons and tollbooths on bridges crossing the Thames, they are a kind of early political protest and not only a sign of religious and ethnic intolerance.
The essay, published by Cambridge University Press in the collection “The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain,” caught the eye of the conference’s organizers, Wallace said.
She will be speaking on “Representing legal and political speech in eighteenth-century British satirical prints, 1750-1790,” a topic based on her research as a visiting fellow ay Yale’s Lewis Walpole Library Fellow in 2012. There, Wallace researched the library’s collection of serious and caricature images of that era’s public speeches — from speeches by famous attorneys and political/parliamentary speakers to caricatures of commoners speaking in pubs or rousing the populace with open-air speeches.
In those images, she says, gesture and posture stand in for actual speech. Those political speakers had been trained in classical Roman oratory techniques, like where to stand and what gestures to use. And while the gestures themselves have changed, the skill still is used today, from presentations on the job to speeches in Congress to sound bites on television.
“It makes me think about how much appearance and presentation matter to help someone to hear your words or enable them to dismiss your words,” Wallace said. “So we may say that we are voting for someone’s ideas, but a lot of what we’re voting for is their self-presentation – their posture, gesture, speech patterns. That’s not necessarily a terrible thing, but it’s something to understand as a performance and a skill, and one we too can practice.”
At the conference, Wallace is looking forward to meeting with some leading scholars of British social and legal history, including Nicholas Rogers and Douglas Hay, both of York University, and to presenting in the conference’s unique venue, the moot court room of the university law school.
“I think it will be fun, if a little intimidating, to hold the floor in a Moot Court!”– though appropriate given her interest in authoritative public speaking, she said.
And though she will be discussing images of oration by members of parliament and commoners from more than a century ago, she notes that the topic is relevant today: “These are still issues – what does freedom of speech still mean, who can be heard, whose testimony is acceptable? These are not things that have gone away.”