Sound in Place: Italian Migrant Street Music in the Nineteenth-Century Novel

In 1864, the mathematician and “father of the computer” Charles Babbage published his memoir, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, devoting a chapter to the figure he believed to be the natural enemy of London’s intellectual workers: the Italian organ grinder. Babbage was not alone in his disturbance: the period between 1840 and 1865 saw a massive chronicling of complaints against the “organ nuisance”, co-signed by prominent figures of the age, that placed the blame for “discordant noise” overwhelmingly on foreign migrants, particularly working-class Italian men. Historicizing the clamour of these debates, scholars have interpreted the organ nuisance discourse of this period as part of a broader reaction to the changing shape, and sound, of nineteenth-century urban life. This chapter, however, locates the anti-street music debates within the historical and cultural contexts of Italian economic migration into Britain and turns its focus from the detractors of street music to its migrant performers by attending to literary and cultural representations of Italian organ grinders and organ grinding. Whilst the organ-nuisance debates played out across the Victorian press present consistently xenophobic and negative depictions of migrant musicians as the embodiment of unskilled labour, nineteenth-century fiction offers a more ambivalent acoustic space, I argue, in which to test out and amplify the disruptive and affiliative potential of organ grinding. Examining work by Charles Dickens, George Gissing, Wilkie Collins, and George Manville Fenn, amongst others, the chapter demonstrates how nineteenth-century authors deploy the sounds of the Italian barrel organ to question the reproduction of social categories, expose the superficiality of Victorian moral codes, and examine the dislocating experiences of intra-European migration, relocating the reader within unfamiliar social worlds. Through form and content, Victorian fiction engages with the complex resonances of Italian migration and Italian music and offers new sonic modes of integration that shift the figure of the migrant musician from a position of narrative liminality, into the heart of Victorian text.