The day technology reached back into time

From The Paris Review, a look at the first time technology revived the dead (to hear the recording, click here):

In April 1889, only a few months before he died, Robert Browning became the first major literary figure to commit his voice to wax. At a dinner party held by the artist Rudolf Lehmann, Browning stood before the Edison Talking Machine—then new and exceedingly novel—and recited his poem “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix.” The problem: he couldn’t remember his lines.

“I forget it—er,” Browning stammers only three lines in. Then, after another false start: “I—I am most terribly sorry that I can’t remember my own verses.” (Imagine if, today, poets were expected to have all their own poems memorized.) “But one thing that I will remember all my life is the astonishing sensation produced upon me by your wonderful invention.”

He wouldn’t remember it very long—he died eight months later, thus conferring new value on the wax cylinder containing his voice. As John M. Picker writes in Victorian Soundscapes, Edison’s machine created a “kind of relic, a hollow, grooved talisman of identity”; with Browning dead, it could be used “in an unprecedented form of poet worship.”

On December 12, 1890, the first anniversary of Browning’s death, the members of the London Browning Society gathered to listen to the recording in commemoration. H. R. Haweis recounted the “extraordinary séance” in the London Times:

Today was the anniversary of Robert Browning’s death at Venice, and at 5 o’clock in the afternoon, in singular commemoration of it, an event unique in the history of science and of strange sympathetic significance took place at Edison house. The voice of the dead man was heard speaking. This is the first time that Robert Browning’s or any other voice has been heard from beyond the grave. It was generally known that Colonel Gouraud had got locked up in his safe some words spoken by the poet … at the house of Rudolph Lehmann, the artist. But up to yesterday the wax cylinder containing the record had never been made to yield up its secret … the small white wax cylinder containing the record carefully wrapped in wool was produced, and, on being put upon the machine, the voices at Rudolph Lehmann’s house on the night of April 7, 1889, were accurately reproduced … while in breathless silence the little, awed group stood round the phonograph, Robert Browning’s familiar and cheery voice suddenly exclaimed: “Ready?”

Haweis was quick to imbue the event with historic and spiritual significance, but Browning’s sister, Sarianna, took a dim view of the ceremony. “Poor Robert’s dead voice to be made interesting amusement!” she wrote to a friend. “God forgive them all. I find it difficult.” And as Picker points out, there is something ironic in the proceedings; “in listening and relistening to just a lapse, they memorialized, of all things, their hero’s forgetfulness.” But I understand the inclination to fetishize this recording: think of how Browning’s survivors must’ve seen it. Here was one of the few recordings available anywhere, of anyone, and it happened to contain his voice. Unless he’d been cursing up a storm or retching, his sounds, in their scarcity, were sure to take on an extraordinary preciousness.

Browning’s stint as the sole recorded poet was short-lived; not long after, Tennyson recorded some of his own works with the machine. And fittingly, W. H. Preece, an early phonograph enthusiast, had touted the invention by borrowing some lines from Tennyson: the “sound of a voice that is still,” he wrote, “may now be realized.”