Contents -- Illustrations -- Introduction:The Tramp of a Fly's Footstep -- Hearing Things -- An Auscultative Age -- Nuisance and Resonance -- 1 "What the Waves Were Always Saying":Voices, Volumes -- Babbage and Dickens: A Library of Air -- "Away, with a Shriek, and a Roar, and a Rattle" -- Forever and Forever through Space -- 2 The Soundproof Study:Victorian Professional Identity and Urban Noise -- Scatterbrain London -- "Blackguard Savoyards and Herds of German Swine" -- Writers' Block -- Embodying Noise:The Leech Case -- "Great Facts" -- 3 George Eliot's Ear: New Acoustics in Daniel Deronda and Beyond -- On the Other Side of Silence -- Helmholtz and Eliot: Sympathetic Vibration -- "On the Verge of a Great Discovery":Talking Cures -- 4 The Recorded Voice from Victorian Aura to Modernist Echo -- Tennyson's Talking Machine -- "Send Me Mr. Gladstone's Voice" -- Sinful Speech -- Sound Bites -- Coda:The Victor Dog -- Appendix: Dickens's Prospectus for the Cheap Edition (1847) -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- X -- Y -- Z.