To the people they spoke from another stage. Earlier Victorian history is ...

To the people they spoke from another stage.

Earlier Victorian history is punctuated with famous platform feats. From the later seventies the noise is continuous, the reverberations in the press incessant.

The newspapers had begun to notice that the public was less interested in parliamentary debates than of old, but its appetite for oratory was insatiable. Whether it was an inherited craving for the spoken word, or the pleasure of making the great ones feel the approval or the censure of the people, whether speeches satisfied an intellectual or a dramatic taste, to hundreds of thousands speech-going was a delight as keen as a Puritan's joy in sermons.