‘Alarm’d at the Hesitation in his speech’

IMPEDIMENTS in SPEECH effectually cured by CHARLES ANGIER, in Wardour-street, opposite St Anne’s-court, Soho, as can be attested by persons of the most reputable characters, who have been cured by him, people of known probity and honour. He does not desire his fee till what he undertakes is performed. He undertakes children of almost any age, who may be taught at the same time several branches of education.¹

BY THE AUTUMN of 1773, Lady Portsmouth knew her eldest son was not like other five-year-olds. The Austens had sounded the alarm bells: Lymington was a slow learner, and, most troubling of all, he was not talking in a normal manner. He had a ‘hesitation in his speech’, according to Mrs Austen, which was getting worse. Speech was the foundation stone for the rest of life. Schooling still depended upon oral repetition of everything from Latin verbs to times-tables, and, later in life, fluency in speech would be vital for Lymington’s public roles as a Hampshire aristocrat. He had to learn to speak well.

The advertisements placed by Charles Angier in a number of newspapers throughout 1773 leapt out to Lady Portsmouth as beacons of hope. While perfecting the art of public speaking, or rhetoric, had long been held in esteem, and was an academic subject at university, correcting speech faults was relatively unknown in the eighteenth century. Speech therapy as we understand it did not exist and Charles Angier did not suffer from competitors in his field. But, in such uncharted waters, Lady Portsmouth did not want to be taken for a fool. The medical marketplace was awash with quacks and fraudsters who were all too ready to take patients’ money in return for remedies that stood no chance of curing their complaints. Before she placed her confidence in Charles Angier, she needed to check his credentials.

Much of Angier’s credibility, she discovered, derived from his father, Samuel. In the mid-eighteenth century, Samuel Angier spotted a business opportunity that was to be the origins of a family business. In a society in which polite manners and conversation were thought to distinguish the best from the rest, knowing how to speak appropriately became a key asset. Presentation was all: delivery was almost as important as content. Correct pronunciation, tone, countenance, and gesture while speaking commanded respect.

Here was Samuel’s chance. Nobody was born knowing how to speak effectively, but he could teach the ‘arts’ of speaking to ‘great perfection’. Rather than laying the blame of speech ‘impediments, low voices, disagreeable tones, etc’ on ‘the badness of the organs, or weakness of the constitution’, as others had done, he could demonstrate that these proceeded ‘entirely from the irregular playing [of] some of the instruments of that art’. In other words, speech problems did not arise from physiological faults, but from bad habits. By practising and following the rules of speech that Samuel laid down, anyone might ‘become an elegant speaker in a very short time’.²

Samuel realized that, while speaking with ease was desirable in polite society, it was a necessity for some professions, particularly for clergymen who had to deliver sermons, and barristers whose oral skills were vital for the defence of their clients. He started advertising his services directly to these professionals, wrote a pamphlet addressed to clergy on public speaking, and in 1751 achieved a remarkable coup by being permitted to deliver his lectures on pronunciation to the University of Cambridge.³

Samuel had not had a university education, but he gave his lectures five times in Master’s Lodges and Senior Combination Rooms of Cambridge colleges. In his audience were ‘many Heads of Colleges, besides several Doctors both of Divinity and Physick, together with Professors, Masters of Arts, Fellows of Colleges’; these were the promising gentlemen of his generation. It was not difficult to understand the popularity of his lectures. He was playing to the insecurity of his audience: who would not want to learn how to present their ideas and arguments more effectively, or miss the chance of picking up a few tips that might give them the edge over their academic rivals? The delivery of Samuel’s lectures was itself a test of his skill, but his audience apparently ‘shew’d him a great deal of respect, and attended closely’ to what he said. One Cambridge professor who simply attended the lectures, and another bachelor who saw Samuel privately for four consultations, were said to have ‘alter’d so much for the better in their manner of reading publicly, as to surprise all their friends’. The Cambridge visit was such an important endorsement of Samuel’s methods and ideas that his son, Charles, was still boasting about it ten years later.⁴

By the time Lady Portsmouth spotted Charles Angier’s advertisements, Samuel had been dead for at least twelve years, but, on the back of his father’s success, Charles had built a reputation of his own. He had been his father’s assistant, inherited his manuscripts, and followed his no-nonsense approach. Like his father, he believed that, with the right tools and training, everybody could acquire the ‘mechanical art’ of speech. Furthermore, he thought that childhood was the best time to learn how to speak well. It was in childhood, Charles later explained, that any ‘disorder was less fixed, and the docility of mind, irritability and contractibility of muscles, were greater’. If parents acted in time, faults could be corrected because children’s minds and bodies were more pliable than in later life. Parents needed to take action before it was too late, argued Charles, because speech problems could hinder other areas of children’s development. ‘Impediments in Speech’, ran one of his advertisements in January 1772, ‘frequently prevent Children improving in several Branches of Education, as well as cramp and deject their Spirits.’ Predating any language of psychology, Charles was nevertheless fully switched on to the emotional consequences of speech problems. Without correction, he recognized that children would be left struggling to learn and could become painfully demoralized.⁵

Charles Angier was a perfect match for Lady Portsmouth’s needs. He took a positive view of the origins of speech problems, and he was confident of his ability to fix them. So much so that could claim ‘he does not desire his fee till what he undertakes is performed’. He promised results in a short time. ‘Several Persons can assert that they could speak plain, when they had been with him but two Hours’, he advertised shortly after his father’s death. With experience, and no doubt with an eye to the profits that could be made if treatment took longer, his optimism was tempered, and he began to argue that a two-month residential stay was most likely to yield results. He offered ‘genteel accommodations’ within his home, from his wife a mother substitute for his young charges, and the continuation of children’s other ‘branches of education’ by himself, or by their nominated tutors. This complete package, he assured parents, was all available at a very reasonable price.⁶

On 12 December 1773, Mrs Austen wrote to tell her sister-in-law that ‘Ld. Lymington has left us’. ‘His mamma,’ she explained, ‘began to be alarm’d at the Hesitation in his Speech, which certainly grew worse, and is going to take him to London in hopes a Mr Angier (who undertakes to cure that Disorder) may be of Service to him.’ It was the last time Mrs Austen made mention of Lymington, who had spent about six months in their home.⁷

At approaching six years old, Lymington was exactly the age that Charles Angier thought best to begin instruction. Removed from the comfort of the Austen family, the trip to see Mr Angier was probably Lymington’s first visit to London. It seems very likely, although we have no positive proof that he stayed with Angier at his address, 99 Wardour Street, Soho. From the rural village of Steventon, Lymington was thrust into the heart of urban life. Wardour Street was all noise, smell, and bustle. Angier’s rented house formed a pair with number 97 and John Tallis’s illustration of it in 1838–40 shows it as a four-storey home that was three windows wide.⁸ It was a large dwelling, but attached to another house and cheek by jowl with its neighbours. Other residents in the street were grocers, carpenters, ironmongers, upholsters, and builders. This was an area of London unfamiliar to most people of Lymington’s social standing, and far removed from the streets and squares that he would come to know as an adult. For Lady Portsmouth, this was precisely its attraction: she and her son were unlikely to bump into people who mattered when visiting Angier. Lymington could be treated anonymously.

Lymington presented Angier with a challenge. Unlike many of his other clients, Lymington’s mother was not consulting Angier for help to improve or polish her son’s speech, but to teach him the more basic skills of forming and articulating words. Lady Portsmouth was a demanding woman, who wanted to see results, but also a desperately worried mother. To cure Lymington of his speech problems would give Angier a tremendous boost, even if his client’s wish for confidentiality would mean that Lymington joined the long list of nameless individuals of ‘known probity and honour’ who had been assisted by him.

According to Angier’s later treatise on the subject, hesitation in speech could be caused by an impediment in the lips, tongue, or throat, or a mix of the three. The problem might only surface when the individual sufferer tried to say a word beginning with a particular letter or sound. But, as a person with a stammer tried to speak, they presented a horrifying appearance. Flushing from a ‘stagnation of Blood’, they could suffer from a ‘distortion of the Eyes’, a struggling for breath, and an ‘uneasiness in the Chest’. Sometimes sufferers had their throat open, and breath repeatedly taken in for so long that it could be ten minutes before they uttered a single word. All these symptoms would ‘painfully convulse the Sufferer, and endanger Health’. In the meantime, they were individuals who were unpleasant both to hear and to see.⁹

We do not know what Lymington looked like when he spoke, but we can be sure that his mother wanted to cure him of such an unattractive complaint. Likewise, we do not have direct evidence of how Angier treated Lymington, or indeed, any of his other clients. His cures were a trade secret that he and his father had perfected over many years. Charles probably followed his father’s practice, as experienced by the philosopher and clergyman Joseph Priestley. When Priestley consulted Samuel Angier for his stammer, he was made to take ‘an oath not to reveal his method’. It was a promise that Priestley did not break even many years later when he wrote his memoirs.¹⁰

But we can tell what Angier did not do. Taking over his father’s business in 1761, Charles was keen to state that his father had cured, ‘not by those unnatural Methods which many are afraid of … For some have girted the Body to force out the Words by Violence; others teach them to speak in a doleful Manner, which always strain the Lungs’. Neither Samuel nor Charles followed these techniques. There is no evidence either that Lymington’s speech problems were treated with bleeding. Nor did he suffer the blistering treatment administered to poor Samuel Johnson to cure him of his speechlessness following his stroke in June 1783.¹¹

Fortunately for the young Lymington, Angier did not pursue any of these terrifying cures because they did not fit with his ideas of the origins of speech problems. Physical force or techniques designed to correct the imbalance of the body’s humours would do nothing to correct bad habits. It is from Angier’s ideas about the causes of speech impediments that we can surmise his methods. These were likely to be behavioural, and governed the ‘rules’ that Samuel laid down, and Charles adopted. Lymington probably underwent a kind of oral retraining, in which Angier encouraged him to correct the position of his lips, tongue, and mouth. Breathing and voice exercises taught him to manage his breath as he spoke, and use his vocal muscles efficiently. Perhaps he practised in front of a mirror making different sounds and faces, and was given tongue twisters and phrases to repeat. Angier may have tried to increase Lymington’s self-confidence by encouraging him to believe that he had the ability to overcome his stammer. After all, once learned, many of these exercises were ‘take-home’ cures that could be practised alone, and revived if the problem reoccurred. In his publications, Angier could never resist mentioning Demosthenes, the ancient Greek statesman and orator who overcame the speech impediment he suffered as a boy by daily practice of oral exercises and hard perseverance. He was the Greek hero and obvious role model for Angier to use in his teaching of the six-year-old Lymington.¹²

Whatever Angier tried, it does not seem to have worked, at least in the long term. A number of witnesses in the legal trials that Lymington faced as an adult, when he held the title Lord Portsmouth, commented upon his speech. They included Thomas France, a lawyer who had known Portsmouth from his youth. Lord Portsmouth had ‘an impediment in his speech,’ he explained, ‘a hesitation and stammering’. The impediment meant that it took longer than normal for him to answer questions. It was a ‘natural and a permanent impediment’, but it ‘did not always exist to the same extent’. ‘It became more observable when his Lordship was flurried: when he was at ease it was often hardly perceptible: but there was always a hesitation in his speaking.’¹³

Like others, France probably did not know that Lymington had been taken to see Angier. But the reason why witnesses were asked about Portsmouth’s speech may have been related to Angier’s failure to cure him. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, there was enormous uncertainty and division of opinion about how to interpret stammering. Speech defects such as stammering were attributed to a variety of causes, and some of these were linked to mental development. On the one hand, stammering was seen as an indicator of extreme sensitivity, and a fault of genius, as exhibited by such notable individuals as Priestley, Charles Kingsley, and Martin Tupper. Samuel Angier did not cure Priestley of his stammer, but nobody ever questioned Priestley’s intellectual capacity.

But, on the other hand, as listeners waited interminably for the stammerer to get their words out, it could be tempting to believe that a person who found speaking such a problem was in some way mentally deficient. Why else would they find a straightforward human action so difficult? Statistics seemed to support this view: as lunatics were collected in the growing number of asylums across the country, observers noted a higher incidence of stammering in their populations than outside their walls.¹⁴ Were Lymington’s problems speaking evidence of his mental weakness?

If Lymington’s speech impediments were a symptom of a diseased brain, then Angier had no hope of curing him using his methods. Indeed, Angier and his father had but one qualification to their claims of offering a certain cure: they would take on ‘any Person, except an Idiot’. Speaking may have been a ‘mechanical Art’, but people were not machines, and they needed to have sufficient presence of mind to understand how to correct their faults and be empowered to control their speech. Utterance, explained Charles Angier, ‘is an Embellishment that adorns and sets off the Powers, and Accomplishments of the Mind’: it was the means by which ideas and thoughts were communicated.¹⁵ But if the mind remained underdeveloped, or became corrupted, then no amount of remedial speech education could help to counter its problems. Angier dared not turn away a son of a wealthy aristocrat, but how soon did he become aware that his treatments might not work for this boy, and was he ever prepared to admit this to his parents?

As Lord Portsmouth, Lymington found that his speech attracted attention, and added to suspicion about his mental state. Elizabeth James, a family friend of Portsmouth’s second wife, had heard many rumours about Portsmouth before she met him. But when she did so, ‘she did not find him so weak a Man as from previous report she had been led to believe’. He was ‘remarkably polite and well bred’. ‘If it had not been for a great hesitation in his Lordship’s speech he might have passed exceedingly well in society,’ she concluded. In her view, his stammer was the only thing that made Portsmouth stand out. It separated him from the rest.¹⁶

While others found having a speech impediment personally devastating, we have no evidence of how Portsmouth himself felt about this problem. However, there may be clues in another area of vocal expression: his singing. Portsmouth sang out of tune and time. Perhaps, like his younger sister, Henrietta Dorothea, who suffered from serious hearing problems when she was in her twenties, Portsmouth was tone deaf. It is also possible that Portsmouth’s speech and singing difficulties stemmed from some fault with his hearing, although this seems unlikely. Lady Portsmouth wrote many letters expressing concern about her daughter, Henrietta Dorothea, but never linked her eldest son’s problems to this cause.¹⁷ Nor in all the years that Portsmouth was examined by physicians was there ever any mention of a fault with his hearing.

Nevertheless, when Portsmouth sang, he made an extraordinary noise. The rudest interpretation of the sound he made was given by John Godden, for over forty years the park keeper at Hurstbourne. Portsmouth fooled around with his farm workers at harvest time, Godden said, and start singing psalms. He sang them ‘in a strange way: it was no more singing than a Bull’s bellowing’. His singing in the church at Acton left the young girls in stitches of laughter, complained their school mistress. On occasion, even the church minister at Hurstbourne was reduced to laughter when he heard Portsmouth sing.

Most people would have been embarrassed and stopped singing, but not Lord Portsmouth. He enjoyed singing, and sang loudly. When he asked the school mistress why her girls were laughing, and she told him that it was ‘because they were not attentive’, he was ‘satisfied’. He was the victim of humour, but he was blissfully oblivious to the fact.¹⁸

So, as with his singing, Portsmouth could have been unaware that his speech problems invited, as Angier put it, the ‘uneasiness or pity, and too often the mockery and ridicule’ of others. But this apparent lack of emotional response also condemned Portsmouth in the eyes of others. It showed an absence of feeling and sensitivity. A man who had so little self-awareness (or what we would term self-consciousness) was not normal.

He might have been spared the pain and embarrassment experienced by many of those who suffered from a stammer, but, when Lymington left Angier to be sent to school, he could not escape the attention of others. Having been sheltered and closeted by the Austens and then afforded the individual care provided by Angier, this would be Lymington’s first step into the wider world. Special education had ended, and it now had to be seen how Lymington would fare alongside other boys in the schoolroom and playground.