by John A. Hodgson
[Hodgson, John A. "An Other Voice: Ventriloquism in the Romantic
Period." Romanticism On the Net 16 (November 1999)
[Date of access]. <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/hodgson.html>]
The early nineteenth century was a golden age of ventriloquism. After
having been a rare (and rarely discussed) as well as
mysterious phenomenon for centuries, ventriloquism rather suddenly
developed at this time into a matter of great public interest.
Ventriloquists proclaiming their own rareness became, in a mild paradox,
mainstays of popular entertainment. (1) While
represented only occasionally in literary works, ventriloquism as a
dramatic and rhetorical concept became important and
prominent in the cultural vocabulary and the literary criticism of
the period. Most notably, it widely informs the criticism of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. As James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate note,
ventriloquism "is one of C's favorite terms." (2) It is
also, for Coleridge, a curiously ambivalent one. The term carries a
consistently negative import in Coleridge's commentaries on
drama and dramatic poetry: for example (writing of Ben Jonson's Sejanus),
"Think of Jonson's erudition, and the force of
learned authority in that age -- and yet in no genuine part of Shakespeare
is to be found such an absurd rant and ventriloquism
as this. . . ." (3) Yet ventriloquism nevertheless also appears regularly
in his other writings as a compelling figure for
transcendent voice: "Conscience . . . [is] a perfect ventriloquist"
(1795); "Reason [is] a ventriloquist" (1800); "Reason . . . [is]
like the voice of an external Ventriloquist" (1809); "truth [is] a
divine ventriloquist" (1817); "the Ventriloquist Truth" speaks
from various places (1819); God is "a superhuman . . . Ventriloquist"
(1824). (4) These very different responses to
ventriloquism suggest the gap between real and ideal, performance and
theory.
The temporary prominence of ventriloquism in this period was in part
due to the ambiguity of its character, an ambiguity not
unrelated to Coleridge's ambivalence. Was it a genuine phenomenon,
or was it illusory; was it natural, or preternatural? With
these questions finally resolved to the satisfaction of most critics
by the 1830's, and with ventriloquists -- often and increasingly
by their own explicit acknowledgment -- finally categorizable as showmen,
ventriloquism assumed the comfortable status of a
vaudeville act. This later status, which continues today, has greatly
obscured the much greater and more complex significance
that the concept of ventriloquism once had.
Ventriloquism, as it unsettles both voice and attribution, also unsettles
critical boundaries. Consider, for example, Stephen
Dedalus's quick discrimination, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man, of the lyric, narrative, and dramatic genres.
Stephen presents them as a progression of decreasing authorial immediacy,
from the "purely personal" utterance of the lyric
poet to the removal of the dramatic author behind the esthetic life
of his handiwork, like God behind His creation, invisible,
refined out of existence, paring his fingernails. Stephen's musings,
as Lynch joyously notes, often have "the true scholastic stink,"
and he shapes them by trying to answer such aesthetic questions as,
"Is a chair finely made tragic or comic? . . . Is the bust of
Sir Philip Crampton lyrical, epical, or dramatic?" In something of
the same spirit, we might test Stephen's own generic schema
with some stinkers of our own: what shall we think, for example, if
the dramatist is a puppeteer? Or what again -- and this time
the question is itself progressive and transitional -- if the dramatist
is a ventriloquist? Both questions, as we shall see, are in fact
Coleridge's.
In Europe, ventriloquism, as it came to be recognized and then examined,
proved to have a long if very obscure tradition: the
further back it was pursued, the older it seemed to be. In the early
American republic, however, ventriloquism was originally a
rumor from a void, the voice of an absence. There was no there there;
it was elsewhere, not here. And since this condition --
the disembodied voice, the absent speaker -- curiously mimics the early
condition of ventriloquism itself, the entirely derivative
history of ventriloquism in America nevertheless has from the beginning
a remarkably self-contained, self-definitive, and
autochthonic quality.
Ventriloquism as the voice of an absence: we must begin by abandoning
our own twentieth-century preconceptions and
recovering those of an earlier era. Charlie McCarthy is a badly misleading
guide to the practices of his predecessors. Before
1800, ventriloquism almost exclusively implied not a transferred but
a disembodied voice -- the voice putatively of a spirit, of a
ghost, of God, or (once ventriloquism became a popular entertainment)
of the performer's hidden or invisible companion. The
ventriloquist's is always an other's voice; but the history of ventriloquism
during the early Romantic period (ca. 1801-1820) is,
like many other Romantic histories, a history of the gradual appearance
and embodiment of the other.
I: The Emergence of the Ventriloquist
When Charles Brockden Brown published Wieland; or, the Transformation
and wrote the Memoirs of Carwin the
Biloquist in 1798, there had never been a ventriloquist in America.
Brown had examples of murderous religious enthusiasm
ready to hand in late eighteenth-century America, and relied on one
of these as an occasion for his Wieland plot; but his notion
of the dangerous human agency manipulating such enthusiasms most likely
came primarily from an entry in a contemporaneous
encyclopedia. (5)
The first ventriloquist in America is usually said to have been "Mr.
Rannie," a Scot billing himself as "the European
Ventriloquist," who arrived to considerable attention in Boston in
late November, 1801 and began performing a few weeks
thereafter. (6) This is both true and false. James Rannie -- who, incidentally,
proclaimed himself to be, and probably was, "the
[ventriloquist] mentioned in the Encyclopedia," (7) the same encyclopedia
that Brown had probably consulted in writing
Wieland -- did indeed begin his American career at that place and time.
But James Rannie (he would later begin styling himself
"Rannie, Senior," or "Rannie the Elder"), had been preceded to America
by his younger brother -- also "Mr. Rannie," naturally
enough. The younger brother, John Rannie, also a ventriloquist, arrived
sometime in the preceding spring, probably in March or
April, and gradually worked his showman's way from Philadelphia across
New Jersey and on to New York City. For a while
one brother performed in Boston while the other performed in New York;
then John traveled on to Boston and the two joined
their performances for a few days. Thereafter they moved southward
again; an apparently solo stand in New York City
(James, this time) was followed by an extensive joint stand in Philadelphia.
(8) But then, suddenly, their professional relationship
exploded, and the brothers became fierce competitors. For the next
several years, they performed an odd, extensive pas de
deux through the United States and elsewhere, sometimes apparently
seeking to preempt or undercut one another, sometimes
dancing carefully around each other's itineraries, sometimes touring
in widely separated areas or in greatly divergent directions,
and then sometimes again collaborating. At times, the competitor is
"his own brother"; at other times, the other Mr. Rannie, "not
the Rannie who performed here lately"; at still darker moments, an
imposter, "another person, who calls himself Mr. Rannie, a
Ventriloquist." (9) Throughout this period, moreover, the Rannies were,
as ventriloquists -- if not as magicians, gymnasts, rope
dancers, actors, and stage managers, to touch lightly on but some of
their other talents -- almost entirely without competition of
any kind. (10) From 1801 until 1809, with only the most trivial and
suspect of exceptions, "ventriloquist" in America effectively
meant "Mr. Rannie" -- which is to say, of course, that the term thus
had an inevitably double referent, an echo.
So for eight years the ventriloquial Rannies had the field and audiences
of America entirely to themselves; but each also always
worked in the shadow of his other, his brother. This, apparently, was
a sufficient competitive spur. In Europe they had been
successful, but not unique; in America, not only did they thrive professionally,
they also seem to have taken ventriloquism to
new levels of dramatic development. Through the Rannies and a few of
their contemporaries, we can follow ventriloquism's
emergence from the voice of an absence to the voice of a presence,
from anti-apostrophe to address; we can witness the
gradual appearance and embodiment of the other.
II: The Emerging Embodiment of the Other
The progress from absence to presence -- the progress to natural supernaturalism
-- in these early days of professional
ventriloquism passed through many stages of development. Not surprisingly,
these greatly overlapped and mingled, often in a
single performance. Nevertheless, their progressive tendency is readily
apparent.
In its beginnings, the ventriloquial voice is bodiless, supernatural.
The supposed speaker is a spirit or ghost, The performances
of Carwin the biloquist are representative of this sort; that of the
Witch of Endor before Saul in I Samuel is a frequently cited
precedent. (11) Almost all of the pre-nineteenth-century anecdotes
of ventriloquism are of this sort, although many have a
comic turn, rather than the tragic and somber twist of Wieland. Such
performances typically had not audiences, but victims. As
such, they constitute a terminus a quo of professional ventriloquism.
Closely aligned to these private ventriloquial victimizations were the
pranks in which an animal or an infant would seem, like
Balaam's ass, to utter pointed or prophetic speech. Rannie was particularly
famous for several of these. Most notoriously --
and this anecdote is recounted so widely by so many that it may well
have been true -- he asked a woman selling fish in the
market at Edinburgh when her fish had been caught, and when she told
him, the fish suddenly spoke up, "It is false, I am a
week older." (12) The result was widespread consternation in the market
and a general throwing away of fish. Similarly, in
Portland, Maine, he "occasioned a child 12 hours old, to exclaim apparently,
that the town of Portland would be swallowed up
by an earthquake in three days," leading "great numbers to depart from
the city for several days." (13) The point of these feats,
however -- or of the stories about them, which comes to much the same
thing -- was especially the publicity, the advertising.
Like the utterances of a seemingly supernatural voice, they depend
upon the unsuspectedness of the ventriloquist for their
power. Thus these demonstrations do not take place on stage before
a paying audience; their purpose is rather to attract that
paying audience.
For those who did pay for and attend the performer's exhibition — and
in cities there would be hundreds each night -- one
feature of the show was usually animal imitations. These might include
"Dogs, Ducks, Cats, Hens, Chickens, Pigs squealing and
Cocks crowing. . . . Birds whistling, viz., the Black Bird, Thrush,
Sky-Lark, a Chipart, a Wren, a Quail, and the Robin." (14)
These imitations were at once closely associated with ventriloquism
and carefully distinguished from it, in a separate although
usually adjacent act of the program. The effect, certainly, was to
further establish the ventriloquist as a skilled mimic, thereby
making more familiar -- wonderful, rather than dangerous -- some of
his truly ventriloquial tricks, such as this one: "the notes of
a pig's voice were heard to come from a gentleman's pocket; and, on
his being asked by Mr. R. to set the Pig at liberty, he said
he would do so provided Mr. R. would insure his hand from being bitten."
(15)
But the featured center of Rannie's performance was his command of the other voice.
He possesses by nature the faculty of commanding
a voice to answer him from any object he pleases. . . . He will
clearly demonstrate that he has an absolute
power of commanding the same voice to be heard in any other room. .
. . None in Europe or America is possessed
with the power of conveying the voice but himself. (16)
Rannie would command this other voice to speak "from the pockets of
his audience, or from any object present." (17) It might
come from a gentleman's hat, from inside a clothes press, or from under
a teacup. Once in New York City, he claimed, "when
the voice proceeded from a Lady's muff, . . . the lady was so fully
impressed with an idea of reality, that she threw the muff
away, with an exclamation of terror and astonishment." (18)
The ventriloquial voice, of course, was not, could not be, the ventriloquist’s
ordinary, usual voice, else his ostensible throwing of
it would never persuade or deceive. Rannie's other voice, typically,
was the voice of a child, and behaved as such. It answered,
"from all parts of the room, ... whatever question [Rannie] propose[d]";
(19) sometimes it called for help, as when it found itself
in a teapot, or a gentleman's snuffbox, or a lady's thimble: "let me
out, let me out or I shall smother." (20) This was a strangely,
unnaturally small child, then; perhaps we can understand the fright
of the lady who suddenly perceived it concealed in her muff.
But in all these cases, the child's is still the voice of an absence;
no child is to be seen.
Yet just at this time this absent child, this domestic other, was also
acquiring a presence and a body. The advent of the
ventriloquist's doll was at hand.
Indeed, there had been avatars. As early as 1757 the Baron de Mengen,
an Austrian nobleman who often sported with
ventriloquism, was using a little puppet or doll [poupee] with a mouth
like a kind of nutcracker then common; the lower jaw
was moveable by a peg. (21) As ventriloquism was becoming an established
dramatic art in England in the late 1700's,
however, the doll was scarcely in evidence. Well into the 1830's ventriloquists
featured what is now called the distant voice,
emphasizing their ability to make a voice seem to come from a point
at some significant distance from the performer. (22) So
Joseph Askins, the ventriloquist whose triumphant engagements at Sadler's
Wells Theatre in London in 1796 and 1797 aroused
widespread popular enthusiasm for the art, explicitly advertised "curious
ad libitum Dialogues between himself and his invisible
familiar, Little Tommy." (23) And Rannie himself frequently emphasized
the distance to which he could throw his voice, at
various times claiming a range of twelve, fourteen, or even sixteen
yards.
Yet, very quietly and unobtrusively, an alternative ventriloquial tradition
was already developing. An early record of it comes
with the stories about one James Burne or Burns, an Irishman who made
a living performing in the Nottingham area in the latter
part of the eighteenth century. Most anecdotes of Burne's performances
feature his distant voice. But John Throsby, in his
History of Nottinghamshire, also recounts that Burne
carries in his pocket, an ill-shaped doll,
with a broad face, which he exhibits . . . as giving utterance to his own
childish jargon. The gaping croud, who gather
round him to see this wooden baby, and hear, as it appears, its
speeches, are often deceived; nothing but
the movement of the ventriloquist's lips, which he endeavours to
conceal, can lead to the deception.
An accompanying illustration shows Burne holding a rigid, somber figurine
partly wrapped in a large handkerchief (Figure 1).
This would seem to be the first English illustration of a ventriloquist's
doll. (24)
In the late 1790's another prominent ventriloquist, Thomas Garbutt,
was also, without fanfare, using a doll in his performances.
Garbutt's advertisements, typically, stressed his distant-voice powers:
He . . . questions in one voice, and answers
in another, which he commands to come from any object the
Company pleases, from Closets, Presses; from
under chairs, Tables, the Floor, the Roof, etc. etc. (25)
But while none of Garbutt's advertisements ever alludes to a doll, its
presence is confirmed by a striking anecdote dating from
his 1797 engagement in Dublin:
A curious occurrence took place, at a tavern,
last week between Mr. Garbut, the Ventriloquist, and one of the
waiters. The former called for dinner which
was served up, and he placed at the table with him his little
companion, a puppet, he calls Tommy, with
which it would seem he converses, at his exhibition, the oddity of
which not a little surprized the waiter. Mr.
Garbut having dined, he rang the bell, and the attendant appearing,
Tommy, as was imagined, demanded what was
to pay. --The waiter at first could not believe his ears; but the
question being repeated, Tommy, saying at
the same time, he would pay the bill -- this so frightened the boy, who
could not observe the ventriloquist speaking,
he ran down stairs, and swore he would not receive the reckoning in
the room he came from, for he was sure the
two that were in it in company, were the Devil and some conjurer,
and had the Ventriloquist thought proper,
he might have come off with dining for nothing, during the consternation
the waiter created in the house. (26)
Such publicity was surely invaluable, and may well have been planted by Garbutt himself.
It is quite probable that Garbutt was James Rannie's mentor in ventriloquism.
(27) And while Rannie never once, in more than
fourteen years of highly detailed advertising, mentioned the fact,
it is also clear that Rannie himself was using a doll, which he
too called "Tom" or "Tommy," during his performances. As early as 1803
an eyewitness in Georgia reported,
When it came to the performance of what he
calls Ventriloquism, the man came with his infant, which he calls
Tom, and made appearantly [sic] Tom speak
by asking Questions, and Tom answered. (28)
The 1798 Encyclopedia also describes the Edinburgh ventriloquist (probably
Rannie) as making the voice of a child "appear to
proceed . . . from a wooden doll, with which he held many spirited
conversations." (29) An 1805 description of Rannie's 1804
appearances in Boston gives a similar account, including the doll's
name, Tommy. (30)
Rannie was a great pioneer in the use of illustrations in his advertising;
and some of his woodcuts provide what would seem to
be the first widely disseminated illustrations of the ventriloquist's
doll. The earliest such woodcut, dating from December, 1802
(Figure 2), and a slightly different version, from April, 1804 (Figure
3), show Tommy as a stiff, articulated figure, man-like but
child-sized, wearing a ruff and an elaborately plumed broad-brimmed
(or possibly tricorn) hat, standing balanced on one leg on
the ventriloquist's flat, outstretched palm. (31) A second and quite
different kind of illustration, dating again from April, 1804
(Figure 4), shows instead a tiny child, again in a ruff but now hatless.
(32) He is again poised on one leg, but poised now on the
ventriloquist's supporting index finger, for the child is seemingly
but a few inches tall -- small enough to lose itself in a lady's ruff
or a gentleman's pocket indeed, but too small to be effectively visible
on stage to an audience of several hundred, so we must
perforce regard this figure, I think, as the imaginary child of Rannie's
best distant-voice tricks, not the actual Tommy.
The introduction of the ventriloquist's doll is, in hindsight, surely
the most remarkable single development in the dramatic history
of ventriloquism. But one of the most remarkable things about it is
how terribly little attention it received at the time. For in fact
this development is almost invisible in the records. Neither Rannie
ever mentioned it in their years of often quite lengthy and
descriptive advertisements. Neither did Richard Potter, the first American
ventriloquist, ever mention it in his twenty-seven
years of performing and advertising, although he, too, at least occasionally
used "a wooden doll, with which we have seen him
hold spirited conversations" in his ventriloquial act, as we know from
an 1819 account. (33) Were it not for the
contemporaneous testimonies of a few eye-witnesses, we would know nothing
of these dolls; we would instead have every
reason to think, as generally has been heretofore thought, that the
ventriloquist's doll first appeared only in the 1830's or 1840's.
(34)
Such facts suggest inescapably that in these first decades of the nineteenth
century the ventriloquist's doll itself was of little
significance, surprising though this may seem to us today. Even its
recording witnesses take note of it only in passing. Both
puffery and audience attention remained strongly focused on the ventriloquist
himself: he was the unique and mysterious figure,
however gentlemanly, respectable, and upstanding he appeared. The doll,
after all, was itself familiar, both from childhood and
from Punch and Judy shows; the creating of doll-speech was but child's
or puppeteer’s play. And these Tommies (unlike Punch
and Judy) were docile and respectable dolls; Rannie's Tommy even addressed
him as "Papa." (35) The other voice, thus, was
not an other’s voice. But the fantastic throwing of voice, the commanding
of voice from a distant place, the speaking as it were
from the belly -- these were strange and extraordinary indeed, and
the ventriloquist did not hesitate to proclaim them as such.
All attention remained on the ventriloquist rather than the doll, this
is to argue, because it was still the ventriloquist, and not the
doll, that embodied the other. And his personal differentness only
reinforced this judgment. The Rannies were foreigners in
America, as both their accents and their acts testified, although James
eventually became a naturalized American citizen. And
the dark-skinned Richard Potter, although he hailed from Massachusetts,
was the mulatto son of a Guinea slave. (36) In the
early part of his career he sought to ease the burden of this racial
identity by advertising himself as a West Indian, (37) in the
middle part he passed as white while touring through the slave-holding
states for some four years, but in the later part he was
often recognized and identified by others as "colored." The lingering
strangeness of ventriloquism was thus compounded by the
perceived otherness of the ventriloquist.
III: Coleridge and "Ventriloquism"
In this historical context, we can see that Coleridge did not always
mean the same thing by "ventriloquism," and so not always
what we mean by the term today. We can also begin to trace the outlines
of his gradually increasing, if incidental, familiarity with
the art.
Consider, for example, Coleridge's early mention of ventriloquism in
Conciones ad Populum (delivered January or February
1795; published November 1795):
Lastly, I applied to Conscience. She informed
me, that she was indeed a perfect ventriloquist, and could throw
her voice into any place she liked; but that
she was seldom attended to, unless when she appeared to speak out
of the Pocket. (Lects 1795 31)
The allusion is to a typical early ventriloquist's trick -- making a
voice seem to proceed from a gentleman's or lady's pocket or
pocket-book, as if from an unseen being hidden therein. (Coleridge
humorously suggests that the pocket's or pocket-book's
contents seem to speak; "money talks.") (38) It is quite likely, moreover,
that at this time Coleridge had observed no other kind
of ventriloquial performance -- had never witnessed a ventriloquist
working with a doll. That may have changed, however, by
early 1800, when he writes,
If we could dissever from the ideas the ludicrous
association, we would personify Reason as a ventriloquist; it is of
inferior importance into what uncouth vessel
she throws her voice, provided only that it is audible. (EOT 1:120)
"Vessel" here may be meant literally or figuratively -- the early ventriloquists
typically threw their voices into any number of
actual vessels (wineglasses, teapots, teacups, and the like) -- but,
in context (the "uncouth vessel" to which Coleridge is here
alluding is a political faction), would seem to imply a human-like
speaker. (39) And by 1803, at any rate, it is quite certain that
Coleridge has witnessed a vent-and-doll performance -- although surely
no very good one. Writing dismissively of "the vulgar
Schoolbooks, histories, & religious Tracts in the dialogue form,"
he objects,
these are not Dialogues, but dull Exhibitions
of a sort of Ventriloquism, one man is speaking all the while, but
every now & then he alters his Voice into
a Semi-squeak and wd. fain make it appear to proceed from some doll
or man of Straw at some little distance from
it[.] (40)
This "sort of Ventriloquism," however crudely realized, differs fundamentally
from the earlier sort: now the voice has its own
presence on the stage, and ventriloquism's truly dramatic potential
becomes apparent.
Clearly ventriloquism made a powerful impression on Coleridge. He was,
indeed, one of the very first and one of the very few
men of his time even to take note of the ventriloquist's doll. Recognizing
ventriloquism's potential relevance to his own concerns,
he adapts its ideal as a contemporary figure for vatic possession,
most famously in the Biographia: "I regard truth as a divine
ventriloquist: I care not from whose mouth the sounds are supposed
to proceed, if only the words are audible and intelligible."
(41) He brought the word into our critical vocabulary, giving it a
currency it retains today.
While ahead of his time in all these respects, however, Coleridge was
simply of his time in finding no true otherness in the doll's
ventriloquial performance. Probably, indeed, he never witnessed anything
better than a mediocre performance. Certainly he
seems never to have found the illusion of such performance either persuasive
or moving: he several times alludes to the doll as a
"puppet" or "Straw Moppet" or the like, and to the dialogue as "insipidity."
(42) For whatever reason, the gap between the
ideal and the performance of ventriloquism never closed for him.
The lesson from the history of ventriloquism, as from Coleridge's Shakespeare
lectures, seems to be this: dramatic form
becomes effective only when the artist projects the other onto the
stage. For Coleridge, this ability distinguished Shakespeare
from all of his dramatist contemporaries, whose scenes too often "are
mock dialogues, in which the Poet Solo plays the
ventriloquist, but cannot suppress his own way of expressing himself"
(CM 1:402). For ventriloquism, such development finally
appears in the 1830's and 1840's, when the ventriloquist's doll becomes,
not a respectful child, but a mouthy street kid:
suddenly, audiences remember the doll as well as the ventriloquist;
suddenly, ventriloquism becomes truly dramatic.
Notes
(1) Acts involving ventriloquism were more numerous than any other popular-culture
entertainments -- magic, acrobatics,
automata, popular science -- in Boston throughout 1805-35, for example.
See H. J. Moulton, Houdini's History of Magic in
Boston 1792-1915 (Glenwood, IL: Meyerbooks, 1983) pp. 6-24. (back)
(2) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed James Engell and
W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1983) 2:135n. Hereafter BL. (back)
(3) Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, ed Thomas Middleton Raysor
(London: Constable, 1936) p. 54. Hereafter Misc C.
(back)
(4) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion,
ed Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1971) p. 31 (hereafter Lects 1795); Essays on His
Times in The Morning Post and The Courier, ed.
David V. Erdman, 3 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University press, 1978)
1:120 (hereafter EOT); The Friend, ed. Barbara E.
Rooke, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969) 2:127
(hereafter Friend); BL 1:164; Collected Letters of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: The
Clarendon Press, 1956-71) 4:979; Confessions of an
Inquiring Spirit, in Shorter Works and Fragments, ed. H. J. Jackson
and J. R. de J. Jackson, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1995) 2:1136 (hereafter SWF). (back)
(5) Sydney J Krause et al., eds., Wieland, or, The Transformation; an
American Tale. Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist,
by Charles Brockden Brown (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press,
1977) p. 325 note that "Brown could have gotten
some of his background material on ventriloquism from an Encyclopedia;
or, a Dictionary of the Arts, Sciences and
Miscellaneous Literature published at Philadelphia in 1798." They also
take seriously Brown's acknowledgement of the Abbe
de la Chapelle's Le Ventriloque (1772) as a source (pp. 325-26). It
is far more likely, however, that Brown did not know de
la Chapelle's work (which was widely cited and excerpted) immediately,
but had only read accounts of it or excerpts from it at
second hand. (back)
(6) Thus this Rannie -- misidentified as John (confusion of the two
brothers is endemic) -- is the earliest ventriloquist in America
cited by Milbourne Christopher, The Illustrated History of Magic (New
York: Crowell, 1973) pp 59-60, and by Valentine
Vox, I Can See Your Lips Moving: The History and Art of Ventriloquism
(North Hollywood, CA: Plato Publishing and
Players Press, 1993) pp. 59-60. (back)
(7) Charleston, SC. Times, 11 December 1802 p. 3. See note 12 below. (back)
(8) For a sense of the Rannies' travels through Boston and New York,
see Moulton pp 7-24, and George Clinton Densmore
Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 15 vols. (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1927-49) 2:143-44, 210, 344.
(back)
(9) Charleston Courier, 11 March 1807 p 2; New York Commercial Advertiser,
24 February 1802; New York Evening
Post, 1 March 1810 p. 3. (back)
(10) I am aware of only one possible competitor. Thomas Scharf and Thompson
Westcott, History of Philadelphia
1609-1884, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: L. H. Everts, 1884), apparently quoting
an unidentified newspaper advertisement, say that
"Mr. Smith, lately from Europe, announced 'freaks of philosophy, ventriloquism,
astronomy,' etc., at Quesnet's ball-room"
(2:955). This brief appearance would seem to have occurred ca. 1804,
but the authors do not say, and I have not yet been
able to locate the advertisement. (back)
(11) The identification of the Witch of Endor as a ventriloquist was
frequently argued, and was accepted as authoritative by
Coleridge. See M. de la Chapelle, Le Ventriloque, ou L'Engastrimythe
(London, 1772), pp. 47-90; Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Marginalia, ed. H. J. Jackson and George Whalley, 4 vols.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980- ) 1:420,
2:1108 (hereafter CM); Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk, ed. Carl
Woodring, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1990) 1:50-51. (back)
(12) [James Rannie,] "Ventriloquism. The Ladies and Gentlemen of Boston,
are respectfully informed, that on . . . Dec. 9,
1801, will be displayed . . . the inimitable powers of the European
Ventriloquist." Handbill held by the Massachusetts Historical
Society. The same anecdote is recounted of the unidentified contemporaneous
ventriloquist (Rannie claimed it was he) cited in
the Encyclopedia; or, Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Miscellaneous
Literature, 21 vols. (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson,
1798) 18:640b. (back)
(13) [James Rannie,] "The European Ventriloquist's Exhibition" (Portsmouth, N H.: S. Whidden, [1808]) p. 7. (back)
(14) Philadelphia Aurora, 26 May 1802 p 3. (back)
(15) New York Morning Chronicle, 4 May 1804 p 2. (back)
(16) New York Commercial Advertiser, 19 February 1802. (back)
(17) "The European Ventriloquist's Exhibition," p 7. (back)
(18) New York Daily Advertiser, 30 April 1804 p 2. (back)
(19) New York American Citizen, 30 March 1810. (back)
(20) Boston Gazette, 8 November 1810, 24 December 1810. (back)
(21) De la Chapelle, pp 291, 293, 309. (back)
(22) On "near ventriloquism" versus "distant voice ventriloquism," see Vox pp 183-84, 194. (back)
(23) E. Johnson's British Gazette and Sunday Monitor, 4 June 1797 p.
1; my emphasis. A 1796 spectator later recounted a
sample of Askins' "dialogue with a supposed parrot in his left coat
pocket" and then in a couple of handkerchiefs held in his lap;
he "at length unfolded them to the astonished assembly, whose senses
had believed that he really had a bird concealed in his
pocket" (Philadelphia Weekly Magazine 2:300 [7 July 1798]). For a synopsis
of Askins' career, see Vox pp. 55-58. (back)
(24) Thoroton's History of Nottinghamshire: Republished with Large Additions
by John Throsby, 3 vols (London: B. and
J. White et al., 1797) 2:149; illustration opposite p. 149. (back)
(25) Edinburgh Evening Courant, 19 January 1797 p 1. (back)
(26) Dublin Freeman's Journal, 23 January 1798 p 3. (back)
(27) To begin with, Rannie's early advertisements and performances borrow
liberally and explicitly from Garbutt's: compare,
for example, the advertisements in the Edinburgh Evening Courant on
19 January 1797 p 1 (Garbutt) and 9 March 1797 p.
1 (Rannie). There are many other suggestive connections between the
two performers, too numerous to list here. (back)
(28) Augusta [GA] Chronicle, 16 April 1803 p 3. (back)
(29) Encyclopedia 18:640b (back)
(30) William Frederick Pinchbeck, The Expositor; or Many Mysteries Unravelled
(Boston: printed for the author, 1805) pp
54-56. Rannie was performing in Boston from mid-July until mid-September
1804. Pinchbeck notes that "I have seen and
conversed with Mr. R[annie]" (p. 41) and that Rannie and "Brisloe"
[Breslaw] were the only performers of legerdemain he had
ever known who were "equal to the talk" (p. 58). (back)
(31) Figure 2: Georgetown, D C. Olio, 19 May 1803 p. 7 (p. 375 of continuously
paginated volume). One of the Rannies,
probably John, is using this woodcut as early as 10 December 1802,
when it appears in the Frederick, MD Bartgis's
Republican Gazette p. 3. Figure 3: New York Chronicle Express, 30 April
1804. (back)
(32) New York Daily Advertiser, 16 April 1804. (back)
(33) Hartford Connecticut Mirror, 1 November 1819 p 2. (back)
(34) Vox pp 76-77, 79 names "Signor Blizt [sic; actually Blitz] and
John Wyman" and then E. D. Davies as early pioneers and
popularizers of the ventriloquist's doll. Blitz first came to America
from Europe (where he already had established a reputation)
in 1835; John Wyman flourished in the 1840's through 1860's; Davies
began using dolls in the 1850's. But George Smith
Sutton, a ventriloquist of the 1830's, in his pamphlet A Treatise on
Ventriloquism (New Haven, CT: printed for the author,
1833) already alludes to the use of "a Wooden Doll" (p. 15) and says
that he himself, picking up the idea from the ineffectual
performance of a colleague, "introduc[ed] in my entertainment a speaking
automaton," "the lips of [which] are made to move by
a small spring" (p. 30). (back)
(35) Pinchbeck, The Expositor, p 55. (back)
(36) Much of the information published about Potter (as about the Rannies)
in the standard sources, including Vox and
Christopher, is inaccurate. For Potter's origins, see Elias Nason,
Sir Charles Henry Frankland, Baronet: or Boston in the
Colonial Times (Albany: J. Munsell, 1865) pp. 112- 15. (back)
(37) See, for example, the Boston Independent Chronicle, 24 September 1810 p 3. (back)
(38) Coleridge returns to this same figure in 1811: "conscience, who
while she spoke in her own person, had been listened to
with a drowsy ear, became all-eloquent, when, like a shrewd ventriloquist,
she threw her voice into the purse, and made it
appear to proceed from the money-pocket" (EOT 2:309). (back)
(39) Cf Friend 2:127: "like the voice of an external Ventriloquist,
it is indifferent from whose lips [Reason] appears to come, if
only it be audible." (back)
(40) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Outlines of the History of Logic," in SWF 1:131. (back)
(41) BL 1:164; cf Friend 2:127. For Coleridge's linking of divine ventriloquism
to that other contemporary figure of divine
possession, the Aeolian Harp, see SWF 2:1136. (back)
(42) "Puppet": Misc C 54; cf BL 2:224. "Straw Moppet": CL 4:979. "INSIPIDITY":
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures
1808-1819 on Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1987) 1:351. (back)
John Hodgson
Princeton University
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