A Hundred Tongues: George Darley's Stammer

This chapter explores the literary history of stammering through a reading of the neglected late Romantic poet George Darley (1795–1846). Darley’s lifelong stammer has often seemed to justify reading his work as engaged in a poetics of failure and incapacity. Davies presents new evidence showing that for several crucial years of his career Darley believed that his stammer had been more or less resolved by the celebrated speech therapist John Broster. Reconsidering the relationship between Darley’s creative project and his verbal impediment, Davies argues that the poet conceived of his disability and its treatment as an education in linguistic craftsmanship. Davies locates Broster’s ‘secret’ therapeutic method within the history of treatments for stammering, and reads one of Darley’s most significant works, the comic pastoral drama Sylvia; or, The May Queen (1827), as a fantasised version of Broster’s cure. Sylvia proposes that disability can itself give rise to a strategy for overcoming minority, and becomes a declaration of creative difference.