The Other King’s Speech: Elocution and the Politics of Disability in Georgian Britain

This essay examines the role that vocal disability played in eighteenth-century political discourse surrounding the exercise of governmental power by looking closely at two stutterers on opposite ends of the political and social spectra – King George III and the radical orator and elocutionist John Thelwall. Using contemporary disability theory as a critical frame, the essay explores the ways in which disabled elocution emerged in late Georgian Britain to become a politically significant motif as evidenced by a range of works of written and visual satire. By their very materiality within a print medium, I argue, these works mark and render visible disabled bodies otherwise transparent as the ephemeral entity of speech becomes codified in print. Broadly speaking, then, the essay argues that speech—perfected, deformed, repressed, enabled, and disabled—served to codify British systems of political authority and social oppression even as they seemed to clear a space for political resistance. By focusing on the manner in which the era’s representations of and reactions to disabled speech instantiated a system of compulsory fluency, this essay demonstrates how disability operated as a governing trope in Georgian-era debates over government sovereignty, political access, national identity, and freedom of expression.