This oratorical call to action, drawn from John Thelwall's edited version of John Armstrong's ‘Management of the Mind’, presents a striking ideological revision of our concept of Britain's traditional reading practices. Calling for a shift in genre from serious philosophy to playful fable, an exchange in voice from a demure Antonine to a verbally explosive Rabelais, a reconfiguration of register from silent prose to oral song and, in turn, a redefinition of reading itself from passive absorption to active performance, Anderson's passage proposes a reading practice informed by the performative values of oratory. Featured in Thelwall's elocutionary textbook, Selections, Armstrong's ‘Management of the Mind’ conceptualizes Thelwall's poetics of speech and serves as a paradigm of his orally-inflected program of self-improvement. As one of several excerpts in the Selections which reflect the tenets of Thelwall's learner-centred approach to elocutionary development, Armstrong's passage demonstrates the connections between Thelwall's speech-based theory of education and Britain's nascent learning culture. More specifically, this command to ‘read aloud, resounding Homer's strain’ speaks to a unique historical moment in the early years of the nineteenth century, when the emergence of what Jürgen Habermas refers to as the ‘public sphere’, coupled with innovations in the structure and accessibility of popular print forms, were met with powerful reforms in the nation's education system.

In the early years of the nineteenth century, a climate of what Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite refer to as ‘Romantic sociability’ began to emerge, ‘engendered by the commercialization of culture in venues such as the coffee-house, the inn, tavern, alehouse, the proliferation of forms of voluntary association … and so on’.