How can we write histories about the voice, and about communities of people who were defined by their voices, in an age without audio-recordings? In my own research, which examines stammering in the long twentieth century, I use medical books produced about stammering, as well as material from the stammering advocacy and activist movements, to tell this story. Like many historians, I seek these books out in libraries and archival collections, but occasionally – if one of them is not too expensive – I enjoy buying my own copy from second-hand bookshops to keep for easy reference. You can imagine my surprise, then, while reading through a recently delivered copy of Walter A. Yearsley’s A Practical Self-Cure of Stammering and Stuttering (1909), to find several pages missing, seemingly cut out. Historical vandalism it might be, but can it reveal something deeper in answer to our question?
Let us start with the book’s author. Precise biographical details for Yearsley’s life are not well known, and what little information I have can only be pieced together from a mixed collection of sources such as census returns and legal records, as well as his own words. He was born near Colchester, Essex, in 1876. His father died when Yearsley was a teenager and the family lived from his mother’s wage as a tailoress. Yearsley recounted in A Practical Self-Cure of Stammering and Stuttering that he had a stammer from a young age, how it had led to school bullying and prevented his access to certain professions.
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