Managing the Experience of Hearing Loss is a much-needed exploration of those affected by hearing loss in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. As Graeme Gooday and Karen Sayer explain in their introduction, the history of hearing loss or of those who are “hard of hearing” has fallen between the cracks of several subdisciplines of historical research. Disability or impairment of any type continues to have a limited, if growing, historiography, with many “mainstream” historians ignoring issues of disability all together. Similarly, historians of sound or “soundscapes” have tended to assume normative hearing. From the other perspective, disability historiography and histories of deafness have tended to focus only on those who were profoundly deaf, deaf from a young age, and, in particular, on sign-language users. Those who lost their hearing later in life, continued to identify as “hearing,” and did not engage with or possibly actively shunned the Deaf community have fallen outside the remit of such studies. This is decidedly, then, not a history of the Deaf or of deafness, but of hearing loss, a distinction that, if subtle to mainstream historians, is a crucial difference to both the Deaf community and those interested in Deaf history and Deaf studies. This focus, readily acknowledged by Gooday and Sayer, is obvious throughout the book, registered by its title, its foreword by Action from Hearing Loss, its focus on auditory technology, and so forth. As the Deaf comedian John Smith is quoted in the preface as putting it, “hearing aids are for the hearing” (ix).

Each of the succinct and engaging chapters that make up Managing the Experience of Hearing Loss illuminates a different way in which hearing loss has affected people as well as attempts to mitigate these effects. In the first chapter, Gooday and Sayer define various ways in which deafness was understood and examine the different “categories” of hearing loss and its relationship with deafness on the one hand and hearing on the other. Harriet Martineau (1802–1876), the Victorian travel writer and sociologist, who appears as a key figure throughout the book, is also introduced here. Losing a significant degree of her hearing at the age of seventeen, Martineau became an exponent of the ear-trumpet and openly identified as “deaf,” writing a famous “letter to the deaf” in 1834 in which she advised fellow people with hearing loss on how to participate in a hearing society. Advice for people with hearing loss is a theme continued in the next chapter, including guidance by medical “experts” and those who identified as experiencing hearing loss themselves. The limited degree to which medical interventions were able to mitigate the effects of hearing loss is striking. The next two chapters, on communication and hearing aids, respectively, both engage with the issue of adaptation to a hearing society and efforts to mitigate the exclusion that often comes with hearing difficulties. While Gooday and Sayer organize the book thematically rather than chronologically, their final two chapters successfully move the reader toward the end of the period, looking in turn at ways to prevent hearing loss and at the self-organization of people with hearing loss. Themes that cut across these chapters include the sense of acquired hearing difficulties as loss and of hearing as something of which someone might be bereft, the relationship between hearing loss and sight loss in their popular representation, and the impact of hearing loss on issues of identity.

The epilogue of the book points towards many of the ways in which this study can be taken forward. It is a slim volume, and its primary strength lies in flagging up this new and important area of research rather than conducting in itself an in-depth social study (though it does some work in this regard). One key area of expansion would be to engage more fully and systematically with the lived experience of hearing loss than is possible in a study of this length, where only a few voices of already-famous individuals with hearing loss can be explored. Relatedly, as acknowledged by Gooday and Sayer, many of the developments and experiences discussed in the book principally apply to the middle classes (83). Many of the approaches to hearing loss examined, from ear trumpets to lip-reading tuition, were prohibitively expensive, and some class-based causes of deafness (of which factory noise is perhaps the most obvious) are not discussed in detail. Nonetheless, this book provides an important and concise introduction to the field. It is an excellent study that I thoroughly recommend not only to historians of disability but also to social historians of Britain generally.