Elocution, Speech & Voice

Elocution - just the word is sufficient to conjure up images of Victorian or Edwardian gentlemen getting their pupils to recite long poems and ridiculing them for their mispronunciation of vowels and consonants.
Perhaps the most well know elocution teachers of the early 1900s were Samuel and Alice Hasluck. This married couple ran the highly successful Polytechnic School of Elocution situated on Regent Street, London. Gentlemen and gentlewomen of the day would enrol for instruction in elocution, which involved students learning to 'roll their r sounds' and to project dramatic verses to the back of the theatre.