George Green's Voice: A Concept for Studying the History of Young People

Abstract

Using the example of George Green and British child migration of the late nineteenth and twentieth century, this article aims at reconceptualizing ‘voice’ for the study of marginalized historical figures. Young people are particularly revealing subjects for the reconceptualization of voice: they were and are perceived as pure yet malleable, loud yet mute in the historical record. Criticizing the use of voice as a self-explanatory metaphor, charged with a liberal, democratic ideal, this article addresses four inherent analytical problems: the search for authenticity, the neglect of voices’ non-narrative dimension, the neglect of non-verbal voices and the one-dimensional interpretation of silences. The case of George Green lends itself to a demonstration of the epistemological potential of the analytical concept of voice as it touches on various aspects of voice: legal voices, vocal practices and sound as well as silences in the production, recording, archiving and excavation of marginalized voices.