But it is also too easy to fit this controversy into the contemporary academic mold, as Picker sometimes does, arguing that the street musicians presented "a challenge to centralized class-based and political control," as if the conflict were simply between populist liberty and elitist oppression. Wouldn't Picker similarly object to clamor -- of whatever origin -- outside his Harvard office while he was trying to write? Picker practically acknowledges as much, as he confesses that "battles continue for spaces to concentrate and to write," but that doesn't prevent him from invoking tropes about the critics' "aggressive desire for separation along lines of nation, class and body."
More information is really needed: What were the sounds of the London streets, the assumptions of its dwellers, the goals of the players, the ambitions of the regulators? Is this really a matter of listeners condemning "noise" primarily because they scorned the class of music and its players? Hurdy gurdys, after all, were music boxes whose melodies could easily become monotonous drones. They might not have been the heroic victims Picker portrays, offering "an alternative to acceptable middle-class definitions of music."
Picker speculates that the novel's view of sound and resonance partly developed out of George Eliot's study of the German scientist Hermann Helmholtz, who did ground-breaking studies of the ear, acoustics and the effects of resonant sound. Whatever the influences, though, in lyrically sounding her characters' emotional strings, in finding, as she once put it, that "vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence," Eliot succeeded in disclosing the secret human harmonies hidden under society's roaring noise.
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