Lecturing the Atlantic : speech, print, and an Anglo-American commons, 1830-1870

265 Pages·2017·7.8 MB·English

by  Wright

i
Lecturing the Atlantic

ii i
Lecturing the Atlantic
SPEECH, PRINT, AND AN ANGLO- AMERICAN
COMMONS 1830– 1870
Tom F. Wright
1
3
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v
{ CONTENTS }
List of Figures  vii
Acknowledgments  ix
Note on the Terminology of “England” and “Britain”  xi
Introduction  1
1. The American Lecture Hall and an Anglo- American Commons  9
2. Britain and Antislavery: Frederick Douglass’s Transatlantic Rhetoric  49
3. Britain as Order: Listening to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “England”  81
4. Britain as Prophecy: Horace Mann, Horace Greeley,
and the Choreography of Reform  117
5. Britain and Kinship: William Makepeace Thackeray
as Cultural Commons  143
6. Britain and Wartime Unity: Lola Montez and
John B. Gough as Cultural Diplomats  171
Epilogue  199
Notes  201
Index  241

vi i
{ LIST OF FIGURES }
I.1 Lecture Room of the First Methodist Church, Elmira,
New York, circa 1870 2
I.2 The Broadway Tabernacle, December 1847 2
1.1 “Rival Lectures: Mechanics’ Institution,” Northern Looking Glass, 1825  15
2.1 Abolition Fanaticism in New York, 1847  61
2.2 “Exeter Hall, the great anti- slavery meeting,” 1841  70
3.1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, carte de visite, 1852  86
3.2 “Working men, shall Americans or English rule! in this city?”
American Committee broadside, 1849 100
3.3 “Riot at the Astor- Place Opera- House, New York,” Illustrated
London News, 1849 114
3.4 “The New York Mercantile Library,” Scribner’s Monthly  115
4.1 Horace Mann, carte de visite, 1850  136
4.2 James Parton, The Life of Horace Greeley, frontispiece  139
5.1 John Leech, “Mr. Micheal Angelo Titmarsh at Willis’s Rooms,” 1851  145
5.2 Eyre Crow and Thackeray at the Melodeon Boston, 1853  152
6.1 Caricature of Lola Montez’s departure for America, 1852  175
6.2 Daniel Macnee, John B. Gough, engraved by Edward Burton, 1855  183

ix
{ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS }
The book you hold in your hands is the product of its own journey through trans-
atlantic circuits of co- operation, and has amassed many debts of gratitude. It
began at the University of Cambridge, where I was fortunate enough to bene-
fit from the counsel and scholarly example of Sarah Meer, David Trotter, and
Michael O’Brien, among many others. My lengthy long- distance correspondence
with Angela Ray helped energize and transform the project, and culminated
in our eventual meeting at the American Antiquarian Society at the event that
resulted in the publication of the edited collection The Cosmopolitan Lyceum
in 2013. What I learnt from the group of scholars assembled there in Worcester
helped catalyze and strengthen the ideas that run through the chapters that
follow.
Archival work for the book was completed thanks to the award of a Mary
C. Mooney Fellowship at the Boston Athenaeum; a British Association for
American Studies Ambassador’s Award for research at Harvard University;
a Newby Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in the
Humanities at the University of Edinburgh; and a Fulbright Early Career
Fellowship at Northwestern University and the Newberry Library. Sections of
this work were presented at meetings of the American Literature Association,
American Studies Association, British Association of American Studies, C19,
SHARP, and Symbiosis, across both Europe and North America.
The research process was made as smooth as possible by the excellent staff
of, among other places, Cambridge’s University Library and the Lee Library,
Wolfson College; the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts
Historical Society, Harvard Houghton and Widener Libraries, New York Public
Library, the New York Historical Society, the Cooper Union Library the National
Library of Scotland; and Northwestern University Libraries. During my long
periods in New England, the hospitality and joie de vivre of Murray Wheeler Jr.,
Barbara and Eugene McCarthy, Kathryn Douglas, and the céad míle fáilte of my
American cousins re- affirmed my faith in Atlantic exchange.
Many people have enriched this book through advice, suggestions, and cautions
against wrong turns. In addition to those listed before, the most important of these
include Thomas Augst, Michael J. Collins, Simon Cooke, Wai Chee Dimmock,
Carolyn Eastman Hilary Emmett, James Emmott, Paul Erickson, Linda Freedman,
Huston Gilmore, Sandra Gustafson, Thomas Jones, Michael Jonik, Susan Manning,
Donald Pease, Clare Pettitt, Peter Riley, Matt Rubery, Becca Weir, Mary Saracino,
and Ronald J. Zboray. Brendan O’Neill and his successors at Oxford University