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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 July 2012
Ralph Waldo Emerson's delivery of his essay “England” at Manhattan’s Clinton Hall on 22 January 1850 was one of the highest-profile of his performance career. He had recently returned from his triumphant British speaking tour with a radically revised view of transatlantic relations. In a New York still in shock from the Anglophobic urban riots of the previous winter, media observers were prepared to find a great deal of symbolism in both Emerson's new message and his idiosyncratic style of performance. This essay provides a detailed account of the context, delivery and conflicting newspaper readings of this Emerson appearance. Considering the lecture circuit as part of broader performance culture and debates over Anglo-American physicality and manners, it reveals how the press seized on both the “England” talk itself and aspects of Emerson's lecturing style as a means of shoring up civic order and Anglo-American kinship. I argue for a reexamination of the textual interchanges of nineteenth-century oratorical culture, and demonstrate how lecture reports reconnect us to forgotten means of listening through texts and discursive contests over the meaning of public speech.
1 Mercantile Library Association of New York, Annual Report, 1850.
2 “City Items – Lecture Rooms and Ventilation,” New York Daily Tribune, 12 Dec. 1849; Mercantile Library Association of New York, Annual Report, 1851.
3 “Lecture on England at the Mercantile Library,” New York Herald, 23 Jan. 1850; “Mercantile Library Lecture,” New York Daily Tribune, 23 Jan. 1850; “Mr. Emerson on England,” Literary World, 2 Feb. 1850.
4 Nathaniel Parker Willis, “Emerson,” Home Journal, 2 Feb. 1850.
5 Uncovered New England reports include “Newport R.I. Correspondence,” Boston Evening Transcript, 11 Dec. 1848; “England: Mercantile Library Lectures,” Boston Post, 29 Dec. 1848; and “The English and American Character,” Hartford Courant, 20 Jan. 1849. The lecture was reprinted in New York as “Mr. Emerson on England,” New York Tribune, 6 Jan. 1849, and subsequently discussed extensively in several articles, including “England from Two Points of View,” Literary World, 20 Jan. 1849; “The Durability of England and Englishmen,” Holden's Dollar Magazine, Feb. 1849 and March 1849; and “The Other Side of the Picture,” Saturday Evening Post, 18 Aug. 1849. It was discussed in the London media in “Emerson on England,” London Examiner, 10 March 1849; “An American's Opinion of England,” The Times, 14 March 1849.
6 “Newport R.I. Correspondence,” Boston Evening Transcript, 11 Dec. 1848.
7 “Lecture on England,” New York Herald, 23 Jan. 1850.
8 Willis.
9 “Mr. Emerson's Lecture on England,” Albion, A Journal of News, Politics and Literature, 26 Jan. 1850.
10 Recent discussions of Emerson's platform career include Cayton, Mary Kupiec, “The Making of an American Prophet: Emerson, His Audiences, and the Rise of the Culture Industry in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Historical Review, 92, 3 (1987), 597–620CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Emerson's Emergence: Self and Society in the Transformation of New England 1800–1845 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Engstrom, Sallee Fox, The Infinitude of Private Man: Emerson's Presence in Western New York 1851–1861 (New York: Peter Lang, 1997)Google Scholar; Augst, Thomas, The Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 114–57Google Scholar; and O'Neill, Bonnie Carr, “‘The Best of Me Is There’: Emerson as Lecturer and Celebrity,” American Literature, 80, 4 (2008), 739–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson 1843–1871, ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson, 2 vols. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001).
12 The lyceum is notably absent from Bank, Rosemarie K., Theatre Culture in America, 1825–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. This article's treatment of antebellum manners and performance culture has been informed by Kasson, John F., Rudeness & Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1991)Google Scholar; and Augst.
13 My analysis of this has been influenced by the discussion of mid-century attitudes to Tennenhouse, Britain in Leonard, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; and Tamarkin, Elisa, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Examples of this “new orality” in American literary studies include Cmiel, Kenneth, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Looby, Christopher, Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Gustafson, Sandra, Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Smith, Mark M., Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)Google Scholar; and Gibian, Peter, Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a critical survey of such work see Gustafson, Sandra, “American Literature and the Public Sphere,” American Literary History, 20, 3 (2008), 465–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
15 The most comprehensive treatment of the popular lecture circuit is Ray, Angela, The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2005), 2Google Scholar. In addition, pioneering work was undertaken in a series of articles by Donald Scott: “The Popular Lecture and the Creation of a Public,” in William L. Joyce et al., eds., Printing and Society in Early America (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1983), 791–809; idem, “Print and the Public Lecture System 1840–1860,” in ibid., 278–99; and idem, “The Profession that Vanished: Public Lecturing in mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” in Gerald Grierson, ed., Professions and Professional Ideologies in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 80–102. Earlier valuable studies include Bode, Carl, The American Lyceum: Town Meeting of the Mind, 2nd edn (London: Feffer & Simmons, 1968)Google Scholar; Mead, David, Yankee Eloquence in the Middle-West: The Ohio Lyceum 1850–1870 (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1951)Google Scholar.
16 “Emerson the Lecturer,” Later Lectures, 1, xviii.
17 Cayton, “Making of an American Prophet,” 599.
18 See Rusk, Ralph L., The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Scribner, 1949), 382–83Google Scholar.
19 See Later Lectures, 1, xxiv–xxv; James Russell Lowell, “Emerson the Lecturer,” in idem, My Study Windows (Boston: Osgood, 1874), 379.
20 “Mr. Emerson's Lectures,” Christian Inquirer, 13 April 1850.
21 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 7Google Scholar.
22 Cooke, George Willis, Ralph Waldo Emerson: His Life, Writings and Philosophy (Boston: Osgood, 1881), 256Google Scholar.
23 Richardson, Robert D. Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 195.Google Scholar
24 Margaret Fuller, “Review of Emerson's Essays: Second Series,” New York Tribune, 7 Dec. 1844.
25 For Melville's lecture career see Sealts, Merton M. Jr., Melville as Lecturer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for Taylor's platform career, and further exploration of the travel lecture genre, see Wright, Tom F., “The Results of Locomotion: Bayard Taylor and the Travel Lecture in Mid-nineteenth-century America,” Studies in Travel Writing, 14, 2 (June 2010), 111–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
26 Throughout this essay, slippage will be noted in sources between the nomenclature of “British” and “English.” Though an internationally recognized concept of “Englishness” independent of the more abstract political signification of “Britishness” had emerged by 1850, the great majority of foreign commentators, and a number of English writers, continued to use the two as synonyms. Paul Langford locates one origin of this slippage in the reluctance of Romance languages “to coin a precise translation for ‘British’ or at least to use it once coined,” noting that “even Americans, with no linguistic barrier to surmount, did not necessarily show more discrimination.” Langford, Paul, English Identified (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 12Google Scholar. Whilst allowing for this discursive slippage in my sources, I have attempted throughout to employ “England” as a geographic designator, and “Britain” and “British” to denote political and imperial institutions.
27 Statistics drawn from Charvat, William, Emerson's American Lecture Engagements: A Chronological List (New York: New York Public Library, 1961)Google Scholar; and von Frank, Albert J., An Emerson Chronology (New York: Hall, 1994), 224–310Google Scholar. The lecture was also performed during 1848–51 under such titles as “Why England Is English” (e.g. Concord, Dec. 1848), and “England and the English (e.g. Cleveland, May 1850). Later performances under such titles as “English Influence in Modern Civilization” (e.g. Philadelphia, Jan. 1854) and “Characteristics of English Civilization” (e.g. East Boston, March 1854) represent separate texts from the lecture as performed during the earlier period.
28 Responses that emphasise its disparaging assessment of Britain include Weisbuch, Robert, Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 21–25Google Scholar; Bridgman, Richard, “From Greenough to ‘Nowhere’: Emerson's English Traits,” New England Quarterly, 9, 4 (1986), 469–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Studies that treat the work as an evasion of the sectional crisis include Nicoloff, Philip L., Emerson on Race and History: An Examination of English Traits (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961)Google Scholar; and Stowe, William, American Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 74–101Google Scholar. Recent work that synthesizes these readings includes Castillo, Susan, “‘The Best of Nations’: Race and Imperial Destinies in Emerson's English Traits,” Yearbook of English Studies (2004), 100–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hanlon, Christopher, “'The Old Race Are All Gone: Transatlantic Bloodlines and English Traits,” American Literary History, 19, 4 (2007), 800–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
29 See, for example, Sacvan Bercovitch, “Emerson, Individualism, and the Ambiguities of Dissent,” in Lawrence Buell, ed., Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1992), 101–34; Newfield, Christopher, The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996)Google Scholar.
30 The Houghton Library manuscript of “England” is reprinted in The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson 1843–1871, ed. by Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson, 2 vols. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 1; and in The Selected Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. by Bosco and Myerson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005).
31 For Whig leader Henry Clay's “American System” see Howe, Daniel Walker, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979), 20–21Google Scholar.
32 The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Robert E. Burkholder, Alfred Riggs Ferguson and Philip Nicoloff, 7 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971–2007), 1, 58.
33 Emerson, “The Young American,” in Collected Works, 1, 217–47.
34 Emerson, “Carlyle's ‘Past and Present’”, Dial, 4, 1 (1844), 99.
35 For an assessment of this approach see Buell, Emerson, 92. Weisbuch, Atlantic Double-Cross, 275–76, sees this at the heart of the “double-cross” of English Traits.
36 Thomas Carlyle to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 19 April 1849, in Joseph Slater, ed., The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 453.
37 “Mr. Emerson on England,” Literary World, 2 Feb. 1850.
38 The summary draws upon Moody, Richard, The Astor Place Riots (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958)Google Scholar; and Cliff, Nigel, The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama, and Death in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Random House, 2007)Google Scholar. See Samuel W. Haynes, “Anglophobia and the Annexation of Texas: The Quest for National Security,” in Samuel W. Haynes and Christopher Morris, eds., Manifest Destiny and Empire (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997), 115–45.
39 Anon., “Shakespeare Readings and Fashionable Vulgarity,” New York Herald, 23 April 1849.
40 See Moody, 86–96; and Baker, Thomas N., Sentiment and Celebrity: Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Trials of Fame (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 108–10Google Scholar.
41 Nathaniel Parker Willis, “After-Lesson of the Astor-Place Riot,” Home Journal, 26 May 1849.
42 Anon., “America,” The Times, 29 May 1849; reprinted as Anon., “The English View of the Riot,” New York Herald, 16 June 1849.
43 Speakers for the 1849–50 winter season had included six lectures by Henry Giles on “Don Quixote” and Horace Mann on “Advice to Young Mercantile Men.” The association also specialized in narratives of travel and global culture: W. H. C. Hosmer had spoken on “Scottish Song” in December 1849, and the performances that were to follow Emerson's “England” and “London” in January included Rev. W. Ware on “Florence” and Rev. George W. Bethune on “Holland and the Hollanders,” in the Mercantile Library Association, Annual Report, 1850, 24–25.
44 “Mr. Emerson's Lectures,” Christian Inquirer, 13 April 1850.
45 Of 2,974 members in 1850, 2,805 described themselves as “clerks.” New York Mercantile Library Association, Annual Report, 1850, 24; see also Augst, The Clerk's Tale, 118–21.
46 Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas Kellner, eds., Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 174–76.
47 See Cliff, Shakespeare Riots, 196–210, original emphasis.
48 “Mr. Emerson's Lecture on England,” Albion, 26 Jan. 1850.
49 Printed first in the Home Journal of 2 Feb. 1850, the sketch was excerpted in the Boston Evening Transcript, 4 Feb. 1850; it was subsequently published in Willis, Nathaniel Parker, Hurry-Graphs: Sketches of Scenery, Celebrities and Society (New York: Scribner, 1851), 189–92Google Scholar.
50 See Baker, Sentiment and Celebrity, 101–04.
51 Willis, “Emerson.”
52 Ibid.
53 The penchant of the Herald for such jeremiads was mocked in Anon., “Lectures and Lecturers,” Putnam's Monthly, March 1857, 317.
54 New York Herald, 23 Jan. 1850.
55 For Herald quote see Cliff, Shakespeare Riots, 237. For discussions of anti-British oratory see Ernst, Robert, “One and Only Mike Walsh,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly, 36 (1952), 43–65Google Scholar.
56 New York Herald, 23 Jan. 1850.
57 The reference in Emerson's script was as follows: “The fabulous St. George has never seemed to me the patron saint of England; but the scholar, monk, soldier, engineer, lawgiver, Alfred … he is the model Englishman. They have many such in their annals. Cromwell is one.” Later Lectures, 1, 163.
58 For example, Anon., “Trial of the Astor Place Rioters,” New York Herald, 17 Jan. 1850; and anon., “Interesting Opera News: Another Riot or Emeute Expected,” New York Herald, 19 Jan. 1850.
59 Tamarkin, Anglophilia, xxvii.
60 Levine, Lawrence, High Brow/Low Brow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.
61 Anon., “The Public Amusements,” New York Herald, 29 May 1849.
62 See anon., “The New York Mercantile Library,” Scribner's Monthly, Feb. 1871; and Augst, Clerk's Tale, 261–64.
63 Gustafson, “American Literature and the Public Sphere,” 465.
64 Emerson, “Fugitive Slave Law” (1854), in idem, Later Lectures, 1, 334.