Lecturing in America

“All Americans lecture, I believe. I suppose it is something in their climate.” Lord Illingworth, in Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance, Act II (1893).

Collins, Philip. “‘Agglomerating Dollars with Prodigious Rapidity’: British Pioneers on the Lecture Circuit.” Victorian Literature and Society: Essays Presented to Richard D. Altick. Eds. James R. Kincaid and Albert J. Kuhn. N.p.: Ohio State UP, 1984: 3-29.

Quoting from Louis B. Wright’s, Culture on the Moving Frontier (1955) – “The persistence of the English lecturer in the West [i.e. America] is one of the curious cultural phenomena of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (qtd. 6) – Collins offers a number of factors that explain this persistence: the fantastic sums of money to be made, which could not be equalled in Britain by either lecturing or writing; efficient transportation (i.e. railroads); lecture agencies; and the Lyceum movement, which created a huge demand for lectures and which, unlike the theatre, did not offend scruples informed by the New England Puritan tradition. The lectures also offered one of the only forms of ‘moral recreation’ for middle-class women, who, one observer noted in 1870, were prominent as audience members and lecturers (12).

“To simplify and generalize by decades: in the 1830s the British began to realize the possibilities of lecturing in America, and a few tried it. In the forties the first such financial killing was made (by an Irishman [Dionysius Lardner]), and American zest for lectures became so conspicuous that British travelers (like Charles Dickens in 1842) commented on it more than their predecessors had done. In the fifties, the first big stars entered the business…. In the early sixties the Civil War interrupted this development…” (7).

“The seventies and eighties seem to have been the climax of business. By the nineties, according to the leading American lecture agent, Major J.B. Pond, who had organized many of the most illustrious tours by native and imported speakers, lecturing had fallen in disrepute…. Nevertheless, as Pond reports, the demand for quantity, if not quality, was still rising. In the seventies there were five hundred Lyceums to be kept supplied with speakers; in the summer of 1900 over two hundred lecturers had announced their winter season plans for touring one state alone (Illinois)” (8).

The decline of lecturing was attributed to the growing acceptance of the theatre and the increasing availability of magazines and newspapers (13).

British Lecturers in America: Sir Edwin Arnold (poet and journalist), Matthew Arnold, Reverend Bellew (see Collins, Reading Aloud), Annie Besant (Theosophist, activist and writer), Charles Bradlaugh (freethinker and republican), James Silk Buckingham (traveler, journalist and politician), Alfred Bunn (poet), Hall Caine (novelist), Wilkie Collins, George Combe (Scottish phrenologist), Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, Charles Dickens Jr. (editor and dictionary writer), Frederic William (Dean) Farrar (religious writer), Edward Augustus Freeman (historian), J.A. Froude (historian), Edmund Gosse, Samuel Reynolds Hole (Dean of Rochester), Anthony Hope (novelist), Charles Kingsley (writer), Dionysius Lardner (popularizer of science), Samuel Lover (Irish poet, novelist and composer), George MacDonald (novelist), ‘Ian MacLaren’ (pseudonym of John Watson, Presbyterian minister and writer), Charles Mackay (poet), Gerald Massey (artisan-poet), Justin McCarthy (politician), Richard Proctor (astronomer), George Augustus Sala (journalist and author), H.M. Stanley (of ‘Mr. Livingstone, I presume?’ fame), W.M. Thackeray, Martin Tupper (poet), John Tyndall (scientist), George Vandenhoff (actor and elocutionist), Oscar Wilde, Edmund Yates (journalist, author), Israel Zangwill (novelist). An 1844 letter from Dickens to actor Charles Macready mentions lecturing by “Elton” and “Knowles,” perhaps referring to James Frederic Elton (explorer) and James Sheridan Knowles (playwright, actor and Baptist preacher) (see 27 n.22).

Offered lecture tours, but declined: Thomas Carlyle, T. H. Huxley (who did eventually lecture at Johns Hopkins University), Tennyson, W. E. Gladstone, J.M. Barrie, Charles Haddon Spurgeon (preacher), John Bright (politician), Herbert Spencer (philosopher), John Ruskin (using this insularly idiotic excuse: “I could not, even for a couple of months, live in a country so miserable as to possess no castles” [qtd. 9]).

American Lecturers: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mark Twain, Kate Field.

British lecturers who lectured in Britain about America: Wilde, Arnold, Lover.

American lecturing in literature: Dickens, Pickwick Papers (1837), Chapter 45; Martin Cuzzlewit (1844) Chapter 17; Henry James, The Bostonians (1886).

Selected Bibliography

Adrian, Arthur A. “Charles Kingsley visits Boston.” Huntingdon Library Quarterly 20 (1956).

Berger, Max. The English Traveller in America 1836-1860. New York, 1943.

Bernard, William Bayle. Life of Samuel Lover. 2 vols. London, 1874.

Buckingham, James Silk. America, Historical, Statistical, and Descriptive. London, 1841.

Bunn, Alfred. Old England and New England. London, 1853.

Burt, Robert C. “A Dealer in Brains: Major J.B. Pond and his Association with Great Men.” Pearson’s Magazine 5 (1898): 80-1.

Charteris, Evan. Life and Letters of Sir Edmund Gosse. London, 1931.

Chitty, Susan. The Beast and the Monk: A Life of Charles Kingsley. London, 1974.

Crowe, Eyre. With Thackeray in America. London, 1893.

Dickens, Charles. American Notes. London, 1842.

Hole, S. Reynolds. A Little Tour in America. London and New York, 1895.

Hudson, Derek. Martin Tupper: His Rise and Fall. London, 1949.

Lambert, John. Travels Through Canada and the United States 1806-8. 3rd ed. 2 vols. London, 1816.

Lawrence, E. P. “An Apostle’s Progress: Matthew Arnold in America.” Philological Quarterly 10 (1931): 62-79.

Lyell, Charles. A Second Visit to the United States of North America. 2nd ed. 2 vols. London, 1850.

—–. Travels in North America. 2 vols. London, 1845.

MacDonald, Greville. George MacDonald and his Wife. London, 1924.

Mackay, Charles. Forty Years’ Recollections. 2 vols. London, 1877.

—–. Life and Liberty in America. 2 vols. London, 1859.

—–. Through the Long Day. 2 vols. London, 1887.

Mesick, Jane Louise. The English Traveller in America 1785-1835. New York, 1922.

McCarthy, Justin. Reminiscences. 2 vols. London, 1899.

Raleigh, John Henry. Matthew Arnold and American Culture. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1957.

Randel, William Pierce. “Huxley in America.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 114 (1970).

Towle, G.M. American Society. 2 vols. London, 1870.

T[owle], G.M. “Our American Letter.” Athenaeum (18 June 1870): 806.

Trilling, Lionel. Matthew Arnold. London, 1949.

Trollope, Anthony. North America. London, 1862.

Trollope, Mrs. [F.E.]. Domestic Manners of the Americans. London, 1832.

Whitman, Walt. “Our Eminent Visitors: Past, Present and Future.” November Boughs (1888).