G. K. Chesterton on British Lecturers in America

As a follow-up to the post on Philip Collins’ article on British lecturers in America, G. K. Chesterton has a satirical passage on the undiscriminating enthusiasm of Americans for attending lectures in a Father Brown story, “The Curse of the Golden Cross,” in The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926). Father Brown, sailing home to Britain from America, is seated at a table with five others, including two

English lecturers returning from an American tour. One of them was described as Leonard Smyth, apparently a minor poet, but something of a major journalist; long-headed, long-haired, perfectly dressed, and perfectly capable of looking after himself. The other was a rather comic contrast, being short and broad, with a black, walrus moustache, and as taciturn as the other was talkative. But as he had been both charged with robbing and praised for rescuing a Roumanian Princess threatened by a jaguar in his travelling menagerie, and had thus figured in a fashionable case, it was naturally felt that his views on God, progress, his own early life, and the future of Anglo-American relations would be of great interest and value to the inhabitants of Minneapolis and Omaha.

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).

Reading Aloud

Collins, Philip. Reading Aloud: A Victorian Métier. Tennyson Society Monographs 5. Lincoln: The Tennyson Society, 1972.

Philip Collins is a scholar probably best known for his work on Dickens and Tennyson: he edited Dickens’ The Public Readings (1975).

Collins’ paper, published as a pamphlet by the Tennyson Society, provides a broad overview of what could be called Victorian “oral culture,” replete with a wealth of concrete detail. This detail gives weight to Collins’ assertion of the centrality of reading aloud in Victorian culture, and how reading aloud shaped Victorian literature.

Collins argues that much Victorian literature was viewed by creators and consumers as creations for reading aloud, in the home or at Penny Readings. Because literature was so often read aloud, many Victorians “met literature as a group or communal, rather than an individual experience” (27), a phenomenon of which writers were certainly aware, and which consequently, Collins argues, shaped Victorian literature: writers knew that successful literary works would be those that could be read in a family or public setting (28).

A notice in The Times (7 October 1868: 10) dated the vogue for public readings from 1844, when Charles Kemble read Cymbeline in public. The notice remarks that it had previously been thought “presumptuous” for a person to recite to a paying audience, given that members of the audiences could just recite the texts themselves. The notice observes that “there is not a literary institution that does not in the course of a year publish a programme of entertainment in which some plays or poems to be ‘read’ by some person of celebrity…do not hold a prominent place, and…’penny readings’ in the parish schoolrooms are now commonly encouraged by every clergyman who takes a practical interest in his flock” (qtd. 10-11).