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The Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain
Sarah Zimmerman
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T H E RO M A N T I C L I T E R A R Y L E C T U R E
I N BR I TA I N
The Romantic Literary

Lecture in Britain
SARAH ZIMMERMAN
1
3
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For Isabel and Jay

Preface
This book began in the lecture room. One of my first teaching assignments
was “Introduction to Literature,” a course that often enrolled hundreds
of students per section. I soon learned that lectures are a two-way street.
My students’ presence was highly communicative, not only when they
asked questions and took notes, but also as they shifted in their seats,
gazed out the window, or shuffled papers as the hour ticked to a close.
I learned to improvise, working from detailed outlines that allowed me to
leave a point when I was losing them or to elaborate when it took hold.
I came to realize how much the physical space mattered—how the room’s
atmosphere was set by its size, the kind of light it received, whether its
seats were banked, and if a microphone was necessary. I discovered that
while no amount of planning could guarantee a successful lecture, I fared
best by preparing with my students’ collective characteristics clearly in
mind and later revising in light of where I had them and when I lost them.
Their presence changed neither the facts of literary history nor the way
that I read texts, but what happened in those halls informed my critical
arguments and the version of literary history that they heard from me.
Learning to lecture taught me something else as a Romanticist: that we
were failing to grasp the full import of some of the period’s most influen-
tial literary criticism—Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare
and William Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets (1818)—by considering
them solely as printed texts rather than as oral arguments pitched to live
audiences. Robert Darnton makes the case that the period’s print works
are inflected by their participation in a “communications circuit that runs
from the author to the publisher (if the bookseller does not assume that
role), the printer, the shipper, the bookseller, and the reader.” The reader
plays a crucial role: that figure “completes the circuit because he influences
the author both before and after the act of composition,” as the author
“addresses implicit readers and hears from explicit reviewers.”¹ In the
lecture room, the circuit of affect is tighter and quicker, and the critical
arguments far more immediately susceptible to inflection by responsive
auditors. The period’s public lectures make especially clear how its literary
culture was shaped not only by the self-appointed arbiters of literary taste,
but also by those who listened and read.
¹ Darnton, Kiss of Lamourette, 111.

viii Preface
Lecturers pursued their own critical agendas, but they needed to engage
the auditors who could determine a series’ fate. Independent series could
collapse midway if they stayed home, and the scientific and literary
institutions that sponsored these events would not invite a lackluster
speaker to return. Successful lecturers therefore couched their arguments
with particular audiences in mind (since demographics varied by venue
and urban location), retooled arguments in retrospect, and sometimes
reacted in the moment. Even those who eschewed extemporaneity and
read aloud from full scripts had to be able to improvise. Lecturers did not
field questions, but auditors clearly communicated their pleasure or dis-
approbation in “[b]oos and cheers, ‘hear-hears,’ ‘aye-ayes,’ sniffs and
yawns.”² While lecturers aimed to shape listeners’ reading habits, establish
a literary canon, and burnish their own public profiles, listeners wielded
their own considerable influence, not only in the lecture room, but also at
the private gatherings that sometimes followed, where they compared
notes on the lecturers’ arguments and performances. The conversations
continued in solitude and silence in auditors’ own rooms, as they wrote
letters and autobiographical accounts recording what they had heard and
what they thought. Thus lecturers’ critical arguments reached the auditors
gathered around them first before radiating outward from that intimate
exchange in conversations carried on by dispersing crowds, traveling in
letters near and far, resurfacing in newspaper notices, lodging in print and
manuscripts for future readers.³
Auditors’ accounts contribute to a “history of listening” initiated by
music historians and also respond to Maureen McLane’s call for “a full
literary-historical account of the use and abuse of orality, oral cultures, and
orality effects by and in what we conventionally call British Romantic
poetry.”⁴ The Romantic-era public lecture on literature is a vital part of
these histories. In tracing the career of this still understudied medium, this
book has two main aims. One is methodological: addressing how to treat
these lectures as historical performances rather than simply as linguistic
texts, and considering the consequences of doing so for understanding the
critical arguments made as fully as possible. The other is historical: elabor-
ating the particular case of the public lecture on literature at the time and
² Forgan, “Context, Image and Function,” 102.

³ Tom Wright takes up this issue in regard to lyceum culture, observing that this kind of
oratory “worked upon dual audiences: a primary crowd of live auditors and a vast potential
secondary readership for accounts and transcriptions of speeches” (Lecturing the Atlantic, 20).
⁴ McLane, “Ballads and Bards,” 426. See Leon Botstein’s “Toward a History of
Listening” and David Cavicchi’s call for a history of “[t]he reception of performances and
works, the history of music consumption, the development of audience practices” (Listening
and Longing, 4).
Preface ix
place of its decisive emergence as a popular medium in early nineteenth-
century England.
I undertake the first task in the first chapter, which aims to consolidate
the lessons of a broad interdisciplinary discussion that conceptualizes the
problem of, and recommends best practices for, treating historical speak-
ing performances. Biographers, editors, and scholars in an array of discip-
lines (the history of science, theater history and performance studies,
literary studies, music history, art history, media studies) have come to a
working agreement that this necessarily speculative work requires gather-
ing surviving documents from both speakers and listeners, and situating
these events in their specific times and places. My next four chapters adopt
that approach in treating the historical performances of the period’s four
most prominent literary lecturers: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Thelwall,
William Hazlitt, and Thomas Campbell. I close with two chapters on their
auditors (including John Keats, Mary Russell Mitford, Lady Charlotte
Bury, and Catherine Maria Fanshawe) that consider their influence on
lecturers’ critical arguments but focus more fully on their own creative
responses to what they heard in their poems, letters, and other writings.
My first, methodological, aim informs my second, of treating the
decisive emergence of literary lecturing as a popular cultural medium in
early nineteenth-century England, most visibly in London. The public
lecture on literature caught the popular imagination and flourished for
over two decades in the interlocking careers of the period’s most promin-
ent lecturers. When Thelwall ventured onto the provincial circuit in late
1801 as an elocution lecturer he used poetry and prose in demonstrations
of reading aloud and recitation. At the London school he established in
1806 he soon developed separate literary series, including one on the
“English Classics.” In 1808 Coleridge followed in his footsteps, launching
a lecturing career at London’s Royal Institution that would span more
than a decade. Campbell in turn followed Coleridge’s lead, debuting at the
Royal Institution in 1812 and ending there in 1820 after a career that
included series in Liverpool and Birmingham. Hazlitt lectured on phil-
osophy at the Russell Institution in 1812, but he was a latecomer on the
literary lecture scene, offering his first series at the Surrey Institution in
early 1818. By 1820, all four of the period’s best-known literary lecturers had
retired from the main stage of public lecturing. Only Thelwall would return
after temporarily closing his school to resume full-time political work.⁵
⁵ Hazlitt gave two lectures in Glasgow at what was then called the Andersonian
Institution on May 6 and 13, 1822, the first on Shakespeare and Milton and the second
on Thomson and Burns. They were drawn from his already twice-delivered and published
Lectures on the English Poets (1818). See Jones, “Hazlitt as Lecturer.”
x Preface
Approaching the literary lecture as a distinctive medium serves two
main ends. First, we may more fully grasp the critical arguments lecturers
made by treating them on their own terms. Contemporaries took for
granted that lecturers tailored them for specific audiences. For instance,
even a quick glance at newspaper advertisements and reports of Cole-
ridge’s lectures on Shakespeare indicates that he chose some topics—“on
LOVE and the FEMALE CHARACTER, as displayed by Shakespear” [sic]—with
particular listeners in mind, in this case the women whose approbation
was required for a series to be considered fashionable (Lectures on Litera-
ture, 1: 300). A correspondent for The Traveller applauded Coleridge for
“taking effectual means to render [his lectures] delightful to those of his
auditors whom we presume him peculiarly anxious to please—the Fair”
(Lectures on Literature, 1: 320). The influence of the wished-for women
extended well beyond advertising to the development of critical ideas:
across several lectures Coleridge elaborated an account of “a feeling, a deep
emotion of the mind” that he eventually dubbed “love momentaneous,” a
coinage that is at once a defense of Romeo’s apparent fickleness and
Coleridge’s own take on the notion of love at first sight (Lectures on
Literature, 1: 327–8). Thus the attempt to attract the women auditors
whose approbation was necessary for a series to succeed elicited from him a
shrewdly calibrated critical inventiveness.
The second main end served by treating the period’s lectures as oral
arguments couched for live audiences is the unique view they provide of its
literary culture. We would expect to find Coleridge and Hazlitt featured
prominently but not, perhaps, that they were easily rivaled by Thelwall
and Campbell. Thelwall was until recently known primarily as a radical
political figure, while Campbell has lingered at the edges of literary history
as a minor poet and friend of Lord Byron. In their own day, however,
auditors listened eagerly to all four lecturers arguing often conflicting
critical agendas. Directing sustained attention to public lecturing also
brings into sharper focus the lasting impact of Thelwall and Campbell
on the modern field of literary studies. As lecturers, they parted company
with Coleridge and Hazlitt in two significant ways that distinguish their
literary critical perspectives. First, they openly welcomed women auditors,
and thus willingly acknowledged their increasing importance as cultural
arbiters. Thelwall taught female students at his London school alongside
his first wife and, after her death, his second. From the beginning he
included the works of women writers on his syllabi, including Anna Letitia
Barbauld, whom Coleridge and Hazlitt disparaged in their lectures.
Campbell frankly courted female auditors whom he recognized as influ-
ential patrons who could advance his professional and social ambitions.
Second, Thelwall and Campbell agreed that, as a pedagogical medium,
Preface xi
lectures could be a means of expanding the educational franchise, a viable
means of social reform in counter-revolutionary and wartime Britain.
Both put these views into action by participating in the institutionaliza-
tion of a literary education organized around lectures. Thelwall opened the
doors of his London school to the public in 1806 and embraced the
Mechanics’ Institutes movement in the early 1820s. In 1825 Campbell
initiated a public campaign for what would become University College
London. It would make higher education more accessible to middle-class
men and eventually become the first university in England to grant
degrees to women. It would also establish the first chair in English
literature and language in England.⁶ All of these innovations demonstrate
the importance of Romantic-era lecture culture in the disciplinary history
of literary studies and the lasting impact of lesser-known figures such as
Thelwall and Campbell on the field.
Viewing Romantic literary culture through the lens of its public lectures
also reveals an array of cultural roles played by auditors using various
media. Some of the era’s avid lecture-goers were also authors, including
Keats and Mitford. They were joined by others such as Bury and Fanshawe
whose literary profiles have faded but who were well known on the
Regency literary scene. As a cultural arena, public lecturing had its own
gendered restrictions, including most obviously the exclusion of women
from the main speaking part. It nevertheless provided women with other
influential literary roles in an era when they still faced significant limita-
tions in print culture. Some lecture auditors acted as patrons, and they
wielded influence as hosts and guests at the conversation parties, dinners,
and other private gatherings that accompanied public lectures. They
pursued these cultural activities in a number of media that have only
recently begun to receive significant attention in literary studies. Public
lecture culture depended upon the medium of print for advertisements,
prospectuses, newspaper notices, and sometimes publication of the lec-
tures themselves. It was, however, also oral culture and manuscript cul-
ture. The period’s lecture rooms put on display a rich concentration of
media, including public oratory, intimate conversation, and myriad
manuscripts, from lecturers’ speaking scripts to auditors’ responses in
letters, poems, journals, and diaries.⁷
⁶ University College London’s English Department scrupulously qualifies its own histor-
ical claims: <http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english/department/history-of-the-english-department>.
⁷ In discussing popular lecturing in the nineteenth-century United States, Wright
convincingly suggests that this “baffling heterogeneity” of media may have contributed to
“the phenomenon’s surprising scholarly neglect” (Cosmopolitan Lyceum, 4).
xii Preface
Together, the period’s literary lecturers and their auditors engaged in a
sustained cultural debate that included what a literary education should
consist of, who should receive one, and for what ends. Its intensity was
fostered by the “London lecturing empire” being a small world in which
lecturers and auditors were acutely aware of, and sometimes personally
acquainted with, one another.⁸ Peter Manning makes an astute observa-
tion about the salience of public lectures at this historical moment: “If, as
Jon Klancher and others have argued, the reading audience of early
nineteenth-century England was not single but multiple, leaving authors
at a puzzling distance from a diverse readership that they could not know,
the lectures offered a far more knowable community, formed by the
combining circumstances of site, admission price, and the tickets at the
lecturer’s disposal, which to some degree enabled him to paper the house.”⁹
Lecturers responded to one another’s arguments, spoke to auditors after
performances, and socialized with them at related private parties. Auditors
such as Mitford, Henry Crabb Robinson, and James Montgomery attended
enough public lectures to be able to compare lecturers’ performances and
critical claims. The surviving documents of all parties demonstrate how
common concerns, questions, and themes emerged in what formed a
sustained, if discontinuous debate about literary culture generated in the
period’s lecture rooms. The six chapters on lecturers and their auditors aim
to capture something of that vibrant, animated discussion. The argument
is organized as follows.
My first, introductory chapter (Chapter 1) sketches the literary lecture’s
debts to established speaking traditions and consolidates the lessons of
an interdisciplinary conversation about how to treat historical speaking
performances. I then turn to Coleridge (even though as a lecturer he
followed in Thelwall’s footsteps) for two reasons (Chapter 2). First, he
helped establish the Romantic literary lecture as a popular medium in his
own day. Second, his efforts to negotiate his acute ambivalence about
lecturing reflect two conflicts that would come to define the period’s
literary lectures: the medium was haunted by a 1790s culture of radical
speaking and it also seemed to some all too enmeshed in a commercialized
cultural marketplace. In the lecture room, Coleridge developed his key
critical notion of the “willing suspension of disbelief” as part of his effort to
imagine himself as the “Poet-philosopher” he wished to be rather than the
political speaker he had been or the “Lecture-monger” he feared he had
become, in what I call his “disappearing act.”¹⁰ During his 1808
⁸ Hays, “London Lecturing Empire,” 91.

⁹ Manning, “Manufacturing the Romantic Image,” 234.
¹⁰ Coleridge, Collected Letters, 2: 668; 4: 855.
Preface xiii
apprenticeship at the Royal Institution and in his celebrated 1811–12
series on Shakespeare and Milton, Coleridge developed interpretations of
Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet that accrue an additional layer of meaning as
part of this “disappearing act.” In Hamlet, he finds a figure of ambivalent
identification who by hesitating to act fails to do his “duty,” just as
Coleridge feared he himself was doing by lecturing rather than completing
his “great philosophical work” (Collected Letters, 4: 892–3). Self-cast as
Hamlet, however, Coleridge was a glorious failure, a compelling figure of
meditative extemporaneity despite the vagaries of his literary career. In his
lectures on Romeo and Juliet, he attempts to ease another persistent anxiety
about women’s increasing cultural agency. In his reading of the play the
influence women have over men who are in some way dependent on
them—as he was on female auditors—reinforces masculine autonomy
rather than disabling it.
Unlike Coleridge, Thelwall had no hope of banishing the ghosts of
his radical past, because his role in the 1794 Treason Trials rendered his
public profile as a political speaker indelible (Chapter 3). In reinventing
himself as a teacher of elocution and practitioner of an early form of speech
therapy, Thelwall did not so much abandon his political ideals as reshape
the nature of his democratic commitment. At the school he established in
London in 1806, Thelwall offered male and female auditors of all ages an
education in “oral eloquence,” and thereby translated the lost cause of
universal suffrage into a pedagogy that helped auditors speak for them-
selves.¹¹ Poetry was a core subject in his curriculum, and in teaching it he
developed a distinctive and almost entirely overlooked Romantic literary
criticism that treats poetry as an oral, performative, sociable genre. I offer a
portrait of Thelwall as a literary critic who interprets poems by reciting or
reading them aloud, and judges them by how well they lend themselves
to these practices. The public lecture was the perfect medium for his
approach to poetry as a communicative genre. By establishing his own
school, Thelwall managed to institutionalize this audible literary criticism,
even though his commitment to spoken language also worked to obscure
its legacy, since he preferred extemporaneity, and as a result relatively little
evidence of his literary lectures seems to have survived.
One of the poets whose verse Thelwall recited was Campbell who, like
Thelwall, authored a distinctive literary criticism that has been virtually
¹¹ Thelwall, Prospectus, 3. He uses the term “oral eloquence” in a number of publica-

tions. In Introductory Discourse he defines it as “the Art of communicating, by the
immediate action of the vocal and expressive Organs, to popular, or to select assemblies,
the dictates of our Reason, or our Will, and the workings of our Passions, or Feelings and
our Imaginations” (2).
xiv Preface
lost to Romantic studies (Chapter 4). An émigré Scot who became a
central figure on the Regency literary scene, Campbell sought to render
his lessons as appealing and readily consumable as possible. This attitude
set him in opposition to Coleridge and Hazlitt, who liked to stress the
difficulty of acquiring aesthetic judgment. These canonical lecturers held
up Campbell’s Pleasures of Hope (1799)—two books of bright, polished
couplets laced with literary, and particularly classical, allusions—as a signal
example of everything wrong with modern poetry. They accused him of
pandering to an expanding literary marketplace increasingly influenced by
women readers and periodical critics. Campbell mostly shrugged off such
attacks, content to capitalize on his popularity when he began giving his
own lectures in 1812 at London’s Royal Institution. In its celebrated
theater, he repeated the winning formulation of Pleasures by offering
auditors a literary education in highly polished prose, with a particular
emphasis on ancient poetry in (translated) Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. As a
lecturer, Campbell took equal care to present himself appealingly by
paying scrupulous attention to his own grooming, dress, and delivery.
He openly courted auditors, especially the women, correctly assuming that
they could further his social and professional ambitions. He was in turn
willing to share with them the classical education that had sponsored his
own mobility and that was especially difficult for them to acquire. Camp-
bell’s carefully scripted performances were, however, also underwritten by
a serious agenda of educational reform that culminated in his public
campaign for a “Metropolitan University” that would not discriminate
on the basis of rank or religion. Campbell established a vital link between
Romantic-era literary lectures and the institutionalization of modern
literary studies when he proposed a university organized around lectures
(rather than Oxbridge tutorials) in a letter to the London Times.
By the time Hazlitt began lecturing on literature, his rivals Thelwall,
Coleridge, and Campbell were already popular speakers. In his first series,
Lectures on the English Poets (1818), Hazlitt enters into an intensive
engagement with the period’s oral cultures (Chapter 5). I argue that he
negotiates a deeply ambivalent relationship to those cultures, which
extended from the radical speaking of the 1790s to the glittering Regency
lecture scene that he joined. In particular Coleridge’s voice as a Dissenting
preacher and poet of Lyrical Ballads had carried Hazlitt’s political and
aesthetic hopes. By 1818, that early optimism had been disappointed, but
Hazlitt was determined to glean for his own critical prose the appealing
qualities that had enchanted and inspired him in the oral cultures of his
youth. I read his first literary series as a tour de force performance in which
he consolidates the increasingly fluid prose he had honed as a journalist
into the conversational “familiar style” that would become his signature as
Preface xv
a critic. At the same time, Hazlitt resisted what he viewed as the dangers of
public speaking, choosing instead to act like an author, performing the
qualities of intellectual independence and interiority that he associated
with “writing” in his essay “On the Difference Between Writing and
Speaking” (1820). In Lectures Hazlitt also publicly stakes his critical claims
by reading the history of English poetry as a decline from its bright early
promise to a present moment, represented by the lecture room itself, in
which an increasingly commercialized, feminized literary marketplace
discouraged the patient pursuit of “true fame.” I pay particular attention
to the series’ well-known ending on the “living poets,” in which Hazlitt
mourns the loss of his hopes in the early Coleridge and claims his former
mentor’s role as a leading political and cultural critic in his own preferred
medium of print.
The verse of John Keats, Hazlitt’s best-known auditor, demonstrates
how the period’s literary lectures impacted its poetry (Chapter 6). We are
used to thinking of Keats as a museum-goer (“On Seeing the Elgin
Marbles”) and reader (“On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once
Again”), but his role as lecture auditor influenced his poetry in ways
that we have yet to appreciate fully. At the Surrey Institution Keats learned
not only from what Hazlitt said, but also from how he said it: the lecturer’s
famously aggressive, theatrical delivery helped Keats better to understand
the tremendous impact that a human voice could have on the listener.
Keats had already been trained as an auditor in the period’s Enlightenment
science culture at Enfield Academy and Guy’s Hospital. In addition,
shortly before Hazlitt’s series, Keats reviewed several plays on the London
stage and became fascinated by Edmund Kean’s fierce “eloquence.” Keats
recognized a similar quality in Hazlitt’s lectures, and attempted to capture
it for his verse. In his understudied sonnet, “O thou whose face hath felt
the winter’s wind,” Keats offers a rare, unrhymed poem of pure hearing,
featuring a speaker who doesn’t say a word. The lessons in the drama of
listening that Keats absorbed at the Surrey Institution resurface strikingly
in later poems, including “Ode to a Nightingale” and “The Fall of
Hyperion.” Scholars have recognized the dramatic quality of Keats’
mature verse, and I argue that his experience as Hazlitt’s auditor helped
to crystallize it. In these poems and in the letters that he wrote during and
after the series in which he engaged with Hazlitt’s arguments, Keats’
responses as a listener constitute literary works in their own right.
In the lecture room Keats sat alongside the women readers about whom
he was famously ambivalent as an aspiring poet (Chapter 7). That space
serves as a stage for the diverse range of active roles that women played in
Romantic literary culture beyond that of author. The influence of the
French salonnières and the British Bluestockings is widely recognized, but
xvi Preface
we have only begun to acknowledge the activities of their Romantic-era
counterparts. The period’s public lectures and the private parties that
sometimes followed are important for understanding women’s cultural
impact as auditors, convivial hosts and guests, and patrons, as well as
authors. They pursued their own aims in a variety of cultural media
including some that have been receiving increasing attention in literary
studies, such as conversation and works in manuscript. Few women had a
significant presence in the lecture room as authors whose works were
treated, but a figure as prominent as Barbauld could not be ignored if
lecturers wished to speak to the moment. Coleridge and Hazlitt tried to
delimit women’s influence in literary culture partly by disparaging her and
by admonishing auditors not to follow literary fashions associated with
women writers (especially novel reading). Auditors like Mitford ignored
such strictures while avidly pursuing their own literary careers, treating the
lecture room as a schoolroom. Mitford’s apprenticeship involved penning
epistolary responses to what she heard, including irreverent accounts of
Coleridge’s, Campbell’s, and Hazlitt’s performances. By the time Lady
Charlotte Bury sat in Campbell’s lectures, she was an author in her own
right. She published most of her “silver fork” novels anonymously, in part
to protect her position as lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Wales (after-
ward Queen Caroline), a role she subsequently exploited in the anonym-
ous (but swiftly surmised) publication of Diary Illustrative of the Times of
George IV (1838). At the Royal Institution Bury identified Campbell as a
poet to patronize, inviting him into the royal household and thereby
advancing his social and literary ambitions. In Sydney Smith’s lectures
on moral philosophy at the Royal Institution, the poet and artist Cather-
ine Maria Fanshawe found a rich source of inspiration for an “Ode” that
challenged contemporaneous satires on women’s prominence in lecture
audiences. Fanshawe did not attempt to publish her works, preferring to
circulate her poetry in manuscript in literary circles that included fellow
lecture auditors. She frequently took as her subject the sociable oral
cultures in which she participated as a valued guest, including literary
conversations held at house parties and private dinners. In these domestic
settings and in lecture rooms, women found spaces filled with possibility
for their own literary activities. It is fitting that listeners have the last word
in this book, as they so often did in life.
Acknowledgments
This book has been a long road, and I was fortunate to have a lot of help
on it. Travel for research and time to write was generously supported by
Fordham University, and the ACLS provided the boon of an entire year
that enabled me to lay the project’s foundations. Susan Wolfson, Peter
Manning, and Alan Bewell offered encouragement and support from the
beginning. I discovered that speaking about oral culture added a level of
intensity to conferences and other talks, and the responses I received at
these events proved to be a particularly rich source of insight and energy.
For helpful exchanges and invitations to present work-in-progress I am
especially grateful to the late Paul Magnuson, Orrin Wang, Michael
Macovski, Anne-Lise François, Jon Klancher, Elizabeth Denlinger, Nick
Roe, Charles Mahoney, Jacob Risinger, Jeffrey Cox, Jill Heydt-Stevenson,
Sean Franzel, Kurtis Hessel, Kevis Goodman, and Danny O’Quinn.
I have received vital assistance in piecing together accounts of
Romantic-era public lectures and the institutions that sponsored them
from many archives, collections, and libraries. I am indebted to Frank
James of the Royal Institution of Great Britain for helping me to under-
stand these events, including the opportunity to attend a lecture there
myself. Sincere thanks go to the members of staff who have answered
questions and made useful suggestions at the British Library; the National
Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum; the Wellcome Collection;
the Guildhall Library; the London Metropolitan Archives; the University
of London Archive, Senate House Library; the Royal Institute of British
Architects Library and Collections; the Research Library and Archive at
Sir John Soane’s Museum; the National Library of Scotland; the Mitchell
Library, Glasgow; Archives and Special Collections at the University of
Strathclyde; the Dundee University Archives; the Carl H. Pforzheimer
Collection; the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and
American Literature; the Rare Books Division of the New York Public
Library; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; and the Rare
Books and Special Collections at Princeton University.
A number of scholars graciously responded to queries with insight and
information, including Michael Scrivener, R. A. Foakes, Geoffrey Carnall,
Gregory Claeys, Richard Holmes, and Duncan Wu. I have been fortunate
in having editors for earlier versions of several chapters who advanced and
sharpened my thinking, including Angela Esterhammer, Alex Dick, Charles
Mahoney, and Robert DeMaria. Samantha Sabalis, David Querusio, and
Sean Spillane provided excellent research assistance. I am indebted to
xviii Acknowledgments
everyone I have worked with at Oxford University Press including two
anonymous readers who gave wonderfully thorough, perceptive critiques.
A number of readers contributed astute commentary that fueled
thought and revision including Susan David Bernstein, Aniruddho Biswas,
Lenny Cassuto, Anne Fernald, Kevin Gilmartin, Wolfgang Mann, and
Manya Steinkoler. Judith Thompson read drafts and shared research and
an enthusiasm that rejuvenated mine when it was flagging. David Duff
offered guidance and good reading at a crucial moment in concluding the
project. Along the way John Bugg was infinitely generous in offering
advice and suggesting ingenious ways out of corners into which I had
written myself. As the project took shape Stuart Sherman graciously
discussed it all, in conversations filled with hilarity and kindness. This
book is partly about the art of listening, about which I learned tomes from
Marvin Geller. It saddens me that Kristin Gager is not here to celebrate
the completion of this project, especially since her friendship extended to
lending it her astute editorial eye.
My most personal debts are to those who kept me going, kept me
laughing, kept me diverted when I needed it, and convinced me to finish
already, including Moshe Sluhovsky, Ginger Strand, and Wolfgang
Mann. Aniruddho Biswas saw me through to the end. My family has
been a sustaining force, and I am happy that completing this project will
leave more time to spend with Jay, Julie, Kate, and Jacob. My parents were
my first and best teachers. By reading what seemed an entire children’s
library to me including Dr. Seuss, The Story of Ferdinand, and Robert
Louis Stevenson’s poems, my mother taught me to love stories, animals,
and the sounds of words. My father was my last, best reader of this book,
who considered every word, more than once, with a writer’s ear and a
structural geologist’s keen eye. It is dedicated to Isabel and Jay with love.
Earlier versions of several chapters appeared in the following publica-
tions, and I am grateful for permission to reprint this material. A version of
Chapter 2 appeared as “Coleridge the Lecturer, a Disappearing Act,” in
Spheres of Action: Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture, edited by
Angela Esterhammer and Alexander Dick. © University of Toronto Press,
2009. 46–72. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. A version of
Chapter 6 appeared as “British Romantic Women Writers, Lecturers, and
the Last Word,” in The Blackwell Companion to British Literature. Vol. 4:
The Long Eighteenth Century, 1660–1837, edited by Robert DeMaria, Jr.,
Heesok Chang, and Samantha Zacher. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell,
2014. 380–95. © John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. A version of Chapter 7
appeared as “The Thrush in the Theater: Keats and Hazlitt at the Surrey
Institution,” in A Companion to Romantic Poetry, edited by Charles
Mahoney. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. 217–33. © John Wiley
& Sons, Ltd.
Contents
List of Illustrations xxi

List of Abbreviations xxiii
1. Approaching the Lecture Room 1

The Critical Field of Romantic-Era Public Lecturing 8
Engaging in Speculation: Approaching Historical Speaking
Performances 16
Mapping Romantic-Era Literary Lecturing 23
2. Coleridge the Lecturer, A Disappearing Act 30

Coleridge at the Royal Institution: A Star is (Re)Born 33
Spending Time: The 1811–12 Lectures on Shakespeare
and Milton 41
The Pedagogy of Permanence: “Fixed Principles” and
Extemporaneity 46
Suspending Disbelief: Hamlet in the Lecture Room 51
Happy Endings: Romeo and Juliet 56
3. John Thelwall’s School of Eloquence 60

A Defense of “Oral Eloquence” 65
Phys Ed for Poets 72
Applied Poetics 76
Locution, Locution, Locution 83
4. Thomas Campbell, Scholar-Poet 91

The Case against Campbell 94
Performing Enlightenment 102
Literary Lecturing’s Afterlives: “a great London University” 112
5. Acting Like an Author: Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets 118

Jacob’s Dream: Fathers, Sons, and the Work of Mourning 121
Lectures on the English Poets: An Elegy 127
Don’t Speak: The Case for Authorship 133
Acting Like an Author: Hazlitt’s Delivery Style 142
6. The Thrush in the Theater: Keats at the Surrey Institution 154

Listening Lessons 157
Hearing Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets 160
xx Contents
Poetry Demonstration: “O thou whose face hath felt
the winter’s wind” 165
Applied Listening: The Later Poems and Letters 170
7. The Last Word: Women in the Romantic Lecture Room 176

“Philosophy in Fashion” and Other Strictures 179
Anna Letitia Barbauld: The Rival 182
Mary Russell Mitford: The Apprentice 187
Lady Charlotte Bury: Patronage and Prose 190
Catherine Maria Fanshawe’s Conversation Poems 195
Private Lectures 200
References 203
Index 217
List of Illustrations
1. Detail from Rival Lectures: Anderson’s Institution, from Vol. 1,

no. 10: Northern Looking Glass, 1825 25
2. “The Royal Institution and Colquitt Street, Liverpool,”
by George Pyne and Charles Claude Pyne, reproduced
in Bygone Liverpool (1913) 26
3. Michael Faraday delivering a lecture at the Royal Institution
on December 27, 1855, by Alexander Blaikley, c.1856 32
4. “Scientific Researches! New discoveries in
PNEUMATICKS!—or—an Experimental Lecture on the
Powers of Air,” by James Gillray, 1802 36
5. “Election fair, Copenhagen Fields,” by James Gillray, 1795 66
6. Topographical view, showing the portico for Nos. 57–58
Lincoln’s Inn Fields 86
7. “A Chemical Lecture at the Surrey Institution,”
by Thomas Rowlandson, 1809 108
8. The Surrey Institution, by Thomas Rowlandson and
Augustus Pugin, in The Microcosm of London (1808–10) 109
9. Frontage of the Leverian Museum, Blackfriars Road,
London, 1805 136
10. Lecture VIII: “On the Living Poets,” Lectures on the
English Poets, n.d. 144
11. John Keats to J. H. Reynolds, February 19, 1819 167
12. Lady Charlotte Campbell, 1775–1861, by Johann
Wilhelm Tischbein, c.1789 194
List of Abbreviations
Collected Letters Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. Edited by Earl Leslie Griggs. 6 vols. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1956–71.
Complete Works Hazlitt, William. Complete Works of William Hazlitt. Edited
by P. P. Howe. 21 vols. London: Dent, 1930–4.
Keats Letters Keats, John. The Letters of John Keats. Edited by Hyder
Edward Rollins. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1958.
Lectures on Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Collected Works of Samuel
Literature Taylor Coleridge. Vol. 5, pts. 1 & 2: Lectures 1808–19 on
Literature. Edited by R. A. Foakes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1987.
Letter to Cline Thelwall, John. A Letter to Henry Cline, Esq., On Imperfect
Developments of the Faculties, Mental and Moral, as Well as
Constitutional and Organic; and on the Treatment of
Impediment of Speech. London: Richard Taylor, 1810.
Life and Letters Beattie, William. Life and Letters of Thomas Campbell. 3 vols.
London: Moxon, 1849.
MC The Morning Chronicle
1
Approaching the Lecture Room
Inquiring into the history of a medium that helped to construct that

inquiring itself is sort of like attempting to stand in the same river
twice: impossible, but it is important to try, at least so the (historicity
of the) grounds of inquiry become clear.
—Lisa Gitelman¹
Literature arrived late on England’s public lecture curriculum. At the

beginning of the eighteenth century, independent lecturers on science
“burst on the scene as the Enlightenment’s answer to the itinerant
preacher, trading on the new prestige of Newtonian science and the
magic of experiments using dazzling apparatus.”² Early in the next century
the medium became more fully established with the founding of scientific
and literary institutions that offered slates of lectures by “recognized
authorities in their fields” that held “high educational standards” while
remaining “popular in approach.”³ The Royal (1799), London (1805),
Surrey (1808), and Russell (1808) Institutions joined the many independ-
ent lecturers who were already fanning a vogue for self-improvement in
London and the provinces. Hundreds of middle- and upper-class auditors
crowded into rooms such as the Royal Institution’s celebrated theater to
hear literary critics propound their aesthetic views, to acquire an informal
literary education, and to see and be seen. The lectures were “public” in
varying degrees. Independently organized series were open to anyone who
could pay the entrance price, but that amount was prohibitive for the
working classes: it hovered at two guineas for a full course, one guinea for a
short course, and five shillings per lecture. Even for those who could afford
it, admission was limited at the scientific and literary institutions to
members and subscribers (in different categories), although transferable
¹ Gitelman, Always Already New, 20. Gitelman is adverting here to the familiar Her-
aclitean saying (cf. Plato, Cratylus, 402 A–B).
² Porter, English Society, 240. I specify England since the history of literary lectures being
open to the public differs in Scotland. See for instance Stewart J. Brown, “Hugh Blair.”
³ Kurzer, “History of the Surrey Institution,” 109.
2 The Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain

tickets frequently made their way into the hands of a somewhat
broader public.⁴
Science retained center stage in early nineteenth-century lecture cul-
ture, but the scientific and literary institutions recognized the need to
broaden their curricula to keep a large enough audience returning. In
1810 the Royal Institution’s resident Professor of Chemistry Humphry
Davy explained to auditors that “the nature of the audiences, which are
always to be expected in the lecture rooms of the metropolis” is so diverse,
including “students, men of science, persons in search of amusement,
persons in search of information,” that a varied slate was required “[t]o
afford satisfaction to all.” The “[n]umerous courses” that “were conse-
quently established” included elocution, moral philosophy, history,
music, architecture, art history, chemistry, astronomy, and belles lettres.⁵
The primary focus of the lecturers in this study was poetry, since its
preeminent generic status made it the key critical object in lecture-room
debates about which writers and works deserved to last. That heightened
attention to poetry in the lecture room was, however, part of a broader
historical shift in the aesthetic category of “literature.”
Lectures on literature were popular from the moment of their arrival on
the cultural scene. At the Royal Institution, Thomas Frognall Dibdin had
already begun lecturing on “English literature” when Coleridge first
appeared there in 1808 speaking on the “Principles of Poetry.” Coleridge’s
celebrity gave the subject a new visibility in public lecture culture, but
what it meant to lecture on “literature” was very much in flux. The
scholarly consensus is that, as Ian Duncan puts it, “the modern category
of literature in English emerged conceptually in the Romantic period.”⁶
The era’s public lectures represent a crucial but still under-written chapter
in that history. Jon Klancher has recently argued that the era’s scientific
and literary institutions played a powerful role in shaping the meta-
disciplinary rubric of the “arts and sciences,” which helped produce “a
modern conception of what literature is, and how it became a ‘specialized’
⁴ The line between public and private blurred, but it mattered. When Coleridge
organized two short series of lectures on European Drama and Shakespeare in 1812, he
rented Almack’s, the fashionable suite of assembly rooms in King Street, St. James’s,
which was exclusive enough to deny admittance to the Duke of Wellington when he
did not meet the dress code prescribed by a committee of female patrons who also
controlled admission (Sheppard, London, 247). Shute Barrington, the Bishop of Durham,
attended Coleridge’s first literary series at the Royal Institution. When Coleridge invited
him to his independently organized series at Almack’s, Barrington obligingly subscribed,
but then told him that he could not “himself appear in a hired Lecture Room” (Collected
Letters, 3: 387).
⁵ Davy, Lecture on the plan, 11. ⁶ Duncan, Scott’s Shadow, xi.
Approaching the Lecture Room 3

domain in its own right.”⁷ Although it is not my primary focus, the
chapters that follow confirm that the debates over literary culture that
unfolded in the lecture room actively shaped that history. Prominent
critics and equally opinionated auditors considered who should be
included in literary canons, the appropriate relationship between Shake-
speare and the modern stage, the value of novel reading, the influence of
periodical critics, and the comparative merits of modern systems of
education.
The lecture room renders particularly visible how earlier educational
traditions fed an emerging, increasingly “restrictive” definition of litera-
ture as “‘imaginative’ writing.”⁸ In the eighteenth century, public lectures
on elocution were popular, and students were taught rhetoric and belles
lettres in England’s Dissenting academies and Scotland’s universities. At
the Warrington Academy Joseph Priestley “taught the classical languages
and antiquities, French, and English grammar and composition” as a tutor
in languages and belles lettres from 1761 to 1767.⁹ In 1762 Hugh Blair was
appointed the first Regius Chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at the
University of Edinburgh, where he lectured on both written and spoken
eloquence. Independent lecturers including Theophilus Cibber and
Charles Macklin, both of whom spoke on Shakespeare within a popular
elocutionary tradition of training actors, carried these traditions into the
new century. Like Cibber and Macklin, William Kendrick emphasized
recitation, a pedagogy on which Thelwall would build a second speaking
career.¹⁰ As a self-styled “professor of Elocution” who sometimes adver-
tised lectures on “Impediments, Oratory, Polite Literature,” Thelwall’s
ties to these traditions were obvious, but Coleridge also adopted them
(MC, March 21, 1808).¹¹ At the Royal Institution, Coleridge’s fellow
lecturers included the Rev. John Hewlett, who spoke on belles lettres (MC,
November 30, 1807), and Coleridge offered his own series on the subject
⁷ Klancher, Transfiguring, 23. Klancher succinctly observes that listening to Dibdin’s

lectures on “English Literature” at the Royal Institution from 1805 to 1807 would mean
“learning about neither imaginative ‘literature’ as we now conceive of it, nor about the more
spacious Enlightenment category of all educated discourse published in print, as it had
essentially meant for the past two centuries” (Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences, 73).
Raymond Williams charts the term’s gradual shift away from the “general sense of ‘polite
learning,’ firmly attached to the idea of printed books,” locating “the first certain signs of a
general change in meaning” in the eighteenth century, when “literature was specialized
towards imaginative writing, within the basic assumptions of Romanticism” (Keywords,
184–6).
⁸ Guillory, Cultural Capital, 123. ⁹ Schofield, “Priestley, Joseph.”
¹⁰ In his discussion of Cibber, Macklin, Kendrick, and other early lecturers on literature,
Osler reports finding “only one course of lectures on Milton before the nineteenth century,
that delivered by John Marchant in 1758” (Rise of Public Lecturing, 224).
¹¹ Thelwall, Selections, & c.

at the Surrey Institution in the winter of 1812–13. Alan Osler identifies
something new in the lectures of Kendrick, a periodical writer, translator,
and would-be playwright who lectured at the Devil Tavern in Fleet Street
in the spring of 1774: his “aim was to deal critically with the text.” The
Gentleman’s Magazine offered contemporaneous support for that view
when it recognized Kendrick’s approach as newsworthy, describing his
lectures as “a novel kind of entertainment . . . an attempt to exhibit the
beauties of Shakespeare, both by speaking, action, and explanation.”¹²
The modern definition of “literature” and a modern literary criticism
were also shaped by acute historical pressures that were palpable in the
period’s lecture rooms. It was a fiercely contested forum constituted along
two major historical fault lines, the most perilous being the relationship
between radical politics and Regency literary culture. Beginning with
Thelwall’s early elocution lectures, the medium thrived between two
moments of acute political unrest, the immediate post-revolutionary era
and the post-war resurgence of the movement for parliamentary reform,
which was punctuated in August 1819 by the Peterloo massacre.
A number of oral traditions, including science lectures and sermons, fed
the literary lecture’s development, but it was vitally charged by the radical
lecturing culture of the 1790s. In that era both Thelwall and Coleridge
advocated political reform in public lectures before being silenced by sharp
ministerial and loyalist repression. Both were forced to refashion their
public profiles when they returned to the lecture room. At London’s
Royal Institution, Coleridge defined his new aesthetic project against the
radical sympathies he had espoused. In contrast Thelwall’s new lecturing
scheme complemented his political commitments. At his elocution
school, Thelwall employed literary works for a broader social end: in the
wake of the collapsed campaign for universal suffrage, he aimed to foster
self-representation by teaching effective speaking.
The second major fissure defining the period’s literary lectures was the
medium’s proximity to an expanding literary marketplace. Public lectures
rendered poets’ increasing dependence on a buying public undeniable,
because a series’ success, and sometimes even its completion, required the
sustained enthusiasm of auditors, many of whom were women. As popular
sociable events, public lectures threatened to render poetry susceptible to
fashionable trends, a phenomenon associated with the women who enthu-
siastically attended them. After attending a lecture at the Royal Institu-
tion, Southey’s fictional Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella asked pointedly,
“What think you of philosophy in fashion?”¹³ Coleridge and Hazlitt
¹² Osler, Rise of Public Lecturing, 233–5. ¹³ Southey, Letters from England, 3: 284.

answered by mocking the works of women writers and chiding auditors
about their literary tastes, especially their fondness for novels.
These debates played out performatively in the lecture room, as
speakers addressed their auditors directly and one another indirectly as
representing particular threats to literary culture. To many, Thelwall still
seemed to conjure a volatile political past while Campbell, along with
women auditors and other “Fashionables,” appeared to presage an increas-
ingly commercialized literary future (Lectures on Literature, 1: 195). From
their respective lecture rooms Coleridge attempted to distance himself
from Thelwall in an effort to expel his own radical ghosts, while Hazlitt in
turn disparaged Coleridge for abandoning his political ideals. Both Coler-
idge and Hazlitt attacked Campbell as representing a spurious popular
poetry. Auditors too seemed to pose specific dangers within a contested
literary culture. The laboring classes were effectively expelled from the
Romantic lecture room in an era when educating them was deemed
dangerous, while middle- and upper-class women were welcomed but
with stipulations about the nature of their participation.
In this performative arena lecturers prosecuted their critical claims using
not only reasoned discourse but also direct address and ad hominem
attacks. As the best-known radical speaker of his day, Thelwall seemed
to embody the potential abuse of authority that lingers at the edges of
political oratory. Even friends acknowledged the twin dangers of dema-
goguery and mob violence in his history. In his 1850 Autobiography John
Britton defended him, insisting that Thelwall had not been one of the
“unprincipled and reckless demagogues of the time, who by fluency of
speech and unscrupulous language produced exciting effects on the
idle, the dissolute, and the dishonest.”¹⁴ Henry Crabb Robinson deemed
Thelwall “a perfectly honest man,” but conceded that he “had a power of
declamation which qualified him to be a mob orator.”¹⁵ Despite having
publicly defended Thelwall and his co-defendants in Cursory Strictures
(1794), William Godwin turned on him a year later, arguing for a
fundamental distinction between “agitators” and “philosophers,” warning
that “[a]ll oratorical seasoning is an appeal to the passions,” and that when
“all the indignant emotions of the human mind are excited” then “[t]he
cauldron of civil contention simmers.”¹⁶
Godwin’s metaphor demonstrates how concerns about the undue
influence of speakers were coupled with worries about reactive auditors.
Hazlitt felt compelled to defend Thelwall’s listeners by suggesting that
even though he was “the model of a flashy, powerful demagogue,” he was
¹⁴ Britton, Autobiography, 182. ¹⁵ Robinson, Diary, 1: 27.

¹⁶ Godwin, Political Writings, 2: 133.

“a madman blessed with a fit audience” (Complete Works, 12: 264). In this
way the medium itself seemed haunted by its participants. Mary Fairclough
confirms that attitudes toward crowd behavior darkened in the aftermath
of the French Revolution, citing in particular the concerns that Godwin
articulates about “the unruly nature of sympathetic communication.”¹⁷
These worries persisted in wartime Britain. It might seem as if “the
distinction between society and the mob” would be perfectly clear in the
Regency era, but the lingering specter of mass protests resulted in the
banishment of the laboring classes from the Romantic lecture room.¹⁸
Klancher recounts “a remarkable and still partly obscure reversal” of the
Royal Institution’s “original purposes” of providing a scientific and
technological education to “London’s most educable workers, mechanics,
and artisans.” The “rapid conversion” of this plan “into the fashionable
Royal Institution” is detailed in a poignant account by a figure at the
center of the storm, Clerk of the Works Thomas Webster.¹⁹ In his
unpublished autobiography he describes designing the theater to accom-
modate “different ranks in Society” by building an upper gallery for “such
ingenious mechanics as had gained a title to be there” to which “a separate
stone staircase led from the street.” Webster ruefully recalls that “[t]he whole
of this was built” before the “project for improving mechanics” was
“crushed” for having a “dangerous political tendency.” As a result, he
reports regretfully, “my mechanics stone staircase, was pulled down.”²⁰
For over two decades, until the establishment of the Mechanics’ Institutes,
Webster’s staircase remained a ghostly appendage to the Romantic lecture
room, gesturing toward the laborers’ expulsion from it.
This preemptive banishment is unsurprising because the two decades
on which I focus were bookended by determined efforts to silence political
and religious dissent. Despite the effective suppression of the 1790s
movement for parliamentary reform, the ministry remained alert to the
possibility of its resurgence. When it reignited in the aftermath of Water-
loo and post-war recession, the government responded with the Six Acts
(1817), one of which was “substantially a re-enactment of the Act of
1795,” one of the Two (or Gagging) Acts (1795) that had been directed at
radical lecturers including Thelwall.²¹ By targeting public speaking as a
medium in its own right, the administration acknowledged the need to
address it as a specific kind of threat. James Chandler observes that the Six
¹⁷ Fairclough, Romantic Crowd, 5–6.

¹⁸ Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation, 115.
¹⁹ Klancher, Transfiguring, 54, 60, 62.
²⁰ Webster, “Autobiography.” Quoted by courtesy of the Royal Institution of Great Britain.
²¹ Aspinall and Smith, English Historical Documents, 394.

Acts addressed two political “fronts,” “powerful mass demonstrations and
mass media.”²² This renewed struggle over political speaking took place at
the height of Romantic-era public lecturing.
In contrast to the artisans, middle- and upper-class women were wel-
comed in Regency lecture rooms as “essential to the legitimation” of the
scientific and literary institutions’ “claims to politeness and civility as well
as to their financial survival.”²³ Their presence in numbers nevertheless
seemed to pose a double threat to the cultural authority of the institutions
and their literary lecturers: as auditors they could determine a lecture
series’ popularity, and as readers they wielded increasing power in deciding
which writers and works would sell. Peter Manning describes the Roman-
tic lecture scene as “oral culture under market conditions” in which
literary “knowledge” was both a “mark of cultural distinction” and “one
among many interchangeable and banal novelties.”²⁴ Andrew Bennett
argues that concerns about the growing influence of the reading public
prompted a heightened emphasis in the period on “posterity” as an
aesthetic value: “Once the conditions of publication and the market for
books have given poetry audiences a certain anonymity, and once the
democratization of the readership has allowed a certain degradation and,
by association, a feminization of reading to become credible as a narrative
of reception, then poets begin to figure reception in terms of an ideal
audience—masculine, generalized and anonymous—deferred to an
unspecified future.”²⁵ The Romantic-era lecture room was thus an
important site for developing what Pierre Bourdieu has described as
the “aura of indifference and rejection towards the buying and reading
public” that he considers a reaction precisely to “the pressures of an
anonymous market.”²⁶
These struggles informed canonical arguments that were developed for
that arena. In that space Coleridge and Hazlitt inveighed against fleeting
popularity and championed instead what the former called the “glorious
immortality of true greatness” (Lectures on Literature, 1: 206). At moments
in reading the period’s literary lectures one can almost see the speakers
gazing out over the heads of their auditors to what Hazlitt called “post-
humous fame” (Complete Works, 5: 126). Time itself became a preoccu-
pation in the period’s literary lectures as these critics meditated on
why some works had lasted and what would survive from their own day.
²² Chandler, England in 1819, 42.

²³ Russell, “Spouters or Washerwomen,” 133.
²⁴ Manning, “Manufacturing the Romantic Image,” 234, 228.
²⁵ Bennett, Romantic Poets, 2–3.
²⁶ Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, 114–15.

They also worried that as paid performers in a fashionable, ephemeral
medium they were contributing to the problems they addressed, leaving
Coleridge to long for “unhired eloquence,” and Hazlitt to confess at the
end of his first series that during it he had feared “ending in nothing,” a
tacit acknowledgment of the medium’s transience (Collected Letters, 4:
926; Complete Works, 5: 168). In the chapters that follow I argue that
lecturers were deeply involved in questioning the newly popular medium
in which they were working, and those concerns are often discernible in
the critical claims they make. My focus on how to approach lecture
arguments that were intimately informed by, responsive to, and some-
times reflective upon the cultural arena for which they were made is
indebted to a recent wave of interdisciplinary scholarship on Enlighten-
ment and Romantic-era sociability that has brought its lecture culture into
much sharper historical focus.
THE CRITICAL FIELD OF ROMANTIC-ERA

PUBLIC LECTURING
Historians of science led the way in developing critical approaches to

public lecturing. In Science as Public Culture (1992), Jan Golinski defines
the role that lectures played in broadening an audience for Enlightenment
science. We have detailed understandings of the major scientific and
literary institutions, including London’s Royal (Morris Berman and
Frank James), London ( J. N. Hays), and Surrey (Frederick Kurzer)
Institutions.²⁷ Sophie Forgan has demonstrated the importance of the
institutions’ architecture in analyzing how a “communications circuit”
operates in the lecture room. Ian Inkster and others have argued the
vitality of the provincial science lecture scene and the medium’s import-
ance to the history of adult education.²⁸ These are only the highlights of a
deep scholarly field that provided literary historians with a substantial
foundation on which to build.
Within the field of British Romantic studies, a handful of high-impact
essays broke critical ground on public literary lectures beginning in the
early 1990s. David Hadley’s “Public Lectures and Private Societies:
Expounding Literature and the Arts in Romantic London” (1993) pre-
sented a vividly detailed picture of the London literary lecture scene,
featuring Coleridge’s and Hazlitt’s appearances at a variety of venues,
²⁷ For the London Institution see Hays, “Science in the City.”

²⁸ See for instance Inkster, “The Public Lecture as an Instrument of Science Education
for Adults.”

including the Royal, Russell, and Surrey Institutions. We have a substan-
tial understanding of the impact of Coleridge’s and Hazlitt’s lectures on
Romantic literary studies thanks to two other important essays. In a
pioneering account of the medium, Klancher described how the remark-
able “transmission effect” of “Coleridge transforming himself into a
Shakespearean presence” before live audiences led to an equally conse-
quential “transmission failure,” as a “history of corrupt reproductions” of
those lectures produced ironically, in turn, “a grand program of Romantic
interpretive performance and authority.”²⁹ Klancher has provided the
most sustained treatment of the period’s lecture culture as part of his
broader concern with the institutionalization of British Romanticism and,
more recently, with the emergence of disciplinary distinctions in the arts
and sciences. In another pivotal essay, Manning illuminated the lecture
room as a vital site for “Manufacturing the Romantic image” (2005),
explaining that “[i]f readers saw Shakespeare through Coleridge, they also
watched Coleridge create an image of himself” that survived to become
“the image of the Romantic poet.” Manning dubs this “the Coleridge-
effect.”³⁰ In a 2002 essay on “the sociability of Romantic lecturing,”
Gillian Russell penciled Thelwall and the many women auditors who
populated these events into the scene in her account of public lecturing as
a key site for the period’s political and gendered struggles over literary
culture. Thus in little more than a decade literary critics swiftly sketched
and peopled the Romantic lecture room.
Attention to Romantic-era literary lectures as performances was fostered
by a wave of scholarship on the period’s plays and theatricality that
gathered force in the 1990s. My thinking about the lecture room is
particularly informed by Julie Carlson’s landmark In the Theatre of
Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women (1994), for her focus on
Coleridge and the importance to him of the playhouse in the “middle
years” of his career (1807–16), which roughly coincide with his literary
lecturing. In Carlson’s account, for Coleridge and some of his contem-
poraries, the dramatic theater, so closely associated with “bodies, women,
crowds,” was the perfect place to confront the still palpable menace of
revolutionary France with a countervailing idealization of England that
“places imagination center-stage” and features a “poetic I who is male.” If
“London theatre is the cultural domain in England that most neatly
embodies the sexual politics associated with France, where women, in
their roles as over-sexed queens or under-class women, run the show,”
then Coleridge answered partly by entering that world himself and,
²⁹ Klancher, “Transmission Failure,” 189, 174–5.

³⁰ Manning, “Manufacturing the Romantic Image,” 236, 229, 239.

I would add, by lecturing. It seems telling that Osorio began a successful
run at Drury Lane in January 1813 just as he finished lecturing on belles
lettres at the Surrey Institution. Like some Romantic plays, literary lectures
by Coleridge and, in a different vein, Hazlitt, exploited the medium’s
potential for “embodying invisible processes” including a gendered “anat-
omizing of mind that is meant to be enacted for and imitated by theater
audiences.”³¹ The lecture room also provided public space for counter-
examples in Thelwall, who held on to his political ideals, taught actors,
and occasionally featured performances by women at his school, and
Campbell, who theatricalized a cooperative and mutually beneficial rela-
tionship with women auditors.
Scholarship on public lectures was likewise sponsored by new attention
to what Paul Magnuson called “public Romanticism” in the wake of the
1989 translation into English of Jürgen Habermas’ influential account of
an eighteenth-century bourgeois public sphere. Romanticists embraced
Habermas’ account but challenged assumptions that it reinforced an early
nineteenth-century retreat from Enlightenment sociability. In Print Pol-
itics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth Century England
(1996), Kevin Gilmartin argued for the persistence of “political sociabil-
ity” into the nineteenth century. Although his primary focus was print
culture, he stressed that the “radical counterpublic” was “never confined to
the printed page” and pointed out that “[r]adical weeklies were saturated
with speeches and debates, and with rich evidence of collective reading
practices.”³² Deidre Lynch made an important related argument about the
persistence of other, feminized “counter publics,” including “shopping” as
an instance of “women’s sociability.” This argument is highly relevant to
the Romantic-era lecture room as a site that women auditors eagerly
embraced and that was in consequence criticized for pandering to literary
“fashion.” Making these cases for counter-publics has required revising
Habermas’ paradigm. Lynch rejects as one of many “legends of the Fall”
Habermas’ claim “that after the eighteenth century the Enlightenment
public sphere began to dissolve under the pressures of nineteenth-century
consumer capitalism” and the accompanying “story of a (bad) feminiza-
tion of culture.” Lynch’s dismissal of the notion that “commercialization
represents the sad, feminized sequel to public sphere conversation” was
part of a broader case for Romantic Sociability (2002) made by the
collection of essays in which her essay appeared.³³ Editors Russell and
Clara Tuite contend that “the solitary self has stood for Romanticism for
too long.” Noting the “comparative neglect” in literary studies of even a
³¹ Carlson, In the Theatre of Romanticism, 3–25. ³² Gilmartin, Print Politics, 30.

³³ Lynch, “Counter Publics,” 213–14.

cultural event as well known as Robert Benjamin Haydon’s “immortal
dinner,” they argue for understanding it “as a kind of text in its own right,
a form of cultural work.”³⁴ This argument was complemented by
Jon Mee’s 2011 claim for the resilience of what David Hume called the
“conversable world.”³⁵
This new attention to the period’s convivial oral cultures proceeds with
an understanding not to set up a “binary between oral speech and print
culture.”³⁶ Literary lecturers relied heavily upon publications, including
newspaper advertisements, occasional notices and reviews, prospectuses,
and syllabi. Gilmartin’s treatment of radical print culture describing its
relationship with public speaking as dynamic and reciprocal is relevant to
Romantic-era literary lecturing: “vigorous print arguments about public
opinion” extended “to concrete assemblies of that opinion, in meetings,
debating societies, and organized petition campaigns, which were then
linked back to print culture through such practices as reading aloud,
and transcribing meetings in the weekly press.”³⁷ Sean Franzel points to
a similar dynamic with the period’s literary lecturing: “literary-critical
lecturers constantly refer to printed texts,” sometimes published their
lectures, and “often used the form to reflect on and represent print
circulation and the imagined publics that it was to set in motion.” He
goes further in describing the Romantic public lecture as “a privileged site
for theorizing, staging, or imagining the interdependencies and differences
between various media—a privileged site, in other words, of remedi-
ation.” My aim is to keep this understanding of “the interplay of print
and orality at work in the cultures of lecturing” active while spending most
of my time on the particular historical impact of literary lecturing within a
discipline that still focuses largely on print works.³⁸
One of the dangers of treating a medium as distinctive is the possibility
of essentializing certain qualities, and in the case of performance a pitched
scholarly debate has been waged over “liveness.” Peggy Phelan argued that
“[p]erformance’s only life is in the present,” so that it “cannot be saved,
³⁴ Russell and Tuite, “Introducing Romantic Sociability,” 4.

³⁵ Hume defines the “conversable world” against the “learned” world that is “secluded
from the world and good company” in “colleges and cells” (David Hume, 1–2).
³⁶ Mee, Conversable Worlds, 31. ³⁷ Gilmartin, Print Politics, 4.
³⁸ Franzel, Connected by the Ear, 21–2. In his account of David Garrick as “the first
performer to work full-time at the newspapers’ new nexus of fame and ephemerality,” Stuart
Sherman provides an historically relevant case study of “the amplitude, energy, and
complexity of the two-way traffic between daily paper and daily performance” that is
particularly illuminating for how Thelwall and Coleridge shrewdly used prospectuses and
newspaper advertisements to shape audience expectations (“Garrick among Media,”
967–8).

recorded, documented,” and “once it does so, it becomes something other
than performance.”³⁹ That view has been extensively challenged, most
prominently by Philip Auslander, who opposes ascribing to performance
any essential quality that would erect “a reductive binary opposition of the
live and the mediatized.”⁴⁰ In the wake of this debate, media historians
have negotiated a more modulated approach. Martin Harries contends
that “media are not unchanging, but one can, with some care, specify a
state of a medium at a particular moment.” In making his case, he draws
on Lisa Gitelman’s insight that media “are very particular sites for very
particular, importantly social as well as historically and culturally specific
experiences of meaning.”⁴¹ His response to the problem of liveness is
therefore neither to fetishize nor to discount it, but to write a history of its
effectiveness. Harries reframes the question, asking “[h]ow can we specify
the function of the embodied presence of performers and audience at a
particular historical moment?” In answer he quotes Gitelman, arguing “it
is better to specify,” by paying “attention to the specific historical moment
and the specific location” of an event.⁴² For my study this means attempt-
ing to read lectures’ critical arguments as “finely grained case histories”
that consider as far as possible “the whole social context” in which they
were delivered.⁴³
One of the benefits of this approach is that it takes seriously the
perspectives of contemporaneous auditors. After reading the printed ver-
sion of a lecture that she heard Hazlitt deliver, Mitford asked herself why
she responded so differently to it in print. She initially wonders if he had
revised his claims: “When I read his lecture on the living poets it seemed,
impudent as it is, so much civiller than my recollections that I at first
thought he had softened and sweetened it from a well-grounded fear of
pistol or poison.” She concludes that the difference lay, however, in the
media he used and more specifically “Mr Hazlitt’s fine delivery.” In the
lecture room he seemed to make a more biting attack on the “living
poets,” an impression she attributes to “slight inflections” in his voice,
“certain almost imperceptible motions” of his body, and “above all . . . a
certain momentary upward look of malice . . . by which he contrives to
turn the grandest compliment into the bitterest sarcasm.” In short,
Hazlitt’s delivery style not only supplemented, but actually seemed to
³⁹ Phelan, Unmarked, 146.

⁴⁰ Auslander, Liveness, 2–3. He nuances his response to Phelan in a revised edition: “the
idea that liveness as a concept describes an historical, rather than an ontological, condition
has increasingly come to seem to me the central point” (xii–xiii).
⁴¹ Gitelman, Always Already New, 8. ⁴² Harries, “Theater and Media,” 11, 8, 16.
⁴³ Gitelman, Always Already New, 11, 15.

reverse his words’ meaning, a “superior effect” that led Mitford to find
him “more delightful viva voce than in a printed book.”⁴⁴ From the other
side of the lecture desk James Montgomery acted on a similar understand-
ing of the medium in revising for publication a series he had delivered
at London’s Royal Institution (1830–1). He realized that he had to add
words to supplement the meaning lost on the page, restoring sections
he had previously excised in his speaking scripts for “limited time.”
“Those parts” seemed “more necessary” for the lectures’ “intelligence
when submitted to cool perusal, than when uttered before indulgent
hearers with the living voice.”⁴⁵ Public lectures were produced and con-
sumed differently in performance and print, and efforts to gauge their
historical import must take those differences into account.
Treatments of the period’s oral cultures can benefit from recent reeva-
luations of two terms that were thoroughly dismantled by poststructuralist
critiques: “presence” and “voice.” Intent on accounting for the historical
impact of “stage presence,” Jane Goodall defines it in physical terms to
characterize actors who have a “[c]ommand over the time and space of
performance.”⁴⁶ This command can, however, never be complete, since
even star performers cannot fully control how auditors perceive them.
Marvin Carlson describes a phenomenon he calls “ghosting,” in which
each new performance is “conditioned by inevitable memories of this actor
playing similar roles in the past.”⁴⁷ Those memories, Joseph Roach claims,
reside in the actor’s “theatrical body,” made up of “actions, gestures,
intonations, vocal colors, mannerisms, expressions, customs, protocols,
inherited routines, authenticated traditions—‘bits.’”⁴⁸ For instance, in the
elocution teacher and literary lecturer standing before them, Thelwall’s
auditors could not help seeing the radical agitator who had once been tried
for treason. Even Coleridge, whose profile as a political speaker had been
lower, could not escape the memories of his Dissenting sermons and
lectures. In a famous example, the publication of Biographia Literaria
(1817) prompted a letter from “Q” to the Monthly Magazine complaining
that Coleridge was attempting to rewrite his own history. “Q” was in a
position to correct him, having been “an auditor at a lecture, the first
which he gave in Bristol, in a room over the corn-market, in the beginning
of the year 1795” when “Mr. C. talked of ‘preparing the way for a
revolution in this country.’” Claiming his status as an eyewitness, “Q”
⁴⁴ Quoted in Jones, Hazlitt, 284–5. Wright offers support for Mitford’s perspective. In
his treatment of lyceum culture in the United States, he argues that lectures were “com-
posed for the ear, and we lose sight—or more appropriately, miss the sound—of this fact
when we treat them as straightforwardly written texts” (Lecturing the Atlantic, 7).
⁴⁵ Montgomery, Lectures on Poetry, viii. ⁴⁶ Goodall, Stage Presence, 15.
⁴⁷ Carlson, Haunted Stage, 58. ⁴⁸ Roach, Cities of the Dead, 93.

insisted: “[t]his, sir, Mr. Coleridge said,—this I heard him say.” Coleridge
the radical speaker could not vanish because “Q” could still hear him
speaking.⁴⁹
The lecturer’s voice is a vital aspect of “stage presence,” and this term
too has recently undergone scholarly renovation. Janice Schroeder
addresses how voices operate within what she calls a “speaking context”
in her treatment of “Victorian feminist public speech.”⁵⁰ The term “vocality”
has been proposed for capturing the “materiality of the speaking voice.”
Schroeder draws on the work of music historians Leslie Jones and Nancy
Dunn who, in attending to the “embodied voices” of women, announce “a
shift from a concern with the phenomenological roots of voice to a concep-
tion of vocality as a cultural construct.”⁵¹ Together, the revised keywords
“presence” and “voice” can help convey how the critical arguments made in
the lecture room were charged by the visceral nature of the encounter. The
potential for performances to have an historical impact “requires presence,”
as Diana Taylor puts it: “people participate in the production and reproduc-
tion of knowledge by ‘being there,’ being a part of the transmission.”⁵²
“Being there” can have consequences.
I have been treating public lectures as performances, but the question of
what kind remains. Romantic-era lecturers varied significantly in practice.
Thelwall and Coleridge preferred speaking extemporaneously, often work-
ing from outlines, head notes, marginalia, and other partial scripts, while
Campbell and Hazlitt read aloud from full scripts, the latter with an eye to
swift publication. Nevertheless all lecturers sometimes had to improvise,
and the medium is in significant ways closer to another popular kind of
performance, the “solo extemporization of poetry” practiced by Romantic
improvvisatori and improvvisatrici, than to plays. Angela Esterhammer’s
account of an art of improvisation defined by its temporality and sociabil-
ity also illuminates the period’s public lectures. Like improvisation, lec-
turing is “an art of occasion that privileges the experience shared between
performer and audience here and now.” Both are bound by “[t]he forward
movement of time, which disallows erasing, editing, or revision” and
shaped by the “the immediate feedback” of auditors. Extemporaneity
comes closest to improvisation’s need to follow “the directions of time’s
arrow,” but even lecturers who read full scripts aloud cannot begin again.
⁴⁹ Q., “To the Editor of the Monthly Magazine,” 204.

⁵⁰ Schroeder, “Speaking Volumes,” 99.
⁵¹ Dunn and Jones, “Introduction,” 1–2. In yet another instance of the far interdiscip-
linary reach of this work, Dunn and Jones give credit for coining the term “vocality” to a
literary historian, the “medievalist Paul Zumthor in his polemic against the critical tendency
to overlook the primacy of the human voice in medieval poetics” (2).
⁵² Taylor, Archive and Repertoire, 20.

For improvisation and public lecturing the act of composition is
“creatively collaborative and social, rather than solitary.”⁵³ At London’s
Royal Institution, this sense of being in it together for a certain of amount
of time was formalized by a tradition established in the early twentieth
century involving a large clock placed in the lecturer’s sightline: “The
lecture commences as the clock strikes the hour and is supposed to finish
as the clock strikes the next hour.”⁵⁴ This tradition highlights another
defining quality of performance: what Taylor describes as an emphasis on
its own “artifice, its constructedness.” She explains that while “many
practices and events” could potentially be performances, those that qualify
are often “bracketed from those around them” with a “framing” that marks
“a beginning and an end.”⁵⁵ Thus the Royal Institution’s clock not only
promised auditors that the demand on their concentration was limited, but
also gave lecturers a performative challenge of ending just then.
The task of defining public lectures as performances raises significant
questions about how to treat them. Recent attention to literary lectures
joins a broad effort to expand “the traditional archive used by academic
departments in the humanities” to include performance as a medium in its
own right. Taylor explains the difference between the traditional academic
“archive” and “the repertoire” to which performances belong: “‘[a]rchival’
memory exists as documents, maps, literary texts, letters, archaeological
remains, bones, videos, films, CDs, all those items supposedly resistant to
change,” while the repertoire “enacts embodied memory: performances,
gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing—in short, all those acts
usually thought of as ephemeral, non-reproducible knowledge.” One
question has been how to treat evanescent events historically. In the case
of relatively recent performances, “individual instances of performances
disappear from the repertoire,” while others persist “as ritualized, formal-
ized, or reiterative behavior.”⁵⁶ As time passes, however, this form of
endurance becomes increasingly attenuated, and after more than two
centuries performances demand a different approach.
When I first began considering these questions I discovered that rele-
vant discussions were well underway in a surprising range of disciplines.
I looked first to theater history, and indeed they had addressed the
theoretical and practical issues early, but it soon became clear that similar
inquiries were being pursued by social historians, biographers, editors,
literary historians, art historians, music historians, and scholars of
⁵³ Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation, 4.

⁵⁴ James, Guides to the Royal Institution, 12.
⁵⁵ Taylor, Archive and Repertoire, 13, 3.
⁵⁶ Taylor, Archive and Repertoire, 26, 19–20.

performance and media studies. In the next section I quote from them
liberally in an effort to share the sensation I experienced of hearing
a chorus of questions, suggestions, and speculations converging into a
consensus on best practices for treating historical speaking performances.
ENGAGING IN SPECULATION: APPROACHING

HISTORICAL SPEAKING PERFORMANCES
Theater historians have theorized the problem and devised a vocabulary

of loss to define “the perceived contradiction of writing the history of
so notoriously transient a form as theatre.” Joseph Roach suggests that
treating historical performances means living with a “wistful sense of
incompletion . . . even when documents do survive intact, because of the
evanescence of performance itself.” In acknowledging these challenges,
scholars “often begin their accounts of the discipline of theater history”
with “an anecdote of irretrievable loss” that highlights “the fragility of their
subject” and serves as a “parable of disinheritance.”⁵⁷ As Aleksandra
Wolska puts it, even though plays may be performed over and over
again, “one cannot step twice into the same show.”⁵⁸ For public lectures,
that loss may double: not only is the event itself ephemeral, but unlike
most plays, it may leave no texts behind. In the case of mostly extempor-
aneous speakers like Thelwall and Coleridge speaking scripts may not
survive or even ever have existed beyond outlines, marginalia, or head-
notes. The “parables of disinheritance” that litter the history of public
lectures often concern disappearing speaking scripts. For instance, one day
during his first, 1808 series Coleridge claimed that he was forced to lecture
from memory when a “pocket-book containing quotations for a lecture
was stolen from him as he was on his way to the Royal Institution”
(Lectures on Literature, 1: 15). Auditors’ notes from the same series
subsequently went missing: James Tomalin’s shorthand accounts of
eight lectures were “lost by Ernest Hartley Coleridge when he was travel-
ing to Torquay by train and all that survive are transcripts made by James
Dykes Campbell of Tomalin’s notes of three lectures” (Lectures on Litera-
ture, 1: 160). This problem of the vulnerability of lecture texts becomes
acute with Thelwall’s lectures on elocution and literature, which seem to
have disappeared altogether.⁵⁹ These texts may reappear with equal
⁵⁷ Roach, “Theater History and Historiography,” 191.

⁵⁸ Wolska, “Rabbits, Machines,” 84.
⁵⁹ E. P. Thompson tells the story of Thelwall’s missing archive. In 1837, Thelwall’s
second wife, Henrietta Cecil, published the first of two planned volumes of his Life; the

unpredictability. In a biography of his grandfather, William Carew Hazlitt
relates his father’s discovery of Hazlitt’s 1812 lectures on philosophy:
“I found them with other papers in an old hamper which many years
ago he stuffed confusedly full of MSS. and odd volumes of books, and left
in the care of some lodging-house people, by whom it was thrown into a
cellar.”⁶⁰ The possibility of lectures resurfacing unexpectedly persists into
the present, as Judith Thompson’s 2004 discovery of a significant piece of
the “lost Thelwall archive” demonstrates.⁶¹ Notes for Thelwall’s literary
lectures were not included in this trove, but the possibility that they might
be found, while tantalizing, also serves as a reminder of the fundamentally
provisional nature of treating historical public speaking cultures. Even
when lecture scripts suddenly reappear they can present problems. Car-
ew’s tale of near miraculous recovery is tempered by losses that produce
methodological challenges: “Some of the Lectures, indeed, to my deep
regret, are altogether missing, burnt probably, by the ignorant people of
the house; and I have had the greatest difficulty in preparing those which
remain for the press.”⁶²
Social historians, editors, and biographers have confronted the chal-
lenges of handling the remains of historical speaking performances. In his
treatment of the Gettysburg Address, Garry Wills provides a primer for the
difficulties of even the best-case scenario of having myriad scripts and
auditors’ accounts to consult:
What should be counted as the authoritative text? What Lincoln actually said
on the spot? Stenographic accounts differ on that. The text he spoke from—his
delivery text? It is not certain that we have that; but if we do, then he clearly
departed from it. His revised later texts? There are least four of these.⁶³
second was to house “an account of his domestic history and of his labours in the field of
literature, of the Science of Elocution.” The second volume never appeared, however, and
what Henrietta Cecil described as “a great variety of manuscripts” disappeared. They may
have passed through the hands of James Dykes Campbell, one of Coleridge’s biographers,
before Charles Cestre (biographer of Thelwall) purchased them at auction. And there,
despite the detective work of Thompson and David Erdman, the trail runs cold: Cestre
indicated that he may have “lent or sold” the papers, or they may have been in his library
when it “was very much damaged and plundered by the German occupants during the
war.” Thompson held on to “a dwindling chance that the collection may survive some-
where,” noting that “more Thelwall manuscripts are scattered in libraries across three
continents” (Romantics, 218–20). A portion of that archive surfaced when Judith Thomp-
son located “a three-volume, 1,000-page manuscript of his poems, never before known to
have existed, covering exactly the period of his life that was missing from the historical
record” (“Overlooking History,” 103).
⁶⁰ William Carew Hazlitt, Memoirs, 1: 194.
⁶¹ Thompson, “Overlooking History,” 104.
⁶² William Carew Hazlitt, Memoirs, 1: 194n.
⁶³ Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg, 191.

These fundamental questions about a central speech in United States
history demonstrate the uncertainty in determining an “authoritative”
version. In lieu of certainty about the superiority of one text over others,
Wills argues for the criterion of proximity: “A text more closely linked to
the actual event would, if it could be established, take precedence in
modern editorial practice.”⁶⁴ Wills articulates a desire that echoes
throughout scholarly treatments of public speaking culture: to get as
close as possible to “the actual event” and to recover what was “actually
said” in the full knowledge that this is ultimately impossible.
In his fascinating account of preparing an edition of W. H. Auden’s
lectures on Shakespeare, editor Arthur Kirsch echoes that ambition “to
provide as accurate an historical record of the lectures as possible.” From
October 2, 1946 until May 14, 1947, Auden lectured on Shakespeare at
the New School for Social Research in New York City. An auditor
remembers the series as “enormously popular,” with the “low broad
auditorium” being “filled to capacity.” Yet no manuscripts exist because
Auden believed that “‘criticism is live conversation’” and “always threw
away his lecture notes.” Thus Kirsch found himself thwarted by the
lecturer himself. Left with motley surviving texts, he pieced them together,
frank about the patchwork quality of his edition. He acknowledges the
inherently provisional nature of this work, explaining that he relied
primarily on one auditor’s notes, supplemented them with another, “less
reliable set,” and consulted Auden’s marginalia in his copy of George
Lyman Kittredge’s Complete Works of Shakespeare. Kirsch makes his
careful, but provisional reconstructions of Auden’s lectures part of the
editorial story, which involved detective work. In an ingenious scholarly
move unavailable to editors of Romantic-era lectures, Kirsch placed a
query in The New York Times looking for surviving auditors and received
in response “typed copies of the notes” of two auditors that offered fresh
“details.” Finally, Kirsch turned to Auden’s relevant published works,
using them as a speculative supplement to these firsthand accounts.
Faced with Auden’s insistence that his lectures were never meant to appear
in print, Kirsch resolved to be “faithful to Auden’s voice.” Doing so
required Kirsch to stay his editorial hand, preserving even lengthy quota-
tions, “repetitions and plot summaries.”⁶⁵ His volume provides an exem-
plary lesson on why the medium of public lecturing requires editorial
practices of its own.
Biographers of public lecturers face a related problem: how to provide a
vivid picture of the speaking subject? Both Wills and Kirsch acknowledge
⁶⁴ Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg, 191. ⁶⁵ Kirsch, Lectures on Shakespeare, ix–xii.


that the keen desire to get as close as possible to the “actual event” can
never be fulfilled, but the challenge to create a coherent picture of the
public speaker remains. Richard Holmes reflects on the obstacles he faced
in trying to capture Coleridge the public lecturer, and in particular “one of
his most characteristic traits,” his flair for “the brilliantly suggestive aside.”
Observing that these turns of phrase “are rarely in his Notes, and the
shorthand writers had to work hard to catch them,” Holmes decided
simply to gather and list the few that were “successfully caught on the
wing.” He thereby succeeded in developing an evocative portrait of
oratorical eccentricity occasionally punctuated by a “spontaneous flash
of poetic imagery.”⁶⁶ By integrating in his portrait of the Romantic
lecturer an account of the challenges that Coleridge poses, Holmes effect-
ively communicates a sense of what it must have been like to listen to
Coleridge, trying to catch glimpses of critical insight that had the “tran-
sitory brightness” of a Shelleyan “fading coal.”
Among literary historians, the rich public speaking culture of the
nineteenth-century United States has generated multiple discussions of
best practices. In Angela Ray’s treatment of American lyceum culture, she
describes a “creative representation of the past event” that involves gath-
ering as many “surrogates” for it as possible, including “reminiscences,
private correspondence, editorial commentary, speech texts.”⁶⁷ Like Wills
and Kirsch, she wants to get as close as possible to “what actually
occurred” while acknowledging the speculative nature of all such efforts.
As Marlene Boyd Vallin puts it in her treatment of Mark Twain as a
“platform performer”: “no collection of words can impart what actually
occurred when Twain interacted with his public in the performance
itself.” The best we can do is to collect both parties’ surviving texts,
including “Twain’s notebooks, letters, and autobiography” along with
“the comments of his contemporaries in newspapers and magazines” and
“recollections in biographical accounts.”⁶⁸
The scholarly consensus on an approach to historical performances is, as
theater historian Antonio Favorini puts it, to “relocate” the performative
event, moving it “away from what transpires on the stage to some mid-
point” that marks the exchange “between performer and audience.”⁶⁹ This
shift in perspective has implications for understanding how authority
⁶⁶ Holmes, Darker Reflections, 272–3.

⁶⁷ Ray, Lyceum and Public Culture, 9. The interdisciplinarity of this work is deepened by
Ray’s observation that in reading “closely” the “surrogates—the editorials, diary entries,
newspaper reports, personal letters” of historical speaking events she is following “the lead of
rhetorical critics like Michael Leff ” (10).
⁶⁸ Vallin, “Mark Twain, Platform Artist,” 322–4.
⁶⁹ Favorini, “Position Paper,” 4.

operates in the lecture room, disabling the implicit hierarchy between the
speaker and auditors. In Forgan’s treatment of Enlightenment science
lectures she challenges understanding that relationship as a simple “top-
down dissemination of knowledge.” She argues that “[i]t is more revealing
to consider lectures and discourses in terms of circuits of communication,
where audience reaction and the making of meaning is as significant as an
individual authorial voice.”⁷⁰ Music historian Christopher Small likewise
rejects an understanding of musical performances as “a one-way system of
communication.”⁷¹ In the case of public lectures, this means considering
how a speaker may have couched arguments for particular audiences and
rethought them in the light of their reception, so that their anticipated and
recollected presence helps shape what is said.
This approach raises questions about how to treat “historical audi-
ences.”⁷² Darnton notes that “[r]eading remains the most difficult stage
to study in the circuit that books follow,” and the same is true of audience
members.⁷³ Cavicchi makes a point about listeners that accords with what
literary historians have said about readers: it’s far easier to locate critical
reviews than the views of “ordinary” audience members, but the two
should not be confused. Mindful of this distinction, music historians
have called for a history of “listening practices” that involves gathering
auditors’ “book marginalia, diaries, and autobiographies.”⁷⁴ In the case of
Romantic-era public lectures, speakers’ views survive in their notes; the
lectures, advertisements, prospectuses, and syllabi they published; and
their epistolary and autobiographical accounts of their own performances.
Auditors responded in conversation and recorded their thoughts in private
(in manuscript) and in published poems, letters, diaries, journals, and
memoirs; critical responses appeared in the occasional newspaper and
periodical accounts of public lectures.
Directing attention to lecture auditors means engaging what Hume
called the “conversable world” of “company and conversation.”⁷⁵ Private
conversation was a vital counterpart to the lectures’ public oratory. At the
scientific and literary institutions, conversation rooms were often steps
away from the lecture theater. The one at London’s Royal Institution was
“furnished with a collection of good Maps,” “refreshments” were available
“at the most reasonable prices, from the Housekeeper’s Room below,” and
the “Clerk” provided “writing paper,” along with “pens and ink” for those
who “have occasion to write letters at the house of the Institution.”⁷⁶ After
⁷⁰ Forgan, “National Treasure,” 35. ⁷¹ Small, Musicking, 6.

⁷² Cavicchi, Listening and Longing, 4. ⁷³ Darnton, Kiss of Lamourette, 122.
⁷⁴ Cavicchi, Listening and Longing, 5–9. ⁷⁵ Hume, David Hume, 1.
⁷⁶ Royal Institution, Journals, 1: 21.
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order to reconcile me to a separation which she seemed to think
would give me pain.
Thursday, June 14.—I rode down to see Wellington, the black. His
quarantine was to last in all forty days. He was alone in the building
before described, called the Shemaôony, lying with his mattress on
the stones, in the open air, and with an invalided soldier to attend on
him, who of course was condemned to the same length of
quarantine as himself. Wellington thanked me for the things which
had been sent him. “Ah, sir,” said he, “this is not like my own country.
At New York I should, even in a hospital, be attended by a good
nurse; I should have my comfortable cup of tea, my bread pudding;
and what the doctor ordered me would be properly administered: but
that man” (pointing to the soldier) “wants to kill me. He is tired of
being as it were in prison, and last night he beat me—yes, he beat
me, ill as I am, because I woke him to assist me in my helplessness.
My swelling is broken too; and it wants rags and plasters, and I have
not strength to dress it myself; for I am so weak! look, see how my
arms and legs are reduced in size. Tell that lady who is so kind to
me, that, when I get well, I will bring her some of the beads and
cockle-shells, and other curiosities I bought at Jerusalem; and I have
got some fine cotton stockings that I brought from New York,”—“Oh!
but Wellington,” said I, interrupting him, “the lady is not in need of
such things, although your feelings are not the less creditable on that
account. She is a great lady, like the wife of your President, and she
loves to do good to everybody.” “God bless her!” cried the poor
fellow; “and it was so thoughtful of her to send me this soft pillow to
put under my back, when I only asked for one for my head; for, do
you know, it was the very thing I wanted, I have got such sores down
my backbone from lying so long in the same position! Will you be so
good as to explain to that man that he must make a fire, and boil the
water here, when I want tea? for Lufloofy brings the water from the
town, and it is quite cold before he gets here. And do, sir, tell him he
is not to beat me—but no! perhaps you had better not; for in the
night he will be revenged on me, and who is to help me here? Oh,
sir, if you knew what I suffer! I have not had a clean shirt, until those
you sent me, since the day of our reaching this place.”
On leaving Wellington, I rode into Sayda, and going to Signor
Lapi, where I found the governor’s secretary, I told them how the
soldier maltreated the poor sick man. He immediately provided
another attendant, an old Christian, named Anastasius, and,
accompanying me to the Shemaôony himself, he menaced the
soldier with a good bastinadoing, ordered him to the corner of the
building farthest removed from Wellington’s bed, and threatened to
have him shot if he dared molest either the black or Anastasius.
Having settled this affair, I went to one of the city baths, called
Hamàm el Gidýd, where I was obliged to hurry myself greatly to
make way for the women, who, their time being come, were raising a
clamour about the door. Baths are generally open for men until noon,
and for women until sunset.
To-day news had come that the Druzes had advanced as far as
Hasbéyah and Rashéyah about a day’s journey from Sayda; that
they had killed the governor, and had spread consternation
throughout the district. This news was confirmed by Khosrô Effendi
and Selim Effendi, two gentlemen in the governor’s service.
On my return, I had occasion to witness the successful results of
the Emir Beshýr’s measure for the destruction of the locusts.
Immense swarms of these insects had come from the south-east,
and settled for many leagues around during the month of ——,
laying their eggs in holes in the ground, which they bore, as far as I
could observe, with a sort of auger, which nature has sheathed in
their tails. Their eggs form a small cylinder about as big as a maggot,
and in minute appearance like an ear of Turkey corn, all the little
eggs, as so many pins’ heads, lying in rows with that beautiful
uniformity so constant in all the works of the Creator. How many of
these conglomerate little masses each female locust lays I know not,
but those I handled were enough to equal in size a hazel-nut, and,
united by some glutinous matter, they are hatched about May. But no
sooner had the swarms laid their eggs, than, to prevent their
hatching, an order was enforced all through the district where the
locusts had settled, obliging every member of a family above a
certain age to bring for so many days (say) half a gallon of eggs to
the village green, where, lighted faggots being thrown on them, they
were consumed. The order was in full force for, probably, three
weeks, until it was supposed that the greatest part of the eggs had
been dug up and destroyed. The peasants know by certain signs
where the females have laid their eggs: but the utmost vigilance may
overlook some ovaries; and, as each clot of the size of a nut may
produce 5,000 locusts (for the peasants told me that each separate
cluster of the size of a maggot contained more than a hundred
eggs), it may be easily imagined how they swarm as soon as they
are hatched. What one first sees is a black heap, about the size of
the brim of a coalheaver’s hat. A day or two after the heap spreads
for some yards round, and consists of little black grasshopper-like
things, all jumping here and there with such dazzling agility as to
fatigue the eye. Soon afterwards they begin to march in one
direction, and to eat; and then they spread so widely through a whole
province that a person may ride for leagues and leagues, and his
horse will never put a foot to the ground without crushing three or
four at a step: it is then the peasants rush to their fields, if fortunate
enough to meet the vanguard of this formidable and destructive
army. With hoes, shovels, pickaxes and the like, they dig a trench as
deep as time will permit across their march, and there, as the
locusts, which never turn aside for anything, enter, they bury, burn,
and crush them, until exhaustion compels them to desist, or until, as
was the case this year, from previous destruction of the eggs, and
from having only partial swarms to contend with, they succeed in
nearly annihilating them. When they fly, the whole village population
comes out with kettles, pots, and pans, and, by an incessant din,
tries to prevent their settling. The greatest enemy to locusts is a high
wind, which carries them to the sea and drowns them, or, opposing
their course, drives them back to the desert, probably to perish for
want of sustenance.
In the evening, Lady Hester was in very low spirits. She said
many unpleasant things to me, calling it frankness. She made a long
tirade on my obstinacy in not listening to her prophetic voice. She
said—“Wherever you go, you will regret not having followed my
counsels, whether in Syria or in Europe. I should not,” she added,
“have bestowed so much time on you, but I wish you well, and am
sorry you will not put yourself in my train. You can be of no use to
me, for I shall want persons of determination, judgment, and courage
—neither of which you possess: but I know from what cause all your
errors come—from having given up your liberty to a woman.”—Such
was her opinion of what she called the slavery of marriage.
Monday, June 18.—I was mounting my horse to go to Sayda,
when a person on a sorry nag, dressed in the nizàm dress, passed
my gate, followed by a servant. “Good morning,” said I, in Arabic (for
it is a sin almost not to give a good day to friend or stranger in these
countries), and, receiving a reply in the same language, I concluded
he was some officer of the Pasha’s come on business, and I rode off.
On arriving at Sayda, I was asked if I had met a Frank on the road,
and replied no; until, by the description, I learned that the person in
the nizàm dress was a European. “Of what nation he is,” said my
informant, “I can’t tell; we spoke to him in three or four languages,
but it was all the same to him—he answered fluently in all. There is
his lodging” (and he pointed to a small tent pitched in the middle of
the khan quadrangle); “for we told him we had not a room to give
him, owing to the earthquake; but he said he preferred being near us
to going into the town, and so there he slept. When he wanted a
guide up to mylady’s house, we told him that he must first send to
ask permission to visit her; but he maintained there was no occasion
for that; so we left him to his own course.”
According to the news that I collected, the signs of the times were
rather alarming. Whilst I was holding the above conversation, a
peasant entered the khan gate with a brace of pistols in his girdle.
“There they are,” whispered a Turk to me. “A fortnight ago, that
peasant would have no more dared to come into town with his arms
—but now they hang them on a peg in their cottages, especially in
and about Nablôos, and set the soldiers and the pasha at defiance;
and the garrison here is as mute as a mouse. God knows how things
will turn out! In the mountain there is even a fanatic shaykh who
goes about haranguing the people, advising them to pay no more
miri to Ibrahim Pasha. A man, too, has been murdered on the
Beyrout road.”
When I returned to the Dar in the evening, I saw Lady Hester.
Nothing was said about the stranger’s arrival, although, by the
stranger’s garden-door being open, I knew he was installed there;
but, according to the etiquette observed in the house, I made no
inquiries, judging that this was to be a mysterious visit, with which I
had nothing to do; so I went home. It must appear very strange to
the reader, that there should be a European so near to me, who
would have to dine alone when I would willingly have had his
company; yet, without seriously offending Lady Hester, I could
neither invite him, nor even pay him a visit—but such was her
character. With her everything must be secret, and everything
exclusive; and if ever there was a being who would have
appropriated all authority to herself, and have shouldered out the
rest of mankind from the enjoyment of any privilege but such as she
thought fit to concede, it was Lady Hester Stanhope.
Tuesday, June 19.—This morning the conversation turned on the
Druze insurrection. Lady Hester now assumed the air of a person
who, having made extraordinary prophecies, saw that the time of
their accomplishment had arrived. “I foretold all this,” said she: “in a
short time you will not be able to ride from here to Sayda; the country
will be overrun with armed men; but I shall be as cool, from first to
last, as at a fête. All the cowards may go: I want only those who can
send a ball where I direct them. Why do I keep such men as Seyd
Ahmed and some others? because I know they would mind no more
killing a score of people than eating their dinner. You wanted me to
get rid of them, and blamed my tubba [disposition] because I had
such fellows about me, whose plots you are afraid of:—why, yes,
they were uneasy and troublesome, because they had nothing to do:
but I knew the time would come when they would be useful, as you
will see.”
Finding that Lady Hester seemed, for some unknown reason, to
wish for my absence, I took my leave of her until Wednesday
evening.
Wednesday, June 20.—I rose rather late, and was told by my
family that a curious figure of a European on a mule, followed by a
servant dressed as a sailor, and coming from Lady Hester’s house,
had passed our gate just before, with two mule-loads of luggage,
altogether bearing the appearance of a travelling pedlar. “What can
this mean?” thought I: “this cannot be the stranger I heard of in
Sayda, for he was dressed in the costume of the country; but
perhaps this is some travelling merchant, who has been to show his
European wares to her ladyship.”
Sunset came, and, after dinner, I joined Lady Hester. She began,
as I entered the saloon, with—“Well, doctor, I have got rid of
him.”—“Of whom!” I asked. “Oh!” rejoined she, “such a deep one!—a
Russian spy from the embassy at Constantinople: but he got nothing
out of me, although he tried in all sorts of ways. I as good as told him
he was a spy: and the Russians employ such clever men, that I
thought it best you should not see him; for he would have pumped
you without your suspecting his design, and have been more than a
match for you. I dare say he is affronted because I packed him off so
soon. I told him his fortune. You should have seen his splaws and
have heard him talk—it was quite a comedy. He asked me if it was
true that I could describe a person’s character merely by looking at
him. ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘and, although I don’t see very well, and the
candles give a very bad light, I will describe yours, if you like,’ and,
without giving him time to stop me, I hit it off so exactly, that he
exclaimed—‘Really, my lady, it is quite, quite wonderful!’ But, now he
is gone, I must tell you that there is another person here—a sort of
savant. Here, take this little book which he has given to me; but, you
know, I don’t pretend to understand such things; it is something he
has written about hieroglyphics: look at it, and then go and sit a little
with him.”
After casting my eye over the work, I went to the strangers’
garden, and introduced myself. It was Dr. Lœve, the great orientalist
and linguist, whom the newspapers had designated as librarian to
his royal highness the D. of S., although I had thought that another
gentleman of the medical profession held that honourable post. His
knowledge of tongues was prodigious. I passed an hour or two with
him, whilst he explained some of the objects of his Eastern
researches. One thing struck me very forcibly, that, of all Europeans
who study the literature of the East, the Jew has a decided
advantage, inasmuch as his school studies in Hebrew render the
transition to Arabic a step of no more difficulty than from Latin to
Italian.
When I went back to Lady Hester, and told her that Dr. Lœve, as I
thought, had been sent out at the expense of one of the oriental
societies, or else at that of the Duke of S., and that he had spoken
very highly of his royal highness’s library and learning, Lady Hester
halloed out—“Oh! Lord, doctor—the D. of S. learned! If I were to see
him, I would tell him when and where he was laid across his horse
drunk.—But I loved all the princes—all, except George the Fourth;—
they were so lively, so good-natured;—people who would laugh at a
straw.”
Thursday, June 21.—I rode down to Shemaôony to see
Wellington, but not without some misgivings; for the groom who
accompanied me related several things which made me suspect that
the road was no longer safe. He had heard that between Tyr and
Acre there was no passing: “and,” said he, “what is to prevent any
desperate villain, or gang of villains, from attacking anybody
anywhere? Our very governors hardly dare stir out of the towns; and
who is to go in pursuit of robbers now? They know that; for the
country is ready to rise, and in four or five days we shall perhaps see
strange doings.”
After visiting the black, whose state was far from improving, I
entered Sayda. I learned that from some villages a hundred and fifty
horsemen had marched off the preceding night to join the insurgents;
that, at Garýfy, a distance of four hours from Jôon, cattle had been
carried off; that between Acre and Sayda travelling had become
dangerous. At a village called Helliléah, the people had shut up their
houses, and taken refuge in the city: nay, the monks of Dayr el
Mkhallas had packed up their valuables and church ornaments, and
sent them to Sayda. The people in the gardens had also taken the
alarm, and no longer slept there, as is customary in the summer
season.
When I got back to the Dar, I told all this news to Lady Hester
Stanhope. “Oh!” said she, “that’s not all—the people of Jôon are in a
fright, and were going to desert the village; and Fatôom has been
asking leave to bring her mother’s cow into my cow-house: but I sent
word over to them to remain where they were, and that no harm
should come to them.”
M. Guys, before setting off to Aleppo, had raised on a bill of her
ladyship’s 27,000 piasters: these were in the house. “Would it be
right,” said I, “to pay the servants the six months’ wages due to them,
so that, if anything happens, each person may take care of his
own?”—“Oh!” answered Lady Hester, “I don’t fear; I would throw all
my doors open, if the Druzes were on the outside, and should not be
afraid that anybody would touch me.”
My family in the mean time remained in total ignorance of what
was going on around them; they ate, drank, slept, and walked out,
totally unconscious of danger. I did not apprehend that these reports
would come to their ears, for they understood very little Arabic, and,
even if they had, the Arabs, generally speaking, have so much tact in
knowing when they ought to be silent, that I thought myself safe in
that respect: but I was mistaken. An old chattering washerwoman, in
bringing home the linen, began a long speech, addressing herself to
me, as I was smoking at the door, about the risk that women ran in
being away from any habitation in these lawless times. “Do you
know,” said she, “there are deserters in the woods and disabled
soldiers in the high roads? And it was but yesterday that those ladies
were an hour’s distance off in the forest, that leads to the river: for
some neighbours of mine, who had taken their grists to the water-
mill, saw them. By the Prophet! you do wrong to let them go so far.
We had yesterday two of Ibrahim Pasha’s soldiers in the village
begging, each with one hand only; for the Druzes had taken them
prisoners and cut off their right hands;[31] but though they can’t fight,
they are very dangerous men: for, you see, they are Egyptians.” The
woman talked with much vehemence, and, although I silenced her,
by answering that I would inquire into it, she had said enough to
excite suspicion, in those who stood by listening, that something was
not right, and I was obliged to disclose part of the truth.
Friday, June 22.—Lady Hester dictated a very uncivil letter to
Signor Lapi, the Austrian referendary, in which she said things as if
coming from me. It was not an unusual way with her to employ my
name to repeat her opinions, by which people were offended, who
afterwards vented their spite in some way or another: it was one of
her many manœuvres to keep people aloof from each other when it
suited her purposes. Twenty years before, I had a serious quarrel
with Shaykh Ibrahim (Mr. Burckhardt) in the same way, she not
having so high an opinion of that gentleman as people in general
had: but this was independent of his literary merits, and on different
grounds.
Lady Hester related to me a dream that some one had had about
her, in which a hand waving over her head, and several crowned
heads humbled before her, were interpreted to indicate the
greatness that just now, as she flattered herself, awaited her. What
reason she had for thinking that relief from all her troubles was near
at hand the reader has had opportunity of judging. She was always
disposed, however, to see things in their brightest aspect—yesterday
plunged into difficulties, and to-day extricating herself, if not in reality
at least in imagination. “I am,” said she, “like the man in the Eastern
story, who, imprisoned in a dungeon, and nearly starved to death,
found in a poor sailor an old acquaintance, who conveyed to him
secretly a basin of warm soup: but, just as he was putting it to his
mouth, a rat fell from the ceiling, and knocked it out of his hand.
Reduced thus to the lowest pitch of wretchedness, and seeing
nothing left for him but to die, at the critical moment came a firmán
from Constantinople to cut off the head of the pasha who had thrown
him into prison, and he was saved. So it is with me: I cannot be
worse off than I am; I shall, therefore, when the next steamboat
comes, see what it brings; and, if I hear no news about the property
that was left me, I shall get rid of you and everybody, and of all the
women; and, with one black slave and Logmagi, I shall order the
gateway to be walled up, leaving only room enough for my cows to
go in and out to pasture, and I shall have no communication with any
human being. I shall write to Lord Palmerston before you go, and tell
him that, as he has thrown an aspersion on my name, I shall remain
walled in here until he publicly removes it: and if he, or anybody,
writes to me, there will be no answer; for, when you are gone, I shall
have nobody to write for me.—This sort of life perhaps will suit me
best, after all. I have often wished that I could have a room in my
garden, and, lying there with only some necessary covering, slip
from my bed as I was into my garden, and after a turn or two slip
back again: I do assure you I should neither be low-spirited nor dull.”
To-day a letter was brought from an English traveller, Mr. M., to
Lady Hester, the purport of which was that a gentleman of an ancient
and honourable family was desirous of paying his respects to her.
Lady Hester asked me to go down to Sayda, to call on him and say
she should be happy to see him: accordingly, next morning, I went. I
found a gentleman, of about forty or forty-two years of age, installed
at the customary lodging of the English, and, after delivering my
message and conversing with him a little while, I left him to see
Wellington, the black, and go in search of news. I learned from
Khosrô Effendi, the government secretary, that one of Ibrahim’s
regiments, sent to quell the rising in Hasbéyah and Rashéyah, had
been compelled, by the superior numbers of the insurgents, to shut
themselves up in the castle, and were there closely besieged,
expecting a reinforcement from Damascus to their relief.[32]
Towards Jerusalem some manifestations of rising had been
made, and nearer to Jôon some bodies of insurgents, in their way
from different villages to join the main body in Rashéyah and the
Horàn, had, in passing Btedýn, the Emir Beshýr’s residence, uttered
loud and reviling menaces and cries. The Emir, being deprived of
arms to put his dependants in a state of defence, had sent to
Beyrout to demand 400 muskets, and had induced the Patriarch of
the Maronite Christians to assemble some of the chief shaykhs, and
to bind them with an oath not to join the Druzes. He had despatched
couriers to the Metoualy country (the mountains running parallel with
the sea from Sayda to Acre, and in some measure a continuation of
Mount Lebanon), calling on the chieftains to hold their allegiance to
Ibrahim Pasha. But it was considered that all these were measures
of little use, should the Christians and Metoualis see a chance of
expelling their oppressors. The inhabitants of the peaceable villages
kept themselves in readiness on the first alarm to fly to the towns for
security. Looking, however, dispassionately at the probabilities of
success between the rival parties, it is not likely, considering that the
Egyptian satrap holds all the strong places, that the Druzes can do
anything more than carry on a harassing warfare, unless powerful
aid comes from without, and ships of war blockade Acre, Beyrout,
and the other ports.[33]
I saw Wellington: his case presented little hope. Dysentery had
supervened, and, feeble as he already was, I judged it impossible
that he could survive.
Sunday, June 24.—Mr. M. came up, and remained, I forget
whether two or three days. He told me he was of Trinity College,
Cambridge, but had been a long time abroad. Lady Hester said of
him, “I like to converse with such people as are what you call country
squires—one hears a great many anecdotes from them. Sometimes
he makes very sensible remarks, and sometimes he is very strange.
He asked me if I knew the Emir Beshýr; and, when I was giving him
some information about him, all of a sudden he asked me if I liked
dancing when I lived in England. He goes from one thing to another,
like a dog in a fair:” (I laughed):—“yes, doctor, just like a dog that
goes from one booth to another, sniffing here and there, and stealing
gingerbread nuts. When he sat with me in the evening, he was
constantly turning his head to the window, which was open, as if he
thought somebody was coming in that way.”
Tuesday, June 26.—Mr. M. went away.
Wednesday, June 27.—A letter came from two more travellers,
dated from the quarantine ground, where the black lay ill. Colonel
Hazeta, the writer, informed her ladyship that he had travelled
overland from Calcutta, and was commissioned to deliver to her a
letter from her nephew, Colonel T. Taylor; but he alleged the
impossibility of being the bearer of it himself, owing to the necessity
he was under of proceeding onward to Beyrout, and performing his
quarantine there. He was accompanied by Dr. Mill.
Thursday, June 28.—I received a note, acquainting me with the
death of Wellington, and I rode down to inform myself of the
circumstances of his end. By Signor Lapi’s care he was decently
interred in the Catholic burial-ground at Sayda. What religion he was
of I never heard him say; but he was what is called a pious youth,
and told me his mother had brought him up in the practice of virtue
and godliness; and, from what I saw of him, I believe he spoke truly;
for he was of great singleness of mind, artless, ingenuous, and
grateful to the duke, his master, and to Lady Hester, for the
kindnesses they had shown him. But who shall console his poor
mother!
I collected a little news, from which the Pasha’s affairs seemed to
wear a better aspect. He had marched, it was said, with two
regiments and some field-pieces against the rebels at Hasbéyah,
and had sacked the place. The Horàn, it was reported, was also
reduced to obedience.
Friday, June 29.—To-day Lady Hester wrote a letter to Lord
Palmerston, in answer to one she had received from him, which I
shall first transcribe.
Lord Palmerston to Lady Hester Stanhope.

Foreign Office, April 25, 1838.
Madam,
I am commanded by the Queen to acquaint you that I have
laid before her Majesty your letter of the 12th of February, of
this year.
It has been my duty to explain to her Majesty the
circumstances which may be supposed to have led to your
writing that letter; and I have now to state to your ladyship that
any communications which have been made to you on the
matters to which your letter refers, either through the friends
of your family or through her Majesty’s agent and consul-
general at Alexandria, have been suggested by nothing but a
desire to save your ladyship from the embarrassments which
might arise, if the parties who have claims upon you were to
call upon the consul-general to act according to the strict line
of his duty, under the capitulations between Great Britain and
the Porte.
I have the honour to be, madam, your ladyship’s most
obedient humble servant,
Palmerston.
Lady Hester Stanhope to Lord Palmerston.

Jôon, Mount Lebanon, July 1, 1838.
My Lord,
If your diplomatic despatches are as obscure as the one
which now lies before me, it is no wonder that England should
cease to have that proud preponderance in her foreign
relations which she once could boast of.
Your lordship tells me that you have thought it your duty to
explain to the Queen the subject which caused me to address
her Majesty: I should have thought, my lord, that it would have
been your duty to have made those explanations prior to
having taken the liberty of using her Majesty’s name, and
alienated from her and her country a subject, who, the great
and small must acknowledge, (however painful it may be to
some) has raised the English name in the East higher than
any one has yet done, besides having made many
philosophical researches of every description for the
advantage of human nature at large, and this without having
spent one farthing of the public money. Whatever may be the
surprise created in the minds of statesmen of the old school
respecting the conduct of government towards me, I am not
myself in the least astonished; for, when the son of a king,
with a view of enlightening his own mind and the world in
general, had devoted part of his private fortune to the
purchase of a most invaluable library at Hamburgh, he was
flatly refused an exemption from the custom-house duties;
but, if report speaks true, had an application been made to
pass bandboxes, millinery, inimitable wigs, and invaluable
rouge, it would have been instantly granted by her Majesty’s
ministers, if we may judge by precedents. Therefore, my lord,
I have nothing to complain of; yet I shall go on fighting my
battles, campaign after campaign.
Your lordship gives me to understand that the insult which I
have received was considerately bestowed upon me to avoid
some dreadful, unnameable misfortune which was pending
over my head. I am ready to meet with courage and
resignation every misfortune it may please God to visit me
with, but certainly not insult from man. If I can be accused of
high crimes and misdemeanours, and that I am to stand in
dread of the punishment thereof, let me be tried, as I believe I
have a right to be, by my peers; if not, then by the voice of the
people. Disliking the English because they are no longer
English—no longer that hardy, honest, bold people that they
were in former times—yet, as some few of this race must
remain, I should rely in confidence upon their integrity and
justice, when my case had been fully examined.
It is but fair to make your lordship aware, that, if by the next
packet there is nothing definitively settled respecting my
affairs, and that I am not cleared in the eyes of the world of
aspersions, intentionally or unintentionally thrown upon me, I
shall break up my household and build up the entrance-gate
to my premises: there remaining, as if I was in a tomb, till my
character has been done justice to, and a public
acknowledgment put in the papers, signed and sealed by
those who have aspersed me. There is no trifling with those
who have Pitt blood in their veins upon the subject of integrity,
nor expecting that their spirit would ever yield to the
impertinent interference of consular authority.
Meanly endeavouring (as Colonel Campbell has attempted
to do) to make the origin of this business an application of the
Viceroy of Egypt to the English Government, I must, without
having made any inquiries upon the subject, exculpate his
highness from so low a proceeding. His known liberality in all
such cases, from the highest to the lowest class of persons, is
such as to make one the more regret his extraordinary and
reprehensible conduct towards his great master, and that
such a man should become totally blinded by vanity and
ambition, which must in the end prove his perdition—an
opinion I have loudly given from the beginning.
Your lordship talks to me of the capitulations with the
Sublime Porte: what has that to do with a private individual’s
having exceeded his finances in trying to do good? If there is
any punishment for that, you had better begin with your
ambassadors, who have often indebted themselves at the
different courts of Europe as well as at Constantinople. I
myself am so attached to the Sultan, that, were the reward of
such conduct that of losing my head, I should kiss the sabre
wielded by so mighty a hand, yet, at the same time, treat with
the most ineffable contempt your trumpery agents, as I shall
never admit of their having the smallest power over me—if I
did, I should belie my origin.
Hester Lucy Stanhope.
Here let me ask the reader whether Lady Hester had not indeed a
right to be indignant with the minister who then directed the foreign
affairs of the country, for the illiberal manner in which he gratified his
spleen and mortified vanity. He had not the power of directly
stopping the payment of her pension, it being a parliamentary grant;
but he had recourse to the unworthy artifice of directing his agent not
to sign the certificate of her life, without which her pension could not
be paid. Nothing can be added to the well-merited castigation
inflicted upon him, and he has brought down upon himself the
condemnation of all men of good breeding and generous sentiment.
What his present feelings on the subject may be it is impossible to
say; but I would fain hope that there are few who are disposed to
envy him, much less to follow his example.
This day an English sloop of war hove-to off Sayda. The captain
of her sent for the English consular agent alongside, and what took
place on this occasion may serve as an example of the necessity of
having Englishmen, and not foreigners, as consular agents in distant
countries. The precise object that the captain of the sloop had in
view of course can only be known to himself; but what queries he put
to Mr. Abella, the agent, and what answers he received, very soon
transpired. Since, how could it be otherwise, when the agent was a
native of Syria, and understood no language but Arabic? Being,
therefore, summoned to the ship, which he could not go aboard, as
she could not communicate with persons from the shore until her bill
of health had been examined by the health officers, he was first of all
compelled to take some one as an interpreter between the captain
and himself, and then to hold his parley from the boat to the ship’s
quarter; but, as the interpreter might only speak Italian, and the
captain only English, a third aid is required, and we will suppose an
officer to be called, who takes the question from the captain’s mouth
in English, repeats it in Italian to the agent’s interpreter, who
translates it into Arabic; and then the answer goes back through the
same channels: so that it must necessarily happen that the sense
and the wording undergo a material change. But there is yet a
greater evil. If the questions relate to matters of importance, as the
progress of the Druze insurrection (for example), or the probability of
Ibrahim Pasha’s success or defeat, how is the consular agent, so
circumstanced, to give a faithful account? for, should he divulge
matters unfavourable to the Pasha’s cause, his well-being, and
perhaps his life, may be endangered: since, although he himself, as
an agent in the English service, receives a certain protection, he may
have brothers and relations who are at the Pasha’s mercy: nay, he
himself, perhaps an agent to-day and dismissed to-morrow, may be
left to cope with powerful enemies for the rest of his life.
Now, the French government secures Frenchmen for consuls and
agents, and the English government, one would think, ought to act
on the same principle. Let it not be said that men could not be found
—native Englishmen—willing to banish themselves to these
countries, and that for a very trifling salary. Among the half-pay
officers of the army and navy might be selected numbers, who, even
for so small a stipend as two hundred a year, would willingly accept
such situations; because a very short residence would show them
that, with economy, a hundred a year in the Levant is equivalent to
two at home.
In affairs, where the conflicting interests of English and
Mahometans, or disputes between travellers and natives, are to be
settled, it is absurd to suppose that an agent, accustomed to cringe
and fawn to the Turks all his life, will, or can, ever obtain redress for
the party whose country he represents: it is impossible!
Saturday, June 30.—Lady Hester had sent to Dayr el Kamar for
old Pierre, and he arrived this day. He brought news of a very
different nature from that which I had learned at Sayda on the
preceding Thursday. Ibrahim Pasha had been defeated by the
insurgents, and had retreated as far as Zahly, a burgh overlooking
the Bkâa, on the north-east slope of Mount Lebanon. In
consequence of this, the road from Dayr el Kamar to Damascus was
too dangerous to pass, and all the muleteers were stopped at those
two places, afraid to cross the intervening plain.
I was surprised in the evening, when conversing with her
ladyship, to see how the strongest minds are borne into the regions
of fancy by what, with people of common sense, would be
considered as mere visionary absurdities. I believe I have related
elsewhere how a person, having gained the confidence of Lady
Hester, told her he knew of a book that foretold the destinies of
persons, which book he procured at her desire, and out of it offered
to answer any questions she chose to put about anybody. “I would
not,” said Lady Hester, when narrating the story, “ask him what
would happen in Syria, because I conceive the course of events may
be predicted by a man of great sagacity in any country, where he has
cast a wistful eye on things passing around him; but I fixed on you,
and asked him, ‘What is the doctor doing in Europe?’ The man
opened his book, and read, and explained thus:—‘I see an elderly
person sitting up in his bed, and by the bed-side a young woman
kneeling, whilst she entreats and implores the elderly person not to
take some journey, or go on some voyage,’ which of the two he
could not precisely say. Now, doctor, that you know was exactly the
case: for did not Mrs. M. some one day cry and beg of you not to go
and join me? I am sure it was so. I next asked him about myself. He
consulted his book, and said, I was to be witness to great battles, or
be near where they were fought, and that one of the contests would
be so bloody that, on one side, not a person would be left to tell the
story: this battle, moreover, was to be fought on a plain three miles
long and three broad, near Zahly, and upon Mount Lebanon. But,”
added Lady Hester, “I never could find any solution to this prophecy
until now; and the battle between Ibrahim Pasha and the insurgents
clearly was the one meant. Neither could I discover where the plain
was three miles long, and three broad, and I sent people to the
neighbourhood of Zahly; but nobody knew anything of such a place,
until at last information was brought me that there existed a plain as
described in the heart of the mountain, like a basin, and which was
shut out from the rest of the world. The book also said that a boy of
royal blood would come from distant regions, would kiss my stirrup,
and place himself under my guidance. All this was prophesied some
years ago, and I always interpreted the bed-scene as relating to Mrs.
M. That came to pass; for, though you will not confess it, I am sure it
was so; and now the other part has been fulfilled too.”
In the course of the day, Lady Hester received a letter from Dr.
Mill and Colonel Hazeta, to say that their quarantine was over, and
that they would be at Jôon on the 1st of July.
Sunday, July 1.—They arrived early in the morning. After they had
breakfasted, I received a note from Dr. Mill to say that he was about
to read the morning prayers in his room, and to invite me and any
others so disposed to join him.
These gentlemen remained two days, but a press of business
prevented me from making memorandums. They always went
together, when Lady Hester sent word she was ready to receive
them: and this vexed her a great deal. Dr. Mill’s profound knowledge
of languages, and his extensive reading, had given her hopes that
she might have cleared up some difficulties respecting Eastern
history, and have discussed certain religious points about which she
had not perfectly made up her mind; but Colonel Hazeta, who was a
man of the world, and could take no part in abstruse subjects, was a
barrier to such conversation.
Friday, July 6.—Lady Hester was very low spirited, and her cough
troublesome. She was unable to converse, and I left her at ten in the
evening. Ali, the messenger, had gone to Beyrout two or three days
before to carry the letter to Lord Palmerston, and to await the arrival
of the steamboat, which was expected. His delay in returning had
created great despondency in her; and, as the air was balmy and
serene and it was a moonlight night, I sat on my terrace, which
overlooked the path by which Ali must pass, fondly hoping that he
would make his appearance with the long looked-for letter from Sir
Francis Burdett. Presently I heard the dogs bark, and saw Freeky,
the stoutest of our mastiffs, and generally the leader, rush towards
the brow of the mountain which overlooked the valley through which
Ali must come. Their barking grew fainter, and on a sudden ceased,
and I then knew they had met some one belonging to the household.
In about a quarter of an hour I recognized Ali, who, entering the gate,
delivered his oilskin portfolio to me, and, under a cover to myself
from the French chancellor, I found a packet for Lady Hester. I
immediately sent it to her, and waited anxiously for the morning to
learn what good news it brought.
Saturday, July 7.—It was Sir Francis Burdett’s long-expected,
long-procrastinated answer, the delay of which had caused so many
wretched nights and days to poor Lady Hester, and prevented her
from forming any settled plans. Alas! now that it was come, it proved
very unsatisfactory; yet, notwithstanding, Lady Hester invented a
thousand excuses for him. “It is evident, doctor,” said she, “that he
could not write what he wanted to write: he wishes me all the
happiness that a mortal can share, but says not a word that I did not
know before. I have told you that Colonel Needham left Mr. Pitt a
large property in Ireland by his will; but it so happened that Mr. Pitt
died three days before Colonel Needham, and consequently the
death of the legatee before the testator, in a legal point of view, put
an end to the right. I knew that as well as he did; but that was not
what I inquired about: for when Lord Kilmorey died, to whom the
property went, I supposed that, as it was originally intended for Mr.
Pitt, he might have said, ‘As I have no children, this may as well
revert to where it was originally intended to go:—’ just as Mrs. Coutts
did not get her property from Mr. Coutts, but with the understanding
that it was to be left afterwards to some of his grandchildren. One
time, when Lady B. was so odd in her conduct, Mr. C. had some
thoughts of making his grandson his heir, and asked me to get him
created Lord C.; but the pride of Lord Bute, and other reasons,
prevented this.”
She went on. “I dare say Sir Francis was puzzled how to act. He
was afraid some of my relations would say, ‘What business have you
to interfere in family affairs?’ and so perhaps, thinking he might get
into a duel, or some unpleasant business, he writes in an evasive
manner. But never mind! when the correspondence gets into the
newspapers, somebody will be found somewhere who will know
something about the matter. Why, doctor, when Mr. Pitt died, there
were people from the bank who came to tell me of the money he had
there, and advised me to take it—they came twice: I suppose it was
money somebody had put in for him. But how Sir Nathaniel Wraxall
could ever get into his head that Lord C. lent him any, I can’t imagine
—a man who was so stingy, that nothing ever was like it. No! when
Mr. Pitt went out of office, six great men subscribed a sum to pay his
debts, but Lord C. was not one of them.”
Sunday, July 8.—To-day was marked by a little fright not
uncommon in these countries. Mrs. M. was reading the morning
service with the children, when, on looking up, she observed, outside
of the window, which was open, an immense number of sparrows
making sharp cries, fluttering about the terrace, and hovering round
some object, which she immediately perceived to be the body of a
huge serpent, hanging in one coil from the rafters of the terrace, and
suspended by the head and the tail. Sayd Ahmed, the porter, or
Black Beard, as he was usually called from that large jet black
appendage to his chin, was known to be a deadly enemy to
serpents, and my wife had the presence of mind to say to one of the
children, “Steal gently out of the door, without alarming the serpent,
and run and call Black Beard here directly, telling him what he is
wanted for, that he may bring some weapon with him.” John did as

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The Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain

The Romantic Literary

For Isabel and Jay

¹ Darnton, Kiss of Lamourette, 111.

² Forgan, “Context, Image and Function,” 102.

⁸ Hays, “London Lecturing Empire,” 91.

¹¹ Thelwall, Prospectus, 3. He uses the term “oral eloquence” in a number of publica-

List of Illustrations xxi

1. Approaching the Lecture Room 1

2. Coleridge the Lecturer, A Disappearing Act 30

3. John Thelwall’s School of Eloquence 60

4. Thomas Campbell, Scholar-Poet 91

5. Acting Like an Author: Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets 118

6. The Thrush in the Theater: Keats at the Surrey Institution 154

7. The Last Word: Women in the Romantic Lecture Room 176

1. Detail from Rival Lectures: Anderson’s Institution, from Vol. 1,

Inquiring into the history of a medium that helped to construct that

Literature arrived late on England’s public lecture curriculum. At the

2 The Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain

Approaching the Lecture Room 3

⁷ Klancher, Transﬁguring, 23. Klancher succinctly observes that listening to Dibdin’s

4 The Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain

Approaching the Lecture Room 5

¹⁴ Britton, Autobiography, 182. ¹⁵ Robinson, Diary, 1: 27.

6 The Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain

¹⁷ Fairclough, Romantic Crowd, 5–6.

Approaching the Lecture Room 7

²² Chandler, England in 1819, 42.

8 The Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain

THE CRITICAL FIELD OF ROMANTIC-ERA

Historians of science led the way in developing critical approaches to

²⁷ For the London Institution see Hays, “Science in the City.”

Approaching the Lecture Room 9

²⁹ Klancher, “Transmission Failure,” 189, 174–5.

10 The Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain

³¹ Carlson, In the Theatre of Romanticism, 3–25. ³² Gilmartin, Print Politics, 30.

Approaching the Lecture Room 11

³⁴ Russell and Tuite, “Introducing Romantic Sociability,” 4.

12 The Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain

³⁹ Phelan, Unmarked, 146.

Approaching the Lecture Room 13

14 The Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain

⁴⁹ Q., “To the Editor of the Monthly Magazine,” 204.

Approaching the Lecture Room 15

⁵³ Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation, 4.

16 The Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain

ENGAGING IN SPECULATION: APPROACHING

Theater historians have theorized the problem and devised a vocabulary

⁵⁷ Roach, “Theater History and Historiography,” 191.

Approaching the Lecture Room 17

18 The Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain

⁶⁴ Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg, 191. ⁶⁵ Kirsch, Lectures on Shakespeare, ix–xii.

Approaching the Lecture Room 19

⁶⁶ Holmes, Darker Reﬂections, 272–3.

20 The Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain

⁷⁰ Forgan, “National Treasure,” 35. ⁷¹ Small, Musicking, 6.

Lord Palmerston to Lady Hester Stanhope.

Lady Hester Stanhope to Lord Palmerston.

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