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i

Lecturing the Atlantic

iii

Lecturing the Atlantic

SPEECH, PRINT, AND AN ANGLO-​A MERICAN
COMMONS 1830 –​1870

Tom F. Wright

1
 3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

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© Oxford University Press 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
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address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress

ISBN 978–​0 –​19–​049679–​1

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Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
v

{ CONTENTS }

List of Figures vii

Acknowledgments ix
Note on the Terminology of “England” and “Britain” xi

Introduction 1

1. The American Lecture Hall and an Anglo-​A merican Commons 9

2. Britain and Antislavery: Frederick Douglass’s Transatlantic Rhetoric 49

3. Britain as Order: Listening to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “England” 81

4. Britain as Prophecy: Horace Mann, Horace Greeley,

and the Choreography of Reform 117

5. Britain and Kinship: William Makepeace Thackeray

as Cultural Commons 143

6. Britain and Wartime Unity: Lola Montez and

John B. Gough as Cultural Diplomats 171

Epilogue 199

Notes 201
Index 241
vii

{ LIST OF FIGURES }

I.1 Lecture Room of the First Methodist Church, Elmira,

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

{ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS }

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

Press, and the anonymous readers of the manuscript, helped me feel my way toward
the shape this book now takes. Rav Casley Gera gets his own sentence for remain-
ing an inspiration and an insightful critical friend throughout. The completion of
this book would not have been very different without the surprise late appearance
and miraculously eager involvement of my most valued reader, and my soulmate,
Ursula Sagar. Above all, this book would not exist without the support, encourage-
ment, and example of my parents Fiona Fitzpatrick and Paul Wright, for whom it
is dedicated.
An earlier version of Chapter 3 was published as “Listening to Emerson’s
‘England’ at Clinton Hall, 22 January 1850,” Journal of American Studies 14.3
(August 2012). Parts of Chapter 6 were published as “The Transatlantic Larynx in
Wartime: John Gough’s London Voices,” in Traffic and (Mis)Translations: New
England in the World 1600–​1900, ed. Robin Peel (University of New England
Press, 2012).
xi

{ NOTE ON THE TERMINOLOGY

OF “ENGLAND” AND “BRITAIN” }

Throughout this book slippage will be noted in sources between the nomen-
clature of “British” and “English.”1 Recent historiography has described the
emergence during the long eighteenth century of an internationally recognized
concept of “Englishness,” independent of the more abstract political significa-
tion of “Britishness.”2 However, the great majority of foreign commentators, and
a number of English writers, continued to use the two as synonyms throughout
the nineteenth century. Paul Langford locates one origin of this slippage in the
reluctance of Romance languages “to coin a precise translation for ‘British’ or at
least to use it once coined,” noting that “even Americans, with no linguistic bar-
rier to surmount, did not necessarily show more discrimination.”3 While allow-
ing for this discursive slippage in my sources, I have attempted throughout to use
“England” as a geographic designator, and “Britain” and “British” for political
and imperial institutions.
xiii

Lecturing the Atlantic

1

{ Introduction }

The popular lecture was a paradoxical icon of nineteenth-​c entury modernity. On

both sides of the Atlantic, audiences and performers transformed a cultural prac-
tice with origins in the medieval cloister into an unexpected flashpoint medium of
public life. It was an educational form that began to flourish amid the educational
fervor of the late Scottish Enlightenment. But it burst into life most powerfully in
the United States in the decades leading up to the Civil War, where it was often
known as the “lyceum movement.” As it grew, this phenomenon sat at the con-
fluence of at least three major transformations in American life. First, it helped
shape a revolution in oratory, fashioning a space for educational speech and
rational debate that promised to float free of creed or party. Second, it embodied
new ideals of republican education, democratizing the habits of elite collegiate
pedagogy for the masses, and forging new economies of knowledge and cultural
consumption. Third, it set in motion a lasting transformation in the relationship
between the public and American literature, providing both the necessary condi-
tions for the modern public intellectual and a powerful new performative con-
ception of authorship. The aspirations of the public lecture form remain with us,
conceived anew through book festivals and televangelist performances, lurking
in the background of every TED talk video upon which we click.
Lecture culture was a phenomenon often baffling in scope and marked by
internal contradictions. The array of spaces both grand and humble that
nineteenth-​c entury Americans called “lecture halls” (see Figures I.1 and I.2) were
equal parts academy, church, and theater: symbols of both Enlightenment educa-
tional ambitions and an Evangelical cult of presence. Attendance was a formative
practice of class and civic identity, yet also a market transaction. Lecturing was
often presented as a proudly “neutral” forum and yet, as one of the most pow-
erful means of being “public” in the midcentury republic, soon began to play a
key role in controversial social movements. For the lecture-​goer, attendance was
a crucial means of immersing oneself fully in the local moment, and of perform-
ing that participation to one’s peers. Yet feverish newspaper coverage of the cir-
cuit held out the promise of shared national experience through a media ecology
FIGURE I.1 Lecture Room of the First Methodist Church, Elmira, New York, circa 1870

FIGURE I.2 The Broadway Tabernacle, December 1847

3

Introduction3

linking village, town, and metropolis, allowing diverse actors to hear, read, and
debate about the same message. It is perhaps these interdisciplinary tensions that
have contributed to the form’s strange critical neglect. Even as contemporary
scholarship has consolidated our understanding of multiple modes of nineteenth-​
century public culture, orality, new media, and reform, uncertainty about how
to approach the scope and conflicts of lecture culture has helped perpetuate a
continuing scholarly disregard for a fundamental expressive form of the period.1
Lecturing the Atlantic argues for a new interpretation of this neglected insti-
tution. It reorients our understanding of the lyceum by seeing it as an interna-
tional and cross-​media phenomenon patterned by an intellectual and cultural
investment in what I term an “Anglo-​A merican commons.” This occurred in
two related senses: first, as the traditions, practices, or heritage of a diasporic
people; second, more abstractly, as a recognition of shared resources of cul-
ture, language, and history.2 As Elisa Tamarkin and Christopher Hanlon have
recently shown, a surprisingly large proportion of antebellum cultural produc-
tion can be understood in terms of a “contest over transatlantic connection.”3
This book hails the lyceum as an arena for such contests of unique power and
immediacy. As I reveal, the lyceums of the republic satisfied a voracious popu-
lar appetite for discussion of Britain through multifaceted performances that
reflected on the problems and potentials of transatlantic history, literature, pol-
itics, manners, and shared cultures of reform. The complexity of lecture hall
performances stems from their fascinating role as a metarhetorical meditation
on the comparative nature of the discursive arena itself. Utterances from the
lyceum stage, I argue, must be understood as a distinct category of civic orality
that enacted key ideals of an enlarged but unevenly integrated public sphere; one
with a productively ambivalent relationship to nationalism, cosmopolitanism,
and empire. Lyceum discussions of Anglo-​A merican themes therefore helped
define the very nature of this evolving American speech ritual and the notion of
a democratic character.
This book explores the ways in which some of the midcentury North Atlantic
world’s most enduring cultural figures, such as Frederick Douglass, William
Makepeace Thackeray, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as some of the more
fascinating marginal voices such as Lola Montez and John B. Gough, brought
such topics to the platform. I will show how their performances helped address
fundamental questions about the condition of the transatlantic world: the pub-
lic spheres of republic and monarchy; the meanings of emerging social, physical,
and linguistic distinctions; and the lessons of Old World modernity and imperial
destiny for a republic embroiled in national crisis. By unraveling the meanings
of these debates, I interrogate the lyceum’s idealized rhetoric of classless demo-
cratic unity and its modeling of public interaction, to suggest how the diverse and
often fraught discourses of an Anglo-​A merican commons provided an ideal sym-
bolic site for these negotiations.4 My analysis of an Anglo-​A merican performative
commons connects the transatlantic turn in cultural studies to important debates
4Introduction

in media theory and public sphere scholarship. In doing so, Lecturing the Atlantic
make a case for the world of the antebellum platform as a material network that
helped shape the nature of midcentury US public culture through its reimagining
of Anglo-​A merican commonality.5

Lecture Culture

In embarking from this viewpoint, this book offers an enlarged conception of lec-
ture culture that challenges a still widely accepted narrative inherited from influ-
ential nineteenth-​c entury commentators. One strand of this narrative was the
emphasis on its sheer novelty. To Douglass the figure of the public lecturer was
“a modern invention called forth by the increasing demands of restless human
nature.”6 For Emerson, the new mass form of the spoken essay promised “a new
literature, which leaves aside all tradition, time and place and circumstance.”7
Implicit in these assessments was also the promise of national distinction. For
Harper’s Monthly editor George William Curtis in 1855, “The popular lecture
[was] an American and a Yankee institution” with “nothing corresponding” in
the societies of Europe.8 To Henry David Thoreau, it was the institution “from
which a New Era will be dated to New England, as from the games of Greece.”9
In such ways, midcentury northern cultural nationalists of various stripes were
apt to present lecture culture as a national metonym, a superstructure of feder-
ated listening spaces whose emphasis on internal self-​reflection helped to forge
a distinctive literary culture and national public. This view was codified several
generations later by the lyceum’s elegists who idealized the midcentury platform
as an arena that had forced the issue of women’s rights and antislavery, secured
the triumph of liberal principles, and had become synonymous with the flowering
of an indigenous public culture.10
In what little recent work exists on the lecture circuit, Americanist scholar-
ship has often appeared to follow the lead provided by views such as these.11 They
set the tone for foundational modern accounts of the lyceum, a movement that
for Donald Scott “not only expressed a national culture; it was one of the cen-
tral institutions within and by which the public had its existence.”12 Similarly,
for its most recent historian, Angela Ray, the movement was a “culture-​making
rhetorical practice” whose nation-​building agency depended on a collective turn
inward.13 Broader accounts of nineteenth-​century literary and reform move-
ments have long recognized the importance of lecture culture, but have still
tended to invoke a consciously “national” lyceum.14 This narrative was sustained
by F. O. Matthiessen’s classic act of canon formation in American Renaissance
(1941), which held up the popular lecture as the solution to Emerson’s “quest for
a form,” and an engine of native literary emergence.15 Even where more recent
accounts of oratorical culture have been increasingly attuned to lecturing as part
of what Lawrence Buell calls transatlantic “proliferation of media,” the sense still
remains of a domestic forum whose role in forging the consciousness of the new
5

Introduction5

republic was made possible by turning its back on European influence and mod-
els.16 However, as the essays in the recent collection The Cosmopolitan Lyceum
(2013) have revealed, an uneasy dialectic of fascination with and rejection of such
models was in fact a vital component of lecture culture. As I argue in the intro-
duction to that volume, the historical archive shows us that nineteenth-​c entury
audiences were in thrall to both the vocal and the exotic, and that lecture culture
played on the often contradictory interaction between cosmopolitan and nation-
alist impulses.17

Print and Orality

Beyond calling for an enlargement of lecturing’s geographic and thematic

scope, this book also re-​examines the boundaries of its communicative con-
text. The first gesture involves a reassessment of terminology. Though I follow
nineteenth-​c entury usage in treating the terms “lyceum” and “lecture circuit”
interchangeably, the latter was in fact merely the most visible part of a broader
civic institution of the lyceum movement. Even pushing beyond this to the key
term “lecture” only gets us so far. The origins of the Latin word lectura (“read-
ing”) take us back to the monastic dictation practices of an age of scarce print,
and only in the sixteenth century does the verb “to lecture” enlarge its meaning
in English to refer to instructive oral discourse.18 Come the period covered in
this book, the term had enlarged once again to embrace a new and diverse mass
form, confined not only to sacred or collegiate contexts but now brought before
a heterogeneous audience, and embracing matters far more diverse. This was
still a form centered on a lone figure delivering a discourse forty-​five minutes to
two hours in length, often read aloud from a text, but it was now also a category
of performance strangely located somewhere between the playhouse and pulpit.
Popular lecturing married intellectual stimulation with a structure of display,
and was as much a part of show culture as any other staged ritual. Given such
breadth, it makes little sense to speak of a unified form of “the popular lec-
ture.” I prefer to embrace the looser but more instructive concept of “lecture
culture”: a cluster of practices and habits that constellated around a particular
type of vocal performance event.19
A key claim of what follows is that lecture culture’s significance as a discursive
construct demands weight equal to that of its material reality. In the words of
the subtitle of the first modern study of this phenomenon, lectures represented a
“town meeting of the mind,” a phrase Carl Bode intended to suggest parity and
continuity with the New England collectivist tradition.20 This book takes a literal
reading of that phrase in arguing that lecture culture was an arena that was con-
structed as much in the mind as in front of the lectern, as an imagined or projected
community and process, and as something framed by contemporaries eager to
inflect and condition the meanings of a cultural phenomenon. As Thomas Augst
has argued, lecture halls were “not simply another source of knowledge, they
6Introduction

were engines of civil society, ritual spaces that mobilised communities around the
symbolic value of education as a democratic good.”21 I build upon this sense of
“symbolic value,” and upon the arguments of print studies put forward by Trish
Loughran and others, to argue for the popular lecture as a form whose value lies
in its idealized construction of a public sphere centered uneasily on concepts of
tolerance, liberality, gentility.22
This is most clearly evidenced in the constant process of conditioning of the
lecture circuit through its contact with and reliance on rival media. Thanks to a
proliferating culture of reportage, transcription, and commentary, the lyceum
was a matter as much of print as of performance—​a culture of display that was
experienced and conditioned far more through newspaper reportage as by first-
hand encounter. The American press was invariably present at prominent lec-
tures to capture details for broadcast in the next day’s paper. From the 1840s
onward it was customary for some local and city newspapers to report on the
previous day’s lectures as newsworthy events. Throwing one’s voice into a lec-
ture hall meant engaging what Thackeray called the “reflecting medium” of the
American press, setting words loose on a national circuit of transmission and
reception, and speakers could not predict upon whose ears or pages they might
fall, nor the nature of their contingent effects.23
These dynamics helped generate what we now perceive as new categories of
text at the boundaries of voice and print. In their accounts of the rise of print-​
based cultures, Walter Ong and Jack Goody both point to the long nineteenth
century as a moment of irreversible transition between oral and print para-
digms.24 Ong speaks of the “tenaciousness of orality” in post-​oral cultures by
which verbal features retained a “residual” presence in an increasingly “chiro-
graphic” landscape.25 However, as the New England editor and public speaker
George William Curtis acknowledged in 1856, such claims for the demise of the
oral may have been premature:

A few years since, when the steam-​engine was harnessed into the service of
the printing-​press, we were ready to conclude that oral instruction would
have to yield the palm, to written literature … but we forgot, in our hasty
generalization, how the law of compensation rules everywhere … so the
new motor, in the service of newspapers and books, would call out other
forms of the talking mind.26

We might think of this law of compensation as a governing process of nineteenth-​

century media life: that is to say, nineteenth-​c entury orality can be viewed more
valuably as resurgent than as residual. Opportunities for live speech multiplied.
Oratory resounded from the pages of the antebellum media: turning its densely
packed pages, the auditory sense is still repeatedly assailed by elaborate tran-
scriptions of speeches, debates, toasts, commemorations, and lyceum talks.27
The steam-​driven press of the 1830s, we might say, did not extinguish the oral or
render it obsolete, but catalyzed greater prominence for the verbal, generating
new textual forms of the talking mind in which print is called in to reinforce, not
7

Introduction7

replace, the spoken word. Lecture reports lie at this fault line of communication
history among several forms of intermedial overlap, reliant on a complex reci-
procity between speech and print events, helping to reconfigure hierarchies of
literacy and textual knowledge in a number of ways.28
These were speech texts most obviously because they had captured words
spoken in a given context. To some, the very orality of the lecture form suggested
a new intermediary creativity between text and voice—​in this vein, Putnam’s
magazine argued in 1854 that “the greatest achievements in poetry are the plays
which were never intended for print; and doubtless the best additions to our liter-
ature will be the lectures which were only written to amuse an audience, and not
intended for publication.”29 This status lay in the plausible fact that many pieces
were composed for the ear, and we lose sight—​or more, appropriately, miss the
sound—​of this fact when we treat them as straightforwardly written texts. To
take only the most obvious example, lyceum orators such as Emerson, aware of
the intertwined nature of oral and print, wrote with both the ear and the eye in
mind, always aware of multiple possible scenes of listening and sensual reading.
Their sonic appeal was a cardinal element of their nineteenth-​c entury meaning
and literary function. The orator’s initial rendition was understood as merely one
of many potential reimaginings of an aural composition, and speech texts were
understood as demanding oral reanimation to establish the word’s true meanings
and confer upon the reciter some public ethos of the original speaker.
My analysis involves immersion in a deep archive of newspaper and period-
ical sources as rhetorical artifacts in their own right, which projected oratori-
cal events outside the lecture hall into the hands of an atomized reading public.
Lecturing was a material and textual network of knowledge whose role in the
antebellum imaginary consisted of discursive contests over the meanings of pub-
lic speech.30 Since such reports frequently allow us to trace a number of divergent
responses to a single oratorical event, they enable critics to perceive the processes
by which socially agreed-​upon interpretations were formulated, meanings con-
tested, and the authority of speakers challenged.31 I suggest that tracing an orig-
inal speech act, in all of its ambiguities, through a series of transformations and
scenes of reception allows for a fuller appreciation of the multiple textualities and
new media modalities of lecture culture.32 My focus is therefore on close read-
ing of both performances and their reception, exploring the use that performers
made of the lecture form and the use that media interests made of their utterances
as complementary forms of what Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical analysis asks us to
think of as dramatic action.33

Book Outline

An introductory chapter helps to flesh out the arguments made above. In it,
I trace the roots of modern lecture culture to the civic institution-​building of
late eighteenth-​c entury Glasgow, before sketching the emergence and evolution
8Introduction

of the American lyceum movement in the 1830s. I also explore the ways in which
practitioners and observers struggled with one of the key claims for the early
lyceum: that it was a space of dispassionate, bipartisan neutrality. Since lecture
culture was conceived from the outset as an unaffiliated arena, distinct from the
stump and the pulpit, disagreements over its usefulness amounted to debates
over the function and viability of nonpartisan speech in a democracy, and over
how orality and performance might be controlled, co-​opted, and understood.
As I make clear, lectures on Anglo-​A merican ideas and themes provide a useful
testing ground for such ideas, not simply because of the often indirect politics
and assimilationist agenda of such events, but because an intense culture of vis-
ual scrutiny meant that “Englishness” and “Americanness” became politically
charged categories for performance analysis.
Lecturing the Atlantic then turns to four case studies that illustrate these
dynamics in action between 1830 and 1870. Since much has already been writ-
ten about the American tours of Charles Dickens (1867–​68) and Oscar Wilde
(1882), I made the decision to go beyond these well-​k nown cultural flashpoints,
to explore a series of lesser-​understood instances of performers who took Anglo-​
America as their theme.34 Chapter 2 begins this work by thinking about the role
of British imagery in the lecturing campaign against slavery. It explores the mul-
tiple uses that Frederick Douglass found for British liberalism, tolerance, and
Anglo-​Saxonism in his transition from “lecturing agent” to cosmopolitan intel-
lectual. Chapter 3 takes the example of Emerson’s high-​profile 1850 lecture on
England in New York and Ohio, and reveals the ways in which his reimagining of
industrial Britain in terms of “order” was understood in terms of wider theatrical
culture and crises of Anglophobia. In ­chapter 4, I explore what I term the “chore-
ography of reform” by turning to the examples of Whig activists Horace Greeley
and Horace Mann. Both the educational reformer Mann and the legendary cam-
paigning news editor Greeley drew upon spatial and temporal prophetic rhetoric
in the service of subtly contradictory visions of Anglo-​A merican futurity.
Chapter 5 pursues the global literary celebrity Thackeray on his two tours of
the United States during 1853 and 1855. It charts the media controversies that
attended his discussion of themes of monarchy, humor, and global “Englishness,”
and the ways in which his brand of genial humor was by turns celebrated as a signa-
ture mode of Anglophone culture and an imperial affront. The final chapter con-
cludes the book’s discussion by turning to the Irish “spider dancer” Lola Montez
and the British-​A merican temperance reformer John B. Gough. Exploring the
transition that these two unlikely figures made from the worlds of reform and
theater to that of mainstream lecturing, I reveal the surprising means by which
both attempted to serve as guarantors of transatlantic unity during the strains
of the Civil War. Through these reconstructed rhetorical contexts, Lecturing the
Atlantic tells a story about the ways in which midcentury Americans thought
about Britain, how they articulated these views to their fellow countrymen, and
how the strange media journey of such ideas helped shape public culture.
9

{1}

The American Lecture Hall and

an Anglo-​American Commons

In March 1857, the New York–​based Putnam’s Monthly magazine offered its
verdict on an iconic national pastime. “The lyceum,” its article began, “is the
American theater. It is the one institution in which we take our nose out of the
hands of our English prototypes—​the English whom we are always ridiculing
and always following—​and go alone.”1 By 1857, it was possible for organs of cul-
tural nationalism such as Putnam’s to point with pride to this nation-​building
endeavor as one that, once and for all, marked the public sphere of the republic
as distinct from its European counterparts: more democratic, egalitarian, and
possessed of its own unique dignity.2 And at the close of its affectionate survey
of this still-​new world’s characteristics and foremost speakers, the magazine con-
cluded that lecturing was “the American amusement which is most congenial to
our habits and tastes,” and a performance culture that seemed in these antebel-
lum years to be “the great exchange of the world.”3 It is an assessment whose wry
subtleties continue to resonate for modern scholars seeking to understand the
world it describes. Imagining lecture attendance in terms of taking one’s “nose”
from the books of tradition, it encourages reflection on the medium’s contradic-
tory relationship to more static print-​c entric scenes of reading. In presenting the
phenomenon as “theater,” it invites us into an expansive understanding of lecture
halls as spaces of license and spectacle, a pragmatic compromise between educa-
tional and dramatic impulses.
Moreover, the emphasis on the lecture hall as a “great exchange” and its dis-
course as “congenial” underscores the importance of self-​proclaimed neutrality
to how this milieu preferred to see itself. In one of the most influential modern
readings of the phenomenon, Donald Scott has argued that the popular lecture
of the period was “expected to incorporate the public, to embrace all members
of the community, whatever their occupation, social standing or political and
religious affiliation. Useful to all and offensive to none, the lecture was an ora-
torical form deliberately and carefully separated from all partisan and sectarian
10 Lecturing the Atlantic

discourse.”4 This aspiration for the lyceum as “great exchange” dominates many
contemporary accounts. Its cultural arbiters, that is to say, saw its function as
an ecumenical cultural commons, and its usefulness defined by its ability to find
“congenial” discursive ground whose propriety might mediate the tenser forces
of midcentury life.
This idea of commons must be read as closely related to the issue of nation. In
defining the lyceum through its democratic opposition to “English prototypes,”
it captures American lecture culture’s self-​conscious and richly generative simul-
taneous disavowal and embrace of Old World models. British literature, history,
reform, and social developments and the health of Anglo-​A merican culture were
some of the most prevalent themes on the circuit. Far from removing its “nose”
from Old World influences, the midcentury lecture hall was one of the most
revealing contexts through which Americans could reflect on the challenges and
legacies of British social and intellectual “prototypes,” as a form of resistance to
and reciprocity with transatlantic habits of congregation, display, debate, and
commentary. As Christopher Hanlon has recently argued, a surprisingly large
swathe of antebellum cultural production can be understood anew when viewed
in terms of a “contest over transatlantic connection, an American competition
over English history, culture and politics.”5 The “great exchange” of the lecture
hall was at the heart of such contests, most importantly because discussions of an
Anglo-​A merican imaginary were seen by many to provide just the kind of “con-
genial” subjects whose unifying appeal might transcend the contending forces of
midcentury national life.
Contests over the purposes and uses of the nation’s lecture halls provide a
route into a renewed understanding of some of the most pressing debates of the
period: debates about the necessary conditions of a rational society and the role
of performance and speech within that. But even further, these disputes were
about the attempt to fashion and construct an idealized public through habits of
congregation, scrutiny, listening, and reflection. Lecture hall disputes over the
relevance and purchase of British “prototypes” were central to this endeavor, in
part because it is through lecture culture’s own transatlantic origin myth, and
its handling of its debts and affinities to its inheritances from the British public
sphere, that we can best know it. These performances were likewise a key medium
through which midcentury Americans forged and modeled concepts of their own
national character.
This introductory chapter illustrates these themes through a survey of lecture
culture during the 1830s–​1860s. It draws upon a wide archive of articles, editori-
als, letters, journal entries, public commentaries, and reminiscences in order to
develop and nuance the claims of multiple generations of historians and critics.
The discussion falls into two parts. The first surveys the transition of “lyceum”
into “lecture culture” and the shifting values that this involved. It explores the
role of ideas of civic speech, and the influence of the experiments of Scottish
educationalists such as John Anderson and George Birkbeck on what many
11

The American Lecture Hall and an Anglo-American Commons11

participants in the lyceum saw as its laudable values of liberal neutrality, inde-
pendence, and civic duty. The tension between such (often unattainable) ideals
and the demands of individualist republicanism, I proceed to argue, was one of
the catalyzing dynamics of lecture culture.
The second part of this chapter argues that we can read the American lecture
circuit’s obsession with a transatlantic imaginary as a complex, and problematic,
means of securing this neutrality. Lectures on British history, literature, travel,
and reform, I maintain, provided a shared referential field of what Putnam’s called
the “English prototypes.” Performances on these themes helped to legitimate an
ascendant national identity based on a sustaining dialogue with the “manners”
and institutions of the British public sphere. As I show, this category of perfor-
mances embraced key lecture by groups—​such as Native Americans or Irish
nationalists—​whose rhetoric challenged the meanings of the Anglo-​A merican
commons. But more often, it was a medium by which the mainstream lecture
platform could model a form of transcendental whiteness, using Anglocentric
manners as a cultural adhesive.

Civic Speech from Glasgow to Massachusetts

The delivery of educational and entertaining talks to public audiences was not
an entirely unknown practice in the early American republic. In the decades fol-
lowing the Revolution, enterprising itinerants began to carve out a living as trav-
eling independent speakers. What the nation lacked, however, was any means
of cohering such efforts. The first meaningful attempt at orchestrating lectures
into regular courses was provided by Josiah Holbrook, a pioneering educational-
ist. Holbrook founded an organization in Milbury, Massachusetts, in late 1826,
opting for the moniker “lyceum,” deriving from Aristotle’s teaching ground, to
refer to a body devoted to community learning. In a manifesto published in the
American Journal of Education in October of that year, he outlined the goals
for what he called a “society for mutual instruction,” with a diktat to “check
the progress of that monster, intemperance” and “diffuse rational and useful
information through the community generally.”6 While lacking in specifics about
how this goal might be achieved, Holbrook proposed “regular courses of instruc-
tion by lectures or otherwise” as an arrangement that might “do more for the
general diffusion of knowledge, and for raising the moral and intellectual taste
of our countrymen, than any other expedient which can possibly be devised.”7 In
this sense the lyceum can be viewed both as a social institution and as a crusade,
conceived from the outset as a discrete arena, distinct from the political stump
and the pulpit, in which communities could speak to and learn from each other.
Catalyzed by the self-​i mprovement spirit of the Jacksonian period, sister organ-
izations proliferated during the 1830s through areas settled by the New England
diaspora, notably the northern Midwest.8 As this spread of lyceums continued
12 Lecturing the Atlantic

into the following decade, the loosely connected debating society model gave way
to a more static and spectatorial system based on the hosting of talks by vis-
iting speakers. In the major cities in particular, the lyceum became associated
overwhelmingly with lecture courses rather than other forms of discussion. By
the 1837–​38 season there were already twenty-​six annual lecture courses offered
in Boston, and the nation soon boasted hundreds of lecture-​sponsoring organ-
izations under guises such as Young Men’s Associations, Mercantile Libraries,
Philomathean Societies, and Athenaeums, which hosted lectures in regularized
winter seasons running from midautumn through spring.9 By the mid-​1840s, the
transition from “lyceum” proper to “lecture circuit” was clearly visible.
After weathering a slight downturn in the late 1840s, this circuit saw a signif-
icant resurgence during the next decade. By 1855 a Boston paper observed that
“every town or village of any sort of enterprise or pretentions has its annual
course of popular lectures, while the cities support several courses.”10 Across
the country, such courses now included comparable specialist interest lecture
organizations, including German-​ A merican lyceums from the mid-​ 1830s in
Pennsylvania and a number of African-​A merican equivalents. “Originally cas-
ual and irregular,” observed another Massachusetts paper in 1860, lecturing
had by now entirely “matured into a definite system, which may be regarded as
having passed the stage of experiment. It is now an institution, a fixed fact.”11
In Bode’s terms this was “now a lyceum from which most of the early elements
except the lecture had disappeared, but the lecture proved it not an ailing attrac-
tion.”12 Central to this transition was a general trajectory of lyceum as education
to entertainment.
This shift from debating lyceum to speaking circuit gave birth to the short-​
lived profession of the “public lecturer.” The 1840s in particular were the heyday
of semiprofessional freelance speakers, entrepreneurial young men who began to
forge careers and precarious livelihoods by touring an increasingly thickly popu-
lated local network as largely independent actors in a knowledge economy. From
the early 1850s onward, this loose system consolidated further into what contem-
poraries knew as the “star system”: rather than serving local or amateur speak-
ing talent, this mature cultural economy was now dominated by a small number
of eminent names largely drawn from the metropolitan elites of Boston and
New York who toured the country lucratively each winter.13 Every September, the
membership of what was termed the “Lecturing Fraternity” announced itself in
the form of listings of available lecturers in the editorial column of the New York
Tribune, with over a hundred speakers from all walks of professional life ready to
bring their spoken thoughts to the market. They were what Putnam’s magazine
in 1857 termed “the intellectual leaders of intelligent progress in the country.”14
Contrary to the assertions of many of the American lecture circuit’s most
impassioned commentators, a number of parallel activities across the Atlantic
can be read as important precedents for these advances. In England, educational
public talks of some form had been a feature of London life for centuries through
13

The American Lecture Hall and an Anglo-American Commons13

institutions such as the Gresham or Blackfriars series, and through the periodic
ventures of fellows from Cambridge and Oxford. By 1800, lectures were being
delivered across the country from Newcastle to Bristol, and in 1815 the Times of
London spoke of “peripatetic philosophers who give lectures for a guinea each
course, in every village near London.”15 Some of these were devoted to new urban
audiences of the industrial cities. The prevailing model of these English events,
however, was the engagement by private arrangement of enterprising professors
or graduates, squarely aimed at middle-​class audiences and the metropolitan dis-
cursive elite, and generally focused exclusively on belletristic subject matter or
scientific demonstrations. Especially in London, this model of the occasional lec-
ture as something approaching a society event flourished during the early nine-
teenth century, and was one of the public arenas of scientists such as Michael
Faraday and writers from William Hazlitt to Thomas Carlyle. By midcentury,
the American lecture system resembled this model in tone and composition. But
it was a version of lecturing from north of the Scottish border, and the ideas upon
which it was based, that was to prove particularly influential on the tone and self-​
image of the American context.
At the very outset, when educationalists such as Holbrook began to feel their
way toward the lyceum movement they were often explicit about one particu-
lar point of inspiration. Of the new Franklin Institute of Philadelphia, an 1827
chronicler observed that “the plan is unquestionably of Scotch origin … the first
among the universally instructed nations of Christendom.”16 Opening the Boston
Mechanics’ Institution the same year, the inaugural speaker claimed that such
lyceums “owe their first establishment to that country … which has long been
distinguished for its anxious attention to the education of its children.”17 To many
of the founders of the organizations that would evolve into the lecture circuit, the
most inspirational models for institutions of civic education were Scottish, and in
particular those pioneered at the turn of the century in the colleges of Glasgow,
dedicated to bringing education to the new industrial populace and allowing the
free circulation of information through Scotland’s growing industrial cities.18
American lecturing thus drew upon and transformed a generation of debate
within Scottish social thought over the possibility of independent spaces of free
reflection and nonpartisan debate separate from the noise of industrial society.19
By the 1780s, the emphasis on lectures had grown into a phenomenon notable
enough to attract the ire of Samuel Johnson, whom James Boswell records as
remarking,

Lectures were once useful; but now, when all can read, and books are so
numerous, lectures are unnecessary… . People have nowadays got a strange
opinion that everything should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see
that lectures can do as much good as reading the books from which the lec-
tures are taken. I know nothing that can be best taught by lectures, except
where experiments are to be shown.20
14 Lecturing the Atlantic

Whereas this classic teleology of orality and literacy took lectures to be a pre-
modern mode belonging to a time of scarce literacy, this “strange opinion” was
very much a feature of Scottish pedagogy. The distinction with more print-​based
English practice was sharp enough for later observers to point to “the two great
modes of university teaching” in the two nations: public lecturing in Glasgow,
Edinburgh, and St. Andrews, versus private tutoring at Oxbridge:

The English tutor exhibits a local picture of a magnificent castle and

princely domain, describes minutely all the parts of the building, and all
the beauties of the grounds: the Scottish professor holds up the panorama
of an extensive and diversified country, gives the name, the distance, and
magnitude of any thing which meets the eye, and concludes by bestowing a
map of its roads, with directions for traveling over it to advantage.21

As encapsulated here, it is a duality rich in symbolism: between analytic and

synthetic knowledge; taxonomic breadth and intensive depth; aesthetic judgment
and utilitarian survey; above all, between attitudes to the correct orientation
of speech: English private exchange over Scottish sociability, hermetic Socratic
engagement over utterances aimed at a broader audience.
This predilection for oral training went in tandem with a more public under-
standing of the duties of universities. Scottish academia of the period combined
belief in the civic function of effective public speech with an emphasis on freedom
of educational access and the duties and obligations of learned men to share their
expertise. From the mid-​eighteenth century onward, it was customary for college
lectures to be advertised in the press and for urban publics to attend. Professors
at Glasgow and Edinburgh such as Adam Smith, Thomas Sheridan, and Hugh
Blair were professionally obliged to give public courses known as “anti-​toga” lec-
tures, named for the lack of academic robes worn on such occasions.22 Education
in Scotland therefore retained a distinct attitude to discursive public orality as
a civic act, and Smith was shocked by the more sparse attendance at the lec-
tures he delivered while in post at Oxford.23 In the 1790s, John Anderson, pro-
fessor of natural philosophy at Glasgow, developed this impulse and pioneered
newly expanded courses of lectures tailored specifically for mixed public audi-
ences. This new, specifically public form of lecture was adopted by a sophisti-
cated, middle-​class, mixed-​gender audience, but also succeeded in attracting and
retaining more modest sections of Glaswegian society. One memorialist recalls
that “within the walls of the College of Glasgow, there was a large class of opera-
tive mechanics and artizans, receiving instruction in science, which hitherto had
been to them quite inaccessible as the pages of a sealed book.”24
Upon his death in 1796, Anderson left his estate to found a civic body known as
the Andersonian Institute, where his endeavors were continued and expanded by
his influential successor, George Birkbeck.25 Developing the idea of loosely institu-
tionalized local adult education venues for the common man, Birkbeck founded the
Glasgow Mechanics Institute in 1821 (see Figure 1.1) before taking these Scottish
Another random document with
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without uttering a sound, he fell forward into the bush.
*****
Ducos opened his eyes to the vision of so preternaturally
melancholy a face, that he was shaken with weak laughter over the
whimsicality of his own imagination. But, in a very little, unwont to
dreaming as he was, the realization that he was looking upon no
apparition, but a grotesque of fact, silenced and absorbed him.
Presently he was moved to examine his circumstances. He was
lying on a heap of grass mats in a tiny house built of boards. Above
him was a square of leaf-embroidered sky cut out of a cane roof; to
his left, his eyes, focussing with a queer stiffness, looked through an
open doorway down precipices of swimming cloud. That was
because he lay in an eyrie on the hillside. And then at once, into his
white field of vision, floated the dismal long face, surmounted by an
ancient cocked-hat, slouched and buttonless, and issuing like an
august Aunt Sally’s from the neck of a cloak as black and dropping
as a pall.
The figure crossed the opening outside, and wheeled, with the
wind in its wings. In the act, its eyes, staring and protuberant, fixed
themselves on those of the Frenchman. Immediately, with a little
stately gesture expressive of relief and welcome, it entered the hut.
“By the mercy of God!” exclaimed the stranger in his own tongue.
Then he added in English: “The Inglese recovers to himself?”
Ducos smiled, nodding his head; then answered confidently,
feeling his way: “A little, sir, I tank you. Thees along night. Ah! it
appear all one pain.”
The other nodded solemnly in his turn—
“A long night indeed, in which the sunksink tree very time.”
“Comment!” broke out the aide-de-camp hoarsely, and instantly
realized his mistake.
“Ah! devil take the French!” said he explanatorily. “I been in their
camp so long that to catch their lingo. But I spik l’Espagnol, señor. It
shall be good to us to converse there.”
The other bowed impenetrably. His habit of a profound and
melancholy aloofness might have served for mask to any temper of
mind but that which, in real fact, it environed—a reason, that is to
say, more lost than bedevilled under the long tyranny of oppression.
“I have been ill, I am to understand?” said Ducos, on his guard.
“For three days and nights, señor. My goatherd came to tell me
how a wounded English officer was lying on the hills. Between us we
conveyed you hither.”
“Ah, Dios! I remember. I had endeavoured to carry muskets into
Saragossa by the river. I was hit in the leg; I was captured; I
escaped. For two days I wandered, señor, famished and desperate.
At last in these mountains I fell as by a stroke from heaven.”
“It was the foul blood clot, señor. It balked your circulation. There
was the brazen splinter in the wound, which I removed, and God
restored you. What fangs are theirs, these reptiles! In a few days you
will be well.”
“Thanks to what ministering angel?”
“I am known as Don Manoel di Cangrejo, señor, the most
shattered, as he was once the most prosperous of men. May God
curse the French! May God” (his wild, mournful face twitched with
strong emotion) “reward and bless these brave allies of a people
more wronged than any the world has yet known!”
“Noble Englishman,” said he by and by, “thou hast nothing at
present but to lie here and accept the grateful devotion of a heart to
which none but the inhuman denies humanity.”
Ducos looked his thanks.
“If I might rest here a little,” he said; “if I might be spared——”
The other bowed, with a grave understanding.
“None save ourselves, and the winds and trees, señor. I will nurse
thee as if thou wert mine own child.”
He was as good as his word. Ducos, pluming himself on his
perspicacity, accepting the inevitable with philosophy, lent himself
during the interval, while feigning a prolonged weakness, to
recovery. That was his, to all practical purposes, within a couple of
days, during which time he never set eyes on Anita, but only on
Anita’s master. Don Manoel would often come and sit by his bed of
mats; would even sometimes retail to him, as to a trusted ally, scraps
of local information. Thus was he posted, to his immense
gratification, in the topical after-history of his own exploit at the
gallows.
“It is said,” whispered Cangrejo awfully, “that one of the dead,
resenting so vile a neighbour, impressed a goatherd into his service,
and, being assisted from the beam, walked away. Truly it is an age of
portents.”
On the third morning, coming early with his bowl of goat’s milk and
his offering of fruits, he must apologize, with a sweet and lofty
courtesy, for the necessity he was under of absenting himself all day.
“There is trouble,” he said—“as when is there not? I am called to
secret council, señor. But the boy Ambrosio has my orders to be
ever at hand shouldst thou need him.”
Ducos’s heart leapt. But he was careful to deprecate this generous
attention, and to cry Adios! with the most perfect assumption of
composure.
He was lying on his elbow by and by, eagerly listening, when the
doorway was blocked by a shadow. The next instant Anita had
sprung to and was kneeling beside him.
“Heart of my heart, have I done well? Thou art sound and whole?
O, speak to me, speak to me, that I may hear thy voice and gather
its forgiveness!”
For what? She was sobbing and fondling him in a very lust of
entreaty.
“Thou hast done well,” he said. “So, we were seen indeed, Anita?”
“Yes,” she wept, holding his face to her bosom. “And, O! I agonize
for thee to be up and away, Eugenio, for I fear.”
“Hush! I am strong. Help me to my legs, child. So! Now, come with
me outside, and point out, if thou canst, where lies the Little Hump.”
She was his devoted crutch at once. They stood in the sunlight,
looking down upon the hills which fell from beneath their feet—a
world of tossed and petrified rapids. At their backs, on a shallow
plateau under eaves of rock, Cangrejo’s eyrie clung to the mountain-
side.
“There,” said the goatherd, indicating with her finger, “that mound
above the valley—that little hill, fat-necked like a great mushroom,
which sprouts from its basin among the trees?”
“Wait! mine eyes are dazzled.”
 “Ah, poor sick eyes! Look, then! Dost thou not see the white worm
of the Pampeluna road—below yonder, looping through the bushes?”
“I see it—yes, yes.”
“Now, follow upwards from the big coil, where the pine tree leans
to the south, seeming a ladder between road and mound.”
“Stay—I have it.”
“Behold the Little Hump, the salt mine of St. Ildefonso, and once,
they say, an island in the midst of a lake, which burst its banks and
poured forth and was gone. And now thou knowest, Eugenio?”
He did not answer. He was intently fixing in his memory the
position of the hill. She waited on his mood, not daring to risk his
anger a second time, with a pathetic anxiety. Presently he heaved
out a sigh, and turned on her, smiling.
“It is well,” he said. “Now conduct me to the spot where we met
three days ago.”
It was surprisingly near at hand. A labyrinthine descent—by way of
aloe-horned rocks, with sandy bents and tufts of harsh juniper
between—of a hundred yards or so, and they were on the stony
plateau which he remembered. There, to one side, was the coppice
of chestnuts and locust trees. To the other, the road by which he had
climbed went down with a run—such as he himself was on thorns to
emulate—into the valleys trending to Saragossa. His eyes gleamed.
He seated himself down on a boulder, controlling his impatience only
by a violent effort.
“Anita,” he said, drilling out his speech with slow emphasis, “thou
must leave me here alone awhile. I would think—I would think and
plan, my heart. Go, wait on thy goats above, and I will return to thee
presently.”
She sighed, and crept away obedient. O, forlorn, most forlorn soul
of love, which, counting mistrust treason, knows itself a traitor! Yet
Anita obeyed, and with no thought to eavesdrop, because she was in
love with loyalty.
The moment he was well convinced of her retreat, Ducos got to
his legs with an immense sigh of relief. Love, he thought, could be
presuming, could be obtuse, could be positively a bore. It all turned
upon the context of the moment; and the present was quick with
desires other than for endearments. For it must be related that the
young captain, having manœuvred matters to this accommodating
pass, was designing nothing less than an instant return, on the wings
of transport, to the blockading camp, whence he proposed returning,
with a suitable force and all possible dispatch, to seize and empty of
its varied treasures the salt mine of St. Ildefonso.
“Pouf!” he muttered to himself in a sort of ecstatic aggravation;
“this accursed delay! But the piastres are there still—I have
Cangrejo’s word for it.”
He turned once, before addressing himself to flight, to refocus in
his memory the position of the mound, which still from here was
plainly visible. In the act he pricked his ears, for there was a sound of
footsteps rising up the mountain path. He dodged behind a boulder.
The footsteps came on—approached him—paused—so long that he
was induced at last to peep for the reason. At once his eyes
encountered other eyes awaiting him. He laughed, and left his
refuge. The new-comer was a typical Spanish Romany—slouching,
filthy, with a bandage over one eye.
“God be with thee, Caballero!” said the Frenchman defiantly.
To his astonishment, the other broke into a little scream of
laughter, and flung himself towards him.
“Judge thou, now,” said he, “which is the more wide-awake
adventurer and the better actor!”
“My God!” cried Ducos; “it is de la Platière!”
“Hush!” whispered the mendicant. “Are we private? Ah, bah! Junot
should have sent me in the first instance.”
“I have been hurt, thou rogue. Our duel of wits is yet postponed. In
good time hast thou arrived. This simplifies matters. Thou shalt
return, and I remain. Hist! come away, and I will tell thee all.”
Half an hour later, de la Platière—having already, for his part,
mentally absorbed the details of a certain position—swung rapidly,
with a topical song on his lips, down the path he had ascended
earlier. The sound of his footfalls receded and died out. The hill
regathered itself to silence. Ducos, on terms with destiny and at
peace with all the world, sat for hours in the shadow of the trees.
Perhaps he was not yet Judas enough to return to Anita, awaiting
him in Cangrejo’s eyrie. But at length, towards evening, fearing his
long absence might arouse suspicion or uneasiness, he arose and
climbed the hill. When he reached the cabin, he found it empty and
silent. He loitered about, wondering and watchful. Not a soul came
near him. He dozed; he awoke; he ate a few olives and some bread;
he dozed again. When he opened his eyes for the second time, the
shadows of the peaks were slanting to the east. He got to his feet,
shivering a little. This utter silence and desertion discomforted him.
Where was the girl? God! was it possible after all that she had
betrayed him? He might have questioned his own heart as to that;
only, as luck would have it, it was such a tiresomely deaf organ. So,
let him think. De la Platière, with his men (as calculated), would be
posted in the Pampeluna road, round the spur of the hill below, an
hour after sunset—that was to say, at fifteen minutes to six. No doubt
by then the alarm would have gone abroad. But no great resistance
to a strong force was to be apprehended. In the meantime—well, in
the meantime, until the moment came for him to descend under
cover of dark and assume the leadership, he must possess his soul
in patience.
The sun went down. Night flowing into the valleys seemed to expel
a moan of wind; then all dropped quiet again. Darkness fell swift and
sudden like a curtain, but no Anita appeared, putting it aside, and
Ducos was perplexed. He did not like this bodiless, shadowless
subscription to his scheming. It troubled him to have no one to talk to
—and deceive. He was depressed.
By and by he pulled off, turned inside-out and resumed his scarlet
jacket, which he had taken the provisional precaution to have lined
with a sombre material. As he slipped in his arms, he started and
looked eagerly into the lower vortices of dusk. In the very direction to
which his thoughts were engaged, a little glow-worm light was
burning steadily from the thickets. What did it signify—Spaniards or
French, ambush or investment? Allowing—as between himself on
the height and de la Platière on the road below—for the apparent
discrepancy in the time of sunset, it was yet appreciably before the
appointed hour. Nevertheless, this that he saw made the risk of an
immediate descent necessary.
Bringing all his wits, his resolution, his local knowledge to one
instant focus, he started, going down at once swiftly and with
caution. The hills rose above him like smoke as he dropped; the
black ravines were lifted to his feet. Sometimes for scores of paces
he would lose sight altogether of the eye of light; then, as he turned
some shoulder of rock, it would strike him in the face with its nearer
radiance, so that he had to pause and readjust his vision to the new
perspective. Still, over crabbed ridges and by dip of thorny gulches
he descended steadily, until the mound of the Little Hump, like a
gigantic thatched kraal, loomed oddly upon him through the dark.
And, lo! the beacon that had led him down unerring was a great
lantern hung under the sagging branch of a chestnut tree at the foot
of the mound—a lantern, the lurid nucleus of a little coil of tragedy.
A cluster of rocks neighboured the clearing about the tree. To
these Ducos padded his last paces with a cat-like stealth—
crouching, hardly breathing; and now from that coign of peril he
stared down.
A throng of armed guerrillas, one a little forward of the rest, was
gathered about a couple more of their kidney, who, right under the
lantern, held the goatherd Anita on her knees in a nailing grip. To
one side, very phantoms of desolation, stood Cangrejo and another.
The faces of all, densely shadowed in part by the rims of their
sombreros, looked as if masked; their mouths, corpse-like, showed a
splint of teeth; their ink-black whiskers hummocked on their
shoulders.
So, in the moment of Ducos’s alighting on it, was the group
postured—silent, motionless, as if poised on the turn of some full tide
of passion. And then, in an instant, a voice boomed up to him.
“Confess!” it cried, vibrating: “him thou wert seen with at the
gallows; him whom thou foisted, O! unspeakable, thou devil’s doxy!
on the unsuspecting Cangrejo; him, thy Frankish gallant and spy”
(the voice guttered, and then, rising, leapt to flame)—“what hast thou
done with him? where hidden? Speak quickly and with truth, if, traitor
though thou be, thou wouldst be spared the traitor’s estrapade.”
“Alguazil, I cannot say. Have mercy on me!”
Ducos could hardly recognize the child in those agonized tones.
The inquisitor, with an oath, half wheeled.
“Pignatelli, father of this accursed—if by her duty thou canst
prevail?”
 A figure—agitated, cadaverous, as sublimely dehumanized as
Brutus—stepped from Cangrejo’s side and tossed one gnarled arm
aloft.
“No child of mine, alguazil!” it proclaimed in a shrill, strung cry. “Let
her reap as she hath sown, alguazil!”
Cangrejo leapt, and flung himself upon his knees by the girl.
“Tell Don Manoel, chiquita. God! little boy, that being a girl (ah,
naughty!) is half absolved. Tell him, tell him—ah, there—now, now,
now! He, thy lover, was in the cabin. I left him prostrate, scarce able
to move. When the council comes to seek him, he is gone. Away,
sayst thou? Ah, child, but I must know better! It could not be far. Say
where—give him up—let him show himself only, chiquita, and the
good alguazil will spare thee. Such a traitor, ah, Dios! And yet I have
loved, too.”
He sobbed, and clawed her uncouthly. Ducos, in his eyrie, laughed
to himself, and applauded softly, making little cymbals of his thumb-
nails.
“But he will not move her,” he thought—and, on the thought,
started; for from his high perch his eye had suddenly caught, he was
sure of it, the sleeking of a French bayonet in the road below.
“Master!” cried Anita, in a heart-breaking voice; “he is gone—they
cannot take him. O, don’t let them hurt me!”
The alguazil made a sign. Cangrejo, gobbling and resisting, was
dragged away. There was a little ugly, silent scuffle about the girl;
and, in a moment, the group fell apart to watch her being hauled up
to the branch by her thumbs.
Ducos looked on greedily.
“How long before she sets to screaming?” he thought, “so that I
may escape under cover of it.”
So long, that he grew intolerably restless—wild, furious. He could
have cursed her for her endurance.
But presently it came, moaning up all the scale of suffering. And,
at that, slinking like a rat through its run, he went down swiftly
towards the road—to meet de la Platière and his men already silently
breaking cover from it.
And, on the same instant, the Spaniards saw them.
*****
 “Peste!” whispered de la Platière “We could have them all at one
volley but for that!”
Between the French force, ensconced behind the rocks whither
Ducos had led them, and the Spaniards who, completely taken by
surprise, had clustered foolishly in a body under the lantern, hung
the body of Anita, its torture suspended for the moment because its
poor wits were out.
“How, my friend!” exclaimed Ducos. “But for what?”
“The girl, that is all.”
“She will feel nothing. No doubt she is half dead already. A
moment, and it will be too late.”
“Nevertheless, I will not,” said de la Platière.
Ducos stamped ragingly.
“Give the word to me. She must stand her chance. For the
Emperor!” he choked—then shrieked out, “Fire!”
The explosion crashed among the hills, and echoed off.
A dark mass, which writhed and settled beyond the lantern shine,
seemed to excite a little convulsion of merriment in the swinging
body. That twitched and shook a moment; then relaxed, and hung
motionless.
 THE RAVELLED SLEAVE
Sleep, that knits up the ravelled sleave of care.

I should like to preface my subject with a Caractère, in the style of

La Bruyère, as thus:—
Pamphilus is what the liberal call a reserved man, and the
intolerant a secretive. He certainly has an aggravating way of
appearing to make Asian mysteries of the commonplaces of life. He
traffics in silence as others do in gossip. The “Ha!”, with which he
accepts your statement of fact or conjecture, seems to imply on his
part both a shrewder than ordinary knowledge of your subject, and a
curiosity to study in you the popular view. One feels oddly superficial
in his company, and, resentful of the imposition, blunders into self-
assertive vulgarities which one knows to be misrepresentations of
oneself. Do still waters always run deep? Pamphilus, it would
appear, has founded his conduct on the fallacy, as if he had never
observed the placid waters of the Rhine slipping over their shallow
levels. One finds oneself speculating if, could one but once lay bare,
suddenly, the jealous secrets of Pamphilus’s bosom, one would be
impressed with anything but their unimportance. Yet, strangely,
scepticism and irritation despite, one likes him, and takes pleasure in
his company.
Possibly the fact that he cultivates so few friends makes of his
lonely preferences a flattery. Then, too, loquacity is not invariably a
brimming intellect’s overflow. It is better, on the whole, if one has
very little to say, to keep that little in reserve for a rainy day. Too
many of us, having the conceit of our inheritance, think that we, also,
can feed a multitude on five loaves and a couple of fishes. But we
must adulterate largely to do it.
Pamphilus, again, has the winning, persuasive “presence.” He is
thirty-three, but still in his physical and mental attributes a big-eyed
wondering boy. You can mention to him nothing so ordinary, but his
eager “Yes? Yes?” startles you into trying to improve upon your
subject with a touch of humour, a flower of observation, for his rare
delectation. Is he worth the effort? You don’t know. You don’t know
whether or not he wants you to think so, or is really instinctively
greedy for the psychologic bonne bouche. He is tall, and spare, and
interesting in appearance. In short, he lacks no charm but candour;
and I am not sure but that the lack is not a fifth grace. He is, finally,
“Valentine,” and the subject of this “Morality.”
It may have been a year ago that, coming silently into my rooms
one night, Valentine “jumped” me, to my dignified annoyance. I hate
being so taken off my guard. Generally, I hold it that a man’s
consideration for his fellow-creatures’ nerves is the measure of his
mental endowment. Valentine, however, does not, to do him justice,
make these noiseless entrances to surprise one, so much as to
entertain himself with one’s preoccupations. Mine, as it happened,
was the evening paper.
“Ah!” he exclaimed, breathing the monosyllable suddenly over my
shoulder, like an enlightened ghost. The characteristic note was, I
supposed, in allusion to the paragraph which engaged my attention
at the moment. It was headed “The Brompton Sleeping Girl.”
I started, of course; and, in the instant reaction of nerve, flew to an
extreme of rudeness.
“Yes,” I drawled; “an interesting case, isn’t it? Supposing it had
been a private letter, how long would you have stood before shouting
your presence into my ear like that?”
He laughed as he moved away (he had not shouted at all, by the
by); then, as he sat down opposite me in the shadow, appeared for
the first time to realize my meaning.
“Just long enough to recognize the fact,” he said quietly. “What do
you mean by the question?”
Thus rebounding, my own rudeness struck me ashamed. I had no
real justification for the insult, anyhow that I could call into evidence.
“O, nothing!” I mumbled awkwardly; “except that you made me
almost jump out of my skin.”
It was characteristic of him, and a further puzzle, that in spite of his
self-suggested consciousness of superiority he was easily
depressed by a snub. We sat for a little in a glowering silence, and
perhaps with a mutual sense of injury.
 “Yes, an interesting case,” he said at length with an effort. “A
trance, isn’t it?”
“Something of the sort,” I replied. “I saw the girl yesterday.”
He looked up interested.
“Yes?”
“She is in a private ward of B—— Hospital. I know the house
surgeon. He took me to see her.”
“Well! How does she look?”
“Seen the St. Amaranthe at Tussaud’s—the one whom, as
children, we used to call the Sleeping Beauty? Not unlike her: as
pretty as wax and as stiff: just breathing, with pale cheeks and her
mouth a little open.”
“The fit—I seem to remember—was brought on by some shock,
wasn’t it?”
I growled—
“According to report, concealment of birth. I conclude she was put
to shame by some rogue, and couldn’t face the music. The child was
found, three or four months ago, on a doorstep or somewhere, and
traced to her. When the police entered, I suppose she feared the
worst, and went off. Odd part is, that the infant itself was intact—as
sound as a bell. But all that’s of little interest. It’s the case for me; not
the sentiment.”
“Ah?” said Valentine.
He leaned forward, resting his long arms on his knees and gently
clicking his fingers together. His eyes were full of an eager light.
“Johnny, I wonder if you could get me a sight of her?”
“Why not?” I answered. I felt that I owed him some atonement. “I’ll
ask C—— if you like.”

II

C—— demurred, hummed and hawed, and acquiesced.

“Your friend must keep in the background,” he said. “He’s not a
backstair reporter, I suppose?”
“He’s an independent gentleman, and either a poet or an ass—I
don’t know which.”
 “Same thing,” said this airy Philistine; “but no matter, so long as he
don’t talk.”
“He won’t talk.”
“Very well, bring him up. Fact is, we’re trying an experiment this
afternoon. Aunt’s brought the baby—sort of natural magnetism to
restore the current, cancel the hiatus—see? I’ve not much belief in it
myself.”
I fetched Valentine, and we followed C—— up to the ward. There
were only present there—one, a list-footed nurse; two, a little
shabby-genteel woman, with a false tow-like front over vicious eyes,
who carried a flannelled bundle; and three, the patient herself.
She had not so much as stirred, to all appearance, since I last saw
her. We, Valentine and I, took up our position apart. Some accidental
contact with him made me turn my head. He was quivering like a
high-strung racer for the start. This physical excitability was news to
me. “H’mph!” I thought. “Is there really that in you which you must
keep such a tight rein on?”
The nurse took the infant, and placed it on the sleeping girl’s
breast. It mewed and sprawled, but evoked no response whatever.
“She’d never a drop of the milk of kindness in her,” muttered the
little verjuicy woman.
“Hold your tongue!” said the doctor sharply.
He and the nurse essayed some coaxing. In the midst, I was
petrified by the sight of Valentine going softly up to the bed-head.
“May I whisper a word?” he said. “It may fail or not. But I don’t
think you can object to my trying.”
And actually, before his astonished company could move or collect
its wits, he had bent and spoken something, inaudible, into the
patient’s ear.
Now, I ask you to remember that this girl had been in a cataleptic
sleep for not less than three months, under observation, and with no
chance, so far as I knew, to cozen her attendants; and believe me
then as you can when I tell you that, answering, instantly and
normally, to Valentine’s whisper, she sighed, stretched her arms,
though at first with an air of some lassitude and weakness, and,
opening her eyes, fixed them with a sort of suspended stare upon
the face of her exorcist. Gradually, then, a little pucker deepened
between her brows, and instantly, some shadow of fright or
uneasiness flickering in her dark pupils, she turned her head aside.
Obviously she was distressed by the vision of this strange face
coming between the light and her normal, as it seemed to her,
awaking.
Valentine immediately stood away, and backed to where she could
not see him.
C——, obviously putting great command on himself, since
circumstances made it appear that some damned “natural magic”
had got the better of his natural science, took the situation in hand
professionally, and frowned to the aunt, to whom the baby had been
restored, to show herself. The woman, rallying from the common
stupefaction, gave an acrid sniff and obeyed.
“Well, Nancy!” she said, in a tone between wonder and
remonstrance.
The girl looked round again and up, with a little shock. Immediately
her dilated pupils accepted with frank astonishment this more
familiar apparition.
“Gracious goodness, Aunt Mim!” she whispered; “what have you
got there?”
Then she turned her face on the pillow, with a smile of drowsy
rapture.
“Anyhow, you’ve found your way to Skene at last,” she murmured,
and instantly fell into a natural sleep, from which, it was evident,
there must be no awaking her.
C—— wheeled upon my friend.
“I suppose you won’t part with your secret?” he asked drily.
It was a habit with Valentine, not his least aggravating,
composedly to put by any unwelcome or difficult question addressed
to him as if he did not hear it.
“Skene’s in Kent, isn’t it?” he asked, ostensibly of the aunt, though
he looked at me. I could have snapped at him in pure vindictiveness.
He wasn’t inscrutable, any more than another. What was his
confounded right to pose as a sphinx?
“She fancies she’s there,” he said. “Why?”
I turned dumbly with the question to the little woman creature. I
don’t know if she supposed I was in some sort of official authority to
cross-examine her. She had powder on her face, and a weak glow
mantled through it.
“It was there she met her trouble, sir,” she said, hesitating. “She’d
gone down to the hop-picking last September, and I was to follow.
But circumstances” (she wriggled her shoulders with an
indescribable simper) “was against my joining her.”
“Well,” broke in C——, suddenly and rather sharply, “you must
take the consequences, and, for the present anyhow, the burden of
them off her shoulders.”
“Begging your pardon, sir?” she questioned shrewdly.
“The child,” said the doctor, “the child. Everything, it appears,
relating to it is for the moment obliterated from her mind. She takes
up existence, I think you’ll find, last autumn, at this Skene, with
expecting you. Well, you have come, and returned to London
together. You understand? The time of year is the same. None of all
this has for the moment happened.”
There was an acrid incredulity in his hearer’s face as she listened
to him.
“Do I understand, or don’t I, sir,” she said, “that her shame is to be
my care and consideration? And till when, if you’ll be so good?”
“That I can’t say,” he answered. “Probably the interval, the abyss
in her mind, will bridge itself by slow degrees. Her reason likely
depends upon your not rudely hastening the process. I warn you,
that’s all.”
“And pray,” she said, with ineffable sarcasm, “how is I, as a
respectable woman, to account to her for this that I hold?”
“Put it out to nurse.”
“No, sir, if you’ll allow me. The hussy have done her best to bring
me to ruin already.”
“Say you’ve adopted it.”
She gave a shrill titter.
“Nanny will have lost her wits, hindeed, to believe that.”
“Well, she has in a measure.”
“And the police?” she said. “Aren’t you a little forgetting them, sir?”
“The police,” said C——, “I will answer for. The case isn’t worth
their pursuing, and they will drop it.”
 The baby began to wail; and Aunt Mim, with her lips pursed, to
play the vicious rocking-horse to it.

III

One evening, a week later, Valentine came quietly into my room. I

had not seen him in the interval, and was immediately struck, though
it was semi-dusk, by the expression on his face. It was white and
smiling, and the eyes more brightly inscrutable than ever.
A storm had just crashed across the town, and left everything
dripping in a liquid fog. Looking down, one could see the house-
fronts, submerged in the running pavements, become the very
“baseless fabrics of a vision.” The hansom-drivers, bent over their
glazed roofs, rode each with a shadowy phantom of himself
reversed, like an oilskin Jack of Spades. No pedestrian but, like
Hamlet, had his “fellow in the cellarage” keeping pace with him. The
solid ground seemed melted, and the unsubstantial workings of the
world revealed. To souls hemmed in by bricks, there are more
commonplace, less depressing sights than a wet London viewed
from a third story.
There was a box in my window, with some marguerites in it, the
sickly pledges of a rather jocund spring. Valentine, joining me as I
leaned out, handled a half-broken stem very tenderly.
“It has been beaten down, like poor Nanny, by the storm,” he said.
“We must tie it to a stick.”
I did not answer for a minute. Then very deliberately I drew in my
head and sat down. Again like my shadow, in this city of shadows,
Valentine did the same. For some five minutes we must have
remained opposite one another without speaking. Then sudden and
grim I set my lips, and asked the question he seemed to invite.
“Are you the stick?”
He nodded, with a smile, which I could hardly see now, on his
face.
“You speak figuratively, of course,” I said, “in talking of tying her to
you?”
“No,” he said. “I talk of the real bond.”
 “Of matrimony?”
“Certainly.”
With a naughty word, I jumped to my feet, strode the round of the
room, sat down flop on the table, put my hands in my pockets, tried
to whistle, laughed, and burst out—“I suppose you intend this, in a
manner, for a confidence? I suppose you are taking straight up the
tale of a week ago? Well, I haven’t lost the impression of that
moment, or gone mad in the interval. Do you want me to sympathize
with your insanity, or to argue you out of it—which?”
He did not answer. Indeed, the offensiveness of my tone was not
winning.
“I am perfectly aware,” I went on, “that the melodramatic unities
demand an espousal with the interesting spirit we have called back
to life. They have a way, at the same time, of ignoring Aunt Mims.
You will, I am sure, forgive me if I say that it is the figure of that good
lady which sticks last in my memory.”
Still he did not answer.
“I will put my point,” I continued, growing a little angry—“I will put
my point, as you seem to ask it, with all the delicacy I can. You drew
an analogy between—between some one and that broken cabbage
yonder. The sentiment is unexceptionable; only in France they
consider those things weeds.”
“Do they?” he said coolly. “We don’t.”
“No; because we must justify ourselves for exalting ’em out of their
proper sphere. They’ll not cease to smell rank, though, however you
give ’em the middle place in your greenhouse.”
I struck my knee viciously with my open palm.
“That was in vile bad taste, Val. I beg your pardon for saying it.
But, deuce take it, man! you can’t have come to me, a worldling and
an older one, for sympathy in this midsummer madness?”
I was off the table again, going to and fro and apostrophizing him
at odd turns.
“Let’s drop parables—and answer plainly, if it’s in you. You don’t
exhale sentiment as a rule. Did or did not that touch about ‘poor
Nanny’ imply a hint of some confidence put in me?”
“I’ve always considered you my closest friend.”
 “Flattered, I’m sure; though I didn’t guess it. You put such
conundrums—excuse me—beyond the time of a plain man to guess.
Well, I say, I’m flattered, and I’ll take the full privilege. It’s natural you
should feel an interest in——by the way, I regret to say I only know
her as the Brompton Sleeping Girl.”
“She’s Nanny Nolan.”
“In Miss Nolan, then. A propos, I’ve never yet asked, and mustn’t
know, I suppose, the secret of your ‘open sesame’?”
“No, I can’t tell you.”
“O, it doesn’t matter! Only, as a question of this confiding
friendship——”
“It isn’t my secret alone.”
“Then I’ve no more to say. But I presume she’s the—the flower in
question?”
“O, yes! And I’m the stick.”
He said it with a quiet laugh.
“I shouldn’t have supposed it, on my honour,” I assured him. “You
can have stuck at very little in a week.”
I took a few turns, and faced him, or his motionless shadow, very
solemnly.
“Now,” I demanded, “for the plain speaking. Will you answer me
the truth? I brought away an impression, as I said. It might have
been, after all, an impertinent one. A man’s a man for a’ that—
though I confess I can’t quite apply the moral to a woman. Still, I’ll
ask you frankly: How is she socially?”
“Nothing at all. Her father was a colour-sergeant, a red-headed
Celt from over the border of dreams. He’s gone to join the Duke of
Argyll’s cloud army at Inverary. Her aunt’s an ex-coryphée living on a
mysterious pension.”
“Of course; only rather worse than I supposed.”
“Verender, I must tell you the girl is without reproach. Socially, it is
true, they are in a very limited way. They eke out existence in a
number of small directions, even, as you know, hop-picking.”
“I’ve nothing but respect for Miss Nolan’s virtues. I can even
appreciate the appeal of her prettiness to a susceptible nature, which
I don’t think mine is. Anyhow, I’m no Pharisee to pelt my poor sister
of the gutter because she’s fallen in it. That’s beside the question.
But it isn’t, to ask what in the name of tragedy induces you, with your
wealth, your refinement, your mental and social amiability, to sink all
in this investment of a—of a fancy bespoke—there, I can put it no
differently.”
“Call it my amiability, Verender. She’s like the centurion’s daughter.
There’s something awfully strange, awfully fascinating, after all, in
getting into her confidence—in entering behind that broken seal of
death.”
“You’re not an impressionable Johnny—at least, you shouldn’t be.
You’ve passed the Rubicon. This child with a child—with Aunt Mim,
good Lord! Have you thought of the consequences?”
“Yes; all of them.”
“Of the—pardon me. Do you know who he was?”
“Yes.”
I stared aghast at him—at the deeper blot of gloom from which his
voice proceeded.
“And you aren’t afraid—for her; for yourself?”
“You mean, of her relapsing?” he said clearly. “Not when she
knows the truth—knows what a poor thing he is.”
“Are you sure you know woman? She is apt to have a curious
tenderness for the blackguard who distinguishes her with his most
especial brand of villainy. Then she hasn’t learned it—the truth—
yet?”
“No. Aunt Mim has been loyal.”
“Well, well she may be, so long as you offer yourself the prize to
such a self-denying ordinance. She sees which side her bread’s
buttered, no doubt. And how does she account for the little
stranger?”
“By adoption. It’s an odd thing, Verender—Verender, it’s a very
odd thing, and very pitiful, to see how she—little Nanny—distrusts
the child—looks on it sort of askance—almost hates it, I think. I’ve a
very difficult part to play.”
I groaned.
“Then why play it? What does it all matter to you? You’ve opened
her eyes. Isn’t that enough, without waiting till she’s opened yours?”
“Ah!” he said, obviously not attending to me. “But that isn’t the
whole of my difficulty. The truth is, she appears to shrink from me
too.”
“You’ll forgive me,” I said grimly. “That’s your first comforting
statement.”
“I don’t know how it is,” he continued, in a low voice, self-
pondering; “she’s frightened—distressed, before a shadow she can’t
define. Sometimes and somehow it seems as if she wants to love
me, but can’t—as if she were trying, and vainly, to shape out of a
great gloom the obstacle which separates us. And I want to help her;
and yet I, too, can’t understand. Shall I ever, I wonder?”
I stared at him. “Isn’t it plain enough? But you have love’s eyes, I
suppose.” Then I asked, a little softened, “Does she ever lose
herself, trying to piece that broken time?”
“I don’t know,” he answered. “She speaks so little. She is like a
little shy ghost—half-materialized—fearful between spirit and matter
—very sweet and pathetic.”
With the last word he turned abruptly and strode out of the room. I
was not so much astonished at his curt conclusion, as at a certain
tell-tale cough which accompanied it.
“O, hang the fellow!” I muttered. “If he’s developed tears in his
voice, I give him up.”

IV

One afternoon, accident taking me past the Nolans’ house in the

Fulham Road, I was disturbed to hear Valentine’s voice hailing me
from the parlour window. It was a little cheap tenement, and a
curiously shabby frame to his rather distinguished figure as he stood
up eagerly to stop me.
“Come in,” he said. “I want you.”
I demurred, in an instant and instinctive panic.
“What for? I’m horribly pressed. Won’t it do another time?”
“It won’t,” he answered. “It’s its way. But go on, if your need is
greater than mine.”
“That’s shabby,” I thought; and yielded with the worst grace
possible. He retaliated by meeting me all sweetness at the door, and
conducting me into the parlour.