[In the following essay, originally published in 1987, Cayton offers an assessment of Emerson's cultural impact in the context of contemporary media.]

… The case of Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the most celebrated of American intellectuals, can shed light on the ways in which meanings are made in intellectual discourse and what those meanings have to do with those people not filling the role of intellectual within the culture. Historians have never known precisely how to categorize Emerson. Perry Miller saw him as the heir and transformer of Edwardsian Puritanism. F. O. Matthiessen saw in him the founder of American literary romanticism and termed his the “age of Emerson.” Others (notably Stanley Elkins) have seen him as a prime mover in a generation of reformers, with Transcendentalism being a dangerously uncompromising Emersonian movement for social reform. He was also, according to various scholars, a democratic philosopher, an incipient Darwinist, and a pragmatic mystic.¹ Reception theory suggests that Emerson's cultural impact may have depended less on what he intended than on what key communities of interpreters made of him.

If reaction in the popular and religious press and in the journals of the literary community is any gauge, Emerson attained a limited, local notoriety in his native new England during the 1830s. He was born in Boston in 1803, the son of a prominent Unitarian minister who died young. Prior to 1825, Emerson seems to have viewed himself (to judge by his journals and letters) primarily as a fledgling poet who hoped to make his mark on the world of belles-lettres. In need of both money and a socially sanctioned way of indulging his proclivities for philosophizing, he entered upon the study of the ministry, eventually assuming the pastorate of the Second (Unitarian) Church, Boston. He resigned in 1832: his ministerial colleagues and his congregation interpreted the role of the Lord's Supper celebration in the spiritual life of the church in a way he had come to view as intolerable. After a period of travel, he returned to his ancestral home of Concord, lecturing occasionally, substituting for local ministers, and preaching from time to time in vacant pulpits. Freed from immediate financial pressure by his wife's legacy, he also spent time during the period 1834-36 reading, thinking, and writing his challenge to the epistemology of the time, Nature.

Prior to 1836, Emerson seems to have been viewed by his contemporaries much as one might expect: a somewhat unorthodox clergyman whose eccentricities and devotion to literature were within the bounds of acceptability for the Unitarian ministry. Joel Myerson and Robert Burkholder, in their comprehensive Emerson bibliography, have listed fifteen published works, mainly in the religious press, that speak of or implicitly refer to Emerson during the period 1829-35. Nearly all refer to ecclesiastical, literary, or civic activities that would have been well within the province of a Unitarian minister of the day. With the publication of Nature, attention to Emerson increased but remained within the elite circles of institutional Unitarianism and its literary adjuncts, the Harvard-dominated literary journals of the Boston area.² Part of a culture in which literature still functioned principally as a mode of spiritual discourse, the reviewers of Nature analyzed something they named philosophical and aesthetic discourse, but, clearly, they meant to read through these in order to see its religious and moral implications.³

Emerson emerged as a recognizable national figure in the decade and a half following the publication of Nature because his message shifted from being heard in religious and literary terms to being heard as discourse pertaining to something else. That something else seemed to move beyond the conventions of religious or literary discussion and provide a framework that included both. It would not be entirely accurate to call Emerson's message “secular” in contrast to “religious,” since both he and his audiences perceived something spiritual in his utterances. Nor am I willing to use the term “popularization,” since the process was not necessarily one of simplification and homogenization of a complex, determinate message for a non-expert audience. Rather, something happened from 1836 to 1850 that made Emerson accessible and appealing to a new audience who, because of its own circumstances, was able to hear him in a new and different way.

In lyceums and Mechanics' Institutes, knowledge that had formerly been defined only as religious, literary, or scientific began to be defined also as practical or pragmatic. The lyceum movement in its early days depended mostly on local speakers who had regional reputations. As Donald Scott has noted, early lyceum speakers were usually people with training and connections in other areas of public performance—law or the ministry, for instance—and their drawing power may have been proportional to the audience's familiarity with their other public roles.⁴ Some speakers may also have been known through locally printed and distributed sermons, speeches, essays, or textbooks. Speakers not immediately familiar to the audience were probably arranged for by local ministers, lawyers, and other intellectuals, who tended to be part of networks that, in some cases, crossed regions. Emerson's course on “The Times,” in New York, 1842, for instance, was arranged by his brother William, a New York lawyer. The new “popular” audience for the lyceums grew out of preexisting networks of intellectuals who began to be heard in new contexts.⁵

The existence of a new popular press, growing in conjunction with a burgeoning commercial economy, eventually provided a vehicle that made these early word-of-mouth connections superfluous and masked the origins of the speakers in the religious or legal communities. At first, in the major publishing centers of Boston and New York, coverage of lecturers in newspapers was minimal, lest summaries of lectures steal the speaker's “product” and render it unusable with other audiences. The only evidence in the Boston Daily Advertiser of Emerson's lecture course on “Human Life” in Boston in the winter of 1838 took the form of paid advertisements: two in October announcing a course of “ten or more Lectures” and soliciting subscriptions; and individual announcements printed the day of each lecture, advertising its topic, time, location, and price.⁶ This neglect of Emerson was neither unique nor the consequence of his late notoriety over the “Divinity School Address.” Wendell Phillips's lecture in 1839 at the Boston Lyceum on “The History of Inventions” was announced with much the same lack of fanfare.⁷

Before long, the situation changed, at least in some newspapers. An article in the Boston Daily Advertiser, reprinted from the New York Evening Post, commented that other newspapers had responded to the public's desire for press coverage of lectures. The Post spoke of “the practice which certain newspapers have recently adopted, of reporting the lecture made before the different societies of the city” and felt compelled to explain why it had not covered lectures.⁸ The Post's misgivings notwithstanding, a number of New York newspapers and literary periodicals began to afford Emerson significant coverage in the mid-1840s. New York controlled the publishing market, and what New Yorkers wrote about, other parts of the country usually read about. “The eastern papers had said much of Mr. Emerson, and we get an eastern mail every day,” wrote a Cincinnati correspondent on Emerson's first visit there in 1850.⁹ Perhaps the most important paper to cover lectures was Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, said to be “the most influential newspaper in the country.”¹⁰ Greeley's coverage of the “isms” of the day, sensational in their own way, sold newspapers and rocketed the Tribune to a position of importance in the world of the New York press.¹¹

In Boston, the Daily Advertiser wholeheartedly endorsed the New York Evening Post's position and refused to publish accounts of lectures. Perhaps in recognition of Emerson's rising popularity as a lecturer, it nevertheless accorded Essays, First Series, themselves print versions of the lectures, a lengthy front-page review.¹² This article treated Emerson as part of a literary community and evaluated Essays in literary terms. The review was far from flattering; the writer found Emerson's Essays tough, distorted, inharmonious, opaque, ponderous, and labored. Yet he expended time and attention on the book, he explained, because, “from its intellectual tendencies, it may be viewed as the representative of a class of works (chiefly of foreign importations) which have met with some success in ‘Young England.’”¹³

The British connection the Advertiser refers to provides a second clue to the sources of Emerson's early notice as a public figure in the United States. Although Emerson had enjoyed substantial popularity among a certain group of educated, patrician, Unitarian-bred young men in New England, a transatlantic connection contributed significantly to the furthering of Emerson's reputation as a literary figure. The Boston reviewer who took Emerson to task for Essays, for example, began his article by noting that the preface to Emerson's book had been written by Thomas Carlyle. Emerson “is brought before the reading public by one of the ‘observed’ of the day,” the reviewer remarked, “and may thus gain a degree of notice, which, we will venture to affirm, he would not else have attracted.”¹⁴ Emerson had done Carlyle the service of overseeing the American publication of Carlyle's works and ensuring that he received royalties for them; Carlyle in turn arranged for the publication of a British edition of 750 copies of the Essays and wrote a preface. The anonymous reviewer of the Advertiser was responding not to the American edition of Emerson's work but to the British edition, published almost half a year after its American counterpart under the patronage of an established British literary figure. The British edition of Emerson's work proved popular enough to be pirated. Beginning with the British publication of Essays, First Series, British periodicals began to review Emerson, frequently pairing his name with that of Carlyle. (“A Yankee pocket edition of Carlyle,” some called him.)¹⁵ Although the reviews in Great Britain were far from uniform, Emerson was generally noted, whatever his faults, to be a characteristically American product.¹⁶

Emerson's lecture tour of Britain in 1847-48 increased his standing as a public figure there, and British periodicals took note of him, for better or worse. The several American periodicals that reprinted British literary gleanings—the Eclectic or Littell's Living Age, for example—picked up the British literary assessments.¹⁷ Emerson made no money from any of his books until after his celebrated tour of England; English Traits, published in 1850, was the first to make a profit. An anecdotal example of the role of British publicity in expanding Emerson's reputation beyond his region appears in the autobiography of Moncure Daniel Conway, the young Virginian who became Emerson's hagiographer and his publicist in Cincinnati. Studying law in Warrenton, Virginia, in December of 1847, Conway stumbled on an article about Emerson with extracts from his essays in Blackwood's, the Scottish literary review.¹⁸ Conway traveled to a bookstore in Fredericksburg, where a copy of Emerson's “Arithmetic” was in stock but Emerson's Essays unheard of. Ordering a copy and remarking on his new literary find to his cousin John, Conway learned that the increased attention to Emerson had prompted John to write an article about him for the Richmond Examiner.¹⁹

Between a growing notice in the New York press, whose literary editors were often originally from New England, and a reputation in British literary periodicals, which persisted in influencing American literary opinion, Emerson's name was becoming familiar by the late 1840s to a class of readers who kept up with literary affairs. Characterization of him in the British popular press during his 1847-48 lecture tour, however, provided him with an image more readily transferable to popular American audiences. Townsend Scudder's work contains substantial evidence that the British press, in presenting Emerson to audiences of the Mechanics' Institutions, substantially de-emphasized the literary and religious aspects of his discourse in order to portray him as an already highly acclaimed American of prophetic stature. He was a man who spoke directly to the heart, not subject to the ordinary canons of logic. Both literary and religious criticism of Emerson continued to be produced, and, in fact, critics frequently evaluated his writing in either negative or decidedly mixed fashion. Even these appraisals, however, began to betray the influence of the popular press: this man was not to be evaluated strictly according to the rules defining literary or theological discussion. Rather, he was to be seen as a radical of some sort, whose message was to be judged according to some new, and as yet unarticulated, rules governing “feeling” and “spirit,” and whose exemplary American-ness was defined as somehow crucial to audience reception of his message.²⁰

Although dissenters and young Oxford intellectuals formed part of Emerson's audience, by far the majority of those who heard him in Mechanics' Institutions were not mechanics at all, but “clerks, shopkeepers, apprentices, &c … professional men, merchants, warehousemen, schoolboys.”²¹ The new commercial classes coalesced around Emerson despite the fact that they remained relatively oblivious to his notions of theology, metaphysics, society, and government. What such an audience made of Emerson is a perplexing question. Its primary concern lay neither with literature nor theology. Yet, to understand the making of Emerson as a “popular” intellectual, it is crucial to know the mind of his audience. Between 1840 and 1855, Emerson began to be seen not primarily as a religious or literary figure but as something else, and the coalescence of a bourgeois mercantile audience via the press had much to do with this redefinition of role.

The importation of eastern lecturers such as Emerson in the 1850s marked a new phase of the lyceum and lecturing movement in the midwestern United States. The formation of audiences for these lecturers suggests a good deal about the ways in which the emerging American commercial classes “made” Emerson and gave a cultural imprimatur to particular aspects of his message. Over time, various parts of Emerson's message became obscured through the sheer inability of his listeners to comprehend them as relevant to their own situations. Other parts became exaggerated, probably beyond anything Emerson ever intended, as a result of the coalescing audience's ability to fit them into discourse patterns and experiences that it brought to its experience of the speaker. Emerson's audience had come to a sense of group identity long before his arrival, and hearing him seems to have played a part in heightening its self-consciousness as a group. Before examining in detail how this audience heard his message, it is important to look closely at who his listeners were and the common experience they brought to their interpreting.

Nearly every town had its own lyceum by the mid-1830s. Cincinnati's lyceum was founded in 1830, Cleveland's in 1832; the Columbus Reading Room and Institute was organized in 1835, and the one in Indianapolis sometime before that year.²² These lyceums were part of the national movement begun by Josiah Holbrook in 1829 to promote dissemination of useful information, discussion, and debate. Lyceums began to languish within a decade, however, and were forced to change their form of organization. It was to the second form of this lyceum movement that Emerson was eventually invited to speak, and in the character of these newer organizations lie the clues to the nature of Emerson's audience in the Midwest.

Throughout the young cities of the region, Literary Societies, Young Men's Societies, and Young Men's Mercantile Libraries rapidly displaced lyceums, These new organizations were explicitly established by and for the young mercantile classes of the cities. The urban centers of the newer region contained a disproportionate number of young, unmarried men, most of whom lived in boarding houses. In Chicago in 1850, for example, 94 percent of the male population was under the age of fifty, two-thirds were under thirty, and half ranged from fifteen to twenty-nine years of age.²³ Mostly migrants from rural areas, these young clerks, salesmen, bookkeepers, and banktellers were potentially cut off from the influences of family, friends, and church that might have held them in the path of virtue at home. Many writers saw these young men in danger of slipping into vicious habits such as gambling, drinking, theater-going, brothel-visiting, and Sabbath-breaking. A steady stream of advice manuals and tracts poured forth to advise them on the formation and maintenance of character and the path to social acceptability in their new environment.²⁴ In the cities of the Midwest, the Young Men's Societies provided an alternative gathering-place to taverns and theaters for the young members of the mercantile class. These groups also afforded young men the opportunity to acquire the practical knowledge and debating and speaking skills necessary for social and professional advancement.²⁵

The Young Men's Associations, like the lyceums themselves, were anchored in the tenets of the self-culture movement. Self-culture as an ideal originated in urban centers, from the desire of artisans and mechanics to acquire an education in practical and theoretical knowledge of scientific and technical matters. The notion of self-culture quickly took on wider implications: the apostles of the self-culture movement began to advocate the cultivation of an internalized system of morality especially fitted to the newly commercialized portions of the country, particularly, urban areas. Introspective self-examination of conduct would provide highly mobile young men of the urban centers, isolated from traditional institutional bolsters of morality, the means for maintaining character in a disorienting environment.²⁶ Within the philosophy, however, a tension existed: the young man had to be self-reliant and independent of external influences but only so that he could remain true to a collective standard of morality in time of trial. “Self-culture” was, in short, an articulation of the process whereby moral character might be maintained. The “culture” that succeeded it—and that Emerson's lecturing did its part to promote—focused on the definition of collective standards of morality and acceptable behavior.²⁷

The self-culture movement in the Midwest was intimately linked to city boosters and businesspeople, those who had the greatest interest in maintaining moral order among the young male migrants to the city. In the Midwest, the gradual commercial development of eastern cities was compressed into a few years, as cities rapidly appeared out of the prairie. As a result of this rapid economic development, the midwestern merchants played a larger part in civic affairs than their counterparts in the East. Because the merchant—not the minister, the lawyer, the politician or the college professor—was the representative civic figure, the culture movement in the Midwest was, almost from its inception, dominated by the merchant classes.²⁸ Over and over in their official biographies, successful merchants had their good fortune attributed to self-education and self-culture.²⁹ It is not surprising that they dominated the foundation of a new lecture movement in the Midwest designed to inculcate certain moral values in their protégés. When Emerson came to Pittsburgh in 1851, merchants closed their shops early so that young clerks could go to hear him.³⁰ The sorts of messages he and other eastern lecturers brought to the platform fit the aims of a mercantile version of the self-culture ideal. In it, recommended activities and ways of thinking led not only to improvement of character but directly to business success.³¹

While sponsoring self-culture activities such as debating, public speaking, and literary study, the Young Men's Organizations also served to consolidate the young business class of a city by introducing them to one another and giving them a common set of cultural activities that, by their very definition, built “character.” The reading rooms that flourished with these organizations were regarded as “a pleasant resort and an agreeable place to introduce one's friends and also respectable strangers who visit the city.”³² These organizations provided the setting for Emerson's lectures in the Midwest during the 1850s. Although they shaped the character of popular response to him, he in his turn acted as a catalyst for the cultural consolidation already underway in the region. Emerson's reception in one important midwestern city—Cincinnati—illustrates how these business-oriented audiences helped create an Emerson in line with commercial values.³³

The primary impetus for Emerson's first trip to Cincinnati in 1850 was literary. Emerson's reputation at this time still rested principally on his print production. In October of 1849, twelve young men—lawyers, clerks, and teachers, none of whom were over twenty-five years of age—formed the Cincinnati Literary Club. These men lived close together and gathered on Friday nights in the rooms of Ainsworth Rand Spofford, a clerk at a Cincinnati bookstore, to eat, drink, and debate slavery, the tariff, and free will. The group combined the aims of self-culture and conviviality that typically characterized Young Men's Associations. It met weekly “to promote the wider culture of our intellectual, moral, and social powers,” with one night a month set aside for formal debate and another for the “Informal”: songs, light verse, and drinking.³⁴ As was the case with Young Men's Organizations elsewhere, the young men of the Literary Club could not afford to guarantee Emerson's expenses, so they turned to the “solid men of Cincinnati,” lawyers, ministers, and merchants, to underwrite his expenses. The merchants responded by pledging one hundred and fifty dollars toward the course of lectures.³⁵

Emerson came to deliver his course of lectures in May of 1850, to a city decidedly unclear as to what to believe about him. He already had a large enough reputation for the Daily Cincinnati Gazette to note on 15 May that “the movement for a course of lectures from Ralph Waldo Emerson, to which we alluded sometime since, has proved successful, and … Mr. Emerson will arrive in Cincinnati in a few days, and commence a course of five lectures here early next week.” The Gazette thought he would have “‘a few’ people to hear him, at least.”³⁶ “In this don't-care-much-for-genius sort of latitude,” a Cincinnati correspondent of the Salem Register wrote after Emerson's first lecture, “the town was on tip-toe of ‘look out’ to see what kind of reception would be extended to him, what class of people would attend, and, finally, what would be thought of him. No one could come to any conclusion upon either point from what the daily papers said in advance; for it was observed that they had not been paid in advance, and consequently the ‘Locals’ were as silent as an oyster, excepting so far as they felt called upon to draw attention to his advertisement, &c.—and that, by the way, with the same adjectives that informed us that a notable fat boy was exhibiting at the Museum, &c.”³⁷ For the majority of Cincinnatians outside the small literary and professional circles that issued the invitation, the popular attitude was one of wait-and-see. Emerson was but one more presumably famous name, of whom many might have heard but from whom few knew what to expect.

Press reception of Emerson on his first appearance in Cincinnati is significant both because it illustrates the process of public image-making and because it set the tone for Emerson's visits to the region throughout the decade that followed. In the race with other growing cities of the region for resources, midwestern newspapers, which were even more intimately connected with the mercantile community than those of the East, became “civic cheerleaders.”³⁸ Extensive journalistic treatment of the individual lecturers, including Emerson, contributed toward the shaping of a corporate response to the speaker, as had been the case in Britain during Emerson's 1847-48 tour there.

By far the most common response to Emerson was to wonder why all the fuss about his transcendentalism. “Judging Mr. Emerson's matter and manner, by this single lecture,” the Gazette reporter wrote, “we should write so differently of both, from what we have seen written by others, that the same man could not be recognized as the subject of the several descriptions … [H]e is so far, in his intellectual and oratorical lineaments, from resembling the newspaper portraits above which we have at various times seen his name written, that we half incline to think the wrong man has come along, and attempted to play off a hoax upon us backwoods people.” “Gothamite scribes have certainly mistaken Mr. Emerson for somebody else, and given descriptions of him which will not be recognized in this region,” the Gazette concluded, referring to descriptions of Emerson that emphasized his religious deviation and his impractical and unintelligible philosophy.³⁹ Another reviewer, “perfectly satisfied by the Lecture of Wednesday evening,” insisted that “a great deal more nonsense has been written about him by Gilfillan and others, than they have written about other people.” George Gilfillan reviewed Emerson in 1848 for Tait's Magazine, a British periodical, and the Gazette reviewer's familiarity with the British review is perhaps as significant as his disagreement with Gilfillan, who attacked Emerson for triteness, mistiness, and worship of man disguised as nature.⁴⁰

Although Cincinnatians persisted in looking for evidence of Emerson's vaunted unorthodoxy and fuzzy philosophical doctrines, they could not find it. “In that portion of the discourse which might be placed under the didactic head,” wrote the correspondent for the Cincinnati Daily Commercial, after Emerson's second lecture, “no theory was introduced which would appear to present the lecturer in the character of a ‘new light.’” He was “as unpretending as … a good old grandfather over his Bible,” the Gazette reported, and “his most remarkable trait is that of plain common sense.” The Columbian and Great West reported that “the transcendentalism didn't come, longingly as we looked for it from the beginning, and stoutly as many, who professed to have heard the course before, declared that it would be along by-and-by.” When Emerson's planned course of lectures met with success, he was persuaded to give a second course of three, “The Natural History of Intellect,” “The Identity of Thought with Nature,” and “Instinct and Inspiration.” In these, it was judged, “our people will get something more of what is peculiar in Mr. Emerson's mind, and philosophical views, than was obtained from the first course.” Still, newspapers found no sign of a threatening religion or philosophy.⁴¹

A comparison of the print essays “Aristocracy,” “Eloquence,” “Books,” and “Instinct and Inspiration” with reportage of the lectures that formed their basis offers some idea of what Emerson's audiences thought they heard if it was not transcendentalism. It is noteworthy that in none of his lectures of the first course did Emerson speak directly about religious or philosophical opinion as he had in lectures of the late 1830s and early 1840s. Rather, he adapted his philosophy to the needs of the popular audience by choosing topics that communicated through concrete and homely metaphors his attitude toward these subjects without ever approaching them directly. His audience believed itself to be getting “common sense, humor, and truth; the second time, humor, truth, and common sense; the third time, truth, common sense, and humor.”⁴² The texts of the essays show that the audiences of the lectures were still receiving, albeit indirectly, the characteristic Emersonian depiction of the universe as a series of laws that transcended social convention, tradition, or proscriptive statute. In other words, Emerson's underlying philosophy and his religious stance in these lectures had not changed substantially from the more controversial Nature and “Divinity School Address,” but Emerson was no longer explicitly using the languages of philosophy or religion to make his points.

By applying those laws to subjects that were ostensibly nonpolitical and nonreligious, Emerson seemed to his listeners to be merely passing along practical advice on practical subjects—the epitome of self-culture. In Cincinnati, the talks that received the most enthusiastic responses included “Eloquence” and “England.” “Eloquence” contained what conventionally came to be called “gems” or “pearls of wisdom”: aphoristic sayings that encapsulated the practical laws of human life in a novel way. “England” was praised as “one of the most graphic and interesting pieces of descriptive narration that we have listened to.”⁴³ It was treated as a catalogue of observations rather than as a coherent piece of thought. If the audience was pleased by Emerson's “common sense,” it was because his compelling images drawn from everyday life could be understood in a practical, materialist way as well as in the metaphorical, idealist sense in which Emerson probably intended them. Emerson “don't say at all—he hints or intimates or walks around about what he would say but don't say,” the young Rutherford B. Hayes, a member of the Cincinnati Literary Club, astutely observed in a letter to a friend.⁴⁴

Ironically, one of the least successful of Emerson's lectures in Cincinnati was concerned with literary culture itself, the area in which Emerson had presumably made his mark. “Books” was pronounced “above the range and without the best of the great majority of the auditory.” His lectures on “The Natural History of the Intellect,” of a more overtly philosophical character, were “of too abstruse a nature, and altogether too comprehensive in their method, to be characterized in a newspaper paragraph or two, at all events from a single hearing.” “Instinct and Inspiration,” which the printed text shows to be one of the most overtly philosophical and least anecdotal of his lectures, flowed right past the audience. It was what the British and American reviewers would have called “misty”; the Cincinnati audience, at least, the commercial elements of it whose opinions tended to be reflected in newspapers, were by that time prepared for a frontier philosopher rather than a dangerous transcendentalist. Listeners found the lecture difficult and waited for something more to their liking. As Emerson's lectures grew more philosophical and the novelty of having him in town wore off, attendance at his lectures fell.⁴⁵

Throughout the 1850s, midwestern newspapers that reported on Emerson's discourses exhibited some difficulty in summarizing his lectures as coherent wholes. Although audiences were described as “strongly impressed” or “profoundly attentive,” reporters often found it “impossible to give a synopsis of the lecture,” no matter how favorably impressed.⁴⁶ The organizing principles escaped them. Of “The Conduct of Life” in Cincinnati in 1857, for example, the Daily Enquirer's front-page story stated: “The lecture was listened to with profound attention, though, from its epigrammatic and somewhat abrupt and disconnected style, it was a matter of extreme difficulty to follow the thread of the discourse.”⁴⁷ Rutherford Hayes's description of his impression of an Emerson lecture echoes the responses of most newspaper reviewers. “Logic and method, he has none,” Hayes wrote, “but his bead-string of suggestions, fancies, ideas, anecdotes, and illustrations, delivered in a subdued, earnest manner, is as effective in chaining the attention of his audience as the most systematic discourse could be.”⁴⁸ Emerson's philosophy of composition, natural law, and organic growth are clearly articulated elsewhere, and his treatment of individual subjects in the western lectures are without a doubt illustrative of his philosophical framework as he had sketched it in earlier writings. Because he focused on concrete topics for the popular audience, however, the system behind the anecdotes remained implicit and suggestive rather than explicit and logically developed. Audiences frequently reached the conclusion that, in his talks, there was no point at all.

When reporters did summarize Emerson's lectures for their readers, the result was frequently a disjointed series of remotely connected sentences. The following selection, taken from the Cincinnati Gazette's summary in 1852 of Emerson's “Wealth,” conveys some of the difficulty listeners had in finding an overarching framework in which to put Emerson's anecdotes and aphorisms:

One of the most natural enquiries about a person, but partially known, was “what has been his success in life?” The first question asked with regard to a stranger is, “How does he get his living?” All men are consumers, and all ought to be producers. Man is an expensive animal and ought to be rich. Wealth has its source in the application of mind to nature. The most intimate ties subsist between thought and nature. The art of getting rich consists, not in industry, but in being at the right spot for such getting, and in the right application of forces. Steam was as abundant 100 years ago as now, but it was not put to so good a use as now. (Applause.) The grass and wheat rots in Michigan, until the active men screw steam power to that hay and flour and whirl it into New York and London. Coals have been rightly called black diamonds. Coal is a portable climate and transports itself. (Applause.) But coal and water were useless in England, till Watt and Stephenson and Brunel came, and then how quickly transformed to wealth!⁴⁹

This summary also affords an interesting comparison of what the audiences heard and what the speaker actually said. The essay “Wealth” from The Conduct of Life parallels the lecture in every respect, yet it is fascinating to notice how the newspaper interpretation compares with this printed text:

As soon as a stranger is introduced into any company, one of the first questions which all wish to have answered, is, How does that man get his living? And with reason. He is no whole man until he knows how to earn a blameless livelihood. Society is barbarous until every industrious man can get his living without dishonest customs.

Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He fails to make his place good in the world unless he not only pays his debt but also adds something to the common wealth. Nor can he do justice to his genius without making some larger demand on the world than a bare subsistence. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich.

Wealth has its source in applications of the mind to nature, from the rudest strokes of spade and axe up to the last secrets of art. Intimate ties subsist between thought and all production; because a better order is equivalent to vast amounts of brute labor. The forces and the resistances are nature's, but the mind acts in bringing things from where they abound to where they are wanted; in wise combining; in directing the practice of the useful arts, and in the creation of finer values by fine art, by eloquence, by song, or the reproduction of memory. Wealth is in applications of mind to nature; and the art of getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot. One man has stronger arms or longer legs; another sees by the course of streams and growth of markets where land will be wanted, makes a clearing to the river, goes to sleep and wakes up rich. Steam is no stronger now than it was a hundred years ago; but it is put to better use. A clever fellow was acquainted with the expansive force of steam; he also saw the wealth of wheat and grass rotting in Michigan. Then he cunningly screws on the steam-pipe to the wheat-crop. Puff now, O Steam! The steam puffs and expands as before, but this time is dragging all Michigan at its back to hungry New York and hungry England.⁵⁰

Some immediately apparent differences between the two texts include a treatment of material facts (steam, wheat, grass, coal) as a more prominent part of the message in the lecture summary and as the substance of the message rather than as illustrative of higher theory. The audience appears to have been expecting instruction in empirical truth, and that is what they found in Emerson's address. The applause would indicate that the audience responded more readily to the illustrations than to the point of those illustrations: that wealth, both material and moral, consists in the discovery of a “better order” to the one currently in use. Moreover, the newspaper's concern with success is as a how-to proposition rather than as a moral issue having a bearing on one individual's relationship to the social order. For Emerson, the issue is how “every industrious man can get his living without dishonest customs.” For the reviewer, it is merely the issue of getting a living. Finally, the newspaper account flattens the double sense of Emerson's utterances. “Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer,” says Emerson, echoing themes introduced in “The American Scholar,” the “Divinity School Address,” Nature, and “Self-Reliance.” In the newspaper summary, the question becomes purely a material one. Emerson's “He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich,” becomes “Man is an expensive animal and ought to be rich” (emphasis added). For Emerson, “rich” stands as material metaphor for a spiritual and moral state; in the context in which the reviewer places it, it seems to have predominantly material and economic references.

Emerson meant to inculcate moral reformation through his lecture topics, and he proposed to draw in his audience through a choice of topics that seemed familiar and practical. Some of the titles in his western course, “The Conduct of Life,” indicate the nature of the audience to whom he was accommodating himself stylistically—“Power,” “Wealth,” and “Culture.” Each title can be read as praise of the commercial culture as practiced in the United States or, as Emerson intended, a subtle indictment of its shortcomings. Emerson's attempt to restructure his mercantile audience's vision of the institutions they were creating to define their lives might easily be mistaken for endorsement of the existing order. For example, when Emerson says in his lecture on “Power” that “life is a search after power,” the audience who heard common sense but no organizing idea may have interpreted the comment as sanction for an aggressive economic expansionism they could readily recognize as a part of their current practice. The organizing idea of the lecture is, however, Emerson's advocacy of a power that derives from a moral understanding of the laws of nature and a “sympathy with the course of things.”⁵¹ His larger message has little to do with economics. His analogies, which include much practical advice to young men, are nevertheless taken from the realm of affairs with which his audience was familiar—business.

Emerson may have been systematically misconstrued by his audience. Several instances of newspaper reportage of lectures reveal the same tendencies as are apparent in the Cincinnati Gazette's report on “Wealth”: a summary of the individual propositions from the lecture without a sense of underlying structure, an inclination to take Emerson's statements at face value as common sense, and a failure to acknowledge Emerson's reasoning by analogy from the material to the moral sphere.⁵² Other newspapers flatly refused to summarize Emerson's discourses and explained their failure to do so in terms that are very suggestive of misunderstanding. The Alton Weekly Telegraph (Illinois) is a case in point: “Concerning the matter of Mr. Emerson's lectures, we shall not attempt to speak, as a synopsis of anything so closely condensed would be almost impossible. Each sentence seemed separate and distinct, perfect in itself. On his views, however, of culture, that of polishing our manners so as to suppress all natural and spontaneous emotions—making men mere cultivated automatons—was rather in advance of his audience. They may be capable of being educated to such a point;—but we question its desirability.”⁵³ The irony is, so did Emerson. The discussion either obscures or distorts Emerson's point; from the summary, it is not entirely clear which.

Audience claims that Emerson used no logic in constructing his lectures appear to have been another way of saying that his mercantile audiences could not see the logical structure of the discourses. Stephen Toulmin has analyzed the structure of an argument as consisting of claims (assertions about what is true), grounds (the underlying foundation that assures the claim to be solid and reliable), and warrants (the connection that exists between ground and claim).⁵⁴ Emerson's warrant for the assertions of his “common sense” lectures was the radically idealist cosmology sketched out in Nature and further elaborated in the spoken and published lectures of the early period. Whatever language or analogies he employed to reach his audience, he saw himself as preaching a message of moral reform whose warrant was a unique spiritual understanding of nature and nature's laws. His audience heard the warrant to be a set of already familiar, pragmatic, common-sense rules for attaining individual financial and social success. The Emerson whose anecdotes and aphorisms are understood but whose larger method is not becomes the epitome of the commercial values prized by the audiences who invited him.

Often presented in the same lecture series with such pragmatic materialists as P. T. Barnum, Emerson's lectures resembled in import, if not in style, Barnum's “Art of Money-Getting,” or “Success in Life.”⁵⁵ Emerson's presence and message became implicated in the expansion of the commercial culture that sponsored his visits. As the lecture system of which he was part became more solidly entwined with the making of the urban commercial order, his lecture performances came to be part of a canon of acquired learning that defined the parameters of knowledge and behavior within the new international bourgeois way of life, and he himself the representative par excellence of “culture.”

The transition in the Midwest from institutions for self-culture to institutions for the spread of culture can be seen in microcosm in the transformation of the lecture into a form of popular entertainment. The process mirrored a larger one, in which “culture” was becoming a form of consumption necessary for the maintenance of one's class standing. Although originating in the ideals of personal empowerment implicit in the self-culture movement, the new culture industry was signaled by appreciation of emerging icons of culture who apparently supported mercantile values. Emerson's reputation as American prophet became firmly established in tandem with the rise of a national culture industry that created and perpetuated obedience to social hierarchy.⁵⁶ Speakers like Emerson began to be publicized in newspapers and competed with the theater, concerts, panoramas, and wax museums for public audiences. Lecturers were introduced to the public in the same way as other performers.

One criterion that audiences increasingly used to evaluate the worth of performers was the national or international reputation of the performer or amusement in question. P. T. Barnum's extraordinary engineering of a public reception for Jenny Lind in the United States in 1850 illustrates the influence that journalistic coverage of a public figure could have on a career. Barnum distributed widely a biography of Lind emphasizing her international fame, her piety, character, and philanthropy. Crowds who had not heard of her a few months before mobbed her upon arrival in New York. “All of this extraordinary enthusiasm … had developed before Jenny Lind had sung a note in America,” wrote Neil Harris. “In a sense the musical performances, tumultuously received as they were, formed only an anticlimax.”⁵⁷

Lind's remarkable success as a result of Barnum's promotion was one version of a national trend toward celebrity-making, which capitalized on gossipy anecdotes designed to reveal the inmost characters of performers. As Emerson entered a company of “distinguished performers and well known names” in Cincinnati, for example, he began to receive a familiar kind of attention in the local press heretofore rare. One “Anecdote of Mr. Emerson” the Gazette published during Emerson's visit to the city depicted Emerson as at once disingenuous, familiar, and eccentric—in short, as a “personality.” His journal was called “a kind of intellectual and scientific rag-bag” in the popular press, his wife an amazed observer of a genius she little understood. The significance of stories such as these lies not so much in any real information they imparted to audiences as in the way their personification of Emerson and performers like him met the needs of audiences for personalities (not belief systems) with whom to identify and on whom to model themselves.⁵⁸

Newspapers began to comment frequently on the physical appearance of the speaker as if it were equal in importance to anything he might say. Emerson surprised audiences with his gaunt and homely appearance, his narrow forehead, and his long, hooked nose. In his habitual “plain suit of ill-fitting black,” he was “not unlike a New England schoolmaster.” He was by turns bashful, ungraceful, embarrassed, and half-apologetic, but each designation only added to his mystique as an uncalculating soul of pure wisdom and character. “He rarely looks his hearers full in the face,” the Gazette observed, “but at emphatic expression has a habit of turning his eyes backward as if to look in at himself.” Here was no trickster or partisan but a single-hearted purveyor of truth.⁵⁹

Response to great individuals became the index of culture in a city, and evidences of “cultured” responses to them became in turn proof of the speaker's own worthiness. The newspapers announced one of a new course of Emerson lectures in 1857 with the assurance that it had been “delivered with great effect before a very cultivated Boston audience.” In Chicago, in February of 1854, the Tribune prepared the city for Emerson's arrival by reprinting a laudatory excerpt about him from the Edinburgh Review, for Chicago, a foreign literary journal of impeccable reputation. Such notices served a dual function: while drumming up interest in a particular speaker, they also reaffirmed for booster-conscious cities their connection with a larger world of “culture” outside the region. Awareness and appreciation of people who had captivated the better sort of audiences elsewhere testified to the tone and quality of the city itself.⁶⁰

The emphasis on a speaker's wide reputation enabled the promoters to clear a profit and established the city's claim to fame as a member of the cultural avant-garde but led to the demise of speakers of purely local reputation. As a city's participation in a national system of culture grew, local notables declined in status and authority on the lecture circuit. When the Reverend Francis Vinton of New York came to Cincinnati to lecture on “The Gentlewoman,” the Enquirer regretted the small crowd in attendance. “The reverend lecturer has not the particular kind of notoriety which, we regret to say, is most attractive here.” Cincinnati's own Rev. C. M. Butler lectured on “Sir Philip Sidney” in his home city, and the Enquirer took the opportunity to fulminate on the pervasiveness of the celebrity lecture system and its “imported trash.”⁶¹ So prevalent did well-known, highly paid speakers become on the western lecture circuit that some newspapers began self-consciously to try to stem the tide and restore the old regional system. In 1855, the Sandusky Register and the Genius of the West both published lists of western lecturers in the hope that the region would begin to employ its own.⁶² They were not successful. Westerners continued for the most part to look to those of established reputation, that is, to easterners, to occupy their lecture platforms.

Along with describing visiting speakers in inflated terms, newspapers offered glowing descriptions of the audiences who partook of the high-toned intellectual fare. The more famous the speaker, the more elaborate the description of the audience. “The audience to-night will no doubt be the most brilliant and fashionable that has been drawn together for some time,” ran the announcement of a Cincinnati concert of Ole Bull, a Norwegian violinist of renown, and Maurice Strakosch, a pianist, in 1852. Theodore Parker's fame attracted “the select many” to his lecture on “The Progress of Mankind.” With Emerson, the praise awarded the audience grew with his national reputation. His first course of lectures in Cincinnati in 1850 attracted an “audience intellectual as well as large.” “The literati and the fashion of our Queen city” were expected in December of 1852.⁶³ By 1857, Emerson's lectures were “largely and brilliantly attended,” and it was apparent to the reviewer that “the intellectual aristocracy of the city has seldom been so well represented as in this audience.” In Milwaukee, too, Emerson's audience was certified “very large and brilliant.” After the Civil War, when Emerson had become a household word as literary figure and popular lecturer, newspaper accounts increasingly congratulated audiences on their wisdom in appreciating such a great man, “The literary public of Cincinnati honored themselves last night, in honoring perhaps the finest scholar and most profound thinker of the country,” the Gazette reported in the first sentence of its review. “The most elegant assemblages we remember to have seen on any occasion in this city” welcomed him. When Emerson gave his final lecture in Chicago in 1871, it was the audience reaction, not the quality of the lecture, that was at issue. “It is needless to say that it [the lecture] was well received. The applause was discreetly timed, and bespoke the culture of the audience.”⁶⁴

The press continually reinforced the renown of the speaker before, during, and after his arrival and thus promoted the notion that the audience was cultured and brilliant. The “justly celebrated Emerson” was praised; journalists were certain that “the fame of the lecturer will undoubtedly draw a crowded hall”; “the poet and philosopher, who is universally recognized as one of the great thinkers of the age” was coming to speak.⁶⁵ This newspaper promotion could not have created talent where there was none, but it did establish a cycle whereby the repute of the speaker drew self-defined “intellectual” and “cultivated” audiences, and “cultivation” itself began to be defined as attendance on and acquaintance with certain famous cultural figures. Self-culture, the active expansion of one's faculties and the promoting of self-awareness, was becoming transformed into culture, the conspicuous consumption of the performances of people who were nationally and internationally defined as important intellectuals. Emerson became one of the first symbols of this culture, newly defined as the awareness and mastery of a certain body of knowledge. Culture was a state to be achieved, a status to be acquired, no longer a process of self-awareness and introspection.⁶⁶

Emerson the public personality contributed to a national system of culture that was effectually the consumption of well-known texts and performances. Indeed, his lectures, in an oft-repeated phrase, came to be known as “intellectual treats,” tidbits of wisdom dispensed by the wise man to the public at large. Thomas Wentworth Higginson perhaps best expressed this representative image Emerson had come to hold for most midwesterners as he repeated the assessment of a booking agent for western tours: Emerson's continued popularity rested “not on the ground that the people understand him, but that ‘they think such men ought to be encouraged.’”⁶⁷ “He impresses one with the idea of long years of study, of many nights of toil, of incessant diligence in the fields of art, science and literature,” another commented.⁶⁸ Emerson had become the professional embodiment of Man Thinking, the archetype set forth in his own “American Scholar” address of 1837. Ironically, however, in becoming a representative man, he seemed set apart, superhuman—no longer an inspiration to individual thought but an embodiment of the best that had already been thought and was known to be true. As Emerson himself remarked of Horace Greeley, the people liked him because he did their thinking for them.⁶⁹

Nearly half a century after Emerson's decade of western lecturing, Thorstein Veblen observed that, in all known civilizations, the people place an esoteric knowledge of truth and reality in the keeping of a select body of specialists; scientists, scholars, savants, clerks, priests, shamans, folk healers. “In the apprehension of the group in whose life and esteem it lives and takes effect,” Veblen wrote, “this esoteric knowledge is taken to embody a systematization of fundamental and eternal truth; although it is evident to any outsider that it will take its character and its scope from the habits of life of the group, from the institutions with which it is bound in a web of give and take.”⁷⁰ Even though Emerson had not necessarily intended to do so, even though, in fact, such a system of culture as an end in itself was at odds with some of the cardinal tenets of his philosophy, he became its high priest. By 1860, it was generally agreed that Emerson was “one of the most remarkable men in America.” He embodied values that his audience took to be vital to their way of life. He was “original, self-reliant, bold in thought and utterance,” yet he seemed to threaten none of the customs or institutions that had become comfortable. He was “unpretending and simple in manners,” yet he became a standard by which to measure one's own intellectual and moral sophistication. “He says many things that the majority of people either misunderstand or intelligently disapprove,” yet his audience could tell, from his impeccable character and apparent approval of the mores of society—of wealth, power, aristocracy—that he did not really mean these things.⁷¹ He became the image of the seer and prophet whose double-edged moral message could be taken materially if it made more sense to do so. The embodiment of the democratic scholar, he helped to consolidate for an economically defined community a notion of culture that reinforced boundaries between the cultivated and the uncultivated. He represented the paradox of a dominant culture that claimed to be dedicated to self-improvement but that increasingly took self-improvement to mean adherence to an ever-more-clearly defined body of standards and behaviors sanctioned by the mercantile and professional groups who sponsored him.

Emerson could become this powerful national symbol because the structure of the lecture system encouraged speakers and audiences alike to view what happened on the lecture platform as unbiased and apolitical.⁷² The moral knowledge dispensed from the platform by the guileless speaker could shape a national consensus. Especially in the Midwest, where the proliferation of religious denominations provided some measure of ideological division, Emerson's ideas were bled of any philosophical, political, or religious implications and used as the basis for a secular faith that focused on a materially defined progress, unlimited wealth, and conspicuous social achievement within the framework of a stable and proscriptive set of moral values. If professional and mercantile people dominated the values of this new consensus, if the moral orientation of the mercantile community and its Young Men's Associations was generalized and taken to be impartial and unbiased knowledge, it was not through hypocrisy. The intentions of the groups were sincere, even if the result was to extend their own hegemony over American culture as a whole.

Certainly, this is not the whole story of Emerson or the whole story of what audiences made of him. There remains the question of what he may have thought of his audience's misapprehension of him. In general, he seems to have believed that a person had to speak the truth and maintain a studied oblivion toward what hearers might or might not make of it.⁷³ Other audiences contested for the right to interpret his words definitively, among them, religious scholars, philosophers, literary critics, historians, and radical reformers, who did not cease to appropriate his discourse to their own ends, despite the popular triumph of the mercantile Emerson. Because he claimed to speak a truth that transcended context, Emerson may also be a particularly blatant example of the process by which an intellectual may be “made” by the interpretive stance of a specific discourse community. With other intellectuals, the process may not be nearly so clear cut.

A view of the mercantile Emerson nevertheless helps sort out many of the apparent contradictions within Emerson scholarship, as scholars may belong to more than one discourse community at a time. It reminds us that there is one Emerson but many discourse communities to hear his message. It is not only the speaker who represents a battleground in which conflicting cultural tensions or differing discourse communities strive for reconciliation; the text itself is debated and interpreted by various publics. Groups that are catalyzed into new forms of self-consciousness as a result of hearing texts that resonate for them receive ways not only of naming the world for themselves but also of seeming to share a common vision with others who share the text. No matter that the same words may be recognized in a wholly different way by other communities of listeners or readers. If Emerson has come down to us as a cultural prophet, it is not necessarily evidence that we all share a common culture founded on a common intellectual philosophy—only that the words themselves are common to enough cultural groups that we are willing to overlook the sometimes radically different ways in which we hear them.

Notes

1. Perry Miller, “From Edwards to Emerson,” New England Quarterly, 13 (1940): 589-617; F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York, 1941); Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago, 1976). For a variety of views on Emerson spanning 150 years, see Critical Essays on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert E. Burkholder and Joel Myerson, eds. (Boston, 1983). Some of the major biographies of Emerson include Ralph L. Rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York, 1949); Joel Porte, Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time (New York, 1979); Maurice Gonnaud, Individu et société dans l'oeuvre de Ralph Waldo Emerson (Paris, 1964); Stephen E. Whicher, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Philadelphia, Pa., 1953); Gay Wilson Allen, Waldo Emerson: A Biography (New York, 1981); and John McAleer. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of Encounter (Boston, 1984).

2. Robert E. Burkholder and Joel Myerson, Emerson: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1985).

3. See Burkholder and Myerson, Bibliography, 12-27; and selected reactions to Nature in Emerson's Nature—Origin, Growth, Meaning, Merton M. Sealts, Jr., and Alfred R. Ferguson, eds. (New York, 1969), 74-110.

4. Donald M. Scott, “The Popular Lecture and the Creation of a Public in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of American History, 66 (1980): 791-809. On the lyceum movement, see Carl Bode, The American Lyceum: Town Meeting of the Mind (New York, 1956); and David Mead, Yankee Eloquence in the Middle West: The Ohio Lyceum, 1850-1870 (East Lansing, Mich., 1951).

5. Until 1835, even publication was predominantly a local matter, with few materials marketed outside the area where the bookseller had printed and bound them. Of the lecturers during the first decade of the lyceum in Salem, Massachusetts, for example, fewer than half resided in Salem itself. The rest included locally prominent politicians, ministers, and college professors, such as William Sullivan, Edward and Alexander H. Everett, and Henry Ware, Jr. See William Charvat, “James T. Fields and the Beginnings of Book Promotion, 1840-1855,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 8 (1944-45): 76; and Historical Sketch of the Salem Lyceum, with a List of the Officers and Lectures since its Formation in 1830 (Salem, Mass., 1879), rpt. in Kenneth Walter Cameron, ed., The Massachusetts Lyceum during the American Renaissance (Hartford, Conn., 1969), 15-17.

6. Boston Daily Advertiser, 21, 22, and 26 October 1838.

7. Boston Daily Advertiser, 21 February 1839.

8. To publish accounts of lectures, or even to describe the lecturer so as possibly to misrepresent him, the Post argued, was tantamount to robbing him of his daily bread, because it precluded his right to give the lecture again and to receive remuneration for it. Excerpts from this article are reprinted in the Boston Daily Advertiser and Patriot, 7 December 1841.

9. Salem Register (Massachusetts), 3 June 1850, p. 2, rpt. in Kenneth Walter Cameron, ed., Literary Comment in American Renaissance Newspapers (Hartford, Conn., 1977), 19.

10. William Alexander Linn, Horace Greeley (New York, 1912), 71.

11. Emerson met Greeley in 1842; throughout the decade, Greeley published sympathetic reports of what had come to be called “transcendentalism.” In 1844, Emerson's stock undoubtedly rose further as Greeley hired Margaret Fuller as his regular literary editor. Her first piece for the Tribune was a review of Emerson's Essays, Second Series. George Ripley, late of Brook Farm, followed her as the Tribune's literary critic in 1849. See Linn, Horace Greeley, 71-109; Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life (New York, 1869), 169-91; James Parton, The Life of Horace Greeley (Boston, 1855), 219-28; and Glyndon G. Van Deusen, Horace Greeley: Nineteenth-Century Crusader (Philadelphia, Pa., 1953). Charvat indicated that, during the period of the commercialization of the book trade (1840-55), an author's “literary and social contacts”—and those of the publisher—were instrumental in getting books reviewed in the popular press (“Fields and the Beginnings of Book Promotion,” 77-78). Hence the contact of Emerson's friends with the influential world of New York periodicals seems particularly significant. Charvat's Literary Publishing in America, 1790-1850 (Philadelphia, Pa., 1959) provides a fuller description of the way in which publishing networks in the United States operated during this period.

12. Boston Daily Advertiser, 7 December 1841.

13. Boston Daily Advertiser, 16 December 1841.

14. Boston Daily Advertiser, 16 December 1841.

15. See, for example, George Gilfillan, “Ralph Waldo Emerson; or The ‘Coming Man,’” Tait's Magazine, rpt. in Littell's Living Age, 17 (April 1848). This article is in turn reprinted in Kenneth Walter Cameron, ed., Emerson among His Contemporaries (Hartford, Conn., 1967), 15-19.

16. In addition to Gilfillan's article, see “Emerson,” Blackwood's Magazine, rpt. in Eclectic Magazine, 13 (February 1848): 145-58, in turn rpt. in Cameron, Emerson among His Contemporaries, 8-14; “Mr. Emerson's Lectures,” Jerrold's Newspaper, rpt. in The Daguerrotype, 2 (12 August 1848): 467-73, and in Cameron, 20-24; “The Emerson Mania,” The English Review, 12 (September 1849): 139 and following, rpt. in The Eclectic Magazine, 23 (December 1849): 546-53, in Littell's Living Age, 25 (6 April 1850): 37-38, and in Cameron, 38-39; “Review of Representative Men,” British Quarterly Review, 11 (1 May 1850): 281-315, rpt. in Littell's Living Age, 26 (6 July 1850): 1-16, and in Cameron, 45-56. On the wide notice taken of Emerson in British periodicals from 1840-50, see William J. Sowder, Emerson's Impact on the British Isles and Canada (Charlottesville, Va., 1966), 1-28.

17. E. Douglas Branch, The Sentimental Years, 1836-1860: A Social History (New York, 1934), 111.

18. The article is almost certainly “Emerson,” Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 62 (December 1847): 643-57. This was the first article on Emerson published in Blackwood's.

19. Moncure Daniel Conway, Autobiography, Memories and Experiences, 2 vols. (London, 1904), 1:68-70.

20. Evidence is both summarized and quoted at length in Townsend Scudder, “Emerson's British Lecture Tour, 1847-1848,” American Literature, 7 (1935): 166-80.

21. Robert Chambers, “Mechanics' Institutions,” Papers for the People (Philadelphia, Pa., 1851), 3: 197-228, quoted in Scudder, “Emerson's British Lecture Tour,” 35. For more extensive remarks on the nature of Emerson's British audiences, see Scudder, 15-36; see also David D. Hall, “The Victorian Connection,” in Victorian America, Daniel Walker Howe, ed. (Philadelphia, Pa., 1976), 84.

22. John J. Rowe, “Cincinnati's Early Cultural and Educational Enterprises,” Bulletin of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio, 8 (1950): 304-06; Elbert Jay Benton, Cultural Study of an American City: Cleveland, Part II (Cleveland, Ohio, 1944), 38-39; William Alexander Taylor, Centennial History of Columbus and Franklin County, Ohio, 2 vols. (Chicago and Columbus, 1909), 1: 241; W. R. Holloway, Indianapolis: A Historical and Statistical Sketch of the Railroad City (Indianapolis, Ind., 1870), 50. Mead, Yankee Eloquence, provides the fullest account of the growth of the lecture system in Ohio.

23. Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), 109.

24. See Boyer, Urban Masses, 108-20; Irvin G. Wyllie, The Self-Made Man in America: The Myth of Rags to Riches (New Brunswick, N.J., 1954), 34-54; and Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, Conn., 1982), 1-32. On the moral dangers inherent in the theater, see Claudia D. Johnson, “That Guilty Third Tier: Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century American Theaters,” in Howe, Victorian America, 111-20.

25. William Ellery Channing, in Self-Culture (1838) noted the importance of “Utterance”—not only because he considered speaking in public a prime way of improving one's intellect but also because “to have intercourse with respectable people we must speak their language.” He noted that social rank and social advancement depended on this fluency. See Self-Culture (rpt. edn., New York, 1969), 27-28.

26. Wyllie, Self-Made Man, 21-54 and 94-115; and John G. Cawelti, Apostles of the Self-Made Man (Chicago, 1965), 39-98.

27. On character as a defense of virtue against the corrupt, see Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 1-55.

28. This is not to suggest that the mercantile classes of eastern cities were not also influential in the establishment of its cultural institutions. The leisure and professional classes nevertheless seem to have been more strongly represented there than in the West. See Ronald Story, “Class and Culture in Boston: The Athenaeum, 1807-1860,” American Quarterly, 27 (1975): 178-99. An example of mercantile leadership in cultural affairs that I take to be fairly typical in the Midwest was the organization of the St. Louis Mercantile Library Association, the organization that sponsored Emerson's visit in 1852. It was established and funded by merchants and businessmen. Convinced by mercantile journals such as Hunt's Merchant Magazine that their young clerks needed to be educated beyond practical matters of business to do their jobs well, merchants took pride in the “inestimable value” that the new association would offer “the young men connected with commerce” by sponsoring lectures and discussions as well as providing books. Missouri Reporter (St. Louis), 6 January 1846. The typical founder of the association tended to be an older and established merchant involved in business dealings with the New York financial market and with markets outside St. Louis. He had probably migrated to St. Louis in his youth in search of “a wider field of enterprise,” as the stock phrase for the sort of ambition that was positively evaluated went. He looked on himself as a self-made man whose thirst for self-culture led to his success. A canny businessman as well as a morally responsible employer, he took personal responsibility for promoting the reputation of his city as a cultural center. See Brad Luckingham. “A Note on the Significance of the Merchant in the Development of St. Louis Society as Expressed in the Philosophy of the Mercantile Library Association, 1846-1854,” Missouri Historical Review, 57 (1963): 184-98.

29. For the St. Louis case as one example, see Richard Edwards and M. Hopewell, Edward's Great West and Her Commercial Metropolis, Embracing a General View of the West, and a Complete History of St. Louis, from the Landing of Ligueste, in 1764, to the Present Time (St. Louis, Mo., 1860), 389, which lists thirty-six individuals instrumental in the establishment of the Mercantile Library Association.

30. Anne Louise Hastings, “Emerson's Journal at the West, 1850-1853” (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1942), 8.

31. This is the traditional notion of the self-made man, as opposed to the ideal of self-culture. It is discussed at length in Wyllie, Self-Made Man; and Cawelti, Apostles of the Self-Made Man.

32. Taylor, Centennial History, 241.

33. Although the responses to Emerson's visits to Cincinnati had at times their own character, they are, so far as I can tell, fairly typical of the range of reaction he received elsewhere in the region. I base this judgment mainly on a wealth of accounts of Emerson's lecture tours in the Middle West and his reception there that rely heavily on local periodicals for documentation: Mead, Yankee Eloquence, 24-61; Willard Thorpe, “Emerson on Tour,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 16 (1930): 19-34; Samuel P. Orth, A History of Cleveland, Ohio, 3 vols. (Chicago and Cleveland, 1910), 1: 491-93; Owen Philip Hawley, Orient Pearls at Random Strung: Mr. Emerson Comes to Marietta (Marietta, Ohio, 1967); C. J. Wasung, “Emerson Comes to Detroit,” Michigan History Magazine, 29 (1945): 59-72; Russel B. Nye, “Emerson in Michigan and the Northwest,” Michigan History Magazine, 26 (1942): 159-72; Donald F. Tingley, “Ralph Waldo Emerson on the Illinois Lecture Circuit,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 64 (1971): 192-205; Paul Russell Anderson, “Quincy, An Outpost of Philosophy,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 34 (1941): 54-57; Robert R. Hubach, “Illinois, Host to Nineteenth Century Authors,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 38 (1945): 454-59; Hubert H. Hoeltje, “Ralph Waldo Emerson in Iowa,” Iowa Journal of History and Politics, 25 (1927): 236-76; Hubert H. Hoeltje, “Notes on the History of Lecturing in Iowa, 1855-1885,” Iowa Journal of History and Politics, 25 (1927): 62-131; Luella M. Wright, “Culture through Lectures,” Iowa Journal of History and Politics, 38 (1940): 115-62; Brad Luckingham, “The Pioneer Lecturer in the West: A Note on the Appearance of Ralph Waldo Emerson in St. Louis, 1852-1853,” Missouri Historical Review, 58 (1963): 70-88; “Emerson in Indianapolis,” Indiana History Bulletin, 30 (1953): 115-16; Lynda Beltz, “Emerson's Lectures in Indianapolis,” Indiana Magazine of History, 60 (1964): 269-80; Hubert H. Hoeltje, “Emerson in Minnesota,” Minnesota History, 11 (1930): 145-59; and C. E. Schorer, “Emerson and the Wisconsin Lyceum,” American Literature, 24 (1953): 462-75. Louise Hastings, “Emerson in Cincinnati,” New England Quarterly, 11 (1930): 443-69, focuses on Emerson's reception in this city.

34. Cincinnati Literary Club, Minutes, vol. 1, MS., Cincinnati Public Library. On the Cincinnati Library Club, see Hastings, “Emerson's Journal at the West,” 6-7; James Albert Green, The Literary Club and Cincinnati in 1849 (Cincinnati, Ohio, 1931), 3; and Eslie Asbury, “The Literary Club,” Cincinnati Historical Society Bulletin, 32 (1974): 105-21.

35. Ainsworth Rand Spofford, “Address Delivered at the Literary Club's 50th Anniversary,” Minutes of the Literary Club, 28 October 1899, quoted in Hastings, “Emerson in Cincinnati,” 443.

36. Daily Cincinnati Gazette, 15 May 1850.

37. Salem Register, 3 June 1850.

38. Carl Abbott, Boosters and Businessmen: Popular Economic Thought and Urban Growth in the Antebellum Middle West (Westport, Conn., 1981), 39. On the booster mentality on the midwestern frontier, see also Don Harrison Doyle, The Social Order of a Frontier Community: Jacksonville, Illinois, 1825-70 (Urbana, Ill., 1978), 62-91.

39. “Emerson's Lectures,” Daily Cincinnati Gazette, 22 May 1850.

40. Daily Cincinnati Gazette, 24 May 1850.

41. Cincinnati Daily Commercial, 23 May 1850; Daily Cincinnati Gazette, 24 May 1850, Columbian and Great West, 1 June 1850; Daily Cincinnati Gazette, 30 May 1850.

42. Columbian and Great West, 1 June 1850.

43. Daily Cincinnati Gazette, 30 May 1850. For a complete text of “Eloquence,” see W 1: 59-100.

44. Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, Charles Richard Williams, ed., 5 vols. (Columbus, Ohio, 1922), 1: 315.

45. Daily Cincinnati Gazette, 30 May 1850, 3 June 1850. For the printed essay versions of these lectures, see W 7: 187-222 (“Books”), and 12: 65-89 (“Instinct and Inspiration”).

46. Chicago Tribune, 23 January 1857.

47. Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 28 January 1857.

48. Diary and Letters of Hayes, 301. For a similar reaction, see the commentary of William Cullen Bryant a decade earlier, who, as he listened to Emerson in New York, explicitly listened for transcendentalism: “In regard to the peculiar doctrines of Mr. Emerson, we hardly consider ourselves qualified to judge. We cannot say that we precisely apprehend what they are. Now and then, in listening to his discourses, or reading his essays, we have fancied that we caught glimpses of great and novel truths”; New York Evening Post, 3 March 1842, rpt. in Charles I. Glicksberg, “Bryant on Emerson the Lecturer,” New England Quarterly, 12 (1939): 530-34.

49. Daily Cincinnati Gazette, 13 December 1852.

50. W 6: 85-86.

51. W 6: 55, 58.

52. Instances in which parallel texts can be compared include reportage on “Power” in the Daily Cincinnati Gazette, 10 December 1852, with “Power” in The Conduct of Life (W 6: 51-82); and a summary of “Power” in The Illinois Journal, 13 January 1853, rpt. in Robert R. Hubach, “Emerson's Lectures in Springfield, Illinois, in January, 1853,” American Notes and Queries, 6 (1947): 164-67. Compare a summary of “Books” in The Independent (New York), 4 April 1850, with “Books” in Society and Solitude (W 7: 187-221). Compare “Social Aims” and “Resources,” summarized in Boston Semi-Weekly Advertiser, 30 November 1864, with the essays of those titles in Letters and Social Aims (W 8: 77-108, 135-54). Summaries of lectures for which I have not yet 30 November 1864; “The Man of the World,” Cincinnati Daily Gazette [same periodical as Daily Cincinnati Gazette], 15 March 1867; “Economy,” Daily Cincinnati Gazette, 14 December 1852; “Culture,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 4 February 1854.

53. 20 December 1867, rpt. in Paul O. Williams, “Emerson in Alton, Illinois”, ESQ [Emerson Society Quarterly], 47 (1967): 98. Among those who declined to synopsize because of the “condensed nature” of the utterance were the Daily Cincinnati Gazette, 5 June 1850; and the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 1 February 1857.

54. Stephen Toulmin, Richard Rieke, and Allan Janik, An Introduction to Reasoning (New York, 1979), 25-26.

55. On Barnum, see Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Boston, 1973), 154-58, 193-95.

56. I have borrowed the term “culture industry” from Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York, 1969), 120-67.

57. Harris, Humbug, 121.

58. Daily Cincinnati Gazette, 22 November 1852; 15 December 1852. On the tendency toward the creation of media personalities, see Richard Sennett, who, in The Fall of Public Man (New York, 1976), made the case that, by the nineteenth century in Western culture, privatization of experience led to a distorted emphasis on personality of public figures rather than attention to their social roles.

59. Daily Cincinnati Gazette, 28 January 1857. Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 56-152, has commented on the use of dress and mannerisms during this period to communicate an image of personal sincerity.

60. Daily Cincinnati Gazette, 31 January 1857; Chicago Daily Tribune, 4 February 1854.

61. Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 25 January 1857.

62. Sandusky Commercial Register, 24 October 1855. Mead, Yankee Eloquence, 194-95, discussed the growing disenchantment with eastern lecturers by the end of the 1850s; W. H. Venable, Beginning of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley: Historical and Biographical Sketches (New York, 1949), 251-53, lists the eastern and western lectures being promoted by the various factions.

63. Daily Cincinnati Gazette, 23 and 30 November 1852; 22 May 1850; and 8 December 1852. Cincinnati Daily Times, 8 December 1852, printed the only mixed description of an audience I have come across. The auditors were mixed in character, it observed, and “people who never had a Father, and do not possess a thousand dollars in the world to bless themselves and progeny” took the front seats.

64. Cincinnati Daily Commercial, 3 February 1857; Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, 8 February 1854; Daily Cincinnati Gazette, 15 March 1867; Cincinnati Daily Commercial, 15 March 1867; Chicago Tribune, 28 November 1871.

65. Daily Cincinnati Gazette, 10 December 1852; Chicago Tribune, 2 February 1854; Cincinnati Daily Commercial, 27 January 1857.

66. This definition of culture as acquisition of a certain body of knowledge and style is suggested by Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York, 1982), 140-81; and Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York, 1976), 1-45.

67. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “The American Lecture-System,” Every Saturday, 5 (18 April 1868): 494.

68. Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 1 February 1857.

69. Chicago Daily Tribune, 4 February 1854.

70. Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum of the Conduct of Universities by Business Men (New York, 1957), 1.

71. Cincinnati Daily Gazette, 2 February 1860.

72. The Cincinnati Young Men's Mercantile Library Association, for example, took pains to prevent discussion of anything “political” in its lecture program. Orestes Brownson caused a ruckus in 1852 when he made inflammatory remarks about Louis Kossuth. See David Mead, “Brownson and Kossuth at Cincinnati,” Bulletin of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio, 7 (1949): 90-93. Henry Ward Beecher was invited to St. Louis in 1860 on the condition that he “eschew all subjects pertaining either to politics or religion”; Daily Cincinnati Gazette, 2 February 1860. He refused the invitation. Emerson himself received some difficulty in the press in Cincinnati after he had publicly spoken elsewhere in praise of John Brown. See Cincinnati Daily Times, 1 February 1860; and Cincinnati Daily Commercial, 2 February 1860.

73. On Emerson's attitude toward audience reception, see John H. Sloan, “‘The Miraculous Uplifting’: Emerson's Relationship with His Audience,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 52 (1966): 10-15. Passages in Emerson's own writing that are illuminating include L 5: 4 and JMN 9: 10-11, 50, 225, 258, 430; 10: 315.