Culture Club: The Curious History of the Boston Athenaeum (review)

In Culture Club: The Curious History of the Boston Athenaeum, independent scholar Katherine Wolff explores the origins of the Athenaeum as idea and as institution and then uses a thematic approach to examine certain aspects of the Athenaeum's first half century. (This book is not a full historical account of the institution; the most recent 150 years are but briefly sketched in a three-page concluding section [149–51].) Under the broad themes of enterprise, identity, and conscience (xvi), Wolff employs three sets of paired chapters to mine the Athenaeum as a "case study of the many uses a self-proclaimed 'ornament for the city' had over the first decades of the nineteenth century" (xiv).

The first chapter focuses on the Athenaeum's roots in Boston's Anthology Society, a literary discussion group composed of the city's leisured Anglophilic intellectuals. Wolff takes as her main subject William Smith Shaw, the nephew of John and Abigail Adams who was for many years the embodiment of the Athenaeum itself (so much so that he became known as "Athenaeum" Shaw). Wolff argues that the Athenaeum's "exclusivity and conservatism can be traced to Shaw's mournful disposition" (17), brought on by the untimely death in 1807 of his dear friend and Anthology Society colleague Arthur Maynard Walter, just as the Athenaeum was taking shape. In placing so much emphasis on Shaw's melancholy as the model for the tone and structure of the library, however, Wolff discounts much of her own second chapter, which makes clear just how much the Boston Athenaeum was based on its English predecessors, most notably the Liverpool Athenaeum.

Wolff offers a close visual reading of the Athenaeum's seal and its Italian emblem antecedent as well as a study of the 1807 Memoir of the Boston Athenaeum (Boston: Printed at the Anthology Office, Court-Street, by Munroe & Francis, 1807), a pamphlet designed to solicit subscriptions to the institution. The Memoir, Wolff humorously notes, presents the Athenaeum as a sort of "one-stop, full-service cultural spa" (52), proclaiming its many planned offerings: reading room, library, museum, gallery, observatory, laboratory. Most of these uses never came to be, of course, but the Memoir sure makes it sound like a place with which anyone would wish to be associated.

Taking up her second theme, identity, Wolff devotes the third chapter to historian Hannah Adams, the first woman to be granted formal access to the Athenaeum's reading room, in 1829. Wolff sees Adams as "both pawn and player" (66), patronized by the male leadership of the Athenaeum, who "enhanced their own sense of self through her reputation," but, as an accomplished writer and known scholar, was able to gain access to the materials she needed for her work.

More traumatic to the genteel docility of the Athenaeum's sensibilities than the polite Miss Adams was the decision to host public art exhibitions, the first in 1827. Wolff examines various aspects of this landmark moment, including collection and exhibition strategies and priorities, responses from the contemporary press, the variety of promotional images used, and the physical spaces designed to accommodate public visitors while maintaining the customary peaceful refuge for the membership.

The fifth and sixth chapters fall under the general theme of conscience. Wolff discusses the Athenaeum's official silence on the issue of abolition, arguing that the institution "operated within a context of contradiction—sustaining an environment of benevolent authority while simultaneously taking no public stand on the question of the day" (110). She goes on: "[By] trying to remain apolitical, the Athenaeum nevertheless unwittingly participated in the debate about slavery. Its limited role, played out through ostracism and the withdrawal of privilege, subtly contributed to the delay of emancipation" (113). This is quite a charge, and rather an unfair one, based as it is mainly on the 1835 termination of Lydia Maria Child's access to the library (nowhere linked to...