Reading Lind Mania: Print Culture and the Construction of Nineteenth-Century Audiences

On 2 September 1850, the New York Tribune reported on an event that would become an American legend. The steamship Atlantic was greeted upon its arrival in New York by “the spectacle of some thirty or forty thousand persons congregated on all the adjacent piers. . . . From all quarters, crowds . . . could be seen hurrying down towards the Atlantic’s dock. The multitude increased so rapidly that we began to fear there would be difficulty making a way through it.” As the “distinguished visitors” disembarked, the reporter noted, several people in the crowd were “severely bruised, some came off with bloody noses, and two boys, about twelve years of age, appeared to be seriously injured. Had not the rush been checked in time, many lives would have been lost.” ¹ All this in honor of a “young, untitled woman,” who had, the Tribune noted,

won her way by genius, by effort, by lofty achievement, to the society and friendship of the noblest and most eminent of her sex and to the hearts of admiring nations. . . . Surely the landing of such a woman on our shores may well call forth a burst of popular enthusiasm, which her talents, however peerless, would never have elicited had they not been paralleled by her truth, her goodness, and her boundless generosity. ²

The Tribune reporter’s explanation of Jenny Lind’s popularity—or, as it was termed by the popular press, “Lind mania”—is only partially accurate. As her biographers and those of her promoter, P. T. Barnum, have rightly noted, Americans were drawn to Lind because of a combination of her own talents and personal qualities and Barnum’s successful manipulation of press and public. However, such arguments do not sufficiently consider the audience’s responses to and uses of Jenny Lind as a public figure. Why was Lind’s version of talent and virtue, as presented by the press, so attractive to mid-century Americans?

Understanding audience response is a key problem in the study of nineteenth-century popular culture. Private writings provide some insight, but they are too limited in number and representation to allow anything but a very rough approximation of the audience-based scholarship so useful in understanding twentieth-century popular texts. Based on their ethnographic studies of popular-culture audiences, critics such as John Fiske and Janice Radway have argued that texts achieve popularity because they offer audiences opportunities to construct versions of themselves and their worlds that appeal to their psychological and social needs. As Fiske suggests, audiences choose to make certain texts popular based on their relevance in contemporary culture, including their incorporation of current issues and images. He further argues that texts become popular because they are “producerly,” offering both familiar motifs and multiple meanings. Radway’s work suggests that readers might have been especially drawn to texts that offered useful ways of reading their own experiences. In her study of romance-novel readers, Radway argues that the novels meet their readers’ psychological needs, in part because they offer women alternative models for reading their own lives. ³ These critical approaches offer useful guidelines for reading nineteenth-century texts, even if we cannot test these readings against representative audience responses. We should, they suggest, be attentive to the ways nineteenth-century texts use images and language from contemporary public discourse to offer opportunities for multiple readings and to the ways they represent their audiences.

Jenny Lind offers a useful case study for such an approach. Her story provides important insights into the creation of public, popular culture and the construction of mass audiences during the period when entertainment was first becoming a commodity for mass consumption. Moreover, public writing provides an appropriate set of texts to consider. Lind’s concerts attracted huge crowds, but her audience extended far beyond the walls of the concert hall to include thousands who never heard her sing. They observed Lind as we must, through newspapers, magazines, and books. These texts demonstrate that the Swedish Nightingale’s tour provided writers and readers an opportunity for public discourse about gender, religion, business success, and...