- Performing Authorship in the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Lecture Tour by Amanda Adams
While some author biographies highlight lecture circuits, Amanda Adams’s Performing Authorship in the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Lecture Tour takes an in-depth look at the central role tours played within literary culture. Adams skillfully illustrates how self-promotion became a necessary—if uncomfortable—element of both British and American authors’ desire to remain relevant within the increasing “craze for elocution” (4). Like modern writers pressured to maintain snowballing public profiles including web pages, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, blogs, book signings, readings, and appearances, nineteenth-century writers were required to play the role of author by embodying the name on the title page and engaging with audiences in live transatlantic performances. Though some authors famously excelled at dramatizing their public personae and heightening the appeal of their written texts, others felt increasing discomfort and anxiety about the demand for institutionalized performances.
Although the American lyceum and Chautauqua movements have received scholarly attention for the way they popularized educational public lectures, Adams provides a focused examination of the ways in which literary authors were obligated to embrace performative oral culture. As celebrity culture grew, lecture tours became an increasingly common method for both struggling and established authors to assert themselves in the transatlantic mass marketplace. The lecture system hosted speakers on topics of religion, politics, education, and the anti-slavery movement. Audiences increasingly demanded a bridge between the text and the name behind the text, forcing authors to consider how they would embody their “authentic” personae and use their bodies both on and off the stage while performing their “authority” (11). As Adams puts it, “performance was everything” (6). [End Page 199]
The first chapter looks at Harriet Martineau’s and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s transatlantic lectures on abolition as precursors to the literary lecture tour. At a time when the public frowned upon women writers and women speaking in public venues, Martineau and Stowe were met with tension on both counts. Anti-abolitionists did not simply seek to stifle Martineau’s published works, but to silence the author’s body itself. In her efforts to speak out against slavery during an American engagement, Martineau became the target of frightening death threats including warnings of lynching and having her tongue cut out. During the same era, Adams argues, abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe was reticent to speak in public due to external social pressures about proper gender spheres and an internal desire to balance her public identity as an author with a performance of her private life as a conventional female.
Perhaps no nineteenth-century transatlantic author tours are more famous than those of Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. Adams’s second chapter argues that beyond wanting to give successful dramatic readings and public performances, both authors were invested in protecting their literary copyrights. Prior to the British Parliament and the U.S. Congress signing the International Copyright Agreement in 1891, British and American authors held no legal protection against the widespread transatlantic reprinting of their works. During the 1860s and 1870s, both Dickens and Twain traveled across the Atlantic to engage with their growing audiences, though their lack of revenue from international sales made the relationship inherently fraught with conflict. In so doing, both celebrities asserted ownership over their intellectual property by never speaking as “the author” but always performing as one of the characters or narrators of their publications. According to Adams, “they achieved an embodied intimacy with the published work from which the reading came” because the dynamic “performed an authorial persona that stressed the author-as-source” (59).
Adams’s third and fourth chapters cover the transatlantic performances of Matthew Arnold, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James. Arnold’s and Wilde’s public performances—and particularly Wilde’s famed wit—engaged their fans, grew their celebrity, and shaped their public personae. Perhaps more interesting is Adams’s concluding chapter, which looks at Henry James’s return to the lecture tour scene in 1904 some twenty years after his last appearance. Adams argues that...