Performing Authorship in the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Lecture Tour by Amanda Adams (review)

Seeing the enviable list of Victorians who crossed the Atlantic to lecture on everything from the evils of slavery to the right to privacy makes me wish the phonograph had been invented a few decades earlier. Then we could hear those speeches for ourselves. Amanda Adams’s Performing Authorship in the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Lecture Tour makes abundantly clear how much we miss through books alone when dealing with a media ecology pitched to “hearers” as well as “readers” (5).

Fortunately, we have Adams to guide us through this lost world. Lecturing emerged from the pulpits, theaters, lyceums, and Mechanics’ Institutes in Britain and the United States (despite American efforts to depict the lecture as a home-grown entertainment) to become a profession in its own right by the 1860s. We have the nineteenth century to thank for our suspicions that lecturing is as much about style as substance. The lecture’s arc is an all too familiar one, evolving from an activity for amateurs into a lucrative industry, especially for writers. By the end of the nineteenth century, authors could hardly avoid the obligation to make some kind of transatlantic statement. British lions (and lionesses, in Harriet Martineau’s case) sought a market overseas while American authors sought respect. And the press took notice. At a time when magazines splashed authors’ images across their pages and Henry James complained about “the devouring publicity of life,” those who refused to play the game risked an unflattering portrait (The Complete Notebook of Henry James, edited by Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers [Oxford University Press, 1987], 19).

Adams deserves credit for pairing authors (usually matching them with a “mirroring foreign author”) in a way that moves beyond potted biographies and instead illuminates different aspects of the tours (32). Hence we see the variety of speaking styles as some authors improvise while others recycle the same script night after night. We consider not only Oscar Wilde but also Matthew Arnold as a celebrity (both took elocution lessons). And we ponder why Charles Dickens was outraged by the sale of his hair whereas Wilde considered the sale of his an honor. The case-studies highlight the gap between those authors who mastered the art of self-promotion (such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, and Wilde) and those discomfited by celebrity (such as Arnold and Martineau). As one might expect, Americans were generally better at this than their British counterparts. The benefits of Adams’s comparative approach more than offset the casualties left out of the book as a consequence (Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope, to name a few).

Adams’s survey will hold few surprises for anyone familiar with her chosen authors, whose careers have been well documented elsewhere. The focus here is on the usual suspects—from Dickens to Twain and Wilde—instead of, say, Margaret Fuller or John Gough. The book’s value instead resides in the strange bedfellows brought together by a book that opens with Frederick Douglass and closes with Henry James. Douglass frames the lecture circuit in fascinating ways even though he is the least representative figure. He is not even an author when he begins lecturing and risks arrest as a fugitive slave at every public appearance; his props include a whip, an iron collar, and fetters. (They flashed back into my mind when we reached Wilde’s garb: purple sack coat, knee breeches, and a cloak slung over the shoulder.) Douglass provides a vivid counterpoint to the book’s other authors, who faced risks of a very different kind such as damaging their reputations, offending audiences, or even—as Arnold learned from a newspaper hoax—identity theft.

The contrasting receptions given to the two Harriets (Martineau and Beecher Stowe) likewise show the risks women faced in speaking out loud. Women and men met with different expectations on the lecture circuit; for instance, Arnold did not have...