Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an Anglo-American Commons, 1830–1870 by Tom F. Wright (review)

Promoted as a means of education, entertainment, and civic participation, popular lectures were a cornerstone of public life for many communities in the nineteenth century in the United States. Throughout his extensively researched and well-written book, Tom F. Wright draws from foundational literature that has primarily explored the lyceum as a common experience constitutive of national identity and culture. Yet Lecturing the Atlantic: Speech, Print, and an Anglo-American Commons, 1830–1870 demonstrates the significance of viewing nineteenth-century lecture culture through the lens of its transatlantic themes. Centering on what he calls the "Anglo-American commons," Wright contends that lecture performances thrived on what should be considered "a distinct category of civic orality that enacted key ideals of an enlarged but unevenly integrated public sphere; one with a productively ambivalent relationship to nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and empire" (3). His dive into a "deep archive of newspaper and periodical sources" allows Wright to explore audience accounts, journalist reviews, and transcripts of lectures that circulated in print (7). Therefore, Lecturing the Atlantic is an important addition that expands the research of comparative rhetoric in general and lecture culture in particular during this vibrant historical period.

Chapter 1 of the book offers an orientation to nineteenth-century lecturing, focusing first on the influence of Scottish rhetorical traditions on the American circuit. Readers are treated to a helpful background of Wright's methodology as well as a discussion of how the lyceum served as a site where ideals of neutrality and decorum—predicated on normative assumptions about class, race, and gender—could be understood and negotiated. Here, Wright compellingly argues that it was no accident that many popular performers took Britain as their focus. Predominantly white American audiences were drawn to learn more about transatlantic themes at precisely the moment that their own communities were becoming increasingly diverse. Although speakers of various racial and ethnic groups challenged and critiqued this focus, lectures about Britain were promoted as a way to assert a "normative ethnic identity" rooted in the "mythic commons of an imagined cultural homeland" (38). Wright identifies the tensions and contradictions that characterized the "Anglo-American commons," where the very idea of Britain might be alternately embraced, rejected, or mocked.

The five case studies in the book illustrate the versatility of Britain as a subject, as was performed in lecture halls. In terms of case selection, Wright chose to "explore a series of lesser-understood instances of performers who took Anglo-America as their theme" rather than focusing on better-known events, such as Charles Dickens's 1867–1868 tour of the United States (8). Still, most of the chapters involve famous figures, and their translation of transatlantic themes to the stage proves to be a fascinating focus. Chapter 2 does not emphasize a particular tour; instead, it explores Frederick Douglass's lectures delivered in the United States and in Great Britain over a stretch of nearly 40 years (the 1840s–1880s). That Douglass used these lectures and his knowledge of transatlantic media cultures to pivot from "antislavery activist to cosmopolitan intellectual" is a case convincingly made (50). However, Wright also illustrates how Douglass was otherized in both locales. In England, he was embraced but tokenized as a black antislavery advocate. In America, auditors frequently sought to make sense of the ways that his time in England had transformed his manners, body, and voice. Chapter 3 examines Ralph Waldo Emerson's popular lecture "England" as an endorsement of British order. Wright accounts for how the lecture was associated with class-based elitism that failed to play well with New York and Cincinnati audiences but was acclaimed in Cleveland in 1850.

The next chapter is the tour de Horace, and readers can learn of how Whig orators Horace Mann and Horace Greeley used the lecture stage to engage in a "choreography of reform" by telling American audiences about...