The Cosmopolitan Lyceum: Lecture Culture and the Globe in Nineteenth-Century America

7. “Barnum is undone in his own province”: Science, Race, and Entertainment in the Lectures of George Robins Gliddon

Part III Internationalism or Imperialism? “This page intentionally left blank” 151 7 “Barnum is undone in his own province” Science, Race, and Entertainment in the Lectures of George Robins Gliddon Susan Branson In the spring of 1850, the Hartford Daily Courant informed its readers that George Gliddon, former American vice consul to Egypt, renowned scholar, and collector of Egyptian antiquities, planned to unwrap an Egyptian mummy at Boston’s Tremont Temple. The notice ended with the following comment: “Barnum is undone in his own province, and unless he can get up another Joyce Heth, may as well succumb.”1 Gliddon, a respected authority on ancient Egyptian culture, had recently concluded a six-year lecture tour in the United States. Why were Americans so interested in a time and place so distant from their own? And why was Gliddon linked with P. T. Barnum, that purveyor of spectacle and low entertainment, the individual to whom the term humbug was most often applied? Placing Gliddon’s lectures and public activities within the context of the lyceum movement in the mid-nineteenth century illuminates this otherwise puzzling association of culture with spectacle. The popularity of Gliddon’s Egyptian lectures suggests how the lyceum phenomenon was an American cultural practice indebted to, and embedded in, transnational events and issues. The lyceum ideal of promoting American intellectual development and education rested on the assumption that Americans were part of a global community; knowledge of other cultures was a crucial way to understand, and interpret, ideas and practices e f 152 Susan Branson fundamental to American society. In this regard, the lyceums, societies and associations that sponsored lecturers in the second quarter of the nineteenth century created an important venue for exposing Americans to the intellectual building blocks required to develop and define American society .2 As Tom Wright suggests in the introduction to this book, “transcending the national was to be the culmination of nationhood.” Lyceums may not have created this interest in the world beyond America ’s borders, but they consolidated it, packaged it, and created opportunities for audiences to interact with people and ideas. Incorporating images, objects , and artifacts, George Gliddon’s lectures embodied the central tenets of the lyceum ideal: placing American society within a global framework. He made the exotic familiar by tracing the historical origins of the cultural , religious, and political practices of the United States, thereby linking it with great civilizations of the past. Gliddon’s lectures on ancient Egypt and Egyptians were part of the cosmopolitanism that characterized the outlook of American audiences. He challenged Americans to think about their place in the world from a historical perspective, that is, how Americans were linked by culture and lineage to civilizations and peoples beyond their own borders. New Yorker Philip Hone wrote in his diary on November 15, 1841, that “lectures are all the vogue, and the theaters are flat on their backs.”3 The nineteenth-century drive for knowledge, what David Jaffee terms the village enlightenment in early nineteenth-century America, fostered the creation of many organizations that sponsored lectures.4 In Boston, for example , Daniel Webster, John Lowell Jr., and others formed the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in 1828. Lowell’s interest in popular education led him to bequeath a substantial sum to fund a lecture series on the “philosophy, natural history, the arts and sciences, or any of them, as the trustees shall, from time to time, deem expedient for the promotion of the moral, and intellectual, and physical instruction or education of the citizens of Boston.”5 This was the venue for George Gliddon’s first lectures during his tour in the early 1840s. Lowell’s generous funding guaranteed that the lecture series attracted luminaries, American and foreign, in a variety of disciplines. The fee paid to Yale professor Benjamin Silliman for his twelve lectures on geology in 1836, for instance, exceeded his yearly salary.6 Each of Silliman’s lectures attracted between fifteen hundred and two thousand people, a testimony to the interest in knowledge of all kinds. As Gliddon’s editor noted, “Profundity is not, nationally speaking, an American characteristic, but there is 153 “Barnum is undone in his own province” no people more readily receptive of general information.”7 Though perhaps not everyone had the same motivation for attending lectures on geology or even Egyptology. As Angela Ray suggests, public lectures enabled community members to “‘pay twenty...