The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States (review)

In The Lyceum and Public Culture, Angela G. Ray provides a thorough survey and careful analysis of the discursive practices that defined the nineteenth-century lyceum. Ray shows how, because the lyceum circuit was more a collection of mutually influenced organizations and less a coherent institutional structure, it fostered a diverse array of continually evolving rhetorical performances. As Ray reads the history of the lyceum through its rhetorical traditions, her work should be interesting and useful to historians and rhetorical critics alike. Moreover, because Ray understands the lyceum to be a culture-defining institution, and she "explicates the ways that the lyceum contributed to the creation of the idea of a U.S. public" (8), her project should interest anyone concerned with the rhetorical foundations of U.S. culture.

After a brief introduction outlining her critical approach, Ray's first chapter describes the evolution of the lyceum system over the nineteenth century. She demonstrates how Josiah Holbrook's vision of lyceums as mutual education societies geared toward social betterment, originally detailed in 1826, gradually gave way to a popular vision of the lyceums as spaces for political debate, often for entertainment purposes, which led to their becoming, by the end of the century, profit-driven venues for entertainment alone. As she charts this progression, however, Ray also shows how these competing impulses of education, entertainment, and economic benefit were all present throughout the century. The following four chapters each examine one or more definitive text(s) from these various eras in the lyceum's history.

In chapter 2, Ray reads Holbrook's journal, Family Lyceum, focusing most of her analysis on one story published in the short-lived journal. She concludes that Holbrook's central value was universally accessible education, that his key educational strategy was modeling, and that he conceptualized knowledge as a set of discrete facts that could be learned. Ray argues that, for Holbrook, the ultimate purpose of this education was for industrial and economic growth, as well as for "increasing human comprehension of the mind of God" (71) and for producing the "ideal U.S. citizen, a person of moral rectitude, intellectual curiosity, and civic responsibility" (51).

In chapter 3, Ray examines the Milwaukee lyceum circuit between 1854 and 1857 in terms of its developing criteria for judging lectures. By this point, she argues, the lyceums had changed from shared spaces for mutual education, where audience members were participant-learners, to venues for professional lectures, where audience members were spectator-judges. As such, Ray considers the ways that audience members shaped and negotiated the criteria for judging lectures; she maintains that through negotiating these criteria, Milwaukeeans defined their shared culture. Moreover, their judgments rendered about the lectures allowed the lyceum to "constitute itself as a cultural leader and its public as an audience and a representative of the broader public" (88).

Chapters 4 and 5 are each devoted to textual analysis of one rhetor's lyceum speeches. Chapter 4 attends to three speeches that Frederick Douglass performed repeatedly—"The Races," "Self-Made Men," and "Our Composite Nationality"—as the early lyceum celebrity itinerated through the circuit. In these speeches, Douglass drew on the principles shared within lyceum culture, including self-education and common sense, to promote an assimilationist-integrationist vision for race relations. As he alternately invoked and troubled narratives of American exceptionalism, Douglass "imagined a national identity transformed through incorporation of difference" (139). In chapter 5, Ray attends to a lyceum celebrity as famous as Douglass, Anna Dickinson, whose speech "Whited Sepulchres" was heard across the Northeast and into the Midwest in 1869–70. In that speech, Dickinson dramatized her 1869 trip across the West, using the images and lessons of the trip to critique her own social milieu and the status of women within it. Ray argues that Dickinson used "conventional lyceum forms—the travel narrative, the eyewitness account, even the anti-Mormon diatribe . . . in...