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

Scholars of literary professionalism, particularly those who work on nineteenth-century America and the United Kingdom, have made the compelling claim that both celebrity and authorship are socially constructed categories that emerge from specific conditions and within particular historical moments. This new study focuses on nineteenth-century transatlantic authors who engaged in extensive lecture tours in both the United States and the United Kingdom and in so doing offers an important and needed source of evidence that situates one major way that authorship came into being—as an idea, a profession, and a category of celebrity.

Three of the four chapters in this book pair an American and a British author of note in order to investigate different topics related to professional authorship and to the process of embodying the public author. In chapter 1, for instance, Adams considers Harriet Martineau and Harriet Beecher Stowe, indicating the particular challenges they faced as “public” women; in chapter 2, she pairs Charles Dickens and Mark Twain to think more thoroughly about copyright issues; in chapter 3, she considers Matthew Arnold and Oscar Wilde to argue that for both men lecturing served as an “embodied experience that ironically emphasized the distance between the body and the public personality”; and in chapter 4, she concludes her transatlantic analysis with an extensive case study of American expatriote Henry James and his contested relation to both nation and celebrity (86).

As Adams’s work nicely demonstrates, authors expressed an obligation to make the category of authorship itself intelligible through performance and thus were often called to speak and stand in for a category of labor (the production of creative materials) as well as the written work itself. Touring on the lecture circuit functioned as a critical type of literary labor (often its most profitable part). This public and embodied element of authorship, Adams argues, served to make the author “real” amidst a book’s broader, often transnational, circulation. While Performing Authorship in the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Lecture Tour is a fine contribution to existing scholarship, I do wish its examination of the relation between celebrity, authorship, and public performance might have taken up less canonical authors since nineteenth-century lecture circuits were often populated by people who were widely popular and even famous in their contemporary moment but are less known today (Victoria Woodhull, for example). It would also help to note that many professions used the American Lyceum or British lecture circuits to lend credibility and intelligibility to their own fields and also to a broad swath of social issues and concerns, including emancipation, suffrage, and anti-polygamy campaigns. But even with these reservations, Adams’s broader point is valid: performance helped consolidate notions of creative labor and fame into a concrete and knowable category called the author.