“The Great Work of Mutual Education”: Class, Popularity, and the Position of the Intellectual in Margaret Fuller’s Literary Journalism

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“The Great Work of Mutual Education”: Class, Popularity, and the Position of the Intellectual in Margaret Fuller’s Literary Journalism Clemens Spahr (bio) In 1844, Margaret Fuller took a leap into popular journalism. Two years before she would embark on the journey to Europe that would eventually turn her into a political radical, Fuller accepted a position as the cultural critic at Horace Greeley’s influential New-York Daily Tribune. Responses among her peers ranged from encouragement to outright rejection of her attempt to popularize Romantic reform. In a letter to James Freeman Clarke from 14 August 1845, Fuller used the occasion to reassess the position of the public intellectual and intellectual labor: “I was pleased with your sympathy about The Tribune; I do not find much among my old friends. They think I ought to produce something excellent, while I am well content for the present to aid in the great work of mutual education in this way. I never regarded literature merely as a collection of exquisite products, but as a means of mutual interpretation. Feeling that many are reached and in some degree aided the thoughts of every day seem worth writing down, though in a form that does not inspire me.”1 The editors of Fuller’s Memoirs, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Henry Channing, and James Freeman Clarke, present the letter as evidence that Fuller’s turn to journalism, and popular journalism at that, prevented her [End Page 481] from producing something truly valuable during her post-New England years: “it hindered her free action to aim at popular effect.”2 While Fuller’s diction displays a similar unease about popularizing her ideas—she is “content for the present” to write in a “form that does not inspire” her—her letter simultaneously undermines the distinction between popularity and literary autonomy on which the editors insist. Fuller’s letter exemplifies how in the mid-1840s she began to reconsider literature as a comprehensive cultural practice rather than a small elite’s “collection of exquisite products.” By redefining literature as a “means of mutual interpretation” Fuller confronts the tension between philosophical idealism and institutionalized practice inherent in transatlantic Romanticism. The Romantics sought to establish the poetic life as the organizing principle of human relations. Philosophically, they could link individuality and collectivity by proclaiming the universal validity of the individual’s aesthetic experiences. As Emerson famously declared in “The American Scholar,” Man Thinking, the true Romantic, “learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.”3 But Fuller insisted that self-reliance first needed to become a cultural practice available to everyone, and that this practice could be established comprehensively only through “the general education of the people.”4 I will argue that Margaret Fuller’s turn to popular journalism forced her to address Romanticism’s “neglect of popular education.”5 The more concrete her conceptualization of education becomes in her literary journalism, the more pronounced her emphasis on social class. Fuller reconsidered Romanticism in her New York journalism and, more importantly, in her European dispatches, as an ideal whose realization was prevented by the exclusionary mechanisms underlying the educational system. Her literary journalism develops a class-inflected Romanticism that reconsiders both the idea of Romantic education and the intellectual’s role [End Page 482] in realizing the Romantic ideal of self-reliance and poetic social practice. Fuller’s conceptualization of the exclusionary mechanisms underlying the educational system and her Romantic ideal is much more central to her later writing than has henceforth been acknowledged. While her earlier pedagogical activities, from her positions at Amos Bronson Alcott’s Temple School and Hiram Fuller’s Greene Street School to her Boston conversational circles for women, sought to “ascertain what pursuits are best suited to us in our time and state of society, and how we may make best use of our means for building up the life of thought upon the life of action” (L, 2:87; emphasis added), these educational efforts, although comprehensive in principle, were limited to the middle class. Fuller’s writings for the New York Tribune and her European dispatches theorize Romanticism as an...