The Popular Lecture and the Creation of a Public in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

Americans of the mid-nineteenth century were untiring inventors of cultural and educational institutions. Among the most ubiquitous and important of the agencies they devised to satisfy their seemingly insatiable craving for useful knowledge was the public lecture, a form of instruction distinguished from the sermon, speech, and oration as well as from the treatise or essay, though it borrowed from them all. It would be difficult to exaggerate the scale and scope of public lecturing. In New York City there were more than 3,000 advertised lectures between 1840 and 1860, and in 1846 the citizens of Boston could choose from twenty-six different courses of lectures. But the lecture was not simply a phenomenon of the large cities. By the early 1840s there probably were between 3,500 and 4,000 communities that contained a society sponsoring public lectures. ' A lecture society was frequently among the first institutions established in a newly formed town. Davenport, Iowa, organized its first lyceum in 1839, for example, just three years after it had been plotted and the same year that it received its charter, held its first elections, and reached a population of about 250.2 Indeed, by the mid-1840s few northern towns of 1,000 or more people lacked at least one association sponsoring lectures. Moreover, the podium was encyclopedic in its range. Among other topics, the