The Romantic Literary Lecture in Britain

Sarah Zimmerman
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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/12/2018, SPi

T H E RO M A N T I C L I T E R A R Y L E C T U R E
I N BR I TA I N
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/12/2018, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/12/2018, SPi

The Romantic Literary

Lecture in Britain
SARAH ZIMMERMAN

1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/12/2018, SPi

3
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First Edition published in 2019
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/12/2018, SPi

For Isabel and Jay

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/12/2018, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/12/2018, SPi

Preface

This book began in the lecture room. One of my first teaching assignments
was “Introduction to Literature,” a course that often enrolled hundreds
of students per section. I soon learned that lectures are a two-way street.
My students’ presence was highly communicative, not only when they
asked questions and took notes, but also as they shifted in their seats,
gazed out the window, or shuffled papers as the hour ticked to a close.
I learned to improvise, working from detailed outlines that allowed me to
leave a point when I was losing them or to elaborate when it took hold.
I came to realize how much the physical space mattered—how the room’s
atmosphere was set by its size, the kind of light it received, whether its
seats were banked, and if a microphone was necessary. I discovered that
while no amount of planning could guarantee a successful lecture, I fared
best by preparing with my students’ collective characteristics clearly in
mind and later revising in light of where I had them and when I lost them.
Their presence changed neither the facts of literary history nor the way
that I read texts, but what happened in those halls informed my critical
arguments and the version of literary history that they heard from me.
Learning to lecture taught me something else as a Romanticist: that we
were failing to grasp the full import of some of the period’s most influen-
tial literary criticism—Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare
and William Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets (1818)—by considering
them solely as printed texts rather than as oral arguments pitched to live
audiences. Robert Darnton makes the case that the period’s print works
are inflected by their participation in a “communications circuit that runs
from the author to the publisher (if the bookseller does not assume that
role), the printer, the shipper, the bookseller, and the reader.” The reader
plays a crucial role: that figure “completes the circuit because he influences
the author both before and after the act of composition,” as the author
“addresses implicit readers and hears from explicit reviewers.”¹ In the
lecture room, the circuit of affect is tighter and quicker, and the critical
arguments far more immediately susceptible to inflection by responsive
auditors. The period’s public lectures make especially clear how its literary
culture was shaped not only by the self-appointed arbiters of literary taste,
but also by those who listened and read.

¹ Darnton, Kiss of Lamourette, 111.

 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/12/2018, SPi

viii Preface
Lecturers pursued their own critical agendas, but they needed to engage
the auditors who could determine a series’ fate. Independent series could
collapse midway if they stayed home, and the scientific and literary
institutions that sponsored these events would not invite a lackluster
speaker to return. Successful lecturers therefore couched their arguments
with particular audiences in mind (since demographics varied by venue
and urban location), retooled arguments in retrospect, and sometimes
reacted in the moment. Even those who eschewed extemporaneity and
read aloud from full scripts had to be able to improvise. Lecturers did not
field questions, but auditors clearly communicated their pleasure or dis-
approbation in “[b]oos and cheers, ‘hear-hears,’ ‘aye-ayes,’ sniffs and
yawns.”² While lecturers aimed to shape listeners’ reading habits, establish
a literary canon, and burnish their own public profiles, listeners wielded
their own considerable influence, not only in the lecture room, but also at
the private gatherings that sometimes followed, where they compared
notes on the lecturers’ arguments and performances. The conversations
continued in solitude and silence in auditors’ own rooms, as they wrote
letters and autobiographical accounts recording what they had heard and
what they thought. Thus lecturers’ critical arguments reached the auditors
gathered around them first before radiating outward from that intimate
exchange in conversations carried on by dispersing crowds, traveling in
letters near and far, resurfacing in newspaper notices, lodging in print and
manuscripts for future readers.³
Auditors’ accounts contribute to a “history of listening” initiated by
music historians and also respond to Maureen McLane’s call for “a full
literary-historical account of the use and abuse of orality, oral cultures, and
orality effects by and in what we conventionally call British Romantic
poetry.”⁴ The Romantic-era public lecture on literature is a vital part of
these histories. In tracing the career of this still understudied medium, this
book has two main aims. One is methodological: addressing how to treat
these lectures as historical performances rather than simply as linguistic
texts, and considering the consequences of doing so for understanding the
critical arguments made as fully as possible. The other is historical: elabor-
ating the particular case of the public lecture on literature at the time and

² Forgan, “Context, Image and Function,” 102.

³ Tom Wright takes up this issue in regard to lyceum culture, observing that this kind of
oratory “worked upon dual audiences: a primary crowd of live auditors and a vast potential
secondary readership for accounts and transcriptions of speeches” (Lecturing the Atlantic, 20).
⁴ McLane, “Ballads and Bards,” 426. See Leon Botstein’s “Toward a History of
Listening” and David Cavicchi’s call for a history of “[t]he reception of performances and
works, the history of music consumption, the development of audience practices” (Listening
and Longing, 4).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/12/2018, SPi

Preface ix
place of its decisive emergence as a popular medium in early nineteenth-
century England.
I undertake the first task in the first chapter, which aims to consolidate
the lessons of a broad interdisciplinary discussion that conceptualizes the
problem of, and recommends best practices for, treating historical speak-
ing performances. Biographers, editors, and scholars in an array of discip-
lines (the history of science, theater history and performance studies,
literary studies, music history, art history, media studies) have come to a
working agreement that this necessarily speculative work requires gather-
ing surviving documents from both speakers and listeners, and situating
these events in their specific times and places. My next four chapters adopt
that approach in treating the historical performances of the period’s four
most prominent literary lecturers: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Thelwall,
William Hazlitt, and Thomas Campbell. I close with two chapters on their
auditors (including John Keats, Mary Russell Mitford, Lady Charlotte
Bury, and Catherine Maria Fanshawe) that consider their influence on
lecturers’ critical arguments but focus more fully on their own creative
responses to what they heard in their poems, letters, and other writings.
My first, methodological, aim informs my second, of treating the
decisive emergence of literary lecturing as a popular cultural medium in
early nineteenth-century England, most visibly in London. The public
lecture on literature caught the popular imagination and flourished for
over two decades in the interlocking careers of the period’s most promin-
ent lecturers. When Thelwall ventured onto the provincial circuit in late
1801 as an elocution lecturer he used poetry and prose in demonstrations
of reading aloud and recitation. At the London school he established in
1806 he soon developed separate literary series, including one on the
“English Classics.” In 1808 Coleridge followed in his footsteps, launching
a lecturing career at London’s Royal Institution that would span more
than a decade. Campbell in turn followed Coleridge’s lead, debuting at the
Royal Institution in 1812 and ending there in 1820 after a career that
included series in Liverpool and Birmingham. Hazlitt lectured on phil-
osophy at the Russell Institution in 1812, but he was a latecomer on the
literary lecture scene, offering his first series at the Surrey Institution in
early 1818. By 1820, all four of the period’s best-known literary lecturers had
retired from the main stage of public lecturing. Only Thelwall would return
after temporarily closing his school to resume full-time political work.⁵

⁵ Hazlitt gave two lectures in Glasgow at what was then called the Andersonian
Institution on May 6 and 13, 1822, the first on Shakespeare and Milton and the second
on Thomson and Burns. They were drawn from his already twice-delivered and published
Lectures on the English Poets (1818). See Jones, “Hazlitt as Lecturer.”
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/12/2018, SPi

x Preface
Approaching the literary lecture as a distinctive medium serves two
main ends. First, we may more fully grasp the critical arguments lecturers
made by treating them on their own terms. Contemporaries took for
granted that lecturers tailored them for specific audiences. For instance,
even a quick glance at newspaper advertisements and reports of Cole-
ridge’s lectures on Shakespeare indicates that he chose some topics—“on
LOVE and the FEMALE CHARACTER, as displayed by Shakespear” [sic]—with
particular listeners in mind, in this case the women whose approbation
was required for a series to be considered fashionable (Lectures on Litera-
ture, 1: 300). A correspondent for The Traveller applauded Coleridge for
“taking effectual means to render [his lectures] delightful to those of his
auditors whom we presume him peculiarly anxious to please—the Fair”
(Lectures on Literature, 1: 320). The influence of the wished-for women
extended well beyond advertising to the development of critical ideas:
across several lectures Coleridge elaborated an account of “a feeling, a deep
emotion of the mind” that he eventually dubbed “love momentaneous,” a
coinage that is at once a defense of Romeo’s apparent fickleness and
Coleridge’s own take on the notion of love at first sight (Lectures on
Literature, 1: 327–8). Thus the attempt to attract the women auditors
whose approbation was necessary for a series to succeed elicited from him a
shrewdly calibrated critical inventiveness.
The second main end served by treating the period’s lectures as oral
arguments couched for live audiences is the unique view they provide of its
literary culture. We would expect to find Coleridge and Hazlitt featured
prominently but not, perhaps, that they were easily rivaled by Thelwall
and Campbell. Thelwall was until recently known primarily as a radical
political figure, while Campbell has lingered at the edges of literary history
as a minor poet and friend of Lord Byron. In their own day, however,
auditors listened eagerly to all four lecturers arguing often conflicting
critical agendas. Directing sustained attention to public lecturing also
brings into sharper focus the lasting impact of Thelwall and Campbell
on the modern field of literary studies. As lecturers, they parted company
with Coleridge and Hazlitt in two significant ways that distinguish their
literary critical perspectives. First, they openly welcomed women auditors,
and thus willingly acknowledged their increasing importance as cultural
arbiters. Thelwall taught female students at his London school alongside
his first wife and, after her death, his second. From the beginning he
included the works of women writers on his syllabi, including Anna Letitia
Barbauld, whom Coleridge and Hazlitt disparaged in their lectures.
Campbell frankly courted female auditors whom he recognized as influ-
ential patrons who could advance his professional and social ambitions.
Second, Thelwall and Campbell agreed that, as a pedagogical medium,
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/12/2018, SPi

Preface xi
lectures could be a means of expanding the educational franchise, a viable
means of social reform in counter-revolutionary and wartime Britain.
Both put these views into action by participating in the institutionaliza-
tion of a literary education organized around lectures. Thelwall opened the
doors of his London school to the public in 1806 and embraced the
Mechanics’ Institutes movement in the early 1820s. In 1825 Campbell
initiated a public campaign for what would become University College
London. It would make higher education more accessible to middle-class
men and eventually become the first university in England to grant
degrees to women. It would also establish the first chair in English
literature and language in England.⁶ All of these innovations demonstrate
the importance of Romantic-era lecture culture in the disciplinary history
of literary studies and the lasting impact of lesser-known figures such as
Thelwall and Campbell on the field.
Viewing Romantic literary culture through the lens of its public lectures
also reveals an array of cultural roles played by auditors using various
media. Some of the era’s avid lecture-goers were also authors, including
Keats and Mitford. They were joined by others such as Bury and Fanshawe
whose literary profiles have faded but who were well known on the
Regency literary scene. As a cultural arena, public lecturing had its own
gendered restrictions, including most obviously the exclusion of women
from the main speaking part. It nevertheless provided women with other
influential literary roles in an era when they still faced significant limita-
tions in print culture. Some lecture auditors acted as patrons, and they
wielded influence as hosts and guests at the conversation parties, dinners,
and other private gatherings that accompanied public lectures. They
pursued these cultural activities in a number of media that have only
recently begun to receive significant attention in literary studies. Public
lecture culture depended upon the medium of print for advertisements,
prospectuses, newspaper notices, and sometimes publication of the lec-
tures themselves. It was, however, also oral culture and manuscript cul-
ture. The period’s lecture rooms put on display a rich concentration of
media, including public oratory, intimate conversation, and myriad
manuscripts, from lecturers’ speaking scripts to auditors’ responses in
letters, poems, journals, and diaries.⁷

⁶ University College London’s English Department scrupulously qualifies its own histor-
ical claims: <http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english/department/history-of-the-english-department>.
⁷ In discussing popular lecturing in the nineteenth-century United States, Wright
convincingly suggests that this “baffling heterogeneity” of media may have contributed to
“the phenomenon’s surprising scholarly neglect” (Cosmopolitan Lyceum, 4).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/12/2018, SPi

xii Preface
Together, the period’s literary lecturers and their auditors engaged in a
sustained cultural debate that included what a literary education should
consist of, who should receive one, and for what ends. Its intensity was
fostered by the “London lecturing empire” being a small world in which
lecturers and auditors were acutely aware of, and sometimes personally
acquainted with, one another.⁸ Peter Manning makes an astute observa-
tion about the salience of public lectures at this historical moment: “If, as
Jon Klancher and others have argued, the reading audience of early
nineteenth-century England was not single but multiple, leaving authors
at a puzzling distance from a diverse readership that they could not know,
the lectures offered a far more knowable community, formed by the
combining circumstances of site, admission price, and the tickets at the
lecturer’s disposal, which to some degree enabled him to paper the house.”⁹
Lecturers responded to one another’s arguments, spoke to auditors after
performances, and socialized with them at related private parties. Auditors
such as Mitford, Henry Crabb Robinson, and James Montgomery attended
enough public lectures to be able to compare lecturers’ performances and
critical claims. The surviving documents of all parties demonstrate how
common concerns, questions, and themes emerged in what formed a
sustained, if discontinuous debate about literary culture generated in the
period’s lecture rooms. The six chapters on lecturers and their auditors aim
to capture something of that vibrant, animated discussion. The argument
is organized as follows.
My first, introductory chapter (Chapter 1) sketches the literary lecture’s
debts to established speaking traditions and consolidates the lessons of
an interdisciplinary conversation about how to treat historical speaking
performances. I then turn to Coleridge (even though as a lecturer he
followed in Thelwall’s footsteps) for two reasons (Chapter 2). First, he
helped establish the Romantic literary lecture as a popular medium in his
own day. Second, his efforts to negotiate his acute ambivalence about
lecturing reflect two conflicts that would come to define the period’s
literary lectures: the medium was haunted by a 1790s culture of radical
speaking and it also seemed to some all too enmeshed in a commercialized
cultural marketplace. In the lecture room, Coleridge developed his key
critical notion of the “willing suspension of disbelief” as part of his effort to
imagine himself as the “Poet-philosopher” he wished to be rather than the
political speaker he had been or the “Lecture-monger” he feared he had
become, in what I call his “disappearing act.”¹⁰ During his 1808

⁸ Hays, “London Lecturing Empire,” 91.

⁹ Manning, “Manufacturing the Romantic Image,” 234.
¹⁰ Coleridge, Collected Letters, 2: 668; 4: 855.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/12/2018, SPi

Preface xiii
apprenticeship at the Royal Institution and in his celebrated 1811–12
series on Shakespeare and Milton, Coleridge developed interpretations of
Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet that accrue an additional layer of meaning as
part of this “disappearing act.” In Hamlet, he finds a figure of ambivalent
identification who by hesitating to act fails to do his “duty,” just as
Coleridge feared he himself was doing by lecturing rather than completing
his “great philosophical work” (Collected Letters, 4: 892–3). Self-cast as
Hamlet, however, Coleridge was a glorious failure, a compelling figure of
meditative extemporaneity despite the vagaries of his literary career. In his
lectures on Romeo and Juliet, he attempts to ease another persistent anxiety
about women’s increasing cultural agency. In his reading of the play the
influence women have over men who are in some way dependent on
them—as he was on female auditors—reinforces masculine autonomy
rather than disabling it.
Unlike Coleridge, Thelwall had no hope of banishing the ghosts of
his radical past, because his role in the 1794 Treason Trials rendered his
public profile as a political speaker indelible (Chapter 3). In reinventing
himself as a teacher of elocution and practitioner of an early form of speech
therapy, Thelwall did not so much abandon his political ideals as reshape
the nature of his democratic commitment. At the school he established in
London in 1806, Thelwall offered male and female auditors of all ages an
education in “oral eloquence,” and thereby translated the lost cause of
universal suffrage into a pedagogy that helped auditors speak for them-
selves.¹¹ Poetry was a core subject in his curriculum, and in teaching it he
developed a distinctive and almost entirely overlooked Romantic literary
criticism that treats poetry as an oral, performative, sociable genre. I offer a
portrait of Thelwall as a literary critic who interprets poems by reciting or
reading them aloud, and judges them by how well they lend themselves
to these practices. The public lecture was the perfect medium for his
approach to poetry as a communicative genre. By establishing his own
school, Thelwall managed to institutionalize this audible literary criticism,
even though his commitment to spoken language also worked to obscure
its legacy, since he preferred extemporaneity, and as a result relatively little
evidence of his literary lectures seems to have survived.
One of the poets whose verse Thelwall recited was Campbell who, like
Thelwall, authored a distinctive literary criticism that has been virtually

¹¹ Thelwall, Prospectus, 3. He uses the term “oral eloquence” in a number of publica-

tions. In Introductory Discourse he defines it as “the Art of communicating, by the
immediate action of the vocal and expressive Organs, to popular, or to select assemblies,
the dictates of our Reason, or our Will, and the workings of our Passions, or Feelings and
our Imaginations” (2).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/12/2018, SPi

xiv Preface
lost to Romantic studies (Chapter 4). An émigré Scot who became a
central figure on the Regency literary scene, Campbell sought to render
his lessons as appealing and readily consumable as possible. This attitude
set him in opposition to Coleridge and Hazlitt, who liked to stress the
difficulty of acquiring aesthetic judgment. These canonical lecturers held
up Campbell’s Pleasures of Hope (1799)—two books of bright, polished
couplets laced with literary, and particularly classical, allusions—as a signal
example of everything wrong with modern poetry. They accused him of
pandering to an expanding literary marketplace increasingly influenced by
women readers and periodical critics. Campbell mostly shrugged off such
attacks, content to capitalize on his popularity when he began giving his
own lectures in 1812 at London’s Royal Institution. In its celebrated
theater, he repeated the winning formulation of Pleasures by offering
auditors a literary education in highly polished prose, with a particular
emphasis on ancient poetry in (translated) Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. As a
lecturer, Campbell took equal care to present himself appealingly by
paying scrupulous attention to his own grooming, dress, and delivery.
He openly courted auditors, especially the women, correctly assuming that
they could further his social and professional ambitions. He was in turn
willing to share with them the classical education that had sponsored his
own mobility and that was especially difficult for them to acquire. Camp-
bell’s carefully scripted performances were, however, also underwritten by
a serious agenda of educational reform that culminated in his public
campaign for a “Metropolitan University” that would not discriminate
on the basis of rank or religion. Campbell established a vital link between
Romantic-era literary lectures and the institutionalization of modern
literary studies when he proposed a university organized around lectures
(rather than Oxbridge tutorials) in a letter to the London Times.
By the time Hazlitt began lecturing on literature, his rivals Thelwall,
Coleridge, and Campbell were already popular speakers. In his first series,
Lectures on the English Poets (1818), Hazlitt enters into an intensive
engagement with the period’s oral cultures (Chapter 5). I argue that he
negotiates a deeply ambivalent relationship to those cultures, which
extended from the radical speaking of the 1790s to the glittering Regency
lecture scene that he joined. In particular Coleridge’s voice as a Dissenting
preacher and poet of Lyrical Ballads had carried Hazlitt’s political and
aesthetic hopes. By 1818, that early optimism had been disappointed, but
Hazlitt was determined to glean for his own critical prose the appealing
qualities that had enchanted and inspired him in the oral cultures of his
youth. I read his first literary series as a tour de force performance in which
he consolidates the increasingly fluid prose he had honed as a journalist
into the conversational “familiar style” that would become his signature as
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/12/2018, SPi

Preface xv
a critic. At the same time, Hazlitt resisted what he viewed as the dangers of
public speaking, choosing instead to act like an author, performing the
qualities of intellectual independence and interiority that he associated
with “writing” in his essay “On the Difference Between Writing and
Speaking” (1820). In Lectures Hazlitt also publicly stakes his critical claims
by reading the history of English poetry as a decline from its bright early
promise to a present moment, represented by the lecture room itself, in
which an increasingly commercialized, feminized literary marketplace
discouraged the patient pursuit of “true fame.” I pay particular attention
to the series’ well-known ending on the “living poets,” in which Hazlitt
mourns the loss of his hopes in the early Coleridge and claims his former
mentor’s role as a leading political and cultural critic in his own preferred
medium of print.
The verse of John Keats, Hazlitt’s best-known auditor, demonstrates
how the period’s literary lectures impacted its poetry (Chapter 6). We are
used to thinking of Keats as a museum-goer (“On Seeing the Elgin
Marbles”) and reader (“On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once
Again”), but his role as lecture auditor influenced his poetry in ways
that we have yet to appreciate fully. At the Surrey Institution Keats learned
not only from what Hazlitt said, but also from how he said it: the lecturer’s
famously aggressive, theatrical delivery helped Keats better to understand
the tremendous impact that a human voice could have on the listener.
Keats had already been trained as an auditor in the period’s Enlightenment
science culture at Enfield Academy and Guy’s Hospital. In addition,
shortly before Hazlitt’s series, Keats reviewed several plays on the London
stage and became fascinated by Edmund Kean’s fierce “eloquence.” Keats
recognized a similar quality in Hazlitt’s lectures, and attempted to capture
it for his verse. In his understudied sonnet, “O thou whose face hath felt
the winter’s wind,” Keats offers a rare, unrhymed poem of pure hearing,
featuring a speaker who doesn’t say a word. The lessons in the drama of
listening that Keats absorbed at the Surrey Institution resurface strikingly
in later poems, including “Ode to a Nightingale” and “The Fall of
Hyperion.” Scholars have recognized the dramatic quality of Keats’
mature verse, and I argue that his experience as Hazlitt’s auditor helped
to crystallize it. In these poems and in the letters that he wrote during and
after the series in which he engaged with Hazlitt’s arguments, Keats’
responses as a listener constitute literary works in their own right.
In the lecture room Keats sat alongside the women readers about whom
he was famously ambivalent as an aspiring poet (Chapter 7). That space
serves as a stage for the diverse range of active roles that women played in
Romantic literary culture beyond that of author. The influence of the
French salonnières and the British Bluestockings is widely recognized, but
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/12/2018, SPi

xvi Preface
we have only begun to acknowledge the activities of their Romantic-era
counterparts. The period’s public lectures and the private parties that
sometimes followed are important for understanding women’s cultural
impact as auditors, convivial hosts and guests, and patrons, as well as
authors. They pursued their own aims in a variety of cultural media
including some that have been receiving increasing attention in literary
studies, such as conversation and works in manuscript. Few women had a
significant presence in the lecture room as authors whose works were
treated, but a figure as prominent as Barbauld could not be ignored if
lecturers wished to speak to the moment. Coleridge and Hazlitt tried to
delimit women’s influence in literary culture partly by disparaging her and
by admonishing auditors not to follow literary fashions associated with
women writers (especially novel reading). Auditors like Mitford ignored
such strictures while avidly pursuing their own literary careers, treating the
lecture room as a schoolroom. Mitford’s apprenticeship involved penning
epistolary responses to what she heard, including irreverent accounts of
Coleridge’s, Campbell’s, and Hazlitt’s performances. By the time Lady
Charlotte Bury sat in Campbell’s lectures, she was an author in her own
right. She published most of her “silver fork” novels anonymously, in part
to protect her position as lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Wales (after-
ward Queen Caroline), a role she subsequently exploited in the anonym-
ous (but swiftly surmised) publication of Diary Illustrative of the Times of
George IV (1838). At the Royal Institution Bury identified Campbell as a
poet to patronize, inviting him into the royal household and thereby
advancing his social and literary ambitions. In Sydney Smith’s lectures
on moral philosophy at the Royal Institution, the poet and artist Cather-
ine Maria Fanshawe found a rich source of inspiration for an “Ode” that
challenged contemporaneous satires on women’s prominence in lecture
audiences. Fanshawe did not attempt to publish her works, preferring to
circulate her poetry in manuscript in literary circles that included fellow
lecture auditors. She frequently took as her subject the sociable oral
cultures in which she participated as a valued guest, including literary
conversations held at house parties and private dinners. In these domestic
settings and in lecture rooms, women found spaces filled with possibility
for their own literary activities. It is fitting that listeners have the last word
in this book, as they so often did in life.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/12/2018, SPi

Acknowledgments

This book has been a long road, and I was fortunate to have a lot of help
on it. Travel for research and time to write was generously supported by
Fordham University, and the ACLS provided the boon of an entire year
that enabled me to lay the project’s foundations. Susan Wolfson, Peter
Manning, and Alan Bewell offered encouragement and support from the
beginning. I discovered that speaking about oral culture added a level of
intensity to conferences and other talks, and the responses I received at
these events proved to be a particularly rich source of insight and energy.
For helpful exchanges and invitations to present work-in-progress I am
especially grateful to the late Paul Magnuson, Orrin Wang, Michael
Macovski, Anne-Lise François, Jon Klancher, Elizabeth Denlinger, Nick
Roe, Charles Mahoney, Jacob Risinger, Jeffrey Cox, Jill Heydt-Stevenson,
Sean Franzel, Kurtis Hessel, Kevis Goodman, and Danny O’Quinn.
I have received vital assistance in piecing together accounts of
Romantic-era public lectures and the institutions that sponsored them
from many archives, collections, and libraries. I am indebted to Frank
James of the Royal Institution of Great Britain for helping me to under-
stand these events, including the opportunity to attend a lecture there
myself. Sincere thanks go to the members of staff who have answered
questions and made useful suggestions at the British Library; the National
Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum; the Wellcome Collection;
the Guildhall Library; the London Metropolitan Archives; the University
of London Archive, Senate House Library; the Royal Institute of British
Architects Library and Collections; the Research Library and Archive at
Sir John Soane’s Museum; the National Library of Scotland; the Mitchell
Library, Glasgow; Archives and Special Collections at the University of
Strathclyde; the Dundee University Archives; the Carl H. Pforzheimer
Collection; the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and
American Literature; the Rare Books Division of the New York Public
Library; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; and the Rare
Books and Special Collections at Princeton University.
A number of scholars graciously responded to queries with insight and
information, including Michael Scrivener, R. A. Foakes, Geoffrey Carnall,
Gregory Claeys, Richard Holmes, and Duncan Wu. I have been fortunate
in having editors for earlier versions of several chapters who advanced and
sharpened my thinking, including Angela Esterhammer, Alex Dick, Charles
Mahoney, and Robert DeMaria. Samantha Sabalis, David Querusio, and
Sean Spillane provided excellent research assistance. I am indebted to
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/12/2018, SPi

xviii Acknowledgments
everyone I have worked with at Oxford University Press including two
anonymous readers who gave wonderfully thorough, perceptive critiques.
A number of readers contributed astute commentary that fueled
thought and revision including Susan David Bernstein, Aniruddho Biswas,
Lenny Cassuto, Anne Fernald, Kevin Gilmartin, Wolfgang Mann, and
Manya Steinkoler. Judith Thompson read drafts and shared research and
an enthusiasm that rejuvenated mine when it was flagging. David Duff
offered guidance and good reading at a crucial moment in concluding the
project. Along the way John Bugg was infinitely generous in offering
advice and suggesting ingenious ways out of corners into which I had
written myself. As the project took shape Stuart Sherman graciously
discussed it all, in conversations filled with hilarity and kindness. This
book is partly about the art of listening, about which I learned tomes from
Marvin Geller. It saddens me that Kristin Gager is not here to celebrate
the completion of this project, especially since her friendship extended to
lending it her astute editorial eye.
My most personal debts are to those who kept me going, kept me
laughing, kept me diverted when I needed it, and convinced me to finish
already, including Moshe Sluhovsky, Ginger Strand, and Wolfgang
Mann. Aniruddho Biswas saw me through to the end. My family has
been a sustaining force, and I am happy that completing this project will
leave more time to spend with Jay, Julie, Kate, and Jacob. My parents were
my first and best teachers. By reading what seemed an entire children’s
library to me including Dr. Seuss, The Story of Ferdinand, and Robert
Louis Stevenson’s poems, my mother taught me to love stories, animals,
and the sounds of words. My father was my last, best reader of this book,
who considered every word, more than once, with a writer’s ear and a
structural geologist’s keen eye. It is dedicated to Isabel and Jay with love.
Earlier versions of several chapters appeared in the following publica-
tions, and I am grateful for permission to reprint this material. A version of
Chapter 2 appeared as “Coleridge the Lecturer, a Disappearing Act,” in
Spheres of Action: Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture, edited by
Angela Esterhammer and Alexander Dick. © University of Toronto Press,
2009. 46–72. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. A version of
Chapter 6 appeared as “British Romantic Women Writers, Lecturers, and
the Last Word,” in The Blackwell Companion to British Literature. Vol. 4:
The Long Eighteenth Century, 1660–1837, edited by Robert DeMaria, Jr.,
Heesok Chang, and Samantha Zacher. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell,
2014. 380–95. © John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. A version of Chapter 7
appeared as “The Thrush in the Theater: Keats and Hazlitt at the Surrey
Institution,” in A Companion to Romantic Poetry, edited by Charles
Mahoney. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. 217–33. © John Wiley
& Sons, Ltd.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/12/2018, SPi

Contents

List of Illustrations xxi

List of Abbreviations xxiii

1. Approaching the Lecture Room 1

The Critical Field of Romantic-Era Public Lecturing 8
Engaging in Speculation: Approaching Historical Speaking
Performances 16
Mapping Romantic-Era Literary Lecturing 23

2. Coleridge the Lecturer, A Disappearing Act 30

Coleridge at the Royal Institution: A Star is (Re)Born 33
Spending Time: The 1811–12 Lectures on Shakespeare
and Milton 41
The Pedagogy of Permanence: “Fixed Principles” and
Extemporaneity 46
Suspending Disbelief: Hamlet in the Lecture Room 51
Happy Endings: Romeo and Juliet 56

3. John Thelwall’s School of Eloquence 60

A Defense of “Oral Eloquence” 65
Phys Ed for Poets 72
Applied Poetics 76
Locution, Locution, Locution 83

4. Thomas Campbell, Scholar-Poet 91

The Case against Campbell 94
Performing Enlightenment 102
Literary Lecturing’s Afterlives: “a great London University” 112

5. Acting Like an Author: Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets 118

Jacob’s Dream: Fathers, Sons, and the Work of Mourning 121
Lectures on the English Poets: An Elegy 127
Don’t Speak: The Case for Authorship 133
Acting Like an Author: Hazlitt’s Delivery Style 142

6. The Thrush in the Theater: Keats at the Surrey Institution 154

Listening Lessons 157
Hearing Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets 160
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The power of
kindness and other stories
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
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eBook.

Title: The power of kindness and other stories

Author: T. S. Arthur

Release date: May 24, 2022 [eBook #68158]

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: T. Nelson and Sons, 1877

Credits: Charlene Taylor, David E. Brown, and the Online

Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
(This file was produced from images generously made
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE POWER

OF KINDNESS AND OTHER STORIES ***
THE POWER OF KINDNESS.
And Other Stories.
THE FIRST INTERVIEW
A TIMELY RESCUE
page 105
 The
Power of
Kindness
& OTHER STORIES.

T. NELSON & SONS

 THE

POWER OF KINDNESS.
And Other Stories.

A BOOK FOR THE EXAMPLE AND ENCOURAGEMENT OF

THE YOUNG.

By T. S. ARTHUR.

LONDON:
T. NELSON AND SONS, PATERNOSTER ROW;
EDINBURGH; AND NEW YORK.

1877.
 Contents.
THE POWER OF KINDNESS, 7
ADA AND HER PET FAWN, 18
HOW TO AVOID A QUARREL, 26
THE BROKEN DOLL, 34
HARSH WORDS AND KIND WORDS, 42
A NOBLE ACT, 46
EMMA LEE AND HER SIXPENCE, 53
THE TIMELY AID, 59
THE DOUBLE FAULT, 69
A STORY ABOUT A DOG, 74
THE DISCONTENTED SHEPHERD, 81
THE SHILLING, 86
THE WOUNDED BIRD, 90
THE HOLIDAY, 99
ROVER AND HIS LITTLE MASTER, 104
JAMES AND HENRY, 108
THE USE OF FLOWERS, 116
 The Power of Kindness.
“I HATE him!”
Thus, in a loud, angry voice, spoke a lad named Charles Freeman.
His face was red, and his fair white brow disfigured by passion.
“Yes, I hate him! and he had better keep his distance from me, or I
—”
“What would you do, Charles?” asked the lad’s companion, seeing
that he paused.
“I don’t know what I might not be tempted to do. I would trample
upon him as I would upon a snake.”
For a boy fourteen years of age, this was a dreadful state of mind to
be in. The individual who had offended him was a fellow-student,
named William Aiken. The cause of offence we will relate.

Charles Freeman was a self-willed, passionate boy, who hesitated

not to break any rule of the institution at which he was receiving his
education, provided, in doing so, he felt quite sure of not being found
out and punished. On a certain occasion, he, with two or three
others, who were planning some act of insubordination, called into
the room of William Aiken and asked him to join them.
“It will be such grand sport,” said Freeman.
“But will it be right?” asked the more conscientious lad.
“Right or wrong, we are going to do it. Who cares for the president
and all the faculty put together? They are a set of hypocrites and
oppressors: make the best you can of them.”
“They don’t ask us to do anything but what is required by the rules of
the institution; and then, I think, we ought to obey.”
“You are wonderfully inclined to obedience!” said Charles Freeman,
in a sneering voice. “Come, boys! We have mistaken Master Aiken. I
did not know before that he was such a milksop. Come!”
The other lads retired with Freeman, but they did not insult Aiken, for
they knew him to be kind-hearted and honourable, and felt more
disposed to respect him for his objections than to speak harshly to
him for entertaining them. Aiken made no reply to the insulting
language of the hot-headed, thoughtless Charles Freeman, although
his words roused within him an instant feeling of indignation, that
almost forced his tongue to utter some strong, retaliating
expressions. But he controlled himself, and was very glad, as soon
as his visitors had left him, that he had been able to do so.
On the next morning, before daylight, some persons, unknown to the
faculty, brought from a neighbouring field a spiteful ram, and tied
him, with a strong cord, to a post near the door of the president’s
dwelling. The president, who was very near-sighted, always read
prayers in the chapel at five o’clock in the morning. At the usual hour
he descended from his chamber, and came out at his front door to
go to the chapel, which was distant some fifty yards. It was a little
after break of day. In the dim morning twilight, the president could
see but indistinctly even objects that were very near to him.
The ram, which had, after his fierce struggles with those who had
reduced him to a state of captivity, lain down quietly, roused himself
up at the sound of the opening door, and stood ready to give the
president a rather warm reception the moment he came within reach
of him. Unconscious of the danger that menaced him, the president
descended from the door with slow and cautious steps, and received
in his side a terrible blow from the animal’s head, that threw him,
some feet from where he was standing, prostrate upon the ground.
Fortunately the ram had reached within a few inches of the length of
his tether when the blow was given, and could not, therefore, repeat
it, as the object of his wrath was beyond his reach.
The president was rather severely hurt; so much so that he was
unable to go to the chapel and read morning prayers, and was
confined to his chamber for some days. No investigation into the
matter was made until after he was able to be about again. Then he
assembled all the students together and stated to them what had
occurred, and the pain he had endured in consequence, and asked
to have the individuals who had been guilty of this outrage
designated. All were silent. One student looked at another, and then
at the assembled faculty, but no one gave the desired information,
although many of those present knew the parties who were engaged
in the act. Finding that no one would divulge the names of those who
had been guilty of the outrage against him, the president said,—
“Let all who know nothing of this matter rise to their feet.”
Charles Freeman was the first to spring up, and one after another
followed him, until all had risen except William Aiken. The president
paused for some moments, and then ordered the young men to take
their seats.
“William Aiken will please to come forward,” said the president. As
the lad rose from his seat, several of the faculty, who had their eyes
upon Freeman, and who had reason for suspecting that he knew
about as much of the matter as any one, noticed that he cast a look
of anger towards Aiken.
“It seems, then, that you know something about this matter,” said the
president.
“All I know about it,” replied Aiken, “is, that I was applied to by some
of my fellow-students to join them in doing what has been done, and
that I declined participating in it.”
“For what reason, sir?”
“Because I thought it wrong.”
“Who were the students that applied to you?”
“I would rather not answer that question, sir.”
“But I insist upon it.”
“Then I must decline doing so.”
“You will be suspended, sir.”
“I should regret that,” was the lad’s manly reply. “But as I have
broken no rule of the institution, such a suspension would be no
disgrace to me.”
The president was perplexed. At this point one of the professors
whispered something in his ear, and his eye turned immediately
upon Freeman.
“Let Charles Freeman come forward,” he said.
With a fluctuating countenance the guilty youth left his seat and
approached the faculty.
“Is this one of them?” said the president.
Aiken made no reply.
“Silence is assent,” the president remarked; “you can take your seat,
young man.”
As Aiken moved away, the president, who had rather unjustly fixed
upon him the burden of having given information, tacitly, against
Freeman, said, addressing the latter:—
“And now, sir, who were your associates in this thing?”
“I am no common informer, sir. You had better ask William Aiken. No
doubt he will tell you,” replied the lad.
The president stood thoughtful for a moment, and then said,—
“Gentlemen, you can all retire.”
It was as the students were retiring from the room where this
proceeding had been conducted that Freeman made the bitter
remarks about Aiken with which our story opens. It happened that
the subject of them was so close to him as to hear all he said. About
ten minutes after this, against the persuasion of a fellow-student,
Freeman went to the room of Aiken for the satisfaction of telling him,
as he said, “a piece of his mind.” Aiken was sitting by a table, with
his head resting upon his hand, as Freeman came in. He looked up,
when his door opened, and, seeing who it was, rose quickly to his
feet, and advanced towards him a few steps, saying, with a smile, as
he did so:—
“I am glad you have come, Charles. I had just made up my mind to
go to your room. Sit down now, and let us talk this matter over with
as little hard feelings as possible. I am sure it need not make us
enemies. If I have been at any point in the least to blame, I will freely
acknowledge it, and do all in my power to repair any injury that I may
have done to you. Can I do more?”
“Of course not,” replied Charles, completely subdued by the
unexpected manner and words of Aiken.
“I heard you say, a little while ago, that you hated me,” resumed
William. “Of course there must be some cause for this feeling. Tell
me what it is, Charles.”
The kind manner in which Aiken spoke, and the mildness of his
voice, completely subdued the lion in the heart of Freeman. He was
astonished at himself, and the wonderful revulsion that had taken
place, so suddenly, in his feelings.
“I spoke hastily,” he said. “But I was blind with anger at being
discovered through you.”
“But I did not discover you, remember that, Charles.”
“If you had risen with the rest—”
“I would not, in word or act, tell a lie, Charles, for my right hand,” said
Aiken, in an earnest voice, interrupting him. “You must not blame me
for this.”
“Perhaps I ought not, but—”
Freeman left the sentence unfinished, and rising to his feet,
commenced walking the floor of Aiken’s room, hurriedly. This was
continued for some minutes, when he stopped suddenly, and
extending his hand, said,—
“I have thought it all over, William, and I believe I have no cause of
complaint against you; but I acknowledge that you have against me.
I have insulted you and hated you without a cause. I wish I could act,
in all things, from the high principles that govern you.”
“Try, Charles, try!” said Aiken with warmth, as he grasped the hand
of his fellow-student.
“It will be no use for me to try,” returned Freeman, sadly. “I shall be
expelled from the institution; my father will be angry; and I shall
perhaps be driven, by my hot and hasty spirit, to say something to
him that will estrange us, for he is a man of a stern temper.”
“Don’t fear such consequences,” said Aiken kindly. “Leave it to me. I
think I can make such representations to the president as will induce
him to let the matter drop where it is.”
“If you can do so, it may save me from ruin,” replied Freeman, with
much feeling.
William Aiken was not deceived in his expectations. He represented
to the kind-hearted but rather impetuous president the repentant
state of Freeman’s mind, and the consequences likely to arise if he
should be expelled from college. The president made no promises;
but nothing more was heard of the subject. From that time the two
students were warm friends; and Freeman was not only led to see
the beauty and excellence of truth and integrity of character, but to
act from the same high principles that governed his noble-minded
friend.

There is not one of our young readers who cannot see what sad
consequences might have arisen, if William Aiken had not kept down
his indignant feelings, and been governed by kindness instead of
anger.
 Ada and her Pet Fawn.
THERE was once a dear child named Ada, who was of so sweet a
temper that she only knew how to love; and the consequence was,
that everybody and everything that could know her, loved the sweet
little girl in return. I do not believe that a servant in her father’s family
ever spoke unkindly to Ada, she was so good. There are but few of
my young readers, I am afraid, that can say so of themselves. Cook
scolds, the chambermaid is so cross, and nurse is out of temper,
whenever you come near them. Yes, you know all that; but, my
young friends, I am afraid it is all your own fault. Now, examine
closely your own feelings and conduct, and see if you do not make
this trouble for yourselves. Do you always speak kindly to those
around you; and do you always try to give them as little trouble as
possible?
As for Ada, everybody loved her; and the reason, as I have already
stated, was plain: she didn’t know any feeling toward others except
that of love. Even the dumb animals would come to her side when
she appeared. The cat would rub against her, and purr as she sat in
her little chair; and when she went out to play among the flowers,
would run after her just as you have seen a favourite dog run after
his master. She never passed Lion, the watch-dog, that he didn’t
wag his great tail, or turn his head to look after her; and if she
stopped and spoke to or put her hand upon him, his old limbs would
quiver with delight, and his face would actually laugh like a human
face. And why was this? It was because love prompted Ada to kind
acts towards everything. Love beamed from her innocent
countenance, and gave a music to her voice that all ears, even those
of dumb animals, were glad to hear. Yes, everything loved Ada,
because she was good.
The father of gentle, loving Ada was a rich English lord—a certain
class of wealthy and distinguished men in England, as most young
readers know, are called lords—and he had a great estate some
miles from London, in which were many animals; among them, herds
of deer. When Ada was three or four years old, her father went to live
on this estate. Around the fine old mansion into which they removed
were stately trees, green lawns, and beautiful gardens; and a short
distance away, and concealed from view by a thick grove, was the
park where roamed the graceful deer.
Under the shade of those old trees, upon the smoothly-shaven lawn,
or amid the sweet flowers in the garden, Ada spent many hours
every day, one of the happiest of beings alive.
One morning—it was a few weeks after Ada had come to live in this
fair and beautiful place—she strayed off a short distance from the
house, being lured away by the bright wild flowers that grew thickly
all around, and with which she was filling her apron. At last, when
her tiny apron would not hold a blossom more without pushing off
some other flower, Ada looked up from the ground, and discovered
that she was out of sight of her house, and among trees which stood
so thickly together that the sky could scarcely be seen overhead, nor
the light beyond, when she endeavoured to look between the leafy
branches. But Ada did not feel afraid, for she knew no cause for fear.
She loved everything, and she felt that everything loved her. There
was not any room in her heart for fear.
Still Ada felt too much alone, and she turned and sought to find her
way out of the woods and get back again. While yet among the
trees, she heard a noise of feet approaching; and turning, she saw
an animal that was unlike any she had seen before. It came up close
to her, and neither of them felt afraid. It was a fawn, only a few
months old. The fawn looked into Ada’s face with its dark bright
eyes, and when she spoke to it, and laid her hand upon its head, the
young creature pressed lovingly against the child.