Given that a family influences and molds the aspirations of a child, Emerson's family traditions pointed young Waldo toward a career as a minister. Born May 25, 1803, the son of the Reverend William Emerson and Ruth Haskins Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson's ancestors included eight ministers on both sides of the family since their arrival in the American colonies. The family was not wealthy, but respectable. Young Emerson went to the Boston Latin School and Harvard, where he was an undistinguished student unlike his older brothers whose academic records brought honor to the family.
Following graduation, he taught school with his brother William for two years while contemplating a future vocation. His mediocre academic record promised little success as a university professor. Ministry and the law were the two professions traditionally open to men of Emerson's class who wanted to pursue a scholarly life outside the university. Emerson showed little aptitude for the legal intricacies of contracts and torts or courtroom confrontations. It seemed natural that a child whose whole life was shaped by the pastoral example of his father would eventually become a minister.
In February 1825 he formally enrolled in the Theological School at Harvard University. By October of the next year he presented his first sermon to the Middlesex Association and gained his license to preach. Speaking in the pulpit presented no terrors to the young Emerson, for he had been training for this activity for most of his life. Emerson's training in public speaking reflected the classical precepts of observing good models, learning sound principles, and practicing regularly. He grew up in a society that valued good public speaking and he listened to his father and other ministers in the pulpit on a regular basis. At the Boston Latin School, he and the other pupils practiced public speaking every Saturday. At Harvard, he had weekly declamation exercises and participated in a club devoted to writing and speaking. He read Hugh Blair's Rhetoric, listened to the lectures of Edward T. Channing, the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, and memorized passages from Edward Everett's speeches.
After studying theology at Harvard, Emerson was ordained and began his ministry at the historic Second Church in Boston where the Mathers had preached. He served the church for over three years and preached almost 200 sermons before resigning his ministry on October 28, 1832. During his years as pastor of the Second Church, he married Ellen Tucker, whose untimely death from tuberculosis greatly affected him. In poor health himself, and at loose ends following his resignation, Emerson used a small legacy from her estate to travel to Europe where he met Thomas Carlyle and other literary figures.
The meeting with Thomas Carlyle on August 25, 1833, brought Emerson face to face with a sympathetic soul who had read widely in the German Idealism that was beginning to influence the younger generation in England and the United States. Although Emerson was familiar with the German philosophy through the intermediary sources of Wordsworth and Coleridge, his discussions with Carlyle brought him in direct contact with a major literary thinker who was conversant with the writings of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.
Returning to the United States in October 1833, Emerson faced again the vexing problem of finding a vocation. His brother Charles suggested that Waldo be engaged for a series of lectures on natural history for the Boston Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. This organization and many more like it arose to meet the need for public education and were loosely organized into a lecture circuit. Emerson changed his pulpit for a lecture platform and created a new career for himself (L, 1, 397).
When Emerson began lecturing the lyceum movement was in its infancy. Its founder, Josiah Holbrook, saw the lyceum as a means to provide instruction and promote useful knowledge by drawing on the resources within the community. Individuals who had special expertise would be given an opportunity to share their knowledge with those who desired to learn. The lyceum reflected the democratic spirit of the Jacksonian era with its emphasis upon equal opportunity and its celebration of the ability of the common man. In an age when few attended let alone graduated from college, and the standards for practicing law and medicine were virtually undefined, the idea that individuals with special interests or talents could instruct others seemed reasonable. Unfortunately, in practice, the officers of the lyceum discovered the old truism that a prophet is without honor in his own country. Homegrown talent was too familiar to command the excitement and interest of the neighbors. Gradually, the focus of the lyceum changed from mutual education to providing a platform for visiting lecturers, many of whom provided more entertainment than instruction.
When Emerson gave the first lectures on natural history he was a young apprentice following the example of other lecturers who popularized ideas for their audiences. Although an experienced speaker, he was new to the lyceum and lacked confidence in his ability to hold an audience with his own thoughts. These early lectures were all given under the sponsorship of organizations such as the Boston Mechanics Institution whose audiences expected a popular or at least interesting treatment of a vaguely educational subject. Although a relatively new phenomenon, the lyceum had already developed a formula for success. As a beginner without a reputation or a following, Emerson, at first, had to conform to the formula to succeed (EL, 1, xii- xxi).
While earning an income and a reputation lecturing around Boston in the next few years, Emerson read widely in philosophy, corresponded with Carlyle, and meditated on the relationship of man to the natural world. The result was the publication of his first book, Nature, in September 1836, which began an unusually productive period in his life. In the next few years he gave the major addresses, "American Scholar" in 1837 and the "Divinity School" in 1838, founded and edited The Dial, and published his first and second series of Essays and his first book of Poems.
On October 5, 1847 Emerson left Boston on the Washington Irving and arrived in Liverpool on October 22, giving him a little over 10 days to rest before beginning a lecture tour of Great Britain at Manchester on November 2. This was Emerson's second visit to England but his first lecture tour. When he toured England in 1833, he met a several famous literary men including Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle. He also became an acquaintance of a young Scotsman, Alexander Ireland, who in later life became one of the leading spirits of adult education in Manchester and who in 1846 wrote to Emerson inviting him to return to England and give a series of public lectures. Emerson was not unknown to the English public. His Essays, First Series and Essays, Second Series had both been published in England with introductions by Carlyle and widely reviewed in the press. The audience to whom Emerson spoke was familiar to him for the "Mechanics Institutions" that sponsored his lectures in England inspired the lyceum movement in the United States and followed a similar path of development.
His English lecture tour confirmed Emerson's growing reputation as an intellectual, brought him into personal contact with some of the leading literary personalities in England, and rekindled his friendship with Carlyle. When he returned to the United States, he brought with him the mantle of English approval-a valuable commodity in a young nation that lacked an intellectual establishment that could give approbation to a young writer-lecturer.
Even when his lectures began to deal with his own ideas, Emerson spoke to audiences that knew something of him from his ministry or his occasional speeches. Until 1850 his lectures did not take him far from his home, but his growing reputation as an author and his acceptance by the English literati made him a "name" or public personality who began to receive invitations from lyceums far removed from his usual lecture circuit. His first major invitation came in the spring of 1850 from the members of the Literary Club of Cincinnati, who pledged money to support a course of lectures by Emerson in the city. Although traveling farther away from home would involve greater personal discomfort, the invitation to lecture in the Western states must have been a welcome assurance of continued popularity to Emerson, whose principal source of income until after the Civil War was his lecture fees. This invitation also provided the opportunity to recycle many old lectures previously given in New England and New York that would be fresh to these new audiences.
The audiences were "new" not ony in the sense that most had never seen or heard him before, but also in the sense that they heard Emerson's message in a different way. During this decade, Emerson took on the aura of a public figure who symbolized to the popular mind the prestige culture of New England as exemplified in the sobriquet, "The Yankee Sage." Mary K. Cayton studied this process in the city of Cincinnati and found that the new audience consisted of the rising young business class represented by such institutions as the YMCA which sponsored 'character-building' activities such as reading rooms, debating activities, and lectures as an alternative to taverns, gambling dens, and brothels. The young men who had migrated to the city in search of opportunities lived alone in rooming houses without the supervision or guidance of parents or familial friends. Institutions of self culture could provide these young men with the internal controls to confront the temptations of the big city. In a larger sense, the self culture movement represented the interests of the business class in disciplining the lower middle class work force of clerks and salesmen who carried on much of the business of the commercial organizations in the city.
In the early lectures given from 1833 to 1842, Emerson used the lecture form as the primary vehicle to express his ideas. By the 1850s, the lecture had become secondary to the published essay and served primarily financial rather than artistic ends. Lectures were repeated more frequently as Emerson traveled farther afield in search of new audiences. Lectures in Boston and New York became social events, with the same people showing up year after year to see Waldo and be seen by others. Emerson became a public figure whose personal- ity and presence on the platform were experienced by the cultivated classes much as going to a museum or an art exhibit might be. In this later stage of his life, Emerson became an icon of culture-the sage of Concord-and was used to promote the genteel culture of New England.
The lectures " Power," "Wealth," and "Culture" given as part of the "Conduct of Life" series during the 1850s spoke directly to the concerns of the rising business class that formed his audience, and these lectures were especially popular in the West. Although the ideas that are the basis of the lectures are religious and designed to challenge the listeners' complacent view of lives they were leading, Emerson's indirect presentation of these ideas through metaphors and allusions allowed the audience to focus on his observations without comprehending the ideas they represented. Newspaper accounts reported the sharp observations and brilliant aphorisms without comprehending the framework of ideas that gave them coherence. As Emerson's reputation and popularity grew, he increasingly became identified as an optimistic seer who preached a progressive vision of self culture within a competitive commercial order.
This book focuses on the early lectures when Emerson was at the height of his powers. Following the Civil War, Emerson would continue to lecture, but both his physical strength and his mental abilities began to decline. For example, in 1867, Emerson gave 80 lectures and traveled to 14 states. By 1868 he reduced his schedule to a little over 30 lectures, and by 1869 his tours to the West were all but ended, as he stayed mainly within his old orbit of Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island. By 1872, his memory was so weak that he frequently read the same page of his lecture twice without realizing it. That year, following a series of six "conversations" given at Boston's Mechanics Hall during the afternoons and attracting primarily women who were old friends and admirers, Emerson limited himself to an occasional address usually before familiar audiences. His days as a traveling lecturer were over. His psychological balance was further disrupted when a fire swept through his house destroying the roof but thankfully not his papers or his books. His friends raised over $12.000 to restore the house and support him for the few remaining years of his life.
Friends persuaded him to travel to Europe while the house was being restored. Although in declining health, he felt strong enough for one last trip to Europe, where he rekindled his friendship with Carlyle and met the leading literary figures of England and the Continent. When he returned to Concord, he was greeted by an overwhelming display of his neighbors' affection for him including a brass band and a floral arch leading to the newly restored house. In the remaining years he gave occasional speeches at literary meetings but declined most invitations. He gradually declined and on April 27, 1882, Ralph Waldo Emerson died after a brief struggle with pneumonia. He was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in a family plot not far from the graves of Hawthorne and Thoreau.
2. Rusk, Life, Chapters 1 and 7.
3. David M. Robinson, "The Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Introductory Historical Essay," In The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Albert J. von Frank, et al. 4 vols. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989) 1-32.
4. Herbert A. Wichelns, "Ralph Waldo Emerson," in The History and Criticism of American Public Address, ed. W. Norwood Brigance, 2 vols. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1943) 501-25.
5. Rusk, Life, Chapters 11 and 12.
6. Joseph Slater, ed. The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 1-94.
7. Carl Bode, The American Lyceum: Town Meeting of the Mind (Carborndale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968) 3-59.
8. McAleer, Days of Encounter, 228ff.
9. Townsend Scudder, "Emerson's British Lecture Tour, 1847-1848," American Literature 7 (1935): 35.
10. Mary K. Cayton, "The Making of an American Prophet: Emerson, His Audiences, and the Rise of the Culture Industry in Nineteenth Century America," American Historical Review 92 (1987): 597-620.
11. Cayton, "The Making," 605.
12. Rusk, Life, 388ff.
13. McAleer, Days of Encounter, 612ff.
14. McAleer, Days of Encounter, 661ff.
Lloyd Rohler rohlerl@uncwil.edu