Serially Speaking

Chapter 6 focuses on another rapidly evolving media form of the 1840s: the lecture. The rapid growth of print in this decade energized the civic spaces of American and British cities, and the lecture and the mass-meeting became popular components of a renovated public sphere. The written word and print elicited and supported a new focus on oral communication and bodily presence. This chapter focuses on the performances of two famous and very different orators: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass. Both syncopated their lecturing and writing so that each activity promoted the other, and both created a linked chain of public ‘appearances’, both bodily and in print, in order to keep themselves constantly in front of the public and to keep their ideas continuously in play. This chapter follows their UK lecture circuits and shows how their experiences in revolutionary Europe challenged their thinking about American democracy and citizenship.