Public lectures on poetry caught the popular imagination in Britain in the first two decades of the nineteenth century with the performances of John Thelwall, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Campbell, and William Hazlitt. Lecturers aimed to shape auditors’ reading habits, burnish their critical profiles, and establish a literary canon, but auditors also wielded considerable influence, since their sustained approbation was necessary to a series’ success. A number of oral traditions fed the literary lecture’s development, but it emerged most vitally out of and against the radical speaking cultur ... More

Public lectures on poetry caught the popular imagination in Britain in the first two decades of the nineteenth century with the performances of John Thelwall, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Campbell, and William Hazlitt. Lecturers aimed to shape auditors’ reading habits, burnish their critical profiles, and establish a literary canon, but auditors also wielded considerable influence, since their sustained approbation was necessary to a series’ success. A number of oral traditions fed the literary lecture’s development, but it emerged most vitally out of and against the radical speaking culture of the 1790s in which Thelwall and Coleridge had participated, and developed in anxious proximity to an expanding literary marketplace. These pressures informed lecturers’ critical arguments as they debated who should receive a literary education, what works they should read, and for what ends. As historical speaking performances, public lectures demand a methodological approach of their own, because lecturers communicated their arguments with words, physical gestures, facial expressions, and via self-presentation. An interdisciplinary scholarly consensus now recommends approaching these events by gathering as many surviving texts as possible from both parties and situating these performances in their specific times and places. Although women were disallowed from being public literary lecturers, female auditors performed significant cultural roles as patrons, and as hosts and guests at private gatherings that sometimes followed public lectures. Auditors including John Keats, Mary Russell Mitford, Lady Charlotte Bury, and Catherine Maria Fanshawe responded to lectures in conversation, poems, letters, and journal entries that should be considered creative works in their own right.