Tom F. Wright's Lecturing the Atlantic attempts to redefine the tradition of public lecturing during the antebellum era in terms of an “Anglo-American commons” (3), drawing upon the term popularized recently by Elizabeth Dillon to make his case for a dissemination of shared transatlantic values across the lyceum circuit. After an introductory discussion that theorizes “The American Lecture Hall and an Anglo-American Commons,” there are chapters on Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Mann and Horace Greeley, William Makepeace Thackeray and Lola Montez. The book thus gets more adventurous in its choice of subjects as it goes along, starting with the relatively familiar story of Douglass, but covering much more original ground in its treatment of Thackeray's lecture tours to America and the exploits of Montez, the Irish actress who combined her popular lectures with the charisma she carried as a former erotic dancer and courtesan. In this final chapter, which also considers the former actor John B. Gough, Wright makes the compelling point that too many discussions of the lyceum tradition as a highbrow phenomenon have tended to underestimate its links with popular culture and with the burgeoning entertainment industry in America.

This work still bears some scars of its doctoral origins, particularly in the occasionally clunky use of theoretical models of “performance” taken from Stuart Hall (101), and its insistence on reading the lyceum as a precursor to “new media modalities” (7), ranging from “televangelist performance” to “every TED talk video upon which we click” (1). Perhaps this is a gesture towards the significance of “impact,” but it can come at the cost of a certain historical depth. While Wright makes important contributions to transatlantic scholarship, his thesis would have benefited from more sustained engagement with research on traditions of oral and literary performance, such as Stephen Railton’s Authorship and Audience (1991). Wright is good on the popular dynamics of the lyceum and the way its system of cultural production framed and circumscribed the work of its lecturers, but he is not especially interested in how this tradition came to influence literary works. The chapter on Thackeray, for example, is original and interesting, but there is nothing at all on how the author's lectures on “The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century” or the “four Georges” of the Hanoverian dynasty (144) might have overlapped with his authorial concerns more generally. Given Thackeray's birth in India and his interest in thinking about the scope of the Anglosphere in the middle years of the nineteenth century, this feels like a missed opportunity. The omission here of Charles Dickens on the grounds that Thackeray's transatlantic lectures are much less well-known, while understandable enough on its own terms, does perhaps contribute to the somewhat emollient notion proposed here of a shared Anglo-American “commons,” a position that Dickens's more spiky performances would not altogether have endorsed. Wright's preference for, as he says, “following the reading of Anglophilia offered by [Elisa] Tamarkin” (190) leads him perhaps to overlook some of the transatlantic political tensions with which Dickens engaged more overtly.

Nevertheless, there is much about Lecturing the Atlantic which is useful and valuable. Wright is particularly good on how the model of lecturing that was prevalent in Scottish universities came to influence the American lyceum tradition, and he is also perceptive about ways in which a commercial conception of the lecture room as a place for “Social Exchange” (27) tended to render more controversial topics off-limits as far as the organizers of these events were concerned. The irascible Thoreau, not surprisingly, found it difficult to accommodate his lectures to these popular requirements, and Wright cites a complaint from his 1858 journal about how audiences “do not wish to be stimulated and instructed, but entertained” (33). Wright aptly describes Emerson as a “theorist of the lyceum” (81), and it might have been interesting to have had a fuller discussion of ways in which a mixture of oral performance and literary belatedness is interwoven within Emerson's printed lectures and how Emerson's style was shaped by such generic hybridity. Wright's particular focus, however, is more upon how Emerson's lectures were received in popular newspapers of the day, which is certainly an illuminating topic in its own right, and what this book does, it does very well.