This is a dynamic study charting the ways that Ralph Waldo Emerson's lecture tour through Europe from October 1847 to June 1848 impacted his thought and political action in the 1850s and 1860s. Britain was suffering from a severe economic crisis at the time of Emerson's tour, and one of Koch's strengths as a biographer and historian is to chronicle both Emerson's exposure and response to the revolutionary activity and the rise in the class-consciousness of workers that resulted from it. For as short as the lecture tour was, Koch argues that “Emerson's contribution to antislavery thought and abolitionist activity in the U.S.A. cannot be understood without reference to his experience of Great Britain and the European revolutions of 1848” (3).

The study employs a complex methodology organized chronologically but informed by various critical approaches, including historiography, biography, transatlantic studies, literary studies, and cultural studies. Therefore, while the chronology lends a narrative structure, Koch's multivalent analysis creates an exciting nexus that enlivens this period, both in Emerson's evolution as a thinker and activist and in British history. The result is an energetic hybrid of critical applications, casting the intersecting ideological, cultural, and personal contours of the tour into relief.

The kind of liveliness that Koch brings to the tour asks readers to hold Emerson's evolving thought in balance with the details surrounding his experiences in Great Britain and France, and in chapter 1 Koch gives us the context for both his arrival in Britain and his departure from America. Indeed, Koch sets an exciting tone for the tour and the book by setting the stage. First, he foregrounds a Britain ready to embrace or reject Emerson, and then he describes an Emerson whose writings reveal tension around the problem of reform. Emerson was disappointed, for example, by Fruitland's failure, the end of Brook Farm, and the Dial's discontinuation. In addition, he could not commit to abolition. Koch notes that Emerson's early lectures do not advocate reform activity even in the face of dissatisfaction with existing laws. Instead, they uphold the influence of noble character as a force for cultural change.

It is with this introduction that Koch begins his discussion of the tour itself, organizing chapters 2 and 3 respectively around an analysis of Emerson's reception in Britain (which he argues poses a challenge to historians' Marxist narrative of Chartism in Britain) and a nuanced picture of the personal side of the tour. Visiting two types of venue, the Mechanics' Institutions, educating working-class adults, and Athanaeums and Literary and Philosophical Institutions, serving the middle and upper classes, he delivered lectures from Representative Men to audiences made up mainly of artisans and members of the labor aristocracy. The lectures are united, Koch argues, by the idea of man's potential to improve himself, with an emphasis on the promise of “self-culture.” In turn, Emerson's early “racialist Saxonism” was reinforced by meeting merchants, industrialists, and manufacturers who treated their workers humanely. However, even as he remained convinced that progress could be achieved through industrialization and the role of elite leadership, he was simultaneously recording the vast ideological differences between skilled and unskilled workers, as well as the impact of the Chartists, who were making plans for an insurrection.

In chapters 4 and 5, however, Koch offers an insightful transition to the stages of Emerson's tour that challenged his investment in this elitism. Although his journals contain antirevolutionary sentiment, he was captivated by student protests in Oxford and the Chartist plans for revolution on 10 April. According to Koch, the turning point came when 10 April passed without action, and Emerson was forced to ask himself what a scholar's duty was. Witnessing Britain's intellectual class retreat from the political sphere prompted Emerson to articulate his responsibility: “The scholar has a duty not only to observe, support, and sympathize with the side that represents the progressive tendency, no matter how vulgar its base-level adherents may appear, but also to be a leader, a ‘priest or poet’ to them” (130). In London, Emerson delivered the Mind and Manners series revealing his new conviction: “The scholar must … express belief in the necessity of dismantling systems that go against the ‘moral sentiment’” (147).

The central ideas presented in the Mind and Manners series would then become the platform for Emerson's increasingly radical abolitionist rhetoric, which he framed as an epic conflict between the spirit of progress towards human rights and a fatal materialism. English Traits was a direct outcome, in which he revised his previous belief that English honesty, justice, and work ethic were biologically determined. Instead, Koch argues, the Saxon becomes a symbol of freedom, demonstrating Emerson's new conviction that reform is a matter of civic duty rather than the occupation of elite leadership. Upon return to America he imagined a broader anti-slavery and pro-reform agenda, one that encompassed Chartists, French republicans, and socialists, and those who supported worker's rights, universal male suffrage, and the abolition of slavery.

The dynamism that Koch brings to this study could have easily led to a disintegration of coherence. Instead, Koch handles the multivalent methodology deftly and further organization is lent through tables, appendices, notes, and an extensive bibliography. Combined, Koch reveals the ongoing conversation that Emerson had with his experiences during the tour and that Britain had with Emerson's impact. The analysis Koch provides of Emerson's published and unpublished manuscripts, which recover his lectures, is carefully intertwined with a history of the tour, and, by doing so, Koch captures the force of upheaval. Ralph Waldo Emerson in Europe gives us Emerson the thinker as well as British history and extends our own conversations with both.