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Culture Club: the Curious History of the Boston Athenaeum

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Culture Club: the Curious History of the Boston Athenaeum CULTURE CLUB Culture Club The Curious History of the Boston Athenaeum Katherine Wolff University of Massachusetts Press Amherst & boston Copyright © 2009 by Katherine Wolff All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America LC 2009017734 ISBN 978- 1- 55849- 714- 6 (paper); 713- 9 (library cloth) Designed by Jack Harrison Set in Monotype Dante Printed and bound by Thomson-Shore, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Wolff , Katherine, 1963– Culture club : the curious history of the Boston Athenaeum / Katherine Wolff . p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-55849-713-9 (lib. bdg. : alk. paper) — isbn 978-1-55849-714-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Boston Athenaeum—History. 2. Subscription libraries—Massachusetts—Boston—History. 3. Boston (Mass.)—Intellectual life—19th century. I. Title. Z733.B74W65 2009 027'.274461—dc22 2009017734 British Library Cata loguing in Publication data are available. Portions of Chapter 6 also appear in Boston Athenaeum: Bicentennial Essays (edited by Richard Wendorf, 2009), by permission of the Boston Athenaeum. for my mother Mary Neave Wolff & in memory of my father Nikolaus Emanuel Wolff (1921– 2007) CONTENTS List of Illustrations ix Preface xi Chronology xvii Introduction: Boston’s Confl icted Elite 1 Part One: Enterprise Chapter One: The Collector 15 Chapter Two: Sweet Are the Fruits of Letters 35 Part Two: Identity Chapter Three: A Woman Framed 63 Chapter Four: Ornament for the City 81 Part Three: Conscience Chapter Five: The Color of Gentility 109 Chapter Six: Pamphlet War 130 Conclusion: Ex Libris 148 Acknowledgments 153 Biographies 155 Notes 161 Index 197 ILLUSTRATIONS 1.1 William Smith Shaw 16 1.2 The Monthly Anthology and Boston Review 19 2.1 Athenaeum seal 36 2.2 Italian source for the Athenaeum seal 36 2.3 William Roscoe 41 2.4 James Perkins 42 2.5 The Perkins Mansion 51 3.1 Hannah Adams 64 3.2 Jedidiah Morse 70 4.1 Chester Harding 83 4.2 The Royal Academy Exhibition of 1828 84 4.3 Athenaeum exhibition cata logue 90 4.4 Connoisseurs 93 4.5 Palazzo da Porta Festa 96 4.6 Philadelphia Athenaeum 97 4.7 Facade of Boston Athenaeum on Beacon Street 98 4.8 Athenaeum on Beacon Street, plan of fi rst fl oor 99 4.9 Exterior 102 4.10 First- fl oor sculpture gallery 102 4.11 Second- fl oor reading room 103 4.12 Third- fl oor painting gallery 103 4.13 The Sumner Staircase 105 ix x Illustrations 5.1 “Perish Slavery, Prosper Freedom” cup 110 5.2 Lydia Maria Child (née Francis) 115 5.3 Charles Sumner 121 5.4 Lithograph of the Sumner caning 128 6.1 George Ticknor 136 6.2 Josiah Quincy 137 PREFACE Posh library. Sanctuary for eminent Bostonians. Brahmin enclave. There has always been a mystique surrounding the Boston Athenaeum. For the aca- demic, especially, the place poses a challenge. Founded in 1807, the Athe- naeum raises issues about the mood of a young nation and the promise of American cultural institutions. My initial research questions sounded simple enough. How did the Boston Athenaeum arise? What if one were to use the institution to probe the ori- gins of “high culture” in America? An abstract concept, to be sure. But what needs and desires led to an offi cial site for culture in the antebellum era? Soon the plot thickened. In making an athenaeum the focus of my investiga- tion into capital- C culture, I came to realize that libraries and galleries as re- search topics in themselves have been neglected. The neglect is due, in part, to the enchantment of such sites and their romanticized role in our life sto- ries. Though it embraced many purposes, the Boston Athenaeum was fi rst and foremost a library. Because a library is the setting in which most other research is pursued, its own richly textured history generally becomes invis- ible. Just as the fi eld of book history requires, at least temporarily, the disen- chantment of the book, so library history demands its own disenchantments. The Athenaeum found ers sought the pleasures that come with, as they might have put it, “civilization’s ornaments.” This book seeks the origins of that impulse; it tracks the elusive idea of American high culture. The term culture is itself problematic.1 I locate “culture” in the realm of in- stitutionalized learning and the arts, narrowing but also intensifying the term. I try here to resurrect the ideal that early nineteenth- century American men and women held fast. (I say “ideal” because the word “culture” in reference to philosophy, literature, music, and art is somewhat anachronistic for the ante- bellum United States.)2 Though they may not have used the word until later, the Athenaeum’s found ers purposely built a center for culture, a place where they could control chaos and celebrate civility. Yet they also had their own xi xii Preface culture as a community; they had their own ways of living out their shared goal. In describing the habits and rituals of the Athenaeum community, I por- tray the institution’s sometimes quirky internal culture as well. The most prolifi c and oft- cited scholar on the subject of culture is the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who advanced a theory of cultural capi- tal. In brief, his argument is this: one’s tacit absorption of gentility and elo- quence functions as capital, much like economic capital, which is spent like currency to establish social standing.3 For him, cultural taste defi ned social class; he maintained that culture in the sense of education and the arts is al- ways hierarchical. Further, according to Bourdieu, culture can be said to be “coded”; the internalized code is unequally distributed and thus confers dis- tinction upon those who possess it. I fi nd Bourdieu’s terms useful but ulti- mately limiting. In researching and writing about the Boston Athenaeum, I certainly saw cultural capital and cultural coding at work. I borrow the terms freely. Yet the meaning that Athenaeum members sought for themselves tran- scends so cio log i cal categories. Cultural authority— the special power wielded by a city museum or library, for example— originates in an emotional, even psychological, matrix of needs. Found ers of elite centers of culture have their own histories that move beyond the single- minded pursuit of status. And con- sumers of such institutions visit again and again for reasons that might in- clude status- seeking but embrace more idiosyncratic motivations. Students of American history have puzzled over the idea of cultural au- thority for de cades.4 Richard Bushman, in The Refi nement of America, has documented the spread of genteel culture. He concludes convincingly that through emulating the houses, material goods, and manners of the En glish aristocracy, middle- class Americans in the nineteenth century gained secu- rity and solidifi ed their identities. By constructing parlors in their houses (to off er one example), modest homeowners set off a place to welcome guests, as well as to display a few books and perhaps a painting. Parlor culture con- nected these homeowners— remotely but distinctly— with the leisurely mo- res of En glish gentlemen. The emulation reinforced the cultural authority of Great Britain and, at the same time, weakened it: “Once cultural power was invested in chairs and carpets, rather than armies and castles, the aristocracy was vulnerable.” Bushman observes elsewhere that in the early republic the project of defi ning an American high culture led in two directions: booster- ing American arts and letters that mimicked British culture; heralding a pure, rustic native style. He shows that the former impulse proved to be more infl uential.5 In order to understand the establishment of high- cultural norms, scholars have sometimes focused on institutions. Alan Wallach, in Exhibiting Contra- diction, explores the history and function of the American art museum. He Preface xiii shows that early American institutions such as athenaeums proclaimed their cultural visions proudly but, because of regionalism and factionalism, often lapsed into clubbiness. In the antebellum era, American collectors diff ered greatly from the public at large, who tended to view art as entertainment. The evolution of American “high art,” according to Wallach, involved rele- gating plaster cast collections to gallery basements and (by the early 1900s) identifying museums with spectacular displays of connoisseurship. Wallach interests himself in the way museums depict American society and the American past. Through close attention to curatorial details (“the hang,” the lighting, the text on exhibit labels), he exposes intellectual problems con- cealed within the cultural space of the museum— assumptions and ideolo- gies related to nationalism, for example. His work is valuable to any study of institutions that exhibit art.6 Other Americanists have indulged in what could be called high- low fetish- ism. For example, historian Lawrence Levine and sociologist Paul DiMaggio have argued that after the mid- nineteenth century a high culture of carefully prescribed standards and behavior split off from a looser, more demo cratic middlebrow culture.7 Levine, especially, writes in an elegiac tone about the erasure of a common culture and the resulting symphonies, parks, and the- aters that mirror class distinctions. He argues that a deliberate “sacraliza- tion” of cultural forums in the latter part of the nineteenth century rein- forced class distinctions benefi cial to elites. This train of thought betrays a particularly American preoccupation with the line that separates pop u lar entertainment from high culture. Although there is persuasive evidence that strict norms arose around the consumption of nineteenth- century arts and letters, Levine’s conclusions are incomplete and misleading.
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