The Boston Athenæum, Transatlantic Literary Culture, and Regional Rivalry in the Early Republic

Origin Stories: The Boston Athenæum, Transatlantic Literary Culture, and Regional Rivalry in the Early Republic lynda k. yankaskas RITING of the Boston Athenæum’s founding in his 1861 W memoirs, Robert Hallowell Gardiner traced the inspiration for the new literary institution some fifty years before to a specific moment. The Athenæum, he explained, was the work of Boston’s Anthology Society, a group of young men who came together in 1805 to publish the Monthly Anthology.Likeother early nineteenth-century periodicals, the Anthology published essays on literature written by its board of editors, the results of scientific investigations on everything from toes to cats, and a miscellany of other prose. Gardiner, scion of a wealthy Maine family and Anthology Society member, described how the So- ciety, in accordance with common practice, accepted books in exchange for its periodical, and soon found itself with more volumes than space to house them. Short of funds as well as space, the Society resolved at the end of 1806 to reinvent itself as a membership library, open to a much wider circle than contributors to the Anthology alone. The specific form of this I am grateful to James Green of the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Early Americanists of the Lehigh Valley, and the Quarterly’s editors for their comments on earlier drafts of this article, and to the Muhlenberg College Provost’s Office for financial support that made possible my research in Liverpool. I also thank the staffs of the Boston, Philadelphia, and Liverpool Athenæa, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Massachusetts Historical Society for their assistance and for permitting me to quote from unpublished material in their collections. The New England Quarterly, vol. LXXXIX, no. 4 (December 2016). C 2016 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. doi:10.1162/TNEQ a 00566. 614 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00566 by guest on 27 September 2021 ORIGIN STORIES: THE BOSTON ATHENAEUM 615 reinvention, Gardiner recalled, took shape when an account of the Athenæum of Liverpool was read at an Anthology meet- ing. Upon hearing the account, he wrote, the Society members “were all at once impressed with the great advantage there would be in having such an institution in Boston” and “de- termined at once that it should be established with the same name.”1 In pinning the origins of the Boston Athenæum to the Liv- erpool example, Gardiner was retelling an old tale. When the Anthology Society set out in 1807 to recruit subscribers for its new venture, the members also explained that their plans were modeled on those of Liverpool, citing (in a printed Memoir) the inspiration of “cities of Great-Britain, probably inferiour in opulence and population to this metropolis” that nevertheless supported great central libraries. These in turn, the Memoir claimed, laid “a permanent foundation for [the] cultivation and advancement” of literature and the arts “through successive pe- riods.” The text of the appeal went on to cite the Athenæum of Liverpool as a particularly estimable example.2 They also paid homage to their inspiration in their first printed catalogue, ex- plaining that their institution was “intended, as a foundation 1Robert Hallowell Gardiner, “The Anthology Club,” excerpted from chapter 12 of Gardiner’s unpublished “Reminiscences” (1861), Boston Athenæum Archives, B.A. 1.2, Boston Athenæum. Quotation from p. 7. Although Gardiner called the organization the “Anthology Club,” contemporary accounts call it the “Anthology Society.” For the sake of consistency, I use the latter appellation throughout. In addition to Gardiner’s memoir, there are several contemporary histories of the Boston Athenaeum. See Josiah Quincy, History of the Boston Athenæum, with Biographical Notices of the Deceased Founders (Cambridge: Metcalf & Co., 1851) and Boston Athenæum, The Athenæum Centenary: The Influence and History of the Boston Athenæum, from 1807 to 1907, With a Record of its Officers and Benefactors and a Complete List of Proprietors (Boston: The Boston Athenæum, 1907). For an abbreviated history, see Edward Wig- glesworth, “Sketch of the Boston Athenæum,” American Quarterly Register 12 (1839): 149-53. The best study of the Anthology Society is in Catherine O’Donnell Kaplan’s Men of Letters in the Early Republic: Cultivating Forums of Citizenship (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). Some of this story is also told in early chap- ters of Katherine Wolff’s Culture Club: The Curious History of the Boston Athenaeum (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009). The Anthology was first published in 1803, but the board of editors organized itself under a formal constitution only two years into the magazine’s run. The Anthology Society’s Records are at the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, and the Boston Athenæum. 2Memoir of the Boston Athenæum. With the Act of Incorporation, and Organization of the Institution (Boston: Munroe & Francis, 1807), pp. 16, 18. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00566 by guest on 27 September 2021 616 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY in this metropolis of an establishment, similar to that of the Athenæum and Lyceum of Liverpool in Great Britain; combin- ingtheadvantagesofapublicklibrary...withareadingor news-room.”3 Historians, too, have accepted the story of Liverpool as the inspiration for the Boston Athenæum; it is repeated in at least two recent accounts of its origins. Catherine O’Donnell Ka- plan states plainly that “[Athenæum librarian William Smith] Shaw’s plan was to elevate American culture by re-creating a British institution.” Similarly, Katherine Wolff’s otherwise com- prehensive history of the Athenæum reads the institution as an attempt to imitate a British cultural form and quotes the Mem- oir’s citation of Liverpool, apparently at face value. It is not surprising that scholars have taken the Athenæum’s founders at their word because this reading reflects broader understand- ings of the relationship between the United States and Britain during the first half-century of American independence. Kari- ann Yokota, for example, writing of the culture and politics of the post-revolution decades, characterizes the citizens of the new republic as being “caught between the urge to innovate and the need to adhere to European standards and traditions, which conferred both national and Old World legitimacy.” Elisa Tamarkin goes further, arguing that early national “Americans adore[d] England as part of their national character.” These analyses accord with a broad scholarly tradition that has em- phasized the continuing influence of English taste in the early republic.4 If historians have been quick to accept Gardiner’s account, it is partly because much of the primary material confirms the 3Anthology Reading Room rules and catalog (1807), p. 1,B.A.1.3,folder23,Boston Athenæum Archives. 4Kaplan, Men of Letters in the Early Republic, p. 186n3; Wolff, Culture Club, p. 21; Kariann Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 44; Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. xxviii. A centenary history of the Athenæum of Liverpool explicitly claims that the most prominent American athenaea were “based on the Liverpool plan.” Neville Carrick and Edward L. Ashton, The Athenæum Liverpool, 1797-1997 (Liverpool: The Athenæum Liverpool, 1997), p. 5. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00566 by guest on 27 September 2021 ORIGIN STORIES: THE BOSTON ATHENAEUM 617 importance of British examples to American cultural projects; careful examination of library records corroborates that the founders of elite subscription libraries like Boston’s conceived of their institutions as participating in a transatlantic world of print and as tied explicitly to British print culture. This impulse was widespread among American men of letters. Philadelphian philanthropist and politician Samuel Breck, speaking at the cornerstone-laying ceremony of the Athenæum of Philadelphia in 1845 similarly recalled that the institution’s name had been “chosen...inimitation of similar institutions in Europe and America.”5 At first glance, then, it seems plausible that Gardiner reported the Athenæum’s origin story accurately; however, a closer examination reveals that his story obscured the truth. While British predecessors generally and the Liverpool Athenæum specifically were justly famous in America, they were far from the sole or guiding inspirations for the Anthology men’s project—a fact well known to contemporary chroniclers like Gardiner. Given the differences between the Boston and Liverpool athenæa, the Anthology Society’s prior knowledge of Liverpool, a range of closer models, and the Boston founders’ emphasis on the specifically American nature of their project, it is difficult to believe that the first inspiration came from a written account of the English institution. I argue instead that Gardiner’s account—and the earlier accounts it echoed—were deliberate constructions, and I seek to offer possible explana- tions for the telling and retelling of this particular origin story. The repetition of Gardiner’s narrative obscures the complexity of the founders’ relationships both to English libraries and to American counterparts; conversely, examining this story as a deliberate construction reveals the competing impulses of an urban elite in the early national era. Although boosters in 1807, like Gardiner a half-century later, claimed that the Boston Athenæum was modeled on Liverpool, 5Samuel Breck, Address, 1 November 1845, printed with Thomas I. Wharton, Esq., Address Delivered at the Opening of the New Hall of the Athenæum of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: John C. Clark, Printer, 1847), p. 6. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00566 by guest on 27 September 2021 618 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY the two institutions were more different than alike from their earliest days, and they grew more distinct over time.

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