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of Philadelphia, and the Massachusetts Historical Society for their assistance and for permitting me to quote from unpublished material in their collections.

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 meeting. 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, explaining 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 emphasized 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 explanations 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. The similarities are easily summarized. Each library was essentially a joint-stock company, with members, called proprietors, holding ownership shares. A share entitled a member to a voice in the institution’s governance and to a property right in the collection; to ensure exclusivity and maintain share value, the number of proprietors was always limited. Each group of founders described their library as an “ornament” to its home city; Boston’s language about the need for a library to match the “civilized and flourishing people” of the city echoes the language in the 1802 Liverpool Athenæum catalogue, which, in recounting that library’s origins, described the city as having “risen so high in opulence and population” by 1797 that the lack of a library was rapidly becoming a blot upon its reputation.6 The two institutions shared the same basic structure. Each had a reading room where members could get up-to-date magazines and newspapers, and a library that could be consulted on-site. The reading room set the Liverpool Athenæum apart from places like Philadelphia’s Library Company and the Boston Library Society and may be what made claiming Liv- erpool as a model for Boston plausible. Unlike the Library Society across town, but like its Liverpudlian counterpart, the Boston Athenæum provided a place of refuge where members could gather. The Boston Library Society, founded in 1794, served a similar range of members and allowed members to borrow books, but provided no space to consult them on-site. Access to a circulating collection that could serve their profes- sional research needs and satisfy their curiosity was evidently not sufficient for Boston’s elites. What the Anthology Society provided in its new incarnation was a social space that was both collective and private, a place of sociability for members carefully insulated from society in general. The same impetus was influential in Liverpool, where accounts cite overcrowded and

6Memoir of the Boston Athenæum, p. 9; Catalogue of the Library of the Athenæum in Liverpool. To which are preﬁxed, the Laws of the Institution, and a List of the Proprietors, (Liverpool: J. M’Creery, 1802), p. i.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00566 by guest on 27 September 2021 ORIGIN STORIES: THE BOSTON ATHENAEUM 619 noisy coffeehouses as unsatisfactory for a merchant class that wanted a more genteel place to read the papers.7 The similarities between the two institutions are not surprising because Bostonians were familiar with Liverpool and its Athenæum long before 1807. Descriptions of the city were readily available in Boston; Pelham’s Circulating Library at Corn-Hill stocked Samuel Derrick’s 1767 Letters from Liv- erpool, for example.8 Moreover, Americans traveling to Britain often disembarked at Liverpool; it was, after all, a major trad- ing partner. William Roscoe, the man most associated with the Liverpool Athenæum, seems to have been well-known to Bostonians. Indeed, Katherine Wolff in her study of the Boston Athenæum suggests that its elites maintained a kind of cult of Roscoe, seeing him as an eminently imitable man, an exem- plary European who might also serve as a model for American manhood.9 Each city, however, struck its own balance. In Boston, the library quickly took precedence over the reading room while the reverse was true in Liverpool. The Boston Athenæum traced its beginnings, in addition to Liverpool, to the collection of books accumulated by the Anthology Society. The books were consistently calculated to be the most valuable asset of the institution, and the vast majority of the annual funds were ex- pended on buying new books and rebinding old ones. In 1811,

7Carrick and Ashton, The Athenæum Liverpool, 1797-1997, p. 3. 8Catalogue of Pelham’s Circulating Library, No. 59 Cornhill; Consisting of a chosen assortment of Books in the various branches of Literature. (Charlestown, Mass.: Samuel Etheridge, 1801). Derrick’s Letters is listed on p. 9. The same title was available at the Library Company of Philadelphia by 1807 and was listed for sale in New York City in 1802, indicating that it had purchase in the United States. See [Catalogue of ] books, to be sold on Tuesday evening, November 16, at 6 o’clock, at public auction, by Irving and Smith, no. 161, Pearl-Street, (New York: n.p., 1802); and A catalogue of the books, belonging to the Library Company of Philadelphia; to which is preﬁxed, a short account of the institution, with the charter, laws, and regulations, (Philadelphia: Bartram & Reynolds, 1807); Derrick’s account is listed on p. 75. 9Wolff, Culture Club. Wolff’s discussion of Roscoe, including her use of the term “cult,” is in chapter 2. A contemporary account records at least twenty round trips by steamer between Boston and Liverpool in 1847; counting trips that originated or con- cluded elsewhere and took in Boston or Liverpool as an intermediate stop would raise that number. Thomas Baines, History of the Commerce and Town of Liverpool, and of the Rise of Manufacturing Industry in the Adjoining Counties (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1852), 1:680.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00566 by guest on 27 September 2021 620 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY for example, the Athenæum valued its book collection at just under $12,000 out of total property of just under $39,000.This put books ahead of the institution’s real estate, which was then valued at about $10,000.10 In 1822, “books at their actual cost,” and thus not including the value of donations, were calculated to be worth $15,411.90, still the largest single line in the as- sociation’s accounting of its property.11 Looking back in 1848, then-Secretary Henry T. Parker asserted that “to provide a very large Library” was the “main object for which the institution was originally founded.”12 Telling, too, was the decision the Athenæum’s proprietors made in the mid-1840sasthey erected a magnificent new building on Tremont Street, near the Boston Common and across from the Massachusetts State House. Like a lot of building projects, this one saw cost over- runs, and the Athenæum quickly ran out of money to complete it. Having spent far too much erecting the exterior of the building, they triaged their financial situation by completing only the most crucial interior elements: they chose to finish only a single staircase and the library room.13 When they made that decision in 1847, the library was indisputably the key element of the Boston Athenæum, the aspect that members considered most essential to the institution. In Liverpool, by contrast, the newspaper room was always more important than the library. It opened first, at least six months before the library room was ready, and took far more of the supervising committee’s time. The Liverpool steering committee met monthly, and—judging by the committee’s minutes—it spent most of its time attempting to calibrate the organization’s newspaper subscriptions to the precise needs of its members. In contrast to Boston, where trustees made an accounting of subscriptions approximately annually, in Liver- pool the governing committee revisited its list at virtually every second meeting. In an effort to satisfy members’ acute need for

10Records of the Proprietors of the Boston Athenæum, 7 November 1811,B.A.6.1, Boston Athenæum (hereafter referred to as BA Proprietors). 11BA Proprietors, 7 January 1822. 12BA Proprietors, 11 October 1848. 13BA Proprietors, 9 February 1849, reporting on a 27 April 1847 decision.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00566 by guest on 27 September 2021 ORIGIN STORIES: THE BOSTON ATHENAEUM 621 commercial information, they subscribed to a range of English papers; it is clear that there was a premium on timely news because they subscribed to as many as four copies of some London papers. Multiple copies meant that several proprietors could read the news simultaneously, thus reducing frustrating waits for time-sensitive commercial information. Whereas in Liverpool the primary purpose of these subscriptions was to satisfy an immediate need, in Boston papers were regularly bound for archival storage, suggesting that archival or historical purposes were at least as important there. Thus, even the par- allel institution of the newsroom—present in both cities—had different meanings and purposes on the opposite sides of the Atlantic. Still more telling was the distribution of the Liverpool Athenæum’s funds. The institution’s bylaws were specific: one- third of the annual income was to be spent on newspapers, reviews, pamphlets, and periodicals. The remaining two-thirds was to be spent on books, with one-third of that remainder (2/9 of the total) to be spent on foreign language works and the rest on ones in English. Yet, the committee immediately violated this bylaw and continued to violate it. In 1808 and 1809,the committee spent more than twice as much on the newsroom as on the library, resulting in an increase of dues in 1811.An 1825 account shows that during the preceding thirteen years over £2500 intended for the library per the bylaws had instead been spent in the newsroom. That figure means that they had diverted to the newsroom over half of what should, strictly speaking, have been spent on books. Though the committee noted that the library had been “deprived,” they did not make any significant shift in their spending. In 1854, for instance, they appropriated £500 to the newsroom and only £200 to the library, a ratio that—while still in violation of the bylaws—had become so entrenched that the discrepancy no longer rated a mention.14 In Boston, by contrast, there was no separate

14Minutes of the Proceedings of the Liverpool Athenæum (hereafter referred to as Liverpool Minutes), 2 July 1811, 14 February 1825, 14 August 1854, 2:25-27, 259, 3:373.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00566 by guest on 27 September 2021 622 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY accounting for newspapers and periodicals; bound into volumes, they were counted with other books in the Athenæum’s annual reports and seem to have been valued more as permanent additions to the collection than as sources of breaking news. If books remained more important in Boston and periodicals in Liverpool, the American athenæum also cast a much wider net, supporting art exhibitions and scientific collections that were never part of the Liverpool library. While the Liver- pool institution focused on periodicals, the Boston Athenæum joined its American peers in becoming a crucial node in elite scientific and art networks. In Boston, the original Memoir so- liciting contributions outlined plans for the scientific agenda of the institution. After describing the plans for the reading room and library, the document explained “it is proposed . . . to join to the foundation a Museum or Cabinet, which shall contain specimens from the three kingdoms of nature, scientif- ically arranged; natural and artificial curiosities, antiques, coins, medals, vases, gems, and intaglios.” The memoir also proposed “a Laboratory and an Apparatus for experiments in chemistry and natural philosophy, for astronomical observations, and ge- ographical improvements.”15 Thus the erstwhile Anthology So- ciety rooms were to be a natural history museum and working scientific laboratory in addition to supporting literary ends. The institution took the first step towards its scientific goals when it received the apparatus of the Society for Cultivating Philosoph- ical Knowledge. It is not clear from the surviving records exactly what kind of apparatus this was, but at an original cost of some $1480, it must have been extensive. Despite “having suffered considerably by breakage and use,” the apparatus was valued at $1000 when it was transferred to the Athenæum in 1807.The Athenæum paid for the equipment in credits toward shares in the new institution.16 They sold it again in 1814, but by then the Athenæum had acquired a “considerable collection” from

15Memoir of the Boston Athenæum. pp. 5-6. 16Report of the Trustees of the Boston Athenaeum, 10 June 1807,B.A.1.1, item no. 23, Boston Athenæum Archives (hereafter referred to as BA Trustees).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00566 by guest on 27 September 2021 ORIGIN STORIES: THE BOSTON ATHENAEUM 623 bibliographer and Anthology Society member Obadiah Rich, and had designated a room for a “Cabinet of Natural History,” with special cases and attention to the arrangement of items “so as that the collection may offer a ready and convenient aid in the study of Natural History.”17 In its support for scientific endeavor, Boston’s new library closely resembled other American libraries. In Philadelphia, for example, Thomas Wharton hoped that city’s Athenæum would establish “apartments for the proper reception and display of useful instruments and inventions, minerals, medals, coins, and other curiosities.”18 While Wharton’s vision was never fulfilled, the Library Company a few blocks away did include just such items in its collection. The first “useful instrument” in the Com- pany’s collection was an air-pump received from John Penn in 1739 (and still on display in the Company’s Logan Room today). The Company’s rooms were the site of Franklin’s first experiments with electricity, and in 1747, the Company received “a compleat Electrical Apparatus” from Thomas Penn.19 The Company’s “cabinet of curiosities” included medals, ani- mal and mineral specimens, Native American artifacts, leaves and seeds of various plants, and other artifacts from around the world.20 Similarly, the Athenæum at Portsmouth, New Hamp- shire, boasted a “Museum, containing collections in mineralogy, natural history, antiquities, &c.”21 Although its reading room and museum were well attended, the Boston Athenæum may have drawn the greatest number

17BA Trustees, Minutes for ﬁrst Monday of January 1812,B.A.4, Boston Athenæum. Unfortunately for Boston, the bulk of Rich’s book collection went ﬁrst to London and then to New York; part of it survives in the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public Library. 18Wharton, Address, p. 40. 19The Library Company of Philadelphia, At the Instance of Benjamin Franklin: A Brief History of the Library Company of Philadelphia, revised and expanded edition (Philadelphia: Library Company, 1995), p. 13. 20The Library Company no longer holds the “Bottle with two Tarantulas, another with two scorpions and a Tarantula’s Nest” presented to it as a gift in 1789, having de-accessioned its entire natural history collection. Minutes of the Library Company of Philadelphia [hereafter referred to as LCP Minutes], 3:186. 21“Portsmouth Athenæum,” The Portsmouth Journal and Rockingham Gazette, 21 January 1832.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00566 by guest on 27 September 2021 624 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY of visitors to its art gallery, established in 1827 for both the use of artists, who came to copy works in the collection, and the enjoyment of the public.22 In addition to the permanent gallery, the Athenæum organized an annual exhibition, which drew large numbers of both women and men, and gave local artists a chance to show their work. By offering prizes in the categories of landscape (or marine) and “historical or fancy cabinet” paintings, the trustees sought to “give additional interest” to an event designed to be “at once attractive to the public & useful to the artist.”23 The exhibition, which in addition to rais- ing interest among local and national artists attracted a large audience, brought a broader public to the Athenæum’s rooms. It may, therefore, have been as a patron of the arts rather than as a library or newsroom that the Athenæum was most visible to ordinary Bostonians. In contrast to the expansive activities of the American athenaea, the Liverpool Athenæum maintained a more exclu- sive focus on print, leaving art and science to other institutions. While membership lists overlapped—William Roscoe, for instance, the Liverpool Athenæum’s most important supporter, was also a key ﬁgure in most of Liverpool’s other cultural ventures—there was much less formal collaboration or coor- dination across institutions. Boston’s men of letters saw themselves as connected not only to local artistic and scientiﬁc pursuits but to an international context, emphasizing the ways that the Athenæum provided access to broader cultural circles. Not only did its chroniclers cite Liverpool, but the institution’s catalogues and introduc- tory Memoir emphasized British publications. The Memoir, for instance, placed its list of twenty-one English periodical (and four newspaper) subscriptions before its list of twelve American periodical subscriptions.24 Even the emphasis on developing

22For establishment of the gallery, see BA Trustees, 9 April 1827. Josiah Quincy states that the collection started in 1823 with a Gilbert Stuart portrait of James Perkins, an Athenæum ofﬁcer who had donated his Pearl Street house for its home in 1818. Josiah Quincy, History of the Boston Athenæum, p. 86. 23BA Trustees, 10 October 1831. 24Memoir of the Boston Athenæum, pp. 21-22.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00566 by guest on 27 September 2021 ORIGIN STORIES: THE BOSTON ATHENAEUM 625 American art assumed an already developed—and superior— European art scene. Its British counterpart showed little re- ciprocal interest. When the Liverpool Athenæum printed a new catalogue in 1820, the managers sent copies to institutions across England, Scotland, and Ireland. Oxford and Cambridge made the list; so did Trinity College Dublin and the British Museum. Not a single American institution was sent a copy.25 Equally significant, in the first five decades after the Boston Athenæum opened its doors, not a single mention of it was made in the minutes of the Liverpool Athenæum. Nor did any other American library merit a mention in those minutes. This is not to say that Liverpudlians had no interest in what was happening on the far side of the Atlantic. On the con- trary, they were very interested in some aspects of American news. Specifically, they were interested in American trade. As a major English port, Liverpool was an important center for cotton and, until 1807, the slave trade. Thus the city’s merchants needed to keep abreast of American developments—not only the price of cotton, but also any political developments that might affect trade. But either the Athenæum was never the prime source for American news, or the Athenæum’s merchants got the American news they needed from other sources. Perceiving that more papers were wanted in 1800,theyre- solved to order additional copies of London papers, not Amer- ican ones. Indeed, the only foreign newspaper subscribed to in these early years was the Leyden Gazette.26 Similarly, only sixteen titles in the 1820 catalogue covered American subjects, and a quarter of those were about the West Indies or South America. By contrast, the Boston Athenæum owned by 1824 more volumes on British politics and government alone than on politics, government, biography, and travels in North and South America combined.27 So while the Liverpool Athenæum

25Liverpool Minutes, 2:169. 26Liverpool Minutes, 13 December 1798, 15 September 1800, 1:40, 124. 27A Catalogue of the Library of the Athenæum, Liverpool; by George Burrell, Principal Librarian (Liverpool: Harris & Co., 1820); BA Proprietors, vol. 2, 5 January 1824.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00566 by guest on 27 September 2021 626 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY was perfectly willing to accept gifts of American titles, like the sheaf of New York newspapers it acquired in 1800 in trade for extra copies of “such News-Paper[s] as can be conveniently spared,” as an institution it never sought the kind of transatlantic connections that Boston continually emphasized.28 Of course, in 1807 Bostonians could not have anticipated Liver- pool’s indifference. Still, they would already have known that their own emphasis on books and expansive ambit differed from Liverpool’s emphasis on its newsroom. Moreover, both the Memoir and Gardiner’s “Reminiscences” point speciﬁcally to a written account of the Liverpool Athenæum, yet Anthol- ogy members had visited it and even met with founder William Roscoe. On the basis of those visits, they could have created an exact replica of the institution, had they wished to.29 Instead, they perpetuated a story about a spark of inspiration struck from a written account. And they continued to tell that story as late as Gardiner’s 1861 memoir when the differences between the two institutions must have been obvious to all interested parties. The choice to invoke the startlingly dissimilar Liverpool Athenæum as a model for Boston is particularly remarkable because there were a range of possible examples much closer to home. Boston’s elites need not have looked across the Atlantic for their model, since social libraries already existed in the United States. Social (also called subscription) libraries were all organized on a membership basis, with proprietors owning shares in the books and other property and thereby gaining access to the collections. Finding themselves in need of money, most eventually also sold annual memberships admitting subscribers to use of the books for a fee without conferring ownership. Usually founded by groups of ten to thirty men, some eventually had hundreds of members; still, ownership shares were always limited in number. Unlike commercial circulating libraries operated for a proﬁt, social libraries were voluntary or- ganizations often designed around groups with similar interests,

28Liverpool Minutes, 15 September 1800, 1:124. 29Wolff, Culture Club, pp. 38-44.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00566 by guest on 27 September 2021 ORIGIN STORIES: THE BOSTON ATHENAEUM 627 such as merchants’ clerks or artisans’ apprentices. In twelve of the thirteen original states, at least one subscription library was established before independence.30 Those that called themselves athenæa were generally designed for and limited their membership to an urban elite that already shared ties of education, profession, social status, and often neighborhood. While the Boston Athenæum was the first American social library to use the Roman term, there was already a social library operat- ing barely half a mile away when the Anthology Society opened its reading room in 1807. Established on the same subscription basis as the Athenæum and providing its members with a circulating collection, the Boston Library Society had appealed to the same network of mostly Harvard-educated legal, medical, and business men since 1794. It staked its claim to high culture by setting up in a suite of rooms designed by Charles Bulfinch and located in a then-fashionable part of the city.31 At least three Anthology members held memberships in the Library Society, so there is no question that the Athenæum’s founders knew about this much closer model. If the An- thology men found their literary and research needs un- fulfilled by the Library Society, they might have looked to other American cities for useful models. Indeed, the same 1807 appeal to subscribers citing Liverpool also noted that Boston was behind Philadelphia—where Benjamin Franklin’s

30The Davies Project at Princeton University’s American Libraries before 1876 database lists at least fifty-nine social libraries established in the years up to and including 1776. Though the greatest numbers of libraries were located in Connecticut and Pennsylvania, every colony except Delaware boasted at least one. Because the Davies definition of “social library” is more restrictive than the one I use here, the real number of such libraries—and thus of potential models—was greater. The database is online at http://daviesproject.princeton.edu/databases/index.html (accessed 15 May 2006). See also Haynes McMullen, American Libraries before 1876 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000). 31The records of the Boston Library Society are held at the Boston Athenæum. A brief history is in Michael Wentworth with Elizabeth Lamb Clark, The Boston Library Society, 1794-1994: An Exhibition of Portraits, Views, and Materials Related to the Foundation of the Society and Some of Its Early Members (Boston: Boston Athenaeum, 1995). Bulfinch’s Tontine Crescent was demolished in 1858, displacing the Society. The site is roughly at the corner of Arch and Franklin Streets, near today’s Downtown Crossing, while the Athenæum was then located close to today’s Government Center.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00566 by guest on 27 September 2021 628 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Library Company had operated since 1731—and New York City in literary culture. Though the Library Society offered no reading room—books could be read only off-site—other American libraries offered that convenience and might have served as models for the Athenæum’s innovation vis a` vis its neighbor. Boston’s literary men were well aware of the Library Com- pany in 1807, just as the founders of the Athenæum of Philadel- phia later on were aware of the Boston venture. Athenæum founders in each city were familiar with library societies’ activities elsewhere through newspaper accounts, the exchange of catalogues, and letters among friends or business partners; traveling library members might also visit their local institution’s counterparts in other cities. Most elite libraries had generous provisions for visitors; the Philadelphia Athenæum provided in 1820 that “persons whose usual place of residence is not within Ten miles from the Athenæum may . . . be admitted gratis, for a period of one month at each visit to Philadelphia.” Simi- larly, William Bentley, longtime pastor of the First Church in Salem, Massachusetts, and Salem Athenæum member, noted in September 1808 that he had visited the Boston Athenaeum on Court Street; he called it “the Commencement of a very valuable Collection” and noted that “it contains the splendid folio edition of Hume & many works of the ﬁrst price & ex- cellence.” Bentley was shown the library as part of a tour of Boston libraries during one of many regular trips to Boston, and returned about once a year, visiting again in September 1809 and May 1811. Bentley may have been unusual in his devotion to literary pursuits, but his involvement in ﬁrst the Salem Philosophical Library and then the Salem Athenaeum seems to have only made him more eager to explore their counterparts in Boston.32 Presumably Anthology members had similar motivation to explore sites of literary culture in their own travels.

32Athenæum Board Minutes, 16 October 1820, Athenæum of Philadelphia; The Diary of William Bentley (Gloucester, Mass.: Essex Institute, 1962), 1 September 1808, 3:381, 6 September 1809, 3:458, 29 May 1811, 4:27.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00566 by guest on 27 September 2021 ORIGIN STORIES: THE BOSTON ATHENAEUM 629 Less frequent visitors would have had no trouble ﬁnding the various reading rooms since they were listed prominently in city directories. City directories also commonly listed the ofﬁcers of each library, sometimes with their addresses. Visitors might also have used guidebooks such as Picture of Philadelphia, or, A Brief Account of the Various Institutions and Public Objects in this Metropolis. Being a Complete Guide for Strangers. with an Addenda of All Improvements to the Present Time, which listed the Philadelphia Athenæum and the City Library (as the Library Company was then called) alongside the Apprentices’ Library and the American Philosophical Society in a special section detailing the city’s literary institutions.33 Whether they found a library through a guidebook, a city directory, or—probably most frequently—through a personal invitation from an acquaintance, men found them. The Philadelphia Athenæum recorded the visits of “535 very respectable strangers from all parts of Europe & America” in 1816,and“832 Gentlemen . . . from every civilized portion of the globe” in 1818.34 While the primary goal of these visitors was most likely keeping up with the news of home through the wide selection of newspapers stocked in the reading rooms, they could also take away innovations in library organization and collections for use in their home institutions. There was enough similarity among these institutions that such sharing of plans and ideas would have been useful, even—perhaps especially— if it also inspired civic rivalry. In 1807, the Anthology Society clearly knew of Philadel- phia’s Library Company, Charleston’s Library Society (founded 1754), and the Library Company of Baltimore (1796), all

33Picture of Philadelphia, or, A Brief Account of the Various Institutions and Public Objects in this Metropolis. Being a Complete Guide for Strangers. With an Addenda of All Improvements to the Present Time. (Philadelphia: E. L. Carey & A. Hart, 1835), see pp. 100-105. For a less ﬂattering view of the Library Company, see letter, Theodore Sedgwick to Pamela Dwight Sedgwick, 9 January 1791, Sedgwick Family Papers, Mas- sachusetts Historical Society, in which he describes the LCP’s new rooms as “empty” and producing “the sensation of poverty in the proprietors.” I thank Marla Miller for sharing this letter with me. 34Minutes of the Board of the Athenæum of Philadelphia, 1 February 1817, 1 February 1819.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00566 by guest on 27 September 2021 630 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY of which were specifically cited in the Memoir. Gardiner, writing in 1861, would have known of all of these and many more. The Memoir called the Charleston effort “very respectable”; the same passage praised Franklin’s Library Company for its “great splendour and utility.” Yet the writers relied on “the cultivated character and the liberal spirit” of their own city for support of their plan. Surely “the advancement of society and the state of the metropolis” would elicit enough support for the venture to “justify their claim to this praise.”35 Historians have charac- terized the post-revolution decades both as a time of increas- ing national feeling and as deeply riven by both partisan and regional division, and the Memoir’s language illustrates both trends. It recognized the existence of libraries elsewhere, but insisted that Boston’s version would be superior.36 Reflecting what Robb Haberman has termed “provincial nationalism,” the Memoir stressed a kind of confined patriotism that celebrated national achievement by extolling the specifically local.37 Rivalry may partially explain why the Athenæum’s proprietors and historians avoided citing available American counterparts as their models. Still, the choice to pin the Athenæum’s origins to Liverpool seems especially odd in light of the Boston proprietors’ insistence that theirs was a specifically American project, intimately tied to the fate of the new nation. “A nation,” they wrote, “that increases in wealth, without any correspond- ing increase in knowledge and refinement, in letters and arts, neglects the proper and respectable uses of prosperity.” The Athenæum, they asserted, would result in “improved and cultivated character of the citizens at large,” by encouraging the

35Memoir of the Boston Athenæum, pp. 18-19. 36David Waldstreicher argues that regionalism was the basis for nationalism in this period. Waldstreicher, “In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes”: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Trish Loughran extends Waldstreicher’s work by arguing that such sense of national identity as existed depended on regional atomization; when technology allowed for a truly national print culture in the age of railroads, print did more to tear the nation apart than to knit it together. Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 37Robb K. Haberman, “Provincial Nationalism: Civic Rivalry in Postrevolutionary American Magazines,” Early American Studies 10,no.1 (2012): 162-93.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00566 by guest on 27 September 2021 ORIGIN STORIES: THE BOSTON ATHENAEUM 631 “love of intellectual improvement and pleasure” that was especially crucial to a “civilized and flourishing people” like that of the young republic.38 In claiming this kind of national significance, Boston’s proprietors echoed the earlier language of the Anthology Read- ing Room, which touted a project “so useful to the publick.”39 While more concise, the Philadelphia Athenæum expressed the same sentiments in its Fourth Annual Report (1819), which explained the importance of its mission: “To promote the literature Science & the arts of our country should be the aim of ambition, because they are the noblest accompaniments of a free government, & the surest strength of a powerful people.” Free government and a powerful people: these were themes that ran through the promotional literature and internal reports of many American libraries. The next year’s report elaborated these points, explaining that “the greatness of every nation con- sists in the intellectual wealth of its people” and that “the wide dissemination of useful knowledge is calculated to perpetu- ate the peculiar form of government, under which we have the happiness to live.”40 In their view, libraries would help to shape their members—and by extension the wider society—in just the right ways to assure the development of a strong and appropriate national character. The Boston Athenæum’s first Memoir was still more specific, laying out in detail the benefits of the reading room and library for “every class of readers,” who were envisioned to “de- rive profit and pleasure from a constant access” to periodicals, pamphlets, and literature. It went on to discuss the particular uses that would appeal, separately, to businessmen, merchants, legislators, historians, “gentlemen of each of the learned pro- fessions,” and “studious inquirers in general.” Even young people would benefit, because “useful reading” would “serve to

38Memoir of the Boston Athenæum, pp. 8-9. 39“Proposal for the establishing of a reading room in Boston, to be called The Anthology Reading Room,” 5 May 1806,B.A.1.1,folder2, Boston Athenæum Archives. 40“Fourth Annual Report,” “Fifth Annual Report,” Minutes of the Board of the Athenæum of Philadelphia, 1 February 1819, 1 February 1820.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00566 by guest on 27 September 2021 632 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY withdraw them from gross relaxations and hurtful pleasures, by the desire of enlarging their minds and improving their taste.” In turn, they would grow up into useful citizens, and therefore the Athenæum would be valuable not only to them, and to the other named classes of citizens, but also “to the publick.”41 The Boston Athenæum thus aspired to contribute to the public good mostly through services provided to its members, whose improved moral character and usefulness would infuse a nebulous public with virtue and sense. Boston’s proprietors were satisfied that they had met this goal by 1849, when they reported that the support of generous friends had made the institution “an object of just pride to our whole community.” Since proprietorship started at $300 per share (a life subscription could be had for $100) and was unavailable to women at any price, only a small proportion of residents had access to the reading room; how such a library would reform the morals and cultivate the intellects of all Bostonians remained undefined. Nevertheless, the public in general was expected to consider themselves beneficiaries as well.42 The library project, then, was explicitly part of nation-building, a tool to create a new citizenry for a new country. If the methods remained obscure, the goal was explicit: institutions built on books were a way of shaping the morals and manners of the public for the re- sponsibilities of citizenship in a democratic republic and were therefore particularly necessary—but also especially effective— in a still politically fragile America. Elsewhere in the new republic, leaders sought to affirm the nation’s importance and inspire its citizens with reference to classical examples. Though they invoked the temporally closer example of Liverpool in their narrative account, Athenæum supporters selected the classical route in their symbolic choices. The name athenæum itself was carefully chosen, and reflected a range of complementary influences. If it borrowed the name Liverpool had chosen in 1797, the term also deliberately invoked the academies of ancient Rome, in turn formed and

41Memoir of the Boston Athenæum, pp. 10-13. 42BA Proprietors, 9 February 1849.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00566 by guest on 27 September 2021 ORIGIN STORIES: THE BOSTON ATHENAEUM 633 named to honor Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. Though the Liverpool Athenæum had been the first modern English institution to choose that name (as Boston’s had been the first American one to choose it), Samuel Breck invoked classical, not English, origins when he explained Philadelphia’s adoption of the same label. At the laying of the Philadelphia Athenæum’s cornerstone, Breck told his audience that the institution’s name was meant to hearken back to “a celebrated school upon the highest hill in Rome.”43 The choice of a classical name reflected a more general fascination in this era with things Greek and Roman. In the same years that the first American athenaea were founded, the United States also saw the flourishing of neoclassical (also called Federal style) and Greek Revival architecture, which drew on the motifs and styles of Greek and Roman temples. Similarly, many of the Americans depicted in sculpture or painting in this period chose to be portrayed in Roman togas, against a background of Greek temples, or in other ways that evoked the idea of ancient Greece and Rome. When, for example, Benjamin Franklin was consulted about a statue in his likeness to be created for the Library Company’s new building, he asked to be depicted in “a Gown for his dress and a Roman head.”44 Together, these recreations of classical styles reflected a sense that the United States was recreating the ideal democracy of Athens, making a nation whose ora- tors would rival Pericles while its government would—rejecting European monarchism—revive the best of a primitive, in the sense of prime, tradition. The tagging of George Washington as a “modern Cincinnatus” is perhaps the best-known example of this trend, but a fascination with Greece and Rome can be seen in architecture, fine arts, dress, politics, interior decorations, and even educational materials from this period.45 The adoption of the term athenæum was a part of this sweeping interest

43Samuel Breck, Address, p. 6. 44LCP Minutes, 1 October 1789, 3:182. This statue of Franklin can still be seen in a window of the Library Company. 45Wendy A. Cooper, Classical Taste in America 1800-1840 (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 1993); Richard L. Bushman, The Reﬁnement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992); and Caroline Winterer, The Culture of

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00566 by guest on 27 September 2021 634 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY in things ancient in the cultural realm, a piece of the same attraction to an older time. The classical allusion may have had particular resonance in Boston as it began to label itself the “Athens of America.” That epithet usually referred to the con- centration of literary and intellectual talent in the city—this was the period of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Bronson Alcott, and Margaret Fuller—but for Athenæum founders the echo may have had another layer of meaning.46 A fascination with Greece and Rome influenced the architecture of athenæum buildings as well as their names. After hous- ing itself successively in several buildings across the city rented or inherited from donors, Boston’s Athenæum proprietors laid the cornerstone of their first (and still only) purpose-built home in 1847. Like many of its counterparts, this Beacon Street building was Italianate in style. In the same year, Philadelphia’s Italian-style Athenæum opened its doors and was deemed “most impressive as a piece of street architecture” with “an air of stateliness and grandeur.”47 Providence, Rhode Island con- structed its own Greek Revival palace in 1838,justadecade before Boston and Philadelphia.48 These buildings reflected the prevailing architectural style of their time, but in doing so drew on the vocabulary of the classical period. The character- istic features of Italianate architecture—molded frieze, heavy cornice, and entrance pillars—all hearkened back to classical architecture. Thus the classical references in the institution’s

Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1790-1910 (Balti- more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 46The phrase “Athens of America” as a label for Boston is usually attributed to William Tudor, who is said to have coined it in 1815. If that is so, then it would postdate the choice of the Athenæum’s name, but the phrase may have been in oral circulation earlier. On the idea of Boston as an American Athens, see Thomas H. O’Connor, The Athens of America: Boston 1825-1845 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006). 47“Architectural Description of the New Hall of the Athenæum,” p. 46, printed with Wharton, Address. 48For the Providence Athenæum, see Grace Fisher Leonard, The Providence Athenæum, a Brief History, 1753-1939 (Providence: Providence Athenaeum, 1940); and Jane Lancaster, Inquire Within: A Social History of the Providence Athenæum since 1753 (Providence: Providence Athenaeum, 2003).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00566 by guest on 27 September 2021 ORIGIN STORIES: THE BOSTON ATHENAEUM 635 very name were again echoed in its physical appearance, rein- forcing the connection between the modern institution and the glories of the old world. Although the choice of “athenæum” as a label echoed the supposed model of Liverpool’s library, the broader cultural context makes clear that there were many other possible wellsprings of classical allusion available to the Anthology Society. If the Anthology Society members sought to build an explicitly American institution and looked to the ancient past and to American examples to design their library, why then did they claim inspiration from Liverpool? And why did that claim per- sist in the accounts of men like Robert Gardiner? There are at least two possible, and related, explanations. First, Athenæum founders faced a newly industrializing society where fortunes were being made and lost more rapidly than before in an Amer- ica that was still—especially before 1814—seeking its place on the world stage.49 For these men, the Athenæum was a way of shoring up a communal identity that balanced democratic impulse (the Athenæum would be a light to the world) against patrician elitism (high membership fees would wall off access). If despite their wealth and standing, the Boston Athenæum’s founders felt that their city’s status and their own was precari- ous, they may have wanted to link this major cultural project to an undeniable center of influence. Even as the United States was “unbecoming British,” in Kariann Yokota’s phrase, Euro- pean culture both ancient and modern remained a touchstone for Americans. So, describing their new institution as essentially English may have been a way of claiming the status and prestige associated with British culture. The choice may also have reflected the realities of British influence. Although American printing was a rapidly growing

49The literature on the market revolution is vast. See Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Martin Breugel, Farm, Shop, Landing: The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley, 1780-1860 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). On the importance of the War of 1812 for U.S. national identity, see Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010); and Paul A. Gilje, Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights in the War of 1812 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00566 by guest on 27 September 2021 636 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY industry in the first decades of the nineteenth century, libraries such as the Athenaeum imported most of their books from En- gland. In April 1828, for example, Boston trustees voted to ask Obadiah Rich, their former associate then living in London, to choose £50 worth of such books “as he may think expedient” for the library.50 Similarly, Philadelphia’s Library Company had a standing arrangement with Joseph Woods and William Dill- wyn, who acted as its agents in London, to fill its orders and choose additional books at their discretion. Their twice-yearly orders of books entreated the agents to send specified titles, but also requested Woods and Dillwyn to choose “such works of moderate prices as you shall judge proper for the Library.” The agents were urged to rely upon their own “usual taste and Judgment” since the writers “labor[ed] under difficulties derived from [their] distance from the great literary Reservoir London.”51 Though publishers’ sale-catalogues and the requests of members kept directors abreast of many of the most interesting works appearing in England, their distance from London made it difficult to keep current. The emphasis on recent works and the reliance on those closer to the British book trade to de- cide what was interesting and appropriate shows the continuing significance of English taste.52 As historian Sarah Fatherly has argued, Philadelphians’—and by extension Americans’—reading choices were shaped in large part by the prescriptive literature directed at the British gentry. In publications like the Tatler, Spectator, Female Specta- tor, and the Ladies’ Library—works appearing on the shelves of the Boston Athenaeum—specific curricula were suggested for the substantive education of elite ladies and young gentlemen.53 Though by 1807 few Boston elites would have described

50BA Trustees, 14 April 1828. 51LCP Minutes, 1 January 1789, 3:123, 16 December 1793, 3:346. 52For an analysis of the relationship between British booksellers and American buyers, see James Raven, London Booksellers and American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community and the Charleston Library Society, 1748-1811 (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2002). 53Sarah Eleanor Fatherly, Gentlewomen and Learned Ladies: Women and Elite Formation in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia (Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh University

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00566 by guest on 27 September 2021 ORIGIN STORIES: THE BOSTON ATHENAEUM 637 themselves as aspiring to be members of the British gentry, they continued to look to these publications as they stocked the shelves of their library. Political independence aside, British fashions continued to govern, at least in part, wealthy Ameri- cans’ literary tastes. While patterns of book purchasing may have mostly acknowl- edged the unavoidable power of British publishing, there are other indications that founders tended to embrace that inﬂu- ence. Appeals for subscribers, whether published in newspapers or distributed as circulars, invariably touted the library’s subscriptions to English and French periodicals as a major selling point. Thus Boston’s proprietors listed among the foremost “Objects of the Athenæum” not only “magazines, reviews, and scientiﬁck journals in the English, French, and other modern languages, memoirs of learned societies, [and] London and Paris newspapers” but also “London and Paris booksellers’ catalogues,” and, for the library, “particularly such rare and ex- pensive publications, as are not generally to be obtained in this country.”54 The same impulse led the writers of the Philadel- phia Athenæum’s Fifth Annual Report, published in local newspapers, to emphasize that “twenty-eight English Magazines, Reviews and other periodical publications, together with the most celebrated of those published in Paris—with four English and three French newspapers are regularly received.” The report went on to assure potential subscribers that these newspapers and periodicals were not only interesting but timely, as they “are placed upon our tables, sometimes, after the short interval of one month, and invariably within two months, from the period of their publication on the other side of the At- lantic.” A list of the relevant periodicals was appended to the report.55 The emphasis on both the number and the timeliness

Press, 2008). See also her, “‘The Sweet Recourse of Reason’: Elite Women’s Education in Colonial Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 128,no. 3 (2004): 229-56. 54Memoir of the Boston Athenæum, p. 4. 55“Fifth Annual Report of the Directors of the Athenæum of Philadelphia,” 1 February 1820, newspaper clipping pasted into Minutes of the Board of the Athenæum of Philadelphia, vol. 1, 1814-1821, emphasis in the original.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00566 by guest on 27 September 2021 638 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY of European periodicals, even more than the quantity of books imported from across the Atlantic, reflected a desire among American elites to be associated closely with European literary culture. Library proprietors assured potential members that by joining, they could have early and frequent access to London’s literary scene, be among the earliest to read new publications, and thus maintain their position among their city’s foremost cultural experts and arbiters. Access to European imprints, whether book or periodical, was a major selling point; perhaps casting the entire institution as a bit of European culture transplanted was also meant to make it attractive to potential members. A second possibility is that Boston’s elites were reacting to the turning of domestic political and economic tides. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the city’s elites were increasingly beset by political dislocation; as Federalists in an increasingly Jeffersonian America, this dislocation was particularly acute. Pinning their new cultural edifice to British origins may have been a way of asserting the primacy of British (and hierarchical) culture over French (and democratic) challenges. Catherine O’Donnell Kaplan has argued that the Anthologists deliberately excluded politics from their periodical, maintain- ing a “suprapolitical” stance in the face of rising partisanship; yet, she notes, even a magazine that celebrated having “never lent ourselves to the service of any party” betrayed the Fed- eralist leanings of its editors by its critiques of mass culture and mob politics.56 Having committed themselves to keeping the Athenæum—like the periodical (at least in concept)—from being a site for explicit political debate, its origin story may have been for proprietors a way of firing a salvo in the ongo- ing tension between Francophile Jeffersonians and Anglophile Federalists as eastern Massachusetts found itself increasingly at odds with the national political mood.

56Kaplan, Men of Letters, pp. 194-200, “suprapolitical,” p. 195; [Samuel Cooper Thatcher], “Address of the Editors,” Monthly Anthology 10 (June 1811): 363, quoted in Kaplan, p. 194.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00566 by guest on 27 September 2021 ORIGIN STORIES: THE BOSTON ATHENAEUM 639 Perhaps the most compelling possible motive for men like Gardiner, in the context of growing political divisions, may have been precisely that it allowed them to avoid giving credit to institutions closer to home. Already in 1807, and even more so in 1861, Boston was in competition for power and prestige with other American cities as the Boston-based politics of revolution gave way to a government based in New York, Philadelphia, and then the new capital at Washington. That competition was invoked explicitly in Philadelphia, when its Athenæum opened a new building in 1847. Perhaps because Philadelphia was win- ning the competition for economic (if not political) importance, Philadelphian Thomas Wharton used domestic comparisons as a goad to potential donors who were less openhanded than he would have liked. In his otherwise celebratory 1847 address, Wharton, then vice-president of the institution, asked his listeners to “compare for a moment—for in this connex- ion comparisons are not odious—what has been done here for literary institutions, with what has been given in Boston.” “I am afraid,” he lamented, “that the result will be anything but gratifying to our municipal vanity.” The evidence he provided came from the Boston Athenæum’s foundation stone, which recorded the $75,000 given for the building in 1844; Wharton compared this ﬁgure to the $25,000 raised for the Philadelphia building.57 Bostonians were more oblique, but it is clear that the Athenæum was partly an attempt to reclaim for their city some leading role in the new nation, having lost out as both a political and an economic capital to cities farther south with larger harbors. Indeed, they were already noting in 1807 that “in the city of New-York much has recently been done for the promotion of these objects.”58 By implication, Boston needed to catch up to its southern neighbor. Rivalry might explain, too, why Bostonians chose “athenæum” rather than the more common “library company” or simply “library” as a label; no American library had yet adopted that label and so it would set Boston apart. Comparisons to other cities would have been

57Wharton, Address, pp. 28-30. 58Memoir of the Boston Athenæum, p. 19.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00566 by guest on 27 September 2021 640 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY even more on Gardiner’s mind in 1861, since the opening of the Boston Public Library just seven years earlier had been accom- panied by exactly this kind of argument for civic advancement. A key line of argument for the new public library had been that Boston was falling behind cities like New York in literary cultivation and national prominence; the Boston Public Library was intended in part to counteract Boston’s declining significance. George Ticknor, later a Public Library trustee, weighed in on the debate to warn that “we may justly expect, in a quarter of a century, to fall as much behind New York, with its Astor Library, in the means of intellectual culture, as we do already in the advantages for commercial success.”59 Gardiner was likely to have paid attention, because one proposal was that the Athenæum should give itself to the city as the seed of the new library. If that debate still felt fresh when he wrote his “Reminiscences,” he may have been eager to avoid ced- ing precedence to Philadelphia, Providence, or Baltimore by acknowledging the influence of their libraries on his own. Thinking of Gardiner’s account as motivated by civic rivalry may also help to explain why the Athenæum founders seized on Liverpool specifically—and not London or another English metropolis—as their purported model. While Liverpool had a population about three times that of Boston, its place in En- gland in 1807 was in important ways analogous to Boston’s in America. Each was a significant port, a gateway for com- modities like cotton, beef, and cheese, and yet each city sat some 220 miles from a larger and more economically important city. When men like Gardiner looked at Liverpool, then, they may have seen in Liverpool’s rivalry with London an echo of Boston’s rivalry with New York.60 By 1861, the two cities remained comparable in some respects; each, for example, had

59[George Ticknor] “Union of the Boston Athenæum and the Public Library,” (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, Printers, 1853), p. 7. 60For population data I have relied on the historical tables included in the 1960 U.S. Census (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1960 Census, Volume I, Part A: Number of Inhabitants, Section 23-10,Table5), accessed 1 July 2016, http://www2.census.gov /prod2/decennial/documents/10107945v1pAch05.pdf; and on the Vision of Britain project at the University of Portsmouth, GB Historical GIS / University of Portsmouth, Liverpool RegD/PLPar through time | Population Statistics | Total Population, A

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00566 by guest on 27 September 2021 ORIGIN STORIES: THE BOSTON ATHENAEUM 641 been transformed by an influx of Irish immigrants. In claiming Liverpool as a twin, though, Gardiner would have been laying claim to a prominence that Boston lacked. London still out- stripped Liverpool for social cachet, but Liverpool’s star was on the rise. While Boston was no backwater, its economic and political star, by contrast, was falling. For precisely that reason, emphasizing Boston’s similarity to Liverpool, a provincial capital hundreds of miles from the political center that was nevertheless of uncontested national significance, may have been a way of strengthening its claims to precedence over its American rivals. Whether they had in mind regional rivalry or partisan politics, when Gardiner and his predecessors came to write the history of the Athenæum and attributed the idea to Liverpool, they were consciously shaping a narrative that obscured some key differences and flatly ignored some parts of the story. It is tempting—but ultimately mistaken—to see that choice as reflecting a sense of inferiority, or as Yokota phrases it, enacting “old templates of dependence.”61 Paying homage to Liverpool, we might think, was of a piece with purchasing English imprints and seeking guidance from London book dealers. That is, Americans sought to import what they could not fully imitate. Instead, the evidence from Boston shows, the deliberate choice to identify Liverpool as the model was likely as much about domestic relationships as Atlantic ones. That is, it was about the status of Boston vis a` vis New York and Philadelphia and the domestic political symbolism of an English template as much as about the status of Boston in relationship to London. So they elided the differences between the Liverpool and Boston athenaea in order to tell the story they wanted to tell. Although this story is sometimes told as Bostonians trying to create an institution in the image of Britain, ultimately what Bostoni- ans said about Liverpool was much more about themselves

Vision of Britain through Time, accessed 1 July 2016, http://www.visionofbritain.org .uk/unit/10067169/cube/TOT POP . I thank Elizabeth Weber Handwerker for guiding me through the U.S. census and locating the relevant data. 61Yokota, Unbecoming British, p. 63.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00566 by guest on 27 September 2021 642 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY than about that city and its institutions. When they invoked their transatlantic counterpart, Boston’s Athenæum proprietors were neither misinterpreting the details of a faraway place nor naively revealing their indebtedness to an erstwhile colonial power. Instead, like victors anywhere who get to shape the story, they told one serving their own political and cultural needs. They invented the Liverpool Athenæum in their own image.

Lynda K. Yankaskas is assistant professor of history at Muhlen- berg College. Her book manuscript in progress examines social libraries and civic culture from the age of Franklin to the rise of the public library.

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