Moral Enterprise For BLP: Wilt thou not ope thy heart to know What rainbows teach, and sunsets show? Verdict which accumulates From lengthening scroll of human fates, Voice of earth to earth returned, Prayers of saints that inly burned,— Saying, What is excellent, As God lives, is permanent. W Moral Enterprise Literature and Education in Antebellum America Derek Pacheco THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS COLUMBUS Copyright © 2013 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pacheco, Derek Andrew, 1976– Moral enterprise : literature and education in antebellum America / Derek Pacheco. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-1238-7 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8142-1238-7 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-9340-9 (cd-rom) ISBN-10: 0-8142-9340-9 (cd-rom) 1. American literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Popular education—New England—History—19th century. 3. Literature and society—New England—History—19th century. 4. Mann, Horace, 1796–1859—Criticism and interpretation. 5. Hawthorne, Nathan- iel, 1804–1864—Criticism and interpretation. 6. Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer, 1804–1894— Criticism and interpretation. 7. Fuller, Margaret, 1810–1850—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PS208.P33 2013 810.9'3557—dc23 2013023700 Cover design by James A. Baumann Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Caslon Pro Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American Na- tional Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 W CONTENTS List of Figures and Tables vii Acknowledgments ix INTRODUCTION Education and the “Alexandrian Library” 1 CHAPTER 1 Bibliographic Nationalism: Marketing America in Horace Mann’s School Library 17 Schools, Authors, and Economics 20 “Respectable” Publishing 28 Bibliographic Nationalism 34 Conclusion: “Grandest Moral Enterprise” 46 CHAPTER 2 “Disorders of the Circulating Medium”: Hawthorne’s Early Children’s Literature 50 “Benumbed Fingers” 53 “Disorders of the Circulating Medium” 55 Grandfather’s Love 63 Loving “Sam” Johnson 70 Conclusion: “Very Capital Reading” 75 vi Contents CHAPTER 3 “Contact with the World”: Elizabeth Peabody’s West Street Bookshop 79 Engendering Controversy 83 “No Worthless Books” 90 Transcending West Street 97 Conclusion: “Transcendental Exchange” 103 CHAPTER 4 “Conversation of a Better Order”: Margaret Fuller from the Classroom to The Dial 105 Conversations in Providence 107 Boston and the “Animating Influences of Discord” 113 Fuller, Emerson, and The Dial 118 Conclusion: “Old Gentlemanly Pace” 132 CODA “The Sun is but a Morning Star” 137 Notes 147 Bibliography 181 Index 194 W FIGURES AND TABLES Table 1.1 Volume Titles in The School Library, Adult Series, and Juvenile Series. 19 Figures 1.1 Facsimile autographs in Lives of Eminent Individuals: Celebrated in American History. 31 1.2 “Plainly” and “substantially” bound volumes of The School Library. Adult Series. 33 1.3 Title Page for Sarah J. Hale’s Things by Their Right Names, and Other Stories, Fables, and Moral Pieces. 35 1.4 “Plainly” and “substantially” bound volumes of The School Library. Juvenile Series. 40 1.5 Frontispiece for The School Library. Juvenile Series. 41 · vii · W ACKNOWLEDGMENTS HIS BOOK owes its existence to the support of many excellent aca- Tdemic colleagues. It began its life as a dissertation under the direction of Barbara Packer, an advisor so immeasurably generous with her time that she once penned pages of handwritten commentary for one of its chapters while on vacation, sitting in a Venetian gondola. I also owe a deep professional debt to Michael Colacurcio for years of guidance, as well as to Eric Sundquist and Naomi Lamoreaux for their careful reading of the book’s early drafts. Additionally, I am grateful to have had the assistance of two ideal readers in Denise Cruz and Nush Powell, who combed through the book’s chapters on multiple occasions, suggesting improvements on each read-through from the first to the fifth. I am indebted to friends and faculty members from the Uni- versity of California, Los Angeles, including Helen Deutsch, Chris Looby, and Felicity Nussbaum for advice honing the book’s arguments through vari- ous incarnations from job materials to campus talks; Nicole Horesji, Reggie Allen, Sean Silver, and Geneva Gano for reading early versions of chapters; and Julia, Erin, Luke, Heather, and Rhonda for football at The Shack. Of course, the research for this book would not have been possible with- out numerous library archives, as well as the expertise of their library staff, and the permission of the libraries to quote from their collections. Therefore, I wish to thank the Massachusetts Historical Society; the American Anti- quarian Society; the Houghton Library and Gutman Special Collections · ix · x Acknowledgments at Harvard University; the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College; the Boston Public Library; the College Library, the Southern Regional Library Facility, the Charles E. Young Research Library, and the Special Collections Department at the University of California, Los Angeles; the Pollack Library at California State University, Fullerton; the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Education Library, Hicks Undergraduate Library, and Hicks Repository at Purdue University; and the prompt interlibrary loan services available to me at these institutions. I am also grateful for the research fellowships and travel grants provided by the Massachusetts Historical Society; the Depart- ment of English at the University of California, Los Angeles; the Graduate Division at the University of California, Los Angeles; the Department of English at California State University, Fullerton; and the English Depart- ment at Purdue University. I would also like to thank Gutman Special Col- lections and the Massachusetts Historical Society for their permission to reproduce images in this book. Beginning it as a Ph.D. student at UCLA, I finally completed the manu- script at Purdue University. In the English department, I have been blessed with a vibrant community of early and nineteenth-century Americanist col- leagues, including Kris Bross, Bob Lamb, Chris Lukasik, and especially Ryan Schneider, who always gives good advice. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Sandy Crooms, Maggie Diehl, Martin Boyne, Malcolm Litch- field, and others at The Ohio State University Press for shepherding the manuscript through to print, and also to my anonymous readers for their enthusiasm, as well as their advice on how to make the manuscript better. A version of chapter 2 first appeared as an article, “‘Disorders of the Circulat- ing Medium’: Hawthorne’s Early Children’s Literature,” in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 53.3 (2007): 282-319, copyright 1984 by the Board of Regents of Washington State University; I thank the publishers for their permission to reproduce it here, and the essay’s readers and editors for their assistance in refining its argument. Finally, as in all things, I am thankful for the support of my spouse—my confidante, reader, editor, thesaurus, wordsmith, satirist, and inspiration— not only without whom this book would never have been completed, but also without whom I would probably still be lurking amongst the cubicles of Royce Hall, dreaming of a degree, a job, a home, and a life (having never planned beyond my thirtieth year); half of all my good ideas come from her, and none of my bad ones. Of course, I would be remiss if I did not also thank Henry and Pickles: Henry for being awesome, and Pickles for being tolerable. W INTRODUCTION Education and the “Alexandrian Library” N ADVERTISEMENT quoted in the September 1839 issue of the Chris- A tian Examiner trumpets the fact that The School Library’s publishers would include a “Book-case, with a lock and key . gratuitously, to all who take the Library.”1 This is from the “Prospectus” for Horace Mann’s The School Library, a series of books endorsed by the state Board of Education for use in Massachusetts’ newly formed district school libraries. The promotion of the bookcase is interesting not only because it positions the series as an effort to control the dissemination of literature in a burgeoning antebellum print culture—the series’ contents appear complete and self-contained in its case, while the lock and key determined who could take books out and when—but also because it, along with the Christian Examiner’s singling it out, acts as an argument for the series’ moral and economic worth. The locked case inti- mates that someone may want to steal the contents inside it, which, in turn, reinforces the notion that the books are actually worth something; they are, quite literally, valuable commodities. The notice concludes with the series’ “Introductory Essay” and the words of William Penn: “For learning be liberal. Spare no cost; for by such parsimony all is lost that is saved. But let it be useful knowledge, such as is consistent with TRUTH and GODLINESS.”2 That the case, therefore, is “gratuitous” implies both the publishers’ generosity in giv- ing it away for free and also the readers’ own economic liberality, the kind of excessive economic expenditure (“Spare no cost”) they hope “all who take the · 1 · 2 Introduction Library” will make when they purchase it at a price commensurate with its moral worth (its “TRUTH and GODLINESS”). This book investigates the intersections of authorship, education, and the literary market in antebellum New England. It examines a coterie of what I call “literary reformers”—including canonical figures (Nathaniel Hawthorne), those less so (Elizabeth Peabody), those more recently inducted into the canon (Margaret Fuller), and still others influential but nonetheless over- looked by current literary scholarship (Horace Mann)—to argue that ante- bellum writers came to see in educational reform, and the publication venues emerging in connection with it, a means to encourage popular authorship while at the same time validating literary work as a profession.