The Thrush in the Theater

Hazlitt’s influence on Keats’s poetic development is well known, but as an auditor in Hazlitt’s lectures Keats learned not only from what was said but also from the experience of hearing it live. In the letters and poems written during and after Hazlitt’s first literary series, Keats developed a line of thinking in response to Hazlitt’s disparagement of the quality of “indolence” in James Thomson’s poetry. In an unrhymed sonnet in which the speaker does nothing but hear a thrush sing, Keats developed a poetics of listening as a potentially productive idleness. This insight informed subsequent poems in which the drama is anticipating what another will say and responding to it in the moment. In his letters the recurrent figure of the thrush and an accompanying image of leaves become shorthand for a counter-impulse to the ardent pursuit of what Hazlitt in his lectures called “true fame.”

Acting Like an Author

William Hazlitt was steeped in a 1790s culture of radical speaking. Listening to Coleridge as a Dissenting preacher and hearing him recite his verse fostered Hazlitt’s hopes in political and aesthetic reform. In Lectures on the English Poets (1818) he responded to the dashing of those hopes by developing an aesthetic agenda that might renew them and a conversational prose that would become his signature as a critic. He advocated looking to the earliest British poets for examples of how to achieve lasting fame and, rejecting Coleridge’s extemporaneity, honed a delivery style that emphasized qualities he associated with the kind of authorship he championed by preparing full scripts and adopting a studied distance from auditors. In assuming the role of lecturer Hazlitt attempted to supplant his former mentor and assume his own cultural authority.

John Thelwall’s School of Eloquence

Thelwall could not escape the ghosts of his radical past as a political speaker who had been tried for treason. In reinventing himself as a speech therapist and lecturer on elocution he channeled his previous democratic commitments into teaching how to represent oneself through effective speaking. As he expanded the role of poetry in his elocution lectures, Thelwall developed a distinctive literary criticism that was particularly suited to public lectures. His key criterion for judging poetry was how well it lent itself to being read aloud or recited. At his London school he institutionalized this critical perspective, but his preference for extemporaneity left it vulnerable to loss in the historical record. Collecting the newspaper advertisements and other surviving texts of his literary lectures can help piece together a speculative account of his Romantic-era critical manifesto.

Coleridge the Lecturer, A Disappearing Act

Coleridge set some of the key terms of Romantic-era literary lecturing in his responses to two historical pressures. He attempted to define himself as a literary lecturer against his former roles as a political speaker and Dissenting preacher. He also tried to distance himself from the pressures of the literary marketplace. He developed his key concept of the “willing suspension of disbelief” partly from a desire to persuade auditors to see him not as a paid performer, but rather as a “Poet-philosopher.” Some of his best-known critical arguments gain new meaning once they are understood as in part responses to the culture for which they were pitched. These include his readings of the character of Hamlet and the relationship of Romeo and Juliet.

Approaching the Lecture Room

Public lectures on poetry became popular events in England in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. They joined a thriving lecture scene dominated by science lectures, and they were indebted to traditions of lecturing on elocution and on rhetoric and belles lettres. The public lecture is a crucial medium for the development of the modern category of “literature” because it highlights its debts to these traditions. The literary lecture was also crucially informed by the radical speaking cultures of the 1790s, and it thrived in anxious proximity to a burgeoning literary marketplace. New scholarly attention to the public lecture on literature has been sponsored by research in a number of disciplines, and critical approaches to the medium have been developed in an interdisciplinary conversation about how to treat historical speaking performances.

Thomas Campbell, Scholar-Poet

Among Romantic-era literary lecturers, Thomas Campbell had the distinction of having his own poetry treated by his primary competitors, Thelwall, Coleridge, and Hazlitt. Coleridge and Hazlitt attacked him in gendered critiques as the representative of a spurious popular poetry that pandered to the public, particularly women, and to periodical critics, thereby forfeiting lasting fame. As a literary lecturer Campbell performed the qualities that had made him an overnight success as a poet. Acculturated in Enlightenment Scotland, Campbell adhered to literary tradition and came to specialize in classical literature. He read aloud from polished scripts and presented himself appealingly in an effort to render his literary lessons accessible. He was willing to enter into a mutually beneficial exchange with auditors, especially the women whose patronage could advance his professional and social ambitions. He also viewed education as a viable means of reform in a counter-revolutionary era and launched a successful public campaign for a university in London.

The Last Word

Women were welcomed as lecture auditors who could make a series successful, but lecturers, the institutions that sponsored series, and some male auditors also tried to restrict their participation. They were concerned that female auditors might use the education for their own ends or treat lectures as mere fashionable entertainment. Women authors were acknowledged by lecturers only if they were too prominent to be ignored, such as Anna Letitia Barbauld. Female auditors nevertheless exerted considerable influence in non-print media. They acted as hosts and guests at private gatherings, and as informal patrons for lecturers. Mary Russell Mitford attended lectures to acquire a literary education and wrote accounts of performances by Coleridge, Campbell, and Thelwall. Lady Charlotte Bury acted as host and patron to Campbell, and Catherine Maria Fanshawe circulated poems in manuscript that took as subjects the oral cultures in which she moved as valued guest, including public lectures and private gatherings.