From spectators to visionaries: visual culture and the transformation of Boston, 1820-1860

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FROM SPECTATORS TO VISIONARIES:

VISUAL CULTURE AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF BOSTON, 1820-1860

by

Justin Tyler Clark

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL,
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(HISTORY)

April 2014

Copyright 2014 Justin Tyler Clark
ii
Acknowledgments

I owe my deepest intellectual debt to my unfailingly generous and brilliant
adviser, Karen Halttunen. Her deep and resourceful engagement with the problems of
American cultural history and her unflagging commitment to her students have set an
example I can only hope one day to match. I am also grateful to Philip Ethington and
John Rowe for their invaluable guidance of this project; their insight and encouragement,
along with that of Judith Bennett, Lisa Bitel, Kate Flint, Richard Fox, Deborah Harkness,
Peter Mancall, and Steve Ross, shaped critical phases of my intellectual career as a
graduate student.
Numerous other friends and colleagues at the University of Southern California
read portions of this project early on and helped untangle its many knots: Max Felker-
Kantor, Ann Johnson, Justin Haar, Nicholas Gliserman, Karin Huebner, Luman Wang,
Monica Pelayo, and Keith Pluymers, especially. Ann Fabian at Rutgers offered
wonderful feedback on a conference paper drawn from the manuscript, and Anne Rose of
Penn State University thoroughly and helpfully critiqued the entire project. Needless to
say, I could not have survived without the help of the history department staff: Lori
Rogers, Sandra Hopwood, Laverne Hughes, and Joe Styles.
I am deeply thankful for the financial support of the American Antiquarian
Society Center for Historic American Visual Culture, the New England Regional
Fellowship Consortium, the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, the USC-
Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute, the USC Graduate School, the USC Center
for Law, History and Culture, the USC Science, Technology and Society Research
Cluster, and the USC Visual Studies Research Institute. I received helpful guidance from
Conrad E. Wright and Katheryn Viens of the Massachusetts Historical Society; Rosemary
Krill, Brock Jobe, and Jeanne Solensky of the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library;
Catherina Slautterback, David Dearinger, Hina Hirayama, Mary Warnement, and Carolle
Morini of the Boston Athenaeum; Paul Erickson, Laura Wasowicz, and Nan Wolverton
of the American Antiquarian Society; and the many other staff members and fellow
readers I had the pleasure of working with in the archives.
On a more personal level, my parents, Susan and Edwin Clark, offered
encouragement throughout my years as a graduate student. Of my partner, best friend,
and fellow intellectual adventurer, Shaoling Ma, I can only say that none of it would have
been worth it, or possible, without her.

iii
Abstract

Between 1820 and 1860, the newly incorporated city of Boston evolved from a
dilapidated, cramped, haphazardly planned, poorly lit, and architecturally stagnant,
provincial town, into a booming and visually impressive metropolis. Even as residents
reveled in a vibrant new landscape of landmarks, art galleries, parks, museums, glittering
shops and bustling streets, however, many among them—Transcendentalists, magnetic
clairvoyants, Spiritualists, and blind autobiographers—sought out more ethereal visions
of the invisible, infinite, and ideal. Through an interdisciplinary analysis of journals,
sermons, periodicals, maps, architectural renderings, novels, and artworks, this
dissertation relates two seemingly antithetical antebellum developments: spectacular
urbanization and a popular preoccupation with the unseen. I argue that the visually
congested, commercial, and competitive world of the antebellum city spurred Bostonians
to look beyond the city, toward the sanctified realms of the imagination, nature, and even
spirit-land.

The project is divided into two parts. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 analyze the efforts of local
reformers in the 1820s and 1830s to promote moral and social order by constructing
cleaner streets, public art exhibition spaces, and the nation’s largest market, tallest
monument, and first public park. By teaching Bostonians to see “correctly,” the
architects of this didactic landscape hoped to suppress the materialism, sensualism, and
worldliness they feared endemic to urban life. Yet this campaign provoked unintended
consequences, as explored in chapters 4, 5, and 6. Starting in the mid-1830s, a socially
diverse range of visionaries attained fame by seeing past the city and its spectacular
seductions. By describing and depicting those visions for an eager public, blind
autobiographers, spirit-drawing artists, magnetic clairvoyants, and other Bostonians
sought social parity with more polished observers. In the process, Boston’s visual
transformation re-shaped the meaning of “seeing” in ways that went far beyond the more
literal forms of spectatorship typically associated with the urban experience.

iv
Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: 17
The Urban Origins of Boston’s Didactic Culture

Chapter 2: 60
Moral Landmarks, Ideal Vistas and the Problem of Spectacular Pluralism

Chapter 3: 104
Public Art Exhibition Culture and the Emergence of Supersensory Vision

Chapter 4: 139
From the Drawing School to Spirit-Drawing Mediumship
in Boston’s Amateur Art Culture

Chapter 5: 178
The Education of Boston’s Blind and the
Performance of Clairvoyance

Chapter 6: 223
Fairy Spectacles, the Performance of Enchantment,
and the Rehabilitation of Urban Sensory Disorder

Conclusion 261

Figures 276

Bibliography 312
v
List of Figures

1. Shawmut Peninsula in 1882.
2. Boston in 1880.
3. Major Boston neighborhoods and landmarks, 1880.
4. Henry Sargent, The Dinner Party.
5. François-Marius Granet, The Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome.
6. Unknown, Easterly View of Franklin Street.
7. James Brown Marston, State Street, 1801.
8. James Bennett, Old Tremont House.
9. B.F. Smith, View of the Water Celebration, on Boston Common October 25, 1848.
10. Abel Bowen, Bowen's Picture of Boston.
11. George Harvey, View of the State House from the Common.
12. Robert Salmon, Boston Harbor from Mr. Greene's House, Pemberton Hill.
13. John Bachmann, Bird's Eye View of Boston.
14. Henry McIntyre, Map of the City of Boston and Immediate Neighborhood from
Original Surveys by H. McIntyre.
15. Winslow Homer, "Corner of Winter, Washington, and Summer Streets, Boston."
16. Winslow Homer, “Scenes on the Back Bay Lands, Boston.”
17. Thomas Crawford, Orpheus and Cerberus.
18. Henry Sargent, The Tea Party.
19. David Claypoole Johnston, Connoisseurs.
20. Henry Pettes & Co.'s Carpet Room.
21. Thomas Sully, Thomas Handasyd Perkins.
22. Frontispiece, Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of the Imagination.
23. David Claypoole Johnston, Veneration.
24. A Critic at the Athenaeum.
25. David Claypoole Johnston, Lola Has Come! Enthusiastic Reception of Lola by
American Audience.
26. Washington Allston, Belshazzar's Feast.
27. Illustration, William Bentley Fowle, An Introduction to Linear Drawing.
28. Illustration, John A. Andrew, The Boston Drawing Book: Designed for Beginners,
and Accompanied with Letter Press Instruction.
29. Frontispiece, Benjamin Coleman, Spiritualism in America.
30. Josiah Wolcott, Invitation to the Spirit-Land.
31. "Chinese Market Scene, in 'Aladdin.'"
32. The Grand Burletta of the Female Forty Thieves, or the Fairy Daughters of
Cochituate Waters.
33. Boston Water Celebration, October 25, 1848.
34. "The Children of Cyprus, at the Boston Museum."
35. "Interior View of Jones, Ball, & Poor's Store, Washington St., Boston.”
36. Panorama of Washington Street, 1853.
37. "Mr. Verigreen, from the Rural Districts."
38. Jerush Prym's version of Washington Allston’s Saul and the Witch of Endor.
39. "The Swells and the Mechanics." The Carpet-Bag, September 27, 1851.
1
From Spectators to Visionaries: Visual Culture and the Transformation of Boston,
1820-1860

Introduction:

A merchant admires a statue in the Boston Athenaeum art gallery, straining to
hear the whispers a critic claims to have heard coming from it. A Harvard student strolls
the Charles, contemplating infinity in the passing current. A clairvoyant travels in spirit
from a Boston drawing room to the streets of New York City, describing what she sees
hundreds of miles away. A graduate of the Perkins School for the Blind boasts in his
autobiography of spiritual visions that the sighted can only envy. The spirit of a dead
New England boy contacts a Unitarian minister, demanding that the minister find an artist
to paint the boy’s portrait. An audience at a theatrical “fairy spectacle” learns that
invisible and benevolent little creatures float everywhere in their midst, but only the pure
of heart may see them.
Beginning in the 1830s, the recently incorporated city of Boston, styled by its
elite as the “Athens of America,” became known as something else: a hotbed of visions.
Local artists, animal magnetists, clairvoyants, blind autobiographers, Spiritualists, and,
most famously, Transcendentalists, developed a sudden urge to glimpse the ideal, the
infinite, and the invisible in the world around them. But why then, and why there?
Scholars have found a plausible but bewildering range of explanations for the explosion
of visionary subcultures in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s: Protestant revivalism,
commercialism, industrial capitalism, democratization, urbanization, social and
geographical mobility, scientific discovery, and war, among others. Resisting the tyranny
2
of the rational, visible, disenchanted world of the Enlightenment, and seeking a more
authentic, harmonious and liberating relationship with God, nature, and their fellow
human beings, antebellum Americans forged a new relationship with the invisible, the
ideal, and the infinite.
Despite decades of work exploring the visual dimensions of antebellum urban
culture, scholars have had little to say about the city’s influence on another important
form of “sight”: visionary culture. Historians of Transcendentalism, for instance, have
rarely asked why “[c]ities give not the human senses room enough,” as Emerson
claimed.
1
Studies of other important visionary phenomena, such as magnetic
clairvoyance and Spiritualism, have treated the city as little more than a convenient
gathering point for believers and their demonstrations. Most of these works offer the
impression that visionaries found little reason to engage with the spectacular world of the
city, except to condemn it. Yet there is a problem with this assumption. For scholars no
longer regard Spiritualists, Transcendentalists, and other visionaries as reclusive, isolated,
and inward-looking, but as committed participants in and reformers of middle-class
culture.
2
That middle-class culture, however, was shaped by urban spectacle. What a
cultural historian has written of mid-18th century London—“Seeing and being seen were
crucial indices to one’s social standing, to one’s self-definition”—applies equally to the

1
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: Second Series (Boston: J. Munroe, 1844), 167. For a
reconsideration of the Transcendentalists’ anti-urbanism, see Robert A. Gross,
“Transcendentalism and Urbanism: Concord, Boston, and the Wider World,” Journal of
American Studies 18, no. 3 (December 1, 1984): 361–381.
2
Anne C. Rose, Transcendentalism as a Social Movement: 1830-1850 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1981); Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights
in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); Molly
McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-
Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
3
antebellum city.
3
The vast majority of audiences who heard Emerson lecture, admired a
Thomas Cole painting, or participated in a séance, lived in cities, and engaged with their
visual environment on a daily basis, with some hesitation, but with also a great deal of
enthusiasm.
These contradictory impulses were particularly acute in Boston. Between the
city’s 1822 incorporation and the onset of the Civil War, Boston transformed from a
dilapidated, cramped, haphazardly planned, poorly lit, and architecturally stagnant,
provincial town, to a booming metropolis boasting grand and bright boulevards, countless
art galleries, theaters, fancy shopping districts, and the nation’s first public park and
largest market and monument. Ironically, the desire to see through or past the visible
world emerged at a time when cities such as Boston offered more spectacular pleasure
than ever before. Exploring a wide source-base of sermons, popular periodicals, diaries,
autobiographies of the blind, maps, city records, art works and novels, this dissertation
attempts to understand the contradictory impulse of the urban spectator to both gaze upon
and look away from the city’s increasingly dazzling and disorienting environment.
Boston’s dizzying transformation from a town of lingering iconoclastic sentiment into a
spectacle-rich city, I argue, played a central role in establishing and shaping visionary
culture.
The question of how to see was especially acute for the city’s new middle class,
on whom this dissertation largely focuses. As new migrants flocked to Boston from
villages and towns predominantly in New England over the century’s first three decades,
they were cautioned by moralists that the city was a place of sensualism and gross

3
Peter De Bolla, The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in
Eighteenth-Century Britain (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003), 69.
4
materialism, whose worldly fashions, vain displays of wealth, and immoral amusements
threatened to corrupt the simple eyes of the rural newcomer. Even as it absorbed these
warnings, however, the middle class understood the social value of acquiring a more
sophisticated urban identity. The contradictory imperative to soak up the spectacular
culture of the city without succumbing to it, I argue, helped spark the visionary impulse
that emerged in the late 1830s with the Transcendentalist revolt, the animal magnetism
fad, the Millerite mania, and somewhat later, Spiritualism. Visionary culture, to put my
thesis simply, helped the middle class cross safely from the city’s iconoclastic past into
the spectacular present. What Emerson defined in 1842 as the defining characteristic of
the Transcendentalist—“He does not deny the sensuous fact: by no means; but he will not
see that alone”—thus became the aspiration of many ordinary Bostonians who did not
consider themselves members of any other radical movement.
4

The foundation for that middle-class aspiration, however, was laid by elites in the
1820s. From the moment that the new urban spectators stepped into the city, they were
immediately exposed to an unprecedented, top-down campaign of sensory and
environmental reform, led by the mayoral administration of Josiah Quincy III. This
campaign and its effects are examined in the dissertation’s first half (chapters 1, 2, and 3),
which largely focuses on the didactic visual culture that emerged between the early 1820s
and the middle 1830s. As Boston reeled from the Panic of 1819, the city’s elites saw
their authority threatened by democratic politicians, labor leaders, Protestant revivalists,
Free Thought skeptics, violent riots and mobs, and the logistical challenges of rapid
urbanization. Convinced of human perfectibility and the interdependence of the moral

4
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Transcendentalist," in Nature; Addresses, and Lectures
(Boston: J. Munroe, 1849), 319–320.
5
and sensory faculties, these politically and socially conservative but theologically liberal
reformers (primarily Unitarian, but to a lesser degree Universalist, Episcopalian, and
liberal non-Unitarian Congregationalists) sought to tame disorder by remaking the middle
class into attentive, pious, and self-disciplined spectators who shared in, but ultimately
deferred to, elite tastes.
5
Once given orderly streets, art galleries, republican monuments,
and genteel parks, Quincy and other elites believed, the independent urban middle and
working classes would acquire “self-culture” and abandon the “sensuous” pleasures of
vice and intemperance for the “disinterested” visual pleasures of the connoisseur and the
pious naturalist. Exposed to heavenly Boston Common and proud Bunker Hill
Monument, the spectator would be moved with respect for unseen authorities, both divine
and civic.
These innovations were both progressive and deeply conservative. However far
they had diverged theologically from their Puritan ancestors, Boston’s liberal Protestant
elite hoped to recreate in the urban environment writ large the New England
meetinghouse ideal, a place that “made visible the fellowship of Christians” and united
them in their faith in an invisible world.
6
Antebellum Boston’s environmental reform

5
Though they play a central role in this dissertation, Unitarians were not the only local
liberal Protestants. Indeed, I follow the group's leading historian, Conrad Wright, in
understanding early 19th-century Unitarianism less as a distinct religion and more as a
theological, moral, and stylistic tendency among local Protestants, many of whom shared
the Unitarians' characteristic concerns with human perfectibility and education reform,
yet did not identify as Unitarian. Conrad Wright, The Beginnings of Unitarianism in
America (Boston, Massachusetts: Starr King Press, 1955). For a classic summary of the
links between liberal theology and antebellum reform, see John L. Thomas, “Romantic
Reform in America, 1815-1865,” American Quarterly 17, no. 4 (December 1, 1965):
656–681.
6
As a scholar describes the Puritan meetinghouse ideal: “The meetinghouse was more
than just a place to learn about salvation. It made visible the fellowship of Christians; it
symbolized a set of rules or ethics that defined the meaning of community. The church
6
was both genuinely civic-spirited and self-serving; the didacts hoped to demonstrate on
the largest possible scale that their own pursuit of fine art, architecture, furnishings, and
other objects of visual refinement, served a higher purpose than vanity and materialism,
and attested to their own moral superiority and fitness for leadership.
In reconciling its visual refinement with a lingering fear of worldliness, Boston’s
didactic visual culture attempted but failed in the 1820s and early 1830s to establish a
clear division between sensibility and sensuality, cultured luxury and aristocratic
overrefinement, connoisseurship and snobbery. These problems were critical not just to
elites, but to the urban newcomers themselves, albeit for different reasons. Spectatorship
offered more than amusement to the thousands of in-migrants and immigrants entering
Boston; it constituted an important element of the middle-class identity they aspired to
attain and retain. Throughout the antebellum period, Boston’s apprentices and
journeymen struggled to become masters, masters attempted to become businessmen, and
businessmen aspired to Brahmin status. Living in an age of sudden economic gains and
losses, and sharing a boundless faith in social mobility (largely mistakenly, as historians
have discovered), Bostonians understood the middle class less in absolute socioeconomic
terms than in terms of moral character—the piety, industry, and sobriety that made an
individual both worthy of trust and likely to succeed in untrustworthy and economically
volatile times.
7
Much as their Puritan ancestors studied themselves for signs of spiritual

was like an ideal order, a place where peace prevailed, and love among the brethren.”
David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early
New England (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990), 165.
7
As Peter Knights has shown, only 1 of 28 skilled Boston workers moved into clerical or
proprietary positions in the 1830s. In the 1850s, mobility had increased somewhar; 8 of
45 moved into clerical or proprietary positions. 5 of 13 clerks, on the other hand, became
proprietors. In other words, mobility within the Boston’s middle class was greater than
7
election, antebellum Bostonians looked for visible manifestations of character in
themselves and others through such pseudosciences as physiognomy and phrenology. Yet
character did not simply manifest in how one appeared to others, but also what one
looked at, and how.
8

This study presupposes that the middle class remained very much in flux in the
antebellum period, defined more by its attitudes and cultural aspirations than by its
socioeconomic position per se. (I concur, however, with the view that this had begun to
change by the century’s second half.)
9
Yet the very democratization of culture that
Boston’s elite had begun to embark upon (in part to stave off economic and political
equality) inhibited the usefulness of cultural institutions as class markers. In the

mobility into the middle class. Overall mobility existed, but in a far more modest measure
than contemporary champions of opportunity promised. Peter R. Knights, The Plain
People of Boston, 1830-1860: A Study in City Growth (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1971), 98–99. For the emergence of the urban middle class in antebellum
America, see Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience
in the American City, 1760-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Mary
P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-
1865 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press, 1981); John S. Gilkeson,
Middle-Class Providence, 1820-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); and
Gary John Kornblith, “From Artisans to Businessmen: Master Mechanics in New
England, 1789-1850” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1983). The solidification of
Boston’s Federal-era elite into the Brahmin class is examined by Ronald Story, The
Forging of an Aristocracy: Harvard & the Boston Upper Class, 1800-1870 (Middletown,
Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1980). See also Heather D. Curtis, “Visions of
Self, Success, and Society among Young Men in Antebellum Boston,” Church History
73, no. 3 (September 1, 2004): 613–634.
8
For the antebellum faith in the visible manifestation of character, see Karen Halttunen,
Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America,
1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), and Charles Colbert, A Measure
of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1998).
9
Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the
American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Julia
B. Rosenbaum and Sven Beckert, The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in
the Nineteenth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
8
increasingly accessible visual culture that emerged in 1820s and early 1830s Boston, the
mere presence of the spectator at such genteel sites as the art gallery or curiosity cabinet
rarely sufficed to demonstrate his membership in the middle class, or his possession of
the keen visual sensibility associated with the key middle-class values of industry, piety,
and temperance. Having paid his 25 cents for admission, was the admiring gallery
viewer lured by simply the material expense and fine coloring of the art before him, or
did he actually discern in it a deeper moral significance? Was the monument visitor
impressed by the message of the monument, or the size of the stone? Throughout the
antebellum period, these questions played out in a new urban culture of novels, images,
and periodicals that reminded Bostonians that the spectator’s habits reflected not just his
personal preferences or interests, but his character as a Christian and citizen.
If these questions were not easily resolved, it was in part because, as a leading theorist of
visual studies has remarked, “Vision is itself invisible.” Though I may catch you in the
act of looking, I cannot be certain what you are seeing.
10
Obvious though this fact may
seem, it struck the new antebellum urban spectator with novelty and anxiety, precisely
because his and his peers’ visual habits served as a key index of character. Because the
urban spectator remained torn between delight and anxiety about the visual world of the
city, and because he could not know with certainty what others saw, the new world of
urban spectatorship provided both the cultural space and the moral significance for the
visionary culture that emerged in mid-1830s Boston. To see in a world of urban
sensuousness more than what Emerson called “the sensuous fact,” and to apprehend the
moral and spiritual truths beneath its disorderly and dazzling surface, signaled that one

10
W. J. T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture,” Journal of Visual
Culture 1, no. 2 (August 1, 2002): 166.
9
both belonged to and transcended the city in the best possible way, morally speaking.
Thus, as Boston’s middle class grappled with the simultaneous problem of becoming
sophisticated in its spectatorship without succumbing to urban sensualism and
materialism, it came to idealize and sentimentalize spectators whose perception was
incorruptible: the spiritually-keen art viewer, who saw images in the art gallery not
expressly represented on canvas; the self-taught amateur artist, unfettered by the
superficial rules of craft; and the students of the city’s blind asylum, gifted with interior
visions untainted by the external world.
These spectator archetypes emerged not in rebellion against the elite spectacular
ideal, but to the contrary, as a means of achieving that ideal in an imperfect urban
environment. Even so, local visionary subcultures such as Transcendentalism and
Spiritualism were understood to have revolted against both rationality and true
Christianity. As chapters 4 and 5 discuss, the perceptual authority of the amateur artist
and the blind were appropriated between the late 1830s and early 1850s by local
Spiritualist drawing mediums and mesmeric clairvoyants, whose lack of artistic training
and physiological sight enhanced their credibility as visionaries. Unlike the ideal
Unitarian spectator, these urban visionaries did not simply infer the unseen world
passively, but actively saw it. While I do not argue that such visionary phenomena as
mesmerism and Spiritualism emerged in Boston primarily to assuage the anxieties of its
spectators, I do believe that their arrival was smoothed by the middle-class idealization of
such incorruptible spectators as the amateur artist and the blind. For instance, before
Spiritualism could comfort the grieving and offer a political voice to the less powerful, its
urban adherents needed both a standard of proof and a moral imperative for those who
10
claimed to see and hear spirits.
11
Reconciling the desire to see and not to see, the
Romantic spectator archetypes that emerged from antebellum Boston provided both.
After the Civil War, Boston’s visionary culture, including Spiritualism, lost much,
though certainly not all, of its fervor. The dissertation’s final chapter focuses on the
period between 1845 and the Civil War, when a series of fancy fairs, civic celebrations
and theatrical fairy spectacles afforded Bostonians dazzling and splendid views of an
“invisible” fairyland, as well as pre-modern medieval or oriental cities whose bustle and
disorder delightfully mirrored contemporary urban space. Razing the wall between the
physical and spiritual vision that the Puritans had erected, and which antebellum
visionaries had begun to peer through in the mid-1830s, these fairy spectacles and the
associated aesthetic of enchantment demonstrated that the urban middle-class had
acclimated itself by mid-century to the sensory confusion and visual commodification of
urban life. More confident in its identity, and better able to control the suburban
environment to which it was migrating, Boston’s middle-class worried less about seeing
what was around it, and in the process grew less interested in seeing the unseen. By the
end of the 1850s, a new age of urban realism was gradually ensuing.
12
In hindsight, fairy
culture and the aesthetic of enchantment appears to have served less as an escapist denial

11
Among the first to note the connection between Spiritualism and the sentimental
culture of consolation was Ann Douglas, “Heaven Our Home: Consolation Literature in
the Northern United States, 1830-1880,” American Quarterly 26, no. 5 (December 1,
1974): 496–515. Spiritualism’s appeal to women’s rights advocates, abolitionists, and
other reformers is discussed in McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past and Braude, Radical
Spirits.
12
Many scholars date the emergence of realism to the 1850s. See for instance David E.
Shi, Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850-1920 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995).
11
of the spectacular city, but as a final, cautious step toward the less restrained middle-class
visual culture that emerged in postbellum Boston.
Why does the infatuation with the unseen in antebellum Boston matter? In part,
the answer is that visionary culture helped usher in the new terms of selfhood under late-
capitalist modernity, reinforcing the role of vision, in the word’s both literal and
figurative senses, as a key index of individual and class identity. As the traditional social
networks of village, church, and workshop yielded to the atomizing forces of
industrialization and urbanization, middle-class Americans found themselves afloat in
society. Spectatorship offered the middle class a new sense of belonging and identity in
urban society, but only if it could shed its moral hesitations about the competitive,
materialist, and sensuous world it was entering. By the last third of the 19th-century, the
average middle-class American understood consumption (a practice largely mediated by
spectatorship) not as a tool for achieving a collectively idealized character, but as a tool
for discovering, shaping, and signifying his individual personality. By liking the look of
certain fashions and products, and by understanding one’s future in terms of personal
visions and dreams, the middle-class individual came to terms with modern life.
13
By
examining how, when, and why the visionary impulse captivated the urban spectator, it
becomes easier to understand the how the middle class developed a coherent modern
social identity.

13
Warren Susman was the first to describe this transition from a producerist culture of
character to a consumerist culture of personality. Warren Susman, “Personality and the
Making of Twentieth-Century Culture,” in Culture as History: The Transformation of
American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 271-286.
T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of
American Culture, 1880-1920 (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1994).
12
The study of the antebellum visionary impulse sheds light not just on the
emergence of the modern subject, but also on the larger cult of “visionary” leadership
that emerged in the final third of the 19th century and which still survives today. At the
beginning of the century, the “visionary” was an individual to be avoided, and a “vision”
in public life typically implied an impossible, impracticable, and often downright
dangerous scheme, undisciplined by practical observation. But by the Gilded Age, not
only individual identity, but also the nation’s emerging corporate and political
hierarchies, were justified as the visions of leading men—visions that by then originated
in inspirations more personal than religious. “In our day the man of vision… stands out
as a leader among men,” a Massachusetts minister sermonized at the century’s end.
“Such are the leaders of Industry, of State, of the Church, such always are the successful
men of any generation.”
14
Only a culture which had come to understand the idiosyncrasy
and “invisibility” of “vision”—an understanding that I attribute to antebellum urban
life—could be prepared to credit the powerful with such figurative “visions” in which it
never fully expected to share. By explaining how antebellum Boston’s visual
environment helped rehabilitate the visionary imagination as a resource for an
increasingly secular, individualistic, and urbanized middle class, this dissertation attempts
to reveal one of the key origins both of the modern self, and of the modern leader.
While grounded in Boston’s urban, social and religious historiography, this study
owes much to the work of interdisciplinary Europeanists, who in the last decade or so
have questioned Romantic visual culture’s supposed antipathy for the 19th-century city.
Building on several decades of urban visual studies that demonstrate how profoundly the

14
Eben Putnam, Porter Leaflets (Salem, Massachusetts: by the author, 1896), 39.
13
urban experience changed the way the residents of London and Paris saw, these scholars
have recognized the generative if often-uncomfortable engagement of canonical
Romantic artists and writers with the new urban world of museums, panoramas, and stage
machinery. Rejecting the earlier characterization of Romantic writers and artists as
alienated and reclusive critics of the Enlightenment and of modern society-at-large,
scholars have reconceived European Romanticism as productively engaged with urban
spectacular desires.
15

Despite several decades of thriving scholarship on the spectacular life of New
York, Philadelphia, and other new metropolises, historians of the 19th-century American
city have yet to join their Europeanist colleagues in reassessing the urban origins and
development of visionary culture in the United States. Most recent studies of the
spectacular dimensions of 19th-century American cities have focused instead on the
purely ocular dimensions of urban space. They have explored the way that the anxious
and alluring everyday sights of crowds, goods, exhibitions and street spectacles
established new cultural hierarchies and visual norms of race, class, and gender, re-drew
the boundaries of public and private, promoted consumer culture, authorized new forms
of bureaucratic, medical and legal authority, and reshaped the construction of the built

15
The earlier view of Romantic reaction can be found, for instance, in Isaiah Berlin, The
Roots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
The more progressive view of Romanticism appears in Sophie Thomas, Romanticism and
Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle (New York: Routledge, 2007); Gillen D'Arcy
Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760-1860 (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Jon Saklofske, “Between History
and Hope: The Urban Centre of William Blake and William Wordsworth,” in City Limits:
Perspectives on the Historical European City, ed. Glenn Clark et al. (Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s Press, 2010), 300–324.
14
environment.
16
Though groundbreaking and critical, such scholarship has yet to explore
the 19th-century American city’s significance to the broader antebellum preoccupation
with the ideal, the infinite, the imaginary, and the invisible. Instead, most of the
scholarship on American urban spectatorship has oriented itself toward the emergence of
the modern urban observer: the flâneur, the self-conscious object of bureaucratic
surveillance, the photographic eye, the sensory-shocked neurasthenic, all of them more
attuned to the outward world than the inward. Vigilant for the signs of modernity, this
scholarship has largely disregarded the continuing influence of the religious visionary
imagination in the antebellum city, despite abundant evidence that divinely-inflected
visions remained central to the Protestant experience.
17
Visual studies of the 19th-

16
A haphazard introduction to this literature might include David M Henkin, City
Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998); James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with
Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,
2001); Michael Leja, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to
Duchamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Miles Orvell, The Real
Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow:
The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1990); Michael Rawson, Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010); Maurie Dee McInnis, The Politics
of Taste in Antebellum Charleston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2005); Elaine S. Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the
Victorian Department Store (New York: Oxford University Press US, 1992); M. Stange,
“Jacob Riis and Urban Visual Culture: The Lantern Slide Exhibition as Entertainment
and Ideology,” Journal of Urban History 15, no. 3 (May 1, 1989): 274–303; M. J.
Bouman, “Luxury and Control: The Urbanity of Street Lighting in Nineteenth-Century
Cities,” Journal of Urban History 14, no. 1 (November 1, 1987): 7–37; Wendy Bellion,
Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Peter Bacon Hales, Silver Cities:
Photographing American Urbanization, 1839-1939 (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 2005); and Joy S. Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives: Women in
Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
17
Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, & Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining
Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Leigh
15
century American city have thus described an urban entity that is unrecognizably secular
to many antebellum historians. This omission of the spiritual has made it difficult to
appreciate the city’s full contribution to visionary culture.
In seeking out the popular foundation of the visionary impulse in the incompletely
modernized and even more incompletely secularized antebellum city, I have focused less
on canonical writers and artists than on more “ordinary” visionaries—animal magnetists,
clairvoyants, and Spiritualists, whose names are largely forgotten. Furthermore, what
qualifies as visionary in this study depends less on the object of vision than on the
experience it engendered in the spectator. One might consider Emerson’s formative and
visionary 1833 encounter with the orderly and rational displays of Paris’s Jardin des
Plantes, an experience that inspired his preoccupation with nature as a metaphysical
force.
18
Indeed, I argue that the visionary impulse emerged in precisely this disjunction
between the didactic spectacles of museum exhibits and monuments, and the
unpredictable response of urban spectators, most of them forgotten to us.
This study re-evaluates urban visionary culture in light of a generation’s worth of
research on the spectacular city, integrating two topics of visual studies whose
interdependence has long been overlooked: the Protestant visionary tradition, and urban
visuality. I argue that the combination of these forces stimulated a visionary impulse
whose diverse expressions lay somewhere between the wholly sacred and the wholly

Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000).
18
David Robinson, “Emerson’s Natural Theology and the Paris Naturalists: Toward a
Theory of Animated Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas 41, no. 1 (January 1, 1980):
69–88.
16
secular.
19
It is not a study of Boston’s visual environment writ large, nor a
comprehensive account of the urban origins of Transcendentalism, Spiritualism, or any
other particular 19th-century visionary social movement, figure, or artistic genre. These
various movements and figures emerged and acted in response to particular social and
cultural causes too numerous to catalog and explore in any one study. However, by
exploring how the problems and possibilities of the spectacular city impelled diverse
groups of urban dwellers toward the unseen world, I hope to deepen our understanding of
the modern cultural legacy of antebellum urbanization.

19
My model in this regard is M.H. Abrams’ notion of “natural supernaturalism,” which I
discuss in greater detail in the following chapter. Meyer Howard Abrams, Natural
Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 1973).
17
From Spectators to Visionaries:
Visual Culture and the Transformation of Boston, 1820-1860

Chapter 1:

The Urban Origins
of Boston’s Didactic Visual Culture

In January of 1830, an 18-year-old dry-goods clerk named Bradley Newcomb
Cumings braved “a real cold day” to hear a local physician, J.V.C. Smith, lecture at the
Boston Athenaeum on “the most wonderful and astonishing” of human organs: the eye.
The lecture’s gist can be gathered from its printed source, Smith’s new pamphlet, Animal
Mechanism: The Eye. In spite of recent discoveries about the physiology of vision, “no
one has been able to explain how or why we see,” the pamphlet explained. As Cumings
would report in his journal, Smith’s argument was that “the Organ of Vision ought to be
sufficient proof of the existence of a God.” Persuaded or not, Cumings “liked the lecture
very well” and attended several other talks dealing with vision and sensation over the
next few years.
1

Smith’s lecture was no anomaly, for the topic of sight had recently become a
subject of growing discussion among teachers, physicians, ministers and the general
public. Starting in the 1830s, local audiences learned that the eye allowed the unschooled

1
Bradley Newcomb Cumings journal, 11 January 1830, Bradley Newcomb Cumings
Journal, MHS; Jerome Van Crowninshield Smith, Animal Mechanism: The Eye (Boston:
Carter, Hendee, and Babcock, 1831), 97 (emphasis in original).
18
to learn without formal education, offered aesthetic refinement to those without access to
art, and perhaps most importantly, demonstrated the existence of a benevolent deity.
Nearly every child-rearing manual published starting that decade extolled the eye as a
divine gift to be treasured, protected, and cultivated. This concern was partly practical in
an industrializing age increasingly dependent on visually intensive clerical and factory
labor.
2
Yet as Smith’s comment on God suggested, the eye was celebrated equally if not
more as a channel of moral and spiritual knowledge. An early and popular parenting
manual, The Mother’s Book (1831), recommended that parents give for their children’s
Sabbath reading, “books which treat of the wonderful mechanisms of the eye and the
ear,” for as its Bostonian author Lydia Maria Child explained, that genre “leads the mind
to dwell upon the goodness and power of God.”
3
A similar message was conveyed in
novels such as Bostonian Eliza Lee Cabot Follen’s A Well-Spent Hour (1828), whose
main character spends several chapters patiently explaining the anatomy of the eye to her
daughter, before arriving at the moral:
And now, my dear, when you go into a garden and dance with joy at the sight of
the flowers; when you look up with so much wonder and delight at the beautiful
moon sailing through the clouds, and at the bright twinkling stars; and when after
having been even one day away from your father and mother, you feel so happy at
looking in our faces… of whose goodness ought you to think?
4

Though the popular reach of this Christian apologetic was new, its message was
not. For the past few decades, students at Unitarian Harvard had read and admired works

2
For the antebellum significance of healthy eyesight, see P.J. Brownlee,
“Ophthalmology, Popular Physiology, and the Market Revolution in Vision, 1800–1850,”
Journal of the Early Republic 28, no. 4 (2008): 597–626.
3
Lydia Maria Child, The Mother’s Book (Boston: Carter, Hendee, and Babcock, 1831),
71; see also “Chapter XIX: Education of the Senses” in William Andrus Alcott, The
Young Mother (Boston: G. W. Light, 1838).
4
Eliza Lee Cabot Follen, The Well-Spent Hour (Boston: Wait, Greene, 1828), 20.
19
of moral philosophy and natural theology that sought a rational and empirically
discoverable basis for Christian conduct and faith. Rejecting their Calvinist forebears’
theological emphasis on special acts of Providence, these rationalist Protestants sought
proofs of divine goodness and wisdom in the regular operations of nature. Among the
most compelling of these proofs was the eye, an organ so physiologically complex and
useful that only a wonderful and benevolent God could have created it.
5

Though the eye had been celebrated at Harvard since the turn of the century, it
was not until the unprecedented urbanization of the antebellum period that sight became a
subject of popular and self-conscious celebration. By the end of the 1820s, local liberal
Protestant lecturers and authors routinely promoted the eye as an instrument of popular
mental and moral self-culture, and steered urban spectators toward a new array of
visually-refining institutions and practices: a natural history museum, fine arts galleries,
amateur drawing courses, and horticultural and industrial exhibitions, to name only a few
examples. Even for those who did not attend such institutions, there were other newly
established, morally improving sights that no sighted resident could miss: Bunker Hill
Monument, so large it could be seen almost everywhere in Boston; Boston Common,
recently converted from pastureland into the nation’s first public park; and a host of

5
Among the most important influences on the Harvard curriculum, for instance, were
Thomas Reid's Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind (1788) (and its
interpretation by Reid's student, Dugald Stewart) and William Paley's Natural Theology
(1802). For a recent treatment of eyesight in 18th- and 19th-century Christian
apologetics, Jessica Riskin, “The Divine Optician,” The American Historical Review 116,
no. 2 (April 1, 2011): 352–370. For the increasingly hegemonic role of vision in modern
life, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century
French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); David Michael Levin,
Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993);
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992).
20
elegant new neighborhoods and buildings. Thus, as Bostonians such as Cumings were
instructed explicitly in the moral and intellectual uses of vision, they learned the same
lesson implicitly in their daily travels through a city that had recently dubbed itself the
“Athens of America.” The city itself affirmed the moral value of vision.
But why, if it was so self-evidently wonderful, did the eye need to be promoted?
An important audience for the sermons, lectures, and spectacular rational amusements
that emerged in 1830s Boston were young men such as Cumings, socially ambitious but
young and inexperienced as spectators.
6
In the early 19th century, unprecedented
numbers of rural youth, male and female, left their villages for larger towns and cities
such as Boston, helping grow the city’s population over 50% in the 1820s alone; at the
end of the antebellum period, some three-quarters of the city’s native-born white male
Boston residents had been born outside the city.
7

These urban newcomers acclimated themselves to city life by becoming
spectators. Those who hoped to make their fortunes in this city learned to carefully
observe the manners and tastes of the more sophisticated world they were entering—
without, however, betraying the naivety that such observation implied. The droves of
middle-class advice manuals that appeared starting in the 1830s frequently reprinted or
echoed Lord Chesterfield’s advice to his son to study everything around him: “You
should not only have attention to every thing, but a quickness of attention, so as to

6
Howard M. Wach, “‘Expansive Intellect and Moral Agency’: Public Culture in
Antebellum Boston,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 107 (January
1, 1995): 30–56.
7
Peter R. Knights, The Plain People of Boston, 1830-1860: A Study in City Growth (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1971); Peter R. Knights, Yankee Destinies: The Lives of
Ordinary Nineteenth-Century Bostonians (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1991).
21
observe, at once, all the people in the room, their motions, their looks, and their words;
and yet without staring at them, and seeming to be an observer.” For, as Chesterfield
explained, “This quick and unobserved observation is of infinite advantage in life, and is
to be acquired with care.”
8

Even without such inducements, most urban newcomers felt a complicated
mixture of fascination, admiration, and apprehension for the spectacular urban world they
were entering. The excitement of bustling streets, shining shop windows, fashionable
dress, art galleries, curiosity museums, and concert halls of metropolises such as Boston,
New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cincinnati and Chicago was coupled with a dread of
their grog-shops, ballrooms, theaters, brothels, gambling dens, and countless other
ruinous temptations.

This anxiety was given further justification in the increasingly
popular scientific theory of moral environmentalism, through which early physicians,
clergymen, reformers and educators emphasized the role of surroundings in shaping
human behavior, for good or ill. By far the most critical of those surroundings was the
home, and yet for a large number of Boston’s youth, home was not the affectionate
nuclear family household idealized in domestic literature of the 1830s, but the boarding
house, from which newcomers were free to venture as they pleased to more or less
salubrious scenes.
9
Local moralists thus considered it all the more imperative to offer

8
The Works of Lord Chesterfield: Including His Letters to His Son, Etc (New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1838), 100.
9
Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class
Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982); Paul S.
Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992); Philip Howell, “Sex and the City of
Bachelors: Sporting Guidebooks and Urban Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Britain
and America,” Cultural Geographies 8, no. 1 (January 1, 2001): 20–50; Rodney
Hessinger, Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn: Visions of Youth in Bourgeois America,
22
rational amusements that would steer the impressionable, unsupervised youth toward
more uplifting and refining sights and relieve the drudgery of his labor.
In promoting these rational spectacular amusements, Boston’s early 19th-century
consciously elites rejected, but only incompletely, their New England ancestors’ real or
exaggerated suspicion of sensory pleasure. For the Puritans, the most effective means of
eradicating sinfulness simply had been to ban such temptations as ungodly dress,
theatrical entertainments, masques and holidays.
10
Though some socially conservative
Bostonians longed for such prohibitions in the antebellum period, it was clear by the
early 19th-century that local ministers and politicians had lost most of their power to
dictate Boston’s amusements. Thus, as local evangelical reform societies carried on the
Calvinist project of shaming sinners through moral societies and campaigning for
prohibition, Sabbath laws, and similar legal measures, influential liberal Protestants such
as the Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing took a different tack.
“The wide-spread intemperance of New England is a signal judgement on the
Puritan attempt to banish amusement from human life,” Channing argued in 1825. The
most effective way of improving the morality of the urban masses, Channing explained,
was “to multiply innocent public amusements” such as art galleries, concerts, and public
festivals whose wholesome sensory delights would stimulate the imagination.
11
A few
years later, the equally liberal Unitarian minister John Pierpont similarly recommended

1780-1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Wendy Gamber, The
Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2007).
10
Bruce C. Daniels, “Sober Mirth and Pleasant Poisons: Puritan Ambivalence Toward
Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England,” American Studies 34, no. 1 (April 1,
1993): 121–137.
11
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Reminiscences of Rev. Wm. Ellery Channing, D.D.
(Boston: Roberts Bros., 1880), 100.
23
amateur scientific study, accessible through the city’s new museum of natural history, as
a diversion from more sinful urban temptations. Such rational use of the senses was
endorsed by God Himself:
He who gave us eyes and ears, and made them to be inlets to knowledge, made
them, in the same degree, to be avenues of pleasure to the soul. And there is not
an object to which the eye can turn, that He has not presented to its notice; not a
sound to which the ear can open, which is not just such as it is, in obedience to his
laws; and that does not affect us just as it does, for some good use…
12

The argument was echoed somewhat later by a thriving antebellum middle-class conduct
literature. In their best-selling works, conduct manual authors assured readers that “MEN
NEED, AND WILL HAVE SOME KINDS OF RECREATION,” for the Creator had
“made the eye, the ear, and the mouth, all inlets of pleasure.”
13

Moralists did not actually endorse all objects of sight, but only those which
tended to elevate the spectator above the sensualism that moralists believed endemic to
the antebellum city. The proponents of visual self-culture did not simply designate
objects fit for the spectator’s contemplation, but idealized a way of looking that was pious
yet passionless, sensible yet never sensuous. As Pierpont described the naturalist at his
observations: “No passion is shown, and none is excited within him, but the desire to see
and learn more of what is so quietly and beneficently going on around him.”
14
This
description applied equally to the rational, sober, yet sensible spectator at the art gallery,
at the monument, or in any of the other didactic sites that will be discussed. Precisely
because sight was such a critical channel of knowledge, liberal Protestants feared its

12
John Pierpont, On the Moral Influences of Physical Science (Boston: Carter, Hendee,
1833), 6–7; Richard I. Johnson, “The Rise and Fall of the Boston Society of Natural
History,” Northeastern Naturalist 11, no. 1 (January 1, 2004): 81–108.
13
Daniel Clarke Eddy, The Young Man’s Friend (Boston: Dayton, Wentworth, 1854),
84; Frederic William Sawyer, A Plea for Amusements (New York: D. Appleton, 1847).
14
Pierpont, On the Moral Influences of Physical Science, 9.
24
corruption even more than their Puritan predecessors; it was all the more imperative,
then, that they distinguish between sensible and sensuous forms of spectatorship.
The moralistic celebration of vision which young men like Cumings were
encouraged to share in the 1830s developed after a decade of unprecedented urban
renewal and improvement. This was no coincidence, for without new museums,
galleries, parks and monuments to reward Boston’s spectator, moralists would have had
little to celebrate. Thus, any full understanding of the moral significance of sight to both
antebellum urban spectators and visionaries must include an account of the
transformation of Boston’s urban environment.
That transformation began in the 1820s with Boston’s streets themselves. That
decade, the newly incorporated city undertook the most ambitious, expensive, and
controversial campaign of urban improvement in the nation’s history: straightening,
broadening, and cleaning streets; establishing new public promenades; sweeping the
indigent, criminal, and insane from the corners; tearing down districts notorious for vice;
and establishing a number of new morally-inspiring landmarks. Yet as we will see, in
rendering the city an object of genteel admiration, Boston’s transformation inadvertently
exacerbated the very fears of worldliness and sensuousness that it was intended to relieve.

Boston’s Sensory Environment in 1820
In the late-Federal era, Boston’s streets, squares, and wharves presented a much
more chaotic appearance than today. Lacking modern sewers, its narrow, labyrinthine,
and often unpaved streets overflowed with the stench of animal and human waste.
Without zoning codes, dense warrens of rickety shanties multiplied until fire incinerated
25
them and surrounding neighborhoods. Unregulated by government, thousands of
pushcarts and draymen blocked traffic as they hawked their wares. Simply going about
their daily business, respectable Bostonians were forced to confront such eyesores as
“Mount Whoredom” and Ann Street, an infamous lane of noisy taverns and brothels with
names like the “Beehive” for the endless buzzing of prostitutes and their drunken clients.
None of these problems was new in the 19th century, but all were subjects of
increasing complaint, in part because unprecedented urban growth had rendered them
increasingly visible. In 1800, Boston’s population numbered 25,000; by 1830, it had
more than doubled to 60,000.
15
The city had neither the infrastructure, the government,
nor the space needed to comfortably accommodate such growth. For the first two
decades of the century, Boston operated without a mayor or professional fire, sanitation
or full-time police services. Crowded into the Shawmut Peninsula’s 1.2 square miles, the
core of the city grew denser, messier, and more Dickensian in its social contrasts.
16
In
1822, advocates of incorporation finally convinced Bostonians that they no longer lived
in a town, and could not afford to be governed as one.
To be sure, Boston’s population growth does not fully account for residents’
growing aversion to sensory disorder, especially compared to their counterparts in
similarly sized cities such as New York, Baltimore and Philadelphia.
17
Thus, despite the

15
Knights, The Plain People of Boston, 1830-1860.
16
Roger Lane, Policing the City: Boston, 1822-1885 (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 1967).
17
For a comparison of the development of New York's and Boston's built environments,
see Mona Domosh, Invented Cities: The Creation of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century
New York and Boston (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); for New York, see
David M. Scobey, Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City
Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003); for a comparison of the built
environments and spaces of Philadelphia and New Orleans, see Dell Upton, Another City:
26
increasingly vocal complaints of leading Bostonians about such visible offenses as
drunkenness, vagabondage, assault, and public lewdness, Boston saw no marked increase
in criminal prosecutions during that period. Residents complained with increasing
frequency about the cows marauding on the Common (until the latter were banned
entirely in 1830); but these bovine nuisances were no more numerous or ill-behaved than
they had been for most of Boston’s history.
18
In other words, much of the dissatisfaction
Bostonians felt for the sights, sounds and smells of city streets stemmed not just from the
new urban growth, but also from a heightening sensory sensitivity, particularly on the
part of elites.
This new squeamishness aside, there is little doubt that Boston’s appearance was
growing objectively worse as its population exploded. A main source of complaint was
the city’s streets, cramped, chaotic, filthy, and especially “narrow and crooked” at the
center of the peninsula, according to an 1821 gazette edited by a Charlestown minister.
19

As Bostonians reflected, nature itself had contributed to the city’s congestion. While
Philadelphia was laid out on a neat grid at its founding in 1682, and Manhattan had room
to expand onto one in 1811, Boston’s peninsular confinement offered little room for
growth, planned or unplanned. Desperate for more living space, Bostonians altered the

Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2008).
18
A leading historian of crime and policing in 19th-century Boston has found that
Boston's average annual number of criminal court cases remained fairly steady in the
period, at two thousand a year. Lane, Policing the City, 6. On the Common's cows, see
Charles Rawson, Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2010). Edward Everett Hale estimated seeing
only 50 cows or so on the Common as a boy in the 1820s. Edward Everett Hale, A New
England Boyhood: And Other Bits of Autobiography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1910), 89.
19
Jedidiah Morse, A New Universal Gazetteer, Or, Geographical Dictionary (New
Haven: Sherman Converse of New-Haven and Silas Andrus of Hartford, 1821), 119.
27
city’s topography in unprecedented ways in the early 19th century, tearing down the tops
of Beacon Hill and Copp’s Hill, filling in the Mill Dam pond, wharfing out the edges of
the Shawmut Peninsula, and most ambitiously, filling in the Back Bay. By 1890, the
city’s total area had tripled (Figure 1, Figure 2, and Figure 3).
20
Even so, before the
introduction of steam shovels and railroads, geographical expansion failed to keep pace
with the peninsula’s population growth. The unprecedented size of major U.S. cities in
the post-Civil War era and the misleading emptiness of antebellum street views have
distracted us from a surprising fact: urban population density—a leading contributor to
sensory disorder—reached its peak in the early 19th century. Boston had a higher ratio of
occupants to inhabitable ground in 1800 than it would in 1870, despite claiming only a
tenth as many residents at the earlier date. Thanks to the gradual segregation of business
and residential districts, the city developed denser pockets (especially in poorer
neighborhoods) by the later date, but its overall density declined through land
reclamation projects, annexation of surrounding neighborhoods, and migration to the
suburbs.
21

It is thus hard to conceive of a city less prepared for the massive influx of
population that Boston received over the course of the century. Thanks to an exodus
during the Revolution, Boston’s population in 1790 was only slightly larger than it had
been 50 years earlier. But with economic and industrial development in the early
national period, large numbers of native-born Americans migrated to the city from

20
Walter Muir Whitehill, Boston: A Topographical History, 3rd ed. (Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2000).
21
Carole Shammas, “The Space Problem in Early United States Cities,” The William and
Mary Quarterly 57, no. 3 (July 1, 2000): 505–542; Sam Bass Warner, Streetcar Suburbs:
The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1978).
28
western Massachusetts and other parts of New England.
22
Starting in the 1830s, these
domestic migrants were joined by foreign-born newcomers largely from eastern Canada
and the British Isles, attracted by the proximity and cheapness of Boston to their ports of
departure. Within a decade, thanks largely to the agricultural famine in Ireland, foreign
immigrants outnumbered Boston’s newcomers. While only 5.7% of Boston’s 60,000
whites and 2,000 blacks in 1830 had been born abroad, the flood of mostly working-class
Irish immigrants over the next twenty years drove the non-native percentage up to
45.7%.
23
Despite their relegation to unskilled trades and increasingly unsanitary and
squalid slums, a high proportion of these immigrant arrivals stayed within the city,
exacerbating already strained infrastructure. The overall population increase stressed the
Shawmut Peninsula’s scarce fresh water supply and exacerbated sanitation problems.
Sewage stagnated in the water surrounding the Town Dock at high tide, and animal and
human waste piled up uncollected in the streets; Boston’s second mayor, Josiah Quincy
III would have some six thousand pounds of it removed by the end of his first year in
office. By 1845, the city’s foremost demographer warned that the city, already saturated
with converted tenements, simply could not accept any more inhabitants.
24

Well before population growth peaked at mid-century, Boston’s haphazard and
unsightly development was apparent to even its proudest citizens. In Boston, A Poem
(1803) the Federalist politician Winthrop Sargent complained about a city without

22
Knights, The Plain People of Boston, 1830-1860.
23
Nathan Kantrowitz, “Racial and Ethnic Residential Segregation in Boston 1830-1970,”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 441 (January 1, 1979):
41–54.
24
Oscar Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants, 1790-1880: A Study in Acculturation
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991), 94; Richard A. Meckel,
“Immigration, Mortality, and Population Growth in Boston, 1840-1880,” The Journal of
Interdisciplinary History 15, no. 3 (January 1, 1985): 393–417.
29
monuments, where “[n]o dome ascends, no turret strikes the skies.” What Sargent meant
was not that the city lacked such architectural landmarks—undoubtedly he was aware of
the domed State House and the spired Old South—but that on the whole, Boston’s
topography was flat, claustrophobic, and decrepit. Instead, “A pyre of shapeless
structures crowds the spot / Where taste and all but cheapness is forgot.”
25
These mostly
wooden “shapeless structures,” often of four or five stories, frequently caught fire,
leading to countless tragedies and driving up the cost of property insurance.
26
A scarcity
of housing, however, impeded efforts to ban multi-storied wooden constructions and
impose setbacks. The consequences of unregulated development could be seen in such
infamous areas as the Shambles. Lying between the city’s main thoroughfare of
Washington Street and the rat-infested wharves on the eastern edge of the peninsula, and
between Water Street on the south and Ann Street in the north, the city’s commercial
district was an infamous eyesore, but most of the city’s merchants were obliged to
conduct their business there. Not surprisingly, it became one of the first targets for
redevelopment in the 1820s.
27

Boston’s packed and crooked streets and blind alleys drove visitors and locals to
distraction. Addresses were numbered haphazardly until 1824, streets were
inconsistently named, and the absence of signage meant that most early 19th-century

25
Winthrop Sargent, Boston: A Poem (Boston: Joseph Nancrede, 1803).
26
For an account of the fire that leveled Boston’s Exchange Coffee House in 1818, see
Jane Kamensky, The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s
First Banking Collapse (New York: Penguin, 2008).
27
On these late Federal-era zoning battles, see Matthew H. Crocker, The Magic of the
Many: Josiah Quincy and the Rise of Mass Politics in Boston, 1800-1830 (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1999); for the development of the market itself, see
John Quincy, Quincy’s Market: A Boston Landmark (Boston: Northeastern University
Press, 2003).
30
guides offered directions using the increasingly transient landmarks of prominent
merchants’ residences, rather than permanent street addresses. Navigation at night,
particularly prior to the gradual introduction of gas street lighting after 1829, was both
difficult and dangerous; the city was hardly much brighter than it had been since the late
17th century, when the Puritan minister Samuel Sewall feared going out at night.
28
In the
daytime, the problem tended to be human congestion. Boston’s geographical setting
meant that most goods were transported from the docks to shops and residences by
pushcart men, or simply sold out of dray carts at busy corners, further exacerbating
congestion. Poorly drained streets grew impossibly muddy in the rainy seasons,
produced endless dust in the summer, and piled up with garbage year-round.
29
Despite a
1799 ordinance banning wheeled vehicles from footpaths, there was little to keep
pedestrians and vehicles apart. “Except when driven on one side by carts and carriages,
everyone walked in the middle of the street, where the pavement was the smoothest,”
recalled an upper-class Bostonian.
30
Simply walking amid such chaos could be
hazardous and annoying, but for most residents there was little alternative.
Meanwhile, the city’s poverty problem was undoubtedly growing. As the city’s
population doubled between 1790 and 1820, the number of inmates of Boston’s
Almshouse quadrupled. Shortening lengths of stay suggest that such institutions were

28
For a description of Boston at night in Sewall’s time, see David D. Hall, Worlds of
Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press), 214–217.
29
Thomas H O’Connor, The Athens of America: Boston, 1825-1845 (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2006).
30
Eliza Susan Quincy, Memoir of the Life of Eliza S.M. Quincy (Boston: J. Wilson and
Son, 1861), 61. Descriptions of Boston’s congestion prior to the 1820s can be found
throughout Annie Haven Thwing, The Crooked and Narrow Streets of the Town of
Boston, 1630-1822 (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1920).
31
becoming overwhelmed with the poor, many of whom sought outdoor relief through the
growing number of missionary societies.
31
These societies concentrated their efforts on
places such as Southack Street on West Boston’s “Mount Whoredom,” where as a
missionary reported in 1817, “The street is filled during the day with old and young of all
complexions, numbers drunken and sleeping by its sides and corners; and awful noises
and confusions are witnessed.”
32

By the 1820s, however, Boston’s new municipal government set about removing
filth, brightening streets, and eliminating bad smells from city streets themselves. This
unprecedented urban renewal campaign had a relatively new theory behind it. “In cities
as well as among individuals, cleanliness has reference to morals as well as to comfort,”
Mayor Quincy informed the new city council in 1824. “Sense of dignity and self-respect
are essentially connected with purity; physical and moral.” Cleaning and fixing the
streets served both aims. “To remove from our streets whatever might offend the sense,
or endanger the health, was the first duty.”
33
To make sense of the energy devoted to this
new campaign of renewal, one must first look at its broader cultural and intellectual
origins.

31
Ruth Wallis Herndon, “Poor Women and the Boston Almshouse in the Early
Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 32, no. 3 (October 1, 2012): 349–381.
32
A Brief Account of the Origin and Progress of the Boston Female Society for
Missionary Purposes (Boston: Lincoln & Edmands, 1818), 8.
33
Josiah Quincy, An Address to the Board of Aldermen: And Members of the Common
Council, of Boston, on the Organization of the City Government, at Faneuil Hall, May 1,
1824 (Boston: Commercial Gazette Office, 1824), 5.
32
Moral Environmentalism and the Roots of Urban Renewal
Elite Bostonians’ expressions of disgust and dismay at the sights, sounds, and
smells of the city’s streets were more than natural aversions: they were proclamations of
an increasingly distinct social identity originating from what the German sociologist
Norbert Elias famously dubbed the “civilizing process.” In the late 18th and 19th
centuries, Western social elites began to assert their sensitivity to morally disturbing and
physically disgusting sensory stimuli, professing horror and revulsion for violent or ugly
spectacles, raucous sounds, and unclean odors, and associating such unpleasantness with
the lower classes, whose senses were purportedly dull enough to tolerate it. Safely
distanced from the noisy and noisome masses, elites expressed pity at the sight of the
suffering and filthy masses. In other words, genteel Bostonians’ desire to live apart from
the poor, and their increasing philanthropy, were no contradiction. The identification of
gentility with moral and sensory acuity made both ignoring and living with unpleasant
sights, sounds and smells equally impossible.
34

The sight, sound, and smell of sin, filth, and pain had not always evoked such
distaste. 17th-century New England divines such as Cotton Mather viewed public
executions as edifying illustrations of sin’s just retribution, rather than as traumatizing or
callousing events. Pleasurable exercises of the senses such as art and theater, on the other
hand, had no place in Puritan New England, nor were they easy to reconcile with the

34
On the origins of this spectatorial elite and their intellectual critics, see Alain Corbin,
Time, Desire and Horror: Towards a History of the Senses (New York: Wiley, 1995);
Thomas L. Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 1,”
The American Historical Review 90, no. 2 (April 1985): 339–361; William A. Cohen and
Ryan Johnson, Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2004); and Jay, Downcast Eyes.
33
virtuous asceticism of 18th-century republicanism.
35
But as Boston’s increasingly
prosperous and largely Unitarian elite embraced more optimistic views of human nature
over the course of the 18th-century, their attitudes toward the senses changed, and these
affluent liberal Protestants came to embrace the desire for physical comfort and the
aversion to morally or physically repulsive spectacle as natural.
36

As Boston’s elite grew averse to the city’s unpleasant sights, sounds, and smells,
it also fretted over their moral implications. Sensory disorder supplied local reformers
with an attractive explanation for the poverty, vice, and crime that afflicted much of the
city—attractive, because the theory accorded with the reformers’ liberal view of human
nature, rested much of the blame on the lower classes, and suggested a relatively
straightforward solution: greater hygiene. The nation’s most influential early advocate of
moral environmentalism had been the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush, a member
of the founding generation and an early advocate of urban environmental reform: “Too
much cannot be said in favour of CLEANLINESS, as a physical means of promoting
virtue.”
37
For the sake of the moral faculty, Rush also recommended solitude and silence,
as well as the avoidance of bad odors and excessive darkness, as well as profane society
and conversation. Unfortunately, from the reformers’ point of view, there was no more
perfect nursery for immorality than Boston’s disordered streets.

35
Daniels, “Sober Mirth and Pleasant Poisons.”
36
John E. Crowley, “The Sensibility of Comfort,” The American Historical Review 104,
no. 3 (June 1, 1999): 749–782; Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the
American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,
2000).
37
Benjamin Rush, An Inquiry Into the Influence of Physical Causes Upon the Moral
Faculty (Philadelphia: Haswell, Barrington, and Haswell, 1839), 15–17. For religious
influences on Rush’s thinking, see Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American
Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
34
Rush’s medical theory was not the only source of the elite’s sense-conscious
moral environmentalism. Another was the elite’s increasing appreciation for the role of
the imagination in political and religious life. Since the late 18th century,
Congregationalists had increasingly sought to impress reverence upon the worshipper by
constructing more visually impressive houses of worship. As 18th-century New
Englanders moved their civil business from the meetinghouse to the town house,
courthouse and schoolhouse, they abandoned their Puritan predecessors’ humbler places
of worship and, by the 1790s, constructed far more elaborate churches with prominent
steeples, pediment porches, palladian windows, and gable end entrances, engaging in
what an architectural historian has called the “religious rehabilitation of the visible.”
Criticized by members of less affluent and humbler dissenting churches, these features
reasserted Congregationalism’s primacy at a time when its civil authority was never more
in question, and cautiously enlisted the architectural environment as an instrument of the
pious imagination.
38
The revolutions of the late 18th century, however, demonstrated
that true religion enjoyed no monopoly on the imagination. For New England’s socially
conservative elite, the French Revolution demonstrated the power of demagogues to
manipulate the popular imagination in the name of a visionary ideal of equality. “The
French Revolution had diseased the imagination and unsettled the understanding of men
everywhere,” recalled William Ellery Channing of the period.
39

38
Kevin M. Sweeney, “Meetinghouses, Town Houses, and Churches: Changing
Perceptions of Sacred and Secular Space in Southern New England, 1720-1850,”
Winterthur Portfolio 28, no. 1 (April 1, 1993): 59–93.
39
Memoir of William Ellery Channing, ed. William Henry Channing (Boston: Wm.
Crosby and H.P. Nichols, 1848), 1:60, quoted in David Bjelajac, Millennial Desire and
the Apocalyptic Vision of Washington Allston (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1988), 58.
35
By the early 19th-century, the resurgence of visionary Protestantism and hyper-
rationalist Free Thought further affirmed the eye’s critical role in harmonizing the
Christian’s reason, imagination and senses. As the Second Great Awakening broke out in
New England, accounts of direct and supernatural revelation such as Mr. Heman Harris's
Dream, or Transe (1801) and A Remarkable Prophecy of Abraham Wood (1811) found a
plentiful local readership.
40
So did the even more influential visions of the 18th-century
Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, whose “name and writings have attracted more
attention, in this vicinity, than heretofore,” warned the Unitarian North American Review
in 1821.
41
Another nonconformist sect, Shakerism grew rapidly in New England
throughout the early national period. In terms of sheer energy, however, the most
credible threat to Protestant rationalism was the evangelical movement that coalesced
locally around the Connecticut-born lawyer Charles Grandison Finney. In 1821, Finney
went out to pray in the woods around Adams, New York, where he underwent a profound
conversion experience. Returning to his unlit room that night, he would recall to his
followers, “it appeared to me as if it were perfectly light.” He then saw Jesus Christ, not
metaphorically, but “face to face,” as “I would see any other man.”
42
By the mid-1820s,
Finney had begun to conduct successful revivals in Boston, where he even managed to
convert the orthodox Lyman Beecher to his style of enthusiastic preaching.
43

40
Heman Harris, Mr. Heman Harris’s Dream, or Transe [sic] (Dedham, Massachusetts:
s.n., 1801); Abraham Wood and James Perkins, A Remarkable Prophecy of Abraham
Wood, Who Was Born Dumb and Blind (Lancaster, Pennsylvania: for the purchasers,
1811).
41
“Swedenborgianism,” North American Review 12 (1821): 89. Swedenborgianism was
especially threatening, as many Unitarians were attracted to his writings.
42
Charles Grandison Finney, Memoirs of Rev. Charles G. Finney (New York: A. S.
Barnes, 1876), 19–20.
43
Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination.
36
For the fast-multiplying visionary sects of the Second Great Awakening, the
revivals were proof that God spoke not so much through the external senses—for even
those who had witnessed Christ’s miracles and resurrection firsthand had denied them—
but instead inspired direct and awful interior revelations.
44
More rationalist Protestants
saw matters differently: the revivals furnished vivid proof of the power of the sight and
sound to disturb the reason and overturn proper social order. Thus, liberal Unitarians and
Universalists as well as orthodox Trinitarians condemned and satirized the ever-
multiplying visions of the Finneyites, Swedenborgians, Shakers, and others, arguing that
the revivals deprived attendees of their very sanity.
45
“The infernal den [of Satan] and its
grizzly inmates, in all their hideous accoutrements, are so glowingly drawn up that they
seem dancing in the vision of the culprits,” an anti-revivalist warned.
46
Their
imaginations pathologically stimulated by crowds at revivals, their participants fell into a
form of mesmeric trance.
47

44
“We see how inefficacious is evidence to convert the sinner,” Bradley Newcomb
Cumings heard a leading Boston Baptist minister explain in 1834, dismissing the
Unitarians' rationalist approach to faith. Bradley Newcomb Cumings journal, 30 August
1834. One of the best sources on the Second Great Awakening visions remains William
James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York:
Longmans, Green, 1905).
45
Orville Dewey, Letters of an English Traveller to His Friend in England, on the
“Revivals of Religion” in America (Boston: Bowles, Dearborn, 1828); James Walker,
“Dissensions Among the Revivalists,” The Christian Examiner 6 (1829):101-130;
Ephraim Perkins, A Bunker Hill Contest, A.D. 1826 (Utica, New York: for the author,
1826); William J. Haskett, Shakerism Unmasked, Or The History of the Shakers
(Pittsfield, Massachusetts: by the author, 1828); Russell Streeter, Latest News from Three
Worlds, Heaven, Earth and Hell (Boston : B.B. Mussey, 1832).
46
“Revivals,” Correspondent 1, no. 15 (May 5, 1827): 231.
47
Grant Powers, Essay Upon the Influence of the Imagination on the Nervous System:
Contributing to a False Hope in Religion (Andover, Massachusetts: Flagg, Gould, 1828);
H. F. Stearns, A Dissertation Upon the Influence of the Imagination on the Nervous
System (Dover, New Hampshire: John T. Gibbs, 1834). For more on psychological
37
New England’s orthodox and liberal Protestants did not disavow the religious
imagination entirely, but they did ground it in a Puritan tradition of sober introspection.
“True devotion,” explained Boston Weekly Magazine in 1805, was “a silent act,” one that
“requires a considerable degree of abstraction from the world.” Yes, faith meant
removing oneself from the distractions world, but without indulging in the chimerical
interior “visions” and “dreams” of enthusiasts and mystics. “Real piety… looks up to
God, sees, hears, feels him in every event,” the article continued. “It is theory verified by
experience.”
48
Of course, what constituted “experience” was an open question.
Furthermore, though they disavowed the revivals, many orthodox Trinitarian clergy
increasingly appreciated the role of the imagination in giving life to the Christian’s
experience. In 1832, the Boston school teacher and Congregationalist minister Jacob
Abbott pleaded for youth to stop reading the words of the Scripture in a mechanical
fashion, and ask them instead to actively picture the scenes it summoned in their minds.
“Each reader can, if he will task his imagination, paint for himself the scenes which the
Bible describes. And if he does bring his intellect and his powers of conception to the
work, and read, not merely repeat, formally and coldly, sounds already familiar, but to
bring to his mind vividly and clear conceptions of all which is represented there, he will
be interested.”
49

critiques of the revivals, see Bratt, “Religious Anti-Revivalism in Antebellum America,”
Journal of the Early Republic 24, no. 1 (April 1, 2004): 65–106;
and Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, & Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining
Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton University Press, 1999).
48
“On Devotion,” Boston Weekly Magazine 3, no. 51 (1805), 201.
49
Jacob Abbott, The Young Christian: Or a Familiar Illustration of the Principles of
Christian Duty (New York: American Tract Society, 1832), 229–230.
38
Compared to Trinitarian Congregationalists such as Abbott, however,
Universalists and Unitarians interpreted the Christian’s experience in a more empirical
fashion: it was the external senses and their derived truths that breathed sense and life
into Scripture. A New England Universalist minister implored his parishioners in 1826,
the year that Lyman Beecher arrived in Boston, to feel a “rational, philosophical
definition of gratitude” for the visible world around them. “Cast your eyes in any
direction, above and around you, and the unexampled workmanship of the almighty
Artist, and the inimitable touches of His celestial pencil, will meet your enraptured
view.”
50
In a similar spirit, the Unitarian minister John Pierpont sermonized in his 1833
on physical science that “[a]ll revealed religion must rest upon the foundation of natural
religion, and all books containing the records and the evidences of a revelation, need
some external test or standard, confessedly proceeding from the hand of God, to which
they may be brought for comparison and proof.” Through sight, the Christian empiricist
was led along “one link of the long chain of being, that runs up, from the dust upon which
he treads, to that higher and spiritual world which lies beyond the reach of his eye or of
his glass, and can be see only through that spiritual light which shines within.” On the
other hand, "[h]e who shuts his eyes upon God's creation, and will not see in it the God
which it reveals to him, will soon worship a God which his own gloomy imagination has
formed," as the orthodox did.
51

Exemplified by their establishment of the Linnaean Society in 1814 and the
Boston Society of Natural History in 1830, urban elites’ growing esteem for naturalist

50
Russell Streeter, A Discourse Delivered in the Universalist Chapel (Portland: Argus
Office, 1826), 5, 9.
51
Pierpont, On the Moral Influences of Physical Science, 3, 13, 20.
39
observation and its role in stimulating the religious imagination emerged not only out of
their contest with the revivalists’ “gloomy imagination,” but also from their quest to
renew their moral authority through rural pursuits. After their humiliating failure to avert
“Mr. Madison’s War,” many local Federalist gentlemen retreated to their county seats.
By devoting themselves to virtuous agricultural and horticultural pursuits on their farms
in Roxbury, Brookline, and other nearby towns, merchant elites such as Josiah Quincy,
George Cabot, and Nathaniel Ingersoll hoped to disprove their Jeffersonian critics’
charges of materialism and elitism. These suburban estates were not simply imitations of
yeoman industry, however. They were ambitious exercises in crafting landscapes that
would not just symbolize virtue to the eye, but also cultivate it.
52

These experiments in rural living further solidified an elite conviction in the moral
influence of the environment. In both their own literary journals as well as in practice,
Boston’s Federalists embraced the notion that studying the rural landscape improved
character and encouraged piety. In the same 1804 issue of the Monthly Anthology in
which Winthrop Sargent lamented Boston’s crowded landscape, another poem extolled
rural Cambridge’s tendency to “wake each soft emotion of the soul,” and “view in
thought sublime the God of all.”
53
These poetic odes to country living, in other words,
suggest that Boston elites—many of them gentlemen farmers—had already embraced the
psychology of environmental influence that would justify their later post-incorporation
urban renewal campaign. Instead of serving the public good, however, the elite’s

52
Johnson, “The Rise and Fall of the Boston Society of Natural History”; Tamara Plakins
Thornton, Cultivating Gentlemen: The Meaning of Country Life among the Boston Elite,
1785-1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
53
“A Rural Scene,” Monthly Anthology, and Boston Review 1, no. 8 (June 1804): 370.
For a discussion of elite Bostonians’ literary emulations of such sentiments, see
Thornton, Cultivating Gentlemen, 45–48.
40
experimentation with rural landscape-making was an act of private self-fashioning. As
the Monthly Anthology poem illustrates, class and religion served as symbiotic
justifications for elites seeking to escape the urban environment and reaffirm their
impugned virtue through rural pursuits.
Between the Revolution and incorporation, elite Bostonians focused their urban
renewal efforts almost entirely upon their own neighborhoods. The Almshouse and its
indigent population were removed from the Common in 1795, preparing for the
development of a new row of townhouses on adjacent Beacon Hill. In 1812,
neighborhood locals petitioned to ban public executions from their traditional location on
the Common; public executions continued to occur, hidden from the sight of the genteel,
in a less well-to-do area of South Boston.
54
By relocating such unpleasant sights to other
parts of the city, elite Federal-era Bostonians spent less time dictating what the public at
large saw then in improving the views from their own front windows. Convinced that the
urban visual environment contributed to moral decay, Boston’s Unitarian elite sought to
remove themselves from it. By the 1820s, however, as the elite recognized the manifold
threats to its authority, it attempted to shape the visual form, and thus the conduct, of the
city at large.

54
Samuel Tully, John Dalton, and Joseph Story, The Trial of Samuel Tully & John
Dalton (Boston: Joshua Belcher, 1813), 29. Elites were keen to shield their own eyes and
their family members from such spectacles; thus the physician and writer Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Sr., was scolded as an eight year-old child in 1817 for bringing his younger
brother to the last execution on the Cambridge Gallows Lot.
41
The Spark of Reform
However much control they might wield over their Roxbury estates and Beacon
Hill mansions, elite Bostonians’ aversions to the “mean” spectacles of filth, suffering,
poverty and disorder were bound to collide with the realities of the wider city. Spectacles
of unruly conduct were more bothersome there than in other cities, thanks to the Hub’s
cramped geography. “Few could any longer maintain the walled protection of the
country estate within the town,” historian Roger Lane has explained. “Neighborhoods
were not clearly separated, and new construction made it more than ever difficult to draw
the lines of privacy.”
55
What was true of immoral spectacle applied equally to the
general sensory disorder of early 19th-century Boston. “The most costly dwelling in
Beacon street could no doubt be deprived of a large part of its comfort [by laborers]
beating carpets too near that street,” remarked a “Friend of Improvement.”
56
Genteel
though the newer residences of Fort Hill, Pearl Street, and Beacon Hill might be,
residents did not need to venture far from their homes to encounter the stinking mud-flats
at the edge of Boston Common, the dilapidated and irregular architecture of the
Shambles, or the unruly behavior of red-light districts such as “Nigger Hill,” viewed by
authorities as a “moral and architectural wasteland.”
57

Even so, these problems did not seem to require action until the early 1820s, when
they presented a badly needed political opportunity for the city’s threatened ruling class.

55
Lane, Policing the City, 6.
56
Nehemiah Adams, The Boston Common: Or, Rural Walks in Cities (Boston: G.W.
Light, 1838), 39.
57
Jeffrey Klee, “Civic Order on Beacon Hill,” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the
Vernacular Architecture Forum 15 (October 1, 2008): 54-55.
42
Between the Revolution and Boston’s incorporation in 1822, first-generation Federalists
had run the city’s public affairs without the benefit of a political party or municipal
government, on the strength of their personal reputations as men of talent and wealth.
Their conservative leadership stymied numerous proposals to transform town into city.
But as the town model of governance proved increasingly ineffective for dealing with
growth, and as growing numbers of small business owners, artisans, craftsmen,
innkeepers and others in Boston asserted their position as a self-described “Middling
Interest,” a second generation of Federalist leaders realized the need to justify their
authority. This lesson was made particularly clear after 1819, when a sharp credit
contraction and shrinking European demand for American agricultural exports plunged
the nation into its first true economic panic. Embarrassingly, many of Boston’s affluent
leaders actually benefitted from the recession, but the Middling Interest as well as the
working class and poor suffered severely. Hundreds of businesses shuttered, thousands
of residents were reduced to begging on the streets, and 3,500 debtors went to prison
during the crisis. Federalist leaders were pilloried as luxurious and sensuous aristocrats
not just by their Jeffersonian rivals, but by the emerging middle class. In the process,
Boston entered its first period of “anonymity, disorder, and conflict-oriented politics.”
58

Unfortunately for local elites, the festering class resentments of the early 1820s
coincided with the final schism of an important pillar of Federalist authority,
Congregationalism’s so-called Standing Order. By resisting pressure to follow other

58
Robert A. McCaughey, “From Town to City: Boston in the 1820s,” Political Science
Quarterly 88, no. 2 (June 1, 1973): 192; Crocker, The Magic of the Many; Andrew R. L.
Cayton, “The Fragmentation of ‘A Great Family’: The Panic of 1819 and the Rise of the
Middling Interest in Boston, 1818-1822.” Journal of the Early Republic 2, no. 2 (July 1,
1982): 143–67.
43
states in disestablishing religion and eliminating state salaries for the clergy,
Massachusetts Federalists received a crucial endorsement from the Standing Order. In
the 1810s, the moral problems of the city had offered a common cause for liberal and
conservative Protestants. That decade, the helm of urban reform was taken by moral
societies, more than a hundred of which formed across the nation between 1812 and
1830. In the vicinity of Boston, these societies included the Charlestown Association for
the Reformation of Morals, founded by the anti-Unitarian critic Jedidiah Morse in 1813,
the Boston-based Massachusetts Society for the Suppression of Intemperance, established
the same year, the aforementioned Boston Female Society for Missionary Purposes, and
countless others. Through their publications and meetings, these societies made an issue
of the scenes of vice and degradation purportedly ubiquitous in Boston’s taverns, alleys,
and less reputable streets. Relying on a mixture of social and legal pressure, these
societies asked merchants, wharfingers, manufacturers, and other social authorities to
discourage their employees from swearing, sabbath-breaking, gambling, excessively
using spirits, and other offenses.
59

The climate of anxiety produced by the War of 1812 convinced many of New
England’s liberal clergy to temporarily overlook their misgivings and join these societies.
By the end of the century’s second decade, however, this clerical alliance disintegrated.
60

In the process, Unitarian clergy began to emphasize environmentalist approaches to
reform over that of evangelical suasion, reflecting in part the new importance of their

59
Joel Bernard, “Between Religion and Reform: American Moral Societies, 1811-1821,”
Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 105, Third Series (January 1, 1993):
1–38.
60
Peter S. Field, The Crisis of the Standing Order: Clerical Intellectuals and Cultural
Authority in Massachusetts, 1780-1833 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1998).
44
congregations’ wealthy benefactors under disestablishment. A moral investment in the
visual environment was logical and convenient for elites uniquely privileged to enjoy the
influences of God’s nature on their Roxbury and Dorchester estates. It made less sense,
perhaps, for the Unitarians’ poorer, less cosmopolitan partners in the moral societies, and
indeed most Bostonians in general. With the collapse of the clerical alliance in 1821 and
formal disestablishment imminent, a new generation of volatile and politically outspoken
ministers such as Lyman Beecher openly criticized Boston’s upper class as luxurious and
intemperate.
61

The loss of united clerical support for the Federalist establishment, coupled with
the extension of the franchise to Massachusetts’ white male voters in 1820, encouraged
Boston's local elite to seek new channels of influence over the population.
62
One channel
was church architecture. In 1820, the Episcopalian merchant-aesthete and leading
Federalist William Tudor took what would have been seen as an outrageous step only a
few decades earlier: he insulted the city’s meeting houses, traditional symbols of moral
authority, as “awkward wooden lanterns,” and urged their replacement with “a style of
building better suited to the purpose of religious worship.”
63
In part, the opulent style of
church building that emerged in late-1820s Boston reflected the local clergy’s new
reliance on elite patronage. But it also testified to elite Bostonians’ increasingly liberal
attitude toward the senses, as well as their recognition that their wealth could be used to

61
Sidney E. Mead, “Lyman Beecher and Connecticut Orthodoxy’s Campaign against the
Unitarians, 1819-1826,” Church History 9, no. 3 (September 1, 1940): 218–234.
62
Harlow W. Sheidley, Sectional Nationalism: Massachusetts Conservative Leaders and
the Transformation of America, 1815-1836 (Boston: Northeastern University Press,
1998); Crocker, The Magic of the Many; Marshall Foletta, Coming to Terms with
Democracy: Federalist Intellectuals and the Shaping of an American Culture, 1800-1828
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001).
63
William Tudor, Letters on the Eastern States (New York: Kirk & Mercein, 1820), 155.
45
create attractive religious environments capable of drawing worshippers away from their
poorer but faster growing denominational rivals.
64

The church-building strategy was clearly limited, however. By 1838, the
Unitarian minister-at-large Joseph Tuckerman estimated that a quarter to a third of the
city did not attend church, and large number of laborers spent the Sabbath in “intercourse
and indulgences… corrupting to themselves [and] injurious to society.”
65
Recognizing
that only a minority of Bostonians could be induced to worship in Unitarian churches, if
at all, many elites soon sought to impose a more sober, orderly, reverent, and almost
church-like atmosphere on the city’s environment writ large.

Gentrification and the Contemplative Sublime
Elected in 1823, the Federalist renegade Josiah Quincy set about cleaning and
renovating Boston’s streets, expanding asylums, workhouses, houses of reform, razing
much of the chaotic market district and replacing it with the exorbitantly handsome
Faneuil Hall Market, commonly known as Quincy Market. During Quincy’s five terms,
the city passed ordinances reducing streets to single names, rationalizing address
numbers, and requiring graves to be laid out in neat and parallel rows. The mayor’s
administration banned residents from cleaning rugs on the Common, posting bills, and
the “daubing with paint” (graffiti) of buildings. The owners of howling dogs were to be
fined, as were drivers who generated noise pollution by snapping their whips

64
For a quantitative view of this denominational competition for the city’s new residents,
see “Appendix B: Growth Rates of Boston Churches, 1820-1860,” in Anne C. Rose,
Transcendentalism as a Social Movement: 1830-1850 (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1981).
65
Joseph Tuckerman, The Principles and Results of the Ministry at Large, in Boston
(Boston: J. Munroe, 1838), 10.
46
unnecessarily, or who “unreasonably or cruelly beat” their horses. More fines were
levied on common criers who shouted “profane, or obscene matter,” on fishermen who
called business with horns and trumpets, on anyone who discharged a gun or squibs
(firecrackers) within city limits, and on unlicensed theatrical exhibitions, so as to
“preserve order and decorum, and to prevent the interruption of peace and quiet.” Public
gambling was banned, as were public swimming and bathing.
66

The common foundation of such diverse measures as banning loud noises,
removing “street dirt” and cracking down on prostitution was local leaders’ belief that a
clean-looking city behaved well. Thus, in another instance, reformers campaigned to
municipalize the public water supply not just to reduce disease, but also to eliminate
intemperance.
67
Moral disorder was both caused by and reflected in sensory disorder. “If
in great cities the existence of vice is inevitable,” Quincy explained, “its course should be
in secret, like other filth, in drains, and in darkness.”
68
Such logic helps explain why the
task of the city’s police superintendent was not only to detect immorality but also to tend
to broken streets, drains, and lights and oversee the internment of the dead. Anticipating
the 20th-century “broken windows” theory of policing, the superintendent turned his
vigilant eye on physical and moral defects alike. Addressing the city’s aldermen at the
end of his final term in office, Quincy recalled how “the city possessed no House of
Correction, and the natural inmates of that establishment were in our streets,—on our
“hills,”—or on our commons,—disgusting the delicate, offending the good, and

66
The Charter of the City of Boston (Boston: True and Greene, 1827), 30, 54, 71.
67
Michael Rawson, “The Nature of Water: Reform and the Antebellum Crusade for
Municipal Water in Boston,” Environmental History 9, no. 3 (July 1, 2004): 411–435.
68
Josiah Quincy, A Municipal History of the Town and City of Boston, During Two
Centuries (Boston: Little, Brown, 1852), 380.
47
intimidating the fearful.” By 1829, there was no more “systematic” begging or crime
according to Quincy, who wished it remembered “that this state of things has been
effected, without the addition of one man to the ancient arm of the police.”
69
Attention to
the environment and its moral influences was cheaper and more effective than simply
flooding the streets with officers of the law.
By the end of his five terms in office, claimed a later admirer, Quincy had
“transformed, as if it were by enchantment, the antiquated town of Boston into the most
elegant city of the United States.”
70
Indeed, by the early 1830s, domestic travel guides
took admiring notice of Boston’s preceding decade of improvement. In 1821, the genre’s
most popular representative, moral society leader Jedidiah Morse’s A New Universal
Gazetteer, found more to praise in Boston’s benevolent societies (one of which Morse
led) and library collections than in the city’s benighted topography. By contrast, an 1832
gazetteer found that “[a]lterations and additions have of late years vastly improved the
appearance of Boston”; the city’s streets “have been in a great degree rendered wide and
commodious,” and “the old wooden structures, have in the greater part of the city been
replaced by handsome buildings of stone or brick.”
71
Regardless of the actual extent of
improvement, Bostonians had become more invested in their environment.
On the whole, Boston’s upper class interpreted the transformation of the built
environment (if not its expense) as harbingers of social and moral perfection. “What is

69
Josiah Quincy, Address to the Board of Aldermen of the City of Boston, Jan. 3, 1829
(Boston: Crocker, Brewster, 1829), 20–21.
70
James Spear Loring, The Hundred Boston Orators Appointed by the Municipal
Authorities and Other Public Bodies (Boston: J. P. Jewett, 1852), 269.
71
Morse, A New Universal Gazetteer, Or, Geographical Dictionary, 119; John Marshall,
A New Universal Gazetteer (New York: W. W. Reed & Company, 1832), 113.
48
hereafter to be erected, will go down to other ages to tell of our taste, and to exert its
influence on theirs,” opined an 1830 essay that surveyed Boston’s improvements:
Let us remember too, that it will be an intelligent and a keen-sighted population.
We wish them to respect our memory; let us show that we have respect for them:
we wish them to reverence our laws and institutions, for we believe them good;
let the objects we associate strongly with these laws and institutions, objects to be
seen every day by them, and to influence their opinion of us, let these objects be
such as to heighten reverence...
72

Recognizing the urban environment as a powerful force on the imagination, the
Unitarian upper class focused much of its energy on scattering reverence-inducing
objects throughout Boston. Though this new cityscape was not thought sacred in the
conventional sense, its effect was supposed very much consistent with that of religion
itself, constituting what a literary critic has called (after Thomas Carlyle) “natural
supernaturalism,” or a “secularized version of devotional experience.”
73

Among the foremost instruments of this secularized devotion was architecture; the
Unitarian North American Review afforded it “a high place among those causes which
affect the character of an age, and exert a prominent influence over the moral and
intellectual habits of a people.”
74
The desire to harness luxury to the cause of virtue led
more prominent architects to enthusiastically adopt the sober Greek Revival style in the
self-styled Athens of America. Embodying a rational and self-disciplined
republicanism—the antithesis of sensuousness—Greek Revival helped legitimate the
city’s most opulent edifices of commerce and consumption in the 1820s, 1830s, and

72
“Architecture in the United States,” American Journal of Science 18 (July 1830): 227–
228.
73
Meyer Howard Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in
Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 65.
74
“Architecture in the United States,” North American Review 58, no. 123 (April 1844):
436.
49
1840s. The Tremont House, Quincy Market, the Merchant Exchange, the Custom House,
the residences of leading merchants such as Nathan Appleton and David Sears, and
numerous other visible testaments to the city’s robust economy, embodied a style that
advocates invariably (and ironically, given its expense) described as “chaste.” “We
cannot avoid the noticing the peculiar aptness of the Grecian architecture for banking-
houses,” opined the North American Review in 1836. “The simplicity of the
form…[presents] a befitting temple for the worship of the blind goddess.”
75
In a period
of frequent panics, the large and heavy stone architecture of these structures implied not
only simplicity, but also solidity. When it was commented that not even a stampede of
bulls could knock the market down, Quincy’s building committee was so pleased that
they placed bull ornaments on the market’s exterior.
76

The ideal pose of the spectator before the city’s visually refined environment was
similarly chaste and solid. It was illustrated by a painting exhibited to commercial
success in the 1820s, Henry Sargent’s The Dinner Party. Painted in the wake of the class
turmoil of 1819, Sargent flatteringly modeled his elite Boston dining party on the monks
in French neo-classicist François Granet’s well-known painting of the Capuchin chapel,
substituting Sargent’s upright, regular and poised dining guests for the worshipping
monks (Figure 4 and Figure 5). Equating taste with the monks’ piety and the genteel
diners’ self-restraint, the painting suggested that the proper response to the refined and
genteel environment was an alert and attentive state of physical self-possession that never
exhibited strong passion.

75
Henry Russell Cleveland, “American Architecture,” North American Review, 43
(October, 1836), 361.
76
Quincy, Quincy’s Market, 91.
50
Sargent’s canvas imbued his urban subject with a Romantic sense of the sublime,
albeit one unlike its better-known 18th-century Burkean and Kantian formulations.
Edmund Burke had defined the sublime in terms of massive or frightening spectacles that
caused the body to visibly recoil, as seen in the terrified or awed postures and expressions
of the subjects of Biblical and history paintings, and felt by the viewers of dramatic
landscapes. However, the conception of the sublime that reigned in 1820s Boston—
what the influential Boston painter Washington Allston called the “moral sublime” and
the “true sublime,” and which art historians and critics have described as the
“transcendental sublime” or the term I prefer, the “contemplative sublime”—was far
more subdued. Derived from Scottish Common Sense philosophy, the contemplative
sublime did not arise mechanically from the senses, but from an innate religious and
moral inner sense or imagination.
77
Summoned by comparatively modest objects, the
contemplative sublime was an experience that urban spectators could hope to achieve. It
was the contemplative sublime that Sargent attempted to evoke in his synthesis of the
genteel Boston dining room and the somber Capuchin chapel: a pleasurable and quiet
reverence, consistent with the upper-class Unitarian conception of “true devotion” and

77
Bjelajac, Millennial Desire and the Apocalyptic Vision of Washington Allston, 1–20;
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful (London: J. Dodsley, 1776). For the “contemplative sublime” and
“transcendental sublime,” see Barbara Novak, "American Landscape: Changing Concepts
of the Sublime," The American Art Journal A (1972): 36-42; and Earl Powell,
“Luminism and the American Sublime” in American Light: The Luminist Movement,
1850-1875, ed. John Wilmerding (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1980), 69-
94. For an extensive discussion of the sublime as related to the Common Sense
philosophy of Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart, see Timothy M. Costelloe, “Imagination
and Internal Sense: The Sublime in Shaftesbury, Reid, Addison, and Reynolds,” and
Rachel Zuckert, “The Associative Sublime: Gerard, Kames, Alison, and Stewart,” in The
Sublime: From Antiquity to Present, ed. Timothy M. Costelloe (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012), 50-76.
51
genteel social etiquette. And it was precisely this sense of reverence that Boston’s 1820s
authorities hoped to evoke through a new landscape of architecture, parks, monuments
and art galleries.

Sensuousness in Athens
The reformers of Boston’s streets had hoped to create a quieter, brighter, cleaner
and more and rational space, more conducive to mental peace and contemplation. In the
process, however they helped accelerate the development of a glittering materialistic
culture of amusement that replaced the distractions of poverty and filth with the
allurements of the fancy shop, the showy residence, the theater, and the luxury hotel. At
the turn of the century, the city’s longest thoroughfare, Washington Street, had offered
little in the way of exotic merchandise: the commercial addresses for the street in the
1805 directory were dominated by artisans-for-hire and dealers in perishable goods. In
1828, however, a novel described “Washington-street” as the city’s “most fashionable
shopping place.” By that time the street boasted not only many more retailers, but more
who dealt in luxuries, such as “Dane’s Shawl and Fancy Goods Warehouse,” the “New
England Glass Factory,” and “Stimpson & Clapp,” dealers in “fancy articles.”
78

Such fancy-goods outlets were far from the only sign of Boston’s growing
prosperity. With the construction of the fancy Tremont Theatre in 1827, Boston was a
one-theater town no longer. Two years later, entrepreneurs established the nation’s most
luxurious hotel Tremont House, built at the staggering price tag of $3,000,000. Featuring

78
Louisa Caroline Tuthill, Love of Admiration: Or Mary’s Visit to B----. A Moral Tale
(New Haven: A. H. Maltby, 1828), 26; Boston Directory (Boston: Stimpson, Clapp,
1832).
52
French delicacies priced at $2 to $4, much beyond the reach of the ordinary mechanic, it
was the first restaurant to cater exclusively to a genteel clientele.
79
Purged of disorder,
Boston’s better streets became places of genteel accommodation, where the bourgeois
could dine, shop, promenade, and display their fashionable dress and equipage as never
before.
For its critics, the new and conspicuous environment of luxurious buildings,
expensive fashions, fancy goods and refined dining halls did not at all encourage the cool
and passionless sensibility depicted in Sargent’s painting, but instead incited a worldly
sensuousness. The subject of both envy and complaint, the Tremont House was almost
certainly the “house of feasting” excoriated by Episcopalian minister John Henry
Hopkins at Boston’s Old South Church in 1832: a place of epicurean and fashionable
excess “where every sense is addressed at once, by the choicest modes of fascination.”
80

For Hopkins, there was little moral difference between the metaphorical intoxication of
the city’s luxurious sensory environment and the more literal intoxication of the
drunkard.
Criticism came from below as well as above. By the end of the 1820s, Unitarian
Boston’s power and wealth were publicly attacked by a growing number of working-class
Free Thinkers led by the notorious apostate Universalist, Abner Kneeland. Local labor
leaders decried the “lust of possession” that had developed among local capitalists, who

79
Kelly Erby, “Public Appetite: Dining out in Nineteenth-Century Boston,” (PhD diss.,
Emory University, 2010), 34–36.
80
John Henry Hopkins, The Pleasures of Luxury, Unfavorable to the Exercise of
Christian Benevolence (Boston: Perkins, Marvin, 1832), 11.
53
loved to “roll and riot in splendid luxury.”
81
A leader of Boston’s small but important
free African-American community on the north slope of Beacon Hill argued similarly at
African Masonic Hall in 1833. “Cast your eyes about, look as far as you can see,”
declared Maria Stewart, “all, all is owned by the lordly white, except here and there a
lowly dwelling which the man of color, midst deprivations, fraud and opposition, has
scarce able to procure.” The unequal urban landscape was a reminder of not just class,
but also racial injustice: “we have performed the labor, they have received the profits.”
82

Not only working-class African-Americans, but whites, felt the same.
Boston’s elite understood this criticism as a serious threat to its authority. But
instead of reigning in its consumption, it deflected the charges of incontinence onto the
opposition, declaring that the opposition was guilty of an even lower form of
sensuousness, last seen during the French Revolution, memories of which remained
vivid. As Yale’s president Timothy Dwight recalled in 1822:
Youths particularly, who had been liberally educated, and who with strong
passions, and feeble principles, were votaries of sensuality and ambition,
delighted with the prospect of unrestrained gratification, and panting to be
enrolled with men of fashion and splendour, became enamored of these new
doctrines.
83

The doctrines of equality and infidelity had re-emerged from a more threatening quarter,
the working class, whose sensuousness was evidenced in the Boston Free Society of Free
Thinkers’ heterosocial dances, lectures on birth control, and other entertainments that,

81
Seth Luther, An Address to the Working Men of New England (New York: Office of
the Working Man’s Advocate, 1833), 8 (emphasis in original).
82
Maria Stewart quoted in Klee, Civic Order on Beacon Hill, 48. For more on Boston’s
black community, see James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Black Bostonians:
Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North, rev. ed. (Teaneck, New
Jersey: Holmes and Meier, 2000).
83
Timothy Dwight, Travels: In New-England and New-York (New Haven: by the author,
1822), 376.
54
from the perspective of most Protestants, were not worship at all, but lewd and sinful
rites.
84
If wealthy Bostonians were sensualists, so was the impious working-class.
Unitarian clergy themselves looked on these developments with concern. As
William Ellery Channing put it in a widely discussed 1835 sermon, many of the city’s
moral and social problems now stemmed from the very elegance wrought in the past
decade. The visible indulgences of the wealthy produced the intemperance of the poor,
driving them to the bottle and the brothel:
They live in the sight and in the midst of innumerable indulgencies and
gratifications, which are placed beyond their reach. Their connexion with
the affluent, though not close enough for spiritual communication, is near
enough to inflame appetites, desires, wants, which cannot be satisfied.
From their cheerless rooms, they look out on the abodes of luxury. At their
cold, coarse meal, they hear the equipage conveying others to tables
groaning under plenty, crowned with sparkling wines, and fragrant with
the delicacies of every clime…. Hence burning desire. Hence brooding
discontent. Hence envy and hatred. Hence crime…
85

In other words, the city’s visual refinement had exacerbated charges of sensuousness
against both the wealthy, who cavorted in the city’s new fashionable areas, and the poor,
who were driven by envy and discontent to their own immoral sensual satisfactions. In
an age of Protestant republican moralism, sensuousness represented an existential threat
to the nation, and yet it was also so vaguely defined that the rich and laboring classes,
could accuse each other of it.
For many moralists, the solution to the urban crisis of sensuousness lay not in a
Puritanical asceticism, but in a middle-class moderation centered on domestic life. In the

84
Roderick S. French, “Liberation from Man and God in Boston: Abner Kneeland’s
Free-Thought Campaign, 1830-1839,” American Quarterly 32, no. 2 (July 1, 1980): 202–
221.
85
William Ellery Channing, The Ministry for the Poor (Boston: Russell, Odiorne,
Metcalf, 1835), 11.
55
1830s, local authors such as Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee began to unfavorably compare
the extravagance of the wealthy and the vulgar amusements of the poor with the more
temperate domestic pleasures of those who lay between the two extremes.
86
Yet
precisely because Boston’s antebellum middle class existed in a state of flux, geographic,
social, and material, its reigning ideal, moderation, was no easier to define than was
sensuousness.
Even so, the desire of Boston’s elites to pander to a middle-class ideal of
moderation and restraint, while nevertheless demonstrating their wealth in an impressive
spectacular form, helps explains frequent shifts in taste. Thus, by the 1840s, upper-class
Bostonians had begun to question the moral efficacy of aesthetic formerly regarded as the
essence of chastity and sobriety, Greek Revivalism. Less than a decade after heartily
endorsing the style, the North American Review lamented the showy ubiquity of its
“extravagantly large stones” and expense. Cutting was its criticism of the Tremont
Theatre (adjoining the Tremont House), “barbarized into a lath and plaster hybrid of
church and concert-hall,—an ingenious reconciliation of God and Mammon which it
remained for the liberal and enlightened nineteenth century to discover.” Uncomfortable
with this fusion of the secular and the sacred in a genteel architecture that humbled
Boston’s older meetinghouses, the North American Review declared by the 1840s, “we
are firm in the belief that the introduction of Grecian architecture among us has been a

86
For an overview of the 1830s middle-class critique of urban over-refinement, including
luxurious urban accommodations, see Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America:
Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992); Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee, Three
Experiments of Living: Living Within the Means, Living Up to the Means, Living Beyond
the Means (Boston: W. S. Damrell, S. Colman, 1837).
56
great mistake.”
87
Within a generation, the taste for expensive public architecture that
Quincy had justified as a moral improvement had itself proved to be a moral concern.
Throughout the 1820s and 1830s, Boston’s liberal Protestant elite did their best to
distinguish between the sensuous sins of drunkenness and vice, for which they retained a
Puritanical suspicion, and the pleasures of sight, for which they theoretically did not. Yet
their anxiety about sensuousness, exacerbated by the spectacular divides of urbanization,
meant that they could not simply justify visual refinement as a sensory pleasure. Instead,
they insisted that refined spectacles did not serve the senses, but rather the moral taste.
“The pleasure afforded by works of art,” the Unitarian North American Review insisted,
“is thus strictly and purely an intellectual enjoyment.”
88

By idealizing spectatorship as an intellectual enjoyment, and a labor of the
imagination, Boston’s upper class attempted to defend their luxurious pleasures from
charges of sensuousness. This was a risky strategy, to say the least, for even if the
imagination was capable of attaining the contemplative sublime, it was also prone to the
manipulation and irrationality seen in religious enthusiasts and sufferers of delirium
tremens, among others.
89
By the 1820s, the faculty of imagination had become the
common property of the well-heeled connoisseur and the hallucinating drunk, the sober
republican and the wild Romantic, the quietly pious Christian and the raving revivalist.
In their determination to distinguish their lofty visual pursuits from vulgar sensuousness,

87
“Architecture in the United States,” North American Review 58, no. 123 (April 1844),
442, 447, 453.
88
“On the Fine Arts,” North American Review 3 (1816): 196.
89
Matthew Warner Osborn, Rum Maniacs: Alcoholic Insanity in the Early American
Republic (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2014).
57
and distance their own morally sublime gaze from that of the sensualist and materialist,
Boston’s elite had sparked a crisis which they now needed to resolve.

Conclusion
By the 1830s, the contrasts of rich and poor, sacred and secular, embodied in the
physical extremes of Southack Street and “abodes of luxury” such as the Tremont House
and Quincy Market, revealed Boston’s inequality and worldliness. These contrasts had
exposed the tricky contradiction at the heart of the culture of visual didacticism: the
conflict between genteel sensibility and immoral fascination, between the unabashed
celebration of vision—“there is not an object to which the eye can turn, that He has not
presented to its notice” as one minister claimed in 1833—and the constant threat of the
“bodily senses mount[ing] the throne,” as another minister had warned the year before.
90

Every material symbol of taste, morality, and rectitude, could as easily serve as its
opposite; that is, as upscale incitements to sensuousness, pride, and vanity.
The problem converted many champions of urbanization into its critics. Writing
home to his mother in Greenfield, Massachusetts in 1826, the year that he became
minister of Boston’s Unitarian Purchase Street Church, George Ripley happily explained
that, “I am pretty well satisfied that I shall be happier in the city than I could ever be in
the country. I have access to sources of improvement and enjoyment here which I could
not have elsewhere…”
91
The son of a provincial store keeper, Ripley typified the
enthusiasm of the middle class for the moral opportunities of antebellum Boston’s culture

90
Hopkins, The Pleasures of Luxury, Unfavorable to the Exercise of Christian
Benevolence, 11; Pierpont, On the Moral Influences of Physical Science, 6.
91
Octavius Brooks Frothingham, George Ripley (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882),
39.
58
of improvement.
92
Yet by the 1840s, Ripley had found that the city’s gentility simply
underscored the presence of inequality and selfishness. He and his fellow utopian
founders of Brook Farm declaimed Boston a “selfish and egoistical society… not of
Christianity,” a place “where, within the sound of music and gay company, with half
frantic eyes lighted only by gleams from luxurious halls, hunger and pain lie gasping.”
Ripley was far from alone in questioning the social and moral gains of the city. Labor
leaders, for instance, increasingly liked to point out that Boston’s workers lacked the
energy or time to enjoy the city’s rational amusements, visual or otherwise. However
tasteful, the city’s material refinement merely exacerbated possessive desires. It was
“only in the sphere of the senses that individual interests, property, self-ism, isolation,
and discord could have had their rise,” explained the Brook Farmers. The genteel city
was proof of such self-interest and disorder.
The solution for more utopian reformers was to start society afresh in a more
natural setting, in which the vision remained uncorrupted by city life, and the ideal of a
collective sensory reverence was realized across class boundaries. “Where a general
spirit of culture prevails unchecked by the spirit of money-getting,” explained the Brook
Farmers, “the laborer appreciates the beauty of the world about him. It is to him in place
of fine halls and picture galleries and purple robes….”
93
Few ordinary Bostonians

92
Among the new sources of improvement were the Boston Museum, the city’s first
genuinely middle class theater and art gallery, which dispensed temperance dramas and
neo-classical sculpture to the masses; industrial exhibitions such as the Massachusetts
Charitable Mechanic Association (first held in 1837) and charity fairs; and a new local
crop of illustrated periodicals such as Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion
that brought affordable prints of art and architecture to their middle-class readership.
93
John Sullivan Dwight and Charles Anderson Dana, Association, in Its Connection with
Education and Religion (Boston: B.H. Greene, 1844), 6, 16,19, 25.
59
followed, and those who remained behind were forced to contend with the moral
problems that Boston’s spectacular gentrification had posed.
The enthusiasm of observers such as Ripley for Boston’s improvements suggest
just how far the city had shed its iconoclastic inhibitions by the end of the 1820s. Yet
because liberal Protestants deemed vision such an important influence on the character
and the intellect, and because they found themselves unable to establish concrete
distinctions between a sober, reverent spectatorship and the mindless feasting of the eye,
they were arguably just as anxious about the implications of visual display and
refinement as their Puritan ancestors had been. By establishing monuments, parks, and
other didactic visual sites, Boston’s leading moral and cultural authorities attempted to
define the proper practice of spectatorship for the city’s residents as a whole. Instead,
these urban elites unwittingly helped introduce a visionary culture that challenged their
authority.
60
From Spectators to Visionaries:
Visual Culture and the Transformation of Boston, 1820-1860
Chapter 2:

Moral Landmarks, Ideal Vistas and
the Problem of Spectacular Pluralism

Despite the confidence of Boston’s paternalistic Unitarian elite that it could
reinforce its moral and social authority by crafting a rational and morally sublime urban
sensory environment, that elite soon began to worry that residents were too distracted to
notice or benefit from these efforts. Throughout the antebellum period, Bostonians
increasingly recognized their membership in a large, chaotic, and unfocused world of
self-absorbed bystanders and exhibitionists who were seemingly less preoccupied by their
environment than by each other. In 1842, an observer recorded a tableau of spectatorship
that was anything but attentive, self-disciplined, and collectively focused:
The busy and the leisurely are in the streets. The mechanic with his steady pace;
the eager looking banker; the merchant, with anxious eye and pleasant
countenance; the seaman, with his careless air; the market-man, intent on the
disposal of his availables; the country trader, on his yearly, monthly, or weekly
mission of business; the politician, reading the news in some public lounging-
place; the editor, in moody thought on a thousand matters; the lawyer, seeking
good evidence and logical deductions; the clergyman, in secret pursuit of some
wanderer who has strayed from duty, or some forsaken soul who has seen “better
days”; the physician, hurrying onward to his sick or dying patient; the country
visitant, taking his first gaze at new and strange things in the emporium of wonder
and fashion; the nodding, shifting, buzzing crowds on 'change; the venerable
corporation directors of State Street; the mothers, daughters, wives, matrons, and
maids, with or without special attendants of the sterner sex, parading Washington,
Court, Hanover and Tremont Streets, and the Common, for health, business,
61
vanity, or fun; the pale and interesting; the round and ruby; the white and black,
with all the intermediate shades and tints; some old and artfully bedecked and
bedizened, looking ugly to all eyes save their own; some, young and full of
freshness and beauty, both of which gifts are for public exhibition; some of every
age, with modesty of dress and mein, looking exactly like themselves, goodly
enough for any eyes to gaze upon; and so on in all the forms and combinations of
human being and invention, such as cities see…
1

For antebellum moralists, this self-conscious world of spectators was far too
caught up in its worldly affairs to pay enough attention to its environment to be improved
by it. Worse, this worldly self-absorption threatened to infect the innocent rural visitors
who joined the urban throngs in the streets. In 1836, a leading Unitarian minister warned
of a scenario in which
[a] man comes from a distant part of the country—a trader, perhaps,—to your
city. It is impossible that he should not be much impressed with what he sees
around him—business, life, fashion, equipage, all upon a scale so much more
splendid and luxurious than that to which he has been accustomed…. He is
introduced, you perceive, both by the spectacle and the spirit of things around
him, to new modes and new ideas of life. Instead of that regular and reasonable
application to business, and that quiet, domestic fidelity and enjoyment, which
mark out, as he had before thought, the only lawful plan in life, he finds those in
the city throng—made up as it is of many moral classes—he finds those, and not a
few, perhaps, who are pushing business to unscrupulous excess one part of the
day, that they may urge pleasure to criminal excess another.

“Thus does a city, if corrupt,” the minister direly predicted, “inevitably become a source
of corruption to the country.”
2

How, then, could Boston’s didactic elite ensure that the “city throng” and the rural
visitors joining it each day devoted their attention to loftier affairs than their own worldly
business and pleasure? How could residents be reminded of their civic and religious

1
J. G. Adams, “Our Metropolis,” in The Rose of Sharon: A Religious Souvenir for
MDCCCXLII, ed. Sarah C. Edgarton (Boston: A. Tompkins, B. B. Mussey, 1842), 53–54.
2
Orville Dewey, A Sermon, Preached in the Second Unitarian Church, in Mercer Street,
on the Moral Importance of Cities and the Moral Means for Their Reformation (New
York: David Felt, 1836), 6–7, 9.
62
duties within the present social order? By the late 1820s, many Boston elites attempted
to resolve this conundrum by drawing the spectator’s attention to the landmarks that
greeted his vision as he traveled about the city. Beginning that decade, countless
dedication sermons and speeches celebrated Boston’s secular landscape with a reverence
once reserved for the city’s most sacred edifices. Leading ministers and politicians
concurred as they dedicated one monument and public building after another, both new
and existing, to the moral improvement of the populace.
“By presenting this work of gratitude to the eye,” the Massachusetts
representative Daniel Webster remarked at the laying of the corner-stone of Bunker Hill
Monument in 1825, the sight of the obelisk would “foster a constant regard for the
principles of the Revolution.”
3
By establishing Mount Auburn cemetery in 1831 across
the Charles from the Shawmut Peninsula, Boston’s leading jurist remarked that the site
would “preach lessons, to which none may refuse to listen”—lessons, that is, demanding
behavior proper to men “as patriots, as christians, as immortals.”
4
As Boston Common
was transformed in the 1820s from pasture to genteel park, it became a space of “mental
and moral cultivation.”
5
With its uglier sounds and sights removed, the bell of the
adjacent Park Street meetinghouse could now invite those on the Common “to prayer and

3
Daniel Webster, An Address Delivered at the Laying of the Corner Stone of the Bunker
Hill Monument (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard, 1825), 8.
4
Joseph Story, An Address Delivered on the Dedication of the Cemetery at Mount
Auburn, September 24, 1831 (Boston: J. T. & E. Buckingham, 1831), 13.
5
“Mental and Moral Cultivation on Boston Common--No. 6,” Youth’s Companion
(September 1, 1837): 64. For the transformation of the Common, see “Enclosing the
Common,” in Michael Rawson, Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2010).
63
effort for the amelioration of the unevangelized world.”
6
Wherever a Bostonian looked,
he received a sermon in tangible, visual form (Figure 3).
The campaign to instill a sense of the contemplative sublime in the urban
landscape was not entirely successful, however. Boston’s decade of gentrification
exacerbated anxiety about whether the city’s sites and edifices could play their intended
role amid the visual competition of surrounding topographical and human congestion.
The champions of improvement sought to ease their doubts by commissioning images
and constructing or gentrifying distant vantages that permitted spectators to imagine
urban landmarks free of their disorder. Yet as popular literary and journalistic accounts
grappled with the growing anonymity of the city, Bostonians began to doubt that all
spectators saw these moral landmarks alike. A new middle-class culture of novels,
guidebooks, periodicals, plays, and other sources embraced a typology of spectators—the
connoisseur and the poseur, the vista-seeker and the speculator, the libertine and the
sentimentalist—whose divergent reactions to the city’s monuments, parks, galleries,
paintings and sculptures revealed their inner character.
Possessing as little in common as Puritan New England’s sinners and saints, these
spectator archetypes demonstrated that what mattered was not simply what the spectator
looked at, but how he looked. Increasingly, it was up to the individual spectator to not
simple see the moral landmark, but also to overcome the gross materiality and disorder
that cloaked its meaning. And once the act of looking was understood in such subjective
terms, the very assumptions about vision that underpinned Boston’s didactic visual
culture were ripe for challenge by visionaries.

6
Nehemiah Adams, The Boston Common (Boston: Ticknor, Williams, 1842), 40.
64

Establishing Moral Landmarks
In the early 1820s, Bostonians showed little of the enthusiasm for landmarks that
they would develop by the end of the decade. The city’s first true guide, Hale’s A Survey
of Boston and Its Vicinity (1821) included only a single topographical illustration, the Old
State House. Orienting the reader throughout the city by reference to the residences of
prominent merchants and established families, the Survey appears to have catered more to
basic navigation than to sight-seeing.
7
Over the next two decades, however, Boston’s
civic orators, antiquarians, and cartographers took notice of a vastly expanded number of
local landmarks. An 1832 gazetteer included the Common, the State House, a dozen or
so churches, including Park Street’s, with “a spire that towers above every other in the
city,” Old Faneuil Hall and the new Faneuil Hall Market, and the handsome new Tremont
House hotel, which the guide declared the finest in the nation.
8

Physical transformation alone does not account for this new interest in Boston’s
most important sites. Many landmarks that had existed in past decades received little if
any notice in local guides and gazetteers until the 1830s. Boston’s gentrification not only
reared new sites for admiration, but also transformed older specimens of architecture,
such as the sixty-year-old Brattle Street Church, into objects worthy of notice by
guidebook readers and viewers of the countless topographic prints that began to circulate
in the 1830s. By 1838, the third edition of antebellum Boston’s most popular guide,
Bowen’s Picture of Boston: Or the Citizen’s and Stranger’s Guide to the Metropolis of

7
John Groves Hales, A Survey of Boston and Its Vicinity: Shewing the Distance from the
Old State House (Boston: E. Lincoln, 1821).
8
E.g. John Marshall, A New Universal Gazetteer (New York: W. W. Reed & Company,
1832), 113.
65
Massachusetts and its Environs, contained countless illustrations and descriptions of
Boston’s public buildings, new hotels, as well as its older burial grounds and edifices.
Granted a special amount of space were the 60 churches listed in the book, accounting for
36 of the book’s 62 topographical views. While part of this expansion owed to the
growing popularity of books and illustrations in general, it also reflected the practical and
psychological need for landmarks in a period of unprecedented topographical, social, and
political change.
9

Acknowledging these topographical changes, the 1838 edition of the popular
guidebook Bowen’s Picture of Boston remarked that “such has been the advancement in
the business of local improvements, that strangers who were once familiar with the city,
scarcely recognize their former haunts.”
10
Not only strangers but local citizens found
themselves disoriented, hence the work’s subtitle, “A Citizen’s and Stranger’s Guide.”
At a time when Americans were both unprecedentedly mobile and sentimentally attached
to their homes, most locals were, in a sense, strangers. By the end of the antebellum
period, half of Boston’s population was replaced by newcomers every one or two years.
11

Preparing to go off to sea, a character from Maria Cummins’s popular sentimental novel
The Lamplighter (1854) estimated “not one chance in a hundred, if I should be gone five
years, that there would not be a block of brick stores in this spot when I come to look for

9
Abel Bowen, Bowen’s Picture of Boston: Or the Citizens and Stranger’s Guide to the
Metropolis of Massachusetts, and Its Environs (Boston: Otis, Broaders, 1838). The focus
of Bowen’s Picture was not unusual. Another work focusing especially on republican
and Christian landmarks was John Warner Barber's Massachusetts Historical Collections
(Worcester, Massachusetts: Dorr, Howland, 1839).
10
Bowen, Bowen’s Picture, 223.
11
Peter R. Knights, "Population Turnover, Persistence, and Residential Mobility in
Boston, 1830-1860," in Nineteenth-Century Cities: Essays in the New Urban History, ed.
Stephan Thernstrom and Richard Sennett (New Haven: Yale University, 1969), 258-274.
66
it.”
12
Faced with unprecedented growth and few legal tools for preservation and zoning,
Bostonians were increasingly attached to landmarks, and at the same time largely unable
to protect them, at least prior to the postbellum planning and preservation movement.
13

But which landmarks? So much had been eradicated by “the plough of the
improver,” lamented a founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1822, that the
merchant Peter “Fanueil [sic], and Fanueil alone, has left a hall to be remembered by.”
14

“Our ancestors have left no Corinthian temples on our hills, no Gothic cathedrals on our
plains, no proud pyramid, no storied obelisk, in our cities,” admitted Josiah Quincy in
1830, Boston’s bicentennial.
15
In fact, Boston had no shortage of old and well-known
buildings, but neither age nor architectural significance proved compelling criteria for
preservation until the last third of the century.
16
For in designating landmarks,
antebellum Bostonians were generally less interested in the visibility, size, grandeur,
permanence or age of sites and structures, than in their moral significance. Such
significance might stem from the site’s historical association with exemplary figures and
episodes from the city’s past, or it might simply embody the rational or pious ideals of
newer neoclassical commercial or Gothic church architecture. Either way, a landmark
was a building that morally uplifted the viewer.
Though “venerable for its years,” for instance, John Hancock’s residence was

12
Maria Susanna Cummins, The Lamplighter (Boston: J. P. Jewett, 1855), 135.
13
Michael Holleran, Boston’s Changeful Times: Origins of Preservation and Planning in
America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Whitney A. Martinko,
“Progress and Preservation: Representing History in Boston’s Landscape of Urban
Reform, 1820–1860,” The New England Quarterly 82, no. 2 (June 1, 2009): 304–334.
14
Redford Webster, Selections from the Chronicle of Boston and from the Book of
Retrospections & Anticipations, ([Boston?]: s.n., 1822), 68.
15
Josiah Quincy, An Address to the Citizens of Boston (Boston: J.H. Eastburn, 1830), 9.
16
Holleran, Boston’s Changeful Times.
67
“more so for having been the residence of a man whose memory is so dear to heart of
every Bostonian, and every American,” according to Bowen’s Picture of Boston.
17
Grand
and aged residences of less moral significance, on the other hand, were torn down with
little public protest, as was colonial governor Thomas Hutchinson’s in 1833.
18
Though
fascinated with Boston’s colonial past, the protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1838
short story “Howe’s Masquerade” felt disappointed with the Province-House, the old
colonial governor’s residence across from the Old South Church. “To confess the truth, I
was forced to draw strenuously upon my imagination, in order to find aught that was
interesting in a house which, without its historic associations would have seemed merely
such a tavern.”
19
That moral interest trumped both historical association and antiquity
can be seen in the bias of Bowen’s Picture of Boston toward engravings of newer
meetinghouses and churches, at the expense of far older structures. After the houses of
worship, the work’s illustrators gave preference to symbols of law and charity, such as
the city’s new courthouse and hospital, as well as objects associated with respected
figures: the tombs of the historian Hannah Adams and the locally lionized phrenologist
John Gaspar Spurzheim, and the childhood home of Benjamin Franklin.
If older was not necessarily better, neither was newer. The authors of city guides
and histories overlooked the elegant new private residences of Beacon Street for sites of
lesser beauty, but greater didactic utility. Bowen’s Picture championed a childhood
resort of Benjamin Franklin as a landmark: “if the exterior should continue to appear less
inviting than that of some buildings in the vicinity, the owner, the occupant, and the

17
Bowen, Bowen’s Picture of Boston, 241.
18
Martinko, “Progress and Preservation.”
19
Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Howe's Masquerade," in Twice-Told Tales (New York: F.
DeFau, 1902), 7.
68
observer may improve the consideration, by reflecting that no one of them ever gave
shelter to a greater man than the latter, or a better than the former.”
20
Illustrations of the
childhood homes of civic heroes such as Daniel Webster grew ever more popular during
the period, reflecting in part the middle-class belief that early environments helped make
great leaders. The structures that evoked reverence were not necessarily the grandest or
the oldest. So Mayor Harrison Gray Otis claimed in 1830 in an address delivered at the
Old State House. Dwarfed by Bullfinch’s newer State House, Otis acknowledged that the
older structure had “no pretensions to vie with the magnificent structures of other
countries or even our own,” and yet “to this edifice there is not only a natural but ‘a
spiritual body,’ which is the immortal soul of Independence.”
21
Not only men, but also
buildings had souls; and just as portraits in the age of antebellum phrenology offered
unmistakable and objective clues about their subject’s character, so could buildings be
read for their own spiritual significance, and thus improve the spectator.
In recent years, historians have closely studied how antebellum Bostonians felt
about the tremendous reshaping of the city’s built environment. Scholars once argued
that antebellum Bostonians retained too much of their Puritan forerunners’ skepticism of
hallowed ground, too much republican conviction in the inevitability and desirability of
change, and too much pride in material progress, to embrace a preservationist ethos.
More recently, however, scholars have questioned this supposed indifference to historical
sites and edifices, pointing to locals’ growing investment in antiquarian societies and
their fascination with and nostalgic attachment to the ruins left behind by material

20
Abel Bowen, Bowen’s Picture of Boston, or the Citizen’s and Stranger’s Guide to the
Metropolis of Massachusetts, and Its Environs (Boston: A. Bowen, 1829), 226.
21
Harrison Gray Otis, An Address to the Members of the City Council on the Removal of
the Municipal Government to the Old State House (Boston: John H. Eastburn, 1830), 9.
69
progress.
22
A third possibility, however, has been overlooked. Bostonians’ apparently
contradictory attitudes toward the city’s landscape—their simultaneous desire to collect
images and relics of buildings about to be demolished, and their great enthusiasm for new
development—resulted from their prioritization of the moral landmark over the simply
historic or modern structure.
The interest in moral landmarks derived from a broader culture of moral
environmentalism disseminated from elite intellectuals to the middle classes, whom
together constituted the principal producers and consumers of the orations, writings, and
images of Boston’s landmarks. The most important early publisher of views of the
Boston landscape was also the author and editor of Bowen’s Picture of Boston, Abel
Bowen. As a leading Universalist connected to the printing of that group’s leading
publication, The Universalist, Bowen belonged to a sect that rejected even more strongly
than their Unitarian brethren the Calvinistic doctrine of innate human depravity,
attributing good and evil conduct instead to the individual’s moral education, particularly
at childhood.
Bowen demonstrated his investment in the moral importance of the individual’s
early visual environment in Early Impressions, the didactic novel he published
anonymously shortly before his first edition of Bowen’s Picture of Boston (1829). Most
of the plot follows its contented Christian protagonist, Emily Clifton, on her return to her
childhood village. There, she is saddened to discover the fate of her childhood friends,

22
The older view is represented in Holleran, Boston’s Changeful Times; scholars’ more
recent discovery of an antebellum interest (if not success) in urban preservation is found
in Martinko, “Progress and Preservation” and Nick Yablon, Untimely Ruins: An
Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819-1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2010).
70
whose faulty early educations have led them into miserable lives. Environment,
especially its sensory lessons, has made all the difference. As Emily explains to her
daughter, “This lovely garden spot was the scene of my best instruction; it was here,
when at your age, that I learned to ‘look through nature up to nature’s God,’” an apt
description of the contemplative sublime. Later, after Emily’s sister notes the durability
of childhood impressions, Bowen’s heroine draws the obvious conclusion: “How careful
we should be, then…what impressions we permit to be engraven there.”
23
A literal
engraver of impressions, Bowen and his fellow didacts clearly hoped that the landscape
of urban Boston would improve its residents’ moral character in the same way that Emily
Clifton’s village garden had benefitted hers.

Boston’s Moral Landmarks and Associationist Psychology
Unlike the home of sentimental domestic literature, with its unique memories and
associations, Boston’s moral landmarks would have to function in a far more collective
and uniform fashion. While Emily Clifton could recall the scenes and events that made
her home significant, fewer and fewer residents in 1830 had personally witnessed the
Revolutionary scenes at Bunker Hill or on the Common: hence the need for guidebooks,
histories, orations, and other tools for interpreting and promoting sites of patriotic or
sacred “associations.” As Mayor Harrison Gray Otis remarked in 1830 at the removal of

23
Abel Bowen, Early Impressions (Boston: Bowles, Dearborn, 1828), 42, 88; on the
antebellum literary expressions of the moral influence of the domestic material
environment, see Lori Merish, Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture,
and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University
Press, 2000); for Bowen's biography, see William Henry Whitmore, Abel Bowen,
Engraver: A Sketch Prepared for the Bostonian Society, (Boston: Rockwell and
Churchill, 1884).
71
the municipal government to the Old State House,
There are none, who have paid even a superficial attention to the process of their
perceptions, who are not conscious that a prolific source of our intellectual
pleasures and pains is found in our faculty of associating the remembrance of
characters and events which have most interested our affections and passions,
with the spot whereupon the first have lived and the latter have occurred…. But
the potency of these local associations is not limited to the sphere of our personal
experience.
24

Otis had found a new, urban application for an 18th-century psychological theory
called Associationism, through which certain texts, images, or objects were thought to
forcibly trigger or “awaken” chains of images and ideas. These associations were not
typically “free” in the sense that depth psychology would later posit, nor were they even
necessarily learned. Instead, visual and literary stimuli—a dome, a spire, a tree, or a
mountain—sparked a pre-determined and inexorable chain of ideas in even the most
unseasoned spectator. Between 1815 and 1825, scholars have shown, Boston
intellectuals understood the Associationist psychology of David Hartley, Archibald
Alison, and other thinkers, as a cure for nationalist anxiety about the presumed absence of
a distinctly American literary and artistic tradition; in essence, the expansive and wild
American landscape, and the associations it evoked in the viewer, would supply a cultural
foundation for the new republic.
25
Yet Associationism was equally important to
designers of Boston’s built environment such as Horatio Greenough, the Boston-born
Harvard student who suggested the basic form of Bunker Hill Monument and numerous

24
Otis, An Address to the Members of the City Council on the Removal of the Municipal
Government to the Old State House, 3–4.
25
Terence Martin, The Instructed Vision: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the
Origins of American Fiction (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1961); Robert E.
Streeter, “Association Psychology and Literary Nationalism in the North American
Review, 1815-1825,” American Literature 17, no. 3 (November 1, 1945): 243–254;
Howe, The Unitarian Conscience.
72
other local monuments.

Like every other Harvard student, Greenough encountered
Alison’s theories as paraphrased in the texts of Scottish Common Sense philosophers.
26

In suggesting Bunker Hill Monument’s form, Greenough could be confident that its
patriotic inspiration would make its moral impact felt on even the most uncultured
imagination.
The urban built environment’s sublime moral influence on Boston’s residents was
invariably invoked in orations dedicating the city’s public improvements. As Daniel
Webster observed in his Bunker Hill Monument dedication address in 1825, “Human
beings are composed not of reason only, but of imagination also.”
27
Dedicating Mount
Auburn in 1831, Joseph Story offered the same point about the spectator: “[I]magination,
will exercise a strong dominion over him.”
28
Over the course of the 1820s, local
politicians, ministers, and authors began to designate certain local sites as more inspiring
to the imagination than others. As every Christian knew, one did not need to directly
witness events of great moral significance to feel the influence that their locations
emanated. “To this must be referred the awe and contrition which solemnize and melt the
heart of the Christian who looks into the Holy Sepulchre and believes he sees the place

26
For these thinkers, writes an intellectual historian, “architecture and poetry are
prominent examples of sublime objects, which gain their sublimity from associations—
with durability and strength, the wealth and prominence of the owner of the building, the
skill of the architect." Rachel Zuckert, “The Associative Sublime: Gerard, Kames,
Alison, and Stewart,” in The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present, ed. Timothy M.
Costelloe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 69. For Alison’s influence on
Greenough, see Donald A. Ringe, “Horatio Greenough, Archibald Alison: And the
Functionalist Theory of Art,” College Art Journal 19, no. 4 (July 1, 1960): 314–321.
27
Webster, An Address Delivered at the Laying of the Corner Stone of the Bunker Hill
Monument, 8.
28
Story, An Address Delivered on the Dedication of the Cemetery at Mount Auburn,
September 24, 1831, 14.
73
where the Lord was laid,” argued Otis.
29
The mayor stopped short of directly comparing
the Old State House to the Holy Sepulcher, yet he clearly believed the sight of the former
could not but encourage awe and dutifulness in his fellow Bostonians. The moral
landmarks of the Athens of America proselytized just as forcefully as those of the Holy
Land.
Through their access to elite orations, lectures and travel guides, the middle class
was exposed both implicitly and explicitly to Associationist psychology. Attending a
lecture on the senses in 1830, the local dry-goods clerk Bradley Newcomb Cumings
heard the orator tell the audience it could be sure that a great battle had taken place at
Bunker Hill, despite not having witnessed it with his own eyes.
30
The testimony of books
and lectures was less effective than physical encounter, however, as Boston’s leading
jurist, Joseph Story, told the crowd assembled the following year for the dedication of
Mount Auburn: “The truth, which strikes home, must not only have the approbation of
his reason, but it must be embodied in a visible, tangible, practical form.”
31
As one
popular 1845 Boston travelogue remarked: “There are two kinds of antiquaries in the
world, fools and wise men, one class valuing the relic for its own sake, the other for its
associations with periods he can never know but by the dim reflex of history, and into
which such relic, corn, bone, statue, or whatever it may be, more strongly transports men

29
Otis, An Address to the Members of the City Council on the Removal of the Municipal
Government to the Old State House, 6.
30
Bradley Newcomb Cumings journal, 12 February 1830, Bradley Newcomb Cumings
Journal, MHS.
31
Story, An Address Delivered on the Dedication of the Cemetery at Mount Auburn,
September 24, 1831, 14.
74
of vivid imaginations.”
32
Through such popular orations and texts, Boston’s gentlemen
antiquarians and belletrists invited ordinary citizens to view the city’s landmarks as
delicate and profoundly important relics. Like the Holy Sepulcher, these relics should
produce not just foolish and superficial curiosity in the individual, but a deep universal
reverence in the entire population.
At a time when market forces and politics threatened to sunder social bonds,
Boston’s moral landmarks offered a basis for a collective psychological identity.
Boston’s Harvard-educated politicians and clergy assured themselves and the public that
the tomb, the Common, and the monument evoked identical feelings of reverence in
every citizen, regardless of class, generation, politics or creed. Indeed, this was the very
purpose of such landmarks: to speak to those who lived beyond the earshot of Boston’s
ministers and civic leaders, in an age of religious disestablishment, democratic
insurgency, and growing urban anonymity.
Freed from its previous disorder, the natural beauty of the Common—“the Poor
Man’s Garden”—would speak its lessons to those who had never ventured into a
museum, or witnessed British troops camped there. While its newly landscaped pond
exerted “a powerful influence on the rising generations of this city,” the Common’s
heights offered views more inspiring than those enjoyed by the rich on adjacent Beacon
Hill.
33
“The rich man cannot deprive his poor brother of one jot or tittle of the calm
pleasures of this sweet place,” proclaimed the narrator of a popular novel that paid

32
John Ross Dix, Local Loiterings and Visits in the Vicinity of Boston (Boston: Redding,
1845), 70.
33
Adams, Boston Common, 20.
75
homage to the Common.
34
Similarly, republican monuments such as Bunker Hill’s,
according to the leading merchant and aesthete William Tudor, were “recognized by
every citizen, and not reserved for the observation of the student,” i.e. the elite
connoisseur.
35
As a “silent Orator” and a “Great Speaker,” Charlestown’s towering stone
obelisk needed no translator; as “nature’s own massive lithography,” it illustrated the
site’s heroic lessons as clearly as any history painting did.
36
Echoing the argument-
from-design of natural theologians, orators declared Boston’s monuments legible to all,
and not just to the most cultured spectators. Just as even a child could see God’s hand in
nature, so the rural transplant and the freshly arrived immigrant could not help but
recognize in the monument the heroic deeds of the past, and find moral elevation in the
process.
Orators also insisted that the landmark speak to future generations of Bostonians.
Throughout the early 19th-century, but particularly amid as the flow of Irish and German
Catholic immigrants quickened in the 1830s and peaked the following decade, native
Bostonians experienced a crisis of ethnic and religious identity.
37
In an effort to preserve
their Yankee past, New Englanders founded countless antiquarian societies and published
countless local histories in the first half of the century. But it was landmarks, not musty
history books, which would speak most forcefully to the new citizens. Boosters
confidently announced that even if civilization itself should fall, Boston’s landmarks

34
A Lady [Mrs. R.G. Varnham, Mrs. Farren?], Boston Common: Tale of Our Own Times
(Boston: J. French, 1856), 184.
35
William Tudor, Letters on the Eastern States (New York: Kirk, Mercein, 1820), 152.
36
Hannah Flagg Gould, The Rising Monument, [Newburyport, Massachusetts: s.n, 1840];
Edward Everett, Inauguration of the Statue of Warren (Boston: Bunker Hill Monument
Association, 1858), 22.
37
Oscar Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants, 1790-1880: A Study in Acculturation
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991).
76
would remain legible to future civilizations.
“Though our alphabets may become as obscure as those which cover the
monuments of Nineveh and Babylon,” proclaimed an orator at Bunker Hill Monument,
“its uninscribed surface …will perpetuate the memory of the 17th of June,” the date of
the battle.
38
The choice of a plain obelisk over fifty other potential designs, some of
which bore more literal homage to the battle’s heroes, reflected Bostonians’ Protestant
and republican fears of idolatry.
39
The monument’s abstract form did little explicate its
meaning. Even so, Bunker Hill’s orators routinely declared their own commemorations
superfluous; the viewer supposedly needed no legend, no key, to “read” the monument
and feel a sublime admiration for the battle’s heroes. Solid and conspicuous, the obelisk
would guarantee the conscience of the public who regarded it daily. Celebrating its
completion in 1843, Daniel Webster asked the assembled crowd to contemplate what
might happen if the republic should ever fall. “Who, from beneath the weight of
mortification and shame…could look up to behold [the obelisk]?”
40
No one, for the
Silent Orator’s reproach would be self-evident to anyone who could see it.
Smaller civic structures were understood to be equally legible. In constructing the
grand new edifice of the Boston Public Library, the memories of its founders “will be

38
Everett, Inauguration of the Statue of Warren, 22.
39
As the art historian Kirk Savage has observed, both republican and Protestant
inhibitions delayed the construction of Revolutionary memorials until the antebellum
period. This hesitation was grounded in “the Puritan hostility toward graven images, and
the Renaissance belief, seemingly verified by the ruins of antiquity, that words always
outlived the grandest handiworks of sculpture and architecture.” Kirk Savage, Monument
Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial
Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 1.
40
Daniel Webster, An Address Delivered at the Completion of the Bunker Hill
Monument, June 17, 1843 (Boston: Tappan, Dennet, 1843), 8.
77
registered ‘where every day we may turn the leaf to read them,” an orator explained.
41

The same went for the city’s parks, such as the proposed Corey’s Hill; a century from
now, a writer predicted, “thousands and thousands” who go there will “look back and join
in the praises” of those who founded it. At sunset each evening, the writer imagined of
these future visitors, “a hush comes over the multitude, no noisy conversation is heard;
the sense of beauty is aroused in all.”
42
From podiums and pulpits, antebellum Boston’s
politicians and ministers endlessly repeated the same comforting refrain: the city’s
steadily expanding landmarks would forever unite its residents in collective reverence for
civic benefactors and republican heroes. There was a problem, however. These
ostensibly sublime landmarks were surrounded and obscured by the city’s very un-
sublime and worldly disorder. For many spectators, that disorder could be conquered
only in visions of a highly individual nature.

Looking Past Disorder
Even while assuring the public of the supreme legibility of the moral landmarks,
their admirers nevertheless did their best to shape how the populace would see them.
Politicians, private citizens, and civic associations published memorials and buried copies
in the cornerstones of new structures for future generations to uncover, essentially
claiming the last word on the landmarks’ origins and meanings. These admirers
published volumes explaining the historical and moral significance of monuments,

41
Robert Charles Winthrop, Proceedings on the Occasion of Laying the Corner-Stone of
the Public Library of the City of Boston, 17 September, 1855 (Boston: Moore, Crosby,
1855), 24.
42
John Sullivan Dwight, “From My Diary, No. 10,” Dwight’s Journal of Music 11, no.
18 (August 1, 1857): 141.
78
buildings, and parks, and even of individual trees. They commissioned countless images
that imaginatively recast landmarks free from its real congestion. As we have seen, they
invoked the meaning of these landmarks in countless orations from Boston Common,
Bunker Hill Monument, Mount Auburn, to the Faneuil Hall Marketplace, Boston
Exchange, Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association Hall, Boston Public Library,
Horticultural Hall, and a host of other new buildings.
43
By the 1850s, the landmark-
designers belied their own insistence on the legibility of existing monuments by adding
portrait statues of heroes such as Joseph Warren, Benjamin Franklin, and Daniel Webster
to Bunker Hill Monument, the Common, and other moral landmarks. Through such
actions, elites revealed their uncertainty that the didactic landscape spoke for itself, after
all.
Such gestures were needed not just because new waves of spectators were
constantly entering the city, but also because the visual spaces surrounding the city’s
landmarks were deemed less than ideal for reverent study and meditation. Even as the
municipal government and civic associations dedicated themselves to constructing
elegant new public buildings and genteel parks, these sites and structures remained
surrounded by disheveled structures and disorderly crowds.

43
For a sample of these orations, see “Proceedings Of Laying The Corner-Stone Of
Faneuil Hall Market,” Columbian Centinel, April 30, 1825; George Washington Warren,
The History of the Bunker Hill Monument Association During the First Century of the
United States of America (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1877); Winthrop, Proceedings on the
Occasion of Laying the Corner-Stone of the Public Library of the City of Boston, 17
September, 1855; Thomas Handasyd Perkins, Remarks Made by the Hon. T.H. Perkins at
the Laying of the Corner Stone of the Boston Exchange: August 2, 1841 (Boston: Samuel
N. Dickinson, 1841); Proceedings on the Occasion of Laying the Corner Stone of a
Building for the Use of the Mass. Charitable Mechanic Association (Boston: Rand &
Avery, 1857); The City Hall, Boston: Cornerstone Laid, Monday, December 22, 1862,
Dedicated, Monday, September 17, 1865 (Boston: City Council, 1866).
79
For their boosters, the influence of the moral landmarks (and the faith in their
legibility) was threatened by the very social disorder they were meant to tame. That
disorder grew in concert with urban improvement. Between 1764 and 1822, Boston
experienced only three or four riots or large-scale brawls. By contrast, riots broke out on
a nearly annual basis starting in 1823, thanks to the city’s increasingly visible racial,
social, economic, and political divisions. Serving as focal points for both physical and
rhetorical protest by workers, abolitionists, anti-abolitionists, nativists, and others, the
landmarks divided as well as unified.
Leading local construction trades in a major strike in 1832, the labor leader Seth
Luther urged his fellow tradesmen to let the monument at Bunker Hill remain unfinished
as an “excellent emblem of our unfinished independence. There let it stand unfinished,
until the time passes away when aristocrats talk about mercy to mechanics and
laborers.”
44
The same decade, abolitionists began to address crowds from Faneuil Hall,
the Old South and Boston Common and other sites strategically chosen for their
symbolism, and skirmishes frequently resulted.
45
It became apparent that far from
assuring order, monuments often inspired chaos. In 1837, Boston’s attorney-general
delivered a speech at Faneuil Hall that excused pro-slavery violence in Illinois: in the
very shadow of Bunker Hill Monument, the official remarked, lay the ruins of a convent
recently burned by an anti-Catholic mob.
46
If Boston with its proud obelisk could not

44
Luther, An Address to the Working Men of New England, on the State of Education,
and on the Condition of the Producing Classes in Europe and America, 26 (emphasis in
original).
45
Jack Tager, Boston Riots: Three Centuries of Social Violence (Lebanon, New
Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2001).
46
James Spear Loring, The Hundred Boston Orators Appointed by the Municipal
Authorities and Other Public Bodies (Boston: J.P. Jewett, 1852), 476.
80
escape mob passions, it was unreasonable to expect better behavior from the frontier. In
1853, a nativist used the presence of the monument to excuse the actions of a another
anti-Catholic mob:
The young men of Charlestown are not prone to riots or disturbance of the public
peace, and in no city in the Union is there less crimes or more seldom popular
outbursts of violence; but it is not strange that those whose play-ground in youth
was the base of Bunker Hill, and whose eyes are daily turned to the summit of
that shaft erected toward Liberty, should have a deep regard for freedom and
should watch with a jealous eye any encroachment of their rights.
47

Instead of instilling a quiet reverence in spectators, Boston’s moral landmarks evoked
unruly passions.
More everyday forms of disorder also marred the landscape of moral landmarks.
Though free of grazing cows and rug-beating servants and almshouse applicants by the
late 1820s, the Common remained a space of conspicuous social stratification and
unsavory activity. Observers in the 1830s noticed that fashionable Bostonians had begun
to promenade on the new brick walk at the edge of the Common, ceding the older and by
all accounts more picturesque malls to the laboring classes.
48
The writer Edward Everett
Hale recalled seeing sailors’ gambling games in the late 1820s on the Public Garden,
directly adjacent to the Common.
49
Though hardly unprecedented, such immoral activity
so concerned ministers and police by 1827 that constables began patrolling the Common
during daylight hours.
50
In more claustrophobic and congested parts of the city, even
more lawful activities distracted from the quiet calm under which landmarks were

47
Hannah Corcoran: The Missing Girl of Charlestown (Boston: Palfrey, 1853), 4.
48
Rawson, Eden on the Charles, 65.
49
Edward Everett Hale, A New England Boyhood: And Other Bits of Autobiography
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1910), 94–95.
50
Edward Hartwell Savage, Police Records and Recollections, Or, Boston by Daylight
and Gaslight (Boston: J.P. Dale, 1873), 66.
81
supposed to be viewed. Threading through the “densest throng of Washington street,”
the landmark-seeking narrator of Hawthorne’s 1838 story “Howe’s Masquerade” comes
across the colonial Province-House only by accident. “It is desperately hard work,”
complains the narrator on his return to the busy street, “when we attempt to throw the
spell of hoar antiquity over localities with which the living world, and the day that is
passing over us, have aught to do.”
51

Landmarks also faced visual competition from the ever more imposing structures
that surrounded them. Once the most dominant feature in its vicinity, Old South Church
was gradually obscured in the antebellum period by neighboring structures three or four
stories high. “Buildings, since erected in the vicinity, have shut out almost every object,”
remarked the disappointed protagonist of Hawthorne’s “Howe’s Masquerade” on
climbing to the cupola of the adjacent Province-House.
52
Boston’s ministers were deeply
troubled by the visual implications of the fine residences and commercial structures that
had begun to tower over the once-unsurpassed steeples of the city’s historic houses of
worship. “A crockery shop overlooks the roof-tree of the church where once the
eloquence of a Channing enchanted to heaven the worldly hearts of worldly men,”
lamented Theodore Parker in his 1851 sermon, “The Chief Sins of the People,” adding
sarcastically, “I am glad that the churches are lower than the shops…. I am glad they are
less magnificent than our banks and hotels…. Let the outward show correspond to the
inner fact.”
53
Boston’s topography reflected its despicable worldliness.
Just as potentially distracting were the class implications of the newer residences,

51
Hawthorne, "Howe's Masquerade," 16.
52
Ibid., 3.
53
Theodore Parker, The Collected Works (London: Trübner, 1864), 266.
82
shops and markets encroaching on the city’s older and plainer structures. Architectural
symbols of virtue such as Franklin’s childhood homes and the less-than-magnificent Old
State House were upstaged by more impressive modern structures. “The very edifices,
which a century ago seemed to our fathers luxurious, seem now to multitudes hardly
comfortable, because surrounded by more commodious and beautiful dwellings,” noted
William Ellery Channing in an 1835 sermon decrying the new worldliness and
materialism.
54
For Channing, the increasing conspicuousness of wealthy mansions not
only evoked class resentments, but demoralized the poor, leading them to despair, vice
and crime.
As congestion and disorder hindered the contemplation of Boston’s landmarks,
Bostonians gravitated in the 1830s toward idealized representations and elevated
vantages that minimized or erased that disorder. By inviting the viewer to see a city that
existed more in the mind’s eye than in fact, this idealized topographical representation
served as an early catalyst for the visionary impulse that would erupt more forcefully by
the end of the decade.

New Views and New Vantages
Given the human and topographical disorder surrounding Boston’s public
landmarks, it makes sense that most antebellum viewmakers chose to abstract them from
their immediate environment, either by closely cropping images or creatively subtracting
surrounding structures. Unlike their Revolutionary-era and Federal-era predecessors,
viewmakers in the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s tended to depict both newer and older parts of

54
William Ellery Channing, The Ministry for the Poor (Boston: Russell, Odiorne,
Metcalf, 1835), 11.
83
Boston as eerily and misleadingly uninhabited. Like their counterparts in cities such as
London, Boston’s painters, draughtsmen, engravers, and lithographers eschewed
depicting the laborers, porters, carriage traffic and other human congestion to which so
many contemporary observers objected.
55
Typical, for instance, was an artist’s depiction
of the Easterly View of Franklin Street around 1830 (Figure 6) as vacant. Despite the
city’s swelling population, early antebellum topographic views of Boston tended to
include fewer pedestrians, animals, and vehicles than had the images of a generation or
two earlier, such as a 1789 view of the Charles River Bridge and James Brown Marston’s
1801 painting of State Street (Figure 7). There was a reason for this. Like those who
decided to redub Mount Whoredom by the more inspiring name, Mount Vernon, the
artists who represented a burgeoning Boston as a sleepy village were projecting an image
more wishful than real.
56

Artists’ hesitation to represent Boston’s actual congestion reflected not only
nostalgia for the past—after all, newer developments were among those most popular
subjects of street-views—but also a sense of anxiety about crowds in an age of
heightened class tension and disorderly mobs. Two exceptions that proved the rule were
an unknown artist’s 1832 portrait of Green Street, depicting a fire company performing
maneuvers, and James Bennett’s image of the Tremont House, at the corner of Tremont
and Beacon Streets, which included a military company (Figure 8). Omitting the crowds
and the indiscipline that accompanied these events, artists depicted only the military and

55
Alex Potts, “Picturing the Modern Metropolis: Images of London in the Nineteenth
Century,” History Workshop, no. 26 (December 1, 1988): 28–56.
56
18th-century maps had actually called the peak “Mount Whoredom.” Whitehill,
Boston, 7.
84
fire regiments, in a perfect state of order.
57
When urban views began to depict crowds in
the late 1840s, it was never spontaneously, but instead at moments of civic progress: the
Railroad Jubilee of 1851, and the celebration at the completion of the city’s first
municipal water system, for instance (Figure 9).
Artists rendered landmarks more impressive by removing not only Boston’s
crowds, but also by subtracting distracting or less attractive structures. The illustrators of
guides such as Bowen’s Picture of Boston (Figure 10) and Dearborn’s Reminiscences of
Boston simply razed the surrounding topography. More creative artists found ways of
occluding competing structures, as George Harvey did in his 1835 watercolor of the State
House, using foliage to block out the new mansions of Beacon Street on the left (Figure
11). In any case, these artistically cropped, decontextualized and depopulated images
suggested less about how the city looked than how artists wished their largely upper-class
consumers to see it.
By the 1830s, Bostonians found an additional technique for minimizing the city’s
unpleasant sights, both human and architectural: the elevated vista. Civic-minded
citizens wrote literature and orations inspired by rooftop views, produced countless
paintings and prints that showed the city as it appeared from real or imaginary elevations,
and campaigned (usually belatedly and ineffectively) for the preservation of high points
in their city such as Corey’s Hill. This interest was almost entirely new. Bostonians
traditionally regarded the five hills that surrounded the Shawmut Peninsula as laborious
obstacles rather than spectacular assets, until grading operations (Beacon Hill in the early

57
An exception to this rule were images of the onlooking crowds at major fires, as in
John Ritto Pennimann’s 1824 painting of the conflagration that had destroyed the
Exchange Coffee House six years earlier.
85
19th century, Fort Hill in 1866) rendered them accessible to horse-drawn wagons and rail
cars.
58
In the 18th century, Boston’s five peaks, Copp’s Hill, Fort Hill, and the
Trimount’s three peaks of Mt. Vernon, Beacon Hill, and Pemberton Hill, were reserved
for stigmatized or dangerous purposes such as the city’s almshouse and workhouse,
gunpowder houses, and ropewalks.

Consequently, Boston’s poor and racially
marginalized concentrated at the beginning of the 19th century atop “Mount Whoredom”
(Mount Vernon) and “Nigger Hill” (the north side of Beacon Hill), while wealthier
residents dwelled mostly on lower ground more convenient to the center of the peninsula.
As the peninsula grew increasingly cramped, wealthier Bostonians began in the century’s
first decades to concentrate on higher ground, often in close proximity to the poorer
residents who had traditionally inhabited them. Responding to the demand for space and
exclusivity, a group of developers known as the Mount Vernon Proprietors began in the
first decade of the century to develop the south slope of Beacon Hill, directly above the
Common. Between 1807 and 1824, the top 60 feet of Beacon Hill’s 138 feet were torn
down and replaced with the streets of Boston’s attractive new elevated neighborhood,
whose structures were required to be of brick.
59

The rich sought such elevated locations not so much to segregate themselves, for
Beacon Hill brought together some of the peninsula’s wealthiest and poorest inhabitants,
but because the affluent increasingly valued elevated vantages. By the 1820s, Boston’s
newspapers routinely advertised local properties for sale not just in terms of their extent,
buildings, or agricultural riches, but for their views. The June 3, 1826 issue of the

58
William B. Meyer, “A City (Only Partly) on a Hill,” in Remaking Boston: An
Environmental History of the City and Its Surroundings, ed. Anthony N. Penna and
Conrad Edick Wright (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 127-147.
59
Whitehill, Boston, 81–85.
86
Columbian Centinel typically advertised the Cambridge property of Sarah Fayerweather
as enjoying “a commanding prospect in almost every direction.” Located close enough to
Boston to offer “all the advantages and charms of the city with an exemption from its
inconveniences and evils,” the property’s views offered “intellectual entertainments” to
the “amateur of mental feasts.”
60

The owners of these coveted views were nevertheless willing and perhaps eager to
share them with the public by commissioning images that were not simply of their
estates—something the British gentry had long done—but from their estates. Rendering
Boston harbor as seen from the Gardiner Greene estate on Pemberton Hill, the marine
painter Robert Salmon in 1829 chose not to crop out Greene’s lawn and fence. Instead,
Salmon consciously situated Greene’s view as belonging to the property, as further
reflected in the title of the massive work, Boston Harbor from Mr. Greene’s House,
Pemberton Hill, when it was displayed for curious crowds at Quincy Market (Figure
12).
61
Another painting of the same estate created prior to 1832 established its vantage
even more explicitly by surrounding the view with a painted window frame and billowing
curtain. As with a long tradition of British landscape painting, not to mention recent
publicly exhibited paintings of genteel Boston interiors such as Henry Sargent’s 1821 The
Dinner Party, Salmon’s landscape advertised the status and sensibility of its owner.
Unlike the paintings of elite estates and interiors, Salmon’s painting did not exalt his
patron's property itself, but rather the marvelous view that Gardiner Greene’s property
commanded of the surrounding city and harbor. More than a view of its patron’s

60
“The Fayerweather Estate in Cambridge, for Sale,” Columbian Centinel, June 3, 1826.
61
For details on this painting, see D. Brenton Simons, Boston Beheld: Antique Town and
Country Views (Lebanon, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2008), 58.
87
property, Boston Harbor from Mr. Greene’s House in a sense laid claim to land and
water that did not belong to the owner. The painting reflected as much about the city’s
new land-use patterns as it did about the romantic sensibility driving them.
Even as wealthy Bostonians such as Greene “shared” their private views, public-
spirited writers and artists began to celebrate more accessible vantages on the city. For
their champions, elevated landmarks such as the top of the Common, the State House
Cupola, Bunker Hill Monument, and others, served an important moral function by
visually melding a busy and fragmented city into a harmonious and tranquil whole.
Delivering a dedication address of Mount Auburn Cemetery in 1831, Justice Joseph Story
commended the view. “In the distance, the City,—at once the object of our admiration
and our love,—rears its proud eminences, its glittering spires, its lofty towers, its graceful
mansions, its curling smoke, its crowded haunts of business and pleasure, which speak to
the eye, and yet leave a noiseless loneliness on the ear.”
62
The view from the State House
Cupola, according to the author of Sights in Boston and Suburbs (1856), was especially
needed “in consequence of the crooked streets,” reminding spectators that the Common
was a place where “the rich and poor meet together.” Best seen at eleven o’clock in the
morning on a clear day, “perhaps nothing in the country is superior to it.”
63

What topographical views accomplished through an increasingly implausible
artistic fiction—the erasure of human disorder and social stratification from Boston’s
landscape—the vantages of vistas did more naturally. Thus, throughout the antebellum
period, visitors routinely began their explorations of Boston by surmounting its

62
Story, An Address Delivered on the Dedication of the Cemetery at Mount Auburn,
September 24, 1831, 17.
63
R. L. Midgley, Sights in Boston and Suburbs: Or, Guide to the Stranger (Boston: J. P.
Jewett, 1856), 61–62.
88
increasingly numerous and accessible elevated vantages, marking the changing meaning
of the landscape. Transformed from pasture to park in the 1820s, the Common became
by the 1830s a landmark to be admired in itself from the adjacent State House or the
rooms of the newly built Tremont House hotel. In 1838, the year that readers followed
Hawthorne’s fictional protagonist up to the top of the Province-House, the visiting
Philadelphia school principal Enoch Cobb Wines started his exploration of Boston with a
much more successful trip to the top of the State House Cupola, where he found a view
inferior to “few prospects either in this new world or the old.”
64
There, Wines was drawn
to admire the city’s landmarks: its schools, its Common. He also learned of an artist
completing a panorama from the Cupola. In 1843, another set of views was published in
the volume Views from the Cupola of the State House, which was in turned followed a
few years later by Guide-book for Strangers Visiting the Cupola of the State-House, in
Boston.
65

As Boston’s population grew over the first half of the century, sprawling onto the
expanded waterfront of Town Cove, South Cove, and other areas, and choking existing
areas such as Fort Hill and the North End with packed and lightless slums, residents and
visitors sought increasingly distant views of the Shawmut Peninsula. The vogue for the
view from the elevated top of the Common in the 1820s was succeeded by a fad for the
State House Cupola in the 1830s. The following decade, in 1842, Bunker Hill
Monument’s 221-foot high view was opened to the public. Powered by steam, the

64
Enoch Cobb Wines, A Trip to Boston: In a Series of Letters to the Editor of the United
States Gazette (Boston: Little, Brown, 1838), 25.
65
Views from the Cupola of the State House, Boston, Mass. (Boston: s.n., 1843); Guide-
Book for Strangers Visiting the Cupola of the State-House, in Boston (Boston: A. J.
Wright, 1848).
89
nation’s first elevator began carrying countless visitors to its summit.
66
Soon thereafter
illustrated guides such as Views from the Bunker Hill Monument (1843) appeared. The
latter interpolated Webster’s address at the monument’s completion with directions for
visually locating Boston’s landmarks from each of the summit’s four windows.
67
In
addition, there appeared captioned panoramas, such as the one Richard Mallory
completed from the obelisk’s summit in 1848. The next decade, spectators sought even
more distant views from Corey’s Hill, Parker Hill, and other prominences. By the 1850s,
balloon ascents became a routine part of Fourth of July celebrations on the Common,
offering what one aerial witness suspended above Boston described as “a vast moving
testimonial of the insignificance of man and the greatness of the creation.”
68
Still more
distant, however, were the views that Spiritualists claimed visible to the spirits of
Boston’s civic heroes as they hovered over their earthly haunts.
69

Didactically minded Bostonians hoped that vantages overlooking Boston would
impress the values of sacrifice and patriotism on untold future generations of spectators.
Pleading for a philanthropist to step forward and purchase Corey’s Hill for conversion
into a public park, the music critic Andrew Wheelock Thayer took an imaginary trip there
in “A.D. 1950,” at which point, “The Back Bay is filled up, and noble, stately residences
occupy its now loathsome surface. From some point near the public garden, as we stand

66
Lee Edward Gray, From Ascending Rooms to Express Elevators: A History of the
Passenger Elevator in the 19th Century (Mobile, Alabama: Elevator World, 2002), 24.
67
Views from the Bunker Hill Monument: Being Directions to Find Principal Objects to
Be Seen from Its Summit. Designed Particularly for Strangers Unacquainted with the
Localities (Boston: Haskell, Moore, 1846).
68
George Sumner, An Oration Delivered before the Municipal Authorities of the City of
Boston, July 4, 1859 (Boston: Ticknor, Fields, 1859), 159.
69
See for instance A. E. Simmons et al., Spiritualism: A.E. Simmons’ Communications,
from Daniel Webster & Others (Woodstock, Vermont: Medium, 1852).
90
upon the observatory on Corey's hill, we can trace a broad avenue…” Thayer imagined
that the working class would “see the rich pass by them in showy vehicles, but reflect that
they share the pleasures of the rich, and that from them their privilege of coming hither
was obtained.” The poor might not own the noble and stately residences of the Back
Bay; yet they could, through the magic of height and distance, take pleasure in looking at
them. Thus, the urban panorama of Corey’s Hill would forever instill reverence in future
“thousands and thousands [who would] look back and join in the praises of the Man of
Fancy, who wrought out the salvation of Corey's hill from the ruthless hand of
speculation.”
70

Strangers and Spectacular Pluralism at Boston’s Landmarks
Despite the growing moral and economic investment in the city’s landmarks (or
perhaps because of it) observers by the 1840s called into question the power of the
church, the monument, and the park to win the attention of an increasingly anonymous,
private, and self-absorbed urban population. “[T]hey are so light headed & light
timbered, ever many thinking more of his inconveniences than of the objects of the
occasion,” remarked Emerson of the crowd gathered to hear Daniel Webster dedicate the
newly-completed Bunker Hill Monument on June 18, 1843.
71
Emerson’s remark
probably said less about the crowd than the contradictions of Boston’s antebellum visual
culture, in which spectatorship had become such an important yet opaque index of
character. As a leading theorist of visual studies has remarked, “vision is itself invisible,”

70
Dwight, “From My Diary, No. 10,” 194.
71
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1984), 308.
91
meaning that no spectator can see his own seeing, or what another sees.
72
Even gazing
directly at the monument, Bostonians were uncertain of how to see it. So illustrated a
scene from local schoolmaster Jacob Abbott’s 1845 juvenile novel Marco Paul’s
Adventures in Pursuit of Knowledge: City of Boston. Arriving at Bunker Hill, the two
sightseeing boy protagonists debate whether the obelisk is at heart a monument or an
observatory. When Marco wishes that the top of the obelisk had more windows to look
out from, his wiser companion Forester has to remind him of the true purpose of the
moral landmark, offering its history and explaining that “It is made to be looked at, and
not to look from. It will be seen from below every day for centuries, and by perhaps, fifty
thousand pairs of eyes; while not more than a hundred will come up to the top, to look
from it to the country below.”
73
That the wiser Forester needed to correct his friend’s
naïve desire for nothing more than a view suggested that the monument was far less
legible than its admirers had proclaimed.
Failure to see and heed the city’s moral landmarks was presented in a more
moralistic vein by a popular literary genre that appeared in the 1840s, the city mystery.
Appearing soon after the development of the steam press, the omniscient narration of the
city mysteries allowed readers to voyeuristically nose into the sordid and sensational
private lives of the urban rich and poor.
74
American city mysteries deployed post-
Calvinist imagery to describe urban social types and places: the rich, for instance, were

72
W. J. T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture,” Journal of Visual
Culture 1, no. 2 (August 1, 2002): 166.
73
Jacob Abbott, Marco Paul’s Adventures in Pursuit of Knowledge: City of Boston.
(Boston: Benjamin B. Mussey, 1845), 137.
74
Paul Joseph Erickson, “Welcome to Sodom: The Cultural Work of City-Mysteries
Fiction in Antebellum America” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2005).
92
specimens of “total depravity,” while brothels were “forts of the devil.”
75
A significant
part of that imagery was supplied by urban landmarks, which appeared as representatives
of repentance and charity all too often lacking in the modern Sodoms of Philadelphia,
Boston, and New York, and which knit together class-divided lives otherwise connected
only by sordid plots of seduction and thievery.
The city mysteries reflected a contemporary desire to idealize urban landmarks as
visible reminders of republican and Protestant ideals. Yet the genre also presented the
urban population as largely incapable or uninterested in the moral meaning of those
landmarks. In the godless antebellum city, only the city’s landmarks bore moral
authority, and that authority was feeble indeed. George Lippard’s Philadelphia-set The
Quaker City (1845) thus opened with an epigraph pondering what would happen if
Washington “could once more assemble in Independence Hall” and gaze on “a city
disgraced by Riot, by Robbery, by Murder!,” i.e. its present fallen state.
76
Throughout
The Quaker City, the clock outside Independence Hall (otherwise known as the Old State
House) represents an absent civic virtue. In one typical scene, the clock strikes one in the
morning, and the narrator uses it to weave together the lives of the bell’s lonely and
debauched auditors. Hearing the “voice of God’s judgment” in the bell, the suicide
pauses before throwing himself into the Delaware; the starving mechanic raises his head
as he shivers to death in his hovel; the greedy Bank Director is aroused from counting his
cash; the fallen woman startles, her ears “fast-sealed to all the warnings of conscience;”

75
David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in
the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 89–90.
76
George Lippard, The: Or, The Monks of Monk-Hall : A Romance of Philadelphia Life,
Mystery, and Crime (Philadelphia: by the author, 1845), 1.
93
and the young author beholds his future success in the State House bell—“God bless it
for its memories!”—before each returns to his respective, lonely existence.
77

A nearly identical scene opened George Thompson’s Venus in Boston (1849), as
its doomed and impoverished young fruit-seller heroine shivers one winter evening,
“unnoticed by the passing throng” before the Old South Church. Instead of calling forth
charity, the tolling of the bell sends citizens selfishly on their way to supper: a feast for
the “perfumed exquisite,” and humbler repast for others, and starvation for the most
wretched. The sight and sound of the moral landmark is powerless to awaken these
individuals from their private and sensual self-absorption to their civic Christian duty.
78

Such scenes deployed the moral power of urban landmarks only to reveal that in a city of
strangers, sights such as the Old South meant different things to different spectators.
Extolled by the 1856 travel guide Sights in Boston and Suburbs as “a silent
remembrancer of scenes and events associated with all that is dear to Americans,” the
Old South was all too silent and incapable of asserting a fixed and collective meaning for
the city’s worldly inhabitants.
79

Such doubts were not limited to the sensationalist city mystery genre, but broadly
pervaded the literature and press. Herman Melville’s 1855 novel Israel Potter: His Fifty
Years of Exile, based on a real life Bunker Hill Battle veteran forgotten by his country,
similarly concluded by exposing the blindness of residents to the Bunker Hill obelisk,
even as they looked directly upon it. Stumbling ashore at the end of his exile on the day

77
Ibid., 293.
78
George Thompson, Venus in Boston and Other Tales of Nineteenth-Century City Life,
ed. David S. Reynolds and Kimberly R. Gladman (Amherst: University ofMassachusetts
Press, 2002), 4.
79
Midgley, Sights in Boston and Suburbs, 27–28.
94
of a great procession to the monument, the hero is ignored by the riotous crowd outside
Faneuil Hall, and chooses to watch the procession heading toward Bunker Hill alone,
from Copp’s Hill. Dedicating his story “To HIS HIGHNESS The Bunker-Hill
Monument,” Melville’s narrator lays Potter’s story at the feet of the towering obelisk—
the “Great Biographer”—precisely because no one else will listen.
80

As novelists questioned the moral effects and collective recognition of Boston’s
proudest landmarks, so did a new crop of middle-class periodicals such as Gleason’s,
Ballou’s, and the Punch-esque Carpet-Bag. In 1854, Gleason’s surveyed a human
panorama on the Common that included an elderly gentlemen “meditating on by-gone
days,” when Boston’s famous elm-tree was “but a sapling”:
Turning from the old gentleman, our eyes encounter a well-known land speculator
gloating over the scene with envious, grudging eyes. He is calculating the
geometrical area of the Common; he is mentally dividing it into house lots –
covering it with bricks and plaster, laying out streets, planning stores, workshops
and stables, covering every inch of ground.
81

The increasing importance of landmarks to civic culture only helped dramatize the
differences among spectators.
82

80
Herman Melville, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (New York: G.P. Putnam,
1855), 3, 5.
81
"BOSTON COMMON," Gleason's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion 6, no. 23
(June 10, 1854), 365.
82
Ironically, the same flash press that depicted the new urban world of inscrutably self-
absorbed strangers had helped facilitate that self-absorption, filling the city’s public
spaces with legions of lone, silent readers. On private reading in public in the antebellum
city, see Isabelle Lehuu, Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum
America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); David Henkin, City
Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998).
95
The Solitary Spectator
“The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there is a great
difference in the beholders.”
83
By the time Emerson made the observation in 1844,
Bostonians had learned this lesson not just from studying the rural landscape, but from
participating in an urban culture in which not only one’s visual environment, but how one
observed that environment, served as a key index of moral and spiritual character.
Whereas the champions of the Boston landmarks declared their moral meaning
transparent and their influence inexorable, writers of the 1840s presented a population
who saw different things when they regarded the city’s most important landmarks.
Among the figures who most clearly embodied this fragmented urban spectatorship, and
yet simultaneously rose above it, was the lonely Romantic spectator, who saw what
others had ignored or missed, and whose starting point was more often than not the urban
moral landmark.
Four years before Emerson’s transparent eyeball metaphor appeared in “Nature,”
for instance, Boston schoolmaster Samuel Pettis presented himself as a similarly
disembodied spectator in his 47-page poem Boston and its Environs; as they Appear from
the Cupola of the State House (1832). Pettis seems to have been inspired by the success
of the previous decade’s local histories and guidebooks, which commended not only the
view from the top of the State House, but the same landmarks that Pettis celebrated: the
unfinished monument rising from Charlestown, the buildings of Harvard’s Divinity
School, Boston Common during a Fourth of July celebration, the mansions of Beacon
Hill, and the city’s asylums and schools. Beholding “the diversified scenery, and the

83
Emerson, Essays: Second Series, 191.
96
apparent prosperity and happiness of a dense population,” Pettis admitted that the city “if
closer viewed, appears a darker shade.” Were Pettis a typical late-19th-century flâneur,
he might have sought a closer view. Yet Pettis was uninterested in inspecting the city up
close. Instead, his literary gaze floated over Boston’s slums and mansions, melding into
a harmonious whole the “artificial mounds” raised by “invidious distinctions, such as
middling interest, mechanics, working-men, old and young, rich and poor, learned and
unlearned.”
84
Similarly, “instead of a chaotic world of vice and corruption,” a literary
critic has observed, the narrator perched atop a Boston church in Hawthorne’s 1837
sketch “Sights from a Steeple” observed a “world of social order, of extreme propriety,”
in which pedestrians yielded politely to one another, the streets appeared well-
maintained, and the principal human traffic, military companies and funeral processions,
was wholly orderly.
85

This desire for social harmony and propriety was as old as the covenant theology
of the city’s Puritan founders, and Boston’s Unitarian elite had tried to legislate it into
existence. Their failure, however, forced the lonely Romantic observer to pursue that
harmony alone, leaving behind both the madding crowd, and, at times, his own earthly
body. Delivering the 1846 Phi Beta Kappa Society poem, the Transcendentalist James
Freeman Clarke celebrated the Boston landscape with an imaginary tour of its landmarks.
Beginning from a cosmic vista of “transcendental heights” from which “the eye/Can see
nought smaller than Humanity,” its narrator’s eye plunged toward the dear sights of
Boston Common and the State House’s dome, the Old Feather Store on Dock Street, and

84
Samuel Pettis, Boston and Its Environs: As They Appear from the Cupola of the State
House: A Poem (Boston: L.C. Bowles, 1832), 3, 4-5, 11.
85
Dana Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth Century American Literature
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 109.
97
what was most likely the Hanover Street Church.
86
Similarly, in the 1847 tract A
Midsummer's Day-Dream: Libelløus, or, a Little Book of the Vision of Shawmut,
pseudonymously authored by “Admonish Crime” (a minister upset with Bostonians’
failure to erect a church), the narrator awakens from a life as a “bondslave to the delusion
of the senses” and floats through Boston’s streets, re-examining local landmarks he had
previously mistaken as the “noble and enduring pillars of Doric granite” and realizing
that he had been dwelling in the “Temple of Mammon” all the while.
87
Only by ceasing
to look with the eye alone could the spectator decipher the spiritual significance of
Boston’s landscape.
In their effort to find a proper vantage on the city on a hill, from which its true
moral essence could be distilled from the surrounding confusion, Bostonians in the 1830s
and 140s resorted to the visionary techniques of the disembodied clairvoyant. Visions
served Bostonians’ desires to attain the urban ideal of visual self-culture in an
environment grossly unfit for it. But by the 1850s, middle-class literature had begun to
naturalize and sentimentalize the flâneur, in the process idealizing the moral landmark as
a place which engendered private and idiosyncratic, rather than public and universal,
associations.
A rich illustration of the naturalization of such private associations can be found
in the pseudonymous novel Boston Common, Or A Tale of Our Times (1856). As an
innocent new middle-class arrival to the city, the protagonist Helen Clifton takes a room

86
James Freeman Clarke, A Poem: Delivered Before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, Alpha
of Massachusetts, on Its Anniversary, August 27, 1846 (Boston: W. Crosby & H. P.
Nichols, 1846), 5.
87
Admonish Crime [James Cook Richmond], A Midsummer’s Day-Dream: Libelløus,
Or, a Little Book of the Vision of Shawmut (Boston: Jordan & Wiley, 1847), 4.
98
at the Tremont House overlooking the Common, through which she strolls often with her
pious and upright cousin Ernest, an aspiring minister. After a year, Ernest startles Helen
with the unwelcome revelation that he has been using the walks to court her; only,
distracted by the beauty of Boston’s “great temple of Art and Nature,” she has failed to
notice his advances. Soon thereafter Helen bumps into Roland, a vain seducer who
previously rejected her; he confesses that he has been following her from only yards
away, while she is lost in her reveries. Unwisely accepting his marriage proposal, Helen
watches her husband become a drunk and gamble away her property. Abandoned by
Roland, Helen returns to the Common, only to find now that “it had lost its charm for
me.” Forced by fire from her cheap boarding home, Helen shivers alone one dark
evening on the Common, where she is seized with a vision of her old promenading
companion Ernest, who appears soon afterward in the flesh to save her. Now a minister,
Ernest urges Helen to find Roland, now wasting away from his addiction in a Boston
slum, and save him. Helen brings her dissipated husband to the Common, where an
acquaintance from more prosperous times sees Roland and mocks him; fortunately,
“Roland, immersed in his own beautiful reveries, had not seen them… He was fast
leaving the vanities of earth, and cleaving to things spiritual.”
88
Soon thereafter, Roland
dies, to be buried on the Common.
Boston Common commenced by echoing the dedication orations that had become
so common thirty years earlier: “Boston Common! What memories does this beloved
name awaken in my heart!—what associations recall from the recesses of the long-buried

88
A Lady, Boston Common, 176, 433, 529.
99
past!”
89
Helen’s associations were not those of the Puritan and republican past, but of her
own life. The Common induces private reflections so intense that they prevent characters
on several occasions from noticing the obvious presence of friends and seducers around
them. Instead of forcing the same meanings on all visitors, the Common invited visitors
to project their highly subjective associations onto it.
The sentimental culture of private thoughts, memories, keepsakes, and places
exemplified in Boston Common, as well as the broader visionary impulse that allowed
spectators to imaginatively float outside their bodies, suggested that individual observers
not only saw objects of perception differently—a premise already established by the
18th-century cult of the sensibility—but even saw differently.
90
Yet most antebellum
Bostonians, including the Transcendentalists, could not wholly embrace the subjectivity
of vision. For Emerson, the observer’s subjective perceptions were only a transient step
toward a more collective vision; in nature, he wrote, “all mean egotism vanishes.”
91

Regarding collective visual perceptions as essential to moral society, but unable to ignore
the differences among beholders, antebellum liberal Protestants placed a heavy burden on
urban spaces such as Boston Common that could serve both public and private
associations. Thus, in the 1830s and 1840s, the only way of escaping the disorder of the
urban environment encouraged was to leave it physically, or via the visionary
imagination. But by mid-century, disorder was becoming its own visual attraction.

89
Ibid., 5.
90
For a late-19th century view of alienation as the dominant theme of urban experience,
see Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Urban Sociology Reader,
eds. Jan Lin and Christopher Mele (New York: Routledge, 2012), 23-31.
91
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (Boston: J. Munroe & Company, 1849), 8.
100
Conclusion
By the 1850s, Boston’s middle class (by then the principal consumers of images
and literature) apparently grew more comfortable with seeing their city’s sprawl,
disorder, and commercialism. The fashion for imaginatively depopulating, cropping, and
decontextualizing was gradually giving way to urban realism and a passion for flânerie.
First, starting in the late 1840s, some 4,000 bird’s eye panoramas of American
towns and cities began to flood the market, faithfully emphasizing urban sprawl over
carefully composed and more picturesque views such as Harvey’s and Salmon’s.
92
These
bird’s eye views represented landmarks and monuments, but subordinated them within
the larger cityscape. Within these images, landmarks served less as objects of sublime
contemplation than as tools for orienting the observer, or so suggested the legends that
accompanied the new views. Only a tiny fraction of the 160 factories, roads, and other
topographic features identified in a typical 1848 panorama of Boston had attained the
status of moral landmarks through orations or local guides.
93
Furthermore, these images
depicted the city from imagined elevations impossible to attain except by balloon, thus
depriving the city’s moral landmarks of much of their impressiveness as vantages even as
they shrank them into insignificant elements of topographic sprawl. For instance, John
Bachmann’s 1850 lithograph of Boston as seen from the west reduced Bunker Hill
Monument to relative insignificance and offered no key sites of interest, historical, moral,
or otherwise (Figure 13). Similarly, topographic views increasingly focused on sites of

92
John William Reps, Views and Viewmakers of Urban America: Lithographs of Towns
and Cities in the United States and Canada, Notes on the Artists and Publishers, and a
Union Catalog of Their Work, 1825-1925 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press,
1984).
93
Richard P. Mallory, Panoramic View from Bunker Hill Monument (Boston: Redding,
1848), 1.
101
commercial interest. Henry McIntyre’s 1852 map of Boston devoted roughly 70 percent
of its topographical illustrations to private businesses—a far cry from the 1838 Bowen’s
Picture of Boston, which had devoted more than half of its illustrations to churches, and
most of the remainder to sites of republican interest (Figure 14).
The desire to see the city “as it was” emerged not only at vistas, but at street-level
at mid-century. By the late 1850s, crowds and “street characters” had become dominant
subjects of visual interest in the works of illustrators such as Winslow Homer.
94

Winslow Homer’s street views for Ballou’s included such chaotic and apparently
unfocused scenes as his 1857 view, “Corner of Winter, Washington, and Summer Streets,
Boston,” just outside Ball, Jones & Company’s jewelry bazaar (Figure 15). In a typical
illustration on July 9, 1859, Homer depicted policemen chasing after firework-hurling
mischief-makers on the Fourth of July; in another, he delighted in the similarly kinetic
forms of an “Evening Scene at the Skating Park, Boston.” Even the scenes of the poor
digging through the trash used to fill in the Back Bay had become a subject of interest
(Figure 16). The article presented just the sort of social contrasts that had evoked so
much spectacular anxiety before; yet the text accompanying the illustration expressed no
sympathy for the rag pickers, but devoted itself to explaining the construction process
going on the city.
This new urban visual realism emerged at a time when the city’s middle class was
flocking out of the congested core of Shawmut Peninsula, and new techniques of urban
management had begun to emerge. By the 1860s, a new generation of planners,
preservationists, civil engineers, and professional sanitation, police and fire forces

94
David Tatham, Winslow Homer and the Pictorial Press (Syracuse, New York:
Syracuse University Press, 2003).
102
assumed greater responsibility over the appearance of the urban environment. Though
the professional management of the city met mixed success, it helped reframe urban
sensory disorder as a scientific problem to be managed by trained experts rather than by
moralists.
95

In any case, it was becoming increasingly easy for the city’s middle class escape
the industrialization, visual congestion, and higher pauper taxes that accompanied the
unprecedented migration of poor Irish into older parts of Boston such as Fort Hill and the
North End. They did so by moving to areas such as Roxbury, Dorchester, and the
reclaimed Back Bay, the city’s first large experiment in urban planning. Modeled on a
rural image—for the concept of the suburb had yet to be invented—these communities
were growing even before horse cars began to service them in the 1870s; some 167,000
new suburbanites—nearly all of Boston’s population in 1860—would settle in the
streetcar suburbs between 1870 and 1900.
96
Thanks to the introduction of mail order,
rural variety stores, and the rise of the corporate traveling sales agent in the 1870s, even
the communities that lay beyond the suburbs were increasingly assimilated into the urban

95
For an overview of this development in Boston and elsewhere, see Stanley K. Schultz
and Clay McShane, “To Engineer the Metropolis: Sewers, Sanitation, and City Planning
in Late-Nineteenth-Century America,” The Journal of American History 65, no. 2
(September 1, 1978): 389–411; Jon A. Peterson, “The Impact of Sanitary Reform upon
American Urban Planning, 1840-1890,” Journal of Social History 13, no. 1 (October 1,
1979): 83–103; Michael Holleran, Boston’s Changeful Times: Origins of Preservation
and Planning in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Cynthia
Zaitzevsky, Frederick Law Olmsted and the Boston Park System (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992); and Cynthia
Zaitzevsky, “Housing Boston’s Poor: The First Philanthropic Experiments,” Journal of
the Society of Architectural Historians 42, no. 2 (May 1, 1983): 157–167.
96
Sam Bass Warner, Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1978).
103
marketplace.
97
In effect, as the middle class increasingly fled Boston’s ever-congested
core, distance lent enchantment, or at least interest, to the view. Safely ensconced in the
suburbs, the readers of Ballou’s and Harper’s could afford to delight in the rag pickers
and mischief-makers on the Common whose presence artists had spent decades ignoring.
Yet before the realist impulse emerged in the late 1850s, influential Boston
Unitarians viewed the city’s sensory disorder as a significant threat to moral and social
order. Unable to impose on the city at large the degree of rationality and reverence they
desired, many clergy members, aesthetes, and political elites in the late 1820s and 1830s
focused on establishing visually orderly venues—natural history museums, botanical
gardens, and public art galleries—that exposed the middle class to art and nature. Yet for
their critics as well as ordinary patrons, the refined art gallery encouraged an only slightly
more genteel version of the vanity, materialism, and selfishness that the city mystery
authors discovered at the city’s public landmarks. Yearning for the sublime, but
distracted by the worldly atmosphere of the gallery, viewers found themselves journeying
into the uncharted territory of their visions.

97
On the rise of those sales agents, see Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870-
1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
104
From Spectators to Visionaries:
Visual Culture and the Transformation of Boston, 1820-1860

Chapter 3:

Public Art Exhibition Culture and
The Emergence of Supersensory Vision

In the 1820s, Boston’s emerging middle class encountered the fine arts in an
unprecedented range of new public spaces that included auction rooms, warehouses, and
dedicated exhibition halls such as the Boston Athenaeum Gallery, Harding’s Gallery, the
Boston Museum, the triennial Massachusetts Charitable Mechanics Fairs, Horticultural
Hall, and similar cultural institutions. Criticized by some as a luxury and an
extravagance, the new public exhibition culture was defended with equal passion by
Boston’s leading liberal Protestant aesthetes, for whom art served as a “laudable and
improving resort for the community,” as a minister and amateur artist insisted.
1
Exposure
to art supposedly offered Bostonians more than a knowledge of aesthetic genres and
forms; it instilled in them sensory and intellectual habits conducive to social and moral
order. Though modeled on the discerning and disinterested pursuits of 17th- and 18th-
century genteel British collectors, Boston’s new public exhibition culture required
adaptation to republican and urban conditions in order to serve its moralistic purpose.
This included the construction, in the mid-1820s, of the city’s first public art venue, the

1
John Henry Hopkins, The American Citizen: His Rights and Duties, according to the
Spirit of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Pudney & Russell, 1857), 429.
105
Athenaeum Gallery, followed by more genuinely middle-class exhibition spaces. By
relocating drawing, painting, and sculpture from the city’s glittering luxury carpet
warehouses and fancy-good stores into these comparatively less commercialized public
venues, aesthetes hoped to distance art from its un-republican and even paganistic
connotations, while publicly “rescuing” less cultured spectators from even lower forms of
sensuousness and materialism such as vice and rum. Sufficiently practiced, the art
viewer was understood to judge art not by the social status of its owner or its subject, but
according to purer aesthetic and moral criteria. The viewer’s enjoyment, furthermore,
though mediated through the senses, was understood as a form of rational sensibility
rather than as a physical pleasure.
By the late 1830s, Boston’s public exhibition culture produced not only
connoisseurs, however, but also viewers with more unpredictable, idiosyncratic, and even
hallucinatory responses. Critics such as Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody along
with less noted spectators began to perceive in publicly displayed artworks sights and
sounds that the works themselves did not expressly represent. Such viewers anticipated
Emerson’s 1842 definition of the Transcendentalist as one who “does not deny the
sensuous fact: by no means; but he will not see that alone.”
2
By the mid-1840s, this
supersensory aspiration was embodied in a new style of sculpture whose heroes mastered
the world around them through their extraordinarily keen sight and hearing.
The democratic nature of the gallery abetted such pluralistic visionary impulses.
By virtue (it bears re-statement) of the invisible nature of seeing, Peabody’s and Fuller’s
supersensory responses could not be disputed by others, nor could they be assimilated

2
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Transcendentalist," in Nature; Addresses, and Lectures
(Boston: J. Munroe, 1849), 319–320.
106
and reduced to a model of the subconscious that did not yet exist. At the same time, their
critical responses were more than individual acts of rebellion against the cultural
hegemony of the city’s upper-class aesthetes; instead, by seeing past the crude material
and sensuous fascinations of art to its underlying spiritual essence, these visionary
viewers achieved the moral aspiration of a broader class of new and mostly middle-class
urban Protestants, who struggled to perfect their vision in an imperfect sensory
environment. Intended to shore up rational sensory habits, the public exhibition spaces
that emerged in 1820s Boston offered unexpected, alternative ways of seeing that bore a
strong affinity with Transcendentalism, magnetic clairvoyance, and Spiritualism.

Warehouses, Auction Rooms, and Middle-Class Picture Hunters in 1820s Boston
Despite its reputation for wealth and culture, Boston lacked a public art gallery for
the first quarter of the 19th century. Given the Hub’s iconoclastic Puritan heritage, it is
little wonder that its public art culture lagged behind that of New York and Philadelphia,
where dedicated academies and exhibition venues had thrived nearly since the nation’s
founding. Many of Boston’s leading Federalist clergy and politicians were educated at
Harvard, where in the late 18th century they had absorbed the admonitions of
philosophers such as David Hartley: “It is evident, that most kinds of music, painting, and
poetry, have close connexions with vice, particularly with the vices of intemperance and
lewdness; that they represent them in gay, pleasing colours… and that they introduce a
frame of mind, quite opposite to that of devotion, and earnest concern for our own and
other's future welfare.” As late as 1817, no less than the world-traveled John Adams
could ask, “Are we not in too great a hurry in our zeal for the fine arts?” After all, for
107
Adams, “[F]rom the dawn of history, they [the arts] have been prostituted to the service
of superstition and despotism.” Even while calling for the creation of a public art
academy in 1820, a leading arts advocate reported that his own earlier efforts to do so had
been thwarted by the perception that “the arts exercised a corrupting influence on
society.”
3

If a combination of Puritan and republican objections to a cultural pursuit long
associated with tyrants and idolaters helped stall the development of a public exhibition
culture other cities already enjoyed, such qualms did little to dissuade established and
socially aspiring Bostonians (even Adams) from privately collecting works of art,
portraits in particular. Even without the imprimatur of an arts academy, portrait
production and consumption grew significantly in an increasingly prosperous and
industrialized early national New England. A study of inventories has suggested that the
number of central Massachusetts households owning pictures doubled from one in ten in
1800 to one in five in 1840.
4
Most of these works were domestically produced. While
elite merchants used their transatlantic business connections to import art and furnishings
from London and Liverpool, Massachusetts’ increasingly prosperous middle class
commissioned portraits from a growing army of self-taught and itinerant domestic
peddlers, staking claim to a luxury once monopolized by leading merchants.

3
David Hartley, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations
(London: T.Tegg and Son, 1834), 481; John Adams quoted in Neil Harris, The Artist in
American Society: The Formative Years, 1790-1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1966), 33, 36; William Tudor, Letters on the Eastern States (New York: Kirk &
Mercein, 1820), 146.
4
David Jaffee et al., Meet Your Neighbors: New England Portraits, Painters, & Society,
1790-1850 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 10; David Jaffee, A New
Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
108
Adorning the homes of established and rising New Englanders alike, and
signaling the owner’s disposable income and family pride, the household portrait was by
far the dominant artistic genre of 18th-century New England. The ambition to collect
other genres emerged only at the turn of the century, when wealthy merchants such as the
future Athenaeum gallery patron Thomas Handasyd Perkins began to exploit their
transatlantic and transpacific business connections for the purposes of collecting. In the
18th century, sculpture busts and landscape paintings and prints were enjoyed almost
exclusively by the occupants of Boston’s mansions and suburban estates.
5
Most colonial
and Revolutionary-era portraiture therefore could not have been more remote from the
ideal of a “disinterested” exhibition culture that emerged in 1820s Boston. Costing as
much as a substantial piece of furniture but enjoying little if any resale value, New
England portraits did little to stimulate either a retail art market or a public exhibition
culture.
6

Though a majority of ordinary Bostonians did not own any art, they nevertheless
hungered to see it. Following the Revolution, painting and sculpture found their way into
local curiosity museums such as the Columbian Museum (established in 1795) and its
successor, the New England Museum (established in 1818). Modeled on the crowded
collections of art and natural history artifacts that Europe’s learned gentry had kept for
centuries, and catering to both wealthy and middle-class Bostonians (admission was
typically a quarter), these spaces treated art as a casual curiosity, mixing painting and
sculpture with the more dubious spectacles of circus performers, electricity displays, toy

5
David B. Dearinger, “American Neoclassic Sculptors and Their Private Patrons in
Boston” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 1993), 76–81.
6
Margaretta M. Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in
Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
109
trains, phantasmagoria, wax figures, and exotic animals. The sensory overload of the
curiosity museum’s clanging automata, vulgar illusions and bodily performances
contrasted starkly with the solemnly sepulchral environment of later institutions such as
the Athenaeum gallery.
7

In the late 1810s, Boston’s retail market in decorative arts and furnishings
expanded dramatically, as artisans-turned-businessmen and auctioneers marketed their
wares on a speculative basis to an ever broadening consumer clientele. Their auction
rooms and warehouses attracted both serious customers and curious onlookers. “We
have a taste for splendid furniture in our houses, and certainly prove, by their appearance,
that we have the means of gratifying it,” despaired North American Review founder
William Tudor in 1820; the merchant-aesthete wished the public spent its money on art
rather than such “gilded bawbles.”
8
As if heeding Tudor’s wish, the Brattle Street
auction room Blake & Cunningham began that year to receive regular shipments of
elegantly framed “Cabinet Pictures” that visitors could pay a quarter to see prior to their
auction.
9
Whereas 18th-century portraits lacked resale value and rarely circulated, the art
market had matured sufficiently by the 1820s to allow auction houses and retailers to
accept old masters and even successful domestic artists on consignment. At auction
rooms such as Blake & Cunningham and at warehouses such as Doggett’s Repository of
Arts (1821-1825) on Market Street, copies of European masters crowded alongside

7
See for instance Columbian Museum, Milk-Street, Boston--1805 (Boston: Josiah Ball,
1805); for an analysis of the Learned Pig and other spectacles, see Scott C. Martin,
Cultural Change And The Market Revolution In America, 1789-1860 (Lanham,
Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).
8
Tudor, Letters on the Eastern States, 148.
9
Blake & Cunningham, Gallery of Paintings: Descriptive Catalogue of Original Cabinet
Paintings (Boston: W.W. Clapp, 1820).
110
looking-glasses, fancy frames, carpets, and such curiosities as mechanical panoramas and
the occasional Egyptian mummy.
10

Though much of the art was unaffordable for most Bostonians—the average price
of a canvas at an 1821 Blake & Cunningham auction was over $180—it cost far less to
attend an auction or purchase a cheaper print.
11
The middle class’s growing participation
in exhibition culture was exemplifed by the pursuits of a young art lover in the 1827
novel Evenings in Boston: “Sometimes Frank would spend a whole afternoon in an
occupation which he called picture-hunting; i.e. rambling over the city and searching
among auction rooms, print shops, engravers’ shops, furniture warehouses, &c. after
paintings and engravings.”
12
Further signaling this popular interest in art, the city’s
fancy-good stores began in the 1820s to charge admission for sporadic exhibits of works
such as Sargent’s The Dinner Party (1821) and The Tea Party (1824), which offered
ordinary Bostonians a rare glimpse of the social elite’s fashionable interiors (Figure 4 and
Figure 18).
13
Studying such works in the midst of fine furnishings similar to those
Sargent depicted, ordinary warehouse shoppers could feel, for a moment, as if they had
entered the city’s most refined drawing rooms.

10
See for instance July 29 and October 6, 1828 in the “John Doggett Letterbook 1825–
1829,” Downs Collection, WTL; “The Egyptian Mummy,” The Boston Daily Advertiser,
June 18, 1823.
11
Blake & Cunningham, Original Paintings from Europe (Boston: s.n, 1821).
12
Doggett’s Repository of the Arts and his looking-glass warehouse occupied the same
address: 16 Market Street, per the 1823 Boston Directory (Boston: Frost, Stimpson,
1823), 84; John Lauris Blake and Isaac Ridler Butts, Evenings in Boston (Boston: Bowles
and Dearborn, 1827), 54.
13
A leading authority on Boston interiors has argued that Sargent set both works in his
own Franklin Place apartment. See Jane C. Nylander, “Henry Sargent’s Dinner Party and
Tea Party,” Antiques 121 (May 1982): 1172–1183.
111
As these advertisements, novels, and exhibitions suggest, Boston’s emerging
antebellum retail economy lent an unprecedented visibility to the pursuit of art even
before the establishment of the city’s first dedicated gallery in 1827. For Boston’s arts
advocates, the emergence of a visible urban art trade was a hopeful sign of improving
tastes. But as Boston’s class divides deepened, expanding art consumption renewed older
republican and Puritan misgivings about the fine arts, particularly at moments of
economic crisis. Speaking for an increasingly vocal middle and working class,
newspaper editors asked in the wake of the Panic of 1819 why the working men of
Boston’s militias should be asked to defend “the palace and treasures of his rich
neighbor.” Critics claimed that would-be connoisseurs not only exemplified inequality,
but helped precipitate crises. “The fine arts, which are capable of exerting a refining and
excellent influence, have only served to minister to the insolvency of those whose only
standard of value is price, and whose rules of taste are graduated by dollars,” proclaimed
a pamphlet analyzing the cause of the Panic of 1837.
14

Yet upper- and middle-class Americans refused to surrender their pursuit of
material refinement, for it was in this pursuit that the socially ambitious developed and
affirmed the most essential of genteel traits, taste. The rise of the middle class led
moralists by the 1830s to distinguish modest refinement from distasteful luxury not in
terms of any absolute class of commodities (such as those once prohibited by sumptuary

14
“Our Militia,” New England Galaxy, Mar. 31, 1820, quoted in Matthew H. Crocker,
The Magic of the Many: Josiah Quincy and the Rise of Mass Politics in Boston, 1800-
1830 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 26–28. Crocker describes at
length the class resentments that broke out in the wake of 1819. Old-Fashioned Man
[pseud.], The Pressure and Its Causes: Being the Old Fashioned Notions of an Old
Fashioned Man (Boston: Otis, Broaders, 1837), 63.
112
laws) but rather in terms of what the individual could reasonably afford.
15
A new
prescriptive middle-class literature, exemplified by works such as Hannah Farnham
Sawyer Lee’s 1837 novel Three Experiments of Living: Living Within the Means, Living
Up to the Means, Living Beyond the Means, excoriated those who purchased unaffordable
houses and furnishings, while equally pitying those too miserly or uncultured to cultivate
their homes.
16

The middle-class ideal lay somewhere between these extremes, but where? In an
age of volatile fortunes, it was rather difficult to know whether the acquaintances and
strangers one saw arriving at the opera in fancy carriages, or dining in low taverns were
living within, up to, or beyond their means. Amid the recession of 1829, a North
American Review art critic explained, “Luxury, or the indulgence of imaginary wants, is
an offence with which every man in every state of society is chargeable. It is a very
narrow use of the word to confine it to pictures and statues, gold and silver, houses and
furniture.” Luxury equally included “the indolence of the savage, the inebriating draught
of the laboring man, [and] the afternoon excursion of the industrious citizen.”
17
The poor
were as culpable as the rich. “Luxury and extravagance have been the curse of all
classes, from the richest down almost to the very poorest,” claimed a Boston pamphleteer
who identified himself only as an “Old Fashioned Man.”
18

15
Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York:
Knopf, 1992).
16
Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee, Three Experiments of Living: Living Within the Means,
Living Up to the Means, Living Beyond the Means (Boston: W. S. Damrell, S. Colman,
1837).
17
“Catalogue of Pictures in the Athenaeum Gallery,” The North American Review 29
(1829): 259–260.
18
The Pressure and Its Causes, 62–63.
113
The very breadth of these accusations threatened to render them meaningless.
What were luxury and extravagance, if the poor were as prone to them as the rich? By
the late 1820s, a new wave of liberal Protestant sermons, novels and middle-class advice
manuals addressed this question by shifting the moral problem of excess from the object
of consumption to the sensory experience it produced. This new definition of excess
proved critical to redefining the ideal art spectator as one who experienced art not
through the senses, but through the imagination.

Defining Temperance in the Gallery
In the late 18th century, Anglo-American elites increasingly expanded the
definition of “comfort” to refer to physical, rather than spiritual or moral well-being. Yet
until the 1850s, most Americans, especially the emerging middle class, were unsure
where to draw the lines among spiritless austerity, reasonable physical comfort, and
ruinous luxuriousness.
19
Torn between their celebratory view of the senses and their
commitment to republican ideals of moderation, Boston’s liberal Protestants were
particularly troubled by the task of defining luxury in an age of widely visible urban
consumption.
As a general rule, the definitions available to moralists tended to be circular.
Ministers tended to describe modest and healthy pleasures as “comfortable” and
“rational,” while condemning as extravagant those that fascinated the senses at the
expense of the intellect. The rich and poor were each extravagant in their own way. For

19
John E. Crowley, “The Sensibility of Comfort,” The American Historical Review 104,
no. 3 (June 1, 1999): 749–782; Katherine C. Grier, Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making
and Middle-Class Identity, 1850-1930 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2010).
114
the poor, William Ellery Channing sermonized in 1835: “sensual pleasures are the only
means of ministering to that craving for enjoyment, which can never be destroyed in
human behavior.” From “the poor man’s table, strowed with broken food,” Channing
turned to the middle-class dining room. “These pleasures, in other dwellings, are more or
less refined by taste. The table is spread with neatness and order; and a decency pervades
the meal, which shows that man is more than a creature of sense.”
20
On the other hand,
the polite restraint of the appetite could pose the very same problems. In 1832, the
Episcopalian minister John Henry Hopkins, an avid painter, warned parishioners at the
Old South Church to avoid the genteel version of the “house of feasting,” where the
“wholesome demands of hunger and thirst are taught an artificial fastidiousness, which
invites extravagance, endangers health, and destroys solid comfort.” Instead of offering
“solid comfort,” the “house of feasting” was simply the place “where every sense is
addressed at once, by the choicest modes of fascination.”
21

In an age of shifting consumption patterns, art helped liberal Protestants find a
balance between fastidiousness and extravagance. As a North American Review art
viewer put it in 1829: “The pleasures of taste and imagination are rather to be
encouraged, than those grosser and more corporeal indulgences, which are almost sure to
be their substitutes.”
22
The argument was not new. One hundred and fifty years earlier,
the English critic William Aglionby had recommended art as a pastime for Englishmen,

20
William Ellery Channing, The Ministry for the Poor (Boston: Russell, Odiorne,
Metcalf, 1835), 10.
21
John Henry Hopkins, The Pleasures of Luxury, Unfavorable to the Exercise of
Christian Benevolence (Boston: Perkins, Marvin, 1832), 10–11.
22
“Catalogue of Pictures in the Athenaeum Gallery,” 259–260.
115
declaring it superior to “Profuse Gluttony” and “Exorbitant Drunkenness.”
23
But as both
the arts and more questionable pleasures became increasingly visible parts of urban
antebellum life, aesthetes went much further than claiming art as the lesser of many
entertainments; they boldly declared it a moral influence ne plus ultra.
Once the ally of church and state, but more recently “subservient, in a great
degree, to mere fancy and luxury,” Tudor argued in 1820, the arts were “now returning to
their legitimate uses” in the new republic, instilling in spectators the disinterested
affections of “the patriot and statesman.”
24
Tudor’s claims were modest compared with
those of later Boston arts advocates. By 1825, leading Unitarian minister William Ellery
Channing argued that art exhibitions were among the most effective methods of
discouraging alcoholic intemperance.
25
In 1841, arguing for the inclusion of drawing
lessons in the common schools, Horace Mann’s Common School Journal explained that
“Every pure taste implanted in the youthful mind becomes a barrier to resist the
allurements of sensuality.”
26
The arts were not simply symptoms, but incentives, for
moral conduct. By 1847, Channing’s art critic nephew and namesake went even further.
“It is for the uncultivated that Art wishes to exhibit its best works; in the place of prisons,
laws, and preaching, to substitute the statue, the picture, and the song.”
27
Over three
decades, arts advocates went from modestly conceiving art connoisseurship as a polite

23
William Aglionby, Painting Illustrated in Three Diallogues, quoted in Carol Gibson-
Wood, Studies in the Theory of Connoisseurship from Vasari to Morelli (New York:
Garland, 1988), 97.
24
Tudor, Letters on the Eastern States, 153.
25
Peabody, Reminiscences of Rev. Wm. Ellery Channing, D.D. (Boston: Roberts Bros.,
1880), 100.
26
“Extracts from the Report of the Charlestown School Committee,” Common School
Journal 3, no. 12 (June 15, 1841): 186.
27
William Ellery Channing, Conversations in Rome: Between an Artist, a Catholic, and a
Critic (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, 1847), 93.
116
refinement, to boldly declaring it the basis of urban social order, and a potent substitute
for jailors, judges and clergymen.
In adopting these arguments, Boston’s arts advocates did more than repeat the
arguments of the virtuoso and the republican that connoisseurship was preferable to
intemperate drinking and eating, and vain displays of material consumption. They also
claimed that art’s pleasures operated in a wholly different fashion. Unlike more
questionable gratifications, art’s enjoyment was not directed at the external senses.
According to the city’s most respected painter, Washington Allston, art worked by
“transcending the highest bodily sensation, as must that which is immortal transcend the
perishable.” Instead of rewarding the selfish and worldly organs of the external senses,
art objects pleased the disinterested faculty of the imagination. Even in finding some
Dutch paintings of oysters “almost exquisite,” Allston insisted “the appetite then was in
no way concerned. The pleasure, therefore, must have been from the imitated truth.”
28

Antebellum art advocates had done more than discover what the 18th-century
English poet Mark Akenside had called “the pleasures of the imagination.” They had
enlisted them in a didactic campaign to rehabilitate the urban spectator’s imagination.
Moreover, this campaign to substitute the pleasures of the senses with those of the
imagination took shape in the city at a time when consumption–at fine restaurants and
greasy taverns, in auction houses and warehouses—rendered the city’s class divides
unmistakably visible. Urbanization thus played a central role in encouraging an elite
definition of art spectatorship that was peculiarly dependent on a faculty not engaged by
low and selfish sensory pleasures. That disinterested form of spectatorship was

28
Washington Allston, Lectures on Art, and Poems (New York: Baker and Scribner,
1850), 12, 34.
117
understood to require an equally disinterested exhibition space: the public gallery, in
other words.

Market Anxieties
By the late 1820s, many Boston aesthetes expressed dissatisfaction with the city’s
commercial art dealers. Far from representing their ideal of disinterested spectatorship,
the city’s warehouses and auction houses threatened to infect the connoisseur and his
idealized pursuit with the market’s inherent selfishness, materialism and dishonesty. In
The Birthday (1832) by the Bostonian Eliza Follen, a morally upright servant named
Patrick is forced to attend a local auction to re-purchase a beloved piano his employers
have lost to their creditors. “It was impossible for him to affect the indifferent tone of
voice and manner which an experienced bidder at auction would have adopted. Patrick’s
nature was too much for him; he bid with a loud, determined manner, as much as to say,
‘I mean to have it, cost what it will.’”
29
At the auction, the highest ideal of the republican
connoisseur—disinterest—became nothing more than a disguise adopted by the
experienced bidder to further his own selfish aims.
Boston’s art advocates were equally disturbed by the undignified way that art was
crammed into the city’s new warehouses next to the lesser goods of furniture and other
material luxuries, and even pornography. In 1835, the county sheriff was charged with
destroying 400 obscene prints, “some of them executed in a superior style,” secretly sold
at shops in Boston and elsewhere in New England. What seemed to bother moralists
most about these “indecent and lewd prints” was not simply their content but their form:

29
Eliza Lee Cabot Follen, Sequel to “The Well-Spent Hour”, Or, The Birthday (Boston:
Carter, Hendee, 1832), 48.
118
“done with a great expense of art and coloring,” they bore a dangerous resemblance to art
and thus confused the moral categories of art and pornography. Indeed, the Mercantile
Journal condemned “the occasional display of prints in some of our shop windows,
which are not calculated to improve the moral atmosphere of society, or to reflect the
taste or refinement of the proprietors.”
30

While antebellum conservatives worried about art disguising pornography,
aesthetes were just as concerned about furniture disguised as art, which in turn allowed
artisans to pass for artists, and consumers for connoisseurs. Before the blurring of
consumption patterns in the antebellum period, such distinctions were well enough
established to require no defense. Representations of fine furnishings and foods had thus
occupied an honored place in the works of 18th-century painters such as John Singleton
Copley.
31
As late as 1808, The Athenaeum (published in London, but enjoyed by
Boston’s literati) had proposed a rather prosaic distinction between the artisan and artist:
technical skill. “A sign-painter is denominated an artisan, and a painter of furniture-
pictures an artist, although there is no other difference in their employment than that a
higher degree of skill is claimed in the latter occupation.”
32

Their city now awash in decorative painters catering to the middle class, many of
them quite highly skilled, antebellum Boston aesthetes sought a firmer distinction
between artist and artisan: imagination. “[E]manation of mind is the true and only lasting

30
Destruction of Indecent Prints, [Boston: s.n., 1835]. For the role of the expanding print
market in fueling moral anxieties in the 1830s, see Katherine Noel Hijar, "Sexuality,
Print, and Popular Visual Culture in the United States, 1830-1870" (PhD diss., Johns
Hopkins University, 2008).
31
Paul Staiti, “Character and Class: The Portraits of John Singleton Copley,” in Reading
American Art, eds. Marianne Doezema and Elizabeth Milroy (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1998), 12–37.
32
John Aikin, "Synomic Elucidations Continued," The Athenaeum, v. 4 (July 1808), 498.
119
criterion of greatness in the arts. It is all that elevates them above mere mechanical
employments,” argued the North American Review in 1831. “No beauty of design, no
splendor or delicacy of color can compensate for the want of this communion of intellect
between the artist and those who look on his works.”
33
In their eagerness to defend art as
a high and disinterested pursuit, Boston’s arts advocates and artists frequently
emphasized Renaissance distinctions between the works of the artist, whose first and last
thoughts were beauty, truth, and sometimes the republic, and those of the artisan, whose
allegiances were to his reputation and monetary gain. As a North American Review critic
admonished in 1831:
[M]uch as we rejoice in the progress of the Fine Arts, we confess we care
comparatively little about the merely mechanical labor that is sometimes called by
that name. We do not think the country would be much benefited or its character
much elevated, if our artists could paint brass-kettles as well as Ostade, or dead
game as well as Snyders. The painter who copies such things, is indeed likely to
be somewhat more refined than the tinker or cook who handles the originals; but
he is still further removed in an opposite direction from the artist, who endows
with form and color the beautiful objects of his own invention, or embodies in
portrait the intellect and character as well as the features of the face. We would
not absolutely denounce what is called still-life painting, but we value it very
lightly; and we protest against admitting among productions of the Fine Arts,
those works, of which the whole supposed merit consists in an imitation of what
is in itself entirely insignificant, and the highest aim of which is to produce a
momentary deception.
34

It was a timely argument; both still-life and the still more effective illusions of
trompe-l’oeil had enjoyed a resurgence in the Federalist period.
35
By resorting to simply
deceiving the senses rather than engaging the imagination, however, the antebellum artist

33
“Exhibition of Pictures at the Athenaeum Gallery. Remarks upon the Athenaeum
Gallery of Paintings for 1831,” 510.
34
“Exhibition of Pictures at the Athenaeum Gallery. Remarks upon the Athenaeum
Gallery of Paintings for 1831,” North American Review 33 (October 1831): 512.
35
Wendy Bellion, Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early
National America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
120
risked becoming a mere artisan, and the viewer a mere admirer of kettles and plate. As
the nation’s first major arts periodical The Crayon described the connoisseur, “His
imagination supplies all that is wanting, and he does not seek or expect that his senses
shall be deceived.”
36
Washington Allston argued similarly. “The painter who is content
with the praise of the world in respect to what does not satisfy himself, is not an artist, but
an artizan [sic]; for though his reward be only praise, his pay is that of a mechanic for his
time, and not for his art.” Allston himself described his ideal works as ones that appealed
to more than such a primitive instinct for the glare of shiny luxuries. According to a
letter published in 1834, his favorite painters “leave the subject to be made by the
spectator, provided he possesses the imaginative faculty—otherwise they will have little
more meaning to him than a calico counterpane,” i.e. a bedspread more luxurious than
many Bostonians could afford.
37

The argument was not wholly original; since the Renaissance, theorists had
attributed to the true artist an intellectual power of disegno, or design, that the mere
artisan lacked.
38
Yet as they responded to a new and abundant urban marketplace,
antebellum aesthetes used the same distinction, probably for the first time, to elevate the
connoisseur above the consumer. For contemporaries, Allston’s works frequently
symbolized the superiority of art to lesser commodities. After his death, the prominent
Philadelphia painter Thomas Sully (1783-1872) recalled that “Washington Allston

36
“Polychromy in Sculpture: On Coloring Statues,” The Crayon 6, no. 4 (April 1859):
130.
37
Allston, Lectures on Art, and Poems, 176; Allston quoted in William Dunlap, History
of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (New York: George P.
Scott, 1834), 163.
38
Donald James Gordon, The Renaissance Imagination (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1980), 94-96.

121
always preferred an old picture-frame to the glaring glitter of a new one.” As the
sophisticated Boston Lyceum asked in 1827, “Who can talk of such paintings as Allston’s
I would ask, in the matter-of-fact language that we use when we buy our boots, or haggle
with a butcher at his stall?”
39
Yet just such haggling went on in the city’s commercial art
market. The warehouses and auction rooms belied the aesthetes’ hopeful distinctions
between artist and artisan by providing them roughly similar fees. In 1832, for instance,
when the Athenaeum paid Thomas Sully $600—his largest fee ever—for a portrait of its
benefactor Thomas Handasyd Perkins, the institution also paid John Doggett $235 for its
frame.
40
Nor was the distinction between the artist and artisan visually obvious in an age
of painted furniture. Well before landscape painting achieved the tremendous veneration
it enjoyed in the United States by mid-century, landscapes, genre scenes, and still-life
compositions were painted onto high-end furnishings. Many local artists had cut their
teeth in painting such objects.
41
The warehouse customer, the aesthetes feared, made
little distinction between the art work and the piece of furniture displayed next to it.
Yet economic panics and the consumption anxieties they engendered rendered the
distinction between the art object and furnishing all the more significant. During the
Panic of 1819, as newspaper editors regularly inveighed against Boston’s luxurious elite,
Tudor argued for establishing public art exhibitions that would teach local residents to

39
“Leisure Hours,” The Boston Lyceum 1, no. 6 (June 1827): 319.
40
Boston Athenaeum Treasury Journal, Nov. 30, 1832, object file for Thomas Sully,
Thomas Handasyd Perkins, 1831-32, BA.
41
For a sampling of such objects, see Stuart P. Feld, Boston in the Age of Neo-
Classicism, 1810-1840 (New York: Hirschl & Adler Galleries, 1999); Dean A. Fales,
American Painted Furniture, 1660-1880 (New York: Dutton, 1979). For a profile of a
typical New England artisan aspiring to the status of artist, see Tracie Felker, “Charles
Codman: Early Nineteenth-Century Artisan and Artist,” American Art Journal 22, no. 2
(July 1, 1990): 61–86.
122
“forego the purchase of some gilded bawble [sic] to procure [art].”
42
Far from deepening
Bostonians’ extravagance, the love of art curbed it, if only by redirecting their disposable
income. As Boston recovered from a later recession, Oliver Wendell Holmes complained
in 1840 of viewers who “admire all pictures, especially if they are in richly ornamented
frames. The strong primitive instinct for rich colors attracts them alike to the studio and
the carpet warehouse, to the camera obscura and the kaleidoscope.”
43
Indeed, as a
contemporary advertisement revealed, the carpet warehouse looked rather like a gallery
(Figure 20). D.C. Johnston satirized just such a viewer in another panic year, 1829, in his
cartoon Connoisseurs.
44
At the far right stands a gentleman in a top hat staring through
an opera glass at a painting’s frame—which he is dangerously close to touching—saying
to himself, “What useful things these tubes are when a body wants to see just the gildin
without nothing else” (Figure 19). Such uncultured spectators were a convenient symbol
for the speculators whose foolish speculations had supposedly caused the panic.
Similarly, the public art market threatened to expose art collecting as nothing
more than an excuse for tasteless vanity and ostentation. Such fears were not new; the
English aesthete Jonathan Richardson claimed to have penned his 1719 Essay on the
Whole Art of Criticism as it Relates to Painting and an Argument in Behalf of the Science
of the Connoisseur because “there are so Few Lovers of Painting; not merely for

42
Tudor, Letters on the Eastern States, 148.
43
Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Exhibition of Pictures Painted by Washington Allston at
Harding’s Gallery, School Street,” North American Review 50 (1840): 359.
44
The pretensions of Boston connoisseurs was one of Johnston’s favorite satirical
subjects. See David Tatham, "D.C. Johnston's Satiric Views of Art in Boston, 1825-
1850," in Art and Commerce: American Prints of the Nineteenth Century
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978).

123
Furniture, or for Ostentation, or as it Represents their Friends, or Themselves.”
45
But the
warehouses that appeared in the 1820s offered an unprecedented visible symbol of the
use of art as a domestic prop of the genteel. Publicly exhibited works such as Sargent’s
The Tea Party revealed as much, depicting its fashionable genteel subjects as oblivious to
the fine works of art surrounding them (Figure 18). While Sargent intended to glamorize
the event, there were plenty of critics, elite or otherwise, willing to confront the private
collector for attempting to turn his home into a furniture warehouse. Attending a party at
the home of manufacturer Abbott Lawrence in 1833, Josiah Quincy’s daughter Anna
Cabot Lowell mocked the wealthy host because “[p]ictures of every shape, size, and hue,
were hung, or rather pitched upon the walls, without the slightest regard to conformity.”
46

The Barclays of Boston (1854), a novel by Eliza Otis (another mayor’s daughter) painted
an unflattering picture of a wealthy antebellum Boston drawing room where great works
of art were surrounded by “abominations, in the manner of furniture and upholstery”:
“Really nothing was ever so odious as the sprawling tables and comfortless chairs and
sofas, which, covered with gilding and brocade, encumbered those small rooms.”
Marvelous though the parlor’s Raphaels and Corregios might be, the narrator lamented
how they had been hung on the walls “at a venture” (that is, haphazardly), surrounded by
“loads of knicknackeries, puerile and ridiculous enough.”
47

45
Jonathan Richardson, Essay on the Whole Art of Criticism as it Relates to Painting and
an Argument in Behalf of the Science of the Connoisseur, quoted in Gibson-Wood,
Studies in the Theory of Connoisseurship from Vasari to Morelli, 120.
46
Anna Cabot Lowell quoted in Jane C. Nylander, Our Own Snug Fireside: Images of
the New England Home, 1760-1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 256.
47
Eliza Henderson Bordman Otis, The Barclays of Boston (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and
Fields, 1854), 257–258.
124
Committed to art as a morally improving enterprise, few aesthetes discouraged
collectors from buying what the auction houses sold. “I would not banish from the
private habitations of such as can afford them, the glowing landscape or the fragrant
flower-piece, the tasteful Parian or the enduring bronze,” former Massachusetts senator
and arts champion Robert Charles Winthrop told a Boston audience in his oration on
“Luxury and the Fine Arts” in 1859, as the Panic of 1857 still subsided. “A thousand-
fold nobler and purer and worthier are the gratifications which ornaments and souvenirs
like these communicate, than any which can be derived from the most gorgeous
upholstery, or the most glittering mirrors, or the most massive and magnificent plate,
which ever dazzled the eyes of a gaping crowd, or bedizened the halls of a vulgar
fashion.” Even so, Winthrop preferred not to see pieces of art “garnishing and furbishing
the mansions of pride and ostentation, of ambition and arrogance.” There, he explained,
“they too often become responsible for a wasteful and ridiculous excess of expenditure,
and too often engender a licentious luxuriousness of living, which are at war with all the
just simplicities and equalities of republican society.”
In rendering the art trade visible, Boston’s retail spaces exposed two inconvenient
truth: art was as much a commodity as the looking glass and the gaudy cabinet, and it was
destined to served a similarly shallow purpose in collectors’ homes. Ultimately,
therefore, Winthrop claimed, art should be given its own space: “Those are to be
honored, at home and abroad, who do not shut up such treasures for their own selfish
enjoyment, but open them wide…”
48
In the mid-1820s, Boston’s aesthetes did just that,

48
Robert C. Winthrop, An Address Delivered at the Music Hall, Boston in Aid of the
Fund for Ball’s Equestrian Statue of Washington: On the Evening of 13 May, 1859
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1859), 38–39.
125
establishing the city’s first regular exhibitions as a more disinterested and virtuous
alternative to the warehouse and auction room, while of course promoting their own
status as men of culture. In the process of teaching the public how to see art, these
didacts unwittingly provided the space for visionaries to subvert their aesthetic ideals.

A Public Space for the Disinterested Spectator
In establishing the Boston Athenaeum as a membership library in 1807, William
Tudor and 25 other mostly Unitarian and wealthy Bostonians (none of whom left behind
an estate smaller than $25,000) explicitly stated their desire to reinforce “the ties, that
bind men together.”
49
Among these ties was their shared love of art and literature.
Despite their early ambitions to show art at the Athenaeum, its founders did not take
serious steps in that direction until a private art market had begun to appear.
50
In 1823,
the Athenaeum’s trustees circulated a prospectus among the city’s leading citizens,
proposing the addition of a lecture hall and gallery to the existing building, then located
on Pearl Street. Through the bequest of the merchant brothers James and Thomas
Handasyd Perkins, a three-story brick building was erected behind the Athenaeum in
1826, the third floor of which was devoted to the city’s first regular public art
exhibitions.
51
These exhibitions continued annually for a half-century, until the

49
Ronald Story, “Class and Culture in Boston: The Athenaeum, 1807-1860,” American
Quarterly 27, no. 2 (May 1, 1975): 181, 191.
50
The “Repository of Arts” would include “drawings, designs, paintings, engravings,
statues, and other objects of the fine arts….” Memoir of the Boston Athenaeum: With the
Act of Incorporation, and Organization of the Institution (Boston: Munroe & Francis,
1807), 227.
51
For an excellent discussion of the Athenaeum gallery space, see “Chapter Four:
Ornament for the City” in Katherine Wolff, Culture Club: The Curious History of the
Boston Athenaeum (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009).
126
Athenaeum’s collections were transferred in 1876 to the newly established Museum of
Fine Arts.
52

The new gallery came with a ready-made ideal of the connoisseur, illustrated by
the portrait of its leading patron (Figure 21). As a gesture of gratitude to Thomas
Handasyd Perkins, Athenaeum trustees chose an artist esteemed enough to receive studio
space within the institution, Thomas Sully.
53
Echoing the composition of his mentor Sir
Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of King George the IV, Sully drew an obvious connection
between the American merchant prince and British royalty.
54
Perkins’s status is
demarcated, however, by the objects which mark him as a collector: the handsome
Chinese porcelain ewer (signifying Perkins’s role in the China trade), and the red
portfolio of worn, dog-eared drawings leaning against it, perhaps collected while on
business in Europe. Though surrounded by his luxurious possessions, the subject relates
to them through his imagination rather than his senses, his gaze averted like that of the
poet illustrated in nature in a contemporary edition of Akenside’s The Pleasures of the
Imagination (Figure 22).
55
In other words, Perkins is the poised and disinterested
antithesis of the vulgar, gawking and inept spectators seen in D.C. Johnston’s satires of
exhibition culture (Figure 23 and Figure 24).
Cultured Bostonians idealized the Athenaeum not as a forum for ostentation but
as an oasis from urban sensualism. In 1835, publicly asking the Boston Society of

52
This story is told in Hina Hirayama, “With Éclat”: The Boston Athenaeum and the
Origin of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Lebanon, New Hampshire: University Press
of New England, 2013).
53
Stanley Ellis Cushing and David Bernard Dearinger, eds., Acquired Tastes: 200 Years
of Collecting for the Boston Athenæum (Boston: Boston Athenæum, 2006), 231–232.
54
For Lawrence’s influence on Sully, see Carol Troyen, “Thomas Sully’s ‘The Torn
Hat,’” Journal of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 4 (January 1, 1992): 4–16.
55
Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination (Glasgow: Richard Griffin, 1825).
127
Natural History to open its collections to the public, and thereby enhance Bostonians’
appreciation for nature and its creator, William Ellery Channing’s brother Walter, a
leading physician and Harvard professor of medicine, held up as evidence the success of
the Athenaeum’s public exhibitions. Educated in Harvard’s tradition of moral
philosophy, Walter Channing, like most other Unitarian thinkers, believed that all human
beings were born with an innate moral sense, which could be cultivated into a taste for
the beautiful and good. “Harvard Unitarians tended to assume that the two capacities
would go hand in hand,” their historian has explained. “The man of refined sensibility
whom they idealized would have an acute emotional sensitivity to both virtue and
beauty.”
56
Among Boston’s less educated citizens, Channing explained in his address,
taste was “not wide nor deep” and thus “it is soon satisfied, and then the senses,
especially the touch, demand their portion of the gratification.” But sensualism was
simply the result of senses inadequately educated, and Channing claimed to have
personally witnessed the gradual refinement of middle-class visitors to the Athenaeum.
57

As the North American Review claimed in its review of the third Athenaeum exhibition,
“The natural taste for art is almost universal, and requires only opportunity for
development.”
58

For many antebellum moralists, the perceptual refinement acquired in the art
gallery was all the more needed when local conservatives failed to suppress the
expansion of a traditional urban corruption, the theatre. The theater had been legalized in

56
Daniel Walker Howe, The Unitarian Conscience (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan
University Press, 1988), 188.
57
Walter Channing, “Address before the Boston Society of Natural History, 1835,”
Walter Channing (1786-1876) Papers, 1800-1872, Box 6 Folder 3, MHS, 23–24.
58
“Catalogue of Pictures in the Athenaeum Gallery,” 260.
128
1792, but moral conservatives succeeded in stalling its expansion in Boston until the late
1820s, when new playhouses such as the Tremont Theatre (1827) and the American
Amphitheater (1832), with its third tier reserved for prostitutes, appeared. Antebellum
opponents hoped that art exhibitions would overshadow the spectacular attractions of the
theater. Railing against the introduction of the Tremont, the journalist David Hale
(husband of influential Godey’s Lady’s Book editor Sarah Hale) could at least take solace
that “the intelligent and liberal plans of the directors of the Athenaeum here, and of
similar institutions elsewhere, have a strong tendency to divert the current from theaters;
and I cannot but think that they will do more than produce a mere diversion.”
59
In an age
of disestablishment, liberal Protestants hoped the public gallery would offer the same
space of collective reverence once provided by the meeting house, an experience that
local schoolmaster Jacob Abbott described after visiting the Athenaeum: “As we came
forward before the canvass we felt the same solemn expression which had silenced the
others, and it was interesting and affecting to observe, as party after party came up the
stairs, talking with usual freedom, that their voices gradually died away, and they stood
silent and subdued before the picture of the Savior.”
60

Yet as a didactic space, the Athenaeum—a moral place where art was rescued
from the noise, commercialism, and material temptations of the warehouse and auction
room—proved not entirely satisfying. For one thing, it allowed and even encouraged
vain spectators to take advantage of the Athenaeum as a stage itself. Prior to the
Athenaeum exhibitions, many genteel Bostonians had experienced art primarily within

59
David Hale and Joseph Parrish Thompson, Memoir of David Hale: Late Editor of the
Journal of Commerce (New York: J. Wiley, 1850), 152–153.
60
Jacob Abbott, The Young Christian: Or a Familiar Illustration of the Principles of
Christian Duty (New York: American Tract Society, 1832), 227–232.
129
the private space of the home, and looked warily on public exhibitions, particularly of
portraits. In 1829, a visitor argued that portraits of any but the famous “are only for the
domestic altar. I would not have the likeness of one of my nearest and dearest friends in
the Gallery, exposed to the stare and criticisms of the crowd—to say nothing of the
connoisseur, for the whole profit of the Athenaeum.”
61
The emergence of a public
exhibition culture highlighted the ambiguous nature of looking: was the viewer engaged
in tasteful study, or simply posturing and gloating?
Beyond its dubious theatrical implications, art spectatorship was a potential
channel of sensualism itself. Even the Athenaeum was charged by some with inciting
licentiousness. Responding to an anti-theater screed, an anonymous writer in the Boston
Lyceum proclaimed that the Athenaeum, even with its religious pictures, was a moral
threat. “Will he pretend that by the spectacles presented to the eye, at the latter place [the
Athenaeum], none but pure and holy feelings are excited? Has he never seen the groups
of ‘sons,’ and ‘daughters’ too, around the lascivious and half-naked picture Le
Negligee?”
62
The same point was made by Johnston’s caricatures, who equally rejoiced
in depicting the absurdity of the spectators drawn to the scandalous performances of Lola
Montez and the pretentious connoisseurs at the Athenaeum (Figure 23 and Figure 25).
Gallery patrons were entitled to no more respect than were theater-goers.
But vain and prurient spectators were not the deepest threats to the moral mission
of the Athenaeum exhibitions. The concern among some of Boston’s connoisseurs was
precisely that the sensory medium of the painting would itself stand in the way of a true

61
“The Athenaeum Exhibition,” Ladies’ Magazine 2, no. 6 (1829), 288.
62
“Critical Notices: Letters on the New Theatre,” Boston Lyceum 2, no. 2 (August 1827):
93–94.
130
spiritual encounter with art. Unitarian viewers could not easily accept that their aesthetic
satisfaction derived from a purely physical source. In 1835, addressing a group of Boston
educators, Walter Channing claimed that when looking at a beautiful piece of art, “We
look at such a work with somewhat of that joyful content,—internal peace,—true
unalloyed pleasure, which the beautiful in the universe produces—we are in
correspondence,—in harmony,—with what?—not with the mere oil, the paint, the
canvass before us. Oh no.” The viewer was meant to connect not with the object, but
with its creator. “With much more and higher than all these; we are in sympathy, in
feeling, with the mind, the spirit which caused all this beauty.”
63

Even in the dedicated gallery, however, materialist tendencies threatened to
deprive art of the respect it deserved. Regarding the drapery in Allston’s The Dead Man
Restored to Life by Touching the Bones of the Prophet Elisha, Elizabeth Peabody
expressed concern: “I fear that many only dwell upon this splendid drapery, and lose the
highest effect of this picture.”
64
The art spectator risked becoming nothing more than the
carpet warehouse customer, and the “primitive instinct for rich colors” substituted for
sublime contemplation. The desire to transcend this instinct soon led some connoisseurs,
including Peabody, to abandon the external senses entirely.

63
Walter Channing, Lecture on the Moral Uses of the Study of Natural History:
Delivered Before the American Institute of Instruction, at Its Annual Meeting. Boston,
August, 1836 (Boston: Tuttle, Weeks & Dennett, 1836), 8.
64
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Last Evening with Allston, and Other Papers (Boston: D.
Lothrop and company, 1886), 34.
131
The Emergence of the Visionary Impulse
By the mid-1830s, New England’s aesthetes faced a problem similar to that which
plagued the city’s moral landmarks. In attempting to refine the public’s moral and
sensory perception while demonstrating their own moral and cultural superiority, upper-
class aesthetes had inadvertently dramatized the potentially vulgar character of art
spectatorship. The Athenaeum was as much plagued by covetousness, prurience, and
materialism as the warehouse and auction room. Instead of eliminating sensuality, the
gallery encouraged ways of seeing just as sensual and selfish as a myriad of less
respectable urban amusements.
In the 1820s and 1830s, civic leaders, moralists, writers and artists attempted to
eliminate the social and sensory distractions by privileging particular and often distant
viewpoints on the city. Likewise, local spectators began to experiment in the 1830s with
viewing conditions that maximized art’s moral impact: specific points of view, correct
lighting, and properly silent gallery conditions. Explaining in 1832 how to display his
portrait bust of Athenaeum founder John Thornton Kirkland, the professional artist and
Harvard graduate Horatio Greenough opined that “unless a bust be placed in nearly the
same light in which it was wrought, its modulations of surface, its character, its flesh,
evapourate. It becomes sheer stone.”
65
This was a subject Greenough knew something
about, for he had suggested Bunker Hill Monument’s massive stone form. As he later

65
“Exhibition of Pictures at the Athenaeum Gallery. Remarks upon the Athenaeum
Gallery of Paintings for 1831.,” 510; “Historical Sketches of the Old Painters,” Christian
Examiner 25, no. 3 (January 1839): 317; Greenough quoted in Mabel Munson Swan, The
Athenæum Gallery, 1827-1873: The Boston Athenæum as an Early Patron of Art
(Boston: Boston Athenæum, 1940), 142.
132
remarked in a published letter concerning a piece that drew large crowds of Bostonians,
Edward Brackett’s Shipwrecked Mother and Child:
I was a little puzzled at the eagerness of many spectators to get so near this work
that it was impossible for them to see it. I venture to suggest to those who wish to
enjoy it, that they sit quietly on the several sides of the room, and even there
survey it with half-closed eyes. The work is of marble; it is vain that you will
seek aught else by crowding upon it. By remaining at a proper distance, you will
find that it is no longer marble, but poetry. To hope to enjoy a higher illusion by
scrutiny, is like going to Milton [Massachusetts] to enjoy the blue of the Blue
Hills.
66

Neither the landscape nor the sculpture was meant to be examined too closely, for such
scrutiny reduced art to its gross physical medium.
Art journals and visitors frequently swapped advice on these matters. In his
journal in 1837, Emerson reported the conventional wisdom that one could not see the
Athenaeum’s copy of the famous Laocoön “unless the room is nearly empty. For you
must stand at the distance of nearly the whole hall to see it and interposing bystanders
eclipse the statue.”
67
Allston’s The Dead Man, Elizabeth Peabody reported, was meant to
be “seen alone, in a very large room with a full light falling on it, while the spectator is
standing in the shadow, and is uninterrupted by whatever else can affect the senses.”
68

Yet some visitors found that they never felt properly alone in the gallery, and could not
appreciate the art until returning home, and the imagined work of art replaced its physical
counterpart. “I can never make up my mind concerning the merits of a picture till I am in
my own chamber, alone,” explained “Laura” in Ladies’ Magazine in 1829. “Then I sit
down and endeavour to recall some piece I have seen, or rather paint it over in thought;

66
John Sullivan Dwight, “Brackett’s Group—Mr. Greenough’s Letters,” Dwight’s
Journal of Music 1, no. 2 (April 17, 1852): 13.
67
Quoted in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1984), 171.
68
Elizabeth Peabody, Remarks on Allston’s Paintings (Boston: W.D. Ticknor, 1839), 6.
133
and when it rises before me, in all the vividness of the original, I know it is the triumph of
the artist which left the impression on my mind, and I unhesitatingly call such a picture
good.”
69
The writer was no Transcendentalist, and yet her approach as a connoisseur
clearly anticipated Elizabeth Peabody’s view that certain pictures require the “withdrawal
of all phenomenal environment, in order to be felt.”
70

Anxious to avoid the sensualism, covetousness, and insincere admiration thought
to permeate the “phenomenal environment” of the gallery, spectators avoided these
pitfalls by imaginatively entering the world of the artwork itself. Starting in the late
1820s, viewers penned ekphrastic descriptions of encounters with art, fleshing out their
whole narratives. In Poetical Illustrations of the Athenaeum Gallery of Paintings (1827)
and the similarly titled Illustrations of the Athenaeum Gallery of Paintings (1830), local
poets figuratively inserted themselves into the paintings, as in “Landscape by Shaw”: “I
stood upon the green hill-side,/ Where life’s first golden hours began.” The subjects of
painting were treated as living beings, present in the space of the gallery, as in the Byron-
esque “A Lady in a Bower by T. Sully”: “I saw her in the pictured hall/ Her blush was
like the morning’s glow.”
71
Prose reviewers followed suit. A reviewer of the fourth
annual exhibition in 1831 described Allston’s The Spanish Girl in Reverie as if absorbed
into the painting. “It was one of the richest days of autumn; a warm haze filled the air,
mitigating and diffusing the splendor of the sun, tinting every object with new colors,”

69
“The Athenaeum Exhibition,” Ladies' Magazine 2, no. 6 (1829): 288 (emphasis in
original).
70
Peabody, Last Evening with Allston, and Other Papers, 35.
71
William George Crosby, Poetical Illustrations of the Athenaeum Gallery of Paintings
(Boston: True and Greene, 1827), 16, 25; Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Osborne Sargent,
and Epes Sargent, Illustrations of the Athenaeum Gallery of Paintings (Boston: F. S. Hill,
1830).
134
the review began, describing elements not actually pictured in the work, such as “gay
groups of dancers twirling the castanets,” and even reporting the Spanish maiden’s
thoughts as she pined (according to the writer) for her absent lover.
72

These details appear to have been initially introduced more as literary flourishes
than as serious reports of a visionary encounter with the unseen and unheard world. This
ekphrastic stage of art criticism represented a midway point between the collective model
of vision that Boston’s didactic aesthetes had hoped to create, and the highly individual
and idiosyncratic experience of the visionary spectator that emerged in the mid-1830s. By
then, some viewers had begun to describe the Athenaeum’s works in terms that were not
simply poetic, but almost hallucinatory. Responding to Alvan Fisher’s Boy Going to
Ride at the 1833 Athenaeum exhibition, a writer for the Boston Literary Magazine
reported his amazement at being “transported to a living grove, breathing the fragrance of
the richest flowers, listening to the drowsy hum of the insect, the song of birds, the
babbling of brooks and waterfalls, and the lowing of distant herds.”
73
Discussing one of
Allston’s landscapes in 1839, Elizabeth Peabody remarked to a friend that she had seen
the landscape before at the Athenaeum, but in her memory it was different, containing a
much more immense range of mountain summits not present in the actual canvas, and
obscuring a set of figures that actually were in the landscape.
My friend replied by asking if I did not see in these pictures, by an operation of
my own imagination, what other eyes could not see, and what Allston himself
never intended? Not more than Allston intended I should see, said I; because he
did intend to suggest all Switzerland to my imagination. My friend did not realize

72
“Exhibition of Pictures at the Athenaeum Gallery. Remarks upon the Athenaeum
Gallery of Paintings for 1831,” 506.
73
“The Athenaeum Gallery,” Boston Literary Magazine 1, no. 2 (1833): 97; Peabody,
Last Evening with Allston, and Other Papers, 35; Emerson, Nature; Addresses, and
Lectures, 47.
135
how high was the compliment that he paid to Allston, when he suggested that my
imagination could see in his works more than the eyes discern.... The highest art
does more than give us a facsimile of a piece of Nature; it selects and combines
natural objects under the inspiration of a sentiment or idea, so that the whole is
suggested by the miniature. It is the very proof of the truth as well as ideality of
this picture of a single Alp, that it opens to my inward eye the whole of the Alpine
scenery.
74

Margaret Fuller, Emerson recalled after her death in 1850, enjoyed similar
supersensory encounters with art around the same time. “She was very susceptible to
pleasurable stimulus, took delight in details of form, color, and sound. Her fancy and
imagination were easily stimulated to genial activity, and she erroneously thanked the
artist for the pleasing emotions and thoughts that rose in her mind.”
75
Such a conceit was
treated as plausible not just by Fuller, but also by a number of Harvard elites educated in
the Associationist psychology already discussed. Yet Fuller herself felt certain that the
beauty she saw in her mind’s eye existed objectively. Commending “the ideal beauty
that shone through rather than in” the works Allston exhibited in 1839, Fuller compared
them to “long forest glades glimmering with golden light, longingly eyed from the
window of some crowded drawing room.”
Even so, the drawing-room threatened to taint Allston’s works. “Mr. Allston
seems to have an exquisite sensibility to colour, and a great love for drapery.” As a
result, “[t]he last sometimes leads him to direct our attention too much to it, and
sometimes the accessories are made too prominent; we look too much at shawls, curtains,
rings, feathers, and carcanets.” The colorful distractions of material fancy, so
prominently displayed in both the drawing room and Boston’s retail goods districts,

74
Peabody, Last Evening with Allston, and Other Papers, 58.
75
Margaret Fuller et al., Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Boston: Phillips, Sampson
and Company, 1852), 49.
136
impeded Fuller’s imagination, but not entirely. Fuller concluded her review by quoting
two ekphrastic sonnets, written independently by herself, and another local critic,
“showing how similar trains of thought were opened in the minds of two observers” in
response to Allston’s painting The Bride. While one sonnet celebrated the traveler who
escaped “his dim-visioned company,” the other explained that “to see aright the vision
which [Allston] saw/ We must ascend as high upon the stair/ Which leads the thought to
heavenly law…”
76
Through the staircase of the imagination, keener viewers transcended
their subjective responses and enjoyed an experience of collective reverence not to be
found in the fashionable drawing room, or even the public art gallery.
Prominent Transcendentalists were not the only art viewers to seek out such
supersensory experiences in the gallery. Responding to Brackett’s Shipwrecked Mother
and Child, displayed at Boston’s Amory Hall in 1852, a writer for the New York Tribune
opined that, “It is fairly part of the success of art in the work, that the spectator who does
not look with eyes alone, hears the sea, enamored of its own victim, remorsefully
retreating.” Like the babbling brooks heard in landscape, Brackett’s sculpture could
actually be “heard,” but only by those willing imaginative enough to transcend their
senses and the tainted world of urban spectatorship.
77
Active and heroic, this new model
of spectatorship was visually exemplified in the mid-1840s, starting with Thomas
Crawford’s sculpture Orpheus and Cerebrus (Figure 17), which was commissioned and

76
Margaret Fuller, Art, Literature, and the Drama (Boston: Brown, Taggard and Chase,
1860), 285–286, 292, 296–297 (emphasis in original).
77
Quoted in Thomas Buchanan Read, Edward A. Brackett’s Marble Group of the
Shipwrecked Mother and Child (s.n., 1852), 6; for an art historian’s take on 19th-century
Americans’ experience of “listening” to painting, see C. Holochwost, “Enchanted
Machines: Vision and Imagination in Nineteenth-century American Painting” (PhD diss.,
University of Delaware, 2011).
137
given its own gallery by the Boston Athenaeum in 1843.
78
Previous sculptures based on
the myth, including one produced by a key influence on Crawford, the Italian artist
Antonio Canova, showed Orpheus in egress from the underworld, when the hero
faithlessly looks back to ensure his wife Eurydice is with him. Instead of repeating this
tragic and blundering glance, Crawford’s Orpheus is seen peering fearlessly through the
fires of hell before plunging into them in search of Eurydice. Seen by countless
Bostonians, the sculpture presented the senses not as a passive channel of contemplation
and reverie, but as a crucial resource in a drama of survival.
That theme was henceforth explored repeatedly in the works of other sculptors
working or exhibiting in Boston, including Thomas Ball’s Amina, from “La
Somnambula” (1851), based on the popular opera’s tightrope-walking somnambulist;
Randolph Rogers’s Nydia (1855) and The Lost Pleiad (ca. 1874-75), the former of which
showed its blind heroine navigating the ash-choked streets of Pompeii with her
superhuman hearing; and Anne Whitney’s Africa (1863-64) and Leif Eriksson (1887),
whose protagonists respectively faced the promising but daunting prospects of
emancipation from slavery and a “new” continent. Though drawn from very different
narrative sources, the heroes of these sculptures all eschewed the Romantic pose of
reverie, sharpening rather than suspending their sensory perceptions, often by
dramatically cupping their hands around their eyes and ears as they made their way
through unseen lands and spaces.

78
Lauretta Dimmick, “Thomas Crawford’s Orpheus: The American Apollo Belvedere,”
American Art Journal 19, no. 4 (October 1, 1987): 46–84.
138
Conclusion
The 19th-century museum’s role in institutionalizing what French sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu famously dubbed the cultural “distinction” of an aesthetically literate
bourgeoisie is a familiar story. In recent years, scholars have argued that the museum’s
cultural capital is distributed through a “politics of the invisible,” permitting more
cultured spectators to observe in the gallery what less educated viewers might fail to see.
According to this argument, this capacity to discern what others had missed did not
emerge until the late 19th century, when art critics sought to withhold aesthetic
distinction from working-class viewers recently admitted to the gallery and museum.
79

Yet the desire to see the “invisible” elements of art clearly emerged earlier in Boston,
prior to the introduction of working-class viewers to the art museum. The supersensory
art encounters of Elizabeth Peabody, Margaret Fuller, and lesser known spectators did not
so much distinguish them from the inexperienced viewer, but from more cultured (at least
in the superficial sense) elites. In any case, their transcendence of the senses represented
not so much a desire for class distinction, but their desire to preserve the aesthetic, moral,
and spiritual effects of art from the sensory temptations of the city itself.
Bostonians’ desire to absorb the city without degrading their senses found
expression not only within the spatial limits of the landmark and gallery, but also through
a more portable urban practice: amateur drawing. This practice abetted the visionary
impulse once again, this time with enduring consequences for the Spiritualist movement.

79
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1984); “Art and Theory: The Politics of the
Invisible,” in Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New
York: Routledge, 2009).
139
From Spectators to Visionaries:
Visual Culture and the Transformation of Boston, 1820-1860

Chapter 4:

From the Drawing School to Spirit-Drawing Mediumship
in Boston’s Amateur Art Culture

One of the most significant expressions of Bostonians’ desire to refine their vision
was their enthusiasm for learning to draw. Practiced in colonial New England almost
exclusively by artisans, amateur draughtsmanship did not achieve popular appeal until the
first decades of the 19th century.
1
Around that time, a number of private schools around
Boston incorporated drawing as a de rigueur subject for middle-class pupils of both
sexes. By the mid-1820s, Boston’s middle- and working-class common schools began to
incorporate draughtsmanship as an informal part of their curriculum. Boston’s amateur
drawing culture helped furnish talent for the city’s rapidly expanding graphics industry,
encouraged the development of new amateur exhibition venues, and helped drive a
nation-wide drawing-manual publishing boom that placed over 145,000 drawing manuals
into the hands of ordinary Americans between 1820 and 1860.
2

1
Unlike their English counterparts, few New England colonial elites studying drawing.
See “Chapter Six: The Drawing in the Painting,” in Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution:
Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
2
Peter C. Marzio, The Art Crusade (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1969).
140
With the advent of the Spiritualist movement in the late 1840s, the new passion
for drawing also provided a credible means for the spirits of the dead to communicate to
the living: the spirit-drawing medium. Once more, urban spectatorship played an
important role in the emergence of the visionary impulse. The ideal of the amateur
draughtsman that Boston’s liberal Protestant middle-class had embraced in earlier
decades provided a crucial model for untrained and often unskilled mid-century spirit-
drawing mediums. For believers, the spirit-drawing mediums’ lack of artistic polish
proved that the spirit-world was aiding their more sophisticated productions. As with
Transcendentalist art critics such as Elizabeth Peabody and Margaret Fuller (and as with
Boston’s blind, as the next chapter discusses) these visionary artists converted their
outsider status within a world of sophisticated urban aesthetes into a source of authority
over the invisible.
The source of the drawing-medium’s authority, the amateur ideal, was a direct
product of urbanization. In the first half of the 19th century, drawing promised middle-
class Bostonians entrée to a sophisticated world of urban connoisseurship, while
simultaneously appealing to their opposing desire to remain rooted in the “natural”
sensibility of the rural countryside that a substantial portion of that middle class had
abandoned only recently. The proliferation of drawing schools, drawing manuals, and
amateur exhibition and employment opportunities in Boston forced moralists and
aesthetes to face this contradiction. Through fiction, satire, and essays, they warned that
the very popularity of drawing was debasing its moral purpose, allowing social-climbing
art students and huckster drawing teachers to disguise their mindless imitation and
formulaic methods as the height of perceptual refinement. So severe was this crisis that
141
many Transcendentalists began to shun the urban art world entirely, dedicating
themselves to the observation of a natural world free of the snobbish, spiritually shallow
connoisseurs Emerson disdained as “umpires of taste.” As Thoreau would put it in
Walden (1854), observation was a moral pursuit that transcended the fine arts. “It is
something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a
few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere
and medium through which we look, which morally we can do.”
3

Though most Bostonians did not follow the Transcendentalists into the untainted
studio of nature, they began in the 1830s to idealize the untrained eye of the rural
amateur, who learned her craft with a minimum of formal instruction, and pursued it
strictly out of her pious love of nature, rather than for any economic or social motive.
The spirit-drawing medium represented only a more extreme expression of an amateur
ideal that had emerged from the middle class’s struggle to adapt to the spectacular city.
As with its monuments and galleries, antebellum Boston’s amateur drawing schools and
exhibitions provided another important stimulant to the visionary culture for which the
Athens of America became unexpectedly famous.

From Pasttime to Cause
In the mid-18th century, according to one antebellum account, there was “neither
a painting school nor a drawing master in Boston.”
4
Nor was Boston’s situation unusual,

3
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882), 142–143.
4
William Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United
States (New York: George P. Scott, 1834), 472.
142
for Philadelphia did not have its first drawing master, James Coxe, until 1794.
5
The
amateur art was sufficiently distant from its artisan origins for a handful of colonial New
England merchants to practice it, but they did not need to do so in order to enjoy genteel
status.
6

Nevertheless, knowledge of drawing grew among all classes in early 19th-century
Boston, thanks to the growing reliance of New England’s manufacturing industries on
technological literacy, as well as to the desire of more affluent Bostonians to emulate
their amateur counterparts in the British gentry. For the 18th-century virtuosi, drawing
was not a vocation, but a means of intellectually mastering the science of optics,
triumphing over the irrational tendencies of illusion, and acquiring (as well as
demonstrating) a genteel sensitivity to beauty and nature.
7
Such objectives grew equally
imperative in the early national United States, where the category of gentility was far less
fixed than in England, and the anxieties of republican government demanded new proofs
of the individual’s capacity for leadership. A wide range of elite Federalist artists and
politicians such as the Philadelphia painter Charles Willson Peale (an influential art
teacher himself) understood visual perception, evidenced in the ability to detect illusions,
as a critical test of the republican citizen-spectator’s political fitness.
8
The ability to draw
was understood to demonstrate not just aesthetic refinement, but also the moral and
intellectual superiority, of the ruling class.

5
“Portraits from the Peerage,” The Monthly Magazine, Or, British Register 25 (1838):
75.
6
Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution.
7
Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and
Useful Art (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2000).
8
Wendy Bellion, Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early
National America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
143
By the 1810s, Boston’s emerging middle class insisted that its children should
learn to draw. The 1812 copybook of one fifteen year-old Henry Whittemore, a student
at Mrs. Gill’s Academy in West Cambridge, contained numerous geometrical figures as
well as architectural illustrations, designed as a “specimen of attention to the useful and
ornamental sciences.”
9
Two years later, the School Street portrait and miniature painter
Henry Williams published the nation’s first original manual, 1814’s Elements of
Drawing. Through drawing, explained Williams, “we are apt to fancy we see objects
which have no real existence, and that the imagery before us, which is no more than a
painted cloth, actually breathes. The whole creation, with all its works and wonders,
comes within the power of its imitation.”
10
One of the city’s first professional drawing
instructors, Eloise Richards Payne promised her students a similar sense of mastery over
the visible world: “A person who has knowledge of drawing sees things in a different
light from one who takes everything at second hand and half the beauties of wonders of
nature are unknown.”
11
The aspiration of British aristocrats had become that of the city’s
middle class by the 1830s, when Lydia Sigourney would advise her young female readers
that “a taste for Drawing, heightens the admiration of Nature by enforcing a closer
examination of her exquisite workmanship, from the hues of the wild flower, to the
grandeur of the forest, and the glowing beauties of the extended landscape.”
12

9
Henry C. Whittemore, Henry Whittemore's copybook, Whittemore Family Papers 1812-
60, Downs Collection, WTL.
10
Henry Williams, Elements of Drawing: Exemplified in a Variety of Figures and
Sketches of Parts of the Human Form (Boston: R.P. & C. Williams, 1814), 3.
11
Quoted in Diana Korzenik, “Becoming an Art Teacher c. 1800,” Art Education 52, no.
2, (March 1, 1999):10.
12
Lydia Howard Sigourney, Letters to Young Ladies (Hartford: P. Canfield, 1833), 52.
144
In the century’s first decades, amateur drawing remained the prerogative of those,
like Whittemore and Quincy, with sufficient economic or social privilege to afford
private tuition, purchase expensive imported drawing manuals, and access private
collections of prints and paintings to emulate. But as Boston urbanized, and as Unitarian
reformers grew concerned about the city’s increasingly churchless and masterless youth,
local advocates found a more important justification for the study of drawing: their belief
that an accurate sense of vision was critical to moral development, and thus a bulwark of
urban moral order. A number of Unitarian reformers began to propose introducing
drawing in the city’s common schools, institutions designed “to improve the hearts, as
well as develop the intellects, of the pupils.”
13

In publishing the nation’s first drawing textbook An Introduction to Linear
Drawing in 1825, the head of Boston’s recently-established charitable Monitorial School
sought to improve both the heart and the intellect. “Notwithstanding the great utility of
this branch of education, it is a lamentable fact, that it is seldom or never taught in the
publick schools, although a very large proportion of our children have no other education
than these schools afford,” argued William Bentley Fowle, nephew of one of New
England’s first openly Unitarian ministers.
14
He and other reformers urged school
trustees and local politicians to consider drawing’s moral and intellectual influence on
less affluent youth. “One is apt to say, that it [drawing education] has taken a wrong turn
altogether, as it is seldom thought of but by the higher and better-educated classes, who

13
Abstract of the Massachusetts School Returns (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1841),
49.
14
William Bentley Fowle, An Introduction to Linear Drawing: Translated from the
French of M. Francoeur, and Adapted to the Use of Publick Schools in the United States.
1st ed. (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard, 1825), iii.
145
have consideration to value it, and money to pay the charge of its teachers,” lamented a
Boston education journal in 1827.
15
Armed with a more “distinct vision,” the same
publication argued, youth “may by degrees be informed of the bounty and love of that
Omnipotent Architect, who created and upholds all things”; in this cause, “the art of
drawing may be exceedingly useful.”
16
In 1830, when the nation’s first education-reform
group formed in Boston, its members urged the adoption of drawing instruction as a
means of instilling “a habit of accurate observation” through which students would gain
“mental power, moral feeling, delicate taste, and correct knowledge.”
17
By 1841, the
opinion of reformers had become the official position of the Charlestown School
Committee, which recommended drawing education on the grounds that “every pure taste
implanted in the youthful mind becomes a barrier to resist the allurements of
sensuality.”
18
By the antebellum period, in other words, drawing was widely regarded as
a partial solution for the social and moral ills of urbanization.
In Boston’s common schools, that solution was conveyed in a rigidly and
hierarchical manner. Students sat side by side, dutifully copying the casts, drawing cards,
and slate figures their instructors provided. Boston’s earliest drawing teachers
emphasized the strict study of classical proportions, lines, and geometrical forms,
examples of which could be found as readily in Boston’s streets as in its drawing

15
“Intellectual Education—Drawing,” American Journal of Education 2, no. 11
(November 1827): 725.
16
“Physical Education:—The Sense of Sight,” American Journal of Education 3, no. 25
(January 1828): 52.
17
Walter R. Johnson, “On the Importance of Linear Drawing, and on the Methods of
Teaching the Art in Common Schools and Other Seminaries,” in The Introductory
Discourse and Lectures Delivered in Boston before the Convention of Teachers (Boston:
Hillard, Gray, Little and Wilkins, 1831), 260.
18
Abstract of the Massachusetts School Returns, 49.
146
classrooms. Students of the Monitorial School were encouraged to replicate Ionic, Doric,
and Corinthian orders, moldings, and other objects closely associated with Boston’s
Greek Revival building vogue (Figure 27). Sensory perfection meant teaching the eye to
conform to the standards of the ruler and compass. As Fowle put it, “A precision may be
acquired by the eye and hand almost equal to that of ordinary instruments.” Thus,
teachers forbade students from using these instruments, not to discourage rigidity—for
monitors were encouraged to test its correctness with rules and squares—but instead to
internalize it, thus shaping the pupils’ characters along balanced, rational, classical
lines.
19
One of Fowle’s colleagues at the Monitorial School, Maria Turner, echoed the
same notion in her own manuals, urging her students to reject the myth of a naturally
correct eye. The only way to acquire a genuinely correct perception needed “to improve
our intellect, and to increase our moral obligations to Him who endowed us with this
inestimable gift,” was to impose on the eye a geometric precision through rule-based
study.
20

The notion that drawing taught visual precision dated to the Renaissance; but the
Unitarian conviction that repeated visual exposure to rational geometric forms might
enhance “moral feeling” and deter sensuality was a newer and bolder claim that had
emerged in part from urbanization. The equation of correct sight and correct character
was reinforced by the spectacular environment of the city, as successive waves of
architectural improvement were justified based on the purported moral effects of their
signature forms. Over time, the preferred geometry changed from the classical, low-lying

19
Fowle, An Introduction to Linear Drawing, iv–vi.
20
Maria Turner, The Young Ladies’ Assistant in Drawing and Painting (Cincinnati:
Corey and Fairbank, 1833), vi.
147
symmetry of neo-classical Greek Revivalism to Gothic architecture. Thus, proposing the
decoration of Faneuil Hall with a tall arched shrine and vertical drapery for a charity
event, an antebellum writer suggested: “We have an acceptable worship—let us have a
temple for its exercise;—one whose ascending lines shall carry the soul upward, like the
Mediaeval architecture; not press it downward… like the transverse bars of the horizontal
Greek.”
21

Though Unitarian educators hoped that drawing lessons could achieve a similar
effect, they were nagged by a persistent doubt: in delineating the tasteful forms around
them, did their students really hone their perception (and thus their character), or did they
merely learn to proudly imitate these “correct” forms without grasping their deeper moral
meaning? Fearing the latter, more radical Transcendentalist educators began to idealize
freer and spiritually deeper forms of perception.

The Anxieties of Imitation
By the 1820s, the shortcomings of rote methods of learning troubled educators.
Drawing instructors were no exception. “Not one in fifty of those who have gone
through a course of instruction in drawing, can do more than copy such drawings as are
placed before them,” Fowle lamented.
22
His method was intended to be the exception,
yet it too consisted of nothing more than a set of imitative practices. Nor was this
contradiction unique. “No one can really understand and appreciate the beauty which the
beneficent Creator has scattered so profusely around us, in every variety of aspect,
without attempting, by means of the pencil, to reproduce its forms,” explained a manual

21
“The Fourteenth Anti-Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, Jan 14, 1848.
22
Fowle, An Introduction to Linear Drawing, 1st ed., iii.
148
written by Boston schoolmaster Jacob Abbott. Abbott too saw the danger of students’
simply reproducing forms. “You must always remember that the great object of learning
to draw is, to develop and cultivate the taste and the imaginative faculties, not the powers
of imitation.”
23
Yet Abbott’s course consisted of nothing but cards for students to
imitate.
Imitation was a cardinal sin in 19th-century middle-class sentimental culture,
implying as it did a false adherence to the outward rules of propriety without the
correspondingly sincere feeling understood to flow naturally in truly moral individuals.
24

Their inherent moral superiority threatened by their equally innate love of fashion,
women were particularly tasked with resisting the urge to imitate in matters of dress,
etiquette, and even drawing; as one antebellum drawing manual explained, “girls are
more in danger of erring in this respect than boys.”
25
Like conduct manuals, drawing
manuals warned in one breath against imitation, and, in the next, offered rules that
needed to be imitated to help avoid it.
The ever more visible pursuit of drawing in antebellum Boston’s galleries and
classrooms rendered the specter of imitation increasingly threatening, however. A
competitive urban landscape of amateur exhibitions and factory-like printmaking studios
eroded the once-clear distinctions between the artist of original genius and the hack. In
1825, brothers William S. and John B. Pendleton established one of the nation’s first
lithography studios, opening a new avenue of employment and training to aspiring

23
Jacob Abbott, Abbott’s Drawing Cards for Schools and Families (New York: Saxton &
Miles, 1845), 8.
24
Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class
Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).
25
Jacob Abbott, The Studio: Or, Illustrations of the Theory and Practice of Drawing, for
Young Artists at Home (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1855), 43.
149
draughtsmen such as the painter Fitz Henry Lane and future drawing instructors such as
Louisa Davis Minot, Eliza Susan Quincy (daughter of the mayor) and Sophia Peabody.
Pendleton’s was soon joined by a number of other firms on Graphics Court, near
Washington and Franklin Streets.
26
Boston also established one of the first American
venues for amateur drawing exhibition, the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanics
Association Fairs, in 1837. Instead of producing more original images, most of Boston’s
artists earned their living painting portraits of the city’s middle class, producing menial
caricatures and illustrations for local publications, or reproducing in print shops the
works of better-regarded artists.
27
An entire street, Graphic Court, was dedicated to such
firms. Thus, even as a new and visible graphics industry catered to the pursuit of social
and moral refinement through art, it also helped call into question the very standards and
meaning of that pursuit.
Many of these doubts were illustrated in a number of antebellum novels and short
stories that cast doubt on the formal study of drawing. These narratives typically pitted
the naïve but natural vision of the female drawing student against that of the urban
drawing instructor, a cultural impostor. If the latter did not actually seduce his student,
he threatened her most virtuous asset as a female amateur—her perception, untutored but
true. This was, of course, a cultural fiction, whose polarized character types—the genius
and the hack, the rule-hawking teacher and talent naïf—bore little resemblance to the new
and increasingly mechanized complex of drawing schools, printmaking studios, galleries,

26
See David Tatham, “The Lithographic Workshop, 1825-50,” in The Cultivation of
Artists in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Georgia Brady Barnhill et al. (Worcester,
Massachusetts: American Antiquarian Society, 1997).
27
For the status envy of Boston's commercial artists and illustrators, see Jennifer A.
Greenhill, “Playing the Fool: David Claypoole Johnston and the Menial Labor of
Caricature,” American Art 17, no. 3 (October 1, 2003): 33–51.
150
and periodicals through which art was produced and consumed. That fiction, however,
was precisely the appeal of these stories. By contrasting the hack’s rule-bound methods
with the naïve amateur’s unmediated vision, middle-class literature preserved drawing’s
moral ideal from corruption in the fashionable and commercialistic urban art world.
Among the first instances of the genre was art critic John Neal’s 1823 epistolary
novel Randolph, narrated as a correspondence between the titular Boston drawing master
and his more naturally talented, amateur student Sarah Ramsey. Randolph (under the
name Edward Molton) encounters Ramsey while roaming the countryside in search of
students. An unusually honest seducer, Randolph admits, “I am an impostor. I have been
teaching an art, of which I am ignorant.” “But then,” as he explains, “I am not so ignorant
as the people here.”
28
Randolph is able to make a living primarily thanks to his “faculty
of imitation,” which allows him at once to pass himself in a number of false persons, as
well as to construct outlines just passable enough to impress the undiscerning portrait
clients to whom he owes his reputation. His student, on the other hand, has no interest in
the marketplace; learning for purer purposes than making a living, she is able to construct
far more compelling pictures. Though Randolph proves heroic enough in other
circumstances, he is a fraud as a teacher, and a danger to his students.
Conduct-manual author Eliza Leslie’s “The China Set” (1834) reflected a similar
cynicism about drawing education, and its social-climbing urban middle-class students in
particular. Appearing in The Knickbocker (a publication that drew a substantial portion
of its contributors and readers from Boston), the story relates how the would-be social
climber Mrs. Atmore brings her daughter Marianne to Philadelphia’s “most fashionable

28
John Neal, Randolph: A Novel ([Baltimore?: s.n.], 1823), 79.
151
drawing school,” where she explains to its master Mr. Gummage, a slovenly fellow “no
gentleman, in either appearance or manner,” that she wants to follow the example of a
New York lady who sent her daughter’s drawings to China to be copied onto a tea set.
“She said that it was talked of all over New-York,” Mrs. Atmore explains, “and
that people who had never been at the house before, came to look at and admire it.” Mrs.
Atmore’s goal is to create a social sensation: “I have set my mind on having this china
the wonder of all Philadelphia.” Simply decorating one’s parlor with purchased china
was an insufficient exhibition of genteel taste and wealth, compared to demonstrating one
had the time and vision required to realize one’s own artistic vision. Like Fowle, the
drawing master Mr. Gummage prohibits the use of rulers and compasses, and his
students’ failure to learn his methods lead to outright fraud: “The chief attractions of a
drawing master—for Mr. Gummage was nothing more—lay in doing almost every thing
himself, and producing for his pupils, in their first quarter, pictures (so called) that were
pronounced ‘fit to frame.’” The mediocre and gaudy result of this unacknowledged
collaboration between master and student is sent to China for copying, only to return
ruined by the production instructions its literal-minded manufacturers have painted onto
it: “THIS IN THE MIDDLE.”
29
It is a case of imitation gone awry in more ways then
one.
Leslie’s dim view of Marianne Atmore notwithstanding, the antebellum city
permitted a growing number of women to find employment as drawing instructors,

29
Eliza Leslie, “The Set of China,” The Knickerbocker: Or, New-York Monthly Magazine
4 (1834): 435, 436, 441. The author’s skepticism toward American drawing instruction
may have been inspired by personal experience: Leslie’s brother, the prominent London
painter and Royal Academy member Charles Robert Leslie, had only the previous year
attempted to teaching drawing in America, only to quit and return to England after only
six months.
152
manual authors, and professional artists during the period; indeed, Maria Turner was all
three, honing her craft in the late 1820s at the Pendleton’s lithography studio, where she
delineated plates for a textbook she developed as a Monitorial School instructor. The
steady expansion of work for women artists in Boston even prompted the founding of a
school of design for women in 1851. Even so, sentimental fiction writers continued to
warn against an increasingly familiar narrative of women traveling to the city for artistic
training, only to have their vision threatened by its culture of false forms. On arriving in
Boston from her rural village, the heroine of Hetty Holyoke’s “The City Cousins; Or, the
Art-Student in Boston” (1855) attends her first drawing class at a fictional version of the
new design school. There, Kitty Clover relates in a letter home to her mother,
A number of lines and curves is given us, and each of the class may combine
them with whatever figure occurs to her; over these combinations I work all day,
wake up in the night with a new idea, and lie there in the dark bringing my lines
and curves together, with a success I cannot copy by day. At the table I can only
see the angles at which the knives and forks are placed, and the curve of the water
as it is poured into my cup; in the street it is just the same—goers and comes,
corners and walls stand to me for so much straightness and so much undulation.
Only the stars keep their old, own place in my mind…

Fortunately, Kitty Clover’s naturally keen vision is not easily conquered by her city
drawing master. He complains that “I do not adapt my means to my ends—that I put into
a carpet or table-cloth pattern, the great sweep of oak-boughs, the bold, brave uplifting of
the hillsides…. But never mind! I’ll smother down the genius for now, and make as
narrow lines and as obedient curves as the most citified, see if I don’t!” Allied to these
citified drawing rules are Clover’s citified, art connoisseur relatives, all of them false,
vain, and excessively fashionable, with the exception of one Will Clover. When Will
takes Kitty to the Athenaeum to improve her taste, she improves his instead: Kitty
manages to convince her cousin that, rather than purchasing the Claude landscape he has
153
loaned the gallery, “it were better to invest the thousands it costs in a little country-house,
for the hot days, every one of which would unroll above it boundless sky-scapes… skies
so boundless they make us think of the love of our dear Father God.” Ultimately, the
citified connoisseur proposes to Kitty Clover, allowing her to quit her drawing lessons
and avoid the sensory and moral corruptions of life as an urban professional artist.
30

Judging by the continuing popularity of what an historian has called the
antebellum “art crusade,” such narratives did little to discourage the popularity of
drawing masters and manuals. They did, however, represent a growing skepticism about
the moral achievements of rule-bound approaches to art education. For critics, the fruit
of that approach was a culture of poseurs with more aesthetic than moral knowledge. In
1844, Emerson called them “umpires of taste,”
persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures,
and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they
are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that
they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of
dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge
of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of
color or form, which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of the
shallowness of the doctrine of beauty, as it lies in the minds of our amateurs, that
men seem to have lost the perception of the instant dependence of form upon
soul.
31

Like Hetty Holyoke, Emerson was discounting the moral potential not of a finely honed
visual perception in general, but rather one founded in “rules and particulars” of the sort
that Unitarian drawing educators had championed, and which had become in the
antebellum period a tool for social climbers such as Mrs. Atmore.

30
Hetty Holyoke [Caroline Snowden Guild], “The City Cousins; Or the Art-Student in
Boston”, Peterson’s Magazine, vol. 28 (1855): 283–288.
31
“The Poet,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: Second Series (Boston: J. Munroe,
1844), 3.
154
Emerson’s reaction was not unique. Sentimental authors had neatly and wishfully
divided the art world into rural amateurs and urban professionals, untutored geniuses and
huckster drawing teachers, all of whom hampered the visual perception with false rules
and forms. The reality was undoubtedly more complicated. Indeed, the jab at untalented
amateurs such as Marianne Atmore was likely motivated by the growing competition of
the urban professional art world. Instead of confronting the mechanical conditions
transforming art and artistic labor, it was far easier to satirize the world’s Atmores, and
idealize its Kitty Clovers. The fresh and unmediated perception of the latter could only
have appealed to a middle class both enamored with and anxious about attaining “taste.”
By the mid-1830s, that ideal would acquire even deeper importance in the pedagogy of
Transcendentalist educators.

Transcendentalism and the Unmediated Vision
Among the most vocal early critics of the rule-bound approach to sensory
education was the Transcendentalist Elizabeth Peabody. A Unitarian and an amateur
(though less passionate an artist than her sister Sophia Peabody Hawthorne), Peabody had
taught drawing in Maine in the early 1820s. After moving to Boston, she developed an
even deeper respect for art’s moral function through her conversations with her minister
William Ellery Channing and his brother-in-law Washington Allston. In 1834, Peabody
put her ideas concerning art education into action while assisting her fellow
Transcendentalist Bronson Alcott at the latter’s ill-fated Temple School.
Physically speaking, the Temple School was modeled upon the Athenaeum
gallery, furnished as it was with busts of Shakespeare and Milton and the portraits of
155
Chester Harding. Yet the ways in which students were encouraged to examine these
works of art had little in common with the connoisseurship of Emerson’s “umpires of
taste.” Peabody was well-acquainted with the techniques of drawing education that
Unitarians had introduced to Boston’s common schools, including Fowle’s book, which
she recommended to her sisters. In her Record of a School, Peabody began her
discussion of the school’s drawing education with the same commonplace observation
found in manuals such as Fowle’s: “The art of drawing has well been called the art of
learning to see; and perhaps no person ever began learning to draw, without astonishment
at finding how imperfectly he had always been seeing.”
32
Yet Peabody, unlike Fowle and
other more orthodox Unitarian educators, regarded drawing as a process, not of learning
to see, but of unlearning. So she explained in her 1846 translation of the art manual of
Peter Schmidt,
a German artist, gifted by nature with a perspective sight, so perfect, that at
twelve years of age, he executed miracles of drawing. A well-meant attempt of a
German prince to educate him for a professor, according to the common methods
of the German schools, entirely confounded this intuitive power, so that he left off
drawing altogether. But his mind being taken out of the strait jacket of a false
method and refreshed, he began again to see with his eyes, and recovered his
power.
33

In their quest to perfect the student’s vision, Boston’s Unitarian thinkers had
attempted to internalize the geometric precision of the compass within the eye, to help the
mind distinguish between false and true forms. Student work was evaluated with the help

32
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Record of a School: Exemplifying the General Principles of
Spiritual Culture (Boston: J. Munroe, 1835), 4. For Elizabeth Peabody’s recommendation
of Fowle’s book, see Robert J. Saunders, “Elizabeth P. Peabody’s Quest for Art in Moral
Education,” in Donald Soucy, Framing the Past: Essays on Art Education (Reston,
Virginia: National Art Education Association, 1990), 40.
33
Elizabeth Peabody, The Common School Drawing-Master. Containing Schmid’s
Practical Perspective (Boston: E.P. Peabody, 1846), iii–iv.
156
of a compass and ruler to ensure that it conformed to its geometric ideal. By contrast,
Alcott and Peabody understood the student as already possessing the correct ideal within
his or her head; learning to draw was simply a matter of giving the hand and eye the
practice necessary to realize the student’s vision. Borrowing (if unknowingly) the
methods of Rousseau, the pair refrained from criticizing their pupils’ drawing as
incorrect, “knowing that practice would at once mend the eye and the hand; but that
criticism would check the desirable courage and self-confidence.” Far more important
was developing the student’s individual vision, by encouraging “those primal sympathies,
with which nature seems to wed different minds to different portions of the universe.”
34

Alcott and Peabody shared with their Unitarian predecessors a belief in the moral
value of a finely honed sense of vision, yet the former were anxious that the learning
process not terminate in a mere knowledge of correct forms. Students were taught
through drawing that every object the eye could regard was an allegory for some spiritual
truth. Learning to see properly did not mean distinguishing correct from incorrect forms,
but understanding how all these outward forms represented “God’s address to the human
soul.”
35

This emphasis on seeing the spiritual reality underlying physical forms emerged
directly from the moral anxieties of Boston’s recent decades of improvement. For
Unitarian Boston, improvement was certain to deepen the spectator’s moral sensibility by
allowing him to pick out the beautiful forms from the lesser forms in which they were
surrounded. So claimed Boston’s landmark boosters, as they constructed vistas for the
city’s monuments and parks, as well as aesthetes, as they guided spectators from the

34
Peabody, Record of a School, 5, 6.
35
Ibid., 5.
157
gilded baubles of Boston’s retail districts to galleries of worthier artworks. Yet for the
Transcendentalists, the result was a landscape of fine and tasteful objects that, though
intended to purge the spectator of sensuousness, simply encouraged a more genteel
version of it, corrupting an inward vision that had never needed correction to begin with.
Already the process had affected the city’s youth. “Things, perhaps, are a net which
catches us sometimes. Perhaps some of you are caught?” Peabody recorded Alcott’s
telling his pupils one day:
I should like to see one person caught, said a little boy. Should you, said Mr.
Alcott, like to see a boy, whose eyes and ears are so caught by things, that his
mind is all taken up, and never looks inward? Yes. Well there he is! said Mr.
Alcott, holding a looking glass before him.
36

For many in Alcott’s and Peabody’s circle, escaping the sensory temptations of
things in the 1840s meant abandoning the city to live deliberately in the less urbanized
utopias of Concord, Fruitlands, and Brook Farm. The utopians left behind Boston’s
galleries and drawing schools, but they brought drawing with them. Through learning to
draw, the Brook Farm reformers explained to their Boston lecture audiences, students
from the ages of six to sixteen would “acquire true and accurate perceptions, a sense of
form and of proportion, and an habitual regard to the beautiful objects of sight.” The
point was not to create artists, which “only the smaller part will become,” but rather to
establish a common mode of seeing that allowed “the farmer and the scholar and the
mechanic…the musician, the artist, even the wayward desultory genius,” to meet “on a
perfect equality.”
In other words, the Brook Farm community aimed to create social harmony
through visual perception—the very goal Unitarian reformers had hoped to achieve in the

36
Ibid., 174.
158
Common School. Yet like at the Temple School, Brook Farm’s approach to developing
the eye placed a far greater emphasis on an original, unmediated perception. Instead of
building art galleries to educate the eye, the program of sensory education would take
place in early childhood in a “spacious, pleasant hall” that would replace landscape
paintings with large windows onto the actual landscape. “The sun and the green shades,
and the gleaming river, must visit it through pleasant windows.”
37
By replacing art with
nature, the community would avoid the social and sensory divides of places like Boston.
While not all would be artists, all members would enjoy the deep visual sensibility that
Boston’s visual didacts had attempted to create among all of the city’s citizens.
Most of the collectivist innovations introduced by the short-lived Temple School
and Brook Farm did not survive the experiments that produced them. Yet the notion that
sight was a faculty that required liberation from the forms and occupations of urban life
influenced a broad range of contemporary educators, ophthalmologists, and other
authorities by the 1840s. “[The pupil] should be told, that, in order to draw correctly, he
must accustom his eye to see things as they are presented to it by Nature; that is, as the
infant sees them,” explained a prize-winning essay published by Boston’s American
Institute of Education in 1840.
38
In practice, true sight meant recognizing that nature’s
forms were imposed by the imagination. As the local engraver John Andrew explained in
The Boston Drawing Book (1840):

37
John Sullivan Dwight and Charles Anderson Dana, Association, in Its Connection with
Education and Religion: Two Lectures Delivered Before the New England Fourier
Society, in Boston, February 29th and March 7th, 1844 (Boston: B.H. Greene, 1844), 21–
22.
38
Thomas H. Palmer, The Teacher's Manual: Being an Exposition of an Efficient and
Economical System of Education, Suited to the Wants of a Free People (Boston: Marsh,
Capen, Lyon, and Webb, 1840), 134.
159
In no one branch of the arts has there been a greater alteration [than in drawing].
Formerly, all was made out, as it was termed; a hard, firm outline surrounded
each object; every thing was elaborately developed. The leaves of a tree, the
fibres of its trunk or stem, the brick or stone work of a house, the trees on the hill
in mid-distance; all, whether near or remote, received equal attention. Nothing
was left to the imagination, and the result was as might have been expected.
Drawings so made might be valued for the labor bestowed on them, but they
could afford no pleasure as works of art.
39

An approach more unlike Fowle’s could not be conceived. By eschewing explicit
outline, Andrew hoped to facilitate a primeval, child-like first encounter with nature, in
which form was actively created by the viewer’s imagination rather than imposed on the
passive eye (Figure 28). Like Alcott’s students, the amateur was advised not to become
so caught up with things (their outlines, at least) that he neglected to look inward.
Meanwhile, Boston’s physicians seconded the cultural suspicion of excessive
visual scrutiny. The close and attentive focus required by clerical and related occupations
could hurt the eye; fortunately, nature could cure it, by allowing the eye the space that, as
Emerson had warned, cities “give not.” “The rest which is demanded in most of the
cases, is not an entire disuse of the organ, but a relaxation of the adjusting apparatus of
the eye, by the relinquishment, wholly or in part, of occupations requiring the application
of it to small and near objects,” explained a leading ophthalmologist in 1849. “This
purpose is most readily accomplished by habituating it to picturesque rural scenery.”
This meant actual nature, the physician explained, though the art gallery might substitute
if absolutely necessary.
40
The eye needed a holiday from its exhausting urban occupation

39
John A. Andrew, The Boston Drawing Book: Designed for Beginners, and
Accompanied with Letter Press Instruction (Boston: Weeks, Jordan, 1840), i.
40
John Homer Dix, Treatise Upon the Nature and Treatment of Morbid Sensibility of the
Retina, or Weakness of Sight (Boston: William D. Ticknor, 1849), 120.
160
of closely studying forms, and the best place for it to take was a world as uncontaminated
by form as possible: the terra incognita of nature itself.
The appeal that unmediated perception had acquired by the 1840s can be further
seen in the unprecedented number of American artists, both professional and amateur,
who set out to see things as they were presented by Nature. Like Crawford’s Orpheus
and the subjects of similar sculptures discussed in the previous chapters, landscape
painters, both amateur and professionals, ventured into the purported terra incognita of
the Hudson River Valley, New Hampshire’s White Mountains, and the Mississippi, and
when these images arrived back in Boston in the form of paintings, prints, and moving
panoramas, urban spectators clamored for a glimpse of these supposedly unmediated
images.
41
Ironically, however, an ever-growing range of mechanical reproduction
techniques imposed themselves between the firsthand vision of the painter who actually
visited Niagara Falls, and the Bostonian who admired its engraving in the gallery or
illustrated press. Few of the city’s professionals or amateurs had the chance to discover
terra incognita in the most literal sense; most were like Longfellow, who based the
setting of his poem Hiawatha on the moving panorama of the Mississippi he saw in
Boston in 1846.
42
Even as the new urban marketplace brought views of the country into
city, it reinforced morally-charged distinctions between true artists and hacks,
connoisseurs and poseurs. In turn, these distinctions tested the definition of what the
artist’s “vision” was and who might claim it. As an infamous episode from the mid-
1840s illustrates, Boston’s art culture helped redefine the artistic process in terms that

41
Angela L. Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American
Cultural Politics, 1825-1875 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1993).
42
Dorothy Dondore, “Banvard’s Panorama and the Flowering of New England,” The
New England Quarterly 11, no. 4 (December 1, 1938): 817–826.
161
anticipated (and presumably molded) the practices of the mid-century Spiritualist
movement—revealing once again the close links between urban spectatorship and the
visionary impulse.

Artistic Mediumship before the Spiritualist Movement
In 1846, the Boston artist Thomas T. Spear aroused controversy by displaying his
own “completed” version of Belshazzar’s Feast, the recently deceased painter
Washington Allston’s unfinished masterpiece (Figure 26). Had Spear simply copied the
painting in its unfinished state, his efforts would likely have received less interest;
instead, he justified and promoted his “finished” copy by claiming it represented a
faithful and unmediated view of the work as the dead artist had intended to finish it.
Though many understood Spear’s as an act of theft (the painting’s elite owners had
refused him permission to copy it), his supporters declared his work a more perfect
expression of the dead artist’s vision, and urged Bostonians to see so for themselves. The
urban art gallery, in other words, had begun to serve as a space in which dead and living
artists communicated. It did so, strikingly, even before the emergence of Spiritualism
proper in 1848.
The tragic story of Belshazzar’s Feast was well-known to Boston aesthetes. Their
city’s (and probably the nation’s) most revered artist had struggled for most of his career
to complete his magnum opus, taking out loans and turning down profitable commissions
to do so. The painting depicts the decadent court of the Babylonian king Belshazzar at
the moment he has anxiously summoned the Jewish prophet Daniel to interpret the
handwriting that has mysteriously appeared on the wall. The painting directly engaged
162
republican concerns about luxury, contrasting Belshazzar’s glittering idols, fine furniture
and robes with Daniel’s humble rags. Upper-class Bostonians’ investment in
Belshazzar’s Feast was deep; it embodied their fears about their political and moral
survival in the Jacksonian era, as well as their own millennial desires.
43
It was a project
to which the city’s leading men were financially committed, as well, for in 1827 a group
of the Athenaeum’s richest shareholders gathered together to advance Allston $10,000—
a fortune at the time—to enable him to devote himself full time to the painting’s
completion. The painting was to be the central attraction of the first Athenaeum
exhibition later that year, but Allston decided it was not ready. Instead, he refused to
show it to anyone as he worked and reworked the painting over the remainder of his life.
By the time Allston died in 1843, a popular mystique had developed around
Belshazzar’s Feast. When his backers entered the studio to inspect the painting, they
were disappointed to discover it not only unfinished, but in serious disarray; at his death,
Allston had been in the process of changing the angle and scale of the painting’s most
important figures, and left only tentative outlines to indicate his intentions. Despite the
confused and incomplete condition of the painting, the subscribers attempted to recoup
some of their investment by publicly displaying Belshazzar’s Feast. It was first shown in
the Boston Museum’s Corinthian Gallery in 1844, and at the Athenaeum annually
afterward. Conscious that not all viewers would be pleased with its unfinished state, the
proprietors issued an explanatory pamphlet, noting that "[f]or artists, the unfinished state
of the picture hardly diminishes its value, as it shows Mr. Allston's processes in almost all

43
David Bjelajac, Millennial Desire and the Apocalyptic Vision of Washington Allston
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988).
163
their different stages from first to last."
44
For the enterprising proprietors, the fact that the
work was unfinished actually contributed to its interest; it was for the viewer to imagine
how the great Allston had intended to complete his masterpiece.
It was under these circumstances that Spear began to lobby the painting’s
proprietors for permission to execute a scale copy of the work, in order to exhibit it for
curious audiences throughout the nation. Spear evidently appreciated the proprietors’
desire to recoup their investment, for he offered to use his proposed exhibition’s profits to
compensate them for their 1827 advance to Allston. He also offered the proprietors a
chance to approve his copy before it was exhibited. “Unless it shall then receive your
approbation, and be in your opinion a true copy, and not unworthy of the original, it shall
never be exposed to the public eye,” he wrote them on July 31, 1844. His request was
denied, however. At that point, Spear took matters into his own hands, or rather, his own
hat. As he would inform the public in a pamphlet issued in 1846 to accompany the
exhibition of his work at Chester Harding’s gallery, Spear surreptitiously took some
sketches of the painting at its exhibition, transferring them to his own canvas “while the
impression of the original was fresh upon my mind.”
After “eighteen months of incessant labor,” Spear had not only produced a copy
of Allston’s masterpiece, but completed its unfinished parts according to what Spear
claimed were the “design of the author.” “I have in no instance, altered a line of Mr.
Allston’s, and my purpose has been to carry out and justify his conception, on another

44
Description of the Grand Historical Picture of Belshazzar’s Feast, Painted by
Washington Allston: And Now Exhibiting at the Corinthian Gallery, Federal Street
(Boston: Eastburn’s Press, 1844), 8.
164
canvas.”
45
In other words, Spear was not simply showing a copy of a painting, but
completing it according to what he claimed was Allston’s mental conception. This was a
bold claim, perhaps, but it was consistent with the claims that Peabody and others
(including Allston himself) had made a few years earlier about the nature of great art. It
also accorded with a new ideal of the drawing that suggested more than it actually
represented.
The proprietors and their supporters disagreed that Spear had carried out Allston’s
conception. One publication declaimed Spear’s work as “a vile libel,” while another
remembered it twenty years later as a “a stolen and travestied copy.” For them, Spear
was the more dangerous for claiming to have actually finished the work of a true artist.
Others, however, came to the defense of Spear, who later became an officer of the artist-
led New England Art Union. “In comparing the two together, it is almost impossible to
credit one’s senses, so faithfully and completely has the later carried out in his copy ‘the
real presentment’ of the original,” claimed the Boston Morning Post, while the Daily
Evening Transcript averred that “the noble minded Allston would be proud, were he
living, to see how his own great gifts could inspire another towards artistic excellence.”
46

The issue for Spear’s supporters and critics alike was whether he succeeded in
realizing Allston’s conception; no one, however, contested that what he had set out to do
could be accomplished, in principle. That is to say, the artist’s creativity did not reside in

45
Description of the Grand Historical Picture of Belshazzar’s Feast by Washington
Allston, Painted on Another Canvass of the Same Size, and Finished with a View to Carry
Out the Design of the Author by Thomas T. Spear (Boston: Eastburn’s Press, 1846), 4.
46
“Something About Our Painters,” American Whig Review 4, no. 20 (1846): 187; Sarah
Clarke, “Our First Great Painter, and His Works,” Atlantic Monthly 15, no. 88 (February
1865): 139; Spear’s supporters quoted in Description of the Grand Historical Picture of
Belshazzar’s Feast by Washington Allston, Painted on Another Canvass of the Same Size,
and Finished with a View to Carry out the Design of the Author by Thomas T. Spear.
165
his ability to fashion a new image, but rather to see, through his mind’s eye, an image that
already existed. Indeed, this was the view that Elizabeth Peabody claimed Allston
expressed to her in 1843: “‘In a strict sense,’, said he, ‘imagination does not create, it
only sees the spiritual creations of God.’”
47
This notion had already proved central to
Peabody’s supersensory transcendence of the material and sensual world of the art
gallery, but Spear had actually invited a large urban audience to participate in a
conversation previously dominated by intellectuals. Anyone could, for the same price,
visit the original Allston on display nearby; but Spear’s image had its own attractions, in
demonstrating the prior existence of a conception that the artist and the keen-eyed viewer
shared, but which most spectators could not see unaided. Having rendered the visible
passé, the spectacular city of the city had begun to encourage struggling artists such as
Spear to seek out the invisible.
There is no evidence to suggest Spear joined the Spiritualist movement that
emerged in 1848. Yet a number of untrained Spiritualists claimed, like Spear, the ability
to see invisible sights that originated not from their individual imaginations, but from the
unseen world. Writing to Boston’s spiritualist newspaper, Banner of Light, a reader
described the ability to see at will “objects, places and things I never beheld before…all
of which come before me like a moving panorama” (a popular urban spectacle). Coming
to the point, the reader asked, “Now is this anything more or less than what is commonly
called imagination?” The Spiritualist editor responded with conviction. “Absolutely
there is no such thing as imagination. Everything that exists at all has a cause for
existing.” Instead, the editor explained that the “correspondent is to a certain extent

47
Elizabeth Peabody, Last Evening with Allston, and Other Papers (Boston: D. Lothrop,
1886), 4.
166
spiritually unfolded in the perceptive faculties, or, in other words, his spirit sees these
things without the aid of the usual medium—the eye.”
48
By the 1850s, the amateur artist
had become a model for this “spiritually unfolded” viewer.

Spirit-Drawing and 1850s Boston
One day in the spring of 1852, the Boston Universalist minister and reformer John
Murray Spear (not closely related to Thomas Spear) found his hand compelled by an
external spiritual force to create a series of drawings. His hand began to draw itself, then
other parts of his body, and then labeled the anatomy with various spiritual mottos.
Through this drawing, Spear learned, he was being sent on a mission to heal the sick and
spread the news about Spiritualism. Though long acquainted with Boston’s trance-
medium community, as well as members of the newer Spiritualist movement, Spear had
only begun a few weeks earlier to receive messages from beyond. But confirmation of
his mediumship came from the sixteen subsequent drawings that issued involuntarily
from his hand over the next few weeks, “beautiful diagrams of things which he, and no
one else on earth, so far as I am aware, ever saw, or heard of, before.” So a pamphlet
issued by Spear’s supporters related:
What is the specific meaning of them, or what they represent, no one can tell. All
the explanation vouchsafed by the spirits, at present, is, that they show that the
spirit has power after it leaves the body. But, whether it comes, or not, one thing
is clear, and that is, the drawings are made by the involuntary movement of the
hand of one who never drew the first thing in his life, till this strange power took
possession of him, and moved him to the work.
49

48
“Questions and Answers,” Banner of Light, October 19, 1867, 6.
49
Simon Crosby Hewitt and John Murray Spear, Messages from the Superior State:
Communicated by John Murray, Through John M. Spear, in the Summer of 1852
(Boston: Bela Marsh, 1852), 43–44.
167
The episode marked what was probably the first documented spirit-drawing
manifestation in Spiritualism’s four year history, but it would not be the last. In 1854, the
Boston Spiritualist Eliab Wilkinson Capron received a letter from a fellow Spiritualist in
Washington D.C. concerning seven spirit-drawing mediums, five of whom shared at least
one characteristic: they “had not acquired the slightest skill in the art by any previous
discipline.” Nevertheless, one medium completed a sketch in only a half-hour, which “it
is believed that few persons experienced in pencil-drawing could copy…in three hours,”
while another completed architectural drawings, despite being only 12 years old.
Another drew a remarkable number of animals in the space of a banknote, “yet without
the least appearance of confusion.” The most popular, however, appeared to be drawings
of fruits and flowers that grew in the spiritual spheres. “These pictures do not, in all
respects, conform to the accredited rules of art; but it must be conceded that very many of
them are well drawn, while the shading is often delicate and beautiful.”
50
Accounts of
Boston’s drawing mediums closely matched this pattern.
51
While few of their works
have survived, specimens from a New York medium offer further evidence that the genre
frequently depicted such favorite amateur subjects as flowers—even though Spiritualists
insisted that the species could not be found on earth (Figure 29). Drawing mediumship
has received far less scholarly attention than Spiritualism as a whole; only one recent
monograph has explored Spiritualism and the arts at all.
52
Yet spirit-drawing was
undeniably useful to the movement as a form of visual evidence all too rare, especially

50
Eliab Wilkinson Capron, Modern Spiritualism: Its Facts and Fanaticisms, Its
Consistencies and Contradictions (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1855), 356, 358.
51
Benjamin Coleman, Spiritualism in America (London: F. Pitman, 1861).
52
Charles Colbert, Haunted Visions: Spiritualism and American Art (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
168
prior to the emergence of spirit photography in the early 1860s (which also took place in
Boston). Within a few years, the international Spiritualist network buzzed with accounts
of spirit-drawings manifesting in England, France, and Australia.
53

What mattered in most of these accounts was not only what spirit-drawings
depicted, but also who had drawn it. Historians of Spiritualism have argued that the
spiritual authority of mediumship expanded women’s opportunity for self-assertion; at
the same time, ironically, women made particularly persuasive mediums, precisely
because their gender was perceived as too submissive by nature to dissimulate the bold
pronouncements of the spirits.
54
Amateur spirit-drawing mediums occupied a similar
position; mediumship provided amateur artists with critical attention they would not
otherwise have received, while the mediums’ lack of artistic training, in theory, enhanced
their credibility. In some cases, drawings that should have required hours appeared in a
matter of seconds, thanks to the collaboration of multiple spirit hands; in other cases,
drawings were produced in total darkness or under blindfold. (The latter had already
served as a test of clairvoyant phenomena in Boston a decade or so earlier, as discussed
in the following chapter.) The amateur’s lack of education, along with these adverse
conditions, demonstrated that spirit-drawings were authentic visions of the unseen,
produced outside the city’s sophisticated visual economy. Gifted with a purer perception
of visible nature, the amateur was ideally situated to perceive invisible nature as well.

53
Coleman, Spiritualism in America; William Howitt, The History of the Supernatural,
(London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, Green, 1863).
54
Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of
Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Ann
Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century
America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).
169
That spirit-drawing and its more technologically sophisticated successor, spirit
photography, appeared first in Boston deserves exploration. For it was there, in a city
swiftly hurtling from its iconoclastic past to its spectacular future, that the myth of the
keen-sighted amateur, receptive to the world that lay beyond a world of imitative and
unnatural forms ruled by urban umpires of taste, enjoyed its greatest appeal. Over a
decade earlier, Transcendentalist critics had insisted that artists could transmit their
visions to the sensitive spectator, bypassing the visible media of canvas and paint. This
theory was plausible enough to draw spectators to Thomas Spear’s copy of a painting
whose original they could easily see as well. Equally important, however, were the
motives of the drawing mediums themselves. The marginal and menial employment
afforded to urban artists, and the elusiveness of achieving an unmediated perception in a
city, likely rendered spirit-drawing mediumship a potential shortcut to respect and
employment, as the cases of two Boston artists who took up spirit-drawing suggest.

Two Boston Spirit-Drawing Mediums: Josiah Wolcott and C.L. Fenton
Born in rural Massachusetts in 1814, and moving to Boston’s North End with his
family in 1820, Josiah Wolcott was part of the very urban migration that would soon
romanticize the rural perceptions it had left behind. Apprenticed to a Boston chair
painter at sixteen, he soon “sighed for something higher,” and found a new master in the
esteemed landscape painter Thomas Doughty between 1832 and 1837.
55
Wolcott first
listed himself as a painter in the 1835 Boston Directory, the year he managed to exhibit
two landscapes at the Boston Athenaeum. Evidently in need of a better living, however,

55
John Worth Edmonds and George T. Dexter, Spiritualism (New York: Partridge &
Brittan, 1853), 487.
170
Wolcott advertised himself just four years later as a “chair painter,” and subsequently
turned to ornamental and sign painting. His difficulty in attaining financial security as an
artist in Boston helps explain why, by 1843, Wolcott joined the community at Brook
Farm, where he hoped to attain not only a more secure living but also a closer study of
nature. (Wolcott’s are the only surviving paintings of the community.) Yet as Brook
Farm failed, Wolcott was induced to return to Boston and seek employment painting
furniture and an abolitionist panorama, and illustrating for the short-lived periodical, The
Carpet-Bag. These jobs proved transient, and he soon abandoned Boston again, this time
to paint carriages in Concord, New Hampshire.
56

This series of professional frustrations offer a potential explanation for Wolcott’s
transition into spirit-drawing in June of 1853. An occasional, though skeptical attendee
of Spiritualist meetings, who was by his own account uncertain of the afterlife, Wolcott
attended a séance in Boston that would give him new direction as an artist. The medium
fell into a trance and reported that she saw herself within a gallery full of paintings. She
then approached Wolcott and pressed her head to his, whereupon he “was presented with
a view of a picture of singular beauty and composition.” After the séance, Wolcott
attempted to depict the image in his brain, and found that “my hand seemed to move with
unusual ease and freedom.” The result was “much more perfect than I thought myself
capable of producing.”
57
The result was Invitation To The Spirit Land (Figure 30).
During the next three weeks, Wolcott received more spirit-pictures from at least
two other mediums. Some appeared to the artist as works of art with perceptible pencil

56
Nancy Osgood, “Josiah Wolcott: Artist and Associationist,” Old Time New England
76, no. 264 (1998): 5–34.
57
Edmonds and Dexter, Spiritualism, 483–484.
171
strokes; others resembled unmediated “reality.” All of them, however, were “wholly
unlike any thing I saw or imagined before.” Despite their apparent similarity to the
landscapes he had created in the past, Wolcott was certain they were not of earthly origin.
As he explained, they could not be the invention of the three mediums through whom he
had received them, “as they have no artistic knowledge”; at the same time, “they can not
be my own imaginings,” he explained, because of their extraordinary clarity:
They are all impressed upon my mind with extreme distinctness, more so than any
pictures I ever saw, and haunt me continually. Something keeps saying within,
‘Paint! Paint !! Paint these Pictures!!!” The spirits insist upon it that I must give
up my present employment and paint the pictures they present me, that the world
may have some visible representations of the glories of the future life.
58

At least one was signed by Raphael, whose spirit, as we will see in a moment, contributed
generously to another struggling artist-turned-drawing medium. Wolcott wished to trade
his “present employment” as a struggling illustrator with a career as a Spiritualist artist,
but needed to support his family; he thus appealed for patronage through a prominent
Spiritualist supporter. “The time has come, I think, when pictorial illustrations will be
demanded for the numerous publications on this subject, and some one of artistic skill,
and knowledge of spiritual things will be required to furnish them.”
59

The complicated relationship between the spectacular city and drawing
mediumship is illustrated in a third Boston spirit-drawing episode that occurred more or
less simultaneously with John Murray Spear’s and Josiah Wolcott’s. In 1854, the
respected Boston Unitarian minister Allen Putnam, supposed by Spiritualism’s first
historian to have “induced a vast number of persons” to join the movement, found
incontrovertible proof of Spiritualism’s truth through a local drawing medium. A recent

58
Ibid., 484.
59
Ibid., 492.
172
but enthusiastic convert to the movement, Putnam was contacted by the spirit of a New
England boy named Natty, some forty years deceased.
60
According to Putnam’s
account, when Natty adopted him as his father, he had expressed his desire to see Natty
himself; and so, the impish boy declared he would manifest himself through the help of a
local artist.
In Natty, a Spirit: His Portrait and His Life, the minister explained that this idea
originated during a visit with a medium of his acquaintance, possible the woman “just
come to Boston from the country” he described in his previous publication:
At one of my calls upon Miss Fanny Bugbee, medium, in the autumn of 1854,
there were shown to me some drawings, executed by her hand, though she denied
all consciousness of mental action when the work was going on. While we were
in conversation about the merits of the work, and the process by which it was
produced, "Little Natty" displaced her from her own organism, and, taking hold of
it himself, commenced a playful chat with me. Among other things, I said to him,
"Who moves and guides this medium's hand while it forms these flowers?"—"
Ben[jamin] West," he answered.—“Good, Natty, good!" said I; "for if that famous
painter is at work here, he can sketch for me your likeness."— "You shall have it,
father” was his quick rejoinder.
61

There were limits, however, to what the spirit could achieve, especially when it
came to Benjamin West-quality portraiture; Bugbee could not complete Natty’s portrait,
not because she lacked the artistic skill, but because her brain proved insufficiently
“impressible” to complete Natty’s portrait. Fortunately, another solution presented
himself: Natty appeared again in the spring of 1855 through another medium, and begged
to be taken shopping for his own likeness. Guided by Natty, the second medium scoured
the print shops of Hanover, Court, and Washington Streets, finally locating a French

60
Emma Hardinge Britten, Modern American Spiritualism: A Twenty Years’ Record of
the Communion Between Earth and the World of Spirits (New York: by the author,
1870), 167.
61
Allen Putnam, Natty, a Spirit: His Portrait and His Life (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1856), 9.
173
lithograph of a boy whom Natty confirmed to be himself. “Here was evidence that
spiritual vision was in harmony with external vision,” Putnam explained. Two other
clairvoyant mediums independently confirmed that the boy in the print was the spirit they
saw hovering around Putnam.
Soon after, Putnam learned from the original medium, Fanny Bugbee, the story
behind Natty’s manifestation in a print shop on Washington Street. Through Natty’s
influence, the spirit of Benjamin West had “daguerreotyped” Natty’s image onto the
brain of an artist a few years earlier, as the latter sketched a landscape in France; the spirit
then contrived in guiding the portrait into lithographic form, and subsequently to the
market in New York and Boston. Aided by spirits, the artist’s original perception
managed to find its way to Putnam through the mechanical reproduction and retail
process. “There is no other like it in the city,” Natty insisted.
62

To test Natty’s account, Putnam decided to see if the portrait was indeed unique.
Putnam scoured the city’s numerous print shops looking for a second copy of the print;
when he discovered one that was practically identical, he was thrown into doubt. Yet by
carefully comparing the two prints, Putnam was relieved to discover slight differences in
the expression of the eyes and the coloring. Though such differences routinely occurred
as a consequence of the collaborative labor process that dominated printmaking by that
time, Putnam patiently concluded that Natty had essentially told the truth; only the spirit
did not impress the artist during the original sketching, but only during the coloring
process.

62
Ibid., 20, 21.
174
Perhaps having recognized how he had tested Putnam’s confidence, Natty
(speaking, as always, through his medium) insisted on having his portrait painted by an
obscure and unsuccessful local artist, C. L. Fenton. On arriving at the artist’s studio,
Putnam learned that although Fenton was “not exactly a believer in Spiritualism,” Fenton
did have an interest in spiritual matters, and was willing to take the job. Putnam gave it
to him, despite—or perhaps because—the works exhibited in Fenton’s studio suggested
the artist was not “well suited to execute the delicate work I had in view.”
63
For though
Fenton was a professional, he was far from skilled enough to execute a fraud; an inspired
portrait from his hand would confirm Natty’s existence, and by extension, Spiritualism
itself. Much of Putnam’s account thus dealt with Fenton’s difficulty in completing the
portrait, until he was struck with a vision of Natty.
64
Still, when the three mediums who
had independently seen Natty attended the unveiling of Fenton’s work, its correctness
and beauty dumbfounded them. As Natty explained through the mediums, the work
represented a collaboration of history’s greatest “painter-angels,” “Raphael, Michael
Angelo, and Ben West,” who planted the vision of Natty into Fenton’s brain. Its spiritual
and aesthetic achievement were identical: Natty’s portrait was a “dawning hour of new
triumphs in the art of painting” which the writer, giving his address in Roxbury, invited
all Spiritualism’s skeptics to come and see.
65
By becoming a medium for the old masters,

63
Ibid., 28.
64
The tendency of Spiritualist accounts to redact or omit the names of practitioners
makes difficult to establish direct social links among these various drawing mediums.
However, it is more than possible that Wolcott and Fenton were inspired (in the secular
sense) by John Murray Spear’s drawing mediumship. This would explain why so many
incidents occurred almost simultaneously in 1853.
65
Putnam, Natty, a Spirit, 61–62.
175
Fenton earned the patronage of a noted minister and converted his lack of professional
credibility as an artist into an asset.

Conclusion
Especially well-documented, the Natty incident alerts us to the ways in which the
anxieties of urban spectatorship helped invert the ideals of artistic training, providing
space and credibility for the spirit-drawing medium. The authority of spirit-drawing
emerged from an urban visual culture deeply invested in the moral influence of vision,
yet highly anxious about the way that force was mediated through the urban complex of
galleries, print shops, hack drawing masters, and umpires of taste. Even though Fenton
was a working urban artist, the Spiritualists around him stressed his inexperience, which
made him the most “amateur” of artists actually capable of depicting Natty. Like Spear
and his “finished” version of Belshazzar’s Feast, Fenton’s “vision” and status were
products of the urban spectator’s desire to see art without acknowledging its commercial
and materialistic nature.
Approximately a decade after the spirits began expressing themselves through
John Murray Spear’s hand, a Boston engraver by the name of William Mumler began
experimenting with what may be considered spirit-drawing’s improved version,
spirit photography. Within a decade, Mumler’s name would become infamous when he
was put on trial for hoaxing his photography studio clients with ghostly images of their
deceased friends and loved ones.
66
In the meantime, Mumler’s path resembled Spear’s:
by claiming a method of rendering the invisible world, he rose above the competitive

66
Louis Kaplan, The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
176
world of urban artists and artisans. Yet his craft, and spirit-drawing itself, owed a more
direct debt to the principle, honed at the Athenaeum, the Temple School, and Brook
Farm, that the best vehicle for expressing a spiritual vision was that least mediated by
human artifice. The camera, many supposed, saw the world with a truth and an absence
of guile that only the child and the rare artist could claim.
Boston’s importance as a center of Spiritualism owed to many factors beyond its
spectacular culture; yet that culture, and its conflicting commitments to its iconoclastic
past and spectacular present, provided the terms through which Spiritualism marked the
important boundaries of the visible and the invisible. Ultimately, however, Spiritualism
did not allow many artists, amateur or otherwise, to transcend urban competition.
Spiritualism’s great success in 1850s Boston helped transform it into a business; by the
next decade, paid mediums even advertised in the Directory.
67
This commercial spirit
helps explain why, at the decade’s end, a group of Harvard’s most prominent professors
investigated the phenomenon (with the assistance of Putnam) and declared it a fraud.
Though supporters were undeterred, the setting of Spiritualist gatherings shifted from
Boston’s meeting halls to camp meetings in suburban or rural areas such as Walden.
68
“I
saw, upon reflection, that we could not hope to succeed in the atmosphere of a
mercenary, professional mediumism,” says a medium in William Dean Howell’s
Spiritualist-themed novel The Undiscovered Country, explaining his decision to leave

67
At least four did so in 1862. See Boston Directory (Boston: Adams, Sampson, &
Company, 1862), 236, 248, 345, 444.
68
For the Harvard investigation’s causes and effects, see R. Laurence Moore,
“Spiritualism and Science: Reflections on the First Decade of the Spirit Rappings,”
American Quarterly 24, no. 4 (October 1, 1972): 474–500; for Spiritualism’s
suburbanization, see William D. Moore, “‘To Hold Communion with Nature and the
Spirit-World’: New England’s Spiritualist Camp Meetings, 1865-1910,” Perspectives in
Vernacular Architecture 7 (January 1, 1997): 230–248.
177
Boston for the suburbs.
69
Shaped by desire of the urban middle class to protect its
perception from the spectacular city, spirit-drawing mediumship was not destined to
survive there for long.
The amateur artist and her spirit-drawing offspring was not the only urban figure
whose visions transcended the city, however. Just as amateurs were idealized because of
their visual inexperience, so even less experienced spectators, the blind, provided
spectacle-dazzled Bostonians with a coveted channel to the unseen world.

69
William Dean Howells, The Undiscovered Country (New York: Houghton, Mifflin and
Company, 1880), 181.
178
From Spectators to Visionaries:
Visual Culture and the Transformation of Boston, 1820-1860

Chapter 5:

The Education of Boston’s Blind and the
Performance of Clairvoyance

In 1835, the Boston resident Abram V. Courtney opened his autobiography,
Anecdotes of the Blind, by explaining his reasons for writing it. “I have observed that
men generally take an interest in matters relating to the blind, or others deprived of the
ordinary means of communicating with their fellows,” Courtney offered, adding that it
was not sympathy or pity alone which accounted for the public’s interest in the blind, but
psychological curiosity: “The study of the means whereby persons so deprived gain
knowledge, cannot be indifferent to anyone who wishes to know and understand his own
mind.”
1
Courtney’s confidence owed directly to the culture of spectatorship that had
emerged in Boston over the last decade-and-a-half. Though the first American to write
an autobiography focused on its author’s visual impairment, he and dozens of subsequent
19th-century American blind autobiographers enjoyed a large middle-class audience.
That audience was keenly aware of the importance of vision to genteel urban-dwellers
entering the new spectacular world of galleries, monuments, theaters, and other visual
attractions. Eager to know what sight could and could not teach, the sighted middle class

1
Abram V. Courtney, Anecdotes of the Blind (Boston: s.n., 1835), 3.
179
discovered that it had not only new reasons to pity the blind, but new lessons to learn
from them.
The most perceptive of the antebellum blind understood this. As a sojourner at
the nation’s first school for the blind, Boston’s recently established New England Asylum
for the Blind (later renamed the Perkins Institution, then the Perkins School), Courtney
had experienced firsthand the public’s growing interest in the blind. In the 1830s and
beyond, the New England Asylum for the Blind regularly organized public exhibitions of
its pupils, published widely read reports of their progress, and attracted such famous
visitors as Charles Dickens and Davy Crockett, the latter of whom “was not a little
astonished” at being led by Courtney from the Tremont House to the Asylum, as his
proud guide later boasted.
2
If live audiences and eminent figures were interested in and
even astonished by the blind, it was a safe bet that ordinary American readers might be as
well. Indeed, Courtney’s autobiography was only the first of dozens in its genre. Soon
after its appearance, moreover, numerous clairvoyants came to the attention of the New
England public by performing remarkable feats—reading books, locating tumors,
discovering buried treasure—while under the temporary or permanent handicap of
blindness.
These clairvoyant demonstrations proved an inadvertent outgrowth of the urban
visual self-culture cultivated by the Harvard Unitarian establishment—the same
establishment, ironically, that would ultimately dismiss their visions, and empanel
rationalist experts to debunk them. As discussed throughout this dissertation, that elite
sought to spread its moral and aesthetic ideals (and thus its authority) through local

2
Ibid., 26.
180
landmarks, vistas, and galleries in the 1820s and 1830s. Undergirding this campaign was
the pious celebration of sight: the notion that that the eye’s sophisticated physiology and
the inexplicable phenomenon of perception it enabled could have arisen only through
divine providence. By celebrating ordinary vision as a divine gift, Boston’s Unitarians
hoped in a singled stroke to undercut their various challengers: visionary prophets who
claimed direct access to the invisible, skeptics who denied the existence of the invisible,
and class critics who challenged the liberal elites’ pursuit of refinement as an
extravagance unsuited to a Protestant republic.
The blind served as actors in this drama, as well as symbols of both the
advantages and dangers of urban spectatorship. For their champions, the blind
demonstrated that through careful attention, the poor could overcome the educational
disadvantages that attended their class and avoid the sensory temptations of their
environment. Though sight was not necessary, it was a tremendous gift that ought not be
abused. The educators, writers, ministers and philanthropists who championed the blind
succeeded in sentimentalizing the blind. Inadvertently, however, their lectures,
exhibitions, and writings on the blind also encouraged broader questions about what the
blind saw, and how vision might transcend its physiological basis in the eye. For as
Boston’s middle class grappled with the problem of cultivating its vision in an
environment plagued by disorder, sensualism and materialism, the blind served as models
of clairvoyant vision in much the same way that amateur artists became models of
Spiritualist inspiration. Once more, urban didactic visual culture catalyzed the visionary
impulse in ways that elites had never intended.

181
The Reconstruction of Blindness in Liberal Protestant New England
Antebellum Bostonians’ interest in the blind stemmed in part, but only in part,
from their enthusiasm for charity. Boston was an epicenter of philanthropy, much of it
directed by an increasingly powerful and wealthy class of Unitarians and other liberal
Protestants who had abandoned Calvinist pessimism about humanity’s innately and
intractably sinful nature, and embraced instead more optimistic views of human
perfectibility.
3
By 1840, the city supported, either through private or public funding,
thirty charitable institutions, and provided indispensable leadership for the asylum
movement.
4
Even so, if the sympathetic fascination with the blind in 1830s Boston were
fueled only by a growing humanitarian zeal and a desire for social order, one would
expect a much more equitable distribution of interest among the disadvantaged groups
receiving charitable support. Instead, it is clear that few if any of the many groups
targeted by reformers, from juvenile delinquents to convicts to orphans to the mentally
ill, received as much publicity, or evoked as much fascination, as did the blind in the
1830s. No ward of Boston’s numerous other asylums gained a fraction of the fame

3
As one scholar has argued, the battle between these optimistic Unitarians and their
pessimistic peers provided the basis for the secular reform culture that eventually took
hold throughout the nation. Conrad Edick Wright, The Transformation of Charity in
Postrevolutionary New England (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992); David J.
Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic
(New York: Little, Brown, 1971); T. Gregory Garvey, Creating the Culture of Reform in
Antebellum America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 72.
4
Among the charitable organizations listed in an 1830 address by Josiah Quincy, for
instance, were the Humane Society, the Boston Dispensary for the Medical Relief of the
Poor, the Massachusetts Charitable Society, the Boston Penitent Female Refuge Society,
the Boston Fragment Society, the Boston Female Asylum, the Boston Society for the
Religious and Moral Instruction of the Poor, the Boston Asylum for Indigent Boys, the
Fatherless and Widows’ Society, the Howard Benevolent Society, the Seamen’s Friend
Society, and numerous others. Josiah Quincy, An Address to the Citizens of Boston
(Boston: J.H. Eastburn, 1830), 65–66.
182
enjoyed by Laura Bridgman, the most famous child in America, and no other institution
drew as steady a stream of visitors as the Perkins school.
5
Courtney understood that the
blind had become more than an object of acute sympathy; they had been given a
“notoriety,” he claimed, that was “not at all enviable.”
6

A century earlier, Courtney and other antebellum blind autobiographers would not
have found as much popular interest in their psychological insights into blindness. In
early 18th-century New England, the blind were treated much the same as the poor; their
claim to charity derived less from their sensory deprivation per se than from their
typically marginal economic status. The blind were treated as indigents, particularly
when they wandered outside their own communities.
7
As in real life, fictional
Anglophone representations of the blind prior to the 19th century tended to treat them as
members of an underclass. Blind beggars abounded on stage and in print, not because the
affluent were impervious to blindness, but rather because poverty was more pathetic than
sensory deprivation.
8
The blind were owed sympathy less for their disability per se than

5
Elisabeth Gitter, The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, The
Original Deaf-Blind Girl (New York: Macmillan, 2002); Ernest Freeberg, The Education
of Laura Bridgman (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001).
6
Courtney, Anecdotes of the Blind, 3.
7
Thus, Boston's selectmen noted in 1718 that “Thomas More a blind man, belonging to
Virginia” was warned to depart after two weeks, while the same treatment was given to
“John Ballow a Sickley man very Poor.” On the other hand, in 1721 the Massachusetts
House of Representatives reimbursed a John Billings six pounds for having supported
“John Woconconick, a blind Indian, who lost his Sight in the Publick Service” for the
past year, suggesting that Billings’ town offered the blind the same relief typically given
to other local indigents. A Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston,
Containing the Records of Boston Selectmen, 1716–1736 (Boston: Rockwell and
Churchill, 1885), 40–41; Journals of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts:
1721-22 (Boston: MHS, 1922), 28.
8
Such for instance was the narrative of the popular story, “Blind Beggar of Bethnal
Green,” in which a famous aristocrat lost his sight in battle and became a mendicant. A
recent work explores the foundations of this association between poverty and blindness in
183
because of its economic implications. In Puritan New England, blindness was often
deemed a sinner’s punishment, relievable only by specific acts of Providence. Increase
Mather recorded accounts of liars being struck with blindness, while his son Cotton
interpreted rare instances of literacy among the blind as sure instances of divine
intervention.
9
Relievable by divine intervention but not by human agency, physical
blindness was treated by clergy as an effective analogy for the equally intractable
spiritual condition of New England’s sinners.
10

By the Second Great Awakening, however, as substantial numbers of New
Englanders embraced evangelical doctrines, they reconceived physical blindness not
simply as an analogy for spiritual blindness, but as a path to regeneration. Typical for
instance was the New England Tract Society’s Happy Poverty, or the Story of Poor Blind
Ellen (1815): a “well-authenticated narrative” of a long-suffering woman who, though
blind since the age of six, “maintained herself… without any assistance from the parish,”
and contrived to live on only a shilling a week in a small hovel. Thanks to the grace of
God, the contentedly blind Ellen faithfully attended church, supported herself by spinning
silk, and even cared for an even more disabled woman, upending the earlier assumption
that the blind should receive in-house relief.
11
In the 1794 broadside The Experiences of

medieval Europe: Edward Wheatley, Stumbling Blocks Before the Blind: Medieval
Constructions of a Disability (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010).
9
Increase Mather, Remarkable Providences Illustrative of the Earlier Days of American
Colonisation (London: Reeves and Turner, 1890), 252–253; Cotton Mather, The
Christian Philosopher: A Collection of the Best Discoveries in Nature, with Religious
Improvements (Middlesex, Massachusetts: J. M’Kown, 1815), 302.
10
See “Men’s Natural Blindness, in the Things of Religion,” in Jonathan Edwards, The
Works of President Edwards (New York: Leavitt, Trow, 1844), 32.
11
Happy Poverty, or the Story of Poor Blind Ellen (Boston: New England Tract Society,
1815), 1,4,5; Blind Willie, Or, the Way to Heaven (Boston: American Tract Society,
184
Nancy Welch, a Blind Woman, a Marblehead, Massachusetts woman blind since infancy
described how conversion helped her endure her blindness: “If I have lost my natural
sight,/ Yet I can prize that greater light.”
12
In his autobiographical narrative, the English
sailor James Downing claimed that it was not until he became blind that he gave up his
violent, intemperate, and sinful habits. The same was true of the titular blind character in
The Blind Man & Little George, written by one of the most popular authors of children’s
literature in Boston, British evangelical Mary Martha Sherwood. After suffering his
affliction and experiencing “darkness within, and darkness without,” Sherwood’s blind
man at last turned to God. His story of spiritual redemption helped reform its audience,
the sighted truant Little George.
13

Despite embracing blindness’s power to humble the spirit, early national
Bostonians did not imagine that the condition conferred any Romantic interior visions.
Instead, they remained preoccupied by the economic implications of blindness—
implications made increasingly unavoidable by the efforts of relief societies, the
expansion of urban slums, as well as by what one scholar has called a “market revolution
in vision” that transformed normal vision into a commodity for the growing number of
clerical workers who depended on their eyes.
14
Though both rich and poor suffered eye
trouble, blindness continued to bring images of beggars and street organ grinders to the
minds of urban Americans: “Whoever would study the diseases of the eyes must pass by

1800); James Downing, A Narrative of the Life of James Downing, (a Blind Man,) Late a
Private in His Majesty’s 20th Regiment of Foot (New York: J.C. Totten, 1821).
12
Nancy Welch, The Experiences of Nancy Welch, a Blind Woman; Together with Lines
for a Family of Her Acquintance (Composed by herself). [Boston?: s.n., not before 1794].
13
Mary Martha Sherwood, The Blind Man & Little George (Boston: Samuel T.
Armstrong, 1823), 9.
14
P.J. Brownlee, “Ophthalmology, Popular Physiology, and the Market Revolution in
Vision, 1800–1850,” Journal of the Early Republic 28, no. 4 (2008): 597–626.
185
the houses of the affluent and enter those of the poor,” noted Edward Reynolds, co-
founder of the Boston Eye Infirmary.
15
Yet despite the lingering associations of poverty
and sin, few antebellum clergymen in Boston or elsewhere imagined any longer that
blindness was a just punishment. As a consequence, the blind proved useful for
philanthropic Americans seeking symbols of virtuous poverty. “In ninety-nine cases out
of a hundred, blindness arises from causes beyond the control of the individual afflicted
with it,” opined the New Yorker in 1839, writing in support of the state’s blind asylum. At
a time when middle-class and affluent urban Americans worried about widening
inequality and supported the growth of the vicious poor, they assuaged their consciences
by supporting the best of the poor—the blind, who were thought “less inclined—because
under less temptation—to low vices than the average of persons in the same walks of
life.”
16
Even so, these pure objects of sympathy were not yet the spiritual visionaries
they would become in the early antebellum period. In Boston, that contribution would be
the work of Unitarians, not evangelicals.

Middle-Class Encounters with Boston’s Blind
The more optimistic view of human nature that took hold in late-18th-century
liberal Protestant New England encouraged new efforts to educate the blind. In the
1810s, for instance, the writer and antiquarian Thomas Wallcut and other Boston
gentlemen arranged to secure the education of a blind boy named John Few.
17
A decade
later, as Unitarian reformers in Boston learned of the establishment of progressive

15
Edward Reynolds, An Address at the Dedication of the New Building of the
Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, July 3, 1850 (Boston: C.C.P. Moody, 1850), 15.
16
“The New-York Institution for the Blind,” The New-Yorker 7, no. 13 (1839), 237.
17
Thomas Wallcut, Thomas Wallcut Papers, reel 2, MHS.
186
schools for the blind in Europe, they grew determined to set up a similar institution.
After visiting Paris’s blind asylum in the late 1820s, the physician John Dix Fisher
decided to establish the first American institution for educating the blind, choosing the
crusading reformer Samuel Gridley Howe as its director. Exemplifying liberal
Bostonians’ faith in human perfectibility, the Perkins school would serve as a national
model for blind education throughout the century.
18

One of the inadvertent effects of the establishment of such schools, first in Boston
and later in Baltimore, New York, and other American cities, was the dilution of the
association between blindness and poverty. Middle-class families now had a reason to
send their blind children to Perkins, located for most of its early existence in a handsome
mansion next-door to the Boston Athenaeum on Pearl Street—comfortably removed, in
other words, from the almshouses and exposed streets where the public traditionally
encountered the blind.
19
While the Perkins school served very few people compared to
most other charitable institutions in Boston, it received more publicity than the rest of
them combined.
20
Perhaps the most potent symbol of Boston’s newfound interest in the
blind was the elaborate fair organized for the benefit of the Perkins school in 1833.
Prompted by Thomas Handasyd Perkins’s offer to donate his mansion to the school if its
supporters could raise the very significant endowment of fifty thousand dollars, a group
of socially prominent Boston women organized a massive four-day charity bazaar in May

18
Gordon Phillips, The Blind in British Society: Charity, State and Community, c. 1780-
1930 (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2004).
19
Gitter, The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, The Original Deaf-
Blind Girl; Freeberg, The Education of Laura Bridgman.
20
Beginning with a class of six, the Perkins School admitted only ten students in 1835.
The Boston Eye Infirmary, by contrast, saw 886 patients its first month. "Dr. Edward
Reynolds," Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, 106, 1 (1882): 20.
187
1833. These organizers converted Faneuil Hall into what organizers and journalists
described as a fairy wonderland, stationing Perkins students next to tables of luxurious
goods operated by the daughters and wives of the city’s leading merchants, some of
whom played the role of fairies. Fifteen thousand tickets sold in a city of less than sixty
thousand; the fair was remembered a half-century later in one newspaper as the most
significant social event of the decade.
21
Well-clothed and groomed, the blind at the fair
appeared to need educational opportunities more than they did basic necessities.
Assigning reason to the blind and demonstrating their desire to learn and improve
themselves, sympathetic liberal Protestants began to re-conceive blindness as a state, not
of economic disability, but of intellectual, sentimental, and aesthetic deprivation. That
deprivation could be partly, yet never fully, relieved. From the time of Perkins’s
founding, the blind were regarded as aesthetes who could appreciate nature’s visible
beauties, but were tragically denied them. “When you look at the bright flowers and fair
skies of summer, think with compassion of her [the famous Connecticut deaf-blind
woman Julia Brace], who must never see the face of her fellow creatures, or the beauty of
earth and sky,” the Juvenile Miscellany instructed its young readers in 1828.
22
“The sun,
moon and stars, never enter my mind / Oh! Tell me what light is!” lamented
Massachusetts poet Hannah F. Gould. Her wildly popular “Song of the Blind Boy” went
into at least twenty editions by 1842, proved a hit on the Boston stage, and helped to
spread progressive views of the blind outside of New England. According to New
York’s The Knickerbocker, “there are doubtless few of our readers, especially in the

21
“The Treasury,” The Liberator, (Boston, MA) Saturday, May 11, 1833; pg. 75; Issue
19; col D; “The Fair of 1833,” Boston Evening Transcript, December 17, 1887, 18.
22
Lydia Sigourney, “The Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Girl,” Juvenile Miscellany, Or, Friend
of Youth 4, no. 2 (1828): 141.
188
cities of the Northern and Middle States, who have not listened with deep interest” to
Gould’s song. That “deep interest” derived from a partial decoupling of sense and
sensibility. The blind were depicted as hungry for a glimpse of visible nature, yet
extremely sensible to singing. “Upon their ears each intonation of the voice falls with a
deeper meaning, a more intense and thrilling power, than upon the ears of those whose
senses take in a wider range of observation or happiness,” explained the article. This
sensibility, alas, went unnourished, for the blind rarely had the opportunity to hear music.
“Yet, with this keen perception of the modulations of the human voice, how rarely have
they opportunities of hearing it in all its wondrous capacity!”
23
Sensible enough to enjoy
genteel status, yet denied sensation, the blind were ripe for the sympathy of a middle
class that visited the Athenaeum and the theater, enjoyed Boston Common, and prided
itself precisely on its own well-refined sense of sight.
This new bourgeois conception of the blind was promoted before a larger
audience through events such as the 1833 Fair for the Blind at Faneuil Hall. The fair
dramatized the sensory gap that divided the blind and the sighted, as the latter took in the
fashionable spectacle of affluence, luxury goods, and fairy-like décor that the blind could
not see. Such spectacles were expressly intended to overwhelm and enchant the senses.
Amid the “Grotta of Flora,” one journalist recounted being “struck with a melancholy
pleasure” after seeing “two interesting blind girls, clad in white—wreathed with garlands,
and holding forth in their hands little bouquets” which the writer lamented they could not
enjoy. “Poor cherubs! they passed that bright and beaming day, as they pass all theirs—

23
“Music Among The Blind,” Knickerbocker 30, no. 6 (1847), 548.
189
in total darkness!”
24
A generation of New England women writers, including Frances
Osgood, Hannah Gould, and Lydia Sigourney, deployed these fairs as backdrops for their
sentimental musings on blind sensibility. Sigourney’s 1827 poem “The Deaf, Dumb, and
Blind Girl at a Festival” lamented the young girl who sits “with drooping head” in
“solitary gloom” amid so much “smile and song and mirth.”
25
“Yet, blest in vision’s
radiant light/ and grateful for the gift of sight,/ Oh! stranger, come! We’ll show you all/
the treasures of our crowded hall,” Osgood similarly promised sighted readers of her
1833 Sketches for the Fair.
26
Such fairs were, paradoxically, highly stimulating
spectacles of insensibility, in which the sighted had occasion to feel grateful for the gift
of sight, not for economic reasons, but for its own sake.
Starting with Courtney in 1835, students of the Perkins school and other
institutions for the blind took advantage of growing middle-class interest in the blind by
publishing autobiographies. As an itinerant book peddler who earned his living from the
rapidly expanding print culture of the antebellum period, Courtney was undoubtedly
aware that readers were eager to read works by socially unpolished authors such as
himself.
27
In coming to print for the first time, these ordinary blind individuals both

24
“The Boston May Fair,” The North American Magazine 2 (1833): 97.
25
Lydia Howard Sigourney, Poems by the Author of Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse
(Boston: S. G. Goodrich, 1827), 223.
26
[Frances Sargent Locke Osgood], Sketches for the Fair (Boston: s.n., 1833), 15.
27
In the next four decades, approximately 20 personal accounts of blindness appeared in
book or pamphlet form in the United States; this small but influential genre helped shape
public perceptions of the blind in particular and the disabled in general. Justin Clark,
“The Origins of Blind Autobiography in Visionary Antebellum New England,” The New
England Quarterly 87, no. 2 (June 2014). The social marginality of their authors, and the
truthfulness such marginality implied, provided much of their appeal for middle-class
readers. Ann Fabian, The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century
America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002): 228-251. For a reading of two
190
exploited and critiqued the contradictory sentimentalism and triumphalism of their
sighted advocates. As Benjamin Bowen, a member of Perkins’ first class, explained in A
Blind Man’s Offering (1847), “On leaving the institution, I returned to my native town,
penetrated with a more profound consciousness of the deprivation to which I was
subjected, without being able to do much more than before I entered the institution, to
overcome its defects.” Echoing fellow autobiographer Frederick Douglass’s observation
that becoming literate had only worsened his unhappiness in captivity, Bowen’s
complaint called into question the grandiose claims for self-culture made in the Athens of
America. On returning to his native Marblehead, Bowen learned that “my knowledge of
History, Geography, Mathematics, Natural, Moral and Intellectual Philosophy, was
superior to that of my brothers and sisters, who, previous to my entering the [Perkins]
institution, had enjoyed greater advantages,” yet Bowen couldn’t find employment, and
“still I found the difficulties of obtaining an independent subsistence for myself not only
undiminished, but even increased.”
28
Bowen’s ultimate solution was to become a
travelling lecturer, telling his story, including that of his failure to find employment after
Perkins, to paying audiences.
29

Simultaneously endorsing new notions about the humanity of the blind, Bowen’s
complaint echoed that of many 19th-century labor organizers, that the sort of work which
would furnish him a living (in his case, weaving “Manilla mats” for fourteen hours a day)

blind autobiographies, see Mary Klages, Woeful Afflictions: Disability and Sentimentality
in Victorian America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).
28
Benjamin B. Bowen, A Blind Man’s Offering (Boston: by the author, 1847), 16.
29
Shortly before the publication of his book, Bowen wrote letters to Samuel Gridley
Howe suggesting that the two had experienced some form of falling out over unspecified
attacks made on his character by the editor of the Boston Journal. It is possible that
Bowen’s remarks had angered Howe. Benjamin B. Bowen, July 21, 1846, Perkins Bound
Correspondence, PSB.
191
left no time for mental cultivation. Such deprivation was all the more painful to those for
whom “the material world can afford… but little gratification.” For an earlier generation,
it would have been unnecessary for the blind to remind the sighted of their economic
hardships. Now, however, the very success of liberal Protestant reformers in recasting
blindness as a struggle of sensibility rather than class, and in convincing themselves that
the blind were being well-cared for, forced Bowen to remind his readers and listeners that
it wasn’t true, “as it has been frequently supposed,” that “the misfortune of blindness
protects the individual from the vicissitudes and casualties to which others are
subjected.”
30

By creating interest in the blind and presenting them as equals, the Perkins school
had furnished its graduates with an opportunity to challenge their sentimental caricatures.
Yet the voices of the blind were few in a sea of sighted sentimental writers by then apt to
see the blind not as an economic underclass, but as sight-impaired versions of
themselves. Publications such as The Token, a gift annual popular with genteel
Bostonians, included poems such as “The Blind Mother” which celebrated the kindness
of a loving daughter who guides her mother past the unseen glories of a forest walk,
patiently describing their beauty. Read largely by liberal Protestants, the publication
eschewed the evangelical emphasis on the rewards of humility in the blind seen in
narratives such as Poor Blind Ellen. The narrative instead laments that the mother cannot
enjoy such natural splendors as “evening’s dewy light” and the “hazels cluster fair.”

30
Bowen, A Blind Man’s Offering, 17–18.
192
“Alas, dear mother, for thy clouded eye!” cries the writer.
31
The blind mother’s
deprivation was aesthetic and sentimental, not economic.
The illustration accompanying “The Blind Mother,” surrounding the blind
individual with the unseen charms of the forest, appears to have resonated with Boston’s
middle-class readers, for it was referenced in another novella centering on a bourgeois
character. The Blind Made Happy (1837) tells of a genteel Boston family who receives a
visit from the child of a distant family friend, and together pay an educational visit to the
Perkins school. The story opens with the Boston children finding their mother in the
parlor, tearfully examining an engraving identical to that printed in The Token: a young
woman helping her mother cross a bridge over a stream. The mother explains she had
been reminded of a close friend from her village whose mother, a woman accustomed to
“luxury and splendour,” went blind in middle age. The once wealthy, and now widowed
and blind Mrs. Norris had not suffered poverty and experienced spiritual submission as
Poor Blind Ellen, though she was forced to live a more modest, but thoroughly middle-
class lifestyle—a lesson proposed by many writers on domesticity during the economic
panic that broke out that year.
32
Mrs. Norris turns to charity work, producing clothing for
the poor. While the stated moral echoed that of Poor Blind Ellen, “to learn much from
these examples of persons who were so industrious, patient, and persevering,” The Blind
Made Happy’s heroine is solidly middle-class, and her sufferings have less to do with

31
Samuel Griswold Goodrich, ed., The Token: A Christmas and New Year’s Present
(Boston: Gray and Bowen, 1831), 187.
32
See for instance Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee, Three Experiments of Living: Living
Within the Means, Living Up to the Means, Living Beyond the Means (Boston: W. S.
Damrell, S. Colman, 1837).
193
sinful resistance to God’s will than the sentimental deprivations of being unable to see
her daughter’s face.
33

As the blind were transformed from suffering beggars into symbols of bourgeois
moral purity, their example derived less from their patient endurance of a generic
impoverishing affliction than from the specifically visual deprivation of blindness, and
ultimately, the spiritual vision with which the blind were compensated. In Unitarian
author Maria Susanna Cummins’s highly popular sentimental novel The Lamplighter, the
protagonist is fascinated by her friend Emily Graham, whose blindness, and the moral
superiority it confers, evoke an odd mixture of sympathy and admiration. When her
sighted companions try to direct her attention “to one object and another, quite forgetting
for the moment her sad deprivation,” Emily does not express self-pity, but is instead
“quite satisfied with the description she heard, or the pictures which she formed in her
imagination.”
34
Like Blind Ellen, the middle-class Emily Graham was contented with her
condition; unlike Blind Ellen, her problem was not poverty but sensory deprivation itself,
and she compensated for it not with mere faith but through the exercise of her
imagination.
By the late 1820s, New England’s middle-class liberal Protestants no longer saw
the blind as emblems of spiritual blindness, nor generic symbols of poverty, but as proof
of the value of vision itself. Understanding this transition requires us to take a step back
from the blind and examine the meaning of vision more broadly in Unitarian Boston.
There, the blind were used to demonstrate an important tenet of liberal Protestant belief:

33
The Blind Made Happy (New York: Scofield & Voorhies, 1837), 43.
34
Maria Susanna Cummins, The Lamplighter (Boston: J. P. Jewett, 1855), 73.
194
natural sight was a wonder too great for deists to disclaim or for evangelical visions to
upstage.

Promoting the Wonder of Sight in Cambridge and Boston
In the first three decades of the 19th century, Unitarians competed not only with
their orthodox Trinitarian rivals in Congregationalism, but also with two other groups:
the visionary revivalists of the Second Great Awakening and the skeptics and deists who
banded together as the Society of Free Inquirers. As Boston’s population swelled with
newcomers, Unitarian ministers and intellectuals competed for their spiritual allegiance.
In the early 1830s, the clerk Bradley Newcomb Cumings recorded attending the lectures
of such mutual religious rivals as William Ellery Channing, Lyman Beecher, and Charles
Grandison Finney. The messages he received were vastly different. After hearing
Methodist clergyman John Maffitt frighten his audience with “‘the alarming progress of
infidelity, immorality and sin in this Country; there never was a time when we were so
deep in sin,’" Cumings went only nine days later to hear Hosea Ballou, the Universalist
minister, oppositely sermonize on the ever-growing goodness of Christian society.
35

It was clear that men like Cumings, despite their proximity to Boston’s genteel,
Unitarian-dominated upper class, could not be depended to simply follow the faith of
their family or employers. They would have to be persuaded to take the proper Unitarian
path. Eager to arrest the progress of both visionary enthusiasm and hyper-rationalistic
infidelity, Unitarian intellectuals arrived at a creative solution. The Unitarian argument
was strikingly simple: there was indeed a wondrous form of vision, which allowed the

35
Bradley Newcomb Cumings journal, 19 and 28 February 1830, Bradley Newcomb
Cumings Journal, MHS.
195
Christian to commune with the divine. But that vision was entirely rational: it was that of
ordinary eyesight itself. Because of its ordinariness, such vision was often taken for
granted by those gifted with it. The divine gift of ordinary vision could only be properly
appreciated by those to whom it had been denied.
The most important intellectual source for this argument was the curriculum of
natural theology and Scottish Common Sense philosophy established at Harvard in the
wake of the institution’s early-19th-century Unitarian take-over. By the late 1810s,
William Paley’s Evidences of Christianity had been adopted as a standard textbook in
Cambridge, and his Natural Theology was widely read.
36
While not as original as
sometimes claimed, Bishop Paley’s famous “watchmaker analogy,” which postulated that
the complexity of nature strongly implied the existence of a designing deity, was highly
influential. Paley was the first to apply the argument to the eye, an organ whose
physiology had only recently become a subject of serious scientific interest. Treated as a
simple instrument—a window, essentially—the eye had not been a source of much
interest among Western physicians until the late 18th century.
37
Paley was less interested
in perception itself than in the mechanical complexity of the eye. He and his proponents
explained how eyes received light, but avoided the more vexing question of how this

36
Edgeley Woodman Todd, “Philosophical Ideas at Harvard College, 1817-1837,” The
New England Quarterly 16, no. 1 (March 1, 1943): 63–90; Wendell Glick, “Bishop Paley
in America,” The New England Quarterly 27, no. 3 (September 1, 1954): 347–354.
37
Optics had long been a topic for natural philosophers, but the complex muscular
processes the eye performed in sight were only beginning to be understoon in the late
18th century. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in
the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992); Nicholas Wade,
Natural History of Vision (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000).
196
reception produced vision itself.
38
Paley did not celebrate the wondrousness of visual
perception, but only its instrument, and the eye was only one small element of the human
anatomy he celebrated.
Exposed to Paley’s arguments in the late 1810s, however, Cambridge-trained
ministers and physicians would discover in them an endorsement for the celebration of
the sensory organs. The wonderful anatomy of the eye did not just attest to the existence
of a designer, but implied His support for such empirical pursuits as natural history. “All
the laws of light and of vision, of sound produced, and of sound perceived, are so adapted
to the organs of the outer, and to the delicate sensibilities of the inner man, as to be a
source of perpetual pleasure even where those laws [of nature] are not understood; but of
tenfold pleasure where they are," John Pierpont would sermonize in 1833.
39
Graduating
from Harvard’s Divinity School in 1818, Pierpont had studied at a time when the college,
now under Unitarian control, had begun to adopt a more empirical approach to the study
of science. In 1805, the college appointed William Dandridge Peck as its first professor
of natural history; one of Peck’s first tasks was to establish a botanical garden where
students could observe nature firsthand. In 1815, the college began to take its first active
measures for not simply teaching astronomy as an abstract subject, but for establishing an
observatory.
40
Harvard had begun to replace “science, perceptible only to the intellect,”

38
Severing the physical apparatus of the eye from the spiritual medium of perception left
an intellectual gap in the Paleyites’ account of vision that laid them vulnerable to
Darwinist critique a half-century later. Jessica Riskin, “The Divine Optician,” The
American Historical Review 116, no. 2 (April 1, 2011): 352–370.
39
John Pierpont, On the Moral Influences of Physical Science (Boston: Carter, Hendee,
1833), 6–7.
40
Solon I. Bailey, The History and Work of Harvard Observatory, 1839 to 1927 an
Outline of the Origin, Development, and Researches of the Astronomical Observatory of
197
as Henry Ware, Jr. had disdainfully called it, with a science that offered visible proof of
God’s existence, and glorified empiricism itself (that is, not just knowing, but seeing) in
the process.
The second intellectual foundation for the pious appreciation of vision came from
Harvard Unitarians’ adoption of courses in Scottish Common Sense philosophy. Founded
by Thomas Reid, the new philosophical school supplanted that of John Locke at a critical
moment. In the middle of the 18th century, skeptics such as David Hume had distilled
Lockean sensationalism into a general attack on the possibility of knowing anything
outside of one’s immediate and unreliable perceptions, thereby casting doubt on the
testimony of Scripture and moral knowledge in general. By the 1760s, Reid leapt to
rational Christianity’s rescue by insisting that humanity did indeed possess a common
sense, capable of acting through and yet independently of the five outward senses. Not
surprisingly, works such as Reid’s Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind
(published in 1788 in Scotland, and read at Harvard a few decades later) made prominent
use of the capacity of the sensory disabled. By showing what the blind could know
without seeing, Reid reiterated the Lockean postulate that all knowledge ultimately
derived from the external senses, while adding, critically, that through the operation of
common sense, knowledge might consist in more than just those external perceptions
themselves.
Reid and his peers remained empiricists, and the moral philosophy arguments
Harvard students read in the first decades of the 19th century fell short of a full-fledged
embrace of Romantic intuition. Instead, Common Sense philosophers emphasized the

Harvard College Together with Brief Biographies of Its Leading Members (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1931), 12.
198
Gospel as an account of vicarious sensations. Man was equipped with sufficient reason
to judge the testimony of his (and others’) senses, including the witnesses of the New
Testament; thus, while its revelations need not be blindly trusted, it nevertheless stood up
to skeptical examination. The Common Sense approach not only encouraged empiricism,
but quietly installed it as the true basis of faith. As one historian has explained, the
Scottish Common Sense thinkers’ “insistence upon the reality of the world and the
trustworthiness of our senses carried a great deal of emotional freight. If the visible
world were not what it seemed, how could men believe in that world which was
invisible?”
41
Whether through direct encounters with visible creation or through the
vicarious sensations of biblical witnesses, natural vision lay at the heart of true faith.
Writing his Christian apologetics at roughly the same time as Paley, Reid
celebrated the eye in a similar fashion. “The structure of the eye, and of all its
appurtenances… do clearly demonstrate this organ to be a masterpiece of nature's work,”
Reid proclaimed. Ultimately, it was not the sighted who most appreciated this
masterpiece, however, but the blind:
If we should suppose an order of beings, endued with every human faculty
but that of sight, how incredible would it appear to such beings,
accustomed only to the slow informations of touch, that by the addition of
an organ, consisting of a ball and socket of an inch diameter, they might
be enabled in an instant of time, without changing their place, to perceive
the disposition of a whole army, or the order of a battle, the figure of a
magnificent palace, or all the variety of a landscape?... How many
mysterious things must a blind man believe, if he will give credit to the

41
“Religious faith, according to Unitarians, was grounded upon testimony, and differed
from sensory knowledge only in not being first-hand. A form of vicarious sensation,
religious faith was, in the first instance, nothing more than involuntary ‘rational assent to
evidence.’” Daniel Walker Howe, The Unitarian Conscience (Middletown, Connecticut:
Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 31, 35.
199
relations of those that see? Surely he needs as strong a faith as is required
of a good Christian.
42

Popularized by his student Dugald Stewart, Reid’s argument echoed the
traditional Christian position that faith was blind, yet it ironically inferred that faith from
empirical evidence. For just as the blind individual, “if he were candid and tractable,”
would “find reasonable evidence of the reality of this gift [sight] in others, and draw great
advantages from it to himself,” so the Christian could reasonably trust the inspiration of
the authors of scripture, whom, Reid emphasized, had received their inspiration through a
faculty no more supernatural than eyesight.
43
Similarly, if a sighted individual
considered how much he was able to deduce about the invisible operation of the natural
world by using his eyes, he would realize that much of what he sensed about the visible
world transcended raw sensory data. Thus, though eyesight was not a miracle, and the
divine could not be directly seen through it, the eyes constantly assured the reflective
believer that the presence of an invisible world could be inferred from visible nature
itself.
Reid’s commonsense arguments thus rendered faith the only possible outcome of
Enlightenment scientific empiricism, without forcing the believer to reject biblical
revelations or embrace contemporary visions. “Wonderful as the dreams and visions of
prophetic inspiration may appear,” argued another philosopher read at Harvard, “they
surely could not seem more wonderful [to the blind], as a medium of communication,
than that by which the very secrets of the mind, and events apparently the more distant,

42
Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind:
An Inquiry Into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (London: Thomas
Tegg, 1843), 458–459 (emphasis added).
43
Ibid., 461.
200
were made known, through the intervention of a small ball like the eye.”
44
A generation
of Harvard-trained ministers and physicians would absorb this lesson and, starting in the
late 1820s, share it with the public across the Charles River.
One of the key platforms for Unitarian intellectuals to spread their celebration of
vision to the broader public was through lectures on sensation and blindness, such as
those the dry-goods clerk Cumings attended throughout the following decade.
45
In
January of 1830, for instance, Cumings braved “a real cold day” to hear Jerome Van
Crowninshield Smith, port physician and future Boston mayor, lecture at the Boston
Athenaeum from his new pamphlet, Animal Mechanism: The Eye. Born in New
Hampshire in 1800, Smith had graduated in 1818 from Brown, an institution that adopted
many of the same texts as Harvard. Smith followed Paley’s argument in explaining the
anatomy of the eye as well as its perfect adaptation to nature. Yet in characteristic
Unitarian fashion, Smith was careful to use the natural as evidence of, rather than as a
substitute for, the supernatural. He presented the eye as not simply a mechanism of
divinely perfected design, but as a sublime mystery:
No one has been able to explain how or why we see. Although the visual
organs are constructed with such exact references to the laws of light, that
telescopes and microscopes, made upon truly philosophical principles, are
but imitations or modifications of the apparatus of the human eye,—there
is still a difference between the animate and inanimate, the most
wonderful and astonishing. The first is a perceiving instrument; the
second, a receiving.
46

44
Thomas Brown, A Treatise on the Philosophy of the Human Mind: Being the Lectures
of the Late Thomas Brown, M.D.; Abridged, and Distributed According to the Natural
Divisions of the Subject (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Hilliard and Brown, 1827), 187.
45
For Boston’s lecture culture in the 1830s, see Howard M. Wach, “‘Expansive Intellect
and Moral Agency’: Public Culture in Antebellum Boston,” Proceedings of the
Massachusetts Historical Society 107 (January 1, 1995): 30–56.
46
Jerome Van Crowninshield Smith, Animal Mechanism: The Eye (Boston: Carter,
Hendee, and Babcock, 1831), 97.
201

If an expert who knew everything about the eye still regarded it as a wonder, then
a wonder it had to be. When anti-revivalist Unitarian minister Orville Dewey opined in
the Boston-published gift annual The Token a year later, that “Anatomists may explain
the structure of the eye and ear, but they leave inexplicable things behind;—seeing and
hearing are still mysteries,” he was simply echoing the authority of science. Two years
earlier, Dewey had excoriated the “dreams and visions and sights” of revivalists, but the
wonder of natural vision was one he could celebrate.
47

The overlap between Dewey and Smith on the subject of vision was not
accidental. In lecturing on the “wonderful and astonishing” phenomenon of visual
perception, Smith was offering not just scientific knowledge, but a Christian apologetic.
Cumings, who “liked the lecture very well,” recorded that Smith commenced it with the
remark “that the Organ of Vision ought to be sufficient proof of the existence of a God;
and he made the remark at this time, because on Saturday last, he saw a person who
believed in no God.” Such statements could easily be construed as illegal under the
state’s 1782 blasphemy law; indeed, the law was used two years after Smith’s lecture to
imprison Free-Thought leader Charles Knowlton in Cambridge. The target of Smith’s
lecture may have been influenced by, or a member of, Boston’s First Society of Free
Enquirers, which had begun publishing pamphlets a few months earlier, and was in the
process of organizing its own lecture series when Smith took the podium at the

47
“The Mysteries of Life,” The Token, 15; Orville Dewey, Letters of an English
Traveller to His Friend in England, on the “Revivals of Religion” in America (Boston:
Bowles, Dearborn, 1828), 59.
202
Athenaeum.
48
The organization’s claim to embody rational thought may have irked
Smith, a leading physician and until recently the editor of the Medical Intelligencer. In
any case, Smith appears to have taken issue not only with unbelievers, but with
visionaries and their overly credulous followers, as evidenced in his biting 1838 satire of
the clairvoyance fad, A World of Wonders, or Divers Developments, Showing the
Thorough Triumph of Animal Magnetism in New England, published under the
pseudonym Joel Peabody.
49
Smith clearly thought it his duty as both a Christian and an
educated physician to encourage reverence for ocular vision while debunking the claims
of clairvoyant visionaries.
A month later Cumings heard another lecture devoted to natural vision, this time
by the educator John Park, “on Sensation, as a source of knowledge, or the means of
ascertaining truth.” A significant portion of the lecture was devoted to the blind.
Cumings was most impressed by “some interesting anecdotes of blind and deaf persons,
some of which were most incredulous; as for instance, [Park] told of a girl who was born
and had continued perfectly blind, who was engaged in a Mat Factory in France, where
they braided several colors together; told how exactly they would be arranged and put
together and if any mistake were made, would without being told, immediately unbraid
and set all to rights again while the materials were similar.” A week later, Cumings
attended another lecture by Park, this time on “the fallibility of the senses.” Park’s
argument was not that the senses were unreliable, but rather that their evidence needed to

48
Roderick S. French, “Liberation from Man and God in Boston: Abner Kneeland’s
Free-Thought Campaign, 1830-1839,” American Quarterly 32, no. 2 (July 1, 1980): 202–
221.
49
Previous historians have not recognized Peabody as a pseudonym, but Smith’s obituary
makes clear his authorship. “OTHER DEATHS.; DR. JEROME VAN C. SMITH,” The
New York Times, August 22, 1879.
203
be evaluated scientifically. Anyone willing to do so could obtain knowledge through
vicarious sensation.
Drawing an obvious analogy to the evidence of the Gospels, Park asked “if there
was in the audience one who doubted there ever was a Julius Ceaser [sic]; or a Bonaparte,
or any other distinguished person, whom we had never seen; for his part he felt as certain
of it, as if he had seen them; and also of the Battle of Bunker Hill, or any other
remarkable event which had ever occurred.”
50
The blind served as exemplars of rational
assent to vicarious sensation: they had no choice but to place their faith in the senses of
others, and yet they were able to function perfectly well in the world. It seems certain
that Park, like Smith, was concerned with steering the young and impressionable along
the treacherous route between the skeptical materialism of Boston’s Free-Thinkers, and
the supernatural irrationalism of the Second Great Awakening—the Scylla and Charybdis
of 1830s Protestantism. At the Boston Lyceum for Young Ladies, Park educated a
number of Bostonians interested in the blind, including the future Transcendentalist
Margaret Fuller and Frances Osgood, author of Sketches for the Fair, and introduced to
them such empirical instruments for the visual study of natural history as the planetarium,
microscope, and camera lucida. Attending church weekly, Park was a typically
rationalist Unitarian. “His interest in religion was largely a theological one,” according to
a biographical sketch. “He had little patience with the religious mysticism that was
creeping into the Unitarian pulpits.”
51
Even if Park disavowed the Transcendentalists’

50
Bradley Newcomb Cumings journal, 5 and 12 February 1830.
51
Hall, Edward H. “Reminiscences of Dr. John Park.” Proceedings of the American
Antiquarian Society 7 (1895): 92.
204
nature-worship, he shared with them the belief that the study of the natural world would
lead his students toward God, not away from Him.
After hearing Park speak, Cumings continued to attend Unitarian philosophical
and scientific talks on sensation. Three times in 1832, he heard the superintendent of
Massachusetts General Hospital, Gamaliel Bradford, lecture on the topics of “Spectral
Dreams,” “Omens,” and “Apparitions” (“they are seen often by drunkards, as often by
convalescents from fever, and are the effects of a nervous imagination” and “proceed
from nocturnal causes,” Cumings learned).
52
Such arguments were clearly less aimed at
the Free-Thinkers and Deists, than at the evangelical visionaries at the opposite pole of
the spectrum of religious rationalism. Bradford dismissed supernatural visions as the
product of disordered biology, linking a major source of evangelical authority to
intemperance, disease, nervousness, and possibly libidinousness.
Routinely invoking the case of the blind as a pillar of support, these lectures may
well have stimulated Cumings’s desire to see the blind firsthand. On March 26, 1833, he
expressed in his diary an unusual degree of enthusiasm for the event he had attended that
evening at the Masonic Temple, where he was “very much gratified at the Exhibition of
the Blind.” There, Howe’s students demonstrated their ability to read from embossed
texts (Braille would not be adopted for another thirty years), perform mental arithmetic,
answer geographical questions, and most impressive to Cumings, find their way around
Boston’s notoriously labyrinthine streets unassisted. Cumings was especially delighted
when the head of the Perkins School, Samuel Gridley Howe, “said he would send one of
his pupils home, who had been at the Temple but once before; he strolled off and was

52
Bradley Newcomb Cumings journal, 26 January, 9 February, and 10 December 1832.
205
gone but twenty minutes, when he returned with the article he was sent for.” The
audience was amazed. “The Hall was crowded,” wrote Cumings, adding, “the exhibition
was well worth seeing.” Five weeks later, Cumings walked from his boarding house to
Faneuil Hall, where he found the venue “thronged with visitors” to the aforementioned
Fair for the Blind. “[V]ery many persons have been obliged to go away, not being
willing to wait their turn,” explained Cumings of the 1833 fair.
53

By attending lectures on sensation and witnessing exhibitions of the blind,
Cumings, like so many young, ambitious, literate but not college-educated men in the
audience, was cultivating a habit regarded as the key to moral improvement and
professional advancement: a disciplined attention. In their patient quest for knowledge
that came much easier to the sighted, the blind were presented as examples for aspiring
young men like Cumings. Regaling his audience with tales of blind mat-weavers, John
Park’s “principal desire was to impress upon the audience, the necessity of attention, by
which most anything can be accomplished. By attention, Newton & Franklin raised
themselves to their high station,” according to Cumings, who was in the audience in
February 1830.
54
A few months later, Perkins’s exhibition of its intellectually
accomplished blind students sent the same message to Cumings.
By the late 1820s, the wonder of natural vision, often illustrated by both the
compensations and deficits of the blind, had begun to percolate into popular literature by
Unitarian authors. Though superficially developed as characters themselves, the blind
served as critical foils for lectures on the moral significance of vision. “Cover your eyes
for a short time, and you shut out this world of beauty,” explained Lydia Sigourney’s

53
Ibid., 26 March, 30 April, and 1 May 1833.
54
Ibid., 5 February 1830.
206
article on her deaf-blind muse Julia Brace, for the 1828 Juvenile Miscellany. “For every
new idea which you add to the mental storehouse, praise Him who gives you with
unveiled senses to taste the luxury of knowledge.”
55
Instead of serving as an analogy or
ameliorative for spiritual blindness, physical blindness had itself become a form of
spiritual blindness, albeit one that charity might overcome. As Unitarian clergy and
writers celebrated vision at Harvard in the late 1810s, and among the general public in the
1830s, the blind became a popular object of psychological fascination. Starting in 1835,
the blind finally had a chance to speak for themselves and explain what they saw.

The Emergence of Blind Autobiography
As Unitarian thinkers used the example of the blind to communicate their
naturalistic brand of piety to the broader public, the psychology of the blind became a
topic of increasing public interest. If a blind person could read without seeing, what else
could she know, and how could she know it? What was it like to live a life “under less
temptation,” as the New Yorker put it? This mounting interest emboldened Abram
Courtney, the first American blind autobiographer, to proclaim boldly in 1835 that
“anyone who wishes to know and understand his own mind” would want to read a blind
man’s autobiography.
In part, popular interest in the blind focused on the mundane details of their daily
existence. “I can pronounce what dishes are on table, and what flowers and fruits are in a
garden, by the smell, and can judge of meat in the market, by the feeling,” Courtney
explained in a passage that went on for pages, explaining how he navigated the City of

55
Sigourney, “The Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Girl,” 141.
207
Boston.
56
But of equal interest was the inner life of the blind. It was here that the
wonders of vision came into conflict with an equally cherished Unitarian idea, the law of
compensation. If a benevolent Creator had given the blind the means of intellectual and
spiritual development, as many educators now insisted, why should they be pitied? On
the other hand, if, as the Unitarian Christian Examiner claimed in 1848, “to suppose that
there can be a full and harmonious development of character without sight is to suppose
‘that God gave us that noble sense quite superfluously,’” did that not call into question
His benevolence?
57

The solution to this conundrum for writers who sought both to identify with the
blind and to celebrate their own acute visual sensibility was to insist that blindness
stimulated purer inner visions than the ocular eye could present. It was the longing for
this protected inner sensibility, divorced from the visual chaos of the outer world, which
drew Lydia Sigourney to Julia Brace and Laura Bridgman.
58
Thus, in Sketches for the
Fair, Osgood imagined the Fair for the Blind through the mind’s eye of the blind child,
representing Faneuil Hall as a forest wonderland in which kind fairies delivered presents
to the blind youths. For Osgood, the sensory gulf dramatized at the fair was compensated
for by the joyful visions which the blind and sighted alike experienced “in thought.” In
the blind, such imaginative vision was even more developed than it was in the sighted.
As Osgood would later apostrophize in “To the Blind Lecturer,” a poem dedicated to one
of the children at the Fair: “But he, whom nature thus bereaves,/Is ever Fancy’s favorite

56
Courtney, Anecdotes of the Blind, 26.
57
“Blindness and Idiocy,” The Christian Examiner 9, no. 44 (May 1848): 451.
58
Ann Douglas Wood, “Mrs. Sigourney and the Sensibility of the Inner Space,” The New
England Quarterly 45, no. 2 (June 1972): 163–181.
208
child;/ For thee, enchanted dreams she weaves/Of changeful beauty, bright and wild.”
59

Faced with the contradiction between the celebration of divine gift of vision, and the faith
in a Providential deity who compensated all his creatures for their deficits, sentimental
writers developed a solution: the blind saw inwardly. With their “enchanted dreams,” the
blind were Fancy’s favorite children.
But what exactly did the blind see? Newly confident in the sympathies of their
own potential readers, the blind recognized the public’s curiosity about this question. For
the first time, American blind authors began to write as blind authors, selling themselves
not just as objects of charity, but also as experts on an unusual and illuminating
psychological condition. The subject of Osgood’s poem was Benjamin Bowen, a member
of the first class at the Perkins school, and a future autobiographer who would have much
to say about the inner experience of blindness. In his A Blind Man’s Offering, first
published in 1847 and reprinted numerous times, Bowen wrote a “Reply” to “To the
Blind Lecturer,” insisting that “through the darkness, I can view/Much that is beautiful
and bright” and proceeded to describe his pleasure in mentally envisioning of a bucolic
scene with a “verdant lawn”, a “gently flowing stream,” and “a thousand flowers…/That
ever in the sunlight gleam.”
60
Falling just after a short autobiographical sketch in his
lengthy A Blind Man’s Offering, this poem essentially offered one of Bowen’s principal
qualifications as an author: he might not see, but his imagination was as fertile as that of
any sighted writer.
Most antebellum blind autobiographers shared mental visions that were deeply
meaningful, yet ultimately secular and consistent with New England rationalism. “It is

59
Bowen, A Blind Man’s Offering, 24.
60
Ibid., 25.
209
probable that our first parents, when exiled from Eden, retained during their whole lives
some recollection of the awful presence of Him whom, while in their innocence, they
were permitted to see,” Bowen explained, comparing this vision of God with his
recollection of his mother’s face, before he was struck blind at the age of six weeks. “I
have always fancied (I suppose some persons will regard it as a mere illusion of the
imagination) that I still retain some remembrance of the beautiful and thoughtful
countenance of her on whom my eyes first gazed.”
61
On briefly having his eyesight
restored to him in a Boston clinic—possibly the Boston Eye Infirmary—Courtney
expressed a similar sentiment about seeing his physician Dr. Warren, probably John C.
Warren. “It was exquisitely painful; but, for a moment, I did enjoy the inestimable
blessing of sight, and that was compensation enough. I saw my benefactor's face, and
forget it I never shall…. May God reward him!”
62
Discussing his own encounter with
nature, the blind New England minister and autobiographer Timothy Woodbridge
claimed Wordsworth’s “visionary powers of eye and soul.”
63
Such visions, natural as
they were, were described in the language of awe and wonder. Replayed before the
mind’s eye, they lived on long after vision was lost, affording the blind access to the
divine gift of vision.
Appearing in the mid-1830s, the first blind autobiographies arrived at a critical
moment. For decades, Unitarians had felt themselves under assault from the external
forces of orthodox Trinitarianism, evangelical enthusiasm, and deistic infidelity. Now a
new threat had appeared from their own midst, Transcendentalism. Downplaying and

61
Ibid., 11.
62
Courtney, Anecdotes of the Blind, 23.
63
Timothy Woodbridge, The Autobiography of a Blind Minister (Boston: J. P. Jewett,
1856), 303.
210
even rejecting the empirical testaments of the Gospel, Transcendentalists such as George
Ripley and Theodore Parker sought to place their faith directly in highly intuitive, and
often highly individual, perceptions of the unseen. In doing so, they afforded a greater
space for the appreciation of the experience of the blind.
Unlike the sighted Christian, the blind autobiographer could not only see the
unseen, but he could credibly describe it. At least, so Bowen claimed: “To the mind of
the blind man all material objects idealize themselves. All that he touches, all that he
hears, become, as it were, to him spiritual verities.”
64
For the piously empirical
Unitarians, the sighted individual who disavowed the visible world was a visionary. But
for Bowen, it was the natural course of things, meaning that he could exploit the
Transcendentalist controversy without having to claim the radical label of
Transcendentalists. In claiming to see with the mind’s eye “spiritual verities” that the
unaided physical eye failed to reckon, and in referring to both Emerson and Carlyle in his
autobiography, Bowen exploited popular interest in the Transcendentalist controversy.
Celebrating the man or woman “who prizes more the revelations of his intuitions than the
doubtful facts he perceives by his senses,” Bowen clearly echoed Emerson’s definition
five years earlier of the “Transcendentalist”: one who can “perceive that the senses are
not final, and say, the senses give us representations of things, but what are the things
themselves, they cannot tell.”
65

Skeptical about natural eyesight by handicap rather than by choice, Bowen and
other blind autobiographers were ideally situated to introduce readers to an invisible

64
Bowen, A Blind Man’s Offering, 50.
65
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Transcendentalist," in Nature; Addresses, and Lectures
(Boston: J. Munroe, 1849), 319–320.
211
world without coming across as a problematic visionary. By introducing the inner
visions of the blind as a model of compensation, Unitarian champions of the blind
inadvertently encouraged questions about the supernatural potential of that vision,
beginning in the mid-1830s.

Understanding Clairvoyance through Blindness
By the mid-1830s, as New Englanders began to contemplate what was visible to
the inner eye of the blind, they also began to wonder what that eye might “see” of the
external world. Interest in this capacity coincided, and mutually shaped, interest in
another visionary phenomenon: the clairvoyant visions of naturally or artificially blinded
subjects, who were somehow able to glimpse not only scenes of their fancy’s creation,
but the external world around them. Historians have offered a variety of explanations for
this surge of interest in the clairvoyant trance state, including its uses in understanding
revival visions and providing a platform for reform.
66
Less remarked, however, is how
blindness served as an intellectual framework for making sense of such states, and how
new ideas about vision and blindness began to infuse popular and medical discourse
surrounding trance subjects. Ironically, the Unitarian celebration of natural sight
ultimately lent credibility to clairvoyant phenomena that most Unitarians dismissed as
“visionary.”

66
Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, & Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining
Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Ann
Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century
America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); Molly McGarry, Ghosts of
Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
212
Widespread interest in trance states, and the temporary blindness such states
engendered or alleviated, did not develop in the United States until the mid-1830s.
American literary and medical discussions of somnambulism before then tended to focus
on the paralyzed will of the sleepwalker rather than any mysterious visual powers
enjoyed by the trance subject. The sleepwalking heroine of the Italian opera semiseria La
Sonnambula, which premiered in New York and then Boston to great success in 1835,
displayed no clairvoyant powers.
67
Despite the fact that the discoverer of mesmerism,
Franz Anton Mesmer, had occasionally used magnetism to treat blindness in the 1770s,
no American writer on magnetism took notice of this therapy until 1837.
68

67
William Warland Clapp, A Record of the Boston Stage (Boston: J. Munroe, 1853), 331.
La Sonnambula told the story of a young woman somnambulist who in her midnight
rambles is mistaken by her fellow villagers for a phantom. Amina is unjustly accused of
infidelity to her betrothed after she sleepwalks her way into another man’s room.
Trusting too much to his eyes, and ignoring the evidence of his heart, Amina’s suitor
regains his confidence in the climactic final scene, when he and his fellow villagers see
her sleepwalking across the village roofs. The villagers realize they must not wake her, or
else she will fall; instead, like the reproved suitor, they must place their trust in instinct,
and indeed, the play ends when she reaches the ground safely. Unlike so many
melodramas of the period, Amina is rescued from physical danger neither by a hero nor
her own cleverness, but by the far more ineffable force of her second sight. The piece was
a tremendous success, tripling the box office, and spawning imitations such as the Boston
Museum’s The Somnambulist, or Awake or Sleeping and English dramatist William
Thomas Moncrieff’s The Spectre Bridegroom; or a Ghost in Spite of Himself, based on
the Washington Irving story. Handbills for these productions can be found in the Boston
Museum Folder, Theatre Collection, HLH.
68
Mesmerism was first mentioned as a treatment for blindness in Joseph Philippe
François Deleuze, Practical Instruction in Animal Magnetism (Providence: B. Cranston,
1837). In 1784, the first case of somnambulistic clairvoyance was documented by one of
Mesmer’s followers, the Marquis de Puységur, whose magnetized subject gained the
ability to “see” into his and others’ bodies and diagnosis their illnesses. In 1808, the
Puységurian Jacques Henri Désiré Petetin further elaborated the relationship between
magnetism and clairvoyance in his Electricité Animale, yet few Americans appeared to
have been interested in magnetic and somnambulistic clairvoyance prior to the 1830s.
Jacques H. Petetin, Électricité animale, (Paris: Brunot-Labbe, 1808).

213
The development of the Perkins school and the parallel emergence of a literary
preoccupation with the phenomenology of blindness in the 1830s coincided with New
Englanders’ growing interest in blind trances. In 1834, the year before La Sonnambula’s
Boston premiere, the city’s medical journals and the general press began discussing
prominent cases of somnambulists, such as Jane C. Rider of Springfield, Massachusetts,
and Mrs. Cass of Lower Canada. Both women exhibited well-established symptoms of
somnambulism; Rider, for instance, would rise in the middle of the night and begin
performing a version of her daytime duties. Yet what interested many commenters was
not simply the mysterious paralysis of the will of somnambulists, but how they managed
to perform physically with their eyes closed. Thus, instead of marveling at Rider’s lack of
consciousness, as typical medical accounts did, non-medical observers focused on her
ability to conduct her somnambulistic routine in darkness. “At one time she laid out the
table correctly for breakfast; and repeatedly dressed herself and the children of the
family, her eyes remaining shut the whole time,” explained the most detailed account of
Rider’s blind feats. Astonished, local authorities began to test her visual capacities.
Blindfolded, Rider was successfully challenged to read books and identify the colors of
objects.
69
These feats were the tricks most commonly performed by the blind; Abram V.
Courtney felt compelled to address them in the autobiography he published the following

69
M. F. Colby, “Additional Observations on the Case of Mrs. CASS, the Stanstead
Somnambulist,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 11, no. 19 (1834): 297–304;
Lemuel W. Belden, An Account of Jane C. Rider, the Springfield Somnambulist: The
Substance of Which Was Delivered as a Lecture Before the Springfield Lyceum, Jan. 22,
1834 (Springfield, Massachusetts: G. and C. Merriam, 1834), 20–21, 60 (emphasis in
original). For a treatment of the Rider case, see Benjamin Reiss, “The Springfield
Somnambulist: Or, the End of the Enlightenment in America,” Common-Place 4, no. 2
(January 2004); Robert S. Cox, Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American
Spiritualism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003).
214
year. Whether Rider performed these tricks at her own initiative, or was led to do so by
her examiners, it is conspicuous that she began performing them in June 1833, a month
after the Fair for the Blind, at a time when New England’s periodicals were filled with
discussions of similar feats performed by Perkins students.
Around the same time that Rider and other somnambulists gained prominence,
New England animal magnetists began to conduct experiments in clairvoyance on their
mesmerized subjects. Interest in animal magnetism in the United States was almost
single-handedly revived by the efforts of one man, Charles Poyen, a French medical
student who had undergone magnetic treatment in Europe, and began in 1836 to apply it
to a Providence, Rhode Island mill worker suffering from a chronic stomach ailment.
Poyen was less successful in convincing skeptics than was Rhode Island physician
George Capron, who learned the practice from Poyen and applied it to a young blind
woman, Lurena Brackett. Brackett had lost her voice and her vision after a domestic
accident at her middle-class home in Dudley, Massachusetts, according to most of the
physicians and journalists who wrote about her beginning in 1837. Brackett’s father sent
her off to the Perkins school, hoping she might be educated, but while en route, Brackett
encountered George Capron, future president of the Rhode Island Medical Society, who
began conducting private demonstrations of Brackett’s abilities.
70
As with Rider and
Cass, one of the chief demonstrations of his success was that Brackett gained clairvoyant
powers while in her magnetized state, including the ability to admire and describe

70
Sheila O’Brien Quinn, “How Southern New England Became Magnetic North: The
Acceptance of Animal Magnetism,” History of Psychology 10, no. 3 (2007): 231–248;
Sheila O’Brien Quinn, “Credibility, Respectability, Suggestibility, and Spirit Travel:
Lurena Brackett and Animal Magnetism,” History of Psychology 15, no. 3 (August
2012): 273–282.
215
pictures or read books by touching them to the back of her head.
71
Explained as a natural
phenomenon, magnetism nevertheless enabled occult powers.
In attempting to make sense of clairvoyant phenomena, believers did not advert to
supernatural spiritual influence, but to the altered physiology of vision found in the
visually impaired. Lemuel Belden’s An Account of Jane C. Rider, the Springfield
Somnambulist (1834) credited Rider’s “extraordinary power of vision”—that is, her odd
capacity “to see distinctly in a room so dark that to common eyes no object was
discernible”—to “an increase in the sensibility of the retina.”
72
Key to Belden’s
explanation was the fact that Rider routinely experienced fits of blindness while
undergoing her somnambulistic “paroxyms,” yet was able to see with perfect clarity
while blindfolded or in total darkness. Deploying the same recent and relatively
sophisticated understanding of ocular physiology that J.V.C. Smith and other physicians
had brought to Boston’s lecture audiences, Belden explained that the eye involuntarily
adapted to differing levels of light. Much as a prisoner kept in the darkness would
require very little light to see, but then see nothing when suddenly exposed to daylight,
Belden suffered from an oversensitivity to light that was heightened during the
“paroxysm” of her somnambulistic state. For Belden, Rider’s clairvoyance was not the
product of supernatural influence, but the direct and natural consequence of her impaired
vision.
The same year that Belden’s account appeared, the Boston Medical and Surgical
Journal (whose predecessor Smith had edited) offered a slightly different explanation of

71
William Leete Stone, Letter to Doctor A. Brigham, on Animal Magnetism (New York:
George Dearborn, 1837), 18.
72
Belden, An Account of Jane C. Rider, the Springfield Somnambulist, 102, 104.
216
somnambulistic clairvoyance, yet one that was equally indebted to contemporary
discussions of blind perception. This one was contributed by M.F. Colby, the physician
who had attended Mrs. Cass. Finding it improbable that enough light could pass through
Rider’s blindfold to enable even a morbidly sensitive retina to see, Colby claimed that
extraordinary visual perception originated not in the eyes but in the sense of touch.
“Vision, then, does not require an organ for the painting of images, but simply a sentient
surface on which the rays of light may be received from every point of an object.”
73

Improbable as Colby’s explanation might sound, it seemed credible enough for printing
in 1830s New England, where even the educated were fascinated and confounded by the
feats of the blind in “seeing” by way of touch. There was some precedence for reports of
such feats. In 1818, the New England Medical Journal had described “The Extraordinary
Case of a Blind Young Person Who Can Read By The Points of Her Fingers.” The
young Liverpool woman in question could not only read ordinary non-embossed texts
with her fingers, but also distinguish colors through touch.
74

Notably, embossed text legible to the blind had recently come into use, and may
have inspired this wonder. By the 1830s, as Perkins students astonished the Boston
public with their own ability to read with their fingers, the blind’s enhanced tactility
served as convenient explanation for the feats of somnambulists. A Boston magazine in
1837 explained that touch was a more mysterious force than it had been given credit for,
as evidenced by the “variety of trades” practiced by the “unfortunate inmates” at the
“Boston blind asylum.” “Blind persons have been known to distinguish colours by the

73
“The Stanstead Somnambulist,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, 1834, 298.
74
T. Glover, “The Extraordinary Case of a Blind Young Person Who Can Read By The
Points of Her Fingers,” The New-England Journal of Medicine and Surgery: And
Collateral Branches of Science 7 (1818), 100.
217
touch,” the author explained. “It is the same power which safely guides the
somnambulist over house-tops… [which] enables the blind man to read with his finger
his embossed letter bible.”
75
In his 1835 autobiography, Abram Courtney attacked fellow
blind who “impose on credulity” by claiming to know the color of flowers and like
objects by touch. “They might learn the flowers by the scent and commit the colors to
memory,” he offered, an explanation whose necessity suggests that the limits of touch
remained uncertain.
76
The same 1834 issue of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal
that presented Colby’s account included the case of a formerly blind Liverpool girl, who,
after her vision was restored, needed to close her eyes to find her way around the city.
77

Such an idea was given credibility by the testimony of the blind and their advocates, such
as the visually impaired Perkins trustee William Hickling Prescott, who had explained to
readers of the North American Review in 1830: “Those who have been relieved from
blindness at an advanced, or even early, period of life, have been found frequently to
recur to the old and more familiar sense of touch, in preference to the sight.”
78
Thus, as
somnambulists began to demonstrate their clairvoyant feats in the mid-1830s, the faculty
of touch struck medical observers as an attractive explanation. Rider’s inability to see in
daylight, relieved only by blindfold, seemed plausible in a culture in which the blind had
already demonstrated the ability to “see” without use of their eyes.
The strange phenomenon of somnambulistic or magnetic clairvoyance continued
to be explained throughout the antebellum period by reference to the more familiar and

75
“The Five Senses,” Family Magazine 4 (1837), 108–109.
76
Courtney, Anecdotes of the Blind, 26.
77
“Interesting Case,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 11, no. 19 (1834): 262.
78
William Hickling Prescott, “Asylum for the Blind,” North American Review 31
(Boston, 1830), 72.
218
credible feats the blind were then performing. “With this view of the sensual life of the
somnambulists, it may safely be said that the general sense, which develops itself from
feeling, takes the place of others, as does feeling in some degree that of sight with the
blind,” offered an account published in New York in 1840, shortly after the founding of
the blind asylum there.
79
“There is, it appears to us, a striking analogy between the
actions as they are performed by the blind and those executed by somnambulists,”
claimed Household Words, a British weekly edited by one of Laura Bridgman’s greatest
champions, Charles Dickens.
80
In using the blind to explain the phenomenon of
somnambulistic perception, both authors had simply repurposed not only the already
discussed Common Sense arguments on the wondrousness of vision, but also the more
recent arguments of natural theologian Charles Bell on the existence of a muscular sense,
more pronounced in the blind and the somnambulist.
81

These feats of somnambulistic vision were complemented by even more
extraordinary displays of heightened visual perception among magnetized subjects. The
first of these demonstrations came in 1837 through George Capron’s blind magnetic
subject, and future Perkins student, Lurena Brackett. Unlike her clairvoyant
predecessors, who could merely read books or describe pictures with their eyes closed,
Brackett displayed the additional ability to travel in spirit to remote locales and describe
what she saw, a talent that would become incorporated into the performance of

79
Frederick August Rauch, Psychology; Or, a View of the Human Soul: Including
Anthropology, Being the Substance of a Course of Lectures, Delivered to the Junior
Class, Marshall College, Penn (New York: M. W. Dodd, 1840), 134.
80
“Somnambulism,” Household Words 3, no. 58 (1851), 136.
81
See “Chapter IX: Of the Muscular Sense,” in Charles Bell, The Hand, Its Mechanism
and Vital Endowments as Evincing Design (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard,
1833), 145-156.

219
subsequent magnetic subjects, and later by Spiritualists. These talents first came to light
in 1837, during Brackett’s sojourn in Providence en route to the Perkins school, when
Capron began staging private demonstrations for visitors from Boston and elsewhere.
These included Margaret Fuller, a former student of John Park (whose lectures on
sensation and the blind have already been discussed) as well as Sarah Helen Whitman, a
fellow Transcendentalist and future Spiritualist, and William Leete Stone, editor of the
New York Commercial Advertiser and a committed rationalist who, two years previously,
had authored a work attacking the “impostures” of the visionary New York prophet
Robert Matthews. Stone had read about previous cases of magnetism, in which subjects
were placed under the direct and total control of magnetizers, yet he had declined to
investigate, remaining a complete skeptic. Stone was drawn to investigate only after
hearing of Brackett’s feats, which unlike Matthews’s visions, consisted not of divinely
inspired revelations, but acts of natural vision performed without eyesight. Stone’s
interest was piqued by hearing that Brackett,
[A]lthough blind, yet, when in a state of magnetic slumber, she had been sent to a
fancy dry goods store to select various items of merchandize, and that she
performed the service as well as a lady of perfect sight would have done it…. [It
was] also stated to me, that by the will of the magnetiser, she would go into a
flower-garden, when asleep, and cull various flowers of various hues.
82

Again, these were precisely the feats that the blind had recently begun to perform
in New England. Howe had sent his students to fetch articles at remote locations in the
city, and Courtney in his autobiography two years earlier had reported the imposture of
blind men who purported to know the color of flowers by their touch. Even before
arriving in Boston, Brackett exhibited abilities that the blind there had recently

82
Stone, Letter to Doctor A. Brigham, on Animal Magnetism, 9.
220
demonstrated (truly or fraudulently). In the presence of her examiners, Brackett also read
books (“unless she is magnetized, she cannot enjoy the pleasure of reading,” one account
reported). It appears that these ordinary acts, performed routinely by the blind, lent
Brackett’s case credibility, enough so that Stone, a professed skeptic of magnetism,
believed Brackett when she began to engage in similar feats of travel, this time without
the aid of her body. As Stone and others would report, Brackett traveled to New York in
spirit form, describing details of the buildings she saw there for those in the room.
83
In so
doing, Brackett inaugurated in New England a tradition of verifying the clairvoyant
ability of magnetized subjects by asking them to describe impossibly remote locations.
Like the feats of somnambulists in making their way through darkened rooms, such feats
of spiritual navigation resembled in no small way those acts of ordinary sightless
navigation which the blind were performing and writing about at the same time, as when
Cumings witnessed a Perkins student retrieve an article from a remote location. Four
years later in Boston, “a large and respectable meeting of the citizens of Boston”
convened in 1841 to investigate the magnetic demonstrations of the traveling mesmerist
Robert Collyer. A few days later, a boy with similar clairvoyant abilities was magnetized
by Collyer and then asked to travel to Charlestown prison and describe what he saw
inside it.
84

Brackett played a critical role in conferring respectability on animal magnetism,
capturing the attention of physicians across the Atlantic. Her middle-class background

83
Deleuze, Practical Instruction in Animal Magnetism, 87; William Leete Stone and
Loraina Brackett, Voyage of Miss Brackett with Colonel Stone: Performed Mentally,
Through the Air, While Under the Influence of Animal Magnetism, to a City Distant 200
Miles (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1838).
84
“Report of the Boston Committee on Animal Magnetism,” Mesmeric Magazine; Or,
Journal of Animal Magnetism 1 (July 1842): 7.
221
permitted her to evade the class prejudices directed at the other well-known early
magnetic subject, Pawtucket mill worker Cynthia Gleason, who was thought by many to
have dissimulated her trance states.
85
Certainly, Brackett’s class status, as well as her
gender, were significant; for as other scholars have argued, magnetizers and their
audiences could more readily accept the magnetizer’s influence when it was practiced on
the “weaker” gender. These arguments are perfectly valid, yet the importance of
Brackett’s blindness in rendering her clairvoyance plausible has not been fully
appreciated. While skeptics argued that trance states could be faked, the clairvoyant’s
ability to see using mechanisms ostensibly established in the blind, was harder to dispute.
In any case, the example of the blind was one of the key proofs for proponents of
magnetic clairvoyance. “Persons born blind, have been made to see, by Clairvoyant
power, (not with the natural eyes) as well as any other magnetic subjects. They have read
books, told the time by a watch, distinguished colors, &c,” claimed a Boston work on
animal magnetism published a few years after Brackett’s performances began.
86

Arguing for the clairvoyant capabilities of magnetized subjects, the Boston magnetist
James Olcott wrote in his 1843 Animal Electricity; or, the Electric Science: “That there is
independent vision, without the eyes or light, is demonstrable, from the fact, that
individuals have, in the midst of darkness, arisen and performed the most difficult
operations in algebraic analysis, in what has been called somnambulism.”
87

85
Quinn, “Credibility, Respectability, Suggestibility, and Spirit Travel.”
86
“A Practical Magnetizer” [pseud.], The History and Philosophy of Animal Magnetism:
With Practical Instructions for the Exercise of This Power (Boston: J. N. Bradley, 1843),
22.
87
James S. Olcott, Animal Electricity; or: The Electric Science; an Application of the
Primary Laws of Nature, Never before Discovered and Demonstrated; to a Solution of
222

Conclusion
Ironically, popular exhibitions and discussions of blind clairvoyance enjoyed
much of their plausibility thanks to a naturalistic account of vision defined by way of
excluding the blind. Starting in the 1820s, the city’s visual didacts had urged the urban
spectator to pity the blind’s sensory deprivation while idealizing their immunity to the
city’s sensual temptations. It was precisely this sense of the limits of vision that enabled
the blind to claim clairvoyant visions, much as the limits of the artistic amateur attested to
the authenticity of the spirit-drawing. By making vision a divine resource, but defining
its limits in natural terms, Boston’s reformers had invited the possibility and encouraged
the desire that such limits could be transcended.
In the 1830s and 1840s, Boston’s visionary blind, like the clairvoyants and
Spiritualists who would invoke them, helped invert the premise of the visual didactic
culture from which they had emerged: it was not so much the visible world that made the
viewer, but the reverse. This visionary impulse helped ease the anxieties of urban
spectators about their sensory environment. By mid-century, however, such anxieties
were beginning to wane, as the dazzling, disorderly city became a legitimate source of
enchantment and visual pleasure for Boston’s middle class.

All the Physical and Intellectual Phenomena That Exist (Boston: N.S. Magoon, 1844),
100.
223
From Spectators to Visionaries:
Visual Culture and the Transformation of Boston, 1820-1860

Chapter 6:

Fairy Spectacles, the Performance of Enchantment,
and the Rehabilitation of Urban Sensory Disorder

On Christmas day in 1844, Daniel Child took his children to see Cinderella, or
the Fairy with the Little Glass Slipper, a fairy opera. A former clerk who had risen to
treasurer at Boston Locomotive Works and a member of Theodore Parker’s congregation,
Child exemplified Bostonians’ new respect for the theater. His daughter “was almost
bewildered with so great a novelty,” while his son “seemed more amazed and astonished
than gratified.” In sum, Child reported, “The amusement was very satisfactory for our
whole party.”
1
Among the first theatrical genres widely attended by Boston’s middle
class, the fairy spectacle offered visions of unseen realms ruled by benevolent and angelic
fairies; the latter tended to reveal themselves only to the virtuous and faithful hero, or in
the case of Cinderella, heroine. Superficially, the fairy spectacles conformed to the goal,
shared by Boston’s elites and their Transcendentalist rebels, of drawing the spectator’s
eye to an unseen spiritual world. Yet this resemblance was misleading: the Childs were
not asked to contemplate evidence of an unseen spiritual reality, but to delight in one
which even the younger Childs recognized did not exist. Furthermore, while the didactic

1
Daniel and Mary Child Diary, 20 December 1844, Daniel F. Child Papers, MHS.
224
landmark, park and gallery had served as spaces to escape urban sensory disorder and
excess, the fairy spectacles offered a thinly veiled version of the latter. Along with the
numerous fancy fairs, costume balls, and glittering retail spaces that emerged in mid-
century Boston, the fairy spectacles suggested that the middle class was increasingly
unperturbed by the “idolatry of sense” that had so exercised earlier antebellum moralists.
The middle class’s increasing comfort with such previously forbidden spectacles
as the theater had not emerged quickly or simply. In the 1820s, liberal Protestant elites
had encouraged Bostonians to acquire a disciplined attentiveness before visually refined
scenes of art and nature. As Bostonians attempted to achieve this didactic ideal in an
urban sensory environment thought grossly unfit for it, however, a Romantic mythology
emerged in the 1830s and 1840s around the visionary spectator who evaded the visible
world’s claim on the senses, and like the Athenaeum’s Orpheus, boldly peered into the
realm of the invisible.
At mid-century, the desire to preserve the senses from the urban environment
gave way to a new discovery of enchantment in the urban environment. The stages for
this new performance of enchantment were diverse: the colorful and alluring fancy-goods
displays that lined Washington Street, middle-class parlors filled with mysterious Gothic
Revival furniture, exotic orientalia, and amateur magic shows; and fancy fairs that re-
established in modern consumer form the pagan excesses of Christmas. More broadly,
the middle class found enchantment (if sometimes a threatening strain of it) in the city’s
endless transformation, which was imaginatively recast as the work of magic rather than
of capitalism. Reveling in the visual confusion surrounded him, the mid-century
225
spectator’s role was not so much to transcend the city but allow himself to be drawn into
it, albeit in a form just otherworldly enough not to seem worldly.
The performance of enchantment was indeed that, however: a performance. For
by exaggerating its wonder, Boston’s largely Anglo-American Protestant middle class
proved itself ironically immune to the genuine intoxication of the idolatry of sense.
Signaling both the innocence and the sophistication of the spectator, the performance of
enchantment thus proved a useful way for Boston’s middle class to embrace its new
urban identity. Neither as naïve as the rural spectator, nor as dulled by urban living as the
citified, Boston’s middle class used the performance of enchantment to both enjoy, yet
remain morally untainted by, the worldly spectacles of the city. The dazzling-yet-
ethereal parlor, ballroom, and retail district all offered an excuse for this performance.
Before turning to these spaces, however, it is worth beginning with an even more literally
enchanted realm: the theatrical fairy spectacle.

The Rise of the Fairy Spectacle
That Daniel Child thought Christmas an appropriate day for taking his children to
watch a pagan-themed play illustrates a remarkable transformation in middle-class
attitudes at mid-century. For decades, respectable Bostonians such as Child had been
sternly warned against the theater, whose sensory delights both on stage and in the
nefarious harlot-ridden third tier, purportedly undermined a sober reverence for more
pious sights. “No throng shall bend their knee in prayer, or raise their voices in shouts of
thanksgiving to that one God, who for a theater has built the universe, for scenery spread
out nature, whose tinsel is the rainbow, whose spangles are planets, whose actors are men
226
and angels led on by himself, Lord of Hosts,” warned the anti-theater activist and editor
of Boston’s Journal of Commerce, David Hale, in 1826. Respectable merchants refused
to hire apprentices who attended the theater, and some even refused to take the mercantile
papers into their homes, Hale claimed, “because of the evil effects of theater
advertisements.”
2
Prejudiced remained strong a decade later, when, applauding the
conversion of the Federal Theatre into the Academy of Music in 1835, the Mercantile
Journal lamented that “deception has a thousand times more charms for the multitude
than the truth.”
3
Even as Boston’s more affluent liberal Protestants celebrated the
wonders of vision, they retained a Puritanical mistrust of the theater’s visual deceptions.
By 1846, however, when the “fairy spectacle” of Aladdin, or, The Wonderful
Lamp premiered, the middle class seemed to have relaxed its attitudes concerning
spectatorship. The play was staged at the new and expanded Tremont Street home of the
Boston Museum, a curiosity museum-cum-theatre. In the last few years, the venue had
attracted a respectable middle-class audience by eschewing scandalous melodramas for
temperance dramas such as The Drunkard, whose 101-night run set a new record in the
history of American drama.
4
In playing for 91 nights, Aladdin became a close second. If

2
David Hale and Joseph Parrish Thompson, Memoir of David Hale: Late Editor of the
Journal of Commerce (New York: J. Wiley, 1850), 148-149.
3
“The Academy of Music,” The Boston Observer and Religious Intelligencer: Devoted
to Liberal Christianity, Sunday Schools, Literature, and Intelligence 1, no. 20 (May 14,
1835): 159.
4
As an historian of the Boston Museum has remarked, “the museum was at first a theatre
that wasn’t a theatre; it grew up in a kind of disguise, and therefore it drew the people
who on principles disapproved of theatres as such.” Claire McGlinchee, The First Decade
of the Boston Museum (Boston: Bruce Humphries, 1940), 20–21 (emphasis in original).
227
anything, it struck an even more enduring chord with the public, for it launched a local
mania for fairy spectacles that did not ebb until after the Civil War.
5

Aladdin’s plot kept mostly true to its literary source: an evil sorcerer tricks a poor
Chinese villager into recovering a magic lamp from a booby-trapped cave, inadvertently
introducing the lad to the lamp’s supernatural occupant, who rewards his summoner by
materializing a “fairy palace.” Notably, however, the Boston Museum’s version replaced
the story’s traditional genie with a fairy-like entity, Coeliyan, Spirit of Faith, through
whom the play became, loosely at least, a Christian allegory. Similar additions
transformed other Eastern folktales performed as fairy spectacles at the Museum, almost
all of which allowed the faithful hero to succeed through the intervention of invisible
fairies seen by him alone. In the Museum’s version of The Forty Thieves, and the Fairy
of the Lake, for instance, Ali Baba enters the robber’s cavern, where “dazzled by the sight
of boundless wealth, his treacherous memory forgets the spell” that opens the cave door;
fortunately, the fairy Gossamer, an angel-like servant of the titular fairy of the lake, frees
him from the trap into which his gold-tempted senses have lured him.
6

5
The early seasons [at the Boston Museum] were not marked by any great successes or
long runs, with the exception of the fairy spectacles,” recalled the Boston theater
historian John Bouvé Clapp in the Boston Evening Transcript at the end of the century.
“Boston Museum: The Passing of an Historic Playhouse,” Boston Evening Transcript,
1903. For Aladdin’s long run, see William Warland Clapp, A Record of the Boston Stage,
(Boston: J. Munroe, 1853), 471. The Forty Thieves, and the Fairy of the Lake appeared
over sixty times. Other fairy spectacles performed in Boston included: The Talisman or,
The Fairy’s Favor; The Enchanted Harp; The Magic Mirror; The Fairy of the Seas;
Children of Cyprus; The Enchanted Beauty, Or a Dream of 100 Years; Fortunio and His
Seven Gifted Servants; Cinderella, or the Fairy and the Little Glass Slipper; Bianco, Or
the Enchanted Sword; Asphodel, Or The Magic Pen, and The Magic Trumpet, Or the
Invisible Harlequin, among others. Clippings on Boston Theatres, Theatre Collection,
HHL.
6
So described the Museum’s house publication. “The Forty Thieves,” The Curiosity Shop
1, no. 2 (1856): 2. See the Sketch of the Plot and Synopsis of the Songs Duetts,
228
These moralistic and superficially anti-materialistic spectacles, furthermore, were
structured around unusually expensive and lavish spectacular tableaux: colorfully lit
backdrops of unprecedented size, animated by enormous and elaborately costumed casts
of principals and extras. The tableaux were made possible by the new and grand
purpose-built building in which the Boston Museum was relocated in 1846, an
architectural wonder with twenty Corinthian columns and iron grooves for quickly
shifting the massive backdrops. The fairy spectacles’ tableaux typically included grand
palaces and carnival-like markets thronged with “Buyers, Sellers, Traders and
Spectators.”
7
In keeping with the anti-worldly spirit of the spectacles, the most
magnificent tableaux were reserved for the fairies themselves. In the first act, audiences
were often treated to a brief glimpse of hidden fairyland, where the fairies, unseen by
mortal eyes, plotted to offer their assistance to the plays’ heroes. The spectacles returned
to fairy land as often as the plot and budget could reasonably justify, often when the hero,
wide-eyed with wonder, was whisked off from his troubles to meet with his fairy
benefactors; otherwise, the fairies traveled to the mortal realm, bringing their court and
props with them, and evoking a similar sense of amazement in the hero at their
otherworldly presence. Finally, after the hero’s triumph, the spectacles climaxed with an
even grander tableau drawn from another fairy setting, or in a magnificent palace, erected
by enchantment, where the hero retired.
Central to their appeal, such spectacular excess echoed the same breathless and
carnivalesque abundance that was coming to crowd shop windows and parlors, and which

Chorusses, Scenery, &c., in the Splendid Oriental Musical Romance, Entitled the Forty
Thieves and the Fairy of the Lake! (Boston: William Marden, 1849).
7
“The Pageant of Aladdin,” The Curiosity Shop 1, no. 5 (1856): 2.
229
filled the pages of the illustrated flash-press with scenes of festive local pageantry and
bustling views of New York and Constantinople. “All imaginable splendors are
combined in it,” the Boston Museum’s house publication promised Aladdin’s audience.
“Flowers, fountains, enchanted castles, priceless jewels, and beautiful women are
mingled in inextricable confusion in our mind, as we sit down to recall it.”
8
Fairy
spectacles not only provided audiences with spectacular confusion, however, but also
encouraged a very different sort of response to it than Boston’s visual didacts had
modeled. Amazed and even stupefied by the marvelous sights around him, the heroes of
the fairy spectacles rejected both the connoisseur’s self-possession and the
Transcendentalists’ impulse to look beyond the senses. When the arrival of a fairy
suddenly causes aloe to bloom on the enchanted isle in The Children of Cyprus (also
called Cherry & Fair Star), characters react in wonder. “What do I see!” exclaims the
young heroine Fair Star. Other characters share her surprise. “Why in the name of all
that is wonderful, what have we here?—the Aloe in blossom!” “Have my senses
wandered?” asks Fair Star when the fairy de-materializes before her eyes.
9
Coming upon
the petrified royal feast in The Enchanted Beauty, “slumbering for a century amid the
luxury and pageantry of a gorgeous festival,” “the champion stands breathless with
emotions of wonder and pity at the mingled gloom and glory of the scene.”
10

The hero’s reaction was supposed to be the audience’s as well. Quoting an
English playwright, the Boston Museum promised its visitors “fairy visions which are the

8
Ibid., 2.
9
Madame d’Aulnoy, Cherry and Fair Star: a Grand Eastern Spectacle in Two Acts.
(New York: R. Hobbs, 1831), 10–11.
10
William Elder, The Enchanted Beauty: And Other Tales, Essays, and Sketches (New
York: J. C. Derby, 1855), 26–27.
230
gleaming foreshadows of golden years which hereafter shall bless the world.” This
offering was not just for their individual benefit, but for society’s, for “while they feel
‘that which gives an awe of things above them,’ their souls are expanded in the heartiest
sympathy with the vast body of their fellows,” and “distinctions of fortune, rank, talent,
age, [shall] give way to the warm tide of emotion, and every class feel only as partakers
in one primal sympathy.”
11

Such was the power of the fairy spectacle, and the drama in general, that like the
city’s vistas and galleries, it recreated in an increasingly anonymous and socially divided
city the corporate piety of New England’s idealized Puritan past, albeit by means that
would have horrified the theater-hating Puritans themselves. Through the fairy
spectacle, the Boston Museum and its competitors appropriated the Puritan corporate
ideal as well as the liberal Protestant urban reformers’ goal of elevating the Christian’s
character by teaching him to see more keenly the world around him. But the fairy
spectacles subverted the reformers’ intentions, for instead of encouraging a studious self-
possession, or teaching the spectator to look through the visible world at the even greater
spiritual beauty that lay beneath it, they instead overwhelmed the viewers with delightful
confusion. In this respect, these spectacles foreshadowed the pose of enchantment that,
whether real or exaggerated, defined at mid-century the proper response to the new urban
culture of consumerism and spectacular pleasure emerging before the very eyes of
Boston’s middle class.

11
“The Theatre and Its Influences,” The Curiosity Shop 1, no. 5 (1856): 4.
231
From Nature’s Theater, to Boston’s
By the mid-1840s, liberal Protestant animosity toward the theater was waning. In
1844, droves of self-respecting Bostonians who had never before attended the theater saw
The Drunkard; or, The Fallen Saved, a “moral play” co-written, most historians agree, by
Hollis Street Church minister and Daniel Child’s friend, John Pierpont. Soon forced to
resign his pulpit because of his uncompromising and unpopular support of temperance,
Pierpont became that year the first minister in the city’s history to openly patronize the
theater, for he had recognized its growing influence, and its power to appeal more
directly to the Christian’s visual imagination than the pulpit itself. Thus, his play
dramatized the evils of drink by enacting through the drunken main character the hideous
hallucinations of the delirium tremens. This dark, visionary spectacle supplied one of the
play’s main attractions; within a few years, the nation’s most famous temperance lecturer
John Gough had begun simulating the DTs on stage as a central element of his lectures.
12

The pathetic hallucinations of the drunkard, meanwhile, contrasted with the beatific
deathbed visions of angelic child characters in later Boston Museum reform plays such as
Ten Nights in a Barroom and Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
In 1848, the Boston Museum introduced family slips: blocks of seating for seven,
sold at only fifty cents. The concurrent popularity of family-oriented spectacles such as
Aladdin, especially at Christmas time, attested to the middle class’s willingness to equate

12
For the stage appeal of alcoholic hallucinations, see Matthew Warner Osborn, Rum
Maniacs: Alcoholic Insanity in the Early American Republic (Chicago: University Of
Chicago Press, 2014) and Amy E. Hughes, “Spectacles of Insanity: The Delirium
Tremens on the Antebellum Stage,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 2, no. 2
(Spring 2010): 7–24.
232
magic with piety, and enchantment with wholesomeness.
13
This was a recent
development, to say the least. Few fairy tales were printed in the city before the 1840s,
but not for lack of a thriving juvenile publishing industry.
14
Instead, middle-class
children were provided the highly rational Peter Parley stories, juvenile versions of
Bunyan’s Christian allegory Pilgrim’s Progress, humorlessly cautionary tales such as
The Child Who Took What Did Not Belong To Her (1827), and educational texts such as
Conversations on Natural History (1820). This didactic literature thrived at the expense
of more fanciful fare, thanks to “the prejudice” that Lydia Maria Child had observed
among her neighbors “against all manner of fairy stories and fables, simply upon the
ground that they are not strictly true.”
15

In the 1830s, however, Boston’s more radical educators, including Child, began to
recommend fairy tales as a wholesome encouragement for the child’s moral imagination.
Helping bring fairy tales to print in Boston were other prominent Boston Unitarians such
as Bronson Alcott, Elizabeth Peabody, Eliza Follen and her husband Charles, a German
immigrant who also helped bring the Christmas tree and German Idealist philosophy to
the United States.
16
Their tales were intended neither to simply entertain nor to convince

13
Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997).
14
Goodrich estimated in 1856 that seven million copies of his Peter Parley books had
been sold. Daniel Roselle, Samuel Griswold Goodrich, Creator of Peter Parley: A Study
of His Life and Work (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1968), 53. Among
the more than 600 juvenile literature books published in New England in the 1820s, less
than a half-dozen featured fairies, per a search of the American Antiquarian Society
catalog.
15
Lydia Maria Child, The Mother’s Book (Boston: Carter, Hendee, and Babcock, 1831),
92.
16
These tales included, among others, Lydia Maria Child, “The Indolent Fairy,” in The
Boston Book: Being Specimens of Metropolitan Literature, Occasional and Periodical
(Boston: Light and Horton, 1836); Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Holiness; or The Legend of
St. George: A Tale from Spencer’s [sic] Faerie Queene (Boston: E.R. Broaders, 1836);
233
children that fairies actually existed (a possibility sufficiently worrisome for Child to
specifically discount it), but instead to develop the faculty of the imagination required for
apprehending the spiritual lessons of Christianity. So explained Alcott in his preface to a
handsomely illustrated 1836 translation of a German collection of allegorical fables and
fairy tales
designed to quicken the hearts of the young, by displaying to their view, in
the significant Imagery of Nature, an Emblem of their Spiritual Life.
Under the Type of a Child, the Soul communes with the Beautiful in the
visible World, quickening whatever it beholds from its own Ideal, thus
apprehending its latent faculties, their resurrection from the senses, and
final ascension into the Spiritual.
17

Despite having rejected along with most Unitarians their Puritan predecessors’
mistrust of the pleasures of sight, the promoters of the fairy tale still regarded
overindulgence of the physical vision as potentially worldly and perilous. Child, for
instance, strongly warned against exposing the child’s senses to such colorful luxuries as
“[g]laring red curtains, and brilliantly striped Venetian carpeting.”
18
One of the merits of
fairies was that they were a diaphanous race—Ali Baba’s rescuer is named Gossamer—
and in this regard encouraged habits of looking through the visible world that the flashy
world of urban spectacle had rendered increasingly important. Just as importantly, the
fairies rejected the world of human wealth for the beauties and purity of nature. This
Transcendentalist conceit was eventually given a more accessible interpretation in such

Friedrich Wilhelm Carové, The Story Without an End (Boston: Joseph H. Francis, 1836);
and Eliza Lee Cabot Follen, Gammer Grethel; Or, German Fairy Tales and Popular
Stories (Boston: James Monroe, 1840). For an overview of the importation of German
folk literature to Boston, see Sigrid Bauschinger, The Trumpet of Reform: German
Literature in Nineteenth-Century New England (Columbia, South Carolina: Camden
House, 1998).
17
Carové, The Story Without an End, iii.
18
Child, The Mother’s Book, 6.
234
best-selling juvenile tales as Caroline Snowden Guild’s Daisy, or the Fairy Spectacles
(1857). Like Alcott, Guild was profoundly anxious about the urban corruption of vision,
a theme reflected both in her story “The City Cousins; Or, the Art-Student in Boston”
(discussed in chapter 4) and in Daisy. In the latter, a young girl is given a pair of
enchanted glasses that allows her to see the fairies flitting all around her, preserving her
from materialist temptations, and leading her, by this magical optical device, to Christian
piety.
19

Yet even as Bostonians expressed their fears of urban sensory corruption in these
anti-materialist, nature-revering fairy tales, they increasingly regarded the spectacular
transformation of the physical city as the work of fairies. “As we gazed we thought the
days of the fairies' triumph had returned and this was of their creation,” reported a visitor
to Boston’s mechanic’s fair in 1837. “Seen through the haze of a summer’s day” and
“divested by distance of its architectural errors,” reported another observer that decade,
Bullfinch’s State House “seems like a scene of fairy land.” And though Lydia Maria
Child was repulsed by the commercial architecture of New York, she delighted in the
“fairy domes” of New York City’s new opulent residences. Even Quincy’s
transformation of Boston was, according to an admirer, a work of “enchantment.”
20

Through the alchemy of the imagination (assisted now and then by the urban vista) these
educated and cultured spectators occluded the agency of market and capitalist forces in

19
Caroline Snowden Guild, Daisy, Or, The Fairy Spectacles (Boston: Phillips, Sampson,
1857).
20
“The Mechanics Fair,” Universalist and Ladies’ Repository 6, no. 5 (1837): 194;
“Reminiscences of a Walker Round Boston,” United States Magazine and Democratic
Review 3, no. 9 (1838): 85; Lydia Maria Child, Letters from New York (London: R.
Bentley, 1843), 86; James Spear Loring, The Hundred Boston Orators Appointed by the
Municipal Authorities and Other Public Bodies (Boston: J.P. Jewett, 1852), 269.
235
creating the urban world. The spectacles of urban-industrial society—grinding
machinery, imperfect architecture, and opulent mansions—were instead cast as the
achievement of benevolent beings. Such fairy visions allowed the sensible spectator to
marvel at urban transformation and its visual allurements without troubling to consider
the underlying forces that had created them.
By the late 1840s, the fairy spectacle had begun to transform from an allegory of
God’s nature into an allegory of man’s city. On the one hand, the tableaux and plots of
the fairy spectacles insisted, like the high-toned Transcendentalist fairy tales before them,
that God’s creation trumped the material treasures of man. The fairy queen of the grotto
in The Enchanted Fountain, a grand “Fairy Opera” performed at Boston’s Melodeon in
1844, presided over “treasures concealed in the deep/their worth in reality known but to
few.” These treasures were the “spangles that drop from the wave,” “the ocean’s bright
gold,” “and the gems which the green waters hold,” treasures, in other words, that existed
in the eye of the sensible viewer.
21

Superficially, at least, this regard for the natural world disproved moralists’
warnings a few decades earlier that the theater would never pay homage to a deity who
“for a theater has built the universe, for scenery spread out nature, whose tinsel is the
rainbow, whose spangles are planets.” Emerging from mists and springing from
suddenly blooming flowers to the delight of Boston audiences, fairies enjoyed a
paganistic power over nature, yet wielded it in a far more Christian manner than the
often-malevolent fairies of European folk tales. Through the timely intervention of a
similarly powerful and heretofore invisible fairy, rewarding the faithful and thwarting the

21
S. J. Burr, The Vocal Parts of the Grand Fairy Opera of “The Peri,” Or, the
Enchanted Fountain (Albany: Weed, Parsons & Company, 1850), 10.
236
sensual, plays such as The Forty Thieves were supposed to teach “(through that delightful
medium, the imagination) the inevitable results of crime, and the happiness which as
surely awaits upon a life of honesty and virtue”—a Christian message, to be sure.
22

Yet as the fairies moved from nature into the theater, the spectacles’ plots and
settings belied their anti-worldly and anti-urban messages. The heroes of The Children of
Cyprus, which debuted in Boston in 1851, abandon their fairy-enchanted island in order
to pursue the rich kingdom of the villainous Emir Mustapha, “guilty of both treachery
and sensuality.”
23
The hero’s path to the material rewards that lay at the end of this and
other spectacles lay though the commercial hubbub of medieval and Eastern kingdoms.
Between trips to serene and magical fairyland, viewers were treated to tableaux of
thronged markets, docks, and streets—the very spaces, strikingly, whose real-life
counterparts a previous generation of Boston reformers, artists, and visionaries had
attempted to re-develop, occlude, and transcend (Figure 31).
24
By mid-century, in other
words, these highly unnatural, disordered, and visually congested urban spaces (and the
thoroughly unrepublican luxuriousness of their rulers) had become a source of delight
rather than anxiety for Boston audiences. It was not simply the jewels of nature that
delighted, but the jewels of these vibrantly congested cities and courts.
Viewers were reminded that they had purchased such visual luxuriousness. “The
scenery with its seemingly miraculous changes, —the effects of machinery,—the dresses,

22
“The Forty Thieves,” 2.
23
"Theatrical Tattle," Boston Weekly Museum (April 12, 1851): 349.
24
Some of the Boston public’s interest in Eastern architecture and luxuries was likely
encouraged by the successful exhibition of Chinese costumes and fancy goods at the
“Great Chinese Museum” between September 1845 and February 1847. Ronald J. Zboray
and Mary Saracino Zboray, “Between ‘Crockery-Dom’ and Barnum: Boston’s Chinese
Museum, 1845-47,” American Quarterly 56, no. 2 (June 1, 2004): 271–307.
237
decorations, and all that goes to make up the ensemble,” the Boston Museum promised
viewers, was purchased “at an expense rarely, if ever, incurred by any other American
Theatre.” By mid-century, however, such expense attracted little objection, for the fairy
spectacles were among the most wholesome entertainments the stage had to offer.
Enthusiastically recommending a Boston production of The Enchanted Beauty in 1850, a
critic in Graham’s Magazine explained that such spectacles were “intended to restore
sacred subjects to the stage in allegorical disguise.” Yet he was forced to admit that,
“Apart from any mystical meanings, it was a perfect luxury of a scenic entertainment. It
was so regarded by the visitors, and probably was designed for nothing more.”
25
Even if
the audience failed to grasp the Christian allegory, the awe produced by the visual
splendor of the spectacle had made it a success, and certainly preferable to more
salacious fare. The pleasure of seeing depended less and less upon the understanding and
sensory transcendence that didacts and visionaries had claimed as the true objects of
sight. The viewer was enchanted; by what, it hardly mattered.
In the mid-1840s, the spectacular attractions of the first earnest wave of fairy
spectacles eclipsed their half-hearted moralism. The following decade, the barrier
between ethereal fairyland and the worldly city dissolved further, as tongue-in-cheek
burlesques such as on the genre blended the heavenly and the earthly into one. The
Female Forty Thieves, or, The Fairy Daughters of the Cochituate Waters located its
action not in some exotic land, but in Boston’s new water reservoir, Lake Cochituate.
26

Myrtilla: A Fairy Extravaganza (1854) opened in an upper-class apartment in Boston, the

25
The critic ultimately published his interpretation. Elder, The Enchanted Beauty, 26, 29.
26
Credited to “Godfrey Goldpen” and “Silvester Silverquill,” the Irish playwright Barney
Williams was involved in the production of The Female Forty Thieves; a New
Extravaganza in Two Acts. Promptbook, Theatre Collection, HLH.
238
loutish Prince Nightshade’s “palace.” Nightshade orders his servant to bring him a
muffin and the Post and Advertiser, before commencing to complain to his friends about
his losses at the gambling table and in the stock market. Plotting to regain his fortune by
marrying the rich Princess Myrtilla, he is thwarted by a good Fairy Queen who conveys
the nobler Prince Hyacinth by “Fairy Train” to reach Myrtilla first.
27
At a time when the
nation’s press buzzed with the possibility of traversing the continent by rail, Hyacinth’s
transportation likely struck audiences as both modern and magical.
Another Boston burlesque, The Grotto Nymph; or Fairy Favor: A Fantastico-
musical Morceau of Absurdity, in One Consecutive Act and a Tableau (1853) used a
similarly modern setting to lampoon the fairy spectacle’s pretensions: “Shortly, the
intelligent spectator will learn the great moral of this play [that] fairies always protect the
virtuous” while “Deadheads will notice that vice is punished and virtue rewarded. A
copyright has been taken out for that novel and ingenious idea.”
28
Increasingly, the
moralism of the fairy spectacles was subordinated to their spectacular attractions: the
sensuality of the racy burlesques whose fairies appeared “with the usual brevity of
skirts,” or the splendid, dazzling theatrical machinery of more conventional fairy
spectacles (Figure 32). In either case, the spectator no longer needed to worry about
enjoying such visual splendors, for they were excused by wonder itself.
Once limited to the works of God, the city’s spectacular luxuries were became as
legitimate a subject of wonder as nature itself. This shift in cultural attitudes was not

27
George Edward Rice, Myrtilla: A Fairy Extravaganza, in One Act (Boston: Ticknor,
Reed & Fields, 1854).
28
A. Wallace Thaxter, The Grotto Nymph; Or, Fairy Favor. A Fantasticomusical
Morceau of Absurdity, in One Consecutive Act and a Tableau. (New York: Samuel
French, 1853), 4.
239
occurring only in Boston’s theaters, but in the mid-century city at large, which appeared
like “some gorgeous vision of enchantment,” as a minister explained in a Boston gift
annual in 1853. “No rational interpretation of what the City is, its architecture, its shows
and pageants, its interests, and the wondrous mingling of most intense and various life,
can separate it from the realm of poetry.” The poetic urban spectator did not shun the
sensory disorder of the modern city, but was as much enchanted by it as audiences were
enchanted by the fairy spectacles. “A true lover of Man feels in the crowded
thoroughfare and amid the extremes of city life, more poetry than is ever expressed. It
lives in visions painted by no words for the eye.”
29
The crowded street scenes depicted in
the late-1850s illustrated press (and discussed in chapter 2) suggest that Bostonians were
finding a new pleasure in urban chaos. Yet in the decade before such full-blown urban
realism emerged, Bostonians preferred to view that chaos through the lens of poetry and
enchantment, as an event in 1848 demonstrates.

Enchanting Civic Celebrations and Fancy Fairs
On October of 1848, thousands of Bostonians applauded as they watched an
enormous column of water gush into the air from a new fountain on the Common: the
culmination of an expensive, contested, and decades-old plan to supply the city with fresh
water from Lake Cochituate (Figure 9). For most of the antebellum period, more affluent
Bostonians had purchased their water from private sources, while poorer residents were
obliged to share crowded and grossly inadequate community wells. Physicians and moral
reformers viewed the scarcity of water as a major cause of illness and intemperance. The

29
Henry Bacon, “The Poet’s Use of the City,” in The Rose of Sharon 1853, edited by
C.M. Sawyer (Boston: A. Tompkins and B. B. Mussey, 1853), 203–204.
240
introduction of water that October day was thus seen at once as a feat of engineering, a
coup for the city’s health, a triumph of the public good over selfish private interests, and
(at least for more sanguine reformers) a step toward emancipating the drunkard from
rum’s evil bondage.
30
The water gushing through Boston’s pipes promised to “brim your
cups with nectar true/that will never make slaves of you,” according to a poem recited for
the spectators. The liberating spirit of water claimed to have come from fairyland itself,
where, “I filled the fairies’ acorn cups.” Now, splashing forth from the city’s fountain, it
wove “A sight in Paradise denied/To unfallen Adam and his bride.”
The true nectar of the event was not only water, however, but also the enchanting
fairy and Orientalist visual motifs of the theatrical fairy spectacle that filled the city that
day. Spanning the route of celebration outside the Boston Museum was a Moorish arch,
through which passed a palanquin “carried by six stout negro bearers, dressed in white
oriental costume, with white turbans,” “a fair young boy reclining in oriental style,” and a
horse-drawn model of the ship The Grand Turk. The scene resembled nothing so much
as a fairy spectacle tableau, in other words (Figure 33 and Figure 34).
31
(As life imitated
art, so art again imitated life, for another local theater soon put on the aforementioned
burletta The Female Forty Thieves, or, The Fairy Daughters of the Cochituate Waters, in
an apparent effort to cash in on the spectacle of water day.) Instead of drinking

30
Michael Rawson, “The Nature of Water: Reform and the Antebellum Crusade for
Municipal Water in Boston.” Environmental History 9, no. 3 (July 1, 2004): 411–435.
31
Celebration of the Introduction of the Water of Cochituate Lake into the City of Boston,
October 25, 1848 (Boston: J. H. Eastburn, 1848), 14, 21-22. The fountain summoned
fairy visions for some time to come. As an observer would remark a decade later, “it
becomes a source of enchantment when the fountain is permitted to show itself....Its
liberation and ascent always remind us of that of the geni in prison in the casket in the
Arabian Nights.” “Keeping Cool.,” Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion 11, no.
2 (July 12, 1856): 29.
241
themselves into a stupor, the spectators at the celebration gorged themselves on the
“fanciful and tasteful forms” of the bluish Bengal lights set up on the common, as well as
the lights specially displayed at public buildings and private dwellings of those who
could afford to share their light with the public. As the mayor, Josiah Quincy, Jr.
rejoiced:
The attractions of the illuminated streets detained much greater numbers abroad,
to a late hour in the evening, than is usual on holiday occasions. Yet decorum
prevailed in every part of the city; persons of all descriptions perambulated the
streets without annoyance or apprehension,—there was no exhibition of
drunkenness or rioting, —and there was no unusual occupation of the Police
Magistrates on the succeeding day.
32

Most remarkably, the mayor reflected, order had been maintained by a crowd that was
not drawn to any central attraction but the city itself, transformed by the gorgeous
lighting of public squares and middle-class residences. Through this collective effort
(sustained largely by those wealthy to contribute to it) light had become, like water itself,
not just a physical but a moral resource. For a day, light produced the elevating effects of
which Boston’s visual didacts had long dreamt, casting a peaceful spell of enchantment
over the city.
In an age of frequent mob violence over political issues such as slavery and
immigration, Bostonians assembled just as often in the name of the public good. Yet the
dominant tone of many public assemblies was carnivalesque, not in the chaotic sense of
pre-modern European festivals, but in a more bourgeois register. By the mid-1830s,
fairy-themed events, known as “fancy fairs,” demonstrated Bostonians’ commitment to
the idea of Christian benevolence. With its fairy bower, fancy goods displays, skeins of

32
Boston Common Council, Celebration of the Introduction of the Water of Cochituate
Lake into the City of Boston, October 25, 1848, 46–47.
242
garlands, and judiciously arranged mirrors, Boston’s first significant fair was the massive
1833 bazaar held at Faneuil Hall to benefit the Perkins School for the Blind, which sold
some 15,000 tickets. Others included the Anti-Slavery Bazaars held annually between
1839 and 1858, the Fair for the Mariner’s House (1839), the Bunker Hill Monument Fair
(1840), and the Fair for the Poor (1858).
33

For their organizers, the outpouring of charity at these enormously successful fairs
seemed to demonstrate, in accordance with earlier elite-sponsored reforms, the
environment’s power to elevate the character. At the same time, the moral engine of the
fairs was not reason, but enchantment, and their visual aesthetic was not order, but
disorder. They thus represented a departure from the ideals of spectatorship that had
captivated Unitarian moralists in the 1820s. The latter had included the broadening of
streets, the removal of filth and vandalism, and the construction of sober, restrained, and
geometrically regular structures such as the Greek Revival-style Quincy Market (1826),
whose neatly separated stalls and orderly arranged goods helped eliminate the
carnivalesque disorder that had previously reigned in the Shambles. By offering a space
where it was possible for parties to examine and compare goods carefully, and deliberate
thoughtfully on their transactions, Quincy’s Market helped reconcile commerce with a
rational republican order, and served as a model for retail spaces around the city.
Instead of promoting sober and self-disciplined reverence, the fairs’ enchanting
visual environment were designed to encourage middle-class visitors’ unsober and
undisciplined generosity. So organizers explained to one another. “Rear a tall arched

33
For an overview of antebellum fancy fairs nationwide, see Beverly Gordon, Bazaars
and Fair Ladies: The History of the American Fundraising Fair (Univ. of Tennessee
Press, 1998).
243
shrine in the centre, where sunlight shall touch its feathery green with gold every
morning, and gas-light flood it every night, and troops of fairy-like children, laden with
their Christmas gifts, glance in and out at every hour between,” recommended an
organizer of the lavish anti-slavery bazaars held at Faneuil Hall in the 1840s. Such decor
“will do wonders for the sales; for it shall raise men’s minds above the small endeavours
of the hour, and make money seem of no value but to serve the cause of Heaven
withal.”
34
It appeared to work. Finding himself dazzled and enchanted, a journalist
explained, “you were suddenly obliged to put your hand into your pocket—out with your
purse, and,—presto!—ere you knew why,—it was empty.”
35
Genuinely enchanted or not,
many visitors claimed to be so. Indeed, evangelicals and merchants complained that the
fancy fairs encouraged an “artificial generosity” among visitors, who opened their wallets
not out of sober Christian duty, but in response to the excitement and charm of the fairs
and their luxurious goods. Despite their noble causes, the fairs thus violated the ideals of
honest and rational commerce and Protestant unworldliness.
36
The rarity of such
criticism, however, suggested that middle-class suspicions of unchecked visual pleasure
were waning. So did the shift of other urban spaces toward enchantment and sensory
excess.

The Urban Ubiquity of Enchantment
The attraction of the pre-modern, enchanted world of fairyland reflected the anti-
urban hesitations of the antebellum period—the impetus, as we have seen, for the first

34
“The Fourteenth Anti-Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, Jan 14, 1848.
35
“The Fair! The May Fair!,” The New-England Magazine 4 (1833): 509.
36
William Bradford Reed, An Address to the Citizens of Philadelphia, on the Subject of
Fancy Fairs (Philadelphia: J. and W. Kite, 1834), 8; Gordon, Bazaars & Fair Ladies.
244
Transcendentalist fairy tales. Yet despite its Romantic implications, fairy culture and the
aesthetic of enchantment proved a useful means for Boston’s urban middle class not to
escape the temptations of city life, but to guiltlessly enjoy it. By indulging the fantasy
that the theater and the fancy goods shop were far-off lands of oriental or medieval
enchantment, distant in both time and place from Puritan Boston, residents found an
effective alibi for their growing desire to see and consume.
The extent of Boston’s appetite for consumption at mid-century can be gathered
from a panorama of the east side of Washington Street printed in Gleason’s Pictorial: in
1853, a large portion of the city’s longest thoroughfare had become an almost
uninterrupted stretch of retail fashion, jewelry, and fine furnishing shops (Figure 36).
The neighborhood’s shifting character represented the new willingness of the city’s
middle class to be enchanted by consumer displays. “Our shops,” wrote a Bostonian at
Christmas in 1842, “are so filled at this season with every kind of tasteful article to attract
one that it is hard to refrain.”
37
Every season was becoming one of temptation. By 1851,
the viewer could feast her eyes on the recently established “Jewelry Bazaar” of Jones,
Ball & Poor on Washington Street (Figure 35). “For brilliancy and richness of display,”
Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion explained, “a view of this gorgeous
mercantile palace will sink into insignificance any description of oriental enchantment
that could be conceived.” When lit up by gas in the evening, the store’s exterior
presented “one of the curiosities of the city”; spectators could frequently be seen
examining it from the sidewalk, then “retiring to the opposite side of the street to examine

37
Mrs. Lee to Mrs. Thomas Tracy [Ann Bromfield], Dec. 1842, quoted in Penne L.
Restad, Christmas in America : A History: A History (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1996), 67.
245
it from a distance.”
38
The enchanting shop had become as interesting as any republican
landmark or work of art.
By the 1850s and 1860s, the most mundane of trades attempted to draw in
customers through unabashedly dazzling presentations of their wares. The “dingy shop”
of the apothecary, where medicines were compounded before the customer’s eyes, now
scintillated. “Do we approach one of our aesthetical establishments in the evening, it is
with the impression, even afar off, that a brilliant conflagration is in progress, so intense
is the flare of light thrown into the street.” Such “dazzling scene[s] of glittering cut-
glass, gorgeous with the last glowing colors which chemistry has discovered,” and
“illuminated by the most powerful of sun burners and multiplied and reflected by the
purest mirrors in every way conceivable, fill our eyes with wonder.” While the writer
objected to such “Eastern splendor,” such splendor was increasingly becoming the
dominant aesthetic of Boston’s retail districts.
39
As another essayist mused in 1861 on
the commercial transformation of downtown Boston, “You are almost ready to believe in
the lamp of aladdin, that could build palaces in a night.”
40

The nation’s transition from a producerist culture that tolerated only a rational and
restrained commerce to one that celebrated the consumer’s enchantment did not happen
overnight. But by the late 1860s, retailing advice manuals had begun to conceive of
sensory manipulation through store arrangement and lighting as a legitimate sales
strategy. With lighting, one manual advised, “the point to go to is just short of where the

38
“Jewelry Bazaar,” Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion 1, no. 28
(November 8, 1851): 441.
39
“Pharmacy as a Fine Art,” The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 70, no. 9 (March
31, 1864): 184.
40
“A Dry-Goods Jobber in 1861,” The Atlantic 7, no. 39 (February 1861): 200.
246
defects in the goods begin to show.” Such manipulation was not supposed to be noticed.
Shopkeepers were advised not to play with their shades while the customer was
browsing, lest they raise suspicion about the quality of their goods. The point was not to
trick the eye, for “nothing is made by deceiving a customer” but to recognize the
imagination’s role in the consumer’s decision-making. “Almost every person is
susceptible to the genial influence of a cheerful and harmonious light in a room,
storehouse, church or other place, while a sombre or a glaring and inharmonious light
distracts the mind and oppresses the eyes, and we do not readily find ourselves pleased
with any thing while in its presence.”
41

As visual enchantment offered a reassuring metaphor for Boston’s booming mid-
century consumer culture, it simultaneously proved useful to the parlor and the ballroom.
As a site of familial activity and domestic bliss, the parlor was assuming its own crucial
didactic importance for the middle class, and becoming an object of what one scholar has
called “pious materialism”: the belief that material possessions reflected and encouraged
their owners’ moral and spiritual worth.
42
Pious materialism helped bring enchantment,
once the property of nature, into the urban parlor. In an 1854 Horatio Alger story written
for Gleason’s, for instance, a poor but virtuous young boy is admitted from the winter
chill into the warmth of a benevolent merchant’s opulent parlor. “To him, whose home
offered no attractions and few comforts, the scene which spread before him might well

41
Samuel Hough Terry, The Retailer’s Manual: Embodying the Conclusions of Thirty
Years’ Experience in Merchandizing (Newark, New Jersey: author, 1869), 114–116.
42
Robert Wuthnow, “Pious Materialism: How Americans View Faith and Money,” The
Christian Century 3 (1993): 239–42.
247
seem a scene of enchantment.”
43
Similarly, in the 1856 novel John True, Or, the
Christian Experience of an Honest Boy, when the hero’s sensibly decorated and
wholesome Fifth Avenue parlor was lighted up for company, “the brilliancy and beauty
of the scene seemed like enchantment more than real life.”
44
In a still more explicit
symbol of the domestication of enchantment, many parlors that year were decorated with
mass-produced versions of Harriet Hosmer’s popular statue Puck, based on the
mischievous and cherubic fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
By mid-century, a benign enchantment also pervaded the increasingly ornate and
fashionable social spaces, the “houses of feasting” that early antebellum moralists had
disdained. In Eliza Henderson Bordman Otis’ 1854 novel The Barclays of Boston, the
fashionable Barclays discover in a ballroom “a scene of perfect enchantment, a ball-room
which Aladdin's lamp might have produced in the good olden time, when we believed
and luxuriated in the Thousand-and-one Nights,” a sight that “dazzled their bewildered
eyes, enchanting the artist as well as the amateur.”
45
Participants consciously cultivated
these enchanting impressions; by mid-century fashionable women frequently costumed
themselves for social occasions in a garb otherwise seen only at the fairy spectacle. For
instance, the heroine of the story “Mrs. Doddington’s Ball,” appearing in the Ladies’
National Magazine in 1848 was “dressed as a Sultana, with her thick ankles concealed by
her full Turkish pantaloons, her fat, white arms covered with sparkling bracelets, and her
face shining like a full moon from beneath her Oriental turban.” Another was dressed as

43
Horatio Alger, “The Christmas Gift.,” Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion
7, no. 26 (Dec. 30, 1854): 411.
44
Jacob Abbott, John True, Or, The Christian Experience of an Honest Boy (New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1856), 16.
45
Eliza Henderson Bordman Otis, The Barclays of Boston (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and
Fields, 1854), 254.
248
Titania, the fairy queen from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Still more disguised
themselves as friars and nuns.
46

Throughout most of New England’s history, enchantment had been regarded as a
dangerous force, wielded by witches, religious revivalists, demagogues, and even
material forces such as liquor and fashion. Yet by the middle of the 19th-century, at the
theater, the ballroom, the civic celebration, the urban parlor and charity fair, fairies and
other fanciful figures had taken up residence in the midst of the visually conspicuous
materialism that had so alarmed an earlier generation of liberal Protestants. Instead of
serving to condemn Boston’s newly dazzling consumer and social culture, enchantment
had become its very aesthetic and even moral ideal.
Why, in the late 1840s and 1850s, did Boston’s emerging middle class so
enthusiastically—and consciously—seek its own enchantment? The most persuasive
explanation for this new ideal was that class’s increasingly distinct and self-conscious
economic identity. Having successfully distinguished itself in earlier decades as
temperate, pious and industrious—moral traits antithetical to enchantment—the urban
middle class’s identity at mid-century depended less exclusively on such virtues, and
increasingly upon its economic status as proprietors, professionals and white-collar wage
earners.
47
Enjoying the material signs of this identity in the display-conscious city,
however, meant finding an alibi for the lingering hesitations about consumption and
spectatorship; enchantment provided that alibi. The rehabilitation of enchantment, in

46
Grace Manners [pseud.], “Mrs. Doddington’s Ball,” Ladies’ National Magazine 13, no
6. (1848), 211, 214.
47
Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the
American City, 1760-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Gary John
Kornblith, “From Artisans to Businessmen: Master Mechanics in New England, 1789-
1850” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1983).
249
other words, was a sign that the iconoclastic hesitations once shared by all of Boston’s
classes had not disappeared entirely, but that were fast eroding under the pressures of
class formation.

The Urban Middle-Class Performance of Enchantment
Pointing to the 19th-century popularity of fairy tales, medieval and Eastern
folklore, magic shows, carnivalesque advertisements, and other cultural expressions of
the fantastic and irrational, recent scholars have refuted Max Weber’s famous
characterization of modernity as “disenchanted.”
48
Weber’s critics have instead treated
enchantment as a resilient and perhaps inevitable aspect of human experience, even under
a more secular modernity.
Indeed, judging by their reading and theater-going habits, Bostonians were far
more enthusiastic about fairy tales and enchantment at mid-century then they had been a
few decades earlier. Yet the re-enchantment thesis requires qualification, at least so far
as the ardently enchanted mid-century urban middle class is concerned. That class
understood enchantment as a force that was dying, if not dead already. “No statues
represent to our eyes the Invisible Deity,” explained the Unitarian minister Nathaniel

48
Mark A. Schneider, Culture and Enchantment (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993);
Jackson Lears, Fables Of Abundance: A Cultural History Of Advertising In America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Caroline Sumpter, The Victorian Press
and the Fairy Tale (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Fred Robert Nadis, Wonder
Shows: Performing Science, Magic, and Religion (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers
University Press, 2005); Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of
Secular Magic (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002); M. O.
Grenby, “Tame Fairies Make Good Teachers: The Popularity of Early British Fairy
Tales,” The Lion and the Unicorn 30, no. 1 (2006): 1–24.; Joshua Landy and Michael
Saler, eds., The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Palo
Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009).
250
Frothingham in 1840. “We are in no danger of bowing down to any material work as if it
were a divine being, or of raising subordinate creatures and shadowy fancies to the throne
of the Most High.”
49
“Fairy faith is, we may safely say, now dead everywhere,” the New
England poet John Greenleaf Whittier similarly mused in an 1854 essay written,
ironically, at the very moment that fairies ruled Boston’s stage. “It never had much hold
upon the Yankee mind, our superstitions being mostly of a sterner and less poetical kind.”
Though Whittier’s essay recounted numerous charming fairy superstitions, it concluded
with the satisfied observation that “the wonderland of childhood must henceforth be
sought within the domains of truth. The strange facts of natural history, and the sweet
mysteries of flowers and forests, and hills and water, will profitably take the place of the
fairy lore of the past, and poetry and romance still hold their accustomed seats in the
circle of the home, without bringing with them the evil spirits of credulity and untruth.”
50

Even New England’s most ardent Romantics seemed to agree with Lydia Maria Child’s
assessment of fairy tales: “I do not believe children ever think they are true.”
51
And if
children did not, who did?
These eulogies of superstition and enchantment were given credence by the
decline of the Second Great Awakening. This was not to say that credulity was dead; far
from it, the threat of being taken in remained a potent concern among the urban middle
class in the 19th century. Mid-century rationalist works such as Philosophy of Popular
Superstitions, cataloged such beliefs as Scottish and Irish fairy lore, in an effort to

49
Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham, The New Idolatry: A Sermon, Preached to the First
Church (Boston: J. T. Buckingham, 1840), 4.
50
John Greenleaf Whittier, Literary Recreations and Miscellanies (Boston: Ticknor and
Fields, 1854), 262, 272.
51
Child, The Mother’s Book, 92.
251
“describe their injurious effects” and “recommend the necessary measures for their
banishment.”
52
As numerous scholars have argued, popular illusions afforded the public
an important opportunity to assert its skepticism in an age wracked by the fear of
deceptions in the urban market society.
53
And as previous chapters have shown, such
visionary phenomena as animal magnetism and Spiritualism, remained a potent concern.
Yet the growing confidence of the white Protestant middle class in its own sophistication,
piety, discipline, and reason, helped convince it that true enchantment and credulity were
really the problems of others. Those who proved overly willing to believe their eyes
were frequently understood at mid-century to be class, racial, geographic or religious
outsiders.
Thus a “jolly tar”—a sailor, and thus unlikely to frequent the theater much—was
mocked in 1844 by the Boston Transcript for standing up in the middle of the Boston
Museum’s production of The Gambler, and sincerely offering a dollar to the actor playing
the production’s impoverished sea captain.
54
By the 1850s, rural visitors to Boston were
increasingly treated in the middle-class press, not as the exemplars of a virtuous rural life,
but as gawking, clueless rubes (Figure 37). Such was Jerusha Prym, a fictional bumpkin
depicted in the Punch-esque Boston publication The Carpet-Bag, who traveled to the

52
Samuel Bulfinch Emmons, Philosophy of Popular Superstitions: And the Effects of
Credulity and Imagination Upon the Moral, Social, and Intellectual Condition of the
Human Race (Boston: L. P. Crown & Company, 1853), 17.
53
James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001); Michael Leja, Looking
Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp; Wendy Bellion, Citizen
Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
54
Boston Evening Transcript, November 21, 1844, quoted in McGlinchee, The First
Decade of the Boston Museum, 26.
252
city. Taking drawing lessons from a Gummage-like Mr. Monochrome, Prym’s lack of
visual acumen is evident in her childish caricature of the painting she copies at the
Athenaeum, Washington Allston’s Saul and the Witch of Endor (Figure 38). “There is
ever so many great pictures here in gold frames, but I don’t think much of these oil
paintings,” says Prym.
55

From the point of view of Boston’s predominantly Protestant and Anglo-
American middle class, even more unsophisticated were the city’s new Irish Catholic
immigrants. In 1854, the year that nativist sentiments culminated in the Know-Nothing
party’s sweeping victories at the city and state level, a local Protestant publicly prayed
that “the rising generation, the future Republicans of the United States” would not “have
their minds contaminated with the superstition and servility of the Dark Ages” that the
Irish were accused of introducing to Boston.
56
Around the same time, Boston’s middle
class delighted in fairy burlesques such as O’Flannigan and the Fairies, or a Midsummer
Night’s Dream, Not Shakespeare’s and The Fairy Circle, or Con O’Carolan’s Dream
that mocked those purported to truly “see” fairies: gullible and intoxicated Irishmen. The
audience of such burlesques could simultaneously delight at the simulated fairies, while
enjoying at joke at the expense of those inebriated immigrants who mistook illusion for
fact. By laughing at the superstitious Irish and the gawking rubes on stage and in the
press, Boston’s largely Anglo-American Protestant middle class carefully displayed its
imperviousness to the more genuine intoxication and irrationality that afflicted other
urban spectators. It had become safe to express one’s delight as “enchantment” only

55
“Familiar Letters on Art,” The Carpet-Bag 2, April 10, 1852.
56
Independent Irishman [pseud.], Familiar Letters to John B. Fitzpatrick, the Catholic
Bishop of Boston (Boston: J. P. Mendum, 1854), 23.
253
because doing so was recognized as an act that did not compromise one’s reputation for
reason or self-control.
In other words, the spectator who announced himself as enchanted in the
ballroom, parlor, or the jewelry bazaar, participated in the same performance of naïve
wonder as the actor who gaped at fairyland in the fairy spectacle; but this performance
was recognized as just that. Indeed, mid-century etiquette manuals presented fancy not
as a spontaneous reaction, but as a pose. As an 1860 etiquette manual explained, fancy
(or at least its affectation) was a social asset not just for the artist or poet, but for the
middle class at large: “The man, who, bringing memory and fancy happily blended to
bear upon what he sees, can make every object worthy of remark familiar and interesting
to those who have not seen it.”
57
As another manual explained, “You may safely give the
rein to fancy and hilarity, certain that, in a well-assorted party, you will make at least a
favorable impression, if not a brilliant one.”
58
Further attesting to the social desire to
enchant were the amateur magic manuals that taught the middle class to perform
enchanting “parlor tricks” at home.
59
And among the most popular of motifs for the most

57
Cecil B. Hartley, The Gentlemen’s Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness: Being
a Complete Guide for a Gentleman’s Conduct in All His Relations Towards Society
(Boston: G.W. Cottrell, 1860), 316.
58
Arthur Martine, Martine’s Hand-Book of Etiquette and Guide to True Politeness (New
York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1866), 17.
59
Popular examples of the genre included John Henry Anderson, The Fashionable
Science of Parlor Magic: Being a Series of the Newest Tricks of Deception, Arranged for
Amateurs and Lovers of the Art (New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1840) and George
Arnold, The Magician’s Own Book, Or, the Whole Art of Conjuring: Being a Complete
Hand-Book of Parlor Magic (New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1857).
254
ubiquitous of social tokens, the visiting card, were fairies, elves, and other enchanted
creatures—a perfect gesture for expressing how enchanted one was to meet someone.
60

Given the disdain for superstition, why was this performance of fancy and
enchantment called for? The answer was that while middle-class Bostonians did not wish
to be seen as credulous, neither did they wish to appear too worldly for enchantment.
And thus, it was by feigning enchantment in the most worldly of urban environments, the
increasingly visually and socially refined middle-class shop, ballroom, and parlor
dazzling itself, that Boston’s middle class claimed a sensibility of its own that was at
once naïve and sophisticated.

The Idolatry of Sense and the Mid-Century Interpretation of Enchantment
For decades, antebellum moralists had warned that high urban living dulled the
senses. The “idolatry of sense” threatened to corrupt the middle class; the luxurious
visual environment was a waypoint on the road to intemperance and moral ruin.
According to moralists, the theater, the public promenade, and other urban amusements
initially aroused the senses, but gradually lost their excitement, leading the individual to
seek out baser pleasures or to succumb to madness. “[T]he ally of Hell, by whom the
wicked are familiarized to crime,” a Boston magazine proclaimed in 1821, was “Habit.”
“It is Habit that takes away the relish for the luxuries of the rich,” and renders “the ball-
room insipid to the once raptured debutante.” In the end, insipidness led to sin, for “it is
the ease with which the rich and the great obtain all they desire, which so frequently
renders their lives vapid and spiritless, and sends them to the gambling-table for

60
A sampling of these enchanted visiting card themes can be found in the Elves/Fairies
folder, Trade Cards C-G Box, John & Carolyn Grossman Collection, WTL.
255
excitement and animation.”
61
Another potential outcome was insanity. “After years of
this indulgence, persons, pleasures, company and novelties, pall upon the heart; the mind
is wearied with that on which it feasted before” and imbecility resulted, explained a
Boston-area physician.
62
An antebellum expert on “City Manners” put it more simply:
“Every mind may be said to have its own allotted fund of ‘excitability.’”
63

On the other hand, even as they moralized about those who feigned a lack of interest,
most antebellum experts on manners simultaneously recommended it, echoing Lord
Chesterfield’s advice to “have attention to every thing” but to avoid “seeming to be an
observer.” To not be attentive, made one either a fool or a madman, according to
Chesterfield; yet to stare, to appear overly engrossed, was a sign of naivety.
64
As the
middle-class moved into a new world of urban spectacle, they resolved this conundrum
by designating nature and art (e.g. the park and gallery) as acceptable objects of
absorption, where attention did not imply an ill manner, but rather self-culture.
Thus, in the early antebellum period, didactic literature contrasted the wholesome
and inexhaustible source of sensory stimulation, nature, with the dissipating excitement
of the spectacular city. Corrupted by city life, the excessively refined urban sophisticate
feigned both enchantment and boredom at the visual pleasures of the city. Both poses
troubled moralists. So illustrated the 1828 didactic novel, Love of Admiration: or Mary’s
Visit to B-----. The pure and keen-eyed Mary Ashford travels from her rural village for

61
“Happiness,” Spirit of the English Magazines 10, no. 4 (1822), 129–130, 131–132.
62
Edward Jarvis, Tendency of Misdirected Education and the Unbalanced Mind to
Produce Insanity. (Hartford: F.C. Brownell, 1858), 608.
63
David Hoffman, Miscellaneous Thoughts on Men, Manners, and Things (Baltimore:
Plaskitt & Cugle, 1841), 159.
64
The Works of Lord Chesterfield: Including His Letters to His Son, Etc (New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1838), 100.
256
the first time to Boston, where her citified and affected cousin Charlotte Parkwell
attempts to induct her into the city’s visual attractions. Their behavior as spectators
marks the cousins’ moral contrast: while at the Athenaeum, Charlotte “threw herself into
raptures and made a thousand ridiculous exclamations at the pictures,” soon giving up her
pose of engagement to rudely gossip with her friends (something Charlotte does even in
church). Meanwhile, Mary quietly absorbs herself in the art. Eventually, Charlotte
grows bored and chastises Mary for looking too long at the pictures. “People who have
been brought up in the city, do not gaze with wonder and admiration at every thing they
behold.” Another citified cousin seconds the notion: “The genteel nil admirari” – the
genteel are surprised by nothing.
65

The opposite of absorption was boredom, a feeling that the literary historian
Patricia Meyer Spacks has argued emerged in the 18th century alongside the aristocratic
condition of leisure. To be bored, Spacks claims, implied inner vacuity at odds with the
rich interior life of the devout Christian. As such, only the impious needed the
stimulations of the senses and of society to cure their boredom. Furthermore, the bored
individual implied a sense of superiority above the people around her—Charlotte, in
other words, to a fault.
66
Yet the point of Love of Admiration was not that absorption was
superior to boredom, but rather that the true spectator was absorbed by pure spectacles
and bored by false ones. In another scene, Mary grows tired of looking at her Charlotte’s
drawings, “mere copies of the most ordinary kind,” and wanders out to the Beacon Hill
balcony with its “delightful view of the extensive common.” There, a nearby “ball room,

65
Louisa Caroline Tuthill, Love of Admiration: Or Mary’s Visit to B----. A Moral Tale
(New Haven: A. H. Maltby, 1828), 35–36.
66
Patricia Meyer Spacks, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995).
257
which seemed in a blaze of light, at its illuminated window, met Mary’s eye. Oh, thought
she, who would prefer that glare, that crowded room, to this sweet light of heaven, this
blue ethereal canopy?” Drawn toward the didactic sights of the Common and the
Athenaeum, away from the city’s talentless drawing students and bright balls, Mary has
her pure and pious rural upbringing to thank. “Her grateful heart rose in silent
thanksgiving and adoration to the Almighty Creator, and she blessed her parents, for
having opened to her, the sources of such pure, exalted joy.”
67
Mary’s boredom with the
drawings and the ball was not a mark of her dissipation or snobbishness, nor was it a
performance, but rather a sign of her moral superiority. Mary was precisely the spectator
whom the city’s didactic elite idealized.
Exactly twenty years later, “Mrs. Doddington’s Ball” offered a very different
message about the moral implications of visual absorption and boredom. Mary’s
counterpart in the later story was Ellen Arlington, another shy rural visitor to the city.
Like Mary, Ellen finds herself at her first ball. Surrounded by gorgeously costumed
knights and troubadours, however, Ellen (unlike Mary) “speedily forgot her fright, and
gave herself up to the enjoyment of the fairy scene.” As she confesses the next morning
to her host Mrs. Doddington, it was “the most enchanting ball” she and her fellow
country cousin had ever been at.
68

As Boston’s middle class grew increasingly surrounded by spectacles of luxury, it
faced a dilemma: was the correct response to the city’s social and sensory delights
fascination, or boredom? Did boredom with the city’s refined environment imply a
higher sensibility, or merely a callous and superior nature? The Love of Admiration

67
Tuthill, Love of Admiration, 21–22.
68
Manners, “Mrs. Doddington’s Ball,” 212–213.
258
suggested that a moral sensibility could only disengage from the urban environment; but
“Mrs. Doddington’s Ball” suggested precisely the opposite. So, more authoritatively, did
an 1866 etiquette manual: “In society, the absent man is uncivil; he who affects to be so,
is rude and vulgar.”
69
For, in a sign that fears about the impact of the spectacular city on
the moral character were easing, the fact of enchantment (or at least its performance) was
coming by mid-century to matter more than its source.
“There is poetry in the heart of the young man…entering the city,” the
Universalist minister Henry Bacon explained to Bostonians in 1853. On the other hand,
“there is something saddening in the gradual lessening of curiosity in the travellers he
passes as the stage leaves the last village, and begins to enter the great avenue, and the
throng on either side increases.”
70
A year later, John Greenleaf Whittier similarly
lamented that, “In our cities and large towns children nowadays pass through the opening
acts of life's marvellous drama with as little manifestation of wonder and surprise as the
Indian does through the streets of a civilized city which he has entered for the first
time.”
71
To admit boredom in urban social life was becoming a greater sign of an
incapacity for wonder, in other words, than to reveal a fascination with the worldly
appearances of the décor, costume, lighting, and other elements of the refined middle
class environment. To be enchanted by the sight of the city was a sign not of corruption,
but of its forestalling. And thus, like the reviewer of The Enchanted Beauty who found
“perfect luxury of a scenic entertainment” a valid substitute for its allegorical moral,

69
Martine, Martine’s Hand-Book of Etiquette and Guide to True Politeness, 12.
70
Bacon, “The Poet’s Use of the City,” 205.
71
Whittier, Literary Recreations and Miscellanies, 260.
259
Bacon celebrated rather than feared the delight of the rural New Englander enchanted by
his first glimpse of Boston.

Conclusion
In defining spectatorship as a tool of urban moral and social reason, discipline,
and piety, Boston’s didactic culture inadvertently accelerated the very worldliness it
sought to discourage. Though the park, the monument, and the gallery helped
disseminate the ideals of urban spectatorship, these spaces also evoked concern that even
the most lofty forms of spectatorship were tainted with sensuousness and materialism.
Enchantment furnished one of the spectator’s few available proofs that he had not
exhausted his “allotted fund of ‘excitability’” through a dissipated urban existence, and
indeed belonged to the morally superior middle class. The performance of enchantment
signaled at once the reluctance of the middle class to abandon its mythological rural
origins, as well as a growing acceptance of the guardedness and theatricality required by
urban life. Ultimately, though, that performance outlived the influence of the moralists
who had made it necessary. By mid-century, enchantment had become its own good,
regardless of its source.
The transitional step between the elite-disseminated ideal of sober spectatorship in
the 1820s, and the urbanized aesthetic of enchantment that triumphed in the late 1840s
and 1850s, was visionary culture. For most liberal Protestants in the 1820s and 1830s,
the invisible and divine could not be seen within the visible world, but only inferred from
it; the spectator might thus infer the existence and nature of heaven by leaving the gross
and sensual world of the city for an hour’s walk through the Common. By the late 1830s,
260
visionaries had demonstrated that it was possible not just to infer the unseen, but to see it,
and thereby escape the grossness of the urban environment.
Yet a decade or two later, middle-class Bostonians had developed more liberal
attitudes about spectatorship. The synthesis of the spiritual and material in the
enchanting sights of mid-century Boston therefore signaled both the triumph of the
visionary impulse, and its imminent obsolescence. Instead of simply suggesting the
invisible, fairy spectacles and other performances of enchantment actually represented it,
and in so doing obliterated the barrier between physical and mental (or spiritual) vision
that Puritan iconoclasts had erected centuries earlier, and which liberal Protestants had
defended in the face of urbanization. By mid-century, Boston’s fairy spectacles, fancy
fairs, plush and dazzling interiors, magical retail displays, and self-conscious social
displays of enchantment, demonstrated that the spectacular city had become as legitimate
a source of wonder as the unseen world. An iconoclastic Puritan village had become, in
other words, a city of budding flâneurs.

261
From Spectators to Visionaries:
Visual Culture and the Transformation of Boston, 1820-1860

Conclusion:

In 1583, the English Puritan Stephen Gosson, a leading foe of the Elizabethan
stage, posed a question: “If we be carefull that no pollution of idoles enter by the mouth
into our bodies, how diligent, how circumspect, how wary ought we to be, that no
corruption of idols, enter by the passage of our eyes & eares into the soul?”
1
Conveyed
to the shores of New England, the Puritan impulse to guard the eyes from the sensory
temptations of theater, art, dress, and other forms of worldly display reigned morally
supreme for much of the early history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Such iconoclastic anxieties appeared to be waning by the early national era, when
Massachusetts’ prohibition of theatrical amusements was repealed over the passionate
objections of social conservatives such as Samuel Adams. Boston’s upper classes took
an increasingly liberal attitude toward the display of wealth of their recently defeated
British foes, abandoning their square meetinghouses, building more opulent private
residences and amassing art collections, and constructing an identity that depended as
much upon taste and wealth as upon godliness. Yet despite its aspirations for
cosmopolitan sophistication, Boston’s theologically liberal Protestant elite retained a
vestige of Puritanical unease in its celebration of sight. Honed through the eyes, taste

1
Quoted in Michael O’Connell, “The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm, Anti-Theatricalism,
and the Image of the Elizabethan Theater,” ELH 52, no. 2 (July 1, 1985), 279.
262
required a careful a juggle of self-discipline and sensibility that could all too easily
violate the boundaries of republican and Christian morality, denigrating into sensualism,
materialism, and the “idolatry of sense.”
The tension between self-discipline and sensibility intensified in the 1820s, as
Boston finally admitted that it was a city, and members of the increasingly assertive
middle and working classes began to challenge the genteel visual pursuits, political
authority, and religion of their wealthier neighbors. Challenged by religious revivalism,
egalitarian democracy, and rapid urbanization, Boston’s largely Unitarian elite sought to
reinforce moral and social order and their own authority by imposing visual order on the
environment. In remaking Boston’s landscape and spectacular institutions, elites hoped
to impress on the public that careful study of such objects of eye would not only hone the
outward senses, but methodically stimulate far grander “associations” in the viewer’s
imagination.
As waves of new Bostonians arrived from the region’s towns and villages in the
1820s and 1830s, they ought to enjoy and benefit from the city’s sophisticated visual
culture without succumbing to the moral corruptions associated with urban life. Even the
most worthy of visual objects, however, deepened their iconoclastic anxieties. The
constant imperative to see the moral landmark and the work of art as more than its gross
and material medium, and to disconnect both from the surrounding environment’s
disorder and sensualism, reinforced both the stakes and challenges of spectatorship with
perverse simultaneity. Was the act of admiring the moral landmark or the work of art
simply an insincere pose? Were Boston’s monuments and parks and galleries not as
much objects of vanity as the genteel hotels and shops that surrounded them? The very
263
fact that such questions could be asked suggests a waning confidence in the power of the
environment and its reformers to dictate how it would be seen.
By the late 1830s, visionary art viewers and artists resolved this conundrum by
seeing the environment as they wished, looking through its physical surface at its
underlying spiritual essence. In the process, they tested the rational boundaries that
Boston’s rationalist Unitarian elite had established between physical and spiritual vision.
Most middle-class Bostonians did not experience visions; but their anxieties as spectators
led them to embrace two spectacular archetypes whose sense of perception was immune
to the corruptions of urban spectacles: the amateur (and often rural) artist and the blind.
While perfectly rational in themselves, these archetypes offered a model for validating
more occult phenomena such as magnetic clairvoyance and drawing mediumship. Thus,
while these visionaries lay outside the mainstream, they capitalized upon spectacular
anxieties faced by every urban spectator who sought to take part in the city’s visual
culture without corrupting her senses in the process.
Countless early antebellum novels had identified with the pure rural visitor’s
efforts to make sense of the city and resist its spectacular and moral temptations.
Yet the urban visual environment posed a threat to the sight of the middle class only as
long as that class continued to consider itself not fully of the city. By mid-century,
Boston’s middle class was more confident in its urban identity and its spectacular tastes,
and patronized a growing range of spectacular venues and publications aimed specifically
at their class. Through fairy spectacles and fancy fairs, the urban middle class began to
embrace the disorder and materialism of the city in allegorical form in the 1840s. By the
1860s, this allegory was no longer necessary, and the urban spectator delighted in seeing
264
the city in all its disorder and material temptation. In the postbellum period, the city was
deemed far less of a moral threat, for as one clergyman advised young men considering
pursuing careers in the city, “The question between city and country life cannot be
determined by any uniform law, nor even by general principles which can be applied with
certainty to every individual case.”
2
Increasingly confident in its own sophistication, the
urban middle class placed itself between the spectacular extremes of the urban poor who
inhabited the shadows of the slums, and the hayseed who gawked foolishly at the city’s
bustle, fashion, and wealth. The middle class could enjoy spectacles of luxury and
enchantment as the fairy spectacles, the fancy-goods store, and the fashionable ball
without fear of being mistaken for rural rubes, superstitious immigrants, or dissipated
libertines.
Two related processes helped the middle class come to terms with urban visual
life: suburbanization and class formation. Starting in the 1840s, suburbanization helped
solidify the identity of the class as a whole, helping it shed much (though certainly not
all) of its anxiety about how and what it saw. As Boston’s middle class began
establishing residential enclaves both in the city and its fringes, it grew increasingly
confident in its superiority to both the poor immigrant laborers and the rural villagers
who had helped populate Boston in such great numbers starting in the 1820s. It also
counted itself as distinct from the upper class, whose identity was made increasingly
transparent through a new genre of social gazettes, appearing in the late 1840s, that

2
Joseph P. Thompson, “The Risks and Failures of City Life,” Atlantic Almanac 1869
(1869): 58.
265
spelled out how much the city’s leading men were worth, and defined by omission the
class that lay beneath.
3

By the 1860s, as the middle class gravitated to suburbs such as Roxbury,
Dorchester, and the newly built Back Bay, the visual delights of the afterlife and the city
merged further. In Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ bestselling novel The Gates Ajar (1868), the
departed dressed, shopped, and enjoyed in transcendental form the material pleasures and
sensory attractions likened to those of Boston. “There will be machinery and pianos in
the same sense in which there will be pearl gates and harps. Whatever enjoyment any or
all of them represent now, something will represent them.” For the children, heaven will
have “nicer playthings—why, nicer than they have in the shops of Boston.” Adults,
meanwhile, would enjoy “galleries of art, over which we may wander at will; or into
orchestral halls, where the highest possibilities of music will be realised to singer and to
hearer.”
4

With its shops, art galleries, and other urban amenities, Phelps’ “sensuous,
material, earthly heaven” would certainly have scandalized her late father, the Andover
Seminary theologian Moses Stuart, as it did many conservative Christians, some as far
away as London.
5
Yet the tremendous popularity of the novel and its imitators suggested
that most middle-class Americans by the Civil War were coming to spectacular terms

3
See for instance Richard Hildreth, Our First Men: A Calendar of Wealth, Fashion and
Gentility: Containing a List of Those Persons Taxed in the City of Boston, Credibly
Reported to Be Worth One Hundred Thousand Dollars, with Biographical Notices of the
Principal Persons (Boston: Published by all the booksellers, 1846) and Thomas L. V.
Wilson, The Aristocracy of Boston: Who They Are, and What They Were: Being a History
of the Business and Business Men of Boston, for the Last Forty Years (Boston: the author,
1848).
4
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1869), 165, 183, 186.
5
“The Gates Ajar” Critically Examined, by a Dean (London: Hatchards, Piccadilly,
1871), 54.
266
with their desire to see and consume, and weaving together an ideal landscape that
contained both pastoral pleasures as well as urbane orchestral halls. No longer depicted
as an unseen and unseeable realm, heaven resembled nothing so much as the new
suburban communities to which the city’s middle class was gravitating. Safely
ensconced in the heavenly suburbs, many Bostonians found that the attractions of “real
life” had begun to displace those of the unseen world. The new willingness of the middle
class to look upon the modern city as it was suggested that the desire of the middle class
to protect itself from the sensory threats of urban life had significantly abated. It had
done so, not only because the middle class felt confident in its own privilege as a
consolidated, and to some extent geographically segregated class, but because the
consolidation of class was increasingly revealing that the urban spectator could not
improve his lot simply by learning to see better.
Throughout much of the antebellum period, a strong belief in the potential for
social mobility and the perceived power of self-culture to elevate the mechanic to middle-
class status had imbued the refinement of vision with urgency for both the individual and
the larger urban social order. As social and labor historians have demonstrated, this
optimism was ill-founded, for the chasm between employer and employed, journeyman
and master artisans-turned-journeymen grew continually wider throughout the period in
Boston and other cities.
6
Yet many Bostonians clung to the myth of social mobility, and
understood keen-sightedness as a key index of the refinement, industry, and dynamism of
the individual. A paternalistic elite reinforced this idea at host of spectacular institutions

6
Gary J. Kornblith, “The Artisanal Response to Capitalist Transformation,” Journal of
the Early Republic 10, no. 3 (October 1, 1990): 315–321; Lisa Beth Lubow, “Artisans in
Transition: Early Capitalist Development and the Carpenters of Boston, 1787-1837”
(PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1987).
267
open to all classes: the art gallery, the natural history museum, the horticultural fair, the
mechanic’s fair, among others.
By the 1840s, many Boston intellectuals and reformers recognized that the ideal
of a universal self-culture was failing to unite the city’s classes, however. These
intellectuals and reformers abandoned the city before they surrendered the ideal. The
desire to re-establish a universal culture that united both mental and manual laborers was
among the foremost aims of Transcendentalist reformers such as George Ripley, founder
of Brook Farm. Though not every member of the Brook Farm community was expected
to be an artist, “the mere presence of such a person and of his art, though he do not teach
it, or seek systematically to impart it to his neighbors, is a great educational influence.”
Utopian though Brook Farm might have been, a similar theory lay behind the inclusion of
the mechanical and fine arts at the highly popular Massachusetts Charitable Mechanics
Fairs triennial fairs that began in 1837. At nearly every fair, speakers reassured the
socially mixed audience that a quick eye and mind were the sure keys to the mechanic’s
success.
“The distinction of Fine and Mechanic Arts, is in a great measure done away,”
promised the orator George Russell, a funder of Brook Farm, at the seventh triennial fair
in 1853. “There was once a broad line between them, and one disdained an alliance with
the other. It was supposed that genius could not descend from her etherealized habitation
and mingle with her plebeian brother. She is now no longer a resident of the clouds, but
dwells on the solid earth.” In the same speech, Russell urged the mechanic who aspired
to the status of artist to “resign thy unprofitable task, and leave this daubing of paint and
kneading of clay. Flourish thy palette, cut and carve as though wilt, the ideal, that is not
268
in thee, cannot be given to the dead things thou art striving to torture into life.”
7
By
urging the mechanic to resume his old craft, Russell and other orators stressed the dignity
of mechanical labor. Even as Russell spoke, however, the ideal of a general spirit of
culture had waned (if only temporarily), and with it the anxiety about learning to see. By
acknowledging the difference between artist’s ideal vision and the mechanic’s practical
vision, Russell was implicitly condoning the distinctions of a new and less fluid class
order.
Almost simultaneously, that order was illustrated by a caricature of spectators at
London’s recent Great Exhibition, reprinted in Boston’s The Carpet-Bag. A pair of
mechanics carefully studies a piece of machinery that two more genteel spectators (the
“swells”) find obscure and uninteresting (Figure 39). The converse implication, of
course, was the mechanics would find little of interest in the art gallery or other genteel
spectacular institutions at which they had been so enthusiastically welcomed by the
promoters of self-culture. As explained a leader of Boston’s Eight Hour League, a
laborer’s organization founded in 1863 to fight for an eight-hour work day, the promises
of self-culture had been empty: “[E]ducation, free lectures, public libraries, parks,
museums, and art galleries…are, and must necessarily remain, practically ineffectual, so
far as lifting the community from its present industrial and social mire is concerned,

7
The Seventh Exhibition of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association,:
Faneuil and Quincy Halls, in the City of Boston, September, 1853 (Boston: Damrell &
Moore and George Coolidge., 1853), 23, 24–25.
269
unless the leisure time of the masses is increased.”
8
Industrial conditions, not differing
moral habits, accounted for the worker’s apparent lack of interest in art and nature.
The moral imperative of spectatorship had been most acute when Boston’s public
spectacular institutions were seen to be promoting a universal culture. By mid-century,
this was increasingly no longer the case. Bostonians remained a two-theater town for
most of the early antebellum period, but by the early 1850s, a Bostonian could see a play
at the Boston Theatre, the Boston Museum, the Tremont, the American Amphitheatre, the
new National Theatre, the Lion Theatre, the Boston Adelphi, the Aquarial Gardens,
among other venues. Or she could visit dozens of art galleries and daguerrean studios.
While the largest events drew Bostonians of all classes, the city’s exhibition venues,
retail accommodations, and music halls increasingly belonged to an established cultural
hierarchy.
9

The more firmly established this hierarchy, the more deviations from it were
understood as lapses, not of morality per se, but simply of taste. Art was becoming,
increasingly, a matter of preference, or so Harriet Beecher Stowe argued in the Atlantic
Monthly in 1869.
10
Aesthetic authority was by then largely outsourced to the professional
critic, detective-like in his attention to details, and critical to a rapidly appreciating art

8
George Gunton and Ira Steward, Wealth and Progress, a Critical Examination of the
Labor Problem: The Natural Basis for Industrial Reform, Or How to Increase Wages
Without Reducing Profits Or Lowering Rents (New York: D. Appleton, 1887).
9
Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The
Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America,” Media, Culture, and
Society, 4 (1982): 33-50; Michael Broyles, Music of the Highest Class: Elitism and
Populism in Antebellum Boston (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Lawrence W.
Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990).
10
Harriet Beecher Stowe, “What Pictures Shall I Hang on My Walls?” Atlantic Almanac
1869 (1869): 41–44.
270
market mined with misattributions and fakes.
11
Yet though more cultured, the critic was
not, at least by definition, morally superior to those with less training in art. So
exemplified the nouveau-riche hero of William Dean Howells’ novel The Rise of Silas
Lapham (1885), whose idea of beauty was the photograph he kept in his desk of his paint
mine, “one of the sightliest places is in the country.”
12
Lapham makes a fool of himself
as he attempts to move into refined Brahmin society, but he retains his moral bearings.
By the late antebellum period, and even more so in later decades, visual
perception was understood less as an index of moral character than as a reflection of the
individual happenstances of profession, experience, and mood. As the Boston physician
Edward Jarvis explained in 1858:
The same object, presented to several men who have different predominant
feelings or interests, will suggest as many and as various images. In the same
landscape, the arrangements of the fields, the gracefulness of outline and detail,
present to the painter a fit subject for a picture. Its soil suggests to the farmer the
idea of its fitness for cultivation of various crops. The speculator sees its
appropriateness for building lots; the geologist, the composition of the earth; the
botanist, the various kinds of plants that grow upon it. In all these and similar
cases the ruling idea, whatever it may be, directs the perceptive faculties in some
degree, and compels the eye to see, and the ear to hear, and the mind to perceive,
that which is in accordance with itself, and prevents them from recognizing that
which is not in harmony with it.
13

It was not moral motives that distinguished the visual perceptions of the geologist and
botanist, but professional knowledge. Spectacular pluralism was no longer an anxious

11
Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues: Roots of a Scientific Paradigm,” Theory and Society 7, no. 3
(May 1, 1979): 273–288; for an engaging example of the early 20th-century world of
professional criticism, see John Brewer, The American Leonardo: A Tale of Obsession,
Art and Money (New York: Oxford University Press US, 2009).
12
William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham (New York: Houghton, 1922), 106.
13
Edward Jarvis, Tendency of Misdirected Education and the Unbalanced Mind to
Produce Insanity. (Hartford: F.C. Brownell, 1858), 600.
271
indicator of moral differences among spectators, but simply an indication of the culture
and knowledge that went along with class.
So established was this class-based difference of perception that local physicians
regarded it as a physiological fact. As the leading Boston eye doctor John Homer Dix
explained, eye trouble was caused not simply by visual labor in general, but especially
afflicted individuals whose lives involved “earnest mental effort.” Such trouble was
“rarely to be met with in persons whose use of the eyes is only mechanical, however
minute the objects upon which they are employed, or however long-continued the use of
them; that it seems almost always to originate in over-use of the eyes for purposes
requiring intellectual effort,” these consisting primarily of “literary pursuits,” “book-
keeping, which involved some degree of anxiety or calculation” and all individuals “more
or less, either in the way of business, improvement, or amusement, literary in their
habits.” There was a faintly priggish cast to Dix’s remarks, for he recommended the
light of the church over the theater; in church, “a subdued light affords a salutary repose
to the eyes which have been toiling for six days,” while the damaging glare of the theater
set a poor example for visitors, all the “more to be lamented [as] an example to be copied
in [the spectators’] domestic arrangements.” Yet the problem was understood in more
physiological than moral terms. The spectator was advised to view nature firsthand; if
this was impossible “viewing scenic representations are useful in relaxing the adjusting
apparatus of the eye, at the same time that they provide for bodily exercise or mental
recreation.” Though the city afforded spaces dangerous to the vision, it also included a
number of spectacular venues that offered plenty of such “scenic representations” for the
272
physiological benefit of the eye.
14

Though how the spectator saw had lost much of its moral significance, what one
saw had not, and it was the latter that would serve as the subject of most bourgeois moral
concern after the antebellum period. In 1878, one of the nation’s most vigilant
censorship groups, the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice, was
established. Initially composed almost exclusively of Brahmins, the group’s members
went after books, plays, prints, and eventually films that they considered immoral,
popularizing the phrase “Banned in Boston” and earning themselves comparisons to the
city’s Puritan founders.
15
Yet these late-19th-century visual didacts, unlike their
antebellum predecessors, felt no discomfort with the “idolatry of sense.” Much of
Bostonians’ interest in visionary culture had stemmed from the need for the individual
himself to refine the senses within an environment feared to be gross and sensual. By the
last quarter of the century, the moral imperative to see correctly had largely vanished; and
with it, the appetite for the real world trumped that of fairyland. By the second half of the
19th century, the model spectator was no longer the attentive, passionless yet sensible
diner at Sargent’s The Dinner Party, nor the visionary Orpheus, straining to see past the
visible world, but the flâneur, enthralled by a dazzling world of urban spectacle to be
soaked up without reservation.
Boston’s visionary culture, however, did not wholly disappear in the age of the
flâneur. Spiritualism, Adventism, and Christian Science, New Thought and other

14
John Homer Dix, Treatise Upon the Nature and Treatment of Morbid Sensibility of the
Retina, or Weakness of Sight (Boston: William D. Ticknor, 1849), 101-102, 113–114,
117–119, 124.
15
Neil Miller, Banned in Boston: The Watch and Ward Society's Crusade against Books,
Burlesque, and the Social Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010).
273
controversial movements continued to provide Bostonians direct access to the spiritual
world.
16
Yet much of what had been understood as a genuine perception of the invisible,
the infinite, and the ideal in the antebellum period was understood in the century’s last
third as a product of the imagination—not the universal imagination, to which
Washington Allston and the Transcendentalists had subscribed, but the idiosyncratic
imagination of the individual.
At the beginning of the century, such imagination had been valued only in the
artist. The term “visionary” had applied pejoratively to the distempered imaginations of
all those who quested after the impossible or illusory: religious enthusiasts, fanatical
reformers, and foolish entrepreneurs who invested in unworkable businesses and
technologies. Perhaps the most representative of this despised class was Melville’s
Captain Ahab, pursuing his absurd whale hunt to the detriment of all those under his
leadership as well as his own soul. Yet by the 1880s, American culture deployed the
visionary label differently, as it began to celebrate in gendered terms its “men of vision.”
These inventors, investors, and captains of industry saw what others could not, gambled
on their visions, and usually benefitted themselves and society in the process. (As the
recent eulogistic labeling of Apple’s “visionary” founder Steve Jobs demonstrates, the
new mythology of the visionary lives on powerfully in today’s corporate world.)
17
This

16
Eric Caplan, Mind Games: American Culture and the Birth of Psychotherapy, 1st ed.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Donald Meyer, The Positive Thinkers:
Popular Religious Psychology from Mary Baker Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale and
Ronald Reagan, Rei Sub (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan Press, 1988).
17
Eric Randall, “A Linguistic Consensus on Steve Jobs: Visionary,” The Atlantic Wire,
October 6, 2011, http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2011/10/linguistic-
consensus-steve-jobs-visionary/43415/.
274
new culture did not just celebrate genius, but defined it in terms of that which was visible
(first literally, and then metaphorically) to some and not to others.
Though visionary culture endowed mystics and geniuses with exceptional powers
of vision that were often dismissed by later generations, it also proposed more enduringly
that such visions were the essence of personal identity for everyone. Before depth
psychology had mapped out the unique, boundless, and visionary subconscious, liberal
Protestant ministers such as Henry Ward Beecher had come to recognize that everyone,
not just prophets and artists, saw visions. As Beecher explained in his 1868 sermon
“Visions”:
We have visions still, and visions meant for the same purpose that visions were in
former times, only we are not authorized to say, ‘This vision is given me for the
sake of the nation.’ If you have a vision, it is for your own guidance… As men
grow wiser and wiser, official visions will be fewer and fewer, and personal
visions will be more and more frequent. With the advance of intelligence, visions
become the right of individuals, and not the right of representative persons, who
stand in an official relation to the race.
18

As late-19th-century American culture celebrated the “visions” of J.P. Morgan
and Thomas Edison, it had already began to embrace a very different notion of the
ordinary self, one in which the imagination served not just as one faculty among others,
but as the defining basis of personality.
19
If it had been the ambition of antebellum moral
authorities to ensure that the imagination was cultivated into a force for moral and social
order, it was the task of Beecher’s generation to ensure that individuals used their visions
for their own benefit, and did not impose them on others. The war between the rational

18
Henry Ward Beecher, “Visions,” in Sermons: Henry Ward Beecher, Plymouth Church,
Brooklyn (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1868), 69.
19
For a broader view of the importance of personality to the modern self, see Warren
Susman’s seminal essay “‘Personality’ and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture,” in
New Directions in American Intellectual History, ed. John Higham and Paul Conkin
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 212-26.
275
collectivist culture of visual didacticism and the more individualist and free-wheeling
culture of visionary culture had come to a draw. On the one hand, visual didacticism had
established the universal existence and importance of visions to all individuals; on the
other, it had failed to counter the visionaries’ insistence that those visions were highly
individual and idiosyncratic. This cultural détente, foundational to the modern self, owed
much to the liberal Protestant effort to manage the spectacular problems and possibilities
of the antebellum city.

276

FIGURES

Figure 1 This 1882 map shows the Shawmut Peninsula’s dramatic expansion, almost all
of it occurring in the 19th century. The peninsula’s original area is seen in yellow; the
green and white areas were reclaimed from the surrounding mudflats and waterways,
much of it at mid-century. Prepared by Justin Winsor for the frontispiece of Volume I of
his Memorial History of Boston, including Suffolk County, Massachusetts (Boston:
Ticknor & Company, 1882).

277

Figure 2 Boston's landmass tripled between the founding of the Massachusetts Bay
Colony and 1880. Source: Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library.

278

Figure 3 This map shows the location of major neighborhoods and landmarks in Boston.
Source: A Map of Boston in the State of Massachusetts, surveyed by J. G. Hales, the
Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library. The bold lines indicate Boston
in 1814; the fainter lines show the city in 1880.

Legend:
1 Beacon Hill
2 “Nigger Hill,” Southack Street
3 North End
4 South End
5 Fort Hill
6 The Shambles, Fanueil Hall, and
Quincy Market (1826)
7 Bunker Hill Monument (1825)
8 State House
9 “Old South End”: Boston Athenaeum
(1822-1849) and Perkins Institution for
the Blind (1833-1839)
10 Ann Street
11 Old State House/Boston Museum
(1841)
12 Back Bay (ca. 1857-1882)
13 Copp’s Hill
14 Mill Pond
15 “Mt. Whoredom”/Mt. Vernon
16 Pemberton Hill/Gardiner Greene
Estate
279

Figure 4 Henry Sargent, The Dinner Party, ca. 1821, 156.53 x 126.36 cm, Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston. Sargent modeled this study of this scene of a dinner at his Franklin
Place residence on a work with a more spiritual subject, Granet’s The Choir of the
Capuchin Church in Rome (Figure 5). Likened to the chapel’s monks, these upper-class
diners epitomize not just wealth and taste, but sensory discipline, as they gather for a
meal.

280

Figure 5 François-Marius Granet, The Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome, 1814-
1815, oil on canvas, 77 1/2 x 58 1/4 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

281

Figure 6 Unknown, Easterly View of Franklin Street, ca. 1830, oil on panel, 13 x 17 in.,
The Bostonian Society. Despite its actual liveliness, Franklin Street is depicted as
deserted here.

282

Figure 7 James Brown Marston, State Street, 1801, 1801, oil on canvas, 95 cm x 129.2
cm, Massachusetts Historical Society. In the early 19th century, Bostonians little
objected to displaying the bustle of their streets, but that would change a few decades
later, as artists began to idealize the city as perfectly tranquil and vacant.

283

Figure 8 James Bennett, Old Tremont House, c. 1830s, oil on canvas, 14.5 x 53 in.,
Anonymous Collection. Except for the orderly militia marching through, the artist has
imaginatively emptied the streets of human life, including the spectators who thronged to
watched such maneuvers.

284

Figure 9 B.F. Smith, del., View of the Water Celebration, on Boston Common October
25, 1848, 1848, lithograph, Tappan & Bradford (Boston). One of the first depictions of
large crowds in antebellum Boston, both the image and the event it represents illustrated
a contemporary belief in the power of the picturesque to tame social disorder.

285

Figure 10 Abel Bowen, Bowen's Picture of Boston (Boston: Otis, Broaders, 1838), 68.
Until the 1850s, few topographical views of Boston acknowledged the disorderly streets
that witnesses reported.
286

Figure 11 George Harvey, View of the State House from the Common, ca. 1835,
watercolor on paper, 8 x 10 in., The Bostonian Society.

Figure 12 Publicly displayed at Quincy Market, the portrait the merchant Gardiner
Greene commissioned in 1829 of his estate focused on its marvelous views—a sign that
in the gentrifying city, not only real estate itself, but the views it afforded, were
increasingly regarded as valuable commodities. Robert Salmon, Boston Harbor from Mr.
Greene's House, Pemberton Hill, 1829, Tempera on canvas, 95 x 180 in., Historic New
England.
287

Figure 13 Mid-century views such as John Bachmann’s 1850 lithograph Bird's Eye View
of Boston de-emphasized the place of the city’s moral landmarks. Seen from the west at
an imagined elevation, the city’s largest landmark, Bunker Hill Monument, at left, is
dwarfed.
288

Figure 14 Roughly 39 of the 55 engravings accompanying Henry McIntyre's 1852 map of
Boston depicted private businesses—a sign that the city's mid-century landmarks lacked
the civic or religious significance of their early antebellum predecessors. Map of the City
of Boston and Immediate Neighborhood from Original Surveys by H. McIntyre, C.E.
Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library.
289

Figure 15 By the end of the 1850s, the pictorial press had begun to revel in urban visual
disorder. Jones, Ball & Company glitters in the background. Winslow Homer, "Corner
of Winter, Washington, and Summer Streets, Boston," Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room
Companion, June 13, 1857.
290

Figure 16 By the late 1850s, Boston's pictorial press served up urban realism without
overt moral comment; the article accompanying Winslow Homer's illustration expressed
no sympathy for the beggars sifting for items of value in the trash used to fill in the Back
Bay. “Scenes on the Back Bay Lands, Boston,” Ballou's Pictorial, v.16, May 21, 1859, p.
238.

291

Figure 17 Displayed prominently at the Boston Athenaeum beginning in 1843, the hero
of Thomas Crawford's marble sculpture Orpheus and Cerberus peered fearlessly into the
unseen world as he prepared to make his descent into Hades. The sculptured exemplified
a more heroic and visionary ideal of the spectator than the passive connoisseur
exemplified in the Athenaeum’s portrait of Thomas Handasyd Perkins (Figure 21).

292

Figure 18 Henry Sargent, The Tea Party, ca. 1824. Oil on canvas, 163.51 x 133.03 cm
(64 3/8 x 52 3/8 in.) Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Surrounded by art, the guests in
Sargent's flat pay no attention to it. A perceived lack of reverence for art as more than
furnishing encouraged Boston’s aesthetes to establish the city first public gallery.

293

Figure 19 David Claypoole Johnston, Connoisseurs, 1829, engraving. From Plate 4 of
Scraps No. 2 for 1830. American Antiquarian Society. The figure at the right is more
impressed by the gilding than the painting.

Figure 20 J.H. Bufford & Co., Henry Pettes & Co.'s Carpet Room. (Boston, 1845.) The
carpet warehouse resembled an art gallery, which helps explain Holmes' concern that
vulgar art viewers saw art as they would carpets. American Antiquarian Society.
294

Figure 21 Thomas Sully, Thomas Handasyd Perkins, 1831-32. Oil on canvas, 287x195.6
cm. Boston Athenaeum. Perkins' dematerialized environment, casual pose and his
dreamy expression suggests he is a man given to reverie and introspection as the
imaginative poet seen in Figure 22.
295

Figure 22 The frontispiece for the 1825 edition of The Pleasures of the Imagination
exemplified the introspective Romantic.
296

Figure 23 David Claypoole Johnston, Veneration, 1837, engraving. From Plate 2 of
Phrenology Exemplified...being Scraps No. 7. American Antiquarian Society.
297

Figure 24 A Critic at the Athenaeum, illustration from The Carpet-Bag (Boston),
November 29, 1851. The critic says: "I declare I never saw a foiner shadow——'tis dem'd
foine—decidedly."
298

Figure 25 David Claypoole Johnston, Lola Has Come! Enthusiastic Reception of Lola by
American Audience, ca. 1852, lithograph. Library of Congress. Even the minister leered
at Lola Montez.
299

Figure 26 In 1846, Boston artist Thomas T. Spear tested the bounds of vision when he
claimed to have completed the conception of Washington Allston’s unfinished
masterpiece. Washington Allston, Belshazzar's Feast, 1817/1843, oil on canvas, 164 x
216 x 9 1/2 in., Detroit Institute of the Arts.

300

Figure 27 Published at the height of Boston's Greek Revival phase, and aimed at the
city’s middle- and working-class schools, the nation's first drawing textbook emphasized
the study of rational geometric forms in order to improve the students' taste and accuracy
of perception. Such forms were understood to be both mathematically and morally
correct. William Bentley Fowle, An Introduction to Linear Drawing, Second Edition
(Boston: Hilliard, Gray, Little & Wilkins, 1828), 38.

301

Figure 28 By the 1840s, Boston's amateur artists were encouraged to present forms
without outline. This shift coincided with a growing mythology of unmediated natural
perception that did not dissect the world into regular geometric forms. John A. Andrew,
The Boston Drawing Book: Designed for Beginners, and Accompanied with Letter Press
Instruction (Boston: Weeks, Jordan, 1840).
302

Figure 29 Produced by a New York medium in 1861, and exhibited as the frontispiece of
Benjamin Coleman’s Spiritualism in America (London: F. Pitman, 1861) this spirit-
drawing resembled countless amateur drawings—except that it was executed in only 11
seconds. Coupled with such adverse conditions, the drawing medium’s usual lack of
artistic training was regarded by Spiritualists as a sure sign that spirits had authored such
productions.
303

Figure 30 In 1853, the artist Josiah Wolcott was inspired at a Boston séance with a
glimpse of spirit land. Invitation to the Spirit-Land, frontispiece in John W. Edmonds
and George T. Dexter, Spiritualism (1853).
304

Figure 31 "A blaze
of splendor from the
first scene of the
last," Aladdin, or the
Wonderful Lamp
delighted Boston
Museum audiences
in 1846 with its
scenes of confused
marketplaces and
crowded docks—
precisely the
disorderly urban
spaces an earlier
generation of
Bostonians had
attempted to contain
and rationalize. This
image depicts a
scene from an 1850s
reprisal of the
production.
"Chinese Market
Scene, in 'Aladdin.'"
Ballou's Pictorial
Drawing-Room
Companion, January
3, 1857, 4.
305

Figure 32 Boston’s fairy burlesque offered a more prurient spectacle than the genre it
parodied, but both reveled in sensory excess. This Bufford's lithograph, ca. 1848,
promoted "the grand Burletta of the Female Forty Thieves, or the Fairy Daughters of
Cochituate Waters," i.e. Boston's new water supply.

306

Figure 33 With its Moorish arch, ship replica, and Oriental palanquin, the Water
Celebration procession that passed outside the Boston Museum along Tremont Street
resembled a fairy spectacle itself (Figure 34); the fairy aesthetic thus allowed middle-
class spectators to come to terms with and even enjoy urban sensory disorder. Boston
Water Celebration, October 25, 1848 (Boston: Bufford’s Lithography, 1848). Collection
of the Boston Athenaeum.
307

Figure 34 Many of the visual motifs of the Water Celebration drew from the fantastic and
Orientalist stage design of popular fairy spectacles such as The Children of Cyprus. This
illustration of the "The Children of Cyprus, at the Boston Museum" appeared in the very
first issue of Gleason's Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, July 5, 1851. The next
issue opened with an illustration of a similarly thronged Boston Common. The fantastic
and disorderly crowd scenes of the fairy spectacles foreshadowed the chaotic street
sketches that appeared in Boston’s illustrated press later that decade.

308

Figure 35 Dazzling and enchanting retail displays such as those of the new jewelry bazaar
of Jones, Ball & Poor rivaled nature as a legitimate source of enchantment for Boston's
middle class at mid-century. "Interior view of Jones, Ball, & Poor's Store, Washington
St., Boston,” Gleason's Pictorial, v.1, no. 28, November 8, 1851, 441.

Figure 36 The extent of the development of Boston’s retail culture can be seen in this
mid-century panorama of Washington Street, 1853, Gleason's Pictorial, v. 4 no. 21, May
21, 1853, pp. 328-329.
309

Figure 37 A store display of the latest urban ladies' fashion, bloomers, has caused "Mr.
Verigreen, from the rural districts" to lose control of his jaw. By mid-century, Boston’s
increasingly spectacularly confident middle class no longer romanticized the pure gaze of
the rural visitor, but theatrically emulated it by striking a pose of “enchantment.” This
illustration appeared in The Carpet-Bag, July 5, 1851, the same day that Gleason’s
presented its enchanting view of The Children of Cypress.

310

Figure 38 The once-idealized rural amateur drawing student discussed in chapter 4 was
mocked in the 1850s by a Boston’s middle-class spectators increasingly coming to terms
with its urban identity. The fictional, buffoonish rural visitor Jerusha Prym (sometimes
Prim) contributed her illustrations to the satirical paper The Carpet-Bag. Prym here has
produced what she regards as an “improved” version of the Athenaeum’s copy of
Washington Allston’s Saul and the Witch of Endor. “Jerusha Prim’s Copy of Allston’s
Witch of Endor,” illustration from The Carpet-Bag (Boston), April 10, 1852. In another
installment, Prym draws the Boston landscape and corrects the Bunker Hill Monuments
by making it crooked, on the theory that straight lines were less beautiful than more
natural ones.

311

Figure 39 "The Swells and the Mechanics," The Carpet-Bag, September 27, 1851. Taken
from a Punch illustration of London's Great Exhibition of 1851, the illustration presented
the spectacular divides of the urban classes as an amusing fact, rather than a crisis to be
remedied through didactic culture. “I wonder what those fellows can see to admire in
that what-do-ye-call-it?” one bourgeois visitor remarks to another of the mechanics.

312
From Spectators to Visionaries:
Visual Culture and the Transformation of Boston, 1820-1860

Bibliography

AAS = American Antiquarian Society
BA = Boston Athenaeum
HLH = Houghton Library, Harvard
MHS = Massachusetts Historical Society
PSB = Perkins School for the Blind
WTL = Winterthur Library

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