Have You Seen Me?: Lacking Works of Nineteenth-Century American Literature – Commonplace
Lacking lecture transcripts: Over the course of the nineteenth century, in style American authors typically delivered speeches on the lecture circuits of their day—primarily in lyceums, library associations, native golf equipment, and subscription-based societies—as a means of partaking the general public and securing supplemental revenue. Some lectures had been reprinted or rigorously transcribed (see Emerson’s, for instance). Others weren’t. Nonetheless, lacking lecture transcriptions should exist in archived or digitized newspapers from the interval. Twain, for instance, lectured on Hawaii (then referred to as the Sandwich Islands) after getting back from an task there in 1866. In all, he delivered fifteen or sixteen such speeches, primarily in Grass Valley, California, and Nevada Metropolis, Nevada. Aside from their normal subject material, these lectures are thought-about totally misplaced. In his guide on the topic, Walter Francis Frear not solely assumes that the lecture notes had been destroyed by the writer, but additionally considers makes an attempt at their reconstruction to be futile, since “the roughly scanty newspaper accounts essentially lack a lot in diction and method of presentation by the lecturer” (177, 184). Nonetheless, it might be attainable to find extra full descriptions (if not transcripts) of those lectures in digitized newspaper archives. Different authors have equally incomplete lecture corpuses, together with Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Henry Ward Beecher, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Douglass’s and Beecher’s quite a few lectures and sermons have been scrupulously catalogued, however they gave so many throughout their lifetimes that their lecture bibliographies are virtually actually incomplete. Gilman’s scenario is virtually the inverse: scholar Carol Farley Kessler notes that although Gilman “delivered so many lectures on ethics, economics, and sociology that she . . . misplaced rely” (97), lower than 100 notices of her lectures have been present in print.
Additional Studying
Louisa Could Alcott, The Journals of Louisa Could Alcott. Edited by Joel Myerson, Daniel Shealy, and Madeleine B. Sterne (Athens: College of Georgia Press, 1997).
Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (New York: Cambridge College Press, 2000).
P. T. Barnum, The Humbugs of the World (New York: Carleton Writer, 1866).
Lawrence Buell, The Dream of the Nice American Novel (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2014).
Hannah Crafts, The Bondwoman’s Narrative, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Time-Warner Books, 2002).
Karen Dandurand, “One other Dickinson Poem Revealed in her Lifetime,” American Literature 54 (no. 3, 1982): 434-37.
Karen Dandurand, “New Dickinson Civil Conflict Publications,” American Literature 55 (no. 1, 1984), 17-27.
Karen Dandurand, “Publication of Dickinson’s Poems in Her Lifetime,” Legacy 1 (no. 1, 1984), 7.
[John William de Forest,] “The Nice American Novel,” The Nation 6 (no. 132, January 9, 1868): 28.Brigitte Fielder, “Nineteenth-Century African American Literature Suggestions,” The Dickens Mission, UC Santa Cruz, August 6, 2022, https://dickens.ucsc.edu/news-events/news/afam-lit-recommendations.html .
Walter Francis Frear, Mark Twain and Hawaii (Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1947).
Caroline Gebhard, Katherine Adams, and Sandra A. Zagarell, “Recovered from the Archive: Two Tales by Alice Dunbar-Nelson,” Legacy, 33 (no. 2, 2016): 404-7.
Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Spouse, A Biography, 2 vols. (Boston: James R. Osgood and Firm, 1884).
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Centenary Version of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Letters, vol. 15, ed. William Charvat, et al. (Columbus: Ohio State College Press, 1989).
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Chosen Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Joel Myerson (Columbus: Ohio State College Press, 2002).
Merle Johnson, A Bibliography of the Work of Mark Twain, Samuel Langhorne Clemens (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1910).
Carol Farley Kessler, “Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1860-1935,” Fashionable American Girls Writers ed. Elaine Showalter, Lea Baechler, and A. Walton Litz (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993).
Herman Melville, Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth (Evanston: Northwestern College Press, 1993).
Johanna Ortner, “Misplaced No Extra: Recovering Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Forest Leaves,” Commonplace 15 (no. 4, Summer time 2015).
Hershel Parker, “Herman Melville’s The Isle of the Cross: A Survey and a Chronology,” American Literature 62 (no. 1, 1990): 1-16.
Basem L. Ra’advert, “‘The Encantadas’ and ‘The Isle of the Cross’: Melvillean Dubieties, 1853-54.” American Literature 63 (no. 2, 1991): 316-23.
Harriet Reisen, Louisa Could Alcott: The Lady Behind Little Girls (New York: Macmillan, 2010).
Bonnie James Shaker and Angela Gianoglio Pettitt, “‘Her First Get together’ as Her Final Story: Recovering Kate Chopin’s Fiction,” Legacy: A Journal of American Girls Writers 30 (no. 2, 2013): 384-96.
Zachary Turpin, “Trying to find Proud Antoinette: Proof and Prospects for Whitman’s Phantom Novel,” WWQR 37 (no. ¾, Winter/Spring 2020): 225-47.
William White, “Whitman’s First ‘Literary’ Letter,” American Literature 35 (no. 1, March 1963): 83-5.
Walt Whitman, The Early Poems and the Fiction, ed. Thomas L. Brasher (New York: New York College Press, 1963).
Walt Whitman, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, ed. Zachary Turpin (Iowa Metropolis: College of Iowa Press, 2017).
Walt Whitman, Prose Works 1892, vol. 1, ed. Floyd Stovall (New York: New York College Press, 1962).
“Wild Frank’s Return,” Story of the Week, Library of America, October 18, 2013, http://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2013/10/wild-franks-return.html .
Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Richard J. Ellis (New York: Classic Books, 2011).
This text initially appeared in October 2023.
Zachary Turpin is an Affiliate Professor of American Literature on the College of Idaho, a former Kluge Fellow on the Library of Congress, and a former Peterson Fellow on the American Antiquarian Society. A scholar of nineteenth-century American periodical tradition, in addition to bodily and digital archival analysis strategies, he focuses on recovering the misplaced writings of nineteenth-century authors, together with main works by Walt Whitman, Emma Lazarus, and Rebecca Harding Davis. His writings have appeared inJ19, ESQ, the Walt Whitman Quarterly Evaluation, PMLA, and elsewhere.