City of Second Sight: Nineteenth-Century Boston and the Making of American Visual Culture

By Justin T. Clark

In the decades before the U.S. Civil War, the city of Boston evolved from a dilapidated, haphazardly planned, and architecturally stagnant provincial town into a booming and visually impressive metropolis. In an effort to remake Boston into the "Athens of America," neighborhoods were leveled, streets straightened, and an ambitious set of architectural ordinances enacted. However, even as residents reveled in a vibrant new landscape of landmark buildings, art galleries, parks, and bustling streets, the social and sensory upheaval of city life also gave rise to a widespread fascination with the unseen. Focusing his analysis between 1820 and 1860, Justin T. Clark traces how the effort to impose moral and social order on the city also inspired many—from Transcendentalists to clairvoyants and amateur artists—to seek out more ethereal visions of the infinite and ideal beyond the gilded paintings and glimmering storefronts.

By elucidating the reciprocal influence of two of the most important developments in nineteenth-century American culture—the spectacular city and visionary culture—Clark demonstrates how the nineteenth-century city is not only the birthplace of modern spectacle but also a battleground for the freedom and autonomy of the spectator.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Mar 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781469638744

Justin T. Clark

Justin T. Clark is assistant professor of history at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

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City of Second Sight

City of Second Sight

Nineteenth-Century Boston and the Making of American Visual Culture

JUSTIN T. CLARK

The University of North Carolina Press   Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the Authors Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2018 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Charis and Lato by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Clark, Justin T., 1977– author.

Title: City of second sight : nineteenth-century Boston and the making of American visual culture / Justin T. Clark.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017041401 | ISBN 9781469638720 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469638737 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469638744 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: City planning—History—19th century—Social Aspects—Massachusetts—Boston. | Arts and Society—Massachusetts—Boston—History—19th century. | Boston (Mass.)—Description and travel. | Boston (Mass.)—Buildings, structures, etc. | Occultism—History—19th century—Social aspects—Massachusetts—Boston.

Classification: LCC HT168.B6 C53 2018 | DDC 307.1/2160974461—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017041401

Cover illustration: An advertisement for stereopticon advertising (Ridgway Stereopticon Advertising Co., Boston [424 Washington St.]: Jos.B.Richards & Co. Lith., [18—]). Used with the permission of the Boston Athenæum.

Portions of chapter 5 have been previously published in a different form as The Origins of Blind Autobiography in Visionary Antebellum New England, New England Quarterly 87, no. 2 (June 2014): 228–51.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1   Ordering Boston’s Landscape

2   Looking Past Disorder

3   Transcending the Gallery

4   Drawing Forth Spirits

5   Discovering the Blind

6   Enchanting the City

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures and Maps

Figures

1.1  Henry Sargent, The Dinner Party, ca. 1821, 40

1.2  François-Marius Granet, The Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome, 1814–1815, 41

2.1  Easterly View of Franklin Street, ca. 1830, 67

2.2  James Brown Marston, State Street, 1801, 68

2.3  James Bennett, Old Tremont House, ca. 1830s, 69

2.4  View of the Water Celebration, on Boston Common October 25th, 1848, 70

2.5  Abel Bowen, Bowen’s Picture of Boston, 1838, 71

2.6  George Harvey, View of the State House from the Common, ca. 1835, 72

2.7  Robert Salmon, Boston Harbor from Mr. Greene’s House, Pemberton Hill, 1829, 73

3.1  Henry Sargent, The Tea Party, ca. 1824, 87

3.2  Advertisement for Henry Pettes & Co.’s carpet room, 1845, 94

3.3  David Claypoole Johnston, Connoisseurs, 1829, 95

3.4  Thomas Sully, Thomas Handasyd Perkins, 1831–1832, 98

3.5  Frontispiece of Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination, 1825, 99

3.6  David Claypoole Johnston, Veneration, 1837, 100

3.7  Washington Allston, Belshazzar’s Feast, 1817/1843, 108

3.8  Thomas Crawford, Orpheus and Cerberus, 1839, 112

4.1  Illustration from William Bentley Fowle, An Introduction to Linear Drawing, 1825, 119

4.2  Illustration from John Andrew, The Boston Drawing Book, 1840, 130

4.3  Frontispiece of Benjamin Coleman, Spiritualism in America, 1861, 132

4.4  Josiah Wolcott, Invitation to the Spirit-Land, 1853, 135

6.1  Chinese Market Scene, in ‘Aladdin,’ Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, 1857, 178

6.2  Boston Water Celebration, October 25, 1848, 182

6.3  The Children of Cyprus, at the Boston Museum, Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, 1851, 183

6.4  Grand Panoramic View of the East Side of Washington Street, Boston, Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, 1853, 188

6.5  "Jerusha Prim’s Copy of Allston’s Witch of Endor," Carpet-Bag, 1852, 193

E.1  John Bachmann, Bird’s Eye View of Boston, 1850, 199

E.2  Winslow Homer, Corner of Winter, Washington, and Summer Streets, Boston, Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, 1857, 200

Maps

1.1  Major neighborhoods and landmarks in nineteenth-century Boston, 20

1.2  Boston’s landmass, 1630–2008, 24

Acknowledgments

Every book is a collective vision; this one is no exception. This project grew out of the generous intellectual encouragement of my mentor Karen Halttunen, one’s beau ideal of a cultural historian. The manuscript also benefited in its early stages from the input of other senior scholars: Judith Bennett, Philip J. Ethington, John Carlos Rowe, and especially Anne C. Rose, whose expertise on Transcendentalism proved invaluable.

My research on this project was made possible through generous fellowships and grants from the American Antiquarian Society, New England Fellowship Consortium, USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute, Winterthur Library, and the University of Southern California’s Science, Technology and Society Research Cluster. I am indebted to the many archivists, librarians, and curators who assisted me at these and other institutions, but especially Paul Erickson, Lauren B. Hewes, Laura E. Wasowicz, and Nan Wolverton at the American Antiquarian Society; David Dearinger and Catharina Slautterback at the Boston Athenæum; Amy Braden at the Huntington Library; Conrad Wright and Kate Viens at the Massachusetts Historical Society; and Rosemarie Krill and Jeanne Solensky at the Winterthur Library. I am also grateful to the Nanyang Technological University for bearing the cost of illustrations.

My thanks go to the many teachers and colleagues who read and commented on chapter drafts and presentations, including Lisa Bitel, Ann Fabian, Kate Flint, Deborah Harkness, Peter Mancall, Max Felker-Kantor, Nicholas Glisserman, Annie Johnson, Karin Huebner, and Keith Pluymers. I received helpful feedback from the American Cultures Workshop hosted by the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. I owe thanks to Judith Rivera, Hoda El-Shakry, and Sarah Townsend at Pennsylvania State University for their friendship and for helping shape the proposal for this book. During my many research trips to Boston, Katrina and Jonah Goldsaito opened their home to me, becoming wonderful friends and culinary companions. I benefited from Laurel Daen’s thoughts on disability history and Matthew Fox-Amato’s on antebellum photography. This book was greatly improved in its later stages through the advice of two external readers, Tamara Plakins Thornton and an anonymous scholar. I am also grateful to Charles Grench, Jad Adkins, Jessica Newman, and other staff at the University of North Carolina Press for shepherding the book to print.

My deepest debts are to my family, including my parents, in-laws, and children. They have made scholarship and the life that goes with it possible and worthwhile. Above all, this book is for Shao—partner, teacher, friend, and bean.

City of Second Sight

Introduction

A merchant admires a statue in the Boston Athenæum art gallery, straining to hear the sounds a critic claims to have heard whispering 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 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 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. Exploring a wide source base of sermons, popular periodicals, diaries, autobiographies of the blind, maps, city records, artwork, and novels, this study attempts to understand the contradictory impulse of the urban onlooker to both gaze upon and away from the city’s increasingly dazzling and disorienting environment.

If the objects, practices, and conceptions of looking collectively constitute what scholars call visual culture, we might similarly label their extension into the occult domain visionary culture.¹ For good reason, Boston was the crucible of visionary culture in antebellum America. Smaller and more conservative in taste than New York or Philadelphia, it was in the city founded by English Puritans that the legacy of early modern visuality, with its debates about apparitions, sacred imagery, and iconoclasm, clashed most palpably with the spectacular culture of a new urban age.

The Puritans had been zealous guardians of the senses. They equated their contemporaries’ love of theater, art, dress, and other forms of worldly display with the idolatrous Catholic practice of communion. 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? a foe of the Elizabethan stage once warned.² Such iconoclastic anxieties had waned by the early national era, when Massachusetts repealed its prohibition of theatrical amusements, despite a passionate outcry from social conservatives such as Samuel Adams. Boston’s postrevolutionary elites took an increasingly liberal attitude toward the display of wealth of their recently defeated British foes, abandoning the traditional square meetinghouse, building more opulent private residences, amassing art collections, supporting the theater, and constructing an identity that depended as much on taste and wealth as on godliness. Yet even as elites built fortunes, their ministers and intellectuals issued warnings about its display. Because of their Puritan heritage, moralists in Boston feared the corrupting effects of ostentation more ardently than conservatives elsewhere.³

These debates over taste and its proper public expression masked profound philosophical disagreements among local intellectuals. Boston’s theologically liberal Unitarian ministers and literary men rejected their Calvinist predecessors’ emphasis on innate human depravity and scripture’s exclusive authority.⁴ At Harvard, these cultural elites absorbed the philosophy of Scottish Common Sense Realism, which endowed all of humanity with intertwined aesthetic and moral faculties developable through sense experience. When physical effort and mental decision making ceased, worthy objects and texts could stimulate grand associations in the reader’s and viewer’s imagination—or so claimed a related philosophical school, Associationism. Conveniently for their affluent and cosmopolitan proponents, Common Sense Realism and Associationism justified, and even encouraged, the improving influence of literature, architecture, art, and fine furniture. Quietly studied, Washington’s painted profile was understood to summon ennobling thoughts about his character and the Revolution as a whole.⁵ For elites, such associations could thus transform an object of material vanity into something priceless: an opportunity to develop culture, and thus virtue, which in turn justified popular deference. Though theologically progressive, Boston’s early national elite embraced an essentially conservative prescription for culture, namely, rote exposure to morally or aesthetically correct objects under controlled conditions.

Starting in the 1830s, under the influence of European Romanticism, the Transcendentalists challenged the presumed need for didactic objects and texts, idealizing instead an unmediated experience of Nature.⁶ Scholars have studied their revolt exhaustively. Less well understood, however, is the challenge that elite cultural authority faced in the previous decade, following the traumatic panic of 1819. By 1822, the year of Boston’s belated incorporation, the middle and working classes had begun to openly question the cultural authority, political virtue, and religion of their wealthier neighbors. Facing a host of opponents—democratic politicians, radical labor leaders, Second Great Awakening revivalists, free thought skeptics, and violent mobs—a second generation of Federalist politicians and philanthropists remade their authority by remaking the city. Under their leadership, between its incorporation and 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.

In improving the city, Boston’s didactic elites hoped to demonstrate on the largest possible scale their own cultural and moral superiority. To appreciate that authority, however, elites believed that the lower orders themselves needed to become pious, self-disciplined spectators. Given orderly streets, republican monuments and genteel parks, and art galleries—the respective subjects of the first three chapters—the broader population would hopefully acquire self-culture and abandon the corporeal pleasures of vice and intemperance for the disinterested visual pleasures of the connoisseur and the pious naturalist. Exposed to heavenly Boston Common and the proud Bunker Hill Monument, the spectator would be moved with respect for unseen authorities, both human and divine. However far they had diverged theologically from their Puritan ancestors, Boston’s liberal Protestant ministers, professionals, and other men of letters 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.⁷ As such, these elites were both self-serving and genuinely civic-spirited, progressive and deeply conservative. They helped open a text-oriented Protestant culture to a more cosmopolitan visuality that recognized the moral authority of monuments, buildings, artworks, and nature. Yet the only practice of spectatorship they considered correct was their own.

As they flowed into early nineteenth-century Boston, provincial New Englanders received conflicting messages about the spectacular environment they were entering. Conservatives cautioned them not to become hypnotized by the excessive consumption, materialism, and immoral amusements they would inevitably encounter. Even so, the more socially ambitious new arrivals understood the value of keeping their eyes open. While satirists and disaffected laborers mocked the bourgeois passion for the art gallery, park promenade, and drawing school, many other ambitious artisans, clerks, and would-be artists believed that such pleasures would smooth their social and professional ascent.⁸ Even those marginalized within the urban culture of spectatorship, including women and the blind, sought equality and improvement through visual pursuits.

Much as their Puritan ancestors once studied themselves for signs of spiritual election, Boston migrants and natives deciphered their neighbors’ status and character both by how they appeared and by how they looked.⁹ Having paid twenty-five cents for admission, was the admiring gallery viewer lured by the deeper moral significance of the art or simply its material expense and fine coloring? Was the monument visitor impressed by the message of the monument or the size of the stone? It was difficult to know, for as an art historian has remarked, Vision is itself invisible. One can never be certain what another sees.¹⁰ Nevertheless, Boston’s visual and literary culture attempted to link the spectator’s habits to his character as a Christian and citizen.

The contradictory desire to physically participate in the city’s visual environment, yet remain spiritually untainted by it, constituted a significant cultural dilemma. By the late 1830s, I argue, visionary art viewers and artists resolved the conundrum by tearing down the recognized boundaries between physical and spiritual vision. Transcendentalists, magnetic clairvoyants, Millerites, and Spiritualists saw the environment as they wished, looking through its physical surface at its underlying spiritual essence. 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 local spectators who did not belong to Emerson’s movement.¹¹

To be sure, most Bostonians did not personally experience visions. Yet those who didn’t nevertheless came to idealize and envy the incorruptible spectators among them: the spiritually keen art viewer, who saw images in the art gallery not expressly represented on canvas; the self-taught female 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 archetypes would serve as crucial models for local Spiritualist drawing mediums and mesmeric clairvoyants, who capitalized on the popularly accepted boundaries of vision by transcending them. Rather than just passively inferring the unseen world as the ideal Unitarian spectator did, these visionaries heroically sought it out and actively glimpsed it. As explored in the final three chapters, the visionaries’ renown thus signaled the growing independence of the city’s female artists, blind residents, and broader middle class from a condescending Brahmin culture.

The urban visual environment posed a threat only so long as the city’s spectators considered themselves not fully of the city. This was no longer the case by midcentury, as this book’s final chapter argues. In the 1830s, a small group of visionaries had transcended the city’s disorder and materialism by peering through the Puritan wall of physical and spiritual vision. By the late 1840s, that wall had collapsed. An independent suburban middle class now reveled in an allegorical, otherworldly version of urban life celebrated in vibrant and disorderly Eastern theatricals, fairy-themed bazaars, and lavishly illustrated periodicals. Ultimately, by the Civil War, the Bostonian’s enchantment with these faraway, allegorical cities gave way to open curiosity toward his own. For the first time, realist artists and writers such as Winslow Homer and William Dean Howells assumed the task of documenting the city rather than idealizing it.¹² Ironically, their success in seeing the city owed much to visionary culture’s determination to look beyond it.

The implications of antebellum Boston’s romance with the unseen extend well beyond the Athens of America—revising, I believe, our understanding of the role of urbanization in making nineteenth-century American visual culture. In recent decades, visual studies scholars have demonstrated how urban spectatorship helped forge new local and national public cultures from the Revolution onward. By the antebellum period, the torrent of new print and visual media that issued from urban newspaper offices, lithograph and daguerreotype studios, along with an expanding culture of theatrical and commercial spectacle, redrew the boundaries of the public sphere and established new hierarchies of popular and high culture. Spectatorship played a crucial role in fueling antebellum and Progressive reform movements, fostering new cultures of consumption and celebrity, refining the nature of legal and scientific evidence, reshaping Americans’ relationship to nature and the built environment, and remaking social divisions. Only once they were visually discerned and mapped could class, gender, and racial identities be challenged or reinforced. What a critic has called the exhibitionary complex of urban art galleries, natural history museums, and World’s Fairs did not just offer amusement and knowledge, but exposed the middle class to ideologies of race, class, and civilization.¹³

Scholars have thus recognized the city as the crucial space in which modernity and the modern subject appeared in the most literal sense.¹⁴ But if this scholarship has expanded our understanding of visual culture and antebellum urban society, it has rarely considered how ideas of seeing shaped both.¹⁵ The story of urban transformation prior to the creation of late nineteenth-century planning and governance agencies has been told as an uncontrolled process defying effective intervention. Fin-de-siècle thinkers and movements, such as sociologist Georg Simmel and the City Beautiful, are often credited as the first to recognize and address the impact of intensifying stimuli on the mental life of the metropolis.¹⁶ Such assumptions may hold for cities whose growth went largely unaddressed thanks to paralyzed or laissez-faire conditions of development, such as pre-Haussmann Paris or New York City. By contrast, Boston’s reforming elite enjoyed substantial power to shape the City of Notions, even as it provoked cultural resistance in the process.¹⁷ By the end of the century, many of the city’s influential writers, thinkers, architects, and artists migrated elsewhere. From Frederick Law Olmsted to William Dean Howells, these intellectuals brought to other American metropolises their sense of what a city should and should not be.

Yet nineteenth-century Boston’s significance extends well beyond urban planning; it was a crucial modernizing influence on American culture writ large. Even as larger cities such as New York and Philadelphia competed as centers of American visual culture, antebellum Boston proved the unrivaled capital of visionary culture.¹⁸ Faced with the spectacular intensity of the modern city, visitors and residents of this capital of visionary culture proved uniquely determined to transcend the limits of ordinary sight. For local painters, writers, mystics, and critics, the sights of the museum and monument and other urban locales presented objects not unlike the sacred icons of the pre-Reformation past, or for that matter the surrealist art and psychedelic experiences of the twentieth century. Simply put, the sights of nineteenth-century Boston captured the senses, only to free them in the process.¹⁹

Social developments played a crucial role in making readers into spectators and spectators into visionaries. From English settlement until the nineteenth century, most New Englanders retained a Puritanical suspicion of images. Those elites who pursued art did so discreetly, at least until they found their supremacy threatened in the early nineteenth century. Hoping to reassert cultural authority over an increasingly large and self-educated middle class, elite Bostonians founded museums and promoted visual practices intended to impress the public and restrain its print-driven cultural independence. But instead of merely admiring elite tastes, an aspirational middle class pursued spectatorship to a visionary extreme, undermining the authority of connoisseurs and clerics to determine what the physical eye could or could not perceive.

This story reveals a key element of the American past: how the Puritanical logocentrism of some of North America’s first English settlers yielded to the democratic ocularcentrism of today. More than any other city, Boston reveals how this process took place. A culture of spectatorship emerged just as the urban visual environment itself became a spiritually charged illustrated text, drawing the competing gazes of art-admiring intellectuals, literate middle-class Protestants, and increasingly socially independent laborers. While The Hub was far from the only nineteenth-century city to give not the human senses room enough, it was there that a liberated faculty of sight first promised escape from the competition, congestions, and social divisions of urban life.²⁰

1      Ordering Boston’s Landscape

In January of 1830, an eighteen-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 Athenæum 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 become a subject of growing discussion among teachers, physicians, ministers, and the general public. Local audiences learned that the eye allowed the unschooled to learn without formal education, offered aesthetic refinement to those without access to art, and perhaps most important, 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 … 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 of moral philosophy and natural theology that offered 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, the more liberal of local Protestant lecturers and authors routinely promoted the eye as an instrument of popular mental and moral self-culture. The same moralists 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, the city had other improving sights to offer: the 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 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 recently dubbed the Athens of America. The city itself affirmed the moral value of vision.

Yet if it was so self-evidently wonderful, why 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, who were socially ambitious but often inexperienced as spectators.⁶ In the early nineteenth century, unprecedented numbers of rural youth, male and female, left their villages in western Massachusetts and elsewhere in rural New England for Boston, growing the city’s population by over 50 percent in the 1820s alone. Substantial though that increase may be, even larger numbers of domestic and foreign migrants—perhaps seven times as many—made antebellum Boston their temporary home. By the conclusion of the Civil War, some three-quarters of the city’s native-born white male Boston residents had been born outside the city. However astonishing, such growth and transience typified major northeastern and frontier cities during this period.⁷

Becoming a city dweller in antebellum America meant exposure to new forms of spectacle. Those who aspired to join the urban middle class learned to carefully observe the manners and tastes of the more sophisticated world they were entering—without, of course, betraying the naïveté that such observation implied. The new middle-class conduct literature that appeared in the 1830s frequently reprinted or echoed Lord Chesterfield’s advice to his son: You should not only have attention to every thing, but a quickness of attention, so as to 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, many urban dwellers in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Cincinnati felt a complicated mixture of fascination, admiration, and apprehension for the spectacular urban world emerging around them. Their excitement at bustling streets, shining shop windows, fashionable dress, art galleries, curiosity museums, and concert halls was matched by their fear of grogshops, ballrooms, theaters, brothels, gambling dens, and countless other ruinous temptations. Such anxiety was justified, for contemporary physicians, clergymen, reformers, and educators constantly emphasized the role of surroundings in shaping human behavior, for good or ill. By far the most critical of those surroundings was the home. 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 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 nineteenth-century 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 was to ban temptations such as ungodly dress, theatrical entertainments, masques, and holidays.¹⁰ Much as socially conservative antebellum Bostonians longed for such prohibitions, they were losing much of their power to impose them. Thus, as local evangelical reform societies campaigned for alcohol prohibition, Sabbath laws, and similar legal measures, influential liberal Protestants took a very different tack.

The wide-spread intemperance of New England is a signal judgement on the Puritan attempt to banish amusement from human life, the Unitarian minister William Ellery 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 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. Ultimately, there is not an object to which the eye can turn, that He has not presented to its notice.¹² The same argument reached a larger audience through antebellum middle-class conduct literature. MEN NEED, AND WILL HAVE SOME KINDS OF RECREATION, one manual explained, 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 primarily those that elevated the spectator above the sensualism endemic to city life. 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