Ralph Waldo Emerson Launches His Career: Perhaps America’s First Great Lecturer, He Signs on to Give His First Ever Lecture Series

One of the earliest letters ever to reach the public market

Ralph Waldo Emerson is remembered today as an essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist, and poet who led the Transcendental movement of the mid-19th century. His ideology is disseminated to us through his voluminous writings.

To his contemporaries, he was best known as a lecturer, and he delivered some 1,500 addresses In the United States and Great Britain over the course of his career. Over the period 1833-1871, Emerson often spent four to six months a year on the lecture circuit.

Emerson toured Europe in 1833 and later wrote of his travels in “English Traits.” He left aboard the brig Jasper on Christmas Day, 1832, sailing first to Malta. During his European trip, he spent several months in Italy, visiting Rome, Florence and Venice, among other cities. When in Rome, he met with John Stuart Mill, who gave him a letter of recommendation to meet Thomas Carlyle. Moving north to England, Emerson met William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle. Emerson returned to the United States on October 9, 1833. Near that time, he gave what today we know was his first real lecture.

The Boston Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in Boston, Massachusetts, was founded “to promote and direct popular education by lectures and other means.” Modelled after the recently formed Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in London, the Boston group’s officers included Daniel Webster, Nathan Hale, Jacob Bigelow, William Ellery Channing, Edward Everett, Nathaniel L. Frothingham, and Abbott Lawrence.

In early 1835, Emerson committed to give what would be his first ever lecture series, the series being before the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, in Boston. There would end up being six lectures on Biography that would draw heavily for his inspirational trip to Europe. He treated among other things the lives of five men, beginning with Michaelangelo the artist, followed by the reformer Luther, the preacher George Fox, the poet Milton, and the statesman and orator, Edmund Burke.

“Why Emerson selected Michaelangelo as the subject of one of his earliest lectures is shown clearly enough by the last sentence as printed in the Essay: ‘He was not a citizen of any country; he belonged to the human race; he was a brother and a friend to all who acknowledged the beauty that beams in universal Nature, and who seek by labor and self-denial to approach its source in perfect goodness.’” Emerson followed and sought to disseminate those guidelines his whole life.

This was the start of a life time of lecturing engagements that would spread his unique philosophy and usher in a generation of likeminded lecturers. The era of the American lecture series had begun.

Autograph letter signed, Concord, June 17, 1835 to Messrs. Gould and Loring of the Committee of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. “I am willing to undertake to deliver eight, perhaps ten, lectures before your society, next Winter, upon subjects of modern literature. I am not yet prepared to define the topics.”

This remarkably early letter of Emerson is among the earliest we have seen reach the market. Only a handful from this early period of his life, predating the publication of his first book, appear in public sale records. But more importantly, this letter is the one that launched his remarkable and influential career, one that helped define 19th century America.