After tallying up what it cost to build his humble “abode in the woods” in Walden (1854), Henry David Thoreau reflects on the far more substantial sums required to establish an institution of higher learning. The typical “mode of founding a college,” he writes, is to get up a subscription of dollars and cents, and then, following blindly the principles of a division of labor, – a principle which should never be followed but with circumspection, – to call in a contractor who makes this an object of speculation, and he employs Irishmen or other operatives actually to lay the foundations, while the students that are to be are said to be fitting themselves for it; and for these oversights successive generations have to pay.1 Although Thoreau himself had trouble paying tuition at Harvard, his primary concern here is not with the bill that students and their families are left to foot when colleges are founded as “object[s] of speculation.” Instead, Thoreau takes issue with the assumption that colleges should be construction sites like any other, a practice he feels is symptomatic of the American college’s misguided sense of mission. By shielding students from the vagaries of life, Thoreau charges, colleges substitute the platitudes of the classical curriculum for anything remotely concrete. There is no shortage of material “professed and practiced,” to be sure, but nothing that could be called useful. Thoreau’s critique was not unique in the mid-nineteenth century. Countless reformers argued against the classical curriculum’s focus on “dead languages” and potted metaphysics, while others railed at the toilsome pedagogy of recitation and “mental discipline” that treated Greek, mechanics, and English as interchangeable tools for training moral character. But if Thoreau is in good company in disdaining the antebellum college, the solution he proposes is far from conventional: students should be required to lay the foundation for their studies in actual concrete – by building the colleges they attend. The point, Thoreau argues, is not to replace the liberal arts with vocational education, but to ground college learning in lived experience. Doing so would help ensure that students do “not play life or study it merely” but “earnestly live it from beginning to end.” No longer shut off from reality, the American college would become a place of active engagement with the world beyond the campus and with “the art of life.”2

From their initial explosion, African American women’s literary societies would go on to outnumber men’s organizations from the 1830s through the 1850s. Literary societies were also sites for the imbrication of oratory and print, since they included not only reading but also listening to texts read aloud, so that members of literary societies need not have been textually literate. Taking Maria Stewart’s first letters to the editor, in Freedom’s Journal in 1827 and The Liberator in 1832, this chapter will argue that the social gospel that would go on to define her career includes a prototypical Black feminist politics that we see emerging in the interconnected female-dominated Black literary societies and fledgling Black press around this time and reaching into the decades that follow. Stewart saw reading newspapers as essential to responsible citizenship for Black women, and understood both literary societies and newspapers as ways to forward her radical politics.

Chapter Five, “Shakespearean Clerisies and Perfect Texts,” concerns the activities of the Victorian Shakespeare societies and the ways that textual debates about Shakespeare throughout the century reproduce and inflect similar debates among Biblical scholars. Shakespeare’s cultural apotheosis raises persistent questions not just about the nature of his authorship, but also about the integrity and order of his oeuvre.During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as David Scott Kastan puts it, “the desire to recover the lost perfection of [Shakespeare’s] text becomes ever more intense.” Here, once more, we see a clear parallel to Biblical studies.For Shakespeare’s oeuvre, like the Bible, admits endless questions about which readings ought to be most authoritative.And in both cases, the textual problem became a theological one for believers who held that an inspired text ought to be uniform and consistent. Moreover, since textual difficulties in sacred texts have higher stakes than in secular ones, so too Shakespeare’s emergence as a companion to the evangelists prompts further exegesis and, eventually, helps to bolster the development of academic criticism.

Chapter Four, “The Elusiveness of the Divine William” traces how nineteenth-century Biblical criticism and theological controversy brought about the so-called “authorship controversy” by bringing to light the uncertainty of Shakespeare’s personal history. In it, I demonstrate how Shakespeare’s person becomes a great mystery in the aftermath of D. F. Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu, translated by George Eliot in 1846 as The Life of Jesus. Nineteenth-century Biblical studies had by this point progressed to the point that their philological and textual tools were widely applied to other distant figures, from Homer to Sappho, and – more importantly – Biblical scholars’ conclusions had also become publicized enough that they were irresistible for Shakespeare scholars.Strauss’s epoch-marking work, for instance, carefully unfolds just how little reliable evidence we have for saying anything historical about Jesus. At just this moment in the history of Biblical criticism, suddenly Shakespeare, too, loomed as an exalted figure about whom real questions lingered.

In 1889, the end of the decade in which all the major literary societies dedicated to poets were formed, Andrew Lang bemoaned their impact: ‘They all demonstrate that people have not the courage to study verse in solitude and for their proper pleasure, men and women need confederates in this adventure.’ This shift in reading practices took place during an important decade for poetry. It was the decade during which some of the era’s most renowned poets died, including Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It was the decade in which the relevance of poetry was increasingly questioned, as vernacular English literature was being claimed as having the capacity to be studied ‘scientifically’ like its sibling rival philology. It was also the decade that witnessed extended debate over the establishment of university Chairs of English Literature. In this context, this chapter examines the establishment and overwhelming popularity of literary societies in the 1880s, tracing their movement away from the ethos of a scholarly gentleman’s club towards more democratic, inclusive and experimental literary associations that tangibly impacted the reading of poetry in the 1880s.