1878 Autograph Letter Signed by Lecturer Rev. Joseph Cook to Boston Publisher James T. Fields on Emerson and Bronson Alcott.

1878 Letter inviting Field to give his lecture “Emerson & Coleridge”

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Autograph letter signed by nineteenth century popular lecturer, Joseph Cook (1838–1901), addressed to Boston publisher James T. Fields. Here, Cook invites Fields to lecture on “‘Emerson & Coleridge.’”

To persuade Fields, Cook notes that previous guest lecturers have included Transcendentalist Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May Alcott) and author and Transcendentalist supporter, Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Indeed, Cook writes, “Mr. A. Bronson Alcott has led six conversations here, & they have several of them been widely reported both in the East & the West, & were not without notice in Europe.”

“A one-year stint as supply pastor to the First Congregational Church in Lynn, Massachusetts, further convinced [Cook] that he should establish himself as a “scholar evangelist” who would undertake the task of confronting and repelling modern challenges to Protestant evangelical Christianity, translated from academic into popular terms and cast in the form of the lyceum-style public lecture. Cook thus created for himself a niche between the aggressive but unsophisticated evangelism of revivalists like Dwight L. Moody and the elegant entertainments of the literary lecture circuit where Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, and Wendell Phillips held positions of considerable cultural eminence.” (ANB Online)

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