Epilogue

By the end of the antebellum period, Bostonians’ habit of idealizing the urban landscape was yielding to the new transatlantic fashion of realism. Rather than idealize the city, realist writers and artists such as Winslow Homer documented it in detached and comprehensive detail. The declining commitment to a collective and idealized way of seeing can be read in a variety of domains, including art criticism, psychology, and even ophthalmology. The epilogue explains the rise of realism in Boston in terms of the development of middle class cultural institutions, suburbanization and geographic stratification. Less concerned with how Bostonians saw, a new generation of reformers and censors (such as the Watch and Ward Society) became exclusively preoccupied with what Bostonians saw.

Looking Past Disorder

By the 1830s, the urban renewal project discussed in the previous chapter only further revealed the intractable messiness of the urban landscape. A decade of gentrification exacerbated anxiety about whether the city’s sites and edifices could compete with surrounding topographical and human congestion. The champions of improvement sought to ease their doubts by commissioning images that abstracted, obscured, or shrank into insignificance the disorder surrounding urban landmarks. Yet even as these ideal representations of the city proliferated, Bostonians questioned whether their fellow spectators saw moral landmarks as intended. A middle-class culture of novels, guidebooks, periodicals, plays, and other sources introduced a new typology of spectators—the connoisseur and the poseur, the vista seeker and the speculator, the libertine and the sentimentalist—who revealed their true characters through their divergent reactions to the city’s monuments, parks, galleries, paintings, and sculptures.

Enchanting the City

As the Second Great Awakening convulsed Boston, liberal Protestants inoculated themselves and their children against irreligious superstition by cultivating a belief in fairies and fairyland. Pointedly allegorical, fairy culture affirmed the genteel, pious and natural sensibility of liberal Protestantism, while simultaneously parodying the lower orders’ supposed susceptibility to illusion. By the 1840s, fairy tales and theatrical fairy spectacles performed at venues such as the Boston Museum served another role: encouraging urbanites to see their class-riven city as an enchanted and abundant metropolis built by truly “free labor,” rather than by morally dubious vanity and capitalist exploitation. Reframing the spectacle of luxury as a magical reward for goodhearted spectators, commercial fairy culture hastened the decline of visual didacticism into outright escapism. For these viewers, the fairy city replaced the tangible civic vistas of Chapters One and Two.

Ordering Boston’s Landscape

Starting in the late 1820s, Unitarian intellectuals began to argue that vision was a miracle for the masses, a God-given channel of mental and moral self-culture. Steering parishioners between the extremes of deistic materialism and religious irrationalism, Unitarian ministers assured Bostonians that by becoming pious but rational witnesses to the world’s natural beauty, they could avoid “visionary” religious enthusiasm and the sensory dazzlement of fashion and drink. By creating a sacred urban geography of genteel parks, vistas, public buildings and monuments, Federalist and later Whig reformers hoped to forge a civic culture based on patriotic “associations” that would survive the city’s topographical and social transience.

Discovering the Blind

In the 1820s, liberal Protestant reformers encouraged popular sympathy for those denied the miracle of vision. Establishing the nation’s first school for the blind, the Perkins School, in 1829, Unitarian reformers hoped to not only help the disabled, but to instill greater respect among the sighted for the moral and mental resource of vision. Yet the following decade, as visual didacticism proved a poor match for the deepening urban crisis and the rise of popular spectacle, reformers found a new role for the blind as exemplars of urban transcendence, capable of navigating the city without vision while avoiding its sensual lures. Even so, a number of Perkins’ students found work as autobiographers and clairvoyants, undermining the sensationalist psychology that underlay visual didacticism.

Transcending the Gallery

Even more effectively than outdoor vistas, indoor galleries offered reformers the ability to manipulate what urbanites saw. Embracing the arts as a form of moral instruction, late-Federal Bostonians established public exhibition spaces to divert the city’s growing middle-class from more fashionable and sensualist attractions. Yet the 1820’s public exhibition culture that emerged at the Athenaeum and elsewhere was ridden with anxiety, as moralists warned that connoisseurship concealed a shallow and fashionable sensualism. To avert this danger, art gallery patrons absorbed themselves in visions that transcended the material art object and the social imposture of their fellow viewers. These supersensory flights from the urban gallery proved a key template for Transcendentalist encounters with nature, epitomized by Emerson’s famous “transparent eyeball” metaphor.

Drawing Forth Spirits

A decade after establishing the Athenaeum gallery, reformers’ concerns about the sensualism of public art exhibition culture led them to promote yet another source of moral instruction: amateur drawing. Still hoping to create a generation of pious and rational observers, Boston school reformers such as Elizabeth Peabody introduced drawing in the 1830s as a non-sectarian substitute for moral instruction. Simultaneously, industrial reformers promoted drawing at Boston’s popular artisan fair as a lingua franca for affluent connoisseurs and technically-minded mechanics. As drawing shifted from a polite art to a moral pursuit, critics feared the practice encouraged hollow mechanical imitation. Draughtsmen responded by embracing a more ethereal, Romantic visual idiom, transforming amateur drawing into a medium of Spiritualism and occultism.

Introduction

The introduction outlines the basic narrative of the book: 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” (as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it), it was there that a liberated faculty of sight first promised escape from the competition, congestions, and social divisions of urban life.