THE LECTURE SYSTEM.

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Sketches of its Humbugs.

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THREE FEMALE PORTRAITS.

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Confessions of a Reformed Lecturer.1explanatory note

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sketch the first—miss nancy sikes.

The Western press and public will find these Sketches well worthy of their study. They are literally true portraits from life; only some of the names of persons and places are changed, and every statement made in them can be confirmed by documentary evidence.—Eds. Herald 2explanatory note

Traveling on the cars from Boston to New York I met a merry-eyed, energetic gentleman who suddenly accosted me, and gave me to understand that he had managed to survive a lecture of mine given a few weeks previously in a New England city.

“I’m the first of a long line to come,” said he.

I made free inquiry which of the Original Jacobs3explanatory note of the coming age I had now the honor to address.

“I’m a Reformed Lecturer!” he answered, as boldly as you please, with as much unction, in fact, as if he had just come from the anxious seat and there proclaimed himself a miserable sinner.

Being at that time still, as it were, in the gall of sin and bond of iniquity,4explanatory note (my “list” had not yet been half “gone through” and it did look lucrative to the mind’s eye,) I asked him what special degradation there was attached in his view of it, to the modern development of the Homeric profession.

“I’m disgusted with it,” he said, “it is getting into the hands of humbugs; and above all of the she-humbugs—women like—,” but I will not indicate the three noted ladies whose sudden rise into newspaper notice had made their names familiar in our mouths as household words.

I remarked that they had certainly been quite successful in winning a high position and added that I presumed they were eloquent speakers.

“Eloquent!” exclaimed my nervous companion. “Eloquent! One of them makes up her lectures of froth and panier in equal parts; the second writes a smart little essay and reads it in a smart little way—without one touch of native or acquired eloquence in either; and the other couldn’t compose a dozen sentences of decent English, in my opinion, to save her soul from Satan, or, what would hurt her worse, her pearls from the pawn brokers!”5explanatory note

“And yet,” I interposed, trying to quiet my excitable friend, “it seems to me you must be mistaken; the metropolitan papers speak highly of them; and, surely, (if the Arabian traditions be true, that God put down ten bushels of talk in the world and women seized nine of them)6explanatory note—surely, we ought to have a large supply of eloquent female orators.”

“That’s theory,” retorted—what shall I call him?—some specially distinctive name it must be—not too common nor yet wholly unfamiliar—Mr. Smith, let us christen him, and Theodosius for short—“That’s theory,” rejoined Mr. Theodosius Smith, “the fact is, that in all this broad land that has the plague of Talkists worse than old Egypt ever had the plague of lice,7explanatory note there are only three women who would hold their present rank if they were suddenly made into men. One of them, a young woman whom everybody knows, and the other two are over fifty years of age.8explanatory note And yet the three she impostors I have named to you are mentioned ten times in the papers where these three genuine orators are mentioned once.”

“How is it done?” I asked—for although I was earning money in my profession, I had never asked “favors” of the press, and my agents had never done so for me, “do you mean to say that all these notices are paid for?”

“Not all;” he replied, “I have found out the whole modus operandi—not all, but all in the beginning. Now what I shall tell you, isn’t imaginary—I won’t say how it can be done, I shall say how it is done to my own knowledge.”

“Go on,” I said.

“Well, one of these dear creatures,—let us be perfectly civil about it,—has an agent all to herself. I don’t want to name her, but, to avoid confusion, let us give her some imaginary name. She is a virtuous and educated lady—of course. To make it impossible to detect her suppose we call her Nancy Sikes? So be it. And suppose we call her agent Bill?9explanatory note

“Nancy’s Bill makes it the one object of his life to keep Nancy’s name constantly before the public. Does General Butler10explanatory note become conspicuous for the time? Nancy’s Bill immediately writes: ‘Miss Nancy Sikes, the celebrated lecturer, is said to be an own cousin of General Butler.’

“Nancy’s Bill has a large newspaper acquaintance. He knows the sub-editors and reporters in New York, and he finds no difficulty in having this paragraph inserted in an evening journal. The public interest in Gen. Butler sends that item flying through the press in every Northern State.

“Out again, in a weekly paper this time, comes the indefatigable Bill once more. ‘The New York Daily —— states that the popular and eloquent lecturer, Miss Nancy Sikes, is an own cousin to Gen. Butler. We cannot credit this statement, because Miss Nancy is very beautiful, and how could she be a relative of Gen. Butler.’

“This poisoned arrow wings its way through the Democratic press.

“The ingenious Bill hasn’t exhausted his resources yet, for, in a prominent metropolitan journal a few days after, up he jumps again: ‘We see a paragraph going the rounds of the country press, that the celebrated lecturer, Miss Nancy Sikes, is an own cousin to Gen. Butler. We have the best authority for stating that she is no relative whatever.’

“This is bad for Butler, but you can see how this lie, well toed, has been made to do a heap of free advertising, can’t you?”

“Do you mean to say,” I asked, “that this very trick has been played?”

My friend, Mr. Theodosius Smith, did not answer, but he took out a circular from his pocket and convinced me that he had not spoken a word in jest.

“Well,” he resumed, “there is no end of items that Nancy’s Bill starts in this way; I have no doubt from what I have seen myself and have heard from other agents, that he manages to get from twenty-five to fifty a week in different parts of the country. Anything that any paper anywhere says in praise or dispraise of his Nancy, her faithful William makes a ‘point’ of. And then, when this fails, Bill goes into the correspondence business. He is a good writer, and so he sends to leading papers all over the country interesting ‘newsy’ letters which he charges little or nothing for, just to insert ingeniously, somewhere, a puff of the celebrated Miss Nancy Sikes. The West is flooded with Bill’s letters. Nancy grows famous. Committee men, seeing her name mentioned so often, think she must be somebody great. They send for her terms, and then they are sure she is great. For Bill modestly answers that if he can find a night, (which the same is doubtful) she will go for $150—the highest price you will notice, for average towns, that the most famous orators of the nation ever think of charging.”11explanatory note

I looked out at the window; we had come to a depot, and the boys were calling out the New York papers.

“I’ll bet you a dollar just for the fun of it,” said Mr. Theodosius Smith, “that some one of these papers has an item in it about Miss Nancy Sikes!”

“Done!” said I, eagerly, for to tell the truth, I had a certain pride of profession— un esprit du corps —which this merciless iconoclast was wounding badly.

“Done!” he repeated. He bought half a dozen papers, and was soon lost in them. “You’ve lost,” he said, from the depths of an evening sheet, “here are two, one an editorial in the ——, and the other a three line item in the ——.”

I had lost.

“Look at this item,” continued Mr. Theodosius Smith, “and see how this fellow has profited by the story of Samson, whose strength lay in his hair.

“‘Miss Nancy Sikes,’” he read, “‘has now entirely dispensed with her $1,500 chignon. Indeed, it is not needed, as her own luxurious hair reaches down almost to her feet when it is unloosened.’”

Here Theodosius roared.

“I wonder,” he said, “how soon Bill will announce to an expectant world that Miss Nancy Sikes has cut her toe-nails! If he ever does, you may bet that three or four days afterward another paragraph will appear contradicting the first item and stating that, in consequence of the incessant demands on her time to answer the letters of lecture committees, Miss Nancy Sikes has never yet found time to cut her toe-nails, and does not hope to be able to do so until the end of the season!”

Theodosius is a very nervous gentleman, and without as much as ‘by your leave,’ he crumpled up the paper and threw it out of the car window.

“Just think,” he exclaimed, with an indignant wave of his hand, “that American journalism will so far degrade itself as to chronicle such frothing small beer! Mind you, this is the second or third little item about Nancy’s hair that respectable metropolitan papers have allowed to crawl into their columns. Oh! for a conscientious small tooth comb editor! But look you,” continued Theodosius, “read that leader.”

It was an editorial on the lecture system; it seemed honest enough, at first sight, but became a crafty puff of Miss Nancy Sikes under the light thrown on it by my traveling companion.

“That’s Bill’s article,” he said. “Bill has brains; he is as cunning as Nancy is—complaisant. You know that Gough12explanatory note is the most popular lecturer in the country—he stands as far ahead of all others in the public favor as the President ranks all his subordinate civil officers—and Anna Dickinson holds the same position to all the women lecturers. Now, look you, Bill has contrived to bring these three names—Gough’s, Anna’s and Nancy’s—into this short editorial several times, as if they were acknowledged equals; read it carefully again, and you will see that without saying so in as many words, he leaves the impressions not only that they are all on a par in popularity, but that Miss Nancy is the ablest of the two. Gough amuses; Miss Dickinson instructs; but (ye Gods!) Miss Nancy Sikes both amuses and instructs!”

The editorial was in a respectable paper and certainly said all that, partly by inference and partly by direct statement.

Mr. Theodosius Smith relapsed into a laugh.

“Shakespeare amuses; Milton instructs; but George Francis Train both instructs and amuses.13explanatory note By the long tresses of Miss Nancy Sikes, I swear I’ll write an editorial and prove it! I’ll easily get it published. I’ll do as Bill does—give it to some sub-editor short of a subject and not charge the poor devil a cent for it and give him a dinner in the bargain. But then,” he said with a sneer, “George Francis Train could’nt pay me as Bill’s bills are paid.”

“My dear fellow,” I interposed, “all this does not account for the big pile of notices that Miss Sikes receives from the press in different parts of the country.”

“It so happens,” said Mr. Theodosius Smith, “that when I was in the Journal office in Boston, I found a lot of old papers in one corner—last summer’s—and saw a far-western sheet among them. I picked it up out of curiosity. There was an editorial on Miss Nancy Sikes! Nancy had been there at the time. Read it,” he said, “and compare it with the editorial in your hand.”

He took out his pocket-book and handed a slip to me.

“Read it.”

I opened my eyes in astonishment. There could be no doubt of it. The same pen had written both. But here there was no inferential language. Miss Dickinson was sneered at as a scold, while Miss Nancy was extolled in the loftiest terms.

“How is this?” I asked.

“Bill was there—he and his Nancy, or Nancy and her Bill, often travel together. And Nancy talks and her William writes. And before Nancy talks William writes, and after Nancy talks Bill writes again. And so the truth is kept away from the knowledge of lecture committees until they find out by experience that although Miss Nancy is smart in her line—largely, let me say, in the clothes-line—she is no more a she Gough, nor a Miss Dickinson, than I am Hercules or Wendell Phillips a Blondin.14explanatory note

“That’s a good comparison, by the way,” said Smith, pleased with his climax, “because I have some strength; I can ‘raise a smile’ sometimes, and Phillips does ‘know the ropes;’ but our forte would seem to lie in other directions.”

When a man makes a very poor joke and thinks it tip-top, every well regulated mind expends its force on the risible muscles, as a matter of good fellowship, so I laughed. Besides, I had seen and heard Wendell Phillips, and to picture him dressed up in tights was not wholly a soul-calming contemplation.

“Well,” went on the merciless Smith—by christen name, Theodosius—“when a season is over, Bill gathers up all these puffs and makes up his circulars for next year. He don’t hesitate to alter them to suit. I got one of them the other day and marked it. Here it is;” and out again from his wallet he jerked, rather than drew, a circular.

“Do you see ‘Bill, his mark’ in these?”

He had drawn his pencil under certain phrases, which showed at once, to a practiced writer, that these notices, although published in papers as far apart as St. Paul’s, Minnesota, and Orange, New Jersey, were the products of the same fertile brain.

“Does Bill always go with Nancy?” I asked.

“No; but don’t you know that lecture committees are always ready to have puffs of the lecturers they engage published in advance, and that local papers have never any objection to oblige the committees, who are mostly the best men of the town? Bill sends notices; these commit the paper; and even when they don’t, unless the lecturer makes an awful failure, editors don’t care to chronicle the true state of the case, lest they should seem to blame the committee.15explanatory note So the truth is crushed to earth in every way—only dearly bought experience tells the committees who are and who are not humbugs.”

“Well, what of it?” I said, “after all, every calling has its humbugs, and this hurts ours as little as quack advertising hurts the medical profession.”

“No sir!” retorted Mr. Smith. “Not so. The Lyceum, in the hands of right-minded and clear-sighted men, might be made the college of the people, with a broader scope, and loftier purpose, than any existing college. It needs every aid that can be given to it. There is not a ‘natural taste’ for it. This taste needs cultivation. Every quack that is allowed to tread the platform is a small national calamity, like the plague of frogs.16explanatory note Every friend of popular education ought to combine to suppress them. Every lyceum whose funds they obtain under these false representations, ought to expose them. Every local journal ought to give them—”

“Ten minutes for refreshments!” shouted the conductor.

We got out and suspended our conversation till the cars started again.

to be continued.