Ralph Waldo Emerson Accepts an Invitation to Deliver a Lecture in Andover, Mass.

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.

But 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. In April 1871, just three months after this letter, Emerson’s lectures are commonly considered to have come to an end. This is so because any later lectures cannot be reconstructed. Because his most important ideas were worked out in his lectures, these lectures provide the best record we have of his evolving thought-and thus are a key to understanding of his essays and other printed works.

Emerson was invited to speak at Andover, Massachusetts on January 13, 1871. Emerson’s Journal records that in September 1870, Emerson has written, “Andover 13 January proposed,” as it had been by a Roderic Terry of that town. At another location, Emerson wrote in the name of Terry and the year 1871. His account books indeed show that Terry paid Emerson on January 13, 1871. Based on other charges Emerson specified for lectures for this period, he likely received $70 for the lecture. The content of the lecture does not appear to be published.

Autograph letter signed, Concord, November 11, 1870, to Roderic Terry. “I do not foresee that any engagement will prevent me from coming to Andover on the evening of the 13th January next, as proposed in your note which should have been answered much earlier.” This letter is cited in The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, which notes that it was sold at City Book Auction in 1949.

By the spring of 1871, Emerson’s mind was on travel. He took a trip on the transcontinental railroad, barely two years after its completion.