Manuscripts and Frothingham

Welcome to Carnegie Hall! Again.

A couple of distractions (family events and a virus) pulled me off-track a little.  Once that happens, it's tough to know where to start again, simply because there are so many places that need to be "started" again.  I have work yet to do on Arthur Dobrin's publications.  But first, one of those "places" that needs attention is the collection of Carnegie Hall Lectures, which I discussed earlier this month (January 10 and January 17).  I still have some loose ends to tie up there, but I did manage to achieve the first goal for the Project:  "Document the Carnegie Addresses in the Bibliography of Ethical Culture."  All 58 addresses have now been added to the Bibliography in a new section for Manuscripts/Typescripts.  This means that I will soon be adding all those typescripts from the Algernon D. Black file (Box 9D), which I recorded last September.

One other task related to the Carnegie Lectures has also been checked off my list.  I spent some (online) time with the Felix Adler Papers that are archived in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.  Happily almost all of the lectures in the NYSEC collection can be found there.  Indeed, it seems that there may be one or more copies of most of the lectures and, perhaps, more than one version of some of them.  I'll leave it to another scholar to compare the versions and progression of thought that they might reveal, since CU is bit out of the way for me these days.  

The value of the CU archive is, for me, more than scholarly curiosity.  We have digital copies of the Carnegie Lectures, but we don't actually know where the paper copies are.  Once we find them--and I will be looking for them on my next trip to New  York--we are also likely to see that they are in very fragile condition.  It is reassuring to know that there are other copies somewhere in the world.  Since the next goals of the project may require us to look at some of those other copies, well, we can breathe again.

Such is not the case with the search for a book that I only heard about a couple of days ago:  The Radical Pulpit.  This is a collection of lectures by Octavius B. Frothingham and Felix Adler.  The bulk of the collection is Frothingham's, but it is interesting to see the senior partner give such a boost to the junior partner (so to speak) with co-authorship.  After a fair amount of time searching all the usual repositories and sellers of books, I managed to find a clear description of the book in The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout:  Volume I [The Truthseeker Library] in New Zealand.  That listing includes the following information about The Radical Pulpit:

The Radical Pulpit. Comprising discourses of advanced thought by O. B. Ffothingham (sic) and Felix Adler, two of America's clearest thinkers. By O. B. Frothingham: The New Song of Christmas, The Departed Years, Life as a Test of Creed, Apocryphal Books of the New Testament, The Sectarian Spirit, The American Gentleman, The Language of the Old Testament, The Dogma of Hell, The Value of the Higher Sentiments, The American Lady, The Consolations of Rationalism. By Felix Adler: The Ethics of the Social Question, Emancipation. Lecture at the Second Anniversary of the Society for Ethical Culture, Our Leaders, Have We Still a Religion? Conscience. Price, in cloth, $1.00

I read that as 11 lectures by Frothingham and 3 by Adler. (Punctuation matters!)  However, we will need to find a copy in order to see whether I have counted correctly.  We will also need to find a copy so that we can document the publication information.  So far I have no place and no publisher and two copyright dates.  The dates that appear in various footnotes and lists are 1878 and 1883.  In all likelihood, the dates represent two editions, but it would be helpful to see copies.  Until then, I take some pleasure in seeing the young Felix Adler, who would have been 27 in 1878, getting a leg up thanks to the older and, at the time, much more famous author and speaker (not quite elderly at 56).  Lest it seem that I am getting all sentimental about Frothingham's "kindness" to Adler, I note that, in his last publication before his death in 1822, Frothingham wrote very positively about Ethical Culture as the predicted (by Emerson) Religion of Humanity and quoted Adler extensively (without, however, naming him).

If you run across a copy of The Radical Pulpit at your local library, snap a photo of the cover page and the reverse (where all the publication info is).  Oh, and get the table of contents, too.  Please and thank you!