From spectators to visionaries: visual culture and the transformation of Boston, 1820-1860

2016-05-21Between 1820 and 1860, the newly incorporated city of Boston evolved from a dilapidated, cramped, haphazardly planned, poorly lit, and architecturally stagnant, provincial town, into a booming and visually impressive metropolis. Even as residents reveled in a vibrant new landscape of landmarks, art galleries, parks, museums, glittering shops and bustling streets, however, many among them—Transcendentalists, magnetic clairvoyants, Spiritualists, and blind autobiographers—sought out more ethereal visions of the invisible, infinite, and ideal. Through an interdisciplinary analysis of journals, sermons, periodicals, maps, architectural renderings, novels, and artworks, this dissertation relates two seemingly antithetical antebellum developments: spectacular urbanization and a popular preoccupation with the unseen. I argue that the visually congested, commercial, and competitive world of the antebellum city spurred Bostonians to look beyond the city, toward the sanctified realms of the imagination, nature, and even spirit‐land. ❧ The project is divided into two parts. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 analyze the efforts of local reformers in the 1820s and 1830s to promote moral and social order by constructing cleaner streets, public art exhibition spaces, and the nation’s largest market, tallest monument, and first public park. By teaching Bostonians to see ""correctly,"" the architects of this didactic landscape hoped to suppress the materialism, sensualism, and worldliness they feared endemic to urban life. Yet this campaign provoked unintended consequences, as explored in chapters 4, 5, and 6. Starting in the mid‐1830s, a socially diverse range of visionaries attained fame by seeing past the city and its spectacular seductions. By describing and depicting those visions for an eager public, blind autobiographers, spirit‐drawing artists, magnetic clairvoyants, and other Bostonians sought social parity with more polished observers. In the process, Boston’s visual transformation re‐shaped the meaning of ""seeing"" in ways that went far beyond the more literal forms of spectatorship typically associated with the urban experience