Public Talk: “Making It Personal: Reading the Correspondence Between Lydia Maria Child and Gov. Wise and Mrs. Mason, of Virginia”
Dr. Bonnie O’Neill will present “Making It Personal: Reading the Correspondence Between Lydia Marie Child and Gov. Wise and Mrs. Mason, of Virginia” in September 28, 2026, at the downtown branch of the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library System.
In the weeks following John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, newspapers published a clutch of letters between the well-known abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, Virginia Governor Henry Wise, and Margaretta Mason, the wife of a Virginia Senator. Widely reprinted in both northern and southern papers, the letters revisited familiar arguments on both sides of the slavery debate. More than that, they addressed the perennial question of how Americans ought to discuss controversial political issues—and who gets to participate in those discussions. These letters reveal the intensely personal nature of public life in a time of national crisis and the incivility that presaged armed conflict.
Dr. Bonnie O’Neill is professor of English at Mississippi State University. She is the author of “Literary Celebrity and Public Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States” (Georgia, 2017), which explores how an expanding celebrity culture affected authorship and civic discourse.
This program is sponsored by a Mississippi Humanities Council America250 Grant.
For more information, call the CLPLS at 662-329-5300.
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