Bodies of Reformstudies what was perhapsthemost coveted object of nineteenth-century American culture, that curiously formable yet often equally formidable stuff called character. So much more than simply the bundle of traits that distinguish and define an individual’s identity, character was to many nineteenth-century Americans, as Orison Swett Marden somewhat gleefully put it, “the grandest thing in the world.”³ The impact of the concept of character on the culture of the nineteenth century is hard to miss, its influence difficult to overstate. A pervasive and defining keyword across a range of nineteenth-century political, literary, philosophical, scientific, and pedagogical...

My study begins with Herman Melville’s 1857 novelThe Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a text that seems to announce—and perhaps to mourn—the closing of the era of character. Set on the riverboatFidèleas it travels up the Mississippi River one April Fool’s Day,The Confidence-Manportrays a series of swindles perpetrated by one singular, and quite “original,” confidence man. The confidence man—in Melville’s text but also as a well-known social type—is named for his signature method of assuming an identity and then garnering the confidence of strangers in order to extract money from them—inThe...

The prominence of the confidence man and his many avatars as an object of concern in the fiction, popular periodicals, and advice literature of the mid-nineteenth century was not simply a reaction to the threat he posed as a new social type but rather expressed the broader ambivalences many people had toward the performative dimensions and imperial implications of the iconic national character he announced and installed. Figures such as Benjamin Franklin, whose famousAutobiographywas published in 1818, were increasingly canonized as “representative characters” not necessarily because of their introspective self-reliance, moral discipline, and self-transparency but rather because of...

In 1851, Sojourner Truth gave a speech to the Akron Women’s Rights Convention that launched her public career and eventually came to define in many ways her legendary status as feminist icon, staunch abolitionist, and exemplary “self-made” character. The power of the speech, which has come to be known by the name of its repeated refrain, “Ar’n’t I a Woman?” has often been attributed not only to Truth’s unique and sophisticated rhetorical style but also to the equally spectacular presence of her powerfully formed and muscular body. In Frances Gage’s influential and controversial reconstruction of the 1851 speech, she attempts...

In January 1905, the editor of the periodical theVoice of the Negropublished a series of short “Messages” intended to give advice to its readers on the important question of “the betterment of the race.”³ The short and prescriptive messages, in their effort to encompass the “republic of thought” spanning “both sides of the color line,” were solicited from a range of esteemed and “representative white men as well as those of the race.” And yet although the editors strove to represent many different “schools of thought,” what is most striking about these messages is the common emphasis they...

In 1928, the organizers of the Chicago Association for Child Study and Parent Education, one of many emerging organizations dedicated to the new science of pedagogy and child rearing, decided to address its annual conference to one of the most important social-reform projects in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States, the project of “Building Character.” The “Mid-West Conference on Character Development,” as it was called, gathered together a diverse and esteemed group of clinical psychologists, primary- and secondary-school educators, doctors, social reformers, and university presidents and professors. Some were noted for their expertise in the scientific study of character...