Then things changed

 

As often happens, my research and what I was learning in the seminar I was taking affected the shape of my project. I found that I had too much information to fit into a typical article but not enough for a book, nor did I really want to write a book. I had to figure out how to focus the project, and I was more and more interested in the problem of how to explain Lind's popularity. Was it just good marketing by P.T. Barnum, or was there more to it?

Luckily, at about the time when I struggling with this, I saw an announcement of a conference on print culture -- magazines, books, newspapers, and such. This provided a target audience and situation for my project, and I went back to my notes, focusing on how printed materials had contributed to Lind's public image and how they were used by their readers. I revised my outline, left out a lot of the ideas that I had been playing with, and developed a more focused version specifically for the conference.