[2] Returning from his voyages with invigorated health, Lowell devoted himself to business and, in his leisure time, to book collecting, reading, and politics, serving on the Boston Common Council and in the Massachusetts State Senate.

Conflict between the Unitarian elite and the evangelical urban masses intensified in the 1820s, as followers of popular ministers like Lyman Beecher openly challenged elite-controlled institutions like Harvard and the Boston Athenaeum using a variety of voluntary associations—young men's and mechanics societies, lyceums, debating clubs, and temperance groups.

Over the course of the next four years, Lowell traveled through France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Armenia, Persia, and Egypt, down the Nile to Khartoum, through Ethiopia, and ultimately to India.

Although large-scale philanthropic gestures were a relative novelty in early nineteenth century America, the idea of an elite institution providing popular lectures by eminent scientists and scholars was not.

After becoming ill while traveling through Egypt in 1835, John Lowell Jr. revised his will to create a trust to fund free public lectures in Boston on the subjects of philosophy, natural history, and the arts and sciences.