“Never made the least attempt to shake off the authority of Great-Britain”

Last month I profiled the Rev. Samuel Madden, the Irish minister who in 1733 was the first person to write fiction based on time travel—a book he suppressed immediately after printing.

Madden wasn’t the only eighteenth-century author to imagine a future George VI, however.

In 1763 the London printer William Nicoll published The Reign of George VI, its author anonymous. It’s scanned here.

This book discusses the years 1900–1925. It praises the future fictional George VI (not the real one who took the throne in 1936) based on ideas in The Patriot King (1749) by Viscount Bolingbroke and thoughts of where the British Empire might go after victory over the French.

The Reign of George VI says interesting things about the British territories across the Atlantic Ocean:

But the immense region of country which the English possessed in North America, was what most extended and forwarded the British manufactures; the King was there Sovereign of a tract of much greater extent than all Europe:

the constitution of the several divisions of that vast monarchy, was admirably designed to keep the whole in continual dependance on the mother country: there were eleven millions of souls in the British American dominions in the year 1920: they were in possession of, perhaps the finest country in the world, and yet had never made the least attempt to shake off the authority of Great-Britain:

indeed, the multiplicity of governments which prevailed over the whole country —— the various constitutions of them, rendered the execution of such a scheme absolutely impossible.

This wide extended region which increased its people so surprisingly fast, was far from being forgot by the King; many noble harbours were surrounded with towns, and made naval magazines; a prodigious number of ships were built by order, from Great-Britain; and the royal navy itself boasted many very fine ships that were built in America.

On the one hand, the author contemplated the chance that American colonists would “shake off the authority of Great-Britain.” On the other, he or she quickly dismissed the possibility that the American colonies could unite to do that or feel “forgot by the King”—a lesson for George III.

In 1899 the Oxford military historian Charles Oman edited and published a second edition of The Reign of George VI, and that in turn was reprinted in 1972. However, Oman’s text included “omissions, rearrangements of sentence order, repunctuation, and other silent variations from the original,” Fred Anderson wrote in his essay about the 1763 Treaty of Paris in The Making of Peace.

The original text of The Reign of George VI has since been printed in the first volume of British Future Fiction, 1700-1914. It occasionally gets mixed up with Madden’s earlier book, or he gets credited for this one.

In Invasions: Fears and Fantasies of Imagined Wars in Britain, 1871–1918, Christian K. Melby suggested that Oman’s republication of The Reign of George VI fed the craze for invasion literature that swept Britain in the early twentieth century. However, since that trend was already under way when the book resurfaced, the influence may have gone the other way—the Oxford scholar tripping across an old title that seemed to fit surprisingly well with modern concerns.

Can America Rock Again?

Earlier this month the Washington Post pubished Prof. Paul Ringel’s essay about Schoolhouse Rock, A.B.C.’s interstitial Saturday morning cartoon, and how it handled the nation’s history.

Ringel wrote:

“Schoolhouse Rock,” the animated Saturday morning children’s television series that ran on ABC mostly from 1973 through 1979 (though there were also new episodes in 1995-1996 and 2009), has reached millions of viewers over the past half-century. . . .

Its history-centered season, “America Rock,” ran from September 1975 through July 1976, as the United States was celebrating its bicentennial. Not surprisingly, the show adopted a celebratory rather than a critical perspective on the nation’s past, focused almost exclusively on White people’s stories and predominantly on men. . . .

These interpretations were a product of “Schoolhouse Rock’s” limited budget and cautious ideological mandate. ABC launched the program in response to criticism from grass-roots organizations like Action for Children’s Television about the excessive commercialism of Saturday morning television, and then handed the project to its advertising firm with no funding for support from educators or historians. Any hint of ideological controversy made the network executives skittish; an episode titled “Three Ring Government” was shelved due to fear that its comparison of the U.S. government to a circus would offend the FCC.

The representations that emerged from this process also exemplified “America Rock’s” less obvious shortcoming: its broader pattern of presenting historical narratives of progress without conflict. These episodes relied on an outdated model of history that honored the past without investigating it. When “No More Kings” presented an American Revolution with no actual warfare, and “Sufferin’ Till Suffrage” explained that female suffragists “carried signs and marched in lines, until at long last the law was passed,” they overlooked the struggles required to bring about these transformative changes. Instead they suggested that people merely had to set their mind to the task and it was done.

The approaching 50th anniversary of “Schoolhouse Rock” offers a ripe opportunity to bring these sorts of lessons to television. The program’s three-minute format seems particularly suited to online viral culture, and to young viewers’ growing preferences for watching videos online.

As young people grow up in an era of heightened disinformation, amid a battle over the nation’s history, bringing them the best version of that history—one that teaches them to think critically—will be crucial to raising the next generation of U.S. citizens. A remixed “Schoolhouse Rock” that helped to achieve this goal could enhance the program’s already formidable legacy.

A longer version of Ringel’s article was published in The Public Historian. It also discusses Liberty’s Kids and The Time Warp Trio, two more recent attempts to explore history through television cartoons for kids.

“Very fit for a Saturday morning’s declamation”

Yesterday we left William Wirt at about age thirteen in 1785 or so, chafing at an unjust accusation and physical punishment by his school’s usher, or assistant master. Wirt was living with the master of his school, the Rev. James Hunt, and from his books had already developed literary ambitions.

Our youth was an author, be it remembered. and that is not a race to take an injury, much less an affront, calmly. The quill, too, was a fair weapon against an usher, and by way of vent to his indignation at this and other continued outrages, but with no view to what so seriously fell out from it in furtherance of his revenge, he indited some time afterward an ethical essay on Anger.

In this, after due exhibition of its unhappy effects, which, it may be, would have enlightened Seneca, though he has himself professed to treat the same subject, he reviewed those relations and functions of life most exposed to the assaults of this Fury. A parent with an undutiful son, said our moralist, must often be very angry;—a master with his servant, an inn-keeper with his guests;—but it is an usher that must the oftenest be vexed by this bad passion, and, right or wrong, find himself in a terrible rage; and so he went on, in a manner very edifying, and very descriptive of the case, character and manner of the expounder of Cicero.

Well pleased with his work, our author found a most admiring reader in an elder boy, who, charmed with the mischief as much as the wit of the occasion, pronounced it a most excellent performance, and very fit for a Saturday morning’s declamation. In vain did our wit object strenuously the dangers of this mode of publication. The essay was “got by heart,” and declaimed in the presence of the school and of the usher himself, who, enraged at the satire, demanded the writer, otherwise threatening the declaimer with the rod.

His magnanimity was not proof against this, and he betrayed the incognito of our author, who happened the same evening to be in his garret when master usher, the obnoxious satire in hand, came into the apartment below to lay his complaint before his principal. Mr. Hunt’s house was one of those one-story rustic mansions yet to be seen in Maryland, where the floor of the attic, without the intervention of ceiling, forms the roof of the apartment below, so that the culprit could easily be the hearer, and even the partial spectator, of the inquisition held on his case.

“Let us see this offensive libel,” said the preceptor, and awful were the first silent moments of its perusal, which were broken, first by a suppressed titter, and finally, to the mighty relief of the listener, by a loud burst of laughter. “Pooh! pooh! Mr. ——, this is but the sally of a lively boy, and best say no more about it; besides that, in foro conscientia, we can hardly find him guilty of the ‘publication.’”

This was a victory; and when Mr. Hunt left the room, the conqueror, tempted to sing his “Io triumphe” [a Roman cheer of victory] in some song allusive to the country of the discomfited party, who was a foreigner, was put to flight by the latter's rushing furiously into the attic, and snatching from under his pillow some hickories, the fasces of his office, and inflicting some smart strokes on the flying satirist, who did not stay, like Voltaire, to write a receipt for them. The usher left the school in dudgeon not long afterward… 

The literature that Wirt recalled from Hunt’s library included the classical historian Josephus, poet Alexander Pope, essayist Joseph Addison, and Lord Kames’s Elements of Criticism (1762), which seems to have been quite progressive in its time.

From “a carpenter in the employ of Mr. Hunt” young Wirt borrowed less formal literature: the play Guy, the Earl of Warwick and probably some of Tobias Smollett’s novel The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle.

[The image above comes from an 1857 elocution textbook. It shows the correct stance and gesture for an orator making an “indignant appeal.”]

Thomas Fleming: Four Pages a Day

The author Thomas Fleming died this week at the age of ninety.

As I described back here, in 1960 Tom was a journalist putting out his first book. Now We Are Enemies was the first full-length narrative of the Battle of Bunker Hill published since the nineteenth century. It launched his career as a historical writer.

Inspired by advice he received early on to write four pages a day, six days a week, Tom completed more than fifty books in all. The best-selling title was probably Liberty!: The American Revolution, based on the P.B.S. television series. But his own studies of the Revolutionary War covered everything from a single battle in New Jersey (The Forgotten Victory) to Yorktown (Beat the Last Drum) and beyond (The Perils of Peace).

Tom also wrote on other periods of American history, he wrote historical fiction, and he wrote books for younger readers. In 2010 I got to attend a staged reading of a play he had composed decades earlier about Dr. Joseph Warren and Dr. Benjamin Church.

I had the pleasure of meeting and corresponding with Tom a few times. What struck me most was his enthusiasm for researching history and communicating it. To illustrate that, in 2009 I analyzed how he’d come to misattribute a few words about Dr. Warren to Abigail Adams. The next time we talked, Tom brought up that post, congratulated me on spotting what had happened, and even seemed happy to see an explanation. A small slip fifty years earlier meant much less to him than the pleasure of learning more.

Isaiah Thomas and a Woman of Pleasure

In 1786, the London bookseller Thomas Evans wrote to Isaiah Thomas, who had finally established himself as a printer in Worcester: “The Memoirs of a W. of P. which if you must have, [I] must beg you will apply to some of the Captains coming here, as it is an article I do not send my Customers if I can possibly avoid it.”

John Cleland’s erotic novel The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, also known as Fanny Hill, had been published in London in 1748-49 by “G. Fenton,” otherwise unknown. On 11 Dec 1752, Garrat Noel advertised that book for sale in the New-York Gazette; its title appeared at the end of a long list of books that started with “Bibles.” By that point, however, Cleland and the reputed printers had been prosecuted for obscenity, and the publication driven underground.

Which is not to say Fanny Hill had disappeared—there were several British editions over the next thirty years, but most were still credited to “G. Fenton” since the authorities could do nothing to him.

Did Thomas ever get his hands on the book? He definitely did, as the American Antiquarian Society’s Past Is Present blog showed a few years back.

…the marbled boards…covering AAS’s copy of Jonas Hanway’s Advice from Farmer Trueman to His Daughter Mary…are actually unbound, unused copies of John Cleland’s quite vicious Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (popularly known as Fanny Hill).

Marcus McCorison, AAS President Emeritus, bibliographer, and author of an essay on early American printing of Fanny Hill, has pointed to the “curious juxtaposition of pious works” bound with such risqué words. Perhaps an impertinent binder, with a supply of marbled Fanny Hill sheets at his side and a Hanway book to bind, covered this copy of Advice From Farmer Trueman. The binder may never have thought that the marbling would wear away, expose Cleland’s words, and reveal the binder to be quite the ironist.

That posting goes on to note that McCorison also found that “In 1814, AAS founder Isaiah Thomas bound many of his newspapers in pages from Fanny Hill.” So Thomas had copies.

McCorison argued that those papers came from an edition of the novel printed in northern New England around 1813, once again credited to “G. Fenton.” In 1817 the printer Anson Whipple of Walpole, New Hampshire, had 293 copies of Fanny Hill in stock. The following year, someone complained to the governor of New Hampshire about copies being sold there, and over the next few years authorities in Massachusetts and New York prosecuted half a dozen men for selling copies of the book.

And who had bankrolled Anson Whipple in his printing business, sent him stock to sell, and remained his senior partner until 1817? None other than his father-in-law, Isaiah Thomas. Some book historians therefore think Thomas was secretly involved in publishing Fanny Hill for American readers after all.

Between Aphra Behn and Jane Austen

Today instead of writing about books I’ll write about a podcast about books.

Earlier this year Helen Lewis, deputy editor of the British magazine The New Statesman, hosted six conversations for its podcast Hidden Histories. That first series of recordings is titled “The Great Forgetting,” and it focuses on the early history of the British novel.

The standard summary of that topic presents a progression through Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Tobias Smollett, and a few other authors before getting to Jane Austen. And there’s nothing wrong with those novelists. (Well, except Richardson.)

Yet in that eighteenth century most British novels were written by women. Likewise, people expected women to be the main audience for most novels, so many if not most novels were about women. So how does that usual list of British novelists before Austen contain nothing but men?

“The Great Forgetting” aims to unearth the female novelists who worked before Austen, and the female literary society that existed in 1700s Britain. Lewis’s interlocutors are Sophie Coulombeau, Elizabeth Edwards, and Jennie Batchelor, scholars at different British universities. Their six conversations are on these topics:

• Re-writing the Rise of the Novel: whom do conventional accounts of the era overlook?
• Bluestocking Culture: how did women become writers?
• Sociable Spaces: what did it mean to have a magazine by women?
• Unsex’d Females: women writers and radical politics
• Fight Club: who’s the most interesting female writer of the eighteenth century?
• The Great Forgetting: why are the authors we remember mostly men?

For people who enjoy exploring eighteenth-century fiction (as well as essays, histories, biographies, poetry, plays, and other literary forms), the conversations will provide some long reading lists. The podcast page also includes links to supporting articles, such as this article about the Whig historian Catharine Macaulay. The recordings can all be downloaded from iTunes. I enjoyed them.

Tristam Shandy in Its Time and In Our Time

B.B.C. Radio’s In Our Time podcast (one of my favorites) tackled Laurence Sterne’s landmark novel Tristram Shandy this spring. The book was a popular sensation after it started to appear in 1759 and still feels far ahead of its time.

Among the novel’s fans in America was Nathanael Greene. He made allusions to the book in his letters, and he imitated characters. According to Greene’s grandson and biographer:

his brothers, to the day of their death, could never mention Tristram Shandy without dilating upon the exquisite comicality of his impersonation of Dr. Slop.

In July 1775, Greene became a brigadier general in the Continental Army assigned to serve under Gen. Charles Lee. Lee was not only the most respected military professional in the Continental Army, but he was also a good friend of Sterne. The two men had even published verse together. Imagine Greene’s feelings about getting a new boss like that.

What Isaiah Thomas Wrote about Ezekiel Russell’s Wife

Back in 2009, I quoted the passsage above from Isaiah Thomas’s History of Printing in America (1874 edition) about Ezekiel Russell and his wife. I then added:

Josiah Snow’s [1847] account (quoted yesterday) credited those ballads to Penelope Russell herself, even saying she could compose them while she set the type. Perhaps Thomas’s phrase “A young woman who lived in Russell’s family” was a coy way of alluding to Penelope without pointing the finger directly. Or perhaps Ezekiel Russell’s struggling shop was kept afloat by the work of two young women instead of just one.

After I mentioned the Russells in my lecture on Friday, I checked out Thomas’s history again—but this time the original, 1810 edition. And here’s what Thomas first published.

So no wonder Josiah Snow thought Ezekiel Russell’s wife wrote those ballads—that’s exactly what Thomas’s book said. The “young woman” didn’t appear in print until decades later.

Thomas left a copy of his book with handwritten corrections at his American Antiquarian Society, which undertook to update and republish it. If that copy still exists, it could confirm if Thomas himself entered the revised information about the Russell printing house.

Given that Thomas and the Russells were both printing in Boston in the early 1770s, and that Thomas kept track of Ezekiel Russell in his movements to Salem, Danvers, and back to Boston, it seems odd for him not to know who wrote those tragical ballads. The passages also shift away from saying that Russell’s wife “made herself acquainted with the printing business,” leaving her just assisting.

That again raises the possibility that the mention of a “young woman” was a ruse designed to fit Mrs. Russell into a more traditional “help meet” model rather than a business partner writing for publication. The couple’s son, Nathaniel Pope Russell (1779-1848), became an important insurance broker in ante-bellum Boston. (In fact, his business records are at the American Antiquarian Society.) So the family may have wished for a more genteel portrait of their ancestress.

TOMORROW: More revisions about Ezekiel Russell’s wife.

Lecture on the Library Patrons of Colonial Newport, 18 Nov.

On Monday, 18 November, the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester will host a lecture by Sean Moore titled “The Redwood Receipt Books and Newport Slavers: A Bio-Bibliographical Inquiry into the Borrowing Records of Early America's Premier Slave-Trading Port.”

That title doesn’t really make clear what this talk is about unless you’re already into the history of the book. “The Redwood” is a circulating library founded in Rhode Island in 1747. Its “Receipt Books” and “Borrowing Records” preserve some of the patrons who were looking at its books. That’s allowed Moore, a professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, to profile some of colonial Newport’s most eager readers.

Or, as his lecture description says:

Rarely do scholars find evidence of the reception of works, but the Redwood Library’s receipt books from eighteenth-century Newport, Rhode Island, present the opportunity to do a bio-bibliographical analysis of some of the Redwood’s readers and perhaps move us towards an understanding of readers’ tastes.

The surviving receipt books are records of what books were borrowed from the library during a five year period from 1756-1761, and were kept by Ezra Stiles, the librarian of the Redwood and future president of Yale University. These printed forms list three blanks per page, and are filled in cursive handwriting with the title of the book, the cash deposit to borrow it, the name of the borrower, and the librarian’s signature. Most of the names have been torn out of them, the custom at the time being to tear out the name of the borrower after the book was returned. Whether this was done to protect the privacy of readers is an open question, but the important thing for my research is that many of the names were not torn out, or at least not completely.

This evidence of who was reading what books is not only of interest to book history, however, but also provides the chance to do what D.F. McKenzie and Jerome McGann described as a “sociology” of the text that considers the possible motives of the readers who were wealthy enough to pay the deposit on a book within what some historians have called early America’s premier slave shipping port. This paper, accordingly, will explore the role of the philanthropy of slave traders and owners in financing the library’s collection and argue that the receipt books give us insight into the financial interests of readers and the possible reasons why they might have been borrowing particular books.

This seminar will take place at 5:00 P.M. in the A.A.S.’s Goddard-Daniels House, 190 Salisbury Street in Worcester. Refreshments will be provided afterwards. If you plan to attend, please reserve a space with Ann-Cathrine Rapp by this Friday.

A Surfeit of Historical Talks in Boston This Week

Liz Covart has taken to starting each week at her Uncommonplace Book blog with a list of historical events coming up in Boston. This week several caught my eye.

Wednesday, 11 September, 12:00 noon, at the Massachusetts Historical Society
A brown bag lunch seminar with Jill Bouchillon of the University of Sterling speaking about her research on “Friendship in Colonial New England, 1750-1775.” She argues that colonial New Englanders understood friendship differently from us, and hopes to support that argument by examining how people wrote about friendship in pre-Revolutionary newspapers, books, and magazines.

Wednesday, 11 September, 6:00 P.M., at the Boston Public Library
Victor T. Mastone, Director and Archaeologist of the Massachusetts Board of Underwater Archaeological Resources, discusses the “Battle of Chelsea Creek,” the latter-day name for the skirmish on Noddle’s Island and the Chelsea shore on 27-28 May 1775. The shoreline and topography of the area have changed greatly, but archeologists are using geographic information system (G.I.S.) analysis to better understand the fight.

Thursday, 12 September, 5:30 P.M., at the Boston Public Library
Stephen Hornsby discusses his new book Surveyors of Empire: Samuel Holland, J.F.W. Des Barres, and the Making of the Atlantic Neptune. This talk is no doubt in conjunction with the Norman B. Leventhal Center’s exhibit of maps and engraved plates from that monumental British atlas; the library recently shifted to the second half of that exhibit, with new items on display.

Thursday, September 12, 5:30 P.M., at the Massachusetts Historical Society
Prof. Bernard Bailyn, whose books have won both the Pulitzer and Bancroft Prizes, speaks on the theme “History Matters: Reflections on Efforts to Make It Come out Right.” All the preceding events are free; this one costs $10 for people who aren’t members of the M.H.S. and reservations even for people who are. Call 617-646-0560 or register online.

What Were British Children Reading in the 1700s?

Earlier this month McGill University in Montreal shared an interview with Prof. Matthew Grenby of Newcastle University on children’s books of eighteenth-century Britain. Some of those made their way to New England, first as imports and later (especially after independence) as models to be pirated.

Some extracts from Prof. Grenby:

…children’s books from the eighteenth century became so rare that often the collectors didn’t have much choice, and had to acquire copies that children had torn, written on, coloured in, sometimes almost worn out. For the book historian, these are more valuable. They give real insight into the way that children used their books and what they thought of them in the period when children’s literature was being invented.

For instance, sometimes a book’s user pencilled marks into the margins to record their progress though the book. From these we can calculate how long it took a child to read a story, or to complete the tasks in a geography textbook (if indeed they did). Other kinds of ‘marginalia’ give children’s comments on the books they were reading – or record what they were planning to do that afternoon, or what they thought of their teacher or classmates. . . .

A lot of the books also have inscriptions: the owner asserting (sometime very menacingly) his or her ownership of the book.

I’ve seen such inscriptions in copies of the textbooks used in Boston’s Latin Schools. Often a boy wrote out a warning against theft—in Latin. Since I doubt there was really a wave of Latin-reading book thieves, I think those inscriptions signal pride in owning both the book itself and a knowledge of Latin.

What we now know is that, in the first years of children’s literature, more girls owned books than boys, books penetrated all social classes and religions, and that ownership was spread widely in geographical terms. . . .

Morality, and piety, was an important element in eighteenth-century British children’s books. They could be surprisingly relaxed about religious conformity though. A book might talk about how important it was, on Sunday, to go to church, but the author could give the alternatives of chapel, or the Quaker meeting house. Sometimes we have evidence of parents who reacted angrily to this ecumenicalism, crossing out ‘chapel’ and ‘meeting house’ to keep their children orthodox.

The most reprinted book in eighteenth-century New England was almost certainly The New England Primer, a schoolbook for children learning to read. And the reason it had the New England name is that it was tailored for the region’s dominant Puritan faith. A typical edition included a picture of a Protestant martyr being killed in front of his children (example above courtesy of Stanford) and the shorter Westminster catechism. I doubt books suggesting Catholic chapels or Quaker meetings would have been popular here, but perhaps the culture opened up after independence.

We now tend to think of reading as quite a private, personal experience. But in the eighteenth century this probably wasn’t always the case, particularly for children. Children’s books were generally supposed to be read aloud and in company. They were supposed to form the basis of conversation. That’s not just chat, but rather ‘conversation’ understood as a distinct and systematic educational practice. It was imagined that parents or teachers would read the book first, then select certain parts for the child to read over him or herself, probably aloud, followed by carefully directed discussion.

Whether this actually happened much in real life is debateable.

Proper parenting can be exhausting, after all.

“His verses are the fruits of simple nature.”

Yesterday I took note of John Hawthorn, poet and private in His Majesty’s 6th and then probably 20th Regiment of Dragoons in 1778-79. During his service Hawthorn actually published a slim book of poetry.

The July 1779 Critical Review, or Annals of Literature, took notice of Hawthorn’s work with a, well, critical review:

His verses are the fruits of simple nature. He appears to be a total stranger to all the rules of grammar; yet in some of his pieces there are strokes of imagination, which seldom appear in the productions of illiterate versifiers.

The Monthly Review, or Literary Journal in October 1779 had less praise but more pity:

Of honest John Hawthorn’s poetical attainments the Reader will form his own judgment from the following extract, which is given, not as the most favourable specimen of his abilities, but merely that, by pointing out the Writer’s situation and circumstances, the humane may be induced to become purchasers of his book.

It is not many months ago, since I
Enjoy’d my freedom and my liberty,
Before I e’er took up a haversack,
Or bullying serjeant to rattan my back,
When on my stockings there might be a spot;
No matter if my shoes were black or not:
Then, calmly I could lie, and take my rest,
No powder’d hair, or ruffles at my breast:
When at my ease I liv’d in a warm cot,
And had of land a fertile handsome spot:
What though my roof no tiles or slates sustain,
The well pack’d thatch kept out the driving rain;
A chearful fire glanced through my floor;
My wife could milk her own cow at my door;
Each day, a dinner dress’d by my good dame,
And chearing smells from boiling beef-pots came:
My horse was sure to know me at first sight;
Nay more, my dog would know my feet at night:
Oft’ I would walk in a fair evening tide.
And muse in quiet by a river’s side;
Where oziers green were nodding o’er the waves,
And water lilies spread their moisten’d leaves;
Then home return with calm and serene breast;
Return my thanks to God, and go to rest.
Thus did I live but in a low degree;
If some liv’d better, some liv’d worse than me:
Till trading bad, and loss of different kind,
Made me enlist, and leave them all behind.

It’s not certain that those lines from “The Drill” are strictly autobiographical; Hawthorn may have adopted the persona of a rustic yeoman. (He identified himself elsewhere as a trained linen weaver.) If so, Britain’s literati offered sympathy but not much respect.

Hawthorn’s poetry appears to have been rediscovered in the late 20th century as an unusual voice from Britain’s eighteenth-century laboring class. The poems he wrote about his army experience are also rare in providing a first-hand description of the everyday life of a British soldier during the period of the Revolutionary War.

Hawthorn’s “On His Writing Verses,” other lines from “The Drill,” and “Advice to a Recruit” appear in Don N. Hagist’s new book, British Soldiers, American Revolution. Tomorrow I’ll say more about that book, and for the rest of the week I plan to share news and opinions about some other recent books of Revolutionary history. I’ll try to be kinder than The Critical Review.

Pvt. John Hawthorn: “Yet I must be a bard”

John Hawthorn was a linen weaver from County Down, Ireland, who enlisted in the 6th (Inniskilling) Regiment of Dragoons in 1778. (Dragoons, we recall, were soldiers mounted on horseback.) That unit was stationed in Salisbury from May 1778 through the end of the following year.

According to an 1847 regimental history, Britain was then beefing up its army in response to France entering the American War. As a result:

one hundred men and horses were added to the Inniskilling dragoons; but the scene of conflict [i.e., North America] was so little adapted for cavalry, that the heavy dragoon regiments were not called upon to quit the United Kingdom.

Hawthorn was actually a light dragoon, and the same regimental history says that “In April, 1779, the men [of the 6th Dragoons] equipped as light cavalry were incorporated” into the new 20th Light Dragoons, along with some companies from other horse regiments. But that regiment didn’t go to America, either.

So what makes Pvt. John Hawthorn worthy of note here? Because at heart he was a poet! He was probably writing verses as an apprentice and continued that activity as a horse soldier.

It was all very well for a wealthy officer like Gen. John Burgoyne to indulge his literary habit, but an enlisted man like Hawthorn face harder challenges, as one of his compositions describes:

On His Writing Verses

Well may they write, that sit in parlours fine,
To raise their spirits can quaff luscious wine,
To keep out noise, the parlour door is shut,
The servants scarce dare speak, or budge a foot;
Under no fear, no terror, and no task,
But coolly can sit at a writing desk;
How different with me the time is spent,
Inclos’d with dragoons in a little tent;
Some darning stockings, others blacking shoes;
Some singing, others telling jests and news;
Their different sounds do ill confound my writing;
One should be solitary, when inditing,
Yet I must be a bard, nought less will do me,
And so write as nature dictates to me.

Despite those obstacles, Hawthorn completed enough work and saved enough money to have a small book of poetry printed in Salisbury in 1779: Poems, by John Hawthorn, Light Dragoon in the Inniskilling Regiment.

TOMORROW: The reviews come in.

Time Warner’s V for Vendetta

V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, began to appear in the British comics magazine Warrior in 1982. Like other British comics magazines, in each issue Warrior published short installments of several different ongoing stories, and V for Vendetta became one of the most popular.

Moore and Lloyd had agreed on what was then a radically new style of comics storytelling: no thought balloons, no explanatory captions, no sound effects. V for Vendetta also had an unmistakable political edge, though set in a future, post-apocalyptic Britain.

Without the backing of a big established firm, Warrior was never a solid financial success, and it ran into legal disputes as well. The magazine stopped publishing in 1985, leaving V for Vendetta only 80% complete.

By that time the American publisher DC Comics had hired Moore to write scripts for some of its famous characters, starting with Swamp Thing and moving on to Superman (“Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?”), Batman (The Killing Joke), Robin (“For the Man Who Has Everything”), and the Green Lanterns (“Mogo Doesn’t Socialize”). His 1986-87 series with Dave Gibbons, Watchmen, would help to push superhero comics to a new level of sophistication.

DC put in the best bid to finish up publishing V for Vendetta. Its art was originally black and white, but Lloyd added color for the American market. The entire story appeared in ten comic books in 1988-89, and then in a collected volume that’s still in print. That very British, anti-authoritarian story with a Guy Fawkes mask as its iconic image thus became one of the assets of DC’s parent corporation, Time Warner.

In 2006 Warner Bros., another division of the same corporation, released a movie version of V for Vendetta. As in the comics, the character V wore a Guy Fawkes mask in every scene. Production designer Owen Paterson, art director Stephan Gessler, and director James McTeigue created that mask based on Lloyd’s drawings. The result was another corporate asset.

The mask actually proved to be a problem. The first actor cast as V quit because he couldn’t stand wearing it all day. Furthermore, while the unchanging face looks neat on the printed page, we expect movies to, well, move. The filmmakers struggled to record some emotion for that character through Hugo Weaving’s line readings, sound, lighting, and other visual effects.

Warner Bros. sent out Guy Fawkes masks to promote V for Vendetta, and licensed Halloween costumes and other products based on its character design. The movie was a moderate success. Moore and the book’s strongest fans saw plenty to complain about, of course; among their issues was how Hollywood had watered down the comics’ anarchist political message. Still, a movie about a heroic terrorist in 2006 had to carry a whiff of subversion.

TOMORROW: A return to politics through the web.

Royall Tyler in a Comic (sort of)

This week the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge published an anthology of comics called Minimum Paige. The first item is a little horror story that I scripted and Alex Cormack drew called “The Essex County Literary Wax Museum & Menagerie.” Last night we learned that the editors also awarded that story second prize among all the eligible entries in the book.

What does this have to do with Revolutionary War history? Hmmm.

The images of Judge Pyncheon from The House of Seven Gables in our story are based on pictures of the playwright and jurist Royall Tyler, who grew up in Revolutionary Boston. Nathaniel Hawthorne took some inspiration for that character from talks with Tyler’s disapproving in-laws; more on that connection here.

Also, I spent all of the prize money and a little more on Revolutionary history books from the store’s used-books basement.

And, um, Gen. George Washington slept in a house a couple of blocks from the store. For almost two weeks.

But really I just wanted to brag.

Tristram Shandy and the American Generals

Yesterday Boston 1775 shared a glimpse of one spread from Tristram Shandy, a publishing sensation two and a half centuries ago. It made its author, the Rev. Laurence Sterne (shown here), into a celebrity.

Among the novel’s fans in America was Nathanael Greene. He made allusions to the book in his letters, and he imitated characters. According to Greene’s grandson and biographer:

his brothers, to the day of their death, could never mention Tristram Shandy without dilating upon the exquisite comicality of his impersonation of Dr. Slop.

In July 1775, Greene was made a brigadier general in the Continental Army and then assigned to serve under the major general Charles Lee.

Reading sources from that year, I sense that a lot of people saw Lee as larger than life. He was considered one of the greatest experts on military affairs in North America. He had been wounded once in battle and twice in duels. He had traveled west far enough to lead the first British expedition on Lake Erie, and east far enough to have seen the Russians fight the Turks.

Lee had told off George III for not granting him a regimental command. He had met the king of Poland, the Holy Roman Emperor, and Frederick the Great of Prussia. He was friends was Isaac Barré, Catherine Macaulay, the Earl of Shelburne, Edmund Burke, and other leading British opposition figures. Lee’s own political writing was widely reprinted in America in 1774-75.

And Lee was a good friend of Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy. The two men had even published verse together. Imagine getting a new boss like that.

“Throw down the book at once”

Sunday’s Boston Globe alerted me to this year’s 250th anniversary of the third volume of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, and its Marbled Page. Actually, I hadn’t thought of the Marbled Page in capitalized terms before.

Sterne and his narrator introduce that page by saying:

I tell you before-hand, you had better throw down the book at once, for without much reading, by which your reverence knows, I mean much knowledge, you will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motly emblem of my work!) than the world with all its sagacity has been able to unraval the many opinions, transactions and truths which still lie mystically hid under the dark veil of the black one.

Since the facing page was originally created with hand-marbled paper, each edition was different. The fact that the effects of marbling aren’t entirely under the craftsperson’s control added another layer of randomness. So, yes, that meaning could be difficult to penetrate. Unless the meaning was randomness itself.

Of course, by the time I read Tristram Shandy as a Penguin paperback, this page had been thinned out to a uniform grayscale image of a single piece of marbled paper, probably chosen by the publisher decades before. Still, it was fun to see Sterne playing with the book form.

This fall the Laurence Sterne Trust, which maintains the author’s home Shandy Hall, will host an exhibit celebrating this anniversary called “The Emblem of My Work”. The exhibit has its own website, naturally. Different artists have been invited to interpret the marbled Marbled Page.

This exhibit follows a similar celebration two years ago of Volume 1’s all-black page (“the black one”), which signaled a character’s death. That exhibit, too, had a website. I have to say, though, that a lot of those Black Pages aren’t very black.

TOMORROW: Tristram Shandy and the American generals.

The Legend of “The White Horseman”

I believe “The White Horseman,” the earliest printed tale of Hezekiah Wyman, is an example of a lost literary genre called a “legend.” Washington Irving launched this form in American literature with such tales as “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820). The genre’s ingredients include a historical setting, a spooky atmosphere (whether or not events are actually supernatural), and a tone of inevitable moral judgment.

Other early American authors who used the form include:

• William Austin, “The Man with the Cloaks: A Vermont Legend” (1836).
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Legends of the Province House” in Twice-Told Tales (1837).
• Robert Montgomery Bird, “The Legend of Merry the Miner” (1838).
• George Lippard, Washington and His Generals; or, Legends of the Revolution (1847).

You might guess that I chose those titles because they include the actual term “legend,” but there are many other examples of the form. Probably the highest achievement within the genre is Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.

The people who wrote legends and probably most of the people who originally read them understood those stories to be fictional. (Especially the ones that involved little men bowling ninepins, of course.) Some authors might have been inspired by historical episodes, but they added too much fiction for the result to be believed.

When those authors remained famous, as Irving and Hawthorne did, their legends were republished under their names, and American readers continued to recognize those tales as fictional. However, when an author was forgotten, his work was easily reprinted and retold without credit or context. In some cases, new authors took those legends to be fact.

For example, some of Lippard’s legends of Revolutionary Philadelphia, such as the Liberty Bell being rung to signal independence, got into the history books. His tale of a mysterious man orating to the Continental Congress continued to circulate as fact at the highest levels of American society into the late 1900s. Lippard appears also to have started the story, mentioned in the last Presidential Inaugural Address, that Gen. George Washington ordered Thomas Paine’s Common Sense to be read to the entire Continental Army (though he might have thought that was accurate, based on his interpretation of a Paine biography).

The fact that legends often included names that grounded them in real places and events furthered that confusion. One local example is the series of tales about “Peter Rugg, the Missing Man.” The Boston lawyer William Austin wrote those stories for The New England Galaxy starting in 1824. They were reportedly a major influence on Hawthorne, and later on Edward Everett Hale’s Man Without a Country.

Austin included some details that seemed authentic, most notably a man from Menotomy named Cutter. That was a common surname in that village; everyone in greater Boston probably knew a man from Menotomy named Cutter. (As I’ve noted, “The White Horseman” also mentions an Ammi Cutter from that village.) Nonetheless, Austin made up the whole story of Peter Rugg.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Austin was forgotten. The story of Peter Rugg was still being retold—as history, or at least as ancient New England folklore. Alexander Wollcott felt he had to write an article setting the record straight.

TOMORROW: So if “The White Horseman” was a legend, where does that leave Hezekiah Wyman of Woburn?

The “Noble Dream” of History as a Science

Having quoted briefly from Gordon S. Wood’s Washington Post essay on writing history, I want to add his further analysis of why so many professional/academic historians write books that don’t appeal to the public as many narrative histories do. I liked how Wood’s article didn’t follow the common pattern of simply lamenting that many historians write opaquely on obscure topics, but analyzed why they come up with their books:

Instead of writing this kind of narrative history, most academic historians, especially at the beginning of their careers, write what might be described as analytic history, specialized and often narrowly focused monographs usually based on their PhD dissertations. . . .

Such particular studies seek to solve problems in the past that the works of previous historians have exposed; or to resolve discrepancies between different historical accounts; or to fill in gaps that the existing historical literature has missed or ignored.

In other words, beginning academic historians usually select their topics by surveying what previous academic historians have said. They then find errors, openings or niches in the historiography that they can correct, fill in or build upon. Their studies, however narrow they may seem, are not insignificant. It is through their specialized studies that they contribute to the collective effort of the profession to expand our knowledge of the past.

The writing of these sorts of historical monographs grew out of the 19th-century noble dream that history might become an objective science, a science that would resemble if not the natural sciences of physics or chemistry, then at least the social sciences—economics, sociology, anthropology, psychology—that were emerging at the same time as professionally written history.

Wood thus recognizes the limitations of both approaches to history, but sees potential for a synthesis of the insights gained from narrowly focused studies applied to narratives that reach outside academia.

Wood also rightly puts the emphasis on subject rather than language; it doesn’t help much to write clearly if your topic doesn’t grab readers outside of the field. The sciences, social sciences, and literary studies have developed specialized vocabularies, either because they need greater-than-everyday precision or because there’s value in seeming obscure to the non-initiated. In contrast, the study of history doesn’t really have jargon, except for a few terms like “agency” and “contingency.” So it all comes down to the topic and the approach.

History and the Narrative Fallacy

Yesterday I discussed the appeal of narrative history that offers the same ingredients as a good fictional story: protagonists, goals, obstacles, resolution through internal forces. The protagonist can be a historical figure (or several) trying to achieve something, or a historian trying to answer a question. Either way, such a narrative structure turns a sequence of events into more than “one damned thing after another,” as Arnold J. Toynbee once characterized some other historians’ work.

The problem with a historical narrative is that it might not reflect real life. We all know that we do a lot of things every day because of circumstances, habits, or whims, not because we approach life with clear and unconflicted goals. We’ve all seen plans work out, or not work out, because of unforeseen outside forces or simple chance. We all experienced social, technological, or environmental forces that can overwhelm one individual’s ability to affect the world—what historians call “agency.”

Yet we still like narratives. We humans are pattern-spotting animals, and sometimes we even impose patterns on life to make it more understandable. A narrative is one such pattern, and a pleasing one. But that understanding of life may get in the way of real comprehension.

For example, the history of Paul Revere’s ride on 18-19 Apr 1775 is an exciting narrative. It offers:

• a protagonist: Revere and his comrades.
• a goal: warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams about the British troops marching west, and maybe warn the folks at Concord as well.
• obstacles: miles of road to cover, British officers in wait, Hancock’s stupidity.
• a clear resolution: the warning gets through!

Henry W. Longfellow made Revere’s ride a popular legend by squeezing out lots of the complexity. David Hackett Fischer wrote a much more detailed, accurate account in his own Paul Revere’s Ride, noting as he did so how the event had what Aristotle called “dramatic unity”—it took place within a relatively compact space and time. I myself recounted a Revere-centered version of the story for Boston National Historical Park last April.

And yet, as I’ve argued, Revere’s ride may not have really affected how the rest of 19 Apr 1775 turned out. Other warnings got through. The militia in Lexington and Concord had started to assemble even before Revere and his colleagues arrived, and spent hours milling around. The British troops weren’t really hunting Hancock and Adams.

Once those troops reached Concord, furthermore, the militiamen massed outside town weren’t sure how to respond; they spent more hours watching and debating, and pulled back after the first engagement at the North Bridge. Even after the shooting really began along the battle road, it’s not clear what the provincials hoped to accomplish. If they had cut off the regulars from Boston, would they have known what to do with them?

And then there’s the larger picture of whether what Revere did on 18-19 April, or even the whole Battle of Lexington and Concord, changed the split between Britain and its North American colonies. Was war bound to start somewhere fairly soon? (Had it already started in Portsmouth?) Was the political and economic conflict within the British Empire too far along to be patched up? Exploring those questions gets us into the realm of large social movements and economic trends, beyond the level of crowd-pleasing narratives.

And as for the alternative narrative form of historian as investigator, diligently gathering evidence to answer a stated question, anyone who’s done research knows that’s even more of a fiction. You determine the questions as you go along, evidence turns up in the most unhelpful order, and the end of the investigation is defined less often by your goals than by your deadlines.

Myself, I like narrative history. I like reading it, and when I plan a talk or article I almost always find myself thinking in narrative terms. I happen to believe in human agency, and in the meaning that accumulates from the sum of individual lives. But at the same time, I worry that narrative history can be a snare, a pleasant illusion of how events fit together that hides a more complex, messy picture.

(The image above is Grant Wood’s rendering of Paul Revere’s midnight ride from the Grant Wood Gallery.)