Americans in British Literature, 1770–1832

A Breed Apart

Christopher Flynn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351959292
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

American independence was inevitable by 1780, but British writers spent the several decades following the American Revolution transforming their former colonists into something other than estranged British subjects. Christopher Flynn's engaging and timely book systematically examines for the first time the ways in which British writers depicted America and Americans in the decades immediately following the revolutionary war. Flynn documents the evolution of what he regards as an essentially anthropological, if also in some ways familial, interest in the former colonies and their citizens on the part of British writers. Whether Americans are idealized as the embodiments of sincerity and virtue or anathematized as intolerable and ungrateful louts, Flynn argues that the intervals between the acts of observing and writing, and between writing and reading, have the effect of distancing Britain and America temporally as well as geographically. Flynn examines a range of canonical and noncanonical works-sentimental novels of the 1780s and 1790s, prose and poetry by Wollstonecraft, Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth; and novels and travel accounts by Smollett, Lennox, Frances Trollope, and Basil Hall. Together, they offer a complex and revealing portrait of Americans as a breed apart, which still resonates today.

Chapter One
English Novels on the American Revolution

More than a thousand of Charles Dickens's readers stood on the docks in New York in 1841 waiting for the shipment of the London periodical Master Humphrey's Clock, which contained the latest installment of The Old Curiosity Shop. These readers feared, quite literally, for the life of the heroine with an intensity and to an extent often recalled in discussions of the connections between writers, readers, and texts. When the ship neared the dock one called out to those onboard. "Is Little Nell dead?"¹ Like readers in England. Americans were thoroughly engaged in Dickens's maudlin tale, and tearfully sympathized with Little Nell as if she were one of their own children. Sadly, Little Nell had perished back in England, and nations mourned. Later Oscar Wilde would declare that no one could read of the death of Little Nell without laughing, a verdict our age would likely agree with but in 1841 the joke was not yet apparent.

This well-known anecdote exemplifies many of the aspects of transatlantic literary sympathy this chapter discusses. First, it highlights a fellow feeling between English and American readers, centered on questions of loss and innocence. Second, it suggests that the material means by which texts were transmitted prior to the laying of the first transatlantic cables in 1851 both heightened that feeling and blocked its communication. The emotions of people on one side of the Atlantic have always already happened for those whose access to them comes through acts of reading, at least six weeks earlier during the 1770s, and still usually three or more weeks by the 1830s. Finally, as Elizabeth Brennan suggests in her introduction to the Oxford World's Classics paperback version of The Old Curiosity Shop, this incident quite possibly never happened. As far as we can tell, it is an anecdote without an event, a discursive history and nothing more.² The relevance of this—and of beginning this chapter with a story that may not have happened—is that at least since the era of the American Revolution, the difference between America and Britain has always been one of time—time manifesting itself in writing as irreconcilable lacunae that sympathy seeks to fill, but in the process only exacerbates. The result of this temporal gap takes a human relationship–or the textual version of one–that seems synchronic in unemotional times, and unmasks it as a diachronic fiction, a twice-told tale of a specifically transatlantic type. Writing the Anglo-American relationship as diachronic is the overarching activity that controls the fictions that aim to show connection but instead demonstrate the impossibility of imagining this "nation" as existing in a single time. Also, just as distance became time for Dickens's sympathetic American readers, apocryphal or real, time has now distanced those who would discover whether this anecdote is an example of fictional Anglo-American sympathy, or actual Anglo-American Sympathy focused on fiction. For this reason, British fiction of the 1780s and 1790s–fiction that focuses on the common and recent connections, history, and experiences of Americans and the English—is the best place to look for the English understanding of America as another country that is also another time.

The possibility that this anecdote is a fiction presents a major difficulty for a study such as mine. Where, in the twenty-first century, does eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture exist? In texts? In anecdotes later rendered as text? In relationships between texts and rumors of texts? If crowds in New York waited for news of Little Nell, the story of their readerly sympathy may have been transmitted orally for a time, or through sources now lost, only to resurface in many accounts based on no apparent evidence. On one level, the anecdote's importance lies as much in its plausibility as its verifiability. Collective reading experiences inspired sympathy, and The Old Curiosity Shop was a major hit with the American public, which surely awaited news of Little Nell's fate with as much concern as English audiences did. The anecdote is no doubt true, if not verifiable, up to that point. Shipping news was in every paper, and ships from England took at least two weeks to reach New York in 1841. This meant Dickens's audience in New York was aware of the existence of knowledge—published, textual knowledge—that it had no access to for several weeks, turning a gap in time and communication into an epistemological gap as well. New Yorkers knew that English readers had already been mourning Little Nell's death or celebrating her recovery for several weeks by the time it knew what to feel, which in this case extends that epistemological gap into the realm of sympathy. The point is that while New York readers may not have waited at South Street for the ship carrying Master Humphrey's Clock, relatives and friends awaiting the news of a death or birth of someone back in Britain certainly did, on a daily basis, and this certainty makes what is likely an apocryphal anecdote plausible, and to a great extent, true.

The concern New Yorkers may or may not have shown for Little Nell, while probably the most famous instance of transatlantic sympathy involving a writer and readers and complicated by slow transatlantic communication was hardly the first. This form of sympathy and a similar hindrance to its immediate communication was crucial in introducing the idea of American identity to the English. The coincidence of the widespread taste for sentimental literature with the American Revolution spawned a host of novels in which the Atlantic, more than any human character, serves as antagonist, a narrative feature which violently creates two sets of English-speaking peoples by dismembering those meant to represent the possibility of unity. News of military events and lists of the wounded and dead faced the same dilemma. Readers—whether real friends and relatives seeking news from Lexington and Concord, Saratoga, or Bunker Hill, or characters in epistolary novels waiting for news of loved ones enmeshed in the drama of war—suffered sympathetically from American events that seemed to be happening not just in a far away place, but in an irreconcilable time. This temporal rupture made itself felt in a way that challenged the epistemological soundness of the dominant metaphors of Anglo-American union.

The English public, if one judges by the number of editions of popular novels set during the war, or the proliferation of polemical poems, pamphlets, periodical essays, cartoons, prints, and other cultural productions, was hungiy not just for news from America, but for explanations of what the Revolution meant. Did political separation suddenly create a new people across the Atlantic, imperfectly termed "American"? Before the Revolution "American" almost always refers to Native Americans, and almost never to the colonists. Afterwards the former colonists are almost always Americans, and Native Americans more consistently become "Indians" and "savages"–names they had already borne in European and Euro-American texts for centuries. Did this change in name signal a shift in ontological content? Or were a common language, culture, and history enough to maintain the wholeness of the English-speaking people across the Atlantic despite political separation?

English and American explanations of the Anglo-American relationship relied heavily on two complementary but ultimately irreconcilable metaphors: the empire as a family, and the body politic. American pamphleteers, novelists, cartoonists, and other participants in the Revolutionary-era public sphere fairly consistently presented the relationship as a familial one. as Jay Fliegelman has convincingly demonstrated.³ English representations of the quarrel with America eventually tended to mix the two metaphors, reluctantly recognizing that families could separate, but that bodies were sounder containers for conceptions demanding organically or symbiotically structured relationships of parts to the whole. This recognition led to depictions that relied on an organicism that could not survive the violence time perpetrated on representation.

Globalization complicated many of the tropes through which authors established a sense of the nation as an identifiable entity. Was there ever such thing as an Anglo-American nation? If so, was this nation homologous to the English, or British nations? I argue here that the ancient rhetorical model of the nation as a body eventually provided English writers with a seemingly sound vessel in which to place the notion of an Anglo-American polity. I set up this argument with a brief discussion of the metaphor of the body politic's place in western European discourse, and identification of other metaphors that found their way into representations of the relationship between England and its colonies during and immediately after the American Revolution. The metaphor of the Anglo-American empire as a family whose children are capable of growth and independence dominated American political discourse, as Fliegelman has shown.

I will draw some conclusions about why the body politic metaphor tended to crowd out family politics in English writings of the same period. While English writers were just as capable of seeing their American cousins or subjects as children, they were inexorably drawn to a more organic figuration, as my analysis of a large number of texts and images from the period will demonstrate. To draw this point more explicitly, and to illustrate the compulsion to mix the metaphor in English discourse, I take as a case study Samuel Jackson Pratt's Emma Corbett; or, the Miseries of the Civil War (1780),⁴ the first English novel about the American Revolution. Finally, the identification of Americans as a separate people emerges through an inability to reconcile temporal schemes. English representations of the American Revolution tend to use sympathy while attempting to create an affective union able to survive political separation. The problem with this attempt is that it must take place discursively, and the distance across the Atlantic defeats efforts to portray the communication of sympathy adequately. Whether one tries to imagine the Anglo-American nation as an entity formed by simultaneous reading experiences, or as teleologically oriented with an identical trajectory through time, one fails.

The Body Politic

Samuel Johnson uses the body politic metaphor in "Taxation No Tyranny" (1775), his pamphlet justifying England's stance against its American colonists, in a way typical of the times and struggle. "A colony is to the mother-country as a member to the body," Johnson writes—combining his metaphors as many writers of the period did—

deriving its strength from the principal of vitality; receiving from the body, and communicating to it, all the benefits and evils of health and disease; liable in dangerous maladies to sharp applications, of which the body however must partake the pain; and exposed, if incurably tainted, to amputation, by which the body likewise will be mutilated.⁵

Johnson characteristically sees the body as England with America as an extremity. His essay tersely sums up the logical consequences for extremities that fail to understand their organic dependence. "The mother-country," he writes, always considers the colonies thus connected, as parts of itself." But while "the body may subsist, though less commodiously, without a limb ... the limb must perish if it be parted from the body."⁶

The metaphor of the political entity as a corporeal body has served writers of various leanings in the Western intellectual tradition since at least the time of Plato's Republic. Developed further in the Laws, and more explicitly by Aristotle in his Politics, it became a common frame for discussing the polis throughout the Middle Ages. It was especially useful to seventeenth-century theorists of absolute monarchy in England such as Sir Robert Filmer and Thomas Hobbes.⁷ Others who sought to incorporate the king's body into that of the polity as a whole, most prominently Locke, found the metaphor almost as useful, and especially consonant with their Enlightenment views. As Antoine de Baecque puts it, "(t)he metaphor of the body offers to politicians and men of letters alike the illusion of an organic ordering of the human community, an illusion that thus gives them a scientific claim to observe it and organize it."⁸

By the time of the American Revolution, the metaphor was enough of a commonplace to slip into popular novels and poetry about the conflict. Sentimental novels took hold of the notion of a political body to define the relationship between the colonists and those home in England. While those works can hardly be understood to be making the sort of scientific claims de Baecque has in mind, they do engage in a sort of Kantian ordering of perception, in this case a political one, employing a corporeal metaphor in their intersecting acts of grasping together parts they wish to present as whole. Sympathetic illness, often death, and weakened and decaying bodies are the inevitable results of the choice of the body as the governing metaphor in the Anglo-American conflict of the 1770s and '80s.

Late eighteenth-century fictional formulations of the body politic metaphor owe much to the way they rely on notions of sentiment, and more particularly sympathy, as understood in the period. Johnson defined sympathy as "(f)ellow feeling; mutual sensibility; the quality of being affected by the affection of another." His definition of "sensibility" included both physical sensation and perception. To "sympathize," he wrote, was "to feel mutually."⁹ The first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1771), the Scottish Enlightenment's most significant instance of corporate thought, defined sensibility and sympathy in even more explicitly corporeal terms. Sympathy "in medicine," it asserted, "denotes an indisposition befalling one part of the body, through the defect or disorder of another; whether it be from the affluence of some humour, or vapour sent from elsewhere, or from the want of the influence of some matter necessary to its action."¹⁰

This sensational and bodily concept of sympathy caused a significant shift in the way the "body politic" was presented, probably by the end of the seventeenth century, and certainly by the time England's hostilities with America began in the 1770s. While Hobbes and earlier writers had stressed the importance of the body of the king as a containing and representational vessel for that of the nation, Johnson tacitly accepts the unpersonified nation as the primary body. As Jay Fliegelman notes, England's replacement of an absolutist monarchy with a constitutional one in 1688 contributed to a change in the way the nation viewed the relationship between sovereign and people. While he stresses the change in familial relations this change encouraged, his point seems also applicable to a change in the conception of the nation as an organic structure.¹¹ Janet Todd has claimed that religious Dissenters, seeking to further the democratic nature of the political body, "were reinforced by the sentimental interest in the deprived," and by the tendency of "sentimental literature" to reinforce that movement.¹² While Hobbes had argued in Leviathan...