Transatlantic Literature and Author Love in the Nineteenth Century

Paul Westover, Ann Wierda Rowland, Paul Westover, Ann Wierda Rowland

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9783319328195
• eBook ISBN: 9783319328201
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book is about Anglo-American literary heritage. It argues that readers on both sides of the Atlantic shaped the contours of international 'English' in the 1800s, expressing love for books and authors in a wide range of media and social practices.It highlights how, in the wake of American independence, the affection bestowed on authors who became international objects of celebration and commemorationwas a major force in the invention of transnational 'English' literature, the popular canon defined by shared language and tradition. While love as such is difficult to quantify and recover, the records of such affection survive not just in print, but also in other media: in monuments, in architecture, and in the ephemera of material culture. Thus, this collectionbrings into view a wide range of nineteenth-century expressions of love for literature and its creators.

© The Author(s) 2016

Paul Westover and Ann Wierda Rowland (eds.)Transatlantic Literature and Author Love in the Nineteenth CenturyPalgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture10.1007/978-3-319-32820-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Reading, Reception, and the Rise of Transatlantic ‘English’

Ann Wierda Rowland¹ and Paul Westover²

(1)

English Department, University of Kansas, Kansas City, MO, USA

(2)

English Department, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA

End Abstract

In early November 1872, some 101 years since the birth of Sir Walter Scott and forty years after his death, a group of prominent New Yorkers and over 5,000 spectators gathered in Central Park to unveil a new monument. Its cornerstone had been laid the summer before, a timely keeping of Scott’s centenary. On this afternoon, the dedication ceremony featured bagpipes, immigrant Highlanders in military costume, and groups performing, in telling conjunction, both ‘God Save the Queen’ and ‘Hail Columbia’. ¹ An account of this event, published in the New York Times on November 2, preserves the opening remarks of the memorial committee chairman, who rejoices that Scott now joins Shakespeare, his best and most fitting company, in Central Park’s outdoor answer to Poets’ Corner. The Times also reproduces the day’s keynote address, delivered by the aged William Cullen Bryant (a regular speaker at such commemorative events), here lauded as a ‘kindred genius’ to Walter Scott. Bryant wears ‘a sprig of heather in the breast of his overcoat’ and reports himself especially pleased and enthusiastic at the city’s effort to add ‘human associations, historical [and] poetic’, to Central Park’s ‘shades, lawns, rocks, and waters’. ‘Henceforth’, he prophesies, ‘the silent earth at this spot will be eloquent of old traditions’, a sacred ground of memory and imagination. ²

This moment of transatlantic cultural theater prompts various questions: Why all this to-do and excitement? Why so much effort to establish a patch of ‘classic ground’ in Manhattan? And why, specifically, erect a monument in America to a foreign (in this case, Scottish) writer? But what may seem a slightly strange gesture to our twenty-first century sensibilities was, for the nineteenth century, not at all unusual. In fact, its very conventionality is one reason why it now deserves attention. The raising of this statue of Walter Scott in Central Park is best understood as a typical episode in the larger commemoration movement that characterized British–American literary culture. What Philip Waller has called the ‘literary marmoreal movement’ and what, at the time, was described as the ‘present rage for centenaries’ ³ reached a crescendo on both sides of the Atlantic in the decades approaching the turn of the twentieth century, as statues, busts, commemorative plaques, and memorial ceremonies honoring beloved authors became a customary mode of literary expression. ⁴ That this was a transnational movement lent cross-cultural vitality to the phenomenon, as Americans raised memorials to British authors (both at home and in Britain itself) and Britons in turn paid tribute to American authors, in some cases crossing the Atlantic to do so. When, for example, a group of Boston Keats devotees erected a memorial bust of the poet in Hampstead Parish Church in 1894, Walter Besant enthusiastically accepted this American tribute on English ground and contemplated ways the English might reciprocate: ‘we might present a statue of Hawthorne to the pretty little town of Concord. We might put up a bust of Washington Irving in the City Hall of New York. We might give a statue of Oliver Wendell Holmes to the great hall of Harvard.’ ⁵ Such gestures, whether realized or merely notional, were characteristic of a literary culture in which the finest sensibilities were often proven and the highest tributes paid in marble or bronze as well as in print.

We begin this volume with the anecdote of a Walter Scott statue in Central Park because it offers a window into a nineteenth-century literary culture that was decidedly transatlantic, author-loving, and in key respects supra-textual—that is, capable of escaping the printed page and finding expression in material culture and in the affective responses and activities of readers. The chapters of this volume share the general assumption that ‘literature’ does not confine itself to books; rather, they explore what has been called literature’s ‘social life’. ⁶ Accordingly, they pose a number of questions: By what various means did ‘English Literature’ come into being? How did it find its way into the hearts and homes of its readers? What fascinations, diversions, cultural expressions, and social affiliations did it inspire? What collective values did it embody? And finally, following David Harlan’s simple observation that ‘we are who we are, at least in part, by virtue of the people and ideas we care about’, ⁷ how did a love of English Literature and its authors shape regional, national, and transnational identities? In addressing such questions, the chapters of the volume also make the specific case that what came to be called and canonized as English Literature in the twentieth century was largely a nineteenth-century Anglo-American invention, the product of a wide range of inscriptional and material practices animated by the affective, social, and identificatory experiences of readers.

By describing English Literature as a transatlantic invention, we mean not only to emphasize the significant role nineteenth-century Americans played in determining what came to count as canonical reading, but also to uncover the degree to which ‘English’, as a category of identity and affiliation, functioned transnationally. Throughout the nineteenth century, ‘English’ shifted between national, linguistic, ethnic, and racial connotations, and English-speaking people around the world, particularly in the USA, played a significant role in shaping what ‘Englishness’ meant at any given time. Indeed, many of the nineteenth-century terms associated with English identity, such as ‘Anglo-Saxon’, were originally used predominantly in North America, contributing to the recasting of English ethnicity as a transnational brotherhood united by language and cultural memory. ⁸ In the performance of English identity, even Britons at times ceded the leading role to the Americans. Charles Wentworth Dilke’s influential book of 1868, Greater Britain, envisioned a ‘worldwide confederation of Anglo-Saxons’, but it was the English in America, he claimed, who were most influentially spreading the values and language of English: ‘Through America, England is speaking to the world.’ ⁹ It is a short, if paradoxical, step from such visions of the English-speaking world as a ‘greater England’—Prime Minister Gladstone’s community of ‘English-speaking peoples’—to an acknowledgment that Englishness has perhaps its fullest expression not in England, but in America. ‘[T]here is not in America a greater wonder than the Englishman himself’, Dilke writes, ‘for it is to this continent that you must come to find him in full possession of his powers’. ¹⁰ The growing sense that Englishness did not signify attachment to a particular place of origin as much as a portable set of imaginative identifications meant that Englishness was increasingly understood as something ‘created for the diaspora—an ethnic identity designed for those who were precisely not English, but rather of English descent’ ¹¹ —or, if not ethnically English (because America was, after all, more racially diverse than this discourse suggested), nonetheless eager to lay claim to aspects of English heritage. England becomes something ‘best imagined abroad, or imagined from abroad’, to adopt Robert Young’s phrase, and it is precisely the element of distance suggested by the term ‘abroad’ that becomes critical to the identity and experience of international Englishness and Anglophilia in the final decades of the nineteenth century. As Young concludes, ‘This dialectic of attachment to England, yet distance from it, of continuity and rupture, similarity and difference, became the dominant characteristic of Englishness itself.’ ¹²

The idea of Englishness as a diasporic identity, one created by and for people living at a distance from England, must inform our understanding of the creation and consolidation of English Literature to a greater extent than it has. So, too, must a greater allowance for the constructive role of reception, for English Literature was the product of readers and reading as much as it was the product of writers and writing. The principles underpinning our scholarly practice for the past two decades have made us well able to describe how social and historical factors influence writers and texts; we are adept at situating a text in the particular national, local, political, and social context surrounding its writing. We also routinely analyze how the text, in turn, shaped its immediate world. And yet, despite major strides in scholarship (especially in book history, afterlives studies, collection history, and cultural memory studies), we are generally less attuned to the long-term contexts of reading and reception, less able to see, describe, and analyze the material archive of readers’ engagement with literature, dispersed, as it is, both temporally and geographically. We agree with Rita Felski, who has argued that while we ‘cannot close our eyes to the historicity of artworks’, we nevertheless ‘sorely need alternatives to seeing them as transcendentally timeless on the one hand, and imprisoned in their moment of origin on the other’. ¹³ Literary history opens itself to new kinds of evidence when we emphasize texts’ extended consumption, transmission, celebration, and remediation histories. As Ann Rigney has modeled in her study of Walter Scott’s ‘afterlives’, the best way to measure the impact of an author or book on literary culture may not lie in the scrutiny of print runs, sale numbers, or reviews at the moment of publication, but instead in the investigation of a work’s ‘procreativity’, its ability to generate theatrical adaptations, visual illustrations, imitations, parodies, baby names, place names, merchandise, tourist sites, monuments, and other cultural offspring. ¹⁴ Catherine Robson notes the extent to which reception history challenges the ‘hegemony within academic literary studies of author-centered periodization’; ¹⁵ we would add that it shakes up the equally entrenched practice of nation-based categorization, insofar as we can consider Longfellow as an ‘English poet’ (memorialized in Westminster Abbey) who happens to hail from the USA, or Scott and Dickens as America’s most popular novelists.

When we consider authors in terms of when and where they were most read and beloved, and not strictly in terms of when and where they lived and wrote, the figure of the author takes on new functions and dimensions. Shifting focus to the reader does not necessary imply the erasure or ‘death’ of the author in the Barthesian sense (though it does tend to make the author ghostly, a friendly spirit or imagined presence to be encountered both in books and geographical ‘haunts’). On the contrary, as the individual chapters of this volume will demonstrate, readers often insist on keeping authors ‘alive’ and at the center of their reading and memorial practices. ¹⁶ What makes the transfer of interest and affection from text to author possible—and indeed what encourages readers to move beyond the text into prolonged, imaginative engagements with its author, characters, landscapes, and stories—is the extent to which literary culture functioned as a structure for personal and social feeling. Indeed, as important new scholarship has made increasingly evident, the nineteenth century saw the rise and consolidation of English Literature as an object of affective ties and relations, both in the sense that literature and books became things to be loved in their own right, and that they became an important currency in social and emotional relations more generally. ¹⁷ Andrew Piper and Deidre Lynch have each described the various ways in which literature and literary culture underwent a process of ‘personalization’ in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a process that involved concomitant practices of personifying the artifacts, materials, and forms of the literary world: the book, the page, the collected...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Reading, Reception, and the Rise of Transatlantic ‘English’
• 2. American Idiom: Sarah Hale’s Flora’s Interpreter and the Figuration of National Identity
• 3. Bentley’s Standard Novelist: James Fenimore Cooper
• 4. ‘The American Tennyson’ and ‘The English Longfellow’: Inverted Audiences and Popular Poetry
• 5. The Americans in the ‘English Men of Letters’
• 6. ‘The Author Makes the Reader Acquainted with His Abode’: Hawthorne as Transatlantic Tour Guide in The Marble Faun and ‘The Old Manse’
• 7. The Transatlantic Home Network: Discovering Sir Walter Scott in American Authors’ Houses
• 8. Wordsworthshire and Thoreau Country: Transatlantic Landscapes of Genius
• 9. Helen A. Clarke and Charlotte Endymion Porter: Literary Criticism in Author Country a Century Ago
• 10. Transatlantic Reception and Commemoration of the ‘Poet of the Scotch’, Robert Burns
• 11. Loving, Knowing, and Illustrating Keats: The Louis Arthur Holman Collection of Keats Iconography
• 12. ‘The Unofficial Force’: Irregular Author Love and the Higher Criticism
• Backmatter