Transatlantic literature and author love in the nineteenth century

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture General Editor: Joseph Bristow Transatlantic Literature and Author Love in the Nineteenth Century Paul Westover and Ann Wierda

Palgrave Studies in

Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture

General Editor: Joseph Bristow

Transatlantic Literature and Author Love in the Nineteenth Century

Paul Westover and Ann Wierda RowlandEdited by

and Culture Series Editor Joseph   Bristow Department of English University of California - Los Angeles

Los Angeles ,   California, USA

monograph series that aims to represent the most innovative research on literary works that were produced in the English-speaking world from the time of the Napoleonic Wars to the fi n de siécle Attentive to the histori-cal continuities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the series will feature studies that help scholarship to reassess the meaning of these terms during

a century marked by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements The main aim of the series is to look at the increasing infl uence of types of historicism on our understanding of literary forms and genres It refl ects the shift from critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only the period 1800-1900 but also every fi eld within the discipline of English literature All titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical perspectives and challenging readings of both canonical and non-canonical writings of this era Editorial Board: Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK; Josephine McDonagh, Kings College, London, UK; Yopie Prins, University of Michigan, USA; Lindsay Smith, University of Sussex, UK; Margaret Stetz, University of Delaware, USA; Jenny Bourne Taylor, University of Sussex, UK

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14607

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-32820-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016950463

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

This work is subject to copyright All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information

in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication Neither the lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made

Cover illustration: © Courtesy of the J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland

Paul Westover

Brigham Young University

Spanish Fork , Utah , USA

Ann Wierda Rowland The University of Kansas Kansas City , Missouri , USA

Thanks to Anna Neill, Chair of the English Department at the University of Kansas, for locating resources in the department to help defray the expense of illustration permissions

Thanks to the helpful people at Palgrave Macmillan, notably Benjamin Doyle, Tomas René, and Joseph Bristow, our series editor We are grateful also to the press’s anonymous reader

The Wasatch Romantic and Eighteenth-Century Studies Symposium (WRECS, October 2014) provided an opportunity to workshop ideas for this volume Participants included Scott Black, Jeff Cowton, Mary Eyring, Andy Franta, Evan Gottlieb, Billy Hall, Nicholas Mason, Michael McGregor, Padma Rangarajan, Jon Sachs, and Matthew Wickman Thanks

to all

BYU’s Faculty Editing Service has been terrifi c Meeting our ambitious publication schedule, especially in light of other obligations, would have been impossible without the assistance of Jennifer McDaniel and her staff Above all, we thank our contributors, who add their own acknowledg-ments in individual chapters

1 Introduction: Reading, Reception, and the Rise of 

Ann Wierda Rowland and Paul Westover

2 American Idiom: Sarah Hale’s Flora’s Interpreter

Kelli Towers Jasper

3 Bentley’s Standard Novelist: James Fenimore Cooper 49 Joseph Rezek

4 ‘The American Tennyson’ and ‘The English Longfellow’:

Sharon Estes

5 The Americans in the ‘English Men of Letters’ 99 Ryan Stuart Lowe

6 ‘The Author Makes the Reader Acquainted with 

His Abode’: Hawthorne as Transatlantic Tour Guide

Charles Baraw

7 The Transatlantic Home Network: Discovering Sir

Paul Westover

8 Wordsworthshire and Thoreau Country: Transatlantic

Scott Hess

9 Helen A. Clarke and Charlotte Endymion Porter:

Alison Booth

10 Transatlantic Reception and Commemoration of the 

Christopher A Whatley

11 Loving, Knowing, and Illustrating Keats: The 

Ann Wierda Rowland

12 ‘The Unoffi cial Force’: Irregular Author Love and 

Charles J Rzepka

Charles   Baraw has taught courses on nineteenth-century, twentieth-century, and

contemporary American literature at Yale, Wesleyan, and Southern  Connecticut State University, where he is currently an Assistant Professor of English He is

working on a book called Reading Encounters , a study on the mutual relations of

travel, reading, and literary form in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Wells Brown, and other American writers His article on Brown, ‘William Wells Brown, Three Years in Europe, and Fugitive Tourism’, won the 2012 Darwin

T. Turner Award for the Year’s Best Essay in the African American Review

Alison   Booth , Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of

Greatness Engendered: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf (Cornell, 1992) and How to

Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present

(Chicago, 2004) She is also the editor of Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender

and Narrative Closure (University of Virginia, 1993), the Longman Cultural

Edition of Wuthering Heights (2009), and The Norton Introduction to Literature

(8th–10th editions) Her articles on women writers, narrative, and fi lm have appeared in such journals as Victorian Studies , Narrative , and Kenyon Review  Booth directs the Collective Biographies of Women project with support

of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, an ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship, and an NEH Level II Start-up Grant Her study of Clarke

and Porter relates to themes in her forthcoming book, Homes and Haunts: Visiting

Writers’ Shrines and Countries (Oxford, 2016), on transatlantic literary tourism,

house museums, and topo-biography

Sharon   Estes received her PhD in English from the Ohio State University in 2013

and is associate professor of Language and Literature at Bucks County Community College The essay in this collection unites her research interests in transatlantic reading, publishing, and circulation of texts with a current larger project that

examines the American reception of transatlantic literary and theatrical tions of bigamous marriage

Scott   Hess is Professor of English and a member of the Environmental

Studies fac-ulty at Earlham College His research fi elds include British Romantic poetry, American nature writing, transatlantic print culture, and theories of authorship and the self, as well as landscape art and photography He has published the books

Authoring the Self: Self-Representation, Authorship, and the Print Market in British

Poetry from Pope through Wordsworth (Routledge, 2005) and William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship: the Roots of Environmentalism in Nineteenth-Century Culture (University of Virginia, 2012) His essay here extends his discussion of

Wordsworth’s Lake District as a ‘landscape of genius’ to engage with author love and the North American context

Kelli   Towers   Jasper is a PhD candidate at the University of Colorado, Boulder

Her research focuses on the literature, culture, and book history of Britain and the USA in the long nineteenth century, with an eye toward the transatlantic histories

of horticulture, botany, and landscape design Her essay in this collection stems from a larger project entitled Gathering Flowers: Romantic Botanico-Literary Production and the Transatlantic Mediation of Culture

Ryan   Stuart   Lowe is a Visiting Assistant Professor in English and American

Literature at Oklahoma State University He received his PhD in English from Washington University in St Louis, a dissertation on the concept  of shyness in Hawthorne and James His interests include transatlantic literature, gender stud- ies, media, and queer theory His current research project explores the rise of the

‘tourist love story’ in American literature and fi lm

Joseph   Rezek is Assistant Professor of English at Boston University and the author

of London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic

Book Trade, 1800–1850 (University of Pennsylvania, 2015) His work continues to

explore the relationship between the book trade and literary expression in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries His essay ‘The Orations on the Abolition

of the Slave Trade and the Uses of Print in the Early Black Atlantic’ was awarded

the Richard Beale Davis Prize for the best article published in Early American

Literature in 2009–2010

Ann   Wierda   Rowland, Associate Professor of English at the University of Kansas,

is the author of British Romanticism and Childhood (Cambridge, 2012) and

numerous chapters and articles on Romantic-era literature Her current book ect, provisionally titled ‘Keats in America’, examines the role Americans, the idea

proj-of America, and the transnational exchange proj-of money, manuscripts, artifacts and other forms of cultural capital have played in the formation of Keats’s reputation and reception

Charles   J   Rzepka is Professor of English at Boston University He is the author of

The Self as Mind: Vision and Identity in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats (1986); Sacramental Commodities: Gift, Text, and the Sublime in De Quincey’s Confessions

(1995); Detective Fiction (2005); Selected Essays in Romantic and American Literature, History, and Culture: Inventions and Interventions (2010); and Being Cool: Elmore Leonard and the Work of Writing (2013), in addition to numerous

Romanticism , Rzepka received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Keats-

Shelley Association in 2004

Paul   Westover is Associate Professor of English at Brigham Young University and

Book Review Editor for the Journal of British Studies He is the author of

Necromanticism: Travelling to Meet the Dead, 1750–1860 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), co-editor of the Romantic Circles edition of Wordsworth’s Guide to the

Lakes (2015), and a historian of literary tourism in the context of Anglophone

canon-building, both national and transatlantic His essays have appeared in such

journals as European Romantic Review and Studies in Romanticism and in edited

collections on tourism, literary reception, and the representation of place

Christopher   A   Whatley, OBE, is Professor of Scottish History at the University

of Dundee, Scotland and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh He has

published extensively on Scottish history, work exemplifi ed by his Scottish Society,

1707–1830: Beyond Jacobitism, Towards Industrialisation (Manchester, 2000) His

best-known recent work is the critically acclaimed and award-winning The Scots

and the Union (Edinburgh, 2006, 2007, 2014) He has long had an interest in the

social background and infl uence of Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns, and has contributed chapters to books and journal articles on Burns since 1994,

most recently in the Journal of British Studies (2012), in Cultures of Radicalism in

Britain and Ireland (Kirk, Brown and Noble, eds., Pickering & Chatto, 2013),

and The Scottish Historical Review (April 2014), this last with Murray Pittock

Whatley was co-investigator on the Pittock-led, AHRC-funded project, ‘Robert Burns: Inventing Tradition and Securing Memory, 1796–1909’

Fig 2.1 Sample page with labeled components Annotated page from

Flora’s Interpreter, or The American Book of Flowers and Sentiments ,

2nd edn (Boston: Marsh, Capen and Lyon, 1833), p. 25

Rare Books & Manuscripts Library of the Ohio State

Fig 2.2 Sample page of index of interpretations Reprinted from Flora’s

Interpreter, or The American Book of Flowers and Sentiments ,

2nd edn (Boston: Marsh, Capen and Lyon, 1833), p. 218

Rare Books & Manuscripts Library of the Ohio State

Fig 2.3 Index of American authors Reprinted from Flora’s

Interpreter, or The American Book of Flowers and Sentiments ,

2nd edn (Boston: Marsh, Capen and Lyon, 1833), p. 226

Rare Books & Manuscripts Library of the Ohio State

Fig 7.1 Abbotsford House in 2015 Photo by Katee Buckley Westover 156

Fig 7.3 Emerson’s ‘gaberlunzie’ Photo courtesy Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fig 7.4 Ellen Emerson’s bedside cupboard with scenes from

Walter Scott’s ‘Lochinvar’ ( Marmion ) (by E. W Emerson,

c.1865) Photo courtesy Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fig 7.5 Sir Walter Scott and his Literary Friends at Abbotsford ,

painted by Thomas Faed, engraved by James Faed,

published by James Keith in Edinburgh and William

Stevens & Williams in New York Courtesy of the

National Park Service, Longfellow-House-Washington’s

Fig 8.1 Title page for Charles Mackay, The Scenery and Poetry of

the English Lakes: A Summer Ramble (London: Longman,

Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1846) Drawn on wood by

W. Harvey and engraved by Thomas Gilks Courtesy L. Tom

Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham

Fig 8.2 N. C Wyeth (1882–1945), Walden Pond Revisited , 1942,

tempera, possibly mixed with other media, on hardboard,

46¼ × 33¼ ″ Brandywine River Museum of Art, Bequest

Fig 9.1 ‘The Chest-Nut Armchair The Gift of the Children of

Cambridge’ Chair made of the tree mentioned in Longfellow’s

‘The Village Blacksmith’ and inscribed with a verse of that

poem From Sloane Kennedy, Henry W. Longfellow:

Biography, Anecdote, Letters, Criticism (Cambridge:

Fig 9.2 Sketch of Clarke and Porter’s summer house from

Lewiston Evening Journal Magazine Section, August 28, 1925 224 Fig 10.1 Sir John Steell’s statue of Robert Burns, installed 1880,

Fig 10.2 George A. Lawson’s statue of Robert Burns, installed

Fig 11.1 ‘A Prize Fight of 1819’ Holman collection, Houghton Library,

Fig 11.2 Photograph of J. B Speed Memorial Museum, Louisville,

Kentucky, with Louis Arthur Holman’s Keats collection on

display (1934) Holman Collection, Houghton Library,

Fig 11.3 ‘Belmont Castle, or The Towers’ Holman collection,

Fig 12.1 Sherlockian menu for the Baker Street Irregulars banquet of

December 7, 1934 MS Am 2717 (389), Houghton Library,

Fig 12.2 Certifi cate of investiture in the Baker Street Irregulars for

Edgar W. Smith MS Am 2717 (381), Houghton Library,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

P Westover, A.W Rowland (eds.), Transatlantic

Literature and Author Love in the Nineteenth Century,

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-32820-1_1

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 monu-ment 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 per-forming, 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 tee chairman, who rejoices that Scott now joins Shakespeare, his best and most fi tting company, in Central Park’s outdoor answer to Poets’ Corner

commit-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

Introduction: Reading, Reception,

and the Rise of Transatlantic ‘English’

Ann   Wierda   Rowland and  Paul   Westover

cially pleased and enthusiastic at the city’s effort to add ‘human tions, 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 tions: Why all this to-do and excitement? Why so much effort to establish

ques-a pques-atch of ‘clques-assic ground’ in Mques-anhques-attques-an? And why, specifi cques-ally, erect ques-a monument in America to a foreign (in this case, Scottish) writer? But what may seem a slightly strange gesture to our twenty-fi rst century sen-sibilities 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 ized British–American literary culture What Philip Waller has called the

character-‘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 cen-tury, as statues, busts, commemorative plaques, and memorial ceremonies honoring beloved authors became a customary mode of literary expres-sion 4 That this was a transnational movement lent cross-cultural vital-ity 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 astically accepted this American tribute on English ground and contem-plated 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

enthusi-of Washington Irving in the City Hall enthusi-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 cul-ture in which the fi nest 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 fi nding expression in material culture and in the affective responses and activi-ties of readers The chapters of this volume share the general assumption

that ‘literature’ does not confi ne 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 fi nd its way into the hearts and homes of its read-ers? What fascinations, diversions, cultural expressions, and social affi li-ations did it inspire? What collective values did it embody? And fi nally, 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 specifi c 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 identifi catory experiences of readers

By describing English Literature as a transatlantic invention, we mean not only to emphasize the signifi cant 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 affi liation, functioned transnationally Throughout the nineteenth cen-tury, ‘English’ shifted between national, linguistic, ethnic, and racial con-notations, and English-speaking people around the world, particularly in the USA, played a signifi cant role in shaping what ‘Englishness’ meant

at any given time Indeed, many of the nineteenth-century terms ated 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 infl u-

associ-ential book of 1868, Greater Britain , envisioned a ‘worldwide

confed-eration of Anglo-Saxons’, but it was the English in America, he claimed, who were most infl uentially 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 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

‘English-it is to this continent that you must come to fi nd him in full possession of

his powers’ 10 The growing sense that Englishness did not signify ment to a particular place of origin as much as a portable set of imagina-tive identifi cations meant that Englishness was increasingly understood

attach-as something ‘created for the diattach-aspora—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 fi nal 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 understand-ing of the creation and consolidation of English Literature to a greater extent than it has So, too, must a greater allowance for the construc-tive 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 infl u-ence 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 recep-tion, less able to see, describe, and analyze the material archive of readers’ engagement with literature, dispersed, as it is, both temporally and geo-graphically We agree with Rita Felski, who has argued that while we ‘can-not 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 histo-ries 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 cul-

ture 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 tions, 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 cat-egorization, insofar as we can consider Longfellow as an ‘English poet’ (memorialized in Westminster Abbey) who happens to hail from the USA,

illustra-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 fi gure of the author takes on new functions and dimen-sions 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 encoun-tered 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, charac-ters, landscapes, and stories—is the extent to which literary culture func-tioned 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 affec-tive 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 edition, the lyric poem 18 In ‘My Books’, an essay that exemplifi es the nineteenth-century habit of repre-senting books and authors as beloved friends, Leigh Hunt remarks, ‘How pleasant it is to refl ect, that all these lovers of books [authors from the past] have themselves become books.’ 19 Hunt transforms dead authors

into fellow readers and then into book-objects, thus allowing books to function, in Lynch’s words, as ‘surrogate selves’, objects of affection capa-ble of standing in for the bodily presence of the author 20 As literary texts came to be treated not merely as things to be used, but as persons to be loved, so, too, were readers increasingly expected to have relationships with authors and characters, and reading experiences both deeply felt and personally enriching 21

Thus, in a culture where authors, books, and fi ctional characters were routinely described as cherished companions (‘the company we keep’, as Wayne Booth would later call them 22 ), reading came to be understood as

an experience of communion, of intimate conversation, of mental, even bodily contact, between reader and author, reader and character, reader and book, or between like-minded readers As the chapters of this volume will demonstrate, readers on both sides of the Atlantic developed deeply felt, insistently personal attachments to the books, texts, and authors of English Literature, often seeking to ‘prolong their interaction with their reading matter, generally well past the time of reading’ 23 To some extent, this impulse to move beyond the text and extend the time of reading through extra-textual imaginative engagements of one sort or another is

a function of print culture and the very ways print works The tion and reproducible quality of print encourages readers, in Leah Price’s words, to ‘bracket sense-data’, to ignore the material form of the text in order to experience the seemingly transcendent and nonmaterial aesthetic experience it promises 24 Paradoxically, however, the transcendent, non-material aesthetic experience promised by print persistently inspired mate-rial, corporeal, and local reading cultures and practices, as readers insisted

reproduc-on placing authors and texts in particular landscapes or ‘author countries’, erecting statues and memorials, repurposing texts for gifts and scrapbooks,

or forming social clubs and literary associations 25 Our focus in this ume on the variety of material practices readers pursued is thus part of the

vol-‘wider cultural history of reading’ called for by Nicola Watson, the study

of ‘how literature is consumed, experienced and projected within the vidual reader’s life, and within a readership more generally’ 26

It is the overall contention of this volume that this wider cultural tory of reading is needed to understand how transatlantic English took shape in the nineteenth century Illustrative prints, monuments, house-hold decorations, and author shrines all gave material embodiment to an emerging literary canon, evidence of the role readers played in deciding which authors and texts became domesticated as English Literature and

his-how that literature extended itself into the daily lives, rooms, meals, scapes, and social relations of a culture Ultimately, however, the volume aims, if only by implication, to do more than point out historical curiosi-ties and recover forgotten modes of literary experience It aims to suggest something about the power of literature to shape mentalities and bring about social and political conditions that affect national and international life

Extending an olive branch after the Anglo-American War of 1812–1815, Washington Irving speaks in 1819 of ‘the literature of the language’ as

a crucial medium of reconciliation and friendship In that same essay,

‘English Writers on America’, he underscores literature’s unprecedented ideological power on both sides of the Atlantic: ‘Every one knows the all pervading infl uence of literature at the present day, and how much the opinions of and passions of mankind are under its control.’ 27 In today’s fragmented media environment it is easy to forget how central literature was in the mental life of the nineteenth century Mass culture was, to a great extent, literary culture, so the invention of transnational English left pronounced ideological and physical marks on both Britain and the USA. It is no coincidence that literary diplomacy became a striking fea-ture of nineteenth-century Anglo-American relations Men of letters were often assigned to diplomatic posts, and formal exchanges of literary devo-tions were often used to strengthen international ties

Thus, in 1946, when Winston Churchill (the British Prime Minister with an American mother) delivered his famous ‘Sinews of Peace’ speech

in Fulton, Missouri, he could call upon the deep-rooted commonplaces

of an Anglo-American cultural block: the broad understanding that the

UK and the USA had a ‘special relationship’ and a faith in the ‘fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples’ 28 Why were such ideas taken for granted and how did they acquire the status of the commonplace? This volume suggests that nineteenth-century literary culture was one impor-tant breeding ground for the conventionality of Churchill’s twentieth- century statement To a great extent, literature normalized the emotional and memorial (not merely political, legal, and economic) connectedness

of the nations

Of course, rhetorical claims of common culture and shared interests are products of both consolidation and contestation, of what Elisa Tamarkin has identifi ed as the related impulses of defi ance and deference that char-acterized Anglo-American relations in the nineteenth century, bringing national traditions together even as they insisted upon drawing distinc-

tions 29 The chapters in this volume present a transnational literary culture neither smooth nor unifi ed, one never fully achieved or organically origi-nal Instead they attend to ad hoc and composite texts, to material practices that imitate, reiterate, and remediate in what Kelli Jasper describes in her chapter as a ‘constructive confusion’ of national literatures, origins, and identities 30 In the literary culture that gave rise to transatlantic English, there was plenty of rivalry and mutual criticism Nonetheless, Americans claimed beloved British authors and texts as part of their own history and cultural identity, and British literary fi gures embraced American writers and readers as ‘English women and Englishmen from over the seas’ 31

(Our equivocation on ‘British’ and ‘English’ here and throughout is intentional—a refl ection of blurry usage from the time.) While there were indeed voices agitating against such broad cultural annexations—Emerson and Whitman, for instance, famously called for American literature to break with European tradition—it seems clear that the American excep-tionalist voices were, to some extent, exceptional

Thus, for example (returning to the historical energies that ultimately placed a statue of Walter Scott in Manhattan), a ‘Eulogium’ for Scott deliv-ered to the Merchants’ Exchange in New York City less than a month after his 1832 death answers the question ‘on what ground we, as Americans, stand forth to testify our sympathy on this occasion’ with a strong (yet conventional) claim of ‘equal inheritance’ 32 The speaker, the Reverend John McVickar, contends, ‘As it was our Shakespeare and our Milton in whose footsteps Scott trode, so now is it our minstrel whose lyre is bro-ken; our Scott whose name is now to be added to the list of the mighty dead.’ 33 In this proprietary assertion of America’s claim on Shakespeare, Milton, and Scott, McVickar locates the bards of Britain in a history that is

a catalogue of illustrious corpses, a history that is both America’s heritage and, emphatically, an accomplishment of the past To claim the illustrious British dead for American history is thus also to locate England (the ‘old country’) in the past and America (‘the new world’) in the present and future But just as this nationalist historical logic takes hold, McVickar rejects it, proclaiming that over such gifted minds as those of Shakespeare and Scott, ‘the petty distinctions of human origin have no power … no nation can claim them as their own’ 34 The rhetorical resources that allow McVickar to blend national cultures in a happy homage to Britain, to claim America’s equal inheritance, and even to imagine America’s future preeminence also enable him to imagine a ‘great family of civilized man’,

a brotherhood of English speakers who know no national boundaries 35

Such rhetorical gestures make and unmake, form and reform, the ever- shifting national identities, affects, and relations of transatlantic English

In sum, transnational English was just one possible model for ing of literary tradition, but it seems to have captured the values and prac-tices of most readers better than its competitors Three main strands of canon-making manifested themselves in nineteenth-century discussions: what might be called the nationalist, the aggregative, and the cosmo-politan models The models had variants on both sides of the Atlantic basin, but they were perhaps easier to see in the USA (for instance, all three animated McVickar’s eulogy) The nationalist mode tapped nativ-ist patriotism so that, in America, some commentators called for cultural independence to match America’s political independence The aggregative model, by contrast, assumed that American and English letters should be regarded as part of a single tradition This model, too, could have nation-alist coloring: if Americans were extending the canon, not creating a new one, they could lay claim to British writers as their own patrimony 36 That was a happy thought for America’s cultural stature (Tamarkin hints at this aggregative logic when she observes that nationalism ‘works every bit

conceiv-as seriously at bringing some conceiv-aspects of the outside in, conceiv-as it does at ing others out’ 37 ) The cosmopolitan model, meanwhile, sought to take a more global, less Anglo-centric view, as when Americans claimed owner-ship in literature from all of Europe In this line of thinking, great litera-ture (the Western ‘supercanon’, 38 in Nancy Glazener’s phrase) belonged

keep-to any people capable of appreciating it Great writers (and sensitive ers) were global citizens, superior to place or time, so that national dis-tinctions did not matter Even this view could have nationalist overtones, for the cosmopolitan stance was one way for Americans to assert cultural refi nement and their place on the world stage It was also perhaps a way

read-to compensate for their nagging sense, especially in the Early National Period, that they had too little cultural heritage of their own

In practice, fi nally, these models could coexist, hybridize, and lend energy to one another An enthusiastic adherent of the Young America movement might still fi nd himself reading beloved British novels while nursing a cold Emerson could call for American self-reliance while rumi-nating on Coleridge and Carlyle (and hanging pictures of them on his walls) Longfellow could specialize in writing poems of American heritage while cultivating literary contacts in Britain and leading the way in the cults of Goethe and Dante But what mattered most, apart from argu-ments among elites on the status of national literature, was what people

actually read —and that was why transnational English Literature was

usu-ally the practical victor in the canon debates Due to longstanding habit, the ‘culture of reprinting’ described by Meredith McGill, 39 the price differ-entials created by asymmetrical copyright regimes, the affective imprint of childhood reading, the emphases of school curricula, and many other fac-tors, custom said that Americans cherished British books in addition to any native productions they might embrace For an American reader, British books were simply part of one’s mental furniture, and loving the English canon was (or at least could be) a way of loving one’s nation by making its past as well as its current cultural attainments more fi rmly one’s own

* * * With a title promising treatment of something so capacious as the inven-tion of transnational ‘English’, it seems best to acknowledge what this vol-

ume does not do, but which it might have done, and thus to point out lines

of inquiry for future scholarship that will enrich the story told here, which

by accident (for reasons of time, space, and the contingencies of collecting contributions) has turned out overwhelmingly Anglo- American, not just

Anglophone in focus For example, this collection does not attend to the

earlier history of international ‘English’, though eighteenth- century ary exchange between England and its neighbors—Scotland especially—molded the discourse adapted for Anglo- American use in the 1800s Along a different but related track, this volume does not engage in a sus-tained way with the histories of school curricula and discipline formation, but those brands of scholarship clearly complement what our contributors have done Further, the collection does not strongly address to what extent and on what terms non-white Americans (especially African Americans and Native Americans) could participate in the culture of author love and transatlantic English Nor does it explore what forms of resistance to the dominant white literary culture might help us better see its functions, con-tours, and limits Finally, this volume does not take up (except in pass-ing) the history of ‘English’ elsewhere in the English-speaking world—for instance, in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or Anglophone India The stories of those places intersect with ours and have many parallels And of course, the internationalization of English had a dark side that has been explored by postcolonial scholarship It must be said that ‘English’ had a way of marginalizing literature in other languages, both in the transatlantic world and elsewhere within the imperial footprint

We acknowledge that much work remains to be done to fi ll these gaps (and inevitable others) in our story Still, it seems clear that there is a strong rationale for focusing on the remarkable cultural relationship between the USA and Britain, nations with an outsized infl uence on the formation and diffusion of English in the world If the UK and the USA have been domi-nant world powers over the last two centuries, it follows that the invention

of transnational English Literature is not a tangential concern, but rather a major historical fact It has generated enduring structures of thought and feeling that continue to shape world affairs (for good and for ill)

Now, let us turn our attention to what the volume does do and to

pre-view what we hope to contribute to the larger discussion of international English The chapters proceed essentially in chronological order, allowing readers to see a story unfolding across the nineteenth century; however, they also sort themselves into thematic strands We begin with a series

of chapters that maps the contested terrains of national literatures and cultural identities, tracking the ways in which a transatlantic print culture served as the space in which various and competing forms of national, transnational, and cosmopolitan identities could be expressed, shaped, acted upon, and performed Kelli Towers Jasper’s chapter begins the series because it models our governing belief that American and English litera-ture took shape through transnational circuits of culture and the repurpos-ing, remediation, and relocation of texts and cultural artifacts that such

circuits entail Sarah Josepha Hale’s popular gift book, Flora’s Interpreter,

or the American Book of Flowers and Sentiments , is Jasper’s focus, and her

chapter carefully traces the ways in which Hale’s fl ower book creates a space of common Anglo-American cultural inheritance at the same time that it presses its transnational literary mix into the service of a new brand

of literary nationalism

Joseph Rezek’s chapter on the inclusion of James Fenimore Cooper in London publisher Richard Bentley’s Standard Novels series also investi-gates the ways in which the transatlantic traffi c in literary texts puts pres-sure on nationalistic ideologies and national literary histories, extending the examination of what insights book history offers into the processes of national culture and identity construction Sharon Estes’s contribution turns to Tennyson and Longfellow as objects of an inverted and transatlan-tic author love; readers of these beloved writers at times envisioned them-selves as an extended transatlantic group and, at other times, as devoted admirers whose insights renationalized their beloved writers, rendering Longfellow an English poet and Tennyson a highly democratic voice of

the American people The fi nal chapter in this fi rst section, by Ryan Stuart Lowe, turns to another entrepreneurial exercise in popular canonization, Macmillan’s English Men of Letters series, in which Henry James’s critical biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne appeared as the sole American entry With a focus on the publication history and contemporary reception of James’s biography, this chapter uncovers the rich intersection of two per-sistent cultural impulses: the expanding vision of the British literary tradi-tion to include American authors and the backlash among exceptionalist American critics who insisted on literary independence

These competing cultural impulses of expansion and ism were also at play outside the bounds of books, shaping the develop-ment of what we now call ‘literary geography’ Consequently, the next group of chapters turns to the heritage industry of literary tourism and its main literary vehicle, the transatlantic homes-and-haunts tradition Charles Baraw’s chapter establishes the extent to which the author love

exceptional-of the nineteenth century facilitated a transnational literary culture deeply imbued with the poetics of tourism, conceiving of authors as celebrities, their homes as tourist sites, and reading as a type of literary tour Baraw uses Nathaniel Hawthorne’s career to demonstrate that literary tourism

is not simply a mode of cultural reception that follows the writing and reading of a text, but rather a literary mode that shapes the production of author, text, and reader in these years Paul Westover’s chapter turns to the symbolic potency of Walter Scott’s Abbotsford House as a model for literary homes (and ultimately for author-house museums) in America Westover’s chapter works with a neglected material archive—the Scott artifacts and mementos on display in the homes of American authors—to uncover the affective traces of transatlantic reading and the construction

of a fully domesticated transatlantic canon This canon, he argues, took shape as a self-conscious community of celebrity authors, writers who per-formed their connections to each other in their homes as well as on the page

The chapters of Scott Hess and Alison Booth extend our focus on ary tourism and heritage into the construction of literary landscapes and author countries Hess turns to natural landscapes—specifi cally, the ‘land-scapes of genius’ associated with Wordsworth and Thoreau—uncovering how literary pilgrims enshrined both the Lake District and Walden Pond

liter-as places where the presence of the author mediated a particular ence of nature Booth examines the topo-biographical ‘author country’ publications of Helen Archibald Clarke and Charlotte Endymion Porter,

experi-editors of the longstanding journal Poet-Lore , in order to demonstrate

how turn-of-the-twentieth-century Anglophilia and amateur biographical criticism, aided by literary tourism, were critical instruments in consolidat-ing English Literature on both sides of the Atlantic

Running through Booth’s chapter, as well as the chapters in the remaining section of the volume, is an implicit challenge to traditional academic practice and its habitual (though happily waning) disregard for forms of affective and material engagement with texts, such as tourism, memorials, scrapbooks, souvenirs, and literary societies (As Zadie Smith has observed, ‘There is something about love that does not sit well with the literary academy.’ 40 ) Can we afford to neglect the participatory and emotional ways in which readers make texts their own and take authors to heart? These chapters, arguing that we cannot, explore a variety of mate-rial cultural practices by which readers have extended their engagement with literature Christopher Whatley’s chapter on Robert Burns memori-als tracks the manufacture and multidirectional export of Burns-related artifacts and especially the various efforts to erect statues of the revered

‘Poet of the Scotch’, exploring various social and political purposes to which Burns-love could be applied Ann Rowland also examines the traf-

fi c of author-related artifacts across the Atlantic by turning to the sive scrapbooking and illustration project of Louis A.  Holman, a Keats collector at the turn of the twentieth century whose quirky collection of Keatsiana became an important teaching tool for college English profes-sors in the early twentieth century when the boundaries between amateur and professional literary pursuits were more porous The volume’s closing chapter, by Charles Rzepka, highlights the Baker Street Irregulars, a liter-ary society and Sherlock Holmes fan club founded in the early 1900s With their parodic scholarly pursuits and obsession with Dr John H. Watson (emphatically not Arthur Conan Doyle) as the true author of the Sherlock Holmes tales, the Baker Street Irregulars expose common assumptions

mas-of authorship and academic scholarship by whimsically and affectionately undoing them

Reviewing these chapters, it seems that it might be better for us to

adopt the plural and speak of author loves , since literary affection has many

types and moods Nonetheless, ‘love’ serves as a useful umbrella term, not least because it brings into view a range of (usually) positive feel-ings, experiences, and sociable projects that round out more traditional accounts of literary history that focus on processes of confl ict and cultural differentiation Literary love, as we shall see in this volume, can be pos-

sessive, divisive, and competitive, but recalling the nineteenth century’s shared enthusiasms offers a salutary corrective to our sometimes love-less academic and social climates, and it helps us read objects of memory that might otherwise puzzle us For much of the most recent century,

as Rigney has observed, cultural memory sites have tended to focus on tragedy Western society has been most likely to commemorate wars, disas-ters, and genocides, to the point that it is now hard to imagine large- scale monuments to imaginative writers But prior to the First World War, literature played a central role in public remembrance, drawing on the

‘binding force’ of shared appreciation rather than of pain 41 We agree with Catharine Stimpson’s argument that one job for the humanities is ‘to put love in its historical places and contexts, to interrogate all those varietals, permutations, vicissitudes, necessities, values, and victories’, and we share her confi dence that we can turn to love without the loss of our critical acu-men, that ‘loving an author or a text or a fi eld can lie coiled together with piercing examinations of them’ 42 The history of transatlantic English, despite its complications, may show us different, more positive ways to construct communities It challenges us to acknowledge and investigate the work of love—its imaginative identifi cations, its social affi liations, its extra-textual experiences and material expressions—in our classrooms, our scholarship, and our public culture

NOTES

1 Other musical contributions were similarly suggestive of the transmedial

reach of author love: Berlioz’s Waverley Overture , Strauss’s ‘Artist’s Life’ waltz, and Sir H. Bishop’s overture to Guy Mannering

2 ‘Sir Walter Scott, Unvailing [ sic ] the Statue at Central Park Yesterday, One Hundredth Anniversary of the Poet’s Birthday’, New York Times , November

3, 1872, p.  1 Note that the Shakespeare statue was installed earlier that same year In 1880, a statue of Robert Burns (discussed by Christopher Whatley in Chap 10 ) was added Ultimately, the park’s Literary Walk would include just one memorial to an American writer: a statue of Fitz-Greene Halleck (a member of the Knickerbocker Group, now mostly forgotten)

3 Pall Mall Gazette , June 20, 1885, p. 3

4 Philip Waller, Writers, Readers and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain,

1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 232ff

5 Quoted in Stephen Maxfi eld Parrish, Currents of the Nineties in Boston and

London (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987), p. 166

6 Ann Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p.  11 See also Michael C.  Cohen, The

Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)

7 From David Harlan’s The Degradation of American History (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 188

8 Robert J.  C Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity (Oxford: Blackwell

Publishing, 2008), p. 179

9 Charles Wentworth Dilke, Greater Britain (London: Macmillan, 1868),

p. 318 See also Harriet Beecher Stowe in Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands ,

I (Boston: Phillips, Samson, and Company, 1854), p.  18: ‘Spenser,

Shakspeare [ sic ], Bacon, Milton, were a glorious inheritance, which we share

in common Our very life-blood is English life-blood It is Anglo-Saxon vigor that is spreading our country from Atlantic to Pacifi c, and leading on

a new era in the world’s development.’ The Works of William H.  Prescott:

Biographical and Critical Miscellanies , ed Wilfred H. Munro, I (Philadelphia:

15 Catherine Robson, Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 18

16 Andrew Bennett’s Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge:

Remains: Poets’ Graves, Bodies, and Books in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2004), and Paul Westover’s Necromanticism: Traveling to Meet the Dead, 1750–1860 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,

2008) all explore how the death and memorialization of authors cally makes them more ‘alive’ for readers

17 On books as a currency of affection, see for instance Gillian Silverman’s

Bodies and Books (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) and Deidre Lynch’s Loving Literature: A Cultural History (London: University

of Chicago Press, 2015)

18 Lynch, pp.  21–61; Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the

Bibliographical Imagination in the Romantic Age (London: University of

Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 55–64

19 Leigh Hunt, ‘My Books’ ( Literary Examiner , July 5 and 12, 1823),

reprinted in Essays and Sketches by Leigh Hunt , ed R.  Brimley Johnson

(London: Oxford, 1906), p. 94

20 Lynch, pp. 23, 31

21 On these points, see Deidre Lynch’s application of Sherry Turkle on tional objects’ (p. 22), Piper on literature as an index of personality (p. 59), and Silverman on books as becoming part of the ‘body image’ of the reader (pp. 10–12)

22 Wayne Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1988)

23 Lynch, p. 140

24 Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), pp. 32–33

25 In Loving Dr Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), Helen

Deutsch suggestively defi nes author love as ‘a kind of secular religion based

on the necessary insuffi ciency and self-transcending power of the printed text’ (p. 17) For more on readers’ desire to supplement the ideal, some- times impersonal experience of text with physical, intimate, interpersonal experience, see Bookish Histories: Books, Literature, and Modernity, 1700–1900 , ed Ina Ferris and Paul Keen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,

2009); Romantic Libraries , ed Ina Ferris (Romantic Circles Praxis, 2004); Nicola J. Watson’s The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic &

Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); and Paul

Westover’s Necromanticism

26 Watson, p. 8

27 Washington Irving, ‘English Authors on America’, in The Legend of Sleepy

Hollow and Other Stories [ The Sketch-book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent ], ed

William L. Hedges (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 46

28 Winston Churchill, ‘The Sinews of Peace’, delivered at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946

29 Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America

(London: University of Chicago Press, 2008)

30 See Chap 2, p. 37

31 From Sir Sidney Colvin’s remarks at the Hampstead Memorial service for

Keats in 1894, quoted in Parrish, Currents of the Nineties in Boston and

London , p. 187

32 John McVickar, Tribute to the Memory of Sir Walter Scott, Baronet (New

York: George P. Scott and Co., 1833), p. 10

33 McVickar, p. 10

34 McVickar, p. 10 McVickar extends this cosmopolitan, spiritualizing strain

of argument: ‘No nation’, he concludes, ‘can claim [such writers] as their own: the earth is their birthplace, heaven is their home, and the heart of man their empire As authors, they have no other domicile’ (pp. 10–11)

35 McVickar, p. 10

36 At the same time, British commentators could claim admirable Americans as their own cultural offspring, so aggregative nationalism worked both directions

37 Tamarkin, p xxvi

38 Nancy Glazener, Literature in the Making: A History of U.S. Literary Culture

in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015),

pp. 49–52

39 Meredith L.  McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting,

1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003)

40 Zadie Smith, ‘Love, Actually’, The Guardian , October 31, 2003

41 Rigney, p. 14

42 Catharine R.  Stimpson, ‘Loving an Author, Loving a Text: Getting Love

Back into the Humanities’, Confrontation , 104 (Summer 2009), 15, 26

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

P Westover, A.W Rowland (eds.), Transatlantic

Literature and Author Love in the Nineteenth Century,

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-32820-1_2

‘It is time our people should express their own feelings in the sentiments and idioms of America’: thus proclaimed Sarah Josepha Hale in the pref-

ace to her 1832 publication, Flora’s Interpreter, or the American Book of

Flowers and Sentiments 1 Bold declarations like this typify Hale, who over

American Idiom: Sarah Hale’s Flora’s

Interpreter and the Figuration of 

National Identity

Kelli   Towers   Jasper

K T Jasper (  )

English Department , University of Colorado , Columbus , OH , USA

Many people helped make this chapter a reality The Center for British and Irish Studies and the Center for the Humanities and the Arts at the University of Colorado provided crucial funding for research For a fruitful month of research and scholarly fellowship I likewise thank the enthusiastic and knowledgeable staff at Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library The staff at the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Royal Horticultural Society’s Lindley Library also provided valuable guidance through their rich archives Kirstyn Leuner, Paul Westover, and Ann Rowland each had a hand in shaping the chapter’s fi nal form, as did the Faculty Editing Service at Brigham Young University For their infl uence on my thinking and writing I particularly thank Jordan Stein, who inspired the project in the fi rst place and whose support and genius have guided

it through the many years since, and Jill Heydt-Stevenson, whose judgment and mentorship have enhanced not only this chapter, but all of my work as a scholar

the course of her long career would become one of nineteenth-century America’s most passionate advocates for the creation and preservation of national heritage 2 More surprising is that Hale would mount her cam-paign on such a humble platform, a slim and rather modest-looking vol-ume about the language of fl owers, drawn from numerous British and American sources Compared to the monumental labors of cultural arbi-tration for which Hale is best known (in particular her forty-year reign as

editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book ), 3 Flora’s Interpreter has received little

schol-arly attention and appears, as Hale herself admits, a ‘trifl ing production’ (p iii) Yet remarkably, even in a market increasingly crowded with similar fare, 4 the book proved so popular with readers—and so dear to Hale her-self—that over the next thirty years it continued through at least seven-teen editions, survived six sets of publishers, inspired a host of emulators, and saw more printings than any other single book Hale ever produced Despite its apparent conventionality and lightweight subject, the volume was clearly no trifl e

In fact, the characteristics that might lead scholars to overlook or

dis-miss Flora’s Interpreter (as unoriginal, perhaps, or merely intended to cash

in on the market for gift books) are the very ones that made it effective in its day and make it worthy of analysis now—namely, its broad consumer appeal and its blend of scientifi c, orientalist, and poetic components that freely echo and excerpt from established genres of European literature This chapter will elucidate the workings of the volume’s unique format and delineate its role within the projects of nation building and culture

shaping that it so passionately endorses For while Flora’s Interpreter fi rst

appears as a whimsical lesson on the sending of eloquent bouquets, mately it reveals itself as an ambitious collection of American-authored secular poetry, one Hale claimed as the fi rst ever produced in the USA and which she designed to declare a measure of artistic independence (or at least distinction) from England Through its odd combination of elements

Flora’s Interpreter executes a complex task, rooting American literature

in a British cultural past while clearing suffi cient ground for the creation, expression, and transmission of a specifi cally American identity

This study not only reveals Flora’s Interpreter as a sophisticated text

in its own right but, what is more important, invites us to consider what insights book history offers into the processes of identity and culture construction, specifi cally those processes that bring transnational circuits

of culture into national service and require defi nitions of nationalism far

more fi gurative than literal As an avowed literary nationalist, Hale ents an especially powerful case in point The opening quotation of this chapter attests to Hale’s impatience and longing for greater cultural pride and unity among Americans In 1832 the USA had long since declared its political independence from Britain, but with the country’s rapidly expanding borders; its transient, transnational, and transcultural popula-tion; and its increasing regional tensions that would lead within decades

pres-to the Civil War, American cultural identity had acquired only a lous defi nition The literary marketplace was decentralized across several regional centers (mainly Philadelphia, New York, and Boston), where scat-tered elements of national culture competed with a fl ourishing trade in cheap reprints of British books 5 Well, then, might Hale declare, ‘It is time our people should express their own feelings in the sentiments and idioms

nebu-of America’; but who exactly were ‘our people’, what were these idioms, and where were they expressed? Hale searched extensively for American writings suitable to her purpose, and where none appeared she doggedly composed them herself 6 Still, by mixing these with information about plants, her collection of American poetry constitutes only one of several elements at work in the text (as we will see), with the British and European elements playing roles equally prominent and fundamental to the overall structure

This partnership of, so to speak, old and new elements in Flora’s Interpreter captures the long, slow process by which cultural identities

take shape: not through rejecting their antecedents outright, but instead through subtly repurposing them Anthropologists Michael Silverstein

and Greg Urban describe this process as entextualization , the making of

things into texts by endowing them with new meanings legible to lar groups of people Because the objects of entextualization themselves are rarely ‘new’, resignifying a particular text usually involves excerpting it from a previous or concurrent cultural framework and erasing or redefi n-ing its other meaning(s) While many have classifi ed such acts as violent

particu-appropriations, Urban and Silverstein instead characterize them as

replica-tions : not theft, but ‘an attempt at reproduction, at relocating the original

instance of discourse to a new context—carrying over something from the earlier to the later one’ 7 This carrying over, they argue, is ‘essential to culture understood as shareable or transmittable across the generations’ 8

In other words, the vitality of any culture depends on its ability to replicate

a version of the past or the other, but one that is suffi ciently unmoored

from previous contexts to make space for new interpretation Like many

composite texts from this period, Flora’s Interpreter has received criticism

for preserving too much of its source material; 9 in her preface Hale self owns, ‘There is nothing new attempted, except in the arrangement, and the introduction of American sentiments’ (p iii) Nevertheless, her calculated imitation and echoing of earlier texts manifests what Meredith McGill calls an ‘exuberant understanding of culture as iteration and not origination’, 10 and her arrangement of Flora’s Interpreter ’s components

her-not only models this iterative culture-building process but also prepares readers to continue it

Because it merges fi elds so deftly, Flora’s Interpreter resonates with many

genres already popular among consumers of printed books, a feature favorable to sales and to the circulation of Hale’s particular agenda Each

entry of Flora’s Interpreter features seven or more components, drawn

from as many differing discourses (Fig 2.1 ) These include the common and scientifi c names of fl owers, their Linnaean classifi cations, their botani-cal descriptions and provenances, their corresponding meanings or ‘sen-timents’, a brief verse linking the fl ower to the sentiment (usually by a well-known European author), and a longer poem on the sentiment itself

by an American author Each of these components connects the book to

a separate cultural antecedent but replicates those antecedents in a new context that enables them to make new meaning

To appreciate the implications of such generic interplay, let us fi rst

con-sider a brief overview of its features First and foremost, Flora’s Interpreter

participates in a genre I broadly identify as the woman’s fl ower book To the characteristics typically found in books for female readers in this period (diminutive scale, decorative appearance, and simplifi ed or sanitized sub-ject matter), the fl ower book adds a well-established literary tradition of pairing women with plants 11 Since plant knowledge had long been con-sidered fi tting to the female sphere and at least a cursory knowledge of botany essential to a genteel female education, 12 women not only con-sumed fl ower books but in fact created the vast majority of them as well

In hundreds of publications from this period, their works assume a range

of forms, from technically detailed botany and gardening manuals, to

Fig 2.1 Sample page with labeled components Annotated page from Flora’s

Interpreter, or The American Book of Flowers and Sentiments , 2nd edn (Boston:

Marsh, Capen and Lyon, 1833), p.  25 Rare Books & Manuscripts Library

of the Ohio State University Libraries

ally stunning collections of botanical illustration, to moral and religious tracts, cultural histories, poetic anthologies, and lexicons of the language

of fl owers

Flora’s Interpreter replicates many aspects of these books, though it

proves too slippery to classify under any particular subheading Most defi nitely it utilizes classic feminine tropes of the woman’s book in its material construction: small in size (sixmo, about fi ve-by-seven inches) but decorative, it boasts even on its standard-issue yellow paper cover an engraving of elegant script and a bouquet of fl owers Many surviving cop-ies sport even more lavish bindings as well as personalized inscriptions, testaments to their cachet in the thriving, and often feminized, market for gift books Still, especially coming from a woman who would build her career on her savvy for addressing female audiences, the construction of

Flora’s Interpreter is markedly less gender specifi c than one might expect

The ‘sentiment of fl owers’ that became so fi rmly associated with women’s popular culture in the second half of the nineteenth century held a more widespread appeal in the 1820s and 1830s 13 Hale explicitly addresses male as well as female readers in her preface, dedicating her book to the young men and women of America She cites male- and female-authored works as essential models and resources for her work, and she anthologizes both male and female poets

Flora’s Interpreter makes another appeal to both male and female audiences

in its use of scientifi c taxonomy and its arrangement according to plant cies; these elements resonate with a second key genre, the botanical manual

spe-or ‘fl spe-ora’ Distinct from herbals (texts documenting practical and medicinal uses of plants), botanical manuals emerged in the eighteenth century to out-line new systems of plant identifi cation and to classify individual plant species

for professional audiences and laypeople alike Flora’s Interpreter opens in this

spirit, with a section of ‘Botanical Explanations’ that clarify technical lary for fl ower parts (calyx, corol, pericarp, etc.) and fl ower shapes (raceme, panicle, corymb, etc.) and set forth the Linnaean system of classes and orders The botanical elements introduced in this section remain rather understated

vocabu-in the remavocabu-inder of the text, Hale’s ‘aim bevocabu-ing rather to stimulate curiosity respecting the subject of Botany, than to impart instruction in the science’ (p

ix) Indeed, on most pages of Flora’s Interpreter the science occupies so much

less space than the sentiment as to appear a perfunctory effort to ‘mingle a little of the useful even with trifl es’ (p iv) Nevertheless, in their function as section headings the botanical elements dictate the overall organization and progression of the text and lend it a decidedly modern edge

Scientifi c frontloading aside, Flora’s Interpreter (as its title suggests)

purportedly models itself on the genre of the fl oral dictionary, or key to the meanings of fl owers Many Romantic writers explored the idea of

fl owers’ eloquence in general terms, 14 but in the 1820s and 1830s a new trend emerged for systematically assigning ‘sentiments’ to particular plants

in a stable, readable code Supposedly taken from, as Hale explains, ‘poets and writers on Eastern manners, where fl owers are, even now, the mes-sengers of the heart’ (p i), this system likely owes its initial European conception to the writings of eighteenth-century travelers to the Middle East, in particular to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters 15 Montagu’s blithe documentation of a ‘Turkish love-letter’, its message relayed through a series of coded objects tied up in a handker-chief, considerably romanticizes and misrepresents the custom of sélam; 16

nevertheless the concept of communicating through things rather than words immediately captivated public imagination Through the end of the eighteenth century the notion lived on in various oriental tales (usually tales of courtship), showing more and more preference for fl owers as the encoded objects In 1819 it blossomed fully into a fl oral dictionary and

‘grammar’ in Charlotte de la Tour’s Le Langage des Fleurs (Paris: Audot,

1819) and inspired a passionate following throughout Europe and the USA that would last the entire century

Hale situates Flora’s Interpreter fi rmly within this folklore, venerating

the ‘Eastern’ origins of the language of fl owers in the preface and ing the volume with a quotation from James Gates Percival: ‘In Eastern Lands, they talk in fl owers, | And they tell in a garland their loves and cares’ (p. 1) Yet despite its self-fashioning as a book of fl oral sentiments

open-based in a supposedly ancient tradition, Flora’s Interpreter is not (or at least

not wholly) either one of these things Hale adopts the system of fl ower

language popularized in Elizabeth Washington Wirt’s Flora’s Dictionary

(1829), one loosely based on reports of ‘Eastern’ customs but largely (and forthrightly) invented by Wirt herself 17 And though the matching

of fl owers to meanings occasions the text, its importance to Hale’s larger project seems primarily structural: without the meanings, there would be

no link between the fl owers and the American-authored poems, because more often than not these poems have little to do with fl owers Of course

as we will see, fl ower language serves national poetry in a host of subtler ways, but from the outset the arrangement signals a crucial point: for Hale

at least, the interpretations that prove of greatest signifi cance pertain to something other than plants

Finally, then, of all genres established at the time of its publication,

Flora’s Interpreter bears most resemblance to the poetic miscellany, an

assortment of poems by many authors, collected in a single volume The

words anthology and fl orilegium both literally translate to a ‘gathering of

fl owers’, and from the Middle Ages onward collected writings took on this fi gurative signifi cance 18 Hale was not the fi rst to make the fl ower–poetry association more literal, 19 but unlike her predecessors, who sought for poems specifi cally about plants, she broadens the focus by collecting poems about plants’ sentiments Lyric poetry, not botany, holds the posi-tion of higher authority in the text; it is the concept around which all the other elements cohere Hale argues that since ‘fl owers seem intended nat-urally to represent pure, tender, and devoted thoughts and feelings’, and since ‘the expression of these feelings has been, in all ages, the province of poetry, […] to the poets we must refer, in order to settle the philology of

fl owers’ (p iii) Part of her rationale for choosing the Linnaean system of nomenclature over Jussieu’s ‘Natural System’, which was gaining popular-ity at the time, stemmed from the former’s literary associations: ‘I found that Howitt, in his “Book of the Seasons”, retains the Linnaean classifi ca-tion’, she explains; ‘it was the one to which [Erasmus] Darwin adhered in his “Loves of Plants”—it is therefore most poetical’ (p v)

Yet although the poetry takes precedence in Flora’s Interpreter , the text

differs signifi cantly from most poetic miscellanies of the eighteenth century and from early nineteenth-century counterparts like the literary annual As Andrew Piper points out, more typical miscellanies display an unruly min-gling of high, low, and even outlandish components through which the reader herself might forge his or her own connections 20 Flora’s Interpreter

certainly combines many elements, but in precise orientation rather than indiscriminate array, the key connections already made Hale’s calculated design extends even into the text’s three separate indexes: one of fl ower names, one of fl ower meanings, and one of American authors It makes the book’s blend of aesthetic pleasure, national pride, and author love explicit Meticulous arrangement and thematic unity notwithstanding, the text does perform similar social work to the miscellany in that it creates a space

of common inheritance and ownership, a kind of literary public works 21

Hale intended her mixture of textual elements to validate and promote the voices of her fellow Americans, and her preface emphasizes their par-ticipation and joint stake in the effort ‘I hope the endeavor to select […] some of the fi nest specimens of American poetry […] will be acceptable

to our community’, she wrote; ‘if we shelter and cherish our fl owers, they