Atlantic Citizens: Nineteenth-Century American Writers at Work in the World 9780748669387

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ATLANTIC CITIZENS

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EDINBURGH STUDIES IN TRANSATLANTIC LITERATURES Series Editors: Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor Modern global culture makes it clear that literary study can no longer operate on nation-based or exceptionalist models. In practice, American literatures have always been understood and defined in relation to the literatures of Europe and Asia. The books in this series work within a broad comparative framework to question place-based identities and monocular visions, in historical contexts from the earliest European settlements to contemporary affairs, and across all literary genres. They explore the multiple ways in which ideas, texts, objects and bodies travel across spatial and temporal borders, generating powerful forms of contrast and affinity. The Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures series fosters new paradigms of exchange, circulation and transformation for transatlantic literary studies, expanding the critical and theoretical work of this rapidly developing field. Titles in the series include: Ethnicity and Cultural Authority: From Arnold to Du Bois, Daniel G. Williams Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture, Michèle Mendelssohn American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation, Daniel Katz The Dandy in Irish and American Southern Fiction: Aristocratic Drag, Ellen Crowell Philanthropy in British and American Fiction: Dickens, Hawthorne, Eliot, and Howells, Frank Christianson Transatlantic Women’s Literature, Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman: A Transatlantic Perspective, Günter Leypoldt Mercenaries in British and American Literature, 1790–1830: Writing, Fighting, and Marrying for Money, Erik Simpson Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777–1826: Rewriting Conquest, Rebecca Cole Heinowitz Transnationalism in Practice: Essays on American Studies, Literature and Religion, Paul Giles South Asian Atlantic Literature, 1970–2010, Ruth Maxey Atlantic Citizens: Nineteenth-Century American Writers at Work in the World, Leslie Elizabeth Eckel Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism, Eric B. White Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature in Middle Eastern Languages, Jeffrey Einboden Forthcoming Titles: Emily Dickinson and her British Contemporaries: Victorian Poetry in Nineteenth-Century America, Páraic Finnerty Visit the Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures web site at www.euppublishing.com/series/estl

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ATLANTIC CITIZENS nineteenth-century american writers at work in the world

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LESLIE ELIZABETH ECKEL

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© Leslie Elizabeth Eckel, 2013 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/13 Baskerville MT by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 6937 0 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 6938 7 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 6939 4 (epub) ISBN 978 0 7486 6940 0 (Amazon ebook) The right of Leslie Elizabeth Eckel to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Susan Manning (1953–2013), one of the founding editors of Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures, was committed to the exchange of ideas across languages, cultures and nations. Indeed an expansive intellectual generosity characterised her entire academic career, one that has been cut all too short. The Series is a testament to her work and contributes to her legacy as an outstanding scholar, a supportive colleague and a good friend. Andrew Taylor

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

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Introduction: The Vocational Routes of American Literature 1. Longfellow and the Volume of the World 2. Fuller’s Conversational Journalism: New York, London, Rome 3. ‘A type of his countrymen’: Douglass and Transatlantic Print Culture 4. Between Cosmos and Cosmopolis: Emerson’s National Criticism 5. The Professional Pilgrim: Greenwood Sells the Transatlantic Experience 6. Standing Upon America: Whitman and the Profession of National Poetry Afterword: Vocation or Vacation? Transatlantic Professionalism Now

1 19 46

Notes Bibliography Index

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71 99 127 153 181 189 216 230

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book drew strength from the company of scholars in the English Department at Yale University, including Tanya Agathocleous, David Bromwich, Janice Carlisle, Hsuan Hsu, Linda Peterson, Lloyd Pratt, Alan Trachtenberg, and my wonderful graduate student colleagues. My dissertation advisors in particular were unfailingly generous in their guidance, and I owe a debt of gratitude to Wai Chee Dimock and Jennifer Baker for sharing their creativity, acuity, and breadth of knowledge of American literary studies. The Dartmouth Futures of American Studies Institute sparked stimulating conversations that expanded my thinking about global frameworks of the field. I am grateful to Institute directors Donald Pease and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, and especially to Colleen Glenney Boggs, whose astute commentary on the manuscript helped this book take its current shape. In wider circles, colleagues in the Emerson and Fuller Societies have been consistently inspiring in their transcendental fellowship. In Boston, I have been extremely fortunate to find a lively intellectual community at Suffolk University, where my colleagues and students in the English Department and in the American Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies Programs are curious thinkers and generous friends. Professor Kenneth S. Greenberg, Dean of Suffolk’s College of Arts and Sciences, and Professor Anthony Merzlak, Chair of the English Department, create an environment in which scholarly pursuits and humanistic inquiry thrive. My thinking about transatlantic studies was invigorated by the ‘Boston and the New Atlantic World’ conference in June 2009, sponsored by Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations and hosted by Suffolk

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University. Joel Pace, my conference co-organiser, has been a thoughtful interlocutor, and I have learned much from our conversations about the cultural flow patterns of Paul Gilroy’s black Atlantic. In support of my research, I am grateful to have received two Faculty Development grants from the College of Arts and Sciences at Suffolk University, Leylan and Enders Fellowships from Yale University, a PEO Scholar Award, and a Graduate Student Award from the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society. This book has benefited from the archival resources of the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Longfellow House, as well as the expert guidance of curators and librarians Heather Cole, Susan Halpert, Paul Erickson, Anita Israel, and Jim Shea. At Edinburgh University Press, series editors Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor have been extremely incisive in their advice. The two anonymous readers of my book manuscript have helped me sharpen my thinking about Atlantic citizenship. I would like to thank Jenny Daly, James Dale, Wendy Lee, and Rebecca Mackenzie for their attention to detail in the publication process. A portion of Chapter 1 appeared in ‘Longfellow and Dante’, a special issue of Dante Studies 128 (2010): 149–61, and is reprinted here with permission of Editor-in-Chief Richard Lansing. An earlier version of Chapter 2 was published in Arizona Quarterly 63.2 (2007): 27–50, and appears here by permission of the Regents of the University of Arizona. Thanks to the Houghton Library at Harvard University for permission to include excerpts from the Margaret Fuller and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow collections. Finally, I am grateful for my extraordinary family and friends, especially my loving and supportive parents Leslie Arends Eckel and Malcolm David Eckel. For their scholarly companionship and personal encouragement, I thank Jana Argersinger, Caroline Bertonèche, Chris Bond, Charles Calhoun, Jim Cocola, Phyllis Cole, Julia Faisst, Allyson Field, Dominique Garcia, Meg Graham, Polly Jones, Megan Marshall, Erin and Tom Moore, Wes Mott, Charlotte Nicklas, Meiko O’Halloran, Matthew Pearl, Patricia Roylance, Cynthia Travers, Abigail Van Hoewyk, and Genevieve Wolfe. For his spirit of adventure, his culinary skill, and his enthusiastic faith in my work, I am grateful to my husband Tim Doherty.

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In memory of my mother, Leslie Arends Eckel, and my grandmother, Betty Arends, with deep love and respect.

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INTRODUCTION

THE VOCATIONAL ROUTES OF AMERICAN LITERATURE

It should come as no surprise to those who know Walt Whitman that the poet chose to mark the United States centennial in 1876 by celebrating himself. As he prepared the ‘Centennial Edition’ of Leaves of Grass for distribution at home and abroad, he composed a ‘personal’ letter ‘To the Foreign Reader’ of his works. In this letter, which he intended to serve as a preface to the edition, Whitman planned to ‘enfold the world’ with his words and to bind its varied nations and peoples together with ‘new formulas, international poems’.1 His vision of a new world order of literary ‘Adhesiveness’, or emotional attachment, would stand on the shoulders of personal relationships rather than institutions of government. Whitman proposes: To begin, therefore, though nor envoy, nor ambassador, nor with any official right, nor commission’d by the President – with only Poet’s right, as general simple friend of Man – the right of the Singer, admitted, all ranks, all times – I will not repress the impulse I feel, (what is it, after all, only one man facing another man, and giving him his hand?) to proffer here, for fittest outset to this Book, to share with the English, the Irish, the Scottish and the Welsh, – to highest and to lowest, of These Islands – (and why not, launch’d hence, to the mainland, to the Germanic peoples – to France, Spain, Italy, Holland – to Austro-Hungary – to every Scandinavian, every Russ?) the sister’s salutation of America from over Sea – the New World’s Greeting-word to all, and younger brother’s love.

Whitman goes to great lengths to tell his foreign readers precisely what he is not. Neither an ‘envoy’ nor an ‘ambassador’, he plays no ‘official’

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role in the constitution of a world state through literature. Instead, he is a ‘general, simple friend of Man’, an amative and ostensibly amateur figure whose only claim to international fame is his identity as a ‘Poet’: one of Shelley’s ‘unacknowledged legislators of the World’.2 Although Whitman’s letter may seem both extraneous and extraliterary, for it was never included in the ‘Centennial Editions’ that Whitman sent abroad, as well as ephemeral in comparison to Whitman’s more substantial writings, it is absolutely central to the story that I want to tell in this book. By recovering this manuscript letter and, along with it, a concrete sense of Whitman’s editorial work in the service of his poetic career, I argue that we gain an understanding of the synchronous relation of his authorial identity to his other professional personae. Whitman’s assertive gesture of self-promotion serves as a case study of the double-edged approaches to literary citizenship taken by the six writers whose working lives I investigate in this book: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sara Jane Clarke Lippincott (popularly known as Grace Greenwood), and Whitman himself. As these authors wrote imaginative literature, they also served as teachers, lecturers, journalists, and editors of others’ work as well as their own. Their commitments and ambitions as public figures constantly informed their creative writing. In Whitman’s case, at the same time that he was composing this letter, he was launching a transatlantic promotional campaign in the American and British press to sell his ‘Centennial Editions’ to readers on both sides of the Atlantic. The success of Whitman’s ‘New World’s Greeting-word’ depended not on its literary qualities alone, but even more significantly on the fact that its author pulled all his professional strings to make sure that his words would be read and absorbed in a certain way by others. Whitman’s insistence on the radical unprofessionalism of his poetic approach hides the fact that this prefatory letter repeats a familiar pattern of editing, criticising, and interpreting the value of his own work that he had established in his 1855 preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass. It also builds upon that foundation to make a highly professionalised claim about the ways in which his work might be ‘launch’d’ and continue to circulate in print ‘over Sea’. Three decades earlier, Frederick Douglass travelled to Britain, where he ascended to the pulpits of churches and the podiums of lecture halls to speak out against American slavery. Before his flight from the United States, a direct result of his decision to expose his status as an escaped slave in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), he gained a literary audience in the United States, primarily among his abolitionist colleagues. During his time abroad, Douglass developed his skills as an orator and discovered

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the tremendous potential of another medium of communicating his political message: print journalism. In a letter written to William Lloyd Garrison on 1 January 1846, Douglass proclaims: I seem to have undergone a transformation. I live a new life. The warm and generous coöperation extended to me by the friends of my despised race; the prompt and liberal manner with which the press has rendered me its aid; the glorious enthusiasm with which thousands have flocked to hear the cruel wrongs of my down-trodden and long-enslaved fellow-countrymen portrayed; the deep sympathy for the slave, and the strong abhorrence of the slaveholder, everywhere evinced . . . contrasted so strongly with my long and bitter experience in the United States, that I look with wonder and amazement on the transition.3

Douglass writes this letter with full consciousness that it will be published in Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper The Liberator and that the evidence he provides of his ‘new life’ in Britain will fuel the fires of the anti-slavery cause at home. His transatlantic rebirth is facilitated by the ‘prompt’ action of a ‘liberal . . . press’: an agent of reform that publicised Douglass’s appearances in lecture halls across the British Isles and made his diplomatic shock tactics a subject of heated debate in American newspapers. The productive tension between Douglass’s sense of liberation in Britain and his assessment of the ‘bitter’ state of race relations in the United States is more than just a matter of personal feeling. Transatlantic difference becomes not only the axis around which his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), revolves, but also the contrast that energises his own journalistic enterprises in The North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper. If we were attempting to construct a linear version of American literary history, Douglass’s editorial ventures might divert us from the main thrust of his creative contributions to the traditions of American autobiography and the slave narrative. Looking more closely at the professional intertexts that inform his narrative work, however, allows us to reimagine Douglass as a figure who was deeply implicated in what Paul Gilroy identifies as the flow patterns of black Atlantic culture, as well as in those transatlantic journalistic exchanges that allowed his contemporaries to imagine both a transnational and an extranational future for American literature.4 This book seeks to expand our current view of six leading nineteenthcentury American writers by asserting that understanding them simply as ‘American authors’ reduces the scope of their cultural impact in both geographical and professional terms. Instead, I argue that we must see them as

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the influential transatlantic citizens that they actually were. These chapters declare the cultural value of the non-literary pursuits – journalism, education, advocacy, and editorial work – to which this group of writers devoted much of their time and through which they moved beyond national borders, both physically and imaginatively. For these writers in particular, standard literary genres such as poetry, fiction, and drama did not work hard enough to bring about social change. Consequently, they speak their minds in direct, often politically charged terms, moving – as Douglass did in his momentous shift from ‘narration’ to ‘denunciation’ – away from private expression and toward public participation in the transatlantic civic sphere.5 I believe that our understanding of writers’ achievements is shaped by which texts we actually read, and consequently, this book aims to recover works normally absent from or neglected in the US literary canon, often pairing them with more familiar ‘national’ texts as studies in transatlantic contrast. Grouped together, these extraliterary texts expose authors in active revolt against the narrow-minded literary nationalism of the ‘Young America’ movement and in vocal protest against the nationalised cruelty of race-based slavery. These literary contexts and intertexts bear witness to the compelling political activism and cross-cultural agency of those writers we thought we knew so well.

Repurposing Transatlanticism Before it became an engine of critical thought complex enough to drive the relatively new field imaginary of transatlantic studies, cultural exchange in the Atlantic world was a solid historical fact. The period with which this book is most concerned – in essence, the half-century between 1825 and 1875 – witnessed several major developments that tied countries together across the Atlantic basin, including the advent of steam travel in 1838, the European national revolutions of 1848, and the stretching of a telegraph cable between the United States and England in 1858. These three innovations changed transatlantic culture from a theoretical prospect into an everyday reality. Within this culture, shared political, literary, and personal connections opened up what Amanda Claybaugh calls ‘a single imaginative horizon’ remarkable in its consistency among individuals still separated by the turbulence of a vast ocean.6 Claybaugh’s ‘horizon’ implies a static sightline and a shared ‘imaginative’ agenda on both sides of the Atlantic. What I would like to examine, however, is the process in which individual writers work to open up that horizon of possibility by turning the transatlantic sphere into a site of cultural confluence and progressive thinking. For the writers whom I study, the Atlantic world is

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more than just a set of technological innovations and network connections: it is a living arena of social transformation. Although transatlantic literary studies have emerged in somewhat belated relation to the charting of an Atlantic history by Bernard Bailyn and others beginning in the 1980s, both historians and literary scholars have taken many decades, to borrow Emerson’s words from his introduction to Nature (1836), to ‘apprehend . . . as truth’ what their nineteenth-century subjects first ‘act[ed] . . . as life’.7 Atlantic Citizens taps into a growing understanding of influence, communication, and collaboration as concrete facts of nineteenth-century life on both sides of the Atlantic. Scholars have developed a finely tuned sense of the literary relationships that flourished in this period: transatlantically minded critics initially emphasised the ties between European and American Romantic writers, but more recently, their focus has broadened to include exchanges between poets and authors of reform narratives, as well as the literary construction of ethnic identities.8 Yet, for the most part, transatlantic studies contextualise national literary production, engaging in what David Armitage identifies as ‘cis-Atlantic studies’, instead of considering the comparative spirit that drives transatlantic travel, literary translation, political activism, and national critique.9 The argument that I develop in this book focuses on writers’ conscious decisions to take creative hold of their shifting geographical coordinates in order to generate conditions of imaginative synchronicity, commercial gain, and social amelioration. While the expansive space of this newly transatlantic world was open to their compatriots in the United States as well, the writers in this study distinguish themselves by actively choosing to balance their US national identity with a commitment to cultural citizenship in a larger world. As a result, they practise forms of literary cosmopolitanism that demand a wider oceanic frame for the study of their lives and works. The six writers whose careers I investigate in Atlantic Citizens spent significant periods of time travelling and living abroad, with the exception of Walt Whitman, who became a global poet not through physical migration but instead by imaginative replication in the eyes of his multinational readers. Longfellow, Fuller, Douglass, Emerson, and Greenwood journeyed between the United States and multiple European countries at least once in their careers, and Douglass travelled even farther afield to the Caribbean and the Middle East after the Civil War. In each case, intellectual engagement with Europe provided these writers with a crucial set of skills that they used to distinguish their writing from that of their American contemporaries and to cast a critically distant eye on the antebellum project of nation-building through literature. In this sense, they were remarkably worldly, as even fellow radical thinkers such as Lydia

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Maria Child – who arrived at the dock in Boston in 1836 ready to board a steamship for England only to be turned back by her husband’s creditors – failed to make the voyage, and most Americans, however geographically open-minded, lacked the professional impetus, the financial latitude, and the personal freedom to travel. Transoceanic migration across the Pacific and even within the American hemisphere was rarer still, which made a sailor like Herman Melville’s knowledge of the world’s oceans profoundly unusual in the antebellum US literary world.10 Recent works of transamerican literary studies, most notably by Anna Brickhouse and Kirsten Silva Gruesz, have emphasised the circulation and translation of texts that create a shared print culture in the Americas rather than writers’ own journeys between countries or their professional engagements within the hemisphere.11 Yet, as theorists of cosmopolitanism suggest, only people, not texts, can be cosmopolitan, as ‘cosmopolitan objects’ lack the philosophical intention that human agents apply to their experiences in the world.12 Given these historical constraints, the transatlantic scope of the six literary careers under consideration in this book was most certainly a privilege, but for the writers themselves, it also had a clear purpose. Especially for Longfellow and Fuller, their fluency in European languages eased their passage and allowed them to inhabit these alternative spaces abroad as near-natives, even as they negotiated with nativist editors in the United States who demanded purely ‘American’ products from these writers’ deliberately comparative minds. These writers lectured to foreign audiences, cultivated friendships with European writers, commented upon social conditions in cities and industrial towns, and became active participants in transnational political revolution. Their transatlantic backtalk, which some American listeners interpreted as treasonous double-talk, was often stridently anti-American, even as it attempted to shore up the nation by holding their compatriots to higher moral standards than those that perpetuated slavery, injustice, and war. To see Emerson at work in the transatlantic world is to perceive him in far more expansive terms than his national literary reputation normally allows, as he regularly sought to ‘exasperate our nationality’ rather than to reinforce its borders.13 Douglass travelled into a freedom of body and mind to which he was denied access in the United States, and Fuller claimed citizenship in a nascent Roman republic whose social boundaries stretched to include women as well as men. Particularly for figures such as Douglass and Fuller, cosmopolitan experience was not a matter of cultural refinement, but more significantly, of personal and political liberation. In this vein, recent work by Ifeoma Nwankwo and Kevin Hutchings and Julia M. Wright helps us to conceptualise the Atlantic world as a space in which restrictions of gender and race

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can be loosened along with ties to national identities.14 On the other hand, higher purposes mattered less to Greenwood and Whitman, whose spirit of transatlantic enterprise was primarily self-serving as they manipulated the print market for the benefit of their own literary reputations. The ways in which these writers engaged the transatlantic public sphere point to two nodes of productive tension within the theory and practice of cosmopolitanism.15 At the crux of the first node stands the question of whether cosmopolitanism is a positive moral force or a sign of commercialised cultural elitism.16 In the second instance, we might ask if cosmopolitanism and nationalism are antithetical pursuits or whether they can productively nurture one another. Conceived by the Stoic philosophers from 300 bc onward as an alternative to hierarchical Greek society and cast in positive humanitarian terms by Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, cosmopolitanism balances a commitment to individual selfhood with responsibilities to imagined others. Initially moral in character, later aesthetic in ambition, and now political in orientation, as Vinay Dharwadker has noted, cosmopolitanism is a term capacious enough to embrace an infinite number of philosophical claims to world citizenship.17 In her study of how cosmopolitanism works in Romantic Britain, Esther Wohlgemut suggests that the post-Kantian historical moment strikes a particular balance of cosmopolitan interests: through their synchronous investments in moral progress and economic gain, as well as in national identity and global development, nineteenth-century British subjects manage to serve their own needs at home as they retain an awareness of the demands and potentialities of the larger world.18 In addition to their British counterparts, nineteenth-century Americans seek instruction from self-consciously cosmopolitan figures such as Roman revolutionary leader Giuseppe Mazzini, a close friend of Fuller’s, who explains his own priorities thus: ‘[f]or us [the true cosmopolitans], the starting point is Country; the object or aim is collective Humanity.’19 Antebellum American cosmopolitans juggle the competing interests of morality and the market as they occupy a middle ground between the nation and the world. In the hands of Longfellow, Fuller, Douglass, and Emerson, cosmopolitanism becomes a moral impulse to apply a global corrective to a nation still in the early days of its democratic experiment. For these writers, cosmopolitanism is more than just a fact of life in the United States, whose internal transnationalism of languages and ethnicities works against claims to singular forms of culture.20 Instead, it is an engaged intellectual practice that seeks to develop the United States in perpetual comparison to and conversation with other countries, imagining it as one among many of Kant’s federated world states rather than an isolated

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nation-state with impermeable moral and geographical boundaries.21 Their form of critical cosmopolitanism anticipates by decades the kind of productive distance that Amanda Anderson locates in the perspectives of Victorian writers such as Matthew Arnold, whose ‘vocation’ she terms the state of ‘disinterestedness’ itself.22 Although they inhabit the same transatlantic space as their fellow American writers, Whitman and Greenwood offer a counterweight to their humanitarian efforts by focusing on foreign territories and audiences as business partners rather than teachers: their cosmopolitan literary branding leverages for economic gain, not for social improvement. As such, they capitalise on what Wohlgemut identifies as the ‘commercially-based internationalism’ that preoccupies their counterparts in nineteenth-century Britain, a country for which the whole world began to look like an interconnected global market.23 Yet, instead of brokering vast trade agreements as nation-states might, and thereby feeding into the global inequalities of colonialism and imperialism, these individual writers act separately, engaging in what Ezra Pound identifies as a productive ‘commerce’ of ideas that seeks to encourage cultural growth on both sides.24 While some of these writers pursue cosmopolitan strategies for the sake of social good and others for a certain margin of profit, all of them retain an investment in the cultivation of American citizenship. In fact, Whitman stakes his reputation on his capacity to represent an abstract notion of ‘Americanness’ to his foreign readers. Given that they are so self-consciously national, we might ask how they can be considered true cosmopolitans, or ‘citizens of the world’. To this end, Fuller leads the way in exploring the possibility of dual citizenship in the United States and a foreign country, precisely because her gender prevents her from enjoying the full privileges of citizenship in her original homeland. In tandem with the political commitments of other writers, Fuller’s investment in the growth of the United States paradoxically becomes the reason that she chooses to lead a cosmopolitan life in the first place. Each of these figures practises the kind of ‘partial cosmopolitanism’ that Kwame Anthony Appiah posits as an ideal human condition: one that preserves its partiality to kindred, home, and nation even as it looks beyond those limits for opportunities to know and to serve others.25 Patriotism and cosmopolitanism indeed can coexist, and in the work of these writers those principles inform one another and guide their engagements with European countries for the ultimate benefit of US culture. In the antebellum period, Americans looked to Europe for moral guidance and economic opportunity more often than European travellers such as Harriet Martineau and Charles Dickens turned toward the United States.26 Still, this imbalance was

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productive, and the ways in which these six writers confidently seek out transatlantic intellectual exchange instead of stumbling under the weight of the European past deeply unsettle assumptions about a pattern of one-way cultural traffic that fed US anxieties about European influence.27 My investigation of the cosmopolitan practices of antebellum American writers who have long been known as the producers of national literary works, and in some instances as the guardians of a mythic ‘American tradition’, aims to explode that ongoing myth of literary nationalisation. I intend to demonstrate that despite their national roots, these writers’ transatlantic work was profoundly anti-exceptionalist in spirit. Their European fascinations, collaborations, and allegiances released them from the bind of American exceptionalism, which hardly suited their flexible and expansive imaginations. In recent criticism, a consensus has emerged that while the nation as a unit of organisation will never disappear from nineteenth-century studies, nor should it because nineteenth-century subjects themselves were so invested in nation-building, the exceptionalism of those national experiences is merely a disciplinary fiction. As Laura M. Stevens observes, the keenest eyes mark the contrast ‘not between the transatlantic and the national but rather between the transatlantic and the exceptionalist’.28 By examining the transatlantic routes that these six writers travel, we too can escape from our ways of thinking about the United States as a geographically and imaginatively limited culture.29 Framing American literature as the product of transatlantic and even global exchanges destabilises its familiar associations with a certain bounded territorial space and the ‘homogenous, empty time’ that constitutes Benedict Anderson’s imagined national community.30 As Wai Chee Dimock contends, once we begin to read literature as ‘the home of nonstandard space and time’, then it becomes much easier to unearth the buried networks of intellectual alliance and moral kinship that stretch across continents and through the fabric of time itself.31 Scholars of transatlantic, circum-Atlantic, and global culture have moved critical thinking above and beyond the exceptionalist frameworks that structured American studies in its early decades and that were upheld by the iteration of recognisably national rhetorical patterns, including the invocation of an Adamic figure, the preaching of a jeremiad, the encounter with a frontier wilderness, and later, the profession of American authorship. It is the final pattern in this series – American authorship – that most intrigues me in this book, because it is a complex exceptionalist puzzle of place and genre that scale enlargement alone cannot solve. Within it, we are doubly bound by our expectations of a progressive narrative of American creative development, as well as by our assumptions as literary scholars about

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authorship as a singular vocation and authors themselves as single-minded producers of imaginative literature.

Beyond the Double Bind: Challenging Literary Exceptionalism In keeping with the historical turn in literary studies, critics are now more likely to focus on the ways in which literary works are shaped by political, social, and economic forces than by an entirely individual creative imagination. The figure of the nineteenth-century author has become de-Romanticised: that author is no longer a solitary genius writing at an attic desk, working within the four walls of a library, or contemplating the change of seasons at Walden Pond. Instead, we see him or her taking up arms with European revolutionaries or with a more homegrown radical, John Brown, working on lengthy projects of translation and being translated by others in turn, and finally, confronting the pressing issues that troubled the antebellum United States: the nationalisation of slavery, the shock of imperialist war on the Mexican border, and the glaring hierarchies of race, gender, class, and ‘native’ or immigrant status.32 Such complexities irrevocably stretch the fabric of the northeastern cultural landscape that F. O. Matthiessen outlined in his 1941 book American Renaissance: a paradigm that set precise temporal, geographical, and imaginative limits for the ‘flowering’ of a distinctly ‘American’ consciousness.33 This book challenges the idea of authorship as an exclusive and fundamentally ‘exceptionalist’ category in its own right. Instead, I argue that authorship must be understood in relation to other occupations and modes of cultural production beyond literature. The terms of authorship established by William Charvat limit critical studies to ‘the profession of writing and the business of publishing’: that is, the composition of imaginative literature and some degree of involvement in its marketing to a reading public.34 As Charvat himself admits, however, this model actually fits very few nineteenth-century American writers, as literary publication alone did not promise adequate financial reward, and consequently, authors were compelled to earn their livings in other professions. It is the intersection between those complementary professions and the work of authorship that most concerns me here. The writers whom I study – Longfellow, Fuller, Douglass, Emerson, Greenwood, and Whitman – were all authors by vocation but not necessarily by profession. In ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’ (1919), sociologist Max Weber suggests that the modern concept of vocation originated in the fusion of internal calling and external response once enjoyed by politicians and spiritual leaders.35 Such figures were able to

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identify a righteous cause and to persuade others to follow them in its pursuit. While those who led by vocational example set a creative agenda, others aided them in a professional capacity as they served both that cause and their own personal interests by the acquisition of material wealth. Weber’s distinctions can help us understand the vocational stances of nineteenth-century American writers who, although called to authorship, were equally compelled by the public influence and the financial reward promised by other related professions. While they may have lived ‘for’ their literary work, they also lived both ‘for’ and ‘off’ their professional work in the fields of journalism, publishing, education, and oratory. Gerald L. Geison observes that the modern concept of the specialised professions emerged from the institutionalisation of particular fields of study at the university level during the latter part of the nineteenth century.36 Modes of antebellum American professionalism therefore constitute a curious historical problem, for according to this definition, the writers studied in this book are amateurs, or pre-professionals, as, with the exception of Emerson’s divinity school education and Longfellow’s casual graduate study abroad, they received no certifications of competence in their fields. Fuller, Douglass, Greenwood, and Whitman were all excluded from higher education on the basis of their race, gender, or class. Instead, as even Emerson and Longfellow did, they learned on the job through the kind of practical experience that we now might associate with ‘vocational training’ for more technical careers than those of college professors or journalists. These writers lay claim to professional expertise in much the same way as they grasp the nebulous concept of ‘world citizenship’. In a country that allowed for greater social mobility than its counterparts in Europe, and in a period before the professions were thoroughly regulated by institutions, antebellum Americans could assert themselves as journalists, professors, editors, and other figures of authority with relative impunity.37 Their claims to professional status tap into what historian Thomas Haskell calls ‘the authority of experts’: that hierarchy of knowledge and division of social roles that is the hallmark of modernity, both in the United States and elsewhere.38 Although I use the terms ‘professional’ and ‘professionalism’ throughout this book to refer to the kind of self-conscious, potentially lucrative expertise that this set of authors cultivated in the pages of their literary works, as well as in their public engagements, I do so with a vivid awareness that they were internally authorising themselves in their efforts to instruct, to exhort, and to entertain their transatlantic audiences. Even as they anticipate the modern professions, however, these writers enjoy a more fluid relation to them than we might imagine from the standpoint of our own clearly delineated specialisations as literary critics

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or otherwise trained interpreters of culture. In addition to the six writers under consideration in this book, we might extend this professional flexibility to Benjamin Franklin, who injected the canniness of a politician and the practicality of a printer into his Autobiography; Lydia Maria Child, whose fiction writing and editorial work on the Juvenile Miscellany and the National Anti-Slavery Standard cross-pollinated one another; James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who slid back and forth between political appointments in the United States and abroad while building their literary reputations; Melville, whose early experiences as a sailor accented his literary voice and his relation to what John Evelev identifies as the ‘professional ideology’ that flourished on land; and Harriet Wilson, whose attention to the patterns of menial labour in Our Nig, according to Xiomara Santamarina, posits such work as a distinct form of literary production.39 Like the cultivation of transatlantic perspective, such professional double-talk is the product of working conditions that require hybrid forms of aesthetic and practical knowledge. Despite their lack of formal preparation, these writers were not mere dabblers in their chosen fields, but each one found a way to answer what Robert Frost identifies as the paired calls of ‘love and need’ as they combined their creative endeavours with the moral work that they felt needed to be done in the world.40 Although Fuller shifted her focus from poetry and fiction writing to journalism in the mid-1840s, and Whitman was driven to supplement his virtually non-existent literary income with editorial and reporting stints at various New York newspapers, these career moves did not signal an abandonment of their artistic goals. Instead, they channelled their imaginative energies into their professional work, just as Longfellow did in his university teaching, Emerson in his lectures, Douglass in his political speeches and journalism, and Greenwood in her travel writing and magazine editing. Those professional alter egos, still shadowy in comparison to the literary figures we know best, both materially supported these writers’ aesthetic pursuits and provided them with public platforms to speak for the causes that called to them from within and beyond the nation: international education, anti-slavery activism, and democratic reform. While Bruce Robbins makes a persuasive case for a more socially engaged model of public intellectualism in the twentieth century, I contend that the impulse toward cosmopolitan thought and action is not the exclusive province of modern cultural critics.41 Instead, it sinks its roots deep into the nineteenth century at an unusually morally charged moment in history. It is the business and the local politics of professional authorship in the nineteenth-century United States that most interest scholars who follow in

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the footsteps of Charvat, whose pioneering work established new parameters for the study of reading, writing, and publishing in the antebellum period.42 The world of nineteenth-century American literary professionalism was much narrower than the scope of a transatlantic vocation, for it was bounded both by the hubs of print culture in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia and by the nationalist aspirations of politically motivated literary factions such as John Louis O’Sullivan’s ‘Young America’. Meeting the demands of the American publishing industry was often a frustrating enterprise for Longfellow, Fuller, Greenwood, and Whitman. Longfellow mocked Young American jingoism in his novel Kavanagh (1849); Fuller locked horns with Evert Duyckinck as he transformed her volume of Papers on Literature and Art (1846) from a cosmopolitan collection to a nationalist statement; Greenwood doggedly solicited transatlantic contributions to her magazine The Little Pilgrim; and Whitman cried foul when early editions of Leaves of Grass failed to receive the positive reviews from his compatriots that he felt the book deserved. The New York scene that Perry Miller evokes in The Raven and the Whale was obsessed with the production of an identifiably national literature, and the Americanist scholarship that draws upon that world tends to reinscribe its authors within a carefully delineated sphere of nationhood. By balancing a critical focus on the longer works that these writers produced – including such familiar texts as Longfellow’s Evangeline, Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Douglass’s autobiographies, Emerson’s Nature and the Essays, Greenwood’s eponymous Greenwood Leaves, and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass – with accounts of their ‘extracurricular’ activities both in print and in the public realm, my work illuminates the vocational energies that they brought to their artistic pursuits. When they step outside their accustomed authorial roles, Longfellow spontaneously translates Dante’s Purgatorio in an undergraduate lecture hall, Fuller invites the readers of her New-York Tribune column into conversation with Italian nationalist leader Giuseppe Mazzini, Douglass challenges Harriet Beecher Stowe’s emigrationist agenda in his newspaper, Emerson turns from ‘American Adam’ into anti-American activist, Greenwood advertises the liberating potential of transatlantic pilgrimage, and Whitman joins forces with the British members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in the pursuit of artistic glory.43 By integrating studies of their major works with more pointed investigations of the canonically silent spaces in between them, as well as the professional beginnings and endings of their careers, this book inaugurates an angle of critical approach to these author–professionals that definitively liberates them from the constraints of the nation with which they are identified, as well as from the pages of their literary works.

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To that end, I consider the records of these six authors’ written statements and oral performances that have gone relatively unnoticed – and in some cases, unpublished – due to their extraliterary nature. Transcripts of speeches, newspaper articles, editorial columns, personal journals and letters, teaching notes, juvenile magazines, and critical reviews all can serve as clues to the missing pieces of these writers’ multifaceted vocational personae. The critical enterprise of Atlantic Citizens is therefore at once contextual, in the sense that it views the territory of American literary studies not as terrestrial but transoceanic in scope, and intertextual, in the way that it brings other forms of knowledge and authority to bear on the imaginative work of literary production. For a model of this approach, I turn again to Douglass and his Narrative as he recounts his story of personal and racial liberation through the medium of print. Caught in the act of reading by his suspicious mistress, Sophia Auld, Douglass recalls, ‘Nothing seemed to make her more angry than to see me with a newspaper. She seemed to think that here lay the danger.’44 Douglass’s textual discoveries in this episode are habitually interpreted as an entrance into literacy, or even more significantly, as the genesis of a literary imagination capable of perceiving and expressing the ironies of his inhumane treatment. My argument in this book, however, recognises both the literary potential and the prescient vocational purpose that inhere in this moment, for Douglass simultaneously asserts his identity as a writer and anticipates his career as a politically minded editor bent on ‘endangering’ slavery in person and in print. Chapter 1 investigates Longfellow’s formative years as a student turned professor of European languages and literatures. A cultural maverick in the pursuit of educational reform, Longfellow instituted a newly cosmopolitan curriculum in American universities that shaped the way in which comparative literature and modern languages are studied today. His efforts to open up his lectures to the general public met with administrative resistance, leading him to channel his pedagogical impulses into the production of ‘teaching’ texts for a wider audience that took the form of translations and anthologies. Although they left him vulnerable to charges of plagiarism by Edgar Allan Poe and of imitation from Fuller, these professional ventures were not distractions from the work of writing American literature but rather pointed attempts on Longfellow’s part to make his American readers more cosmopolitan. In their reverence for Dante and Goethe, two figures upon whom Longfellow modelled his professional identity, his translations reveal the source of the universalist literary values that shaped his later works. In Evangeline (1847), a narrative poem in which he challenges the expansionist agenda of Young America, Longfellow works to map the United States as both a hemispheric space

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and a landscape ruled by imperatives of emotion rather than a desire for territorial conquest. Building upon Longfellow’s principles of cosmopolitan pedagogy and rendering those lessons more politically immediate, Margaret Fuller sought to bring individual American citizens into direct conversation with their European peers. Chapter 2 traces the patterns of dialogue that begin with Fuller’s statement of her journalistic theory in her 1846 essay ‘American Literature’ and gain practical momentum in the columns and dispatches that she wrote for Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune. ‘Newspaper writing is next door to conversation,’ she contends, ‘and should be conducted on the same principles.’45 Rooted in her early experiences in Boston as a facilitator of transcendental conversations for women, Fuller’s dialogic approach to journalism goes hand in hand with her vision of the transnational political progress that such conversation could inspire. In the first-hand accounts of the European revolutions of 1848 that she composed while living in Rome, she engages the United States in transformative exchanges with other, more youthful nations as she argues for the renewal of its national purpose. Fuller’s use of her newspaper columns as a forum to critique American politics transgresses the generic boundaries of antebellum literary culture as it poses a key challenge to Benedict Anderson’s theory of the newspaper as a means of reinforcing the imagined borders of a nation.46 As it traces Frederick Douglass’s radical movements from lecture platform to print media and back again, Chapter 3 catches him both off guard and out of the country during the decade in between the publication of his first two autobiographies in 1845 and 1855. It is in this interval that Douglass begins his life’s work of actively ‘denouncing’ rather than simply ‘narrat[ing] wrongs’.47 By examining the methods that Douglass used to construct a professional identity away from the guiding hand of Garrisonian abolitionists, this chapter uncovers both his distinctively assertive form of self-authorising diplomacy and his establishment of a reputation in print with the help of a transatlantic press fascinated by his bold critiques of American policy. I argue that Douglass’s experiences abroad were crucial to his ability to call the ‘property’ values of the United States into question and to assert his right to own intellectual property as the editor of an abolitionist newspaper. I read Douglass’s speeches abroad and his early work as an editor not as a detour from the trajectory of his literary career, but instead as an alternative vocational history that can help us better comprehend his later work as a political activist, a leader in African American print culture, and an official representative of the government whose ‘un-American’ laws he once exposed to transatlantic ridicule.

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Chapter 4 finds remarkable parallels between Douglass’s political speeches and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s public lectures. Emerson was emboldened by the tightening vice of the Fugitive Slave Law to emerge from his scholarly study and take a firm stand in public against collaboration and racial oppression. This chapter contends that Emerson’s lectures on anti-slavery subjects in the 1850s and 1860s are essential contexts for understanding the books that he published in those decades, particularly English Traits (1856). Emerson’s early writings demonstrate both a suspicion of ‘national criticism’ and a preference for an ‘old largeness’ of thought that transcends the conceptually bounded form of the nation-state.48 His true break with national thinking became powerfully evident when he launched a series of attacks on a ‘hollow nation’ emptied out by slavery. Emerson’s politics have become a matter of intense interest for critics in pursuit of transcendental radicalism, but I approach his political thought differently by bringing his vocational call as a lecturer to bear on his work of discrediting nationality in a transatlantic context. Emerson’s essay collections are themselves refined versions of lectures, and in this chapter previous assumptions about his literary nationalism crumble in the face of the forceful ‘national criticism’ that he, like Douglass, was able to articulate on the lecture platform. Re-emerging from the shadow of fellow ‘scribbling woman’ Fanny Fern, Grace Greenwood makes a far less political case than her peers for the transformative potential of transatlantic experience. Chapter 5 considers the challenges that Greenwood issued to the domestic agenda of American publishers by drawing on her European travels in a popular series of periodical and book publications, particularly the comic narrative Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe (1854) and The Little Pilgrim, an ambitious and original magazine for children that Greenwood edited from 1853 to 1868. This now critically neglected friend and literary rival of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s once shocked him with her success, leading him to equate worldly female ambition such as hers with the world’s oldest profession: prostitution. In her travel writing, Greenwood deals in humorous national stereotypes rather than in the moral and philosophical exchanges that vitally engage Fuller, Douglass, and Emerson. As the founding editor of The Little Pilgrim and the cultivator of what she termed a ‘juvenile public’ sphere, she displays a promotional genius to rival Whitman’s and a fervent faith in both the educational value and the commercial power of transatlantic knowledge. Chapter 6 examines the ways in which Whitman’s editorial impulses and poetic creativity worked in tandem to establish the professional parameters of his career. By focusing on the efforts that he made to

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introduce, interpret, and assess the cultural value of his poetry in the materials that framed various editions of Leaves of Grass, I uncover the traces of Whitman’s own ink-stained fingerprints in the history of his reception as an American poet. I am especially concerned with Whitman’s manipulation of transatlantic literary networks in order to promote his poetry and to solidify his reputation as a nationally representative figure. The redistribution and reinterpretation of Whitman’s works by such foreign readers as William Michael Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne illuminate the fact that his nationality was neither exceptional nor exclusively American. Finally, I follow Whitman as he travels beyond the nineteenth century and into the professional lives of modernist writers such as Ezra Pound, who learns from Whitman both how to be ‘modern’ and how to chart the course of a transatlantic literary career. Finally, the book’s Afterword considers the divergent vocational patterns of two contemporary author–professionals – Caribbean American novelist Paule Marshall and New York-based journalist Adam Gopnik – as they demonstrate the cultural evolution of the transatlantic work begun by their antebellum ancestors. I frame these two figures as studies in contrast, weighing Marshall’s awareness of the complex racial implications of Atlantic history against Gopnik’s reinterpretation of the role of foreign correspondent first played by Fuller and then de-radicalised by Ernest Hemingway and other Lost Generation expatriates. Marshall’s memoir Triangular Road (2009) travels in circum-Atlantic space as it explores the continuing presence of diasporic consciousness in Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. Gopnik’s publications, particularly his essay collection Paris to the Moon (2000) and his literary anthology Americans in Paris (2004), compiled for the Library of America, institutionalise European experience as an offshore component of American national identity. From humanitarian efforts to the transatlantic pursuit of happiness, Marshall and Gopnik negotiate the cosmopolitan paradox of political work and personal growth that structures our own global era. Although the writers at the nineteenth-century core of this book are profoundly invested in the idea of cultural ‘renaissance’ in the United States, the means that they use to achieve that shared end are both varied and startling. All of them would have agreed that the nation needed renovation, particularly during the troublesome decades of the 1840s and 1850s in which its citizens, as well as those excluded from full citizenship on the basis of gender and race, were preoccupied with anxieties about what it meant to be ‘American’ and increasingly conscious of the fault lines of sectional distrust that would open up into the deep chasms of the Civil War. Their calls for rebirth were therefore not merely artistic ones,

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and the solutions that they proposed to complex cultural problems were not exclusively literary. In their work, literary expression joins forces with other professional impulses to bring the United States into transformative conversation across national borders in an effort to redraw the lines of progressive intellectual and political community. These authors put literature’s power to work in the world, and the intensity of their pursuit of authorship as a cosmopolitan vocation challenges us to rethink our understanding of the nation as a geographically flexible field in which far more is ultimately at stake than the fate of American literature alone.

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CHAPTER 1

LONGFELLOW AND THE VOLUME OF THE WORLD

I said with the Cosmopolite, ‘The world is a kind of book, in which he, who has seen his own country only, has read but one page.’ Longfellow, ‘The Schoolmaster’ I saw that in its depth far down is lying, Bound up with love together in one volume, What through the universe in leaves is scattered; Substance, and accident, and their operations, All interfused together in such wise That what I speak of is one simple light. Dante, Paradiso XXXIII, 85–90 (tr. Longfellow)

In one of the most memorable episodes of modernist condescension to a Victorian predecessor, Ludwig Lewisohn spat, ‘Who, except wretched schoolchildren, now reads Longfellow?’1 Lewisohn himself may have faded from view, but his impression of Longfellow as a ‘schoolroom poet’, fit solely for the gentle moral instruction of the young rather than the edification of those who know better, remains ours today. Longfellow’s didacticism is now accepted fact, and most critics see it as an obstacle to the serious academic study of his poetry. Edward Wagenknecht has observed, ‘Neither Longfellow’s “sentimentalism” nor his didacticism is a very profitable subject for discussion now, for the modern rebellion against both these tendencies in literature is too recent to permit us to approach the subject dispassionately.’2 By trying to protect Longfellow from the charges of thinking like a teacher, Wagenknecht actually hides from view one of the most significant forces that shaped Longfellow’s writing from his

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earliest essays in the 1830s to his late masterwork, his translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy: a desire to provide a cosmopolitan education for his readers. In order to understand Longfellow’s literary values and to appreciate the full force of his internationalist agenda, I argue that we must confront the matter of his didactic approach without hesitation. This matter is, in fact, a supremely ‘profitable’ one, for it leads us to the heart of Longfellow’s poetic enterprise, just as an awareness of Emerson’s and Douglass’s careers as public lecturers and Fuller’s, Greenwood’s, and Whitman’s journalistic endeavours can illuminate more fully their contributions to American literary culture. Angela Sorby’s investigations have illuminated the ways in which Longfellow’s poetry was taught in American classrooms, but few critics have studied Longfellow himself as a teacher or explored the vital connection between his early professional life and his ongoing creative agenda.3 Longfellow was indeed a didactic poet, but his desire to instruct his readers made him more of an innovator than an imitator. His pedagogical intentions led him not to reinforce literary convention but instead to throw open the field of national literature to influences from abroad and to create in his writings a progressive curriculum that could be followed by all, regardless of their place in American society. Until recent years, scholars have also avoided delving too deeply into Longfellow’s ‘sentimentalism’. Some of the poems that were most beloved during his lifetime, including ‘A Psalm of Life’ and ‘Footsteps of Angels’, have become grounds for the critical dismissal of much of Longfellow’s writing as manufactured emotional drama. Continuing the work begun by theorists of the sentimental novel, Eric L. Haralson, Kirsten Silva Gruesz, and Matthew Gartner consider the cultural agenda of Longfellow’s sentimental poems and argue that they actually challenge antebellum norms of gender identification and social status.4 In his ‘didactic’ texts, Longfellow endeavours to give his readers an overview of world literature, and in his highly ‘sentimental’ works, he likewise seeks to expand his own poetic range to comprehend a wider variety of emotional and spiritual experiences. I contend that in his narrative poem Evangeline (1847), Longfellow uses the discourse of feeling to counteract the insistent territorial expansionism of his literary nationalist peers. By manipulating national language and imagery to illustrate the universal character of emotion, Longfellow turns his previous academic approach to cataloguing national literatures on its head. Instead of limiting itself to describing national customs and traditions, he argues, literature should stretch to comprehend the shared ‘substance and essence’ of human life.5 Longfellow has drawn more scholarly attention recently as American literary studies have taken a global turn. Often figured as a foil to

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Whitman, who wrote poetry that many recognised as authentically and newly ‘American’ in both form and content, Longfellow slipped from view for much of the twentieth century as he became a casualty of modernist disdain for his supposedly simple-minded verse.6 His current revival depends primarily on his international interests, and on the ways in which, as Lawrence Buell has suggested, those cross-cultural impulses can ‘serve . . . as a corrective’ to the period’s emphasis on literary nationalism.7 Switching Longfellow from national failure to global hero has unfortunate consequences, however. It tends to elide the extent to which Longfellow’s desire to improve the intellectual life of the United States feeds the cosmopolitan impulses of his writing, as well as the curiously discordant fact that his suspicion of nationalist projects undertaken by others causes him to emphasise what he believes are ‘universal’ values over what he interprets as partisan politics. In this chapter, I investigate those moments in which Longfellow fuses his national concerns with his aspiration to demonstrate how broadly universal a form of expression literature can be. In a manner perhaps subtler but certainly no less bold, Longfellow sets a precedent for writers such as Hawthorne, Twain, and James in their efforts to complicate, in cosmopolitan terms, the making of an American national literature.

The Country ‘Schoolmaster’ as National Reformer Longfellow’s two decades of work as a professor of modern languages and literatures, first at Bowdoin College and then at Harvard College, established his position as a founder of American comparative literary studies. No one – not Emerson, or Fuller, or any other member of the scholarly transcendentalist circle – could approach Longfellow in his fluent knowledge of foreign languages or in his ability to translate poetry from a tremendous variety of national traditions. Along with George Ticknor and James Russell Lowell, who served before and after him in the Smith Professorship at Harvard, Longfellow transformed the study of modern languages and their national literatures from curricular addenda to training in Greek and Latin into serious academic subjects in their own right. He bridged the gap between an eighteenth-century mindset that focused on the value of classical learning and a nineteenth-century awareness of European languages as living fields of cultural and political activity. Although many have interpreted Longfellow’s orientation toward Europe as a sign of his cultural conservatism, the dramatic changes that he made to the American university curriculum align him with other educational reformers of the period, including Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and Elizabeth

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Palmer Peabody, who stressed imaginative conversation as an alternative to rote learning. From 1829 to 1854, Longfellow developed his own poetic imagination in direct conversation with his scholarly efforts to break new ground in the study of French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Portuguese and his exploration of many other historically and nationally distinct literary traditions. In a cultural moment shaped by great cosmopolitan thinkers, Longfellow was a true Titan, and his professional role gave him the opportunity (as well as the burden) of carrying the entire world on his shoulders, as he imagined his intellectual model Goethe had done.8 Longfellow’s first decade as a professor has puzzled many scholars as they strive to understand why Longfellow produced so little poetry during that time.9 In this section of the chapter, I focus on Longfellow’s substantial efforts as a teacher and a literary critic during those years and argue for their central importance in framing his poetic enterprise in the decades that followed. These works include literary essays and academic criticism published in various journals, a series of foreign language textbooks and travel narratives, and several anthologies of European and world poetry. The poems that Longfellow published at the height of his career in the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s – including Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha, and Tales of a Wayside Inn – bear telltale marks of his intent to entertain his audience while instructing them in unfamiliar literary genres, to anthologise examples of foreign literatures, and to expand the classroom authority of the ‘schoolmaster’ persona that he developed in his early teaching years. Longfellow jump-started his academic career with three years of travel and study in Europe from 1826 to 1829. When he returned home to take up his position at Bowdoin, he began publishing work that reflected both his pedagogical theories and his literary values. The first material of this kind was a series of sketches titled ‘The Schoolmaster’, which appeared in six instalments in The New-England Magazine from 1831 to 1833. Longfellow introduced his protagonist as a ‘son of New-England’, who, like the poet himself, had developed a ‘restless spirit’ in the limiting round of village life.10 The schoolmaster describes his urge to travel abroad in literary terms, identifying himself with the ‘Cosmopolite’ who believes that ‘the world is a kind of book, in which he who has seen his own country only, has read but one page.’ Not only does the schoolmaster prefer a cosmopolitan existence to a local one, a theme that Longfellow himself would elaborate in a satire of rural Brunswick, Maine, through the eyes of a mysterious and worldly stranger, he imagines that he can take his journey abroad in the pages of a book.11 The schoolmaster’s metaphor of the world as a book works against the idea of a national literature, for his home country represents only ‘one page’ among many, and the entire book of the world

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is multinational in scope. After enumerating his travels, the schoolmaster closes ‘the volume of the world’ and returns to his ‘Native Land’ to take up his teaching duties.12 Although the emphasis of the piece shifts to the schoolmaster’s home country, his global ‘reading’ continues to inform his sense of vocation. Longfellow’s ‘schoolmaster’ may have had visions of national grandeur, but Longfellow himself had an even greater faith in the power wielded by educators and their institutions to shape national culture. During his postgraduate years abroad, Longfellow experienced an intellectual awakening at the University of Göttingen, and he wrote to his father of his desire to build a university in the United States upon a European model. According to Longfellow, universities should be seen as a nation’s greatest sources of pride and its most reliable champions of cultural progress. He claims: Germany and France may well boast of their schools and Universities. Good Heavens! what advantages have they not in these countries! Here indeed the gates of wisdom may be emphatically said to be swung wide open. There is a voice of free grace crying to all, that the fountains of their salvation are open. May it soon be heard in our own happy land, swelling above the voice of worldly gain, and the war of political strife.13

With the force of a jeremiad, Longfellow preaches the gospel of educational reform. In his mind, the university stands at the centre of the nation and puts its democratic principles into action by promising ‘free’ access to learning for ‘all’ and leading the nation away from pernicious forms of greed and social unrest. Throughout his academic career, Longfellow would retain his belief in the importance of ‘open[ness]’ and accessibility of literary knowledge in both his university courses and his published works. His contention that the success of a nation hinges on the education of the young anticipates Emerson’s ‘American Scholar’ address, given at Harvard in 1837 after Longfellow had joined the college faculty. In even stronger terms than those used by Emerson, Longfellow suggests that European-style universities and free public libraries in the United States would save American students from the drudgery of vocational training. ‘[I]nstead of seeing the youth of our country chained together like galley slaves and “scourged to their dungeons”,’ Longfellow asserts, ‘our eyes would be cheered by the grateful spectacle of mind throwing its fetters off – and education freed from its chains and shackles.’14 Although his rhetoric is as overblown as that of any student, Longfellow’s claim that his proposal for a more cosmopolitan approach to teaching and learning would abolish

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intellectual slavery among Americans cannot be taken lightly, particularly in relation to his later pedagogical work. The sheer radicalism of Longfellow’s argument for the political necessity of opening up the localised, elitist system of American higher education becomes evident in the subversive language of his proposal. He predicts, ‘Thus we may steal silently upon the world with these innovations – and without Legislative grants, or College buildings, our State will see an University springing into existence in its very bosom – without its having even an intimation of its origin.’15 For Longfellow, reforming the method of educating the American public means taking covert political action in the manner of the schoolmaster, beyond the purview of bumbling elected officials. His vision of the ideal American university evokes an organic growth that is mysterious in its ‘origin’ and insistent in its staying power. Longfellow objected to the fiercely provincial aspect of American colleges – especially Bowdoin, whose administrative indecision about his professorship was frustrating him at the time – and instead imagined an ideal university unbounded by a campus in the manner of Göttingen. Professors themselves would generate the intellectual electricity needed to run this new institution by drawing students to them with courses of open lectures.16 Longfellow’s proposed site for his university was his hometown of Portland, but he ultimately circumvented institutional structures by importing his European pedagogical principles directly into the writings that he published in the 1830s. Longfellow’s vision of an ideal university offers a cosmopolitan alternative to national organisations. ‘Next to our own free government,’ he exclaims, ‘I think the University of Paris the sublimest of all human institutions!’ The resources of Longfellow’s open campus would be comprehensive, and its libraries would contain ‘books in foreign languages as well as in the vernacular’.17 As he insists on an international range of library acquisitions, Longfellow begins his life’s work of introducing American audiences to foreign literatures. Longfellow himself functions as the ‘nucleus’ of his own university, insisting that his student-readers set aside their prejudices against European writing and recognise its substantial cultural value.18 In comparison to Fuller, who attempts to bring European revolutionary politics home to the United States, and Emerson, who directly confronts the corruption of American national government, Longfellow calls for educational change in a deceptively mild voice. From the beginning, however, Longfellow saw himself as an active ‘reform[er]’, and the opposition that he encountered from university administrators and other critics throughout his professional career demonstrates the extent to which he not only stretched the limits of American higher education, but

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also issued an even more significant challenge to Americans’ understanding of their nation’s place in the world.19

Required Reading: Longfellow’s International ‘Textbooks’ Longfellow’s teaching years were, in many ways, an uphill battle. Both at Bowdoin and at Harvard, he fought to distance himself from the demands of routine language instruction and to widen the scope of his influence as a literary scholar by publishing and lecturing. When Longfellow began teaching, the humanist branch of the American undergraduate curriculum placed an almost exclusive emphasis on the study of classical languages, rhetoric, and oratory.20 Modern languages and literatures, including English, could be taken only as electives, and many considered them social embellishments rather than true academic disciplines.21 Longfellow was one of a very few specialists in his field, for there were no opportunities for graduate training in language or literature in the United States; interested students had to go abroad to German universities for further study, as he had done. The Modern Language Association would not convene for its first meeting until 1883, more than fifty years after Longfellow started his scholarly career and laid the intellectual groundwork for the organisation’s existence. Charged with instructing Bowdoin undergraduates in three modern languages, Longfellow lacked even the most basic textbooks on which to build his courses. His description of his ideal, multilingual library was no elaborate scheme created for his father’s benefit but instead a pressing need that he attempted to fill by publishing his own teaching tools. Longfellow had to compose or translate the materials with which European languages and cultures would be taught to Americans, and in his time at Bowdoin he produced at least six textbooks that reflected his pedagogical priorities. The most significant of these was his four-part series of Cours de langue française, which included a grammar book that he translated from its French original, a French translation of Oliver Goldsmith’s novel The Vicar of Wakefield, Manuel de proverbes dramatiques, and a selection of French poetry. In his ‘Prospectus’ to the first volume, Elements of French Grammar (1830), Longfellow outlines his goals for the work. Its primary purpose is to ‘obviate many of the difficulties now felt in both learning and in teaching. It first presents to the scholar an easy and interesting prose narrative – the simplest form in which the language can be presented.’22 Longfellow values ‘simpl[icity]’ and transparency in the teaching of language, and carries those priorities with him as he approaches the composition of his own poetry.23 He explains that he

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hopes to ‘place the work within the reach of all’, thereby opening up the university language curriculum to the general reader and furthering the goal of accessibility that distinguishes his European-style university from its American counterparts. Critics who have discussed Longfellow’s didacticism tend to give more weight to his moral messages than his academic instruction. The Longfellow that we are most likely to recognise as didactic speaks in the lines of ‘A Psalm of Life’, urging his readers to adopt a stoic attitude of discipline and submission as they ‘Learn to labor and to wait’ (Poems, 4). Encouraging such humble habits of mind in others was surely one of Longfellow’s poetic goals, but he was also driven by an apparent counterimpulse to expand the intellectual range of the minds that encountered his writing. Throughout the 1830s and the early 1840s, Longfellow’s teaching practices in the college classroom crept into each one of his published works, shaping both their formal structure and their literary content. In his language textbooks, Longfellow began the process of educating his readers to understand and to appreciate national literatures outside the Anglo-American tradition. He continued this work in over a dozen scholarly articles in the North American Review and other journals, in his fictional travelogues Outre-Mer and Hyperion, and in his anthologies of European poetry, The Waif (1844), The Poets and Poetry of Europe (1845), and The Estray (1846). These academic and unapologetically didactic writings served as formal templates for Longfellow as he created his own books of poetry, which gave equal weight to his own original poems and his translations from Spanish, French, German, and Italian originals. In his works of the 1830s and 1840s, Longfellow blurred the generic lines between poetry and prose and between creative and scholarly writing with the same force that he used to break down the walls of intellectual elitism that separated his college classrooms from the country at large. Longfellow pieced together his texts from his teaching materials, making those works into hybrids of academic discourse, poetic example, and ‘objects’ he imagined would ‘please and interest the fancy’ of his readers. Longfellow’s works resemble a ‘tailor’s drawer’: a favorite image of his that describes a gathering of odds and ends from different sources and national literary traditions.24 Unlike contemporaries such as Emerson and Thoreau, who fused together into coherent essays those materials previously gathered in their journals and notebooks, Longfellow left the seams of his writing open so that we can still discern his patterns of composition. What those patterns demonstrate is Longfellow’s deliberate effort to widen the circle of his ‘students’, from an initial set of undergraduates to the erudite Boston readership of the North American Review and finally to the

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general public, and to bring all of those groups into meaningful contact with world literatures and cultures. Outre-Mer, published in parts from 1833 to 1834 and in full in 1835, incorporates material from Longfellow’s ‘Schoolmaster’ series, as well as his scholarly articles on French and Spanish literatures. Matthiessen saw in Longfellow’s text only a dogged imitation of Irving’s Sketch-Book, but Longfellow’s travelogue actually bears a closer resemblance to a ‘volume of the world’ than it does to Irving’s.25 The youthful narrator, who introduces himself as a ‘Pilgrim’, makes no secret of his admiration for Europe; it is ‘a kind of Holy Land’ towards which he journeys as if to a ‘shrine of his devotion’ (Writings, 1:20). While Irving’s Sketch-Book reinforces a narrow understanding of transatlantic culture as its author indulges his own Anglophilia, Longfellow’s travelogue speaks in more comprehensive terms of travelling in France, Spain, and Italy. Longfellow was, by trade, far more invested in Continental cultures than in Anglo-American relationships, and that broader outlook distinguishes him from writers such as Irving, Cooper, Emerson, and Hawthorne, all of whom devoted substantial energies to investigating the British roots of American society.26 In his account of his travels, Longfellow’s anonymous narrator strikes an uneasy balance between amusement and instruction. He imagines a youthful audience for his work, as Longfellow himself did in his university teaching, ‘an age less rigid in its censure and more willing to be pleased’ (Writings, 1:21). Longfellow’s European local colour does indeed ‘please’, as he draws the reader in with a bawdy French tale and ostensibly acts as a mere conduit for anecdotes that his narrator hears from the locals. At times, Longfellow’s narrator is a transparent figure who intends to convey cultural facts ‘without note or comment’, but in other moments, he is more rigidly didactic, betraying his relation to Longfellow’s original ‘Schoolmaster’ (Writings, 1:31). In a chapter on ‘The Trouvères’, a school of medieval French poets, the narrator’s playful voice shifts abruptly into academic monologue. He intones, ‘It is not, however, my object, in this paper, to give an historical sketch of this ancient and almost forgotten poetry, but simply to bring forward a few specimens which shall exhibit its most striking and obvious characteristics’ (Writings, 1:95). Longfellow appears to have lifted a piece of his own academic ‘paper’ on French literature directly from the pages of the North American Review and spliced it into the lighthearted travelogue, and his intent to educate the reading public overrides the efforts of the narrator to entertain his audience.27 Longfellow’s narrator (who, at this point, is almost indistinguishable from Longfellow the professor) absents himself from his own story in order to allow readers to experience ‘specimens’ of French poetry without apparent

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mediation. He cannot resist calling their attention to ‘the simple and direct expression of feeling’, however, conveying his own literary values along with his cultural lessons. As Longfellow contends in his earliest statements on education, the work of the professor in an open, European-style university is a form of inherently progressive political action that has larger implications for a nation’s cultural development. Longfellow’s efforts to promote multilingual learning to a wider audience were considered radical in the 1830s and 1840s, and they got him into constant political trouble within the walls of the university itself. Carl L. Johnson has observed that Longfellow’s career as Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard, a post that he held from 1837 to 1854, involved just as much negotiating with a recalcitrant administration as it did teaching.28 Although his initial duties included lecturing to members of the university on ‘the languages and literature of Modern Europe or Belles Lettres’, Longfellow quickly became frustrated by the administration’s assumption that he was merely a language instructor and not a public intellectual.29 He clashed with the Harvard Corporation over their stubborn refusal to relieve him of the extra French language teaching that had begun to interfere with his scholarly ambitions. In his journal, Longfellow comments, ‘Lecturing is all well enough, and in my history is an evident advance upon the past. But now one of my French teachers is gone; and this dragooning of school-boys in lessons is like going backward.’30 Longfellow was driven to leave Bowdoin by his ‘strong desire to tread a stage on which I can take longer strides and speak to a larger audience’, but even at Harvard, he struggled to ‘advance’ in his project of pushing his field beyond the practices of rote learning.31 In an attempt to promote his course of literary lectures, Longfellow asked for the use of either the ‘Chapel or . . . the Philosophical Room’ so that he could draw a wider audience from both the Harvard and Cambridge communities.32 His usual rooms in University Hall were often cramped and ‘[m]iserable’, and he complained of their physical constraints. In one room, there were ‘[w]indows behind me and behind my audience, so that I could not see them nor they me. I had as lief lecture through a key-hole.’33 The Corporation rejected his plea for more space. Nonetheless, Longfellow attempted to make his lectures public events. In an 1838 letter to his father, he explains, ‘By public I mean free to any and every one who chooses to attend, whether in college or out of college.’ According to Longfellow, the university should merge with the city itself, and its intellectual resources should become the common property of all. His educational views were far more ‘democratic’ than those of his

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predecessor Ticknor, and he encountered constant difficulties in his attempts to persuade a ‘conservative’ administration to take his expansive pedagogical ambitions seriously.34 Longfellow’s struggle for recognition as a scholar of the people led him to channel his academic energies into his writing. During his years at Bowdoin, he blurred the line between his scholarly articles and his creative prose, and in his quasi-autobiographical novel Hyperion, he transfers his teaching strategies to a text that can be made accessible to a larger reading public.35 Longfellow’s ‘Records of Harvard Classes’ show that he lectured annually on Dante’s Divine Comedy and Goethe’s Faust and frequently on comparative topics such as ‘Literature and Literary Life’ and ‘Modern Languages and their Literatures’.36 Prioritising accessibility over interpretive complexity, Longfellow summarised difficult texts, translated them into English for the benefit of his students, and brought their attention to passages that revealed the ‘design’ of a particular work.37 At the close of his lectures on Faust, he reflects, ‘We have taken the wonderful machinery all apart. We have been behind the scenes. So to speak, we have seen the hew in his slippers, and brandy-and-water in the green-room.’ In the spirit of his promise to reach willing listeners, ‘whether in college or out of college’, Longfellow inserted into the narrative of Hyperion a series of meditations on the ‘Lives of Literary Men’ that he originally presented in an 1838 lecture course (Prose, 2:8). In his own writing, therefore, Longfellow was able both to capitalise on his academic reputation and to circumvent the restrictions placed on him by Harvard in order to contribute to the general education of the entire nation. Although less of a ‘tailor’s drawer’ than its predecessor, Hyperion functions as a conglomerate of Longfellow’s teaching and thinking about German literature and culture. Like Outre-Mer, it reveals itself early on to be a pedagogical experiment, intended to teach unsophisticated readers how to appreciate authors such as Goethe, Richter, and Hoffmann. The dialogues between Paul Flemming and his companions – a German Baron, an English eccentric, and a young Englishwoman named Mary Ashburton (whom many critics connect to Longfellow’s wife Fanny Appleton) – forsake character development in favour of literary opinion. In a manner only slightly less academically obvious than the narrator’s outline of his ‘paper’ in Outre-Mer, Flemming asks the Baron, ‘And what do you Germans consider the prominent characteristics of [Richter’s] genius?’ (Prose, 2:37). In keeping with the book’s philosophical tone, Longfellow’s Socratic dialogues illuminate as they amuse. Through the character of Flemming, Longfellow encourages his readers to absorb German thought and cultural values. Anticipating F. Scott Fitzgerald’s portrait of Gatsby,

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another American eager for self-improvement, Longfellow’s Baron comments to Flemming: it often astonishes me that, coming from that fresh green world of yours beyond the sea, you should feel so much interest in these old things; nay, at times, seem so to have drunk in their spirit, as really to live in the times of old. (Prose, 2:139)

The Baron’s observation that Flemming prefers European ‘times of old’ to the ‘fresh green world’ of the United States represents another one of Longfellow’s acts of resistance to American literary nationalism. He suggests that more can be gained from imbibing the complex historical ‘spirit’ of the German nation than from insisting on the superiority of the American wilderness. In addition to instructional dialogues, Longfellow uses lecture techniques to encourage his readers to absorb his summaries of German literary history. He introduces the figure of the ‘philosophical Professor’, who captivates Flemming as he explicates a passage from Goethe’s Faust (Prose, 2:98, 102–3). Longfellow’s lectures on specific national literatures often followed the French model of an explication de texte, and in this instance Longfellow recreates the dynamics of the Harvard lecture hall as he attempts to share widely the literary lessons that the university preferred to restrict to an elite audience.38 Flemming proves himself a particularly receptive student by following the example of the Professor in his conversations, or rather monologues, in the company of the fetching Mary Ashburton. Mary provides both Flemming and Longfellow with an opportunity to refute the Anglo-American belief that the German language is too ‘harsh’. Flemming argues, ‘It is not harsh to me, but homelike, hearty, and full of feeling’ (Prose, 2:175). Flemming’s ‘lectures’ on German literature include impromptu translations of poems into English, a practice that Longfellow had mastered in his Harvard classes. ‘I will improvise a translation for your own particular benefit,’ Flemming boasts to his companion (Prose, 2:182). In this moment, the line between lectures as academic exercises and lectures as literary performances seems especially thin. Longfellow’s desire to turn his readers into avid consumers of foreign literatures along the lines of Paul Flemming and Mary Ashburton also shaped his first book of poems, Voices of the Night (1839), which reveals its pedagogical roots when read as a companion to Hyperion. Longfellow published some of his best-known original poems in Voices of the Night – ‘Hymn to the Night’, ‘A Psalm of Life’, and ‘The Spirit of Poetry’ – but he included alongside them three passages from Dante’s Purgatorio, first

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translated for his Harvard lectures, among other translated poems.39 These translations are seldom associated with Longfellow’s own poetry, for in collections of Longfellow’s works his translations are normally separated from the poems that they originally complemented and placed in a section of their own. Although Longfellow himself approved this separation in many of his books, these editorial decisions elide Longfellow’s sense of his translations as literary accomplishments in their own right, and they obscure the origins of his own poetry in his teaching of foreign literatures. By distinguishing foreign from ‘American’ material, modern editors have replayed the literary nationalist drama that Longfellow so fervently opposed. In his epilogue to Voices of the Night, titled ‘L’Envoi’, Longfellow carefully integrates his translations with the rest of his poems. He calls attention to the multilingual nature of the book as he evokes ‘Tongues of the dead, not lost, / But speaking from death’s frost, / Like fiery tongues at Pentecost!’40 Longfellow imagines his volume of poetry not as a monolingual, monocultural effort but rather as a collection that speaks in different national ‘tongues’ and invokes a ‘Pentecost’ that spreads the spirit of poetry to all corners of the globe. As Christoph Irmscher has noted, Longfellow admired Dante for his similar Pentecostal power, as his readers miraculously ‘hear thy wondrous word’ each ‘in their own language’.41

Longfellow: Anthologist or Plagiarist? Longfellow’s vision of Voices of the Night as a gathering of global poetic expressions anticipates his work of anthologising the poetry of myriad national traditions in his books of the 1840s and the 1870s. Instead of illuminating one particular national literature for the benefit of non-academic readers, Longfellow attempted in his anthologies to offer representative samplings of many poetic cultures at once. In his preface to The Poets and Poetry of Europe (1845), the most widely circulated of these anthologies, Longfellow provides an internationalist answer to Rufus Griswold’s nationalist project The Poets and Poetry of America (1842).42 Longfellow makes explicit his goal of ‘bring[ing] together, into a compact and convenient form, as large an amount as possible of those English translations which are scattered through many volumes, and are not easily accessible to the general reader.’43 By emphasising ‘accessibil[ity]’, Longfellow signals that the volume is a pedagogical enterprise. ‘In doing this,’ he adds, ‘it has been thought advisable to treat the subject historically, rather than critically.’ Longfellow does not believe that he needs to add his own ‘critical’ agenda to the volume, and he implies that simply reading the poems themselves will teach readers valuable lessons about European cultures. Longfellow

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claims that he has not passed literary or moral judgement on the contents of the anthology, and that it is therefore ‘a collection, rather than . . . a selection’. His academic approach would get him into trouble with nativist literary critics such as Poe, however, who aggressively promoted the idea of an entirely ‘original’ American literature. Longfellow’s refusal to give ideological weight to his poetic choices, both in his anthologies and in his volumes of original poetry, also caused great offence to Fuller, who used her reviews of foreign literary works as occasions to offer correctives to what she perceived as the social and political corruption of the United States. Few contemporary critics dared to attack Longfellow, who had gained a strong national reputation by the 1840s, but when they did, their observations cut deeply and the wounds never fully healed. Poe’s accusations were the most fiery, for, as Virginia Jackson and Meredith McGill have noted, Longfellow’s habit of borrowing from other poets threatened Poe’s own nationalist campaign for the financial recognition of original creative work by American authors.44 According to Jackson, Poe objected to Longfellow’s professorial role as an institutionaliser (and later, an institution) of poetry.45 Such professional anxiety caused Poe to interpret Longfellow’s appropriations of others’ verse as aggressive acts by ‘the GREAT MOGUL of the imitators’. Although Poe may have perceived the connection between Longfellow’s republication of poems by other writers under his own name and his pedagogical goal of widening the range of foreign literatures to which the American reading public was exposed, he simply could not accept Longfellow’s promotion of others’ work as a legitimate contribution to American letters. As both Jackson and McGill have suggested, Poe’s ‘little Longfellow war’ had more to do with professional and regional pugilism than it did with plagiarism per se. Poe and other critics assumed that Longfellow’s didactic impulses led him backward in time and eastward in space to ‘borrow’, to ‘steal’, and to ‘imitate’ when he should have committed himself to creating American literature anew. In response to Poe’s somewhat hysterical charges of plagiarism, Fuller both defended and dismissed Longfellow in her 1845 review of his Poems for his repeated episodes of borrowing material from other writers. She was quick to recognise the value of Longfellow’s gathering of poetic examples from European sources, for she shared his pedagogical agenda and used her editorial positions at The Dial and the New-York Tribune to persuade her readers to read and to appreciate European literatures. Fuller identifies Longfellow correctly as a ‘teacher to the people’ and observes that his writings and translations could ‘educat[e]’ an unsophisticated public.46

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Simply presenting the fruits of European cultures to a willing audience was not enough, however, to earn Longfellow a place in the American literary pantheon. He is ‘overrated’, Fuller argues, due to the novelty of his literary examples, and he fails to produce the kind of original or nationally significant work that could guarantee him readers beyond his particular day. By preserving and promoting the values of European high culture, the poet reveals himself to be a ‘Dandy’, much to the horror of egalitarian Americans such as Emerson, who echoed Fuller as he scowled at the evidence of Longfellow’s material success in an 1853 journal entry. Emerson contended, ‘If Socrates were here, we could go & talk with him; but Longfellow, we cannot go & talk with; there is a palace, & servants, & a row of bottles of different coloured wines, & wine glasses, & fine coats.’47 Longfellow’s poetics are compromised by his lavish, Continental lifestyle, Fuller agrees, and his books merely reproduce the contents of a library instead of evoking the expansive elements of nature. His volumes of poetry are ‘hot-house bouquets’, effeminate and showy in contrast to ‘the free beauty of nature’ (Fuller, Critic, 292). In the midst of her nationalist commentary, Fuller seizes upon a truth of Longfellow’s composition; his anthologies such as The Poets and Poetry of Europe were, in fact, miniaturised versions of his own literary collections. Like the chapters of that particular anthology, his books were catalogued by national origin on the many bookshelves at Craigie House. In her review, Fuller voices her disapproval of Longfellow’s choice to promote an understanding of separate and distinct European origins over the common culture of an American ‘melting pot’. She asserts: But Mr. Longfellow presents us, not with a new product in which all the old varieties are melted into a fresh form, but rather with a tastefully arranged Museum, between whose glass cases are interspersed neatly potted rose trees, geraniums and hyacinths, grown by himself with aid of in-door heat’ (Critic, 290)

Not only are Longfellow’s poems musty and possibly inbred – he appears here as a poetic version of Hawthorne’s mad scientist Rappaccini, nursing his suspiciously attractive ‘translations’ from the original – his writing stops short of achieving the ‘new’ and ‘fresh’ impact of a truly national, truly New World literature. The crux of Fuller’s argument with Longfellow is her accusation that the ‘schoolmaster’ has failed his students because he has not provided the clear moral instruction that she herself inserted into her reviews of

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European texts. As I will discuss in greater detail in the next chapter, Fuller believed that the books she reviewed could teach Americans not only to expand their cultural boundaries but also to adopt more thoughtful and cosmopolitan ways of life already practised by Europeans. Without such critical imperatives for social and political change, Longfellow’s translations are ‘dead mosaics’, not ‘living growths’ (Fuller, Critic, 289).48 Fuller ultimately objects to Longfellow’s poetry because it does not demand enough of individual readers: This want of the free breath of nature, this perpetual borrowing of imagery, this excessive, because superficial, culture which he has derived from an acquaintance with the elegant literature of many nations and men out of proportion to the experience of life within himself, prevent Mr. Longfellow’s verses from ever being a true refreshment to ourselves. (Critic, 288)

Longfellow’s telltale faults in the eyes of the nativists – his European ‘excess[es]’ and un-American ‘elegan[ce]’ – actually matter less to Fuller than his inability to incite Americans to personal revolution. Fuller expects more from an international education than a ‘superficial’ familiarity with Spanish ballads or Icelandic sagas. For her, the process of confronting other national cultures must be a ‘true refreshment’ to readers and teach them how to live in new ways. In Fuller’s opinion, Longfellow is all show and no substance, for without political impetus, his ‘borrow[ed]’ cultural materials cannot catalyse the acts of self-culture that Fuller (and later, Emerson) believes can bring about national transformation. Despite his claim to be a transparent conduit of foreign literatures as both an anthologist and a translator, Longfellow did indeed have a political agenda for his poetic ‘collection[s]’.49 The poems that he chose to include in his volumes provided the strongest examples of the national particularity of the literature in question. He shared with Fuller and Whitman (although Emerson would forcefully disagree with all of them) a faith in the category of the culturally and linguistically distinct nation as a way of understanding human history and individual personality. Longfellow frequently thought in national terms, and the tables of contents in many of his books were organised by national origin. His efforts to promote and to write a literature of recognisably American nationality must be seen in the context of his equal admiration for both the principle of nationality and its manifestations in the countries that he studied. Longfellow held up the comprehensive ‘volume of the world’ as a literary ideal, and each of his books pays homage in some form to that imaginary work which comprehends all nations at once.

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His anthologies continually expanded their global range, moving outward from European poetry in the 1840s to world literature in Poems of Places (1876–9). Longfellow’s final anthology catalogued geographically specific poems from at least fifteen nations in its thirty-one volumes (some of his categories were continental, not national). This massive effort has been largely overlooked by scholars, but in comparison first to Wordsworth’s Poems on the Naming of Places (1800) and then to Emerson’s anthology Parnassus (1874), Longfellow’s project emerges as distinctive in its tremendous ambition to represent a Goethean Weltliteratur.50 While Wordsworth’s ‘anthology’ is defiantly local, in keeping with his emphasis on folklore in Lyrical Ballads, Longfellow’s casts local particularities as global phenomena that belong to every place and people. Emerson’s Parnassus is most often noted for its failure to include any poems by Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass Emerson judged ‘the most extraordinary piece of wit & wisdom that America has yet contributed’, but in its exclusion of all poetry from outside the Anglo-American tradition, it throws into relief the audacity and the amplitude of Longfellow’s multinational project.51 Longfellow’s seemingly paradoxical faith in both literary nationality and nation-based cosmopolitanism was rooted in his admiration for Goethe and Dante, two writers with whom he felt transhistorical as well as transnational affinity. Like Fuller’s political alliances with European revolutionaries, Longfellow’s connections to these exemplary poets shaped his intellectual career and influenced his development of a public persona. Longfellow saw Goethe as his own mirror image, for a miniature statue of the poet stood on his writing desk in Craigie House, and echoes of Goethe’s voice resonate throughout Longfellow’s writings, from the ‘Schoolmaster’ series to Kavanagh.52 In his introduction to Goethe’s poetry in The Poets and Poetry of Europe, Longfellow celebrates Goethe’s identity as ‘vielseitig, or many-sided’, but also cites Goethe’s expression of devotion to his country, which recalls that of Longfellow’s ‘Schoolmaster’. ‘If a poet has employed himself during a long life in combating pernicious prejudices, overcoming narrow views, elevating the intellect, and purifying the taste of the country,’ Goethe asks, ‘what could he possibly do better than this? How could he be more patriotic?’53 Longfellow appears to have modelled his own understanding of his academic vocation of ‘elevating the intellect’ of the nation on Goethe’s own. Longfellow devoted more time in his lectures to both Goethe and Dante than to any other authors, and he spent four years translating Dante’s Divine Comedy, an endeavour that combined artistic enrichment with pedagogical purpose. Dante’s ambition to take account of the entire globe in one multi-volume work surely influenced Longfellow’s production

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of poetic anthologies, as well as his less successful tripartite epic Christus: A Mystery (1872). Longfellow wrote admiringly of the capaciousness of the Divine Comedy, and echoed Dante’s ultimate image in Paradiso of God as the great text of the ‘universe’ in which all elements are ‘Bound up with love together in one volume’ (Longfellow, Writings, 11:161). As he introduces the poet to the readers of his anthology, Longfellow borrows phrases that he had first used in his Dante lectures at Harvard in 1838.54 He celebrates Dante’s ability to evoke the entirety of divine knowledge in literary form, as he reflects, ‘Upon this slender, golden thread hangs this universe of a poem; in which things visible and invisible have their appointed place, and the spheres and populous stars revolve harmonious about their centre.’55 While Dante had mastered the vernacular of his ‘nation’, or rather, his region of Tuscany, his greatest achievement in Longfellow’s eyes is his use of that language to capture in poetry the vast expanse of the ‘visible and invisible’ universe. Dante showed Longfellow the ways in which literature could become universal by illuminating a broad range of emotional and religious feeling. As Lino Pertile suggests, Longfellow’s translation of the Divine Comedy was ultimately an act of literary devotion and personal redemption rather than another effort in the service of didactic ends.56 Even Longfellow’s early lectures on Dante had been, in some sense, acts of devotion, for as he told his students, ‘I lay . . . [my hand] upon . . . [the poem] with reverence; indeed with so great reverence, that it amounts almost to unwillingness.’57 In his sonnets on the process of translating the Divine Comedy, Longfellow displays tremendous humility, casting himself in the role of supplicant in the ‘cathedral’ of Dante’s imagination.58 Longfellow’s focus in these sonnets is not the national character of Dante’s work, but rather its roots in universal human experiences of ‘agonies’, ‘exultations’, ‘despair’, ‘tenderness’, and ‘hate’. No longer a teacher instructing willing listeners in literature, Longfellow is himself a student of Dante’s poetic skill and a believer in his ‘miracle of song’. In the later phase of Longfellow’s career, the universal character of emotion emerges as a distinct counterweight to the nationally inflected academic discourse that he valued in his years as a professor. By 1840, Longfellow stops noting his Harvard courses as creative output in his careful ‘Chronological list of writings and lectures’, and he begins to speak more frequently in his journals of his family affairs, his literary friendships, and his own poetic progress than of his teaching.59 As he shifts his focus from the ‘intellectual preeminence’ of nations to the intricate terrain of the human heart, Longfellow lays himself bare to the charges of overt sentimentalism by which he is now most often judged.

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Without a more complete knowledge of the scholarly interests and pedagogical goals in which his later writing was rooted, however, we cannot fully understand Longfellow either as a poet or as a maker of the very academic discourses and institutional structures of the modern university that his professorial descendants would eventually use to undermine his literary authority.

‘Universality Is Better’: The Emotional Landscape of Evangeline In the 1840s, Longfellow engaged in a lively critical debate over the value of nationality and universality in literature. The emotional tenor of Evangeline represents a unique line of argument that allowed Longfellow to combine some of the conventions of literary nationalism with a broader concern for the topography of human feeling that he had inherited from writers such as Dante. In his ‘textbook’ works of the 1830s and in his anthologies of poetry, Longfellow developed an ability to recreate the world in print and to deliver the tools of a cosmopolitan education to the general public. In Evangeline, he abandons this macrocosmic literary model in order to explore an individual mind and its encounter with worldly experience. He achieves universality not by reconstituting the globe in all its national parts, but instead by mapping the inner geography of the spirit. In this study of Evangeline, I contend that Longfellow manipulates the imaginary geographical space of his poem to counter the expansionist agenda of literary nationalists such as the Young Americans. Instead of writing a narrative that upholds the principles of ‘manifest destiny’ or even ‘manifest domesticity’, an equally aggressive ideology identified by Amy Kaplan, Longfellow turns the recognisably American landscape of the poem inward, rendering geographical features as landmarks of Evangeline’s own emotional and spiritual development.60 In January of 1847, Longfellow was frustrated in his attempts to finish writing Evangeline by his duties as a teacher and head of household. Nonetheless, he found time to ponder in his journal the matter of an American ‘national literature’.61 He wonders, ‘Does it mean anything?’ Following the line of reasoning that he had used in his study of European national literatures, he assesses the distinctive elements of American literature as he predicts, ‘We have, or shall have, a composite one, embracing French, Spanish, Irish, English, Scotch, and German peculiarities. Whoever has within himself most of these is our truly national writer. In other words, whoever is most universal is also most national.’ Longfellow seizes upon the American paradox of ‘composite’ identity, outlined by Fuller in her 1846 essay ‘American Literature’ and expanded upon by

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Whitman in Leaves of Grass. At this moment, Longfellow is still thinking in academic terms, for his notion of ‘universal’ writing depends upon a fusion of different literary nationalities in one single text. This brief meditation forms the basis of one of Longfellow’s most widely quoted statements on the subject of nationality in literature: a passage in his novel Kavanagh (1849), in which Churchill, an uncannily familiar cosmopolitan village schoolmaster, confronts the exuberant magazine editor Hathaway and his vision of the American literary frontier. Longfellow echoes his own journal entry in Churchill’s speech, but by the time he wrote Kavanagh, his idea of what constituted literary universality had changed from multinational writing to a more abstract notion of shared emotional values. In response to Hathaway’s assertion that a truly American literature should be both geographically ‘commensurate’ with the landscape and stylistically ‘shaggy and unshorn’, Churchill argues: Nationality is a good thing to a certain extent, but universality is better. All that is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in them, but what is universal. Their roots are in their native soil; but their branches wave in the unpatriotic air, that speaks the same language unto all men, and their leaves shine with the illimitable light that pervades all lands. Let us throw all the windows open; let us admit the light and air on all sides; that we may look towards the four corners of the heavens, and not always in the same direction. (Longfellow, Poems, 754–5)

Churchill’s concept of ‘universality’ does not discard the idea of ‘nationality’ altogether, but holds it to a higher standard. He attempts to move the discussion of national literature above ground and into the ‘unpatriotic air’, claimed by no government and recognisable as no one’s territory. In place of Hathaway’s insistently national language, Churchill proposes a literature that ‘speaks the same language unto all men’, invoking a transparency of meaning that needs no translation. According to Churchill, literature should belong to a human commonwealth rather than a particular nationstate.62 He suggests that writers and their readers should focus on ‘the four corners of the heavens’ rather than on a certain national ‘direction’. In this case, that direction is Hathaway’s dogged movement westward, which is surely a reference to the Young Americans’ credo of ‘manifest destiny’.63 By invoking the ‘heavens’, Churchill clarifies his universalist intentions. Universality in literature can be achieved by focusing on the mind and the spirit, Churchill argues, rather than celebrating geography. He challenges Hathaway in earnest as he asserts, ‘Literature is rather an image of the spiritual world, than of the physical, is it not? – of the internal,

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rather than the external. Mountains, lakes, and rivers are, after all, only its scenery and decorations, not its substance and essence.’ In Churchill’s words, Longfellow offers a glimpse of his own philosophy of composition. While the evocation of place can be a literary achievement in itself, the ‘substance and essence’ of a work must be judged by its representation of the intangible ‘spiritual’ dimensions of that world. Longfellow himself may not have been completely persuaded by Churchill’s argument, however. Lewis describes this scene as a self-debate on Longfellow’s part, noting a certain ‘wistful sincerity’ in Hathaway’s nationalist pleas.64 It would indeed be a mistake to dissociate Longfellow completely from the project of literary nation-building, despite his substantial critical distance from his early fascination with ‘native scenery’ and its influence on the work of American authors.65 He did not avoid national themes in his writing; in fact, The Song of Hiawatha (1855), The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858), and the patriotic account of ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’ in Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863) can all be read as Longfellow’s answers to the call for a definitively original national literature. Evangeline, on the other hand, occupies a unique position in Longfellow’s ‘national’ canon. In its search for origins, the poem looks not to British history or ‘native’ legend but to the story of a people whom few in Longfellow’s time would have included in the citizenry of the United States (although, thanks in part to him, the Acadians developed an American identity as Cajuns). As he confronts the geographical rhetoric of literary nationalism in Evangeline and again in Kavanagh, Longfellow insists that the ‘spiritual’ elements of a work matter more than the ‘physical’ materials out of which it is constructed. ‘[S]cenery’, he argues, is not ‘essence’, and mere location should not be interpreted as the key to a work’s literary significance. Edward L. Widmer has noted that advocates of ‘manifest destiny’ pushed writers to prioritise setting over thematic elements in their works, turning them into collaborators in the expansionist effort.66 By making Hathaway’s forcibly western literature seem ridiculous, Longfellow issues a direct challenge to Young Americans such as Evert Duyckinck and Cornelius Mathews, whose journal Arcturus shared the nationalist agenda of Hathaway’s fictional Niagara. By engaging with their project in such concrete terms, Longfellow ended up becoming a pawn in the debates that split the New York literary establishment into two camps in the 1840s. As fervent nationalists, Duyckinck, Mathews, and O’Sullivan were more likely to side with Poe and to imply that Longfellow’s muse was imitative, not original, but their opponents went out of their way to celebrate Longfellow’s ‘universality’ rather than to consider his nationality. Lewis Gaylord Clark, the editor of the Knickerbocker, fought against the

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democratic impulses of the Young Americans, and he used Longfellow’s poems as representative examples of the culturally conservative values that he thought literature should uphold.67 In Clark’s opinion, Longfellow’s ‘universality’ stemmed from his mastery of ‘the poetry of the heart and the affections’: precisely those concerns that Longfellow himself had given Churchill to defend. On the one hand, Clark is correct in identifying Longfellow’s broad appeal to readers as a matter of moral intent and emotional sympathy. Reviewers continually praised Longfellow for rooting his poetry ‘in the heart of our moral humanity’, a heart that they believed was a universal constant that defied ‘all changes of time and all diversities of condition’.68 On the other hand, claiming Longfellow as a supporter of conservative politics is a mistake on Clark’s part. Longfellow’s disagreement with the Young Americans is based partly on difference of political opinion – he represents the ‘Whig-Bostonian cultural matrix’ that the New York Democrats fought to dismantle – but he is not as conservative a thinker as some critics still imply.69 Longfellow’s cosmopolitan pedagogy stems from an imagination more progressive than reactionary, and his ability to combine the agendas of literary nationalism and universalism in his poetry and prose establishes his credentials as a moderate in an age of political extremes. A number of scholars have attempted to claim Evangeline as a political statement on behalf of particular causes, including abolition and opposition to the Mexican War, but the poem’s political flexibility reveals the extent to which Longfellow is working from within its lines to balance competing interests and to find common emotional ground on which readers could encounter both his characters and one another without feeling the sting of partisanship.70 At the start of Evangeline, Longfellow introduces his characters and the elements of their environment as mythic, universalised archetypes.71 The poem’s setting is ‘primeval’, and, like the Upper Midwest of The Song of Hiawatha, Longfellow’s Canadian geography draws heavily on his study of Norse saga (Poems, 57). The trees ‘[s]tand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic, / Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms’. The Acadians live in a deliberately prehistoric, unrecoverable world, and Longfellow portrays the village of Grand-Pré as a prelapsarian community governed by moral absolutes. Its citizens are secure in their ‘peace and contentment’, and in their ‘simpl[icity]’ ‘dwelt together in love . . . / Dwelt in the love of God and of man’ (Poems, 59). By insisting on the Acadians’ purity of spirit and their distance from the ‘tyran[ny], and envy’ of modern politics, Longfellow intends to make their story representative of the origins of all people. Although they retain some habits from the ‘olden time’ in France, they do not become a recognisable ‘nation’ until

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they are challenged by another nation’s army and exiled from their homeland (Poems, 60, 86). Evangeline’s story has been adopted by Acadians around the globe as a fixture of their ‘ethnic identity’, but their ancestors are given few distinctive traits in Longfellow’s poem, thereby breaking the pattern of his aggressive pursuit of elements of literary nationality in his more academically oriented works of the 1830s and 1840s.72 Just as their compatriots embody goodness in the abstract, the lovers Evangeline Bellefontaine and Gabriel Lajeunesse function as essentialised types of man and woman: He was a valiant youth, and his face, like the face of the morning, Gladdened the earth with its light, and ripened thought into action. She was a woman now, with the heart and hopes of a woman. ‘Sunshine of Saint Eulalie’ was she called; for that was the sunshine Which, as the farmers believed, would load their orchards with apples; She, too, would bring to her husband’s house delight and abundance, Filling it with love and the ruddy faces of children. (Longfellow, Poems 63)

Evangeline emerges from this passage as a goddess of fertility, promising ‘delight and abundance’ to both the landscape and the home. Gabriel serves as her male counterpoint, taking charge of ‘thought’ and ‘action’ while she manages the ‘heart and hopes’ of her people. As in The Song of Hiawatha, which starts with the assertion that ‘Every human heart is human,’ Longfellow makes his moral priorities clear from the very beginning of this poem (Poems, 143). He identifies Evangeline as the poem’s moral centre, and urges readers to ‘believe in affection that hopes, and endures, and is patient’ and ‘in the beauty and strength of woman’s devotion’ as they contemplate her life (Poems, 57). It is Evangeline’s task in the narrative to feel ‘abundan[tly]’, and to extend that feeling outward to the world that she encounters. When the fortunes of the Acadians turn sour, she responds immediately, and her emotional turmoil is reflected in the landscape. The narrator remarks, ‘Ah! on her spirit within a deeper shadow had fallen, / And from the fields of her soul a fragrance celestial ascended, – / Charity, meekness, love, and hope, and forgiveness, and patience!’ (Poems, 78). Evangeline is a creature comprised of moral elements: she has in her possession all the universal lessons that the poem intends to teach. They will reappear again and again, often as she contemplates the physical landscape, whose ‘broad ambrosial meadows’ quickly fade into the background. Through this forceful juxtaposition of emotional wisdom and the rawness of nature,

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Longfellow makes a claim to the spiritual ‘essence’ of experience that foreshadows Churchill’s, and he attempts to drown out the voices that cry for territorial expansion untempered by spiritual growth. As the narrative progresses, Longfellow borrows from Hathaway, as well as Churchill, maintaining a balance between nationalist poetics and universalist values. When the Acadians realise that their village is being burned by the British invaders, they respond fearfully: Then rose a sound of dread, such as startles the sleeping encampments Far in the western prairies or forests that skirt the Nebraska, When the wild horses affrighted sweep by with the speed of the whirlwind, Or the loud bellowing herds of buffaloes rush to the river. (Poems, 84)

The guiding metaphor here bears a striking resemblance to Hathaway’s exuberant invocation of a ‘national literature . . . that shall shake the earth, like a herd of buffaloes thundering over the prairies!’ (Poems, 755). While it would be tempting to conclude that Longfellow lapses into nationalist rhetoric at this particular moment in the text, he actually orchestrates a more complex sequence of geographical and emotional displacements that trouble the language of American literary expansion.73 The image of a buffalo stampede is used to evoke a feeling of ‘dread’ rather than a moment of national triumph. Instead of anchoring it in the ‘western prairies or forests’ of the United States, Longfellow applies the metaphor to Atlantic Canada, arguing for its place in a larger transcontinental imaginary. The poem envisions the landscape of the American West as an inherently threatening space, for once she leaves Grand-Pré, Evangeline faces a ‘desert’ full of ‘hopes long dead and abandoned’ rather than a future of endless national possibility (Poems, 86). Longfellow refuses to take human emotion out of his poetic landscape; it is always ‘[m]arked by the graves of those who had sorrowed and suffered’, and never becomes an uncomplicated field for the exercise of national romance. In keeping with Longfellow’s emphasis on unchanging moral absolutes, the emotional centres of Evangeline’s journey are those moments in which she stands still. Gabriel runs from his emotional distress by staying in motion, and seeks ‘in the Western wilds oblivion of self and of sorrow’ (Poems, 92). Like his father Basil, he is bent on plundering the land by ‘follow[ing] the Indian trails to the Ozark Mountains, / Hunting for furs in the forests, on rivers trapping the beaver’, but in his expansionist projects, he fails to accumulate any spiritual wealth. In her own encounter with the frontier, Evangeline contemplates the ‘measureless prairie’ and draws from it both spiritual strength (‘the thoughts of God in the heavens’)

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and aesthetic satisfaction (the ‘fireflies [that] / Gleamed and floated away in mingled and infinite numbers’) (Poems, 101). Her experience of the landscape reinforces the emotional constants of the poem, and in an episode of pure moral fantasy on Longfellow’s part, the prairie itself actually speaks those lessons to Evangeline. The narrator overhears and transcribes the conversation: ‘ “Patience!” whispered the oaks from oracular caverns of darkness: / And, from the moonlit meadow, a sigh responded, “Tomorrow!” ’ At no other moment in the text does Longfellow make more explicit to the reader his use of the American landscape as a means to his ultimate moral end of teaching ‘[p]atience and abnegation of self, and devotion to others’ (Poems, 111). Those who lauded the poem as the first epic to capture the unique geographical features of the continent missed Longfellow’s main point in their own pursuit of a nationalist agenda.74 While Longfellow does indeed devote significant poetic space to descriptions of the western landscape, at times in language that the fictional Hathaway and his Young American colleagues would have celebrated – ‘jagged, deep ravines’, ‘swift-running rivers’, and ‘wondrous, beautiful prairies’ – like Churchill, he shows that national rhetoric can only go so far in a poem’s quest for universal ‘essence’ (Poems, 102–3). For its apparent fusion of ‘male’ ambition and ‘female’ feeling, Evangeline was hailed by a contemporary reviewer as ‘the most perfect of domestic epics, the Odyssey of the nineteenth century’.75 Kaplan’s recent study of works by Catherine Beecher and Sarah Josepha Hale has problematised the ‘domestic’ concerns of sentimental writing by revealing their active involvement in the imperialist project of ‘manifest destiny’ both at home and abroad.76 If Evangeline is truly a ‘domestic epic’, then some might argue that it too falls prey to the misguided effort to ‘civilise’ the frontiers of American life at mid-century. Unlike Kaplan’s examples, however, the narrative of Evangeline reveals its suspicion of expansionist goals and its desire to dissolve rather than to reinforce borders between cultures. When Evangeline encounters an Indian woman on her journey, she seeks emotional communion over the shared experience of lost love rather than the pleasure of colonising a native ‘other’. Evangeline and the woman exchange their stories with one another: Then at the door of Evangeline’s tent she sat and repeated Slowly, with soft, low voice and the charm of her Indian accent, All the tale of her love, with its pleasures, and pains, and reverses. Much Evangeline wept at the tale, and to know that another Hapless heart like her own had loved and had been disappointed.

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Moved to the depths of her soul by pity and woman’s compassion, Yet in her sorrow pleased that one who had suffered was near her, She in turn related her love and all its disasters. (Poems, 104–5)

In previous works, Longfellow had used storytelling as a marker of national tradition, but here, as in the ‘Picture-Writing’ canto of Hiawatha, he portrays it as a common human practice. Instead of highlighting cultural difference, the Indian woman’s story proves that her feelings are exactly ‘like [Evangeline’s] own’. The two characters are tied together across national boundaries by their ‘woman’s compassion’ and their emotional ‘depths of soul’, elements that Longfellow considers universally relevant and central to the poem as a whole. It is no accident that the Indian woman’s ‘features / Wore deep traces of sorrow, and patience as great as her sorrow’, for she acts as a mirror for Evangeline, who must eventually learn the same lessons of ‘patience’ as her native counterpart. In this cathartic episode, emotional expression acts as a counterforce to the physical movement of the narrative westward; it literally stops Evangeline in her tracks, allowing her room to make spiritual progress and dealing another blow to the insistent push of ‘manifest destiny’. By choosing a woman as the protagonist of his ‘domestic epic’, Longfellow strategically ‘cross-gender[s]’ his poetic project in order to temper the agenda of masculine literary nationalism with his vision of a universalised feminine sensibility.77 Evangeline’s encounter with a fellow ‘[h]apless heart’ serves as one of many spiritual ‘landmarks’ in the poem. At these particular points, the universalist values that Longfellow intends to convey rise to the surface of the text from the depths where they usually lie ‘hidden’, reminding the reader that there is more to the poem’s setting and its background figures than the monumental ‘diorama’ from which Longfellow drew his geographical details.78 When Evangeline returns from the West and settles in Philadelphia, a community whose traditional ways ‘recalled the past, the old Acadian country’, Longfellow makes the symbolic role of the poem’s natural landscape even more tangible for his readers (Poems, 110). Once she has finally given up her search for Gabriel, Evangeline gains a new perspective on the spiritual terrain of her life’s journey: As from the mountain’s top the rainy mists of the morning Roll away, and afar we behold the landscape below us, Sun-illumined, with shining rivers and cities and hamlets, So fell the mists from her mind, and she saw the world far below her, Dark no longer, but all illumined with love; and the pathway Which she had climbed so far, lying smooth and fair in the distance.

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The imaginary ‘landscape’ depicted here serves the metaphorical purpose of ‘illumin[ating]’ how Evangeline’s relationship to the physical world has changed over the course of the poem. Although it precedes Evangeline’s own vision of the ‘world’, the landscape dominated by a ‘mountain’ and ‘shining rivers’ is quickly eclipsed by a far more abstract panorama of ‘love’ and Evangeline’s ‘pathway’ through its wilds. In this moment, Longfellow reveals the allegorical character of his poetic landscape and emphasises its essential contribution to the narrative of Evangeline’s spiritual growth. Like Churchill’s ‘universal’ poets, Evangeline has transcended the contentious terrain of the national landscape and basks in the ‘illimitable light that pervades all lands’ (Poems, 755). Her route to that vantage point may have taken her through the actual American wilderness, but her ultimate destination is the moral high ground that she treads as an anonymous ‘Sister of Mercy’, not a particular location in national space (Poems, 111). Longfellow’s use of the geographical details of the American frontier as tools in his construction of a universalist poetics prefigures one of the emotional high-water marks of his literary career: a sonnet written in remembrance of his wife Fanny. ‘The Cross of Snow’, a poem published posthumously, evokes an image of ‘a mountain in the distant West / That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines / Displays a cross of snow upon its side’ (Poems, 671). In his perpetual grief, the poet compares himself to that mountain: ‘Such is the cross I wear upon my breast / These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes / And seasons, changeless since the day she died.’ Although Longfellow’s poetic landscape is rooted in American soil, the poem itself is much more than an instance of national literary production. Its portrayal of loss is at once intensely personal and immediately universal. Most who read the poem know the story of Fanny’s death, but its lines evoke other losses and become, through Longfellow’s remarkably subtle power, those archetypal expressions of grief shared by all. Never one to waste a compliment, Henry James marvelled at ‘the way in which [Longfellow’s] “European” culture and his native kept house together’.79 Although James’s metaphor of ‘ke[eping] house’ captures in clever terms the familial relationship between the ‘native’ and the ‘foreign’ in Longfellow’s work, reducing Longfellow’s poetic domain to a transatlantic literary fireside seems inaccurate in light of his evident ambition to be a poet who transcended nationality. Like Emerson, whose preferred literary element is an ‘old largeness’ of imagination, Longfellow attempts to elevate both the teaching and writing of national literature to a higher plane as he pursues a Dantean vision of a poetic universe bound together by love.

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CHAPTER 2

FULLER’S CONVERSATIONAL JOURNALISM: NEW YORK, LONDON, ROME

When Margaret Fuller left New York for Europe in August of 1846, many of her contemporaries assumed that she had abandoned the United States permanently and that her dispatches from London, Paris, and revolutionary Rome signalled her turn away from a national agenda in literature and criticism. The fact that Fuller herself never returned to American shores has led scholars to conclude that the body of her journalistic work overseas, like her physical body, could not be ‘repatriated’.1 In this chapter, I contend that Fuller’s continuous participation in the work of making American culture at home and abroad marks her as a writer who was at once emphatically national and deliberately transnational. By practising a form of journalism that she described as ‘conversational’, she modelled for her readers the kind of creative transnational exchange that she believed could strengthen American democracy. The very criteria that have been used since the 1840s to exclude Fuller from the American literary canon – her commitment to foreign literatures, her belief in the moral value of a cosmopolitan viewpoint, and her faith in journalism as a means to reach the entire nation at once – argue most strongly for her reinscription into a recognisably American tradition of internationalist thought. In his attempt to exorcise the ‘Margaret-ghost’ that haunted him throughout his career, Henry James assessed Fuller’s credentials as a cosmopolitan figure fit to inhabit one of his transatlantic novels. With finely tuned historical condescension, James reflects, ‘we ask ourselves how, possibly, in our own luminous age, she would have affected us on the stage of the “world,” or as a candidate, if so we may put it, for the cosmopolite crown.’2 James implies that Fuller is not cosmopolitan enough; despite ‘her genius for conversation’, she risks being a ‘formidable bore’ along the

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lines of his bumbling journalist Henrietta Stackpole in The Portrait of a Lady. James may not have been convinced of Fuller’s cultural sophistication, but her cosmopolitanism in fact ran in a deeper and more philosophical vein than his own. Ralph Waldo Emerson, an ally closer in time and space to Fuller, introduced her to Thomas Carlyle as ‘our citizen of the world by quite special diploma’.3 His words identify Fuller with the Stoic ideal of the kosmou politês, or ‘world citizen’, a person who values his or her allegiance to a global human community above ties to a particular locality.4 By focusing on the political implications of Fuller’s cosmopolitanism, Emerson places her in the company of thinkers who use larger categories of judgement than those limited to a geographical territory or a local government. Emerson’s letter to Carlyle recognises the provocatively worldly nature of Fuller’s relationship to American national culture at mid-century. Although problematic for many of her peers, and even more so for staunchly nationalist critics such as Perry Miller, who wrote Fuller off ‘as an eccentric, as no true voice of American civilization’, Fuller’s global consciousness has been a matter of increasing interest to scholars of a more transnational bent.5 Yet, investigations that focus primarily on Fuller’s cosmopolitan interests as an editor and translator have not accounted for the explicitly political agenda that motivated her journalistic work for the New-York Tribune, or for the roots of that writing in one of her earliest professional endeavours: her series of ‘Conversations’ for a group of educated Boston women that included the Peabody sisters and Caroline Healey Dall. Drawing the United States into ‘conversation’ with other countries meant more to Fuller than simply promoting the reading of foreign authors. It meant goading her readers to transform society on a grand scale through imaginative cooperation with other nations. In her Tribune columns and her later dispatches from Europe, she attempted to exert what Bell Gale Chevigny has called a ‘centrifugal’ force on the American mind.6 Fuller did so in order to push the nation away from what she felt were faulty behaviours and policies, and to lift it above its entanglements in slavery and an imperialistic war on the Mexican border. The socialist politics that gave Fuller’s journalistic dialogues such urgency shocked even like-minded friends, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who called her ‘one of the out and out Reds and scorners of grades of society’.7 Once she arrived in Europe, Fuller’s political leanings and linguistic fluencies facilitated conversations and friendships with such radicals as Giuseppe Mazzini and Adam Mickiewicz, who both became close allies of Fuller’s as they led nationalist revolutions in Italy and Poland for the sake of ‘humanity’ in general. Along with Karl Marx, who followed in Fuller’s footsteps as foreign correspondent for the Tribune from 1852 to

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1862, these revolutionaries welcome Fuller in a new conversational circle that widens far beyond transcendentalist Concord, intellectual Boston, and the bordered United States. The conversational legacy that she bequeaths to Marx in particular holds great interest for this chapter, as well as weighty historical significance, as it is through the conversations that Fuller conducts in print that she creates a journalistic precedent for the dialectical method that makes Marx’s thought so distinctive. Although a detailed comparison of Fuller and Marx’s writings lies beyond the scope of this chapter, I mean to suggest that Fuller’s efforts to contextualise the cultural development of the United States within a global framework and her cultivation of a critical, outside perspective on American national life during her years abroad are shared journalistic practices that bring her into direct, if not personal relationship with Marx.8 These dialogic habits of mind, I argue, establish Fuller’s credentials as one of the leading transnational thinkers of her age. Fuller’s European allies supported her pursuit of national renewal by cosmopolitan means: a strategy in keeping with Immanuel Kant’s vision of the corrective offered to individual nations by the world community as a whole.9 Fuller’s cosmopolitanism was influenced not only by Kant’s Enlightenment model of a federal world government within which individual nation-states would keep each other in check, which he outlined in ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784), but also by simultaneously nationalist and globally conscious contemporaries such as Mazzini as well. In their recent assessments of the cosmopolitan impulses of this period, Andrew Taylor and Laura Dassow Walls bring another, more contemporary philosopher into this conversation: Kwame Anthony Appiah. Appiah’s concept of ‘partial cosmopolitanism’ speaks directly to the nineteenth century’s investment in grounded nationalism and its simultaneously developing discourse of universal human rights.10 I believe that Fuller is precisely – and presciently – this kind of ‘partial cosmopolitan’, for her national critiques are charged with loyalty to the founding principles of the United States at the same time that they will the entire world – and the nations within it, especially her own – to live up to those standards of freedom and equality. She thus exhorts her contemporaries to become ‘cosmopolitan patriots’ without fearing a contradiction in terms. Although it was Emerson who named her a ‘citizen of the world’, Fuller did not hesitate to claim her right to US citizenship and to cultivate an additional allegiance to revolutionary Rome, effectively rendering herself a dual citizen of the United States and the short-lived Roman Republic. Barred from what Andreas Fahrmeir identifies as ‘formal’ and

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‘political’ types of citizenship by US laws that restricted the vote to ‘adult, settled, respectable white men’, Fuller, much like her fellow journalist Frederick Douglass, who was also excluded from citizenship, but on the basis of racial identity rather than gender, placed herself in the vanguard of a movement to redefine citizenship according to the standards set by the US Constitution.11 As Fuller asserted her own freedom of speech in the professional context of the freedom of the press, and more crucially, as she assumed moral responsibility for the fate of the nation, she became a US citizen in theory even as she was excluded from that legal status in fact.12 Fuller’s citizenship was therefore self-generated, self-authorising, and transnationally constituted, as she ironically learned how to be a more effective American citizen during her years abroad. In Rome, as I explain later in this chapter, Fuller became ‘Cittadina Margherita Ossoli’: a key player in what Walls identifies as a Kantian ‘planetary, cosmopolitical “league” ’ of women who intended to ameliorate the world.13 As Fuller assumes this radical dual identity, she uses her journalistic platform to argue for the full inclusion of women and minorities in the American public sphere. At the same time, she looks beyond the limits of the singular nationalities of her era to our global present, in which, as Peter Kivisto and Thomas Faist note, a ‘dramatic increase in international mobility, marriage, and commerce has elevated the number of dual citizens, and with it the growing call for accepting dual citizenship’.14 Even as she moves through Europe, partners with an Italian man, and transacts intellectual business in her dispatches, Fuller grasps the sense of moral responsibility that is the hallmark of good citizenship and cosmopolitan practice. In her conversational journalism, she speaks to the world.

Theorising Conversational Journalism By accepting Horace Greeley’s offer of an editorial position at the NewYork Tribune in 1844, Fuller moved herself out of the relatively narrow range of activity sanctioned by her Boston and Concord circles. While she had managed to widen those circles significantly by initiating such globally minded projects as her ‘Conversations’ series (1839–44) and the publication of The Dial (1840–2), she felt restricted by obligations to family and friends and sought a greater sphere of influence beyond those relations. In her 1845 letters, Fuller writes of her desire to shape the course of public life. To her brother Richard, she explains her need for a new intellectual focus by asserting, ‘I have given almost all my young energies to personal relations. I no longer feel inclined to this, and wish to share and impel the general stream of thought.’15 As she moved away from restrictive ‘personal

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relations’, she left behind many of the conversations, both professional and informal, that dominated her life through 1844. She also traded up from The Dial, a fairly obscure periodical with limited and local circulation (although hardly provincial content), to the Tribune, a nationally regarded newspaper that she boasted would ensure her at least ‘half a hundred thousand readers’.16 By the early 1850s, in fact, the Tribune would reach more than 200,000 readers, making it the most widely circulated newspaper in the world.17 Fuller turned from domestic life and from those who were sceptical of her ambitions to a profession that promised her a ‘great field’ of endeavour, far more infinite in prospect than the one her scholarly occupations could have offered. Fuller’s comments mark, in one sense, a definitive break in her thinking, and a choice in favour of the ‘national criticism’ that Emerson rejected in ‘The Poet’, but, in another sense, a direct continuation of her old habits of conversational exchange in a new guise.18 By imagining her interlocutor as the entire nation rather than simply one of its regions or some of its residents, Fuller deliberately chose to become a national writer with a cosmopolitan conscience. Her journalistic choices were influenced by the intellectual practices of her Boston days as she combined her Goethean internationalism with the charge of educating the American reading public. When Fuller counselled a nation shamed by what she believed were the serious faults of materialism, selfishness, and exploitation, she did so by comparing it to other countries that showed the United States ways in which it might improve its own democratic conditions. Although Greeley supported her transnational efforts, she quickly ran afoul of the nativist Young Americans, who sought to develop a national culture independent of foreign influences. Where others saw a conflict of interest, Fuller perceived the potential for synchronicity. All nations, she argued, pursue common ‘human’ goals. In her first two years of work for the Tribune, Fuller developed a theory of journalism’s role in the unceasing effort of building a nation. She distinguished between the professional roles of the creative writer, who pursues aesthetic ends, and that of the journalist, who participates in the ‘great work of popular education’ by addressing a large audience with specific political or social goals in mind.19 Fuller intended to persuade her readers of the rightness of certain causes, and as she grew more radical in her opinions, her writing became even more didactic in tone. Her penchant for pedagogical rhetoric fed into Greeley’s agenda for the newspaper, which supported so many reform initiatives that it became known in its time as ‘The Great Moral Organ’.20 In her Tribune articles, Fuller extended the lessons that she had begun teaching in her Boston ‘Conversations’. Instead

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of explicating Greek mythology and European philosophy, she used living texts, calling her readers’ attention to social conditions in New York and the perils of American imperialism in the Mexican War. She expected that this conversation in print would expand readers’ minds even as it helped her to understand more clearly the nature of her own beliefs. Journalism, like literature, Fuller said, should be ‘a means of mutual interpretation’.21 From this interpretive process, in which the journalist concentrates on ‘diffusing knowledge and sowing the seeds of thought’, should come the ‘infinite harvest’ promised by successful reform.22 The journalist acts in the quotidian present, according to Fuller, in order to affect the collective future. Fuller outlines her theory of conversational journalism in ‘American Literature’, an essay written to enhance the nationalist credentials of Papers on Literature and Art (1846), a collection of reviews published by Evert A. Duyckinck in Wiley & Putnam’s Library of American Books series. Following her disparaging observation that the United States had yet to produce any national literature of note (a statement that spurred a young Whitman to poetic action), Fuller asserts that journalism would be, in the meantime, ‘the most important part of our literature’.23 By expressing her preference for journalism’s instantly accessible format, she distanced herself from her transcendentalist colleagues, who advocated patient and contemplative self-culture. Combining rhetorical prowess with political conscience, journalists wield the power of the printed word as ‘the only efficient instrument for the general education of the people’. Fuller contends that, in her own work as a journalist, she has found a more ‘efficient’ medium for the communication of fact and opinion than the small-group discussion of her Boston days: Newspaper writing is next door to conversation, and should be conducted on the same principles. It has this advantage: we address, not our neighbour, who forces us to remember his limitations and prejudices, but the ideal presence of human nature as we feel it ought to be and trust it will be. We address America rather than Americans.

Journalism changes both the scale and character of debate, Fuller argues, as it reaches out to a larger audience and transforms the body of the reader or listener from a physically bounded ‘presence’ into an abstract and expansive ‘ideal’. As the promise of its wide circulation is so immediate, the newspaper column provides a forum for dialogue between an individual and Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined community’ of the nation: an opportunity for Fuller to correct her readers’ ‘prejudices’ while teasing

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out what she believed ‘America’ truly ‘ought to be’.24 She ties her goals for national growth to universal expressions of ‘human nature’, laying the groundwork for the fusion of patriotism and cosmopolitan humanitarianism that emerges in her response to the European revolutions. In Fuller’s cosmopolitan mindset, ‘America’ is an expansive ‘ideal’ that can be pursued by all regardless of nationality, for it is an expression of the utmost in ‘human nature’. As a journalist, Fuller is concerned not merely with reporting facts as they are, but rather with exerting her imagination through cultural commentary to reshape those facts into new forms. In essence, her journalism is creative work. Like a conversation between ‘neighbor[s]’, the dialogue that Fuller attempts to create in her journalism is an explicitly ‘mutual’ effort that requires intellectual exchange not only between writer and reader, but between nations as well. At the moment in which Fuller begins a conversation with the nation itself – or, more accurately, the disembodied ‘ideal’ of ‘America’ towards which she feels it should strive – she situates it in a broadly international ‘human’ context. Nation-building becomes a collaborative effort undertaken by citizens of a particular country in cooperation with a larger global community. As Fuller addresses the nation, she sees it in perpetual relation to other models of cultural and societal achievement, highlighting both the strengths of the United States and the country’s shortcomings. Fuller’s dialogic practice of interspersing commentary on foreign publications and events with assessments of American progress points to a significant dynamic that runs through her journalistic writing: an interdependence of seemingly opposite interests. In the terms that define Marx’s dialectical method, we also might identify this practice as Fuller’s assertion of ‘contradiction’, or what Bertell Ollman claims is Marx’s similar sense of how historical ‘processes actually interpenetrate’ and signal their ‘mutual dependence’.25 On this methodological point, Fuller appears to be unique, as several scholars have observed that it is Fuller’s propensity for debate that distinguishes her thought most definitively from that of Emerson, who favours solitary intellectual progress and ‘self-reliance’.26 Andrew Taylor interprets Fuller’s journalistic style as a form of internalised opposition, noting, ‘If the newspaper could re-enforce cultural and national positions, Fuller’s work in this form often sets out to disrupt them – or at least to demonstrate their constructed nature.’27 I contend that Fuller’s ‘conversational’ approach to journalism has both stylistic originality and political edge, for it encourages the productive juxtaposition of ostensibly diverging viewpoints and seeks common ground, whether linguistic or transnational. By the untimely end of Fuller’s career, her official Tribune dispatches speak in language that

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mirrors and often overlaps that of her private correspondence, demonstrating how far her habits of dialogue had moved into the public sphere.28

Engaging America in Print Conversation During her two years as literary editor of the Tribune, Fuller addressed subjects that pushed her thought outward beyond the boundaries of the scholarly universe that she had occupied in New England. Her reviews encompassed both textual criticism and social commentary, and many of her articles bore a stronger resemblance to editorials on the state of the nation than to assessments of individual works. As a literary critic, Fuller was poised in an awkward position between the cultural fruits of European nations and the self-conscious efforts of American writers. Many of her peers, particularly those New York publishers and editors most closely associated with ‘Young America’, insisted on cutting off the conversation between the United States and Europe in order to ensure the absolute originality of American thought. In the interest of professional advancement as well as political sympathy, Fuller allied herself with Young Americans such as Duyckinck and O’Sullivan, the editor of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review. She refused, however, to share in their uncritical relation to a nation with which she found many faults, or to subscribe to their explicitly imperialist belief – embodied in the rhetoric of ‘manifest destiny’ – that all world cultures would eventually give way to the United States.29 Instead, she asserted, influence should work in the opposite direction, as other nations could show the United States how to refine its own democratic system. Although they promoted the causes of foreign nationalists such as Mazzini, the Young Americans quickly covered their cosmopolitan tracks, naming their own movement after Mazzini’s ‘Young Italy’ but seeking to protect exclusively American interests.30 By proclaiming the superiority of Europe’s literary achievements, and later, its political innovations, Fuller clashed with the Young Americans, who wanted to tone down such displays of subservience to the Old World. Duyckinck, also an ally of Cooper and Melville, stands as an early misinterpreter of Fuller’s cosmopolitan intentions and a representative of the nativist American establishment that eventually marginalised Fuller for her commitment to national renewal by international means. His reorientation of Fuller toward the United States during her lifetime anticipated the posthumous nationalisation of her career by William Henry Channing, James Freeman Clarke, and Emerson in their Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, as well as the subsequent exclusion of her work from the nineteenth-century canon for her failure to write an adequately ‘American’ book along the

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lines of The Last of the Mohicans or Moby-Dick.31 While Greeley encouraged Fuller to address foreign topics in the Tribune, Duyckinck saw no value for Americans in reading reviews of European books. When he selected essays for inclusion in Fuller’s Papers on Literature and Art, Duyckinck crafted a deliberately national collection, excluding much of Fuller’s writing on Continental literature, which, by her own admission, bore a more ‘radical stamp’ than her Anglo-American reviews.32 Consequently, Fuller felt misrepresented in print, her ‘catholic liberality’ suppressed in favour of a nativist agenda and her book destined to become an embarrassment to her in Europe, where she sought to impress new acquaintances with the broadly transnational ‘range and scope of my efforts’. In his nationalist zeal, Duyckinck ended up compromising the very elements that distinguished Fuller as a critic: her skill with languages, her ability to translate and render accessible foreign material, and her enthusiastic approach to European works of which others were suspicious. Fuller’s early training made it possible for her to read foreign texts in their original languages, and her first book was a translation of Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe (1839). Initially encouraged in her scholarship by Clarke, a fellow transcendentalist, Fuller promoted Goethe’s writings in two essays published in The Dial. As literary editor of the Tribune, she took an aggressively programmatic stance on foreign literatures of all national origins, asserting that they could be morally beneficial for American readers, and that it was her responsibility to introduce new books to the nation’s shelves and to explain their value. In her literary reviews, Fuller deliberately seeks to bring art into conversation with politics. As Christina Zwarg observes, Fuller’s ‘theory of reading’ is informed by her desire for ‘significant social change’.33 Always conscious of the ‘wider field’ of journalism and of her project of ‘general education’, Fuller engages social issues in her discussions of individual works. Her editorial position allowed her the freedom not only to connect European texts to American interests, but also to access already extant discourses of movements such as abolitionism and socialism that were inherently transnational in scope. In addition to reviewing books, she covered developments in both the domestic and the foreign periodical press, running a column called ‘Items of Foreign Gossip’ and including in the Tribune translations from American foreign-language newspapers such as the Deutsche Schnellpost and the Courrier des États-Unis. Arguably the first reporter to introduce Marx to American readers in the context of one of these translations, Fuller allowed her political agenda to dictate her response to certain authors.34 She paid particular attention in her reviews to French novelist Eugène Sue, who championed socialist

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values. Perhaps forcing the conversation by claiming that Sue’s work has already ‘awakened’ ‘deep interest’ in America, Fuller explains the secret of his appeal: the United States detects in his novels ‘a hope which is, half unconsciously to herself, stirring all her veins’ (Critic, 62). Reading Sue helps Americans comprehend themselves by exposing the workings of the national ‘unconscious’, a field that Fuller sees as fertile ground for sowing her suggestions of reform. She implies that the country’s ‘hope’ will lead it in the direction of Associationism: a movement that inspired her and her contemporaries to form utopian communities such as Brook Farm and Fruitlands that were based on socialist principles. In Fuller’s hands, the French novel becomes a window into the progressive future of the United States, for it is animated by values that are at once foreign objects and domestic facts. Fuller faces the national horror of slavery directly on many occasions, calling it the crime that ‘takes from the patriot his home’ (Critic, 149–50). In her meditations on the significance of the first of August – the anniversary of the abolition of slavery by Britain and its empire in 1834 – Fuller provocatively emphasises the national shame of the United States and its moral indebtedness to its own mother country. ‘We must bend low to her as we borrow this holy day,’ she reminds her Tribune readers (Critic, 184). For once, Britain has usurped the United States as the ‘Champion of Freedom’, and like an ‘elder sister’, it sets the standards that its younger sibling should follow in her own national life. Although Americans once expressed a strong theoretical belief in equality and liberty in the founding documents of the republic, they have in effect dismantled the nation by refuting those assertions in practice. By perpetuating slavery, the United States has become profoundly ‘un-American’. Fuller candidly observes: The most shameful deed has been done that ever disgraced a nation; because the most contrary to consciousness of right. Other nations have done wickedly, but we have surpassed them all in trampling under foot the principles that had been assumed as the basis of our national existence and our willingness to forfeit our honor in the face of the world. (Critic, 185)

Fuller warns of embarrassment on a global scale; all eyes are on the United States, she imagines, and all sensibilities attuned to the gap between the nation’s spoken promises and its ingrained habits of exploitation. She ascribes to pro-slavery Americans the deliberately destructive behaviour of ‘trampling [the nation] under foot’, and declares that they must be held responsible in the court of international public opinion. In this instance, the conversation that Fuller initiates between the United States and

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Britain allows her to bring her readers’ attention to precisely the point that she emphasised in her statement of journalistic purpose: the troubling difference between the ideals of ‘America’ and the moral compromises made by actual Americans. For Fuller, that uncomfortable conversation is more humbling, and therefore most effective, when it involves a transnational comparison. Fuller recognised the abolition of slavery abroad as a powerful tool that she could use to expose the nation’s shortcomings. In the United States, national epithets and symbols had been emptied of meaning, for the nation was the land of ‘Freedom’ in name only, and its great Eagle was weighed down by its ‘helpless prey’ (Critic, 332). Her review of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) explores this tremendous source of national irony. Following the French writer of mixed race Frédéric Souliè, who, she observes, ‘found himself free to develop the powers that God had given’ only after leaving the United States for France, Fuller turned eastward to Europe for models of egalitarian societies (Critic, 131). Along with several of her transcendentalist contemporaries, she discovered in the utopian socialist thought of another Frenchman, Charles Fourier, a type of ideally structured community to which she believed America should aspire. Later, she found in the revolutionary impulses of Italian national hero Mazzini the radical drive to bring many of those ideas to fruition. When Fuller became impatient and disillusioned with the nation’s failure to fulfil its promise within its geographical limits (or in the act of relentlessly expanding them), she imported alternative policies from overseas in order to ensure its vigorous future growth.

Patriots in Exile: Fuller’s Representative Men On the eve of her departure for Europe in 1846, Fuller took the measure of her compatriots in characteristically bold and memorable terms. ‘I now know all the people worth knowing in America,’ she observes, ‘and I find no intellect comparable to my own.’35 Fuller’s critics have used this statement as further proof of her egotism – that ‘mountainous ME’ of which Emerson complained – as well as evidence of an essential ‘unAmericanness’ that led her into voluntary exile in Italy and gradually pushed her out of the American canon after her death.36 I propose a more transnationally conscious reading of her words that identifies Fuller as a thinker who was passionately attached to the United States but simply at the end of her rope in her relations to those whose views were not ‘comparable to’ or perhaps as comparative in spirit as her own. Despite the reassurance provided by her colleagues at the Tribune, many of whom

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were Brook Farm idealists, Fuller was troubled by the sense of incompleteness that only a committed comparativist feels. Her dialectical habits of conversation had led her to conclude that the nation was no longer ‘worth knowing’ as it was, and she needed to pursue further her explorations of its transatlantic context. Her ‘Farewell’ to her editorial position at the Tribune celebrates New York as ‘the focus, the point where American and European interests converge’.37 Unlike those for whom New York means ‘America’ in its totality, a group that includes the Young Americans as well as Whitman and Melville, Fuller perceives the city as a space in which the nation could secure common ideological ground with its European counterparts.38 While she may appear to renounce the achievements of American intellect as she leaves that privileged space behind, she still harbours tremendous optimism for the nation as a whole. ‘I go to behold the wonders of art, and the temples of old religion,’ she writes. ‘But I shall see no forms of beauty and majesty beyond what my Country is capable of producing in myriad variety, if she has but the soul to will it.’39 Fuller leaves the shores of the United States buoyed by patriotic hopes, but eager to search out the ‘soul’ she feels has escaped from the national body. The restoration of that spirit, she imagines, will ultimately rebuild the ‘home’ that had been taken from her and from her compatriots. Fuller carried her journalistic ideals overseas as she assumed the role of foreign correspondent for the Tribune. Perhaps not quite as overbearing as James’s Henrietta Stackpole, said to be modelled on Fuller, she nonetheless had enthusiastic expectations for her travels and spoke of their potential fruits in language that recalls her general theory of journalism.40 While admitting to her friends Samuel and Anna Ward in private that she needed the ‘new field of observation’ that Europe would provide, Fuller expressed a public hope to her readers that her experiences of ‘Life in the Old World’ would enable her ‘to bring home some packages of seed for Life in the New’.41 Her journalistic agenda therefore proposed domestic reform by international means, for through her dispatches she intended to plant ‘seed[s]’ of change in the minds of her American readers. Although the majority of her contacts in England and France – the first stops on her tour – were writers such as Wordsworth, Carlyle, and Sand, her conversational interests led her away from literary discussions and toward political debate. Her audience grew as more Europeans responded positively to her views, and she accepted assignments from English and French journals with explicitly socialist agendas.42 Her version of journalistic vocation allowed her to participate in the effort of nation-building at home even as she engaged with political movements abroad. Among

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European reformers, Fuller found many who shared her commitment to transnational activism. She found Europeans more open to dialogue than her American peers had been, and she told her brother, ‘I may add that from their habits of conversation so superior to those of Americans, I am able to come out a great deal more than I can at home, and they seem to be proportionately interested.’43 After receiving an account of her visit to Sand in Paris, Emerson responded with an enthusiastic recognition of Fuller’s conversational priorities and her intellectual growth, commenting, ‘It was high time, dear friend, that you should run out of the coop of our bigoted societies full of fire damp & azote, and find some members of your own expansive fellowship.’44 In Europe, Fuller aggressively ‘expan[ded]’ her original conversational circle to include interlocutors of several nationalities, and she encouraged her Tribune readers to share in the ‘fellowship’ that she established with far-flung thinkers. In the past, scholars have kept Fuller in nearly exclusive conversation with Emerson, even in their assessments of the writing that she produced during her time abroad. Despite the strength of her loyalties to Concord, Fuller developed her revolutionary consciousness in her close friendships with the European activists Giuseppe Mazzini and Adam Mickiewicz, progressing far beyond her transcendentalist colleagues and even kindred spirits in New York such as Greeley in her pursuit of radical political transformation. Mazzini and Mickiewicz provided her with living examples of patriotism strengthened by the experience of exile from their home countries, and they helped Fuller to refine a journalistic strategy that promoted national interests while expressing cosmopolitan concern for the broader human condition. Fuller’s friendships with these ‘representative men’ exerted substantial influence on the transnational structure of her dispatches from Europe, and they encouraged her to balance the competing demands of her ‘dual citizenship’ of Rome and of the United States. They did not pull her away altogether from her own nation, but rather they showed her how to improve American national life by reinfusing it with republican energy from abroad. Fuller’s close ties to female radicals such as Christina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso and Constanza Arconati Visconti were also powerfully inspiring, particularly in her choice to serve the Roman Republic as the director of its Fatebenefratelli hospital, and further demonstrate the importance that Fuller attributed to shared political sympathies in her cultivation of a transnational network of democratically minded allies. In the social whirl of London, Fuller encountered many eminent Victorians, but none of them impressed her as much as Mazzini, an Italian exiled by the Austrian government for his revolutionary activities. Mazzini had mastered skills that Fuller increasingly admired: a selfless devotion

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to country and the ability to educate others as he brought them into his patriotic vision. He quickly assumed a place in Fuller’s trinity of representative men, which was, like Emerson’s own, a transnational group. She exclaimed to Marcus Spring: What would I not give that my other two brothers, R.W.E. and W.H.C., could see him! All have in different ways the celestial fire, all have pure natures. They may have faults, but no base alloy. To me they form a triad. I know none other such.45

Far from the ‘celestial fire[s]’ of Concord, Fuller began to be warmed by Mazzini’s blazing pursuit of national liberation. Mazzini stood at the centre of Fuller’s imagined humanitarian community, a group that she described in a London dispatch as ‘those among us who take an interest in the cause of human freedom’ (Dispatches, 98). People like Mazzini, whose work is at once patriotic and universal, sustain the cause of transnational understanding and progress. Individuals may look to such cosmopolitan leaders to draw them out of the ‘enjoyment of mere national advantages’ towards a larger ‘idea’ of ‘the human family’ as ‘one’. In his essay ‘Principles of Cosmopolitanism’ (1834), Mazzini explains his political strategy: ‘For us [the true cosmopolitans], the starting point is Country; the object or aim is collective Humanity.’46 In her conversations with Mazzini, Fuller learns the ability to reconcile the conflicting demands of nation and globe, for as she notes, he is able to cultivate ‘an especial interest in Italy’ while comprehending the great ‘designs of Heaven with regard to Man’ (Dispatches, 98–9). As the worldwide community of abolitionists watched and waited for the United States to liberate its slaves before declaring victory over oppression, so too would the cosmopolitan leader advocate equality in each and every country until the ‘same can be secured for all’. Fuller argues in favour of a ‘universal interest in all nations and places’, for in her mind the moral health of each nation is a measure of the success of world democracy. In Fuller’s mind, Mazzini reigns as the ultimate patriot, for he serves as an incarnation of ‘the purest disinterested patriotism and humanity’ (Dispatches, 315). For Fuller, the ideal of patriotism is ‘pure[ly]’ intellectual and unclouded by emotion, ambition, or national chauvinism. Unlike the Young Americans, who seek to strengthen one nation at the expense of others, the European patriots that Fuller celebrates pursue ‘disinterested’ ends and promote the greater good over their own advancement. By fixating on patriotism and the figure of the patriot as channels for the expression of the highest political good, Fuller radically modifies the terms

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of the debate about nation-building in this period. She preserves her faith in the principles of ‘America’, but instead of following in the exclusionary footsteps of the Young Americans, she uses the category of the nation as a conduit for her global imagination. ‘America’ is not simply a nation to Fuller, but a democratic ideal toward which all nations tend and all like-minded individuals could demonstrate their ‘patriotic’ allegiance. Like Mazzini, the poet Adam Mickiewicz enjoyed a fruitful exile from his native country of Poland. A lecturer at the Collège de France in Paris, where he introduced Emersonian philosophy to his students, and a close friend of Fuller’s (she chose him as her son’s godfather), Mickiewicz showed Fuller that the most fervent patriotic sentiments were made sharper and more selfless by the patriot’s physical distance from his or her native soil. It was in Italy, not in France, that he reached the apex of his political career, and as Fuller reports to her readers, he was greeted in Florence as the ‘Dante of Poland’, entering the select company of those who had both glorified and transcended nationality (Dispatches, 223). Fuller clarified her journalistic mission in her conversations with Mickiewicz. After meeting her in Paris, Mickiewicz wrote her a provocative letter, outlining her vocation as that of ‘[a] spirit who has known the old world, who has sinned in the old world and who strives to make this old world known in her new world’.47 Perceiving not only the duality of Fuller’s allegiances to the United States and to Europe but also her effort to facilitate dialogue between them, he plots her coordinates, stating, ‘Her point of support is in the old world, her sphere of activity in the new world; her peace in the world of  the future.’ Mickiewicz understands that Fuller’s intellectual work requires the fusion of American and European elements. While drawing knowledge from Europe, she must use her experiences abroad to benefit America, and in turn to help bring about the ‘peace’ of a liberated world. To this end, Mickiewicz incites Fuller to absorb fully her Italian surroundings, to ‘[b]reathe the life in through all your pores’, so that she may speak with authority about the Old World. Not only did Fuller take his advice, but she also begins to echo his words as she constructs her own version of patriotism in (voluntary) exile. Mickiewicz’s lament for a Poland that has been ‘slain, dead, buried’ shapes Fuller’s rhetoric as she responds, ‘my America . . . is not dead, but in my time she sleepeth, and the spirit of our fathers flames no more, but lies hid beneath the ashes’ (Dispatches, 230). As Fuller learns from Mazzini and Mickiewicz the art of pursuing patriotic goals while in exile, she turns her gaze back toward the United States and recognises the paradoxical fact that she, like her European mentors, could promote national progress more effectively from an offshore perspective than from a position at the hub of the country’s literary elite. She

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believes that she can play a central role in nation-building only by loosening her ties to that national centre. Fuller’s indictment of contemporary American culture for its failure to live up to her personal ideals establishes her position as one of the nation’s first and most eloquent critical patriots. In response to imploring letters from home, she defends her choice to live in Italy rather than the United States: My friends write to urge my return; they talk of our country as the land of the Future. It is so, but that spirit which made it all it is of value in my eyes, which gave all of hope with which I can sympathize for that Future, is more alive here at present than in America. My country is at present spoiled by prosperity, stupid with the lust of gain, soiled by crime in its willing perpetuation of Slavery, shamed by an unjust war, noble sentiment much forgotten even by individuals, the aims of politicians selfish or petty, the literature frivolous and venal. In Europe, amid the teachings of adversity a nobler spirit is struggling – a spirit which cheers and animates mine. I hear earnest words of pure faith and love. I see deeds of brotherhood. This is what makes my America. (Dispatches, 230)

Fuller distinguishes her loyalty to the country itself from her ‘faith[fulness]’ to the ‘spirit’ of the country, which once animated the American continent but is now, she argues, ‘more alive’ in Europe. That shifting ‘spirit’ becomes the site of her patriotic allegiance, and like Mickiewicz the ‘pilgrim’, she is willing to leave her own nation behind to follow it as it travels.48 Many of Fuller’s American contemporaries, including Emerson, considered travelling eastward to be a form of historical regression, but Fuller defiantly reverses this transatlantic dynamic, casting the United States as a ‘soiled’ and decadent culture and Europe as a ‘pure’ New World of ‘brotherhood’ that anticipates a brighter American future.49 Fuller’s ‘America’ has been lifted off United States soil and relocated in Europe, where it ‘cheers and animates’ the latest revolutions. By making ‘America’ both a matter of personal affinity and a set of ‘noble’ ideals – ‘faith,’ ‘love’, and ‘brotherhood’ – Fuller powerfully reshapes her readers’ understanding of American nationality. In Europe, she is finally able to converse directly with the ‘America’ that she invokes as the driving force behind her journalistic endeavours: a society that honours the ‘ideal presence of human nature as we feel it ought to be’. As long as Fuller could perceive an ‘American’ spirit at work in Europe, she would feel at home there, despite the fact that she was far from her native soil. On this occasion she refers to the United States as ‘[m]y country’, but on others she declared a similar allegiance to Italy,

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creating an imagined state of ‘dual citizenship’. Responding at first to the idea of Italy itself – a ‘dream’, she concedes, for, when she arrived, ‘Italy’ was not a modern nation-state but rather a loose group of kingdoms and protectorates – she tells Emerson that she has ‘found my Italy’ in the warm ‘repose’ of the Neapolitan landscape.50 It is the city of Rome that earns her most profound affection, however, for she experiences there the realisation of the ideals, both personal and social, that she pursued throughout her career. At first consciously echoing Byron, whose exclamation in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, ‘O, Rome, my country, city of the soul!’, punctuates a letter to her mother, she soon appropriates the possessive phrase for her own use.51 Byron’s speaker mourns the collective past of ‘dead empires’, but Fuller declares her ties to the Rome of the immediate present, to ‘my own house, my own people, and the hour which I had always longed for’. She establishes a fresh relation to a city long claimed by foreign nationals as their own by insisting on its regeneration before her very eyes. Preferring political activity to art appreciation, she refused the comforts of Florence, which sufficed for expatriates such as the Brownings and the Storys, but ultimately reminded her too much of Boston, her old home.52 In a letter sent to William Henry Channing at the outset of her Italian journey, Fuller identifies the focal points of her traveller’s gaze: I write not to you about these countries, of the famous people I see, of magnificent shows and places. All these things are only to me an illuminated margin on the text of my inward life. Earlier, they would have been more. Art is not important to me now. I like only what little I find that is transcendentally good, and even with that feel very familiar and calm. I take interest in the state of the people, their manners, the state of the race in them. I see the future dawning . . . .53

Fuller distinguishes herself from those travel writers who have come before her, both heroes such as Goethe and rivals such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick, by angling her observations away from familiar sites of cultural interest and toward a more elusive element that she calls the ‘transcendentally good’. As one who seeks out the highest forms of universal morality, Fuller the transcendentalist becomes recognisable once again as a Kantian cosmopolitan: a ‘citizen of the world’ who is at home in absolute ‘good’ but not limited to a particular geographical domain. Even far removed from her native soil, Fuller is able to ‘feel very familiar and calm’ as long as she comes to rest in an abstract realm of absolute value. All else fades into the periphery of her vision, or the ‘illuminated margin’. Her words here can serve as a key to understanding why she felt as though

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she belonged in revolutionary Rome and referred to it so frequently as ‘my country’. There, she was able to take part in work that she believed was ‘transcendentally good’. For Caroline Sturgis’s benefit, she describes Rome as a realm of the soul, a place that ‘must be inhaled wholly, with the yielding of the whole heart. It is really something transcendant, both spirit and body.’54 More than a city or the capital of a nation, Rome is for Fuller a gateway into what Jeffrey Steele has called a ‘political sublime’: a revolutionary experience that allows her to ‘transcend’ geographical and temporal constraints.55 As Fuller’s work comes to fruition in the triumph of the Roman Republic in February of 1849 and then under fire in its fall just months later, she expresses even stronger allegiances to Rome and to its founding idea. As the French army threatens the city, Fuller defiantly tells her Tribune readers, ‘I would defend Rome to the last moment’ (Dispatches, 276). It is not only the barricaded city walls that she promises to uphold, but also the ‘higher hope’ that Rome represents, and in which her true faith resides. After she is forced to leave Rome for Florence, fearing for the safety of Giovanni Ossoli and their child, she writes to her friend George Curtis that she is desperately ‘home-sick for Rome’.56 Despite the relief of living in a reunited family, she yearns for a different kind of home, admonishing Curtis, ‘You cannot dream what life was there during the glorious dream of hope.’ Once the spirit of revolution had died out in Rome and Fuller’s ‘dream’ of the spread of republicanism throughout Europe was dashed, she lost interest in inhabiting the place itself. With ‘the ideal of modern Rome’ ‘destroyed’, she writes despairingly to Emerson, ‘here in Rome I shall no longer wish to live. O, Rome, my country! could I imagine that the triumph of what I held dear was to heap such desolation on thy head!’57 After its defeat, Rome is reduced to the ‘desolat[e]’ condition that Fuller deplores in the United States, in which democratic ideals are suppressed and ‘hid[den] beneath the ashes’ of history. When she departs for the United States in 1850, Fuller is chastened, but still loyal to the spirit in which she found a home in Italy. Her final dispatch, more mystical and apocalyptic than ever, does not fixate on a particular manifestation of this spirit, but rather prophesies its presence everywhere, ‘in its extent beyond what the world ever before so much as dreamed’ (Dispatches, 322–3). For the ephemeral but glorious moments during which the Roman Republic is at its height, Fuller enjoys a status previously unknown to her: the title of ‘citizen’. First granted to Mazzini upon his return to Italy, who gave it true ‘luster’, citizenship is the highest honour possible in the new Republic, for it is symbolic of power shared equally by all (Dispatches, 315).

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Letters written to Fuller and Ossoli during the brief tenure of the Republic were addressed to ‘Cittadina Margherita Ossoli’ or ‘Cittadino Giovanni Ossoli’, and these non-hierarchical appellations replaced the family’s aristocratic titles, particularly in official government correspondence.58 Although Fuller worked during her New York years to expand the influence of women on the American national scene, full voting citizenship for women would remain a distant prospect until the Nineteenth Amendment took effect in 1920.59 In Rome, however, she could become a citizen simply by declaring her faith in the ideals espoused by the Republic. When Fuller tells her Tribune readers of the morning on which she ‘rose and went forth to seek the Republic’, she includes in her dispatch the text of the founding decree made by the Constitutional Assembly, which declares the Roman Republic ‘a pure Democracy’ (Dispatches, 256–7). In Rome, citizenship is a matter of loyalty to democratic principles rather than a question of nationality, and the Republic itself is an inherently transnational endeavour despite its claims of a ‘common nationality’ with ‘the rest of Italy’. Fuller’s Roman ‘citizenship’ further complicates her relationship to the United States. Acknowledged as part of her identity by family members who honoured her on her memorial in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as ‘BY ADOPTION A CITIZEN OF ROME’, Fuller’s allegiances abroad seemed to others potential barriers to her reintegration into American society. A colleague at the Tribune called Fuller a ‘compatriot’ of the Roman republicans, and her friend Charles King Newcomb expressed his fear that ‘we can no longer claim you as a[n American] citizen.’60 Fuller herself was certainly transformed by her experience of revolution, but her practice of conversational journalism allowed her to keep ‘America’ in mind even as she moved through Rome a free and equal citizen. Through the medium of her dispatches, she engineered revolutionary exchanges between the emerging Roman Republic and the troubled United States that invited her ‘compatriots’ of all nationalities to become true ‘citizen[s] of the world’.

‘Viva America!’: Fuller’s Cosmopolitan Patriotism As Fuller moved through Europe on the brink of the revolutionary battles of 1848, she witnessed acts of nation-building at first hand. These experiences abroad transformed her relationship to the United States and provided her with concrete examples that she used in her dispatches to enliven the possibility of national renewal at home. As her geographical distance from the nation itself grew, her patriotic faith became less grounded in the actual physical territory of the United States. In the course of her residence

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in Italy and particularly in her contacts with European leaders whom she considered to be strong patriots, she developed her own form of deterritorialised patriotism that celebrated an American nationality based on abstract principles instead of geographical coordinates. The ‘America’ that Fuller discovered in Europe had not been accessible either on the western frontier or in the streets of Manhattan, both spaces that she had explored in her previous works. Rather, it was a purely moral alternative to a geographical understanding of national identity. Fuller’s ‘America’ was an eminently portable set of political concepts and personal beliefs that she argued were far ‘more alive’ in the popular movements of Europe than in the increasingly corrupted national discourse of the United States.61 In this final section of the chapter, I focus on the ways in which Fuller applied the lessons that she was learning in Rome about ideal forms of nationhood to specific American concerns. In her dispatches, she brought her direct experiences of the growth of the Roman Republic to bear on the pursuit of American democracy, and in the process she generated a transnational dialogue that had imaginative life far beyond the limits of her own. Fuller’s years abroad paradoxically revived her patriotic fervour. During her residence in Rome, she lived the historical drama of Italy’s rejection of Austrian rule and Papal dominion in favour of a republic’s representative government. As she watched the tides of newly liberated people flow through the streets of Rome, she saw the resemblance of the Italian fight to the means by which the United States had won its freedom from colonial strictures just decades earlier. Her Tribune column ‘Things and Thoughts in Europe’ appeared on the front page of the newspaper alongside the national headlines, implying that news from Europe should be a significant matter of American concern. She reported on revolutionary events deliberately in order to draw together those nations which were consciously separated by a transatlantic gulf patrolled by American nativists. In one of these dispatches, Fuller acknowledges the death of her cynicism about ritual sources of national pride: At home one gets callous about the character of Washington, from a long experience of 4th of July bombast in his praise. But seeing the struggles of other nations, and the deficiencies of the leaders who try to sustain them, the heart is again stimulated and puts forth buds of praise. One appreciates the wonderful combination of events and influences that gave our independence so healthy a birth, and the almost miraculous merits of the men who tended its first motions . . . No country has ever had such a good future; no other is so happy as to have a pattern of spotless worth which will remain in her latest day venerable as now. (Dispatches, 269)

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From the peculiarly doubled perspective of her voluntary exile, Fuller contends that it is in those points of intersection between national histories that one can seize upon the singular nature of a particular country. Contact with other nations in the midst of their ‘struggles’ for self-definition only fuels Fuller’s own patriotic feeling for the United States, giving rise to uncharacteristic claims for the nation’s ‘spotless worth’. Her patriotism is not exclusive or exceptionalist, however, but rather supremely dialogic and dependent upon acts of transnational identification. In a pattern familiar from her reviews of European literary works, she argues here that the United States can arrive at a better understanding of itself if it perceives and acts upon the connections between its past history and the current pursuit of democracy by European nations. Fuller’s faith in transnational ties and in common political cause between the United States and Europe leads her to adhere to a comparative model in many of her dispatches. Critiques of American failures follow descriptions of developments on the Italian scene, and as in her literary reviews, Fuller calls particular attention to the dangers posed by slavery, imperialist expansion, materialism, and self-absorption. In her efforts to educate her readers, she uses Italy as a lesson plan from which to teach the United States how to be a more just and effective nation. In her dispatches, she speaks expansively but directly to the nation as a whole, seeking to close the gap between the contested American present and its ideal future. She writes: To you, people of America, it may perhaps be given to look on and learn in time for a preventive wisdom. You may learn the real meaning of the words FRATERNITY, EQUALITY: you may, despite the apes of the Past, who strive to tutor you, learn the needs of a true Democracy. (Dispatches, 211)

Her words contain both a critique of European mistakes that might be ‘prevent[ed]’ in the United States and an indictment of a nation that has fallen short of the lofty democratic goals proclaimed by its founders. She perceives the irony of Europe’s sudden ability to ‘tutor’ the New World in political knowledge that it once learned from the American Revolution. For Fuller, the essence of ‘America’ is contained in a set of guiding principles, and those ideas can be constantly revisited, reinterpreted, and reinvigorated through contact with other living examples of themselves.62 Despite the depth and consistency of her patriotic sentiment, Fuller still does not hesitate to put the United States on trial and to judge the nation harshly as ‘the darkest offender’ on the global scene (Dispatches, 165). In fact, she believes that the only legitimate patriot would pursue idealistic

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ends, not uphold the status quo. Fuller’s wide perspective – far wider than the geographical territory of the nation – enables her to see American faults in sharper contrast to those of the other countries that alternately occupied the focus of her gaze and her peripheral vision. Fuller’s friendships with political dissidents such as Mazzini and Mickiewicz lead her to the conclusion that exiles make more loyal patriots than those whose imaginations are constrained by the borders of their respective nations. She thus figures patriotism as a subversive mode of thought that undermines the existing order of the nation. Her theory of patriotism feeds on variety and opposition, and it cannot survive in purely national isolation. In an early dispatch, Fuller contends, ‘The American in Europe, if a thinking mind, can only become more American’ (Dispatches, 161). This ideal traveller, surely a generic version of Fuller herself, proves his or her nationality by way of cosmopolitan openness and a fluid identity that can stretch to encompass other cultures while still retaining its original shape.63 While many of her compatriots, particularly in the previous generation, feared European influence and defended themselves frantically against charges of literary and artistic imitation, Fuller celebrates the dependence of the United States on Europe, asserting that Americans need to transplant many ‘seed[s] from the Past’ into their ‘virgin soil’ in order to ensure a plentiful national harvest (Dispatches, 163). Frustrated by her fellow expatriates, Fuller finds that too few are truly of the ‘thinking mind’ for which she hoped, as most could not enter into another national mindset for fear of compromising their own. Most Americans who travelled to Europe at mid-century were what Fuller calls ‘servile Americans’. Instead of adventurers, they were Grand Tourists at heart who consumed art and culture single-mindedly in the manner of Hawthorne’s characters in The Marble Faun (1860): a novel of a ‘dehistoricized’ Rome published a decade after Fuller’s death.64 Hawthorne himself, whose judgement of Fuller’s involvement in Italian affairs later got him into posthumous trouble with American readers, was doomed to exposure by the more sophisticated Henry James as a cosmopolitan in name only.65 Even those American expatriates who took up permanent residence in Italy often failed to recognise the power of contemporary Italian social and political life to inform a transnational perspective. The proclamation of the Roman Republic in February of 1849 provided Fuller and her contemporaries with a particularly vivid example of a nascent democracy that recalled their own. On the morning when she went out ‘to seek the Republic’, Fuller stood with a fellow American as she watched the ceremonial opening of the Roman Constitutional Assembly: an emphatically transnational event that borrowed elements such as the

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Marseillaise, the tricolour flag, and the liberty cap from the French republicans. Fuller’s companion, much to her exasperation, remained ‘impassive’ in the face of such solidarity. ‘Receiving all his birthright from a triumph of Democracy,’ she adds, ‘he was quite indifferent to this manifestation on this consecrated spot’ (Dispatches, 257–8). Far from being a flexible patriot, this man is instead unable to see American history repeating itself on foreign shores, and he is therefore incapable of recognising instances of democracy elsewhere as opportunities to renew his own national faith. One of Fuller’s counter-examples, he sees only negative differences where others can draw positive parallels. Fuller discovered that Americans such as these ‘had no confidence in the [Italian] Republic’ because it is comprised of people ‘[un]like our People’. They simply could not subscribe to Fuller’s form of cosmopolitan patriotism, which required a willingness to imagine ‘America’ elsewhere, as a set of liberties and values that could travel and take root in foreign soil. Their nationalised patriotism can be expressed only within the borders of the United States. Fuller urges Americans to join her in support of ‘the brotherhood of nations and of men’ by shouting ‘Viva America!’ (Dispatches, 284). Her bilingual, bicultural sentiment is seamless and transparent, and it embodies in its simplicity the shared intent that she feels is so evident in the national lives of both countries. Through this act of linguistic fusion, she joins the voices of two nations, bringing them into conversation and into powerful accord with one another. She also asserts her freedom to speak simultaneously as an American patriot and as a multilingual cosmopolitan concerned with ‘the equality of rights for all’. Facility with languages was a hallmark of the great literary cosmopolitans of the nineteenth-century United States, and as she translated the words of Mazzini and his fellow republicans, Fuller brought the literary work she shared with Longfellow and Emerson, among others, into the highly contested political present. This time her message was even more urgent: attend to cultural developments abroad, or risk compromising the ideals that you hold dear at home. Fuller’s message did indeed get through in a number of forms. Colleagues in both Italy and the United States responded to her call for gestures of transnational support, echoing Fuller’s own celebrations of common democratic cause. She rejoiced in the reverberations of rallying cries from New York, where Horace Greeley hailed all ‘Republicans and lovers of Constitutional Freedom’, both American and Italian, in a public speech that prefaced an American address to the Pope. After hearing news of the rally, Fuller declared herself ‘proud of my country’ (Dispatches, 183). Despite the ‘indifference’ of the American tourist on the foreign street, one of Fuller’s closest friends in Rome, artist William Wetmore Story,

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combined patriotic sentiment with hopes for a new Italy of ‘the good and free’ as he marked Washington’s Birthday with several prominent Americans at his home (Dispatches, 214–16). Italians themselves, both during the revolution and at the present moment in their scholarship on Fuller, need no encouragement to perceive compelling transnational ties.66 Fuller reports a straightforward gesture of inclusiveness in an Italian acquaintance’s comment, ‘The Americans are indeed our brothers’ (Dispatches, 199). The fate of the hard-won Roman Republic soon presented its own challenge to Fuller’s transnationalist hopes. The newborn nation, in which Rome came into eager but tenuous relation with other former Italian states, was not strong enough to define itself fully, let alone sustain diplomatic dialogue with other countries. Fuller writes in exasperation, ‘Could Italy be left alone! but treacherous, selfish men at home strive to betray, and foes threaten her from without on every side’ (Dispatches, 261). France, which Fuller imagined would aid a fellow republican nation, soon threatened invasion in order to re-establish the sovereignty of the Pope. Ideological similarities with other nations were not enough to preserve Italy; it would have to defend its territory, and stand on ground firmer than rhetoric alone. The transnational world proved in practice far more hostile than it had in theory, and open borders became a liability rather than a means of intercultural exchange. As Fuller confronts the presence of French troops in the capital, she recognises the hard physical fact of Rome’s isolation: ‘I write you from barricaded Rome. The Mother of Nations is now at bay against them all’ (Dispatches, 274–6). Hoping for cooperation, she instead faces determined opposition as she experiences the grand historical irony of ‘the soldiers of republican France, firing upon republican Rome’. In this instance, patriotism does not travel, for a nation’s desire for supremacy outweighs any kinship it might feel with another struggling people. While Italy may have shared its founding ideas with other nations, it is ultimately subject to the laws of geographical limit. If its borders are transgressed, the nation crumbles. As it loses ground against France, the Italian nation is reduced to the city of Rome: the place – or rather, the idea – that Fuller promises to ‘defend . . . to the last moment’. Despite the shock of bearing witness to the setback dealt to ‘international life’ by one republic’s emphatic defeat of another, Fuller retains the essence of her transnational optimism, even in her last published article in the Tribune. The same woman who laments ‘the cruel ravage of these days’, predicting that ‘Rome will never recover,’ manages to move beyond the physical devastation of a shattered nation to preserve and to amplify the spirit of her original beliefs (Dispatches, 293). She praises Mazzini for embodying the ‘purest disinterested patriotism and humanity’, and follows

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his path, sublimating her desires for global democracy into a realm of pure imagination. The only legislative body in her ultimately transnational world is ‘[a] congress of great, pure, loving minds’, all focused on promoting common humanity rather than national distinctions (Dispatches, 322). Fuller anticipates a ‘New Era’ of human culture entirely divorced from the territorial disputes that plagued a world of nation-states. In this utopian future, people would no longer be mere ‘hands and feet’ but rather complete ‘souls’ whose patriotic loyalties would be infinitely transferable, instantly comprehensible, and in Fuller’s own words, supremely ‘joy[ful]’.

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CHAPTER 3

‘A TYPE OF HIS COUNTRYMEN’: DOUGLASS AND TRANSATLANTIC PRINT CULTURE

Nothing seemed to make her more angry than to see me with a newspaper. She seemed to think that here lay the danger. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)

In Frederick Douglass’s only fictional work, the 1853 novella The Heroic Slave, he retells the story of an actual slave revolt aboard the American ship Creole in 1841. Douglass imagines a tavern conversation in which the first mate recounts the ship’s collapse under the rhetorical weight of the revolutionary argument made by Madison Washington, the novella’s hero. In response to a friend’s boasts that he could have quelled the rebellion single-handedly, the first mate comments: It is quite easy to talk of flogging n-----s here on land, where you have the sympathy of the community, and the whole physical force of the government, State and national, at your command . . . but, sir, I deny that the Negro is, naturally, a coward, or that your theory of managing slaves will stand the test of salt water. (Douglass, Life and Writings, 5:499)

While slavery may perpetuate itself on land and under the jurisdiction of the American government, the first mate observes, its hierarchies dissolve immediately once they are exposed to the ‘salt water’ of the Atlantic: the test that any faulty policy is bound to fail. In this crucial moment, Douglass tests out his own theory of transatlantic politics, developed during his years in Britain and Ireland from 1845 to 1847, and he suggests that both thought and action outside national boundaries ultimately counteract the deficits of the culture that has developed within their limits.

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Although The Heroic Slave has been a focus of significant critical interest in recent years, I am less concerned with the details of its narrative than with the ways in which it functions as a lightning rod for Douglass’s political ideas and professional activities in the 1840s and 1850s.1 The story of the Creole served as a touchstone for Douglass in his lectures abroad, and he used it to bolster his arguments about the territorial anxiety of the United States and its lust for ‘property’ in both human and geographical forms. He eventually turned the story into a novella at the request of Julia Griffiths, a British woman whose acquaintance he made during his lecture tour and who later worked alongside him as business manager and fundraiser for his struggling Rochester-based newspaper in the early 1850s. The novella thus brought together the fruits of Douglass’s creative labours in Ireland and Britain with the practical concerns of the editorial project that he began upon his return to American shores. This chapter investigates the professional progress that Douglass made as a thinker and a writer in the years between his first two autobiographies: a decade that has been overlooked by most scholars of Douglass’s work. Although Paul Gilroy and Priscilla Wald have acknowledged the significance of Douglass’s travels abroad and the speeches that he gave in Britain and Ireland, they choose not to deviate from their studies of his autobiographical works to consider the other lives that Douglass led as a transatlantic statesman and an abolitionist editor.2 Recent studies by Alan J. Rice and Martin Crawford, Fionnghuala Sweeney, and Bridget Bennett have begun to fill that gap by examining Douglass’s career in an Atlantic context, both his early years in Britain and Ireland and his later engagements with Egyptian and Haitian cultures. Like Sweeney, who asserts that ‘Douglass’s emergence as a major figure in American politics and letters owed as much to his international as to his national activities’ (3), I believe that full knowledge of those professional endeavours is crucial to understanding Douglass’s transformation from local orator to national leader and his success in making and troubling American literary history. In fact, I contend in this chapter that it is not only Douglass’s speeches abroad that merit further scholarly attention, but also his growing skill as a public figure in appealing to the press and circulating his anti-slavery messages within a broader transatlantic culture of print. Later, Douglass uses these skills to effect change within national borders as he advocates racial integration in the pages of The North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper, editorial projects that he considered among the most important of his career. Douglass is by far the most politically radical writer included within the scope of this book, as well as the one most deeply and consistently concerned with defining the elements of American nationality and reversing

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their decline. Although he shies away from the programmatic change advocated by Fuller, who proposed communitarian solutions to the inequalities that fragmented American society, Douglass nonetheless seeks systematically to ‘break, blow, burn, and make [the nation] new’. Each time he holds forth from a lecture platform or from his own editorial page, he practises the kind of holy violence that John Donne imagined in the years leading up to the English Civil War, and he reminds us of his sympathy for John Brown’s intent to resolve the US slavery crisis by violent means.3 Unlike Emerson, who, by and large, avoided discussing antislavery politics until the Fugitive Slave Law brought them to his doorstep in 1850, Douglass tackles questions of national identity from the moment he sets foot on British soil in 1845, assuming the status of national ‘representative’ and boldly leading his audiences through a revised narrative of American history. When he returned to the United States, Douglass spoke and wrote on behalf of what he called ‘a nation in the midst of a nation’: a community of slaves and free black people who, he asserted, were the true co-owners of national territory and culture, not the mere physical ‘property’ of their fellow citizens.4 Douglass’s demands for the integration of that unrecognised ‘nation’ troubled not only the triumphant teleological narrative of American progress favoured by many of his nationalist peers, but also the kind of easy, fluid connections upon which Whitman would base his conception of ‘America’ as a ‘nation of nations’. In fact, even more than Whitman, Douglass works to dissolve the binaries that divide black from white, nation from globe, and literature from politics. Douglass shares with even his most cosmopolitan compatriots the belief that the United States is ultimately worth fighting to preserve, but he distinguishes himself from them by the extremity of his critique, which has the power to break up the familiar ground beneath the nation’s feet and to subject the entire country to the birth pangs of a long overdue ‘American Renaissance’.

Diplomatic Shock Tactics In Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, his third autobiography, Douglass presents himself to the world as a successful career politician and an internationally conversant public figure who fully commands a particular historical era. In the expanded 1893 edition of the autobiography, Douglass’s account of his travels in Ireland and Britain reads like a list of acknowledgements in which he discusses his rhetorical education at the hands of ‘the rising statesmen of England’ and highlights his alliance with Daniel O’Connell, a cosmopolitan Irish nationalist (Autobiographies, 680). He gives

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his sojourn abroad more weight in the official (some would say officious) Life and Times as he emphasises his role as a ‘transatlantic statesman’: a self-appointed mediator between cultures in a time of tremendous national anxiety and defensiveness on the part of the United States (Autobiographies, 683). In this version of his autobiography, Douglass features an event that appears as an afterthought in My Bondage and My Freedom (1855): his clash at the World Temperance Convention in London in 1846 with Reverend Samuel Cox, a New York abolitionist delegate. By giving his readers a thorough explanation of the incident and by reprinting the documents in which it was reported, Douglass provides a compelling account of his distinctly aggressive form of international diplomacy and illuminates some of the tactics that helped him make a name for himself in the transatlantic press. When he rose to speak at the convention, Douglass evidently caught his  audience by surprise. In an irate letter to the editor of the New York Evangelist, a Presbyterian newspaper, Cox extols the ‘glorious unity of thought and feeling’ generated among the delegates and underscores Douglass’s disruptive presence on stage (Douglass, Autobiographies, 691). In Cox’s words, ‘the colored abolition agitator and ultraist, came to the platform and so spake, à la mode, as to ruin the influence almost of all that preceded!’ Douglass’s radically distinct perspective on the temperance cause and its relation to slavery disrupts the ‘glorious unity’ of sentiment toward which the delegates had worked. In the text of his own address, Douglass makes careful note of the nationalist character of those sentiments and proclaims that he ‘cannot fully unite with the American delegates in their patriotic eulogies of America and American temperance societies’ (Autobiographies, 693). Douglass’s failure to ‘unite’ with his compatriots stems from two factors: his exclusion from the American citizenship that they enjoy on account of his race, and his broader objection to ‘patriotic’ feeling for a country that he feels upholds abusive policies. In spite, or perhaps because of, his political exclusion from the American delegation, Douglass’s vocal presence poses a threat to their collective purpose. Douglass’s threat to the American identity celebrated by Cox and his fellows dramatically reverses the terms in which they had been presenting themselves up until that point. Cox explains that Douglass ‘allowed himself to denounce America and all its temperance societies together as a grinding community of the enemies of his people’, and in doing so, he casts their relatively progressive reform efforts in an entirely negative light (Douglass, Autobiographies, 691). The Douglass that emerges in this encounter is not equivocal or ‘ambivalent’ about national matters, as Russ Castronovo has argued, but rather a dealer in absolute moral judgements.5

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His agenda for his speeches at the World Temperance Convention and elsewhere on his lecture tour is both consistent and devastating. He seeks to ‘expos[e] . . . slaveholding practices’ and to change minds by ‘telling the other side of the story’ about American slavery. The stubbornly oppositional quality of Douglass’s rhetoric polarises his audience along national lines, and this conflict makes Cox and his fellows palpably anxious. Cox claims that the American delegates are ‘wounded and indignant’, and that they fear Douglass has ‘rekindle[d] on both sides of the Atlantic the flames of national exasperation and war’ (Douglass, Autobiographies, 692). In Cox’s mind, Douglass’s attacks on slavery are acts of ‘war’ against the nation itself. Without ever being a citizen, he has become a traitor, ‘launch[ing] his revengeful missiles at our country’. The British members of the audience, on the other hand, took Douglass’s side. Along with the text of his speech, which he reprinted in Life and Times, Douglass included the enthusiastic responses he received from the crowd and highlighted their transatlantic bifurcation. After enumerating the persecutions suffered by black temperance societies in the United States, Douglass hears ‘[“Shame! shame! shame!” from the audience, great confusion, and cries of “Sit down” from the American delegates on the platform.]’ (Douglass, Autobiographies, 694). As he replays the episode, Douglass appears to command the action, adding in audience responses as stage directions of sorts that reinforce his leading role. Whereas Cox shouts Douglass down (albeit after the fact), his colleagues repeatedly beg Douglass to ‘Go on!’ The American delegates may have begun as a ‘unit[ed]’ front confident in the value of their ‘patriotic eulogies’, but they are now brought together only by their desire to defend the nation against Douglass’s assaults. Douglass’s critique of racial prejudice in the United States produces extreme reactions from his white compatriots, who immediately take his comments as affronts to the nation as a whole. With the self-assurance of one in complete control of rhetorical cause and effect, Douglass observes ‘how easily Americans parted with their candor and self-possession when slavery was mentioned adversely’ (Autobiographies, 692). Douglass’s implication here that slavery is, in fact, the only force holding the United States together remains a constant point of contention throughout his lectures abroad. His play with the concept of national identity also aligns him with Emerson, who shares his view that an excessive dependence on nationality is a sign of intellectual weakness. Douglass derives confidence in his ability to skewer unsuspecting Americans by ‘telling the other side of the story’ from his repeated successes in representing the interests of those whom, he argued, could not represent themselves. He introduces himself to the convention audience

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as an unelected, self-appointed representative of American slaves, and admits up front that he plays no official role, stating, ‘I am not a delegate to this convention’ (Autobiographies, 693). His power as the representative of a certain portion of the American population is both subversive and wholly imaginative; he seizes this authority for himself and generates it in a political vacuum. Douglass explains his motives for his self-election in a letter written in response to Cox’s diatribe in the New York Evangelist. He writes, ‘Sir, I deem it neither arrogant nor presumptuous to assume to represent three millions of my brethren, who are, while I am penning these words, in chains and slavery on the American soil, the boasted land of liberty and light.’6 Although Douglass’s status as a representative slave was legitimated in part by William Lloyd Garrison, who encouraged him to re-present his experiences to Northern audiences in the years leading up to the publication of his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass in 1845, Douglass’s claim to represent all those enslaved on ‘American soil’ is a bolder gesture that takes on national significance in the context of transatlantic debates. The crucial difference between Douglass’s previous position as a paid agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and his role as a freer Garrisonian agent abroad is that he is no longer simply presenting the facts of his personal history in order to make an essentially regional point about slavery in the South. He still forcefully states the facts of slavery during each of his lectures in Ireland and Britain, but he also exerts significant political force as he passes judgement on slavery as a national phenomenon that disgraces ‘the boasted land of liberty and light’. Priscilla Wald locates the shift in Douglass’s perspective from narrative fact to critical judgement in the publication of My Bondage and My Freedom, in which he states, ‘It did not entirely satisfy me to narrate wrongs . . . I felt like denouncing them.’7 Closer attention to Douglass’s speeches, however, shows that this key transition occurred before 1855, and more precisely, during those years from 1845 to 1847 in which Douglass cultivates a position of moral authority outside the United States. His conscious effort to move from ‘narration’ to ‘denunciation’ signals a shift in his preferred genre of self-expression as well, for Douglass leaves storytelling behind in favour of direct political action in person and in print.

Exposing America in Print: The Power of a Cosmopolitan Press Douglass’s transition from regional to national rhetoric by way of his 1845 transatlantic voyage recalls a similar journey made by Fuller only one year earlier. Although Fuller travelled a relatively short distance from her intellectual home in Boston to Horace Greeley’s New York, she made an

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even more significant imaginative leap as she began to address the nation directly in her journalism. Neither Fuller nor Douglass could be citizens of the United States or national ‘representatives’ in any official capacity, and their turn to the press as a venue for political and social critique signals an important but under-recognised element of American culture in this period. In fact, the long absence of journalism from the antebellum literary canon, an absence that has begun to be filled in the last decade by new scholarship on Fuller’s work in the New-York Tribune, Lydia Maria Child’s letters in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, and African American newspaper writing, has contributed to the suppression of the active voices of dissent and the counter-national impulses that circulated freely in American public discourse of the 1840s and 1850s.8 It is no coincidence that the most effective and widely disseminated piece of protest literature from this period, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, originally appeared in serial form alongside other articles in the abolitionist newspaper The National Era from 1851 to 1852. In a manner that forcefully contradicts Benedict Anderson’s thesis that print journalism reinforces the territorial sovereignty and common culture of a nation, Douglass, like Fuller, uses the transatlantic press to voice his protests against the American government. Before Douglass even arrived on British shores, he seized upon the potential of press coverage to promote his reputation and his agenda at home and abroad. In an incident strikingly similar to the one at the World Temperance Convention, Douglass’s lecture on slavery on board the Cambria in 1845 provoked two Southern passengers to ‘fl[y] to the press to justify their conduct and to denounce [him] as a worthles . . . negro’ (Autobiographies, 679). Their pleas for sympathy from the British public backfired, and Douglass notes that the coverage ‘awaken[ed] something like a national interest in me, and secur[ed] me an audience’ in a country where he was as yet an unknown quantity. Douglass was canny enough to realise that even negative publicity could serve his political purposes. Like Fuller, whose dispatches were proven noteworthy in part by the complaints of a New York cleric offended by her anti-Papal views, Douglass took journalistic ire as a sign that his arguments were troubling the national conscience, even from afar. He therefore capitalised on the criticism that he received, replaying the liveliest insults in a letter to Greeley, Fuller’s editor. ‘I have been denounced by the NewYork Express as a “glibtongued scoundrel,” ’ Douglass boasts, ‘and gravely charged, in its own elegant and dignified language, with “running a muck in greedy-eared Britain against America, its people, its institutions, and even against its peace” ’ (Life and Writings, 1:146). Although Douglass’s sarcastic emphasis on his critic’s ‘dignified language’ intends to entertain, the

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paper’s references to the ‘institutions’ and ‘peace’ of the country indicates that his lectures abroad have cut more deeply. In an 1846 address to an English audience titled ‘My Opposition to War’, Douglass denied the charges that he intended to provoke war between Britain and the United States, claiming a diplomatic role as ‘an advocate of peace between two countries’ (Papers, 1:262). As far as Douglass’s opposition to the ‘institutions’ of the United States was concerned, the New-York Express did not ‘misrepresent’ his views on this occasion, as he claimed elsewhere (Life and Writings, 1:145). Douglass had every intention of attacking the ‘American institution’ of slavery and ultimately the state itself, for in his opinion, ‘the preservation, propagation, and perpetuation of slavery is the vital and animating spirit of the American Government’ (Papers 1:251; Life and Writings, 1:148). However inadvertent the reporter’s promotion of Douglass’s agenda may have been, it informed the American public of the true nature of Douglass’s ‘labors’ in exile. Douglass’s awareness of the patterns of journalistic communication between Britain and the United States shaped the formal structure of the speeches that he gave during his years abroad. The texts of his speeches remain accessible to us, thanks to the painstaking reporting undertaken by British journalists, who served indirectly as Douglass’s publicity agents, making him an unofficial ‘correspondent’ to newspapers both foreign and domestic.9 Douglass made contact with Greeley, a figure of considerable power in the New York journalistic establishment, and he also consistently made headlines in The Liberator and the National Anti-Slavery Standard. He may have been attacked by Cox in the New York Evangelist and by an anonymous reporter in the New-York Express, but his efforts were supported and his agenda was repatriated by newspapers with abolitionist sympathies. A reporter for the Berkshire County Whig perceived that Douglass’s efforts abroad were intended primarily to call attention to inequality in the United States, and he transmitted that message to his readers. In the reporter’s words, Douglass becomes an epic hero who ‘crosses the great ocean, and in king-ridden Europe, on the soil of oppressed England . . . is first recognized as a man, and assumes the rank to which his talents and character entitle him. What a lesson for Democratic America!’10 At roughly the same time that Douglass appeared on stage as a ‘schoolmaster’ at the World Temperance Convention, he was teaching a ‘lesson’ of international significance to the American public, courtesy of like-minded journalists. The press could both circumvent and supersede governmental authority, and it proved itself a more ‘[d]emocratic’ medium than any other form of representation. Douglass’s decision to continue the work

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that he began as a lecturer abroad by founding a newspaper of his own upon his return to the United States signalled his faith in the cosmopolitan power of the press to right wrongs through transnational dialogue. When Douglass spoke to his British audiences, he counted on the fact that his words would travel swiftly across the ocean. In an 1846 speech titled ‘England Should Lead the Cause of Emancipation’, Douglass exhorts his audience to ‘interfere’ wholeheartedly in American affairs. He observes: It is true you are a good way from America; but by the magic power of steam you are brought as it were within mooring distance of each other, and what is uttered this day in the Music Hall of Leeds, will, within fourteen days resound in Massachusetts – striking dismay to the hearts of the slaveholders of America. (Papers, 1:477)

In Douglass’s metaphor, nations have become ships ‘moor[ed]’ alongside one another, communicating freely as if gathered for a Melvillian ‘gam’. The actively cosmopolitan impulses of Douglass’s abolitionist rhetoric, which demands the moral persuasion of one nation by another, are transmitted by the ‘magic power of steam’, marking this out as a self-consciously modern moment in history when technological innovation and progressive reform reinforce one another. Douglass’s commentary on the simultaneity of transatlantic communication echoes Emerson’s in ‘Europe and European Books’, an essay published in The Dial in 1843. Although he is usually pigeonholed by critics as an anti-European thinker, Emerson recognised the force that transatlantic travel could exert on the American mind. In this essay, he comments, ‘The American Academy, the Historical Society, and Harvard University, would do well to make the Cunard steamers the subject of examination in regard to their literary and ethical influence.’11 Emerson looks forward to a gradual diminution of the ‘transatlantic excess of influence’ on American literature, but for his own abolitionist project, Douglass counted on ‘ethical’ pressure from abroad to bring American opinion in line with British anti-slavery practices. Douglass further develops his theory of transnational exchange in his most famous speech, ‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?’ (1852). The discoveries that he made during his years abroad, including the enabling freedom of the transatlantic press and the immediate anxiety and ‘dismay’ engendered by the ‘exposure’ of American wrongs to the eyes of the world, become, in his later account, the signs that a new era has arrived. He contends:

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Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world, and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference . . . Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway over and under the sea, as well as on the earth. Wind, steam, and lightning are its chartered agents. Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively annihilated. Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic are distinctly heard on the other. (Papers, 2:387)

What Douglass describes here is not a post-national turn, but rather a transition from an almost medieval mode of imagining the nation as a ‘walled cit[y]’ to a new way of configuring a global community whose nations are intellectually and morally ‘link[ed] . . . together’.12 The Atlantic no longer acts as a barrier, but now functions as an echo chamber in which citizens of separate nations can speak ‘distinctly’ and powerfully to one another. The weight of historical inevitability that Douglass’s words carry masks the fact that the shared culture of the Atlantic world far pre-dates his perception of it, but as Gilroy contends, the use of its flow patterns to ‘critique’ the sovereignty of individual nations marks the beginning of modern black consciousness.13 The example of Emerson, another American ‘representative man’, can serve here as a counterpoint to Douglass’s vision of a networked global ‘[i]ntelligence’ that holds nations responsible to and for one another. In ‘Fortune of the Republic’, an 1863 speech that bears an uncanny resemblance to Douglass’s own, Emerson imagines ‘the globe . . . [as] a brain’, with ‘nerves and straps, which throb across seas and territories’.14 Emerson describes a form of intellectual communion that can be experienced by individuals normally divided along national lines, but Douglass’s version of the cosmopolitan mind is more politically ambitious. In Douglass’s hands, a shared consciousness of wrong ‘annihilate[s]’ measurements of ‘[s]pace’ and dissolves the borders that normally protect nations from their neighbours. Douglass implies that his broad challenge to the sovereignty of nations applies to the United States in particular, which he had accused on previous occasions of treading stubbornly ‘the same old path of its fathers’. Listeners such as Samuel Cox who sought to preserve American political independence balked at Douglass’s repeated calls for international ‘interference’ in their affairs of state, but Douglass was adamant. If a nation ‘shut itself up from the surrounding world’, it meant that it had something terrible to hide. In Douglass’s speeches, the United States emerges as a

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more awkward and compromised political entity than scholars of this period, and certainly his own contemporaries, would find comfortable. Douglass’s insistence on the opening of a transatlantic communication network calls into question those facts of national life that he believes are being suppressed during the resurgence of nationalist sentiment in the 1840s. By acting to dissolve American slavery by means of cosmopolitan ethical influence, Douglass also threatens the twin projects of national expansion and exceptionalism held dear by patriotic groups such as the Young Americans.

Crossing National ‘Property’ Lines Douglass’s most tangible success during his years abroad – the transfer of ownership that made it possible for him to return to the United States and to participate fully in its political life – was also his most controversial victory. Douglass had to flee the country in 1845 because he identified himself in the Narrative as the legal ‘property’ of Thomas Auld, from whose custody he had escaped seven years earlier. Significant financial support from his British admirers allowed the account of his ownership to be settled for good, and for Douglass to belong only to himself. Although many of his abolitionist colleagues objected to the principle of the sale, Douglass perceived this transfer of his person from the property of another man to the property of himself as a key transition in his life. He plays so often in his lectures with the distinction between property, or objecthood, and independent being, or personhood, that his own identity as a speaker for the abolitionist cause becomes fundamentally wrapped up in that claim to self-ownership. On the most triumphant occasion of Douglass’s tour, the evening of his ‘Farewell to the British People’, fellow abolitionist George Thompson introduced Douglass to a crowd gathered in his honour as the greatest of wonders: a man ‘who was once a piece of property’ (Douglass, Papers, 2:19). Douglass’s new claim to the status of human being looks, on the one hand, like the culmination of an autobiographical process that began with his challenge to Covey in the Narrative, an event that he asserts ‘revived within me a sense of my own manhood’ (Autobiographies, 65).15 On the other hand, as Douglass develops his argument about human ‘property’ and its relation to individual identity in his speeches abroad, it becomes inseparable from his critique of the United States’ strategy of protecting its national ‘property’ at all costs. In his ‘Farewell’ speech, Douglass makes light of white Americans’ inability to see him as anything more than another line on the inventory

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of his former master’s estate. With feigned surprise, he observes, ‘Why, sir, the Americans do not know that I am a man. They talk of me as a box of goods; they speak of me in connexion with sheep, horses, and cattle. But here, how different! Why, sir, the very dogs of old England know that I am a man!’ (Papers, 2:50). In this ironic account, Douglass attributes the national failure to recognise his humanity to the sub-human intelligence of white Americans, who are less perceptive than dogs in their ability to distinguish between persons and things. What he actually dismantles here is an ingrained American taxonomy of race that insists on the classification of blacks as ‘goods’ along with other household ‘animals’ that are used merely for the benefit of their owners. Whereas the ‘very dogs of old England’ uphold the natural order, Americans are bent on reversing it, even in the face of the world’s ridicule. Douglass contends that the only way that he himself has escaped this unnatural degradation is by means of his transatlantic journey. ‘I came here a thing,’ he continues; ‘I go back a human being.’ Had he stayed in the United States, even as a ‘free’ man, he would not have been able to overcome the systemic oppression that reduced slaves and even free blacks to the status of objects. Douglass’s humorous assessment of the dynamics between man and beast on both sides of the Atlantic attacks the racial prejudice that allows a white American to judge a slave as a ‘box of goods’. In an earlier speech, ‘Slavery As It Now Exists in the United States’, he digs even deeper to analyse the institutional framework of a nation that condoned such judgements. Even heard secondhand in the voice of a British journalist, Douglass’s assault on the hypocrisy of ‘slave-holding religion’ rings out clearly: They said that he had stolen himself from his master (a laugh); that the government of the United States had solemnly guaranteed to his master a right of property in his body; and that, in the face of that solemn obligation – in the face of that solemn enactment of the sovereign people of the United States – he had run off with himself (applause and laughter) . . . he had committed the awful theft of stealing his own body, and his own hands, and of appropriating them to himself, an individual in England. (Papers, 1:349)

Douglass contends that the United States government has a vested interest in protecting his master’s ‘right of property in his body’, and that, by extension, his body is the legal property of the nation itself. His flight violates the ‘sovereign[ty]’ of the United States, and by liberating himself from his master and transgressing the national border, he has crossed a crucial property line upon which the American nation depends for its survival.

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Douglass’s audience responds with laughter, but his accusations are more troubling than they seem. They expose a current of nagging insecurity that runs beneath the ‘solemnly’ confident façade of a nation in the midst of a tremendous project of expansion. To such a nation, Douglass’s act of selfassertion is untenable, an ‘awful theft’. Like the extranational escape of the slaves on board the Creole, the story that Douglass retold in The Heroic Slave, it must be accounted for both financially and diplomatically.16 Douglass’s discussion of the ‘property’ value of slaves hinges on the double meaning that he attributes to that particular word, which receives repeated emphasis in his descriptions of the American slave system. As a slave, Douglass himself was a piece of disposable ‘property’, a ‘marketable commodity’ that could be bought and sold at will (Papers, 2:9). As commodities and as labourers, slaves contribute to the gross national product, which ensures the economic integrity of the nation. Nothing, therefore, must be allowed to ‘detract from . . . [their] value as property’ (Papers, 1:476). By escaping from slavery, Douglass cancels his own market value, and by escaping the nation’s borders on his voyage to England, he removes himself from the territorial ‘property’ of the nation, outside of which the laws of the land do not apply. The transnational impulse of Douglass’s flight, as well as the international scope of his abolitionist endeavours, therefore work against the geographical and imaginative forces that hold the nation together. Under such precarious circumstances, the United States could not afford the financial and psychic costs of transnational action or thought, particularly by its enslaved population. Anticipating Fuller’s argument at the end of the decade, Douglass envisions transnational exchange as a source of revolutionary energy, predicting that ‘if a foreign enemy were to land in America and plant the standard of freedom, the slaves would rise to a man, they would rally round that standard; a strong fire would be kindled within their breasts’ (Papers, 1:187). The more open the United States was to the influence of other nations in the years leading up to the Civil War, the greater the threat to its national way of life and to the preservation of its collective ‘property’. At the start of The Heroic Slave, Douglass introduces his protagonist Madison Washington as an unexpected type of ‘founding father’, who ‘loved liberty as well as did Patrick Henry – who deserved it as much as Thomas Jefferson’ (Life and Writings, 5:474). Despite the apparent grandeur of his achievements, Washington ‘lives now only in the chattel records of his native State’, for he is classified as a piece of property on someone else’s estate. The nature of Washington’s achievement over the course of the narrative is primarily intellectual; by persuading a sympathetic white listener to help him and then by defending his revolt on board the Creole

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through a reapplication of the ‘principles of 1776’, Washington is able effectively to think his way out of the nation and its closed system of slavery into freedom in the Caribbean (Douglass, Life and Writings, 5:502–4). His intellectual power distinguishes him from Melville’s Babo, who overcomes the crew of the San Dominick by sheer force in ‘Benito Cereno’ (1855). In Douglass’s novella, a sailor recalls the stealth of Washington’s victory: ‘It was a mystery to us where he got his knowledge of language; but as little was said to him, none of us knew the extent of his intelligence and ability till it was too late.’ Washington’s ‘intelligence’ allows him to cast off the constraints of his status as the commodified property of another and to generate the rhetoric of his liberation, which becomes his own rightful intellectual property. Douglass recognises that the thinking slave is a slave owner’s worst nightmare. In an 1847 lecture, ‘The Skin Aristocracy in America’, he portrays black intelligence as a national blind spot and claims: the hatred of the American was especially roused against the intellectual coloured man. When he is degraded, they can bear with him; he is in the condition which they think natural to him; but if he is intelligent and moral, then there is a contradiction to their theory. (Papers, 2:5)

According to Douglass, black intellectualism threatens the very foundations of the slave system, for intelligent slaves are contradictions in terms who can no longer be contained within the space that society assigns to them.17 Such ‘intelligent and moral’ beings strain at the imaginative limits of their condition, and their intellectual mobility inevitably leads to their successful physical escape from slavery. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe’s character George Harris is able to orchestrate his own flight to free soil in Canada, thanks to his superior intellectual skills – notable enough that he has invented a machine to which ‘[h]is master holds the patent’ – and his ability to pass for a white man.18 His arrival at a Kentucky hotel is preceded by a discussion of the challenges of holding on to intelligent slaves, and in a voice that Douglass would recognise, the most ‘coarse’ and ‘obtuse’ slave owner in the crowd states, ‘Bright niggers isn’t no kind of ’vantage to their masters.’ Instead of allowing these especially bright slaves to transgress the boundaries of his plantation, as he suspects they will, this slave owner sells them ‘down river’ in order to reduce their geographical mobility. As the title of the chapter implies, George himself is ‘Property’, whose escape demonstrates that he has entered into ‘an Improper State of Mind’.19 George’s ‘impropriety’ is both intellectual and physical; like Douglass and his fictional hero Madison

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Washington, he has crossed over into a realm of thought and action that will lead him to criticise and to move beyond the property lines that define the American nation. When George answers his former employer Wilson’s suggestion that he obey ‘the laws of . . . [his] country’ with a defence of his right to leave the United States in search of another, more egalitarian nation, Stowe implies that his rejection of his property status will inevitably cause him to stake his national claim elsewhere. As Robert Stepto has observed, Stowe and Douglass clashed on precisely this point: whether it was possible for free blacks to remain within the confines of the United States once they had realised the extent of the nation’s hostility to their independence.20 While Stowe argued for emigration, Douglass pursued the path of integration, but he also recognised the difference that thinking outside the nation could make to the advancement of blacks whose lives were still restricted within its borders. As they seek their freedom, both George Harris and Madison Washington generate distinctive ‘intellectual property’ of their own. Abolitionists such as Theodore Parker capitalised on the force of these claims to active roles in the nation’s intellectual life, as they argued for the inclusion of slave narratives in the American literary canon. In an 1849 address, Parker asserted that these works were ‘wholly indigenous and original’, for they ‘could be written by none but Americans’.21 Although his theory offers one solution to the perceived deficit of ‘original’ American writing at the time, it also poses a challenge to the patriotic definition of national literature favoured by the Young Americans. The stories of ‘Fugitive Slaves’ might be unique, but they are also inherently critical of national policy and they take particular issue with the ties between the territorial expansion sanctioned by ‘manifest destiny’ and the aggrandisement of slavery. In his speeches abroad, Douglass seizes upon the connection between the territorial property of the nation and its supposed intellectual property as an opportunity to skewer the rhetoric of American exceptionalism. Even as O’Sullivan trumpets the ‘magnificent domain of space and time’ into which the United States would eventually expand, Douglass brings abstract rhetoric such as his down to earth by informing his audiences of the specific historical consequences of those sweeping gestures.22 In Douglass’s hands, the aggressive optimism that shapes O’Sullivan’s prophecies of America’s ‘far-reaching . . . boundless future’ begins to look more like the greed that drove Daniel Webster to insist that the British government repay the United States for its loss of human ‘property’ in the Creole incident. In an 1846 address that ties together ‘Texas, Slavery, and

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American Prosperity’, Douglass observes, ‘This element of character is peculiar to the Americans; all they ask is prosperity, and therefore we see their bony fingers pointing towards the Pacific, threatening to overwhelm and destroy every other power which may dispute their claims’ (Papers, 1:123). By attributing the national obsession with geography to an insistent pursuit of economic gain, Douglass is able to make the United States look both bullying and defensive. Americans’ repeated attempts to redraw the property lines of the nation go hand in ‘bony’ hand with their anxiety about other nations that might ‘dispute their claims’ to their possessions, either territorial or human.

Mapping a Black Body Politic As he drew a more accurate map of the philosophical and geographical terrain of the United States for the benefit of his British and American audiences, Douglass focused on the internal topography of the nation, as well as the shifting status of its borders. Issuing a direct rebuttal to those literary nationalists who celebrated the ‘magnificence’ of American nature, Douglass took the revolutionary step of racialising their ostensibly Edenic landscape. Instead of envisioning the body politic as a sublimely featured land of promise, Douglass forces his listeners to see the nation as a suffering and broken black body. In his ‘Farewell’ speech to his British admirers, Douglass’s critique of nationalist vocabulary is pointed and devastating.23 He says of the United States: She may boast of her broad lakes and mighty rivers; but sir, while I remember, that with her broadest lakes and finest rivers, the tears and blood of my brethren are mingled and forgotten, I cannot speak well of her; I cannot be loud in her praise, or pour forth warm eulogiums upon her name or institutions. (Cheers.) No; she is unworthy of the name of great or free. She stands upon the quivering heart-strings of 3,000,000 of people. (Papers, 2:25)

Douglass unravels his compatriots’ ‘boast[s]’ about the uniqueness of their territorial possessions by identifying those sources of national pride with the oppression of slaves. America’s ‘mighty rivers’ have become veins running with ‘the tears and blood of my brethren’, and they serve as memorials to a history of subjugation rather than as signs of a promising future. While the Young Americans placed geography at the centre of their argument for legitimating American cultural independence, Douglass does the exact opposite. He insists on bringing those very features into the foreground of his audience’s vision, but he claims that the horror of their corporeal

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associations makes it impossible for him to ‘praise’ the nation at all. Douglass leaves his audience with an image of the United States as a malicious giant trampling the ‘heart-strings’ of its slaves underfoot and thereby deals a death blow to the hubris of his nationalist peers. Taking a more extreme stand than fellow critics of slavery such as Fuller, and most certainly than writers like Whitman, who celebrated the expansive potential of the United States as a ‘nation of nations’, Douglass literally gets under the nation’s skin as he exposes the bodily machinery of its political success. In his ‘Farewell’ speech, he turns the tables on patriotic claims made in poems such as William Jewett Pabodie’s ‘Our Country’: a paean to American geographical breadth reprinted by Rufus Griswold in his nationalist anthology The Poets and Poetry of America (1842). Longfellow demonstrated his objections to Griswold’s project by publishing his internationalist anthology The Poets and Poetry of Europe (1845), but Douglass takes an altogether different tack. Instead of counterbalancing American literary nationalism by promoting European tradition, he attacks nationalist rhetoric on the ground, intending to stop American cultural advancement in its tracks until the nation comes to terms with the indignities of its slave system. Douglass’s insistence on painting a grim picture of slavery’s impact on the American landscape also distances him from Emerson, who directly followed Douglass on his own lecture tour of Britain from 1847 to 1848. While Emerson found national jingoism almost universally unappealing, he did indulge on occasion in the kind of territorial pride for which the Young Americans became infamous. Issuing a challenge to his audience in Manchester, England, Emerson proposes ‘the capes of Massachusetts, and my own Indian stream’ as the places in which the future of the AngloSaxon empire would be played out.24 By claiming his own roots on the banks of an ‘Indian stream’, Emerson means to suggest that his version of the American landscape is a primeval space, untouched by European settlement and certainly unstained by the exploitation that distinguishes Douglass’s bloodied ground from its nationalist counterparts. In fact, Douglass’s strategy of racialising the national landscape inaugurates a divergent African American tradition of visual representation developed further by both William Wells Brown and W. E. B. Du Bois in their ‘panoramic’ views of the American continent. Like Douglass, Brown travelled to England as an anti-slavery lecturer and brought with him the innovative tool of an illustrated ‘panorama’ to strengthen his case. This combination of painted scenes of slave life with explanatory text was Brown’s answer to the solely natural panorama of the Mississippi River that he and others (including Longfellow) had seen displayed in

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the United States.25 Brown began exhibiting his panorama in England in 1850, not long after Douglass reminded British audiences of the tragic state of the United States’ ‘broad lakes and mighty rivers’. Brown’s panorama had an explicitly radical agenda, for it was intended to give ‘as fair a representation of American Slavery as could be given upon canvass [sic]’ and ‘to disseminate truth upon this subject, and hasten the downfall of the greatest evil that now stains the character of the American people’. Because it intertwined human subjects with natural features, Brown’s project actually functioned as an anti-panorama, replacing the politics of ‘manifest destiny’ with the abolitionist imperative of slavery’s ‘downfall’. His panoramic vision did not erase altogether those elements that made the United States geographically distinctive, but it insisted, as Douglass did in his speeches, on full ‘exposure’ of the human events that marred the national landscape. In the final chapter of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois asks readers to recognise the central role played by African slaves and their descendants in American history. ‘Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation,’ he asserts. ‘Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood . . . Would America have been America without her Negro people?’26 As he invokes the ‘blood-brotherhood’ between the races in the United States, as well as ‘the gift of sweat and brawn’ that the slaves had given in the massive effort ‘to beat back the wilderness, conquer the soil, and lay the foundations of this vast economic empire’, Du Bois aligns himself with Douglass and with Brown by arguing that blacks must be considered part of a multiracial American body politic. Although Du Bois looks out over the national landscape from a historical moment beyond Reconstruction, the problem of selective panoramic vision that Douglass identified in the 1840s still holds true. White Americans base their sense of national identity on a triumphant relation to a land that was once a ‘wilderness’, but they fail to acknowledge the extent to which that national territory was shaped by – and thus became the ‘property’ of – those who worked the land alongside (or as Du Bois claims, for) them. The mode of representing the landscape that Douglass creates and that Brown and Du Bois refine is not necessarily an anti-nationalist tradition, but rather an alternative way of staking a claim to common national property that firmly rejects the history of figuring American slaves as the physical ‘property’ of their compatriots. In an 1846 speech, Douglass explains to an English audience why individual slaves were loathe to ‘forcibly emancipate’ themselves from bondage. If a slave managed to escape, ‘the moment he attempted to

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become a freeman the whole nation should set upon him and kill him, or hunt him down and restore him to the bondage of his master’ (Papers, 1:351). Douglass’s comment would make perfect sense as a protest against the Fugitive Slave Law, but the fact that he had come to this conclusion at such an early date indicates a crucial difference in his perspective on the nation that results from both personal experience and political conviction. In Douglass’s mind, the nation coalesces around the project of perpetuating slavery, pulling inward from its borders in order to ‘hunt . . . down’ escaped slaves and restore lost property to its rightful owner. While the Young Americans saw the consolidation of national energy as a desirable goal and a step toward cultural independence, Douglass portrays this same moment of nationalisation as an entirely negative and oppressive victory purchased at the expense of the nation’s enslaved population. As a number of critics have noted, Douglass’s rhetoric thrives on the reversal of expectations. His frequent use of antithesis and paradox helps him build what Shelley Fisher Fishkin and Carla L. Peterson identify as a Foucauldian ‘counter discourse’, whose effectiveness depends on the successful use of the language of the ruling class to contradict its claims to dominance.27 As he casts American expansion in negative terms and chastises Americans for their failure to apply the principles of the ‘Declaration of Independence’ to their slaves, Douglass essentially cancels the value of American patriotism. He claims: No other nation on the earth was so loud in its professions as the American people: their political professions were unbounded . . . Yes, they were a nation of professors, and if any one wished to find what their true character was, let him find what just the opposite of their professions was, and he would have it duly declared. (Papers, 1:346–7, italics mine)

In his speeches, Douglass builds his case against the nation by arguing that the ‘opposite’ of the official story that the United States tells about itself is, in fact, the cold, hard truth of its collective life. By refusing to obey the law that forbade even free black Americans from testifying in court, Douglass dares to lead the prosecution of the nation itself. He envisions himself as a provocateur who seeks to ‘blister’ the national conscience in order to bring about radical transformation (Papers, 2:6).28 Like Fuller and Emerson (who made no secret of his desire to ‘exasperate’ his audiences out of their moral turpitude on the subject of slavery), Douglass relates to the nation primarily by criticising it. To those who identify this period as a crucible of nationalist feeling, the oppositional impulses that run through

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these authors’ works carve a deep chasm in the supposedly straightforward discourse of nation-building. As his creative manipulations of the nationalist vocabulary of landscape demonstrate, Douglass endeavours to turn the United States’ strengths against the nation by identifying them as sources of shame. If nationalists were to make an argument about the exceptional character of the United States, Douglass would counter their boasts by asserting that the nation was indeed distinctive in the world, but only because of the extent of its moral compromises. In his ‘Farewell’ to his British supporters, he contends: America presents to the world an anomaly, such as no other nation ever did or can present before mankind. The people of the United States are the boldest in their pretensions to freedom, and the loudest in their profession of love of liberty; yet no nation upon the face of the globe can exhibit a statute-book so full of all that is cruel, malicious, and infernal, as the American code of laws. Every page is red with the blood of the American slave. (Papers, 2:27)

Douglass attacks superlatives such as O’Sullivan’s as he calls America an ‘anomaly’, an odd nation out of an imagined world consensus rather than a superior ‘nation of many nations’. In Douglass’s eyes, the United States is not exceptional, but rather entirely isolated by its hypocrisy. Even its founding documents, the touchstones of American democratic originality, are marked by ‘blood’ that makes the United States a pariah in the international community. In The Heroic Slave, Douglass skewers the ‘MODEL REPUBLIC’ that recognises the slave trade elsewhere in the world as a ‘crime’, but allows it to continue within its own borders (Life and Writings, 5:498). He insists that the United States has earned its uniqueness by exempting itself from the standards that apply to all other countries, and that its exceptionalism is therefore no bragging matter. Reading Douglass in the transatlantic context in which he worked from 1845 to 1847 allows us to reconsider the ‘American Renaissance’ not as a spontaneous outpouring of creative energy, but as a literal rebirth demanded of a culture exhausted by its failures on multiple philosophical, political, and moral fronts. Like Fuller, who discovers the revolutionary equality in Rome that she missed in the United States, Douglass imagines that the rebirth for which he calls would be generated by transnational intervention, not self-contained growth. He concludes: [W]e must appeal to the world for aid in this movement. Slavery has well-nigh destroyed the national conscience of the United States. It has well-nigh corrupted the entire fabric of religion. It has left us but a name to live when we are

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dead. We desire to infuse moral life into the United States – to infuse religious life into the American people. (Papers, 1:374)

Douglass sees the nation as an empty shell and a nation in ‘name’ only, for its body politic has degenerated to the point of death. If the United States is to be revived at all, that new ‘life’ must come from outside its borders. At this moment, Douglass anticipates the massive project of Reconstruction in which he would participate as an agent of the government that he had so harshly criticised in the 1840s. He also levels a final blow at the United States by exhorting fellow abolitionists to ‘destroy’ the nation in order to rebuild it (Papers, 2:31). This kind of subversive violence, normally attributed to outlying extremists such as John Brown, actually situates Douglass at the centre of a self-authorised ‘American Renaissance’.29 No longer a defensive response to embarrassing pressure from those who claimed that the United States had no distinct cultural identity, Douglass’s ‘American Renaissance’ seeks to rebuild the nation from the ground up with the help of those countries that have surpassed the United States in making good on its distinctive national promise.

Douglass as Transatlantic Editor Douglass’s journalistic work from 1847 to 1863 brings together his drive to deliver a cosmopolitan critique of national policy with his insistence on the vital and continuing role that black citizens could play in American history. Refusing the comforts of an egalitarian exile in Europe that would tempt twentieth-century black intellectuals such as James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, and Paul Robeson, Douglass explains that he ‘felt it my duty to labor and suffer with my oppressed people in my native land’ (Autobiographies, 699).30 Among his black professional peers, Douglass stood out for his decision to fight for American nationality rather than to opt out for life abroad. He admitted regretfully to Stowe in 1853 that ‘education and emigration go together with us,’ for there was little reason for successful free blacks to stay in a country whose citizens assaulted them with a constant stream of alienating prejudice and whose laws denied them the vote and actually put them in physical danger of being returned to slavery (Autobiographies, 729). As the editor of The North Star and its subsequent incarnation Frederick Douglass’ Paper, Douglass harnessed the power of what he calls ‘a nation, in the midst of a nation’: a black reading public whose existence both challenged the larger nation to abandon its habits of exploitation and reminded it of its true multiracial character (Papers, 2:427). Although he

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worked within the borders of the United States, Douglass preserved the double consciousness of national insider and critical outsider that had so threatened those Americans who overheard his scathing accounts of national policy in Britain. The journalistic project that Douglass initiated upon his return eventually brought him closer to the foundational elements of the United States that he had attacked abroad, most notably its Constitution, and his loyalty to those very principles of American democratic life would forcibly isolate him from colleagues such as Martin Delany and Stowe, who believed that there was no potential for black participation in the United States. In Life and Times, Douglass asked his readers to consider his editorial years as the most productive and significant of his career. ‘If I have at any time said or written that which is worth remembering or repeating,’ he notes, ‘I must have said such things between the years 1848 and 1860, and my paper was a chronicle of most of what I said during that time’ (Autobiographies, 709). That paper gathered together Douglass’s own speeches with commentaries by other abolitionist colleagues whose dispatches from various cities mapped out a black nation in print.31 If his years as a transatlantic lecturer allowed Douglass to develop his argument against the preservation of national ‘property’ and to emerge as a political force in his own right, then his journalistic period solidified his position as a self-appointed public leader who had a distinct contribution to make to the ongoing debate about the nation’s direction. James McCune Smith, one of Douglass’s allies, identified Douglass’s editorial position as the key to his representative nationality. When it is taken out of context, as McCune Smith’s introduction to My Bondage and My Freedom often is, readers lose the force of his argument that Douglass is one of the ‘rule[rs of] the land’ and ‘movers of public opinion’ precisely because his name and ideas circulate constantly in print (Autobiographies, 132). As an editor, Douglass himself becomes the current that is transmitted ‘over the lightning wires’ of print communication that bind the United States together and situate the nation in the transatlantic network that he describes in ‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?’ By iterating himself across national territory, Douglass achieves national status and intertwines his own fate inextricably with that of the nation. The answer to McCune Smith’s question, ‘And the secret of his power, what is it?’ is therefore more textual than theoretical. ‘He is a Representative American man – a type of his countrymen,’ McCune Smith argues, basing his assumption of Douglass’s representative identity on the extent to which his dealings in newspaper ‘type’ have made him a symbolic ‘type’ of the ‘American man’. To McCune Smith, Douglass’s narrative of his rise from slavery matters

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less than the apex of cultural power that he reaches as a journalist. Such experiences may have made him a conglomerate of ‘every thing that is American’, but he does not embody that essence of nationality until he commands the field of print journalism.32 Recent work by Robert Fanuzzi and Frankie Hutton has illuminated the extent to which black leaders of the 1840s fixated on the press as a means of both advancing the abolitionist cause and establishing racial solidarity.33 In a speech at the 1847 National Convention of Colored People and Their Friends, McCune Smith leads the charge for a black national newspaper as he asserts, ‘The first step which will mark our certain advancement as a People, will be our Declaration of Independence from all aid except God and our souls . . . And such conviction can only be produced through a Press.’34 In McCune Smith’s eyes, the institution of a black press will herald the birth of a black nation, just as the print document of the ‘Declaration of Independence’ marked the establishment of the United States. In the competitive spirit that would lead him to clash with Garrison over the ownership of the nation’s most authentic ‘colored newspaper’, Douglass contends that his paper will be the one to fulfil that promise.35 As an editor, Douglass predicts that his project will garner both black support and white respect: The grand thing to be done, therefore, was to change the estimation in which the colored people of the United States were held; to remove the prejudice which depreciated and depressed them; to prove them worthy of a higher consideration; to disprove their alleged inferiority, and demonstrate their capacity for a more exalted civilization than slavery and prejudice had assigned to them. (Autobiographies, 386–7)

Douglass imagines his journalistic endeavour as a strong intellectual statement that will eventually have deep political ramifications. He seeks to ‘prove’ the qualification of black Americans to attain ‘a more exalted civilization’ and to participate in national life as active citizens. Douglass’s newspaper makes a definitive claim to generate the kind of black intellectual property that he hopes will permanently cancel the ‘property value’ of the black body politic. He aims to awaken ‘the mental energies of the race’, long denied an outlet in an oppressive culture (Autobiographies, 387). Although the newspaper was a personal effort for which Douglass put his reputation and even his family’s financial security on the line, he also saw it as that great step forward for a collective ‘People’ for which McCune Smith had called. In Douglass’s promise to ‘change’ the condition and the prospects of the black American population, he begins to

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demonstrate his greater investment in the nation and his faith in black progress within it. In his new role as a setter of national ‘type’, Douglass envisions himself ‘wielding my pen, as well as my voice, in the great work of renovating the public mind, and building up a public sentiment’ against slavery and prejudice (Autobiographies, 389). Not only does Douglass see the production of his newspaper as a political act of tremendous significance; more crucially, he reconciles himself to the possibility that the nation can indeed be ‘renovated’ and that the American public can correct the errors of its ways. Even though he chose to live and work in his ‘native land’ rather than in Britain, he retained a profound scepticism about the value of American nationality. In fact, when he returned to American shores in 1847, Douglass forcibly dissociated himself from the nation in a speech on ‘The Right to Criticize American Institutions’. He proclaims, ‘I have no love for America, as such; I have no patriotism. I have no country’ (Life and Writings, 1:236). Douglass was bent on seeing the nation destroyed before it could be rebuilt, and declared that he ‘desire[d] to see its overthrow as speedily as possible, and its Constitution shivered in a thousand fragments’. He positioned himself as an anti-national agitator who would push the United States to confront its weaknesses until its political resolve crumbled and its social fabric unravelled. ‘The conscience of the American public needs this irritation,’ he insists. ‘And I would blister it all over, from centre to circumference, until it gives signs of a purer and a better life than it is now manifesting to the world’ (Life and Writings, 1:237). Emerson’s 1862 promise to ‘exasperate our nationality’ looks both modest and belated in comparison to Douglass’s early acts of verbal violence against the nation, and the extremity of Douglass’s denial of patriotic sentiment shows how completely persuaded he was that the nation could only be reformed by means of cosmopolitan intervention.36 As he dug deep into his journalistic enterprise, however, Douglass underwent what he called a ‘radical change’ in his relationship to the nation (Autobiographies, 392). After claiming that he had ‘no country’, he spent the next sixteen years striving to ‘renovate’ that very country through the medium of print because he believed that its political principles were essentially sound. Douglass’s project of national reform resembled Fuller’s ‘great work of popular education’ insofar as he appointed himself a teacher of his fellow countrymen who ‘assum[ed] to instruct the highly civilized people of the north in the principles of liberty, justice, and humanity’ (Autobiographies, 704). As a journalist, he played the role of ‘schoolmaster’ to the American people that ignited the ire of pro-slavery clergy at the World Temperance Convention. In the process of educating the nation,

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Douglass himself was transformed, and he broke permanently with his own abolitionist past. He explains in My Bondage and My Freedom: But for the responsibility of conducting a public journal, and the necessity imposed upon me of meeting opposite views from abolitionists in this state, I should in all probability have remained as firm in my disunion views as any other disciple of William Lloyd Garrison. (Autobiographies, 392)

Instead of fighting for ‘disunion’ and fragmentation of the nation as it stood, as he had in his previous speeches, Douglass began to reinscribe himself within the boundaries of the nation and to renew his belief in its integrity as a democratic construct. Douglass’s journalistic project was a transatlantic venture from the beginning, as he drew his startup costs from British supporters and benefited tremendously from the successful management of Julia Griffiths, a British woman who worked alongside him as copy-editor, financial advisor, and fundraiser on two continents long after he had broken his initial coeditorial pact with Martin Delany. The extent to which Douglass had won the loyalty of British abolitionists irritated Garrison and contributed to the eventual split between Garrison’s Boston faction and Douglass’s Rochester allies. While Douglass was still abroad, Garrison and his colleagues began to receive copious amounts of fan mail from Douglass’s British admirers, praising his extraordinary personal ability to generate transatlantic sympathy for the abolitionist cause.37 Douglass retained that support when he moved to Rochester and called upon it when his paper was in financial trouble in the 1850s.38 When Douglass established himself in direct competition with Garrison as a newspaper editor, it was truly the beginning of the end of their alliance. Their split was political as well as personal, for Garrisonian abolitionists championed the dissolution of the nation and insisted on non-participation in civic life, which meant they refused to vote. As a result of his journalistic work and his alliances with those who supported his paper, particularly Gerrit Smith, Douglass reversed his position on the pro-slavery character of the US Constitution, advocated the cause of national union, and reconciled himself to the ownership of the national ‘property’ that he had found so problematic during his time abroad. When Douglass settled in Rochester in 1847, he received as a gift from Gerrit Smith a parcel of land at Timbucto, a free black colony in upstate New York that many hoped would provide ‘a viable alternative to black emigration’.39 Douglass’s philosophical reconciliation to the nation’s founding principles was therefore accompanied by a practical engagement

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with its geographical territory that allayed the suspicions of national ‘property’ that he developed at length in his British speeches. Timbucto was, in effect, a biracial utopia, in which white as well as black abolitionists had a stake, and Douglass’s co-ownership of that property allowed him physically to ground his assertions that black Americans had earned their right to cultivate the nation’s soil.40 Douglass argues that, unlike the Indian, ‘the original owner of the soil’ whose claims to national property had faded as white civilization advanced westward, ‘the black man[’s] . . . footprints yet mark the soil of his birth, and he gives every indication that America will, for ever, remain the home of his posterity.’41 Although neither Douglass nor Fuller, who had a house built for herself at Brook Farm, ever lived in their utopian communities, their imaginative ties to some portion of the national landscape fuelled their belief that there was room within the nation’s borders for reform and regeneration. Douglass’s new role as property owner also added weight and legitimacy  to his arguments against black emigration. Robert Levine has observed that Douglass exaggerated Delany’s commitment to the emigrationist cause in order to make himself appear more nationally representative and to build his own case for black American citizenship in direct tension with Delany’s vision of a black nation elsewhere.42 Douglass may have referred to his disagreement with Delany only obliquely in his newspaper writing, but he made his clash with Stowe, the period’s most visible advocate of both abolition and emigration, abundantly clear to the reading public. First published in the proceedings of the 1853 Colored National Convention and later used to bolster his political arguments in Life and Times, Douglass’s open letter to Stowe elaborates on his objection to the resettlement programme that she promoted in her preface to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.43 ‘The truth is, dear madam, we are here, and here we are likely to remain,’ Douglass asserts. ‘Individuals emigrate – nations never. We have grown up with this republic, and I see nothing in her character, or even in the character of the American people, as yet, which compels the belief that we must leave the United States’ (Autobiographies, 730). To Stowe, Douglass makes a double case: black Americans constitute a nation in their own right, and they are also part and parcel of the American nation itself. To dislocate one segment of the population would mean that the nation in its entirety would have to be dissolved.44 Although Douglass’s rhetoric of protest uses the same terms as many of his assertions of the 1840s, he now invokes the nation in order to preserve it, not to break it apart. By documenting the sea change in Douglass’s thought over the course of his years as a newspaper editor, I have sought not to prove that Douglass abandoned his doubts about American nationality, but rather to suggest

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that the shift in his professional identity upon his return from exile made a radical difference in his willingness to work with, as well as within, the nation in his pursuit of racial justice. Of course, Douglass still positioned himself outside of and against the nation during the 1850s, particularly in his 1852 Fourth of July speech. By speaking on the fifth of July, he distanced himself from the national holiday by one day and then again from his white ‘fellow citizens’ by marking it as the anniversary of ‘your National Independence, and of your political freedom’, not his own (Papers, 2:360). On no occasion did Douglass step back from criticising national policy or from employing his rhetorical technique of ‘scorching irony’ to demand the immediate recognition of immense wrong (Papers, 2:371). In fact, he would use that very wrong as an argument for the ties that bound white to black Americans within one nation. He contends, ‘Our wrongs and outrages are as old as our country. They date back to its earliest settlement, and extend through two hundred and thirty years – and they are as numerous and as oft-repeated as the days of all these years’ (Papers, 2:426–7). Douglass lays claim both to a more accurate version of American history that includes the silenced and to a parallel counter-history that contradicts the familiar national narrative of liberty and equality for all.45 Although Frankie Hutton has dismissed Douglass’s argument against black emigration as ‘simplistic’, the tangled roots of Douglass’s case both for and against the nation prove otherwise.46 After he allied himself with Lincoln and held public office under various Republican administrations in the post-Civil War years, the balance of Douglass’s professional life tipped definitively from national critic to government insider.47 In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in the 1857 Dred Scott case, Douglass perceived the same troublesome dynamics at work that at once excluded black Americans from citizenship and promised eventually to recognise their full national identity. In Life and Times, he reflects: Standing outside the pale of American humanity, denied citizenship, unable to call the land of my birth my country, and adjudged by the supreme court of the United States to have no rights which white men were bound to respect, and longing for the end of the bondage of my people, I was ready for any political upheaval which should bring about a change in the existing condition of things. (Autobiographies, 769)

At this moment, Douglass sees himself standing entirely outside the nation looking in on its collective life, and he bemoans the fact of his perpetual exile. The ultimate ‘scorching irony’ of Douglass’s career, however, is that the arguments he generated from his position of critical distance from

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the United States – a stance shared to a greater or lesser degree with the other writers discussed in this book – were, for him, the source of creative distinction and, for the nation, the key to its most sweeping and lasting reform.

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CHAPTER 4

BETWEEN COSMOS AND COSMOPOLIS: EMERSON’S NATIONAL CRITICISM

To treat Emerson as Emerson, such is the rarity of the man . . . would be like treating America, or immensity, or eternity, or any other subject that has practically neither beginning nor end. C. A. Ward

For most of the twentieth century, scholars and reviewers equated Emerson with ‘America’, and treated his writings accordingly as manifestations of an original and national way of thinking about the self and its relation to society. Emerson stands at the confluence of the American past and the present, for he is perceived both as the ‘inventor’ of a modern national tradition in poetry and philosophy and as the inheritor of Puritan perfectionism and early republican pragmatism.1 Emerson’s title of ‘Mr. America’ seems almost infinitely renewable, and the value of his works for definitions of American national identity and character seem perpetually current.2 Emerson reigns precisely because he allows critics to argue for a uniquely national literary style and philosophical perspective, and unseating him from his position would require the dangerous and potentially impossible task of dismantling a nation’s understanding of itself as a distinct cultural entity. Treating Emerson as ‘America’ has its own dangers, however. In 1884, British critic C. A. Ward suggested that Emerson could be taken any number of ways: either as ‘America, or immensity, or eternity, or any other subject’ that an interpreter might propose.3 In this chapter, I examine the familiar textual instances in which Emerson has been mistaken either for America or as the nation’s literary spokesman. Instead of allowing those assumptions to stand, I contend that Emerson was far more invested in philosophical questions such as those

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of ‘immensity’ and ‘eternity’ that mattered to him above and beyond the history of the United States itself. In the last decade, scholars have begun to destabilise Emerson’s seemingly ‘original relation’ to the nation by offering alternative visions of his involvement in global networks of literature, religion, and politics (CW, 1:7). In particular, Lawrence Buell and Wai Chee Dimock have argued that Emerson’s focus on nationality was one among many topics of interest and that he was far more concerned with establishing intellectual and spiritual affinities across national borders than with making patriotic statements in support of his own country. These scholars have concluded that Emerson can be considered ‘American only in caricature’.4 This position may be extreme in its denial of Emerson’s Americanism, but my work in this chapter speaks to the as yet unanswered question of why Emerson was so fundamentally wary of nationality from his early days as a religious radical to his later political engagements as a commentator on American national culture. Emerson’s doubts about national institutions and their pressure on individual citizens run deep and frequently come into conflict with his core beliefs in universal principles of morality and the capacity for intellectual self-culture. We may, at this point, be willing to accept Irving Howe’s observation that the Emersonian ‘spirit’ has been a ‘dominant [one] in the national experience’, but I argue that the ‘Americanness’ of that spirit remains a significant question that merits further critical discussion.5 Our assumptions about Emerson’s role as a representative American must be balanced with a stronger awareness of his scepticism of national forms and a more complete understanding of the larger frames of reference that structure his ever-expanding patterns of thought. Starting with his earliest works and most often with his first book, Nature (1836), readers of Emerson describe his attempts to generate ‘an American newness’ and to speak in a powerful and distinctly national voice against the cultural dominance of Europe. Critics who take Emerson’s imperatives to establish ‘an original relation to the universe’ and to ‘[b]uild . . . your own world’ as national commandments do Emerson a disservice, however (CW, 1:7, 45). By reducing the grand historical drama of Nature to a transatlantic sideshow, interpreters of ‘post-colonial Emerson’, such as Robert Weisbuch, artificially narrow the scope of Emerson’s ambitions, as they overlook the fact that he does not use nationally charged language at all in this book.6 Emerson may be arguing for a form of cultural rebirth that ‘demand[s] our own works and laws and worship’, but that renaissance is not simply an American one. Instead, Emerson sets a precedent in this work for radically abstract thinking about cultural revolution on a scale far wider than that of the nation itself.

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The familiar Americanist narrative of Emerson’s literary development continues with an emphasis on the patriotic message of ‘The American Scholar’ (1837): the address that was hailed by one of Emerson’s close friends and biographer, Oliver Wendell Holmes, as ‘our Intellectual Declaration of Independence’.7 Holmes claims Emerson’s speech as the shared property of the nation, and in truth, as Robert D. Richardson observes, it was one of Emerson’s most derivative and ‘least original’ works.8 Emerson avoids the subject of nationality until the end of the speech, and even then, he appears to be making concessions to his audience. ‘But I have dwelt perhaps tediously on this abstraction of the Scholar,’ he admits ruefully. ‘I ought not to delay longer to add what I have to say, of nearer reference to the time and to this country’ (CW, 1:66–70). Emerson’s reluctance to speak nationally carries over into the most recognisably patriotic segment of the address, where he spends more time promoting individual fulfilment than national growth. Emerson describes an ideal society in which ‘man shall treat with man as a sovereign state’ and each individual will realise the fundamentally humanist truth, ‘The world is nothing, the man is all.’ While Emerson may have delivered in earnest the line for which most remember this work – ‘We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe’ – he simultaneously betrays a distrust of national identity as a false substitute for the cultivation of individual intellect. What matters more than American nationality in this address is, in fact, Emerson’s vision of a ‘nation of men’, defined not by geographical limits or membership in ‘gross’ social formations but rather by the expression of singular character traits. ‘The American Scholar’, in fact, should be read as a text that subordinates nationalism to individualism. Emerson’s essay ‘The Poet’ (1844) is often used to bolster his nationalist credentials, but it reveals similar flaws in its ostensible argument for an American originality of thought and literary practice. The segments of the essay most familiar to readers are Emerson’s belated concession to local and actual conditions and his call for a national poet. ‘Yet America is a poem in our eyes,’ he contends; ‘its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres’ (CW, 3:21–2). Scholars tend to interpret this statement as an invitation for a poet to ‘sing America’, and they read Emerson’s subsequent list of distinctly national elements as the first step toward that monumental undertaking. As my study of Emerson’s later writings will demonstrate, however, Emerson regards poetry as a mode of thinking beyond national boundaries with a certain ‘expansiveness’ of mind. Although a poet may take the nation as his or her subject, as many believe Whitman himself did in response to Emerson’s rousing rhetoric in this essay, the poem that results from

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that imaginative effort will not necessarily be constrained by geographical limits. In the observations that directly precede his invocation of America’s ‘ample geography’, Emerson signals his desire not for a national literature, but rather for what he feels is the more elusive and noble achievement of writing made universal. Emerson praises Dante for ‘writ[ing] his autobiography in colossal cipher, or into universality’. Dante is a great poet in Emerson’s estimation precisely because he is not nationally representative, but universally immediate. He is a far more representative figure in this essay than Emerson’s imagined American poet, whom he swiftly abandons in a gesture that retracts his previous national claims. Emerson demurs, ‘But I am not wise enough for a national criticism, and must use the old largeness a little longer, to discharge my errand from the muse to the poet concerning his art.’ Even though Emerson acknowledges his practice of speaking nationally, he declares his preference at this crucial moment for the abstract realm of the ‘old largeness’: the philosophical terrain over which he had ranged in Nature and that he continues to explore in subsequent essays and lectures. In the expansive space of the ‘old largeness’, Emerson is in his true literary element. Unencumbered by the expectations of his literary nationalist peers, he is free to critique the nation by measuring its worth against larger indexes of universal value. I have begun with an investigation of Emerson at his most ‘American’ in the 1830s and the 1840s to provide a context for a more extended discussion of his suspicion of nationality in his later writings. Most critics conclude their assessments of Emerson’s national credentials with studies of the essays, perhaps in anticipation of a perceived ‘decline’ in style and philosophical value in Emerson’s later writings, beginning with Representative Men (1850) and ending with his final set of publications in the 1870s.9 I focus on his later works because they have not received adequate critical attention until very recently and because those writings, especially his lectures, reflect his vocational imperatives and treat political and social matters more directly than their predecessors.10 They provide a significant opportunity to examine Emerson’s responses to the national problems of slavery and war that he and his compatriots faced in the 1850s and 1860s.11 This chapter continues with an investigation of Emerson’s treatment of nationality in English Traits (1856), his first extended study of an entire nation (notably not his own). I argue against reading this book as an assertion of American promise over English decay and claim instead that Emerson used his meditations on English national identity to dismantle systematically the idea that nationality was a meaningful pursuit for any

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human society. In both English Traits and the popular lectures on ‘England’ and ‘London’ (1848–9) upon which it was based, Emerson established himself as a cosmopolitan in theory as well as in practice as he claimed world citizenship. In ‘London’, he proclaims: I am more cosmopolite than patriot, and great cities appear to me the common country of all independent and civilized men. They are the centre where meet all the talents, all the arts, all the knowledges, all the industry, all the resources of a nation. ’Tis from these great foci of light and activity that issue all the favors which the genius of civilization pleases to pour on the human race. (Later Lectures, 1:224)

I follow my discussion of English Traits with an investigation of the historical circumstances that influenced Emerson’s preference to be known as a ‘cosmopolite’ rather than a ‘patriot’ at this point in his career. In ‘London’, cosmopolitanism is a matter of cultural sophistication and intellectual kinship with ‘all independent and civilized men’, but in Emerson’s anti-slavery lectures of the 1850s, the choice of a cosmopolitan viewpoint over patriotic allegiance proves to be a matter of more complex moral import. Emerson’s fear of the consequences of patriotism during this key decade and his refusal to support moral compromises to preserve a faulty national ‘Union’ provide the most compelling explanation of his decision to condemn uncritically patriotic rhetoric in English Traits as ‘narrow’ and ‘childish’ (CW, 5:85). Finally, Emerson’s lectures during the Civil War years allowed him to move away from a critical stance toward the nation – a position from which, as Fuller observed, he was proving his true patriotism by ‘plead[ing] her cause against herself’ – and toward a mindset of renewed faith in the universal significance of American nation-building.12 The key figure in the transformation of Emerson’s attitude toward American nationality was Abraham Lincoln, who surpassed Emerson’s political expectations as he proved his capacity for poetic thought and action that resonated beyond the nation itself. In his praise of Lincoln and also of Thoreau, who became for Emerson a parallel representative American man, he indulged in expressions of the fervent patriotic sentiments that he had previously scorned. Yet, Emerson retained his inherent scepticism about nationally charged language and the energy expended by individuals in the communal effort of nation-building. Far more useful, he argued, was the ability to apprehend and to honour the larger movements of the globe itself, and the will to lift oneself above all categories of human society and into the noumenal realm of universal spirit.

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By giving greater weight to less familiar and perhaps more ‘experienced’  Emersonian texts, I intend to open up a new angle of critical approach to Emerson that seeks, as he himself did, to ‘exasperate our nationality’ and our commonly held assumptions about its source in his writings.13 In contrast to Longfellow’s internationalist poetics, Fuller’s revolutionary patriotism, Douglass’s integrationist arguments, Greenwood’s domestic agenda, and Whitman’s exuberant nationalism, Emerson’s alternately individualist and universalist values make him the one figure in this study who is the least likely to support nationalist thinking. Such a conclusion is certainly surprising in a critical world that continues to look to Emerson as an intellectual liberator who maps out a distinctly American pattern of thought. If we recognise that our ‘Mr. America’ had serious philosophical objections to the practice of ‘national criticism’, is it fair to Emerson, or indeed to ourselves, to continue thinking about an American national tradition in the ‘old’ way?

Nations in Masquerade: Beyond Transatlanticism in English Traits The publication of English Traits in 1856 came as a shock to many who had come to expect from Emerson a certain kind of philosophical ‘largeness’ of thought. Contemporary critics delighted in the new concreteness of the book’s descriptive approach to its sociohistorical subject matter. One reviewer commented that the English seemed to have furnished Emerson with ‘a stronger and manlier diet than that supplied by the flittering fancies and ambitious emptiness of his earlier speculations’.14 Another reviewer was more suspicious of this intellectual feast, claiming that the book was like ‘potted meat . . . not exactly the genuine beef’.15 By this point in his career, Emerson appeared to have completed the transition that he began in ‘Experience’ (1844) toward an acceptance of worldly conditions and social constraints. In Robert Weisbuch’s opinion, Emerson reached his intellectual majority in this work as he rose to defend American nationhood.16 English Traits stands alone as Emerson’s only book-length study of the ingredients of nationality, and on the surface it appears that he has begun to practise the kind of ‘national criticism’ that he previously postponed in ‘The Poet’. This book defies nationalist critical assumptions on two counts, however. Although Emerson finally undertakes a national project, he chooses to study England, ‘the best of actual nations’, rather than the United States, a mere ‘continuation of the English genius into new conditions, more or less propitious’ (CW, 5:19). Emerson’s deference to English superiority not only embarrasses those who seek American intellectual

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independence, but they also frustrate definitions of American national identity as a distinctive counterweight to England’s global dominance at the height of its empire. Emerson’s statements about the United States in this book are rare, oblique, and deeply ambivalent. English Traits actually works to undermine its ostensibly national agenda by exposing the ‘narrowness’ and the ‘limited’ scope of English nationality and, indeed, of all expressions of patriotic feeling. If we take the nineteenth century as the age of nationality, when to be a modern subject means to identify oneself as a citizen of a particular nation – a form of impassioned affiliation that Emerson’s contemporaries Whitman, Fuller, and Douglass believed was worth fighting for, optimists and dissenters alike – Emerson’s indifference is both striking and curious. I argue that in English Traits, Emerson manipulates the genre of ‘national criticism’ to call into question the usefulness of any national paradigm. His most national work therefore becomes a polemic against the concept of nationhood itself. To Emerson, the nation is a static institutional form that resists cultural progress, and it cannot contain the kind of fluid ‘power’ of which he is in perpetual pursuit. Emerson is surprisingly even-handed in his comparative study of England and the United States. If we were to use David Armitage’s taxonomy of Atlantic history as a guideline, we might read this book as a transatlantic work precisely because it thrives on such transnational comparisons.17 For Emerson, however, there is more at stake than a straightforward comparison might imply. While it is possible to interpret the book’s progression from extravagant praise of English national character to condescending critique of its conservatism as a sign of Emerson’s postcolonial assertion of the ascendancy of the United States, I find that Emerson actually circumvents that teleological westward narrative.18 In terms of global currency, Emerson observes, England has no competitor. Its military strength, economic wealth, and cultural sophistication situate it firmly at the ‘heart of the modern world’ (CW, 5:22). His forthright and almost immediate admission of England’s superiority at the start of the work makes it difficult to appropriate as an American nationalist manifesto of any sort; this speaks to Elisa Tamarkin’s concept of Anglophilia more than it betokens postcolonial anxiety. Emerson asserts that the United States cannot hope to compete with this ‘best of actual nations’ as it stands, for ‘[i]n all that is done or begun by the Americans towards right thinking or practice, we are met by a civilization already settled and overpowering’ (CW, 5:19). The transatlantic dynamic that Emerson outlines is so one-sided that it effectively blocks American creativity altogether. England already occupies whatever imaginative space Americans might claim, and every move an American makes is ‘met’ with a crushing blow from a culture far

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better established. While the Emerson of ‘The American Scholar’ adopts a more defensive posture, refusing to listen ‘to the courtly muses of Europe’, here he humbly accepts the fact that England’s dominance casts the rest of the world in deep colonial shadow (CW, 1:69). As a New World explorer of England, Emerson colonises ‘the best of actual nations’ for his own purposes. Like a reporter on the territory of Virginia, he assesses the natural and human resources of the island of Great Britain itself and the conditions that have led to the supremacy of  its people. England emerges from Emerson’s account at the pinnacle  of a global civilisation. Not only does its ‘territory ha[ve] a singular perfection’, England has achieved psychological and spiritual dominance over the whole world (CW, 5:20). Emerson envisions a ‘nation [that] sits in the immense city they have builded, a London extended into every man’s mind, though he live in Van Diemen’s Land or Capetown . . . The modern world is theirs. They have made and make it day by day’ (CW, 5:50). Despite his respect for the English ‘genius’, such a union of temporal power and ‘fierce nationality’ generates in Emerson a feeling of deep unease (CW, 5:23). In a thought pattern that David Robinson has recognised as deeply Emersonian, at the very moment in this work when Emerson acknowledges England to be at its greatest national height, it is most vulnerable to the full force of his critique of the limits of nationality itself.19 England may command the mind of the globe, but it does so at substantial cost to its own intellectual progress and its encouragement of individual fulfilment. Emerson expresses his reservations about the cultural apotheosis of the English nation as he cautions his readers: Whilst they are some ages ahead of the rest of the world in the art of living; whilst in some directions they do not represent the modern spirit, but constitute it, – this vanguard of civility and power they coldly hold, marching in phalanx, lockstep, foot after foot, file after file of heroes, ten-thousand deep. (CW, 5:56)

The English utopia that Emerson has been describing up until this point becomes here a nightmare vision of an absolutist state whose members ‘march in phalanx’, committing ad infinitum the cardinal Emersonian sin of conformity. Emerson confronts here the dark fact of what might be exacted from the individual by his or her nationality. The concept of the nation proves to be fundamentally at odds with the individualist principles that Emerson holds sacred from the beginning of his career and that he outlines in ‘Self-Reliance’ (1841), the essay in which he had

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warned his readers, ‘Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist’ (CW, 2:29). Nationality requires conformity on the part of individual citizens, and as a result, the stronger a person’s ‘national’ traits, the more likely he or she is to be judged by Emerson as narrow-minded and intellectually stagnant. Emerson’s portrait of Wordsworth is a case in point. One of the most fully drawn ‘characters’ in this work, Wordsworth makes two separate appearances and functions as a lightning rod for Emerson’s concerns about nationality. He observes that Wordsworth at first ‘made the impression of a narrow and very English mind; of one who paid for his rare elevation by general tameness and conformity’ (CW, 5:12), thereby reducing Wordsworth to a caricatured version of his own nation. Emerson repeats his criticisms of Wordsworth in his account of his second visit, calling him ‘nationally bitter’ and faulting his poetry for a corresponding ‘want of due catholicity and cosmopolitan scope’ (CW, 5:166–7). Wordsworth’s role of ‘representative’ national man is a dubious honour, for his nationality only diminishes the literary authority that he gains by ‘treat[ing] the human mind well, and with an absolute trust’ (CW, 5:168). For Emerson, Wordsworth serves as a negative example of the provincial, partisan commentator that a writer who wishes to maintain his philosophical integrity must not become. The collective force of English nationality ultimately weakens the character of each individual citizen. Emerson mocks the English for their xenophobic and nativist tendencies in his caricature of ‘Mr. Cockayne’, who epitomises the ‘fierce nationality’ that he shares with his countrymen. ‘He is intensely patriotic,’ Emerson explains, ‘for his country is so small. His confidence in the power and performance of his nation makes him provokingly incurious about other nations. He dislikes foreigners’ (CW, 5:81). The more national this figure is, the more ridiculous he becomes in Emerson’s eyes. He could easily be the comic English tourist who, in an earlier section of the work, stubbornly carries his teakettle to the top of Mount Etna. His individuality has disappeared completely in a dangerous flood of national complacency, and by placing all his trust in the ‘power and performance of his nation’, he neglects to develop his own power. Emerson, like Fuller, finds such ‘insular’ patriotism destructive to moral growth. An indication of intellectual immaturity, ‘childish patriotism’, Emerson contends, ‘costs something, like all narrowness’ (CW, 5:85). Emerson’s assertion that patriotism is somehow regressive is as much a gesture of self-admonition as it is a criticism of English national pride. Philip Nicoloff points to Emerson’s journal entries of the 1820s, in which he dedicates his notes to the ‘Spirit of America’ and vows to rid the

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national imagination of the ‘maggot of Europe’, as evidence of Emerson’s commitment to American cultural independence.20 As he calls the English to task for their ‘narrow’ patriotism, Emerson revises his own relationship to the discourse of American nationalism. When he sees patriotic feeling taken to extremes in England, he begins to regret his earlier posture of defiance. In a conversation with Carlyle recounted in the book’s section on ‘Stonehenge’, Emerson responds to his friend’s accusation that Americans do not take fair measure of England with a paean of his own to English achievement. He then admits: I surely know, that, as soon as I return to Massachusetts, I shall lapse at once into the feeling, which the geography of America inevitably inspires, that we play the game with immense advantage; that there and not here is the seat and centre of the British race; and that no skill or activity can long compete with the prodigious natural advantages of that country, in the hands of the same race; and that England, an old and exhausted island, must one day be contented, like other parents, to be strong only in her children. (CW, 5:155)

Here, patriotic feeling is not a condition of disappointment in the progress of the English nation, but rather an intellectual failing brought on by a certain ‘lapse’ in judgement.21 ‘Narrow’-minded nationalism is figured as a fall from ideally expansive forms of thought, and its expression, in which Emerson ‘surely know[s]’ he will indulge, a sign of the regretful ‘inevitability’ of seeing only with national eyes. The contrast that he sets up between a promising America and a wasted England therefore appears deliberately ironic, for, in Emerson’s opinion, national language itself is fallen and it is capable of marking only ‘petty differences’ rather than apprehending spiritual truths (CW, 5:157). As Emerson goes through the motions of American nationalist rhetoric, he casts doubt on the viability of all patriotic claims. Writing with a national agenda in mind is a ‘superficial’ practice, he later admits, and its failure to take accurate measure of the soul dooms it to a form of comic repetition. The stubborn patriot becomes, in Emerson’s account, not merely a provincial, ‘incurious’ thinker, but a bumbling stage manager who compromises the human spirit by insisting on costuming it in ill-fitting national dress.22 The English ‘trample on nationalities to reproduce London [abroad]’, Emerson laments, ‘and, having attempted to domesticate and dress the Blessed Soul itself in English broadcloth and gaiters, they are tormented with fear that herein lurks a force that will sweep their system away’ (CW, 5:143). By providing a glimpse of a

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national drama that has become grotesque, Emerson mocks the project of nation-building as he exposes its pernicious influence on the higher faculties of individuals. In the image of the corseted ‘Soul’, Emerson circles back to some of his earliest tropes in Nature, in which he instructed his contemporaries not to worship the past or ‘put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe’ (CW, 1:7). The continuity between these two texts confirms that Nature is not an American nationalist project, as scholars of the postcolonial persuasion maintain. The nation is, for Emerson, a dead form of culture, and its precepts are mere ‘dry bones’ that are liable to be ‘swe[pt] . . . away’ by the next wave of global change. John Peacock has observed that Emerson’s early writing actually levels a critique at American society that foreshadows his later dismissal of England as a degenerating nation.23 English Traits therefore follows in this vein as it warns Americans of the dangers of depending upon nationality by analysing the patriotic weaknesses of their English counterparts. Nationality is a fruitless pursuit, for it requires holding fast to traditions that are inherently incompatible with cultural progress. Emerson believes that the world is moving beyond the borders of its nation-states and into a realm of cosmopolitan freedom. He evokes this future as he asserts, ‘Nations have lost their old omnipotence; the patriotic tie does not hold. Nations are getting obsolete, we go and live where we will’ (CW, 5:91). This is not quite a post-national moment for Emerson, for according to John Carlos Rowe, post-nationalism has more to do with interrogating the nation as it stands than with what Emerson manages to do here as he anticipates the supranational, hypermobile, globally networked world in which many of us now live.24 Rather than reading Emerson’s statement as a signal of his historical faith in the progression of achievement from England to the United States, we must see it for what it is: an attempted erasure of the category of the nation as an organising principle of human thought. Just as Emerson’s early works, especially Nature, strive to reconceptualise problematic elements of Protestant theology, so too does this work seek to promote an alternative to political formations and patriotic allegiances. Emerson’s controversial attack on the Church of England concludes with an indictment of institutional religion. He asks: Where dwells the religion? Tell me first where dwells electricity, or motion, or thought or gesture. They do not dwell or stay at all. Electricity cannot be made fast, mortared up and ended, like London Monument, or the Tower, so that you shall know where to find it, and keep it fixed, as the English do with their things, forevermore; it is passing, glancing, gesticular; it is a traveller,

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a  newness, a surprise, a secret, which perplexes them, and puts them out. (CW, 5:130)

Religious energy in this passage parallels the figure of the cosmopolitan ‘traveller’. Refusing containment and solid forms, ‘religion’ gathers in its movement from place to place and person to person that essence of ‘power’ which Emerson evokes in one of the defining moments of ‘SelfReliance’. ‘Power ceases in the instant of repose,’ he contends; ‘it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim’ (CW, 2:40). Emerson’s objections to national institutions and to the cultivation of national traits are therefore profound and consistent, with deep roots that reach back to his earliest writings. Both ‘power’ and ‘electricity’ are defused by stasis, and in Emerson’s mind, the nation demands static forms of thought and behaviour. His philosophical opposition to the intellectually limiting character of nationality sets him apart from his contemporaries, including Fuller, who believed in the infinite perfectibility of the nation, and Longfellow and Whitman, who imagined that the nation could contain multitudes, even as it aligns him with Douglass, who cautioned against the stubbornness of national greed. Emerson’s ongoing objections to national thinking challenge us to revise our conception of him as a representative national figure. If Emerson sought to undermine the concept of the nation, then how can we, knowing his ambivalence, use his writing as a building block in a US national tradition? The answer might be that we should not in good conscience use Emerson that way at all. Instead, understanding the significance of English Traits as Emerson’s ‘best of actual’ books may mean recognising and responding to this figure of the ‘traveller’, who embodies that power which ‘dart[s]’ rather than ‘dwell[s]’. David Robinson suggests that such ‘power’ allows Emerson to ponder ways of taking ‘moral action’, especially in the context of anti-slavery activism in the United States, while Andrew Taylor sees Emerson moving in this book over a particularly transatlantic ‘transitional surface’ that keeps generating possibilities but avoids letting them settle into certainties.25 Whether this force makes a political commitment or remains imaginary in its effect, it helps us pinpoint what it means to Emerson to be modern, to be an engaged citizen of the world, which is something sharply distinct from what his contemporaries believed. Along with Emerson, we move beyond those transatlantic squabbles that concerned many in his era and, in consequence, we leave behind the long echoes of the attacks and counter-offensives of European and American cultures and their self-declared representatives. In English Traits, Emerson

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charges his readers with the energy to use nation formations as springboards for our own thinking, our vibrant critiques, and our reflections on the power that we invest in the world at large. What we accomplish as ‘traveller[s]’, he might suggest, is not determined by our points of national origin, but it lies finally and firmly in our own hands.

Sounding the ‘Hollow’ Nation: Emerson and the Crisis of Slavery In his lecture ‘England’, first given in December of 1848, Emerson applauds the characteristically patriotic leanings of his English subjects that he later pillories in English Traits. While admitting that the Englishman might be too arrogant for his own good, Emerson observes: At the same time, I know no national pride that is so easily forgiven and so much respected as his, and for the reason that it is so well-founded . . . How can he not be proud? There is a certain general culture wherein he surpasses other nations. (Later Lectures, 1:201)

Emerson allows for and even encourages the kind of ‘national pride’ that he finds uncomfortably narrow and conformist in English Traits: the book that grew out of this lecture and others such as ‘London’ and ‘The AngloAmerican’ that were mainstays of his lyceum repertoire in the years following his second European tour. If such patriotism was acceptable from the English, then Emerson saw no problem with answering it in kind, proclaiming from his side of the Atlantic that ‘the main advantage which the American possesses, is a certain versatility, and, as far as I know, a greater apprehensiveness of mind’ (Later Lectures, 1:205). He makes a claim for American superiority explicitly here, not conditionally as in English Traits, and he argues for a historical progression from Old to New World with a conviction that falls away in his book, leaving only deflections of nationalist rhetoric. At the height of the European nationalist movements in 1848 that so invigorated Fuller’s political imagination, Emerson recognised the value of the nation-state as a cultural category.26 He is more than willing at this time to make national statements of his own and to act as a representative American, despite his commitment to an ‘old largeness’ of thought and form. Widespread patriotism is not a sign of national decline, as Emerson would argue later, but rather a symptom of a particular population’s strength and reasonable ‘pride’. In this section of the chapter, I investigate why Emerson’s openness to nationality as an organising principle of thought turned into aversion to nationhood by the time that he compiled his lectures on England and

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America into a book in the mid-1850s. Several critics have situated English Traits in the social context of this period, including Nicoloff, whose discussion of Emerson’s engagement with theories of race and history charts Emerson’s belief in a progressive Anglo-Saxon civilisation, and Paul Giles, whose description of transnational tensions on the western American frontier helps explain the nationalist leanings of Emerson’s book.27 I contend that Emerson’s response to the national events of the early 1850s provides another important context for this work that explains his disillusionment with institutional forms of government and patriotic display. The Fugitive Slave Law, passed in 1850, implicated the Northern states in a Southern social system from which they had managed to remain theoretically, if not practically, separate up until that time. Immediately leaving the positive tone of his most popular lectures behind, Emerson spoke out, starting in 1851, against the nation and its destructive influence on the pursuit of individual and collective morality. At this moment, Emerson perceived that the nation was coming into direct conflict with the personal principles that he associated with profoundly cosmopolitan ideas of freedom and justice. American nationality became instantly invalid and ‘hollow’ for Emerson, and he carried that scepticism forward into his work of emptying out the concept of the nation in English Traits. In order to understand why Emerson transformed his patriotic gestures of the 1840s into statements advocating universalism over nationalism in the 1850s, it is crucial to bring his lectures of the 1850s and 1860s back into the critical conversation. If scholars want to hold on to English Traits as a way of understanding Emerson’s position on nationality, then I argue that it must be read as an equally emphatic warning to Americans about the perils of blind patriotism and nation-based thinking as it is a death-knell for their English ‘ancestors’. Emerson made no secret of his general distaste for politics. When he took the stage in Concord in 1851 to express his outrage about the Fugitive Slave Law, he opened his remarks with an admission of his reluctance to speak out on matters of national concern.28 In a grudging but determined manner, he explains, ‘The last year has forced us all into politics, and made it a paramount duty to seek what it is often a duty to shun’ (Later Lectures, 1:260–2). Although he would later portray political engagement as a sign of intellectual weakness in English Traits, it is here a moral ‘duty’ even for scholars, whose ‘liberal study is discredited’ by the public events that demand their attention. At first, Emerson speaks of ‘personal inconvenience from the laws’ and of local embarrassment, for ‘[t]he famous town of Boston is his master’s hound.’ But he is quick to observe that the immorality of the law has called the nation itself into question, and that it

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makes it impossible for individuals to express legitimate patriotic feeling. Emerson deflates the national ego as he asserts, ‘The popular assumption that all men loved freedom, and believed in the Christian religion, was found hollow American brag.’ Pledging allegiance to corrupt institutions, Emerson argues, discredits the nation, ‘hollow[s]’ out national language, and compromises those citizens who speak it. By the mid-1840s, Fuller had realised the extent of America’s hypocrisy in its perpetuation of slavery, and she made similar accusations in her New-York Tribune articles, but it took Emerson much longer to make this political move, perhaps because he avoided practising the kind of ‘national criticism’ of which Fuller herself was so enamoured. As Emerson the scholar moved out of his study and into the public arena, motivated by a sense of ‘duty’ and moral outrage, he put his critical capacity to work in analysing the breakdown of the nation. Instead of serving as an object of praise, the nation becomes, in Emerson’s mind, an idea to be scrutinised and challenged. His words shift from jovial tolerance of patriotic sentiment to the condescension toward nationalism that shapes the cultural critique of English Traits. Emerson declares: Nothing seems to me more hypocritical than the bluster about the Union. A year ago, we were all lovers of the Union, and valued so dearly what seemed the immense destinies of this country, that we reckoned an impiety any act that compromised them. But in the new attitude in which we find ourselves, the personal dishonor which now rests on every family in Massachusetts, the sentiment is changed. No man can look his neighbor in the face. We sneak about with the infamy of crime, and cowardly allowance of it on our parts, and frankly, once for all, the Union, such an Union, is intolerable. The flag is an insult to ourselves. (Later Lectures, 1:272–3)

According to Emerson, within the space of one year and under the duress of one law, Americans’ relationship to their nation has changed irrevocably. Those who uphold the nation as it stands or champion the ‘hollow’ cause of ‘Union’ merely ‘bluster’, like those who crudely ‘wave [their] own flag’ in ‘polite’ company. That flag has become an ‘insult’ because it compromises individual citizens and causes them ‘personal dishonor’. The nation has come into direct conflict with the development of individual conscience and the charge of self-reliance, values that remain nonnegotiable for Emerson throughout his career. The legal conformity that the nation now demands seems ‘crim[inal]’ to Emerson, as it violates such self-determination. In order to preserve his selfhood, therefore, he must fight against the structure of the nation. Emerson’s assertions recall his

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celebration as a younger man of ‘the plain old Adam, the simple genuine Self against the whole world’.29 Here, that ‘Self’ moves away from national identity – in the opposite direction of the ‘American Adam’ – and in a reinvigorated form stands outside and above the nation, judging it as a temporary and treacherous form of human culture. In 1851, Emerson had reached a turning point in his thinking about the value of nationality. This crucial transition from advocate of (or at least willing accessory to) the project of nationalism to cosmopolitan defender of ‘an older and wider union, the law of nature and rectitude’ went largely unremarked by his contemporaries and has remained relatively obscure until very recently (Later Lectures, 1:275).30 Emerson’s political speeches were not reported upon at great length in newspapers, and they tended to be considered out of transcendental character for him: an assumption that has migrated into the present. The unavailability of his lectures in published form and a preference for his works of philosophy and literary criticism have led twentieth-century scholars to focus on Emerson’s books rather than his lectures, producing an incomplete picture of his relationship to issues of pressing national concern. Scholars have read national agendas into abstract works such as Nature and the Essays rather than going to the source of Emerson’s engagement with the historical transformations of the American nation in the 1850s and 1860s. The politically minded Emerson of these lectures was, for the most part, not lofty or oblique, as many complained he could be, but rather brutally honest about the pernicious influence of national events on an expansive individual consciousness. As he saw public discourse degenerating, Emerson began to perceive the nation as a substantial impediment to, rather than a container for, his own intellectual goals. He admonished his Concord audience, ‘Let us not lie, nor steal, nor help to steal; and let us not call stealing by any fine names, such as “union” or “patriotism.” Let us know, that not by the public, but by ourselves, our safety must be bought’ (Later Lectures, 1:276). As Emerson contends, his life and the lives of others depend on critical distance from the nation and its rhetoric. No figure provoked Emerson to sharpen his position on the value and use of nationality more than Daniel Webster. Webster’s expression of support for the Fugitive Slave Law outraged Emerson, and the Secretary of State became Emerson’s most passionate example of the abuse of national power. Emerson held Webster personally responsible for the national crisis, and he explained the severity of his disappointment in an anti-slavery lecture given before a New York audience in 1854. As he recalled his compatriots’ former hopes for Webster, Emerson reflected:

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I think they looked at him as the representative of the American continent. He was there in his Adamitic capacity, as if he alone of all men did not disappoint the eye and ear, but was a fit figure in the landscape. (Later Lectures, 1:336)

Webster fills the role of ‘representative’ national man, and his betrayal signals the nation’s betrayal of its own citizens. By associating Webster with the landscape, Emerson also empties out the nationalist rhetoric that was favoured by the Young Americans, and into which he himself fell in ‘The Poet’ when he contended that American literary originality would spring directly from the features of the natural landscape. By expressing his doubts about Webster’s ‘fit[ness]’ to represent America, Emerson weakens the imaginative ties between the nation and its geographical territory. The landscape becomes yet another form, like the false rhetoric of ‘union’ and ‘patriotism’, that can mislead people in their thinking about American nationality. Reliance on the landscape to determine national character is a precarious enterprise, for it substitutes appearance for substance and fetishises the quality of nationality itself rather than working to uphold the principles upon which the nation stands. In his support of the Fugitive Slave Law, Webster insisted on the necessity of compromise with the South in order to prevent the dissolution of the nation, but Emerson finds that reasoning both short-sighted and ‘superficial’, a word that he later uses to disparage nationality in English Traits. Thanks to Webster, the nation has paradoxically become a hulking institutional obstacle to the fulfilment of its own ideals. Emerson reminds his listeners that ‘[t]he plea on which freedom was resisted was Union,’ urging them to value the principle of ‘freedom’ over the nation itself (Later Lectures, 1:340–2). The nation has begun to get under Emerson’s skin in a familiar way, for, like institutional religion in works from Nature and ‘The Divinity School Address’ to English Traits, it now hinders access to the living essences behind its dead form. Emerson makes a sweeping statement of his doubts as he dismisses the components of nationality along with other building blocks of society. He claims: These things show that no forms, neither constitutions, nor laws, nor covenants, nor churches, nor bibles, are of any use in themselves; the devil nestles comfortably into them all. There is no help but in the head, and heart, and hamstrings of a man.

In place of the nation, Emerson elevates the individual as moral arbiter; only this figure can check the force of national decline. His consistent individualism also distinguishes his critique of nationality from Fuller’s.

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While she compensated for her loss of faith in the American nation as it was in the 1840s with a loyalty to the nation as she believed it ‘ought to be’, Emerson is quick to abandon nationhood altogether in favour of what seems like an anti-social gesture of self-reliance. As Webster falls in Emerson’s estimation and the nation itself fails in consequence, a new concept of nationality emerges from Emerson’s despair. Despite their significant differences, Emerson shares with Fuller and Douglass a tremendous optimism about the possibilities of the nation and a desire to pursue, through its reform, ‘the ideal good’ (Later Lectures, 1:341). Emerson’s ‘ideal’ nation is a conglomerate, for it is composed of strong individuals rather than singular institutions. Some good has come out of Webster’s betrayal, as ‘[h]is pacification has brought all the honesty in every house, all scrupulous and good-hearted men, all women, and all children, to accuse the law. It has brought United States’ swords into the streets, and chains round the court house’ (Later Lectures, 1:269). In Emerson’s opinion, a national crisis actually creates the conditions for active democratic citizenship. Instead of a monolithic, corrupt ‘law’, Emerson celebrates the plurality of individual voices inherent in the terms ‘United States’. His solution to the political alienation caused by the nation’s moral compromise brings him back into the debate over national destiny and leaves room for hope. He advises his audience, ‘[t]o make good the cause of Freedom, you must draw off from all these foolish trusts on others. You must be citadels and warriors, yourselves Declarations of Independence: the charter, the battle, and the victory’ (Later Lectures, 1:342). Emerson resolves the conflict of self and nation (or ‘Self’ and ‘world’, to use his early terms) by giving individuals the authority to embody and to reshape the nation according to their own principles. The ‘ideal’ nation that emerges from Emerson’s reformulation thus begins to resemble the vision of cosmopolitan intellectual community that he develops in English Traits. In such a community, ‘[i]ndividual traits are always triumphing over national ones,’ for it is only the individual conscience that can do ‘battle’ for principles and maintain active citizenship in both the nation and the world. Once we have witnessed Emerson’s bold dismantling of nationalist rhetoric in his public condemnations of the Fugitive Slave Law and its adherents, it becomes more difficult to comprehend the patriotic bent of a lecture such as ‘The Anglo-American’. Emerson first gave this lecture in 1852 and then repeated it to wide acclaim throughout the 1850s. This lecture inaugurated an entire series on nationalist themes from ‘American Character’ to ‘American Power’ and ‘American Life’, and it returned to the kind of sharp, essentialised versions of nationality that characterise

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Emerson’s lectures of the 1840s (Later Lectures, 1:278–9). Ronald Bosco and Joel Myerson have noted that Emerson actually tried to heighten the lecture’s ‘American bias’: an effort that was appreciated by his listeners, one of whom applauded Emerson’s departure from his usual ‘vague and abstruse’ tone in favour of ‘more hopefulness for the future [of America] than is . . . entertained by the unpractical class of men to which [he] belongs’. This reporter’s comment anticipates other reviewers’ responses to English Traits, which critics found distinctive for its concreteness and practical relevance to the project of nation-building. The fact that Emerson’s highly patriotic lecture played well with his audience evidently was not lost on him, for he observed that the average American, like his British counterpart, was intensely patriotic, and would stubbornly assert, ‘Our country right or wrong’ (Later Lectures, 1:283). Emerson did criticise American national traits in the lecture, but its overall message is strongly positive and exceptionalist. He presents the United States as an improvement upon Europe, for the ‘Atlantic is a sieve, through which only, or chiefly, the liberal, bold, America-loving part of each city, clan, or family, pass’ (Later Lectures, 1:293). Emerson seeks here to define nationality itself as an assimilating force, and that goal seems to conflict directly with his 1854 vision of a nation comprised of morally vigilant individuals, each reinstating the ‘Declaration of Independence’ on his or her own terms. How, then, can these two versions of American nationality be reconciled? Why would Emerson even make such conflicting statements on the subject of nationhood? Never one to pursue a ‘foolish consistency’, Emerson nonetheless seems to be betraying his broader philosophical interests to some degree in his more nationalist lectures. One answer may lie in the overwhelmingly positive reception that lectures such as ‘The Anglo-American’ enjoyed. Despite the solidity of his reputation in the 1850s, which had been secured by favourable newspaper and magazine reviews and by the support of powerful national figures such as Greeley, Emerson was not immune to the pressures of the literary market, and such lectures appealed to wider audiences both in and beyond New England and New York, where he delivered his anti-slavery speeches.31 Nationality had great currency, both on the public lecture circuit and in the publishing industry, as Fuller had discovered when she negotiated with Young American Evert Duyckinck for a place in his Library of American Books series. Emerson may have had different personal standards for his books and his lectures that led to an uncomfortable divide between the abstract and eternal on the one hand and the immediate and practical on the other. If using nationalist rhetoric was, in some sense, a financial choice for Emerson that could guarantee him certain results in the public arena,

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then that factor could explain his assertion in English Traits that patriotism is a ‘coarse’ form of discourse and account for his regret at his inevitable ‘lapse’ into nationalist sentiments once he found himself back on American soil.32 Seen in this light, nationalism becomes not merely an obstacle to the achievement of ‘ideal’ nationhood, but also an impediment to Emerson’s own fulfilment as a thinker. Emerson then appears doubly pressured to speak on behalf of the nation, both by contemporary audiences who insisted on interpreting his words as American facts and by those scholars who have set him at the head of the American literary renaissance. Confronting these patriotic expectations and asserting a cosmopolitan, even global alternative to nationalism therefore seems to have been an even more radical statement on Emerson’s part than we might otherwise assume.

Thinking Globally: Emerson, Lincoln, and Poetic Politics In the course of his lecture tours through the Atlantic states and the Midwest in the 1850s, Emerson gained both a national audience and a national reputation. As Fuller had when she accepted a position at the New-York Tribune in 1844, he turned his attention from local conversations to national debates. In 1862, Emerson arrived in the nation’s capital to deliver a lecture on ‘American Civilization’ at the Smithsonian, one of its chief institutions of culture. At this moment, Emerson was more of a national institution himself than he had ever been, and he charged right on to the proving ground for the political leaders and laws that he had criticised during the 1850s. In the course of his lecture, he argued for emancipation, an idea that Lincoln, whom Emerson met during his visit to Washington, would put into practice several months later. Emerson had spent most of the previous decade developing his skills as a critic of American nationality and the concept of nationhood, and by the start of the Civil War he had reached the height of his own powers to speak directly to the nation itself. Even as he stood on the Smithsonian podium, Emerson refused to take a wholeheartedly patriotic stand in his remarks on the state of the American nation. In his anti-slavery lectures, he threatened to abandon the nation and its rhetoric as viable forms of expression, choosing instead to assert the supremacy of the individual conscience over all corrupt social constraints. He returned to his vision of a ‘nation of men’, first outlined in ‘The American Scholar’ in 1837, as his best hope for the formation of an alliance of ‘United States’ comprised of concerned citizens (CW, 1:70). After the war began, Emerson acknowledged a continued state of ‘national

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crisis’ and lamented the wounds inflicted on the now ‘hollow’ Union by Webster and others who had made concessions to the South (Complete Works, 11:302). While sustaining a critique of national policies in his lecture on ‘American Civilization’, Emerson cleared a path toward the restoration of his faith in American nationality, and eventually, of the American nation to itself. He contended that such renewal would be carried out by individuals who were able to look beyond national limits and to uphold the cosmopolitan principles that they discovered by exercising a wider perspective on the project of nation-building. In Emerson’s eyes, Lincoln would redeem the United States from the damage that Webster had done to the nation’s structural integrity, and he would rescue it as a form in which Emerson and his fellow ‘citizens of the world’ could find philosophical fulfilment. In this section of the chapter, I argue that during the years of the Civil War, Emerson witnessed the realignment of the United States with the universalist values that he had worked to promote throughout his career. At the risk of merely reinscribing Emerson within a familiar Americanist narrative that centres on national rather than international events, I maintain that it was only in this particular ‘national crisis’ that Emerson was able to reconcile his cosmopolitan ideals and intellectual world citizenship with a patriotic faith in the nation as ‘the great charity of God to the human race’ (Later Lectures, 2:334). At the outset of his lecture on ‘American Civilization’, Emerson remains  sceptical of the power of any nation-state to contain and to promote the good. Instead, he contends, individual citizens must act to reform society by displaying ‘that rare courage which dares commit itself to a principle’ (Complete Works, 11:302). The nation itself may be ‘apathetic’, but the individual can be passionate in his or her advocacy of ‘principle[d]’ change. As they reimagine the nation and challenge its laws, Emerson observes, individual citizens actually escape its borders, enacting a drama of national transformation by way of cosmopolitan thought. Emerson exhorts his listeners to practise such globally minded reform as he states, ‘We want men of original perception and original action, who can open their eyes wider than to a nationality, namely, to considerations of benefit to the human race, can act in the interest of civilization’. Emerson echoes his conviction in English Traits that an insistence on ‘nationality’ is a sign of intellectual degeneration and a stale reproduction of the past. Only looking beyond the nation will guarantee ‘original’ thinking and achieve results that ‘benefit’ the entire ‘human race’, not just Americans themselves. Like Fuller, who urged her Tribune readers to engage in transnational dialogue with revolutionary Europe in order to reinvigorate their own sense of national purpose, Emerson seeks not to preserve American

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national identity as it was understood by his contemporaries but rather to ‘exasperate the people to energy, to exasperate our nationality’ (Complete Works, 11:303). Emerson proclaims that he himself is an ‘original’ thinker precisely because he is not thinking nationally, but rather broadly and humanistically. He envisions his own intellectual energy as a force that acts on the nation from above and beyond its borders, ‘exasperat[ing]’ its assumptions about itself and recombining its elements to promote social progress. Not only does Emerson’s argument in this lecture nullify the work of literary nationalists who sought ‘originality’ by reinforcing a prescribed set of native tropes and subjects, but it also frustrates the efforts of critics who would read Emerson as a committed cultural nationalist. In his recent study of Emerson, Buell has proposed that scholars approach Emerson’s thought from four different perspectives: ‘the regional-ethnic, the national, the transatlantic, and the global’.33 Although Buell’s emphasis on Emerson’s range of audiences and frames of reference throughout his career helpfully steers critics away from exclusively national evaluations of Emerson’s work, I believe that Emerson himself perceived his intellectual endeavours in far more hierarchical terms than Buell has acknowledged. Emerson always preferred ‘the old largeness’ and the grander frame of reference to the local and familiar, which he found limiting. When he did speak to concrete political concerns, most often on the American scene, he attempted to infuse local and national institutions with universal, transcendent ‘energy’ in order to make them facilitators of, rather than detriments to, individual self-fulfilment. As Richardson has noted, Emerson outlines his larger intentions as a private and public thinker both in his journal and in his 1841 essay ‘Circles’. ‘I am only an experimenter,’ Emerson writes. ‘I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred, none are profane. I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back.’34 Emerson at once resists critical taxonomies in his promise to ‘unsettle’ categories of thought and proclaims himself superior to them as one who is able to manipulate ‘facts’ and forms at will. Instead of seeking to represent the nation, Emerson claims for himself the largest intellectual terrain possible: that of the universe. On another occasion, Emerson reasons in his journal, ‘Do not imagine that the Universe is somewhat so vague and aloof that a man cannot be wiling to die for it. If that lives, I live; I am the universe.’ Emerson presents himself here as the ultimate cosmopolitan, for his first loyalty is to the whole universe rather than to any one of its parts, including the planet. If we take Emerson at his word, he actually appears to pursue more ambitious ends than those of the cosmopolitan humanist. Instead of declaring himself a citizen of the world, Emerson said at one point that he, in fact, was capable

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of ‘[eating] the world’ because his mind could stretch to encompass the entire cosmos. Emerson’s radical statement of his own imaginative power sets him apart from Fuller, who claimed more sophisticated knowledge of global destiny than her contemporaries, but stopped short of attempting to control or consume the universe. Emerson’s desire to expand his consciousness on an infinite scale anticipates Whitman’s later creation of a poetic space far more vast than any could fathom: a ‘New . . . Spiritual World’ that he called a ‘globe of globes’.35 In his lecture on ‘American Civilization’, Emerson argues for the promotion of universal morality over national integrity. Whoever fights for the cause of emancipation, he contends, ‘will be greeted by the unanimous thanks of mankind’ (Complete Works, 11:308). Liberating the human beings enslaved in the South is a matter of high priority for the universe, and the leader who acts according to a shared global conscience will achieve results that matter beyond the history of the nation itself. When Emerson witnessed Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in September of 1862, he recognised immediately the kind of expansive cosmopolitan gesture that he had been seeking from an American politician. In an address to a Boston audience, Emerson observes: In so many arid forms which states encrust themselves with, once in a century, if so often, a poetic act and record occur. These are the jets of thought into affairs, when, roused by danger or inspired by genius, the political leaders of the day break the else insurmountable routine of class and local legislation, and take a step forward in the direction of catholic and universal interests. (Complete Works, 11:315)

Lincoln’s achievement signals the return of poetry to politics and ‘thought’ to institutions of government. In Emerson’s opinion, Lincoln has acted with the poetic consciousness that Emerson himself values, and that Whitman appears to learn from him as he builds ever-larger worlds in his poetry. The aspects of governance and nationality that Emerson detests – their narrowness, their childishness, their obsessive self-preservation – are redeemed by Lincoln’s visionary decree, which serves both national and ‘universal interests’ at once. The ‘poetic act’ of the Emancipation Proclamation injects power into ‘arid’ and ‘hollow’ institutions and allows what Emerson recognises as universal law to supersede faulty legislation. Emerson’s analysis of Lincoln’s ‘poetic’ gesture recalls a moment in English Traits in which he mocks the English for their blind perpetuation of nationality for its own sake. In contrast to what he perceives as English ‘narrowness’, Emerson evokes ‘[t]hat expansiveness which is the

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essence of the poetic element’ and attributes that imaginative scale not to any Anglo-American figure but rather to the Persian poet Hafiz (CW, 5:145). For Emerson, who sees the ‘poetic element’ as his most natural one throughout his career, poetry is a force that can rise above and defy national borders and even, in Hafiz’s words, ‘break up the tiresome roof of heaven into new forms’. Wai Chee Dimock has argued that Emerson’s fascination with Hafiz indicates an engagement with global currents of literature that dislocates him from the familiar terrain of the nation.36 Nations are finite, Emerson contends, but poetry is infinite. When a politician such as Lincoln essentially becomes a poet by thinking expansively and globally, he elevates the affairs of government to a higher realm usually occupied by literature alone. In English Traits, Emerson presents the ‘Oriental largeness’ of writers such as Hafiz as a mode of thinking that ‘astonishes and disconcerts English decorum’. This ‘largeness’, almost certainly a development of Emerson’s concept of the ‘old largeness’ in ‘The Poet’, exerts an immense ‘power which trifles with time and space’. In the autumn of 1862, Emerson felt he had experienced the collision of this transformative ‘power’ with the structures of the American nation as they stood. What results from that fusion of universal energy with national forms is, for Emerson, a new way of thinking about the United States as a literary work in progress. The author of this new ‘America’ is Lincoln, who Emerson believes ‘has been permitted to do more for America than any other American man’ (Complete Works, 11:317–20, 326). Lincoln does not accomplish his work by attending to the mere perpetuation of the nation, as Webster had, but rather by looking beyond the nation to the world. As Emerson observes, ‘he has replaced government in the good graces of mankind.’ Like Fuller, Emerson feels comfortable supporting a nation only as long as it upholds cosmopolitan values. Once his doubts about the universality of the project of American nation-building are alleviated, he is willing to announce, ‘Our hurts are healed; the health of the nation is repaired.’ The nation goes, in Emerson’s eyes, from being a source of embarrassment to an even more definitive point of pride than it had been for him in the 1840s. Lincoln’s achievement marks for Emerson not only the recreation of America, but also the large-scale ‘melioration of our planet’. In a eulogy given at a funeral service for Lincoln in Concord in 1865, Emerson continued to praise Lincoln in unabashedly patriotic terms. As Lincoln had restored his cosmopolitan faith in the American nation, Emerson no longer compromised his own ideals by speaking the national language of which he had been so wary in the 1850s. He claims:

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The President stood before us as a man of the people. He was thoroughly American, had never crossed the sea, had never been spoiled by English insularity or French dissipation, a quiet native, aboriginal man, as an acorn from the oak; no aping of foreigners . . . . (Complete Works, 11:330)

Lincoln’s ‘thoroughly’ authentic nationality is now considered a sign of strength rather than immaturity. By being fully ‘native’, he can be at once a national and a universal man, despite the fact that he shuns European influences. Emerson returns here to the rhetoric of nationalism that informed early writings such as ‘The American Scholar’: a set of cultural expectations that encouraged him to proclaim, ‘We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe’ (CW, 1:69). By the 1860s, his patriotic feeling had been tested by the immorality of slavery and by the reality of war, and he ultimately recast that patriotism in cosmopolitan terms. Far from being ‘hollow’, patriotic language now had universal currency because the United States had become, in Emerson’s mind, a globally conscious nation. In 1862, Emerson described Thoreau in similar patriotic terms in a eulogy for his friend. ‘No truer American existed than Thoreau,’ he contends. ‘His preference of his country and condition was genuine, and his aversation from English and European manners and tastes almost reached contempt’ (Complete Works, 10:459). Emerson’s claims seem both inaccurate and unfortunate, given the definitively transnational character of Thoreau’s writings: an orientation that Thoreau made particularly evident in his manifold allusions to world literature in Walden. Although Giles has interpreted the aggressively patriotic tone of Emerson’s portrait of Thoreau as a symptom of his consistently nationalist rejection of Europe, I believe that Emerson was engaged in different work with national ideas in the 1860s from that in the 1830s or 1840s.37 He may have been even more of a nationalist than he had been in his early years, but the older Emerson adhered to a nationalism with a global difference. When Emerson praised Thoreau and Lincoln as ‘true’ and ‘thorough’ Americans, he was attempting to capture more than just their national traits. At this advanced point in his career, Emerson appeared to be seeking an American ‘representative man’ to supplement the earlier group that he had assembled during the 1840s, from which his own compatriots were notably absent. He found that man in Lincoln, whom he admired for his ability to combine national and universal modes of thought. Webster had failed in Emerson’s estimation because he did not have a capacity for ‘generalization’ and because his words left no impression on his listeners, for there was ‘not a single valuable aphorism that can pass into literature

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from his writings’ (Later Lectures, 1:337). Webster was deficient in precisely those literary and rhetorical skills that Emerson valued and that he argued Lincoln possessed in abundance. In contrast to Webster, Lincoln could speak with a confident command of popular sentiment. He was a representative figure because his words were repeated in ‘the mouths of millions’ and eventually became ‘the wisdom of the hour’ (Complete Works, 11:333–4). Emerson saw in Lincoln a reflection of the aphoristic thinker he himself had striven to become. Lincoln’s language was not mere political machinery; it embodied universal truths. Emerson effuses, ‘What pregnant definitions; what unerring common sense; what foresight; and, on great occasion, what lofty, and more than national, what humane tone!’ As Lincoln speaks, the form of his thought actually transcends national limits along with its meaning. In this moment, Emerson echoes his earlier comment on Lincoln’s ‘poetic act’. As he suggests at the beginning of the eulogy, it is the explicitly literary character of Lincoln’s achievements that makes him such a central figure in Emerson’s imagination. Emerson’s eulogy for Lincoln was, in many ways, the high-water mark of his public expression of unreservedly patriotic sentiment during his entire career. In order to understand the factors that led Emerson to take such an emphatically nationalist stance, it is crucial to read this work in the context of both his Civil War speeches and his earlier statements on the subject of nationality. Only with the help of this political background can scholars of Emerson’s writings begin to comprehend the extensive ethical deliberations that inform Emerson’s most familiar comments on American national character and destiny. Ending this study of Emerson’s later ‘national’ writings on the high note of Lincoln’s achievement would be misleading, however. To a certain extent, Emerson’s homage to Lincoln signals his own attempt to become a nationally representative figure, or at least to identify that potential in others. Mary Kupiec Cayton has argued that Emerson became known as a national thinker in the second half of his career, thanks to his ability to express succinctly and memorably those mottoes of industry and self-improvement that were received by his audiences as uniquely ‘American’ truths.38 These rhetorical talents closely resemble those that Emerson attributes to Lincoln, whose words likewise became ‘the wisdom of the hour’. Despite his apparent success in aligning his universal frame of reference with the form of the nation itself, Emerson’s moment of great national certainty and even national ambition in the eulogy remains exceptional in his career, as well as exceptionalist in spirit. Emerson’s lecture ‘Fortune of the Republic’, first delivered in Boston in 1863, more accurately captures his perpetual ambivalence toward and

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suspicion of nationality as a simple answer to a set of complex moral questions.39 Len Gougeon has shown that this lecture in particular illustrates Emerson’s remarkable consistency of approach from his earliest writings in The Dial to his later meditations on matters of national concern.40 While Gougeon focuses on the intersections between Emerson’s transcendental idealism and his political activism, I find Emerson’s unusually extensive statement of his relationship to the American nation in this lecture to be even more useful in the context of my discussion. Emerson’s post-Emancipation optimism continues in this lecture, and he positions a renewed America at the centre of the world. ‘At every moment,’ he observes, ‘some one country more than any other represents the sentiment and the future of mankind’ (Later Lectures, 2:322). Emerson’s contention is, on the one hand, overconfident in its patriotism, but on the other, it contains a certain hesitation about the duration of any nation’s success. The United States may represent the globe in the present moment, but in the next it could just as easily sink in the world’s estimation. Emerson prefers to think of the nation as an object of critical study rather than a fixed form. He explains: My own interest in the country is not precisely the same as that of my neighbors. I do not compute the annual production, the imports, or the valuation. My interest is perhaps professional. I wish that war, as peace, shall bring out the heart and the genius of the men. In every company, in every town, I seek knowledge and character, and so in every circumstance . . . For it is not the plants or the animals, innumerable as they are, nor the whole magazine of material nature, that can give the sum of power; but the infinite applicability of these things in the hands of thinking man – every new application being equivalent to a new material – is turning the globe into a brain. Over it, and under it, are laid nerves and straps, which throb across seas and territories, and, at each city and town in the course an operator plays on the elemental forces as on the keys of a piano. (Later Lectures, 2:327–8)

Emerson takes pride not in the facts of the nation’s ‘material’ success, but in the extent to which its resources can promote the development of individual citizens. He finally acknowledges the truth of Wordsworth’s claim that the United States needed a war to achieve a fully-fledged nationality, but unlike his sometime poetic mentor, Emerson refuses to stop there. It is what individuals do with national ideas and national language that matters to Emerson, not how they are defined by them. His vision stretches ‘wider than . . . a nationality’ to imagine the whole ‘globe’ as a giant thinking ‘brain’: a more active version of the ‘transparent eye-ball’ he depicts in

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Nature (CW, 1:10). This global mind is both a network of individual thinkers of the kind that Emerson describes in English Traits and a phenomenon that surpasses the limits of individual consciousness. Cosmopolitan intellectuals, Emerson believes, are joined by ‘forces’ more significant than nationality, but the globe itself asserts natural laws that govern all people, regardless of their citizenship. In a gesture that runs counter to his celebration of Lincoln’s individual achievement, Emerson dares anyone to make a difference on such a vast scale as he declares: The revolution is the work of no man, but the eternal effervescence of nature. It never did not work. And not a republican, not a statesman, not an idealist, not an abolitionist, can say without effrontery, I did it. Go push the globe, or scotch the globe, to accelerate or to retard it in its orbit. It is elemental. It is the old gravitation. (Later Lectures, 2:334–5)

Emerson returns in the end to the abstract realm of the ‘old largeness’, ruled here by the pull of the ‘old gravitation’. For as fierce an individualist as Emerson, an erasure of individual agency in the face of nature seems like an abandonment of his most dearly held principles. The ability of individuals to comprehend, if not influence, the workings of the universe, however, is the ultimate source of Emerson’s hope for the nation and indeed for humanity as a whole. As long as those poet–politicians who shape the nation are aware of the ‘elemental forces’ at ‘play’ in the world, they can lift their compatriots up, even for a short time, into the heady air of an exalted and exhilarated nationality.

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CHAPTER 5

THE PROFESSIONAL PILGRIM: GREENWOOD SELLS THE TRANSATLANTIC EXPERIENCE

Who is ‘Grace Greenwood’? Dismissed as one of a great ‘mob of scribbling women’ by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1855, relegated to the historical background of the antebellum literary world by foundational critics F. O. Matthiessen and Fred Louis Pattee, and then further marginalised by feminist scholars for employing sentimental language, Sara Jane Clarke Lippincott, or ‘Grace Greenwood’, as she was known to her reading public, has virtually disappeared from the drama of American literary innovation in which she once played a powerfully ‘paradigmatic’ role.1 An inheritor of Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s gift for travel writing, Lydia Maria Child’s skill in magazine editing, and Margaret Fuller’s citizenship in the transatlantic world, Greenwood could count Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fanny Fern, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Nellie Bly among her literary and journalistic descendants. Given the company she kept and the professional influence she wielded, why have her writings and literary career remained buried for so long under accusations of flakiness, ‘fluffiness’, ‘absurdity’, and worse?2 Greenwood challenges us to broaden our understanding of literary professionalism in the 1850s: a decade dominated by female novelists in fact and by Whitman and his male ‘American Renaissance’ cohort in retrospective fiction. For Greenwood, success in the publishing world depended not only on the quality of her writing, but also, more significantly, on her editorial ability to identify a niche market for her works and to promote them aggressively through personal networking and appeals to a broader reading public. A regular contributor to magazines and newspapers from 1844 onward, a groundbreaking Congressional newspaper correspondent, an assertive editor who trained at Godey’s Lady’s Book and the National Era

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before founding her own periodical empire, a lively performer in print and on stage, whose ‘shows’ ranged from anti-slavery lectures to slapstick routines, and a generically flexible author whose works were so popular that they sold, as Pattee sarcastically remarks, ‘like a breakfast food in sensational figures’, Greenwood was nowhere near as flaky as she has been made to seem.3 In recent studies by Nina Baym, Melissa J. Homestead, and Lesley Ginsberg, Greenwood emerges as a canny, calculating figure who could hold her own in the publishing world and even intimidate seasoned literary men like Hawthorne and her editor James T. Fields with her imaginative audacity and aggressive business tactics.4 Although these investigations have confirmed suspicions that Greenwood’s insistent presence in American literary history must be acknowledged, they do not account for her success as a writer and editor outside a relatively limited context of personal relationships and specific texts. In particular, critics have not fully considered the transatlantic scope of Greenwood’s career and the extent to which she built her reputation at home and abroad on the strength of the cultural knowledge she gathered and the literary contacts she secured during her travels in Europe from 1852 to 1853. Greenwood’s two collections of magazine ‘letters’ and short fiction, published as Greenwood Leaves by Ticknor & Fields in 1850 and 1852, introduced her to the American reading public and set a verdant stage for Fanny Fern’s and Walt Whitman’s similarly titled Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Port-Folio (1853) and Leaves of Grass (1855), respectively. Abolitionist editor Gamaliel Bailey gambled on her newly established literary reputation by commissioning a series of travel dispatches called ‘Greenwood Leaves from Over the Sea’ for the National Era in the wake of the newspaper’s serial publication of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin from 1851 to 1852, a landmark project that Greenwood helped to shape as an assistant editor. Unlike Stowe, however, Greenwood was motivated more by profit than politics, as before her European tour concluded in 1853, she took her column to the Saturday Evening Post in order to benefit from its higher salaries and wider circulation. This definitive commercial turn oriented Greenwood’s professional energies in a new direction, as she continued to cash in on her transatlantic experiences when she returned to the United States. Greenwood’s spirit of transatlantic enterprise sets her apart from Sedgwick, Hawthorne, and Stowe, whose personal accounts of European adventure were marginal to their fictional output, and also from Child, whose transnational imagination was constricted by the fact that she never left the United States. Like Fuller, Greenwood travelled to Europe as a paid newspaper correspondent, but from the start, she staked her claim as a saleswoman of transatlantic knowledge rather than as a deeply

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committed provocateur of cosmopolitan conscience. Greenwood’s willingness to use every tactic available – no matter how professional or seemingly unprofessional – as an editor of her own work both offended the literary establishment and helped her to break new ground as a writer who comprehended authorship as a holistic project of creative composition, self-editing, and self-promotion: in short, a figure who, in presciently Whitmanian ways, both demands and continues to hold our attention. This chapter follows Greenwood’s transatlantic trajectory from her first appearance as one of the ‘public women’ of the ‘press’ whose influence her friend and literary rival Hawthorne long dreaded, through her composition of the travel dispatches that would become Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe (1854), her best-selling book, and finally to her self-establishment as editor of The Little Pilgrim (1853–68), a magazine for children that packaged cosmopolitan adventure and spawned a host of matching story books targeted to an audience that Greenwood wisely identified as her ‘juvenile public’.5 It is her creation and nurture of this uniquely ‘juvenile’ public sphere that constitutes Greenwood’s most distinctive professional achievement, for within it she capitalises effectively on an underserved audience intrigued by the exoticism of travel abroad and growing in its desire for cultural sophistication, however limited the worldliness she offered in the pages of her magazine may have been in fact. The transatlantic scope of that juvenile public sphere was as open to Greenwood in the 1850s as it is to critical exploration now, for in a string of recent studies of children’s literature by Beverly Clark, Karen Sánchez-Eppler, and Robin Bernstein, juvenile readers remain confined within American national boundaries.6 Greenwood’s transatlantic project made a decisive impact, as the children whom she trained would become the avid consumers of transatlantic culture featured in the postbellum novels of Mark Twain, Henry James, and Edith Wharton, and in turn, their children would take their places in Europe as the café dwellers of the Lost Generation. Despite the era’s demands that her literary output remain comfortably private, domestic, and national in its scope, Greenwood’s decision to market her transatlantic experience to the next generation proved to be a brilliant strategy of making her name a ‘household word’ in print: a paradoxical condition that kept her safely at ‘home’ even as she worked strenuously to earn her fame ‘abroad’.7

Hawthorne, Greenwood, and the World’s Oldest Profession As Greenwood began to make a name for herself in the press – the field that Hawthorne once observed was wide open to ‘feminine ambition’ – and to

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publish the fruits of those labours in two volumes of Greenwood Leaves (1850; 1852), an edginess of literary competition crept into her formerly collegial relationship with Hawthorne (Centenary, 23:66). Greenwood herself sought out such competition; as she rose to greater national prominence in her editorial roles at Godey’s Lady’s Book and the National Era, she expressed a frank jealousy of other women’s professional success. In an 1851 letter to Gamaliel Bailey that he reprinted in the National Era, Greenwood celebrates the immediate impact of the newspaper’s publication of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but she testily observes, ‘I should not be missed if I stood aside and listened with the rest – like a chorus-singer looking out from the side-scenes, while the Prima Donna stands in front, and with her one surpassing voice reaches and satisfies all hearts.’8 As her later writings show, Greenwood herself is, in fact, more of a ‘Prima Donna’ by nature and ambition than a ‘timid, doubtful’ writer who is content to let others take the stage. In Greenwood’s eyes, Stowe is achieving what she herself ultimately desires: ‘an almost miraculous increase of power’ that represents an enviably Emersonian height of literary self-reliance. When the National Era touted a transatlantic extension of her regular column, titled ‘Greenwood Leaves from over the Sea’, as ‘one of the chief attractions of the paper’ for 1852, Greenwood’s professional power appeared to have increased in just such a ‘miraculous’ measure.9 Although Hawthorne agreed to provide Greenwood with letters of introduction for her European trip, as Emerson did for Fuller, his envy of the confidence with which she intended to navigate that Atlantic gulf, as well as the evident pride that their publisher James T. Fields would take in presenting her to the London literati, left a permanent sting. Hawthorne tells Greenwood: Our friend Fields will be in London, I believe, until July, if not longer; and judging by his letters, he is hand and glove with all the literary celebrities. It will be the proudest day of his life, when he can grace himself by putting you in rapport with them.10

In this moment, as Greenwood departs from American shores and takes her  place among the transatlantic ‘literary celebrities’ who gather in London,  she assumes a professional substance that eludes even Hawthorne’s  grasp. His wordplay is surely no accident, for Fields, the editor who had long been ‘[o]ur friend’, will now be ‘grace[d]’ and elevated by the presence and reputation of Grace Greenwood: still not quite a ‘Prima Donna’, but nonetheless a figure of note on both sides of the Atlantic. On this trip, Greenwood enters the rarified and predominantly male world of literary cosmopolitans that had been liberated first by Fuller

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in 1846. When Francis Bennoch, a London patron of the arts, close friend of Fields, and unofficial host to Greenwood during her stay in England, was instructed to send Longfellow the latest news from abroad, Fields advised simply, ‘tell him of Grace Greenwood’s triumphs’ (Hawthorne, Centenary, 17:31). As Greenwood sets sail for a new set of professional adventures in Europe, Hawthorne reports in a defensive tone: I have bought a house in Concord; deeming it better to do so, on the whole, than to spend the money in going to Italy, although I do not yet give up that long-cherished idea. It is best, perhaps, to keep it by way of a second youth, wherewith to gladden my late declining age.11

By staying home in Concord, Hawthorne may be displaying admirable pragmatism, but Greenwood shows that she is capable of greater professional acuity as she secures her financial status by travelling to Europe to enjoy her ‘second youth’, or in her own terms, a ‘perpetual childhood’, while on paid assignment for a newspaper. Hawthorne’s deprivation was short-lived, as he left Concord to take up a consular appointment in Liverpool in 1853, but the damage was already done, as he found himself working in Greenwood’s transatlantic shadow. The two crossed paths in Liverpool: a meeting that Hawthorne records in his sharp-tongued English Notebooks (1870), unpublished until after his death. Hawthorne notes smugly, ‘Grace looked much older for the year’s wear and tear,’ and speculates, ‘it is hard to say what else she will be than a hopeless old maid – with a very capacious heart cold and empty; a great yearning for admiration, never to be half-gratified’ (Centenary, 21:6–7). Greenwood’s professional ambitions and her desire for public ‘admiration’, which Hawthorne attempts to foreclose by modifying her literary success by ‘half-’, have begun to compromise her youth and femininity: precisely those attributes, Hawthorne implies in a self-contradictory if not dishonest manner, that make her friendship most valuable to him. Worse yet, he argues, she is prone to ‘theatrical’ behaviour and ‘nonsense’ in general – charges perhaps not entirely out of step with the performative quality of her transatlantic dispatches, a matter discussed in the next section of the chapter – and she likes England ‘rather better, I suppose, than an American ought’. Greenwood steps out of bounds on two counts: by following her professional ‘yearning’ beyond American territory, she compromises both her appropriately feminine domestic agenda and her patriotic ties to domestic soil. Greenwood’s collection of European dispatches, Haps and Mishaps of a

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Tour in Europe (1854), became the most successful book of her career, but it initially received mixed reviews in the transatlantic press. Henry Ward Beecher celebrates it as a work ‘of genuine sentiment, of refined and poetic feeling, of genial, sprightly narrative, and of pure religious principle’, and John Greenleaf Whittier calls it ‘racy and readable’.12 A British reviewer in the London Athenaeum takes a more sceptical view of Greenwood’s ‘enthusiasm’, however, which he claims has been spread so thin in the course of her travels in Europe that it has been devalued as a ‘coinage of admiration’.13 When Greenwood barrels into the homes of British dignitaries, the reviewer contends, she does not get the joke (in conversation with Carlyle) and turns eminent authors into an ‘exhibition’ for her American readers (at dinner with Dickens). She represents a new class of female writers, ‘the wandering sisterhood of the quill from America’, who are at once professionally bold and entirely unprofessional in their tactics. Hawthorne’s unofficial review of Greenwood’s book in a letter to Ticknor is rigid with disapproval of what he perceives as her professional turn for the worse. He claims in a strong aside that her writing is ‘(miserable stuff – nothing genuine in the volume – I don’t care a button for it)’.14 His assertion that her work is ‘miserable’ makes sense as an attempt to denigrate the competition, but his contention that her work is not ‘genuine’ opens up an entirely different set of concerns that are tied to the vexed matter of authenticity in the American literary market of the 1850s. An earlier letter to Ticknor sheds significant light on the reasons why Greenwood got under Hawthorne’s skin: Grace’s book, I suppose, is a republication of her letters to the Era; and, in that case, you will not make a fortune out of them. I am getting sick of Grace. Her ‘Little Pilgrim’ is a humbug, and she herself is – but there is no need of telling you. I wish her well, and mean to write an article for her, by and by. But inkstained women are, without a single exception, detestable.15

Greenwood makes Hawthorne ‘sick’ with her tendency to repackage her work for multiple publications, as well as with the extent of her popularity in print. His self-diagnosed ‘sick[ness]’ also suggests the type of celebrity fatigue that comes with overexposure. Once a trusted colleague, Greenwood, by way of her editorial creation of The Little Pilgrim, a children’s magazine in circulation from 1853 to 1868, now proves herself to be a mere ‘humbug’. By using that term, Hawthorne means to insult Greenwood and her work, but in some circles it might have been considered a compliment, or a sign that the writer in question was, at the very least, a highly skilled businessman or woman.

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In the 1850s, as Lara Langer Cohen has shown, American literary culture was shot through with ‘fraud’ and the ‘explosion’ of print productions had much more to do with pervasive puffery and showmanship than with any ‘genuine’ attempts (to use Hawthorne’s word) to capture artistic truth.16 Hawthorne’s accusation indicates that he found himself at odds with the prevailing popular culture of this decade: a culture dominated by watchwords like ‘native’ and ‘democracy’, and commanded by such figures as P. T. Barnum and Walt Whitman, the latter only escaping the permanent reputation of a ‘humbug’ through the dogged persistence and professional management of his self-promotional campaigns, which will be explored more fully in the next chapter. Greenwood’s magazine, in fact, may have been a ‘humbug’ of sorts, but that did not necessarily mean that it was an unprofessional effort; on the contrary, it was primed for commercial success. Despite his protests, Hawthorne cannot help but be drawn into the project, as he promises ‘to write an article for her, by and by’. Greenwood would then become his editor rather than simply a fellow writer, a prospect that surely raised his professional hackles. In Hawthorne’s letter, Greenwood’s true identity is finally revealed. She is one of those ‘ink-stained women’, a direct descendant of the ‘inkstained Amazons’ who threatened to defeat Hawthorne and his male colleagues in his 1830 tirade against a rising female literary class.17 These ‘ink-stained women’ soon become ‘that d----d mob of scribbling women’ in Hawthorne’s infamous letter to Ticknor: an indictment of Greenwood and her peers, particularly sentimental novelists like Maria Cummins, whose popular book The Lamplighter (1854) Hawthorne singled out as ‘trash’.18 In Hawthorne’s mind, these women are ‘stained’ by more than ink, as their engagement in the print public sphere calls their moral character into question. No longer an honoured guest at his family’s fireside, Greenwood proves herself to be a ‘morbid and unwholesome’ influence, a woman who offends Sophia Hawthorne’s sensibilities as a wife and mother, and irrevocably, Hawthorne himself.19 Humbug or not, The Little Pilgrim managed to find an audience, as it capitalised on the public’s desire to experience a ‘perpetual childhood’. Despite the Hawthornes’ private suspicions of her character, Greenwood’s skills as a writer and editor allowed her to maintain an appropriately female position at the ‘domestic’ fireside even as she asserted herself professionally in the publishing world. It was Greenwood’s devotion to her reading public and her editorial decisions in the magazine’s pages that caused Hawthorne to draw a professional line in the sand once and for all. In shock, he reports to Sophia:

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In Grace Greenwood’s last ‘Little Pilgrim,’ there is a description of her new baby !!! in response to numerous enquiries which, she says, have been received from her subscribers. I wonder she did not think it necessary to be brought to bed in public, or, at least, in presence of a committee of the subscribers. My dearest, I cannot enough thank God, that, with a higher and deeper intellect than any other woman, thou hast never – forgive me the bare idea! – never prostituted thyself to the public, as that woman has, and as a thousand others do. It does seem to me to deprive women of all delicacy; it has pretty much such an effect on them as it would to walk abroad through the streets, physically stark naked. Women are too good for authorship, and that is the reason it spoils them so.20

It is difficult to say what horrifies Hawthorne most about this scene: the mental image of Greenwood giving birth, or the fact that she has made that birth a public event, if only in a brief printed reference to her newborn daughter. She has become such a literary celebrity in her own right, Hawthorne realises, that her ‘subscribers’ demand more and more from her, and she responds by exposing the products of her body, as well as her mind, to their gaze. In his fevered calculations, Greenwood has engaged in a form of intellectual ‘prostitut[ion]’ in her rush to become a public figure. The kind of American literature that is born in this moment recalls another illegitimate daughter, Hester Prynne’s Pearl, who haunts the forested margins of Puritan Salem with her mother, troubling its peace and upsetting its moral balance. That newborn literature, written by Greenwood and a group of professionals that includes women as well as men such as Whitman, an author who most certainly has no fear of exposure, insists upon its own significance despite repeated attempts to claim, as Hawthorne did of Greenwood’s work, that it was too marginal to be ‘quite worth the trouble’.21 Nina Baym argues that ‘texts like Greenwood’s are not at all marginal to that [public] sphere but on the contrary are right in the middle of it.’22 I would suggest that Greenwood’s professional work and the ways in which it continues to exasperate Hawthorne throughout his career can help us map a new landscape of antebellum literary achievement: one in which, to correct Hawthorne’s phrase, women are not ‘too good for authorship’, but rather, too good at it for comfort.

Domesticating Europe: Greenwood as a Professional Traveller By 1852, when Greenwood arrived in England to begin her European tour, she had already enjoyed several years of multifaceted professional success as a poet, short story writer, and journalistic contributor to a

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number of American newspapers and magazines. Abolitionist editor Gamaliel Bailey boasted of his ‘exclusive’ rights to her work for the National Era,23 and Harriet Beecher Stowe cited Greenwood’s anti-slavery letters as an inspiration for the composition and serial publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in that newspaper from 1851 to 1852.24 Confident enough to speak on behalf, or more accurately, in the voices of her literary colleagues in an essay advocating international copyright law,25 and assertive enough to play an active role in the promotion of her own books by Ticknor & Fields, Greenwood had proven herself, as Lesley Ginsberg has argued, to be a woman who was extremely capable of ‘marketing’ her own ‘authorial persona’.26 The prospect of travelling in Europe nonetheless intimidated Greenwood, or so she claimed. In the third of a series of letters commissioned by the National Era for the column ‘Greenwood Leaves from Over the Sea’ and later collected in the travelogue Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe (1854), she confesses to her readers: Before I left home, I talked bravely of the great plunge into the cold bath of the world which I was about to take – of the new life of entire independence and self-reliance before me. My lip sometimes quivered, and I laughed hysterically as I pictured myself as ‘the strong-minded woman’ abroad, but none could know the cowardly sinking and sickness of my heart through all. Yet thus far have I taken not one lonely and unsupported step. No sooner had I reached the far foreign land which had so appalled me than I found myself so hemmed in with kindness, so guarded and guided by friendly care, that there was, and is, imminent danger of my becoming more babyishly dependent than ever. People on whose good offices I had not the least legitimate claim – mere friends of my friends – rival in assiduous kindness parents, brothers, and sisters, and quite outdo and put to shame all more distant blood relationship whatever. (Haps, 49–50)

As she ‘plunges’ into unfamiliar Atlantic waters, Greenwood’s initial shock could be interpreted as a sign of her ‘cowardice’. Given her professional confidence, however, it is more likely a rhetorical ploy that continues to build on a self-conscious sense of her professional role as a purveyor of ‘perpetual childhood’, or as she explains in this passage, a ‘babyishly dependent’ state that requires the recreation of a protective nuclear family on foreign soil.27 The woman who at first only ‘laughed hysterically’ at the idea of her own ‘independence’ as a traveller soon feels entirely at home abroad, so much so that she capitalises on that privileged feeling by selling it to others in print.

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This section of the chapter concerns itself with Greenwood’s cultivation of those feelings of comfort and control in her writing about Europe, and with her strategy of turning the foreign world into a recognisably ‘domestic’ realm in order to give her travel letters more currency on the American literary scene. Professional income was a primary motivating factor for Greenwood in her transatlantic adventures, as even before her tour concluded, she switched her allegiance from the specialised National Era to the popular Saturday Evening Post, a newspaper that paid a higher salary and enjoyed a wider circulation.28 Those nearly ‘blood relationships’ with Europeans, into which Greenwood ostensibly falls without effort, are the products of careful calculations on her part, and they prove essential when she returns home to establish her own transatlantic cottage industry as the editor of the magazine The Little Pilgrim (1853–68) and the author of six travel books for children. Not only does Greenwood rise to the challenge of being a ‘ “strong-minded woman” abroad’, but she also shows herself to be a canny saleswoman of the transatlantic experience from the start: a role that sets her apart from other cosmopolitan antebellum writers such as Sedgwick, Fuller, Douglass, and Stowe, whose personal and political agendas for their European travels far outweigh their commercial goals. Greenwood takes no pains to hide the fact that she is following a path well trodden and thoroughly catalogued by previous adventurers, American and otherwise. Initially overwhelmed by the literary authority of the travellers who preceded her, she can barely proffer her own description of Newstead Abbey, Byron’s home. She explains, ‘I have not spoken as fully of the abbey and grounds of Newstead as I should have done had I not believed every one familiar with Washington Irving’s charming account and the notes of many other tourists’ (Haps, 26). As a mere ‘tourist’ herself, a generically undistinguished group to which very few antebellum Americans travelling abroad on literary business would have admitted they belonged, Greenwood acknowledges that ‘many’ others have scooped her stories, making the ‘full’ versions that she might have told automatically redundant. The ground that she covers has been claimed imaginatively by others, and it has also been transformed physically by their passage through the landscape. In Ireland, she seeks out the legendary site of ‘St. Kevin’s bed’, but finds upon arrival that others have left their mark, for ‘In the rock of “the bed” I found carved the names of Mr. and Mrs. S.C. Hall, Tom Moore, Maria Edgeworth, and Walter Scott’ (Haps, 105). As Greenwood’s journey is a belated one, even by the early 1850s, the writing that it inspires appears to suffer at first from an excess of representation that threatens to render her own work meaningless. Greenwood’s challenge is therefore clear: find some way to revalue a

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frayed itinerary on her own terms, or risk losing her reading audience’s interest, and even worse, her transatlantic paycheck. Instead of staggering under the weight of the literary past, she begins to welcome its presence eagerly, celebrating the fact that Charles Dickens might have seen the very same figures gathered on the Spanish Steps in Rome that she encounters during her trip. ‘Indeed,’ she contends, ‘I believe that our friends, the patriarch and the brigand, are the identical personages whose portraits stand out so livingly in his grotesque but exquisite description’ (Haps, 250). The fact that her vision of Europe is nearly ‘identical’ to those of past writers is no longer a liability, but rather a sign of her superior taste, as she has learned to cash in on the value of omnipresent literary associations. In Greenwood’s Europe, known quantities carry legitimacy accrued over years of celebrity visits, and they make her appear more of a savvy expert as she reports on them. After only a few days in Scotland, she boasts: Of all foreign places which I had ever seen, Edinburgh wears to me the most familiar aspect. I joyfully recognize object after object, street after street, as though ‘to the manor born,’ and only returned after a few years of wandering or weary exile. (Haps, 128)

‘Familiarity’ with Edinburgh’s streets breeds not contempt, but in Greenwood’s clever hands, a certain brand of transatlantic sophistication that can raise even the most inexperienced tourist to the level of a native aristocrat who is most assuredly ‘to the manor born’. The more thoroughly known her European scenes are, the more likely she – and consequently her American readers – are to feel ‘at home’ in Europe: a level of cultural mastery that would become increasingly desirable in the expatriate postbellum worlds of Henry James and Edith Wharton. Greenwood has her audience nailed: the naïve, gullible Americans with whom she herself travels, as well as cultural pretenders like the ones she meets in Rome. These slaves to ‘the grand tour’, she observes: are men who have come abroad from a sense of fashionable duty, and with a vague expectation of enjoyment, who go about sightseeing with commendable industry, making meritorious efforts at admiring and comprehending, and even attaining to something like enthusiasm at times, but really enduring it all with the resignation of martyrs. (Haps, 238)

Tourists of the ‘merchant’ class confuse travel with business, ticking off cities and key sites with ‘commendable industry’, well aware of their cultural value even before the age of Michelin stars. Greenwood capitalises

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on the fact that European travel is becoming increasingly ‘fashionable’, as well as commodifiable: an adventure that boils down to what William W. Stowe calls ‘choice bits of culture and experience at good price’.29 Once a journey accessible only to the elite, the ‘Grand Tour’ becomes a phenomenon of American mass culture from the 1860s onward, and Mark Twain cannot help but burst the overblown transatlantic bubble in his satire The Innocents Abroad, or, The New Pilgrims’ Progress (1869). This ‘European exodus’ is so definitive, Twain’s narrator claims, that one of his friends ‘came at last to consider the whole nation as packing up for emigration to France’.30 Margaret Fuller, who travelled a similar European route on assignment for the New-York Tribune just a few years before Greenwood began her adventures, shows no mercy for the tourists to whom Greenwood would eventually pander. This type of American, Fuller writes, is: servile . . . a being utterly shallow, thoughtless, worthless. He comes abroad to spend his money and indulge his tastes. His object in Europe is to have fashionable clothes, good foreign cookery, to know some titled persons, and furnish himself with coffee-house gossip, which he wins importance at home by retailing among those less traveled, and as uninformed as himself.31

Fuller’s ability to hit upon precisely those elements of the American tourist class that Greenwood herself would identify, and in some respects, embody – the obsession with material goods, ‘fashionable’ adventures, and gossip with both ‘retail’ and resale value at home in the United States – proves that Greenwood’s audience was ready and waiting for transatlantic literary goods when she began writing home from abroad in 1852. Fuller’s uncompromising portrait of what she feels is the wrong approach to transatlantic experience draws a sharp line of distinction between the writings of these two pioneering journalists, and shows that transatlanticism in this period could take a number of seemingly incompatible forms, from highly politicised and philosophically cosmopolitan exchanges engineered by writers like Fuller and Douglass to Greenwood’s more superficial – but no less successful – trade in names, places, and novelty adventures that could entertain American audiences and give them the confidence to read Europe like a book. Greenwood’s strategy of turning Britain and the Continent into familiar, even domestic territories for her readers directly conflicts with Fuller’s methods of dissolving national borders through revolutionary collaboration. As Greenwood insists that the citizens of the countries she visits behave exactly like their national selves, she essentially polices those borders and delineates them more sharply in print than they might appear

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in fact. While in Ireland, she criticises the locals for their failure to live up to her expectations and complains, ‘I have frequently found them wanting in the spirit of nationality – completely Anglicized in thought and feeling. They, many of them, speak of Ireland and the Irish as though not of it or them’ (Haps, 100). The Irish people that Greenwood meets defy her idea of ‘nationality’, which amounts to containment; in a nation such as this one, no cultural hybridisation can be permitted. Americans who retain their own national integrity despite long-term exposure to European cultures are, on the other hand, subjects of Greenwood’s praise. She applauds expatriate American sculptor Hiram Powers for resisting the nefarious influences of Italian life and thereby ‘retaining all the freshness and naturalness, all the chivalrous, liberty-loving spirit, of a true son of the free, broad west’ (Haps, 359). Greenwood’s claim that Powers is ‘truly’ American, that he has preserved his ‘natural’, ‘western’ affect in the face of European artifice, sends her readers the message that the patriotic loyalties of the author herself are secure, and that by extension they should remain fundamentally unaffected by Europe as well. Although these letters follow a trajectory to reach their audience that is transatlantic in its geographical scope, their intentions are actually anti-transatlantic in spirit. Greenwood’s effort to keep each nationality on its own side of the fence means that her work defies what Mary Louise Pratt has identified as a standard feature of travel writing: the creation of a ‘contact zone’ in which cultures meet, mingle, and eventually merge.32 While certain transatlantic literatures can be considered ‘contact’ literatures, even works such as Longfellow’s that were translated from their original European languages and presented to American readers in English, Greenwood’s writing about Europe tries to minimise the effects of transnational contact – and often succeeds, even as it claims to maximise the cultural value of transatlantic experience for the fundamentally selfcentred American reader.33 Greenwood’s emphasis on the extent to which Europe has already degenerated into a mimetic version of itself leaves her vulnerable to the charges of literary ‘humbug’ that Hawthorne unceremoniously files as he watches Greenwood stage her European journalism in repertory in her children’s magazine The Little Pilgrim.34 More significantly, Greenwood’s admission of artifice undermines the earnestness with which her contemporaries pursued transatlantic experience for their own idealistic ends and for what they imagined was the common cosmopolitan good. In her work, the vocational bent of transatlantic professionalism begins to give way to the commercial branding of global experience that feeds the institutionalisation of travel in the twentieth century with its one-size-fits-all

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guidebooks, package tours, and media outlets. Out of all of the authors considered in this book, it is surely Whitman, in his cleverly orchestrated stunts of transatlantic self-promotion, who bears the strongest resemblance to Greenwood’s self-consciously performative Italians, and to the author herself, who was rumoured to have taken the stage in London in the company of her travelling companion, the actress Charlotte Cushman.35 Blurring the line between reporter and performer, Greenwood assumes multiple professional identities as she travels, denouncing the telltale signs of a lively market in cross-cultural experience as evidence of corruption, even as she throws herself enthusiastically into the print trade in transatlantic adventure. Greenwood makes no secret of her own desire to entertain her readers by generating comic scenes rather than the kind of moral instruction in which writers like Fuller excelled. When she shifts her professional allegiance in April of 1853 from the National Era to the Saturday Evening Post, the tone and content of her letters follow suit. As she had as a Congressional correspondent in Washington, Greenwood reports on legislative sessions of the British Parliament, but even Queen Victoria herself is not safe from her humorist’s eye. From the gallery, Greenwood observes, ‘The lord chancellor having formally announced that parliament stood prorogued until the 20th of August, Her Majesty rose as majestically as could be expected of one more remarkable for rosy plumpitude than regal altitude’ (Haps, 39). In 1854, Hawthorne skewered Greenwood’s transatlantic presumption in presenting a copy of her travelogue to the Queen herself, but in light of these lines, her gesture now seems less a sign of ambition than of bad taste.36 Greenwood’s treatment of European leaders reveals a stubbornness of cultural intent that refuses transatlantic negotiations of any kind. Her manipulation of other well-known figures within her narrative, however, also demonstrates her awareness of the transatlantic realities of Victorian celebrity culture: a swiftly flowing current of news and gossip that such writers as Douglass and Whitman also use to advance their careers. Indeed, Greenwood’s written reports of her visits to Dickens and the Brownings actually became American news in their own right, as Greenwood rose to fame at home on the strength of her contacts abroad.37 Her account of a meeting with the Brownings in Florence is a case in point. After being welcomed into their home, Greenwood ‘leave[s] the door ajar’ for others to enter that literary sanctum. Coyly, she continues: But I should pause here; I feel guilty of a sort of sacrilege in having said so much. Mr. and Mrs. Browning have taken up their residence in Florence, a

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place in every way congenial to them. I know that thousands of her unknown friends across the great water will rejoice to hear that the health of Mrs. Browning improves with every year spent in Italy. Yet she is still very delicate – but a frail flower, ceaselessly requiring all the sheltering and fostering care, all the wealth and watchfulness of love, which is round about her. (Haps, 358)

Those who accompany Greenwood on her literary pilgrimage are given fair warning of this visit’s significance by her clever admission of ‘guilt’ in the midst of her story. Transgressing the Brownings’ private threshold may be ‘sacrilege’, but the value of such privileged access on the transatlantic news market far outweighs any potential offence it may cause. Greenwood gains journalistic authority as she offers the latest update on Barrett Browning’s ‘delicate’ condition, a matter of utmost concern to her ‘thousands of . . . friends’, or rather, fans, ‘across the great water’, whom Greenwood herself is likely to wish to poach. Although Greenwood is reluctant to leave Florence, she is even more attached to the personal and professional boost that the Brownings’ acquaintance provides. She admits, ‘I “sorrowed most of all” at parting, so soon, with my friends the Brownings. My friends, how rich I feel in being able to write these words!’ (Haps, 363). Their friendship has ‘enriched’ not only her life, but also her writing itself, thereby increasing her net worth as a transatlantic author. As Greenwood cashes in on her European associations, she also cultivates her own brand of transatlantic humour. The longer she stays in Europe, the funnier it gets. She and her friends play practical jokes on unsuspecting French train conductors and Italian guards, and her days take on the slapstick quality that we now associate with Twain or perhaps Bill Bryson, but never with a traveller like Fuller, who normally takes great care to separate the transit of her physical body from her professional body of work. Caught in rough waters on her way to the Azure Grotto on Capri, Greenwood plays language games, confessing that as ‘the breeze stiffened and I sickened; the sea rose, and I fell’ (Haps, 331). After failing to land on Capri, and realising that the Italians have literally taken her and her travel companions for a ride, Greenwood’s ability to laugh at the outcome – to recognise that, although they had intended to ‘do’ the Grotto like faithful tourists, their host, in fact, ‘had “done” us’ – proves that she has become a more cynical traveller who is able to pass on her culturally and commercially valuable experiences to others and to help them avoid making the same mistakes. Although the accretion of European experience would prove disappointing to an idealist like Fuller and even life-threatening to such naïve heroines as Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer, Greenwood embraces its

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dangers blithely in her quest for literary thrills. Nothing appears to dampen the spirit with which she began her transatlantic journey, that desire for ‘general enjoyment’ that outweighs all agendas beyond her own delight (Haps, 4). She shoots river rapids in Ireland, rides piggyback into yet another Italian grotto, and visits hospitals in Venice to feed her ‘terrible fascination’ with mental illness and to ‘test [her] own strength’ (Haps, 391). Greenwood’s daring allows us to consider her as the first in an impressive line of female journalists whom Jean Marie Lutes has dubbed ‘girl stunt reporters’: women like Nellie Bly, who would visit asylums undercover and compete with one another to travel around the world in a certain number of days.38 Like postbellum journalist Kate Field, whose European travelogue Hap-Hazard (1873) ‘lay[s] no claim to profundity’ as it seeks to ‘entertain’ its readers, Greenwood sends no single message in her writing, political or otherwise, but rather invites her newspaper audience into the European scene as a vast carnival in which they will be endlessly amused.39 At the height of the Roman Carnival, Greenwood explains the appeal of that celebration, recalling, ‘I went home excessively tired, but decidedly of the opinion that one of the few commendable institutions of this unhappy country is this same custom-sanctioned absurdity, this ancient and annual irruption of folly, this gigantic frolic, the Carnival’ (Haps, 228). Like Carnival itself, Greenwood’s travelogue deals in rhetorically controlled ‘folly’ and cleverly calculated ‘frolic’, and thereby aims to ‘institution[alise]’ the experience of European travel for those American outsiders who seek to become transatlantic insiders. The tremendous success of Greenwood’s enterprise, both in Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe and in the derivative publications for children that she compiled upon her return to the United States, suggests that she fully comprehended and exploited the cultural and economic possibilities of the transatlantic sphere at mid-century. While her more radical contemporaries, especially those engaged in anti-slavery activities, were reviving Atlantic networks in the hopes of mitigating the darker aspects of the ocean’s commercial past, Greenwood deliberately chose to navigate the shallower waters of transatlantic experience. She was, as she claimed at the end of her year abroad, a ‘tolerably contented cosmopolitan’, willing to profit by her European adventures, ‘save in times of sadness and sickness, when my heart cries out for its kindred, and strange scenes and strange faces oppress and appall me’ (Haps, 426). Greenwood may have found herself unexpectedly at home in Europe, and provided the means in print for her readers to feel the same way, but the calculating, often cynical transatlanticism of her work suggests that such easy cosmopolitan ‘content[ment]’ in fact comes at a price.

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The Little Pilgrim and the Juvenile Public Sphere Now a popular travel writer, whose ‘racy and readable’ dispatches gained her a wide audience in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post and guaranteed her the professional envy of less ‘contented cosmopolitans’ such as Hawthorne, Greenwood nonetheless found herself at a professional impasse upon her return to the United States in 1853. After burning bridges in the publishing world, first at Godey’s Lady’s Book as her anti-slavery sentiments threatened to upset Godey’s Southern readers, then at the National Era as she demanded higher pay for her foreign correspondence and eventually took her ‘Greenwood Leaves from Over the Sea’ elsewhere, Greenwood could count on the transatlantic popularity of her writing, but not on her own professional security. Her 1853 marriage to the fickle, seldom employed Leander Lippincott would provide more personal solace than financial stability, but in the end, little of either one.40 Possessing a courage remarkable to her ‘sister editor’ Sarah Josepha Hale, who edited Godey’s Lady’s Book from 1837 to 1877, Greenwood persuaded Hale of her ‘genius’ by demonstrating a combination of creative audacity and business sensibility. Hale realised that a more ‘fearful mind [than Greenwood’s] would have hesitated to risk, by any effort to widen her sway, a failure’.41 As she gambled her literary reputation on the new venture of The Little Pilgrim, a self-published monthly magazine for children, Greenwood’s next professional move was both unique in its claim on a distinct ‘juvenile public’ sphere and similar in its declaration of editorial independence to the newspaper and book projects inaugurated by Douglass and Whitman in the 1840s and 1850s.42 In October 1853, Greenwood published the first issue of The Little Pilgrim, which enjoyed an unusually lengthy and successful print run of fifteen years. This magazine, essentially lost to scholarship until Greenwood’s recent reappearance, has not yet received sustained critical attention.43 In its time, The Little Pilgrim was not only a literary triumph to match Lydia Maria Child’s Juvenile Miscellany (1826–36), but it also successfully outlined and sustained a juvenile print public sphere that was national in scope, transatlantic in orientation, and definitively middlebrow in character. Greenwood calls that ‘juvenile public’ to order in a self-printed advertisement for her first travel book for children, Merrie England (1855), as she demonstrates her explicitly commercial intent to groom a specific segment of the public sphere to purchase and to adore her literary works. Despite the fact that ‘[c]hildren and childhood were less segregated from adults and adulthood in the nineteenth century,’ as Beverly Clark has observed, and both adults and children routinely read and enjoyed what

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we might now consider ‘juvenile’ books like Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), periodicals targeted at younger audiences usually generated a strong and distinct following.44 Magazines such as Child’s Juvenile Miscellany and its primary competitor, the Youth’s Companion (1827–1929), whose founding editor was Nathaniel Parker Willis, laid the groundwork for a profitable juvenile periodical market in the 1820s. Greenwood aggressively sought to expand that market to support her own professional pursuits. On one level, The Little Pilgrim shares with its predecessors what Carolyn Karcher identifies as ‘the social mission of nineteenth-century children’s literature: to promote domestic harmony, provide behavioral models for parents and children, foster a desire for education, and bridge the gap between the privileged classes and their subordinates.’45 Unlike Child’s and Willis’s efforts, however, Greenwood’s magazine largely set aside moral and religious arguments in favour of the more lucrative projects of transatlantic education and capitalist training. Greenwood’s cultivation of her juvenile reading public calls attention to those participants in the print public sphere that Jürgen Habermas pointedly overlooks: children themselves. While Habermas acknowledges that the ‘bourgeois family’ both actively engages in public debates and wields its purchasing power in the market, even as it mistakenly believes that its actions are inherently private, the juvenile members of that theoretical family are notably absent from his analysis.46 In her professional work, Greenwood recognises the potential of these invisible actors, and she begins to speak to them not in the provocative terms that journalists like Child and Fuller would have used, but rather in the enticing tones of the market. The Little Pilgrim is not ‘ideological’, ‘critical-rational’, or ‘pedagogical’ in its intent, as Fuller’s newspaper writing for adults most certainly is.47 Instead, the magazine’s orientation marks a definitive shift from politically charged journalism to the more commercial forms of mass media that, according to Habermas, begin to dominate the transatlantic public sphere from the 1830s onward. Although they may have been born in an age of antebellum revolution, Greenwood’s young subscribers were far less likely to grow into radicals who craved cultural transformation as a result of reading her magazine than they were to turn into the jaded, Gilded Age materialists who populate the novels of Twain, James, and Wharton. In her editorial work on The Little Pilgrim, Greenwood carved out the professional niche that she knew she could serve best as she made European and global experience accessible to a larger national audience, employed personal charm for commercial purposes, and sharpened the

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tools of literary self-promotion and business networking that would help her contemporaries, most notably Whitman, achieve their own ambitious measures of transatlantic professional success. As Hawthorne observed in 1830, antebellum women writers were most likely to make names for themselves in the ‘press’, and Greenwood was no exception, as The Little Pilgrim allowed her to turn what Hawthorne and other critics perceived as a weakness – her dalliance with a ‘perpetual childhood’ – into a source of definitive professional strength.48 As a magazine editor, Greenwood took control of her professional destiny; she was not merely submitting her writing for approval and publication by others, but instead generating a literary system that could sustain her combined efforts in magazine writing, book publishing, and brand-name marketing for an eager ‘juvenile public’. In her ‘Prospectus’ for The Little Pilgrim, Greenwood promises her subscribers that they can look forward to reading ‘some of the best authors of the day’ and that the issues will be ‘composed entirely of original matter’.49 Greenwood’s plan sounds appealing, of course, but as she launches into her latest project, she is exploiting tenuous connections with other writers, who she admits have given her just a vague ‘promise of assistance’, and many under significant duress, as Lesley Ginsberg has noted.50 Greenwood’s claim for the ‘originality’ of The Little Pilgrim’s content is also spurious, as the travel sketches that opened every issue and formed the bedrock of the magazine were merely versions of her European dispatches revised down to a child’s level, soon to be republished yet again in book form as Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe (1854). While she may have mastered the code words of an East Coast publishing industry in which ‘originality’ was prized by nativist Young American editors, as well as by writers such as Poe, who were paranoid about individual cases of plagiarism and transatlantic cultural influence in general, Greenwood was able to disguise her borrowings from her own previous work by turning such repackaging into a lucrative art. Greenwood’s European sketches for children are intended as ‘interesting and instructive’ glimpses of representative sights and stories of England, Scotland, Ireland, France, and Italy. As a writer, she promises to ‘spare neither labor nor research’ in generating that content. Although the extent of such additional written ‘labor’ may have been dubious, Greenwood worked tirelessly as an editor of her own writing, as well as of the magazine itself, to create a cultural need and a literary market for her stories of American transformation through European experience. Revisiting the opening scene of her Atlantic voyage, a crossing repeatedly depicted as crucial to the intellectual and cultural growth of fellow

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New World ‘pilgrims’ from Irving and Longfellow onwards, reveals to us Greenwood’s awareness not only of the cumulative force of imaginative associations, but also of the potential of recasting her own story, first told in Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe, in more youthful and didactic terms. In this version, Greenwood aggressively sells transatlantic adventure. She recalls: I felt like a poor little child left for the first time among strangers; and for awhile I fear I behaved like a child, for I bowed my head upon my hands and cried bitterly, and thought that I had been rash and foolish in leaving my pleasant valley-home and all my dear ones, to seek my fortune, as it were, in that great, strange world over the sea. But presently I said to myself, ‘This will never do; we have undertaken a brave thing and we must carry it bravely through.’ So dashing away my tears, I choked down my childish feelings and never let them overcome me again.51

In Greenwood’s account, sailing to Europe represents a crucial stage in the maturation process of an American individual. While foreign countries and people can make one feel like a ‘poor little child’, they even more significantly force one to leave those ‘childish feelings’ behind in order to grow into a newly adult relationship to the ‘great, strange world’. The emotional dynamics of this scene imply that it is not the specific elements of European culture itself that should be most important to the individual traveller, although such literary and historical knowledge would have mattered to Longfellow, as would models of political liberation to Fuller and Douglass, but rather the acquisition of such intangible personal traits as ‘bravery’ that allow an American tourist to remain entirely selffocused and self-contained even while treading on foreign soil. Thus, Greenwood is perhaps the first American to travel abroad primarily for the vague purpose outlined in the prospectuses of most twenty-first-century study-abroad programmes: the potential for ‘personal growth’. Greenwood’s goal as a magazine editor is to make the pattern of transatlantic growth into adulthood as straightforward, appealing, and accessible as possible. Gone are the troubling racial dynamics and international unrest of Douglass’s Atlantic crossing, the patriotic agonies of Fuller’s Mazzini exiled from his homeland, and the potentially alienating intellectual effort of Longfellow’s translations. In Greenwood’s world of Atlantic experience, the ‘Little Pilgrim’, both a print artifact and an adventurously boyish character, arrives on your doorstep, eager to share his news with all those willing to pay the low subscription price of fifty cents a year.52 In Greenwood’s insistent voice, the magazine speaks for itself:

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He’s not shy about discoursing Of the wonders he has seen, He will open all his budget If you let him once begin – He brings tears and he brings laughter, And some knowledge dropping after – Let THE LITTLE PILGRIM in!53

The ‘Little Pilgrim’, a figure ever friendly and even oddly flirtatious at times (as in his imaginary romance with a young female subscriber, detailed in the February 1854 issue), means to inspire ‘tears’ and ‘laughter’, but any deep cosmopolitan ‘knowledge’ that results from his literary visits is surely an afterthought on his editor’s part. Young readers may hear tales of ‘wonders’ from abroad, and even receive news of such transformative events as the 1848 revolutions in Europe, but they are hardly standing at the barricades, as Fuller had. Instead, when they read the poem ‘Freedom’s Echo’ and absorb its final cry, ‘Then rise, then rise and conquer! with one consent agree / For right and law your swords to draw, till all the world is free’, in the warmth of their American firesides, they are so far removed in time and space from the transatlantic action that only a faint ‘echo’ of the revolution reaches them.54 As in her own travel writing, the Europe that Greenwood presents to the juvenile readers of The Little Pilgrim is static, old, and fundamentally unthreatening to the American consciousness. Although Greenwood boasts of the cosmopolitan origins of her magazine’s sketches and stories, true transnational exchange is kept to a minimum in its pages. She may loudly advertise the fact that many of her authors are English rather than American (an editorial move that surely would have incensed her Young American contemporaries, despite its relative Anglo-American conservatism), and celebrate the Little Pilgrim’s travels beyond Europe by mentioning his invitation to visit ‘the Emperor of China . . . the Khan of Tartary, or may be, the King of Timbuctoo’, but in the universalising force of her print endeavour, such global differences are erased in a normalising sentiment, expressed in this case by English author Anna Maria Fielding Hall, ‘to make the children of the old and the new world love each other’.55 Those New World children and their parents can feel confident that their transatlantic experiences in print will educate them without unsettling their national or racial identities: an outcome upon which Fuller, Douglass, and even Emerson absolutely insist as they engage Atlantic contexts in order to disturb, to agitate, and to realign, in both geographical and moral terms, the conscience of a

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politically broken United States. Charles Mackay, the editor of the London Illustrated News, is so ‘charmed with the elegance and simplicity of the Little Pilgrim – its high aim and generous sentiments’ that he can hardly contain the desire that all such ‘exchange visits to either country [would be] so full of pleasant memories’ as Greenwood’s and that those memories should become national institutions, ‘preserved for general dispersion among the young intellects of America’.56 ‘Pleasant’ to a fault, and seeking to entertain rather than to radicalise, transatlanticism in Greenwood’s hands becomes child’s play. As Colleen Glenney Boggs has shown, lingustic translation is a hallmark of the Atlantic experience, whether it is practised in the wake of a forcible break from an original language in the slave’s passage from a ‘mother tongue’ of Africa to a foreign language of servitude, or elected by a scholar who seeks to complicate monolingual experience through the acquisition of secondary language skills, as Longfellow and Fuller did.57 In Greenwood’s Atlantic world of The Little Pilgrim, however, translation is neither discomfiting nor intellectually challenging, for it takes place in a number of fictionalised sites, most notably in the context of a conversation between French and American children about the matter of doll behaviour. Greenwood’s anonymous contributor proposes that her translation of the French children’s book The Well-Educated Doll will ensure that ‘the small Transatlantic mammas may give a useful hint to the matrons of America, and the Dolls of the United States may blend the grace and charming manners of “la Poupée,” with their own solid and excellent characteristics’.58 Although some measure of transnational progress is made in this particular exchange in the combination of French ‘grace’ and American ‘solid[ity]’, all such behavioural and linguistic change is displaced onto the dolls rather than expected of the children themselves. Greenwood’s nursery cosmopolitanism is portrayed as a felicitous ‘blend[ing]’ of cultures that avoids engaging with the kind of politically charged, morally precarious balance of competing national interests ambitiously envisioned by her contemporaries. Although the pages of The Little Pilgrim are animated by the fantasy of transatlantic travel and the acquisition of worldly knowledge, the real message that the magazine sends is one of capitalist insistence on the material present. The figure of the ‘Little Pilgrim’ himself could trace his literary ancestry back to the transatlantic voyages of Irving and Longfellow, and anticipates Louisa May Alcott’s use of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim as a moral role model for her characters in Little Women (1868). Greenwood is quick to admit, however, that her ‘Little Pilgrim’ is a secular guide and not a spiritual leader. In an early issue of the magazine, he arrives ‘with his

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begging face on’, pledging to ‘love’ the children on his circuit and hoping for equal affection in return.59 Most of all, Greenwood confesses: he wants – their money. He confesses to a taint of mammon in his nature, warm-hearted and generous as he is; – he likes to look upon the round, white beauty of half-dollars and the sunny gleam of little gold pieces; he likes to feel them in his little pockets and hear them rattle and know that they are his.

Greenwood’s gestures of transatlantic openness are inseparable from her desire to expand the circulation of the magazine both at home and abroad, and therefore to feel, as the ‘Pilgrim’ does, the weight of subscribers’ ‘gold’ in her editorial ‘pockets’. She is not alone in her professional ambition, as her words bear a striking resemblance to those written by Fuller in 1845 as she eagerly sought a newspaper audience of ‘half a hundred thousand readers’ so that she might ‘share and impel the general stream of thought’.60 In Greenwood’s hands, however, an initial goal of 50,000 subscribers (a figure she soon raises to 100,000) becomes a straightforward business challenge: an attempt to increase her own wealth rather than to spread any particular word of philosophical conviction.61 To reach that professional goal, Greenwood tries a variety of tactics, all of which trade on her own growing (although, as Hawthorne suggests, precarious) literary reputation. She appeals to her current subscribers to solicit ‘clubs’, a common practice of grouping together multiple subscriptions that was also used to great effect by more widely circulating periodicals such as the Saturday Evening Post. She empowers all juvenile readers to become ‘agents’ of the magazine, claiming that they will make better advocates of The Little Pilgrim’s interests than ‘grown up business men’, including her editor James T. Fields, to whom she refers as a ‘Pilgrim of a larger growth’.62 With the help of these loyal children, Greenwood is able to expand her command of the juvenile public sphere so that it begins productively to complement, if not outright compete with, the adult reading public upon which a publishing house like Ticknor & Fields depended for its success. As it teaches practical lessons of salesmanship and business acumen in conjunction with European cultural enrichment, The Little Pilgrim reverts to an earlier form of transatlantic experience that enlivens Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (1771–90). In that narrative, the adolescent Franklin’s brief tenure at a London printer’s shop makes him all the more effective as an American practitioner of the trade upon his return to Philadelphia: ironically, Greenwood’s professional base of operations as well. Despite Sophia Hawthorne’s vehement objections to Greenwood’s

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presence at her family’s domestic fireside on the grounds of her morally suspicious professional pursuits, Greenwood managed to persuade the key demographic of American mothers that her magazine would make a crucial contribution to their children’s education. Particularly after the birth of her daughter, Greenwood capitalises on the natural tie that she has with other mothers: a connection that is partly emotional and partly feminine (‘I am now one of you,’ she claims), yet mainly financial by way of ‘that visible and tangible metallic tie that unites us’.63 Delegating her editorial responsibilities to the children whom she served and declaring her common moral cause with American mothers were both critical to the growth of Greenwood’s editorial project, but securing the personal devotion of her reading public was paramount to her professional success. Greenwood makes her most outrageous move as an editor in the composition and publication of her poem ‘Love Me, Love My Pilgrim’ in the December 1853 issue of the magazine. An appeal and a challenge to all those in her literary network, this poem demands support for the magazine and for Greenwood herself in terms that are startlingly Whitmanian in their affective aggression. Whitman unconsciously echoes her words in his self-reviews and his 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, which concludes, ‘The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.’64 Unlike Whitman’s call for national approval, however, which falls mostly on deaf ears, Greenwood’s insistence that those in her own ‘juvenile public’ sphere ‘love’ her unconditionally, as though they are devotees caught up in a professional cult of personality, evokes consistently positive responses from her readers, at least in the letters and poems that she chooses to print in her magazine. One reader gives an ‘Answer to Love Me, Love My Pilgrim’ that pledges, ‘Love thee, Grace, we surely do, / And love thy Little Pilgrim, too,’ and assures the editor that ‘love and fame would fondly twine / The Little Pilgrim’s name with thine; / And this we will remember.’65 As long as readers ‘remember’ her name, the author ‘Grace Greenwood’ is assured of literary renown, as her canny editorial work bolsters her reputation far more than Ticknor & Fields ever could. In the adult public sphere, it was Greenwood’s puffs that could guarantee an otherwise unremarkable book a wide readership: a phenomenon that baffled William Charvat, who noted that her ‘occasional literary comments in her fluffy “columns” had the same publicity value’ as the recommendations of more high-minded reviewers.66 By establishing herself at the head of what was, in effect, her own publishing house and counting on Ticknor & Fields to print and to distribute her books, Greenwood succeeded, as critic Henry Giles observed, in turning her name into ‘a

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household word in the popular literature of our country and our day’.67 What distinguished Greenwood’s professional strategies from those of other writers, however, was her keen sense of the best methods of getting inside private households in order to ensure that her name and the title of her magazine would be on the tip of readers’ tongues. While Longfellow, Fuller, and Emerson relied on professional editors to circulate and to promote their work, Greenwood, in the company of fellow editor–writers Douglass and Whitman, inaugurates a new hybrid form of literary professionalism that attends not only to the creative work of authoring a text, but also to the marketing interface with the print public sphere that carries a book or a newspaper directly and lucratively to its intended audience. In his landmark study of the profession of authorship in America, Charvat asserts that such figures as Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Emily Dickinson cannot be classified as ‘professional’ because they were unable (or, in Dickinson’s case, unwilling) to make a living from the sale of their literary works.68 What Charvat and subsequent critics have failed to recognise in their direct equation of professionalism with profit, however, is the extent to which other forms of professional skill, particularly an editorial vocation that extends itself into a productive pattern of self-editing, actually ignite a number of nineteenth-century authorial careers that we might normally consider from the more limited standpoint of literary production alone. Greenwood’s facility with the tools of literary entertainment and salesmanship, both in her writing and in her editorial work, proves that authorial sensibility and professional expertise can develop simultaneously and vitally inform one another. The author who publishes volumes of European travelogues and fictional narratives for children knows precisely what will appeal to those children, as in her editorial role, she has already learned what sells magazine subscriptions and whetted the juvenile public’s appetite for her distinct brand of transatlantic literary experience. Other than Nellie Bly and her fellow ‘girl stunt reporters’, who would dare follow Greenwood’s professional example? In The Feminine Fifties, Pattee suggests that the clash of beauty and violence in Whitman’s poetry indicates his descent from female writers rather than from male contemporaries such as Emerson, to whom his thought is often traced, most likely because Whitman himself was so eager to promote that transcendental alignment.69 Whitman and Greenwood’s unexpected professional kinship tells a different story, however: one that concerns the transfer of editorial power across gender lines in the 1850s. Their alliance does not necessarily confirm Whitman as ‘feminine’ in his poetic focus, but rather in his understanding of the interplay between professional skill and literary success. In light of that new association, Greenwood emerges from Fanny

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Fern’s shadow to reclaim her place as an assertive woman writer who not only expanded the range of American popular experience to encompass the Atlantic world but also charted a distinctive course through the waters of the print public sphere on the strength of her perspicacious editorial vision.

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CHAPTER 6

STANDING UPON AMERICA: WHITMAN AND THE PROFESSION OF NATIONAL POETRY

Yet we are right to know and to recall that this man was born among us: that he never left our lands. He talked with God, standing upon America as Moses upon Sinai. He talked with God, speaking our tongue. America therefore is holy land to us. Not because Whitman stood upon it, but because we have faith that there is meaning in the fact that Whitman stood upon it. Because we cannot be so weak as to doubt that in this juncture of his spirit and our land is revelation. Waldo Frank, Our America (1919) Make the works. Motto above Whitman’s desk in Camden

In 1883, Emma Lazarus wrote the poem that literally built the foundation of an American icon: the Statue of Liberty. Her sonnet ‘The New Colossus’, in which she allows the nation to speak in the voice of the ‘Mother of Exiles’, reflects a number of literary influences and political agendas that actually do more to disrupt a sense of shared national purpose than to confirm its now familiar platitudes.1 In her early years, Lazarus formed an unexpectedly strong bond with Emerson, who urged her to read the work of Thoreau and Whitman. She responded eagerly to their writing, telling Emerson that they seemed truly ‘in harmony with Nature’.2 Lazarus’s reading of Whitman and her subsequent composition of the poem that cast the American project in heroic terms might be told as a purely national story, for Lazarus herself was committed to the promotion of an independent national tradition in literature.3 On the other hand, the text in which she actually encountered Whitman’s poems

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demands that a different and more cosmopolitan story be told. The edition of Whitman’s poetry that Lazarus read was published in 1868 in London and edited by Pre-Raphaelite poet William Michael Rossetti, not in New York by Whitman himself, as his previous editions of Leaves of Grass had been.4 Through Rossetti, Lazarus was exposed to Whitman’s growing transatlantic fame and to the idea that his poetry should be read as the expression of a distinctly ‘American’ point of view. Rossetti’s Poems by Walt Whitman was conceived as a transatlantic project and carried out in collaboration with Whitman, who supervised the compilation, formatting, and publication of the volume abroad in a series of extremely directive letters. Imitating Whitman’s formal habit of framing his poetry with a self-congratulatory introduction, Rossetti presented the poet to British readers as a writer stunning in ‘the depth of his Americanism’.5 Whitman certainly approved of Rossetti’s instructions to read his work nationally, as he proclaimed himself ‘an American bard at last!’ in one of his own anonymous reviews of Leaves of Grass in 1855.6 Rossetti played a key role in Whitman’s establishment of a transatlantic network of support for his poetic agenda upon which he could call in moments of literary and financial crisis. Rossetti’s promotion of Whitman’s fame also illuminates the extent to which the concept of ‘Americanism’ grew out of transatlantic exchange, as well as the stake that foreign nationals had – and continue to have – in imagining Whitman as ‘America’s poet’.7 This chapter works backward in imaginative time from the assumption of Whitman’s nationality upon which American studies was built after World War II and continues to stand today in the work of such scholars as Ezra Greenspan, Mark Bauerlein, David S. Reynolds, Kenneth M. Price, and David Haven Blake, all of whom yoke Whitman to the nation in the titles of their recent books.8 Even attempts to globalise Whitman studies, such as Gay Wilson Allen and Ed Folsom’s multinational anthology Walt Whitman and the World, start from the premise of Whitman’s appeal to the world as a uniquely American writer.9 If Whitman appears to ‘stand upon America’, as Waldo Frank suggested in 1919, and to ‘transmit the American tradition’, as Floyd Stovall asserted in 1955, then by precisely what means did he rise to that pinnacle of national representation?10 This chapter argues that Whitman used the skills that he learned as a printer, journalist, and editor to produce a newly professionalised model of a life’s work in literary form. Through an extended study of his self-presentation as a national poet in his early editions and reviews of Leaves of Grass, his management of his appearances in print abroad, and his creation of a theory of literary nationhood in Democratic Vistas and other later prose writings, I analyse the techniques that Whitman employed to fuse his poetic

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persona with a concept of American nationality that would only make sense with Whitman himself at its core. In his pursuit of a national reputation, Whitman was a consummate professional. He defined the field of national poetry in such a thorough and engaging manner that those who followed him in the study of American national identity or in the writing of what he identified as ‘modern’ literature – American or otherwise – had no choice but to contend with his legacy in print and with the image of himself that he had burned into the world’s eye.11 That image was so distinct that it would stand in for the nation itself in a letter written by one of the poet’s admirers, addressed merely to ‘Walt Whitman, America’.12 The writer of this letter was one of the first to assume that Whitman was the nation’s most prominent citizen and that he was within everyone’s reach. Although Whitman does not stand alone in the context of this book as a maker of national culture, as we may be tempted to regard Emerson as another ‘Mr. America’ in part because of Whitman’s early dependence on him as a philosophical father, Whitman distinguishes himself from Emerson in his relentless pursuit of national attributes, not universal meanings. Whitman’s life’s work of editing and promoting his own national story also distances him from Fuller and Douglass, who sought to bring about social change through their journalistic work rather than to use the medium of print to propagate a self-reflexive view of their own achievements. Whitman was always conscious of print communication’s potential to serve his immediate poetic purposes, and his pattern of reporting on his own creative output as ‘news’ ultimately fused his professional past as a journalist with the future that he imagined for himself as both an American poet and a national institution.

Poetic News from the New World: Whitman’s Self-Introductions In her landmark study From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America, Shelley Fisher Fishkin examines Whitman’s methods of translating the forms and materials that he mastered as a journalist into an entirely new approach to writing poetry in Leaves of Grass. Fishkin investigates exactly how Whitman ‘transformed fact into art’ by reporting on the infinite complexity of the New York scene and then by developing poetic techniques that would render that scene immediately accessible to his readers.13 What most interests me, however, is not Whitman’s journalistic accounts of New York, but rather his efforts to heighten the literary effect of his freshly comprehensive vision by reporting on his own appearance on the American cultural scene as a historic event. Understanding Whitman’s audacious and entirely unprecedented move of making himself

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the subject of his journalistic inquiry requires us to take one step back from his poetry to examine the framing devices that he used to prepare his readers for a new set of imaginative experiences. In his investigation of Whitman’s rise to celebrity status in the United States, Blake observes that Whitman ‘frequently . . . teaches us what we should value in his poems’, and that, by and large, readers tend to believe what he says.14 How, then, does Whitman persuade us that he must be heard and that what he is doing is essential to the development of a distinctly American literary consciousness? My object here is to dig deeper into Whitman’s practice of turning his ‘art’ into national ‘fact’ by examining his early prefaces and self-authored reviews of Leaves of Grass as adaptations of his journalistic practices for his own literary benefit. In his 1855 preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman opens that field in order to make room for his grand entrance onto the literary scene. In every profession, Whitman contends, ‘he is greatest forever and forever who contributes the greatest original practical example. The cleanest expression is that which finds no sphere worthy of itself and makes one.’15 Whitman claims that his poetry is ‘original’ precisely because it is rooted in the ‘practicality’ of a vocational perspective. For more than two decades, he immersed himself in the practices of printing, editing, and journalistic reporting, and his poetry is distinctive because it fuses those daily activities with the broader goals of what Whitman calls ‘the craft of art’. The act of physically crafting a text is as familiar to Whitman as it was to Benjamin Franklin, a fellow printer who called his readers’ attention to the materiality of his Autobiography in Tristram Shandy-esque fashion by reprinting charts and tables from his private journal.16 When Whitman speaks of ‘making’ a new ‘sphere’ for his poetic expression, he evokes both an imaginative space and an actual ‘clean’ copy of the book that he has made with his own hands and now presents to the world. In his later years, Whitman worked at his desk in Camden under the motto ‘Make the works,’ and that material imperative guided his poetic career from the very first edition of Leaves of Grass onward. When Whitman writes his own reviews of the volume – an unusually bold professional move (or perhaps a brilliantly unprofessional one) in its own right – he greets himself as a ‘maker’, whose: whole work, his life, manners, friendships, writings, all have among their leading purposes an evident purpose to stamp a new type of character, namely his own, and indelibly fix it and publish it, not for a model but an illustration, for the present and future of American letters and American young men.17

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The vocabulary that Whitman uses here is borrowed from the world of print journalism: a profession in which words are made into ‘type’ and ‘stamp[ed]’ on paper, ‘indelibly fix[ed] and publish[ed]’ for others to read. The enterprise of print is therefore central to Whitman’s conception of his poetic vocation, for he is (re)producing his poetic self-image as yet another printed object that will serve as an ‘illustration’ for his audience to mark and to follow. In 1855, James McCune Smith hailed Frederick Douglass as a representative ‘type of his countrymen’: an honour that reflected Douglass’s pioneering work in the development of African American print culture. Whitman, on the other hand, announced himself as a ‘new type of character’ whose writing inaugurated its own distinctive tradition and required an entirely ‘new’ apparatus of print production and literary criticism. As he built a print record of his poetic achievements, both in his own words and in testimonials given by others, Whitman continued to shape his poetic persona and his aspirations to cultural significance largely by hand in his mastery of various print forms. Later in life, he would lament the fact that ‘no established publishing house’ would touch his work for fear of being contaminated by its licentiousness. Yet, the ability to control both the textual presentation and the critical representation of his own writing would make all the difference to Whitman in his campaign to persuade readers that he had written ‘the great psalm of the republic’.18 Whitman’s career as a newspaper editor began in earnest at the New York Aurora in 1842. Although he had already done substantial work as a compositor and printer, and had founded his own short-lived newspaper, the Long-Islander, the roots of the patriotic and political orientations of his poetry and prose writings can be traced back to this period of concentrated journalistic effort.19 Whitman learned to advertise himself as a national phenomenon by doing similar work for the Aurora as its exuberant editor. Not only did Whitman claim that ‘the AURORA is by far the best newspaper in the town,’ putting it in line ahead of Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune and William Cullen Bryant’s Evening Post, but he also emphasised repeatedly that the paper was by far the most ‘American’ of the New York group.20 In recognition of what he took to be universal approval from readers of his ambitious agenda for the paper, Whitman writes: Again, from our inmost hearts, we thank our countrymen. Our countrymen! the phrase rolls pleasantly from our tongue. We glory in being true Americans. And we profess to impress Aurora with the same spirit. We have taken high American ground – not the ground of exclusiveness, of partiality, of bigotted [sic] bias against those whose birth place is three thousand miles from our own

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– but based upon a desire to possess the republic of a proper respect for itself and its citizens, and of what is due to its own capacities, and its own dignity.21

As national epithets ‘roll pleasantly from [his] tongue’, Whitman gets his first taste of the effect that an explicitly patriotic agenda could have on his audience. He makes much of his paper’s ‘Americanness’ in order to distinguish it from others edited by ‘foreigners’, but at the same time he takes care not to side with the nativist party, a group of politicians who maintained that no one born abroad could be considered ‘American’. Whitman’s concept of ‘Americanness’ is more flexible than those of his contemporaries, but he does not unsettle nationality to the degree that Fuller did as she located ‘true American’ spirit in revolutionary Rome. Instead, Whitman figures national identity as an expression of individual and collective ‘dignity’: a kind of self-confidence that could be espoused by all members of that ‘teeming nation of nations’ he would describe in his preface to Leaves of Grass. His self-confidence in declaring his national intentions as a poet and editor of his own work was undoubtedly bolstered by his experiences as an editor competing for public attention on the crowded journalistic scene as he hawked his penny newspaper. By exhorting his readers to take pride in their own culture rather than perpetuating their position of ‘timid servility’ to Europe and its representatives in the United States, Whitman set the stage for his one-man show of American poetic expression.22 As an editor, he sought to awaken in his audience ‘a feeling that shall impel them to place their own kind, and their own merits first’. As a creative writer, he took his own advice, portraying himself as a representative of his national ‘kind’ and broadcasting his ‘own merits’ in his reviews of Leaves of Grass. In the United States Review, he asks, ‘But where in American literature is the first show of America?’23 David S. Reynolds has made a persuasive case for the ties between the theatrical spectacles that Whitman attended as a young journalist and his development as a poetic showman.24 In his reviews, Whitman produces what was essentially a hybrid of print statement and public spectacle: the ultimate ‘show’ of American literary self-confidence. On this point, Whitman departs absolutely from Emerson, who declares in ‘Self-Reliance’, ‘My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.’25 As Whitman turns his poetic career into a public event, he blurs the line that Diana Taylor draws between the ‘archive’ and the ‘repertoire’ as distinct spheres of literary and popular culture.26 In his reviews, Whitman applies the quotidian techniques of his journalistic repertoire to the task of packaging his poetry to fit neatly into the American literary archive. Whitman imbues his own book reviews with the urgency of a

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newspaper report. As he constructs an argument for the immediate relevance of his poetry, he borrows the vocabulary that he used in his editorials for the Aurora. Assessing his own qualifications, he claims that the poet ‘Whitman’ is ‘A rude child of the people! – No imitation – No foreigner – but a growth and idiom of America.’27 He emerges from this review as the ‘true American’ whom he had first recognised in his editorials: a speaker who is fluent in the ‘idiom’ of national writing. The figure of the poet that Whitman paints is no foreign body, but rather ‘has the easy fascination of what is homely and accustomed – as of something you knew before, and was waiting for’.28 In this self-description, Whitman strikes a balance between novelty and familiarity as he calls upon his readers to recognise him both as a figure of unexpected ‘fascination’ and as an ‘accustomed’ member of the crowd. In fact, Whitman’s ‘homely’ appearance in print requires a great deal of careful verbal grooming. He sets himself up to confront the literary world as an ‘insolent unknown’, one who appears ‘rough and unbidden among writers, to unsettle what was settled, and to revolutionize in fact our modern civilization’.29 He therefore stakes his literary claim on being a ‘rough’ and unprofessional outsider who has no interest in the rules that governed Anglo-American letters. The grand irony of these reviews lies in the fact that Whitman would not have been anywhere near as successful in persuading his audience that he was capable of generating a cultural ‘revolution’ if he had not already been such a consummately professional ‘maker’ of his own works. In the final review of Leaves of Grass that he wrote for the Brooklyn Daily Times, Whitman brags of the ‘easy nonchalance’ with which he regards the public’s response to his book and contemplates ‘the chances of its present reception, and, through all misunderstandings and distrusts, the chances of its future reception’.30 His claim to entire ‘ease’ with and disregard for the expectations of the professional literary world masks his own assertiveness as a newspaper editor who was used to having the last word. When he admits at the very end of the review that ‘Whitman’ ‘prefer[s] always to speak for himself rather than have others speak for him’, he reveals the underlying force of his professional impulse to shape how readers interpret his poetry and place it in cultural context. Despite his gesture of loosening his ties to the ‘reception’ of his work, he continues to hold tightly to the book even as he hands it over to the world. He argues that the ‘spirit’ of his poetry is as self-evident as natural laws, for ‘[l]ike them, it eludes and mocks criticism, and appears unerringly in results.’ Whitman thus is able to create a self-contained system in which the only ‘criticism’ that seems to fit his verse is his own, and all other readings are misreadings or ‘mock[eries]’ of its true intent. He waits eagerly for the ‘results’ of his

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professional experiment as he challenges his American audience: ‘The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.’31 The first and most emphatic ‘proof’ of Whitman’s national reputation would come not from ‘his country’, however, but instead from his readers abroad.

American Bards and British Reviewers Writing from the centre of the newly established field of ‘American studies’ in 1960, Leo Marx turned to Whitman to orient himself in national space. He asserts, ‘By now the Americanness of Walt Whitman’s poetry is one of the postulates of literary discourse. It is an idea almost as axiomatic as the greatness of Shakespeare.’32 Any theory of national identity therefore has to begin, or at least contend, with the ‘postulate’ of Whitman’s American character. Marx observes that his idea was crucial not only for Americans themselves, but also for others who sought to hold in their hands ‘the essence of the American way’. He notes, ‘Europeans are particularly fond of the idea – perhaps they are more fond of it than Americans are, but of course no one would have liked it better than Walt Whitman.’ Marx’s suggestion that Europeans have more at stake in recognising Whitman as an American figure than Americans themselves points to another side of the transatlantic dynamic to which Whitman habitually calls attention. His British readers provide him not only with material support, but also with a satisfying response to the most powerful spiritual motive for his work: the desire to capture the soul of the nation. At the close of his afterword to the British readers of Specimen Days in America (1887), Whitman explains his epic intent ‘to attempt some worthy record of that entire faith and acceptance (“to justify the ways of God to man” is Milton’s well-known and ambitious phrase) which is the foundation of moral America’.33 By attempting to justify the ways of ‘America’ to the world and by identifying them as ‘morally’ unique, Whitman puts the nation at the centre of his literary endeavours. As Marx implies, the idea of Whitman’s ‘Americanness’ matters first and foremost to Whitman himself, then to those on other shores, and finally to his fellow Americans. This hierarchy of national value can help unravel the complex history of Whitman’s rise to representative nationality. In this section, I explore Whitman’s earliest attempts to represent himself in print and assess the ways in which these documents illuminate his professional drive to become an American poet. In 1856, Whitman first turned to transatlantic dialogue as a potential solution to the problem of communicating his national priorities to readers.

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When he published the second edition of Leaves of Grass, he framed the volume with Emerson’s salutation, ‘I greet you at the beginning of a great career.’ While most critics focus on Whitman’s renegade use of Emerson’s letter as a tool with which to promote his poetic agenda, I believe that Whitman’s inclusion of British reviews alongside Emerson’s statement of literary admiration established the pattern of transatlantic reading and reviewing by which he was able to secure his reputation for American nationality. In the 1856 edition, Whitman grouped together under the heading ‘Leaves-Droppings’ a set of British reviews and the assessments of his own work that he published anonymously in various journals in 1855 and 1856. Emerson’s letter, Whitman’s restatement of his poetic theory in response to Emerson, and the critical reviews themselves form a complex system of transatlantic exchange over which the poet presides as editor (or rather, ‘maker’) of his own works. As the book’s advertisement on the final page of the edition illustrates, he is author, publisher, and self-promoter: all in one. Whitman’s choice of title for the appendix highlights the importance of eavesdropping and hearsay in the construction of his national persona. In his response to Emerson, he attempts to extend their conversation beyond the space of the initial letter by acknowledging him as a mentor. Whitman claims that Emerson has ‘found’ the ‘ever-satisfying and everunsurveyable seas and shores’ of “America” ’. He commends Emerson for his leadership as he adds, ‘I say you have led the States there – have led me there. I say that none has ever done, or can do, a greater deed for the States, than your deed.’34 Whitman therefore becomes one of the first critics to nationalise Emerson’s literary project and the first to place him at the head of a distinct national tradition in which he himself would like to follow.35 It is Whitman who establishes the dynamic of call and response for a new American poetry that scholars normally read retrospectively into Emerson’s brief commentary on national literature in ‘The Poet’ (1844). Whitman’s understanding of their shared genealogy is not entirely imaginary, for Emerson is more willing than Thoreau to acknowledge the national character of Whitman’s verse. In his letter, he states that Leaves of Grass is ‘the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed’.36 Like many of Emerson’s observations, however, this one falls just short of absolute certainty on the subject of nationality. Whitman’s book may be an ‘extraordinary’ work produced in and even by ‘America’, but it does not necessarily represent or capture the essence of the nation. For full confirmation of his national success, Whitman had to look even farther afield than Concord. In William Howitt’s review of Leaves of Grass in

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the London Weekly Dispatch, Whitman’s claim to be a distinctively American poet begins to take root in foreign soil. Howitt contends: We have before us one of the most extraordinary specimens of Yankee intelligence and American eccentricity in authorship, it is possible to conceive . . . What Emerson has pronounced to be good must not be lightly treated, and before we pronounce upon the merits of this performance it is but right to examine them.37

Whitman emerges from this review as a ‘Yankee’, as an ‘American’, and perhaps more importantly, as a representative ‘specimen’ of both, worthy of exhibit abroad. From a British perspective, the hard-edged uniqueness of Whitman’s personality that so troubled his American contemporaries can be softened into a matter of national character. In Howitt’s phrase ‘American eccentricity’, the personal and the national blend together just as the speaker of ‘Song of Myself’, ‘Walt Whitman, an American’, might expect them to. Howitt indicates that he has overheard and been influenced by Emerson’s commentary on Whitman, and Whitman thus rides the wave of Emerson’s transatlantic reputation, which grew stronger in 1856 with the publication of English Traits. An anonymous reviewer in the London Critic recognised in Whitman’s book the culmination of a peculiarly American trend of showmanship that had already made its way to British shores. The critic claims: We had ceased, we imagined, to be surprised at anything that America could produce. We had become stoically indifferent to her Woolly Horses, her Mermaids, her Sea Serpents, her Barnums, and her Fanny Ferns; but the last monstrous importation from Brooklyn, New York, has scattered our indifference to the winds.38

In this reviewer’s imagination, Whitman is the latest in a long line of sideshow attractions and confidence men who has risen to even greater fame as the most ‘monstrous’ creature of them all: an actual American poet. Whitman draws strength from the transatlantic celebrity culture within which, as the reviewer observes, he has begun to carve out a distinct role for himself.39 With the tone of national condescension that usually accompanied British reviewers’ assessments of Whitman’s verse, the critic comments: The words ‘an American’ are a surplusage, ‘one of the roughs’ too painfully apparent . . . We should have passed over this book, Leaves of Grass, with indig-

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nant contempt, had not some few Transatlantic critics attempted to ‘fix’ this Walt Whitman as the poet who shall give a new and independent literature to America – who shall form a race of poets as Banquo’s issue formed a line of kings.

Whitman’s poetry is not inherently valuable, the reviewer implies, but as a leader of a national literary movement, Whitman himself will rise above the faults of his own verse to be considered in a separate sphere of cultural significance. It is worth noting here that the critic points to the collaborative construction of Whitman’s reputation by ‘Transatlantic critics’ rather than by exclusively British or American interests. The outcome of their efforts to identify ‘a new and independent literature’, in which both sides of the Atlantic appear to have a stake, however, is not yet ‘fixed’. It is Americans’ fervent desire to have a national poet, the reviewer sneers, that makes them gullible and desperate enough to accept what Whitman has to offer. He concludes, ‘Once transfix him as the genesis of a new era, and the manner of the man may be forgiven or forgotten.’40 It is ultimately Whitman’s ‘newness’ and his claims to nationality, not his ‘contempt[ible]’ verse, that will ensure his transatlantic success. It seems important to question at this point just how much of Whitman’s reception abroad was mediated by the criticism of his own work that he published in his 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass and in his reviews of the book in American journals. Whitman himself is, of course, one of the more vocal ‘Transatlantic critics’ upon whom the reviewer in the London Critic bases his commentary, and his agenda of national writing therefore influences the ways in which his poetry is read by others from the very beginning. In the final British review that Whitman includes in his ‘Leaves-Droppings’, a critic in the London Leader observes, ‘Walt Whitman, author of Leaves of Grass . . . has been received by a section of his countrymen as a sort of prophet, and by Englishmen as a kind of fool.’41 Although Whitman certainly received positive reviews of early editions of the book from American critics, most notably Charles Eliot Norton, none of them regarded him as a ‘prophet’ except for the poet himself. Even Rufus Griswold, the Young American editor of The Poets and Poetry of America, who would go head to head with Longfellow over the value of promoting national poetry, did not recognise Whitman’s poetry as nationally significant.42 At this early point in his poetic career, Whitman’s reputation as an American bard therefore hung in the delicate balance between his exclamatory voice on one side of the Atlantic and the sceptical responses of his British reviewers on the other.

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Diagnosing the Spread of ‘Whitmania’ in Victorian Britain William Michael Rossetti’s selected Poems by Walt Whitman, published in London in 1868, is a crucial piece in the transatlantic puzzle of Whitman’s national reputation. This edition made as much of a difference to Whitman’s positive reception abroad as the comprehensive 1824 American edition of Wordsworth’s poetry did to the British poet’s ability to shape, in tangible textual ways, the New World Romanticism of the Concord transcendentalists. In his introduction, Rossetti calls attention to Whitman’s long absence in concrete form from the bookshelves and the imaginations of the British reading public. Reading the poems themselves, Rossetti contends, allows British readers to set aside those ‘newspaper extracts and criticisms, mostly short-sighted, sneering, and depreciatory’ that unduly influenced the collective perception of Whitman up until that point and to begin the ‘candid construction’ of their own opinions of his verse (Whitman, Poems, 1–2). After the initial flurry of transatlantic interest in the first edition of Leaves of Grass, British enthusiasm for the ‘extraordinary specimen of Yankee intelligence and American eccentricity’ that Whitman represented waned, and Rossetti took it upon himself to recreate that initial experience of culture shock. The 1868 edition was the product of an extensive epistolary dialogue between Rossetti and Whitman in which the American poet played the heavy-handed editorial role to which he had become accustomed in the production of Leaves of Grass, which by that time had reached its fourth incarnation.43 Rossetti announced his own edition in an 1867 article ‘Walt Whitman’s Poems’, published first in the London Chronicle and then reprinted a month later in the New York Citizen: a move that made the edition’s appearance a definitively transatlantic event. Rossetti reintroduced Whitman to British readers as an American failure: a member of ‘that less successful class of prophets who find little honor in his own country, and almost none elsewhere’.44 By claiming that Whitman had not been adequately recognised by his own compatriots, Rossetti established the dynamic of national disdain and foreign adulation upon which Whitman would capitalise in later addresses to his readers both at home and abroad. Whitman’s emphasis in Specimen Days in America on the gap between his warm welcome abroad and his cold treatment at the hands of his compatriots was rooted in his elaborate efforts to publicise that contrast in ‘Walt Whitman’s Actual American Position’, an article that he published anonymously in the West Jersey Press in 1876. Blake describes this article as the start of an original promotional ‘campaign’ to build support for Whitman’s re-release of Leaves of Grass in time for the national centennial, but I argue

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that Whitman already had learned the transatlantic strategy that he used to great effect on that occasion from Rossetti himself.45 In his preview of the 1868 edition, Rossetti cannily sets up British readers as arbiters of transatlantic taste and suggests that they are in a position to lead by example in their recognition of the United States’ native genius. Echoing Whitman’s own insistent optimism, Rossetti predicts that ‘very extensive and very prominent fame to Mr. Whitman is in prospect, and even inevitable.’ As he encourages British readers to participate in Whitman’s ‘inevitable’ accretion of fame and in his canonisation as an American poet, Rossetti puts a twist on the forces of transatlantic moral influence invoked by Fuller and Douglass as they attempted to generate social revolution on United States soil in the 1840s and 1850s. In Rossetti’s opinion, British readers should tell Americans how to interpret their own national literature, for they are able to perceive the United States as a more culturally distinct and established nation from their transatlantic perspective. In his 1820 essay ‘English Writers on America’, Washington Irving defended his compatriots against charges of literary inadequacy. As Rossetti assesses the transatlantic situation half a century later, however, the primary issue at stake is no longer the lack of distinguished American writing, but rather Americans’ failure of imagination as they see their own national literature face to face. The United States has fallen behind in the process of cultural self-identification, and British readers have a duty to teach them the value of what Rossetti calls Whitman’s ‘poem of American nationality’. Rossetti frames his edition as a project that will illuminate for his own compatriots not only the aesthetic value of Whitman’s verse, but also the extent to which that value depends on its metonymic representation of the United States itself. His epigraph from Carlyle declares, ‘it is a great thing for a nation that it get an articulate voice – that it produce a man who will speak forth melodiously what the heart of it means.’ By hailing the poet in these terms, Rossetti confirms the vocation of giving ‘voice’ to the nation and speaking from its ‘heart’ that Whitman himself outlines in his 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass and to which he returns as he sketches out the Miltonic scope of his national ambitions in Specimen Days in America. As he continues with his introduction, Rossetti urges readers to recognise Whitman as ‘the poet of the epoch . . . and an initiator in the scheme and form of his works’ (Whitman, Poems, 4–5). The grand ‘scheme’ that Whitman ‘initiates’ is, in fact, the idea of the nation itself, for as Rossetti describes it, his book is the great work of ‘American nationalism’. For many readers on both sides of the Atlantic, Whitman’s disregard

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for the literary conventions of both form and subject matter were insurmountable barriers to their appreciation (or even to their reading) of his poems. As he makes his case for Whitman’s significance, Rossetti acknowledges the difficulty of selling the poet and his works to such a disapproving audience. Citing Whitman’s negative reviews in England, he addresses ‘Those who find the American poet “utterly formless,” “intolerably rough and floundering,” “destitute of the A B C of art,” and the like’ (Whitman, Poems, vii–viii). In the face of these ‘utterly’ dismissive remarks about Whitman’s ‘intolerable’ manner and his artistic ‘destitution’, Rossetti adopts a defensive posture. He resorts to the strategy of identifying Whitman as an American in order to escape from the trap of aesthetic judgement. Nationality becomes a new scale by which Whitman can be measured, for as the poet’s first English critics made clear, what is fundamentally ‘American’ can be excused even as it is derided for its cultural inferiority. Whitman may be both a maverick and an ‘originator’, Rossetti observes, ‘[b]ut he is saved from isolation by the depth of his Americanism; with the movement of his predominant nation he is moved’ (Whitman, Poems, 6–7). As long as Whitman is ‘deeply’ American, then he does not need to be anything else. Instead of standing alone in his disturbing imaginative ‘isolation,’ he ‘moves’ with the larger tides of the nation, acting as a mirror that reflects its distinct cultural landscape. The publication of Rossetti’s Poems by Walt Whitman unleashed an epidemic of crazed transatlantic adulation that Algernon Charles Swinburne diagnosed as ‘Whitmania’. Ferdinand Freiligrath, a German writer and longtime ally of Longfellow’s, echoed Rossetti as he introduced Whitman to his compatriots as ‘The only American poet of specific character’ and celebrated his ‘Americanism’.46 British readers in particular responded to Rossetti’s call to recognise ‘the founder of American poetry’ by generating a cult of personality that drew many of its members, both in body and in spirit, across the Atlantic. Anne Gilchrist and Edward Carpenter acknowledged Rossetti’s edition as the key text in their conversion to the religion of Whitmanism, and Gilchrist’s attachment to the poet led her to resettle her family on American shores so that she could be closer to Whitman himself.47 Although both Gilchrist and Carpenter departed from Rossetti’s strategy of elevating the poet on the basis of his successful representation of his nation, they were nonetheless drawn to him because he appeared to be in command of social and sexual feelings that could not be articulated in Victorian Britain.48 The frisson of sexual energy that accompanies Whitman’s physical availability in concrete textual form ties Whitman’s transatlantic celebrity status to the fame enjoyed by Douglass during and after his lecture tour through Ireland and Britain in the 1840s. Douglass’s

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enterprise of print journalism depended, to a large extent, on his ability to persuade his supporters to put stock in him personally, and many of those advocates were British women who were attracted to Douglass’s physical presence, as well as to his political arguments.49 As he diagnosed the craze for Whitman’s verse in Britain and the effects of the poet’s personal magnetism on his countrymen, Swinburne felt compelled to cut the figure to whom Rossetti referred as ‘the illustrious American’ down to size (Whitman, Poems, 22). In his criticism of the transatlantic phenomenon generated by Rossetti’s hyperbolic and deliberately nationalised rhetoric, Swinburne skewers ‘the fiery partisanship of such thoughtful and eloquent disciples as Mr Rossetti and Dr Burroughs’.50 Their ‘partisanship’ was a result not only of their uncritical belief in Whitman’s poetic genius, Swinburne argues, but also of their heavyhanded emphasis on his national character. The pursuit of nationality was, in fact, Whitman’s overwhelming weakness, not his greatest strength. Swinburne observes: It is when he is thinking of his part, of the duties and properties of a representative poet, an official democrat, that the strength forsakes his hand and the music ceases at his lips. It is then that he sets himself to define what books, and to what purpose, the scriptural code of democracy must accept and reject; to determine, Pope himself and council in one, what shall be the canons and articles of the church, which except a democrat do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.51

While Swinburne does not deny Whitman’s ability to ‘represent’ his nation, he nonetheless casts the value of that national identity in doubt. When Whitman attempts to fulfil his ‘duties’ as a ‘representative poet’, he limits himself both personally and creatively to a dogmatic form of political poetry. The national Whitman is a doctrinaire figure, capable of composing the liturgy for and presiding over the growth of his own ‘church’ of ‘Americanism’, but not a poet of universal significance. In Swinburne’s opinion, Whitman is at his most powerful when he catalyses change as a denationalised ‘informing and reforming element’: a force that renews the possibilities of artistic life and social organisation beyond the scope of the nation.52 In this moment, Swinburne approaches Emerson in his preference for an ‘old largeness’ of thought over the ostensibly ‘narrow’ nationalism touted by Rossetti as Whitman’s most ‘original’ and appealing contribution to world literature. Indeed, Swinburne asserts in his 1887 essay that Rossetti and his fellow ‘Whitmaniacs’ have Whitman all wrong.53 They have fallen prey

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to the religious fervour of the poet’s cult and become ‘preachers or the proselytes of the gospel according to Whitman’. Their allegiance to the American poet is a disease that has reached epidemic proportions, a kind of ‘ethical and aesthetic rabies’ that renders its victims crazed and unable to distinguish good poetry from bad. Despite his early association with Whitman’s supporters in Britain, an alliance that Rossetti recognises in his introduction to Poems by Walt Whitman, Swinburne now attempts to distance himself from the party of ‘Whitmaniacs’ by proving his immunity to the transatlantic spread of their disease. As he does so, he continues to identify Whitman’s nationality as a sign of his poetic inadequacy. National poetry, Swinburne contends, is really the best that Whitman can do, for: As a poet, no amount of improvement that self-knowledge and self-culture might have brought to bear upon such exceptionally raw material could ever have raised him higher than a station to which his homely and manly patriotism would be the best claim that could be preferred for him.

Swinburne condescends to his ‘homely and manly’ subject, acknowledging Whitman’s ability to express lower and simpler forms of patriotic feeling than those experienced by refined (and, by implication, English) minds such as his own. Whitman is still American here, but his Americanism is used to confirm his artistic weakness further and to identify a style that Swinburne calls with nearly entire critical venom ‘not always flatulent or inharmonious’. Despite Swinburne’s eventual descent into mockery of Whitman’s poetic and political achievements, it was upon such extravagant gestures of support, such as his 1871 poem ‘To Walt Whitman in America’, in which he figures Whitman as the ‘Heart of their hearts who are free’, that Whitman would build a case for his spotless transatlantic reputation.54 Such responses as Rossetti’s and Swinburne’s matter in their own right as interpretations of the national character of Whitman’s literary project, but they matter even more as material that Whitman was able to use to promote his poetic agenda on American shores. The gap that I have emphasised between Whitman’s reception abroad as a democratic hero and his reputation at home as a dangerously illicit eccentric is, to a certain extent, historically accurate but, to an important degree, our perception of that disjuncture is simply the result of Whitman’s carefully managed professional illusions. In ‘Walt Whitman’s Actual American Position’, the 1876 article that spawned what Blake calls ‘the West Jersey Press affair’, Whitman asserts (anonymously, of course) that a recent ‘estimate of his reputation in

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England and America’ is ‘correct in its foreign statement, but makes an entire mistake about the position of “Leaves of Grass,” and its author in this country’.55 Speaking in a first-person plural voice familiar from his early editorials, Whitman investigates the case of his supposed neglect by ‘orthodox American authors, publishers, and editors’ and reports that the scandalous treatment of his poems has ‘wrecked the life of their author’. Whitman goes on to exaggerate both the ‘friendly’ tone of the notices that he had received from British reviewers and the ‘denial, disgust, and scorn’ by which his poetry had been met in the United States, conveniently setting aside such tributes as William D. O’Connor’s ‘The Good Gray Poet’ (1866) and John Burroughs’s ‘Notes on Walt Whitman as a Poet and Person’ (1867). In fact, O’Connor gave Whitman some of his most extravagant praise yet. He contends: At most, our best books were but struggling beams; behold in Leaves of Grass the immense and absolute sunrise! It is all our own! The nation is in it! In form a series of chants, in substance it is an epic of America. It is distinctive and utterly American.56

Even Rossetti, who seized upon the ‘depth of his Americanism’ as the most powerful argument for Whitman’s poetic distinction, could not have confirmed Whitman’s ambition to write ‘an epic of America’ in stronger terms. If Whitman was getting precisely the kind of national recognition that he sought from one of his own compatriots, then what did he accomplish by crying foul across the Atlantic? At the same time that he was bemoaning his victimisation by the transatlantic press and by the publishing industry in general, Whitman was skilfully pulling the strings of print communication that tied the two sides of the Atlantic together. He sent a copy of his article to Rossetti and requested that he publish it in Britain in order to generate sympathy for his expertly staged scenario of national failure.57 Whitman’s complaints about his unfair treatment had immediately positive results in both England and the United States, as he would report in a smug follow-up article titled ‘Walt Whitman’.58 Robert Buchanan, a Scottish poet, rushed to Whitman’s aid after reading a reprint of the original article in the London Daily Times and proposed that British readers band together to subscribe to Whitman’s complete works. This generosity, Buchanan predicts, will bring ‘so much more honor for England, so much more shame to the literary coteries which emasculate America’. Whitman’s capacity to evoke morally charged feelings of ‘honor’ from his British readers and potential ‘shame’ from his more reluctant compatriots recalls Douglass’s attempts to exert

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cosmopolitan moral force on the United States while lecturing abroad in the 1840s. Although it plays out its transatlantic drama in a more urgent and factual key, Douglass’s letter to the editor of the London Times in 1847, describing the racist treatment he had encountered on his return voyage to the United States, serves an important model for Whitman’s journalistic claim of literary persecution. When Whitman reactivated the professional channels of transatlantic print communication that had been created by fellow editors such as Douglass and Fuller, he did so for distinctly selfish reasons. Fuller and Douglass claimed that their transatlantic work was primarily political and that the purpose of their journalistic critiques was to reshape the nation with the help of liberal European influence. Whitman, on the other hand, invoked British support for personal rather than national ends, although he surely would have argued that his desire to set the agenda for American national literature made those ends one and the same. In his follow-up article, he describes his swift ‘recuperat[ion]’ from the state of abjection into which American neglect had thrown him, and proceeds to promote ‘a new edition of his works, now at last ready and supplied to those who want it’. Assuring readers that they would get their money’s worth, he continues, ‘It is very personal. Whitman puts his portrait in every volume, with his own hands, and signs his autograph. He sells them himself, by mail, (post office address here in Camden, New Jersey).’ In Whitman’s version of transatlantic professionalism, the cosmopolitan thinker becomes a shrewd businessman who can successfully circulate himself in print in the international marketplace. Although Douglass also derived crucial financial support from his abolitionist contacts in Britain, Whitman takes transatlantic networking to a new level by launching a direct mail advertising campaign through the press. His emotionally charged recollections of this particular episode years later in Good-Bye My Fancy play down its commercial intent in favour of a hazy story of transatlantic success. Whitman observes, ‘Anything like unmitigated acceptance of my Leaves of Grass book, and heart-felt response to it, in a popular however faint degree, bubbled forth as a fresh spring from the ground in England in 1876’ (Prose, 2:699). The apparent spontaneity of the ‘fresh spring’ of British enthusiasm for his work belies the years of effort, beginning in 1855, during which Whitman and his allies negotiated their literary positions, vouched for his ‘American’ credentials, and insisted on producing a certain kind of ‘heart-felt response’ from the transatlantic audiences whose approval Whitman perpetually sought.

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Taking the Measure of a Professional Life: Whitman’s Later Prose Democratic Vistas, Whitman’s extended meditation on the state of the United States and its prospects for the future, has been interpreted by a number of scholars as an optimistic ‘statement of American affirmation’ and, on the other hand, by Peter Balakian as a ‘dark prophecy’ of the nation’s demise in the wake of the Civil War.59 The critical disagreement about the text’s mood may, in fact, be the key to understanding the ways in which Whitman made practical and eminently professional use of the gap between the nation’s perceived failures and its potential for growth. Whitman’s decision to deploy a form of the jeremiad to make his case for reconstructing the nation puts him in the company of Fuller, Douglass, and Emerson, all of whom punctuated their antebellum critiques of the United States with unfavourable comparisons to the democratic achievements of other countries. Whitman, however, does no such thing, at least in Democratic Vistas and in the subsequent essays that he collected in his 1892 Complete Prose Works. Instead, he seizes upon the idea of regenerating the nation as an opportunity to assert his own professional qualifications. Echoing the challenge that he issued to his readers in the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, but now raising the historical stakes, Whitman implies that the ‘proof’ of the nation itself lies in its willingness to see him as its founding literary father. As Blake has suggested, placing Democratic Vistas in the context of the other ‘promotional campaigns’ that Whitman coordinated on his own behalf can help reveal the workings of its professional machinery.60 While Blake asserts that Whitman’s extensive efforts in this book amount to a less successful display of ‘self-promotional’ prowess than the shorter and more pointed attacks on the nation that he would launch in the West Jersey Press five years later, I believe that Whitman actually demonstrates greater ambition and more skill in professional execution in Democratic Vistas. As he castigates the nation for its cultural flaws, Whitman clears the field for his own work to fill the glaring absences that he identifies, or rather, creates. By declaring that there will be no ‘America’ without a national literature, Whitman defines his ultimate professional role as the one poet who can justify and perpetuate a national identity. Whitman lays the groundwork for his project of national redemption by emptying out both the concept of nationality and the imaginative landscape that it inhabits. His sweeping gestures of cultural erasure tie him to O’Sullivan, who used the imagery of an empty western landscape to evoke the grand promise of the United States in his 1839 essay ‘The Great Nation of Futurity’. In Whitman’s words, the nation becomes ‘A

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boundless field to fill! A new creation’ (Prose, 2:404–5). What is most revealing about Whitman’s rhetoric is not necessarily the familiar pattern of mapping national experience onto a ‘boundless’ space – a practice that Thoreau advocates in his pursuit of ‘absolute freedom and wildness’ in his 1862 essay ‘Walking’ – but rather the signs of artistic self-consciousness in Whitman’s ‘creation’ of the nation as a literary object.61 As Whitman continues his work of ‘making’ the nation, he hails the country as: A new creation, with needed orbic works launch’d forth, to revolve in free and lawful circuits – to move, self-poised, through the ether, and shine like heaven’s own suns! With such, and nothing less, we suggest that New World literature, fit to rise upon, cohere, and signalize in time, these States.

Assuming the power of a literary deity, Whitman creates a solar system comprised of ‘needed orbic works’ that can illuminate the nation’s path to its future. These works at first ‘rise upon’, then ‘cohere’, and finally ‘signalize . . . these States’, acting with increasing authority to constitute the national imaginary. Only with the help of such works, Whitman contends, will the nation emerge as a ‘coherent’ whole. Whitman’s efforts to establish himself in Democratic Vistas as the literary gatekeeper of American national identity are crucial to understanding the way in which he would be read and canonised by twentieth-century commentators. In his analysis of Whitman’s central role in the ‘institutionalization of literary American studies’ that took place after World War II, Jonathan Arac observes that scholars revived the tropes of cultural nationalism that pervaded the work of many mid-nineteenth-century writers.62 As he addresses the haunting spirit that fired the ‘American Century’, Arac reflects on the postwar period’s concern with ‘the rise of the United States to the position of morally best and economically and militarily most powerful state in the world’. In his own writing, Whitman anticipates the coming age of American empire as he predicts: Long ere the second centennial arrives, there will be some forty to fifty great States, among them Canada and Cuba . . . The Pacific will be ours, and the Atlantic mainly ours. There will be daily electric communication with every part of the globe. What an age! What a land! Where, elsewhere, one so great? The individuality of one nation must then, as always, lead the world. Can there be any doubt who the leader ought to be? (Prose, 2:413)

As he shares his vision of American ‘leadership’, Whitman provides his readers with the vocabulary that they need to write him into their own

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stories of an imperial future for the nation. His promise that the United States will own both the Pacific and the Atlantic worlds and that it will be the hub of ‘electric communication’ with other countries challenges the predictions made by Emerson and Douglass of a cosmopolitan world system in which national borders would become increasingly irrelevant. In Whitman’s eyes, the aggrandisement of the nation and the growth of his own literary reputation are projects inseparable from one another. Speaking at once to his readers and directly to the nation, Whitman reminds them both: You said in your soul, I will be empire of empires, overshadowing all else, past and present, putting the history of old-world dynasties, conquests behind me, as of no account – making a new history, a history of democracy, making old history a dwarf – I alone inaugurating largeness, culminating time. (Prose, 2:423)

As he did in the final question of his imperial prophecy – ‘Can there be any doubt who their leader ought to be?’ – Whitman deliberately blurs the boundaries between personal and national destiny. If he can help the United States become an ‘empire of empires’, then he will be more likely to secure his place in the national imaginary. Both the reader and the nation, melding together in the indeterminate ‘you’, speak in a voice familiar from Whitman’s poems. Both proclaim, ‘I alone inaugurating largeness, culminating time’, as they echo the speaker of ‘Song of Myself’, who boasts, ‘I know the amplitude of time.’63 Whitman therefore ushers the readers of his work into his own project of nation formation. By sharing what he calls ‘the work of the New World’, he implicates his audience in the professional endeavour of constructing national identity through literary channels (Prose, 2:425). In his poem ‘Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood’, Whitman establishes an explicit connection between his poetry in particular and the constitution of the nation through literary production. His speaker makes the following promise to the vast ‘mother’ figure of the United States: I’d sow a seed for thee of endless Nationality, I’d fashion thy ensemble including body and soul, I’d show away ahead thy real Union, and how it may be accomplish’d. The paths to the house I seek to make, But leave to those to come the house itself.64

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Even though Whitman is quite specific in Democratic Vistas about the literary means of achieving nationality, he manages to hold himself back from forcefully stating that his poetry alone will unify the country and grant it an expansive, transhistorical power of ‘endless Nationality’. In subsequent writings, including this poem, he foregoes such subtleties in order to make abundantly clear his intention to shape the nation by ‘fashion[ing]’ its ‘ensemble’. As he ‘show[s] away ahead th[e] real Union’, he encourages his readers to recognise themselves as members of a coherent nation in the mirror of his verse. All roads to nationality lead through Whitman’s poetry, for he claims to have cleared the ‘paths’ to a national ‘house’ once divided but now ready to be rebuilt. As soon as his readers have accepted Whitman’s challenge, they can look forward to the ‘America’ that he envisions as a new formation on a galactic scale: a ‘globe of globes’.65 In Walt Whitman and the American Reader, Greenspan identifies Whitman’s efforts to encourage a ‘dynamic form of reader involvement’ with his poetry as one of his most brilliant strategies of raising the stakes of private reading and public response in nineteenth-century America.66 Applying Greenspan’s theory of the charged relationship between Whitman’s ‘I’ and the reader’s ‘you’ can help reveal the extent to which Whitman imagined the nation, as well as his verse, as a collaborative venture.67 When Whitman gave his readers joint ownership of the national ‘house’ and bequeathed them the tools with which to build it, he became more certain of their eventual recognition of his leadership. As Whitman continued to invest his professional capital in making ‘America’, he became more and more insistent on putting his poetry at the centre of the national story. In fact, the older Whitman got, the more anxious he appeared to be that his national intentions might somehow be misunderstood. In his 1891 essay on ‘American National Literature’, Whitman confronts and attempts to exorcise the spirit that Henry James would later call the ‘Margaret-ghost’, whose ‘high-pitched taunt’ of her compatriots for their lack of literary imagination in 1846 cast a pall over the national literary scene (Prose, 2:666–8). Whitman counters her dismissive comments by reasserting his own theory of national healing through poetry, noting, ‘In my other writings I have tried to show how vital to any aspiring Nationality must ever be its autochthonic song.’ Although he stops just short of saying that he has written that ‘song’, he encourages his readers to make that connection themselves. ‘A national literature is, of course, in one sense, a great mirror or reflector,’ he observes. ‘There must however be something before – something to reflect. I should say now since the Secession War, there has been, and to-day unquestionably exists, that something.’ In Whitman’s opinion, the nation has moved beyond the

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antebellum anxieties about legal and moral principles that troubled Fuller and her contemporaries and into a new realm of substantive nationality. Instead of acting as a ‘mirror’ that ‘reflects’ the nation’s flaws, American literature can come into its own as an agent of national growth. Of course, Whitman wants to be the first writer to harness its power. In ‘Memoranda – America’s Bulk Average’, a brief essay that followed ‘American National Literature’ in the prose collection Good-Bye My Fancy, Whitman identifies his writing as ‘a fair reflection and representation of . . . my age in these States’ (Prose, 2:706). As he claims for himself the authority to ‘reflect’ and ‘represent’ the national scene, Whitman finally arrives at the ultimate statement of his professional purpose. In a tone so measured and casual that it is bound to mislead readers accustomed to the poet’s bombast, Whitman’s declaration at once seamlessly fuses his poetry with the nation and hides the tremendous work that it has taken to create that impression of synchronicity in the mind of his audience. With all the wonder of a majestic illusion, the movements of Whitman’s poetry now appear to ‘mirror’ the historical trends of the nation itself. Whitman finally reached the apex of professional ‘Americanism’ to which all subsequent Americanists would feel obliged to pay homage. From Leo Marx, who insisted in 1960 that Whitman represented ‘the essence of the American way’, to Kenneth Price, who based his 2004 study of the poet on the assumption ‘that Whitman is so central to practices and formulations of American culture, past and present, that we may use his life, work, ideas, and influence to examine major patterns in our culture over the last 150 years’, readers of all stripes cannot seem to escape the idea that Whitman holds open the door of the national ‘house’ that we continue to build along with him.68 If readers are searching for the nation, Whitman insists that they will find it printed in the pages of Leaves of Grass. He boasts in ‘A Backward Glance O’er Traveled Roads’, ‘My Book and I – what a period we have presumed to span! Those thirty years from 1850 to ’80 – and America in them!’ (Prose, 2:716). Whitman contends that his literary work houses the spirit of the nation: that intangible idea of ‘America’ that Fuller had dreamed of addressing in her journalistic ‘conversations’ of the 1840s. As Whitman composes what is perhaps his final set of self-reviews, he speaks of his work with the confidence of one who had arrived at the end of his particular professional road. In ‘The Old Man Himself – A Postscript’, Whitman admits: One of my dearest objects in my poetic expression has been to combine these Forty-Four United States into One Identity, fused, equal, and independent.

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My attempt has been mainly of suggestion, atmosphere, reminder, the native and common spirit of all, and perennial heroism. (Prose, 2:738)

Although Whitman is straightforward in his admission of the ‘objects’ of his ‘poetic expression’, he downplays the professionalism of the journalistic and literary methods that he uses to achieve those national ends. The vagueness of his power of ‘suggestion’ and ‘atmosphere’ – an indeterminacy, Marx observes, that continues to trouble those who attempt to ‘name the American essence in the poetry’ – actually obscures the precision with which Whitman inscribes himself into the history of American national identity.69 We now may be able to assign Whitman a variety of professional roles that he could not have imagined for himself, such as that of a founder of ‘American studies’, but he certainly never would have refused any of the professional honours that his own ‘American continental solidarity of the future’ might elect to bestow upon him (Prose, 2:513).

Whitman at Work in Transatlantic Modernism Before Whitman could take up his position at the imaginative centre of postwar American studies, he would have to run the gauntlet of modernist writers who were bent on dismissing nineteenth-century culture as the ‘medieval’ nightmare that E. M. Forster evokes in his 1908 novel A Room With a View. Why was Whitman able to survive the massive modernist effort to clean the cultural house of its obsolete forms, and how did he emerge in the twentieth century as the forceful presence that Alan Trachtenberg describes as ‘the single most revered and honored and idolized figure from the recent past in the minds of artists dedicated to “making it new” ’?70 In order to answer these questions, I consider in this final section of the chapter those lessons that modernist writers learned from Whitman about how to construct professional artistic personae and how to aggressively define the ‘modern’. Modernists such as Ezra Pound, from whom Trachtenberg borrows the motto ‘Make it new,’ were self-conscious makers of culture who revived both the spirit of Whitman’s poetic manifestos and their strategy of establishing a self-authorising interpretive framework in print to announce their own modernity. One does not have to travel far, either in time or in imaginative space, to tie together Whitman’s imperative to ‘Make the works’ and Pound’s exhortation to ‘Make it new,’ for both writers work on similar projects of generating cultural value and national consensus for their own literary endeavours. Although a full study of Whitman’s professional impact on the development of transatlantic modernism is beyond the scope of this chapter, what I want to do here is

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to shed light on some of the strategies that modernist writers, especially Pound and Waldo Frank, learned from Whitman and the ways in which they were able to figure, through him and his representation of ‘America’, a crucial transition into a new phase of cultural history. Whitman engineered his rise to American poetic stature by declaring loudly and repeatedly the national intentions of his verse. As he predicted, it becomes much easier for us to read him as an American writer because he makes that connection so explicit. As Whitman developed the argument of his own nationality, he also gestured toward the ‘modern’ quality of his poetry. In ‘Song of Myself’, his speaker claims that his is ‘a word of the modern . . . a word en masse’.71 Edward S. Cutler locates Whitman’s consciousness of ‘modernity’ in his visit to the 1853 Crystal Palace exhibition in New York, which provided a spectacular visual and experiential model for his vision of a ‘teeming nation of nations’ in Leaves of Grass.72 What matters more to me than the sources of Whitman’s sense of ‘modernity’, however, are the uses to which he puts the ‘word of the modern’ in his writings. Whitman was more committed to proclaiming his nationality than to asserting his own modernity, but the occasions on which he links the two concepts can help illuminate his desire to be ‘modern’ as part of his larger professional effort of self-promotion. In his 1888 preface to the English edition of Democratic Vistas with Other Papers, Whitman asks his readers to consider the book as a collection of ‘some views of the West and Modern, or of a distinctly western and modern (American) tendency, about certain matters’ (Prose, 2:600). By this point in his career, Whitman had seized upon the tremendous advantage of pulling transatlantic strings and presenting himself to the world as an ‘American’ writer, an identity of which he coyly reminds his English readers in a parenthetical aside. Newer and more significant here, though, is Whitman’s insistence that what is ‘American’, or more broadly ‘western’, is actually ‘modern’ and that the United States should be considered the source of modern energies for the rest of the globe. While Trachtenberg contends that Whitman inaugurates an ‘indigenous’ modernist tradition, in this instance the extent to which his claim to be ‘modern’ depends on transnational recognition actually reveals that there is more to Whitman’s modernity than the nation itself can contain.73 Reading Pound’s account of his relationship to Whitman further reinforces the transatlantic character of Whitman’s contribution to the ostensibly ‘new’ work of being ‘modern’. In his 1909 essay ‘What I Feel About Walt Whitman’, Pound observes that he can see Whitman more clearly from abroad. ‘From this side of the Atlantic,’ he writes, ‘I am for

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the first time able to read Whitman, and from the vantage of my education and – if it be permitted a man of my scant years – my world citizenship: I see him America’s poet.’74 Like Swinburne, Pound imagines that he stands both above and away from Whitman, who occupies an isolated and lowbrow American continent. Pound is willing to grant Whitman the honour of ‘Americanness’ because he can elevate himself by developing a sharp geographical and imaginative contrast between himself and his American ‘father’. Scholars usually set aside Pound’s description of his transatlantic perspective in favour of his more dramatic identification of Whitman with the nation, ‘He is America. His crudity is an exceeding great stench, but he is America.’ When read together, both of these statements demonstrate the extent to which Pound needed Whitman and his American ‘crudity’ as a means to secure national identity, as well as his own temporal advancement into a more culturally sophisticated modernity. In this essay, Pound wants to have it both ways by insisting that Whitman is a primitive poet – as would D. H. Lawrence, who figured the United States as a nation of ‘Calibans’ in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) – yet claiming that he and Whitman share the same ‘sap and fibre of America’.75 Pound’s supposedly cosmopolitan scorn of Whitman for his national limitations covers up his professional indebtedness to ‘America’s poet’. In his poem ‘A Pact (London, 1917)’, Pound speaks of his desire to complete Whitman’s work: It was you that broke the new wood, Now is a time for carving. We have one sap and one root – Let there be commerce between us.76

Pound establishes the terms of professional exchange between Whitman’s rough-hewn poetry and his more finely ‘carved’ creative products. He also invokes but does not specify the nature of the literary ‘commerce’ between himself and Whitman. This traffic in modern forms is most powerfully evident in Pound’s artistic manifesto, ‘Patria Mia’. As he takes up the mantle of the Whitmanian jeremiad from Democratic Vistas, Pound holds the nation accountable for its apparent lack of cultural organisation. The figure of Whitman serves as a touchstone for Pound throughout the essay, and following in Whitman’s own footsteps, Pound uses the wave of positive British feeling precipitated by Rossetti’s introduction of the poet as an occasion to chide Americans for their belatedness in perceiving the coalescence of their own culture. Whitman is Pound’s ‘American keynote’:

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an essentialist version of American identity consolidated in the person and the writing of one man.77 Whereas nineteenth-century Americans were too culturally tone-deaf to hear this ‘keynote’ being played, Pound makes it his mission to bring about the start of a new era in national culture through the recognition of Whitman’s ‘Americanness’. He states: One reason why Whitman’s reception in America has been so tardy is that he says so many things which we are accustomed, almost unconsciously, to take for granted. He was so near the national colour that the nation hardly perceived him against that background. He came at a time when America was proud of a few deeds and of a few principles. He came before the nation was self-conscious or introspective or subjective; before the nation was interested in being itself. The nation had no interest in seeing its face in the glass.78

According to Pound, Whitman had been lurking in camouflage in the national ‘background’ until his modernist descendant came along to delineate his position in the cultural landscape. Just as Whitman once informed his readers of the ‘news’ of his arrival on the American literary scene, Pound insists that the ‘time’ has come to correct the vague and ‘accustomed’ impression of Whitman’s writing and to sharpen it into a more pointedly modern and national ‘self-consciousness’. The nation has reached its maturity, Pound asserts, and it can now ‘be itself’ only by acknowledging Whitman’s ‘face’ as its own. Pound’s argument is not altogether new or even that American, as it echoes the claims made by Rossetti in 1868, but it leads us directly into the foundational assumptions of American studies made by Lewis and others, who saw Whitman as the most fitting archetype of the nation.79 As a critic, Pound works through Whitmanian channels, as well as upon the figure of Whitman, to make the nation, for as he empties out the cultural field, notes the need for national literary tradition, and then puts Whitman at its centre, he repeats the steps that Whitman himself took to establish his professional credentials as a national figure. Pound concludes his essay with a ‘Credo’: a statement of artistic faith in which he outlines the material conditions necessary for an American cultural ‘renaissance’. The systems of government and higher education both have their central roles to play, Pound argues, but even more significant are those ‘artist-workers’ who will both institutionalise and rejuvenate the national imaginary. I believe that this idea of professionalised American art comes directly from Whitman and subsequently acts as a shaping

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force in the development of twentieth-century public intellectualism and state-sponsored work in the arts and humanities. Pound’s ‘faith’ that a new culturally solvent ‘America’ will be achieved along Whitmanian lines ties him to fellow modernist critic Waldo Frank, who speaks of the ‘faith’ that lies behind our institutionalisation of Whitman at the heart of American culture. In Our America (1919), Frank claims that calling Whitman ‘American’ ‘reduce[s]’ him to a mere national caricature.80 It is in the curious combustion of nationality and the ‘faith that there is meaning in the fact that Whitman stood upon [America]’ that Whitman’s true cultural significance finally begins to emerge. Frank evokes that ‘faith’ as a national religion of sorts, and Trachtenberg also calls attention to the ‘visionary’ energies that modernist writers such as Hart Crane drew from Whitman.81 While it may be true that reading Whitman is a mystical experience, I would also insist that we remember the ways in which Whitman and his heirs skilfully mediate that reading experience for us by continually refining the professional techniques of putting ‘America’ in print.

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AFTERWORD

VOCATION OR VACATION? TRANSATLANTIC PROFESSIONALISM NOW

As Whitman and his contemporaries worked to shape a transatlantic future for American literature, they imagined modes of political cooperation and activated professional networks that persist well into the twentieth century and beyond. Mark Twain, Henry James, and Edith Wharton would travel familiar routes to the European capitals once frequented by Longfellow, Fuller, Douglass, Emerson, and Greenwood, asserting their equal rights to define their American literary careers in a transatlantic context. They tended to stay longer and to dig deeper into European culture than their antebellum predecessors, turning what had begun as an imaginative experiment into a lived reality by way of near-permanent remove from the United States. Their cosmopolitanism lost its partiality to home country and became a form of total immersion in life abroad, and the characters in their transatlantic fictions, particularly the innocent Isabel Archers and Daisy Millers, likewise happen to lose their way rather than to find their purpose in Europe. Their loss was the modernists’ gain, however, as Ezra Pound and others found ways to capitalise on the potential of the literary ‘commerce’ brokered by the nineteenth century’s first series of transnationally ambitious thinkers.1 In the course of the twentieth century, we can catch fleeting glimpses of transatlantic professional energy as it travels through the literary journalism of Ernest Hemingway, the cultural criticism of Gertrude Stein, the autobiographical reflections of James Baldwin, and the sly academic satires of David Lodge and Zadie Smith. Spanned by jets, the new Atlantic world that these writers create seems increasingly accessible and far less vast in its oceanic mysteries than it was when Longfellow first disembarked from his ship in 1826 to begin his explorations of the European continent.

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In the meantime, transatlanticism itself has gone from a radical inflection to a merely jarring reflection of American daily life. As we sit at our home computers, with global reams of information and the promise of theoretical world citizenship made accessible to all who have the privilege of internet hyper-connectivity, do intellectually considered and politically engaged forms of transatlantic professionalism still matter? I intend to answer this question here by examining the multifaceted careers of two contemporary American writers – Paule Marshall and Adam Gopnik – both of whom combine creative pursuits in literature with complementary work in journalism and in the familiar duty rounds of public intellectual life at the start of the twenty-first century: public lecturing, conference participation, and editorial work. In their professional lives, I trace the resurgence of antebellum interests in national difference as an element of cultural critique, in the Atlantic as a geographical space conscious of its role in the continuing history of slavery, and in the effort of self-promotion in a reading world that knows no national boundaries. Yet, instead of providing an alternative route to authorship or an opportunity for political provocation, transatlantic professionalism has become what Gopnik recognises as a very American pursuit of ‘happiness’.2 By fusing political commentary with personal narrative, seeking sensual pleasure and material gain, and foregoing dissent in favour of building institutions of transatlantic culture, these writers manage to both preserve and betray the vocational spirit that they inherit from their antebellum literary ancestors. In their personal memoirs, Marshall and Gopnik continue the transit from the high seriousness of philosophical cosmopolitanism and political activism cultivated by Fuller, Douglass, and Emerson to the self-centred transatlanticism of Greenwood and Whitman. Gopnik, essayist for The New Yorker and author of Paris to the Moon (2000), a collection of cultural vignettes and journal extracts from his five years in Paris that recalls Fuller’s blurring of the public and private spheres in her European dispatches, makes this transition in very explicit terms. Deliberately leaving his serious journalism on politics and other subjects out of the essay collection, he instead populates his European experience with ‘the trinity of late-century bourgeois obsessions: children and cooking and spectator sports, including the spectator sport of shopping’.3 This focus on the material conditions of transatlanticism would repel Fuller, who condemns the ‘servile American’ whose ‘object in Europe is to have fashionable clothes, good foreign cookery, to know some titled persons, and furnish himself with coffee-house gossip, which he wins importance at home by retailing among those less traveled, and as uninformed as himself’ (Dispatches, 162).

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While those who avidly listen to the ‘gossip’ in which Gopnik indulges in this book are likely to share his breezy sophistication, in an essay on the competition between cafés in Saint Germain-des-Prés, he embraces the superficial approach to European travel that Fuller, whose ‘hard-edged precision’ as a foreign correspondent he elsewhere admires, strenuously avoids in her own work.4 As a case in point, Gopnik stages in a pair of essays a mock-revolution of diners at a Parisian restaurant that turns the kind of democratic struggle to which Fuller was deeply committed in late 1840s Rome into a matter of personal taste and shared whim. In ‘The Balzar Wars’, Gopnik and his fellow diners, who swear patriotic allegiance to the Brasserie Balzar, unite in grassroots opposition against the forces of culinary corporatisation represented by the ‘Flo Group’. The diners are the better-fed descendants of Fuller’s Romans, and the ‘Flo Group’ their version of the Austrian empire. In what he perceives as post-revolutionary Europe, where even striking French university students seem to chant ‘Status quo forever,’ Gopnik plays this revolution for laughs.5 Instead of the cosmopolitan soldier Giuseppe Mazzini, this popular uprising is led by an older woman who appears to be ‘a veteran of many a foie gras slowdown on the barricades’.6 Gopnik begins to fancy himself as ‘the Tom Paine of the Balzar insurrection’, but such a role is less an expression of political idealism than an anodyne grasp at dual gourmet citizenship. While Fuller, who referred to Rome as ‘my country’ in an 1849 letter to Emerson, channels her hopes for the defeated Roman republic into her utopian dreams for the United States, Gopnik uses his American identity as an excuse to abandon his revolutionary ideals. He observes, ‘My Parisian self is prepared to defend the Balzar to the end, whatever it takes. My American self suspects that the Balzar will stay the same, and then it will change, and that we will love it as long as we can.’7 Where Fuller is earnest, Gopnik is wistful; the revolution already abandoned, only the savour of the steak frites remains. In Triangular Road (2009), a memoir in essay form adapted from a series of public lectures given at Harvard University in 2005, Paule Marshall likewise insists on the convergence of the personal and the political. Although she steers clear of the transatlantic comedy favoured by Gopnik and Greenwood, his predecessor in intercultural slapstick, and maintains a seriousness of tone and intent, Marshall also filters the political elements of her professional work through the lens of personal narrative. In a 1994 lecture given in Barbados, the Caribbean nation from which her parents emigrated to the United States, Marshall traces her fascination with the language and ideas of the ‘Mother Poets’, the group of Bajan women (also from Barbados) who frequented her mother’s kitchen in Brooklyn.

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Marshall roots her stories in those politicised conversations, and as a result, she says, ‘I consider this aspect of my writing, this combining of the personal with the political and historical as the most significant feature of my work.’8 As she recalls the process by which she grew into her vocation as a writer – which she describes in professional terms as the recognition that becoming a writer means simultaneously ‘becoming, essentially, one’s own unsparing editor’ – she maps her geographical routes from Brooklyn to the Caribbean and Africa and back again.9 Her journey of self-discovery is therefore both individual and collective; its transit is personal, but it takes place within the larger, diasporic space of the black Atlantic. Marshall explains: After all, my life, as I saw it, was a thing divided in three: There was Brooklyn, U.S.A., and specifically the tight, little, ingrown immigrant world of Bajan Brooklyn that I had fled. Then, once I started writing, the Caribbean and its conga line of islands had been home off and on for any number of years. While all the time, lying in wait across the Atlantic, in a direct line almost with tiny wallflower Barbados, had been the Gulf of Guinea and the colossus of ancestral Africa, the greater portion of my tripartite self that I had yet to discover, yet to know.10

Marshall plots the three points of an Atlantic triangle as coordinates of her own ‘tripartite self’. As she does so, the Atlantic world becomes a metonym for a fully realised self that comprehends both ancestry and literary destiny within the bounds of its oceanic rim. While still complex and ‘col[ossal]’ in its historical implications, Marshall’s Atlantic has become manageable: the size of a single person and the site of that individual’s work of self-actualisation. As I have argued elsewhere in this book, Frederick Douglass’s transatlantic journey allowed him the freedom to make what he perceived as a crucial transition from ‘narrat[ing] wrongs’ to ‘denouncing them’.11 Oddly enough, Marshall reverses that hard-won victory as she subsumes political activism into her personal narrative. During her time in the Caribbean, she internalises Atlantic history, claiming Olaudah Equiano and the slaves drowned in the Zong massacre, among others, as part of her imaginary ‘gene pool’.12 Her personalisation of transatlantic (or rather, circumAtlantic) experience mirrors, although it does not replicate, Gopnik’s tendency to miniaturise cultural phenomena by looking, as he writes, ‘for the large in the small, the macro in the micro, the figure in the carpet’.13 Both writers’ endeavours to balance political sensibility with personal narrative result in a curious fracturing of transatlantic consciousness, for

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in a world in which each literary traveller makes use of Atlantic experience in his or her own way, there arise an infinite number of transatlantic professionalisms from one common, individualistic critical method. As Marshall and Gopnik locate their writing within a transatlantic sphere that is both public and private at once, they commit themselves to the pursuit of happiness. Marshall makes her first trip to Europe in 1965 in the company of luminary and mentor Langston Hughes, who teaches her how to combine the humanitarian spirit of their diplomatic mission with the virtues of ‘TCB’, that is, ‘taking care of the business’ of professional authorship by selling books and continuing the work of self-promotion.14 Hughes and Marshall lecture and talk politics during the day and revel in Europe at night. Led by ‘a man open to people and parties’, Marshall learns that she too can find herself in Paris, a place where, Hughes asserts, ‘you can be whatever you want to be. Totally yourself.’15 In true Whitmanian spirit, Hughes encourages Marshall to imagine Europe as both a literary marketplace and an arena of self-discovery, where personal and professional identities converge and come into sharper focus against a European background. That process of identity formation and confirmation, so crucial to Whitman in his understanding of himself as a global American poet, is here stripped of its national implications and reduced to the essential pleasure of being ‘[t]otally yourself’. As his own days in Paris unfold, Gopnik finds particular pleasure in cooking as a complement to writing, for it produces things instead of ideas, and beautiful things at that. Noting the prevalence of transatlantic food writing in recent decades, a movement led by Americans such as M. F. K. Fisher and Julia Child, Gopnik treats cooking as an alternative form of literary vocation whose beauty ‘lies in the repetition, living the same participles, day after day’.16 While Greenwood hinted at a bodily relation to Europe in her humorous dispatches, many of the new transatlantic professionals – including the writer Elizabeth Gilbert, who, in the course of her Italian travels in Eat, Pray, Love (2006), ‘declared a double major . . . in speaking and in eating (with a concentration on gelato)’ – literally ingest Europe as they attempt to digest its cultural intricacies.17 In place of the shared moral priorities that brought nineteenth-century cosmopolitans together, Gopnik’s essays on food speak to an experience of cosmopolitan hunger that aligns people of different nationalities according to common principles of taste. One of the architects of this new cosmopolitan sphere is American chef Alice Waters, who, in Gopnik’s writing, becomes the spiritual leader of a movement that stretches from counter-cultural Berkeley back across the American continent and over the Atlantic, finally landing in Europe, where it intends to reinvigorate the soul of French gastronomy.

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In this instance, it is an American who has the cultural power and moral authority to transform European attitudes, whereas for Longfellow, Fuller, Douglass, and Emerson, transatlantic influence would work in the opposite direction as Europeans taught Americans how to become more linguistically skilled, racially tolerant, and democratically inclined. While visiting Gopnik in Paris, Waters reveals herself to be ‘the high priestess of the American generation that has come to believe that only through refined sensual pleasure can you re-create an ideal America’.18 Waters transmutes a familiar antebellum sense of political urgency into her culinary work as she preserves the desire for the kind of ‘ideal America’ that Fuller hoped to shape. Waters’s revolutionary methods, and to a certain extent, Gopnik’s own, foreground ‘pleasure’ even as they seek social transformation. Their brand of cosmopolitan professionalism might experience the whole world at Whole Foods, and is therefore more a condition of privilege than a practice of provocation. By the time Marshall departs for her European tour with Hughes, both her history of dissent in the civil rights movement and her potential for political disruption abroad have been neutralised by the United States government. During an interview with a State Department official, Marshall notes that her personal file stands thick on the table, replete with ‘the transcript of every speech in which I had roundly taken the government to task’.19 Antebellum activists such as Douglass may have wielded the power of surprise, but because Marshall’s every move is well documented, her transatlantic politics no longer have the capacity to shock, or possibly even to transform. After noting the irony that her vocal dissent actually might serve the purpose of broadcasting American freedom to the world, and thereby preserving exactly those institutions that it intends to critique, Marshall resolves to proceed nonetheless, for ‘[s]peaking out would be a way of making use of being used – if, indeed, such was the case.’ Her convoluted thinking about the ‘use’ of individual protest in an age of consolidated state power speaks to the paradox of contemporary transatlanticism: how can a critic find his or her sense of professional purpose within a public sphere that is no longer on the jagged edge of American national culture, but rather definitively in the midst of it? As the editor of Americans in Paris (2004), a literary anthology published by  the Library of America that incorporates writing by Longfellow, Emerson, Fuller, and Douglass, among others, Gopnik finds himself equally bound by the conventions of a new American transatlanticism. Gopnik’s task is no longer to chase the literary revolution, but instead to preserve old forms; his anthologised Paris is a controlled archetype, a ‘neatly mythological’ concept rather than a living field of cultural activity.20

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For Longfellow, compiling such anthologies as The Poets and Poetry of Europe (1845) and Poems of Places (1876–9) was a radical challenge to editors like Rufus Griswold and Evert Duyckinck, who intended to canonise national literature to the exclusion of foreign influences. To see Longfellow and Fuller – who also fell victim to the nationalising agenda of Duyckinck’s Library of American Books series – now tidily inserted into Gopnik’s version of the transatlantic canon is therefore to perceive the irony of literary history at work. Books such as Gopnik’s claim Europe as American territory for the purpose of confirming national identity, rendering it (in a move that Greenwood would have admired) an imaginative space much less foreign than domestic. In Gopnik’s admittedly localised narrative of American cultural development abroad, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of Parisian experience collapse into a single ‘idea of happiness, of good things eaten and new clothes bought and a sentimental education achieved’. His words make us wonder: has the pursuit of ‘happiness’ become the only transatlantic vocation that matters? Contained within government initiatives and celebratory collections, transatlantic energy turns from what Emerson once figured as the ‘electricity’ of innovation into the solidity of static fact.21 For Marshall and Gopnik, these facts are readily apparent in the shared culture of academia, the global flood of news from outlets such as CNN, and the insistent commercialisation of transatlantic activity. In Marshall’s case, the latter is best evidenced by her hunger not for culinary delights, but rather for the intellectual satisfaction of the ‘all-expense-paid overseas cultural conference’ or the ‘heavyweight’ travel grant.22 In his investigation of the organisations that feed this hunger, Bernard Bailyn roots the study of Atlantic history in the formation of such institutions as NATO in the wake of World War II.23 Once Atlantic alliances were established and the shared political and cultural life of certain nations was confirmed, then the Atlantic world could legitimately begin to conceptualise itself as a field of study. As writers who operate within these imaginary boundaries, then, Marshall and Gopnik may have no choice but to declare themselves transatlantic professionals, or indeed, to reflect intently upon themselves within the mirror of a nowcalm ocean. Still, as they suspend themselves between the societies shored up against the ocean’s rim, as well as between the practice of their literary craft and the professional extensions of it, they perpetuate the spirit of the antebellum writers who worked so imaginatively and so skilfully to create a transatlantic world. If the Atlantic’s waves are now subdued by a balance of political power, then it is nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism that helped bring about that radical change, and if transatlantic travellers are now free to pursue pleasure in foreign cities, then it is their antebellum predecessors

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who first opened wide the possibility of remaking the self abroad. For contemporary novelist Charles Johnson, the Atlantic continues to be a ‘theater of transformations’, and the writers considered here invite us into that theatre both to observe the machinery behind that production and to enjoy the great drama of the show itself.24

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NOTES TO PAGES 000–000

NOTES

Notes to Introduction 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

Whitman, ‘To the Foreign Reader’ (1876), in Walt Whitman’s Workshop, 163–4. Shelley, 508. Douglass, Autobiographies, 373. Gilroy, 58. It is Gilroy’s theory of Atlantic experience as an engine of ‘critique’ of the supposedly isolated national cultures around its rim upon which I draw most often in this study. Gilroy identifies Douglass as a founding father in this black Atlantic tradition. Douglass, Autobiographies, 367. Claybaugh, 3. Emerson, Collected Works, 1:7. Future references will be abbreviated as CW. Foundational works of transatlantic studies such as Weisbuch’s Atlantic DoubleCross and Chai’s The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance focus primarily on relationships between English Romantic writers and a select group of American transcendentalists and they tend to foreground exchanges of ideas rather than the circulation of material texts. More recent works, such as McGill’s edited volume The Traffic in Poems, Claybaugh’s The Novel of Purpose and Lee’s The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel, consider the market forces and shared social concerns that bind the transatlantic world together on a more concrete level. O’Neill and Lloyd’s The Black and Green Atlantic and Fulford and Hutchings’s Native Americans and Anglo-American Culture, 1750–1850: The Indian Atlantic follow Gilroy’s lead as they trace crossings of migratory routes and cultural roots in the transatlantic world. Armitage contrasts ‘cis-Atlantic’ history, or local history considered in an Atlantic context, with ‘trans-Atlantic’ history, which involves comparisons between nations on either side of the ocean (17–24). Although my practice of transatlantic studies in this book foregrounds American writers, I emphasise

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10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

Notes to pages 5–7

comparative cross-cultural dialogue. This book also uses what Armitage identifies as a ‘circum-Atlantic’ method in its study of the larger Atlantic implications of American slavery. Such sailor–writers as Herman Melville and Richard Henry Dana are not included in this study of transatlantic vocation due to the fact that their professional experience was not as closely tied to literary production as the complementary vocations of education, journalism, publishing, and oratory, and also because these writers themselves were less concerned with cultural exchange in the Atlantic world than with the particular kind of cultural fluidity that life at sea inspires. The expertise that such writers as Melville and Dana develop at sea and render in literary form deserves significant critical treatment of its own, and Blum has recently completed such a project. For examples of this transamerican methodology, see Brickhouse as well as Gruesz, Ambassadors of Culture. Thanks to studies by Gruesz, Levine (Dislocating Race and Nation), and Nwankwo, however, the transamerican travels and political involvements of Douglass, Martin Delany, and José Martí also have come into sharper focus. Kendall, Woodward, and Skrbis, 9. Emerson, ‘American Civilization’ (1862), in Complete Works, 11:303. Nwankwo underscores the cosmopolitanism of Douglass and other African Americans who, while denied US citizenship, explored the possibility of membership in a transnational black community (12). Hutchings and Wright comment on the ways in which transatlantic writers ‘investigated and refigured the boundaries that ordered nineteenth-century culture, including the borders of the nation-state, the limits enforced on gender and sexuality, the divisions of emergent notions of “race,” and the very nature of intercultural exchange’ (3). Claybaugh theorises an ‘Anglo-American public sphere’ (3), but I contend that the more extensive transnational commitments of the writers I study require an understanding of the transatlantic world that exceeds linguistic and regional boundaries. Like Claybaugh, however, I would suggest that the transatlantic public sphere is potentially disruptive rather than essentially rational, as Habermas originally claimed. Dharwadker asks a similar set of questions in a more current key: ‘Will cosmopolitanism survive globalization’s omnivorous compression of cultural space-time and erasure of differences? Can it hold on to its old ideals of “humanity” as a single (comm)unity, and the earth as a home for everyone?’ (10–11). Dharwadker, 2. Wohlgemut observes that in nineteenth-century Britain, cosmopolitanism and patriotism have a symbiotic relationship, as ‘[t]ogether . . . [they] make up an ecosystem’ (3). Mazzini, 3:7.

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20. For a thorough discussion of the roles played by multilingualism and translation in shaping a cosmopolitan American literature, see Boggs. For further commentary on the United States as an inherently heterogeneous and therefore cosmopolitan nation, see Hickman. 21. Kant originally imagined ‘this great federation’ as a way to achieve shared ‘political security’, but also hoped that it would lead citizens to become ‘morally mature’ (47–9). It is this advanced stage of cosmopolitan moral improvement that most concerns the writers I study here, even though international political alliances such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union would not arise until the twentieth century. 22. Amanda Anderson, 91–5. Unlike deliberately ‘detached’ cultural critics such as Arnold, however, Fuller, Douglass, and Emerson act upon their cosmopolitan views in the political realm. 23. Wohlgemut, 6. 24. In his poem ‘A Pact (London 1917)’, Pound engages in exactly this kind of literary ‘commerce’ with Whitman. See Clarke, Walt Whitman: Critical Assessments, 3:59. 25. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, xvii. 26. For a closer look at this transatlantic imbalance, see McGill, 5, and CognardBlack, 8. 27. For points of origin in the debate about the United States as a culture burdened by postcolonial anxiety, see Weisbuch (Atlantic Double-Cross), Buell (‘Postcolonial Anxiety’), and Kutzinski. In more recent work, Tamarkin preserves the postcolonial dynamic of American admiration for British culture, but Giles reverses its flow pattern by examining the United States as a central figure in the British imagination in Atlantic Republic. 28. Stevens, 94. 29. My use of the word ‘routes’, both here and in the title of this introduction, is intended to evoke Paul Gilroy’s claim that black Atlantic subjects have both ‘roots’ and ‘routes’: that is, that they are rooted in their racial identity as members of the African diaspora, but that their experience is broadened by the routes that they travel around the Atlantic basin (19). Although I do not intend to erase important critical distinctions by equating black Atlantic consciousness with transatlantic experience in general, I do mean to suggest that, like Appiah’s ‘partial cosmopolitans’, the writers that I study embrace a double condition of American rootedness and Atlantic movement. 30. Pease and Wiegman comment on the critical genealogy of ‘exceptionalist’ American studies and on Benedict Anderson’s theory of nationalism (Pease and Wiegman, 16). They discuss the history of the field as the study of a nation-concept ‘circumscribed’ by a certain time frame and by a definitive outline in geographical space. This national imaginary encouraged the construction of free-floating ‘myth-symbol’ paradigms of American cultural development. Anderson establishes the temporal terms of this nation-concept in Imagined Communities, 24–6.

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31. Dimock, Through Other Continents, 4. 32. Recent work that emphasises the social, political, and linguistic contexts of antebellum American literature includes studies by Larry Reynolds, Stauffer, Boggs, and Petrulionis. 33. Matthiessen, vii. 34. See Charvat, 3, 100–1, and 106. Charvat comments in particular detail on the antebellum impossibility of earning a living by writing poetry. 35. Weber, 312–13. 36. Geison, 4. 37. Haskell notes that in the rapidly urbanising United States at mid-century, previously fixed cultural institutions, such as library companies, philosophical societies, and colleges, began to disintegrate, leading to a ‘free-for-all’ that relaxed ‘intellectual standards’ and paved the way for non-experts to claim expertise in various fields (xxv). The rise of specialised programmes in universities in the late nineteenth century eventually restored order to the professional landscape. Evelev comments in greater depth on this transitional period and its significance for the middle class in particular (7). 38. Haskell, ix, xii. 39. See Evelev, 21, and Santamarina. 40. Frost, 252. For more on the late Victorian ‘fantasy’ of paid professional activity as a form of ‘community service’, see Cognard-Black, 4. 41. For a discussion of the tension between professional identity and the ‘public, independent, critical functions’ of the intellectual, see Robbins, Secular Vocations, ix–x. Also, Lynd considers the cosmopolitan orientation of antebellum thinkers, especially radical abolitionists (130–59). For a closer look at the cosmopolitan leanings of such American Victorians as Charles Eliot Norton, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, James Russell Lowell, and George William Curtis, see Butler. 42. In his study of professional authorship, Buell traces New England writers’ ties to the professions, but does not focus on the more substantive connections between literary production and other vocations (New England Literary Culture, 378–80). A number of critical works respond to Buell’s suggestion that women were assertive literary professionals from the start, including books by Coultrap-McQuin and Homestead. Along these lines, Cognard-Black considers the remarkable ‘transatlantic professionalism’ of women writers (10). Evelev concentrates on Melville, a single author in an urban literary world of his own. 43. Lewis takes the title of The American Adam from Emerson’s journal entry, ‘Here’s for the plain old Adam, the simple genuine Self against the whole world.’ See Chapter 4, n. 29. 44. Douglass, Autobiographies, 40. 45. Fuller, Papers on Literature and Art, 2:140. 46. For commentary on the newspaper as a force of national cohesion, see Benedict Anderson, 34–6.

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47. Douglass, Autobiographies, 367. 48. Emerson, CW, 3:22. Notes to Chapter 1 1. Lewisohn, 65. 2. Wagenknecht, 27. 3. See Sorby, 1–34, and Carl Johnson. Johnson’s focus on Longfellow as teacher rather than text in the American schoolroom is a critical exception, not the rule. 4. See Haralson, Gruesz, ‘Feeling for the Fireside’, and Gartner. 5. Longfellow, Kavanagh (1849), in Poems and Other Writings, 755. Further references to Kavanagh are to the reprint in this book and will be cited parenthetically as Poems. 6. Advocates of the opposition between the two schools of American poetic thought represented by Longfellow and Whitman include Matthiessen, Lewis, and Fletcher. See in particular Matthiessen, 567, and Lewis, 79. 7. Longfellow, Selected Poems, xvi. 8. Longfellow, Hyperion: A Romance (1839) in Prose Works, 2:121. The book’s hero, Paul Flemming, hears his friend the Baron describe Goethe in these terms, ‘he stands like Atlas, as Claudian has painted him in the Battle of the Giants, holding the world aloft upon his head, the ocean-streams hard frozen in his hoary locks.’ Further references to this source will be cited parenthetically as Prose. 9. Wagenknecht, 29. In contrast to Wagenknecht’s assumption that Longfellow substituted professorial duties for poetic composition, Buell has argued that Longfellow’s ‘academic career . . . stimulated his work as a writer almost as much as it interfered with it.’ See Longfellow, Selected Poems, xiv. As yet, no one has discussed in adequate depth Longfellow’s prose works and the records of his teaching during these years or demonstrated how those efforts shape his later writings. 10. Longfellow, ‘The Schoolmaster’, 27. 11. Calhoun, 75. Calhoun has situated Longfellow’s relatively unknown story, ‘The Wondrous Tale of a Little Man in Gosling Green’, published by Horace Greeley in The New-Yorker in 1834, in the context of his teaching years at Bowdoin. In Longfellow’s satire, Brunswick became ‘Bungonuck’, a small town with a narrow mind. 12. Longfellow, ‘The Schoolmaster’, 28. 13. Longfellow to Stephen Longfellow, 10 March 1829, in Letters, 1:300. See also Calhoun, 69. 14. Longfellow, Letters, 1:301. 15. Longfellow, Letters, 1:302. 16. Longfellow, Letters, 1:301. 17. Longfellow, Letters, 1:303.

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Notes to pages 24–31

18. Longfellow, Letters, 1:301. 19. Longfellow, Letters, 1:300. Calhoun, 71–2. Calhoun calls Longfellow’s educational agenda ‘strikingly progressive’. 20. Graff, 1. The Yale Report of 1828, which prescribed the goals of American higher education, ‘assured the primacy of the classical over the vernacular languages in American colleges for another half-century’. 21. Graff, 20, 22. 22. L’Homond, 1–2. 23. Calhoun, 74. Calhoun cites Longfellow’s observation that learning a new language put his students ‘on the same footing with children’. Critics such as Lewisohn have denigrated Longfellow as the poet of ‘wretched schoolchildren’, but the exigencies of language pedagogy help explain Longfellow’s tendency to teach to the young in his writing. 24. Longfellow first used this phrase as a chapter heading in Outre-Mer, and it reappears in ‘The Wondrous Tale of a Little Man in Gosling Green.’. In Outre-Mer, Longfellow explains, ‘It is a title which the Spaniards give to a desultory discourse, wherein various and discordant themes are touched upon, and which is crammed full of little shreds and patches of erudition.’ The concept of the ‘tailor’s drawer’ captures Longfellow’s peculiar mix of self-deprecation and literary comprehensiveness (Longfellow, Writings, 1:143). 25. Matthiessen, 201. 26. Cooper’s study of England formed part of his multi-volume Gleanings in Europe (1837–8), Emerson’s was English Traits (1856), and Hawthorne’s was Our Old Home (1863). 27. Longfellow, ‘Origin and Progress of the French Language’. The editor of Longfellow’s Writings notes that Longfellow used material from the article in this chapter of Outre-Mer (Longfellow, Writings, 1:15). 28. Carl Johnson, vi. 29. Carl Johnson, 24, 36. 30. Samuel Longfellow, Life, 1:307. 31. Samuel Longfellow, Life, 1:204. 32. Carl Johnson, 28. 33. Samuel Longfellow, Life, 1:297. 34. Carl Johnson, 88, vi. 35. Gartner, 70. Gartner investigates the connections between the cultural lessons taught in Hyperion and Longfellow’s efforts to justify the pursuit of his literary vocation in a culture sceptical of creative work. 36. MS Am 1340 (4), Longfellow Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 37. Longfellow, ‘Life of Goethe – Lectures and Notes’ (1837), MS Am 1340 (49), Longfellow Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 38. Carl Johnson, 87. 39. Wagenknecht, 221.

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40. Longfellow, Voices of the Night, 144. 41. Irmscher, 276. These quotations come from one of Longfellow’s sonnets on the process of translating Dante’s Divine Comedy. See Longfellow, Writings, 11:10. 42. Gruesz, Ambassadors of Culture, 83. 43. Longfellow, The Poets and Poetry of Europe, v. 44. See Jackson, and also McGill, ‘Poe, Literary Nationalism, and Authorial Identity’, 295. McGill argues that Poe charged Longfellow with plagiarism because he believed Longfellow was stealing ‘literary property’ from other, less well-established authors. 45. Jackson, 23. 46. Review of Longfellow, Poems (10 December 1845) in Fuller, Critic, 291, 286. 47. Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, 13:38. 48. Miller, The Raven and the Whale, 194. Fuller’s choice of words here indicates that she may be directly refuting a claim made by the second generation of Democratic Review editors, who opposed ‘Young America’ and praised Longfellow’s poems as ‘exquisite mosaics, many-colored stones gathered from every region on the face of the earth, set with perfect skill, into forms of the workman’s own designing’. 49. Wagenknecht, 219–21. Wagenknecht emphasises Longfellow’s desire to remain as ‘faithful’ as possible, both in form and in spirit, to the original version of the works that he translated. I would argue that Longfellow’s obsession with literary fidelity has a great deal to do with his pedagogical mindset. As a teacher, he sought above all to create channels of direct access to foreign literatures and frequently sacrificed his own critical opinion for the sake of ‘tell[ing] the whole truth’ to his students. Pertile comments on the ‘literalness’ of Longfellow’s translation in Alighieri, Inferno, xviii, xix. 50. Gruesz, Ambassadors of Culture, 83–4. Although Gruesz recognises this anthology as a significant project, I disagree with her claim that its volumes map out a ‘colonial itinerary’ for Anglo-American readers. In the next section of this chapter, I contend that Longfellow’s expansive vision of ‘universal’ literature was inherently opposed to this kind of relentless territorial expansion. 51. Whitman, Poetry and Prose, 1350. 52. In Kavanagh, Churchill’s exclamation, ‘Let us throw all the windows open; let us admit the light and air on all sides’ (Longfellow, Poems and Other Writings, 755) echoes Goethe’s last words, ‘Open the shutters, and let in more light!’, as recounted in Hyperion (Longfellow, Prose, 2:126). 53. Longfellow, The Poets and Poetry of Europe, 282, 284. 54. Longfellow, ‘Lectures on Dante’ (1838). MS Am 1340 (106), Longfellow Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 55. Longfellow, The Poets and Poetry of Europe, 514. 56. Alighieri, Inferno, xviii. 57. Longfellow, ‘Lectures on Dante’ (1838). MS Am 1340 (106), Longfellow Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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Notes to pages 36–44

58. Alighieri, Inferno, xxxi, xxxii. 59. Longfellow, ‘Chronological List of Writings and Lectures’ (1830–82). MS 1340 (147), Longfellow Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 60. See Kaplan. 61. Samuel Longfellow, Life, 2:73–4. 62. Churchill hints at a shift in Longfellow’s orientation from a practical literary cosmopolitanism to philosophical cosmopolitanism as espoused by Kant and many of the Concord transcendentalists. See Chapter 2, note 10. 63. Widmer, 51. In the July–August 1845 issue of the Democratic Review, editor John Louis O’Sullivan used the phrase ‘manifest destiny’ to show his support for the politics of westward expansion. 64. Lewis, 80. 65. Longfellow, ‘Literary Spirit’, 26. 66. Widmer, 41, 118. 67. Miller, The Raven and the Whale, 99. 68. ‘An English Critic’. 69. Widmer, 71; Gartner, 79. Gartner reveals a critical blind spot when he declares that Longfellow had an ‘essentially conservative approach to writing poetry’. 70. Gruesz, ‘El Gran Poeta Longfellow’, 395, 406; Seelye, 43. Gruesz makes a case for the poem as a response to the aggressive territorial expansion that troubled many at the time of the Mexican War, and compares Longfellow’s use of sentiment in the service of political ends to Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Seelye also claims that the poem anticipates the ‘apocalyptic thunderstorm’ of Stowe’s novel. 71. Gruesz, ‘El Gran Poeta Longfellow’, 412; Calhoun, 182. Gruesz observes that the poem takes place in ‘the mythical ground-zero time of medieval epic’. Calhoun contends, ‘It would be more accurate to say that they [Evangeline and Gabriel] were a composite, a representative type, whose story subsumes and renders mythic the stories of hundreds of families separated, often forever, amid the chaos of the poorly organized expulsion.’ 72. Calhoun, 182. 73. Seelye, 27, 32. Seelye reads this passage as a ‘distinctly American’ nationalist episode. He observes, however, that Longfellow’s ‘geopoetics’ generally defy ‘the boisterous, ebullient spirit of Young America’. 74. Gruesz, Ambassadors of Culture, 90. In his review of Evangeline, Hawthorne praised Longfellow for ‘break[ing] up the rude soil of our American life’. See also Matthiessen, 210. 75. Gruesz, ‘El Gran Poeta Longfellow’, 396. 76. Kaplan, 582. Kaplan argues, ‘Domestic in this sense is related to the imperial project of civilizing, and the conditions of domesticity often become markers that distinguish civilization from savagery.’ 77. Excellent work has been done recently on Longfellow’s ability to combine traditionally masculine and feminine tropes in poetry. See Gruesz, ‘Feeling

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for the Fireside’, and Haralson, who discusses Longfellow’s unique ‘cross-gendered sensibility’ and compares Evangeline to Longfellow’s ‘village blacksmith’ as a model of virtuous suffering (Haralson, 329, 346). 78. Seelye, 27, 33. Seelye notes that Longfellow drew his topographical coordinates primarily from two sources: John Charles Frémont’s Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842 and John Banvard’s ‘diorama’ of the Mississippi, exhibited in Boston in December 1846. 79. James, 1:312. Notes to Chapter 2 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

Chevigny, ‘To the Edges’, 173. James, 1:127–8. Emerson to Carlyle, 31 July 1846, in The Correspondence, 407. Nussbaum, 7. Miller, ed., Margaret Fuller, xii. See previous work on Fuller’s engagements abroad in Chevigny’s ‘To the Edges’ and books by Larry Reynolds, Steele, and Elsden. The essays collected in Capper and Giorcelli’s recent volume make significant contributions to the scholarly understanding of Fuller’s transnational imagination as well. Boggs and Durning have conducted thorough investigations of Fuller’s literary cosmopolitanism and her practice of translation. Chevigny, ‘To the Edges’, 173. I have borrowed the term ‘centrifugal’ from Chevigny’s concept of the ‘centrifugal evolution’ of Fuller’s thought. Contrary to Chevigny’s sense of ‘centrifugal evolution’ as an ever-expanding process, however, I argue that Fuller always generated this imaginary outward-moving force from a fixed national centre, thereby balancing her centrifugal impulses with centripetal ones. Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, 1 December 1849, in The Letters, 1:428. Chevigny was one of the first scholars to note that Fuller introduced American newspaper readers to Marx’s writings in her Tribune column. See Chevigny, The Woman and the Myth, 294. In her discussion of Fuller’s journalism, Zwarg contends that ‘Fuller prepared a space for Marx even as she exceeded him in framing reading formations that he would find difficult to pursue’ (Zwarg, 235). By identifying the nature of that ‘prepared . . . space’ as dialectical, I intend to make the connection between Fuller and Marx more explicit in the terms outlined by Bertell Ollman. Ollman characterises Marx’s thought as preoccupied by ‘the broader interactive context’ of a thing or an idea, the ‘process’ by which it became the thing that it is, and the ‘relation’ it has to other ideas. In addition, Ollman focuses on the ‘perspectival element’ as a key aspect of dialectical thinking (Ollman, 13, 16). Kant, 47. Cheah uses the example of Mazzini’s post-Kantian activism to support his own claim that ‘nationalism is not antithetical to cosmopolitanism’

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10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Notes to pages 48–52

(Cheah, 25). Appiah discusses the competing allegiances of ‘cosmopolitan patriots’ in order to capture the productive tension between identity based on family, tribe, or nation and citizenship in the larger world (Appiah, ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’, 91). Robbins notes that similar combinations of local and global commitment have been described by David Hollinger and Mitchell Cohen (‘rooted cosmopolitanism’) and Homi Bhabha (‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’) (Robbins, ‘Introduction Part I’, 1). For more on ‘partial cosmopolitanism’, see Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, xvii. Further commentary on Appiah’s concept in relation to Fuller and her contemporaries can be found in Andrew Taylor, 114, and Walls, 109, 130. Appiah’s emphasis on the cosmopolitan value and practice of ‘conversation’ is also startlingly relevant to Fuller (Cosmopolitanism, xix). Fahrmeir, 2–3. Fahrmeir catalogues the components of citizenship that vary by country and time period: ‘formal’ (entailing a legal relation with a state), ‘political’ (voting privileges), ‘social’ (entitlement to state support), and ‘economic’ (earning an income and contributing financially to the state). Heater notes that, beginning in ancient Greece and moving forward into Kant’s Enlightenment project of cosmopolitanism, citizenship was earned by exercising moral responsibilities in one’s relation to the state (Heater, 4, 55, 186). Walls includes both Fuller and Alcott in this ‘league’ (110). Kivisto and Faist, 107. Fuller to Richard Fuller, 2 March 1845, in Letters, 4:54. Fuller to Eugene Fuller, 9 March 1845, in Letters 4:56. Karl Marx, Dispatches for the New York Tribune, xviii. James Ledbetter takes note of this figure in his Introduction to Marx’s Dispatches. Zwarg contends that Fuller’s reputation was an important factor in the newspaper’s rising popularity (Zwarg, 230). Emerson, CW, 3:22. Fuller to unknown correspondent, 1845, in Letters, 4:39. Mitchell, 125. Fuller to unknown correspondent, 1845, in Letters, 4:39. Fuller, Papers on Literature and Art, 2:140. Fuller, Papers on Literature and Art, 2:137–8, 140. Fuller’s reasoning follows the pattern of shaping national consciousness through print media identified by Benedict Anderson. Anderson argues that newspaper reading creates a sense of ‘community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations’ (Benedict Anderson, 36). As Fuller dismisses individual ‘Americans’ in favour of the anonymous collective entity of ‘America’, she reinforces Anderson’s observation about the communitybuilding effects of daily encounters with newspapers. To Fuller, however, newspaper reading is more than just a ritual that defines the boundaries of a nation. The interaction between journalists and readers constitutes a critical opportunity for cultural development that requires engagement not only with

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25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

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the domestic concerns of the nation itself but also with other societies outside its borders. Ollman, 16. Among those who draw this contrast between Fuller’s conversation and Emerson’s contemplation are Chevigny and Larry Reynolds. See Chevigny, ‘Growing Out’, 98, and Reynolds, 57–8. Taylor, 101. Fuller, ‘These Sad But Glorious Days’, 9. Further references will be cited as Dispatches. Widmer, 21. Widmer, 58, 210. Boggs contends that Channing, Clarke, and Emerson intended ‘to repatriate Fuller by erasing the central feature of her theory of a multilingual American literature: translation’ (91). Fuller to Duyckinck, 28 June and 30 October 1846, in Letters, 4:213, 234–5. Zwarg, 228–9. Chevigny, The Woman and the Myth, 294. Chevigny claims that Fuller’s 1845 translation of a Paris correspondent’s letter to the Deutsche Schnellpost ‘is surely among the very earliest notices of Marx and Engels in America’. Emerson, Channing, and Clarke, 1:234. Emerson, Channing, and Clarke, 1:236. Fuller, ‘Farewell’ (1 August 1846), in Essential, 403. Miller, The Raven and the Whale, 3. Fuller, Essential, 404. For an account of Fuller’s fictional afterlife in James’s novels, see Chevigny, ‘To the Edges’, 200–1. Fuller to Samuel and Anna Ward, 3 March 1846, in Letters, 4:193; Essential, 404. Fuller to Margarett C. Fuller, 26 December 1846, in Letters, 4:253. Fuller tells her mother that ‘American Literature’ has been published in translation in La Révue indépendante, a socialist literary review edited by George Sand and other activist intellectuals. ‘I have been asked to remain in correspondence with “La Revue Independante,” after my return to the U.S. which will be very pleasant and advantageous to me.’ Fuller to Richard Fuller, 27 September 1846, in Letters, 4:228. Emerson to Fuller, 30 April 1847, in Emerson, Letters, 3:394. Fuller to Marcus Spring, 9 March 1849, in Letters, 5:201. Mazzini, 3:7. Wellisz, 12–13, 17. Andrew Taylor makes a similar observation about ‘the peculiarly itinerant nature of core U.S. values’ in ‘the nineteenth-century American idea of Italy’, under whose conditions ‘American principles could travel, detached from the geopolitical entity of the United States’ (Andrew Taylor, 116). Although I agree with Taylor in his reading of Fuller’s transitory nationalism, I would

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49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61.

62.

63.

64.

Notes to pages 61–67

caution that not all nineteenth-century American writers could imagine the US elsewhere: perhaps only those who experienced political and social exclusion, such as Fuller and Douglass, or who had a particularly critical bent due to extensive travel and immersion in other cultures, such as Melville. Emerson, CW, 2:46. Fuller to Maria Rotch, 23 May 1847, to Emerson, 15 March 1847, and to Mary Rotch, 23 May 1847, in Letters, 4:275, 262, and 274. Fuller to Margarett C. Fuller, 16 November 1848, in Letters, 5:147, 150. Fuller to William Wetmore Story, 9 December 1848, in Letters, 5:161. Fuller to Channing, 7 May 1847, in Letters, 4:271. Fuller to Sturgis, 22 August 1847, in Letters, 4:290. Steele, 274. Steele compares Fuller’s experience in Rome to Wordsworth’s in post-revolutionary France, as described in Book 6 of The Prelude. Fuller to Curtis, 25 October 1849, in Letters, 5:274–5. Fuller to Emerson, 10 June 1849, in Letters, 5:240. These Italian letters are collected in the Margaret Fuller Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University (MS Am 1086). Rouse examines Fuller’s strategies of pursuing a more active role for women in the public sphere through education, conversation, and political action. In an obituary of Fuller published in the Tribune on 24 July 1850, the author noted that Fuller was an ‘intimate friend and compatriot of the Republican leaders’. Newcomb sent his letter to Fuller on 19 February 1850. MS Am 1086, Margaret Fuller Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Chevigny, ‘To the Edges’, 173, 189. Chevigny also argues that Fuller’s concept of ‘America’ is ‘portable’ but insists that it remains with Fuller as she travels and cannot be ‘repatriated’ to the United States. I disagree with Chevigny’s contention that Fuller’s ‘America’ cannot be ‘repatriated’, for Fuller always developed her prescriptions for social and political change in transnational contexts, continually sent her ideas back to American shores in print, and never left the nation of her birth fully behind in her thoughts. See Fleischmann. In their essays in this collection, Fleischmann and Chevigny examine Fuller’s critical relationship to the nation and her pursuit of a perpetual critique through ‘cultural translation’, ‘intercultural dialogue’, and cosmopolitanism (Fleischmann, 7, 19, and 35). Chevigny, ‘To the Edges’, 174. Chevigny suggests that Fuller becomes ‘a more quintessentially American writer’ while abroad by ‘embody[ing] a critique’ of the nation. I am grateful to Richard Brodhead for noting in conversation the contrast between Hawthorne’s and Fuller’s attitudes toward Italy at mid-century. See Brodhead for further clarification of the distinction, as well as for a reference to James’s ‘sneer[ing]’ criticism of Hawthorne’s provincialism (Brodhead, xi– xii, xvii, xxviii). Striking a balance between the two approaches, Arthur Hugh Clough, an acquaintance of Fuller’s, presents Rome as a place where ancient

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and modern energies converge in Amours de Voyage, a poem written during his stay in Rome in 1849. The Roman revolution serves as a backdrop for the satirical poem’s failed romance, whose protagonist asks ‘what’s the / Roman Republic to me, or I to the Roman Republic?’ (III, 66–7) (Clough, 201). 65. The publication of Hawthorne’s mean-spirited (and apparently inaccurate) account of Fuller’s relationship with her husband in Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks generated terrific controversy in the 1880s. 66. Not only is their work in the field of American studies inherently transnational because they look, as Fuller did, westward from within Italian culture, but also Italian scholars such as Zorzi highlight Fuller’s ability to balance her allegiances to her adopted country and to the original home from whose destiny she could not turn away. Zorzi presents her translations of Fuller’s dispatches as texts with an equally profound impact on the formation of Italian national identity and on discussions of American national purpose. Notes to Chapter 3 1. For more extensive analyses of Douglass’s commentary on the nation in The Heroic Slave, see Wilson, Stepto, ‘Storytelling’, and Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, 115–23. 2. See Gilroy, 58, and Wald, 14. Because they focus their analyses almost exclusively on Douglass’s autobiographies, neither Gilroy nor Wald accounts for Douglass’s speeches abroad as significant factors in the development of the political persona that he introduced in My Bondage and My Freedom and refined in Life and Times. 3. For more on Douglass’s association with John Brown, see Stauffer and Larry Reynolds, Righteous Violence. 4. Douglass, Papers, 2:423. Douglass gave a speech titled ‘A Nation in the Midst of a Nation’ on 11 May 1853. 5. Castronovo, ‘ “As to Nation, I Belong to None” ’, 247. 6. Douglass to Samuel Hanson Cox, D.D., 30 October 1846, in Life and Writings, 1:189. 7. Wald, 14. 8. Among the new studies of antebellum journalism are essays by Levine, Vogel, Fanuzzi, and Fishkin and Peterson in The Black Press, ed. Vogel, and the essay collection Early African American Print Culture, ed. Cohen and Stein. 9. Fulkerson studies Douglass’s enthusiastic reception by the British press and its contribution to his transatlantic reputation as a leading abolitionist (72). 10. Berkshire County Whig 6.265 (2 April 1846): 2. America’s Historical Newspapers (last accessed 14 July 2012). 11. Emerson, ‘Europe and European Books,’ 511. 12. Giles, ‘Narrative Reversals and Power Exchanges’, 792. Giles uses this passage as an occasion to discuss Douglass’s belief that greater ‘transatlantic communication serves to ironize and displace indigenous assumptions.’ See

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13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

Notes to pages 80–91

also Baggett, 112. Baggett reads this passage as an instance of Douglass’s promotion of flexible, ‘performative’ nationality. Gilroy, 58. Emerson, Later Lectures, 2:328. See Rice and Crawford, ‘Triumphant Exile’, 4 and Stauffer, 158. Rice, Crawford, and Stauffer all note that Douglass’s years abroad represented as formative and liberating an experience as his victory over Covey. Daniel Webster, whom Emerson later attacked for his defence of the national enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, was serving as Secretary of State at the time of the Creole incident. He demanded reparations from England for the cost of the American slaves who had escaped to free soil in the Bahamas. Douglass used this story as an illustration of the pull of British liberty and the insistence of American greed in a number of lectures abroad, including ‘American and Scottish Prejudice Against the Slave’ (Papers, 1:245). Posnock, 1–2, 51–2. Posnock observes that black intellectualism has been and continues to be a troubling oxymoron for Americans, particularly in the case of ‘freaks’ such as Douglass. Stowe, 92. Stowe, 89. Stowe, 94; Stepto, ‘Sharing the Thunder’, 136, 142–3. Parker, 37. See also Castronovo, Fathering the Nation, 159–60, and Wald, 79. O’Sullivan, 427. Douglass, Life and Writings, 1:126. Douglass’s accusations of corruption in the American landscape in these two speeches are restatements of a case against patriotic sentiment first made in a letter to Garrison on 1 January 1846. Emerson, CW, 5:177. Ripley, The Black Abolitionist Papers, 1:191. Du Bois, 162–3. Fishkin and Peterson, 191–2. Wald, 89; Castronovo, ‘ “As to Nation, I Belong to None” ’, 246. Both Wald and Castronovo discuss Douglass’s rhetorical strategies of opposition and contradiction. Wald comments on his practice of ‘inversion’ in ‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,’ in which Douglass casts the slave as a ‘representative American’ who is closer to the founding principles of the republic than his white compatriots are. Castronovo argues that Douglass cultivates a ‘disruptive identity’ instead of submitting to a ‘disrupted one.’ John Brown is currently receiving a significant amount of scholarly attention for his central role in both the antebellum imagination and the history of American protest. Douglass gives the history of their friendship a prominent place in Life and Times. The most substantial critical work on the alliance between Douglass, Brown, and other radical abolitionists has been done by Stauffer. See Stauffer, 172–3, 197–200, and 247–51. Douglass’s decision to set sail for Britain a second time in 1859 was due in part to his implication

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30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

44.

45.

46. 47.

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in Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry and the subsequent warrant for his arrest issued by the Governor of Virginia. Rice and Crawford, 5. Rice and Crawford observe that Douglass inaugurates a tradition of black transatlantic travel that stretches forward into the twentieth century. Edwards discusses at greater length the transatlantic careers of Douglass’s modernist descendants. Douglass, Life and Writings, 1:92–3. Foner notes that McCune Smith wrote for Douglass’s paper from New York, William Julius Wilson from Brooklyn, Samuel Ringgold Ward (one of the émigrés that Douglass mourned) from Canada, Amos Gerry Beman from New Haven, Loguen from Syracuse, and George T. Downing and H. O. Wagoner from Chicago. Brown also contributed dispatches from Europe, which were later collected in William Wells Brown, The American Fugitive in Europe (1855). Fanuzzi, Abolition’s Public Sphere, 86. See Fanuzzi, ‘Frederick Douglass’s “Colored Newspaper” ’, and Hutton. Fanuzzi, ‘Frederick Douglass’s “Colored Newspaper” ’, 56. Fanuzzi discusses the rivalry between Douglass and Garrison at length in both ‘Frederick Douglass’s “Colored Newspaper” ’ and Abolition’s Public Sphere. Emerson, ‘American Civilization’ (1862), in Complete Works, 11:303. Fulkerson, 70. Blackett, 114–15. Stauffer, 141, 155. Stauffer, 155. Other property owners at Timbucto included Smith, John Brown, William Wells Brown, William Nell, Charles Redmond, Henry Bibb, and Lewis, Milton, and Cyrus Clarke. Douglass, ‘The Destiny of Colored Americans’, The North Star (16 November 1849), in Douglass, Life and Writings, 1:416–17. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, 6–7. Stowe looks ahead to the colonisation of Africa by Americanised blacks and to that day ‘[w]hen an enlightened and Christianized community shall have, on the shores of Africa, laws, language and literature, drawn from among us’ (xiv). Castronovo, ‘ “As to Nation, I Belong to None” ’, 249. Castronovo emphasises the radicalism of Douglass’s claim that African Americans have woven themselves so deeply into the fabric of the nation that America would not be itself without them. See Fanuzzi, Abolition’s Public Sphere, 89, and Castronovo, ‘ “As to Nation, I Belong to None” ’, 250. Fanuzzi discusses the relevance of Houston Baker’s contention that the ‘black public sphere’ also functioned as a ‘counterpublic’ and ‘as a “counter-concept” or “category of negation” ’. In similar terms, Castronovo suggests, ‘[i]n place of the sovereign United States, Douglass proposes a counter-nation infused with diasporic flux.’ Hutton, 31. Stauffer observes, ‘[b]y the end of the war, Douglass was more of an insider than he had ever been’ (279).

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Notes to pages 99–108 Notes to Chapter 4

1. Buell, ‘Introduction’, 4–5, 8–9. Buell summarises Harold Bloom’s argument about Emerson as ‘the great American shaman’ and compares Perry Miller’s conclusions in his essay ‘From Edwards to Emerson’ to those of William L. Hedges in his response, ‘From Franklin to Emerson’. 2. Bloom, ‘Mr. America’. 3. Ward, in Temple Bar LXXII (Oct. 1884), qtd in Sowder, 217. 4. See Buell, Emerson, 3–4, and Dimock, ‘Deep Time’, 770. Others scholars who explore Emerson’s global interests include Larry Reynolds and Richardson. 5. Howe, vii. 6. Weisbuch, ‘Post-Colonial Emerson’, 197. 7. Holmes, 115. 8. Richardson, 263. 9. Buell, ‘Introduction’, 6. Buell notes that Stephen E. Whicher and others have perceived a ‘tragic decline’ in the quality of Emerson’s later work. 10. For a fascinating study of Emerson’s public role as a lecturer, see O’Neill. 11. Recent editions of Emerson’s writings in the 1850s and 1860s and critical commentaries on that work include Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, ed. Gougeon and Myerson; The Later Lectures, ed. Bosco and Myerson; The Emerson Dilemma, ed. Garvey; and Rowe, At Emerson’s Tomb. 12. Fuller, Critic, 2. 13. My understanding of Emerson’s ‘experienced’ viewpoint is indebted to New’s remarkable study The Line’s Eye. Emerson set himself the goal of ‘exasperat[ing] our nationality’ in his lecture on ‘American Civilization’ in 1862 (Complete Works, 11:303). 14. Noah Porter Jr, qtd by Philip Nicoloff in ‘Historical Introduction’ to English Traits (Emerson, CW, 5:liii). 15. The Westminster Review, qtd in Castillo, 101. 16. Weisbuch, ‘Post-Colonial Emerson’, 211–13. 17. Armitage, 20. 18. Most readers of English Traits focus on this postcolonial dynamic, especially Castillo and Paryz. Paryz interprets this book as ‘an ambiguous instance of the Emersonian project of giving testimony to the growing power and significance of America, and, less evidently, to the continuous maturation of American national consciousness’ (48). 19. Robinson writes, ‘This criticism of the English is submerged into a stream of superficial praise, but Emerson’s general strategy follows that of Representative Men – to draw his criticism from a deeper evaluation of apparent strengths’ (119). 20. Nicoloff, Emerson on Race and History, 12, 20. 21. For further discussion of Emerson’s ‘lapse’ into nationalism, see Goluboff, 154, and Andrew Taylor, 49. 22. Cole offers thoughtful commentary on the ways in which Emerson speaks

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23. 24.

25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

[ 205

figuratively in this book by ‘converting English experience into a metaphor for a modern tendency that, by implication, encompassed his own nation as well’ (89). I agree with Cole’s sense that what truly concerns Emerson in English Traits are broader trends in society and individual development, not specific transnational dramas. Peacock, 72. Rowe discusses post-nationalist critical practice as a method of selfconsciousness about the uses and misuses of ‘American’ ideology (The New American Studies, 55). Robinson, 113; Andrew Taylor, 40. For further analysis of Emerson’s response to the European revolutions of 1848, see Larry Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance, 25–43 and 57–62. Nicoloff, Emerson on Race and History; Giles, ‘Transnationalism and Classic American Literature’, 68, 71. Although I disagree with Giles’s conclusion that English Traits is a nationalist enterprise for Emerson, his observations about Emerson’s ‘deflection of the historical category of the nation into a more essentialised idiom of race’ are helpful in understanding how the book undermines the usefulness of national divisions. For a thorough study of the anti-slavery climate of Concord and Emerson’s place within it, see Petrulionis. Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, 4:141. Lewis used this quotation as an epigraph for The American Adam, in which he asserts that Emerson’s ‘Adam’ and other figures stood for American innocence against European experience. My argument challenges the national idiom of that debate, for I believe that Emerson had a greater stake in the battle between individual selfhood and the ‘world’ – a category that included the nation – than in the intellectual power play between the United States and Europe. Bosco and Myerson note the disparity between the press coverage of Emerson’s general lectures on arts and letters and his political speeches (259). Gougeon provides a helpful survey of recent writing on Emerson’s political engagements in ‘ “Fortune of the Republic” ’. While Rowe, for instance, contends in At Emerson’s Tomb that Emerson’s political speeches represent a departure from his transcendentalism, Gougeon and other contributors to the essay collection The Emerson Dilemma (Garvey, ed.) argue that Emerson was a socially conscious critic from the beginning. Teichgraeber, 161, 164, 201–2. Teichgraeber continues the work of assessing Emerson’s reception in the contemporary literary marketplace begun by Charvat. For further commentary on Emerson’s attitude toward ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of culture, see Charvat 293–9 and Levin. Buell, Emerson, 4. Richardson, 341–4. Whitman, Poetry and Prose, 573.

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Notes to pages 122–132

36. 37. 38. 39.

Dimock, ‘Deep Time’, 768–70. Giles, ‘Transnationalism and Classic American Literature’, 69. Cayton, 84–6, 94–5. New, Where the Meanings Are. In this book, New suggests that New England thinkers such as Emerson share a philosophical preference for complexity of thought and metaphor; I would add that Emerson’s aversion to concrete definitions of nationality bears out this assertion. 40. Gougeon, 296. Notes to Chapter 5 1. Hawthorne to William D. Ticknor, 19 January 1855, in Centenary 17:304. Matthiessen distinguishes between books that meet ‘the enduring requirements for great art’ and those (primarily novels by women) that enjoy a brief ‘triumphant vogue’ (x–xi). Although Greenwood’s portrait stands as the frontispiece of The Feminine Fifties, and Pattee freely acknowledges her popularity, he generally portrays her work as frivolous. In The Feminization of American Culture, Douglas misinterprets Greenwood’s early equivocations about ‘true womanhood’ in her magazine articles as signs of her utter capitulation to conservative views of gender roles (91). See also Baym, 29. In her description of the tumultuous friendship and literary rivalry between Greenwood and Hawthorne, Baym notes, ‘Hawthorne’s journals and letters single her out as the paradigmatic woman author.’ 2. Charvat excludes Greenwood from his study of literary professionalism partly on the basis of her ‘fluffy columns’ (181). Lyman contends, ‘There is a delightful absurdity about her wit, into which only a genuine woman could fall’ (153). 3. Pattee, 277. 4. See Baym, Homestead, 1–11, and Ginsberg. 5. See Greenwood’s review of her book Merrie England in The Little Pilgrim 2.1 (January 1855): 5. 6. See recent studies of American children’s literature by Clark, SánchezEppler, and Bernstein. 7. See Henry Giles’s blurb on the front inside cover of The Little Pilgrim 4.1 (January 1857). 8. Greenwood to Gamaliel Bailey, 22 September 1851, repr. in National Era 5.40 (2 October 1851): 158. 9. Editorial notice, ‘To the Readers of the National Era’, National Era 6.283 (3 June 1852): 90. 10. Hawthorne to Greenwood, 17 April 1852, in Centenary, 16:532–3. 11. Hawthorne to Greenwood, 17 April 1852, in Centenary, 16:533. 12. Whittier, Review of Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe, National Era 8.373 (23 February 1854). Whittier excerpts substantial quotations from Beecher’s review of the book in the New York Independent.

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Notes to pages 132–136

[ 207

13. Anonymous review of Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe, London Athenaeum 1412 (18 November 1854): 1390–1. 14. Hawthorne to William Ticknor, 20 January 1854, in Centenary, 17:166. 15. Hawthorne to William Ticknor, 6 January 1854, in Centenary, 17:161. 16. Cohen, 643. 17. See Hawthorne, ‘Mrs. Hutchinson’ (1830), first published in the Salem Gazette, reprinted in Centenary, 23:66–7. 18. Hawthorne to William D. Ticknor, 19 January 1855, in Centenary, 17:304. 19. See Hawthorne, The English Notebooks, in Centenary, 21:437, and also Sophia Hawthorne’s letter to Elizabeth Peabody, 8 February 1855, in Centenary, 17:309. Sophia Hawthorne explains her wariness of Greenwood in the following terms, ‘She does not know at all how to enter the sacred precincts of a child’s mind, because she is not herself highminded delicate, sweet or simple – at least I think so.’ Sophia’s words imply that Greenwood has permanently abandoned the ‘sacred precincts’ of the domestic world in her professional pursuit of literary fame and is no longer welcome by the family fireside. In his own letter written to Peabody on the same day, Hawthorne notes that Sophia’s objections to Greenwood are on ‘a moral rather than literary score’, but in his mind, literary success for women is indistinguishable from moral compromise. 20. Nathaniel Hawthorne to Sophia Hawthorne, 18 March 1856, in Centenary, 17:456–7. 21. Hawthorne to Elizabeth Peabody, 8 February 1855, in Centenary, 17:309. 22. Baym, 32. 23. Ginsberg, 192. 24. Stowe wrote to Bailey in March 1851, ‘I have admired and sympathized with the free spirit of Grace Greenwood, and her letters have done my heart good.’ Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture: A Multi-Media Archive: (last accessed 15 July 2012). In her editorial work for the National Era, Greenwood reviewed proof sheets of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in its original serial form (Garrett, 140). 25. For further discussion of Greenwood’s parodic yet serious essay, see Homestead, 1–11. 26. Ginsberg, 190. 27. Greenwood describes ‘True feminine genius’ as a state of ‘perpetual childhood’ in her letter ‘To an Unrecognized Poetess’ in Greenwood Leaves (1850), 310. Douglas bases her assumptions about Greenwood’s essential conservatism on this description as she groups her with others like Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, who found it more expedient to capitulate to stereotypes of ‘True Womanhood’ than to assert the equal right of women and men to seek literary fame (‘The “Scribbling Women” ’, 5, and Feminization, 91). 28. Garrett, 141. As the National Era could not meet Greenwood’s demands for a higher salary for her remaining travel letters, she secured payment from the

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29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

41.

42. 43.

Notes to pages 136–143

Saturday Evening Post instead. The final instalment of ‘Greenwood Leaves from Over the Sea’ published in the National Era was dated 31 March 1853, but Greenwood kept writing travel letters for more than two more months after that. Stowe, Going Abroad, 34, 126. Twain, 27. Fuller, Dispatches, 162. Pratt identifies a ‘contact zone’ as ‘the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict’ (8). Boggs offers a significant corrective to Pratt’s concept of the ‘contact zone’, suggesting that ‘translation allows for the “dominant culture” itself to be hybridized and transculturated,’ essentially making entire nations into ‘contact zones’ (31). I would add to this argument the point that literature that is transatlantic in scope can and should be theorised as a ‘contact’ literature, as it always shows signs of cross-cultural influence, even if, as in Greenwood’s case, the traces of those exchanges are carefully erased. Hawthorne to William D. Ticknor, 6 January 1854, in Centenary, 17:161. Garrett, 141–2. Greenwood and Cushman shared a house in Rome with the American sculptor Harriet Hosmer, a living arrangement to which one reviewer referred as a ‘harem scarem’. For more details, see Thorp, 155–6. Hawthorne to William D. Ticknor, 7 June 1854, Centenary, 17:227. Hawthorne notes that he has received ‘Grace Greenwood’s Haps and Mishaps, which, it appears, she wishes to present to the Queen. I have forwarded it to Mr. Buchanan, who may hand it to her Majesty, if he chooses to make such a fool of himself.’ Garrett, 141. For extensive treatment of Nellie Bly’s journalistic ‘stunts’, see Lutes, 12–38. Bly published her investigative reporting in Ten Days in a Mad-House (1887) and her travel narrative in Nellie Bly’s Book: Around the World in Seventy-Two Days (1890). Kate Field, Hap-Hazard (1873), qtd in Schriber, 182. Garrett, 141–2. Despite the professional associations implied by his name, Lippincott was not related to members of the Philadelphia-based Lippincott publishing dynasty. Instead, he worked as Greenwood’s editorial assistant, and they were estranged soon after their daughter Annie Grace was born in 1855, due to his rumoured financial misconduct and infidelity. For an extensive study of Hale’s editorial career and her leadership of a powerful band of female periodical editors, see Okker. Hale gave Greenwood these words of credit in her encyclopedia of women’s history (624). See Greenwood’s self-review in The Little Pilgrim 2.1 (January 1855): 5. For a study of Greenwood’s editorial work on the magazine in the context of her relationship with her own editor, James T. Fields, see Ginsberg, 208–14.

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Notes to pages 144–148 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

51.

52.

53. 54.

55.

56.

[ 209

Clark, 16, 48. Karcher, 90. Habermas, 45. Habermas, 182–3. Sánchez-Eppler, 53–5. Despite Hawthorne’s scepticism of Greenwood’s professional strategies, he too dreamed of ‘revolutioniz[ing] the whole system of juvenile literature’ and actually profited more from his books for children than from sales of The Scarlet Letter. Greenwood, ‘Prospectus’, The Little Pilgrim 1.1 (October 1853): 8. Ginsberg, 211. Ginsberg observes that Greenwood ‘privately and publicly harangued’ her literary contacts to produce original material for her magazine, and implies that such editorial assertiveness may have pushed Hawthorne to call The Little Pilgrim – and Greenwood herself – ‘humbug[s]’ in a January 1854 letter to Ticknor. On that point, however, I disagree with Ginsberg, as Hawthorne’s objections to Greenwood’s aggressive selfpromotion had deep roots in his 1830 sketch of ‘ink-stained Amazons’ dominating the literary field, were surely fuelled by her tendency to humiliate authors publicly (including Hawthorne himself in her December 1855 issue of The Little Pilgrim) who had not sent in their new material as promised, and evidently reached their tipping point in the wake of her decision to share news of the birth of her daughter in the January and March 1856 issues. Greenwood, ‘Introduction’ to ‘Countries I Have Seen’, The Little Pilgrim 1.1 (October 1853): 1. ‘Countries I Have Seen’ ran as a regular column in the magazine through 1857. In this column, Greenwood developed the model of a brief factual history or travel sketch, followed by a short fictional narrative that she used in her children’s books about Europe, Merrie England (1855), Stories and Legends of Travel, for Children (1857), Bonnie Scotland (1861), and Stories and Sights of France and Italy (1867), all of which were published by Ticknor & Fields. This price put Greenwood’s brand of transatlantic knowledge within financial reach of the growing American middle class, particularly in the region that she called the ‘prairie’ West, or what we would now consider the Midwest. Greenwood claims that the magazine is relatively inexpensive in comparison to other ‘juvenile publications’ of its kind. See ‘Inducements for Subscribing to The Little Pilgrim’, The Little Pilgrim 4.1 (January 1857): 8. Greenwood, ‘Salutatory’, The Little Pilgrim 1.1 (October 1853): 1. Mary Frances T---, ‘Freedom’s Echo’, The Little Pilgrim 1.9 (September 1854): 66. Greenwood began renumbering the magazine from the beginning in January 1854. For the Little Pilgrim’s itinerary, see The Little Pilgrim 2.1 (January 1855): 8, and for Hall’s utopian pronouncement, see The Little Pilgrim 1.2 (February 1854): 12. Lippincott presents this blurb as ‘Just Praise No Flattery’ in The Little Pilgrim 1.3 (March 1854): 21.

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Notes to pages 148–153

57. For more on ‘mother tongues’ and American multilingualism, see Boggs, 19–20. 58. Anonymous (‘A Doll’s Grandmamma’), ‘The Well-Educated Doll’, The Little Pilgrim 2.4 (April 1855): 30. 59. Greenwood, ‘To Boys and Girls Everywhere’, The Little Pilgrim 1.2 (November 1853): 12. This strange missive is preceded by an announcement of Greenwood’s October marriage to Lippincott, demonstrating the extent to which personal matters and professional imperatives overlapped in her editorial work. 60. Margaret Fuller to Eugene Fuller, 9 March 1845, in Letters, 4:56, and Margaret Fuller to Richard Fuller, 2 March 1845, in Letters, 4:54. 61. Greenwood states, ‘We want fifty thousand subscribers before the close of the coming year! We talk plainly, because we feel earnestly.’ See Greenwood, ‘What We Want and What We Shall Do To Deserve It’, The Little Pilgrim 1.3 (December 1853): 20. 62. For Greenwood’s appeal to her young ‘agents’, see ‘To Boys and Girls Everywhere’, The Little Pilgrim 1.2 (November 1853): 12. For Greenwood’s image of Fields as an adult ‘Pilgrim’, see The Little Pilgrim 1.3 (December 1853): 21. 63. The Little Pilgrim 3.12 (December 1856): 92, and 1.12 (December 1854): 93. Greenwood’s bluntness about the monetary aspect of her relationship with a larger community of mothers presents an intriguing contrast with Stowe, whose explicit appeals to mothers in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) sought to elicit political sympathy, not generate personal revenue. 64. Whitman, Poetry and Prose, 26. 65. Louise E. Vickroy, ‘Answer to Love Me, Love My Pilgrim’, The Little Pilgrim (February 1854): 16. 66. Charvat, 181. 67. Greenwood includes Giles’s blurb on the inside front cover of The Little Pilgrim 4.1 (January 1857). His words stand as a general advertisement for the magazine and for the list of her books detailed above the blurb, including Haps, which she immodestly promotes as ‘A brilliant and admirably drawn narration of the author’s residence abroad, containing sparkling pictures of men and things as she saw them. A most captivating volume, which has gone rapidly through numerous editions.’ 68. Charvat, 297. 69. Pattee, 11. Notes to Chapter 6 1. For a discussion of Lazarus’s political and religious concerns, see Cavitch. 2. Lazarus to Emerson, 27 June 1868, in The Letters of Emma Lazarus, 7. 3. Lazarus, 29. Lazarus published an anonymous article on ‘American Literature’ in The Critic 1.12 (18 June 1881), in which she traced a national line

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Notes to pages 154–157

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

[ 211

of literary descent from Emerson through Thoreau, John Burroughs, and Whitman, among others. Lazarus’s copy of Rossetti’s Poems by Walt Whitman is held in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Whitman, Poems, 7. Whitman, review of Leaves of Grass in the United States Review (1855), in Clarke, 2:11. Pound, ‘What I Feel About Walt Whitman’ (1909), in Clarke, 3:57. Leo Marx made Whitman a national institution in The Americanness of Walt Whitman, which includes essays by John Jay Chapman, George Santayana, Van Wyck Brooks, D. H. Lawrence, and R. W. B. Lewis. Further contributions to Whitmanian American studies have been made by Greenspan, Bauerlein, David S. Reynolds (Walt Whitman’s America), Price, and Blake. Allen and Folsom, eds, Walt Whitman and the World (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995), 2. In their introduction to the volume, Allen and Folsom comment on Whitman’s power to define nationality both at home and abroad. ‘Since no American writer has been more influential in more nations than Whitman,’ they claim, ‘the materials in this book demonstrate some important ways that American culture, as articulated in Whitman’s work, has helped redefine older and more established national traditions and how it has helped emerging nations define themselves.’ This assertion hinges on the assumption of a direct relationship between ‘Whitman’s work’ and ‘American culture’ as a whole. Frank, Our America (1919), in Clarke, 3:126; Stovall, 244. For an extended study of Whitman’s establishment of his literary authority in the transatlantic world, see Leypoldt. Leypoldt defines ‘Whitmanian authority’ as ‘a discursive space that regulates the enunciation of nationality within professionalizing sites of cultural production’ (237). My work in this chapter complements Leypoldt’s by discussing Whitman’s exertion of cultural authority not in his poetry, but rather in the editorial and journalistic methods he used to promote his verse. Price, 4. Fishkin, From Fact to Fiction, 33. Blake, xiii. Whitman, Poetry and Prose, 14. The connections between Franklin and Whitman’s careers as printers have been explored by Drexler. Whitman, review of Leaves of Grass in the Brooklyn Daily Times (1856), in Clarke, 2:23. Whitman claims neglect by the publishing world in another anonymous article, ‘Walt Whitman’s Actual American Position’ (1876). He makes the second statement in his 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass (Whitman, Poetry and Prose, 8). Fishkin, From Fact to Fiction, 15, 29. Brasher covers Whitman’s editorial work

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20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42.

43.

Notes to pages 157–164

from 1846 to 1848 as he paints a more complete picture of a young journalist ‘devoted to his profession’ (13). Whitman, Walt Whitman of the New York Aurora, 112–13. Whitman, Walt Whitman of the New York Aurora, 117. Whitman, Walt Whitman of the New York Aurora, 82. Whitman, review of Leaves of Grass in the United States Review (1855), in Clarke, 2:11. David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 154–93. Emerson, CW, 2:31. Diana Taylor contrasts ‘the archive of supposedly enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice / knowledge (i.e., spoken language, dance, sports, ritual)’ (19–20). As I borrow her terms, I have stretched her distinction between the printed word and the act of performance slightly to fit my description of how Whitman’s ‘ephemeral’ journalistic writings for a series of penny dailies inform his more studied contributions in poetry and prose to the print archive of American culture. Clarke, 2:22. Clarke, 2:24. Clarke, 2:16. Clarke, 2:24. Whitman, Poetry and Prose, 26. Leo Marx, v. Whitman, Specimen Days in America, 311–12. Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1856), 358. A useful point of comparison here is Fuller’s 1844 review of Emerson’s Essays: Second Series, in which she asserts, ‘History will inscribe his name as a father of the country, for he is one who pleads her cause against herself’ (Critic, 2). Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1856), 345. Clarke, 2:50. Clarke, 2:51. Blake considers Whitman’s celebrity as an essentially national phenomenon. In contrast, I argue that Whitman could not have become the celebrated poet that he was without benefiting from the reverberations of positive reviews from across the Atlantic. The more ‘American’ he seemed to foreign readers, the more likely he was to be perceived as a national figure at home. Clarke, 2:52. Clarke, 2:53. Norton and Griswold reviewed Leaves of Grass in Putnam’s Monthly (September 1855) and the New York Criterion (10 November 1855), respectively. Whitman included Norton’s review in his 1856 ‘Leaves-Droppings’. Clarke, 2:93–4. The editorial suggestions (or rather, orders) that Whitman gave Rossetti included a format for the title page and the accurate numbering of the sections of his poems. He particularly wanted to avoid the impression

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Notes to pages 164–174

44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

[ 213

that the edition was an ‘expurgated’ version rather than a selection of his works. Due to the poem’s objectionable content, however, the selection did not include ‘Song of Myself’. Rossetti, ‘Walt Whitman’s Poems’, New York Citizen (10 August 1867). The original article was published in the Chronicle on 6 July. Blake, 202. Freiligrath, ‘Walt Whitman’, Allgemeine Zeitung (24 April 1868), in Clarke, 2:89–90. Blake identifies Gilchrist as Whitman’s first ‘fan’ in the current sense of the term, as she formed an intense psychological attachment to the poet and envisioned a sexual relationship with him (167). Carpenter perceived Whitman primarily as a figure who authorised a transatlantic homoerotic culture. Whitman’s influential role in the creation of a community of sexual affiliation that transcended national boundaries would later be acknowledged by such writers as Oscar Wilde, E. M. Forster, and W. H. Auden. For further discussion of this register of influence, see Woods, Price (56–69), and Thomas (161–91). Fulkerson, 71. Swinburne, ‘On Walt Whitman’ (Under the Microscope, 1872), in Clarke, 3:15. Clarke, 3:17. Clarke, 3:18. Swinburne, ‘Whitmania’, Fortnightly Review 48 (August 1887), in Clarke, 3:20–6. Swinburne, ‘To Walt Whitman in America’ (1871), in Perlman, et al., 5–7. See Blake, 202, and Whitman, ‘Walt Whitman’s Actual American Position’. O’Connor, ‘The Good Gray Poet’, in Clarke, 1:50. See Blake, 204, and Pannapacker, 54. Pannapacker comments on the West Jersey Press affair as a key episode in Whitman’s self-promotional campaign to persuade his transatlantic audience that he was being persecuted by the American literary establishment. In order to counter these accusations and to contribute to his financial well-being, Whitman’s supporters arranged for him to give a series of public lectures on Abraham Lincoln that eventually solidified the poet’s American reputation. Whitman, ‘Walt Whitman’. Balakian comments on the divergence of his reading from other scholars’ more optimistic views of the text (71). Blake, 207–8. Thoreau, 225. For a discussion of Whitman and American studies, see Arac, 44–5. Whitman, Poetry and Prose, 46. Whitman, Poetry and Prose, 568. Whitman, Poetry and Prose, 573. Greenspan, ix. Blake also has noted that the public response to Whitman’s pleas for

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68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81.

Notes to pages 174–186

sympathy and support (particularly in the case of the 1876 West Jersey Press affair) illuminates the extent to which ‘nations had a role in constructing their poets’ fame’ (209). Leo Marx, v; Price, 5. Leo Marx, v. Trachtenberg, 195. Whitman, Poetry and Prose, 49. Cutler, 94, 135–136, 139. Trachtenberg, 195. Pound, ‘What I Feel About Walt Whitman’, in Clarke, 3:57. Lawrence, 4–5. Pound, ‘A Pact (London, 1917)’, in Clarke, 3:59. Pound, ‘Patria Mia’ (1913), in Selected Prose: 1909–1965, 123. Pound, Selected Prose, 124. For a more extended study of Whitman’s role in the establishment of American studies, see McPhail. In contrast to McPhail, I emphasise how Whitman shaped his own national reputation by laying the professional groundwork for American studies rather than how he was elevated to national fame by the convergence of twentieth-century critical interests. Clarke, 3:126. Trachtenberg, 204–6. Notes to Afterword

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Pound, ‘A Pact (London, 1917)’, in Clarke, 3:59. Gopnik, Americans in Paris, xiii. Gopnik, Paris to the Moon, 14. Gopnik, Americans in Paris, 91. Gopnik, Paris to the Moon, 31. Gopnik, Paris to the Moon, 233, 275. Gopnik, Paris to the Moon, 238. Marshall, ‘Language is the Only Homeland’, 24. Marshall, Triangular Road, 101. Marshall, Triangular Road, 163. Douglass, Autobiographies, 367. Marshall, Triangular Road, 110–11. Gopnik, Paris to the Moon, 15. Marshall, Triangular Road, 13. Marshall, Triangular Road, 25, 27. Gopnik, Paris to the Moon, 175. Gilbert, 63. Gopnik, Paris to the Moon, 251. Marshall, Triangular Road, 7, 11. Gopnik, Americans in Paris, xiii.

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Notes to pages 187–188 21. 22. 23. 24.

[ 215

Emerson, CW, 5:130. Marshall, Triangular Road, 151, 164. Bailyn, 9. Charles Johnson, 79.

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Seelye, John, ‘Attic Shape: Dusting Off Evangeline’, Virginia Quarterly Review 60.1 (1984): 21–44. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers. New York: Norton, 1977. Sorby, Angela, Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865–1917. Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005. Sowder, William J., Emerson’s Impact on the British Isles and Canada. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1966. Stauffer, John, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Steele, Jeffrey, Transfiguring America: Myth, Ideology, and Mourning in Margaret Fuller’s Writing. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Stepto, Robert B., ‘Sharing the Thunder: The Literary Exchanges of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Bibb, and Frederick Douglass’. In New Essays on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Eric J. Sundquist, 135–53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. ––, ‘Storytelling in Early Afro-American Fiction: Frederick Douglass’ The Heroic Slave’. In Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass, ed. William L. Andrews, 108–19. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991. Stevens, Laura M., ‘Transatlanticism Now’, American Literary History 16.1 (2004): 93–102. Stovall, Floyd, ‘Walt Whitman and the American Tradition’. In Critical Essays on Walt Whitman, ed. James Woodress, 244–52. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983. Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Elizabeth Ammons. New York: Norton, 1994. Stowe, William W., Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Sundquist, Eric J., To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge, MA: Belknap at Harvard University Press, 1993. Sweeney, Fionnghuala, Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007. Tamarkin, Elisa, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Taylor, Andrew, Thinking America: New England Intellectuals and the Varieties of American Identity. Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2010. Taylor, Diana, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Teichgraeber, Richard F., Sublime Thoughts / Penny Wisdom: Situating Emerson and Thoreau in the American Market. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Thomas, M. Wynn, Transatlantic Connections: Whitman U.S., Whitman U.K. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005. Thoreau, Henry David, Collected Essays and Poems, ed. Elizabeth Hall Witherell. New York: Library of America, 2001.

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INDEX

abolition movement see Douglass, Frederick; slavery Acadians, in Longfellow’s Evangeline, 40–3 African American national landscape, 87–91 Alighieri, Dante see Dante Alighieri ‘American Civilization’ (lecture) (Emerson), 118–19, 121 ‘American Literature’ (essay) (Fuller), 37, 51 ‘American National Literature’ (essay) (Whitman), 174–5 American Renaissance, 17–18, 90–1, 127; see also cultural revolution; United States citizenship ‘The American Scholar’ (lecture) (Emerson), 23, 101, 106 American studies, 154, 160, 172, 176 ‘Americanism’, of Whitman, 154–5, 158–9, 160, 171–5, 177–9 British reviewers on, 162, 165, 166, 167–70 Americans in Paris (Gopnik), 17, 186 Anderson, Amanda, 8 Anderson, Benedict, 9, 15, 77 ‘The Anglo-American’ (lecture) (Emerson), 116–17 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 8, 48 Arac, Jonathan, 172 Arcturus (journal), 39 Armitage, David, 5 Arnold, Matthew, 8 audience see readers Auld, Thomas, 81 authenticity and fraud, 14, 32, 132–3, 139–40, 145

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authorship, 9–18 and editorial role, 91–8, 151–2, 156–60 see also journalism; professionalism Autobiography (Franklin), 12, 149–50, 156 ‘A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads’ (essay) (Whitman), 175 Bailey, Gamaliel, 128, 130, 135 Bailyn, Bernard, 5, 187 Bajan ‘Mother Poets’, 183–4 Balakian, Peter, 171 ‘The Balzar Wars’ (essay) (Gopnik), 183 Barbados (country), Marshall and the contemporary Atlantic diaspora, 183–5 Baym, Nina, 128, 134 Beecher, Henry Ward, 132 Bennoch, Francis, 131 Berkshire County Whig (newspaper), 78 black citizenship, slavery and anti-slavery, 85, 96, 97 community (Timbucto), 95–6 identity, 3, 86–91 intellectualism, 84–5, 91–2 press, 93 see also citizenship; Douglass, Frederick; identity; nationality; slavery Blake, David Haven, 156, 164, 168, 171 Bly, Nellie, 142 Boggs, Colleen Glenney, 148 Bosco, Ronald, 117 Boston, literary culture in, 13, 15, 49–50 Bowdoin College, Longfellow at, 21, 22, 24, 25, 28, 29 Brickhouse, Anna, 6

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Index Britain Douglass and his supporters in, 2–3, 74–5, 95 English national identity, 102–3 Greenwood’s visits to, 131–2, 134–5, 136, 140 Whitman’s British readers and reviewers, 160–70 see also London Brooklyn (New York), Marshall and the contemporary Atlantic diaspora, 184 Brown, William Wells, 87–8 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 47, 140–1 Browning, Robert, 140–1 Buchanan, Robert, 169 Buell, Lawrence, 21, 100, 120 Burroughs, John, ‘Notes on Walt Whitman’, 169 Byron, George Gordon Noel, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (poem), 62 Cambria (transatlantic steamship), 77 Caribbean nation, Marshall and the contemporary Atlantic diaspora, 183–5 Carlyle, Thomas, 47, 108, 165 Carnival, 142 Carpenter, Edward, 166 Castronovo, Russ, 74–5 Cayton, Mary Kupiec, 124 celebrity Greenwood, 130–1, 134, 140–1, 145, 150–1 Whitman, 156, 162 Channing, William Henry Fuller’s correspondence with, 62 Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (with Clarke and Emerson), 53–4 Charvat, William, 10, 150, 151 Chevigny, Bell Gale, 47 Child, Lydia Maria, 5–6, 12, 77, 128, 144 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (poem) (Byron), 62 children’s literature, Greenwood, 16, 129, 132–4, 143–52 Christus: A Mystery (poem) (Longfellow), 36 ‘Circles’ (essay) (Emerson), 120 citizenship American, 8–10, 17–18, 48–9, 64, 77 Douglass’s exclusion from, 49, 74, 75, 77, 91, 96–7 dual, 8, 49, 58, 61–2 Emerson, and nationality, 103, 105–9, 110–11, 116–17, 119–21, 126 Fuller’s transnational and dual, 6, 8, 47, 48–9, 58, 61–2, 63–4 Greenwood, citizenship and nationality, 138–9 in Longfellow’s Evangeline, 39, 40–1 slavery and black citizenship, 85, 96, 97 Whitman, Pound and world citizenship, 177–8

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and women’s rights, 63–4 see also Americanism; identity; nationality; ‘world’ citizenship Clark, Beverly, 143–4 Clark, Lewis Gaylord, 39–40 Clarke, James Freeman, Henry Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, 53–4 Claybaugh, Amanda, 4 Cohen, Lara Langer, 133 commercialism and contemporary transatlanticism, 185, 187 cosmopolitanism and morality, 7–8 Greenwood, 127–8, 132–3, 136, 137–8, 139–40, 142, 149–52: The Little Pilgrim and juvenile public sphere, 143–52 Greenwood, 127–8, 132–3, 136, 137–8, 139–40, 142, 149–52 Whitman, 2, 133, 151, 154–5, 160–3, 164–70 see also journalism; transatlantic press; Whitman, Walt comparative literary studies, Longfellow and European literature, 21–2, 24–5 Concord (Massachusetts) Emerson’s political lectures in, 114 Hawthorne in, 131 contemporary transatlantic professionalism, 17, 181–8 conversational journalism, Fuller, 46, 48, 49–53 ‘Conversations’ series (Fuller), 49 Conversations with Goethe (Eckermann, translated by Fuller), 54 cooking, and contemporary transatlanticism, 183, 185–6 Cooper, James Fenimore, 12 cosmopolitanism, 6, 7–8 and contemporary transatlantic professionalism, 17, 181–8 Emerson and world citizenship, 103 Fuller, and conversational journalism, 46–7, 48–9, 52, 59 Fuller, and cosmopolitan patriotism, 61–2, 64–70 Greenwood and literary celebrity, 130–1, 147 Longfellow, education and national literature, 22–5 see also transcendentalism; transnationalism Cours de langue française (textbook) (Longfellow), 25 The Courtship of Miles Standish (poem) (Longfellow), 39 Cox, Revd Samuel, 74–5 Creole (US slave ship), 71, 72, 83–4 Critic (London journal), 162 critical reviews see literary criticism; reviews ‘The Cross of Snow’ (poem) (Longfellow), 45

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cultural blending, in Greenwood’s juvenile literature, 147–8 cultural exchange, transatlantic, 4–5 cultural revolution, in Emerson’s Nature, 100–1; see also American Renaissance culture see literary and print culture; popular culture Cummins, Maria, The Lamplighter (novel), 133 Curtis, George, 63 Cutler, Edward S., 177 Dante Alighieri and Longfellow, 14, 35–6 Divine Comedy: Longfellow’s lectures on, 29, 36; Longfellow’s translation of, 20, 35–6 Emerson on, 102 Purgatorio, Longfellow’s translation of, 30–1 democracy and contemporary transatlanticism, 183 Fuller and the Roman Republic, 67–8 Democratic Vistas (prose collection) (Whitman), 154, 171–2, 174, 177 Dharwadker, Vinay, 7 The Dial (journal), 49, 50, 54, 79 Dimock, Wai Chee, 9, 100, 122 Divine Comedy (poem) (Dante, translated by Longfellow), 20, 35–6 ‘domestic epics’, 43 Douglass, Frederick, transatlantic politics and print culture, 2–3, 6, 15, 71–98 human property, ownership and identity, 81–6 racialising the national landscape, 86–91 temperance movement and slavery, 2–3, 74–6 as transatlantic editor, 91–8, 169–70 visits Britain, 2–3, 74–5, 95 compared with others: Emerson, 72, 75, 79, 80, 87, 94, 104, 110; Fuller, 73, 76–7, 90, 96; Marshall, 184; Whitman, 72, 87, 166–7, 169–70 exclusion from citizenship, 49, 74, 75, 75, 77, 91, 96–7 newspapers: Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 3, 72, 85–6, 91–2; North Star, 72, 91 speeches: ‘England Should Lead the cause of Emancipation’, 79; ‘Farewell to the British People’, 81–2, 86–7, 90; ‘My Opposition to War’, 78; ‘The Right to Criticize American Institutions’, 94; ‘The Skin Aristocracy in America’, 84; ‘Slavery As It Now Exists’, 82; ‘Texas Slavery, and American Prosperity’, 85–6; ‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?’, 79–80, 92, 97

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works: The Heroic Slave (novel), 71–2, 83–4, 90; Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 73–4, 75, 92, 96, 97; My Bondage and My Freedom, 3, 74, 76, 92, 95; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 2–3, 14, 56, 76, 81 Du Bois, W. E. B., The Souls of Black Folk, 88 dual citizenship, 8, 49, 58, 61–2 Duyckinck, Evert, 13, 39, 53–4, 187 Library of American Books series, 51, 54, 117, 187 Eat, Pray, Love (Gilbert), 185 Eckermann, Johann Peter, Conversations with Goethe, 54 Edinburgh, Greenwood’s visit to, 137 editorial role, and authorship, 91–8, 151–2, 156–60; see also journalism; reviews education Douglass’s project of national reform, 94–5 Fuller’s theory of conversational journalism, 50–1 Greenwood’s The Little Pilgrim, 144, 149–50 Longfellow and ‘didacticism’, 19, 20, 25–6, 31–2, 32–3 Longfellow and university literary curriculum reform, 21–2, 23–5 Elements of French Grammar (textbook) (Longfellow), 25 Emancipation Proclamation, 121 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, national identity, universalism and individualism, 6, 16, 99–126 anti-slavery, and changing views of patriotism, 111–18 citizenship and nationality, 103, 105–9, 110–11, 116–17, 119–21, 126 English Traits, England the US compared, 104–11 Lincoln and poetic politics, 118–26 on Wordsworth, 107 and others: Douglass, 72, 75, 79, 80, 87, 94, 104, 110; Fuller, 47, 52, 58, 63, 104, 110, 112, 116, 119–20, 121; Greenwood, 104; Lazarus, 153; Longfellow, 24, 35, 45, 104, 110; Whitman, 35, 104, 110, 121, 155, 158, 161, 162 essays: ‘Circles’, 120; ‘Europe and European Books’, 79; ‘Experience’, 104; ‘The Poet’, 50, 101, 115, 122, 161; ‘Self-Reliance’, 106–7, 110, 158 lectures: ‘American Civilization’, 118–19, 121; ‘The American Scholar’, 23, 101, 106; ‘The Anglo-American’, 116–17; ‘England’, 103; ‘Fortune of the Republic’, 80, 124–5; ‘London’, 103

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Index works: English Traits, 102–3, 104–11, 112, 113, 116, 117, 119, 122, 162; Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (with Channing and Clarke), 53–4; Nature, 5, 100–1, 102, 109; Parnassus (anthology), 35; Representative Men, 102 emigration / integration, slavery and black citizenship, 85, 96, 97 ‘emotionalism’, of Longfellow, 19, 20, 36–7, 43–5 England Emerson compares England and US in English Traits, 102–3, 104–11 Emerson’s lectures in London, 103, 111 Fuller as Tribune correspondent in, 57–8, 58–9 Greenwood in, 130–1, 134–5, 136, 140 national identity, 102–3 see also Britain; London ‘England’ (lecture) (Emerson), 103 ‘England Should Lead the cause of Emancipation’ (speech) (Douglass), 79 English Notebooks (travelogue) (Hawthorne), 131 English Traits (Emerson), 102–3, 104–11, 112, 113, 116, 117, 119, 122, 162 ‘English Writers on America’ (essay) (Irving), 165 The Estray (poetry anthology) (Longfellow), 26 Europe and antebellum writers, 8–9 Fuller in, as Tribune correspondent, 47, 56–64: her ‘cosmopolitan patriotism’, 64–70 Greenwood’s travels in, 128, 130–2, 134–42: recounted in The Little Pilgrim, 145–8 and present-day transatlanticism, 183, 185, 186–8 see also Britain; England; Ireland; Italy ‘Europe and European Books’ (essay) (Emerson), 79 European literature Fuller as Tribune literary critic, 53–6 Longfellow, and comparative literary studies, 21–2, 24–5 Longfellow as anthologist or plagiarist, 31–7 Longfellow’s international ‘textbooks’, 25–31 Evangeline (poem) (Longfellow), 14–15, 20, 37, 39, 40–5 Evelev, John, 12 exceptionalism, 9 ‘Experience’ (essay) (Emerson), 104 Fahrmeir, Andreas, 48–9 Faist, Thomas, 49 Fanuzzi, Robert, 93 ‘Farewell to the British People’ (speech) (Douglass), 81–2, 86–7, 90 Faust (play) (Goethe), 29, 30 Fern, Fanny, Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Port-Folio, 128

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Field, Kate, Hap-Hazard (travelogue), 142 Fields, James T., 130, 131, 149 Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, 89, 155 Florence, Greenwood’s visit to, 140–1 food, and contemporary transatlanticism, 183, 185–6 ‘Footsteps of Angels’ (poem) (Longfellow), 20 ‘Fortune of the Republic’ (lecture) (Emerson), 80, 124–5 Fourier, Charles, 56 France invasion of Italy, 69 Paris and present-day transatlanticism, 183, 185, 186 Frank, Waldo, 154 Our America, 180 Franklin, Benjamin, Autobiography, 12, 149–50, 156 fraud and authenticity, 14, 32, 132–3, 139–40, 145 Frederick Douglass’ Paper (newspaper), 3, 72, 85–6, 91–2 Freiligrath, Ferdinand, 166 Frost, Robert, 12 Fugitive Slave Law, 16, 73, 89, 112, 114–15 Fuller, Margaret, 6, 15, 46–70 and American tourism in Europe, 138 and citizenship, 6, 8, 47, 48–9, 58, 61–2, 63–4 and conversational journalism, 49–53 ‘Conversations’ series, 49 as linguist and translator, 54–5 as literary critic, and United States social issues, 53–6 materialism and transatlanticism, 182–3 memorial to, Mount Auburn Cemetery, 64 and slavery, 113 as transcendentalist, 62–3 as Tribune correspondent in England and Italy, and European nation-building, 56–64, 116, 119–20 the United States, and cosmopolitan patriotism, 64–70 and others: Douglass, 73, 76–7, 90, 96; Emerson, 47, 52, 58, 63, 104, 110, 112, 116, 119–20, 121; Gopnik, 182–3; Greenwood, 138, 149; James 46–7, Longfellow, 24, 32–3, 33–4, Mazzini, 58–9, Mickiewicz, 58, 60; Whitman, 170, 174–5 journalism: ‘Items of Foreign Gossip’, 54; ‘Things and Thoughts in Europe’, 65 works: ‘American Literature’ (essay), 15, 37, 51; Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe (translation), 54; Papers on Literature and Art, 13, 51, 54

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Garrison, William Lloyd, 3, 76, 95 Gartner, Matthew, 20 Geison, Gerald L., 11 geography see landscape, American German literature and culture, and Longfellow’s Hyperion, 29–30 Gilbert, Elizabeth, Eat, Pray, Love, 185 Gilchrist, Anne, 166 Giles, Henry, 150–1 Giles, Paul, 112, 123 Gilroy, Paul, 3, 72, 80 Ginsberg, Lesley, 128, 135, 145 Godey’s Lady’s Book (magazine), 127–8, 130, 143 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von and Fuller, 54 and Longfellow, 29, 30, 35 Faust (play), 29, 30 Goldsmith, Oliver, The Vicar of Wakefield (novel, translated into French by Longfellow), 25 ‘The Good Gray Poet’ (O’Connor), 169 Good-Bye My Fancy (prose collection) (Whitman), 170, 175 Gopnik, Adam, 17, 182–3, 185 Americans in Paris, 186 ‘The Balzar Wars’ (essay), 183 Paris to the Moon, 182 Gougeon, Len, 125 ‘The Great Nation of Futurity’ (essay) (O’Sullivan), 171 Greeley, Horace, 49, 50, 54, 68, 78 Greenspan, Ezra, 174 Greenwood, Grace (Sarah Jane Lippincott), literary professionalism and commercial success citizenship and nationality, 138–9 the European tour and travel writing, 134–42 Hawthorne and female journalistic achievement, 129, 132–4, 143–52 The Little Pilgrim and the juvenile public sphere, 129, 132–4, 143–52 compared with others, 128, 140, 147–8, 151: Emerson, 104; Fuller, 138, 149, Whitman, 140, 150, 151 works: ‘Greenwood Leaves from Over the Sea’ (travel dispatches), 128, 130, 135, 143; Greenwood Leaves (letters and short fiction), 128, 130; Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe (travelogue), 129, 131–2, 135, 136, 137, 139, 140–1, 142, 145; The Little Pilgrim (children’s magazine), 129, 132, 133–4, 139–40, 143–52; ‘Love Me, Love My Pilgrim’ (poem), 150; Merrie England (children’s travelogue), 143 ‘Greenwood Leaves from Over the Sea’ (travel dispatches) (Greenwood), 128, 130, 135, 143

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Greenwood Leaves (letters and short fiction) (Greenwood), 128, 130 Griffiths, Julia, 72, 95 Griswold, Rufus, The Poets and Poetry of America, 31, 87, 163, 187 Gruesz, Kristen Silva, 6, 20 Habermas, Jürgen, 144 Hafiz, 122 Hale, Sarah Josepha, 143 Hall, Anna Maria Fielding, 147 Hap-Hazard (travelogue) (Field), 142 ‘happiness’, pursuit of, and contemporary transatlantic culture, 182–3, 185–7 Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe (travelogue) (Greenwood), 129, 131–2, 135, 136, 137, 139, 140–1, 142, 145 Haralson, Eric L., 20 Harvard College, Longfellow at, 21, 28–9 Harvard lectures, 30, 36–7 Haskell, Thomas, 11 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 12, 67, 127 and Greenwood, 16, 127, 129–34, 140, 145 works: English Notebooks (travelogue), 131; The Marble Faun (novel), 67 Hawthorne, Sophia, 133–4, 149–50 The Heroic Slave (novel) (Douglass), 71–2, 83–4, 90 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 101 Homestead, Melissa J., 128 Howe, Irving, 100 Howitt, William, 161–2 Hughes, Langston, 185 humour, in Greenwood’s travel writing, 140, 141 Hutchings, Kevin, 6 Hutton, Frankie, 93, 97 ‘Hymn to the Night’ (poem) (Longfellow), 30 Hyperion (fictional travelogue) (Longfellow), 26, 29–30 ‘Idea for a Universal History . . .’ (essay) (Kant), 48 identity black, 3, 86–91 ‘composite’, and literary nationalism, 37–8 concepts of American national identity, 17–18: contemporary, 183, 184, 185, 187; Douglass, 17–18, 72–3, 86–91, 92–3; Fuller, 65–7; Greenwood, 146–8 see also ‘Americanism’; citizenship; Emerson, Ralph Waldo; nationality individualism, Emerson and national identity, 101 The Innocents Abroad (travelogue) (Twain), 138 integration / emigration, slavery and black citizenship, 85, 96, 97

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Index intellectualism, black, 84–5, 91–2 internationalism, and Longfellow, 20–1, 31–2, 187; see also cosmopolitanism; literary nationalism; nation-building; transnationalism Ireland Douglass in, 74–5 Greenwood in, 136, 139 Irmscher, Christoph, 31 Irving, Washington, 136 ‘English Writers on America’ (essay), 165 Sketch-Book (essays and short fiction), 27 Italy Fuller and dual citizenship, 8, 49, 58, 61–2 Fuller’s allegiance to, 60–1, 63, 66 Fuller’s support for Italian nationalism, 48–9, 56, 58, 60, 63, 67–9 Greenwood’s travels in, 137, 140–1 ‘Items of Foreign Gossip’ (newspaper column) (Fuller), 54 Jackson, Virginia, 32 James, Henry, 174 on Fuller, 46–7 on Longfellow, 45 Johnson, Carl L., 28 Johnson, Charles, 188 journalism Fuller and conversational journalism, 15, 46, 48, 49–53 Gopnik, Marshall, and contemporary transatlanticism, 182–3 Greenwood, and literary professionalism, 127–8, 128–9, 151–2 Whitman, poetic news and self-introductions, 155–60 see also authorship; Douglass, Frederick; Fuller, Margaret; Greenwood, Grace; professionalism; transatlantic press juvenile literature, Greenwood, 16, 129, 132–4, 143–52 Juvenile Miscellany (magazine), 12, 144 Kant, Immanuel, 7 ‘Idea for a Universal History . . .’ (essay), 48 Kaplan, Amy, 37, 43 Karcher, Carolyn, 144 Kavanagh (novel) (Longfellow), 13, 38–40 Kivisto, Peter, 49 The Lamplighter (novel) (Cummins), 133 landscape, American Douglass’s ‘racialising’ of, 86–91 ‘emotional’, in Longfellow’s Evangeline, 40–3, 45 Whitman and literary nationalism, 171–2

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languages, modern European, 6 Fuller as critic and translator, 54, 68 Longfellow and comparative literary studies, 21–2, 24–5 Longfellow and modern language teaching, 25–6 see also European literature Lazarus, Emma, ‘The New Colossus’ (poem), 153–4 Leaves of Grass (poetry anthology) (Whitman) and Americanism, 175 1855 edition: preface, 150; reviews by others, 35, 161–3; self-authored reviews, 154, 155–6, 158–60, 163, 165, 171 1856 edition, reviews, 161 1868 London edition, 154, 161–3, 164–6 1876 Centennial Edition, preface, 1–2 Levine, Robert, 96 Lewis, R. W. B., 39 Lewisohn, Ludwig, 19 The Liberator (newspaper), 3 Library of American Books series, 51, 54, 117, 187 Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Douglass), 73–4, 75, 92, 96, 97 Lincoln, Abraham, 103, 118–19, 121, 122–3, 124 Lippincott, Leander, 143 Lippincott, Sarah Jane Clarke (Grace Greenwood) see Greenwood, Grace literary and print culture in Boston, 13, 15, 49–50 contemporary transatlantic, 182–8 in Germany, 29–30 in New York, 13, 39–40, 49, 57, 118, 155 literary criticism, of Longfellow, 21–5, 36–7 literary nationalism, 3, 9, 13 and ‘composite identity’, 37–8 and contemporary transatlantic culture, 186–7 Douglass, and slave narratives, 85–91 Longfellow, and internationalism, 21, 30, 32, 34–5, 37–45 transatlantic modernist commentaries on Whitman, 177–80 see also landscape, American; nation-building; nationality; Whitman, Walt; Young America literary professionalism see journalism; professionalism The Little Pilgrim (children’s magazine) (Greenwood), 129, 132, 133–4, 139–40, 143–52 ‘Little Pilgrim’ (fictional character), 146–7, 148–9 Liverpool (Lancashire, England), Hawthorne and Greenwood in, 131

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London Emerson’s lectures in, 103, 111 Fuller in, 57–8, 58–9 Greenwood in, 130–1 World Temperance Convention (1846), 74, 75, 78 see also Britain; England ‘London’ (lecture) (Emerson), 103 London Leader (newspaper), 163 London Weekly Dispatch (newspaper), 162 Longfellow, Fanny Appleton, 29, 45 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 14–15, 19–45 as anthologist or plagiarist, 31–7 citizenship, in Evangeline, 39, 40–1 and comparative literary studies, 21–2, 24–5 ‘didacticism’ of, 19, 20, 25–6, 31–2, 32–3 globalism and internationalism of, 20–1, 31–2, 187 Harvard lectures, 28–9, 30, 36–7 ‘moral messages’, 26, 33–4, 40–2, 45 nationality, universality and the emotional landscape of Evangeline, 14–15, 37–45 ‘sentimentalism’ and emotionalism, 19, 20, 36–7, 43–5 as teacher and literary critic, 21–5, 36–7 his teaching and international ‘textbooks’, 25–31 compared with others: Emerson, 24, 35, 45, 104, 110; Fuller, 24; Irving, 27; Poe, 32; Whitman, 20–1; Wordsworth, 35 criticism and reviews of: by Emerson, 33; by Fuller, 32–3, 33–4 works fictional travelogues: Hyperion, 26, 29–30; Outre-Mer, 26, 27–8, 29 novel: Kavanagh, 13, 38–40 poems: Christus: A Mystery, 36; The Courtship of Miles Standish, 39; ‘The Cross of Snow’, 45; Evangeline, 14–15, 20, 37, 39, 40–5; ‘Footsteps of Angels’, 20; ‘Hymn to the Night’, 30; ‘A Psalm of Life’, 20, 26, 30; The Song of Hiawatha, 39, 40, 41; ‘The Spirit of Poetry’, 30; Tales of a Wayside Inn, 39; Voices of the Night, 30–1 poetry anthologies, 35: The Estray, 26; Poems of Places, 35; The Poets and Poetry of Europe, 26, 31–2, 35, 87; The Waif, 26 sketches, ‘The Schoolmaster’, 22–3, 27 textbooks: Cours de langue française, 25; Elements of French Grammar, 25 translations: Dante, 14; Divine Comedy 20, 35–6; Purgatorio, 30–1; Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield, 25; Manuel de proverbes dramatiques, 25

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‘Love Me, Love My Pilgrim’ (poem) (Greenwood), 150 Lutes, Jean Marie, 142 McGill, Meredith, 32 Mackay, Charles, 148 magazines, children’s, 143–4; see also The Little Pilgrim ‘manifest destiny’ and Longfellow’s concept of universality, 37, 38, 39, 43, 44 and slavery, 85, 88 Fuller and Young Americans, 53 Manuel de proverbes dramatiques (Longfellow), 25 The Marble Faun (novel) (Hawthorne), 67 marketization see commercialism; reviews Marshall, Paule, 17, 182, 183–5, 186, 187 Triangular Road (essays), 183–4 Marx, Karl, 47–8, 52, 54 Marx, Leo, 160, 175, 176 materialism, contemporary transatlantic, 182–3, 185–7 Mathews, Cornelius, 39 Matthiessen, F. O., 10, 27, 127 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 7, 56, 58–9, 69–70 ‘Principles of Cosmopolitanism’ (essay), 59 Melville, Herman, 12 Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Channing, Clarke and Emerson), 53–4 ‘Memoranda – America’s Bulk Average’ (essay) (Whitman), 175 Merrie England (children’s travelogue) (Greenwood), 143 Mickiewicz, Adam, 58, 60 Miller, Perry, 47 The Raven and the Whale, 13 modernism, and Whitman, 176–80 morality commercialism and cosmopolitanism, 7–8 Fuller’s transcendentalism, 62–3, 70 Longfellow’s ‘moral messages’, 26, 33–4, 40–2, 45 ‘Mother Poets’, 183–4 My Bondage and My Freedom (Douglass), 3, 74, 76, 92, 95 ‘My Opposition to War’ (speech) (Douglass), 78 Myerson, Joel, 117 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Douglass), 2–3, 14, 56, 76, 81 nation-building Douglass, slavery and the transatlantic press, 71–3, 89–91 Fuller, and transnationalism, 46–7, 51–2, 59, 60–2, 64–70

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Index see also ‘Americanism’; cosmopolitanism; literary nationalism; nationality; transnationalism National Anti-Slavery Standard (newspaper), 12, 77 National Era (newspaper), 77, 128, 135, 136, 143 national literatures see European literature; literary nationalism nationalism, and cosmopolitanism, 7; see also literary nationalism; transnationalism nationality, concepts of contemporary, 186 Douglass, 72–3, 75–6 Emerson, 104–11 Fuller, 52 Greenwood, 138–9 Longfellow, 38–9 Whitman, 154–5, 173–4 see also citizenship; identity Nature (Emerson), 5, 100–1, 102, 109 ‘The New Colossus’ (poem) (Lazarus), 153–4 The New England Magazine, 22 New York, literary culture in, 13, 39–40, 49, 57, 118, 155 New York Evangelist (newspaper), 74, 76 New York Express (newspaper), 78 New York Tribune (newspaper) Fuller as foreign correspondent, 56–64 Fuller as literary critic, 47, 49, 50–3, 53–6 see also Fuller, Margaret Newcomb, Charles King, 64 newspapers see transatlantic press; names of newspapers and journals Newstead Abbey (Nottinghamshire, England), 136 Nicoloff, Philip, 107–8, 112 Norse saga, Longfellow’s study of, 40 North American Review (newspaper), 26, 27 North Star (newspaper), 3, 72, 91 Norton, Charles Eliot, 163 ‘Notes on Walt Whitman’ (Burroughs), 169 Nwankwo, Ifeoma, 6 O’Connell, Daniel, 73 O’Connor, William D., ‘The Good Gray Poet’, 169 ‘The Old Man Himself – A Postscript’ (essay) (Whitman), 175–6 Ollman, Bertell, 52 originality, and Greenwood’s The Little Pilgrim, 145 Ossoli, Giovanni, 63, 64 O’Sullivan, John Louis, 39, 53, 85 ‘The Great Nation of Futurity’ (essay), 171 Our America (Frank), 180

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‘Our Country’ (poem) (Pabodie), 87 Our Nig (novel) (Wilson), 12 Outre-Mer (fictional travelogue) (Longfellow), 26, 27–8, 29 ownership, human property and personal identity, 81–6 Pabodie, William Jewett, ‘Our Country’ (poem), 87 ‘A Pact’ (poem) (Pound), 178 Papers on Literature and Art (Fuller), 13, 51, 54 Paris, and present-day transatlanticism, 183, 185, 186 Paris to the Moon (Gopnik), 17, 182 Parker, Theodore, 85 Parnassus (Emerson), 35 ‘partial cosmopolitanism’, 8, 48 ‘Patria Mia’ (essay) (Pound), 178–80 patriotism Emerson, and American nation-building, 103 European revolutionary, 58–60, 67, 69–70 Fuller’s cosmopolitan patriotism, 61–2, 64–70 Greenwood and European travel, 139 white American, 89 see also ‘Americanism’ Pattee, Fred Louis, 127, 128, 151 Peacock, John, 109 personal narrative, Marshall and the contemporary Atlantic diaspora, 183–5 Pertile, Lino, 36 Peterson, Carla L., 89 plagiarism, Longfellow as anthologist or plagiarist, 14, 31–7; see also authenticity Poe, Edgar Allan, 14, 32 Poems of Places (poetry anthology) (Longfellow), 35 Poems on the Naming of Places (Wordsworth), 35 ‘The Poet’ (essay) (Emerson), 50, 101, 115, 122, 161 poetry and the American nation, 175–6 and universality, 101–2 The Poets and Poetry of America (Griswold), 31, 87, 163, 187 The Poets and Poetry of Europe (poetry anthology) (Longfellow), 26, 31–2, 35, 87 political agenda Douglass, 15, 76 Emerson, 16, 113–15 Fuller, 15, 47, 54–6, 57–64 Gopnik, 183 Longfellow, 24, 28, 40 Marshall, 183–5, 186 see also cosmopolitanism; patriotism; transnationalism

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popular culture, Greenwood’s exploitation of, 132–4, 137–8, 146–52 Pound, Ezra, 8, 176, 177–80 essays: ‘Patria Mia’, 178–80; ‘What I Feel About Walt Whitman’, 177–8 poem, ‘A Pact’, 178 Powers, Hiram, 139 Pratt, Mary Louise, 139 press see commercialism; conversational journalism; Douglass, Frederick; Fuller, Margaret; transatlantic press Price, Kenneth, 175 ‘Principles of Cosmopolitanism’ (essay) (Mazzini), 59 print culture see literary and print culture; transatlantic press professionalism and authorship, 11–14 contemporary transatlantic, 17, 181–8 of Greenwood, and literary success, 127, 135, 144–5, 151–2 of Whitman, and self-presentation, 2, 154–5 see also authorship, journalism; commercialism property, human and geographical, 72, 85–6, 88–9 ownership and personal identity, 81–6 see also citizenship; slavery ‘A Psalm of Life’ (poem) (Longfellow), 20, 26, 30 public lectures, Longfellow’s promotion of university literary curriculum, 28–9 public sphere Greenwood, and adult literature, 150–2 Greenwood, and juvenile literature, 144–50 Whitman’s poetic career, 158–9 see also celebrity; commercialism Purgatorio (poem) (Dante, translated by Longfellow), 30–1 racial prejudice, and slavery, 75–6, 81–2; see also Douglass, Frederick; slavery racialising, of national landscape, 86–91 The Raven and the Whale (Miller), 13 readers of Greenwood’s travel writing, 137, 138, 143–5, 149, 150–1 of Whitman, 160–3, 174–5 ‘representative men’ Emerson’s, 102, 123 Fuller’s patriots in exile, 56–64 Webster as, 115 Representative Men (Emerson), 102 reviews of Greenwood’s Haps and Mishaps, 132–3 of Longfellow, 32–3, 33–4 of Whitman, 35, 161, 163–70

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Whitman’s self-authored reviews, 150, 154, 155–6, 158–60, 161, 163, 168–9, 171, 175–6 revolutionaries, European, and Fuller as Tribune correspondent, 47–8, 58–60 Reynolds, David S., 158 Richardson, Robert D., 101, 120 ‘The Right to Criticize American Institutions’ (speech) (Douglass), 94 Robbins, Bruce, 12 Robinson, David, 106, 110 Rochester (NY), Douglass in, 72, 95 Rome Fuller and the Roman Republic, 48–9, 58–9, 60–1, 63–4, 65, 67–9, 183 Greenwood’s visits to, 137, 142 Rossetti, William Michael, and London publication of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, 154, 164–7, 169 Poems by Walt Whitman, 154, 164–6 ‘Walt Whitman’s Poems’, 164 Rowe, John Carlos, 100 Santamarina, Xiomara, 12 Saturday Evening Post (newspaper), 128, 136, 140, 143 ‘The Schoolmaster’ (Longfellow), 22–3, 27 Scotland, Greenwood’s visit to, 137 self-promotion see commercialism; Greenwood, Grace; Whitman, Walt ‘Self-Reliance’ (essay) (Emerson), 106–7, 110, 158 ‘sentimentalism’, of Longfellow, 19, 20, 36–7, 43–5 Sketch-Book (essays and short fiction) (Irving), 27 ‘The Skin Aristocracy in America’ (speech) (Douglass), 84 slavery / anti-slavery and black citizenship, 85, 96, 97 in Douglass’s The Heroic Slave, 71–2 and Emerson, 103 emigration, integration and citizenship, 85, 96, 97 and Fuller, 55, 59, 73 and ‘manifest destiny’, 85, 88 and Marshall, 184 and racial prejudice, 75–6, 81–2 and temperance movement, 74–6 see also Douglass, Frederick ‘Slavery As It Now Exists’ (speech) (Douglass), 82 Smith, Gerrit, 95 Smith, James McCune, 92–3, 157 Smithsonian Institution, Emerson’s ‘American Civilization’ lecture at, 118–19 socialism, and Fuller as Tribune correspondent, 47–8, 54–5

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Index The Song of Hiawatha (poem) (Longfellow), 39, 40, 41 ‘Song of Myself’ (poem) (Whitman), 173, 177 Sorby, Angela, 20 Souliè, Frédéric, 56 The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois), 88 Specimen Days in America (prose collection) (Whitman), 160, 164, 165 ‘The Spirit of Poetry’ (poem) (Longfellow), 30 Spring, Marcus, 59 Steele, Jeffrey, 63 Stepto, Robert, 85 Stevens, Laura M., 9 Story, William Wetmore, 68–9 storytelling, Longfellow and universality, 44 Stovall, Floyd, 154 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (novel), 77, 84–5, 96, 128, 130, 135 Stowe, William W., 138 Sturgis, Caroline, 63 Sue, Eugène, 54–5 Sweeney, Fionnghuala, 72 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 166, 167–8 ‘To Walt Whitman in America’ (poem), 168 Tales of a Wayside Inn (poem) (Longfellow), 39 Tamarkin, Elisa, 105 Taylor, Andrew, 48, 52, 110 Taylor, Diana, 158 technological innovation, 4–5 temperance movement, and slavery, 74–6 territory see landscape, American ‘Texas Slavery, and American Prosperity’ (speech) (Douglass), 85–6 ‘textbooks’, Longfellow’s modern language books, 25–31 ‘Things and Thoughts in Europe’ (newspaper column) (Fuller), 65 Thompson, George, 81 Thoreau, Henry David, 103, 123 Walden, 123 ‘Walking’ (essay), 172 ‘Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood’ (poem) (Whitman), 173–4 Ticknor & Fields (publisher), 128, 132, 135, 150 Timbucto, 95–6 ‘To Walt Whitman in America’ (poem) (Swinburne), 168 topography see landscape, American tourism, Greenwood’s promotion of, 136–8 Trachtenberg, Alan, 176, 177, 180 transatlantic press, 91–8, 138, 140–1, 164–6, 169–70; see also Douglass, Frederick; Fuller, Margaret transcendentalism, 62–3, 70

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translation Fuller, 54–5, 68 Greenwood, 148 Longfellow, 14, 20, 25, 30–1, 35–6 transnationalism Douglass, 83 Fuller, 46–7, 48–9, 55–64 Greenwood, 139, 147–8 travel writing, of Longfellow, 26, 27–8, 29–30; see also Greenwood, Grace Triangular Road (essays) (Marshall), 17, 183–4 Tribune see Fuller, Margaret; New York Tribune Twain, Mark, The Innocents Abroad (travelogue), 138 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (novel) (Stowe), 77, 84–5, 96, 128, 130, 135 United States citizenship, 8–10, 17–18, 48–9, 64, 77 dual citizenship, 58, 61–2 see also literary nationalism; nation-building; Young America United States Review (journal), 158 universalism Emerson and national identity see Emerson, Ralph Waldo Longfellow’s concept of ‘universality’, 38–40 university literary curriculum, Longfellow’s reform of, 21–2, 23–5 The Vicar of Wakefield (Goldsmith, translated into French by Longfellow), 25 Victoria, Queen, 140 Voices of the Night (poems) (Longfellow), 30–1 Wagenknecht, Edward, 19–20 The Waif (poetry anthology) (Longfellow), 26 Wald, Priscilla, 72, 76 Walden (Thoreau), 123 ‘Walking’ (essay) (Thoreau), 172 Walls, Laura Dassow, 48, 49 ‘Walt Whitman’ (review article) (Whitman), 169 ‘Walt Whitman’s Actual American Position’ (review article) (Whitman), 164, 168–9 ‘Walt Whitman’s Poems’ (review article) (Rossetti), 164 Ward, C. A., 99 Ward, Samuel and Anna, 57 Waters, Alice, 185–6 Weber, Max, 10 Webster, Daniel, 114–15, 116, 123–4 Weisbuch, Robert, 104 West Jersey Press (newspaper), 164, 168–9, 171 ‘What I Feel About Walt Whitman’ (essay) (Pound), 177–8

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‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?’ (speech) (Douglass), 79–80, 92, 97 Whitman, Walt, and the profession of national poetry, 1–2, 16–17, 153–80 ‘Americanism’, 154–5, 158–9, 160, 171–5, 177–9: British reviewers on, 162, 165, 166, 167–70 British response to 160–3: ‘Whitmania’ in Victorian Britain, 164–70 later prose and national identity, 171–6 poetic news and self-introductions, 155–60 Pound and world citizenship, 177–8 self-authored reviews, 150, 154, 155–6, 158–60, 161, 163, 168–9, 171, 175–6 self-promotion and literary success, 2, 133, 151, 154–5, 160–3, 164–70 and transatlantic modernism, 176–80 compared with others: Douglass, 72, 87, 166–7, 169–70; Emerson, 35, 104, 110, 121, 155, 158, 161, 162; Fuller, 170, 174–5; Greenwood, 140, 150, 151; Longfellow, 20–1; twentieth-century commentators, 154, 160, 172, 176–80 works review articles: ‘Walt Whitman’, 169; ‘Walt Whitman’s Actual American Position’, 164, 168–9 essays: ‘American National Literature’, 174–5; ‘A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads’, 175; ‘Memoranda – America’s Bulk Average’, 175; ‘The Old Man Himself – A Postscript’, 175–6 poems: ‘Song of Myself’, 173, 177; ‘Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood’, 173–4) Leaves of Grass: and Americanism, 175; 1855 edition, preface, 150; 1855 edition reviews by others, 35, 161–3; 1855 edition

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self-authored reviews, 154, 155–6, 158–60, 163, 165, 171; 1856 edition reviews, 161; 1868 London edition, edited by Rossetti, 154, 161–3, 164–6; 1876 Centennial Edition, preface, 1–2 prose collections: Complete Prose Works, 171; Democratic Vistas, 154, 171–2, 174, 177; GoodBye My Fancy, 170, 175; Specimen Days in America, 160, 164, 165 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 132 Widmer, Edward L., 39 Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 144 Wilson, Harriet, Our Nig (novel), 12 Wolgemut, Esther, 7, 8 women writers, commercial success and literary professionalism of, 127, 128–9, 133–4, 142, 149–52; see also Fuller, Margaret; Greenwood, Grace women’s rights, Fuller and citizenship, 63–4 Wordsworth, William, 107, 125, 164 Poems on the Naming of Places, 35 ‘world’ citizenship cultural and literary, 5–8, 11–12 Douglass, 80 Emerson, 103, 110–11, 126 Fuller, 47, 62–3 and present-day globalism, 182, 183 Whitman and Pound, 177–8 World Temperance Convention (London, 1846), 74, 75, 78 Wright, Julia M., 6 ‘Young America’, 13, 38, 39–40, 50, 53, 59, 85, 86, 89 Youth’s Companion (magazine), 144 Zwarg, Christina, 54

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