Fair Copy: Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women's Poetry 9780812298093

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Fair Copy

MATERIAL TEXTS Series Editors Roger Chartier Joseph Farrell Anthony Grafton

Leah Price Peter Stallybrass Michael F. Suarez, S.J.

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Fair Copy Relational Poetics and Antebellum American Women’s Poetry

Jennifer Putzi

universit y of pennsylvania press phil adelphia

Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Putzi, Jennifer, author. Title: Fair copy : relational poetics and antebellum American women’s poetry / Jennifer Putzi. Other titles: Material texts. Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2021] | Series: Material texts | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021003607 | ISBN 9780812253467 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: American poetry—Women authors—History and criticism. | American poetry—19th century—History and criticism. | Authorship—Social aspects—United States—History—19th century. | Women and literature—United States—History—19th century. | Literature and society—United States—History—19th century. Classification: LCC PS149 .P88 2021 | DDC 811/.3099287—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003607

To Alex, Desirée, Faith, and Theresa

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

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1

Chapter 1. The American Hemans: Lydia Sigourney’s Relational Poetics

21

Chapter 2. “The Songs Which All Can Sing”: Imitation and Working Women’s Poetry in the Lowell Offering

58

Chapter 3. “My Country”: Communal Authorship and Citizenship in Sarah Louisa Forten’s Liberator Poems

92

Chapter 4. “What Is Poetry?”: Class, Collaboration, and the Making of Wales, and Other Poems

124

Chapter 5. “Some Queer Freak of Taste”: Relational Poetics and Literary Proprietorship in the “Rock Me to Sleep” Controversy

164

Conclusion. Recovering the Unremarkable

208

Notes

225

Bibliography

247

Index

265

ACKNOWL EDGMENTS

I write these acknowledgments in the middle of a pandemic, which means that I may not see many of the people I mention here for some time. I won’t go to the archives again for months or even years. And academic conferences— at least in person—are, for the moment, a thing of the past. This absence of normality makes me especially grateful for all that these individuals and institutions have meant to me while writing Fair Copy. I’ve been working on this book for so many years that I’m sure I will leave out people who have provided encouragement, feedback, and friendship along the way. Some (but certainly not all) of these people are Liz Barnes, Victoria Castillo, Melanie Dawson, Claire McKinney, Kathy McKinnon, Francesca Sawaya, Sara Scott, Helis Sikk, Claudia Stokes, Susan Tomlinson, and Jennifer Tuttle. I am incredibly lucky to work in supportive environments in both the English Department and the Gender, Sexuality, & Women’s Studies Program at William & Mary and I thank Liz Losh, Gul Ozyegin, and Suzanne Raitt for their aid and leadership. My students at William & Mary deserve to be singled out: they are delightfully smart and funny and hardworking and have worked through the ideas in this book with me without even knowing it. My honors students—Maddie Benjamin, Sarah Klotz, Nora Pace, Sarah Schuster, and Robin Smith—have provided invaluable practical and intellectual assistance, and I believe I have learned as much from them as they have learned from me. My own teachers, of course, set the stage for all of this. Nancy Huse introduced me to American women’s literature via Margaret Fuller, whose assertion that women could be sea captains in nineteenth-century America shocked and delighted me. In graduate school, Sharon Harris directed me to read nineteenthcentury American women’s poetry (although she couldn’t have known then that I would write a book about it). She taught me how to do research, how to write a book, how to mentor students, and how to operate in the world of academia in a professional and ethical manner. I am forever grateful to her.

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The Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW), which Sharon Harris founded, has been central to the development of this book. Along with Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, for which I’ve been an author, consultant, book review editor, and now coeditor, SSAWW has provided a supportive and nurturing environment for me and many other feminist scholars since its inception in 2000. In recent years, I’ve found another home at Rare Book School (RBS), at the University of Virginia, where Michael Winship, Jim Green, and Peter Stallybrass have expanded my thinking about books and print culture. Thank you to RBS for their high-quality programming, both in the normal world and especially during the pandemic. I’ve presented portions of this book and related material over the years at conferences organized by the Society for the Study of American Women Writers, the Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (C19), and Historical Poetics. I am grateful to these organizations for providing these opportunities for valuable feedback and intellectual exchange. I am also exceedingly grateful to a number of individuals whom I’ve met at these conferences and whose work has helped shape Fair Copy. The field of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry is quite small, but incredibly vibrant and exciting, and the work of these scholars has challenged me to make this book better. They include Paula Bernat Bennett, Michael Cohen, Eric Gardner, Virginia Jackson, Mary Louise Kete, Karen Kilcup, Kerry Larson, Mary Loeffelholz, Tricia Lootens, Meredith McGill, Elizabeth Petrino, Yopie Prins, Eliza Richards, and Angela Sorby. This book only made sense to me when I was elbow-deep in the letters of Elizabeth Akers Allen at Colby College, and that led me to other archives at other libraries. When I couldn’t get to a library, I emailed or called a librarian begging for a photocopy or a scan, and they nearly always complied. I am exceedingly grateful to Pat Burdick at Colby College Special Collections in Waterville, Maine; Frances Lyons, Reference Archivist at the Drew University Methodist Library and Special Collections in Madison, New Jersey; and all of the librarians at William & Mary’s Special Collections Research Center. I also received invaluable assistance from the Maine Women Writers Collection at the University of New England in Portland, Maine; the Maine Historical Society, also in Portland; Special Collections and Archives at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut; and the Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford. For financial assistance in the researching and writing of this book, I am grateful to William & Mary, which, through a series of grants and awards,

Acknowledgments

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made it possible for me to visit archives and find time for research and writing. I’m particularly grateful to Joe J. Plumeri and Jennifer and Devin Murphy for funding awards that support Humanities scholars at William & Mary. Michael Cohen and Eliza Richards read this manuscript for the University of Pennsylvania Press and provided generous and invaluable feedback. From the moment I began Fair Copy, my dream was to publish it in the Material Texts Series, and these readers helped me write a book that deserved inclusion there. Thank you so much. My editor, Jerry Singerman, has been nothing but supportive throughout this process. He has followed up with readers, answered questions, been understanding when he had to be, and generally made me feel like my book was worth the work that it would take to bring it out. I needed that. My greatest thanks go to Sam, Charley, and Simon. (And, as Charley would no doubt remind me, our pets: Emily, Vinnie, Onyx, and Jet.) They have lived with me and loved me throughout the writing of this book—the highs and the lows. Charley and Sam are amazing kids: smart, creative, and hilariously funny. I am constantly impressed with how fiercely themselves they are. All of this—especially the humor—is probably due to their incredible father and my partner, Simon Joyce. Simon has taken charge of the kids so I could do research and write. He has read every word of this book several times and has talked over each chapter with me endlessly. People always ask me what it is like to have my partner in the same profession, the same building, the office next door, but I wouldn’t want it any other way. He is my best friend and I love him. This book is dedicated to Alex Socarides, Desirée Henderson, Faith Barrett, and Theresa Strouth Gaul. These women have generously read most if not all of this book, providing feedback and encouragement, and even writing parts of the introduction when I couldn’t figure out what the hell I was doing or why it mattered. They have helped me navigate my life and career in a way that makes sense to me, putting relationships of all kinds at the center while also embracing and sharing my love for what I do. Most importantly, they have been my friends. It is not an exaggeration to say that this book would not have been written without them. Parts of Chapter 1 are taken from “Remodeling the Kitchen in Parnassus: Lydia Sigourney’s Poetics of Collaboration,” and are reprinted from Lydia Sigourney: Critical Essays and Cultural Views. Copyright © 2018 by the University of Massachusetts Press. Chapter 2 is a revision of “Poets of the Loom,

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Spinners of Verse: Working-Class Women’s Poetry and the Lowell Offering,” which was originally published in A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry. Copyright 2017 by Cambridge University Press. Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear. Chapter  5 is a revision of “ ‘Some queer freak of taste’: Gender, Authorship, and the ‘Rock Me to Sleep’ Controversy,” which was originally published in American Literature, 88, no. 4, pp. 769–95. © 2012, Duke University Press. Republished by permission. www.dukeupress.edu.

INTRODUCTION

Fair Copy is a study of the composition, publication, and circulation of American women’s poetry in the antebellum United States. In opposition to a traditional scholarly emphasis on originality and individuality, as well as a practice of recovery centered on author-based interventions, I propose a theory and methodology of relational poetics—a theory that I argue shaped the work of antebellum American women poets, and a methodology derived from the archive that allows us to engage in the radical recovery of antebellum American women’s poetry as it was mediated by and contextualized in its relationships with print culture. A nineteenth-century relational poetics privileges poems over poets, and publics—of texts, readers, and writers—over individuals. Imitation, community, and collaboration are central to a relational poetics—in poems themselves, in the avenues women poets take to gain access to print, and in the way their poems function within a variety of print cultural contexts.1 In articulating and developing a theory and methodology of relational poetics, I take my cue from the poems themselves—particularly from the many poems by antebellum women poets that we have not read (or have not read very well). In the last thirty years, feminist literary scholars have recovered and reappraised the work of nineteenth-century American women poets, turning to previously neglected primary sources to suggest that our sense of American literary history over the past century has been, in fact, incomplete and at times simply inaccurate.2 Even after approximately three decades of recovery, however, efforts remain largely focused on a handful of important figures—namely, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Emily Dickinson, and Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt—with occasional attention paid to other writers. All four wrote voluminous amounts of poetry over their lifetimes and, with the important exception of Dickinson, published their work broadly in a number of different kinds of periodical venues

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Introduction

as well as in book form. Scholarship on these writers has allowed us to think in important ways about women’s poetic authorship across the nineteenth century—the family and educational background necessary to authorship, for example, as well as the range of subjects they were able to take up and the reception of their work by critics and other readers. However, the majority of poems written and published by women in the nineteenth century were not by poets like these and were never collected as evidence of the existence of an “author.” They were composed by women who may not have appeared in print before, although they likely circulated manuscript poetry; who wrote poems about familial and local occasions; and who saw in the work of published women poets a model for their own verses. In many cases, their marginal status, either as working women or as women of color, meant that their access to print was limited, with publication mediated by a number of actors including employers, patrons, editors, printers, and even readers. Investigating the work of these poets and their positioning in a network of relationships, both personal and textual, leads to a more nuanced understanding of antebellum American women’s poetry and a way of engaging this body of work that does not simply frame it as worth noting (“Wow! Factory operatives wrote poetry!”) but not worth reading (“But it was entirely conventional and therefore uninteresting”). The poetry of working women is particularly productive in this regard, as their process of accessing print was notable enough that it left archival and paratextual traces—in prefaces to books, in editorial commentary, in letters, in book reviews, in the poems themselves. Recovering this work and reading it, then, necessitates a method that combines the best of literary studies, book history and print cultural studies, and feminist studies. It also requires successive deep dives into individual case studies of poets, poems, periodicals, and books, which together point to the pervasiveness and power of relational poetics. To demonstrate both the theory and the methodology of relational poetics, then, I take as my first subject Charlotte Fillebrown Jerauld (Figure 1), a workingclass poet who has not received any scholarly attention and is not included in any recent anthology of American women’s poetry.3 To many twenty-firstcentury readers, Jerauld’s poems would likely be considered conventional, imitative, and completely indistinguishable from the work of other antebellum women poets, and, for the most part, I would not argue with that assessment. This, they might go on to say, is precisely why she hasn’t been regarded as an individual author worthy of recovery. But rather than seeing this as cause for dismissal, I ask, how did this happen? What did being a “fair

Figure 1. Charlotte Fillebrown Jerauld as author. Frontispiece, Poetry and Prose by Mrs. Charlotte A. Jerauld with a Memoir by Henry Bacon (Philadelphia: A. Tompkins, 1850). Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.

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copy” of other women poets offer to Jerauld? To her editors and publishers? To her readers? How are Jerauld’s authorial identity and the poems composed by that author shaped by the print cultural contexts in which she engaged? And what critical frameworks do we use to encounter the work of such a poet in a meaningful way? I recognize the irony in introducing this approach with a case study of an individual poet: How can authorship be decentered if projects like this one take up the author as the object of study? Yet in what follows in this introduction, I am interested in what happens when authorship is just one approach among many. Here and throughout Fair Copy, I investigate the intersections and engagements between authors and poems, genres, publication strategies, and venues. I don’t disregard the question of who wrote which poem: as a feminist, I share the concerns of scholars who regard the popularity of the “death of the author” as at least in part a conservative response to the canon wars of the late twentieth century. As Cheryl Walker stated in 1990, “to erase a woman poet as the author of her poems in favor of an abstract indeterminacy is an act of oppression.”4 Yet just as Walker opposed the positioning of the author as the determining factor in all readings of the text, I propose that an exclusive focus on authors can prevent us from thinking about how texts really got written, read, published, and circulated in nineteenth-century America. While the erasure of women poets was no less “an act of oppression” in the antebellum period than it was in 1990 (and still is today), scholars have to resist the lure of anachronism and recognize that poetic authorship was configured very differently in the antebellum period than it is today. Fair Copy is intended to reposition the author in the recovery of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry, not to erase her or the literary, political, or social cultures that surrounded her. To recover a poet like Jerauld, then, or even to read her work means reconstructing her access to print. In 1850, the Reverend Henry Bacon, pastor of the Universalist Church of the Messiah in Philadelphia, published Poetry and Prose by Mrs. Charlotte A. Jerauld with a Memoir by Henry Bacon. The editor of The Rose of Sharon, a Universalist annual, and the monthly Universalist and Ladies’ Repository, Bacon had published Jerauld’s poetry and prose for three years before her death at the age of twenty-five in August 1845, immediately following the birth (and death) of her first child. As he explains in the “Memoir,” his initial encounter with Jerauld’s work when she was a young, unmarried woman made him feel “that a new star had dawned.”5 This discovery was especially surprising to the editor because, at the time of her first

Introduction

5

submission to the Ladies’ Repository, Jerauld was a laborer in a book bindery. Bacon explains, Charlotte’s school-days were ended when she was at the age of fourteen, and were followed by toil-days, for we find her in the bindery at the age of fifteen. Effectually did she keep herself free from the foolish whims of a large class of minds, that imagine labor and literary pursuits are uncongenial. Her employment was “folding and gathering,” and like labors, in a book-bindery. Her mind thought, while her hands were busied; and she often kept a pencil and paper near her. A portion of her regular labor was in connection with the Ladies’ Repository, a literary and religious monthly of the Universalist denomination; and she thus had courage kindled to attempt something for the press, as she became familiar with the merits of some articles which, doubtless, she felt she could equal, and with others that made her aspire after like excellence. (29)6 Bacon represents Jerauld as both a “star,” a natural talent whose creativity will not be stifled by manual labor, and as a representative of a larger rule—that “ labor and literary pursuits” are, in fact, congenial. As she folds the sheets of paper and gathers the resulting signatures into what will become the pages of the periodical (Figure 2), Jerauld is said to be composing poems in her head, which she then writes down when she has a moment to spare from her labor. A more detailed description of the relationship between Jerauld’s labor as a poet and her labor as a “bindery-girl” is provided in Bacon’s explanation of how the identity of “Charlotte,” who had already contributed several pieces to the Repository under this name, was revealed (31). Bacon reports that Abel Tompkins, the publisher of the magazine, was disappointed to find that a hymn in honor of “the anniversary of a charitable society” he had hoped to print was not ready. Passing through the bindery, he “jestingly” asked a group of workers, “ ‘Why can’t you write me a hymn?’ One of them replied, ‘How long a time will you give us?’ ‘Till twelve o’clock,’ was the answer, the speaker not imagining, in the least, that there was any seriousness in the question, as he had little acquaintance with them. When the bindery-girls left for the noon repast, one of them came into his store, and brought a paper, with a hymn penciled on it, and timidly offered it for acceptance for the occasion required. She had composed it while at work, and, verse after verse, she had committed it to paper” (30). While Bacon implies that Tompkins’s “jest” is due to his

6

Introduction

Figure 2. Women laborers in a book bindery. From Horace Greeley et al., The Great Industries of the United States (Hartford, CT: J. B. Burr & Hyde, 1872). Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.

lack of familiarity with the “bindery-girls,” Tompkins is clearly doubting the girls’ ability to write a hymn that merits publication. In his request for the poem by noon, he might also be noting that these girls have the work of the bindery to do, not the work of poetry. Indeed, among the group of undifferentiated “girls,” Jerauld is the only “one of them” who takes up Tompkins’s challenge. Having handled and read the pages of the Repository in the course of her labor in the bindery, she is able to swiftly produce a poem that not only is worthy of appearing there but does not stand out as significantly different from the other poems in the periodical. Contrary to our critical expectations about authorship and literary originality, it is this achievement that makes her a “star” and merits her publication.7 Her intimacy with and involvement in the production of print is, then, regarded as central to her work as a poet, with the repetitive operations of “ ‘folding and gathering’ ” mirroring the way in which, “verse after verse,” Jerauld’s poem is “committed . . . to paper.”

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Matching the handwriting of the manuscript hymn to that of other submissions by “Charlotte,” Tompkins and Bacon are able to determine that they are written by the same person: Charlotte Fillebrown.8 It is, in part, Charlotte’s handwriting that indicates to Bacon the suitability of her work for print: “The handwriting is beautiful,” he says of a manuscript poem written when Jerauld was thirteen. “The punctuation marks are as handsome as though made with type; and this excellence she preserved through her whole life, in her letters, as in the ‘copy’ for the printer” (26). In Bacon’s analysis of Jerauld’s handwriting, the poet appears almost machine-like, a printing press loaded with movable type that is reproduced on the handwritten page and then rendered into print.9 Indeed, Jerauld’s laboring body is represented as a superbly functioning machine. Even after she is introduced in the pages of the Repository as a poet, Bacon tells us, “Her hand continued to fold the printed sheets for the reader which contained the good thoughts her hand had written” (34). Reduced to a single hand here, Jerauld manages every stage of the printing process from the beginning (writing the words that will form the poem) to the middle (setting the type for printing) and finally, to the end (folding the printed sheets that will find their way into the reader’s hands). Immersed in the world of print and printing technology, surrounded by the pages of the Repository that she reads, folds, gathers, and perhaps sews together, Jerauld is retroactively represented as perfectly suited to producing poems appropriate to the social relations and literary conventions constructed and maintained by the periodical. The hymn that Tompkins solicits, which is reprinted in Bacon’s Poetry and Prose by Mrs. Charlotte A. Jerauld as “Charity Hymn,” serves as just one example of her success in this regard. Written from the point of view of the members of the charitable society, the hymn insists that “Our table is with plenty spread” and asks God to “touch each selfish heart, / And bid it with compassion glow!” And let the offering be pure; Then shall it meet its own reward! What cheerfully we give the poor Is but a loan to thee, oh Lord!10 The recipients of charity are identified only as “poor” in the poem, but Jerauld makes a conventional sentimental appeal to her readers’ love of children and sympathy for the suffering, asking them to make use of their hands even as she uses hers to compose the poem and fold the pages of the periodical: “And

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Introduction

shall WE hear a brother’s moan,” she asks, “And stretch not forth a hand to aid?” (133). Here Jerauld, who works in the bindery to support herself and her widowed mother, assumes the collective “we” of the middle-class charitable lady as well as the voice of religious authority inherent to the hymn genre.11 While Tompkins and Bacon clearly delight in knowing who wrote the “Charity Hymn” for the Ladies’ Repository as well as the other poems signed “Charlotte,” authorship here is generated in and for a network of people, texts, and technologies that confound any notion of Jerauld as originating genius or the poem as an expression of individual subjectivity.12 I begin with this reading of Jerauld’s emergence as a poet to point to the central argument of Fair Copy: that specific gendered relations to the conditions of composition, publication, and circulation shape American women’s poetry and poetics, as well as the varied authorial stances they assume in their engagements with the public. In a series of case studies, I attempt to restore the specificity of women poets’ negotiation of the terms of authorship, while also proposing that a common relational poetics—with an emphasis on imitation, collaboration, and community—arose from these poets’ engagements with a variety of print-cultural contexts. I propose that the particulars of women’s access to print are not separate from the poems they produce: the process of publication shapes poetics and vice versa. While it is true that women poets were, as Augusta Rohrbach notes of nineteenth-century American women writers more broadly, “much maligned and constricted . . . by reigning literary tastes mediated through and negotiated by a male dominated publishing business,” I argue that it is simplistic to read women’s writing across the board as a concession to such gatekeepers.13 Instead, I propose that particular poems, series of poems (published, for example, in a single periodical or under the same pseudonym), or books of poems can be read through a framework of relationality as creative compromises or collaborations with a number of agents in the process of publication. My notion of relational poetics is informed by scholars of book history who insist, along with Michael Winship, that “no published text, literary or otherwise, exists in isolation: rather, it is the collaborative effort of many people—authors and editors, papermakers and printers, publishers and readers, among others—and it acts as a political force in the social and cultural worlds of these historical collaborators.”14 Meredith McGill has lamented “the paucity of book history scholarship devoted to American poetry . . . and the lack of attention given to print culture by scholars of American poetry.” The concerns of book history, she explains, are “generally treated as external

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to histories of poetic form, which continue to be told as a set of relations between and among texts, and not books, institutions, practices, markets, systems of exchange, or media.”15 Her own work on the poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper has influentially demonstrated that a lack of attention to what she calls format has led to a decontextualized, even depoliticized reading of Harper’s antebellum political writing.16 Virginia Jackson points to one reason behind the artificial distinction made between book history and poetic form, arguing that the twentieth-century abstraction of poetry from its literary historical context has resulted in the “modern invention” of the lyric as “the one genre . . . independent of social contingency. . . . By the early nineteenth century, poetry had never before been so dependent on the mediating hands of the editors and reviewers who managed the print public sphere, yet in this period an idea of the lyric as ideally unmediated by those hands or those readers began to emerge and is still very much with us.”17 This privileging of the lyric went hand in hand with a dismissal of the imitative, the collaborative, and the communal, as can be seen in John Stuart Mills’s assertion in “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Va rieties” that “lyric poetry . . . is . . . more imminently and peculiarly poetry than any other: it is the poetry most natural to a really poetic temperament, and least capable of being successfully imitated by one not so endowed by nature.”18 If lyric is imagined as “ideally unmediated,” then it follows that poetry written by those Mills calls “not so endowed by nature” is imagined to be mediated by the hands of other actors in the process of publication (832). It is this body of work that interests me in Fair Copy. What sort of poetry did these poets produce, if not the kind that is “more imminently and peculiarly poetry”? What part did the “mediating hands of . . . editors” and other actors play? How do we read these poems? And what does authorship look like in this differently configured, socially contingent, emphatically print culture? The imitative, the collaborative, and the communal: these are all qualities that have, until recently, been critically disparaged and regarded as antithetical to our understanding of antebellum American literature. Yet recent scholarly interest in what Claudia Stokes has called “literary unoriginality” has demonstrated another way of thinking about the period that was once defined by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s cry for “an original relation to the universe.”19 Several recent studies—namely, those by William Huntting Howell and Ezra Tawil—have attempted to revalue the imitative in early American and antebellum literature, suggesting that imitation—or “the arts of dependence,” as Howell would have it—was central to the work of individual artists

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such as Phillis Wheatley, Charles Brockden Brown, and Herman Melville, and to the larger cultural project of American literature.20 Similarly, Alexandra Socarides argues that women poets’ use of conventions in their work should be seen as “neither static or silencing, but as integral parts of the complicated structures, strategies, and poses almost ubiquitously employed by these poets.”21 Rather than indicating a lack of talent or imagination, the use of conventions indicates women poets’ active participation in “larger literary, familial, cultural, and historical movements” (28). Kerry Larson’s work on Lydia Sigourney also points to an emphasis on the collective rather than the individual. He suggests that, rather than seeking a unique, personalized voice, American literary nationalists saw “a storehouse of objects, each stamped . . . with readily identified and commonly shared emotions” as “the building blocks” of an American literature.22 Taking his cue from Theo Davis’s thinking about theories of associationism, Larson reads literary nationalists as privileging a mode of authorship that resists “dividing the world between originators and receivers, creators and respondents” (79).23 Thus the author serves as proxy for the reader, “render[ing] the difference between authors and readers hard to see” (79). Taken together, these scholars resist the narrowing of our critical attention to the solitary author for whom, as Emerson also said, “imitation is suicide,” rejecting the privileging of subjectivity and emphasizing instead relationships between and among authors, texts, editors, readers, and critics.24 Far from being “suicide,” I argue in this study, a relational poetics provided access to print that might have other wise been denied the majority of women poets published in the antebellum United States. In using the title Fair Copy, then, I allude not only to the polished, handwritten text of a poem that an author provided her editor or publisher but to the “fairness” of copying itself in the antebellum United States—particularly for the “fairer sex.” The title also points to the way in which women poets and their poems serve as copies of one another. In this paradigm, poets replicate the same subject matter, conventions, and genres in their work, and publish in the same (or similar) venues. Authorship is only one factor in readers’ engagement with poems. I am not suggesting that male poets did not imitate other poets, collaborate with editors and other agents in the process of publication, or write out of and for par ticu lar communities. Work by Eliza Richards and, more recently, Colin Wells indicates that although literary history has privileged a rhetoric of originality in regards to poetry by American men, male poets not

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only consciously imitated the work of others but “orient[ed the] meaning [of their work] outward from the individual poem to other literary and discursive utterances circulating at the same moment.”25 Scholars have either neglected this work in favor of poems and poets who more efficiently project a sense of literary independence or recuperated for male poets “the powers of innovation and the force of genius.”26 As Richards points out, this effaces the “lateral models of creation” deployed by many women poets “that are less concerned with the preservation of names and the quest for literary authority” (22). Throughout Fair Copy, I argue that the realities of antebellum print culture combined with cultural perceptions of women’s nature to render women poets perfectly suited to certain kinds of publication and circulation. Moreover, as Susan S. Williams says of her own study of nineteenth-century American women authors, the consideration of women’s authorship “as a distinct, if not exclusive category” is necessary because it existed as such in the nineteenth century, with critics, authors, and readers thinking differently about women authors than they did about male authors.27 While women’s poetry was often published in periodicals alongside that of men, it was also reviewed and collected separately, as is evidenced most clearly in the publication of three anthologies of American women’s poetry in quick succession in 1848 and 1849: Caroline May’s The American Female Poets (1848), Thomas Buchanan Read’s The Female Poets of America (1849), and Rufus Wilmot Griswold’s The Female Poets of Amer ica (1849). Simply put, in the antebellum United States, women poets were read, first and foremost, as women.28 Despite decades of scholarly recovery of and research on nineteenthcentury American women poets, we have barely scratched the surface, in part because of our reliance on author-centered recovery practices that focus our attention on poets who published a large body of work, usually including books of poetry. Because of this emphasis on the book, our recovery efforts have focused primarily on middle-class, white women writers. I am hardly the first scholar to make this point, but it bears repeating. Even with the groundbreaking scholarship of Frances Smith Foster, Joan R. Sherman, and Eric Gardner (to name just a few scholars in the field), we have much work left to do to recover nineteenth-century African American women poets other than Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Poems published by women (or by people using female pseudonyms) in African American periodicals like Freedom’s Journal and the Weekly Anglo-African indicate an active interest in reading and writing poetry among African American women readers, but this is generally overlooked in critical attention to such periodicals. (Gardner’s work is

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Introduction

a notable exception in this regard.) Working-class women poets Lydia Sigourney and Lucy Larcom have received some critical attention, but only rarely for their attention to issues of class; other working women poets, who usually published less frequently and often more locally, are almost entirely ignored in criticism on nineteenth-century American poetry. Broadening the scope of our recovery efforts necessitates an intersectional lens that allows us to investigate the relevance of the category “woman writer” while recognizing the interconnected nature of forms of identity including, but not limited to, gender, race, and class. Fair Copy is, then, a study of women’s poetic authorship, an effort to “read history back into the figure of the woman poet,” as Jackson and Richards recommend in “ ‘The Poetess’ and Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets.”29 It is also a response to Richard Brodhead’s call for a “history of literary access, conceived as the history of the processes by which literary writing has had different cultural places made for it, and so has had different groups placed in different proximities to it,” as well as Leon Jackson’s demand that literary critics investigate “the fundamental embeddedness of authorial activity.”30 In American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853, Meredith McGill suggests that we work backward when we regard the “conditions of literary production” only as “checks and barriers to individuals.” Instead, “we need to ask how the structure and development of literary markets make possible the emergence of particular kinds of authorial subjects.”31 Following the work of McGill, Richards, Leon Jackson, and other scholars, I propose that what we now understand as “authorship”—a par ticular right to and control of one’s published text—would not have been recognizable or necessarily desirable to early nineteenth-century American women poets. In fact, a more fluid concept of authorship facilitated access, providing women poets like Jerauld with opportunities to develop a poetics of relationality suited to the venues in which they published their work and the publics in which their work circulated. Studies of nineteenth-century American women’s authorship have been strangely silent on the subject of women poets, focusing almost entirely on prose writers—or when they do examine poets, they focus exclusively on their prose work.32 This is not to say that the conclusions of such scholars are not also relevant to women poets. For example, Susan Coultrap-McQuin’s early assessment of strategies like “anonymity or pseudonymity, claims of writing for the good of humanity, . . . postures of moral superiority or of selfeffacement” as “indications of their understanding of the expectations of

Introduction

13

the nineteenth-century marketplace” applies just as easily to poets as it does to prose writers.33 Yet none of these studies of women’s authorship account for the par ticular circumstances of poetic authorship that have been raised in studies of women poets by Paula Bernat Bennett, Eliza Richards, Mary Loeffelholz, and others. For example, the relative brevity of poems leads to more frequent publication by poets and an increased use of pseudonymity. Poets often respond to one another in their work, resulting in intertwined poems that invite readers into their conversations.34 Readers also engaged with poems more actively, copying them, reciting them, singing them, and (re) writing them in a way that they seem not to have done with prose.35 Such practices also indicate the intimacy of the relationship between reader and text and between reader and poet, as that role is performed on the pages of periodicals and books. Deeply embedded in print communities—on the page, in the parlor, and in the book bindery, among other places—these poets and their work require deeply contextual, archival readings. Therefore, throughout Fair Copy, I combine attention to the material conditions of poetic authorship with careful readings of poems, most of which have not received any scholarly attention. Critical refusal to engage with these poems results from what Nina Baym identified in 1985 as the “radical break between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in poetic taste.”36 While this problem is likely more usefully defined as one of reading rather than taste, Baym’s point was that our inability to know how nineteenth-century American readers encountered poems prevents any thorough recovery of this work.37 In each of the case studies that follows, I emphasize the importance of reading, in part as a demonstration of an attitude of scholarly respect for these authors and their work. For too long, scholars have insisted that there is nothing in these poems to read, that they are interesting as cultural products but not as poems. My work models a respectful, deeply contextual engagement with these texts that makes possible an expansion of the field and a more accurate accounting of the diversity of nineteenth-century American literature. The twentieth- and twenty-first-century disembedding of texts from what Virginia Jackson calls the “specific historical occasions or narratives for their interpretation” has denuded nineteenth-century American poetry of much of its contextual meaning.38 It is this that I restore in Fair Copy by examining the composition, publication, and circulation practices that produce the work of nineteenth-century American women poets, focusing specifically on the relational poetics that I argue proved particularly generative and successful for these writers.

14

Introduction

This dynamic is best thrown into sharp relief, I argue throughout this book, in an examination of marginalized poets like Jerauld, for whom authorship might initially have seemed out of reach but was accessed by a creative engagement with the literary marketplace. Such an approach has several advantages, not least of which is to expand the scope of recovery to working women poets like domestic servant and Welsh immigrant Maria James, African American activist Sarah Forten, and the New England “factory girls” published in the Lowell Offering. By bringing the work of such poets to light, we can also think about the frameworks we have established thus far to study antebellum American women’s poetry. What, for example, happens to the figure of the “poetess” when the poet herself is marked as a laboring body whose hands are occupied with the binding machine, the loom, the needle, or the broom, as well as the pen? The labor required of such poets to publish exposes the machinery of print—sometimes quite literally. This notion of the woman poet as laborer ran counter to popu lar perceptions of the woman poet as an ethereal being whose talent was entirely natural, a mere absorption of the beauty to be found in family, religion, morality, and nature. In nineteenth- century terms, this figure is most commonly labeled “the poetess” and is seen as nascent within all women, whether they ever published a poem or not. For example, in “The Poetess,” a short story published in the collection The Poetry of Woman (1841), Sarah Carter Edgarton Mayo proclaims, “In whatever state we find [woman], in whatever rank or capacity in life, in whatever circumstances of fortune, every where, at all times, her nature is one of poetry and love.”39 Poetry was therefore as much a mode of being for women as it was words on a page: the thoughts and feelings of woman are, Mayo explains, simply “unwritten poetry.”40 It is for this reason that Jackson and other scholars link the emergence of the poetess to that of the lyric or, as Jackson puts it, “that the modern (or post-nineteenth-century) lyric emerged as the genre we now call poetry by means of the figure of the Poetess.”41 The figuration of lyric as abstracted thought, immaterial to the point of voicelessness, lent itself to the erasure of women’s labor. In fact, many representations of “the poetess” depict her as naturally receptive to beauty but strangely disconnected from the work of writing and publishing. In a poem called “Rhymeless Poets: Written To One Who Professed Not To Be a Poetess,” D. D. W. insists, “There’s many a heart, the soul of song, / Did but the owner know it, / To music’s loftiest tones hath strung;—/ In all but verse, a poet.”42 D. D. W.’s dismissal of “verse” as incidental to the identity of the poet renders both manuscript and print entirely unnecessary for the “Poetess.”

Introduction

15

This is not to say that the labor of poetry was not acknowledged in nineteenth-century America; in fact, the relationship between poetry and women’s labor was something of an open secret. In 1848, in the “Preface” to The American Female Poets, editor and poet Caroline May emphasized the intimate connection between women’s work in the home and the subject matter of her poetry. After explaining the pleasure she took in her search for “the greatest specimens of worth and beauty in this fertile garden of literature,” May reminds her reader, “It may be borne in mind that not many ladies in this country are permitted sufficient leisure from the cares and duties of home, to devote themselves, either from choice, or as a means of a living, to literary pursuits. Hence, the themes which have suggested the greater part of the following poems have been derived from the incidents and associations of every-day life.”43 While May seems initially to mark poetry as a respite from domestic work, her emphasis on writing as a potential “means of a living” reminds her readers that poetry, too, is labor. Just a year later, Rufus Griswold noted the connection between women’s labor and poetry in the “Preface” to his anthology of American women poets, The Female Poets of America: Several persons are mentioned in this volume whose lives have been no holydays of leisure: those, indeed, who have not in some way been active in practical duties, are exceptions to the common rule. One was a slave— one a domestic servant— one a factory girl: and there are many in the list who had no other time to give to the pursuits of literature but such as was stolen from a frugal and industrious housewifery, from the exhausting cares of teaching, or the fitful repose of sickness. These illustrations of the truth, that the muse is no respecter of conditions, are especially interesting in a country where, though equality is an axiom, it is not a reality, and where prejudice reverses in the application all that theory has affirmed in words.44 While he highlights the work of Phillis Wheatley (“slave”), Maria James (“domestic servant”), and Lucy Larcom (“factory girl”) here, he also uses these poets to insist that non-laboring women poets are the exception: the labor of women poets might not be regarded as noteworthy, even in Griswold’s brief introductions, yet women poets are generally working women, stealing time away from housework, teaching, or illness for “the pursuits of literature.” Griswold does not acknowledge the labor of poetry here, as May does, but he

16

Introduction

does mark out the working woman poet as more genuinely American, a true fulfillment of the American theory of equality. I do not intend to point to either May or Griswold as patrons of working women poets or entirely accurate observers of the labors performed by women poets to publish their work. However, their recognition of the labor of women’s poetry (and of women poets) does highlight the fact that this labor was never invisible to readers who engaged with these texts in nineteenth-century America. In fact, the intersections between labor and poetry were of particular interest to readers and editors, as was epitomized in public fascination with the work of factory operatives published in the Lowell Offering, which I discuss in Chapter 2. Taking note of the labor of poetry and the manifestations of such labor in antebellum American women’s poems, I do not argue with Griswold that “the muse is no respecter of conditions” but assert that “conditions” produce a particular configuration of the woman poet, one that later models of authorship effectively erased from literary history. A word about organization is in order. The first case study in Fair Copy takes up the work of Lydia Huntley Sigourney in order to think about how this most famous nineteenth-century American woman poet actively engaged a relational poetics of imitation, community, and collaboration to establish, promote, and maintain her career. The poets addressed in the middle chapters had a specialized, more local audience—those interested in the textile mill workers, for example, or abolitionists, or Methodism, in the case of Maria James—and did not imagine a national circulation for their work. Neither did they publish their work long enough or promote their own careers actively enough to achieve such a goal, had they been interested. Although Sigourney began her career at a local level, publishing with the assistance of a wealthy patron, over the next forty-five years, she became a national celebrity and, as Mary Louise Kete and Elizabeth Petrino note, “actively participated in establishing a literary marketplace in which authors competed against one another for sales to readers rather than for the support of a few wealthy or elite patrons.”45 Sigourney’s prominence in the field of antebellum American poetry, her inclusion in most recent studies of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry, and the existence of an extant archive render her useful as a test case for my argument as a whole. What does a relational poetics look like? How does it allow women poets to publish their work and engage with their audience? What limitations might it place on an author? My intention is to reveal the pervasiveness of a relational poetics in the antebellum period and to show how it allowed access to poetry and print

Introduction

17

for working women on both the local and the national level. I turn then to other women poets whose work has received almost no critical attention to demonstrate the radical potential of this reframing of the critical lens. Fair Copy begins, then, with a consideration of Sigourney’s relational poetics in two par ticu lar contexts: the identification of Sigourney as the “American Hemans” (and therefore an imitator of her British prototype and counterpart) and as the composer of elegies written to order, or by request of her readers. While other American female poets were compared to the very popular Felicia Hemans, Lydia Sigourney was the only one to be labeled the “American Hemans.” In fact, as Edgar Allan Poe asserted in a critique of Sigourney’s popularity, the American poet took advantage of the comparison with Hemans, imitating Hemans’s success and openly declaring her admiration for the British poet, but also carefully asserting authorship of her own work. I examine the politics of the “American Hemans” label, particularly in a cultural moment that thematized and prioritized literary originality and nationalism, and demonstrate the risks and advantages of Sigourney’s embrace of this label by looking at the production, circulation, and (mis)attribution of “Death of an Infant,” one of Sigourney’s best-known poems both in her day and in our own. I argue that this poem demonstrates a larger concern in Sigourney’s body of work with repetition, cyclicality, and an intimate engagement with her audience—all characteristics disparaged by proponents of literary nationalism and developed by Sigourney in her practice of responding to readers’ requests for elegies to commemorate the deaths of loved ones. Such poems are evidence of a collaborative poetics that flies in the face of a romantic notion of authorship based on individuality and originality, as well as the notion of Sigourney as lyric poet. Sigourney’s relational poetics point to a very different mode of authorship that would continue to shape the composition, publication, and circulation experiences of the other women poets in this study as well. In Chapter  2, I develop the connection between women’s labor and women’s poetry by investigating the strategic use of a poetics of imitation in the work of the Lowell Offering poets. Written, edited, and circulated by female factory operatives, the Lowell Offering (published from 1840 to 1845) has received attention for its delineation of the lives and opinions of workingclass women. It has also, however, been critiqued for its aspirations—to either gentility or literariness—with both seen as inauthentic desires on the part of young working women. While generally ignored in scholarly considerations of this periodical, the poetry published in the Offering demonstrates the

18

Introduction

operatives’ awareness of and response to such criticisms. In this chapter, I argue that poetry’s inherent intertextuality allowed Offering writers to demonstrate their “self-culture,” particularly their familiarity with and mastery of a vast reservoir of poetry, primarily British and American, which their middle- and upper-class peers often took for granted. Incorporating lines from published poems into their own work, writing parodies of wellknown verses, and situating themselves as the stylistic heirs to other women poets, the Offering poets did not attempt to hide or disguise their imitative practices. Using a relational poetics generated out of the reading of published poets, as well as the composition and circulation practices of parlor authorship, they sought instead to make their poetics easily legible to a wider, primarily middle-class, audience. Claiming literary culture and community, both inside and outside the textile mills, for themselves—not just as consumers but as producers—these “mill-girls” adapted it to the circumstances of the factory. In Chapter 3, I continue thinking about women’s poetic authorship in the print context of the periodical, arguing that the communal, collaborative voice was actually facilitated by such publications. Here, however, I focus on the work of an individual poet: Sarah Louisa Forten. The most prominent African American woman poet to appear in print after Wheatley and before Frances Watkins Harper in the 1840s, Forten published approximately seventeen poems in her lifetime, sixteen of which appeared in the abolitionist newspaper the Liberator under the pseudonym “Ada.” Yet Forten’s work has received very little scholarly attention outside of historical considerations of antebellum Black Philadelphia and the larger Forten family. As a poet, she has generally appeared ill-suited to conceptions of individual authorship and her poems too conventional, too generic, for literary analysis. I look at Forten’s use of the conventions of anti-slavery and sentimental poetry to think about her conception of poetic authorship and ownership as rooted in collaboration, communal membership, and political advocacy. I argue that her poems take on the challenges presented to the free Black community by the African colonization movement, performing varied modes of affiliation and activism for free Blacks who insisted on their American-ness as well as their loyalty to the enslaved. Focusing primarily on her use of voice in her poetry— particularly the collective “we” and the voices of marginalized women speakers—and comparing it to similar strategies in anti-slavery poetry and prose, I propose that Forten’s Liberator poetry insists on the visibility

Introduction

19

and persistence of the African American community in a cultural moment that threatened their erasure. I turn to book publication in Chapter 4 to further complicate the notions of community and collaboration, which latter term I consider in light of its dual meaning: both “united labor; co-operation” and “traitorous cooperation with the enemy.”46 While I argue that the work of marginalized poets like Maria James cannot be considered as either one or the other, the interplay between the two poles is productive. Published in 1839, Wales, and Other Poems was the result of a collaborative effort by three people: James, a domestic servant; Mary Rutherford Garrettson, the daughter of her employer; and Alonzo Potter, an Episcopal priest and bishop of Union College. While James wrote the poems, Potter negotiated with publishers and wrote the introduction to the volume, and Garrettson managed the collection of subscribers. Using James’s poems and the apparatus that accompanied them into print, as well as letters surrounding the publication and circulation of Wales, I continue my examination of the relationship between class, labor, and poetry for working-class women poets. Building on my discussions of marginalized poets in Chapters 2 and 3, I argue that access to print for James depended upon the incorporation of middle-class aesthetics and ideals, a poetics of imitation embedded in social stratification that shaped James’s use of language as well as her subject matter in Wales. James’s labor effectively disappears in the poems themselves; however, the success of the volume—and the collaboration that produces it—depends upon the visibility of James’s status as domestic servant in solicitations for subscribers, publicity materials, and reviews of the book. In Chapter 5 I investigate the moment at which a very successful and flexible mode of authorship failed women attempting to establish professional careers as poets in midcentury America. I do this through an examination of a single poem. Published in 1860 in the Saturday Evening Post, Elizabeth Akers Allen’s “Rock Me to Sleep” was reprinted throughout the century in newspapers and magazines across the country and was eventually collected in Allen’s Poems (1866) and The Sunset Song and Other Verses (1902). Along the way, it was clipped from newspapers and pasted into scrapbooks, copied into commonplace books, and other wise preserved in manuscript. The continued circulation and immense popularity of the poem resulted in a number of readers claiming authorship; the most notable of these was a New Jersey legislator named Alexander McWhorter Ball, whose defenders published A

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Introduction

Vindication of the Claim of Alexander M. W. Ball, of Elizabeth, N. J., to the Authorship of the Poem, Rock me to Sleep, Mother in 1867. An examination of this authorship controversy reveals that its roots lie in the fluid sense of authorship cultivated by American women poets during the antebellum period (and, in fact, by Allen herself in her early career). Tracing the trajectory of “Rock Me to Sleep”—from uncollected “fugitive” to song to one among many poems in Allen’s oeuvre—highlights the careful navigation of poetic authorship required by women writers over the course of the Civil War and the immediate postwar years. Faced with a rapidly expanding literary marketplace, changing professional standards and practices, and newly configured relationships between poets and their readers, women poets were forced to reassess their deployment of a relational poetics. With this reassessment came a dismissal and an erasure of this earlier model of poetic authorship. Also lost in this transition was an understanding of how to read and value the work of antebellum American women’s poetry. With the expansion of the literary marketplace just before and after the Civil War, women’s access to print was irrevocably altered by a larger cultural sanctioning of a concept of authorship that privileged originality over imitation, subversion over convention, and individualism over community. This shift continues to shape the study of nineteenth-century American literature today. We focus too often on the ways in which individual poets stand out from, rather than represent, literary movements or communities or conventions, constantly searching for the exception rather than the rule. These examples are then used to frame our larger thinking about women’s authorship, leaving us methodologically unable to broaden the scope of our research and obtain a clearer sense of the nineteenth-century cultures of poetry in the United States. The recovery of American women poets in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has, then, operated according to an aesthetic and a model of authorship that did not actually exist in the antebellum United States. To recover an earlier model that privileged a relational poetics does not mean that we create a new canon, replacing Emily Dickinson and Sarah Piatt with the likes of Sarah Forten and Maria James. It does mean that we think more broadly about antebellum women’s poetry, positioning it more precisely in the contexts in which it was written, published, circulated, and read.

CHAPTER 1

The American Hemans Lydia Sigourney’s Relational Poetics

In 1837, Sarah Josepha Hale, newly established as editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book and a poet herself, published The Ladies’ Wreath; A Selection from the Female Poetic Writers of England and America, With Original Notices and Notes: Prepared Especially for Young Ladies.1 In her preface to the volume, Hale insists that poetry “promote[s] civil, moral, and religious advancement” in society “in a three-fold manner; by inculcating reverence and love towards God, or piety; awakening the spirit of national aggrandizement, or policy; teaching the true relations of men to each other and to Nature, or Philosophy.”2 Hale insists that the poetry of “policy” or “national aggrandizement” (3) is the terrain of male poets: “Here, woman has no place,” she writes; “her harp cannot move stones, nor tame beasts. She must wait till the flowers bloom and the birds appear” (4). She claims a place for women in “the poetry of devotion, or piety,” but explains that it is in the poetry of philosophy—what Hale calls “the best and most exalted office of the muse”—that “woman is morally gifted to excel” (4). In a revised version of the preface, published with the second edition of The Ladies’ Wreath in 1839, Hale demonstrates a decided preference for women’s poetry: “The poetry of man exalts the intellect, kindles the passions and fosters the pride of man; but the poetry of woman purifies the affections, refines the sense, and opens the soul to those impressions of the beautiful and the good, which dispose the heart to the love of truth and nature, to the hope of heaven, to faith in God, and a desire to be holy as He is holy!”3 “The truth is,” she opines, in a line that she retained in the 1839 revision, “woman has not such unlimited range of subjects as man; but in the manner of treating those within her province, she has a freedom as perfect as his; and the delicate shades of genius are as varied and distinctly

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Chapter 1

marked in the one sex as its bold outlines are in the other. There are more varieties of the rose than of the oak.”4 Women’s subject matter may be more limited than that of men, Hale admits, but their success with such subjects as are allotted to them provides evidence of their own par ticular “genius.” While men are “lords of creation,” women are roses; but successfully distinguishing oneself from the other roses in the marketplace marks a woman poet as superior to the male poet who has an “unlimited range of subjects” to choose from. Indeed, Hale’s selections for The Ladies’ Wreath were guided by a desire “to allow place to those writers only whose style had some peculiar stamp of individuality, which marked their genius as original” (4). She is adamant in her rejection of the notion that there is only one kind of “female poetry,” British or American, writing: “I am aware that there are critics, who always speak of the “true feminine style,” as though there was only one manner in which ladies could properly write poetry. I ask such to compare the poems of Mrs.  Hemans and Mary Howit, of Miss Taylor and Miss Landon, of Mrs. Sigourney and Miss Gould. Are not all these productions beautifully feminine, and yet different in their style of beauty?” (4). For Hale, the conflation of women poets, both British (Felicia Hemans, Mary Howit, Jane Taylor, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon) and American (Sigourney and Hannah  F. Gould), demonstrates a critical laziness born out of sexism and a subsequent reluctance to pay serious attention to the work of women. Writing six years before the publication of Rufus Griswold’s The Poets and Poetry of America (in which only twelve out of the eighty-seven poets featured were women) and his Gems From American Female Poets (which is dismissively represented by Griswold as having “been prepared within the few days required to stereotype it”), Hale’s volume represents one of the first critical efforts in the United States to give sustained and discriminating attention to women’s poetry.5 Yet Hale’s insistence on the “individuality” of each of the writers in The Ladies’ Wreath is, to some extent, belied by her introduction to the work of Hemans, the first poet included in the volume. Hemans, who had died two years prior to the publication of Hale’s collection, was without a doubt the most widely read woman poet in both England and America.6 A portrait of the British poet graces the frontispiece of the volume, and in her biographical sketch, Hale insists, “The name of Mrs.  Hemans stands pre-eminent among female poetic writers, as unquestionably the Rose holds the rank of ‘garden queen’ among the flowers.”7 As “the Rose” (rather than just one variety of “the rose”), Hemans is clearly an archetype of sorts for the woman

The American Hemans

23

poet, regardless of her national identity.8 And it is inarguable that by the time The Ladies’ Wreath was published in 1837, many female poets, both British and American, had attempted to construct literary reputations on the basis of imitations of Hemans’s poetry. In 1829, Hale herself had noted that “a procession” of “imitators” undermined the value of Hemans’s own work and reputation with the production of their “counterfeit” poetry.9 No poet was more identified with Hemans in the public mind on both sides of the Atlantic than Lydia Huntley Sigourney, whose position in The Ladies’ Wreath as the first of the American poets to be included in the second half of the volume mirrors Hemans’s preeminence in the first. The practice of referring to Sigourney as the “American Hemans” began in the 1820s, long before the British poet’s death.10 When used most generously, the label was meant to point favorably to similarities between the two poets’ subject matter, particularly their attention to domestic and religious topics. For example, in 1841, one writer reports on a visit to “Mrs. Sigourney, the American Hemans,” and notes, “She resembles Mrs. Hemans in being eminently the poetess of the affections; every object and incident creative of human sentiment, or ministering to attachment, finds a responsive note on her truly sweet and feminine lyre.”11 Other critics concede the similarity between the two poets but insist on Hemans’s position as the superior writer; in 1835, one reviewer of Sigourney’s Zinzendorff, and Other Poems writes: “Mrs. Sigourney does not possess that harmonious power of versification, and smooth, unbidden flow, which so eminently characterizes her honored prototype. Neither has she that depth and strength of poetic feeling. As regards style, she may acquire in time perhaps, the ease and grace of Mrs. Hemans—we hope she may equal her in every respect. Like her, she is fulfilling the high and holy trust reposed in her by her Creator.”12 Here Hemans is said to be a “prototype,” an exemplar upon whose model Sigourney fashions herself. There is room for growth— Sigourney “may acquire in time . . . the ease and grace of Mrs. Hemans”— but not outside or beyond the established pattern. The label of the “American Hemans” thus serves as a sort of shorthand in the nineteenth century: it marks Sigourney and other American women poets as eminently religious, sentimental, and feminine.13 It also, however, marks them as imitators, a confirmation of what Hale calls the “opinion of all European critics, and the admitted acknowledgement of most Americans, that our new world afforded no subjects propitious for the muses.”14 To refute such an “opinion,” Hale recommends that “our American poetesses . . . look into their own hearts, not into the poems of others, for inspiration” (275). The cause of

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American literary nationalism required women poets to locate their “inspiration” simultaneously in the nation and in the self, producing poetry that reflected a distinctively American but still individual subjectivity. While this slippage between model and imitation presented a threat to proponents of a national literature, then, it also points to a related problem with women poets as authors. Rather than representing an individual self to their readers, as theories of the romantic lyric would have it, women poets often expanded beyond “their own hearts,” beyond the self—to other texts, to other authors, and to their readers—creating poems that could be inhabited and potentially owned by multiple others. For Sigourney, this meant gaining access to her readers’ own “hearts”—their emotions, their experiences, their beliefs—and giving them what one of Sigourney’s correspondents called “poetic dress.”15 As Sigourney explains in her posthumous autobiography, Letters of Life, many such poems were the result of letters of request; her practice of writing poems to order became part of her legend, recounted over and over again in biographical sketches of her life, with most writers and critics into the twenty-first century agreeing with Catharine Beecher, who wrote, soon after Sigourney’s death, that “the fault of her writings, to a degree, arose from her very virtues. Not only did her generous and sympathetic nature lead her to constant elegiac and funereal effusions, but she was constantly beset by mourning friends, not only among her acquaintance, but entire strangers, through the mail, entreating her to consecrate the graves of their dear ones with the flowers of her genius.”16 Thus, Beecher concludes, “it must be allowed that prolixity and haste were the faults of her literary career; and that her fifty volumes would have been wisely reduced to half that number” (561). What such posthumous assessments mask, however, is that the “constant elegiac and funereal effusions,” bestowed upon friends and “entire strangers,” were central to the establishment of Sigourney’s reputation as a poet. Moreover, such poems demonstrate a collaborative approach to the composition, publication, and circulation of poetry that is obscured by a critical emphasis on romantic genius and individual subjectivity. Therefore, Sigourney’s poems written to order reveal her embrace of the “American Hemans” label to be part of a larger poetics that foregrounds relational poetic practices including imitation and collaboration. As I will demonstrate throughout the rest of Fair Copy, Sigourney is by no means the only antebellum woman poet to make use of such a poetics. She is the best known, however, and has received more critical attention over time than any other poet I consider in this study. Unlike all but Elizabeth

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Akers Allen, many of her letters and manuscripts still survive, facilitating, to some degree, the research of her composition and publication practices. In this first chapter, then, I use Sigourney to think through the challenge that a relational poetics offers to traditional notions of Romantic authorship, particularly as they emerge in antebellum America. I begin by investigating the gendered politics behind the charge of imitation as it was leveled against Lydia Sigourney. I am not particularly interested in proving or disproving the argument that Sigourney imitated the work of Felicia Hemans; rather, I am arguing that Sigourney couldn’t help but imitate Hemans and the poetry “of the affections” that Hemans comes to represent—or at least that she couldn’t help appearing to do so. The critical framework established by the dominant critical discourse (and by the scholarly tradition that later took this discourse as its authority on the period) rendered American women poets imitative by definition, incapable of producing original work that would advance the cause of literary nationalism. Sigourney confounded such critics, however, by gaining immense popularity with her readers despite what critics saw as a lack of originality and a workmanlike attitude toward the composition of poetry. Examining Sigourney’s reputation as the “American Hemans” alongside her writing of poems to order suggests that a relational poetics offered her a way to circumvent critical expectations and censure, creating an alternate path to print and authorship. Sigourney’s success—and by extension, the broad popularity of women’s poetry—demonstrates that while a relational poetics may have been disparaged by critics, antebellum American readers found it not only unobjectionable but indispensable to their engagement with poetry, constituting an alternate national literature that placed women poets at its center.

Literary Nationalism and the Gendered Politics of Imitation While calls for a national literature had been issued for decades, the 1830s and 1840s saw a heated condemnation of imitation by American writers and critics who regarded the establishment of a distinctly American literature as essential to the cultural differentiation of the United States from Great Britain. As I’ll discuss in this section, these condemnations took on a decidedly gendered tone, framing women poets as particularly guilty of the constant reproduction and recirculation of imitative compositions. Theories of American literature grounded in this rhetoric necessarily framed women poets

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not only as failures but as dangerous to the larger success of American cultural equality with the Old World. Such theories created a discourse of literary nationalism that had no room for women poets except as figures of failed reproduction and a lack of progress. The desire for national distinction went hand in hand with the rise of romanticism in the United States, which replaced a neoclassical aesthetic that valued imitation as an essential part of the creative process. At the heart of neoclassicism was a reevaluation of classical Greece and Rome and an adaptation of artistic forms to suit the new republic of the United States. According to this aesthetic, the accomplished writer was expected to become proficient at techniques demonstrated by particular masters “within a limited set of classical genres” and American writers were particularly concerned that their work be as sophisticated and worldly as that of their European counterparts.17 Neal Dolan and Sacvan Bercovitch explain that “American poets of this period . . . tended to be anxious about their provincialism. Mastery of classical and English forms affirmed membership in a larger European tradition.”18 Such an apprenticeship was necessary in order for the artist to have a thorough sense of his (or, much less likely, her) own talents as well as what the past had to offer him (or her). As Robert MacFarlane explains of the neoclassical aesthetic, “Originality, according to these theories, largely meant newness in the sense of modest individuality and was perceived as an achievement to be gained by inventively swerving from a model predecessor.”19 This understanding of the productive relationship between imitation and originality is exemplified in American poet Joseph Rodman Drake’s “The Mocking-Bird,” first published in 1812, when Drake was seventeen years old, in the Philadelphia Port Folio. Here the speaker walks in “field and forest” “on a pleasant day / in the poets’ month of May,” and hears the singing of  birds.20 He recognizes, however, that each of these birds is echoed by the mockingbird, who soon develops his own superior adaptation of their original: Scarce I caught it, as it ran Through the ring-dove’s plaintive wail, Chattering jay, and whistling quail, Twittering sparrow, cat-bird’s cry, Red-bird’s whistle, robin’s sigh, Black-bird, blue-bird, swallow, lark; Each his native note might mark.

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Oft he tried the lesson o’er, Each time louder than before; Burst at length the finished song: Loud and clear it pour’d along. (204) After mastering each individual component (each bird’s “native mark”), the mockingbird is able almost effortlessly to assimilate what he has heard into something far better. The birds themselves and the speaker of the poem are awed by the mockingbird’s song: “All the choir in silence heard, / Hush’d before the wondrous bird” (204–5). While imitation is prized, then, it is only in the ser vice of originality; as the poet in “The Mocking-Bird” expounds “in most poetic wise,” In this bird can fancy trace An emblem of the rhyming race, Ere with heaven’s immortal fire, Loud they strike the quivering wire; Ere in high, majestic song, Thundering wars the verse along; Soft and low each note they sing, Soft they try each varied string; Till each power is tried and known; Then the kindling spark is blown. (205) Drake goes on to note the “kindling spark” of genius in poets as varied as Homer, Virgil, Milton, and Shakespeare, thus positioning the distinctively American mockingbird (and, therefore, the writer who would model himself after him) in a tradition of great national poets. American poets, including Drake himself, would soon come to reject the notion of a transatlantic tradition to which they might belong and contribute. Paradoxically enough, the influence for this new politically independent aesthetic came from the mother country herself. While the United States came late to Romanticism, the influence of the British Romantics can be seen by 1815 in the work of Lydia Huntley Sigourney and 1817 in William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis.” As Mary Louise Kete explains, “Americans began to value poetry that stressed the importance of emotions and that strove to express areas of experience neglected or invisible to the rational mind in a language and a style that was unique to the individual subject. For the individual

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became the source and standard of beauty.”21 By the 1830s, the culturally dominant American aesthetic embraced the notion of the solitary artist, uninfluenced by others, creating something wholly new and wholly one’s own. In other words, according to Kete, “to be a poet did not mean being first an excellent, practiced, and sophisticated reader of the art of others but to be an excellent reader of one’s self and thus one’s world” (22). Or, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it in his 1838 Divinity School Address, “Imitation cannot go above its model. The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was something natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another mark.”22 This emphasis on the individual self coincided with a politicized notion of national identity and expression in the United States to place imitation (particularly transatlantic imitation) at the center of debates about literary nationalism. In this Americanized romanticism, the individual poet performs in ser vice of the nation, rejecting inadequate foreign models for the inspiration he (or she) gains from the new world. Drake’s “To a Friend,” first published posthumously twenty-three years after “The Mocking-Bird,” marks this shift by insisting that an American poet could take on “nobler subjects” than the frivolous “lovesick measure” of the Old World: “Be thine the task a higher crown to gain, / The envied wreath that decks the patriot’s holy strain.”23 Rather than imitating the bird who imitates other birds in order to create a superior song, Drake now advocates that poets “kneel a worshipper at nature’s shrine! / For you her fields are green, and fair her skies! / For you her rivers flow, her hills arise!” (216–17). Nature (and the native inhabitants of the American landscape) provides the subject matter and, more importantly, the inspiration for the poet that will “wake a native harp’s untutored sound, / And give . . . the voice of song” (214). In sharp contrast to the neoclassical poet, the Romantic poet is “untutored” in the traditions of European verse, equipped by nature and the fecundity of the American landscape to produce a distinctively American literature. Critics who agreed theoretically about the need for originality were often unable to agree on what it meant to create or promote an original work of American literature. Did originality consist of attention to particularly American subject matter, as Drake implies and a writer for the Knickerbocker reaffirmed in 1845? “We number many men and women of excellent talent,” the latter insists, “but we want home subjects; something that our hearts and affections can rally round by our own fire-sides; a sympathy with our own,

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and with ourselves.”24 For Cornelius Mathews, one of the most ardent of the literary nationalists, “home subjects” included “descriptions of our scenery, . . . the illustration of passing events, . . . the exhibition of the manners of the people, and the circumstances which give form and pressure to the time and the spirit of the country; and all these penetrated and vivified by an intense and enlightened patriotism.”25 While many nationalists would not go so far as to demand that “American literature” have a particular subject matter, they often agreed with the assertion of the editors of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review that it should arise from a more vaguely American “spirit” or “principle—an informing soul—of our own, our democracy.”26 According to Kerry Larson, in this model, “the ‘nativeness’ of a literature is only secondarily about choice of a theme. . . . Nor is it reducible simply to evoking American landscapes. ‘Nativeness’ is possible only when the artist can tap into a pre-established fund of emotions grounded in certain objects which, when strung together, produce an aesthetic bliss of a peculiarly intense, special character.”27 Critics also debated whether or not this distinctively American literature already existed, as might be inferred from the titles of such anthologies as Samuel Kettel’s Specimens of American Poetry (1829) and Rufus Griswold’s The Poets and Poetry of America: With a Historical Introduction (1842). Such texts designated a group of writers and/or poems to be identified as American and, in the case of Griswold, claimed contemporary poets as part of a longer tradition. In his note “To The Reader,” Griswold expresses some anxiety about this gesture, acknowledging that “some whose names are in this book are POETS, in the strictest and highest sense of that term,” but asking “how many of them are free from that vassalage of opinion and style which is produced by a constant study of the literature of that nation whose language we speak, whose manners we adopt, and which was the home of our ancestors, and is the holy land to which our own spirits turn?”28 In “American Literature: Its Position in the Present Time, and Prospects for the Future,” published in her Papers on Literature and Art in 1846, Margaret Fuller definitively insists that early claims to a national literature are the result of “national vanity” and that a truly American literature will come only with time and maturation.29 That day . . . will not rise till this nation shall attain sufficient moral and intellectual dignity to prize moral and intellectual, no less highly than political, freedom, not till, the physical resources of the country

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being explored, all its regions studded with towns, broken by the plow, netted together by railways and telegraph lines, talent shall be left at leisure to turn its energies upon the higher department of man’s existence. Nor then shall it be seen till from the leisurely and yearning soul of that riper time national ideas shall take birth, ideas craving to be clothed in a thousand fresh and original forms. (124) Fuller laments the precipitous expansion of an American literature that seems to her to lack quality, originality, and any sense of national identity. She insists that the United States develop in stages—first, a focus on politics as well as exploration and settlement, and second, a focus on the arts, or “the higher department of man’s existence.” These earlier stages are necessary for the attainment of creative maturity, clearing the way for American “talent” to turn to “national ideas” in “fresh and original forms.”30 In this respect, Fuller, who was at the time the literary editor for the New York Tribune, is si multa neously inspired and frustrated by the American newspaper, “whose light leaves fly so rapidly and profusely over the land” (139). The newspaper’s ability to circulate widely and almost effortlessly appeals to her in that it provides an opportunity for “the discerning and benevolent” to promote the values of true and original thought “where they may hardly fail of an infinite harvest” (140). Yet poetry, the genre that would seem to Fuller to have the most potential in a newspaper setting, is clearly a disappointment to her. The newspaper, she explains, “is susceptible of great excellence in the way of condensed essay, narrative, criticism, and is the natural receptacle for the lyrics of the day. That so few good ones deck the poet’s corner, is because the indifference or unfitness of editors, as to choosing and refusing, makes this place, at present, undesirable to the poet. It might be otherwise” (139–40). Here she overtly blames the editor but is clearly also critical of those who publish in the “poet’s corner” without actually being poets; actual poets, she insists, find the poet’s corner “undesirable.” This judgment is reinforced elsewhere in the essay where she blames the writers of “rhymes” or “verse” for the sorry state of American poetry: What shall we say of the poets? The list is scanty; amazingly so, for there is nothing in the causes that paralyze other kinds of literature that could affect lyrical and narrative poetry. Men’s hearts beat, hope, and suffer always, and they must crave such means to vent them; yet of the myriad leaves garnished with smooth stereotyped rhymes that

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issue yearly from our press, you will not find, one time in a million, a little piece written from any such impulse, or with the least sincerity or sweetness of tone. They are written for the press, in the spirit of imitation or vanity, the paltriest offspring of the human brain, for the heart disclaims, as the ear is shut against them. (130) Fuller insists that poets should not have the same problems that prevent other American writers from producing because poets everywhere create poetry from the same inspiration and with the same subject matter: the emotions and suffering of their own hearts. Yet while their motivation should be the same, the product, in true Romantic fashion, should be distinctively their own, and it is here that Fuller finds fault, insisting that she has difficulty finding even “a little piece” to satisfy her vague critical standards of “sincerity or sweetness of tone.” Instead, she implies, most American poets merely imitate the emotions and expressions of their models. This lack of originality is all the more frustrating because it seems to ease the way to publication for these poets. In other words, imitation is rewarded with publication. Such poets could produce American art, Fuller suggests, but opt not to because they value money and popu lar recognition more than artistic originality and integrity. Newspaper poetry is thus characterized as “smooth stereotyped rhymes,” fixed and unvaried, despite its abundance. Such poetry simply reproduces itself, appearing over and over again, without any deviation, even “one time in a million.” In fact, Fuller’s use of the word “stereotyped” to indicate that which is of a predictable type also alludes to the use of stereotype plates in book production, which allowed printers to reprint texts as often as they wanted to without occupying the equipment they might need for other jobs. Fuller implies therefore that not only do these poems use the same “rhymes,” they are at heart the same composition, endlessly reprinted. This rush to produce and publish poetry results only in that which is merely fashionable and therefore disposable: “This is the kind of verse which is cherished by the magazines as a correspondent to the tawdry pictures of smiling milliners’ dolls in the frontispiece. Like these they are only a fashion, a fashion based on no real ity of love or beauty. The inducement to write them consists in a little money, or more frequently, the charm of seeing an anonymous name printed at the top in capitals.” (130) “The tawdry pictures of smiling milliners’ dolls” is clearly a reference to the fashion plates found at the beginning of each issue of monthly periodicals like Godey’s Lady’s Book and Graham’s Magazine of

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Literature and Art (previously Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine). Such periodicals featured a variety of offerings, from poetry, short fiction, and criticism, to sheet music and fashion plates, meant to appeal to a wide, but middle-class, audience. These fashion plates, which modeled the construction and correct way to wear popular designs, reveal Fuller’s concern with a larger dearth of creativity in the United States and a shallowness on the part of editors, authors, and readers alike, who turn to the same periodical to find fashion advice and poetry. Rather than being “clothed in a thousand fresh and original forms,” these poems, “the paltriest offspring of the human brain,” are, like the figures in the fashion plates themselves, largely indistinguishable from one another.31 Fuller’s milliners’ dolls, as well as the use of metaphors of reproduction to discuss the publication of American poetry, point to a curious absence in her assessment of the current state of American literature: the complete neglect of women poets. In fact, while she does take note of the fiction of Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Caroline Kirkland, of the nine poets that Fuller finds worthy of mention in her essay, none are women.32 The “dolls,” who seem incapable of life themselves, let alone of producing life, and the “paltr[y] offspring” become, effectively, a sort of stand-in for all of the female poets that Fuller does not mention in the piece—those paradoxically “anonymous names” whose reputations are negated by the absence of any critique, either positive or negative.33 While Fuller does not discuss women poets in her essay, she clearly participates in a theory of women’s poetics that had free range before Rufus Griswold crystallized it in the preface to his The Female Poets of Amer ica in 1849. Here he qualifies his praise for the talents of women poets by insisting that their success was due to superior powers of imitation rather than any real creativity. Opening his “Preface” with the claim that “it is less easy to be assured of the genuineness of literary ability in women than in men,” he continues: “We may confound the vivid dreamings of an unsatisfied heart, with the aspirations of a mind impatient of the fetters of time, and matter, and mortality. . . . The most exquisite susceptibility of the spirit, and the capacity to mirror in dazzling variety the effects which circumstances or surrounding minds work upon it, may be accompanied by no power to originate, or even, in any proper sense, to reproduce.”34 Associated with the heart and the spirit, rather than the mind, women are regarded as incapable of the originality that marks male poets. Moreover, they are potentially

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deceptive, “dazzling” the reader who attempts a sincere engagement with their work. Using the figure of the milliners’ doll, or the fashion plate, Fuller places women poets in a similar position: passively mirroring the current fashions but lacking in any original or even reproductive power of their own. As stand-ins for women’s writing in the nineteenth-century American literary marketplace, the “milliners’ dolls” indicate the endless recycling of women’s writing that contributes nothing (or negatively, for that matter) to the progress of American literature as a national literature.

Edgar Allan Poe and the “American Hemans” Whether or not Fuller had Sigourney in mind when she referred to the “smooth stereotyped rhymes that issue yearly from our press,” Sigourney can be taken to represent, in many ways, the case of the antebellum American woman poet. She was, quite simply, the most popular American woman poet (and possibly of either sex) of the nineteenth century. As Mary Louise Kete and Elizabeth Petrino note, Sigourney “had begun publishing during the second decade of the nineteenth century and went on to dominate the literary marketplace as it took shape during the decades before the Civil War.”35 She published advice books, travel narratives, and memoirs but was best known for the over two thousand poems she published in newspapers, magazines, gift books, and collected volumes of her work from 1815 until her death in 1865. In 1990, Nina Baym now famously insisted that “if Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney . . . had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent her. In fact, she was invented.” Baym explains, “As American women writers published in ever-larger numbers before the Civil War, one of them was bound to be construed as an epitome of the female author in her range of allowed achievements and required inadequacies. The prolific Sigourney was so well known from the late 1830s on that she would naturally become a candidate for this role.”36 While I agree, for the most part, with Baym’s assessment of Sigourney’s role as a writer, what she neglects to note is that the poet was not invented out of whole cloth; during her own career, in fact, it was her supposed imitation and reinvention of the British poet Felicia Hemans that earned both the most praise and the most condemnation from critics and readers alike and had the biggest impact on assessments of her contribution to a national literature. The intensity of this charge can be

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seen most clearly in Edgar Allan Poe’s 1836 review, published in the Southern Literary Messenger, of Sigourney’s Zinzendorff, and Other Poems.37 What the review reveals is a frustration with Sigourney’s success, and the success of women poets in general, based as it is on the repetition of the subject matters and stylistic tendencies that made Hemans so popular on both sides of the Atlantic. Taken together with Fuller’s assessment, published ten years later, of the state of American poetry, it demonstrates that even as proponents of literary nationalism condemned the products of women poets in essays and reviews, poets like Sigourney were forging their own literary traditions poem by poem. Sigourney’s work, I argue, should be seen as a creative, and very successful, negotiation of the print-cultural contexts within which she worked. That her poetry provoked criticism should not prevent literary scholars from recognizing that it represents a very real alternative to the elite model of American literary history formulated by Fuller and other critics. Despite Baym’s assertion to the contrary, in the first decades of the nineteenth century in America, there was really only one model for women poets: Felicia Hemans. Introducing an early American anthology of Hemans’s work, Thomas Ash called her “the model, in every respect, of what a female writer of poetry should be. Her poetry, itself, is the model of female poetry, so to speak.”38 Other American female poets were occasionally compared to Hemans, but Sigourney was the only one to be labeled the “American Hemans,” the equivalent of Cooper being called the “American Scott” or Irving the “American Addison.” Comparisons between Hemans and Sigourney were common; as early as November 15, 1827, in an article titled “Contemporary Poetry” in the Boston Lyceum, one writer insisted, “It might be thought strange were we to compare Mrs. Sigourney with Mrs. Hemans: and yet, after a thorough examination, we are free to confess we could discover no proper reason for the alleged superiority of the latter.”39 Two years after this, Samuel Kettel was able to conclude his assessment of Sigourney’s poetry in his Specimens of American Poetry, with Critical and Biographical Notices with the following assertion: “Had Mrs Sigourney written no more than our ‘Specimens’ exhibit, she would still possess undoubted claims to the proud title of the American Hemans.”40 It is possible that Sigourney’s inclusion in Zinzendorff of a tribute to the British poet, who had died in May 1835, attracted Poe’s attention. Here Sigourney suggests that, on one level, nature takes the place of the poet in mourning for the loss of Hemans:

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Nature doth mourn for thee. There is no need For Man to strike his plaintive lyre and fail, As fail he must, if he attempt thy praise.41 Yet by continuing to voice Nature’s lament for Hemans, and concluding her poem with the survival of the British poet in the mind of “every unborn age,” particularly the “Woman” who will “shrine thee as a vestal-flame / In all the temples of her sanctity,” Sigourney clearly indicates that while “Man” may fail in his efforts to praise Hemans in verse, “Woman” will not (300). Desirée Henderson argues that this and other such elegies for women poets by their female peers were used “to lay claim to an authorial identity”: “A turn of focus from the deceased and toward the work of literary remembrance,” she writes, allows the “elegy to serve as a site for both defining female authorship and engaging in a self-reflexive form of literary criticism.”42 While Poe famously asserted that a dead woman is the most appropriate subject for a poem, this apparently was not what he had in mind.43 In his review of Zinzendorff, Poe accuses Sigourney of consciously cultivating the association between herself and the British poet. He curiously does not mention Sigourney’s lament for Hemans, but he would clearly have seen this as part of a larger campaign to elicit what he regards as undeserved comparisons between the two poets: We have watched . . . with a species of anxiety and vexation . . . the progressive steps by which [Sigourney] has at length acquired the title of the “American Hemans.” Mrs. S. cannot conceal from her own discernment that she has acquired this title solely by imitation. The very phrase “American Hemans” speaks loudly in accusation: and we are grieved that what by the over-zealous has been intended as complimentary should fall with so ill-omened a sound into the ears of the judicious. We will briefly point out those particulars in which Mrs. Sigourney stands palpably convicted of that sin which in poetry is not to be forgiven.44 By alluding to the “progressive steps by which” Sigourney “acquired the title of the ‘American Hemans,’” Poe makes the process seem coldly deliberate and unabashedly ambitious. Sigourney’s imitative practices, then, are not merely a natural part of an apprenticeship as a poet, as the earlier neoclassical model

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emphasized; they are, he proposes, a concerted effort to build a reputation on the successes of another writer. The blame for this deception falls partly on Sigourney’s “over-zealous” admirers but also and perhaps primarily on Sigourney herself. Poe implies that Sigourney tries and fails to hide the deception from herself, but she cannot “conceal from her own discernment” her duplicity here, he insists, in a twist of logic that represents Sigourney as si multa neously deluded and deluding. Responding to Poe’s review in a letter to the critic, Sigourney insists that his accusation is not only groundless but impossible, as she had not read Hemans’s work prior to the publication of her first two volumes and much of her newspaper poetry: “The contents of a volume of poems, published in 1814 & selected by a friend from journals, written in early youth, without a thought of publication, & another in 1821, were composed before I had heard of Mrs.  Hemans, and likewise one of 1827,—most of whose poems were in existence before I had enjoyed the pleasure of perusing any of hers,— can therefore not be classed as imitations of that pure model.”45 While Sigourney’s claim to have been ignorant of Hemans’s work does not account for the poetry written and published between Poems in 1827 and Zinzendorff in 1835, she rejects Poe’s characterization of her in his review as “a determined imitator . . . whose reputation has been greatly assisted by chicanery” (34). Sigourney concedes Poe’s point that her “friends” may have “ imagined” a similarity between her work and that of Hemans, but she is more cagey about her own culpability (34). If she has, in fact, imitated Hemans, she explains, this implies a deficiency of “both intellectual and moral integrity” (34). Yet she stops short of an absolute denial of guilt, commenting instead on the “regret” she feels that “any course of mine, could have induced you to form” the opinions expressed in the review of Zinzendorff (34). Sigourney’s seeming reluctance to firmly denounce Poe and reject his characterization of her as imitator is perhaps due to her inability to deny the characterization of her poetry in Poe’s review—a characterization that he then claims renders her guilty. Poe argues, “Every unprejudiced observer must be aware of the almost identity between the subjects of Mrs. Hemans and the subjects of Mrs. Sigourney. The themes of the former lady are the unobtrusive happiness, the sweet images, the cares, the sorrows, the gentle affections, of the domestic hearth—these too are the themes of the latter. The Englishwoman has dwelt upon all the ‘tender and true’ chivalries of passion—and the American has dwelt as unequivocally upon the same. Mrs.  Hemans has delighted in the radiance of a pure and humble

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faith. . . . And all this too has Mrs.  Sigourney not only attempted, but accomplished—yet in all this she is but, alas!—an imitator” (875–86). Poe’s cata logue of similarities in subject matter between the poetry of Hemans and that of Sigourney is most striking in that it enumerates the limited range of subjects regarded as acceptable for women poets in the nineteenth century, blaming Sigourney for responding prudently to what would appear to be the demands of her audience. These are the same subjects that Hale would claim for women poets just one year later in The Ladies’ Wreath, but she insists on the best poets’ ability to distinguish their work from one another. For Poe, Sigourney’s success, it seems, is evidence of her failure, or at least of her guilt. Poe’s accusation of imitation goes beyond subject matter, however, to stylistic tendencies that he finds unappealing in the work of both women writers, but particularly abhorrent in Sigourney’s poetry because they are the result of imitation. In this case, Sigourney supposedly imitates what is not even worth imitating in the work of Hemans, thereby proving her to be more concerned with popular success than with the quality of her work. His complaint, Poe explains, is with “the structure of her versification”: —in the peculiar turns of her phraseology—in certain habitual expressions (principally interjectional,) such as yea! alas! and many others, so frequent upon the lips of Mrs. Hemans as to give an almost ludicrous air of similitude to all articles of her composition—in an invincible inclination to apostrophize every object, in both moral and physical existence—and more particularly in those mottos or quotations, sometimes of considerable extent, prefixed to nearly every poem, not as a text for discussion, nor even as an intimation of what is to follow, but as the actual subject matter itself, and of which the verses ensuing are, in most cases, merely a paraphrase. These were all, in Mrs. Hemans, mannerisms of a gross and inartificial nature; but, in Mrs. Sigourney, they are mannerisms of the most inadmissible kind— the mannerisms of imitation. (876) While Poe intends this to be an extension of his critique of Sigourney as an imitator, what becomes clear here is that Hemans is also being reviewed and found wanting. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that Hemans is found to be repetitive and easily reproducible—an imitator herself of herself. The “ludicrous air of similitude” that exists between “all articles of her composition”

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due to her use of interjections within the poems and “mottos or quotations” at the beginning of “nearly every poem” reveals her to be a poet who simply copies her own successes repeatedly and without revision. Both of these poets, and perhaps, by extension, all women poets, are guilty of an accumulation and circulation of the same subjects, the same conceits, the same poetic tricks.46 This critique of the process of circulation and recirculation in and of the work of women poets is central to Poe’s larger assessment of Sigourney’s career; after declaring himself not at all “inclined to call in question the justice or the accuracy of the public opinion, by which has been adjudged to [Sigourney] so high a station among the literati of our land,” Poe goes on to critique the way in which the poet’s reputation has been constructed incrementally by a series of mediocre pieces (874). “In a word—no single piece which she has written, and not even her collected works as we behold them in the present volume and in the one published some years ago, would fairly entitle her to that exalted rank which she actually enjoys as the authoress, time after time, of her numerous, and, in most instances, very creditable compositions. The validity of our objections to this adventitious notoriety we must be allowed to consider unshaken, until it can be proved that any multiplication of zeros will eventuate in the production of a unit” (875). Poe’s emphasis on time and repetition (“time after time”) recalls the millions of “smooth stereotyped rhymes” in Fuller’s “American Literature”; both express frustration with the seemingly uncontrolled accumulation of poems that don’t seem to add up to anything. Poe implies here that Sigourney, like Hemans (but somehow worse than Hemans), simply imitates her own work repeatedly and without reflection. Yet the italics used to emphasize this circular logic of publication indicate Poe’s frustration: how does Sigourney manage to accumulate such an “exalted rank”? Poe insists that there are two ways in which writers can achieve a reputation: first by writing a “great work” with the “power of creating intense emotion in the minds of men,” and second, by “keeping continually in the eye, or by appealing continually with little things, to the ear, of that great, overgrown, and majestical gander, the critical and bibliographical rabble” (874–75). While he is careful, probably because of her immense value as a contributor to the Southern Literary Messenger, to say that Sigourney does not fall within the latter group, he identifies her as one who “has trod, however, upon the confines of their circle. She does not owe her reputation to the chicanery we mention, but it cannot be denied that it has been thereby greatly assisted” (875). Equivocation aside, it seems clear

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that Poe is making a serious accusation here—not only does he accuse Sigourney of being an imitator, he says that she imitates a British poet, thus, he implies, damaging the cause of a national literature; he says that she is lacking in literary judgment, imitating what is worst in Hemans; and he says that she is a conscious imitator, producing mediocre poem after mediocre poem in a crass attempt to achieve fame and reputation and thereby popular success. Essentially, Poe criticizes Sigourney for masking her lack of genius with repeated but carefully timed imitations of Hemans that flood the senses of her commonplace readers, while offending the “minds of great men.” Poe’s review attempts to set out in exacting detail the “progressive steps by which [Sigourney] . . . acquired the title of the ‘American Hemans,’ ” as if such a demonstration would condemn her career to failure, but it is clear that the “rabble” he disparages had already proclaimed her success. Sigourney reminds Poe of this fact in an intriguingly indirect way when she writes to him to complain about his review: With regard to the article which has elicited our correspondence, allow me to premise, that few entertain more exalted opinions of the majesty of criticism than myself, and of its salutary influence on national literature, when independently, yet candidly exercised. I have felt that the living writers of our country, especially those of my own sex, had been too indiscriminately fed on praise. At least in my own case, the courtesy of the publick has so far transcended my deserts, that were it not for the deep consciousness of imperfection, I should scarcely have retained hope of improvement. With these sentiments, I should not probably be over sensitive on the subject of a review.47 With exaggerated civility, Sigourney makes it clear that “the courtesy of the public” justifies her questioning of “the majesty of criticism.” Critics, she slyly points out, are not the only game in town. While Poe’s criticisms had an enormous impact on the twentieth-century assessment of Sigourney’s work— Wendy Dasler Johnson insists that “Poe’s ban on ‘inadmissible’ sentimental convention stands virtually unchallenged among U.S. academics well into the twentieth century”—they did very little to affect her popularity in the antebellum period.48 Indeed, Sigourney seems to have embraced the charge of imitation brought by Poe and other critics, using it to gain exposure for her work and employing a poetics of repetition and cyclicality—both so disparaged by Poe—to foster a relationship with her readers based on shared experiences and

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emotions. While such a reading experience and the engagement between author and reader that it fostered would be regarded by Poe as “over-zealous,” it provided Sigourney with an alternative to the rhetoric of literary nationalism that held most contemporary American poetry as lacking.

Writing and Reading “Death of an Infant” It seems clear that Samuel Kettel’s 1829 identification of Sigourney as the “American Hemans” was not intended to undermine her importance to what he calls “our national literature.” Rather, in associating Sigourney with Hemans and reprinting eleven of her poems (far more than he includes for any other author), Kettel highlights her versatility and broad appeal to American readers. He is careful to point not only to her collected work but to her periodical poetry, insisting that “the wings of the periodical press” enable “the widest popularity” to “be combined with the most permanent endurance.”49 Fuller’s conception of the “light leaves” of the American newspaper that “fly so rapidly and profusely over the land” echoes this figuration but renders this form of poetic circulation suspect, bad for American authors and bad for the state of American literature. For Kettel, it is in “the department of fugitive poetry” that Sigourney most resembles Hemans; rather than discouraging this similarity, Kettel hopes “that Mrs. Sigourney will not suffer this rich vein of her genius to lie unworked” (206). One such “specimen” included in Kettel’s anthology (as well as in the earlier Boston Lyceum piece that compared Sigourney and Hemans and “could discover no proper reason for the alleged superiority of the latter”) is “Death of an Infant,” originally published in the Connecticut Mirror in 1826. “Death of an Infant” has served as something of a touchstone for scholars of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry; not only is it discussed frequently (as compared to Sigourney’s other work as well as poems by her female peers), it is also often reproduced in full. It was no less popular in the nineteenth century, having been frequently reprinted and appearing as one of the nineteen poems representing her work in Griswold’s Female Poets. As an iteration of that most popular of nineteenth-century poetic genres, the infant elegy, “Death of an Infant” can be seen as demonstrating the apparent truth of the charge of imitation as well as the dangers of a relational poetics that lends itself to unfettered circulation. But the composition, publication, and circulation history of “Death of an Infant” also reveals

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Sigourney’s mastery of such a poetics, enabling her to cultivate a broad readership and thereby attain a national reputation that Poe would deny her. The poem is reproduced in Kettel’s anthology as follows: Death found strange beauty on that cherub brow, And dash’d it out. There was a tint of rose On cheek and lip;—he touch’d the veins with ice, And the rose faded.—Forth from those blue eyes There spoke a wishful tenderness,—a doubt Whether to grieve or sleep, which Innocence Alone can wear. With ruthless haste he bound The silken fringes of their curtaining lids For ever. There had been a murmuring sound With which the babe would claim its mother’s ear, Charming her even to tears. The spoiler set His seal of silence. But there beam’d a smile So fix’d and holy from that marble brow,— Death gazed and left it there;—he dared not steal The signet-ring of heaven.50 Initially published as the work of “H.” in 1826 and then collected in 1827 in Sigourney’s third collection of poetry, titled Poems; By the Author of “Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse,” “Death of an Infant” was linked only tentatively to its author in the first few years of its existence. The subtitle of Poems was necessary because although Moral Pieces (1815) had been published under her own name (then Lydia Huntley) when she was twenty-four years old and unmarried, her marriage to Charles Sigourney in 1819 forced her to publish her work anonymously. According to Gary Kelly, Charles “considered female authorship to be unfeminine, inappropriate for a married woman and mother, likely to distract her from the domestic supervision that helped sustain his own career, and liable to public controversy.”51 “It is not that I object to your publishing what you write,” Charles clarified in a letter written to his wife late in 1827, “I object to the excess, & the abuse of this talent, the consequent immoderate desire of constantly appearing before the publick, & the immoderate desire of notoriety which follows, which amounts, in fact, to a mental disease.”52 The gesture toward her earlier work in the title of Poems appears to be Sigourney’s effort to appease her husband while also building a literary reputation around her entire body of published work—something she could

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not do if the later poems appeared unconnected to the earlier volume and to the periodical poetry that appeared si multa neously as the work of “Mrs. Sigourney,” “Mrs. L. H. Sigourney,” and “Lydia H. Sigourney.”53 By the time of its publication in Poems, the fugitive status of “Death of an Infant” had already caused some confusion over its authorship, and the tentative anonymity of that collection seems not to have helped. While Sigourney’s name only appeared with the poem a handful of times and it was frequently published without any attribution at all, it was often published as the work of “Mrs. Hemans.” Editors marking “Death of an Infant” as the work of Hemans seem to have been following the lead of the newspaper from which they clipped the poem or simply trying to please their readership by publishing the work of a well-known poet. Attributing the poem to Hemans might also have served to distinguish this poem from the many poems published at the time on the deaths of children, including a number titled “On the Death of an Infant.”54 The rather common misattribution of “Death of an Infant” to Hemans began as early as August 1826, approximately the same time that references to the “American Hemans” began to circulate, in the New Harmony (IN) Gazette. The practice continued in American editions of the British poet’s work: in 1828, a New Haven printer named Nathan Whiting published the poem in The Poetical Works of Mrs. Felicia Hemans and in 1836, just prior to the publication of Sigourney’s Zinzendorff, and Other Poems, Thomas Ash did the same in a one-volume complete works in Philadelphia. Sigourney did not initiate this misattribution, but she does not seem to have resisted it very aggressively either. As Kelly points out, Hemans was, by the late 1820s, “an established poet and public figure on both sides of the Atlantic” and was seen as “particularly address[ing] the self-consciously liberal, Christian, civil society of the new United States of America.”55 As Sigourney’s own reputation grew, the trick became how to profit from the association with Hemans without sacrificing the capital gained from such a popu lar poem. Sigourney’s awareness of her status as the “American Hemans”—and her sensitivity to the charge of imitation leveled by Poe two years earlier—is apparent in a note accompanying the publication of a revised version of “Death of an Infant” in her 1838 Select Poems: This little poem has been inserted by mistake, in one of the American editions of the late Mrs. Hemans. Though this is accounted by the real author, as a high honor, it is still proper to state, that it was originally composed at Hartford, in the winter of 1824, and comprised

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in a volume of poems, published in Boston, by S. G. Goodrich, Esq. in 1827. Should other testimony be necessary, it may be mentioned that a letter from Mrs. Hemans, to a friend in this country, pointing out some poems in that volume which pleased her, designated, among others, the “Death of an Infant.”56 Sigourney makes her claim to the poem by recounting its composition and publication history and enlisting Hemans herself, citing the supposedly irrefutable evidence of a letter that would be impossible to locate based on the information provided in the note. Moreover, while this note is ostensibly published to clarify the misattribution of her work, it also conveniently allows Sigourney to represent Hemans as an enthusiastic reader of her work and this letter as an implied endorsement. Regardless of Sigourney’s effort to clear up this question in 1838, readers continued to ask for clarification as to whom the poem belonged. The always unsettled nature of the question of authorship, which continued to arise as “Death of an Infant” circulated and recirculated throughout Sigourney’s life (and beyond), indicates the necessity for a continual and creative performance of poetic authorship, with each new context of the poem determining the extent to which authorship matters. It also points to the pleasure that readers took in such questions as they engaged with the work of their favorite poets. On June 11, 1842, for example, the New World published a letter to the editor regarding Griswold’s recently released anthology of American poets, The Poets and Poetry of America. Addressing the newspaper’s editor, Park Benjamin  Sr., who had founded the New World with Griswold in 1840, the anonymous letter writer asked for clarification on a question that had arisen during his reading of the volume: I found among the selections made from Mrs. Sigourney’s work lines “Upon the Death of an Infant,” which struck me as being familiar; and upon looking into an edition of Mrs. Hemans’ poetical works, published by Thos. F. Ash, Philadelphia, 1836, I found the same piece there given to her, the variation so slight, that one must have been the copy for the other. . . . Will you have the goodness to inform me through your valuable and interest ing paper, whether this resemblance is owing to the fact that the thoughts and ideas of great minds frequently are expressed in the same words; or, if it is an error of one of the editors, to which the piece indeed belongs.57

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Perhaps because both Hemans and Sigourney had established reputations as poets and both Ash’s volume and Griswold’s anthology contained reprinted pieces, making the editors responsible for their appearance rather than the poet herself, the letter writer’s real purpose here seems to be to clarify first, which of the poets was the author of the poem, and second, which “variation” of the poem is accurate—that reprinted in Ash’s The Poetical Works of Mrs. Felicia Hemans or that in Griswold’s The Poets and Poetry of America.58 Interestingly, the letter writer seems willing to entertain the idea that Hemans and Sigourney—both “great minds”—might have created a single poem containing the same “thoughts and ideas” and the “same words.” In answer to the letter regarding “Death of an Infant,” Benjamin quickly clears up any confusion on the subject, identifying Sigourney as the author and explaining that “the alterations pointed out . . . were doubtless made by Mrs. Sigourney in some recent copy of the poem” (383). Rejecting the idea of a spiritual connection between “great minds” in favor of the evidence provided by “alterations” or revisions, Benjamin resolves the questions that had presumably already been cleared up by Sigourney in her 1838 Select Poems. Yet as Jessica Roberts notes, the misattribution continued, with “Death of an Infant” credited to Hemans in Light on Little Graves, an anthology published by the American Sunday-School Union in 1848, long after the publication of Sigourney’s Select Poems and Griswold’s The Poets and Poetry of America.59 Benjamin’s reference to “alterations” in “Death of an Infant” might indicate one way in which Sigourney attempted to retain ownership of her work while also improving on the effect of the poem. Although Griswold reprinted a single-stanza version of “Death of an Infant” in 1849, Sigourney had already published a multistanza version in the 1838 Select Poems and had made changes to words and punctuation, some of which Griswold’s version reproduces. To a degree, the revisions highlight similarities between “Death of an Infant” and other child elegies of the period. Like many other infant elegies published in the same period, “Death of an Infant” asserts the always already angelic nature of the dead infant, implying, at the very least, the potential for a heavenly reunion between the child and his or her loved ones; it also renders such a union that much more desirable because of the helplessness of witnesses to prevent or ameliorate the ravages of death (or, more commonly, “Death”) on the infant body. Yet these revisions also emphasize the elements of the poem that enable it to stand out from the rest, making the misattribution possible in the first place. (After all, it is not just the identification of the poem as Hemans’s that renders the poem popular; conversely,

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the popularity of the poem renders it fit to be paired with Hemans’s name.) While Roberts speaks to the “beguiling anonymity” of child elegies—“their apparent dislocation from any particular instance of grief” (142)—that allows readers to sentimentally inhabit the space of the poem’s speaker, I see Sigourney complicating the temporal expectations of the genre to intensify and personalize readers’ encounter with “Death of an Infant.” Claiming repetition, cyclicality, and imitation as strengths, rather than weaknesses, Sigourney revises the poem to increase its dramatic appeal to the reader as well as its potential for “use and repurpose” by its audience.60 The revised poem appears in Select Poems as follows: Death found strange beauty on that polish’d brow, And dash’d it out. There was a tint of rose O’er cheek and lip. He touch’d the veins with ice, And the rose faded. Forth from those blue eyes There spake a wistful tenderness, a doubt Whether to grieve or sleep, which innocence Alone may wear. With ruthless haste, he bound The silken fringes of those curtaining lids For ever. There had been a murmuring sound, With which the babe would claim its mother’s ear, Charming her even to tears. The spoiler set The seal of silence. But there beam’d a smile, So fix’d, so holy, from that cherub brow, Death gazed, and left it there. He dared not steal The signet-ring of heaven.61 The separation of the original single stanza into four not only slows down the process of the child’s death but effectively forces the reader to experience it three times; whether Death’s touching the veins with ice, closing the lids of the eyes, and setting “the seal of silence” on the ears happens simultaneously or concurrently, the reader must endure Death’s aggression over and over. There is no forward movement through time in this poem—merely repetition, reiteration, and circulation that end only with the stoppage of time. This emphasis on time is essential to child elegies, by Sigourney as well as

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other poets, particularly the sense that the child who dies has somehow escaped time and the encounters with sin and sorrow that inevitably accompany maturation and adulthood. “Your infant is in Heaven,” one poet proclaims in the Christian Register just a few years after the publication of Sigourney’s poem, “Free from sorrow, free from stain.” Strike a note of triumph o’er it, You have pleasures none can paint; Though in pain and grief you bore it, You are mother to a saint.62 Another poet addresses the dead infant himself, insisting, “Sweet flower! Transplanted to a clime / Where never come the blights of Time—/ . . . To toils so long, so hard as mine, / Be such a recompense as thine!”63 Yet while these poems make such a transformation seem an escape from pain and suffering, Sigourney’s elegy effectively relegates the infant (and therefore the reader of the poem) to a repetitive cycle of death and dying. (Hence, perhaps, the title “Death of an Infant” rather than the more reflective “On the Death of an Infant.”) The past tense of the poem means that the infant is always already dead when the poem begins, even as the reader witnesses his or her death repeatedly in the reading of the poem. Virginia Jackson sees the reader’s role (or lack thereof) in “Death of an Infant” as key to its effectiveness, explaining that “the personified Death apparently has absolute agency and the reader has no agency at all—but that appearance is deceptive, since so much about this poem depends upon a way of reading. . . . Whether the dead baby’s transformation into Heaven’s jewelry seems triumph or loss will depend on the white Christian reader’s desire to be consoled.”64 As Eliza Richards demonstrates, however, it is the child’s transformation into poetic text that effectively speaks to the reader of this poem. The revisions to the poem only highlight this gradual process, this “drain[ing] of life from the body” Richards sees in many of Sigourney’s “posthumous tributes”: “Though Death expunges the infant’s ‘strange beauty,’ it is nonetheless recorded within the poem. Indeed, the description of Death’s erasure engraves the infant’s image, demonstrating the transformation of the dying infant into the living poem.”65 While I agree with Richards that the child’s “strange beauty” can be seen as inscribed within the poetic text itself, it is also true that the very physical violence against the child’s body is permanently etched there. Unlike a daguerreotype of the dead child that, as Karen Sanchez-Eppler

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points out, effectively erases the agony of death, making the child who has suffered (with both life and suffering passed) “instead into a memorial object, a small material thing with which to keep and cherish loss,” “Death of an Infant” cannot wholly negate the ravages of Death that it so memorably records.66 In this sense, the repetitive nature of the poem and its violence against the infant body may also speak to the repetitive nature of child death—not only broadly, within the larger culture, but within individual families. The condemnation of repetition in criticism of women’s poetry, as represented by Fuller and Poe, renders Sigourney’s responsiveness to the emotional and aesthetic needs of her readers in poems like “Death of an Infant” a fault, rather than evidence of her worth as a writer. This dismissal is reproduced in Griswold’s The Poets and Poetry of America, where Griswold concludes his biographical sketch of Sigourney by noting that “Mrs. Sigourney has surpassed any of the poets of her sex in this country in the extent of her productions; and their religious and domestic character has made them popular with the large classes who regard more than artistic merit the spirit and tendency of what they read.”67 Griswold seems to include Sigourney in this volume against his better judgment, to acknowledge the significance of “the extent of her productions” and the “large classes” (reminiscent of Poe’s “rabble”) who read her poems, while also resisting what Sigourney’s success might say about American poetry or readers or criticism. This critical concern about Sigourney’s audience can be traced to her background as the daughter of Ezekiel Huntley, gardener or groundskeeper for the aristocratic Lathrops of Norwich, Connecticut, which was well known and was noted in reviews and biographical sketches throughout her life. Reviewing her first volume of poetry, published with the assistance of her patron, Daniel Wadsworth, and sold by subscription, a critic for the North American Review took particular note of the young “Miss Huntley’s” circumstances: “Miss Huntley, we have been informed, is a most deserving and interesting young woman, who in the most adverse circumstances, has educated herself; and, by constant exertion, providing for the support of some relatives, as well as for her own, has emancipated herself from the humblest penury, and still found leisure at an early age, to compose this volume.”68 Even after she had established a reputation and a successful career as an author, removing the necessity of aristocratic patronage, assessments of Sigourney’s life and work invariably brought up the issue of her plebian roots. According to Paula Bernat Bennett, such references point to the source of the hostility to Sigourney’s work: “Not because she came from the working class, however, but because of the way in

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which she climbed out of it. Having married a man of means (a widower with three children), Sigourney, the gardener’s daughter, went back to work after her husband’s hardware business failed, defying his orders, and aggressively marketing herself and her books.”69 After her death, in a review of Sigourney’s posthumous Letters of Life, fellow Norwich native and professor of sacred literature at Yale University Timothy Dwight questioned her right to “fairly claim the name of poet,” as well as the veracity of her claim to intimacy with the Lathrops. “From the first mention of these names, every thing moves so smoothly and easily and imaginatively and poetically, that one almost loses sight of the individuality of the good old widow lady, and is often at an utter loss as to whether the house, and its furniture, and its library, and every thing within or without it . . . had anything to do with that venerable personage, or whether they were all alike the property of Sigourney’s own family.”70 It is entirely unclear, he concludes facetiously, whether “she was only like the organ-grinder, as compared with a true musician” (333). In other words, like the cuckoo that Drake celebrates in “The Mocking-Bird,” Sigourney seems to Dwight to inhabit the songs and lives of others rather than her own. Her own life, like her poetry, is illegible to her critics. Dwight regards Letters of Life as a “really interesting volume, which she has made as it were out of nothing” (331), while in the biographical entry that precedes his selection of her work in The Female Poets of Amer ica, Griswold insists that Sigourney has not suffered enough to claim the sort of passionate transparency that he places at the center of his notion of “our female poets”; the best of her work, he insists, “suggest[s] that it is only because the flower has not been crushed that we have not a richer perfume.”71 Yet the critical uneasiness about Sigourney’s appeal to a wide audience and the intimate relationship she develops with her readers indicates that it is the “richer perfume” of Sigourney’s sympathy that writers like Griswold find unsettling. To narrow her focus to her own suffering would be to diminish her reach. While “Death of an Infant” appears to focus only on Death’s fatal encounter with the child, the poem actually gestures outward to the infant’s relationship with its mother and, in the presence of the “signet-ring of heaven,” to his or her relationship with God. The “signet-ring” marking the “cherub brow” of the infant can also be seen as functioning similarly to a signet ring used to mark a letter’s origin and authenticity. Such rings, used throughout history to stamp or sign documents and correspondence with clay or wax, would have been recognizable to nineteenth-century audiences as symbols of authority, privilege, and active engagement—whether political,

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commercial, or personal—with others. The imprint of the ring on wax points back to the existence of the ring on the owner’s hand, just as the imprint of the “signet-ring of heaven” points back to the existence of heaven and of God. God is the creator of the child just as Sigourney is the author of the poem just as the letter writer—owner of the signet ring—can be said to be the author of the letter, but neither poem nor letter makes much sense without a mode of circulation and an audience. The seal implies a sanctioning of the letter’s circulation or, in the case of the infant whose death we witness in Sigourney’s poem, the movement of that poem into and throughout the literary marketplace. The child, the poem, the letter—the three become indistinguishable and interchangeable over the course of “Death of an Infant.” Read as a letter, then, this poem invites an intimacy with the reader that lends itself to the “way of reading” identified by Jackson, in which each reader is able to imagine this scenario through the lens of their own experiences, effectively re-embodying the body of the infant at the beginning of the poem, only to have it repeatedly die by the end. (It seems important that Sigourney’s infant is not gendered, therefore increasing the poem’s applicability.) The potential of the poem as letter also points to Sigourney’s larger practice of writing poems to order for friends, acquaintances, and strangers, many of whom were moved by a child’s loss to request a commemorative verse. While these requests were later dismissed by Sigourney as one of the more annoying demands placed upon her as she acquired a reputation as a poet, archival evidence indicates not only that poems written to order were essential to the establishment of her reputation but that such poems further represent Sigourney’s investment in a relational poetics that confounds romantic notions of authorship.

Sigourney’s Collaborative Elegies Recounting the success of her early career in Letters of Life, Sigourney noted that “with the establishment of a poetic name” in the “monthly magazines,” her readers came to feel a sense of ownership over her work, prompting frequent requests for original poetry. She explains: The number and nature of constant applications were alike remarkable. Churches requested hymns, to be sung at consecrations, ordinations, and installations; charitable societies, for anniversaries; academies

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and schools, for exhibition. Odes were desired for the festivities of New Year and the Fourth of July, for silver and golden weddings, for the voyager wherewith to express his leave-taking, and the lover to propitiate his mistress. Epistles from strangers often solicited elegies and epitaphs; and though the voice of bereavement was to me a sacred thing, yet I felt the inefficacy of balm thus offered to a heart that bled. . . . But to gratify all was an impossibility.72 Sigourney then cata logs a number of the requests for poems written to order, including a “poem, intended as a school premium for a young lady,” another “on the feather of a blue-bird picked up by the road-side,” and a third “to copy in the album of a lady . . . , requested by a gentleman ‘to be sent as soon as Saturday afternoon, because then he is more at leisure to attend to it’ ” (373, 372, 373). Many requests solicited elegies written to order. One, for example, presents a “canary-bird, which had accidentally been starved to death,” as the subject for “some elegiac verses,” while another requests an elegy on “a young child,” but the only piece of information offered about the child is that he or she “drowned in a barrel of swine’s food” (373). Another grieving parent is just as vague about the child himself, explaining only that his or her nine-month-old son had been “just thirteen pounds,” but is very specific about the finished presentation and purpose of the product requested: “some poetry to be framed, glazed, and hung over the chimney-piece, to keep the other children from forgetting him” (373). Sigourney’s humor about such requests does not spare her from the critical eye of those who, like Poe and Griswold, resent her appeal to a seemingly indiscriminate mass of American readers. In his review of Letters of Life, Dwight writes, We smile, as she tells us of the letter which she once received, requesting an elegy on a young man, “who was one of the nine children of a judge of probate, and quite the Benjamin of the family, the member of a musical society, and who, had he lived, would likely have been married in about a year,” but of whose character and life she knew nothing beyond these interesting facts. Yet as we finish this account of her own life, we hardly wonder that these few things were deemed sufficient to excite her poetic fervor, and we have a prevailing belief that the wished-for elegy can now be found somewhere among her published or unpublished works.73

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The implication here is that Sigourney responded to even the most ridiculous of requests and that these responses “can now be found somewhere among her published or unpublished works.” Her body of work, Dwight suggests, is so immense and so homogeneous that while the “wished-for elegy” could be found, no one other than the correspondent who requested the poem would care to locate it. Dwight therefore limits the appeal of each elegy to the person requesting it—individual “strangers” whose belief in Sigourney’s power and sympathy is a cause for mockery rather than respect (331). According to Dwight, Sigourney’s presence meant that “no one, however obscure or however youthful, has had a doubt, that even himself might, in some future day, be turned into song, or his own humble virtues made the poet’s theme” (330). The young man—child of a probate judge, member of a musical society, soon to be married—is one such “obscure” figure who, in Dwight’s opinion, clearly is not worthy of poetic treatment. In the extended passage as it appears in Letters of Life, however, it is clear that the requested elegy is also to be an expression of a community’s grief and is meant to be published and shared outside of that community as well. After the section quoted in Dwight’s review, Sigourney goes on to explain, “It is added, that his funeral was attended by a large number of people; and ‘if I let them have a production on his death,’ I am desired to dedicate and have it published for the benefit of a society whose name I cannot decipher.”74 While both Sigourney and Dwight represent this particular request as ridiculous, an imposition on her time and generosity, the elegy is clearly a democratic genre, one at which Sigourney excels.75 Dwight’s scornful dismissal of Sigourney’s practice of writing poems to order also points to its collaborative nature: using the “interesting facts” of the young man’s life, Sigourney is expected to produce a poem that will express the letter writer’s grief and that of the larger community. Dwight’s use of the phrase “interesting facts” is clearly sarcastic—he finds the young man dull and common—but he is echoing its use in many descriptions of Sigourney’s composition of poems written to order. In a note preceding one such poem, “The Unchanged of the Tomb,” published originally in the Boston Bunker Hill Aurora, for example, the editor summarizes the experiences of a couple who had recently lost two small children. “These interesting facts were communicated to a lady,” he goes on to explain, “who gave them the following poetical dress.”76 As Richards notes of Sigourney’s appeal to both individual readers and a broader audience, the “elegiac poetic realm” in her work “offered an opportunity for interpersonal identification when sentiment

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overcame the physical boundaries that separated individuals and texts.”77 Yet I propose that these boundaries are already overcome in the collaborative process that produced many of Sigourney’s elegies, in that subject matter (“interesting facts”) is provided by readers while the form of the poems (“poetical dress”) is provided by Sigourney. This process can best be seen by backing away from the retrospection of Letters of Life and tracking the composition and publication process of individual poems from letter of request to handwritten elegy and finally to publication.78 On December 24, 1831, Lydia Sigourney responded to a letter from Amelia Champlin, wife of a wealthy sea captain in Essex, Connecticut, just thirty miles from Sigourney’s home in Hartford. While Champlin’s letter does not survive, she seems to have requested a poem from Sigourney in memory of her daughter, Louisa Champlin, who had died in February at just three years of age. In response to this request, Sigourney writes: “Your letter containing the affecting account of the death of your little girl was perused with deep commiseration. Sorrows of such a nature will not fail to awaken sympathy in the bosom of every mother. . . . Stricken indeed, the heart must be, that is called upon to resign so sweet and cherished a being, as the one whom you have described.”79 Of her own writing, Sigourney says only, “I have at your request put in a poetical form some of these thoughts which the recital of your grief awakened, and enclose them with assurances of regret for your affliction.”80 The attached manuscript poem, titled “The Lost Darling,” is from the point of view of the mother, and opens with the assertion, “She was my idol.” After recounting the delight she once took in observing her daughter’s everyday activities—playing with her dolls and her kitten, reciting her alphabet and her prayers—the speaker imagines that she hears a sound coming from the child’s bed: “I start, / Half fancying from her empty crib there comes / Some restless sound. I breathe the accustomed words, / ‘Hush, hush, Louisa dearest,’—then I weep.” While the mother attempts to console herself with the assurance that her “darling” now experiences “a seraph’s bliss,” she is unable to erase the memories not only of her child’s happy days but also of her suffering while ill. “I wish I had not seen the pang,” the mother laments, “That wrung her features,—nor the ghastly white / Settling around her lips. I would that Heaven / Had taken its own, like some transplanted flower, / In all its bloom and freshness.”81 Recalling the emphasis on the suffering child in “Death of an Infant,” this poem, written at the request of a grieving mother, suggests that while dwelling on the pain of deceased loved

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ones was a difficult process, it was pleasurable in its own way, allowing the living to feel closer to those who had recently died. Just a month after the letter to Champlin, “The Lost Darling” appeared in print in the Ladies’ Magazine and Literary Gazette, a periodical edited by Sarah Josepha Hale and later merged with the Lady’s Book and Magazine to become Godey’s Lady’s Book.82 The poem was quickly reprinted (with minor changes) in a number of Christian periodicals and women’s magazines (as well as the Youth’s Companion) but apparently not entirely disconnected from its original purpose. A note from a subscriber accompanies the reprinted poem in the Religious Intelligencer, an evangelical magazine published in Connecticut, explaining that “the following tender and beautiful lines are from the pen of Mrs. Sigourney, and were sent to a mother who had been bereaved of a darling child.”83 It isn’t until the poem appears in Sigourney’s collected Poems (1834) that this origin becomes obscured with the replacement of the line “Hush, hush, Louisa, dearest” with “Hush! Hush thee, dearest.” While subtle, the change makes the poem more widely applicable, the subject position of the speaker inhabitable by any woman who has lost a child.84 Without the originating letter, it is difficult to know how much of the content of “The Lost Darling” was taken directly from Champlin’s account of her daughter’s death. Yet another example serves to illuminate the way in which readers collaborated with Sigourney on both the composition and the publication processes, suggesting that Sigourney trusted her readers to know not only what they wanted to read but where they wanted to read it. In November 1846, Sigourney received a detailed letter from a Mrs. Gooking of Terre Haute, Indiana, in which she described in great detail the deaths of her two young sons, as well as what she calls the “principal object of this communication,” a dream that her fourteen-year-old daughter had just prior to the death of the youngest boy in which the gown-wearing, harp-playing deceased are reunited in Heaven under the watchful eye of a beautiful angel.85 The dream is recounted in quotation marks, as if Gooking is representing the speech of her daughter, but in the third person. She saw her brother Theron, then wasting away by disease, standing on an eminence, and beyond him in the blue sky, she saw a gate, which presently opened, and little Frank accompanied by a female attendant of angelic form, and flowing hair, draped in a white robe, came thro’ it. He was draped in a robe of white bespangled with gold. In his hand

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he carried a harp, upon which he played, while another tastefully adorned was suspended on his left arm. Frank and his attendant who carried a robe like his, came to Theron. The attendant draped him in this robe, during which time Frank played upon his harp. Then presenting T—with the other, they all arose and passing thro’ the gate, disappeared.86 This dream, the mother admits, may not be “at all singular perhaps, under all the circumstances, but still to a mother’s partial eye, presenting a scene of singular beauty, and a strong desire to see your graphic pen employed in presenting this scene to the eye of the mind, by the aid of the Muses, has alone induced me to trouble you.”87 Here Mrs. Gooking indicates clearly her understanding of the collaborative process involved in producing such a poem. Presented with the scene of Mrs. Gooking’s grief, Sigourney is expected, with the aid of her “graphic pen” and creative inspiration, to re-present this scene back to her in a slightly different but still recognizable form. The poem that Sigourney writes is titled “The Daughter’s Dream” and it centers on the mother figure’s grief for her two sons, beginning with her “o’er her suffering boy / At rayless midnight hung.”88 In the fourth stanza, however, she shifts to the daughter’s recounting of her dream, as Gooking did in her letter. The daughter explains that she saw her dead brother emerge from an “open gate / Far, in the clear blue sky.” His robes were glistering as the light, All pain had fled away; And a fair golden harp he bore, That well he skilled to play, While hovering near, an angel guide Pressed on, in beauty rare, Still in his hand a vestment rich, Such as they both did wear; They wrapped it round the feeble babe That there in cradle lies, And struggling with the fever-pain So sorely moans and cries.

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They raised him gently in their arms, With more than mother’s care, And straightaway he became like them, As glorious and as fair.89 The daughter’s dream is said to console the mother, “restrain[ing]” her grief and reminding her of the promise of Heaven. Similarly, of course, the poem itself, constructed out of the materials of the daughter’s dream and the mother’s letter, is meant to further comfort the grieving mother by allowing her to see her experiences reflected back to her in the discourse of the sentimental elegy. Her letter makes clear that she understands and even speaks this discourse, but Sigourney’s expertise is needed to fully translate letter to poem, thereby “presenting this scene to the eye of the mind” and forever shaping the way in which it will be recalled by Gooking. Interestingly, it is Mrs. Gooking who makes publication central, rather than accidental, to this process: “Should you comply with my request,” Gooking continues, “I should like very much to see the production in the Mother’s Magazine, of which I have been a constant and admiring reader from its commencement.”90 In January 1847, less than two months after the receipt of the original letter, Sigourney’s poem “The Daughter’s Dream” was indeed published in the Mother’s Magazine. While it was not unusual for her to place her work with this periodical—her name appears on a list of principal contributors just a few years later—Sigourney’s compliance with the request for this poem indicates that letter writers were considered to have some sort of control over the circulation of poems created out of their own personal tragedy. It also implies that such grief was meant to be shared—even that it was felt most fully when shared with a larger community of readers. In Gooking’s case, placing the poem in the Mother’s Magazine, a periodical intended to advise mothers on the discipline, health, and education of their children, may have confirmed her sense of herself as a mother even after the deaths of two of her children. It also provides public evidence of her collaboration with Sigourney. While she tells the poet that “you, after all, are the only proper judge as to the subjects which may, or may not, employ your pen,” Gooking can take comfort and satisfaction in the idea that her sense of the “singular beauty” of her daughter’s dream was accurate.91 The collaborative process behind many of Sigourney’s poems was eventually disconnected from the poems themselves, as they were published under the

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name of “Mrs. L. H. Sigourney,” the work of a singular creator. Sigourney herself came to disavow this process, mocking the requests for poems written to order in Letters of Life and claiming something more like romantic inspiration for her work. In her “Preface” to her 1834 Poems, for example, she insists that the poems included “were suggested by passing occasions, and partake of the nature of extemporaneous productions.” Such a claim erases the contributions of those who request such poems, who provide the “occasions,” the narrative, and often the very language of Sigourney’s poetic response to their grief. This is reiterated when Sigourney frames her experience as poet in Romantic terms: They have sprung up like wild flowers in the dells, or among the clefts of the rock; wherever the path of life has chanced to lead. The hand that gathered and now presents them, borrows for their motto the sweetly eloquent words of Coleridge: “I expect from them neither profit nor general fame; and I consider myself amply repaid without either. Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward. It possesses power to soothe affliction,— to multiply and refine enjoyment,—to endear solitude, and to give the habit of discovering the good and the beautiful in all that meets or surrounds us.”92 Here Sigourney’s narration of her poetic process is contradictory. Poems like “The Lost Darling” and “The Daughter’s Dream” are like “wild flowers,” fully formed and simply gathered by the poet; in this she might seem to acknowledge the efforts of the letter writers. Yet by associating with Coleridge and the Romantic poets here, Sigourney positions herself as writing for herself alone, unconcerned with her accessibility to or relationship with her readership. Poetry is “its own exceeding great reward,” a solitary pleasure rather than a collective effort. Sigourney’s gathering of poetic wild flowers also devalues the labor of composition. She and her admirers frequently found themselves dancing a fine line between acknowledging the hard work that Sigourney put into her poetry and claiming that poetry as evidence of her distance from her workingclass roots. In the biographical sketch of Sigourney in The Ladies’ Wreath, Hale notes that “her parentage was in that happy mediocrity of fortune which requires industry, yet encourages hope—and the habits of order and diligence, to which she was sedulously trained by her judicious mother, have, no doubt, been of inestimable value to the poetess.”93 While she ends the piece

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by insisting that Sigourney’s literary studies are her recreation—“surely as rational a mode of occupying the leisure of a lady, as the morning call, or the fashionable party” (249)—Hale is clearly unable to escape the link between Sigourney’s background and her success as an author. Twenty-first-century critics have made this connection more overtly: as Paula Bennett notes, “With quintessentially working-class pragmatism, Sigourney treated poetry-writing as work . . . view[ing] herself as a maker, not an ‘effuser,’ of verse.”94 Yet what Sigourney made and how she made it is far more complicated than it might initially seem. Recognizing the model set by Felicia Hemans, she attained celebrity status with her audience by publishing a profuse amount of poetry on a wide range of subjects, with a par ticular focus on domestic and religious subject matter. Yet her take on Hemans—her identity as the “American Hemans”—had a democratic edge lacking in her predecessor. Embracing the charges of imitation, of repetition, of unfettered circulation, Sigourney collaborated with her readers to “make” poetry that could appeal to a wide audience, reflecting in both form and content experiences that many of her readers shared. While Sigourney was the best-known and most successful woman poet of the antebellum period, this strategic approach to the composition and publication of poetry was also employed by other women poets, including, as we’ll see in the next chapter, the “mill-girl” poets of the Lowell Offering. It would simply be wrong to claim that Sigourney did not care for fame or reputation, but reading her within the cultures of print in which she published her poetry reveals that her sense of poetic authorship was shaped by the opportunities for publication and circulation available to her.

CHAPTER 2

“The Songs Which All Can Sing” Imitation and Working Women’s Poetry in the Lowell Offering

In her autobiography, A New England Girlhood (1889), Lucy Larcom attempts to articulate the aspirations that led her and her fellow “mill-girls” to publish their work in the Lowell Offering; she writes, “we did not set ourselves up to be literary; though we enjoyed the freedom of writing what we pleased and seeing how it looked in print. It was good practice for us, and that was all that we desired.”1 Reading this explanation is perhaps more confusing than it is enlightening. To begin with, what does it mean to “set [one’s self] up to be literary” and why does Larcom insist that the factory operatives did not do this? Why did “writing what [they] pleased and seeing how it looked in print” give them such satisfaction? Finally, what exactly is print “good practice” for, especially in the case of women who worked for the Lowell textile factories and published in the Lowell Offering between its first appearance in October 1840 and its demise in December 1845? These women were an integral part of the nineteenth-century American textile industry that flourished throughout New England. With the establishment of the Boston Manufacturing Company in 1814, Francis Cabot Lowell and his fellow “Boston Associates” constructed and operated a series of mills throughout Massachusetts. In order to avoid the European practice of employing families in the mills, as well as the employment of male workers who might demand higher wages, the Associates advertised for female employees, usually between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. While parents were persuaded to send their daughters to the mills by owners’ assurance of corporate paternalism and protection, the daughters themselves were drawn by the wages—higher than anything they could earn in other occupations—and the opportunities for independence and self-improvement. Operatives worked

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for twelve hours a day but were encouraged to spend their spare time attending evening schools and lyceum lectures and enjoying free access to circulating libraries. The literary interests of the operatives prompted the organization of improvement circles, often held in churches, in which they met to share their writing with one another.2 Although other operatives’ periodicals were proposed and even published, the Offering quickly became recognized as the only one entirely written and, eventually, edited by the mill girls themselves. It was first published in October 1840, by the Reverend Abel C. Thomas of the First Universalist Church in Lowell, who insisted, “The objects of the publication are, to encourage the cultivation of talent; to preserve such articles as are deemed most worthy of preservation; and to correct an erroneous idea which generally prevails in relation to the intelligence of persons employed in the Mills.”3 It appeared sporadically until January 1841, when it became a monthly magazine featuring fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. In 1842, Thomas sold the Offering to William Schouler, editor and publisher of the Lowell Courier, who merged the Offering with the Operatives’ Magazine, another periodical produced by Lowell operatives. At the same time, two factory operatives, Harriet F. Farley and Harriott Curtis, took on the role of editor. Farley and Curtis eventually purchased the periodical from Schouler, although he remained as publisher until its demise in late 1845. As Judith Ranta notes, the Offering “was the longest-running and apparently the earliest factory-workers periodical. It is also quite possibly the first periodical in the United States . . . written entirely by women.”4 By the time Larcom’s A New England Girlhood was published, almost fifty years after the first issue of the Offering, the equation between writing, print, and publication had shifted, with the dramatic expansion of the literary marketplace on the one hand and increased opportunity and technology for individuals to privately print and circulate their work on the other. During the antebellum period about which she writes, however, to be “in print” would necessarily mean to be published. Many literate women of the period occupied themselves with various forms of “parlor authorship,” as Susan S. Williams calls it, writing diaries, letters, and poems, and occasionally exchanging their work with one another.5 While many sought to preserve their work and that of their peers in commonplace books, scrapbooks, and private collections, relatively few actually attempted to publish. Publication, as Larcom points out, usually required some measure of literary ambition, some sense of oneself as “literary.” The Lowell factory operatives, however,

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found themselves in the rare position of having access to print without first having to imagine themselves as “literary”; any literary aspirations developed as a result of the publication of their work. It is for this reason that the Lowell Offering provides us with a unique opportunity to see working-class American women negotiating their relationship to print in public, as the interrelated processes of reading, composition, and publication are central features of the work of the periodical. The relationship between print culture, labor, and the literary in the Offering is, I propose, particularly salient in the poetry written and published by the operatives, in that poetry was both the most literary of genres and, for nineteenth-century American women, one of the most accessible. While the relative brevity of poetry lent itself to the long working hours of the factory operatives, the genre’s inherent intertextuality allowed the poets to demonstrate their familiarity with and mastery of a vast reservoir of poetry, primarily British and American. Poetry therefore played a prominent role in the Offering’s mission, as articulated by editors Curtis and Farley in 1843, to demonstrate the “intelligence” and “self-culture” of factory girls and of “the mass of [the] country” in general.6 The Offering poets’ use of this reservoir has led them to be labeled as imitative and therefore uninteresting by later scholars. Such dismissals are generally mired in either a modernist aesthetic that has room for only a select few nineteenth-century poets or an expectation of working-class poets that would label their consumption and production of mainstream literary texts as inauthentic in that it does not lead to poetic protests against nineteenth-century capitalism and labor practices. The poetry of the Offering has received little attention, and most of that disparaging; this is, perhaps, in part because most scholars who have looked at the Offering are historians who have tended to turn to the periodical for factual details about factory life and reform. Hannah Josephson established this critical precedent in 1949, when she wrote in The Golden Threads: New England’s Mill Girls and Magnates that “the poetry in the Offering was almost completely undistinguished.”7 Philip  S. Foner’s The Factory Girls (1977), a selection of writing by and about female factory operatives in New England, features a number of poems, but only those that protest the conditions of labor in the factories. Only one poem in The Factory Girls, then, is from the Offering, and even this is included in the section of the book titled “The Genteel Factory Girls” (as opposed to “The Militant Factory Girls,” which follows). Benita Eisler, whose The Lowell Offering: Writings by New

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England Mill Women (also 1977) remains the only available anthology made up entirely of selections from the Offering, includes just one poem in the volume and says this of the periodical’s poetry in her introduction: “Poetry was the least happy form of expression for Offering talents. Most selections, favoring elegiac subjects and form, are frank pastiches of women poets scarcely more gifted than their acolytes. As soon as they set out to ‘pen verse,’ the spontaneous, freshly observed detail, the felt experience, were abandoned for the dreariest poetic formulas of the day.”8 Eisler’s assessment of this body of work as “the least happy form of expression” for Offering contributors indicates her unwillingness to grant it any formal or thematic complexity or to read it as important precisely because it followed such a popular and widespread “formula.” For Eisler, to “pen verse” is simply to replicate the work of female poets whose work appeared in mainstream magazines; the resulting poems are, therefore, unworthy of study. Eisler’s dismissal of the Offering’s poetry as an imitation of an already formulaic original has, for the most part, shaped the critical response to this work, even by literary scholars. Sylvia J. Cook’s study of working-class American women writers, Working Women, Literary Ladies: The Industrial Revolution and Female Aspiration (2008), does much to position the Offering within its nineteenth-century literary and social context, but her argument about what renders the material of interest to scholars is not very different from that of Eisler. Both clearly prefer the fiction and nonfiction of the Offering to the poetry, claiming that the prose work realistically depicts the lives of the factory workers themselves. While Cook does not entirely dismiss the value of imitation and convention, she is quick to prioritize literary innovation in the Offering: “While much of [the operatives’] writing is in the vein of religious idealism, and is conventionally decorous and imitative in both form and content,” she writes, “they also begin the more radical process of developing imaginative literary modes that anticipate later realism.”9 More recently, Lori Merish’s Archives of Labor: Working-Class Women and Literary Culture in the Antebellum United States (2017) dismisses the work of the Lowell Offering altogether as a “thoroughgoing domestication” of “the public nature of factory work” and regards the poetry of the Offering as particularly compromising: “The Lowell Offering was established, in fact, to display the superior cultural accomplishments and attributes of the American female factory worker—to display through her writing (especially poetry) that she possessed feminine sensibility.” She concludes, “Universalizing domestic womanhood was quite clearly a class tool.”10 Both Cook and Merish

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largely ignore the poetry in the periodical because it does not meet their expectations for working-class women’s literature. What I would like to suggest here, however, is that the Offering’s immersion in and response to antebellum print cultures is precisely what should render it of interest to scholars of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry. I argue that these poets used a relational poetics to make their lives, texts, and talents legible to a wider, primarily middle-class, audience—an audience that would have been intimately familiar with the rhetoric of gender and imitation that I discussed in Chapter 1. While Sigourney both courted and denied the charge of imitation, claiming the benefits that a relation to Hemans afforded her, the Offering poets overtly insist on imitation as a way of reading and writing in a sustained and creative way. In doing so, the Offering poets claimed both the reading and the writing of poetry as a classless activity, creating cross-class community both with readers and with other writers. I begin my examination of the Offering by thinking about the twin notions of originality and authenticity and the way they shaped the production and reception of the periodical as a whole. I demonstrated in the first chapter that these notions were enormously important to any consideration of American literature in the antebellum period; however, they manifested somewhat differently in the context of the Offering—a difference that, I argue, does more to complicate critical standards and to lay bare the workings of class and gender within them than it does to clarify them. Next, I demonstrate the range of imitative practices on display in the Offering and think about how these engagements point to a reimagining of the relationship between texts and their working-class readers. Finally, I focus on poems produced by factory operatives that use the work of other women writers as their model or inspiration, not because they represent the majority of poems generated by this relational poetics but because they represent the Offering poets’ positioning of themselves in a wider tradition of female poetic authorship. Claiming literary culture for themselves, these mill girls adapted it to the circumstances of the factory and insisted on their own participation in and contribution to nineteenth-century American poetics.

Authenticity, Originality, and Imitation The editors of the Offering and the authors published there—both the prose writers and the poets, despite the critical preference for narrative—invested

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deeply in the process of reading, reproducing, and displaying the literary conventions of the day, at the same time that they insisted on the originality of their own work. As in the case of Sigourney, originality carries a different valence than it does in romantic rhetoric of the solitary, inspired artist: originality here has value in that it points toward a writer who can engage creatively with print culture, producing new texts that are a part of that culture rather than deviating significantly from it. Continued engagement and exchange with other readers and writers renders imitation and origination difficult to determine and only interesting as they reveal the skill of the poet. These reading and writing practices are evident not only in the content of the Offering but also in its title, which suggests parallels to women’s print culture of the same period. While the periodical is clearly identified as being produced in (and by) the town of Lowell and, in a synecdoche that was clear even in the nineteenth century, in (and by) the Lowell mills, it is also identified as an “offering,” thereby recalling gift books with similar titles. Gift books were not exclusively intended for women, but women were clearly regarded as their primary audience, as well as the source for most of the literary contributions. Lydia Sigourney, for example, was an inveterate contributor to gift books. According to Elizabeth Petrino, Sigourney capitalized on the gift book, “with its wide distribution and sumptuous appearance,” to increase both her popularity and her profits.11 The titles of such volumes highlight their status as object as well as text: The Atlantic Souvenir, The Token, The Wreath, and, simply, The Gift.12 While the Offering was not ornately decorated like these volumes and was clearly intended to be published more often than an annual (Figure 3), its title signaled the mill girl’s participation in a feminine gift-economy as well as a rapidly professionalizing literary economy.13 The contributors’ awareness of their position in both of these economies is clear from “An Acrostic” published in April 1841:

L o! our offering here we bring— O n the altar now it lies! W e have touched the spirit-string— E ven now its notes arise. L owly is the strain we sing— L et none spurn the gift we bring.

O urs is not a costly gem, F rom the mine of Ophir brought; F ame’s bright jeweled diadem E ver here may not be sought. R icher far the gift you’ll find, I f you’ll scan its pages o’er; N ought but fruits of heart and mind, G athered from the spirit’s store.14

Figure 3. The “factory girl” in nature, with book in hand and the mill over her shoulder. Cover of the Lowell Offering, January 1845. Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.

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Acrostics generally begin each line with the letters of the alphabet (with the resulting poem known as an abecedarian), the letters in the name of either the poem’s author or recipient, or the letters in the title of the poem. This poem is clearly not an abecedarian, but it does not precisely fit into either of the other two categories either. Rather, it seems to borrow from both to make a claim about the nature and purpose of the Lowell Offering. As in acrostics whose lines begin with the letters of the author’s name, the Lowell Offering— and the editors of and contributors to it—is framed as the author of this acrostic; while the poem is signed by “Dora,” the poem’s authorship can more properly be said to be simultaneously individual and collective. (After all, the first line of the poem proclaims that “our offering here we bring.”) The fact that no other items in the Offering are attributed to “Dora” might indicate that the name is part of the larger meaning of the poem: “Dora,” short for “Theodora,” is a Greek name meaning “God’s gift,” or simply “gift.” Similarly, while the acrostic is not structured around the title of the poem, it does use the title of the periodical itself, the “LOWELL OFFERING.” The message of the individual poem and the individual poet speaks for the periodical and the collective producing the periodical; published in the Offering, the poem seems to be sanctioned to do so. Unlike the traditional annual gift book or the album in which acrostics were often penned by young women, here the “offering” in question is not one that a consumer purchases for a family member or friend; rather, it is a “gift” from the mill girls themselves to their audience. The poem does not acknowledge the fact that the Offering is a consumer product, sold to subscribers for a dollar a year; the periodical is framed here as a sentimental rather than an economic object, not to be refused. Neither does it allude to that other consumer product produced in the mills by the factory operatives: cotton textiles. It is, nonetheless, this other labor of “Dora” and her peers that distinguishes the Offering from other publications; similarly, it is the Offering that distinguishes the New England factory operatives from their transatlantic peers. Readers and reviewers often expressed surprise at finding that workingclass factory operatives, with rural educations and limited leisure time, could produce material similar to that found in gift books, literary magazines, and newspapers. The prestigious North American Review, for example, paradoxically linked the originality of the Offering to both the women authors’ employment in the textile mills and their awareness of a literary world outside of the mills. “A literary periodical is nothing new under the sun,” the reviewer insists. “One might think that a factory, with its eternal and confounding

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whirl and clatter, would be the last place on earth which the Castalian maids would choose to haunt. But here they have been, past doubt, and have left the authentic print of their step.”15 The noise of the factory was legendary; Farley asserts that “ ‘How can you think amidst such a din?’ is a question which has often been put to us.”16 In the North American Review, the racket of the machinery is compared to the peaceful Castalian waters, a draught of which was said to inspire the genius of poetry. The “Castalian maids,” or the Greek Muses, are used here to signal the authenticity of the work in the Offering: not only that it was, in fact, produced by the mill girls but that it has real literary worth. These two points were essential to the perceived value of the Offering and they pervaded both editorial commentary on the periodical by Farley and Curtis and critical reviews or puffs throughout the early 1840s. The editors’ awareness of the risks attendant upon publishing inauthentic work—pieces by authors who had never worked in the mills or had not worked there during the period of composition—is evidenced primarily in the cover pages of the periodical, which the editors used to render their editorial philosophy and practices as transparent as possible to readers. Easily discardable and rarely saved along with the rest of the Offering, these pages contained editorial commentary, correspondence with contributors, and, occasionally, poems by non-factory operatives. All of this material combines to make an argument about the authenticity of the periodical that is then borne out by the materials contained within the Offering’s pages. In September 1841, for example, Abel Thomas used the inside back cover to emphasize that “in the four numbers of the first series, less than two pages was occupied by the articles of writers who were personally unknown to us; and that those articles were written by ‘factory girls,’ we had the assurance of intimate friends, who knew whereof they affirmed.”17 The need for such a confirmation is revealed by the explanation that “we make these statements for the purpose of satisfying candid persons abroad; and also for the purpose of rebutting the falsehoods and insinuations of a few individuals in our own city.”18 Thomas’s reaction to such criticisms may have been about the publication of eleven poems by “Adelaide” (Lydia Sarah Hall) in the April 1841 issue of the Offering. On the inside front cover of the following issue, published in July, Thomas celebrated the appointment of “Adelaide,” “who has for several years, with little interruption, been employed in the Mills,” as a “preceptress” in one of Lowell’s public schools. Thomas acknowledges that Hall’s hiring looks good for the Offering in that the periodical “was the means of commending Adelaide to the attention of the School Committee.”19 However,

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Thomas is also clearly aware that the publication of Hall’s work might seem to contradict the editorial policy regarding the refusal to publish the work of any author not working in the mills: “Several poetical articles from her pen, are on hand for publication in our pages,” he explains, adding, “They were written during her engagement in the Mill.”20 Only one additional poem by “Adelaide” was published in future issues of the Offering, however, which perhaps indicates the editor’s unwillingness to compromise the periodical’s authenticity, even for the purpose of publishing the work of a popular poet. Cover pages were also used to publish poems by authors whose labor in the mills was over or was questionable in some way. For this reason, poetry came to be the means by which the Offering performed and defended its own authenticity. Publishing such poems on the cover pages drew attention to the poems published in the periodical itself, reinforcing their significance as products of the factory operatives and the factory itself. In November 1842, for example, after Farley and Curtis took over the editorship, they announced that A poetical article, signed Julia, has been sent us; but although we are acquainted with quite a number of Julias, we do not know who has favored us now. . . . The writer of these lines assures us that she is a factory girl, and we have not the slightest doubt of it, but as we cannot vouch for it, they can have no place in our magazine. We will give them room, however, upon the third page of the cover.21 This distinction between “magazine” and “cover” is made more clear in the publication of yet another poem on the cover pages in January 1842: while a headnote identifies “Miss Harriet Parker” as being “of 17 Merrimack corporation,” it explains that her poem, “Tell Ye the Daughter of Sion, Behold, Thy King Cometh,” could not be published in the periodical itself “ because, though she was formerly a mill operative, she was not so employed when she wrote the article.” Miss Parker possessed a vigorous, well-educated mind; and but for the loss of property many years ago, might have become a bright literary star. We publish the poem on the cover. It will form no part of the volume when bound.22

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The concern here is with the permanence of the Offering—its status as bound volume, to which one might return again and again, rather than as ephemeral and ultimately forgettable light reading. In order to be preserved, however, the authenticity of a piece must be beyond doubt, secure from the scrutiny of any of the Offering’s critics. Doubts about the identity of Offering contributors seem to have continued throughout the periodical’s five-year run. As late as July 1845, Farley and Curtis openly mocked their detractors by reprinting a piece from a Georgia newspaper purporting to reveal the truth behind the Offering’s success. “The Lowell Offering.”—Most people have been verdant enough to suppose that that very fair and talented sheet, the “Lowell Offering,” emanated from the female operatives of that vast nest of looms and spindles on the Merrimack, the good town of Lowell. We always shook our head when the subject was mentioned, and knew there was a “fly in the lock” somewhere. A late number of the Richmond Enquirer developes the whole matter thus: “Upon examination, we find that this is one of the greatest delusions of the day. So far from that journal being edited by the operatives, we learn that very few of its articles proceed from the pens of the female laborers. Two young ladies, of family and fortune, had the romantic notion to try the pleasures of a life at the looms; they remained in their uncomfortable position for a few months only, and then returned to their luxurious mansions, where as a matter of amusement, and mental recreation, they employed their delicate fingers in the composition of editorials, and sent forth to the world a very interesting literary sheet.”23 This piece makes clear that any doubts about the authenticity of the Offering were rooted in prejudice against the working classes and, more precisely, against working-class women. “Two young ladies, of family and fortune” are assumed to be able to handle the admittedly “uncomfortable position” of a factory operative without much effort. While they might have been disabused of their “romantic notion” of “the pleasures of a life at the looms,” they are regarded as fully capable of the work. The opposite is clearly not possible, however: the “female laborer” does not possess the intellectual capacity required to write an editorial or to issue a magazine. The quality of the “literary sheet” that is the Offering is not called into question here. What is at stake is whether or not a working-class woman can produce such a

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“sheet.” Harriet Farley responds by pointing out the class privilege behind this representation of the “young ladies”: pretending to address her coeditor, she exclaims, “O my! Why, Harriot, if we could only find the ‘ fortins’ and the ‘luxurious mansions,’ we would bid a final adieu to the romance of the looms, and we had almost said of the pens—wouldn’t we?”24 Farley exposes the real romance here as the idea of a wealthy woman relinquishing her privilege to work in the mills. Yet her reluctance to “bid a final adieu to the romance of . . . the pens” indicates a commitment to and ownership of both writing and editing that, for her and Curtis, was born of their work in the factory. In this context, the Offering can effectively be seen as an imitation of the parlor entertainments of wealthy young ladies (who then, according to this story, go on to imitate the factory operatives by slumming it in the mills). In this, as in all imitations, what is produced by the operatives is something that resembles the original but is, paradoxically, different enough that it becomes a sort of original itself. This conversation—between originals and imitations and back again—lies at the heart of the work of the Offering.

Imitative Practices and the Democratization of Poetry In May 1841, more than a year before she became coeditor of the Offering, Farley published a poem titled “The Graves of a Household” using the pseudonym “Adelia.” This poem is likely one that critics following Eisler would find formulaic and imitative: it is modeled on a poem of the same title by the British poet Felicia Hemans, whose “The Graves of a Household” was originally published in the New Monthly Magazine in 1825, reprinted in Records of Woman: With Other Poems in 1828, and widely circulated in the United States. It therefore provides a good test case for the value of imitation for Offering poets and, by extension, the value of poetry in any study of the Offering. Farley’s poem does more than simply borrow its title from Hemans’s original; she also integrates three entire stanzas from Hemans’s poem into her own. There is no deception here, no plagiarism as such, as the title itself is in quotation marks and the poem is preceded with a note that reads, “The statements in the following lines are facts; but they were suggested by that beautiful little poem of Mrs. Hemans, from which the first verse and the last two verses are extracted.”25 Farley’s parsing of her use of Hemans’s poem— the “statements” in her own poem “are facts,” merely “suggested” by Hemans’s poem, from which she “extract[s]” three stanzas—is not intended as a defense;

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there is no sense that “Adelia” fears that her work will be seen as derivative or inauthentic. It is, it seems, simply a clarification, an explanation of the poem’s form and the poet’s creative—perhaps even collaborative—project. Farley clearly does not intend to alter the meaning of Hemans’s poem; instead, her borrowing reinforces the sentimental, domestic, and religious message of the original, doubling it, in effect, by emphasizing its applicability to her own life experience. Nine stanzas long (as compared to the eight stanzas of Hemans’s original), a third of Farley’s poem is freely “extracted” from Hemans’s, and these parts appear in quotation marks. These “extract[s]” establish the purpose of the poem—the detailing of the speaker’s loss of her siblings, initially through geographical dispersion and eventually through death. While both poems assert a belief in the afterlife—the final two lines of both poems proclaim (with slight variations), “Alas for love, if thou wert all, / And nought beyond, O Earth!”—the emphasis of both remains on the separation of siblings, the disruption of an essential family bond.26 Farley’s use of Hemans’s original demonstrates her intimate familiarity with the work of the British poet but also places her poem in conversation with that of Hemans, rendering her own losses (or those of her own speaker) as worthy of comment as those of Hemans’s speaker. Both poems detail the loss of siblings (one per stanza), and the general narrative is similar in that the siblings travel and die far from home, leaving the speaker to imagine their graves. In some cases, the siblings’ deaths are similar, indicating that this was perhaps an exercise of sorts to test Farley’s ability to write stanzas appropriate to be sandwiched in between the opening and closing of Hemans’s poem. For example, Hemans’s fourth stanza reads: The sea, the lone blue sea, hath one, He lies where pearls lie deep; He was the lov’d of all, yet none O’er his low bed may weep. (304) And Farley’s fifth stanza reads: Another went forth on the deep blue sea, The treacherous wave to dare;— He never returned;—O where is he? There’s none who may tell us where. (40)

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While the final line of the stanza does break the meter, Adelia’s stanza successfully paraphrases the stanza from Hemans’s poem. The narrative is essentially the same—a brother lost and presumably drowned and buried at sea and the italicized “he” echoes that in Hemans’s poem. But the honor of being “the loved of all” is reserved by Adelia for a brother who “to warfare a victim fell,” indicating that her poem reflects the history of her own family (or at least that of her imagined speaker) (40). “Adelia” therefore essentially claims the same importance for her poetic expression of grief that had been afforded Hemans’s poem by publication in her book and association with her name and celebrity. Moreover, by writing stanzas to be fit in between the opening and closing stanzas of the original, Farley also claims at least part of Hemans’s poem as her own. Such fluidity might, in turn, extend to yet another reader of Adelia’s poem or Hemans’s original (or both), who might write a poem of her own on the same subject, with the same title, perhaps even quoting some of the same stanzas. The fact that this sort of exchange did, in fact, happen is evident from the Offering editors’ reprinting in May 1845 of two poems inspired by a short prose piece, “The Wasted Flowers,” written by Lucy Larcom under the pseudonym “Rotha” and published in October 1844. Larcom’s original piece depicts a small child who throws her flowers into the stream beside which she plays, delighting in the “gush of its music.” When she realizes that her act has resulted in the permanent loss of “every bud and blossom,” however, she cries, “Bring back my flowers!”27 Reprinted in a number of periodicals nationwide (the two responses, both titled “Bring Back My Flowers,” are from Georgia and New Hampshire), the piece prompts readers “to weave the poetic thoughts of the author into verse,” according to the Savannah Georgian, in which one poem originally appeared.28 While Farley’s “The Graves of a Household” exemplifies the Offering poets’ imitation of the work of other poets, then, the two poems titled “Bring Back My Flowers” (published, of course, on the cover pages of the Offering) reveal the integration of the poetry of the Offering into a larger literary culture of imitation and collaboration, thereby demonstrating the widespread acceptance of such a practice, as well as the way in which it allowed and even demanded an intimate engagement with texts. Participation of the Offering contributors in this culture points to a larger democratization of literary property and a claiming of poetic authority and authorship. A poem like Farley’s “The Graves of a Household” thus lays bare the process of composition for poets whose access to print came hand in hand

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with their employment in the mills. For middle-class women writers, amateur or professional, the parlor played a central role in the production of literary texts, providing women with a space in which they might read books and periodicals, clip items from newspapers and organize them in albums or scrapbooks, and compose their own work and share it with others. Factory operatives may have used the public spaces of their boardinghouses in a similar way, but they had neither the time nor the space for the sort of parlor authorship enacted in private homes. Instead, they adapted the literacy practices of the domestic parlor to the public space of the factory and, by extension, the Offering. For example, given rules against bringing books (including Bibles) into the mills, many girls pasted poetry on the walls, clipping favorites from the newspaper and creating a scrapbook of sorts out of the environment in which they worked. As Larcom herself recalled in her autobiography, “I made my window-seat into a small library of poetry, pasting its side all over with newspaper clippings. In those days we had only weekly papers, and they had always a ‘poet’s corner,’ where standard writers were well represented, with anonymous ones, also. . . . I chose my verses for their sentiment, and because I wanted to commit them to memory; sometimes it was a long poem, sometimes a hymn, sometimes only a stray verse.”29 The emphasis on memory here is essential: as these poems are read, clipped, pasted on the wall or the machinery, and reread, they are internalized to such a degree that they become the property of the operative herself and her larger community in the mills. The operatives are simulta neously readers, authors, and editors in this process, selecting poems based on their own tastes and preferences, and literalizing the notion of the newspaper’s “poet’s corner.” These poems then inspire their creations, which go on to be privately circulated and finally published in the Offering. Toward the end of the century, former operative Harriet H. Robinson explains, We little girls were fond of reading these clippings, and no doubt they were an incentive to our thoughts as well as to those of the older girls, who went to “The Improvement Circle,” and wrote compositions. A year or two after this I attempted poetry, and my verses began to appear in the newspapers, in one or two Annuals, and later in The Lowell Offering.30 The internalization of newspaper poetry, then, leads to imitation and publication—a process that, to Larcom at least, represented “good practice.” And

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unlike many middle-class parlor authors who had no access to publication or saw publication as inappropriate for women, factory operatives like “Adelia” had the venue of the Offering in which to present their work to a wider public. The centrality of imitation to the literary mission and success of the Offering can be seen in the fact that contributors often combined reflections on the work of the periodical with imitations of well-known poems. Rather than serving as cause for criticism, imitation functions as a kind of defense against critiques of inauthenticity. For example, “The Mouse’s Visit,” in the February 1844 issue, is preceded by this note: “Lines written, impromptu, as the incident occurred. Perhaps the Scottish rhythm was suggested by the remembrance of Burns’ address to a mouse.—ED.”31 This note is rendered ironic by the fact that the poem is clearly an imitation of Burns’s “To a Mouse, on turning her up in her nest with the Plough, November 1785,” and by the fact that the author of “The Mouse’s Visit” identifies herself as “an Editress” in the poem. (“I’m ane they ca’ an Editress,” she writes [94].) The editor who signs the note and the “Editress” who writes it are, no doubt, the same. Only one poem in the Offering can be clearly identified as Harriot Curtis’s: the sentimental “Lament of the Little Hunchback,” published in January 1842. Farley, on the other hand, published many poems, both before and after taking over as coeditor of the periodical, many of which are imitations of popular poems. It seems likely, then, that the author of “The Mouse’s Visit” is Farley, who would, of course, have known whether or not the poem was “suggested” by “Burns’ address to a mouse.” This playful acknowledgment of what would have been obvious to any reader of the poem demands that the reader pay attention to the poet’s imitation of Burns and asks them to judge the poem on that basis. While the stanza length and meter of each poem are slightly different, Farley’s use of Scottish dialect is clearly modeled on that of Burns’s “To a Mouse.” Like Burns, Farley imagines the encounter between the speaker and the mouse as a relatively peaceful one, in which the speaker allows the mouse to live. The speakers in both poems are laborers who come across the mouse in their workplaces. It is notable, however, that Farley’s speaker performs her labor as an “Editress” in her home. She asks for the mouse’s silence while she works, waiting to “loup an’ prance, / An’, o’er my floor, your hornpipe dance” until she has “gane a weavin’ ” in the mills (94). Both also position themselves as somehow more endangered than the vulnerable mouse: Burns because the mouse only lives in the present, while he sees “backward . . . On prospects

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drear” as well as “forward” to what “I guess an’ fear!”; and the “Editress” because she is at the mercy of critics who will treat her far more harshly than she has treated the mouse.32 An’ there are those, who, should they choose, ’Gainst me their powers for ill to use, Could work, for me, e’en more abuse Than I for you, I trow. (94) Thus the mouse and the speaker are allowed an uneasy occupation of shared domestic space, just as Farley (standing in for the Lowell Offering itself) occupies the larger literary marketplace alongside her critics. This cohabitation with the mouse is said to be productive for the “Editress”: Ye ne’er hae scared away a thought Sae gude as these in sang I’ve wrought, A blessing ance ye sure hae brought, For verse wi’ me is rare. (94) “The Mouse’s Visit” is therefore a “rare” feat of verse-making for the author, inspired by the mouse’s visit. It is possible that the relationship between Farley and her critics is equally as productive, one that generates material for the Lowell Offering from the poet and her fellow factory operatives as well as cause for pride among them. L. S. H.’s “Lowell—A Parody on Hohenlinden,” published in the Offering in December 1840, is evidence of the productivity of this conflict, as well as the strategic use of imitation to intensify the denunciation of the Offering’s critics. “L. S. H.” was Lydia Sarah Hall, who other wise used the pseudonym “Adelaide” (and whose employment at the public school caused Thomas to insist that all of her published poems were written while she was a factory operative). Hall’s “Adelaide” poems were largely either patriotic celebrations of “The Tomb of Washington,” “My Country’s Flag,” and “Old Ironsides” or religious meditations on death and marriage. Hall was not averse to using imitative strategies in her “Adelaide” poems: “Old Ironsides” is a response to Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “soul-stirring lyric” of the same name and it begins with the final verse of Holmes’s poem. In a note, “Adelaide” explains, “I quote the closing verse thereof, and append a few stanzas.”33 Signed with her initials, “Lowell” may indicate Hall’s sense that, while parody is another form

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of imitation, it is potentially less sentimental and more irreverent than the work she does in her “Adelaide” poems. Hall may also have thought it important for “Lowell” to be “signed” (at least with initials) by an operative: published in only the third issue of the Offering, the parody was a bold assertion of what Hall calls the “genius” to be found in the periodical—and of the confidence and even defiance of the operatives who wrote for the Offering. As with “Old Ironsides,” “Lowell” makes no secret of its indebtedness to another poet’s work; indeed, unlike many nineteenth-century parodies of popular poems, the source of this parody is trumpeted in the poem’s title. “Hohenlinden,” by the Scottish poet Thomas Campbell, was originally published in 1803. The poem describes the Battle of Hohenlinden, fought on December 3, 1800, during the French Revolutionary Wars. The details of this particular battle are much less impor tant to a reading of the parody than the fact that “Hohenlinden” is both a rousing battle poem and a lament for the war dead. Hall adopts the poem’s martial rhetoric to respond to what she apparently saw as cause for attack: the critique of factory work for women made by Orestes Brownson in “The Laboring Classes,” an essay published in the Boston Quarterly Review in July 1840.34 Brownson advocated for broad social reform rather than the provision of assistance or education to individual workers. While complaining of the inordinately heavy labor performed by operatives in factories throughout New England, Brownson insists, “The great mass wear out their health, spirits, and morals, without becoming one whit better off than when they commenced labor.”35 “The average life, working life we mean, of the girls that come to Lowell, for instance, from Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, we have been assured, is only about three years. What becomes of them then? Few of them ever marry; fewer still ever return to their native places with reputations unimpaired. ‘She has worked in a Factory,’ is almost enough to damn to infamy the most worthy and virtuous girl” (11). Factory women did not appreciate Brownson’s critique of the system and insisted that he was a greater threat to their reputations than their labor in the mills. The best-known response to Brownson was written by Harriet Farley, prior to taking on her role as editor of the Offering. Published on the first page of the Offering in December 1840, this letter from “A FACTORY GIRL” accuses Brownson of being “a slanderer” and, after defending the virtue of female factory operatives, concludes by demanding that Brownson retract his insult: “And now, if Mr. Brownson is a man, he will endeavor to retrieve the injury he has done; he will resolve that ‘the dark shall be made light, and the

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wrong made right,’ and the assertion he has publicly made will be as publicly retracted.”36 Farley’s aggressive challenge to Brownson is echoed in Hall’s rendering of this conflict as a battle; while Campbell’s “Hohenlinden” is represented as “war-clouds, rolling dun” through which the morning sun is impenetrable, the parody proposes the Offering itself as “Truth’s bright sun” working to “undo what slander’s night has done” in the corresponding lines.37 Hall grafts a defense of women’s honor onto Campbell’s masculine scene of warfare, thereby encroaching on men’s literary territory, just as she and her fellow operatives encroached on the public space of the factory. Hall refuses to see either as compromising in any way; in fact, the Offering, as product of both factory and literary labor, is presented as effective evidence against “slander’s night.” Both imitation and original, Hall’s poem puts the literary skills of the operatives on display in a way that only poetry will allow. Both Campbell and Hall write of collective action. In battle, for example, Campbell’s soldiers are represented as fearless but also, to some degree, as mechanical and ultimately ineffective, disappearing into the larger battle and the natural scene surrounding them: By torch and trumpet fast arrayed, Each horseman drew his battle blade, And furious every charger neighed, To join the dreadful revelry. Then shook the hills, with thunder riven; Then rush’d the steed, to battle driven, And, louder than the bolts of heaven, Far flashed the red artillery. But redder yet that light shall glow, On Linden’s hills of stainèd snow; And bloodier yet, the torrent flow Of Iser, rolling rapidly.38 The action in Hall’s poem is no less collective, perhaps even anonymous, but the factory girls strive for justice and are predicted to succeed in their endeavor to “write the victory won, / Upon a truth-lit canopy.”39 The stanzas that correspond to the three quoted above from Campbell’s original read:

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By pen and pencil fast arrayed, And scheme, by thought’s deep doings laid, On reason’s rock, in fancy’s shade, They wrought their spirit’s imagery. Then felt the land the impulse given, Then rushed each pen impetuous driven, And bright as meteor of heaven, Far flashed the mind’s artillery. And brighter yet these minds shall glow, ’Mid Lowell’s drives of mimic snow: And swifter yet shall be the flow Of genius, rolling rapidly. (26)

Figure 4. Woman working on a power loom. From A History of Wonderful Inventions, vol. 1 (New York Harper & Brothers, 1849). Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.

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The battle here is fought with “the mind’s artillery,” but it is no less a battle than that described by Campbell. Armed with the “pen” and driven by both “reason” and “fancy,” the individual operatives become a united force, and like the soldiers in Campbell’s poems, they become one with the landscape around them, synonymous with Lowell and the mills. Unlike the “stainèd snow” of “Linden’s hills,” however, this battle does not tarnish the purity of Lowell, or by extension the factory operatives themselves. While earlier in the parody, a feminized Lowell is said to produce “heaps of cloth as white as snow” as evidence of “what factory girls had power to do,” the production of the Offering “by pen and pencil fast arrayed” demonstrates that Lowell can produce not only “mimic snow” but also “genius” (Figure 4). Indeed, the two seem to go hand in hand, with the “mimic snow” recalling the white sheets of paper on which the factory girls write and publish their periodical. The “mimic snow” might also be read as yet another acknowledgment of the imitative work performed by the poets of the Offering—work that is not distinct from, but absolutely integral to, the “flow of genius, rolling rapidly.”

Imitating Women The project of the Offering as presented in Hall’s parody, and in many other pieces by the factory operatives, received support from non-working-class readers across the nation. Such approbation occasionally took poetic form and was published accordingly on the cover pages of the periodical. Thus the editors of the Offering were able to promote their own work by showing how it was being read by subscribers—as positive evidence of the intellectual and creative potential of working-class women. Yet these pieces could also threaten to undermine the work of the Offering in that they represented the fact of working-class authorship as something made possible only because of the generosity of those willing to “Open the portal wide / To Learning’s lofty hall.”40 “The Lowell Offering,” written by “a lady at the South” identified only as “E. L.” and published on the inside back cover of the June 1842 issue, begins with the following two stanzas: What age hath ever told A tale like this before? Or stumbled on a vein of gold In mines of baser ore?

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Where’s the recorded page On history’s dark scroll, Which could, for any gone-by age, A leaf like this unroll?41 The factory operative is represented as a “novice,” essentially rescued from darkness, who “bends the knee” at the “heart’s altar.” This “lady” therefore frames the operatives as unrefined and inexperienced, but full of potential; their fulfillment is dependent not only on her patronage, and that of other middle- and upper-class readers, but also that of other women writers, the “gifted sisters” of the “trembling devotee” who are asked to welcome the working-class women to “thought’s bright clime.” They ask of those who stand, On Literature’s peak, That aid, the strong and generous hand, Will ever lend the weak. ... They ask of those who soar, To lend the magic key By which, thro- thought’s unfolded door, The spirit courses free. The “aid” that these “sisters” might lend to their “weaker” counterparts is not specified; what is clear is that the operatives have no agency here. Their only action is to “ask”—and presumably to accept whatever they are given. The publication of this poem might imply acquiescence in this sort of paradigm, yet I’d like to suggest that the relational poetics evidenced elsewhere in the Offering indicates a very different attitude toward literary tradition— particularly an American women’s poetic tradition, in which Offering poets claimed an essential role. Rather than passively accepting a “magic key” from their “gifted sisters,” these poets demonstrated a rich critical engagement with their female predecessors and peers, using imitation to shape a new lineage of women’s poetry that did not exclude the working classes. “Factory Blossoms for Queen Victoria,” published in October 1842 by Harriet Farley with the initials “H. F.,” highlights issues of class in its title, drawing attention to the factory context in which much of the Offering’s poetry was originally composed. Farley’s coeditorship of the Offering began in

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this same issue and the poem, which is the first piece in the issue, can be seen as a statement of the editors’ ambitions for the periodical. In “Factory Blossoms,” Farley presents her poem to the queen of England. The poem begins: Lady, accept the humble flowers Which I now tender thee; They bloomed not in Parnassian bowers, Nor on some classic tree. Amid the granite rocks they grew Of a far-distant land; Ne’er were they bathed in Grecian dew, Or watched by sylphic hand. This claims no place amid the wreaths Which often strew thy way; Simple the fragrance which it breathes, A factory girl’s boquet. But deem me not, when it meets your sight, Wanting in courtesy— This stubborn Yankee pen wont write, YOUR GRACIOUS MAJESTY. 42 Farley emphasizes the “ humble” nature of her gift, but her humility is called into question by her daring to address Queen Victoria in this poem as well as her carefully capitalized refusal to behave as the queen’s subject. Similarly, Farley does not mask the origin of her “boquet” in the factory. Unlike the work of other poets, which is nurtured on “Parnassian bowers” or “on some classic tree,” the verses of the Offering poet have bloomed and thrived in the austerity of the industrial workplace. While flowers were commonly associated with poems in nineteenth-century America, this metaphor becomes even more interesting here in light of the fact that, just as many operatives created libraries or scrapbooks of their window seats in the factory, others created small window gardens. As David A. Zonderman notes, “Female workers often traded cuttings with each other, or helped a new arrival start her own window garden. . . . Flowers became a medium of social exchange among workers.”43 Neither growing flowers nor reading and writing

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poems was a solitary experience in the mills; rather, these were communal processes that brought the operatives together and sustained their sense of themselves as working women with lives prior to and outside of the mill. As in Hall’s parody of “Hohenlinden,” the factory operatives (here represented by “H. F.”) are part of the natural and industrial landscape of Lowell and, by extension, of New England. Farley’s poem extends the offer of fellowship across lines of class and national identity. While it is unlikely that the queen of England would read her poem, then, “Factory Blossoms” represents the kind of “social exchange” between the mill and the outside world that Farley and her fellow operatives envisioned for the Offering. This exchange is framed as “simple,” but it indicates the reach of the editors’ vision for the periodical and registers their mockery of the idea that they might humble themselves in order to carry out that vision. The radical potential of Farley’s proffered gift to the queen is highlighted when “Factory Blossoms” is compared to the poem it was “suggested by”: “American Wild-Flowers, For Queen Victoria,” by the American poet Hannah F. Gould. Published first in London in a gift book, the poem was quickly reprinted in the United States; Farley may have encountered the poem in the Lowell Literary Souvenir, which reprinted it on November 6, 1841.44 The placement of this poem in the Forget-Me-Not, one of the earliest and most popular British literary annuals, emphasizes Gould’s desire to work within a transatlantic literary marketplace, to claim American superiority in some things while granting the value of British culture in others. Gould’s poem, like Farley’s, pays honor to the queen, but not to the monarchy. Gould writes, Not drawn by state or titles forth, My liberal heart would homage pay; But at the shrine of moral worth I bring these fresh wild-flowers to lay. Not reared in courts, nor sunned by gold, Nor at the feet of rank, they grew, The proud New England, not the Old, Baptized their opening buds with dew. 45 The poem concludes with Gould’s offering of “the simple wreath I weave,” begging the “Fair Queen, from o’er the deep receive, / A free-will offering of the free.” Gould, whose father fought in the Revolutionary War, proudly

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asserts her national identity but presents rebellion against the British crown as something of the past. While her father’s generation “raised the brand / Against thy royal grandsire’s crown,” her own can take pride in their “British blood.” Together, she and her father watch with pleasure Queen Victoria’s movement “From careless childhood to the throne,” as well as her marriage to Prince Albert in 1840 and the birth of her children. Led by this gracious queen, the monarchy is framed as a boon not just to Britain but to the larger world: Long may’st thou, Royal Rose, be bound Upon thy kingdom’s breast, and worn, Diffusing sweets the world around, Without a canker or a thorn! As an American, Gould can worship the queen’s “moral worth” without being immediately subject to her power. Both Gould and Farley claim their identity as American women poets, but, in the distinctive context of the Lowell Offering, “Factory Blossoms” allows Farley to not only critique the queen but frame her poem (and, by extension, the Offering) as the distinctive contribution of a “factory girl” who “may say / What others leave unsaid” (3). In other words, she insists that the origination of her poetry in the site of the factory and from the experience of a factory operative gives her a perspective not granted to poets inspired by the Greek Muses. Contradicting Gould’s emphasis on the queen’s “moral worth,” Farley suggests that Victoria has been unduly influenced by “diplomatic wile,” allowing others to make decisions for her (2). Farley reserves her harshest criticism of the queen for the way in which she treats the neediest of her subjects, and she laments the fact that Victoria seems to lose her womanhood in her exercise of “regal power” (2). There’s better far than pomp or state To claim a sovereign’s care— Goodness should always make her great, And kindness make her fair. ... Oft think of those, the poor and vile, Whom misery leads to crime; Of those who live for ceaseless toil, And spend for thee life’s prime;

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Of those to whom their tears are drink— From misery’s cup they’re fed; Mother, look on thy babes, and think, If they should cry for bread. (3–4) While Gould’s gift of her “American wild-flowers” represents only her respect and love for Victoria, Farley’s offering is a mild rebuke to the queen, some of whose subjects are “by wrongs oppressed / Beneath a woman’s sway” (2). Rather than benefiting from a woman monarch, whose role as a mother as well as her seemingly innate capacity for “goodness” and “kindness” should render her better able to wield power more sensitively and humanely, the oppressed see no change in their situation. Farley even suggests that British subjects may not always tolerate these conditions: in a blessing on the queen’s children, she hopes that they will be worthy of “heavenly crowns” “if that land should e’er refuse / The royal yoke to wear” (4). As an American workingclass woman, Farley represents the potential of the working class, in England as well as America, capable not only of thriving under the right kind of government but of being Queen Victoria’s equal in all of the qualities that matter: dignity, humanity, moral worth, and intelligence. The poem closes with Farley’s subversive suggestion that, Lady, on earth we ne’er can meet; But when, in death, we’re laid, Proud England’s Queen, perhaps, may greet The Lowell Factory maid. (4) It is not clear whether it is impossible for the queen and Farley to meet in life because of geographical distance or the distance created by social class. Nevertheless, Farley clearly suggests that it would not be inappropriate for the two to meet after death; the only barrier to such an encounter would be Victoria’s pride—a sense of superiority that is out of place on both heaven and earth. By using Gould’s “American Wild-Flowers” as the model for her own poem, it is also possible that Farley is claiming equality to Gould, an established American female poet whose work was published widely in a variety of periodicals and had also been collected several times throughout the 1830s and 1840s. In doing so, she demonstrates her membership and participation in a larger literary culture of both women readers (who write poetry) and

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women writers (who read poetry). Rather than hiding this imitative practice or using it to mask a lack of skill or originality, Farley highlights her use of the poem, adding a note to the inside front cover of the October issue to point her readers’ attention to the imitation. The exchange between women enacted in this poem— Gould and Queen Victoria, Farley and Gould, Farley and Queen Victoria—demonstrates the ambition and potential reach of the Offering, as well as its subversive potential. Published in August 1845, Miriam R. Green’s “To M. M. Davidson” is not an imitation of a specific original, as are “The Graves of a Household” and “Factory Blossoms for Queen Victoria,” yet this poem is an example of the versatility of the poetics of imitation evident in and central to the poetry of the Lowell Offering. Like the other poems I’ve discussed, “To M. M. Davidson” presents imitation as a worthy poetic project, one that demonstrates the familiarity of these working-class poets with their literary forebears and peers. Responding to the relationship between Margaret Miller Davidson and her sister, poet Lucretia Davidson, the poem also positions the Offering poets in a longer tradition of imitation, particularly among American female poets. Imitation is here framed as a collaborative effort between women poets, one that is then reflected and reconstituted in the larger work of the Offering. To understand the project of Green’s poem, we must first turn to the widely circulated story of Margaret Miller Davidson’s life and career. While her work had been celebrated throughout her young life, it was collected and published posthumously in Biography and Poetical Remains of the Late Margaret Miller Davidson (1841) with a lengthy introduction by Washington Irving. Appearing the year following the publication of the first issue of the Offering, it is possible that this book had an impact on the mill girls, whose own manuscript writings had so recently been converted into print. Margaret Davidson was best known as the sister of Lucretia, a poetic prodigy who died at the age of sixteen, when her sister was only two years old. According to Rufus Griswold, Lucretia’s death shaped the course of Margaret’s life, in accord, apparently, with their mother’s wishes: “[Margaret] loved, when but three years old, to sit on a cushion at her mother’s feet, listening to anecdotes of her sister’s life, and details of the events which preceded her death, and would often exclaim, while her face beamed with mingled emotions, ‘Oh, I will try to fill her place—teach me to be like her!’ ”46 As Mary Loeffelholz points out, “The name and death of Lucretia authorize the appearance of her sister Margaret,” and Margaret’s reputation is thus part of

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“the productive family machine of [Lucretia’s] posthumous reputation.”47 Margaret’s self-imposed training to become “like” Lucretia, according to Griswold, was to read precociously and voraciously, to embark “on a general course of education, studying grammar, geography, history, and rhetoric,” and, of course, poetry.48 “When in her sixth year, she could read with fluency, [she] would sit by the bedside of her sick mother, reading with enthusiastic delight and appropriate emphasis, the poetry of Milton, Cowper, Thomson, and other great authors, and marking, with discrimination, the passages with which she was most pleased” (155). Such preparation enabled her to compose the “poetical remains” published in Irving’s edited volume. All reviewers of Irving’s edited volume agreed that Margaret Davidson’s life represented a beautifully tragic example of feminine Christian genius, even if some regarded that potential as largely unfulfilled. For some critics, particularly (and not surprisingly) Edgar Allan Poe, Margaret’s clear indebtedness to her sister’s work indicated a lack of originality: speaking of Lucretia, Poe noted that she “had not, like Margaret, an object of poetic emulation in her own family. In her genius, be it what it may, there is more of self-dependence—less of the imitative.”49 However, while Margaret’s “imitative” relationship to her sister is suggested by Poe, no critics seem to have condemned her work as improperly imitative of the poets whose work she consumed by her mother’s bedside or, for that matter, any popular poets of the period. As is indicated by a review in the Christian Examiner and General Review, at least one critic found Davidson’s work extraordinarily original, especially given her age: “The first poetical effusions of youth are generally imitative, both as regards sentiment and the form of expression. It takes for granted, that what the world calls poetry, is such; and that the only hope of becoming poetical, is to follow in the path of others. The fountain within, springing up to inspiration, is not apt to flow in infancy; but with this remarkable girl, it was far other wise.”50 This reviewer regards youthful imitation as the path to originality for most poets, but claims for Margaret an early and largely natural and untaught genius. While this assessment of Margaret’s work is far more positive than Poe’s, it only allows for her success as a poet within a romantic framework—one that eschews imitation (at least past a certain age) as indicative of a lack of talent. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars have continued in this vein, largely dismissing Davidson’s work because, as the Library Company of Philadelphia website proclaims, it “aped the work of better-known romantics as well as that of her sister.”51 In a biographical entry on the two sisters,

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for example, Carlin T. Kindilien first provides details on Lucretia’s life and work and then proclaims, “While Margaret Davidson’s life is even more closely recorded than her sister’s, her only claim to interest is a sympathetic one. Her youthful imitations of the romantic poets are unrelieved by any sign of honest feeling or original expression.”52 To read for originality in Davidson’s work, however, is to misread her and to remove her from the imitative and even collaborative aesthetic that informed her poetic project. Margaret makes no secret of what drives her desire to write and publish poetry; in fact, her connection to and imitation of her sister and her work are important parts of Margaret’s public image. In the dedication of a long poem titled “Lenore” to Lucretia, Margaret claims that the relationship between the two goes beyond mere influence or imitation to a sort of cohabitation of the same creative spirit. Using the same “hallowed harp” as her long-dead sister, she imagines her work as a collaboration between the two: For thee I pour this unaffected lay, To thee these simple numbers all belong; For though thine earthly form has passed away, Thy memory still inspires my childish song. Then take this feeble tribute! ’tis thine own— Thy fingers sweep my trembling heartstrings o’er, Arouse to harmony each buried tone, And bid its wakened music sleep no more!53 Here Margaret offers “Lenore” to her long-dead sister as “tribute” but also acknowledges Lucretia’s part in the production of this and other poems. It is not simply that Lucretia’s “memory inspires [her] childish song” but that the song actually seems to belong to Lucretia, despite its having been written down by Margaret. Lucretia’s “fingers” are said to “sweep” Margaret’s “trembling heartstrings,” producing poetry from the raw materials of Margaret’s mind and body. The creative process here—the evocation of emotion, the shaping of harmonies, the production of music—is assigned by Margaret to Lucretia. This sort of collaboration between reader and poet as well as between sister poets is exactly what Green intends to evoke in her own tribute to Davidson published in the Offering.

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“To M. M. Davidson” is prefaced by a note that explains that the poem was written “after perusing and reperusing” Margaret Davidson’s Biography and Poetical Remains, particularly the poem titled “To die and be forgotten,” in which, Green states, “she gives sway to the ebullition of a full heart, with regard to literary fame, in an affecting manner.”54 As editor of the Poetical Remains, Irving explains that “To die and be forgotten” was inspired by a conversation with Davidson’s mother in which Mrs. Davidson asked her daughter “whether she had no ambition to have her name go down to posterity.”55 The poem demonstrates Davidson’s “fervent hope” for “worlds of future bliss,” but registers her sense that it would be “saddening to the heart / To be forgot in this!”56 While Margaret rejects any elaborate commemoration of her death, she admits the appeal of being “embalm’d in kindred hearts” (95). Yet as soon as she imagines this sort of afterlife for herself, she dismisses the possibility: To be, when countless years have past, The good man’s glowing theme? To be—but I—what right have I To this bewildering dream? (95) In the remainder of the poem, Davidson rather unconvincingly insists that she will forget about literary fame, instead “toil[ing] to write my name within / The glorious book of life” (96). Having essentially transferred the credit for her own poetry to her deceased sister, Margaret seems in this poem to struggle with how she herself will be remembered. In “To M. M. Davidson,” Green reassures the now deceased Margaret that she will not, in fact, “be forgotten”: Yet thy memory shall live, and ages to come Shall love to repeat thy sweet name: O, the golden thread that thy genius has spun To weave in the web of thy fame!57 While subtle, Green’s emphasis on weaving here renders this poem, like Farley’s tribute to Queen Victoria, a sort of “factory blossom,” a gift that could only come from the mill girls themselves. Although the “golden thread” was created by Davidson and left to survive her after her premature death, it is

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Green and perhaps her fellow factory operatives who are said to have woven this thread “in the web of thy fame!” Therefore, just as Margaret’s career is inspired by and enmeshed with that of her older sister Lucretia, the writing careers of the female factory workers are intimately intertwined with that of Margaret, extending its life beyond her death and even imitating it in their own rapid acquisition of cultural literacy. One way in which Davidson, and by extension other poets, will live on after death is the deployment of a vigorous relational poetics. After commending Davidson’s poetry about nature and calling her Nature’s “lost, her favorite child” (perhaps in contrast to her earthly family, in which Margaret seems always to have been a poor replacement for Lucretia), Green describes the broad range of Margaret’s “fancy” (181). Thy fancy explored the boundless waves, That roar for the mighty deep, And down, far down in the coral caves Where “the green-haired sea-nymphs” sleep. (181) Quoting from Davidson’s poem “A Moonbeam,” Green incorporates Margaret’s work into her own; as in Adelia’s “The Graves of a Household,” this “extraction” is purposeful and is intended to be noticed by Green’s readers. Similarly, later in the poem, Green insists that “The ‘good man’ often will wander forth, / By the purest reverence led, / From the scenes of fashion and festal mirth, / To seek thy lowly bed” (182), thus responding directly to Davidson’s desire in “To die and be forgotten” to be “The good man’s glowing theme” (95). Such borrowings reinforce Green’s desire to successfully imitate Davidson: Methinks ’tis a theme may well inspire The heart with a kindred flame, O, would, while I touch the tuneful lyre, I could imitate thy strain! (181) Like imitation, quotation highlights an engagement with and an incorporation of other poetic texts; as in Adelia’s “The Graves of a Household,” the original text becomes part of the new text, signaling a sort of posthumous collaboration. Imitation is regarded as a positive poetic project, one that is not just instructive for the poet but productive of a superior “strain” of poetry, to which both Margaret Davidson and Green aspire.

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While Green seems to lament her inability to imitate Davidson, her poem, like “To die and be forgotten,” contains mixed messages about her own talent and her desires for fame. In imitating Davidson’s modest dismissal of her own talent and ambition, Green may be seen as asking for a response similar to that she has given Davidson—some assertion that she is not to “be forgotten” herself. At the very least, her tribute has rendered her worthy of Davidson’s own attention: as a sort of reward for her own faithfulness to the deceased poet, Green imagines for herself a meeting of the two poets. O, then may we meet in the heavenly choir, Where eternal anthems ring, And strike with thee the seraphic lyre To the songs which all can sing. (182) Reminiscent of the heavenly meeting between Farley and Queen Victoria at the end of “Factory Blossoms,” this scene renders irrelevant the differences that separate women. In this rendition of an American women’s literary tradition, Green effectively takes the place of Margaret’s sister, striking the “seraphic lyre” with Margaret, just as Margaret herself imagined she and her sister making use of the same “hallowed harp.” The ending frames Green as Margaret’s poetic heir, just as Margaret was her sister’s. By emphasizing “the songs which all can sing,” Green also claims poetry for everyone, thus dissolving the boundary between audience and performer, establishing imitation as the way in which those who hear the song can become those who sing it. The Offering writers can then lay claim to a lineage of song (and poetry) that renders their own work worthy of attention. Two months after the publication of “To M. M. Davidson,” Green published a “Letter from Vermont” in which she described a pilgrimage to the childhood home of Lucretia and Margaret Davidson in Plattsburgh, New York. Influenced by Margaret’s poetry, which she quotes extensively, Green hopes to see “a venerable-looking cottage, romantically nestled down amidst rich old shrubbery that was trained by hands now mouldering with the dust of the valley.”58 The reality of the scene disappoints her, however, and the “unsightly house,” decaying and “forlorn,” drives Green to the “village buryingground,” where she finds Lucretia’s grave (231).59 “I had no trouble about finding the resting-place of Lucretia,” she writes, “but went directly to it, as if by instinct” (231). Her response to this site—Lucretia’s resting place as well as the origin of Margaret’s role as poet—is one of worship: “It was a quiet,

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meet and sacred spot. ‘Put off thy shoes from thy feet. For the place on which thou standest is holy ground.’ I felt it to be so. A sacredness seemed to be infused into the air I breathed, and I almost feared that I should profane so consecrated a spot” (232). Quoting from the book of Exodus in which Moses approaches the burning bush and is appointed by God to lead the Israelites out of Egypt, Green not only emphasizes the sanctity of the site of Lucretia’s grave but also calls attention to her own role in the scene. Green effectively deifies Lucretia—and, by extension, Margaret—and appoints herself a prophet of sorts as well as a successor. That this role is not limited to Green alone is confirmed by a postscript to the “Letter from Vermont” in which Green recounts a subsequent visit to nearby Winooski Falls: “It is a little romanticlooking place, cuddled down within a circlet of hills; and what do you suppose I saw there? A cotton mill: so I guess there are factory girls in these regions. Wonder if they have any ‘Lowell Offering’?” (233). The romance that Green hoped to find in the Davidson home is here located in the mills themselves; it is here, not in the domestic space, that literature is to originate, with the “factory girls” and yet another “ ‘Lowell Offering,’ ” an extension—one might even say an imitation—of the first. Although the poetry in the Lowell Offering has largely been ignored or condemned by scholars, it might productively be seen as central to the project of the periodical in that it represents a complicated engagement with print culture. Speaking of all of the writers published in the Offering, Harriet Robinson insists in her memoir of 1898, Loom and Spindle, “These authors represent what may be called the poetic element of factory-life. They were the ideal mill girls, full of hopes, desires, aspirations; poets of the loom, spinners of verse, artists of factory life” (117). For many scholars, this “poetic element” has been evidence of the factory operatives’ lack of talent, and the work has been condemned for its aspirations—either to gentility or to literariness, with both seen as somehow inauthentic on the part of young working women. The seeming lack of political activism in these poems has prevented any further engagement with them. Rather than seeing these poets as aspiring to be middle class, however, I am suggesting that we see them as rejecting the idea that poetry and print culture are by their very nature the property of the middle class. Accessing and imitating a literary tradition usually denied them by class and education, the Offering poets claimed poetry for themselves, experimenting with its place in their own lives and their own periodical. This was, they were careful to assert, a communal, even a collaborative effort, in that the individual “factory girl’s boquets” represented a larger collective

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engagement with poetry that they saw as a direct response to criticisms of their labor—in both the factory and the Offering. In my next chapter, on the Liberator poetry of Sarah Louisa Forten, I’ll do more to think about the communal origination of women’s poetry, as well as the function of the periodical in its framing and circulation of women’s poems and poetic authorship. Although the Offering and the Liberator were very different publications, both offered access to print for women poets who used it to demonstrate a thoughtful, creative, and, yes, often political engagement with a larger American cultural tradition.

CHAPTER 3

“My Country” Communal Authorship and Citizenship in Sarah Louisa Forten’s Liberator Poems

Sarah Louisa Forten published more poems than any other African American woman poet between the death of Phillis Wheatley in 1784 and the publication of Ann Plato’s Essays; Including Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Poetry in 1841.1 Yet Forten’s work has received very little scholarly attention. In this, she is not so different from other early African American women poets (with the important exceptions of Wheatley and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper). For example, Mary Louise Kete has recently written about the difficulty that scholars have had in fitting Lucy Terry Prince, an enslaved poet whose “Bars Fight” was composed in response to an attack on her community by Native Americans, into “the stories we tell about African American women’s poetry and poetics.”2 Looking to Alice Walker’s seminal essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” (1974), Kete argues that for most scholars, the fact that Prince composed poetry has been more important than the poems themselves. Similarly, while the fact that Forten wrote poems is frequently noted as significant by literary scholars and historians alike, the poems themselves are rarely treated as if they have very much to tell us about antebellum African American literature or culture; similarly, they are almost never discussed in the larger context of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry. Such scholarly neglect is at least partly due to scholars’ inability to identify a complete body of Forten’s work. While the first step in the recovery of nineteenth-century American women poets like Sigourney, Harper, and Sarah Piatt has been to identify and collect a body of work under the name of the author, Forten’s relatively small output has made such a project seem

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unnecessary. At the same time, her use of the pseudonym “Ada”—likely among other pseudonyms—has made it difficult even to confirm authorship of the poems attributed to her. Many antebellum women poets—including Forten and the Lowell Offering poets, as well as Elizabeth Akers Allen, whom I discuss in Chapter 5—published their work under pseudonyms or variations of their “real” names. Lydia Sigourney, for example, used “L. H. S.,” “Mrs. L. H. Sigourney,” and “Mrs. Sigourney,” among others, interchangeably. Akers Allen published under “Mist,” “Florian,” “Lizzie  A. Chase,” “Mrs. M. S. M. Taylor,” “Florence Percy,” “Elizabeth Akers,” and “Elizabeth Akers Allen.” As has been demonstrated by scholars working on Sigourney, the recovery of an author’s body of work can be achieved with careful archival work in an author’s private papers, including letters and diaries, and published work. Yet a poet like Forten, who seems to have published a small body of work and has few surviving personal papers, presents par ticular difficulties. I am invested in recovery work myself: eager to have a larger body of Forten’s work with which to think about her poetic project, I have identified two poems that she published for Freedom’s Journal under the pseudonym “Louisa.” Prior to this discovery, Forten’s known output consisted of a handwritten poem in the friendship album of Amy Matilda Cassey (held at the Library Company of Philadelphia), fifteen poems that she published under the pseudonym “Ada” in the Liberator, and one more in the Philanthropist, an abolitionist newspaper published in Cincinnati, Ohio.3 I am almost certain that there are more poems by Forten, either in manuscript or in print. But I am reluctant to see the identification of an author’s poems and the erasure of their periodical context as the ultimate goal of recovery work. What if we think about this as a question of authorship and not of Authorship? In other words, what if we consider Forten’s poetics within a much broader context, in which community is as important as individuality and publication venue matters as much as the poems themselves? This might seem paradoxical, but the difficulty in identifying Forten’s publications should, I believe, lead us to question our desire to do so. Or, put another way, it should lead us to reconsider the model of authorship that shapes our urge to locate an author in these poems, when an author is so difficult to find. This difficulty is illustrated by the work of Todd Gernes, which has revealed that early efforts to consolidate the work of “Ada” under the name of Sarah Forten resulted in the misattribution of “Lines, Suggested on Reading ‘An Appeal to Christian Women of the South,’ by A. E. Grimke” to Forten.

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Signed “Ada,” this poem appeared in the Liberator on October 29, 1836, but Gernes’s research reveals that it was actually the work of Eliza Earle, a white Quaker woman who published poems under the pseudonym “Ada” in the Liberator and other periodicals from about 1836 to 1841. Gernes’s research corrects the misattribution and, in the process, provides a rare analysis of Forten’s poetic style.4 But Gernes’s work also raises questions about the limited usefulness of a methodology that strains so strongly against the conventions of authorship within which Sarah Forten worked. Is Forten the same author that she was when scholars thought that she wrote “Lines” and the additional sixteen poems mistakenly attributed to her by Jean Fagan Yellin and Cynthia D. Bond?5 The title of Yellin and Bond’s bibliography of the work of African American women, The Pen Is Ours: A Listing of Writings by and About African-American Women Before 1910, with Secondary Bibliography to the Present, borrows from Earle’s poem, which proclaims: “One may not ‘cry loud’ as they are bid, / and lift our voices in the public ear; / Nor yet be mute. The pen is ours to wield, / The heart to will, and hands to execute.”6 Prefacing their introduction with this quotation, Yellin and Bond insist, “With these words, written in 1836, the black poet Sarah Forten inscribed herself as a writer [and] expressed her determination to participate in public discourse.”7 Gernes’s attribution of the poem to Earle rather than Forten is particularly disturbing because it implies that there is nothing in Forten’s work to indicate that it is hers. If a white woman’s poems can be mistaken for Forten’s, if her words can be seen as Forten’s proclamation of authorship, then what do we really know about Forten as an author or about Black women’s poetic authorship in the early nineteenth century? This is not a case of imitation: Forten seems never to have been accused of imitating Earle, nor does Earle seem to have been accused of imitating Forten, although she may have been aware of Forten’s work as “Ada” when she adopted the same pseudonym. There is no discussion of the identity of “Ada” in the Liberator after Earle begins to publish there. Yet given her family’s active role in anti-slavery politics, Forten would have been very familiar with abolitionist rhetoric and poetry; her use of common tropes like the death of enslaved persons, the separation of mothers and daughters, and freedom as a natural right indicates her indebtedness to abolitionist poets like Elizabeth Margaret Chandler and John Greenleaf Whittier (a personal friend of the Forten family). Forten’s racial identity should not blind us to the fact that she engaged on a regular basis with mainstream print culture as well, reading poets like Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Hannah F. Gould, and Anna Maria Wells

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(all of whom also had poems reprinted in the Liberator); it is undeniable that her poetics would have been shaped by these reading experiences and by the modes of authorship deployed by these white women poets. At issue here is an expansive notion of authorship that allowed for—indeed, embraced— imitation and other relational poetic practices as an impor tant part of writers’ and readers’ engagement with poems. As I’ve suggested in Chapters 1 and 2, early nineteenth-century American women poets were not invested in authorship in the way that we have come to expect authors to be. Instead, a fluid sense of ownership shaped the poems, publications, and circulation practices that it produced (and vice versa). In Forten’s case, this process served a larger political purpose: the abolition of slavery and the equal rights of all African Americans. This is not to say, however, that Forten’s work merely fits into a paradigm shaped by her white peers, abolitionist or other wise; indeed, the critical dismissal of early African American poetry as the reproduction of “white” forms and conventions has dominated scholarship for far too long. As Keith Leonard writes in Fettered Genius: The African American Bardic Poet from Slavery to Civil Rights, this assessment “prevent[s] us from appreciating fully how African American poets adapted traditional poetics and ethnic culture in ways that rejected those oppressive ideologies and their binary logic, a practice that constitutes the central beauty of this verse.”8 Moreover, any discussion of authorship in the case of this early Black female poet must also acknowledge the way in which what Max Cavitch calls “the poetics of individuated authorship” can threaten to decontextualize and deracinate antislavery poetry and poetic authorship. According to Cavitch, “Tracking down and naming an author may facilitate,” among other things, “narcissistic forms of readerly identification that often go unexamined; underestimating or forgetting the racialization of authorship’s entitlements; misapprehension of individuation and self-possession as invariably empowering; and, not least, the fabulation of poetic as personal voice.”9 Frances Smith Foster points out that such a methodology privileges the “rugged individualist” in African American literary and cultural history: “Particularly in narratives of African American cultural history before Emancipation, the lone fugitive, the fiery rebel, the singular sojourner, or the inspired visionary dominates our attention. Our narratives of racial progress generally feature a heroic Moses while making it seem that half of his challenge was convincing those he would rescue that if they stopped acting like crabs in a barrel, they could become people with a purpose.”10 She proposes instead that scholars

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investigate “a tradition of collaborative creative industry” whose intention was “to promote progress towards racial equality, spiritual maturity, social competence, and self-esteem” (17). Active members in such collaborations, the Forten family were prominent in Philadelphia’s “black elite,” a leadership class with “great influence within the Northern black community.”11 Sarah’s father, James Forten, was a veteran of the Revolutionary War and a wealthy sailmaker who also dealt extensively in real estate and moneylending; in 1859, a writer looking back upon the activism of the early 1830s called Forten “the merchant prince,” indicating his status and respectability within the community.12 Indeed, respectability is as important as, if not more important than, wealth in assessing relative class status for African Americans in the nineteenth century. As Samuel Otter notes in a reading of Joseph Willson’s 1841 Sketches of the Higher Classes of Society in Philadelphia, the term “higher classes” (and related terms like “elite”) indicates “a relative, rather than superlative, position.”13 Class status in the African American community in Philadelphia was based on homeownership as well as “personal responsibility, social commitment, and intellectual cultivation,” all of which James and Charlotte Forten displayed with their deep involvement in Black institution building and political activism (126). They passed this commitment to social justice on to their eight children. While the list of the activities of all of the children is far too extensive to detail here, their participation in organizations such as the American Anti-Slavery Society, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, and the American Moral Reform Society; their publication in periodicals such as Freedom’s Journal, the Liberator, and the Emancipator; and their public opposition to slavery, colonization, and racial prejudice signal the active and often leadership role they played in antebellum reform. As Janice Sumler-Lewis says, “humanitarianism became a family affair” for the Forten siblings.14 While Sarah Forten attended anti-slavery conventions, participated in petition campaigns to end slavery, raised money to assist the Philadelphia Vigilant Committee (which assisted fugitives from slavery), and helped organize anti-slavery fairs, her most distinctive contribution to the Black abolitionist movement is surely the approximately seventeen poems that she published in Black and abolitionist periodicals in the late 1820s and the early 1830s. Enmeshed as she was in familial, communal, and activist networks, however, Sarah Forten is hardly visible to scholars looking for “individualists.” From this point of view, her relatively small body of work and the brevity of her appearance in print as a poet make her seem uncommitted, perhaps, to either

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activism or authorship. Indeed, as Julie Winch notes, Forten “had little time for politics or literature” once she married in 1838; she and her husband, Joseph Purvis, went on to have eight children in as many years, and worked together on a farm in Bensalem Township, Pennsylvania.15 After her husband’s death in 1857, Sarah was left with financial difficulties and much of the family’s land had to be sold in small increments. In 1875, she and the children still living with her declared bankruptcy and returned to the family home in Philadelphia (364–65). Read as an example of a situationally generated activist poetic authorship, however, Forten is not only visible herself but also committed to Black visibility on a much larger scale, and the venue of the Liberator is central to this project. Forten’s sense of authorship, I am suggesting, is far closer to that of the Offering poets than it is to someone like Lydia Sigourney. Inspired by the circumstances in which she found herself and the publication venue available to her, Forten, like the factory-girl poets, “inscribed herself as a writer” and as a reader. Like them, she wrote with an awareness of her larger community, insisting on the rights of African Americans to represent themselves in print discourse. Unlike the Offering poets, however, Forten also insisted on the political nature of her work, composing poems that responded promptly to current events and publishing them in a prominent abolitionist periodical that circulated among both Black and white readers. The earliest discussions of the relationship of the writer, Sarah Forten, to the pieces she published in the Liberator point to a conception of authorship rooted in collaboration, communal membership, and political advocacy, rather than individualism, genius, radicalism, or any of the terms historically used to justify the recovery of early African American writers like Frederick Douglass.16 On March 26, 1831, the Liberator published two pieces by Forten: “Prayer,” a poem signed “Ada,” and “The Abuse of Liberty,” a letter to the editor signed “Magawisca.” In a headnote to the poem, the editor William Lloyd Garrison explains, “Our correspondent ‘Ada’ and ‘Magawisca,’ we are proud to learn, is a young colored lady of Philadelphia” (Figure 5).17 While “Ada” had published three poems in the Liberator prior to this issue, Garrison seems not to have been aware of her identity until receiving a letter from her father explaining that “as you are not acquainted with the author of ‘Ada’ and of ‘A,’ I have discovered by accident that these pieces were written by one of my Daughters.”18 Both of these statements have an elusive quality to them, seeming to identify the author of these pieces at the same time that they don’t fully do so. Garrison doesn’t quite reveal the identity of his contributor to

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his readers; all he is able to say is that the author of the pieces signed “Ada” and “Magawisca” is “a young colored lady of Philadelphia,” allowing race, class, and location to stand in for proper name. (He says nothing about the pieces signed “A.”: a letter to the editor encouraging Liberator readers to refrain from purchasing the “Productions of Slavery,” and a note requesting and accompanying a reprint of a poem by Elizabeth Margaret Chandler.) While dictates of feminine modesty may have prevented him from naming the author, his effort to go as far as he might despite Sarah Forten’s initially anonymous (or pseudonymous) submission is noteworthy. James Forten, on the other hand, resists identifying his daughter wholly with her pseudonyms; instead, he frames her as “the author of ‘Ada’ and of ‘A,’ ” seemingly acknowledging that the creation of the pseudonymous identity is as impor tant as the pieces to which these names are attached. His own revelation, however, is as ambiguous as that of Garrison: the “author” is not his daughter Sarah Forten but “one of [his] Daughters,” of which there were four. It is entirely possible that Garrison did not know for some time which of the Forten daughters was contributing to his paper. While neither he nor James Forten says so directly, there is apparently nothing in these poems that would mark them as the product of a par ticular poet, a Sarah Louisa Forten, say, rather than any other “young colored lady of Philadelphia.” Of course our own scholarly interest in identifying Forten’s poems— separating them out from others published at the same time, in the same periodicals, and on the same subjects, and often written by young women in similar circumstances—is driven by different motivations than those of Garrison and Forten. As Dickson D. Bruce Jr. points out, “black support” and “the black voice” were central to Garrison’s mission for the Liberator and, given the importance of Black subscribers, to the newspaper’s continued success.19 Approximately 90 percent of the 450 subscribers to the newspaper in 1831 were African American; three years later, nearly 75 percent of the 2,300 subscribers were Black. In December  1834, Garrison begged his “colored friends, who send communications to us . . . to specify whether they are original or selected, as we wish to tell the public (as often as practicable) that the pieces were written by colored individuals.”20 While her father’s letter to Garrison helps us label a group of poems as having been written by Sarah Forten, his own intention seems to have been to mark the pieces written by “Ada” and “A.” as the product of his family. Michel Foucault insists that “the coming into being of the notion of ‘author’ constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of . . . literature.”21

Figure 5. Sarah Forten, “Prayer,” with Garrison’s editorial note. Liberator, March 26, 1831. Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.

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The assumption here, however, is that Sarah Forten’s poetry represents every thing but the individual—the family, the periodical in which she published, and the community or communities in which she lived and wrote. In using the notion of a “black community” here, I am mindful of Saidiya Hartman’s emphasis on “networks of affiliation enacted in performance.” Such networks, she cautions, are “defined not by the centrality of racial identity or the selfsameness or transparency of blackness nor merely by the condition of enslavement.” They are marked instead by: “the connections forged in the context of disrupted affiliations, socially amid the constant threat of separation, and shifting sets of identification par ticular to site, location, and action. In other words, the “community” or the networks of affiliation constructed in practice are not reducible to race . . . but are to be understood in terms of the possibilities of resistance conditioned by relations of power and the very purposeful and self-conscious effort to build community.”22 Forten’s use of the conventions and rhetoric of anti-slavery poetry (and anti-slavery discourse in general) in order to make present the free Black community in which she and her family lived and worked demonstrates her creation and manipulation of such “networks of affiliation.” Her poems clearly employ and recirculate a poetics of anti-slavery available to many white abolitionist poets of the same period and location. Yet when placed within the “site, location, and action” in which Forten’s work was generated, they can be read as articulations of the varied affiliations available to free Black Americans. In thinking specifically about the publication and circulation of Forten’s work in the Liberator, I follow the lead of Eric Gardner, whose remarkable study of the Christian Recorder demonstrates the central role that periodicals played in African American communities.23 While Gardner focuses on “Black print,” the fabulous success of Garrison’s Liberator among both white and Black readers is an excellent example of Benedict Anderson’s notion of “print capitalism, which made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways.”24 Along with Garrison and the other writers published in the newspaper, Forten effectively reimagines the American nation as one that acknowledges the sin of slavery and the presence of African Americans as citizens who have made unimaginable sacrifices to the national interest. She does so by a strategic deployment of individual (“I”) and collective (“we”) stances, calibrating the relationships between and among individuals and communities in the antebellum United States and articulating the “possibilities of resistance” against the cultural

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and physical erasure of African Americans, both enslaved and free.25 Tracking such stances throughout the poems published in the Liberator also allows us to see Forten’s careful use of a relational poetics to negotiate the balance between communal and individual authorship. I begin by looking at the elegy, a genre that, as I’ve demonstrated in the first two chapters, lends itself to a relational poetics with its emphasis on collaboration and community. In two early poems, Forten makes use of the elegy to highlight the lives and deaths of those whom the larger culture would see as insignificant. In doing so, she emphasizes the importance of African American mourning within the abolitionist community that the Liberator represents. She also insists on a place in this community for free Black abolitionists like herself and her family. Next, I think about Forten’s assessment of the free Black community’s responsibility to the enslaved by looking at the use of individual and collective stances in one poem with an unidentified speaker and one from the point of view of a young “slave girl.” Forten’s exploration of the collective “we” in these poems is, I argue, a response to the invisibility of free Blacks in anti-slavery poetry and a larger anti-slavery discourse. Her poems reveal that free Blacks are, in fact, enmeshed in slavery and its resistance. With much in common with both white Americans and enslaved blacks, free Blacks were, in Forten’s view, the linchpin to successful action—action based on carefully directed emotions, rather than misplaced or even exploitative sympathy and strategic racial alliances, rather than hierarchical divisions between the free and the enslaved. Finally, I turn to the only poem in which Forten employs an authorial “I” and a first-person singular possessive to interrogate the rhetoric of colonization that would deny her and her fellow free Blacks American citizenship. Forten’s use of her family history makes this poem easily identifiable as hers. But we do her work a disser vice, I argue, if we ignore the communal context out of which it is produced and circulated.

The Anti-Slavery Elegy and Sarah Forten’s Collective “We” Elegies mark the death of an important public figure or a loved one and give it meaning. In the case of Lydia Sigourney’s elegy for Felicia Hemans, which I discussed in Chapter 1, the American poet commemorated Hemans as a poet and as a woman, thereby indicating her own worth as a successor. Adelia’s “The Graves of a Household,” published in the Lowell Offering, imitates

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and incorporates Hemans’s poem of the same name to lament the multiple deaths within the factory operative’s own family. Elegies by antebellum Black poets functioned in much the same way but specifically demonstrated the emotional and moral capacity of African Americans and presented the grief of African Americans as a subject worthy of poetic treatment. As Eric Gardner writes of Civil War–era elegies published in the Black-owned and Blackedited Christian Recorder, “These texts recorded basic details of the earthly lives of African Americans in a print culture that often forgot or ignored them. In so doing, they also rewrote the sense of sentiment that still dominates many critics’ conceptions of African Americans in the nineteenth century—that African Americans were objects of print sentiment rather than agents. [They] thus simultaneously affirmed that African American mourning could be, first and foremost, for African Americans.”26 Two elegies written and published by Sarah Forten—one published in Freedom’s Journal under the name of “Louisa” and the other published in the Liberator as the work of “Ada”—demonstrate Forten’s familiarity with romantic, sentimental, and abolitionist poetic discourses, as well as her astute assessment of the generic and thematic opportunities available to Black female poets in the antebellum period. Moreover, they provide an excellent opportunity to think about the balance of individual and community in her work. Although the speakers in both poems mourn the death of an African American individual, the poems use individual and collective stances differently depending on publication context and audience. Forten’s first published poem, “On viewing the lifeless Remains of a very dear Friend,” appeared as the work of “Louisa” in Freedom’s Journal in December 1827. The choice of her middle name as pseudonym points to Forten’s authorship of this early poem. More important is the subsequent publication by “Louisa” of a poem titled “Recollections of Childhood,” an early version of “Hours of Childhood,” which Forten publishes as the work of “Ada” in the Liberator, long after “Ada” had been identified by Garrison as “a young colored lady of Philadelphia.” Published when she was just thirteen years old, these two poems are evidence of Forten’s precocity as well as her imitation of poetic models for her work. For example, “Recollections of Childhood” is an exercise in romantic poetry—the sort of lament for the innocence of the past that Wordsworth formulated in “Intimations of Immortality” a decade earlier. Looking back to the “dear cherished hours” of her childhood, Forten’s speaker laments the inadequacy of memory, particularly when “the friends once lov’d so dear; / One after one have pass’d away.”27 In this, she is similar

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to other women poets publishing in Freedom’s Journal: a poem titled “Stanzas” and signed “Rosa” similarly bewails the loss of “the land of [her] childhood,” insisting that she “ne’er shall revisit that dear spot again / Where love, joy, and friendship long held their reign.”28 Neither the author nor the subject of “On viewing the lifeless Remains of a very dear Friend” is identified as African American. Yet published as the poem was in the United States’ first Black-owned and Black-edited newspaper, its author and subject would have been assumed to be Black, even if readers were not aware that “Louisa” was Forten. The poem focuses on the grief of the speaker at the loss of her friend, “so pure and sweet, / So tender, firm, and so sincere.”29 Reflecting on the “hours” that “flew unheeded by” while in the company of her friend, “Louisa” realizes that her memories are forever changed by the sight of her friend’s body: But now how changed those happy days; How altered now is every scene! There all I lov’d, in silence lays, Calmly as if she ne’er had been. Yes, thou art gone! and with thee fled All sense of pain, or fears; Silent, reposing with the dead, Unconscious of our tears. (156) Like the child elegies I discussed in Chapter 1, this poem represents the deceased as somehow out of time, oblivious to the grief overwhelming those around her. Indeed, the directive “There” points outside of the poem to the friend’s “lifeless Remains,” the presence of which changes both the past and the present. At a time when Black women’s bodies only appeared in print in advertisements publicizing the sale of enslaved persons and abolitionist pleas for sympathy, Forten’s poem emphasizes the women who usually lived and died outside of print—privileged women, no doubt, compared to the enslaved, but women who gained respectability only at the cost of remaining invisible. In this final scene of her existence, the “dear Friend” may be beyond reach of the speaker’s voice—her “silence” is noted twice in the poem—but the responsibility to mourn her death and therefore sustain the community in which they have both lived and in which Freedom’s Journal circulates remains. The speaker is an “I” who directs the movement of the poem and therefore

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the public mourning of her friend, but this first-person is presented as part of a collective. “Our tears,” Forten concludes, will serve the purpose of mourning not for the dead, who is “unconscious” of them, but for the community. Neither “On viewing the Remains” nor “Recollections of Childhood”— and none of the other poems published by women poets in Freedom’s Journal—is overtly political. But the publication of poems by “Louisa” in this periodical indicates the Forten family’s support for the Black press as well as the opportunities afforded to Black authors by Black-owned newspapers. As Jacqueline Bacon notes, Freedom’s Journal originated in an African American commitment “to establishing and supporting community institutions and to using the power of writing to gain freedom and selfdetermination.”30 While Freedom’s Journal provided space for political discourse, it also allowed writers like “Louisa” to publish the sort of sentimental poetry so common in other periodicals that were closed to them because of their race. What Frances Smith Foster says of enslaved African Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is just as true for free Blacks like Forten: writing that “focuses on experiences not directly resulting from slavery or racial prejudice . . . demonstrates a sense of empowerment and social awareness beyond that which some might ordinarily attribute to persons enslaved.”31 When Freedom’s Journal failed in March 1829, Forten and others lost the opportunities it afforded them; the only Black-owned and Black-edited periodical to survive for more than a handful of issues was the Colored American, published by Samuel E. Cornish, Phillip A. Bell, Charles Bennett Ray, and, later, James McCune Smith, in New York City from 1837 to 1842.32 The publication of the Liberator in January 1831 was well timed for many reasons, not least because Garrison regarded poetry as playing a critical role in the Liberator. As Monica Pelaez notes, “Antislavery activists turned to poetry so as to connect both emotionally and rationally with a wide audience on a regular basis. By speaking out on behalf of those who could not speak for themselves, their poems were one of the most effective means of bearing witness to, and thus also protesting, a reprehensible institution.”33 Garrison seems to have been aware that, as Michael Cohen asserts, “the work of abolition was borne on the wings of poetry, for . . . poems made reform possible as a social project.”34 Garrison himself was a poet, and much of the poetry in the earliest numbers of the newspaper was signed “G—n.” He also reprinted poems by British writers such as William Wordsworth, Felicia Hemans, and Thomas Hood, as well as Americans Phillis Wheatley, John Greenleaf

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Whittier, and Lydia Sigourney. While Garrison published and reprinted poems that seemingly had little to do with slavery, he was clearly invested in an anti-slavery poetics. His reprinting of poems like William Cullen Bryant’s “The African Chief” and Hannah F. Gould’s “The Black at Church,” as well as multiple poems from Benjamin Lundy’s newspaper, the Genius of Universal Emancipation, demonstrates his belief in the power of poetry to sway public opinion regarding slavery and to prompt his faithful readers to action. Forten’s first poem for the Liberator, “The Grave of the Slave,” was published on January 22, 1831, in the fourth number of the first issue. Like Forten’s poems for Freedom’s Journal, “The Grave of the Slave” is clearly influenced by romantic and sentimental poetry. It is overtly political, however, in a way that the earlier work is not. This might be due to differing editorial expectations for poetry or to Forten’s age: she was seventeen years old when “The Grave of the Slave” was published and was likely more immersed in antislavery activism. In four stanzas of four lines each, “The Grave of the Slave” is a lament for an enslaved man for whom death is a welcome respite from labor, pain, and loneliness. The cold storms of winter shall chill him no more, His woes and his sorrows, his pains are all o’er; The sod of the valley now covers his form, He is safe in his last home, he feels not the storm.35 Domesticity here marks a place of safety, of security, but the irony, of course, is that “home” can only be found in death for the enslaved person. While it is said that “the rich and the poor find a permanent home” in the grave, Forten is careful to note that, unlike the “dear Friend” whose “Remains” are pointed out in the earlier poem, the enslaved man is “all unheeded and lone” after death: “Not a tear, not a sigh to embalm his cold tomb, / No friend to lament him, no child to bemoan” (14). Therefore while death is a relief, inequality continues after death: without a marker for his grave or a community to grieve his loss, the enslaved person is lost to history and to his race. In her emphasis on the marking of death, both by a distinguishable grave site and the rituals of grief, Forten is clearly influenced by the tradition of mutual aid in African American communities. Suzanne E. Smith explains that the earliest Black benevolent societies in the late eighteenth century “were founded primarily to assist fellow blacks through economic cooperation and

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to offer social support in times of need. The most significant aspect of most . . . societies, however, was aid given for burial. In addition to burial insurance, these early organizations promised to provide dignified funeral rites and a cemetery plot.”36 The logic here was circular: while the establishment of community led to the ability to bury one’s dead with dignity, the purchase and maintenance of Black burial spaces was essential to the maintenance of community. As Elizabeth McHenry insists, “Determined that their lives would be marked by respect, [free Blacks] sustained a belief that respect for the dead would help define the humanity of the living.”37 In the absence of a grave, Forten’s enactment of burial and grieving rituals creates a textual space, rather than a geographical space, in which the community can redefine the significance of the dead Black body, thereby (re)valuing life as well. “The Grave of the Slave” makes use of the conventions of the elegy to posit a very different scene of mourning, one that takes place away from the body of the enslaved man, buried as he is “all unheeded and lone.” Forten insists, however, that his death should be as meaningful to the Black community as that of the “dear Friend.” In the first three stanzas of “The Grave of the Slave,” there are no first- or second-person pronouns; the only subject is the enslaved person, identified as male by the use of the masculine he/him. In the final stanza, however, the second-person “we” is employed to indicate a broader audience: Poor slave! shall we sorrow that death is thy friend, The last, and the kindest, that heaven could send? The grave to the weary is welcomed and blest; And death, to the captive, is freedom and rest. (14) Whoever the “we” is here, they are surely not enslaved as “we” is preceded by the exclamation “Poor slave!” But despite the fact that “Ada” has not yet been identified by Garrison as “a young colored lady of Philadelphia,” it does not necessarily follow that readers would have assumed a collective “we” constituted entirely of white people. Forten’s poem is published in the bottom right-hand corner of the page in the Liberator, immediately following three items by African American men: a letter from “A Man of Color” regarding the appearance of the Liberator; another headed “Death of Walker,” on the suspected murder of David Walker, author of An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, by “A Colored Bostonian”; and a notice from James G.

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Barbardoes, a Black barber and anti-slavery activist, about enlisting the help of “African Human and Abolition Societies” in assisting free Blacks who are falsely accused of being fugitives from slavery. The poem itself is preceded by an editorial note reading, “To the anonymous writer of the following effusion we offer our thanks, and request a continuance of favors.”38 Immediately following the poem, at the top of the next page, is an unsigned letter from James Forten. In the note preceding this letter, Garrison insists, “We are really proud of our paper this week. Our colored brethren prove themselves not only rational beings, but very clever writers.”39 The placement of the poem hints at Garrison’s awareness of the identity of the author of “The Grave of the Slave”—or at least of her racial identity. More importantly for my purposes, it also implies that Sarah Forten’s “we” might include free African Americans whose sympathy for and action on behalf of the enslaved could be marshaled by this poem written by one of their own. The inclusion of the free Black community in “The Grave of the Slave” is more noteworthy if we compare it to a poem by Elizabeth Margaret Chandler reprinted in the Liberator two weeks earlier. Chandler was a white Quaker women, seven years Forten’s senior, who edited the “Ladies’ Repository” column for the abolitionist Genius of Universal Emancipation, and published her own work there and in other progressive periodicals. Originally published in the Genius of Universal Emancipation, “Think of Our Country’s Glory” asks the audience to reconsider the “glory” of the United States in light of the sufferings of enslaved persons. The primary image here is of a “frantic mother” being separated from her child: “When heart to heart is rending / Ne’er to be join’d again.”40 After repeatedly commanding her audience to “Think of the frantic mother”—to construct this image in their minds— Chandler presents them with two options for their response: Shall we behold, unheeding, Life’s holiest feelings crush’d?— When woman’s heart is bleeding, Shall woman’s voice be hush’d? Oh no! by every blessing That Heaven to thee may lend— Remember their oppression, Forget not, sister, friend. (6)

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It is unclear whether the last line of the poem instructs white women readers not to forget their enslaved sisters and friends (as in “Forget not your sister, your friend”) or labels these readers the sister and friend of Chandler, the poet (as in “Forget not their oppression, my sister, my friend”). The former is likely, given sentiments expressed elsewhere in her work. For example, in “The Kneeling Slave,” a poem likely written in response to the abolitionist icon of the kneeling enslaved woman, Chandler begins with the injunction to “Pity the negro, lady!” her’s is not, Like thine, a blessed and most happy lot! ... She is thy sister, woman! shall her cry, Uncared for, and unheeded, pass thee by? And seek to raise her from her place of woe?41 It is possible that Chandler’s “lady” might be a reference to class rather than race, with young women like the Fortens included in this address. It seems far more likely, however, that given the distinction between the “lady” and “the negro” in the first line, the “lady” in “The Kneeling Slave” is white and “the negro,” whether male or female, is defined not by gender but by condition (“her place of woe”). This gesture is duplicated in a prose piece published in 1830, in which Chandler expresses her hope that something might be done “by American females for the Negro race.”42 Similarly, by the end of “Think of Our Country’s Glory,” published six months later, the broad audience addressed has been narrowed down to an audience of white women. While this does not diminish the importance of this poem— indeed, one of the strengths of Chandler’s work is her constant demand that white women consider their relationship to enslaved women—it does highlight Forten’s potential inclusion of free Blacks in her own collective “we.” In addition to speaking about Black people, as Chandler does, Forten—a free, well-educated Black woman with access to the mixed-race audience of the Liberator—speaks to Black people who, like white Americans, are free.43 This is not done in an effort to align free Blacks with white Americans or to position both as somehow superior to the enslaved. Rather, it is to interrogate the place of free Blacks within the larger abolitionist community and the larger African American community.

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The significance of this gesture being made by an African American is indicated and reinforced by Francis (Frank) Johnson’s song “The Grave of the Slave,” first published in 1837, but, according to his biographer, composed and first performed in 1834.44 Johnson was an African American bandleader who enjoyed immense popularity with both white and Black audiences. While he “was in demand wherever the white Philadelphia aristocracy gathered for social events,” he remained committed to composing and performing for the Black community.45 A personal friend of James Forten, he was also an early subscriber to the Liberator; a letter written by Forten to Garrison on February 2, 1831, lists Johnson as one of twenty-four subscribers solicited by Forten for the newspaper.46 It seems safe to assume that Johnson’s adaptation of “The Grave of the Slave” was played regularly at Johnson’s performances for Black audiences and perhaps for mixed-race audiences, although there is no record of Johnson taking part in abolitionist activities.47 This would not, of course, have precluded others from carrying the song into such environments. As Benedict Anderson notes, similar to the reading of newspapers, the singing of songs in multiple locations and venues creates “an experience of simultaneity” in which “contemporaneous community” can be formed.48 The circulation of the song and its performance in both private and public gatherings would have heightened the poem’s ability to offer a shared, interracial community of people concerned for and invested in the abolition of slavery. This process is apparent in Samuel May’s post–Civil War recollection that “the singing of such hymns and songs as these was like the bugle’s blast to an army ready for battle. No one seemed unmoved. If there were any faint hearts amongst us, they were hidden by the flush of excitement and sympathy.”49 The slow pace and mournful tone of Johnson’s adaptation of Forten’s poem would not have prompted the same sort of “excitement” as later performances by the Hutchinson Family Singers, but it would certainly have evoked “sympathy” and even action from its listeners.50 There is nothing to be done for the individual enslaved person, the poem/ song insists, as he is already dead and buried; what must be done is to eliminate the conditions in which a man can suffer and die without the proper lamentation of family and community. This is a mission in which both white and Black are enlisted, a “network of affiliation,” to use Hartman’s term. Yet originating as it does within the Black community—a rare example of an abolitionist song written and composed by African Americans—“The Grave of

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the Slave” renders resistance possible without the erasure or elision of racial identity.51

Afric’s Sons and Daughters The use of collective stances in Forten’s poetry thus allows her to think about the place of Black abolitionists in the larger anti-slavery movement while also creating poems that can appeal to a wider abolitionist audience. The development of the collective “we” can be traced in other poems throughout the three years in which she published in the Liberator. While none of these poems were as widely circulated as “The Grave of the Slave,” in that none were set to music, they demonstrate a continued commitment on Forten’s part to making free Blacks and their distinctive circumstances visible. In this refusal to perpetuate the erasure of African American lives, they recall the project of Forten’s elegy “On viewing the lifeless Remains of a very dear Friend.” Publishing in the Liberator for a mixed-race audience, however, Forten also interrogates the association of anti-slavery poetry with white authorship. While Garrison was clearly committed to publishing the work of African American authors, the majority of poets published in the Liberator—and certainly in the Genius of Universal Emancipation and other abolitionist periodicals— were white. As Ada, Forten speaks from an African American point of view to the challenges presented by slavery to the notion of American liberty and moral superiority. She focuses particularly on the responsibility of free Blacks to the enslaved—a responsibility and a relationship that is embedded in her use of collective pronouns. Forten’s “we” is carefully calibrated in each of her poems to take the politics of the larger Black community—enslaved and free—into account. In “Past Joys,” published in the Liberator on March  19, 1831, almost two months after “The Grave of the Slave,” Forten immediately positions the speaker in a collective “we” that is reminiscent of that in the earlier poem: The friends we’ve loved, the home we’ve left, Will ofttimes claim a tear; And though of these we are bereft, Still memory makes them dear.52

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The question that Forten poses in the earlier poem, “Recollections of Childhood” (and in the later revised version, “Hours of Childhood”)—is memory any consolation for the loss of the past?—is settled quickly here, in the first stanza of the poem. The “we” of this first line consists of people for whom memory is sufficient comfort for the absence of old friends and homes. It is already clear that this “we” is very similar to that of “The Grave of the Slave”: these individuals, both Black and white, are not forcibly separated from their loved ones and their memories are not haunted by the horrors of slavery. At issue instead is the ability of the enslaved person to feel sentimental attachments to home and family, and the ability of the reader to feel sympathy for the enslaved: And deep we feel each trifling ill, Each sorrow of the soul: But care we for the painful thrill, That o’er some breasts doth roll?

Poor Afric’s son—ah! he must feel How hard it is to part From all he lov’d—from all that life Had twined around his heart.

His is a sorrow deeper far, Than all that we can show; His is a lasting grief, o’er which No healing balm can flow. (45) The emphasis on sympathy here renders “Past Joys” a good example of the abolitionist poem that Paula Bernat Bennett, in her discussion of the work of Sarah Forten, describes as typical but effective: “The poet’s goal in such works was to make the reader (or hearer) feel the pain that slavery caused and therefore experience the outrage that feeling such pain inspired.”53 Yet Forten also emphasizes the limitations of “show[ing]” the grief of the enslaved in anti-slavery poetry; even as she attempts to represent it, to elicit sympathy from her audience, she pulls back from a full disclosure precisely because

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there is “no healing balm” that would ease his “sorrow.” While part of the work of her elegy in Freedom’s Journal is to demonstrate the capacity for grief in the African American community, she refuses to pointlessly exhibit the grief of the enslaved. To attempt to show the enslaved man’s pain would be to minimize and misuse it. When it seems as if Forten might provide such an image in her poem, she uses a hyphen to indicate a pause and then interjects “ah!” as if to note the inadequacy of speech: “Poor Afric’s son—ah!” As the last stanza of the poem reveals, feeling is all that the enslaved man has left, after being deprived of the people and places he loves: His home—ah! that lov’d name recalls All that was dear to him! But these were scenes he’ll know no more,— He only feels they’ve been. (45) Between the reader and the enslaved man, “Afric’s son” is revealed as the more feeling of the two, or rather, his capacity for feeling is assured here, while the reader’s is in question: “But care we for the painful thrill, / That o’er some breasts doth roll?” As in “The Grave of the Slave,” there are two choices for reader identification presented in “Past Joys”: the “we” for whom memory is a sufficient comfort in times of difficulty and “Afric’s son.” Forten would have been unlikely to identify free Black men like her father and other readers of the Liberator in the early 1830s as “Afric’s son.” While free Blacks did, at times, claim an African heritage and identity in late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury America, discourses of colonization made some wary of being labeled “African.” The American Colonization Society, founded in 1816, presented colonization as the solution to racial prejudice and slavery, brandishing the support of influential African Americans like John Russwurm, the former editor of Freedom’s Journal. Russwurm immigrated to Liberia in 1829 and went on to edit the Liberia Herald. While some free Blacks, including James Forten, briefly considered its potential, colonization had, by the late 1820s, been largely rejected by African American communities in the North. In his book, Some Recollections of Our Anti-Slavery Conflict, white abolitionist Samuel J. May recalled James Forten’s “scathing satire” on the colonization movement in 1833: My great-grandfather was brought to this country a slave from Africa. My grandfather obtained his own freedom. My father never wore

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the yoke. He rendered valuable ser vices to his country in the war of our Revolution; and I, though then a boy, was a drummer in that war. I was taken prisoner, and was made to suffer not a little on board the Jersey prison-ship. I have since lived and labored in a useful employment, have acquired property, and have paid taxes in this city. Here I have dwelt until I am nearly sixty years of age, and have brought up and educated a family, as you see, thus far. Yet some ingenious gentlemen have recently discovered that I am still an African; that a continent, three thousand miles, and more, from the place where I was born, is my native country. And I am advised to go home. Well, it may be so. Perhaps, if I should only be set on the shore of that distant land, I should recognize all I might see there, and run at once to the old hut where my forefathers lived a hundred years ago.54 While Forten acknowledges his great-grandfather’s forced immigration from Africa to North America, he refuses to be wholly defined by that fact. Instead, he privileges other elements of his family history and personal experience: his grandfather’s and father’s desire for freedom; his father’s and his own service in the Revolutionary War; his participation and success in the local economy; and his own domestic happiness, with an emphasis on education. The fact of his great-grandfather’s origin, he suggests, cannot outweigh the many things that tie him to the United States—and that render this country indebted to him. Spoken during a dinner at the Forten home, to which May and several other abolitionists were invited while attending the convention at which the American Anti-Slavery Society was founded, Forten’s comments were surely intended to prompt his guests to draw a sharp distinction between their elegant surroundings and the “old hut” that this wealthy and dignified Black man was expected to regard as “home.” This does not mean, however, that free Northern Blacks had no obligations to “Afric’s son.” Indeed, as early as 1817, Philadelphia’s free Blacks, led by James Forten, proclaimed that “we never will separate ourselves voluntarily from the slave population of this country; they are our brethren by the ties of consanguinity, or suffering, and of wrong; and we feel that there is more virtue in suffering privations with them, than fancied advantages for a season.”55 Fourteen years later, just one week prior to the publication of “Past Joys,” a letter from James Forten as “Cato” appeared in the Liberator under the title “The Colonization Crusade.” Objecting to the “active part” that “the ministers of the gospel” were playing “in endeavoring to convey the freemen

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of color to Africa,” “Cato” insists, “I think the ministers of the gospel might do much towards destroying the domestic slave trade, which breaks asunder the sacred ties of husband, wife, and children. Not a voice is raised by them against this most cruel injustice.”56 Rather than waiting for others to raise their voices, Sarah Forten’s “Past Joys” not only objects to the separation of families within the institution of slavery but interrogates the commitment of free Blacks to the enslaved by asking her readers to think about where their allegiances lie: with the feeling, but ultimately unsympathetic, Northern whites or with the enslaved man, who feels more intensely than those who have the luxury of happy memories. That free Blacks saw themselves as both separate from and united with enslaved African Americans is apparent in Forten’s “The Slave Girl’s Address to Her Mother,” her second poem to appear in the Liberator. Published on January 29, 1831, the poem opens with a young girl attempting to comfort her mother, who is overcome by her grief and suffering. “Oh! mother, weep not,” she begs her, assuring her that “God will be our guard.” And grieve not for that dear loved home no more Our sufferings and our wrongs, ah! why deplore? For though we feel the stern oppressor’s rod, Yet he must yield, as well as we, to God. Torn from our home, our kindred and our friends, And in a stranger’s land our days to end, No heart feels for the poor, the bleeding slave; No arm is stretched to rescue, and to save.57 Presumably kidnapped from Africa, the enslaved girl and her mother see that country as “home” in a way that James Forten and his peers do not; yet infused with the sentimentality associated with the domestic in nineteenthcentury America, Africa is represented as a place of “kindred” and “friends,” where the girl and her mother were safe and happy. In this poem, the individual and collective stances shift with Forten’s adoption of the voice of a “slave girl.” Signed “Ada,” like “The Grave of the Slave,” “The Slave Girl’s Address to Her Mother” announces its imaginative invocation of the enslaved young woman’s voice in the title, thus drawing attention to the very different use of “we” to indicate, at a very basic level, the girl and her mother but also a larger enslaved population.

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Yet the “slave girl” does not just lament the “wrongs” that she and her mother have suffered. In the fourth and fifth stanzas, she turns directly to the readers of the Liberator, rendering the first three stanzas, in which she describes their “sufferings and wrongs” as a sort of authorization of her own power to speak on issues of slavery and freedom. Oh! ye who boast of Freedom’s sacred claims, Do ye not blush to see our galling chains; To hear that sounding word—“that all are free”— When thousands groan in hopeless slavery? Upon your land it is a cruel stain— Freedom, what art thou?—nothing but a name. No more, no more! Oh God, this cannot be; Thou to thy children’s aid wilt surely flee: In thine own time deliverance thou wilt give, And bid us rise from slavery, and live. (18) The final couplet—rendered distinctive by its extension of the fifth stanza to six lines instead of four—predicts a divine resolution to the problem of slavery in the form of a sort of resurrection. Condemned to what Orlando Patterson calls “social death” by the institution of slavery, robbed of home and tribal identity, the enslaved girl and her mother can only be saved by God.58 (The conversion of the enslaved to Christianity does not factor into their complaint, although that would clearly have contributed to their alienation from their identities prior to enslavement.) Reiterating the word “Freedom” in these stanzas as she does the word “home” in the second and third stanzas, Forten points to the hy pocrisy of Americans who claim to revere and defend both. Such language is worthless, she suggests, “nothing but a name,” as long as slavery exists. In this it is possible to see Forten pointing out the way in which slavery renders hollow “Freedom’s sacred claims” for white people as well as Black, the free as well as the enslaved. Speaking from the point of view of an enslaved individual in “The Slave Girl’s Address to Her Mother,” but a free woman herself, Forten uses her own privilege to advocate for the enslaved. Yet their shared race and gender—and it is notable that both of Forten’s poems from the point of view of the enslaved are in the voice of figures called “slave girl”—prompts the readers of the Liberator to consider the similarities between them, rendering Forten’s own

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freedom precarious despite her family’s history, wealth, education, and geographical location.59 These parallels are highlighted on the pages of the Liberator as well: on February 5, 1831, one week after the appearance of “The Slave Girl’s Address to Her Mother,” Garrison initiated his “Slavery Record” column by reprinting advertisements for fugitives from slavery including “a handsome mulatto girl, about 16 years of age (who is well acquainted with the concerns of both house and farm)” and a “black girl, 17 years of age, of excellent character, strictly and morally honest, sober, industrious, and of good disposition.”60 It would be difficult not to make connections between these young women and the “slave girl,” but also between all of them and the “young colored lady” who publishes in the Liberator as “Ada.” To some degree, then, Forten here reverses the careful work of the “we” in “The Grave of the Slave” and “Past Joys.” This reversal reflected the realities of life for free Northern Blacks, whose lives were very different from those who were enslaved, but who were constantly reminded of their own vulnerability. This is perhaps best illustrated in an address by Forten’s friend, Sarah Mapps Douglass, to the Philadelphia Female Literary Society in July 1832: One short year ago, how different were my feelings on the subject of slavery! It is true, the wail of the captive sometimes came to my ear in the midst of my happiness, and caused my heart to bleed for his wrongs; but, alas! the impression was as evanescent as the early cloud and morning dew. I had formed a little world of my own, and cared not to move beyond its precincts. But how was the scene changed when I beheld the oppressor lurking on the border of my own peaceful home! I saw his iron hand stretched forth to seize me as his prey, and the cause of the slave became my own. I started up, and with one mighty effort threw from me the lethargy which had covered me as a mantle for years; and determined, by the help of the Almighty, to use every exertion in my power to elevate the character of my wronged and neglected race.61 Douglass’s “ little world” is represented in geographical terms, surrounded by “border[s]” that she imagines protect her from harm. What goes unsaid here, but is surely understood, is that it is Douglass’s status as “ free” that separates her from “the captive” whose “wail” has had so little permanent impact on her. The “oppressor” has not, of course, forgotten that she is Black like “the slave” and therefore does not hesitate to “seize [her] as his prey.” Increasingly

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vulnerable to racial prejudice and kidnapping, free Black women limited their movements in public space in order to protect themselves; as Forten told Angelina E. Grimké in 1837, “we never travel far from home and seldom go to public places unless quite sure that admission [is] free to all—therefore, we meet with none of these mortifications which might other wise ensue.”62 In this sense, while the “we” in “The Slave Girl’s Address” initially seems quite limited—the enslaved girl and her mother—and eventually broadens out to include all of the enslaved (all of God’s “children”), it may also include all who are vulnerable as long as the “cruel stain” of slavery is on America. As Marcus Wood notes, one of the most prominent themes in American abolitionist poetry is “the emphatic assertion that slavery as an institution is not compatible with the ideals of the new nation.”63 While it may not have been clear to her audience upon publication of “The Slave Girl’s Address to Her Mother” that the poem’s author was African American, the revelation, two months later, that “Ada” was a “young colored lady” would have rendered her exposure of the hy pocrisy of “Freedom’s sacred claims” more complex and perhaps more daring than that of her white peers and her Black male peers. Indeed, the imitation and adaptation of revolutionary rhetoric in Forten’s work exposes the incompatibility of slavery and the ideals upon which America was founded. In this, Forten was not uncommon, especially among Garrisonians, who, Ronald G. Walters notes, “felt compelled to appropriate the sacred mantle of the Revolution” in an effort to demonstrate the superiority of their particular brand of abolition.64 Yet the rare adoption of an individual stance in “The Slave” and “My Country” reveals Forten’s claim not just to moral authority but to citizenship—a claim that is more striking given the pressure put on free Blacks to renounce the United States and “go home” to Africa. In “The Slave,” published in the Liberator on April 16, 1831, Forten claims the authority of her father’s Revolutionary War ser vice to critique the nation’s perpetuation of the institution of slavery: Our sires who once in freedom’s cause, Their boasted freedom’s sought and won, For deeds of glory gained applause, When patriot feelings led them on. And can their sons now speak with pride, Of rights for which they bled and died,— Or while the captive is oppressed, Think of the wrongs they once redress’d?65

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Remaining silent about her own race and gender in these opening lines, Forten claims citizenship by way of her “sire’s” “deeds of glory” and, by extension, affiliation with the “sons” of other patriots. Her own inability to act on this legacy, given her identity as an African American woman, is indicated in her questioning whether or not “their sons”—the sons of patriots—can “speak with pride” of the “rights” their fathers gained in battle. There is an interchangeability in this poem, however, between the “sons” and their “sires,” as well as the Black Sarah Forten and the presumably white “sons.” James Forten indicates something similar in his first published letter to Garrison when he writes of the American Colonization Society, “Is it not a contradiction to say that a man is an alien to the country in which he was born? To separate the blacks from the whites is as impossible, as to bale out the Delaware with a bucket.”66 Yet while the opening “our” of “The Slave” points toward a collective, a nation, the continual but imprecise divisions and subdivisions indicated by multiple iterations of “they” and “their” mark the broken promises of revolution—not only to free Blacks like the Fortens but to the enslaved. In a remarkable claiming of her own authority and privilege as an elite, free African American woman, Forten concludes “The Slave” by speaking directly to the nation: “For oh! my country, must it be / That they still find a foe in thee?” (62). Forten insists on her own American citizenship— America is “my country” to her—at the same time that she acknowledges that the nation is enemy to the enslaved—here a collective “they,” rather than an individual “he.” By transforming the individual enslaved person of the title into a collective, Forten implies that the enslaved might become yet another “they” who fight “in freedom’s cause,” similar to those “sires” who rebelled against British tyranny in the Revolutionary War. The cause of the enslaved, she suggests, is no less worthy than that of the Revolutionaries like her father. The positioning of this poem immediately following a response to John Russwurm’s Liberia Herald by “R.” also points to “The Slave” as a critique of “the many preposterous arguments of colonizationists.”67 In an editorial quoted in the piece, Russwurm insists, “Before God, we know of no other home for the man of color, of republican principles, than Africa. Has he no ambition? Is he dead to every thing noble? Is he contented with his condition? Let him remain in America.” Forten’s “The Slave” claims America as her own because of her “republican principles,” not in spite of them, insisting along with “R.” that “we will never be contented with our condition, but will make it better in this our native home.”

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Nearly three years later, after the Philadelphia convention at which the American Anti-Slavery Society was founded, Forten published yet another articulation of revolutionary citizenship in “My Country.” Appearing in the Liberator on January 4, 1834, and identified again as the work of “Ada,” “a young lady of color,” the poem stands out from Forten’s other Liberator poems because of her use of the first-person singular possessive, as in “The Slave,” as well as the authorial “I.”68 While this “voice-effect” can certainly be read as a claiming of literary and political voice, I suggest that such a claim always leads back to the collective for Forten.69 In other words, Forten’s bold use of the first-person in “My Country” arises out of the privileging of a community that was under threat of erasure by slavery and colonization. Coming as it does on the heels of the anti-slavery convention, it is also a reminder of the importance of a multiracial response to these threats. “My Country” begins with an exasperated “Oh!” signaling the outburst to come, in which Forten demands that Americans seek to improve their own country before attempting to colonize others. Oh! speak not of heathenish darkness again, Nor tell me of lands held in error’s dread chain, Where—where is the nation so erring as we, Who claim the proud name of the “HOME OF THE FREE”? (4) The American Colonization Society (ACS) had long admonished free Blacks to journey to Africa as missionaries. Proponents of colonization insisted that such missions would allow Blacks to return to their native land with the gift of Christianity (for which they were assumed to be grateful to those who enslaved them).70 The opening lines of “My Country” dismiss these arguments, insisting instead that attention should be directed toward the “erring” United States. This point is made undeniable by the echo of “error” in the word “erring” in lines 2 and 3; the implication here is that it is America that is held in “error’s dread chain,” rather than Africa. Of course, the “chains” here recall those binding the enslaved, the casting off of which will result in the “tribute of homage” that America will then deserve by virtue of offering true equality to all of its citizens. In a letter reprinted from the London Patriot on the first page of the Liberator in which “My Country” appears, the AngloCanadian abolitionist Charles Stuart makes a similar critique, quoting from Elizur Wright Jr.’s The Sin of Slavery, and Its Remedy (1833): “Let us not be

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told that the colored men go voluntarily to Liberia. There is not Jesuitism enough in the world to conceal such a lie from any but the willingly blind. The plain fact is this, and every colored man at least, knows it very well, that the white community, under the name of the “Colonization Society,” merely receive the volunteer emigrants—no compulsion—all fair—but mark, the same community, without this name, sanction the oppressive laws, utter the public sentiment, and point the finger of scorn, which together amount to a bitter persecution, and compel the poor blacks to volunteer!”71 Stuart (by way of Wright) invokes the Black community here—“and every colored man at least, knows it very well”—to demonstrate the truth of his critique. In “My Country,” this “young lady of color” claims her own authority to assert the centrality of free Blacks in the colonization debate. While the ACS enlisted the support of free Blacks like Russwurm, they denied the Black community any geographical or rhetorical space in these discussions. Indeed, they appealed to enslavers by suggesting that they send the people they enslaved to Liberia immediately after emancipating them, thereby refusing to acknowledge that free Blacks had any allegiance to the United States or that the nation had any obligations to those who were formerly enslaved. In a meeting of the ACS in January 1831, for example, George Washington Parke Custis, the step-grandson and adopted son of the first president of the United States, insisted that there should be no emancipation of enslaved people, gradual or immediate, without a plan for colonization in place. “Let the Atlantic billow heave its high and everlasting barrier between their country and ours,” he proclaimed. “Let this fair land, which the white man won by his chivalry, which he has adorned by the arts and elegancies of polished life, be kept sacred for his descendants, untarnished by the footprint of him who hath ever been a slave.”72 The “regenerated African” was entitled to enjoy the fruits of his enlightenment, but only “under the shade of their native palms” (112). Authorized by his relationship to George Washington to speak for the nation, Custis denies African Americans any sense of belonging in or to the United States, as well as any part in the growth and development of the nation. Slavery here is seen as a mark of inferiority, to be blamed on African Americans rather than “the white man” whose sophistication and gentility are entirely responsible for the nation’s success. Free Blacks are completely erased in this scenario: despite his ser vice to his country, his property ownership, and his wealth, a man like James Forten (and, by extension, his daughter) has no part in the “fair land” constructed by Custis and his associates. In “My Country,” Forten, like her father before her, explains

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the violence and the futility of this attempted erasure to her mixed-race audience. She would go on to do much the same in a letter to Angelina  E. Grimké in 1837, insisting that the ACS “originated more immediately from prejudice than from philanthropy—the longing desire of a Separ[a]tion— induces this belief—and the Spirit of ‘This is not your Country’ is made manifest by the many obstacles it throws in the way of their advancement— mentally and morally.”73 In Forten’s country, however, the United States cannot be regarded as “sacred” or as a success when the most vulnerable are oppressed. It is slavery that has tarnished the nation in this scenario, rather than “the footprint of him who hath ever been a slave.” The “we” in “My Country” is an undifferentiated mass of Americans, but it is also a place and an ideology. “Where— where is the nation so erring as we,” she asks, including free Blacks in a geographically and politically located nation whose actions no longer live up to its founding principles (and perhaps never did). In this, Forten’s use of the collective “we” is similar to that of “The Grave of the Slave,” “Past Joys,” and “The Slave.” “My Country” stands out among Forten’s political poetry, however, for its use of the personal “I.” Other Black abolitionists often spoke of colonization in personal terms: in July 1832, Sarah Mapps Douglass, writing as “Zillah” in the Liberator, insisted that America was her home, “and though she unkindly strives to throw me from her bosom, I will but embrace her the closer, determining never to part with her while I have life.”74 But this individual stance was exceptionally rare for Sarah Forten. The title of the poem alone indicates that “My Country” will return to the interrogation of national identity initiated in the last couplet of “The Slave.” There Forten asks “my country” if it is possible that the enslaved should “find a foe in thee,” and if so, the poem implies, can Forten continue to call the United States “my country.” In “My Country,” she takes this further, claiming her national identity at the same time that she threatens to renounce it: When America’s standard is floating so fair, I blush that the impress of falsehood is there; That oppression and mockery dim the high fame, That seeks from all nations a patriot’s name. Speak not of “my country,” unless she shall be, In truth, the bright home of the “brave and the free!” Till the dark stain of slavery is washed from her hand, A tribute of homage she cannot command. (4)

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Forten’s assertion of her “blush” is intriguing here for two reasons. First, her audience, who knows her as “a young colored lady,” might not expect a blush to reveal itself on her brown skin. Indeed, the blush on a white woman’s check was said to indicate her possession of virtue; the assumed inability of Black women’s skin to reveal a blush supposedly indicated a lack thereof. Yet the speaker of “My Country” insists on the moral significance, rather than the appearance, of the blush (leaving open the question of whether or not her cheeks reveal her blushing). In doing so, she identifies patriotism as the most important virtue a woman—Black or white—can possess. Second, while her very public assertion of herself and her political opinions might be seen by some as a lack of modesty—a reason for an embarrassed blush—the speaker lays the blame for such embarrassment on the nation. The purity of her womanly blush is compared to the sinful “stain” represented by the nation’s history of slavery; if slavery is “falsehood” in this paradigm, the authorial “I” here represents truth, a claiming of prophetic authority. Forten admonishes her audience to “speak not of ‘my country’ ” until slavery is abolished, yet she speaks of “my country” to assert both her identity as an American and her right to critique the nation. Despite its rare use of the singular “I,” then, “My Country” demonstrates Forten’s claim to belong and speak for multiple communities—free Blacks, Black women, women, African Americans, abolitionists, Americans—all of whom have stakes in the debate over slavery and colonization. Despite the fact that her poetry was uncollected during her lifetime, Forten’s work was known to the communities that mattered to her as the work of “Ada.” When Garrison revealed that “Ada” was “a young colored lady of Philadelphia,” some readers may have known exactly who that “young lady” was. Others might have remained uninformed, but one thing was clear: it was the community out of which Forten wrote that was important, rather than her individual identity. The Liberator provided the venue in which “Ada” could both critique her country and project a utopian vision of a nation in which the citizenship of African Americans is fully acknowledged. Indeed, Forten’s vision found a welcome in the Liberator because Garrison wanted to publish Black writers as proof of the humanity and culture of African Americans; moreover, her critique of slavery and colonization largely mirrored his. Approximately a decade later, Frederick Douglass would break with Garrison and the Liberator to begin publishing the North Star, announcing, “It has long been our anxious wish to see, in this slave-holding, slave-trading, and negro-hating land, a printing-press and paper, permanently established,

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under the complete control and direction of the immediate victims of slavery and oppression.” Such a paper “would do a most impor tant and indispensable work, which would be wholly impossible for our white friends to do for us.”75 Several years prior to Douglass’s escape from slavery, Forten may also have felt limited by her “white friends,” but she worked within the communities to which she belonged in order to create change and to see her work in print. Maria James, the domestic servant who is the subject of my next chapter, shared both the desire to publish her poetry and the necessity of collaborating with privileged “friends” in order to do so. The result—a collection of her work titled Wales, and Other Poems—is, like the work of Sarah Forten, nearly impossible to read if we privilege individuality over community. Yet an investigation of the composition, publication, and circulation processes that produced her book reveal that community is a concept fraught with difficulties.

CHAPTER 4

“What Is Poetry?” Class, Collaboration, and the Making of Wales, and Other Poems

In January  1839, Wales, and Other Poems, written by Maria James, was published in New York City by the evangelical publisher John  S. Taylor (Figure 6). As the Reverend Alonzo Potter explains in the introduction to the volume, James was a Welsh immigrant and a domestic servant; her employer, Catherine Livingston Garrettson, and her daughter, Mary Rutherford Garrettson, owned a home on the banks of the Hudson River, flanked by estates belonging to the Astors, the Lewises, and their Livingston relatives. Despite these prestigious patrons, Potter explains, the poems are presented “in the precise garb with which they were invested by the writer.” No changes have been made, he insists, “with the exception of a few slight errors, the correction of which properly belonged to the printer.”1 Nearly all of the poems in Wales, and Other Poems were previously unpublished and had only circulated locally in manuscript among the Garrettsons’ family and friends. The sole exception seems to have been “Ode, Written for the Fourth of July, 1833.” It is this poem that Potter explains brought his attention to James’s talent as a poet: “If the reader will turn to this Ode,” he insists, “he will not be surprised that such information should have awakened a very lively interest in my mind. It led me to embrace an early opportunity of looking over a number of pieces with which I was furnished by one of the ladies of this family.”2 In a letter that accompanies Potter’s introduction to the volume, Maria James recounts the composition history of the “Ode,” locating its origin in the reading of another poem: “The American

Figure 6. Title page of Wales, and Other Poems (New York: John S. Taylor, 1839). Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.

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Flag,” published in the New York Evening Post in 1819 by Joseph Rodman Drake, with the assistance of Fitz-Greene Halleck (signing themselves collaboratively as “Croaker & Co.”): “This [poem] had like to have kindled up the poetic fires in my breast, which however did not find utterance until fourteen years afterwards, in the ode on the fourth of July, 1833. This appearing in print, some who did not know me very well, remarked to others, ‘do you suppose she ever wrote it?[’] Being answered in the affirmative, it was further ‘ imagined’ she [‘]must have had help.’ These remarks gave rise to the question ‘what is poetry?’ ”3 Connecting her own poem to that of Drake and writing the “Ode” down on July 4, 1833, James frames her work as distinctly American; indeed, both poems are reflections on the joint symbolism of the American flag and the eagle. Distancing the composition of her own poem by fourteen years from the original encounter with “The American Flag,” she also seems to attempt to ensure that the “Ode” will be read as the result of inspiration, rather than imitation. Yet James’s recollection recalls the risks of print for a marginalized author: while Potter’s reading of the “Ode” (either in manuscript or print) prompts a request for more poems, presumably because of his familiarity with James and “the ladies of [the] family” for whom she works, the unidentified readers in James’s memory question her authorship upon their encounter with the same poem in print. Detached from the manuscript page and from the original site of composition, the “Ode” is regarded as evidence of fraud or inauthenticity. What goes unspoken here is that James’s class status lies at the heart of these readers’ suspicions. James responds to this questioning of her intellectual ability and authorship with a romantic assertion of poetic inspiration called “What is Poetry?” A lambent flame within the breast; A thought harmoniously express’d; A distant meteor’s glimmering ray; A light that often leads astray; A harp, whose ever-varying tone Might waken to the breeze’s moan; A lake, in whose transparent face Fair nature’s lovely form we trace; A blooming flower, in gardens rare, Yet found in deserts bleak and bare; A charm o’er every object thrown;

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A bright creation of its own; A burst of feeling, warm and wild, From nature’s own impassioned child.4 Positioned in the context of the publication of the “Ode,” which was itself written in response to another poem, “What is Poetry?” is about the multiple and often contradictory ways in which poems are conceived and composed. For every poem that seems to come from within the poet (“A lambent flame within the breast; / A thought harmoniously express’d;”), another comes from without and is more difficult to access (“A distant meteor’s glimmering ray; / A light that often leads astray;”). Poems are both uncommon (“A blooming flower, in gardens rare”) and common (“A charm o’er every object thrown”). Whatever poems are and wherever they come from, James here claims for herself the role of poet, able to adjust to such disparate circumstances in order to produce poetry. As she no doubt discovered with the publication of the “Ode,” poems themselves are harder to claim: as an amorphous flame, flower, and feeling, the poem is less tangible object than experience or encounter. For “What is Poetry?” is as much about reading poetry as it is about writing poetry. Poems are encountered in a wide variety of ways, allowing each reader to read them and sometimes even take ownership of them. Labor is distinctly absent from all of the scenes of reading and writing in “What is Poetry?” and the poem thereby serves to decontextualize the questions asked of James’s work by skeptical readers (“did she write it?” and “did she have help?”). Yet another response to the publication of the “Ode” frames the poem and James’s composition practices almost entirely within the context of her labor. In a handwritten note pasted into the back of one copy of Wales, and Other Poems, an unidentified reader who clearly knew James clarifies the story of the origin of the “Ode.” Referring to James’s discussion of the composition of her poem, this reader writes, “Allusion is here made to her having heard Clement read aloud to his family Crokers Ode to the ‘American flag’ she told me that the music of more than the poetry rang in her ears for some time—but that fourteen years afterward when she had returned to the Garretson family and was one day on the ladder steps white washing, this Ode again recurred to her, and she alighted from the ladder steps, to write the ‘Ode on the Fourth of July’ which came into her head whilst thinking of the piece by Croker—this is the Ode.”5 The author’s emphasis on the length of time elapsed between the hearing of “The American Flag” (read aloud by

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Clement Clarke Moore, seminary professor and author of “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” for whom James worked as a nurse) and the composition of the “Ode” marks James’s par ticular genius—her ability to recall a poem she is said to have heard read aloud once fourteen years earlier, as well as her ability to craft a poetic response to it.6 For the author of this note, however, James’s talent as a poet is more remarkable because of her simultaneous labor as a domestic servant; indeed, her poetry can be said to be inextricable from her labor, inspired by it as much as it is by the recollection of “The American Flag.” After all, it is while she is “white washing” walls that the “Ode” comes to her; she takes a break to write the poem and presumably mounts the “ladder steps” again to resume her work once it is written. The encounter with “The American Flag” is framed here as core to her burgeoning identity as poet: it is said that “the music of more than the poetry rang in her ears for some time,” implying that this is bigger than any single poem, no matter how successful. Yet even this encounter is staged here in the context of James’s labor, read aloud by her employer as she cares for his children or performs some quiet domestic task. If “What is Poetry?” is one answer to the question “do you suppose she ever wrote it,” this note is another. Both seem to place value on poetic inspiration and origin, a situating of a poem’s composition in a par ticular experience, no matter how explicit (“on the ladder steps white washing”) or vague (“A burst of feeling, warm and wild, / From nature’s own impassion’d child”). But while the poem attempts to separate labor and poetry, the note brings them together, situating the reading and writing of poetry within the context of domestic servitude, even to the extent of naming the families for whom she works at the time that poems are read and written. Poetry is thereby marked as collaborative in a sense: a response to a poem (in this case, “The American Flag”) written by one poet (Drake) with the assistance of another (Halleck), read aloud by a third (Moore), composed while working in the Garrettson home and published with the assistance of the “lad[y] of [the] family” who provides Potter with more of Maria James’s work following his encounter with the “Ode, Written for the Fourth of July, 1833.” Both the emphasis on singular inspiration in “What is Poetry?” and the emphasis on collaboration are present throughout Wales, and Other Poems, as well as the archival materials surrounding the publication of the volume. In order to publish Wales, and Other Poems, James takes advantage of the social networks established and maintained by Potter and the Garrettson family—mustering interest in the proposed volume and obtaining

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subscriptions from supporters, some of whom may have encountered her poems in manuscript. She also uses her poems to build community, linking readers in different networks together through their purchase and (potential) reading of her book. In order to do this, James eschews “origination, individuation, and timelessness” in favor of a relational poetics embedded in the socially stratified world in which she lived and worked.7 Whether she found inspiration in white wash or “fair nature’s lovely form,” access to authorship meant, first, the acquisition and deployment of a poetic language very different from that she spoke in everyday life; in other words, to be a working-class woman poet, James had to sound like anything but. Access also required responsiveness to the people and events around her; like Phillis Wheatley, Lydia Sigourney, and many other women poets before her, James appealed to her audience at least in part by writing poems about them and about the places and events they cared about.8 I want to be careful here, however, about assessing the cost of such access and I resist lamenting with William Wilson, the only academic to address James’s work thus far, that “we are hard put to hear a Welsh immigrant, Maria James, in her time, in her place, in her voice, speaking anywhere among” her poems.9 Rather than seeking some sort of unmediated working-class poetic voice, I attempt here a genealogy of Wales, and Other Poems, unraveling the unequal but collaborative process by which it was composed, published, and circulated. As I discussed in Chapter 2, scholars of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry (and in the larger field of nineteenth-century American literary studies) have been reluctant to address issues of class. The primary complication here seems to be the difficulty of defining what constitutes “working-class literature” and, by extension, “working-class poetry.” For some critics, working-class literature is defined by the subject matter of the text, rather than (or in addition to) the identity of the poet. Paul Lauter, for example, insists, “It is often not so much work itself as the lives, the people for whom working is central, that give working-class literature its distinctiveness. . . . It registers a vital dimension of working-class creativity: that is, the idea that those whose lives are overwhelmingly shaped by work—not, say, by romance, nature, or art—are significant subjects.” 10 Similarly, Nicholas Coles and Janet Zandy identify “a common language of the body at work” as central to working-class literature. “Through its focus on physical labor,” they explain, “this writing presents worlds of work that are usually hidden or not deemed appropriate subjects for literary expression.”11 This formulation presents a problem, however, for the study of pre-twentieth-century working-class

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writers. While some of them did write about their own lives, others did not, leaving scholars to turn to literature about working-class lives but not by working-class writers in order to think about class in American literature prior to 1900. (Perhaps the most common example of this type of text is Rebecca Harding Davis’s short story “Life in the Iron Mills.”) This approach to working-class literature is further complicated when trying to think about the relationship between class and poetry. Is poetry by working-class individuals only worthy of scholarly attention if it is somehow “about” their labor and eschews middle-class conventions and aesthetics? That is generally how scholars have approached poetry by nineteenth-century working-class individuals, but this has left us with very little material to work with. What, then, do we do with nineteenth-century working women’s poetry that seemingly imitates both the subject matter and the style of middleclass women’s poetry? How do we read this work with an eye to issues of class without disregarding it as inauthentic and insignificant? These questions are particularly interesting in the case of a poet like Maria James, whose labor as a domestic servant removed her from any sort of collective experience in the workplace with other workers, the sort of experience that E. P. Thompson identifies as formative of class consciousness.12 In the case of the Lowell Offering poets, I suggested that we think about the use of an imitative poetics to claim a larger tradition of poetry—particularly women’s poetry—for working-class women. Like these poets, Maria James also faced doubts about her ability to write the poems circulated under her name. Yet rather than demonstrate her expertise by imitating individual poems or poets, James used her poetry to demonstrate her embeddedness in the upper-class communities in which she lived and wrote. As was the case with Sarah Forten, any consideration of Maria James as poet has to consider individual authorship as well as, and within the context of, community. As Faye E. Dudden argues, “The contrasting experiences of employer and employee in domestic ser vice illuminate the practical meaning of class in nineteenth-century America, the privileges nourished and the human costs exacted.”13 One of the “privileges” accessed by James in her par ticular workplace was literacy and, by extension, poetry. This does not mean that there weren’t “costs” as well, compromises that rendered this a difficult bargain. Yet the language of surrender, compromise, and resistance (and perhaps even “privileges” and “costs”) may be too stark for a proper reading of James’s work and the circumstances of its publication. Instead I’ll approach James’s access to poetic authorship by thinking about issues of collaboration, community,

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and creativity—not only within the poems themselves but surrounding their composition and publication. Access, I argue, depended upon the incorporation of middle-class ideals, a physical and textual incorporation that we should resist rejecting precisely because James herself did not reject it. Instead, she made use of it, collaborating with her mediators to produce and circulate Wales, and Other Poems.

Maria James and the Uneducated Poets The introduction to Wales, and Other Poems was written by Alonzo Potter, an Episcopal minister and professor of moral and intellectual philosophy at Union College in Schenectady, New York. His wife, Sarah Maria, was the daughter of Eliphalet Nott, Presbyterian minister and president of the college. Sarah Maria spent much of her childhood at Wildercliffe, the Garrettson family home, with Mary Garrettson because of the friendship between their fathers.14 Alonzo was also a prolific writer and speaker, and was involved throughout the 1830s in organizing lectures for tradesmen and mechanics, as well as delivering and publishing his own speeches to working-class men. His wife’s intimacy with the Garrettsons, combined with his belief in the intellectual potential of the working classes, rendered him—in Mary Garrettson’s mind, of course, and presumably that of Maria James—the ideal person to introduce James’s poems to the public. In a letter written to Sarah Maria in the fall of 1837, Mary Garrettson explains, “And now for Maria’s book—I would much rather have Mr Potter’s patronage for it than that of any other person— . . . if however Mr Potter is reluctant to engage in it we must choose another great patron—as M[aria] always designates Mr P.”15 In Potter’s introduction, he places James’s poetry in the context of that of other poets of the working classes, whose verses were said to demonstrate the potential for and rewards of intellectual and moral activity to those whose lives were dominated and defined by their labor. “The fact is,” he writes, “that God has bestowed the gifts of fancy and intellect on all classes alike.”16 In every age, God has been raising up one after another from the ranks of menial employment, to shine as lights in the world. A statue was erected to Aesop (though a slave,) that it might be seen that the way to honour was open even for those in the lowest estate. Terence, an African and a slave, won the palm as a poet when Scipio and Laelius

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were judges. The Bard of the Middle Ages was but a humble retainer in the halls of his liege; and though in later times authorship has formed, in some sense, a distinct profession, we have not been left without illustrious evidence that the Muse still reserves some of her choicest inspirations for the sons of toil. The two Bloomfields,—the ploughman Burns,—Elliott, the author of “Corn-Law Rhymes,”— Dodsley, whose first production, “The Muse in Livery,” was written while he was yet a footman,—Phillis Wheatley, an African slave at Boston, whose poems were printed in England, under the patronage of several distinguished persons, and were justly admired for their elegance and force,—these and many more are instances in point. (21–22) While James is represented in Potter’s introduction as exceptional in many ways—exceptionally imaginative, virtuous, and humble—this global lineage allows Potter to frame her as representative of the intellectual potential of the working classes. Literature, he insists, provides the working classes with opportunities for intellectual development and achievement: “No one can study the history of literature without observing that, while science claims, as it advances, a more and more exclusive devotion from its disciples,—letters, on the other hand, are descending into the arena of every day life, and are offering their honours to ingenuous minds of every rank” (23). Concluding his litany of laboring poets with Phillis Wheatley—born in Africa, enslaved in the United States, and published in England—he traces the geographical and temporal movement of this figure from Greece and Rome to England and, fi nally, the United States. In a class-inflected move that is reminiscent of Sigourney being labeled the “American Hemans,” James is represented as a harbinger of things to come, as American “minds of every rank” are given access to literacy and, less often, to print. This discussion of the poets of “every day life” reveals Potter’s awareness of and engagement with public debates over patronized poets in both England and the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. With the publication of Robert Southey’s Attempts in Verse, With Some Account of the Writer, and an Essay on the Lives and Works of Our Uneducated Poets in 1831 and the reprinting of Phillis Wheatley’s poems with an introduction by Margaretta Matilda Odell in 1834, the “uneducated poet” became a figure of both interest and anxiety in the American literary marketplace. As Gary Lenhart writes of the British poets in Southey’s volume, “The ‘uneducated poet’ was esteemed not for the quality of her verse but the novelty of her origin, as if the mystery

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was that these creatures wrote poems at all. When their efforts were encouraged, it was as novelties, and it quickly turned to discouragement if there were any attempt to leap stations.”17 Like these poets, James is said by Potter to have been a precocious child who responded enthusiastically to efforts to educate her. Her ability to write poetry is similarly regarded as natural. The writing of poems does not get in the way of her labor; as in the best of cases noted by Southey, neither does it cause her to lose her sense of modesty and indulge in literary ambitions. “Had I found her eaten up with the desire of praise, writing only that she might have the means of emerging from the obscurity of her situation, and in terror or in transport as she anticipated the frowns or smiles of criticism,” Potter insists, “I should have declined any agency in the publication of this volume. I should have felt that its merit, be it ever so great, had better remain unknown, than transpire only to make her less simple and less happy” (17–18). Publication, then, is not always regarded as the proper end for workingclass poets and it is said to be the responsibility of patrons to control access to print. For example, Southey insists that John Taylor, the “Water-Poet,” is far too productive, thanks to irresponsible patrons: “Taylor’s productions would not have been so numerous if he had not gained something by them. If any celebrated person died, he was ready with an elegy, and this sort of tribute always obtained the acknowledgement in expectation of which it was offered.”18 When Maria Colling, a British domestic servant, published Fables, and other Pieces, in Verse in 1831 under the patronage of Anna Eliza Bray, the American Christian Index commended the poet for “the graceful colloquial ease of the versification,” but the Albion pronounced themselves weary of “Uneducated Poets”: “Mrs. Bray has placed us in a position of painful delicacy, by convincing us that she herself is a most kind and estimable woman, and that her protegée is an interesting young creature; she has leagued our feelings against our judgment and induced a wish, either that we had never theorized anent ‘uneducated poets,’ or that Mary Maria Colling had been poetical enough to convince us of error.”19 The conventions of the publication of such poems are so familiar that the reviewer lists them with apparent ease: “However, Mary Colling’s Fables are published: Mrs. Bray has procured her a noble list of subscribers, all the particulars of her history are given, her portrait is prefixed to the volume, and, therefore, misgivings of all kinds are too late.”20 The reviewer implies here that the public is somehow deceived by such publications: the involvement of an influential patron and the following of the conventions of the genre fool readers into giving the work of

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the “uneducated poet” serious consideration, when it very rarely repays this kind of attention. A similar rhetoric of fraud is central to reviewers’ responses to the 1834 edition of Phillis Wheatley’s poems and demonstrates the way in which class and race similarly and sometimes simultaneously invalidate the claims of the “uneducated poet” to poetic authorship. These poems, reviewers agreed, do more to demonstrate the intellectual capabilities of “a native African” than to give any satisfaction to the “lover of poetry.”21 Writing in the Christian Examiner and General Review, one critic opposed the continued publication and circulation of Wheatley’s poetry. Readers should not have to consider “the disadvantages [a] writer may have labored under” while writing a poem: “It is not just that they should; for other wise the land would be flooded with bad writings, to the exclusion and discouragement of good. It is little consolation to him, who has wasted his time and money in buying and reading a wretched production, to be told that it was written by an apprentice or a woman. We do not mean by this to express any disapprobation of the publication before us, but merely to say that, singular as its merits are, they are not of the kind that will command admiration.”22 Here Wheatley’s readers (and the readers of any publication by “an apprentice or a woman”) are represented as inevitably disappointed by her poetry. “Singular . . . merits” do not equal literary quality deserving of “admiration.” Yet the quality of the work is inextricable from the identity of the author. Race, class, and gender—all of which are embodied simultaneously by Wheatley—automatically mark her work and that of other “uneducated poets” as inferior. In his introduction, Potter anticipates these concerns on the part of readers of Wales, and Other Poems. He understands, he insists, that some readers will see “the position of the authoress . . . as of itself sufficient evidence that they want merit” (14). Others will see the book as a temptation to “domestics, and those who lead lives of labour” to entertain impossible ambitions that will either embarrass them or destroy the character that has rendered them fit for their responsibilities (15). Yet James is presented by Potter as both unambitious and prudently patronized. The decision to publish is framed as entirely that of Potter, with the assistance of Mary Garrettson, while the poems, he insists, have represented “innocent pleasures” to James, who never intended them for publication (15). Her innocence has been maintained, Potter suggests, by the carefully calibrated attention of the Garrettson family: “The taste for books and original composition which Maria James early manifested, has not been repressed; nor, on the other hand, has it been

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encouraged at the expense of duties which, however humble in themselves, always deserve preference, for the simple reason that they are duties. The friends who had the discernment to appreciate and the kindness to counsel and encourage her, wisely abstained from any appeals to her ambition” (16– 17). It is precisely this sort of narrative—an “apprentice or a woman” is provided with an education, her talent for poetry is encouraged, her poems are published simply because they are written—that causes such anxiety and disapproval among the reviewers of the work of both Colling and Wheatley. Yet Potter clearly attempts to “league[] our feelings against our judgment” nonetheless, making class central to his support of James’s authorship. Despite his insistence that James’s poems “appeared to me to merit, without reference to their origin, a wider circulation,” the purpose of the introductory materials in Wales, and Other Poems is to do just this—to explain the “origin” of the poems and their author, as well as the circumstances of her patronage (14).

The Poetics of Patronage Maria James’s family immigrated from North Wales around 1800, moving to Clinton, New York, where her father and other Welsh immigrants worked in the region’s slate quarries. At the age of ten, Maria went to live and work at Wildercliffe, home of the prestigious Garrettson family of Rhinebeck. Freeborn Garrettson was a popu lar and influential Methodist minister under whose leadership Methodism had spread throughout the Hudson River Valley.23 His wife, Catherine Livingston Garrettson, of the prominent New York Livingstons, had been converted to Methodism in her mid-thirties by a devout servant; her proposal to marry an itinerant Methodist minister was met with fierce opposition by her family, who threatened to disown her if she went through with the match. Catherine and Freeborn eventually won the family’s approval and support and, with the backing of one of the most influential and wealthy families in the region, if not the nation, the Garrettsons were able to overcome fairly strenuous prejudices against Methodism throughout New York. The Garrettsons’ only child, Mary Rutherford Garrettson, was born in 1794. As Anna M. Lawrence notes, it was not uncommon for women active in the Methodist church to have a small family: “Having only one offspring ensured that Catherine could continue her work as an exhorter and organizer, and that Freeborn could continue to preach.”24 Catherine’s age

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may have played a part as well: she was forty years old when she married and forty-one when she gave birth to Mary. The couple may also have been reluctant to have more children when Mary was born with dwarfism; at a time when very little was known about the condition, they may have feared that it was hereditary. They may also have wished to devote themselves to their only child, providing attention and opportunities that would not be easy to obtain outside of their home and social circles.25 The Garrettsons’ home was well-known in evangelical circles as a refuge of sorts for any traveling member of the Methodist church; as historian John H. Wigger notes, Catherine Garrettson “turned her home into a sanctuary for weary circuit riders, adding to the normal fare good food, a library, and paintings.”26 Homes like Wildercliffe “were places of refuge plotted on the maps . . . which laid out possible places to settle, at least temporarily, and be welcome as a member of the Methodist family.”27 Late eighteenth-century Methodism thus offered opportunities to women like Catherine Garrettson that they would not have enjoyed in other churches. According to Lawrence, other Methodist “Mothers in Israel” served the church by “being exhorters, supporting itinerants, and, in select cases, leading class meetings” (86). This sense of equality between the genders was indicative of a broader, more egalitarian “social as well as racial heterogeneity.”28 As Dee Andrews explains, “Middle Atlantic Methodists came from a wide array of social ranks: not only women of all classes and blacks—in itself an unusual diversity—but also poor men, middling farmers, greater merchants, and planters.”29 Such egalitarianism was rooted within Methodist religious discourse and practices. Methodist itinerants were known for preaching to and converting audiences regardless of class, race, or gender. Lawrence explains that the “ubiquitous use” of the terms “ brother” and “sister” among Methodist congregations also “denoted the basic message that Methodists were all equal.”30 She continues, “‘ brother’ and ‘sister’ implied an egalitarian element that supplanted the honorifics of ‘Lady,’ ‘Lord,’ ‘Mr.,’ ‘Mrs.,’ and ‘Miss.’ ” However, “for a number of the upper-class members of this group, the honorifics of ‘Mrs.,’ and ‘Miss’ persisted through their conversion and spiritual attainment,” thus hinting at the retention of class stratification even within the seemingly democratic church (93). While Methodist egalitarianism helps account for the Garrettsons’ promotion of and support for Maria James’s literacy and the eventual publication of her book, the limitations of such rhetoric are revealed in the prefatory materials to Wales, and Other Poems, which trace the generation

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of James’s authorship in the distinctively stratified circumstances of domestic servitude. In a letter accompanying Alonzo Potter’s introduction to James’s poems, Mary Garrettson recalls the circumstances that led to the Welsh girl coming to their home: “As I was a sickly sedentary girl, [Mamma] thought that if she could get a little girl of my own age to bring up, it would be a great advantage to my health. She accordingly applied to Mrs.  James, and found that her eldest daughter was of a suitable age to be useful in the house, and to be a companion for me, and without seeing her, bespoke her” (38). According to Mary, Maria’s mother, Elizabeth, was “the only professing Christian in the little [Welsh] settlement” near the Garrettsons’ home (38). While Methodism was not unknown in late eighteenth-century Wales, Mary’s comment seems to imply that Elizabeth James was the only Methodist in their community; it is likely that the larger Welsh settlement was Anglican or Congregationalist and that Elizabeth had been converted either prior to immigrating or immediately following the family’s arrival in the United States. Regardless, Mary implies that the mother’s faith renders Maria an appropriate “companion”—and servant—to the young “sickly, sedentary” Mary. “She was brought, in her striped homespun dress,” Mary recalls, “well instructed by her mother in all the proprieties of her situation, and in all its moral duties— with a pathos and a simplicity, which might have shamed many an elaborate discourse” (39). The Garrettsons’ search for “a little girl . . . to bring up” was a fairly common practice in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As Dudden observes, “binding out” was regarded as an advantageous situation for young girls (often orphans and/or immigrants) and for the wealthier families into which they were bound: “Since the girls received only room and board and some sort of premium—a suit of clothes or a small lump sum—at age eighteen, they provided the most inexpensive form of domestic ser vice. In practical terms, girls who were too childish and untaught to be of much help in the first few years soon grew and could be trained to be good help by the time they reached fifteen years or so. They then provided cheap and effective ser vice until they turned eighteen. But they were supposed to be at the same time objects of charity and tutelage.”31 Although Maria and Mary were approximately the same age, Maria would have been a sort of attendant for the wealthy child at the same time that she learned—either from another servant or from Catherine Garrettson herself—how to perform domestic

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tasks. Such arrangements “mudd[ied] the boundaries of domestic ser vice,” Dudden insists, as “sheer economic necessity placed girls in a bound-out situation, and economic motives inspired many of their employers as well. Yet each was supposed to enter into an almost adoptive relationship, on the assumption that performing housework in the home of a stranger could be a quasi-familial rather than a monetary relationship” (22). Mary does not mention whether or not Maria was compensated for her dual roles in the Garrettson home (as both companion and servant), but it is likely that some remuneration went to her or her parents. As “companion” of some sort to Mary, Maria is provided an education and given access to books and writing materials. While Mary says simply that Maria “could read, and I believe write, when she came to us,” Maria explains that she learned some English on the voyage to the United States and was taught briefly by her father at home before attending school and learning to read (39). While her exposure to books was limited to the Common Hymn Book and the New Testament, her hearing literature read aloud seemed to have the most impact on the child: in a letter to Sarah Maria Potter that is reprinted in the introduction to Wales, James mentions hearing both “Addison’s inimitable paraphrase of the 23d psalm” and Timothy Dwight’s “Columbia,” the last of which she listened to “in transport” (34). By all accounts, the Garrettsons were generous in allowing Maria to seek to further her education while in their employ, but only if she could do so without ignoring her other duties. James explains, “Besides learning many useful household occupations, that care and attention was paid to my words and actions, as is seldom to be met with, in such situations” (35). This muted recognition of the advantages of her own “situation” might be an indication of her gratitude to the Garrettsons, but it might also point to Maria’s sense of the arbitrariness of her own education. Mary Garrettson’s memory of James’s education is much the same, if a bit less self-conscious: “Her work was light,—and when it was finished, with her clean apron on, she always took her seat on a little bench in the parlour, with her knitting, or sewing, while I said my lessons to mamma, or we read. The lessons were very trifling; but we read a great deal. Papa and mamma were very indefatigable readers, and every interesting or useful book, was read aloud for the good of the whole” (39). Again, the “we” in Mary’s recollection is telling. If Maria’s hands are taken up knitting or sewing on the “ little bench,” then she is surely not a member of the “we” who reads in the statement “we read a great deal.” Even given the importance of reading aloud in middle-class homes and its place in children’s educations,

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it seems important that Maria seems hardly ever to have held the book during these “trifling lessons.”32 James’s poetry seems to be similarly intertwined with her labor and just as distant from the physical act of writing. In a letter written around the same time as Maria’s recollection, Margaret Livingston, Catherine Garrettson’s sister-in-law, tells her daughter about the publication of Maria’s book, confident that she will be interested in how such poems were produced: “Your Papa asked her if she read a great deal? Oh no she had not time,—how did she manage did she study? No she thought over her subject whilst at her work and never wrote until it was all arranged in her head—but how did she acquire her language her information? she did not know she believed it was by attending to the conversation of sensible people.”33 Maria also reinforces the effortlessness of her composition process when she insists, “I can hardly say myself, how [the poems] came to be written.”34 However simple the conception of such poems is, their inscription onto the page is said to require mediation, as is evident in a scene described in the letter from Garrettson to Potter excerpted in the introduction to Wales, and Other Poems. After describing their shared childhood education, Mary says, “About this time, Maria began to write.” What follows though is a scene of transcription, rather than composition, in which Freeborn Garrettson writes down Maria’s first known poem. “She never committed it to paper,” Mary asserts, “but papa did. He called her to him one evening, questioned her about her talent, and begged her to repeat something she had composed. With great modesty,” Mary explains, Maria recited a poem that Garrettson wrote down (40). While James’s practice of composing poetry in her mind long before writing it down is often mentioned in the introduction, this scene demonstrates how her poetry was rendered suitable for circulation. As a precursor to Potter’s act of publishing the poems, Freeborn’s transcription can be seen simultaneously as an act of benevolence and an act of appropriation. Writing down James’s poetry allows her access to manuscript and eventually print, but it also allows others to make decisions about audience and circulation that she can make for herself only as long as the poems are located in her own mind. This is made clear when Mary writes to Potter in response to his request for Maria’s early poems, explaining, “I mentioned . . . your desire to have some of Maria’s early pieces, that you might mark the progress of her mind. She said she had destroyed them all, and it was well I did (she said.) It was all there, but I wanted the power of utterance then” (32). The transcription of poetry (and the mediation of its publication)

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also complicates claims to ownership and authorship. This early poem is reproducible in the introduction (but notably not in the collection) only because Freeborn Garrettson transcribed it and Mary Garrettson retained the copy; unlike James’s other early work, it could not be destroyed by the author. While this transcription is clearly the one reproduced in Wales, the general confusion over the material status of the poem indicates some ambivalence about ownership here—ambivalence that James attempts but fails to resolve by destroying her work. “I had it long in manuscript,” Mary says of the poem, “but have lost it. She never committed it to paper, but papa did” (40). If Maria never wrote the poem down, then who wrote the poem that Mary possessed “in manuscript”? This can’t be the copy of the poem that Freeborn transcribes as that poem is reproduced in Wales and is therefore clearly not lost. The poem here seems to belong to at least three people simultaneously. The constant reading, memorization, recitation, composition, and transcription of poems at Wildercliffe renders Maria James a working-class poet whose work is not clearly marked as working class. “I had before me, some of the best models for good reading and good speaking,” James explains, “and any child with a natural ear for the beautiful in language, will notice these things; and though their conversation may not differ materially from that of others in their line of life, they will almost invariably think in the style of their admiration” (35). Here James explains what others might regard as a telling difference between her style of speaking and her style of thinking—and presumably writing—something that the suspicious readers of the “Ode, Written on the Fourth of July, 1833” might have picked up on when they doubted her ability to write such a poem. James implies that her speech, or “conversation,” remains marked by class and most likely nationality: having lived almost entirely with Welsh speakers until the age of ten, she would likely still have had an accent long into adulthood (if not for the rest of her life). Her poetry, however, reflects only “the beautiful in language” as that language has been learned from those around her at Wildercliffe; by extension, her subject matter is similarly influenced by the elite atmosphere in which she lived and worked. At least one reviewer of Wales saw this as reason to recommend her work to those disturbed by the subject matter of the “uneducated poets”: writing in the Expositor, this reviewer commends James for “twin[ing] her occasional wreaths of bloom,” while “bear[ing] her faculties meekly, and question[ing] not the unerring wisdom that has appointed her to move in so lowly a sphere.”35 He compares James favorably to another “uneducated poet,” Ebenezer Elliott (the “corn law rhymer”):

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He lingers amid the poverty and cheerlessness of his own pent-up poverty, and builds the lofty rhyme, not with the marble of nature’s most cunning workmanship brought from afar, but with the common materials scattered here and there about his own humble cot. He is, however, a poet, and we will not quarrel with him . . . , but turn to one whose spirit, aspirations, and feelings are strongly contrasted with his. (3) Combined with James’s pride in her mastery of “the beautiful in language,” this review indicates the narrow parameters within which working-class poets could operate, as well as the relative impossibility of imagining workingclass poetic authorship. This is also evident in a recollection of Margaret Livingston of “Margaret Astor and Eliza Page when they were children laughing at Maria James writing poetry.”36 Born in 1800 and 1802, respectively, Margaret and Eliza would have been seven and nine years Maria’s junior; this incident must have taken place around 1810, when Maria left the Garrettson home in order to apprentice as a dressmaker, which means that the girls would have been relatively young. Their familial privilege nonetheless enabled them to mock the literary efforts of their social inferior, thus deterring James from writing: “she then abandoned it entirely,” Livingston recalled. James’s return to writing poetry, she explains, was due to Mary Garrettson’s encouragement.37 In the 1838 letter to her sister in which she recounted the young girls’ mockery of James’s poetic efforts, Livingston explains, “About six years ago Mary Garretson asked her one evening for a Christmas hymn for her Sunday school children. The next morning the hymn was laid upon the table Mary was so much pleased with it that she encouraged her to continue and the poems now to be published have all been written since that period.”38 Garrettson herself remembered things a bit differently. “The first piece which she wrote, after her return, was occasioned by the wedding of a Christian friend, whom she accompanied. The match, however, turned out badly,—the piece was ridiculed; (her feelings have been always keenly live to ridicule;) and though, as well as I can recollect, it was very beautiful, she will not consent to put it in the book.”39 If Garrettson’s recollection is correct—and it seems likely that hers is more accurate than that of Margaret Livingston, who did not live at Wildercliffe or interact with James on a daily basis—then James’s authority and experience as a poet was undermined by those around her because of her status as servant, both when she was a young girl and after she had reached

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adulthood and returned to work in the Garrettson home. It is no wonder that despite her early attendance to “the whispers of the muse,” James claims to have “shrunk from the nickname of poet, which had been awarded me; the very idea seemed the height of presumption” (35–36). To the privileged young girls, James’s writing of poetry seemed an imitation of either parlor or professional authorship—neither one of which they regarded her as qualified for, given her status as servant. Mary Garrettson, on the other hand, seems to have seen James as deserving of “the nickname of poet.” After James’s return to the Garrettson home, Mary encouraged James’s participation in the manuscript culture of the home and larger community and, much later, in a broader evangelical print culture. For example, the request “for a Christmas hymn for [Mary Garrettson’s] Sunday school children” recalled by Margaret Livingston may have resulted in productions similar to “Hymn, For the Sunday Scholars, on New-Year” or “Children’s Hymn, For New-Year, For Sunday Scholars,” both of which are included in Wales. Garrettson and James also seem to have collaborated on a family newspaper, perhaps due in part to the constant presence of children and young women in the Garrettson home. While no copies of this newspaper survive, eight poems in Wales are marked as “Written For The Bazaar” and one prose document in Mary Garrettson’s surviving papers is marked as “For the Bazaar or Literary Pic Nic.”40 However long lived or widely circulated this venture was, its existence, along with the request for a hymn (or hymns), demonstrates the terms of the patronage relationship between the two women. Garrettson’s sponsorship of James—her moral and financial support of her education and her writing—requires that James’s poems respond to events in the family’s social and religious networks. At the same time, James’s poetic authorship becomes part of her responsibilities in the Garrettson family home and the larger communities in which she participated because of her place at Wildercliffe. Hymns, for example, would have allowed James to contribute to religious education in Mary Garrettson’s Sunday school classroom, thereby granting James a position of authority there and perhaps within the larger Methodist community in Rhinebeck. Other poems show James seeking out opportunities for the composition of poems embedded in very par ticu lar social and cultural circumstances. Like other patronized poets, James wrote elegies for elite members of the community in which she lived and worked; while the subjects of these poems are not always explicitly named, clues are occasionally provided that would allow readers in the know to identify their loved ones.41 “Requiem,” for example, could be seen as a poem

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about the death of any young woman who had suffered from a lengthy illness, but a note explains that it is “on a most interesting young lady who died in the nineteenth year of her age, October 17th, 1828.”42 More common are the poems written to or at the behest of a member of one of the Garrettsons’ social networks. “To Winnifred,” “To Harriet,” and “To Constance” address three young girls who seem to have lived for a time with the Garrettson family, while “Friendship” is noted as “To Miss B. of W.”43 Here James figures herself as a “minstrel” who will “seize the lyre, and wake its melting tone; / Assume the task, by Anna’s wish assign’d, / With fears all scatter’d to the idle wind” (65). Poems about individuals in the Garrettsons’ social and religious networks also allowed James to demonstrate her intimacy with and membership in these communities. In “The Bride’s Welcome,” subtitled “To Mrs.  J.  C. T—n, On Her Marriage,” James marks the wedding of Matilda Few and John  C. Tillotson in November  1833. The Fews and the Tillotsons were both elite families who, like the Garrettsons, owned mansions along the Hudson River. John C. Tillotson’s mother was the sister of Catherine Garrettson, and his first wife, who had died in 1830, was his first cousin, the daughter of Catherine’s brother, Robert Livingston. In “The Bride’s Welcome,” James positions herself alongside other family and community to receive the bride as she returns “To the hills and the vales which she lov’d in her childhood, / Where the waves of the Hudson deep roll in their pride.”44 She also celebrates the thirty-nine-year-old bride’s assumption of responsibility for Tillotson’s five young children from his first marriage. Using metaphors of natural growth and renewal in the midst of winter, James writes, She comes like the sunshine, the shadows dispersing That gather’d around in the season of gloom; The plants that fresh springing, await but her culture, To cause them in beauty and fragrance to bloom. (120) The poem, a note explains, was left on “the lady’s dressing table” upon her return to “Mr. T—n’s seat” from “the city of N.Y.,” where the wedding had taken place (120). The situation of the author is not implied in the poem and without its inclusion in Wales, and Other Poems, it would be impossible to know that she is a domestic servant: a peer or a relative would have the same access to “the lady’s dressing table” as a lady’s maid or another female servant. Similarly, while the poem is purposely framed as a response to Matilda Few’s wedding, it is possible to extrapolate that the joy of returning “To the

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hills and the vales which she lov’d in her childhood” might have been shared by James upon her much earlier return to Wildercliffe from New York City. Yet another poem situates James firmly within the Methodist community at Rhinebeck, while also paying tribute to the memory of Freeborn Garrettson. “Lines, Written on a Blank Leaf of the Life of the Reverend F. Garretson” is dated 1831, four years after the minister’s death and two years after the publication of The Life of the Reverend Freeborn Garrettson: Compiled from his Printed and Manuscript Journals, and Other Authentic Documents. Predictably locating the scene of composition in James’s manual labor, Mary Garrettson tells Potter that the “piece written in a blank leaf of my father’s life” was “dictated to Winnifred [a young family friend] while at the ironing-table.”45 As in “What is Poetry?” however, labor is erased in this poem; in fact, the poem is vague about any sort of location or scene, with James’s voice, and through her, that of Garrettson, taking the place of anything more tangible: If from the mansions of the dead, Those silent lips could speak to me,— They still would say, as oft they’ve said, “Behold the Lamb on Calvary!” No more the patriarch’s voice we hear At morn, like holy incense rise,— Nor when the evening shades appear, In offering up the sacrifice. But far above we’ll seek for him, Where saints and bright arch-angels dwell,— And where the burning seraphim Their holy song of rapture swell.46 James positions herself here as a mourner for Garrettson, a member of the immediate community, without acknowledging a hierarchy of master (or mistress) and servant. Having grown accustomed to hearing this “patriarch’s voice” both “at morn” and “when the evening shades appear,” James laments the silence that Garrettson has left behind. This is not a voice that she heard occasionally or in the midst of a crowd; these now “silent lips” spoke directly to her often, reminding her of Jesus’ death on the cross and the promise of

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the afterlife that his death ensures. Perhaps more importantly, just as Garrettson transcribes James’s poems, James transcribes Garrettson’s speech directly here, his frequent exclamation, “Behold the Lamb on Calvary!” In a sense, his speech belongs to James and his other auditors now that he has died, allowing her to recycle it for her own original poem. The location of the manuscript copy of this poem points toward an even more important assertion of James’s membership in the Garrettson family and to her assertion of authorship within a larger print culture. The poem, the title asserts, is “written on a blank leaf of” The Life of the Reverend Freeborn Garrettson. Published in 1829, the Life was edited by Nathan Bangs, then senior book agent of the Methodist Book Concern and editor of the Methodist Magazine, with the assistance of Catherine and Mary Garrettson. Mary Garrettson’s letter to Potter confirms that this is no conceit—the poem is actually inscribed in the volume—but the assertion of this fact in the title of the poem renders it worthy of further consideration. Such poems, which marked the location of their inscription in a particular volume, usually commented on the text itself, occasionally to describe its worth to the book’s recipient. For example, in “Lines Written on the Blank Leaf of a Bible,” published in the Christian Advocate and Journal several years after the publication of Wales, the poet who calls herself “Shepherdess” tells “Dear Mary” that if her “lyre” would awaken, “O! it would tell thee that this WORD / Can to the inmost spirit give / Such counsels as, when rightly heard / Can bid the dying look and live.” She concludes, “Dear Mary, here thou too canst know / The will of God concerning thee.”47 Some, written following the death of the author, reflect on the way the book facilitates their continued influence. In “Lines Written on a Blank Leaf of the Memoirs of Harriet Newell,” “L.” addresses Newell directly: Harriet! Thou restest on thy lowly bed, And sweetly shalt thou slumber;—and thy name, Though to the lyre unknown, though strange to fame, Comes on us from afar, ... Though few were they who wept around thy bier, Thou hast not dropt unnoticed, and the tear Of tenderness shall oft be shed O’er her who now is lowly laid, As to thy melancholy tale Is bent the listening ear.48

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James’s memory of Freeborn Garrettson’s voice (“Behold the Lamb on Calvary!”) functions in a similar way. But in marking the location of the manuscript poem, James also points to the respect given her poems within the Garrettson household: surely the copy of the Life, which clearly belongs to the Garrettson household, would not have been available in such a way to just anyone? Indeed, the inscription of the poem connects the work of James’s authorship to that of Catherine and Mary Garrettson and Nathan Bangs in the preparation of the Life; all of them, it is implied, have contributed to the memorialization of one of Methodism’s “most aged, most devoted, and successful ministers.”49 James’s poem clearly does not circulate with every copy of the Life, but its inclusion in her volume, which will likely be purchased by many of the same people who own the memorial of Garrettson, publicly aligns the two texts and confounds any useful distinction between public and private, manuscript and print. Thus while Mary Garrettson elsewhere insists on the importance of her father’s presence to James’s poetic process, here, at least, it is Freeborn Garrettson’s absence, his silence, which sanctions her authorship.

Subscribing to Wales, and Other Poems The publication and sale of Wales, and Other Poems was a carefully orchestrated campaign whose intricacy speaks to the simultaneous importance and imbalance of the patronage relationship. Harper & Brothers was the first publishing company that Potter approached with the proposal for a volume of James’s poems. John, James, Fletcher, and Joseph Wesley Harper came from a pious Methodist family in Newtown, New York, and were no doubt familiar with Freeborn Garrettson and his work with the church. While they were, as Potter reported to Mary Garrettson in early 1838, initially reluctant to publish James’s book, “as poetry never (they said) paid,” they changed their mind. “On being told that it emanated from your family, had passed under your eyes & was written moreover by a member of the church, the corps d’esprit began to operate & they evidently relented.”50 The Garrettson family’s reputation and influence within the Methodist Church clearly swayed the Harpers, as did (albeit to a much lesser extent) James’s own membership in the church. The Harpers’ plans for the volume did not, however, accord with those of Potter and Garrettson, as the firm wanted to wait on publication until the American economy fully recovered from the

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recession of 1837.51 They had no faith in Potter and Garrettson’s ability to sell many copies of the book by subscription in order to offset the price of printing and therefore were unable to commit to the style of printing that Potter had asked for. They recommended that James take the time to write more poems to supplement the existing manuscript. Potter then approached evangelical publisher John S. Taylor, also in New York City, who was “anxious to take these Poems.” Potter explained to Garrettson: [Taylor] offers to issue an Edition of 1000 copies, to be responsible for half the expense & receive half the profits. He says that he is now publishing several works on the same terms. His readiness to take this proportion of responsibility shows that he is confident of saving himself & of course the friends of the author from loss. I imagine that there could be no hazard in assenting to this proposition tho’ it will be necessary for one of us to allow the use of our credit to an amount which he promises shall not be more than $200. This arrangement, of course, makes no provision for the copies which we may dispose of by subscription. As they are obtained by the friends of Maria, without his aid & in quarters where the work wld not be likely to circulate of itself, he ought to allow a handsome commission or else furnish the copies to us at a much reduced rate.52 The novelist Catharine Maria Sedgwick, who served as an advisor of sorts in the publication of Wales, argued that “the Harpers are much the most desirable house, from the vast extent of their correspondence, their influence with the public &c &c,” but Potter pronounced himself “reluctant to succumb to the demands of these Mammoth Establishments” and left the final decision to Garrettson.53 It is difficult to know what part James played in the decision to publish with Taylor. While a later letter indicated that she preferred obtaining subscriptions for the book rather than—or perhaps in addition to—selling it at a booksellers, there is no evidence as to her own opinion on the choice of publisher.54 The decision to publish Wales, and Other Poems by subscription was most likely a response to the fragility of the U.S. economy in the late 1830s, but it also placed the book firmly within the “uneducated poets” genre. While still utilized, the practice of subscription was not nearly as popular as it had been in the eighteenth century and would be in the late nineteenth, in what Scott E.

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Caspar calls “the post– Civil War boom in subscription publication.”55 As Vincent Carretta notes, “First time authors in the English-speaking Atlantic world had published by subscription since the early seventeenth century. By the end of the eighteenth, however, the practice had become very uncommon because it was so susceptible to abuse. Too many would-be buyers had been disappointed by people who never produced the promised books.”56 Despite this lull, James and her patrons seemed certain that subscriptions would not only help offset the cost of publication but also result in a wider circulation and greater success for Wales, and Other Poems. This commitment to subscription tied Garrettson even more firmly to the book’s fate, as her own name and the reputation of her family would ensure the circulation of the subscription proposal and the signing on of many of her friends and acquaintances, particularly within the Methodist Church. The daughter of an itinerant minister, Garrettson may have had particular insight into how religious networks could be used to promote and sell the book. While Garrettson was not named in the proposal for Maria James’s poems, many of the proposals circulating in multiple states could be traced back to her and her influence was crucial in obtaining subscriptions for the volume. A draft of the proposal indicates only that the author of the poems is “a young woman who has spent her life in ser vice.” Although they were written under “peculiar circumstances,” the proposal goes on to say, they are “the production of a brilliant & by no means uncultivated mind.”57 Rather than simply requesting that each of her correspondents subscribe for James’s book of poems, Garrettson acted as agent, mailing out proposals, often accompanied by sample poems, and asking the recipients to subscribe and to obtain additional subscriptions. Some began immediately. Seymour Landon, a Methodist minister with whom Mary Garrettson shared an active correspondence, wrote to her of his excitement about the proposal: “I was right glad to get such a letter. I have no doubt you will readily get a sufficient number of subscribers to justify its publication. I obtained eight in less than an hour after receiving the proposal.”58 Meanwhile, Maria James may have informally traded poems for patronage: the fifth poem in the collection, “The Picture,” is dated “New-York, June 4th, 1838,” and is said to have been “suggested by the writer’s calling to see a very aged and venerable lady, whom she found sitting for her picture.” This lady, a note explains, is the “Widow of the late Bishop Moore,” or Charity Clark Moore, the mother of Clement Clark Moore.59 It seems entirely possible that James may have visited the Moores in 1838, after the production of

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the book was already underway, to solicit subscriptions, writing the poem during the visit as a demonstration of her skill or after her return as a thankyou of sorts. With the influence of the Livingston family, James’s supporters actively worked to have the forthcoming volume publicized in periodicals. Garrettson’s cousin Cora Livingston Barton appears to have asked Mary in March 1838 for permission to have several of the poems published in the Episcopal Recorder. When asked his opinion of this venture, Potter told Mary, “I see no objection to giving the public a limited number of the pieces thro’ the channel she mentions, nor any to the par ticular pieces she specifies. It would be well to get the Editor in an Editorial article to draw attention to them & to the forthcoming volume.”60 Barton seemed convinced that Stephen H. Tyng, the editor of the Recorder and rector of Philadelphia’s Church of the Epiphany, would do more than just publish the poems. She told Mary, “Mr Tyng . . . told me it would give him great pleasure to assist in making the work known, before the book appeared. It would be a very good plan to get Mr Potter to send him a prospectus. Mr Tyng has great influence over his congregation & he spoke with much excess of interest in Mr P., I think this would be the best means of securing his exertions.”61 While it is unclear whether or not Tyng promoted the book outside the pages of the Recorder or solicited subscriptions himself, he did publish two of the poems in April of 1838 (“Good Friday” and “The Wreck of the Home”) with a note explaining that “the lines now offered in the Episcopal Recorder are written by a female moving in a sphere of life in which talent of this kind is not often met with.” Tyng does not mention the name of the poet but explains that “the Rev. Mr. Potter of Schenectady . . . has undertaken to edit” the poems for publication “very shortly.”62 Mary seems to speak for Maria James when she tells Cora, “Maria is much obliged to you for the interest you take in her poems & so am I.” 63 A similar piece in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review seems to have been written as a favor to Catharine Sedgwick. In a letter to Sedgwick from Margaret Livingston, Livingston explains, “I received yours of the 21st the day before leaving home for this place, & consequently had not time to consult with Maria James’ friends on the advantage of a puff from Mr O’Sullivan.”64 John L. O’Sullivan was the editor of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, which he had founded in 1837. In June 1838, he published two of James’s poems (“What is Poetry?” and “Written on Seeing a Bust of the Late Edward Livingston”), attributing them to “Maria James, of

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Rhinebeck, New York, a young woman of very high merit, in every aspect of character and conduct, whose life has been spent from childhood in domestic service.” He added that “proposals have been recently issued to publish a volume of the fugitive poems of this same gifted though humble authoress, which may be found in the advertising sheet accompanying the present Number.” 65 While copies of this “advertising sheet” no longer exist, the fact that the proposal was distributed in this manner suggests that multiple and varied opportunities to subscribe to Wales were available, even for those not immediately within the Garrettsons’ social and familial networks. It is unclear how many copies of Wales sold, either via the publisher, booksellers, or subscription. A letter written to Mary Garrettson on March 25, 1839, from her cousin Julia Lynch asked for confirmation of the report that “nearly the whole of the edition of Maria’s poems is sold.”66 If this edition was one thousand copies, as Potter had anticipated, then sales were indeed very good. No complete list of subscribers exists, nor is there a list of the people Garrettson persuaded to obtain subscribers. Based on her extant papers, these informal agents included Seymour Landon, a Methodist minister; Ann Caroline (A. C.) Bayard, a member of a prominent political family in Philadelphia; Matilda E. Van Ness, daughter of a former mayor of New York City, John P. Van Ness; Julia Lynch, a cousin on the Livingston side of the family; Cora Livingston Barton; and Lydia Sigourney, who told Garrettson, “I am happy that you have decided on this publication, and have no doubt that it will be well received. Please to remember me affectionately to the poetess.”67 This brief and incomplete list indicates that Garrettson enlisted the assistance of people in a number of different circles: the Methodist community, her Livingston relatives, and literary acquaintances (although these clearly overlapped as well). Copies of the volume were distributed in multiple states, including Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Washington  D.C., and a handful of copies made their way to England. The sales of Wales certainly do not represent a national distribution, but they are far more extensive than they would have been had sales been left entirely up to the publisher. It is difficult to know exactly what subscribers to Wales saw themselves as purchasing. Some clearly subscribed to the volume because of their loyalty to or affection for the Garrettson family; others may have subscribed to please the prestigious Livingston family member asking for their participation in the venture. Still others may have regarded subscription as an act of charity: while James was never in dire financial need, the proposal to publish

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the poems requested subscribers not only to offset the cost of publication but “also to afford to the author for whose sole benefit they are published some pecuniary emolument.”68 Produced as it was by John S. Taylor, Wales, and Other Poems might also have been regarded by readers as part of a larger library of evangelical texts, along with the other literary, theological, and educational texts published by Taylor in the same year. None of these should be considered apart from the fact that the book may have simply interested and impressed readers of poetry; multiple letters attest to the quality of James’s work. Samples published in periodicals like the Episcopal Recorder likely drew an audience accustomed to similar work by other women poets of the period. There can be no doubt, however, that in purchasing Wales, and Other Poems subscribers also consumed a par ticular image of Maria James and, by extension, of the mid-nineteenth-century domestic servant. James was clearly seen as a sort of perfect servant during a moment when many elites were suffering from problems with household employees. As Alice Kessler-Harris notes, “Complaints about the lack of sufficient domestic servants were endemic throughout the nineteenth century.”69 With an expansion of employment opportunities for native-born white women in the 1830s, immigrant women went into ser vice in great numbers. The influx of Irish servants, in particular, was lamented by mistresses who saw their Catholicism as alienating, if not suspicious, and regarded the Irish in general as “dirty, greasy, uneducated, undisciplined, [and] immoral.”70 The same stereotypes apparently did not apply to Welsh immigrants, especially those who immigrated in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century; in addition, James’s early binding out to the Garrettson home implied that she was somehow bred to servitude. While, as Dudden notes, “status pursuit and status maintenance” for the middle and upper classes “depended upon the ability to hire domestics,” employers desired servants to be “buffers, transmitters, [and] menial facilitators,” rather than “command[ing] . . . notice or regard in themselves.”71 People encountering James both before and after the publication of Wales read her as performing and indeed embodying servitude. Visiting the Garrettson home six years after the publication of Wales, for example, Sedgwick insists that James “blends a nun-like sanctity and intellectual gleamings with the deferential manner of an English serving woman—an odd mixture enough! . . . She came after—to see me, and when she took leave, ‘God Bless you, Miss S.,’ she said; ‘may you never want a servant, friend, or what you may please to call her.’ ”72 Thus even long after her book has been published, James is regarded as properly “deferential,” unspoiled by ambition, and willing

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to adjust her own identity to the needs of her interlocutor. A very similar modesty is said by Margaret Livingston to be embodied by Maria James prior to the book’s appearance. Writing to her daughter, Livingston notes the disparity between James’s authorship of the poems and her modest demeanor: “It is curious to hear Maria herself speak of [the poems] no vanity no conceit either in tone or manner the smallest praise the slightest word of approbation sends the color to her cheeks and forehead and the tears to her eyes, you remember her little prim formal features mincing step and humble curtsey. The perfect antipodes to any thing poetical or imaginative.”73 James is represented as disturbed only by praise; she seems to embody modesty and even servitude with “her little prim formal features mincing step and humble curtsey.” While Livingston insists that her appearance is the opposite of “any thing poetical or imaginative,” it is also possible to see James as the embodiment of her poems, which perfectly enact the formality and humility necessary to their publication and circulation. This representation of James may not have appealed in the same way to all subscribers to Wales, and Other Poems, but descriptions such as these indicate that James’s status as servant—a servant seemingly bred to servitude and undisturbed by ambition—was a unique and powerful selling point.

Servitude and Poetic Authority An undated draft of a letter from Mary Garrettson to Maria James is one of the few representations of James that contradicts the image of her as perfectly humble and unambitious, and demonstrates the potential disruption to existing class structures signified by the publication of James’s poems.74 The letter appears to have been written sometime in 1838, when arrangements for Maria’s book were already underway. The incident that prompted the letter happened during the visit of a clergyman (“an aged minister of Christ”) to the Garrettson family home.75 In the presence of Mary’s mother, Catherine Garrettson, Maria seems to have disagreed with the clergyman, taking what Mary saw as “a liberty with [her mother’s] guest” and committing “an outrage upon all the decencies of social intercourse.” While the draftiness of the letter and its audience render it difficult to reconstruct the exact nature of the disagreement (after all, Mary had no need to explain the situation to Maria in the letter), the clergyman seems to have spoken of James as a domestic servant, perhaps in reference to the impending volume of poems that

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was advertised to subscribers as having been “written by a young woman who has spent her life in ser vice.”76 James’s emotional reaction to being labeled a servant prompts Garrettson’s judgment of her as “ridiculous & contemptible.” Garrettson acknowledges that there may be disadvantages to being one of “The Employed”: “but that while you [illegible] with credit to yourself & satisfaction to others the duties of that station you should so detest the name as to feel your cheeks glow and your heart burn & to be thrown into violent hysterics at the mildest term which expresses that situation is a mystery as thoroughly incomprehensible to me that I can only exclaim how frail human Nature!”77 It is not James’s performance of her responsibilities in the Garrettson home that is issue here: Garrettson insists on her own “satisfaction” in this regard. What she objects to is James’s excessive pride and sensitivity, both of which manifest on her body in her red cheeks and rapidly beating heart. This representation of James is in sharp contrast to the “prim” and “ humble” servant of Margaret Livingston’s letter, whose body responds in similar ways to praise from others (“the slightest word of approbation sends the color to her cheeks and forehead and the tears to her eyes”). Garrettson is adamant, however, that there is nothing to object to in the label of “servant”: “The term servant carries with it no degradation to me & the term Domestic beings with its so expressive of the sacred characters of home which bind Man to his fellow Man call up to my mind images endeared by long companionship as respected & beloved as any beyond the circle of home & kindred—it is because these relations are not understood that the ignorant & silly used them with such contempt.” As Dudden explains, discourses of help gave way gradually and unevenly to those of domestic service throughout the nineteenth century, with “help” usually indicating a more informal, unsystematic arrangement in which mutual aid dictated the employment of community members. Notably, the starting point for this shift was, Dudden notes, the 1820s and the 1830s, when “Americans began to hire more servants to work in an explicitly domestic sphere. Abandoning the language of help, they began to call them ‘domestic servants’ or just ‘domestics.’ The difference was more than semantic; it reflected altered relationships, in many ways more burdensome to domestics and more problematic, yet more promising, for their employers than the helping relationship had been.”78 While “help” were hired and worked within a larger community, “domestic servants” were often isolated in the middle-class and upper-class home, distanced from their families and often other workers. “Help” worked on projects with their neighbors, often alongside them, while “domestic servants”

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were seen as doing the work of the home for their employers, freeing them for leisure and charitable activities. Perhaps most importantly, “help” were often considered part of the family: in an 1837 review of Sedgwick’s Live and Let Live, a novel about domestic ser vice, the writer insists that Americans should retain the word “help,” as it “recognizes employer and employed in the same family, in the relation, in which, by whatever name denominated, they both ought to be sensible that they stand.”79 Garrettson attempts to use this convention when talking about James’s place at Wildercliffe but is unable to settle on how their relationship is both like and unlike family: it is a “long companionship” (by this time, Garrettson and James have known each other for almost forty years), but it is “as respected & beloved as any beyond the circle of home & kindred.” In other words, the servant-mistress relationship that Garrettson is describing here takes place within the home but can’t possibly be as intimate as one between actual family members. The slipperiness of this line between family and not-family is evident in Garrettson’s published writing as well. Aware, no doubt, that much of the interest in Wales, and Other Poems will arise from James’s position at Wildercliffe as si multa neously household intimate and subordinate, Garrettson creates a romantic portrait of their shared past in the letter to Potter that he includes in his introduction. Recollecting her childhood, Mary remembers the visits of Methodist preachers to Wildercliffe (full of “romance as well as poetry”) as particularly exciting: “They dropped in upon us, in the midst of storms and cold,—brought us tidings from the north and south, the east and west, (our conferences were then very extended,) and always sent a thrill of pleasure to our young hearts. The tidings of a “Methodist preacher coming,” was echoed from kitchen to parlour, and from parlour to bed-room, until all were on the watch, and the saddle-bags and peculiar joy were discovered.”80 Speaking of James, she continues, “I mention these circumstances, as I think they must have had their effect in the formation of her character. If she enjoyed them with as keen a relish as I did, I am sure they had. It was a romantic age in every respect, and we shared largely in it” (40). This memory indicates the difficulty of determining the young Welsh girl’s status in the Garrettson household. The “us” of the first sentence—the recipients of the “tidings”—seems to be those members of the family most invested in finding out what was happening in the larger geographical region (or Methodist “conference”) of which the Garrettsons and their church were a part. The “young hearts,” which feel a “thrill” at the thought of the visit, may belong to Mary and Maria, as well as any other children present at Wildercliffe, and

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Garrettson seems fairly certain that James must have shared her excitement at the search of the saddlebags. What the two girls did not share, of course, is the labor that visitors added to a home like Wildercliffe, labor for which Maria and other servants like her were almost entirely responsible. Census records indicate that, like their neighbors, the Garrettsons employed approximately three or four servants in the early decades of the nineteenth century; after Freeborn’s death, Catherine may have employed more.81 While that made it unlikely that Maria served as a “maid-of-all-work,” the Garrettsons’ large home ensured that she would have had many arduous responsibilities and long working hours. According to Christine Stansell, “No matter how many domestics there were, there was certain work that always fell to them rather than to family members. Cooking, serving, and washing up for three meals and an afternoon tea were in their duties, as well as all the menial labor . . . that utilities would later make unnecessary.”82 Despite the egalitarian nature of the Garrettsons’ faith, neither Catherine nor Mary would have likely done much to assist in these responsibilities. A much later rewriting of this scene in Little Mabel’s Friends, a children’s book published by Mary Garrettson in 1862, may provide additional insight into James’s position in the Garrettson family home as well as the social significance of her authorship of Wales, and Other Poems. “Little Mabel” is a thinly autobiographical version of Garrettson. In Little Mabel and Her Sunlit Home, published in 1860, Mabel’s father is said to be a “pioneer minister” who, “in journeyings oft, in perils oft, in cold and weariness, . . . pursued his steadfast course, until foes became friends, and friends brethren beloved in the same blessed bonds.”83 Like Catherine Garrettson, Mabel’s mother is converted to Methodism and, after marrying a minister, “rejoiced to leave her former beautiful home at [her] Master’s bidding (as she believed) for this homelier one” (60). In a scene from the sequel, Little Mabel’s Friends, the narrator recalls the visits of Methodist ministers to the home occupied by Mabel and her parents. However, the “us” of Garrettson’s letter to Alonzo Potter, waiting eagerly for the arrival of the itinerants, is differently configured, with a formerly enslaved woman standing in for Maria James: They [the ministers] generally rode on horseback, with the saddle-bags slung across the saddle, so they were known afar off; and often did Yaida (whose favorite window took in a long reach of the road) come in with beaming face to say, “A minister is coming, mistress;” and as

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often did Mabel’s little feet dance up and down the house while she repeated the joyful news, “A minister is coming!” and often was the sunlit home filled with the brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews whom Mrs. Seldon so dearly loved. Often did Yaida, from her quiet nook, espy and recognize the carriage of a dear friend, and run in with the news, “The carriage from Klarenburgh!” or, “Mistress, I raily believe Master Rudolph’s carriage is on the road;” or “Master Ernest’s a coming,” etc. They were all Yaida’s masters and mistresses; the manners of the slave mingling with the warm affections of the Christian. Nevertheless, the memory of slavery was a bitter one even to the humble Yaida.84 Here the “thrill of pleasure” at the visits of the itinerants is shared with Yaida rather than Maria.85 This substitution might be due to the fact that Mabel’s “sunlit home” is “a plain Dutch farm-house,” reminiscent of the home in which the Garrettsons lived prior to the construction of Wildercliffe, rather than an imposing mansion on the banks of the Hudson River.86 While the retention of a freed Black woman like Yaida, whose “memory of slavery was a bitter one,” might be seen as charitable, the hiring of a domestic servant might have been regarded as excessive, especially given the size of Mabel’s home. Yet the association of Yaida with James is apparent in Yaida’s address to her “mistress” (“A minister is coming, mistress”). Just prior to recounting the earlier version of the story of the ministers’ visits in the introduction to Wales, and Other Poems, Garrettson says about James’s arrival in the Garrettson home, “Among other things, her mother instructed her always to call Mamma Mistress,—a term which, with the definite article before it, has always been used by our family as a term of endearment and respect.”87 Garrettson is careful here to explain that Maria calls Catherine Garrettson “Mistress,” while “our family” refers to her as the mistress (or the Mistress). Therefore while she approves greatly of Maria’s use of the term, it is clearly only a form of address used by a subordinate in the Garrettson family home. Yaida’s address to her “mistress” more than twenty years after the publication of Wales and sixty years after James’s summoning to Wildercliffe thus blurs the boundaries between fictional freedwoman and actual white servant. The depiction of Yaida might point then to the fixedness of Maria’s position in the Garrettson family home and in the larger social networks in which James’s book circulates. Despite her apparent joy at the arrival of Mabel’s family members who come to hear the minister, the unchanging nature of

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Yaida’s labor is apparent in the way in which she retains “the manners of the slave” despite her status as a “Christian” and, presumably, a free woman. In the draft letter that Mary Garrettson writes to James after the visit of the “aged minister of Christ,” it is James’s inability to know her place that irks Garrettson. Despite the assertion in almost every other piece of writing on the publication of Wales that James is naturally humble and servile, she is represented here as having rejected the label of servant and all that it signifies. “It is this silly indecorous pride my dear Maria,” Garrettson writes, “that mars the happiness of your existence, sullies your Christian character & puts you it into the power of children & fools to insult & torment you if you feel it such a degradation.”88 It seems likely that Garrettson refers here to more than just James’s “pride” at the label she uses to describe her situation in the Garrettson home. James’s poems, which apparently bring her to the attention of the offending clergyman in the first place, threaten to similarly upset her sense of her place—which, by extension, might upset Garrettson’s own equanimity. Garrettson’s reference to the poems themselves and the process of publishing them is worth quoting in full, complete with strikethroughs. Her concern, Mary insists, is not so much that her guest was insulted, but that one whose talents, character & talents raised her occupies so high a place in the estimation of her friends should be disgraced by capable of a vanity too susceptible so ridiculous & contemptible My mind has been much occupied by your ∧literary fate∨ concerns which I saw in fair perspective & I felt truly was truly astonishing & afflictive. I could but exclaim I had My mind has been much occupied with your literary fate and had been reading rereading to Mrs M Mr Potters letter & I could not but think how such an anecdote of it got abroad would make you appear. If I89 Garrettson had seen James’s “literary fate . . . in fair perspective,” but James’s assertion of her right to self-identify—whether as “help” or “author”—makes Garrettson doubt the project, especially as it has been shaped by her and Alonzo Potter. In this context, Garrettson’s imagining of what might happen should “such an anecdote . . . [get] abroad” could be seen as a threat, a clear contradiction to the image of James constructed in the introduction to Wales, and Other Poems. The crossed out “If I” that concludes the passage indicates that Garrettson may have been contemplating some future action

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based on the conflict she is writing about. After all, part of what is being packaged and circulated in the volume is the image of Maria James as ideal servant and Garrettson and Potter as ideal patrons; to acknowledge any conflict between them or any straining against the notion of authorship provided James by her sponsors would be to negate the terms of the relationships in which the project originated and to diminish readers’ interest in the poems. Whatever the conflict was between the two women, it seems to have been resolved, as it is not mentioned anywhere else in the correspondence. Yet James’s awareness of the complicated claim to poetic authorship made by her book of poems is apparent in “The Broom,” which stands out in Wales in that it is about physical labor and compares the working woman to the middleand upper-class woman, whose lives are not defined by work. Early in the poem, the speaker defines herself against a more privileged class of men and women in two ways. First, in her description of the broom itself, she distinguishes between her own hand and that of the lady: A handle slender, smooth, and light, Of bass-wood, or of cedar white; Where softest palm from point to heel Might ne’er a grain of roughness feel— So firm a fix, the stalks confine; So tightly drawn the hempen line; Then fan-like spread divided wove, As fingers in a lady’s glove—90 The speaker’s description of the contact between broom handle and woman’s palm here is almost sensuous—a sensation that is denied the lady, whose “softest palm” would feel no “roughness” in the broom, but whose encounter with life is mediated by the glove. While the broom itself is shaped like a glove and, by extension, might function similarly to mediate experience, it provides a tactile chain between actor and that which is acted upon. The action of the broom points to the second way in which the speaker of the poem is different from those who are more economically privileged. With this in hand, small need to care If C—y or J—n fill the chair— What in the banks is said or done—

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The game at Texas lost or won— How city belles collect their rings, And hie to Saratoga springs;— ... While undisturb’d my course I keep, Cheer’d by the sound of sweep, sweep, sweep. (162–63) With the broom standing in for all of the labor performed by working women, the speaker declares herself independent of politics, economics, and war, either because she doesn’t have time to worry about such things or because they aren’t nearly as important to her life as are the tools to perform her labor. The 1832 election between Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson, the Panic of 1837, and the Texas Revolution of 1835–36 are all seen as irrelevant to the working-class woman, whose immediate concern is her own livelihood. The activities of the servant are thus clearly distinguished from those of her nonworking female counterparts: the life of the “city belle” vacationing in Saratoga Springs is marked as frivolous and insignificant, defined by consumption and leisure, while the speaker’s own life and labor are “undisturb’d.” Given the wealth and influence of the Garrettsons and those in their familial and social networks, however, they would have been intimately involved in the sorts of issues and activities James dismisses here. For example, Catherine Garrettson’s brother, Edward Livingston, served as U.S. secretary of state during the Jackson administration and was one of Jackson’s most trusted advisors. James commemorates his life in “On Seeing a Bust of the Late Hon. Edward Livingston,” but in “The Broom,” she marks the election of Jackson to the presidency as insignificant. (His involvement in the Texas Revolution and the Panic of 1837, of course, came about as a result of his defeat of Clay in that election.) Similarly, women like Margaret Livingston would have vacationed in Saratoga Springs, especially after tourism to the mineral springs increased with the 1832 arrival of the Saratoga and Schenectady Railroad. The speaker of “The Broom” scorns such elite concerns in favor of “sweep, sweep, sweep[ing],” which provides her with a consistent source of activity, income, and identity that is denied women who don’t work: “The broom may prove a friend in need,” she declares, “On this I lean,— on this depend” (163). In the final two stanzas of the poem, however, James abruptly shifts from the point of view of the working woman to that of a preindustrial domestic matron.

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Hand me the broom, (a matron said,) As down the hose and ball were laid; I think your father soon will come; I long to see him safe at home. Pile on the wood, and set the chair;— The supper and the board prepare; The gloom of night is gathering fast,— The storm is howling o’er the waste. The hearth is swept, arrang’d the room, And duly hung the shaker-broom, While cheerful smiles and greetings wait The master entering at his gate. (164) Reminiscent of Mary Garrettson’s memories of waiting for Methodist ministers like her father to arrive at the family home, this scene is slightly different in that the labor here is performed by the mother figure. There is no Welsh servant girl, no formerly enslaved woman hovering whose delight at the visitors renders invisible the labor necessary for their visit. The only figures present seem to be the “matron” and her interlocutor, the child (or perhaps children), whose father will soon come home. James herself is seemingly nowhere to be seen here—the “I” and “me” of the first half of the poem are replaced by the parenthetical attribution of speech to the mother. It is possible to see James paying tribute here to Catherine Garrettson, whose support of itinerants like her husband contributed greatly to the establishment of Methodism throughout upstate New York. Yet James’s identification of the broom held by both working woman and “matron” as a “shaker-broom—“one neatly made / In Niscayuna’s distant shade; / Or bearing full its staff upon / The well-known impress, ‘Lebanon’ ”—is important (162). Shaker communities such as Niskayuna and New Lebanon, both in New York, began manufacturing brooms in the mid-1820s. These brooms quickly became a symbol of the sect and were tied to Mother Ann Lee’s injunction, recorded in the 1816 Testimonies of the Life, Character, Revelations, and Doctrines of Mother Ann Lee, to “sweep clean” the floor of the home and “the floor of the heart.”91 Like Garrettson, Lee rose to power and influence with the Second Great Awakening; she was responsible for transplanting Shakerism from England to the United States and was regarded by many of her followers as a divine messenger or the second coming of Jesus Christ. It is unlikely

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that James, a devout Methodist, would have approved of the activities and beliefs of the Shakers. But the speaker of “The Broom” who “sweep, sweep, sweep[s]” the hearth (either as servant or matron) is mandated spiritual and moral control of both home and heart in her identification with Lee. The identification of the “matron” in this poem with two such powerful female religious figures as Garrettson and Lee—and the fluidity between the “matron” and the working-class speaker with whom the poem opens—allows us to see James claiming an authority that originates in her ability to code-switch, to adapt, one might even say to imitate. In doing so, James’s re-narration of this scene from Mary Garrettson’s childhood allows her to enter fully into the life of the family and the community, to reclaim the narrative from the child (whether Mary or the fictional Mabel) who had been placed at its center. The domestic scene closes abruptly, mid-stanza, with “the master enter[ing] at his gate.” Thus, unlike the two created by Mary Garrettson, James’s representation leaves women in charge of the moment; there is no reassertion of paternal control (yet), nor any celebration of one’s subordinate status in the home. “The Broom” concludes with a description of her process as a poet, rendering what has come before an apparent illustration of her poetics: Let patriots, poets, twine their brows With laurel, or with holly boughs; But let the broom-corn wreath be mine, Adorn’d with many a sprig of pine; With wild-flowers from the forest deep, And garlands from the craggy steep, Which ne’er have known the gardener’s care, But rise, and bloom spontaneous there. (164) This is similar to the “Motto” for Wales, and Other Poems, in which she refuses the role of “reaper,” who “pile[s] their golden sheaves on high,” in favor of that of the gleaner: “I crave the scatter’d ears they yield,” she insists, “To bless the gleaner of the field.”92 Yet the denial of poetic labor at the end of “The Broom”—she claims to be neither gleaner nor gardener here, simply gathering plants and flowers from the natural environment—belies the masterful performance that the poem and the book as a whole have already enacted. As Shira Wolosky reminds us, “Modesty as a literary topos . . . stands in complex relation to its social uses. Indeed, it serves as a manner not only

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of self-effacement but of self-presentation and self-representation in both social and literary intercourse, which could be exploited to enlarge or intensify self-expression.”93 James’s deployment of the modesty topos allows her to compose, circulate, and publish her poems in the midst of immense cultural prejudice against both immigrants and domestic servants. Following the publication of Wales, and Other Poems, James published two poems about New York City’s Colored Orphan Asylum in the American Anti-Slavery Society publication the Emancipator. Wales, and Other Poems seems not to have been available for purchase after 1839, either because Taylor assumed the market for her work was satisfied or because he was bought out by his partner, Moses Woodruff Dodd, who reformed the company under the name M. W. Dodd, and does not seem to have published a second edition of Wales. Mary Garrettson may have lost interest in pursuing the publication of the volume as well, as her friend and Alonzo Potter’s wife, Sarah Maria Potter, died in childbirth in early 1839, just after Wales appeared. Alonzo Potter gave his newborn daughter, Maria, to Mary Garrettson to raise, as his wife wished him to do, and Maria James presumably assisted Mary in her responsibilities to the child. Thus James’s domestic labor likely increased at the same moment that her access to print was achieved. After her death on September 11, 1868, James was buried in the Rhinebeck Cemetery. In addition to her dates of birth and death, as well as a quote from the book of Matthew (“Blessed are the pure in heart”), her headstone contains four lines from her poem “Reflections”: Strong in His strength who bore the cross for thee, Strong in His strength, who won the victory; Nor doubt, nor fear, shall then disturb thy breast, But thou shalt rise to everlasting rest.94 In 1865, the New York State Census listed Mary Garrettson and Maria James as living together at Wildercliffe; while Garrettson was listed as head of the household, James, in contrast to the years prior when she was “servant,” was listed as merely “Friend.”95 Seventy-three years old at Maria’s death, Mary was likely responsible for having the fragment of “Reflections” inscribed on her friend’s headstone. (Mary would live until 1879.) The poem begins with the speaker lamenting her eventual death and separation from the beauties of earthly nature but shifts, in the second stanza, to “the trembling spirit stand[ing]” on the “verge” of Heaven; in the passage quoted on James’s tomb-

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stone the speaker, seemingly the poet herself, addresses the spirit upon whom “a heaven-born peace” has descended (98). Transplanted to James’s tombstone, it is possible to read the passage as James addressing those she has left behind, assuring them from a position of authority of the power of faith and the existence of Heaven. Yet it is also possible to see the authority of this proclamation as shifted to Garrettson and the addressee as James, who is presumed to need such reassurance as she seeks to gain “everlasting rest” after death. However reconfigured, “Reflections” is ultimately exemplary of James’s poems in that its publication—its being made public by being rendered into print, whether on the page or on the tombstone—is a collaborative effort and that collaboration subsequently shapes the meaning that can made of the poem. Accepting such a context for James’s poems does not, as the tombstone also demonstrates, erase her poetic authorship; it simply means that we accept authorship as differently configured for dif ferent authors, whose access to print was not always straightforward or easy.

CHAPTER 5

“Some Queer Freak of Taste” Relational Poetics and Literary Proprietorship in the “Rock Me to Sleep” Controversy

In June 1865, the poet Elizabeth Akers Allen1 sent a letter to the New York Evening Post from Washington, D.C., where she was working as a copyist for the War Department. “Please allow me sufficient space in your columns,” she asked, “for a few words concerning a little poem entitled, ‘Rock me to sleep,’ which unwisely enough, as it has proved, I wrote and published five years ago, the authorship of which, by some queer freak of taste, has been repeatedly claimed by eight or ten persons, not one of whom ever saw the poem until it appeared in print.”2 This was Akers Allen’s first public acknowledgment of the “LITERARY MISAPPROPRIATION” of her poem (as the title over the letter referred to it), and her claim to authorship is made with force and humor: “I certainly wrote the song in question, and sent it from Italy in May, 1860, to the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post, in which it immediately appeared, with the signature of ‘Florence Percy,’ a name which I mistakenly adopted when a school girl” (11). The “mistakes” Akers Allen mentions here—writing the poem, publishing it in a popu lar regional newspaper, adopting a pseudonym—are clearly not mistakes at all; they were, rather, normal protocol in the antebellum American literary marketplace. What is unusual here is the need for Akers Allen to claim her work in this assertive fashion; while, as I’ve argued in other chapters, antebellum women poets were often faced with the misattribution or misappropriation of their work, they very rarely responded with such an assertion of literary proprietorship. Lydia Sigourney’s reclamation of “Death of an Infant” in her 1838 Select Poems comes closest to Akers Allen’s gesture

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here. But Sigourney had only to contend with the editorial misattribution of her poem. Felicia Hemans herself made no claim to “Death of an Infant,” and Sigourney took advantage of the association between the two to advance her own career. Akers Allen, on the other hand, is faced with “eight or ten” claimants to “Rock Me to Sleep” who have attempted to bypass the steps necessary to establish a literary reputation and, in the process, have risked damaging her own. “When I hear myself good naturedly designated in society, as the lady who pretends to have written, etc., it is high time to state the facts,” Akers Allen concludes (11). Akers Allen’s letter focuses on the “facts” of the poem’s composition and publication but does not attempt to explain why “Rock Me to Sleep” experienced an almost unprecedented popularity and widespread circulation, or why it was “claimed by eight or ten persons” who clearly did not write it. After the poem’s initial publication in the Post in 1860, “Rock Me to Sleep” was reprinted throughout the century in newspapers and magazines across the United States and was eventually collected in Akers Allen’s Poems (1866) as well as The Sunset Song and Other Verses (1902). Along the way, the poem was also clipped from newspapers and pasted into scrapbooks, copied into commonplace books, and even “printed on white satin” and presented to loved ones as gifts.3 It soon inspired literary responses (“The Mother’s Reply to Rock Me To Sleep”),4 parodies (“Leave Me to Sleep, Biddy”),5 jokes (which usually use “rock you to sleep” as a euphemism for knocking someone unconscious or even killing them), and advertisements (“‘ROCK ME TO SLEEP, MOTHER’ is a popular song of the day, but it is no more so than the extremely low prices for Fall Clothing at the establishment of GEORGE L. NICHOLS”).6 As the advertisement for “Fall Clothing” implies, the poem was also quickly set to music; the first adaptation was by Ernest Leslie, but dozens of composers followed his lead.7 The song versions of “Rock Me to Sleep” further facilitated its wide circulation, especially during the Civil War, when it became one of a number of songs addressed to “Mother” from the battlefield. As with other copied and reprinted poems I’ve discussed in Fair Copy, the (not always linear) trajectory of “Rock Me to Sleep,” from uncollected “fugitive” to one among many poems in Akers Allen’s oeuvre, highlights the ways in which poems operated both independently of and in conjunction with the author function in nineteenth-century America. Far from a mistake, this kind of circulation was what most poets of the period hoped for when they published their work in periodicals. The reasons behind their desire for wide circulation likely varied: an activist poet like Sarah Forten might have

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wanted to increase the reach of her political message, while an evangelical poet like Maria James likely wanted her poetry to speak to others’ faith in God and perhaps even promote conversion to Methodism. As Melissa Homestead notes, such circumstances offered particular challenges though for women writers who wanted or needed to make money from their work or achieve a local or even national reputation as an author: “As nonproprietary subjects, women adapted themselves to a literary market in which unauthorized reprinting was the norm, making the most of their ‘imperfect’ proprietary status of American authorship and working astutely within the constraints imposed by a law that privileged readers’ access to literature over authors’ property rights.”8 In writing “Rock Me to Sleep,” I argue, Akers Allen, like other women poets before her, knowingly created a sentimental poem that allowed the audience to effortlessly inhabit the subject position of the speaker, thus generating an imagined community of readers sharing similar emotions and experiences. With the poem’s immense popularity, this intimate association was taken to its extreme conclusion by those who claimed the poem as their own. What Akers Allen calls “a queer freak of taste” is actually, then, a by-product of the sort of relational poetics I’ve discussed throughout Fair Copy, as it was facilitated by the conventions of periodical publication: the lines between reading a poem, copying it, and actually authoring it become, under the “right” circumstances, indistinct. Many of the creative uses to which “Rock Me to Sleep” was put were reminiscent of the reading and writing practices of the Lowell factory-girls. Yet Akers Allen’s readers went so far as to plagiarize her work, to claim it as their own, and, in announcing their authorship of the poem, to discredit her as both a poet and a professional writer. While the authorship of other popu lar nineteenth-century poems like “Beautiful Snow” (whose authorship was never definitively established) and “All Quiet Along the Potomac” (by Ethel Lynn Beers) was also contested, none of these poems were composed by a writer with Akers Allen’s reputation as a published author. Because of this, the ensuing controversies did not involve as broad a range of readers, writers, editors, and publishers, and did not go beyond paragraphs in newspapers, usually preceding a reprinting of the original poem. It is precisely because of the vehemence with which claimants to “Rock Me to Sleep” asserted their ownership of the poem, and the corresponding fervor with which Akers Allen defended herself, that the controversy reveals so much about gender, class, and poetic authorship in the mid-nineteenth-century United States.

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Most of the claimants to the authorship of “Rock Me to Sleep” were either journalistic inventions or not-so-bold amateurs who were easily dismissed by Akers Allen’s public statement in the Evening Post. The most successful claimant was also, perhaps, the most surprising: a New Jersey legislator named Alexander McWhorter Ball. Soon after the appearance of Akers Allen’s Poems in 1866, Ball’s defenders published A Vindication of the Claim of Alexander M. W. Ball, of Elizabeth, N. J., to the Authorship of the Poem, Rock me to Sleep, Mother (1867). The primary argument of the authors of the pamphlet is that Ball’s status as amateur poet and feminized middle-class gentleman affords him access to the kind of emotional experience necessary to sentimental authorship. Akers Allen, on the other hand, is cast as a professional woman poet whose involvement in the literary marketplace and desire for fame render her entirely incapable of creating a poem like “Rock Me To Sleep.” Ball’s appropriation of Akers Allen’s poem is intended to invalidate her gender identity and her professionalism, to render her experience in the world of paper, print, and poetry a liability, even an offense, rather than an advantage. His use of sentimental language and, more specifically, the rhetoric of gendered suffering, when paired with the social capital afforded him by his class status, was surprisingly successful. Influential newspapers and magazines such as the Round Table, the Nation, and the New York Evening Post pronounced themselves convinced of Ball’s authorship and challenged Akers Allen to “bring forward for herself something in the way of passably good evidence in her favor.”9 Rather than asserting her own femininity, however, and thereby accepting the terms of the argument established by Ball, Akers Allen attempted to expose the gender and class privilege underlying Ball’s argument, claiming her own professionalism and disparaging Ball as a “poetaster,” or a hopeless amateur. However, the terms of the discourse surrounding the dispute were not entirely under her control. The “Rock Me to Sleep” controversy, I argue, simultaneously marks the continued popularity and success of the relational poetics practiced by antebellum women poets and the inadequacy of such a poetics for professional women poets in a rapidly changing post–Civil War literary marketplace. It is simplistic to think of Akers Allen as a victim of her readers or a form of reading that she found oppressive. After all, as Michael Cohen notes, “the popularity of poems during this period inheres in their capacities to intertwine reading and writing or singing and listening as sociable experiences that entangle literary textuality with personal life.”10 And as I’ve discussed throughout Fair Copy, readers and poets in the antebellum United

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States were well-versed in the poetics of imitation, communal authorship, and collaboration, as well as the way such practices provided access to print and increased circulation. In the first section of this chapter, I examine Akers Allen’s early career as a poet in the late 1840s, just a few years after the final issue of the Lowell Offering. Her success during the antebellum period was largely due to her familiarity with romantic and sentimental verse as well as her collaboration with various agents in the process of publication—some of whom, as in the case of Maria James, likely constrained her potential and exploited her talent. No less impor tant, however, was Akers Allen’s strategic deployment of imitative pseudonymity and authorial identity in the consolidation of her work under the “Florence Percy” pseudonym. All of these practices, I argue, demonstrate Akers Allen’s strategic deployment of relational poetic practices to establish herself as a poet with access to a variety of publication venues. As was the case with Charlotte Jerauld, with whom I began the introduction to Fair Copy, Akers Allen’s engagement with the mechanics of print literalizes this process, highlighting the labor behind the composition, publication, and circulation of poems. In the second section of this chapter, I look at “Rock Me to Sleep,” the poem that catapulted Akers Allen to national recognition at the same time that it threatened her ownership of her work. Spoken from the point of view of a woman lamenting the loss of her childhood, “Rock Me to Sleep” uses meter and sentiment to engage readers and draw them into the speaker’s experience. The multiple reprintings of the poem that ensued, I argue, work to create a community of readers who feel ownership over it. While this clearly happened with many poems during this period, Akers Allen’s burgeoning national reputation resulted in multiple claims of authorship. The reasons behind these claims are varied: while some readers desire the social capital that authorship would bring them in their family or community, others sought access to print for their own work. Still others may have actually believed that they wrote the poem, convinced by its similarity to something they had written or by their multiple engagements with it in manuscript, print, and song. Claiming authorship of the poem was clearly pleasurable for some readers and as Geoffrey Sanborn points out, we must not be too quick to dismiss plagiarism as unproductive or even criminal: “We might begin to turn from the question of whether a piece of writing is original to the question of where its readers are, and where they can go, when a text gives them pleasure.”11 Plagiarism is, in fact, a natural extension of the relational poetics I’ve discussed throughout Fair Copy. Yet as Akers Allen’s case shows, plagiarism

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also represented a very real menace to an author’s ownership of and profit from their own work. The case of Alexander Ball constituted the most significant threat to Akers Allen’s reputation as an author and also illuminates the way that the relational poetics that established Akers Allen as a poet is used against her. I investigate Ball’s claim to authorship in depth in the final section in this chapter, looking specifically at his attempt to trump gender with class, claiming that Akers Allen’s workmanlike attitude toward poetry invalidates her claim to “Rock Me to Sleep.”

Becoming “Florence Percy” Sometime in the first decade of the twentieth century, when Akers Allen was in her seventies, she typed a document that she called “History of One Woman’s Financial Experience.” After finishing this detailed recollection of her lifetime as a working woman writer—one who was frequently deprived of her money by male coworkers, bosses, and husbands—Akers Allen included this note on a separate piece of paper: I neglected to set down in its proper place the first money I ever received for my verses; it was while I was in Bradford, in the bookbindery; I had written several articles for the Boston Olive Branch, edited by Thomas F. Norris (I was boarding at my brother-in-law’s, and he took the paper) I had written for the Vermont Family Gazette, published in Bradford, but received no pay, and expected none from the Olive Branch; but was astonished to receive a badly written letter that had been all through the West, and was well-worn because Mr. Norris had written “V. T.” with a period between the letters, instead of “Vt.” Somebody had translated this “Wisconsin Territory,” and it had been travelling a long time till some brilliant P. O. clerk thought of Vermont, and so sent it along. It contained a two-dollar bill on some Boston bank,—and was the first money I ever earned by my pen. It was a dirty, ragged bill, but it seemed a godsend to me. I kept it a long time, and I believe bought my Coleridge with it, and spent the rest in postage.12 Pasted as it is into the front pages of the book into which the typescript pages of the “History” are glued, this story functions as a sort of introduction to

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the narrative—and to Akers Allen’s early career as a writer. Produced in difficult circumstances, often out of dire financial need, Akers Allen’s poems were published widely and often indiscriminately—here, for example, she has no reason for publishing in the Family Gazette other than proximity. Likewise, she publishes in the Olive Branch because her brother-in-law subscribed to the newspaper. Like the bill she receives for these poems, her work was often extensively circulated, dependent entirely on the attention of editors and perhaps even “clerks.” And the financial rewards, such as they were, for these publications fed her continued writing, as the two-dollar bill does here in the purchasing of a volume of the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and postage, which Akers Allen may have used to submit additional work to newspapers.13 This narrative also ties Akers Allen’s writing of poetry to her labor: her “verses” are produced while she works at Asa Low’s book bindery in Bradford, Vermont, where she had gone, at fourteen years of age, to live with her sister to escape an uncomfortable relationship with her stepmother. Beginning in the fall of 1847, Akers Allen (then Elizabeth Chase) worked as a “ruler” in Low’s book bindery, operating a ruling machine to ink lines in account books, for two years. Work in the bindery, she explains, was preferable to employment in the adjacent paper mill, also owned and operated by Low, but it required physical strength, “a quick hand,” and “a sure touch.” This meant passing [the paper] through an old-fashioned handmachine twice, to rule both sides,—standing all day in exactly the same position, arranging and placing sheets of paper with the left hand, and turning a crank with the right; the more difficult work must be done with the left hand; and it was very difficult; for if the edge of every sheet—and they were large,—was not placed a little under the edge of its predecessor on the “apron” of the machine, it would catch the delicate pens and bend them, besides spoiling the sheet. If it was placed too far under, a black margin was left, which made trouble; so it required judgment and quickness of hand to do it just right.14 For four reams a day, six days a week, Akers Allen and the other rulers earned approximately $1.50, a wage that perhaps renders her excitement over the “dirty, ragged” two-dollar bill more understandable. Later, when she became an “ ‘expert’ ruler,” she was able to rule up to fourteen reams of “extra good

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thick paper for some nice books” in a single day, earning “87 and a-half cents for several days in succession.” “While drudging like this,” Akers Allen explains, she wrote her “first articles for publication in the village paper, and for the Boston Olive Branch.”15 As was the case with Jerauld, it is likely that working in the book bindery provided both inspiration and access to the young poet. The Green Mountain Gem and the Vermont Family Gazette, both of which featured poems by the young Elizabeth Chase, were edited by Azro Benjamin Franklin Hildreth, who was enticed to move to Bradford by Asa Low, for whom he published schoolbooks and almanacs.16 Low’s paper mill also ensured that Hildreth would have a ready supply of paper at an affordable price.17 Thus for Akers Allen, the work of poetry and the work of the bindery become distinct—it is clearly preferable to write poetry for money (or even just for the reward of publication) than it is to operate the ruling machinery—and yet indistinct, in that both indicate Akers Allen’s involvement in the mechanics of print in Bradford as they are operated by Asa Low. Both the work of poetry and that of the bindery also produce a product that is then circulated in order to generate a literate response of some kind—Low’s ruled books might function as account books or diaries or commonplace books, while Akers Allen’s poems (printed on Low’s paper) will be read, recited, copied, and perhaps even sung. Like the work of Maria James and the Lowell Offering poets, the poems that Akers Allen published while living in Vermont were markedly not about labor. Instead, they demonstrate Akers Allen’s awareness, in her late teens, of the conventions of romantic and sentimental poetry. Given conventional titles like “Childhood,” “Flora,” and “Autumn Thoughts,” they celebrate the purity of youth and the beauty of nature. They also posit the author of the poems, known only as “Florence Percy,” as a weary but wise observer of a world that has come to disappoint her. In “Childhood,” for example, the speaker laments the loss of innocence that has come with age and experience: When o’er my heart deep sadness holds its reign, And I shrink back from earth’s cold heartless show, I love to gaze back through long years of pain To a bright happy season, long ago, Ere I had dreamed of earthly care or woe— And dreamed not love a dream, so light and vain— Those blissful days I ne’er again shall know—18

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While “earthly care [and] woe” play a part in the speaker’s disillusionment, the “dream” of love (rather than, say, the exhaustion of operating a ruling machine) is clearly responsible for her “deep sadness.” The source of Akers Allen’s distinctive pseudonym is not entirely clear; despite writing quite a bit about her early career in letters and memoirs, she never explained why she chose to adopt “Florence Percy” initially or why she chose it among all of her pseudonyms to represent her in the literary marketplace of the 1850s and early 1860s. It seems likely, however, that Akers Allen’s choice was a play on the name of Percy and Mary Shelley’s son, Percy Florence Shelley, who was born to the couple in 1819. Such a choice is an interesting one, given that American writers had been reluctant to commend Percy Shelley, or even write about him, in the years following his death in 1822 because of his “socialism and atheism,” not to mention his abandonment of his first wife after meeting the young Mary Godwin, who would go on to publish Frankenstein in 1818, at the age of twenty-one.19 But as Karsten Kleis Engberg notes, time and distance allowed editors and critics to soften Shelley’s image, “appealing to the hearts of the general reading public for compassion and sympathy towards a misguided and maltreated poetic genius.”20 His increasing popularity in the United States in the 1820s and 1830s resulted in the publication of Mary Shelley’s 1839 The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, dedicated to their son, Percy Florence Shelley, and the first American edition of his work in 1845. That Shelley’s poetry, along with his redeemed reputation, was well established by the late 1840s is evidenced by the publication of an article titled “Shelley: His First Love—His Unhappy Marriage” in the same issue of the Green Mountain Gem in which Florence Percy’s poem “Childhood” was printed. While, as the title promises, the piece—containing an excerpt from Thomas Medwin’s 1832 Memoir of Shelley—covers only Shelley’s life until his separation from his first wife and her subsequent suicide, it assumes a familiarity with Shelley’s biography beyond this point, insisting that a “rehearsal” of Shelley’s efforts to get his children back from his wife’s family would “tire our readers.”21 The well-known facts of Shelley’s life, along with those of his wife, Mary Shelley, may have prompted Akers Allen to position herself as a sort of romantic heir, inheriting—and perhaps imitating— Shelley’s poetic genius.22 Akers Allen would eventually consolidate her work under the pseudonym “Florence Percy,” committing herself to the persona she had begun constructing in her late teens. As her memoirs demonstrate, however, Akers Allen clearly published in multiple periodicals at this time—presumably wherever

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her work was accepted—and she likely used other names as well. This practice is confirmed by an 1852 prospectus for a collection of Florence Percy’s work that was circulated by her first husband, Marshall Taylor, a writer and insurance agent whom she married in 1851.23 For some unidentified reason, the proposal was unsuccessful: Akers Allen would not publish a volume of her poetry until 1855. The birth of their first child on July 25, 1852, may have prevented the Taylors from working actively to promote the volume. Marshall Taylor’s abandonment of his wife and child eight weeks after the birth to go to California would certainly have made it more urgent for Akers Allen to earn money from her writing but would likely have rendered the complicated negotiations of publication close to impossible for the single mother of a new baby. Nonetheless the prospectus is revealing in that it demonstrates the collaboration between the writer and her husband, her editors, and her publisher necessary to bring about the individualization of poetic authorship—the author in this case is a single figure who is known as “Florence Percy” and in whose name a group of poems can be identified and collected. Dated May 1, 1852, the accompanying letter, signed by Marshall Taylor, requests subscribers for “Poems By Florence Percy,” informing his audience that “the subscription price is 75 cents, but you can have them at fifty cents each, payable when delivered to subscribers,” thereby giving those who work on his behalf to solicit subscribers a profit of twenty-five cents per volume. The prospectus itself announces that “B. B. Mussey & Co., of Boston, have in contemplation the publication of a Volume of Poems by Florence Percy” and, in a move that emphasizes the importance of the relationships that Akers Allen had developed with her male editors, presents supporting praise from the editors of the Carpet-Bag, the Portland Transcript, the Green Mountain Freeman, and the Burlington Sentinel. At a basic level, the editors endorse the proposed volume: for example, D. P. Thompson, the editor of the Green Mountain Freeman, writes simply, “The author we understand is advised to collect and publish her works. We hope she will, believing her productions, all of which are of the highest order, would make with the public a very acceptable volume.”24 Although the prospectus has the name “Florence Percy” at the top, it is not at all clear who this “author” is. Reprinted from the pages of the periodicals themselves, the endorsements often take as their subject individual poems, as in this comment by John G. Saxe, editor of the Burlington Sentinel: “Her ‘Wings’ fly with great freedom and beauty of motion—the ‘Only

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Son’ is a clever boy, and the ‘Cottage Over the Way’ is a[s] pretty a cottage as one would care to see.” Similarly, the editorial voice for the Saturday Evening Post claims that “we don’t know when we came across a scrap of verse that contained more truth and poetry combined than does the ‘Only Son,’ written by ‘Juniper’ for the Boston Carpet-Bag.” In this, however, the Post points toward the consolidation of authorial identity, emphasizing (but not explicitly noting) the fact that “Juniper” is a name under which the author who is “Florence Percy” publishes her poetry. This is complicated even further by a quote from the Carpet-Bag: We have . . . a fine poem, entitled “Wings,” by another gifted lady, Mrs. M. S. M. Taylor, of Farmington Falls, Me., to which we would ask special attention. It possesses rare beauties, which secure for its fair author an enviable position among our native poets. The poem was originally published in the Portland Transcript, to which excellent and discriminating paper she has long been a regular contributor over either her maiden name of Lizzie A. Chase, or the noms de plume of “Florence Percy,” and “Florian,” behind which latter she has oftenest chosen from a shrinking timidity to conceal herself, while writing poems which would do nor to the brightest genius of the land. We are proud to rank her among our own contributors and though hardly daring to reveal her incognito without her consent, we may pronounce her unsurpassed by any of our family of writers. Here the editorial voice identifies multiple names under which a single poet publishes her work: Mrs. M. S. M. Taylor, Lizzie A. Chase, Florence Percy, and Florian. But instead of privileging the pseudonym of “Florence Percy,” under which the collection of poems is to be presented, he claims “Florian” as the marker of “genius.” Moreover, while “Mrs. M. S. M. Taylor” is identified as the “gifted lady” who writes the poem “Wings” and who uses these pseudonyms, this is clearly no more the name of the author than is “her maiden name of Lizzie A. Chase” or, by extension, the other nom de plume mentioned in the prospectus. In that all of these quotes are marshaled in support of “Florence Percy’s” proposed volume of poetry, they mark the moment at which this disparate collection of poems and pseudonyms is consolidated under one name. In ser vice of that project, the editors quoted in the prospectus identify Florence Percy as being representative of a larger literary and poetic style—she is “a poetess of great power and sweetness”—at the

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same time that they note her exceptional status: “She is one of the most promising of our female writers,” the editor of the Vermont Patriot claims, “and far superior to many that have acquired fame.” While Akers Allen is acknowledged to be a “promising . . . female writer,” the prospectus represents the effort to publish her work in a single volume as the work of men: Marshall Taylor, who signs the letter accompanying the prospectus, and the editors who endorse the project. The labor that Akers Allen puts into the publication of a book and the establishment of her public persona is difficult to tease out from the extant documentation, but it is clear that she diligently worked to keep her poetry and her persona in the public eye. It is entirely possible that the prospectus was largely Akers Allen’s effort, with Marshall Taylor signing the letter and circulating it in his name. Looking back on this time in her life fifty years later, Akers Allen represents Taylor as an insurance agent and claims to have done “about all the writing in this business, while he went gunning, played ball, and rode about ‘on business.’”25 While Samuel Pickard confirms that Taylor was, in fact, a contributor to the Carpet-Bag, which Pickard edited at the time, and that Taylor brought Akers Allen’s work to Pickard’s attention, it does seem clear that Taylor was not the most diligent of writers: after leaving for California, he publishes a few letters in the Carpet-Bag but seems not to have continued in that line for long.26 Akers Allen clearly maintained her own relationships with publishers and editors after her husband’s abandonment. When her book—Forest-Buds, From the Woods of Maine, by Florence Percy—appeared it was published by Brown, Bazin, and Company; J. S. Bazin had worked for B. B. Mussey & Co., the publisher for the volume proposed in the 1852 prospectus, for ten years before establishing a new printing business with Henry Brown and other partners. Both Akers Allen and Samuel Pickard recalled the young mother traveling to Portland to read proofs for the book in the Portland Transcript office. She must have impressed Pickard because “this led to her being employed in the office of the Transcript.”27 In the “History of One Woman’s Financial Experience,” Akers Allen later detailed her many responsibilities: “I helped keep the books, directed papers two days in the week, wrote prose and verse for the paper . . . copied the lists from time to time, wrote business letters, read proof, and did anything and every thing save to set type. When Mr. Elwell was away, I edited the paper; when Mr. Pickard was away, I attended to the business, deposited money in the bank, paid notes, telegraphed the paper-maker, and so forth.”28 The Transcript facilitated the circulation of Forest-Buds by offering “a beautifully bound copy of Florence Percy’s

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Poems” to any subscriber to the paper “who will send us the names of two new subscribers with the money for one year in advance.”29 This method of distributing Forest-Buds increased the range of Akers Allen’s reputation. While Forest-Buds was rarely reviewed, the book seems to have reached the editors of other newspapers: in December  1855, for example, the Boston Transcript reported that it had “recently copied one of the pieces,” which was then reprinted by thirty-two of the newspapers with which the Transcript exchanged issues.30 This method was also beneficial on a more local level, helping to establish an intimate relationship between readers of the Transcript and “Florence Percy.” Whether or not readers knew that Akers Allen “did anything and every thing save to set type” in the Transcript office, poems by Florence Percy appeared regularly in the paper. When Akers Allen went abroad in December 1859 (during which fateful journey she sent “Rock Me to Sleep” to the editor of the Saturday Evening Post), she published a series of letters and poems to the Transcript audience, whom she frames as the loved ones she leaves behind. The Transcript editors capitalized on her popularity, promising “Foreign Correspondence, by our gifted contributor, Florence Percy” before either “news of the day” or “tales, sketches, and poems” in their plans for the new year.31 The identity of “Florence Percy” was not difficult to discover for anyone who made the effort. “Lizzie A. C. Taylor” holds the copyright to Forest-Buds and was widely known to be the author, as is revealed in an 1855 Portland Transcript announcement that “Florence” whose work had been “extremely copied and much admired,” was actually “Mrs. E. A. C. Taylor of Farmington Falls, Maine.”32 What Akers Allen works successfully to do, however, is exploit the conventions of pseudonymity such that the revelation of her “real name” and the reestablishment of her public persona is continually performed and re-performed, satisfying her readers at every turn. This performative exposure of the authorial self can be seen in a poem titled “My Name” that Pickard claims was written in response to a query from him about her multiple pseudonyms. “One day,” he explains, “I wrote wondering which among all her names would become her angel name. Her answer was this fine poem, which has been read & sung all over the world.”33 The poem insists that “the name which mortals give me / Will not be my angel name!”34 While this name might be the one given her at birth—Elizabeth Ann Chase—it might also be any one of the other names she had come to be known by, including her multiple pseudonyms and married names. Yet more than one reader presumably agreed with “Ingomar,” whose poem “A Response to Florence

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Percy,” published alongside a reprinting of “My Name” in the fall of 1855, seems to assume that the “Angel name” referred to in the poem was simply “Florence.”35 (Pickard and Akers Allen might have been having fun when they published “A Week-Day Sermon” by Akers Allen under the pseudonym “Mist” just below Ingomar’s poem.) Similarly, while Akers Allen claims the name “Florence Percy” for her own, she also names her own daughter Florence Percy in 1852. In poems published subsequent to the child’s birth, Akers Allen plays with the notion of the infant as her simultaneous double and inspiration. For example, in “To My Namesake,” a poem included in ForestBuds, the speaker claims that her name “had no sound of harmony / Till since thou has beneath its burden smiled,—/ Has it not caught new melody from thee?”36 Here she teasingly associates the name passed to her from the Shelleys and then on to the child with “melody,” implying not only that the name itself sounds more melodic when applied to the child but that her pseudonymous self has been inspired by, or has “caught new melody” from, the existence of the namesake. She goes on to conflate her own success with that of the young girl to whom she speaks: I had despaired of greatness,—my interests Aspired not to the lofty or sublime, And dreamed not of renown,—but when, years hence, As faith declares will be revealed by time, Thou to the laurel-crown hast proved thy claim, My name—for it is thine,—will grace “the scroll of Fame!” (123) Akers Allen’s quotation from Henry T. Tuckerman’s poem “Love and Fame” in the last line seems to be an attempt to position her poem as a renunciation of ambition and fame, but her use of the past tense—“I had despaired of greatness”—implies that perhaps her aspirations have been renewed by the inspiration of the namesake. And while the final line implies that it is the infant who will grow up to be famous, Akers Allen is clearly playing here with the possibility that it is she (the person writing this poem) rather than the child (a three-year-old toddler when Forest-Buds is published) who will bring fame to their name. Akers Allen’s very public play with authorial identity is most interesting for the way it reveals the workings of pseudonymity and Wolosky’s notion of “the modesty topos,” which I discussed in Chapter 4. Taken to its limit, Wolosky’s argument asks that we think about pseudonymity as a choice as

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well as a convention, in which women writers were fully aware of the effects of “concealment” and “exposure.” “The modesty topos as a literary event does not reduce to invisibility and submission,” Wolosky insists, “but rather also works as a vehicle of assertion: of deploying such public opportunity as was available to women within specific cultural norms.”37 The risks and rewards of “deploying . . . public opportunity” for Akers Allen—both of which led, I argue, to the “Rock Me to Sleep” controversy—are evident in a letter written in 1863 to Akers Allen’s soon-to-be third husband, Elijah Allen, by the naturalist John Burroughs. Burroughs, whose first essay was published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1860, met Allen while teaching school in Orange, New Jersey, and the two became fast friends, with Allen introducing Burroughs to Walt Whitman. When Allen began to court Elizabeth Akers, who was in D.C. working as a clerk in the War Department, he tells Burroughs that Akers and Florence Percy “are one and the same.” Burroughs insists that he “did not dream” of such a thing, and insists on his admiration of Florence Percy’s work: “I have long regarded her as one of the best, if not the best of our female Poets.”38 For Burroughs, who has no personal acquaintance with Akers, it is her natural womanhood that renders her such a fine poet: “One thing that strikes me about her poems is, they are so genuine; they all seem to contain an experience, to be part of her self, a chip from her heart. She is a fine artist, yet a finer woman, that is she writes because she feels and not because she desires to make verse.” Burroughs’s judgment of Florence Percy and her poetry is based upon a perception of her as wholly natural and entirely without agency; poetry originates here in feeling, not in labor or the “mak[ing of] verse,” and that poetry affords readers immediate access to her interiority. It creates an intimacy that nurtures and inspires readers, as it did “Ingomar.” But such intimacy also presents a risk to Akers Allen, as readers’ assumed familiarity with her and her work can “chip” away at her own autonomy. Burroughs’s attention quickly and predictably turns from Akers Allen’s work to his own, expressing delight at the news that “Florence Percy” had read an essay in manuscript that he had sent to Allen. Her response, however, is less important to him than where she kept the essay when she was done: “At this point I received your last note or postscript as you call it; and have been thinking ever since of my essay in Florence Percy’s bosom! You are a cruel joker! Really I should like to know how the thing felt. I dare say it has budded and sprouted in every line; every chrysalis thought has expanded into a golden winged fancy! If you ever get it again bring it to me by all means; I am sure it will have met with a strange metamorphosis!” Proximity to the

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poet’s body has transformed Burroughs’s work, allowing it to bloom and mature at an unnatural rate. Burroughs’s essay is associated with a plant or a butterfly—a living, natural entity—but contact with “Florence Percy’s bosom” renders it grotesquely expansive. The ideas of the essay are conflated with the material object itself, with Burroughs requesting that Allen “bring it to me by all means” so he can see it and, presumably, obtain a kind of proxy contact with Florence Percy’s body. It seems telling here that while Burroughs’s fantasy is an erotic one, it is also wholly textual, based on an engagement between Florence Percy’s poems, his own manuscript, and the letter he writes to Elijah Allen. To some extent, at least, this is Akers Allen’s doing in that she has constructed her public persona in a way to allow for these sorts of revelations and rejoinders. The pleasure of discovery that Burroughs feels when he finds out that “Florence Percy” is “Mrs. Akers” is similar to that he feels when he “discovers” his essay in the poet’s bosom; while other readers might be at greater removes from the poet’s body, they no doubt share his pleasure and savor it. Yet Burroughs’s letter also reveals the danger of appropriation, exploitation, and violence in Florence Percy’s encounters with her readers. Burroughs’s willingness to share his erotic fantasy with Elijah Allen is unnerving, as is his assumption that his own work would somehow benefit from an extended and more intimate engagement with the poet. He assumes that the relationship will serve this purpose for Elijah Allen, who is himself an aspiring writer: “I can see that she will do you great good. Business, with its rubbish, was crushing your flower plants; but I perceive her hand will train them up into the light again.” While the work of both men exists only in manuscript at this moment, both clearly anticipate Akers Allen’s influence will lead somehow organically to print. Indeed, the seeds of the “Rock Me to Sleep” controversy lie here. Even as the work of “Florence Percy” is consolidated under that name, creating and maintaining a public persona under which further work can be published, readers claim proprietorship over the poems and the poet herself. As was the case with Burroughs, however, their engagement with “Florence Percy” is as much about their own poetic fantasies as it is about her poetry.

Writing, Reading, and Reprinting “Rock Me To Sleep” Florence Percy’s poem “Rock Me To Sleep” was published in the Saturday Evening Post on June 9, 1860, and was quickly reprinted in newspapers across

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the country, from New England to the Midwest and eventually the West Coast. As Meredith McGill notes of what she calls “the culture of reprinting,” “dissemination ran in advance of, and often stood in lieu of, payment.”39 Akers Allen received just five dollars for “Rock Me to Sleep” from the Post but saw her national reputation increase exponentially upon the poem’s publication. The extent of the poem’s circulation and success most likely came as a surprise to Akers Allen, but the practice of reprinting would have been very familiar to her. She had published in newspapers for approximately thirteen years by the time “Rock Me to Sleep” appeared, and she had seen several of her poems reprinted regionally. “My Name” was likely her most widely circulated poem prior to “Rock Me to Sleep.” In 1857, “My Name” was reprinted in The Christian’s Gift, edited by Rufus Wainwright Clark and published by John P. Jewett & Co.; the poem appeared alongside selections by Hemans, Sigourney, Longfellow, and Wordsworth. While none of these poems appear to have been solicited and were likely not paid for, Akers Allen’s inclusion here indicates the popularity of “My Name” and her name—or at least her pseudonym. Akers Allen’s ser vice as “general utility woman” or de facto editor, at the Portland Transcript from 1855 to 1859, just before publishing “Rock Me to Sleep,” and again in 1861 was no less impor tant than her experience as a poet. She later recalled that when Edward Elwell went on vacation, “he handed his scissors over to me as a badge of responsibility for the editing while he was away.”40 “Editing” in this case refers specifically to the process of clipping pieces from one newspaper in order to reprint in another, an experience that provided Akers Allen with an insider’s perspective on the process of reprinting and likely allowed her to prosper in such a marketplace. Akers Allen seems to have written “Rock Me to Sleep” with the goal of wide circulation in mind. This is not to say that her employment of sentimentality is somehow insincere or manipulative. It is, rather, to acknowledge what many nineteenth-century American women poets knew at the time: that sentimentality was a culturally acceptable and financially remunerative position from which a woman could both express herself creatively and market her work (and herself) to publishers, critics, and readers. In fact, most women poets wrote poems with the same goal. But Akers Allen’s experience on both sides of the scissors, I am arguing, likely primed her to succeed in this venture. Emotional connection with a broad audience is key, as is the seemingly contradictory expectation that the poet has written the poem based on her own experience, and yet with, perhaps, no audience in mind at all.

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Akers Allen’s mother died when she was a young child and it seems likely that at least a portion of the many poems she wrote about the separation of mothers and children by death are in some way “about” her own mother. Yet to stop at an autobiographical reading of “Rock Me to Sleep” and these other poems is, I believe, to miss a larger point about how nineteenth-century Americans understood poetry to function and how Akers Allen capitalized on that understanding. Years after the original publication of “Rock Me to Sleep,” Akers Allen would insist that it was “a cry of pain; a natural enough longing of a woman to whom the world had not been over kind, for a return, if but for one evening, to the safe shelter which as a child she found in the arms of her mother, long ago dead.”41 The details here are vague: the speaker is “a woman,” but her pain and its source are left open for interpretation. The poem itself is similarly devoid of specifics regarding the speaker’s circumstances; emotion is highlighted at the expense of narrative, and repetition takes priority over detail. The six-stanza poem is worth reproducing in full: Backward, turn backward, oh, Time, in your flight, Make me a child again, just for to-night! Mother, come back from the echoless shore, Take me again to your heart as of yore— Kiss from my forehead the furrows of care, Smooth the few silver threads out of my hair— Over my slumber your loving watch keep— Rock me to sleep, mother—rock me to sleep! Backward, flow backward, oh, tide of the years! I am so weary of toil and of tears— Toil without recompense—tears all in vain— Take them, and give me my childhood again! I have grown weary of dust and decay, Weary of flinging my soul-wealth away— Weary of sowing for others to reap;— Rock me to sleep, mother—rock me to sleep! Tired of the hollow, the base, the untrue, Mother, oh, mother, my heart calls for you! Many a summer the grass has grown green,

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Blossomed and faded, our faces between— Yet with strong yearning and passionate pain Long I to-night for your presence again;— Come from the silence so long and so deep— Rock me to sleep, mother—rock me to sleep! Over my heart, in the days that are flown, No love like mother-love ever has shone— No other worship abides and endures Faithful, unselfish and patient, like yours— None like a mother can charm away pain From the sick soul and the world-weary brain; Slumbers soft calms o’er my heavy lids creep— Rock me to sleep, mother—rock me to sleep! Come, let your brown hair, just lighted with gold, Fall on your shoulders again as of old— Let it drop over my forehead to-night, Shading my faint eyes away from the light— For with its sunny-edged shadows once more Haply will throng the sweet visions of yore. Lovingly, softly, its bright billows sweep— Rock me to sleep, mother—rock me to sleep! Mother, dear mother! the years have been long Since I last listened your lullaby song— Sing then, and unto my soul it shall seem Womanhood’s years have been only a dream;— Clasped to your heart in a loving embrace, With your light lashes just sweeping my face, Never hereafter to wake or to weep, Rock me to sleep, mother—rock me to sleep!42 Addressing her “long ago dead” mother, the speaker pronounces herself weary of life and yearning for a reunion with the one person who could console her. The emphasis here is on the physical and emotional separation between the two women—the way in which the earth covering her mother’s

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body deprives the speaker of her comforting presence. There is no discussion, however, of the cause of her mother’s death or the immediate reason for the speaker’s suffering. It is only clear that she is compelled to labor without relief or compensation. Such self-sacrificing “toil” is identified as specifically female only in the last stanza; a reunion with her dead mother would make her feel, the speaker insists, as if “Womanhood’s years have been only a dream.” Suffering, work, and womanhood are clearly inseparable for the speaker in “Rock Me to Sleep”; the only solution, for her, is to return somehow to childhood and to the comfort of her mother’s embrace, which would release her from responsibility and pain. As in many women’s elegies of the period, the speaker here yearns for the reconnection of a bond that has been broken by death.43 As Mary Louise Kete explains, the use of the apostrophe in these elegies “creates the site in which the important utopian promise of sentimentality—of nonviolated community, of restored losses, of healed wounds—can be offered to its writers and readers. It is the method by which obstructions are removed and salutary bonds instituted and protected.”44 Many women poets proposed a heavenly reunion, in anticipation of which the speaker of the poem would be sustained throughout the remainder of her life. Akers Allen’s reunion, however, is intended to ease the speaker into a death caused by the unremitting self-sacrifice constantly demanded of women. (This despite Akers Allen’s later assertion that the speaker wishes a “return, if but for one evening, to the safe shelter” of her mother’s arms.) There is no mention of a utopian heavenly community, no imagining of what the afterlife might consist of; it is, quite simply, an absence of labor and pain. Effectively rendered a child again by her mother’s care, the speaker desires “Never hereafter to wake or to weep, / Rock me to sleep, mother—rock me to sleep!”45 Ironically, this imperative attempts to recall the mother figure from the “echoless shore” of death, forcing her back into the selflessness of womanhood that has so wearied the speaker herself. In other words, despite popular sentimental rhetoric, it is far better, according to this poem, to have a mother than to be one. Prior to achieving this erasure of the self in death, the speaker attempts to physically bridge the distance of the grave, bringing mother and daughter closer together, if only in fantasy. In fact, as the mother becomes more and more corporeal, a figure actually able to take her daughter in a “loving embrace,” the two appear to fuse into one woman, the interchangeability of their lives and deaths made clear for the reader. The speaker implores her mother to:

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Come, let your brown hair, just lighted with gold, Fall on your shoulders again as of old— Let it drop over my forehead to-night, Shading my faint eyes away from the light— It isn’t clear how, exactly, the mother’s “brown hair” drops over the speaker’s forehead, or, in the last stanza, how the mother’s “light lashes” are “just sweeping [the speaker’s] face.” Rather than providing the reader with a comforting sense of the mother’s constant presence, this dissolution of individual identity implies that maternal comfort is merely a fantasy for every woman who is herself a mother. Both mother and daughter are, after all, both mother and daughter. Without providing any narrative of change, the poem allows the speaker and the reader to mourn the loss of their mothers as well as their own loss of selfhood in “Womanhood’s cares” but doesn’t undermine the domestic ideologies that require such cyclical sacrifice from generations of women. The poem itself ultimately fulfills for the reader the demand for comfort that is both awakened by and denied the speaker. The unvaried use of dactylic tetrameter cut by catalexis lulls the reader, allowing her an uninterrupted, almost hypnotic, experience of the poem, even as its speaker commands the sacrifice of her dead mother and expresses her own wish to die as well. The meter recalls the rocking of a cradle or the gentle and repetitive calming of a hysterical child, an experience with which many of Akers Allen’s female readers could have identified. The use of the imperative (“Rock me to sleep, mother—rock me to sleep!”) in every stanza similarly recalls women’s experiences of themselves as both mothers and children, who might imagine themselves, as the speaker does, on the receiving end of the same kind of comfort they dispense on a daily basis. The speaker of “Rock Me to Sleep” is, in fact, an “everywoman,” of sorts, and the poem is carefully constructed to draw the (female) reader in, to make her lose herself in the speaker’s lament just as the speaker and the mother figure lose their individuated selves in the final stanzas. Unlike Sarah Forten, Akers Allen does not use a collective “we” in her poetry; in fact, her speakers often seem isolated and despondent, unable for whatever reason to connect with others. Yet the imperative in “Rock Me to Sleep” functions to create a community of readers, a female audience who unite around their shared weariness and desire for comfort that is only obtainable in death—or poetry. In her study of “call-to-arms poems” published during the Civil War, Jessica Roberts examines the way in which the

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“imperative mood itself—the fact of it as a seemingly inevitable grammatical component of the poems—syntactically evokes and subsumes individuals in the creation of a national voice.” She argues that the imperative creates a “collective ‘we’ from imagined, disparate ‘I’s’ and ‘you’s,” a collective that is then strengthened with each refashioning and reprinting of the poem.46 Similarly, the multiple reprintings of “Rock Me to Sleep” simultaneously originate in and intensify this shared sense of identity and interchangeability among women.47 In this collective, women’s identities—as mothers, as daughters, perhaps even as authors and readers—merge seamlessly, in the same way that a poem clipped from one newspaper is incorporated without disruption (or copyright infringement) in another publication or, for that matter, in a private collection. Many of Akers Allen’s poems were clipped and pasted into scrapbooks or recopied into commonplace books. One par ticular example illustrates the way this practice highlights the sentimental logic behind the reading of poetry, the circulation of texts, and the fluidity of authorial identity. In 1883, an admirer wrote to Akers Allen to explain that his wife had copied several of her poems into a book as part of a “ labor of love”: “[My wife] copied more than 200 poems or parts of poems, and the dear book is now one of my treasures. I never part with it; but wherever I go it goes. . . . She is an artist by instinct & has a true woman’s heart and soul.”48 Ellen Gruber Garvey calls such scrapbooking practices “writing with scissors” and argues that the resulting scrapbooks “open a window onto the lives and thoughts of people who did not respond to the world with their own writing.”49 The letter written by this particular scrapbooker’s husband demonstrates his own sense that her book “written with scissors” reveals her “lives and thoughts” (or “heart and soul”). Yet it also, I argue, points to the risks inherent in the processes that lend themselves to such practices. While the letter is intended as a compliment to Akers Allen, the man’s wife is the one identified as the “artist” here. The act of creating the “dear book”—selecting the poems, arranging them, and copying them into a bound volume—is essentially equated with the act of writing a volume of poetry oneself, primarily because the wife’s “heart and soul” render her the ideal sentimental reader. Once rendered fugitive by its appearance in a newspaper rather than a published volume, and tethered to authorial identity only by a pseudonym or the site of its original publication, the poem in this paradigm is fair game, vulnerable to recapture by any reader who has been rendered an “artist by instinct” through the reading experience. To feel what the poet feels and to be conversant, as most nineteenth-century

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Americans were, with the conventions of sentimental poetry is, within the tangle of the culture of reprinting, to have the possibility of authorship opened to you. Akers Allen’s early career—the immersion in the production of paper and print; the use of multiple pseudonyms that are finally subsumed under “Florence Percy”; the cultivation of intimate relationships between “Florence Percy” and her readers—rendered her work particularly open to use by readers who were trained to engage (inter)actively with poetry on a daily basis. In the case of “Rock Me to Sleep,” the intentionally sentimental appeal of the poem, combined with the circumstances of its original publication and its subsequent circulation, resulted in an almost outof-control series of claims to authorship, each with its own emotional narrative of origination intended to validate the claimant’s right to the expression of suffering and grief in the poem. Whether or not these pretenders actually thought they wrote “Rock Me to Sleep” is impossible to prove—but it is also, to some extent, irrelevant. What interests me here is what the fantasy of authorship in the “Rock Me to Sleep” controversy reveals about the composition, publication, and circulation of poetry in midnineteenth-century America, as well as the way in which such practices shaped (and were shaped by) gendered notions of authorship that were rapidly changing in mid-nineteenth-century America.

The “Rock Me to Sleep” Controversy The first indication of the poem’s popularity among literary pretenders came in April 1861, when the Saturday Evening Post cited the attribution of the poem to “a printer named Lawrence” in the Sidney (OH) Journal. In defense of Akers Allen, the editors of the Post—who had, of course, been the first to publish “Rock Me to Sleep”—responded with a firm negation of the printer’s claim: “Whether ‘Florence Percy’ among her accomplishments numbers that of ‘printer,’ we are unable to say—but certainly no Mr. Lawrence ever wrote the poem in question.”50 (Of course the irony here is that Akers Allen likely did count “printer” as one of her many “accomplishments.” Whether the editors of the Post were aware of that fact is unclear.) Among the other aspirants to authorship of the poem were “a married lady whose maiden name—singularly enough—was Florence Percy,”51 a blacksmith named Edward Young,52 and a Miss Lizzie Algers, of New York City, who “wrote it in Europe, while overwhelmed with grief for the mother so touchingly called.”53

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The publication of Akers Allen’s Poems in 1866 silenced these claimants and their supporters, at least in part because the copyright of the volume legally protected the poem from theft. The copyright to Poems was held by its publisher, Ticknor and Fields, who purchased it from Elijah Allen for $250; his wife later insisted that he “had no experience whatever in book-making or publication.” “I doubt if a more foolish or suicidal bargain was ever made,” she wrote.54 Despite this loss, the volume, which appeared in Ticknor and Fields’s elite “blue and gold series,” confirmed Akers Allen’s status as an established author. As Sarah Wadsworth notes in her study of this series, “Each new book that appeared in the decorative blue and gold binding was supported, in terms of cultural status, by the series’ distinguished backlist,” which included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others.55 The critic for the New York Evening Gazette is clearly thinking of the volume in this context in his response to the authorship controversy: We say that it was written by her since she has included it in the blue and gold edition of her poems which was published not long ago in Boston. This fact proves nothing to those who dispute her claims in behalf of themselves or others, but it settles the question as regards the general reader who has no interest in it beyond what he derives from the poetry. If an author of reputation says that he or she wrote such or such a poem, his or her word ought to end all controversy, particularly such controversies as are waged by persons of whom no one ever heard before or cares to hear again.56 Here Akers Allen’s established reputation, attained by satisfying the “general reader” and confirmed by the publication of her book, is said to be enough to prove that she wrote “Rock Me to Sleep.” Claimants to the poem “of whom no one ever heard before” have no such reputation and therefore have no grounds for their argument. This logic informed most critical commentary on the question of the poem’s authorship until the publication of A Vindication of the Claim of Alexander M. W. Ball, of Elizabeth, N. J., to the Authorship of the Poem, Rock me to Sleep, Mother, a seventy-page pamphlet written and published by Oliver A. Morse, a judge and a personal friend of Ball’s, in May 1867, around the same time that Akers Allen published a second edition of Poems (Figure 7). The primary argument of the Vindication is that Ball had written the poem

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in 1856, four years before its publication in the Saturday Evening Post; the central piece of evidence is a collection of letters by friends who attested to having heard Ball read the poem aloud while it was in manuscript. Also included are Ball’s version of “Rock Me to Sleep” (fifteen stanzas versus Akers Allen’s six) and a number of poems written by Ball about his mother. As Akers Allen would point out in an account of the controversy written some years later, the Vindication was “bound in boards, [and] decorated with blue and gold,” in a conscious simulation of the prestigious Ticknor and Fields series in which her Poems was published.57 On the one hand, this gesture might point to Ball’s borrowing from and imitation of the markers of professional authorship, without having done what professional authors have done to achieve their reputations. The Vindication essentially allows Ball to publish a “blue and gold” volume of his poetry which then, in a circular fashion, provides him with a reputation that confirms his authorship of the poem in question.58 On the other hand, however, the physical appearance of the Vindication could be a stab at the elite status of the Ticknor and Fields series, an attempt to empty that particular binding of its cultural significance. This gesture of mockery accords well with the way in which Ball and his supporters dismiss professionalism in literature in general—in authors, publishers, and critics. One of the most striking examples of this stance is the complete avoidance of the issue of poetics in Ball’s defense, despite the best efforts of Akers Allen’s defenders to make such a discussion central to the controversy. In a scalding review of the Vindication published in the New York Times, William Douglas O’Connor calls Ball’s version of “Rock Me to Sleep” “a jabber of jingle cast off by the automatic action of a thoroughly prosaic and shallow mind,” and goes on to find the pretender guilty of “arbitrary evidence, ignorant pronunciation, false accounting, superfluous syllables, bald prose, deficient quantity, verbal and metrical faults of the grossest character.”59 Responding to O’Connor’s review of the Vindication, the author of “Who Wrote ‘Rock Me To Sleep, Mother’?” in the Northern Monthly mocks the critic as an elitist “pedagogue” for whom poetics is more important than emotion in the assessment of poetry: “He knows dactyls, spondees, and such like—the harness into which things must go when they come welling from the heart, or all the capitals of Europe will be convulsed. . . . ‘A mountain of testimony’— think of that, an Alp of witnesses!—will not, for him, balance the inversion of an accent, or the truncation of a dactyl.”60 Professional authorship—not only a familiarity with one’s technical craft but also an understanding of and established relationship with the American literary marketplace—becomes

Figure 7. Title page of A Vindication of the Claim of Alexander M. W. Ball, of Elizabeth, N. J., to the Authorship of the Poem, Rock me to Sleep, Mother (New York: M. W. Dodd, 1867). Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.

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a potential liability as Ball and his defenders use a masculinized, middle-class conception of private, amateur authorship to attempt to claim “Rock Me To Sleep” as Ball’s property. It is important to note that this is very different from the sorts of imitative poetics that I’ve discussed elsewhere in this book. Unlike Harriet Farley’s “Factory Blossoms for Queen Victoria,” which is “suggested by” Hannah F. Gould’s “American Wild Flowers, for Queen Victoria” (discussed in Chapter  2), Ball’s poem is not meant to complement or critique Akers Allen’s poem. Rather, it is meant to displace it and to devalue the process that led to its publication. In introducing Ball’s version of “Rock Me to Sleep,” Morse definitively states that “the whole poem, of fifteen verses, of eight lines each, was written by Alexander M. W. Ball, of Elizabeth, New Jersey, in the latter part of the year 1856, and the early part of the year 1857. It is as follows, and as a whole has never before been in print.”61 The point here, of course, is that part of the poem has appeared in print—in Akers Allen’s “Rock Me to Sleep,” which is marked not as imitation but as theft. Throughout the Vindication, in fact, Ball’s labor—the very fact that he is a businessman and a capitalist—is erased, while Akers Allen’s labor as a poet and as a professional author is highlighted. Ball, the Vindication insists, is a middle-class family man and an amateur, whose retiring nature prevents him from publishing his own work or mounting his own defense when it is claimed by another. “He sought no reputation as a poet,” recalls Elias Warner Leavenworth, another lawyer and one of Ball’s most ardent defenders. “He had never published a verse, or permitted it to be published by his friends. He sought no honors from an admiring public. He neither wished his name blazoned in the public press, or his works offered for sale at the booksellers’ stalls.”62 Ball’s attempt to redeem his poem from Akers Allen’s grasp is represented as a necessary task—but one that he was willing to undertake only at the urging of his friends, and with their invaluable assistance. “A man’s duty to himself and family sometimes calls on him to wage a contest he would else shrink from and abandon,” writes another of Ball’s defenders, Luther R. Marsh, in a letter to Oliver Morse that appears as the “Introductory Note” to the Vindication. “These considerations, in a great measure, have been overcome in him by a chivalric forbearance towards his chief contestant,” Marsh adds, “and she would have walked, mistress, over the field, had not you, whose leisure permitted, whose tendencies are in the way of such an investigation, and whose character gives voucher for every statement of fact, undertaken of your own accord, unsolicited by him, the arranging of some of the prominent

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proofs in his behalf.”63 Ball’s modesty and his reluctance to appear before the public eye are therefore favorably compared to Akers Allen’s pursuit of literary success. In presenting Ball’s case, Morse places the two candidates side by side: “Mrs Akers is an authoress favorably known to the public, whose writings have the imprimatur of the press of Ticknor and Fields. Mr Ball is a gentleman in private life, who has never published a line, and is unknown as a poet, except to his intimate friends.”64 While the contrast is ostensibly a representation of Ball as David to Akers Allen’s Goliath, it also functions to highlight and contrast the very different ways in which the two writers produce and circulate their poetry. Akers Allen is public, whereas Ball is private. Akers Allen is identified by her profession (“authoress”) whereas Ball is identified by his class status (“gentleman”). Perhaps most importantly, Akers Allen is associated with Ticknor and Fields, a prominent publishing enterprise, while Ball is associated more modestly with “his intimate friends.” It is as if Akers Allen has no identity— no role, no gender, no relationships—outside of the professional. As I demonstrated in the first section of this chapter, of course, Morse’s representation of Akers Allen is accurate: she did actively seek a “reputation as a poet,” strategically placing her work in periodicals and publishing two volumes of her work. She succeeded in having her “name blazoned in the public press,” carefully selecting and manipulating her public persona. What the Vindication seeks to do is lay bare this process in order to highlight Ball’s supposed suitability for authorship. As Eliza Richards says of Edgar Allan Poe’s relationship to the nineteenth-century Poetess, Ball effectively “establishes a cross-gendered identification with women poets even as he attempts to upstage them.”65 But class, I want to point out, plays as large a role here as gender. Ball’s poetic process, as it is described in the Vindication and other supporting texts, links him to a genteel mode of manuscript production and circulation that was common in the early to mid-nineteenth-century United States and persisted throughout the century in models of parlor authorship more commonly associated with women. In fact, the representation of Ball is similar to that of Sigourney in her early career and of James prior to the publication of Wales, and Other Poems. The differences, of course, are important here: Ball is a man who, because of an accident of birth and because he is able to support himself comfortably in a profession, does not have to worry about economic survival. As Susan Coultrap-McQuin observes, “In the early nineteenth century, people assumed, often rightly, that a writer was a gentleman of leisure who wrote for his own enjoyment and that of his literary

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equals. . . . He wrote when the spirit moved him, not because he needed money or because he wanted popularity.”66 While writing eventually became a more acceptable way of earning a living toward the middle of the century, “the ideal of the leisured writer persisted,” with publication often seen as a betrayal of a middle-class identity built upon ideals of privacy and propriety (14).67 Ball takes advantage of this “ideal,” both to promote the image of himself as a poet and to condemn Akers Allen for her success. In a series of letters included in the Vindication, correspondents accordingly attest not only to Ball’s authorship of the poem but to the middle-class surroundings and family life that facilitated his role as “leisured writer.”68 The first letter, written to Ball by Mrs. Seaver, a family friend, sets the standard of proof, both economic and literary: A projected visit by myself and Mrs. —— was carried into execution. Upon our arriving we found that Mrs. Ball had gone to Leroy to place her daughter at school, but at your urgent request we remained till her return. It was before her return that one evening you read the disputed poem, and so distinct is my recollection of the circumstances, that the room and the positions occupied by all of us, are before me.69 At its most basic level, this letter functions to prove Ball’s authorship of the poem. The details about the letter writer’s visit to Newark and Mrs. Ball’s conveyance of her young daughter to school seem to be intended merely to date the reading of the poem: following another letter that mentions Mrs. Ball’s absence on this journey, Morse reports, “A bill now before the writer rendered by the Principal of the Leroy school, at the beginning of Mr. Ball’s daughter’s first term, fixes the date called for by the writers of the above letters in February, 1857” (29). Yet both the extended visit and Maria Ball’s attendance at boarding school also confirm Ball’s status as a gentleman—his domestic comfort and hospitality, as well as the money necessary to provide his daughter with a boarding school education. According to the Vindication, Ball’s social status also allows poetry to infuse his daily life as well as that of his guests; having come to his house on professional or personal matters, the conversation seems inevitably to have turned to poetry. “I called on you at your house to ascertain where you purchased a set of damask window-curtains; as I wanted to procure the same kind,” writes one of Ball’s friends. “During my visit you read me that poem, with others” (30). Yet again, this intimate scene

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of private circulation is said to be proven by the presence of a bill: “I am confirmed in my recollection of the time, by finding that the curtains I purchased on your recommendation were charged to me in September of that year, and it took some time to procure them” (30–31). Like the letters from Ball’s friends and family, bills are used throughout the Vindication to signify Ball’s social status as well as proof of his authorship. As Morse explains, Ball’s supposed draft of the poem was shown to a committee of public figures including publishers, editors, physicians, and a minister: “It was noticed by these gentlemen, that one of these pieces of paper on which this draft was written, and unfortunately the piece which has been lost, was a tradesman’s bill rendered to Mr. Ball in September 1856. Of course this writing might have been made at any time on a bill of an older date, but where so many bills are presented and paid as in Mr. Ball’s house, the presumption is that this one was thus used by him about the time of its presentation” (51–52). The conveniently “lost” piece of paper demonstrates Ball’s poetic process (he is so inspired that he composes on whatever writing surface is most handy) as well as his class status and economic standing (he is so rich that an innumerable amount of bills are “presented and paid” in his house). The actual absence of the draft does nothing to diminish the evidence it represents. Rather, it is effectively replaced by the pages of letters that crowd the Vindication—letters that represent Ball’s social importance and influence. A review in the Nation confirmed the success of this strategy when they come out in support of Ball’s claim to the poem, insisting, “We are to suppose that Mr. J. Burroughs Hyde, of this city; Mr. Lewis C. Grover, of Newark, N. J.; Mr. A. M. W. Ball, of Elizabeth, N. J., and numerous other reputable citizens of this State and of New Jersey, are guilty of falsehood, or else we are to believe that the popular poem, ‘Rock me to sleep, mother,’ was in existence, in manuscript, in 1856, and well known to many friends of Mr. Ball.”70 Thus while the ostensible purpose of the Vindication is to prove that Ball did write “Rock Me to Sleep,” the argument that develops is whether or not he could have written the poem; his status as “leisured writer” becomes far more important than any draft or manuscript, and certainly more important than evidence of published work—which would, in fact, work against his presentation of himself as an amateur. Having established Ball as gentleman amateur, then, his defenders set to work to prove that he is capable of the kind of emotional depth that the author of “Rock Me to Sleep” is assumed to have. In the Vindication, for example, Morse insists that Ball’s version is “a genuine

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poem,” one that “came from the soul of the writer.” “It was not conceived, but felt,” he claims. “It did not arise from the brain, or fancy, but from the heart, or it would not find an answering chord in so many hearts.”71 Such a characterization of the poem and of Ball as a poet resonates with Rufus Wilmot Griswold’s description of the female poet, inspired by the heart rather than the intellect, the recorder of spontaneous effusions of emotion rather than the creator of carefully constructed verses. In the “Preface” to The Female Poets of America (1849), Griswold asserts, “It is less easy to be assured of the genuineness of literary ability in women than in men. The moral nature of women, in its finest and richest development, partakes of some of the qualities of genius; it assumes, at least, the similitude of that which in men is the characteristic or accompaniment of the highest grade of mental inspiration. We are in danger, therefore, of mistaking for the efflorescent energy of creative intelligence, that which is only the exuberance of personal ‘feelings unemployed.’ ”72 Similarly, Ball’s poetry—the fifteen-stanza version of “Rock Me to Sleep, Mother” as well as a number of other poems included in the Vindication—is described as “unstudied verses,” which are the product of his “marked tenderness over the memory of his mother.”73 The very length of Ball’s version of “Rock Me to Sleep” is used to frame him as the ideal son, whose love for his mother inspires the poem, and whose poem expresses a more idealistic, even spiritualist, vision of the mother’s ability to comfort her child. While the first stanzas of the two versions are the same, Ball follows with three stanzas of his own that introduce spirits encouraging the speaker to cease lamenting the death of his mother because their relationship will continue after death. Later in the poem, their efforts are represented as successful: Stilled are my tumults, I see in the sky Loved ones whose splendors have drowned every sigh, Faces familiar of friends here no more, Fairer and fonder than ever before— Glorified figures that stoop to caress, Mighty to comfort, and mighty to bless— Bright is the vision—no more can I weep, Rock me to sleep, mother, rock me to sleep.74 At the end of Ball’s version, the speaker seems to have died, announcing “With my dear mother, kind watch I will keep, / She charges the angels to

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rock me to sleep” (20).75 The supposed restoration of the nine additional stanzas—or, as Ball would have it, the proof that Akers Allen had removed nine stanzas—is said to demonstrate his superiority to Akers Allen as both child and poet; in a further twist on the feminization of Ball in the Vindication, he is also represented as a more perfect mother. Using the story of King Solomon and the disputed maternity of an infant, Morse attempts to explain how the fifteen-stanza poem is superior to the six-stanza version: “will not the public, guided by like wisdom, with the whole poem, the full creation, the born child, before them, pronounce that the verses published by Mrs. Akers, though beautiful in themselves, are disjecta membra, and that therefore she could not have been the mother” (35–36). The implication here is that a distinctly non-maternal Akers Allen tears the poem/child apart in her blind desire for fame and fortune; Ball, who is the true mother of the poem/child, needs only to retain that which he claims he has already written in order to prove authorship. Therefore, in Morse’s version of events, Ball’s very active revision and reframing of Akers Allen’s original poem is elided in order to position Akers Allen as the aggressor in the controversy and Ball as the selfsacrificing martyr. Akers Allen, on the other hand, is allowed the backhanded compliment of being a “woman of genius,” and is represented as a professional, somewhat greedy writer, “the authoress of many sweet and polished verses, which would have given her a reputation without the aid of the disputed poem” (67). Ball and his defenders make no claims to “genius.” Rather, they associate Ball with the refined feelings that are usually said to distinguish the work of women poets. One of Ball’s supporters triumphantly pronounces such feelings and the experiences that generate them superior to either genius or creativity, saying of Akers Allen’s claim to have written “Rock Me to Sleep”: “We can suppose that a young woman of that age, or under, might have the genius, out of pure fancy, to give forth a piece with certain great dramatic effects. But such as this, never! Like an amalgam, it sinks through every fibre of being, searching out and wrapping into itself every atom of true golden feeling. It has that subtle power which flows from experience to experience. Imagination may produce the dramatic, experience only the real, and this at an immense remove above the other.”76 The point seems to be that only Ball, with his particular amalgamation of personal “experience,” taste, and “feeling,” could have created such a “real” poem. As a professional writer, influenced by the less emotionally authentic “genius,” “pure fancy,” and “imagination,” Akers Allen might create something “dramatic” but certainly not “real.” The discerning

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reader, it is implied, can distinguish between the two and to do so—to determine whose suffering is more genuine, more feminine, in many ways— is to settle the controversy. Critics (professional and other wise) did not hesitate to criticize Ball for being so eager to relinquish his masculinity in the “Rock Me to Sleep” controversy. Central, of course, to their argument is the line “Womanhood’s years have been only a dream,” for which Ball substituted “Manhood’s long years have been only a dream.”77 Some critics objected to the substitution on metrical terms: prior to the publication of Ball’s version in the Vindication, one critic wondered how Ball would deal with the fact that the poem clearly marked the speaker as female and facetiously remarked, “I take it Mr. Ball understands the art of poetic composition too well to permit him to use a word that would destroy the ‘measure’ of the line.”78 Others agreed with O’Connor that “Rock Me to Sleep” was clearly written by a woman, and not just because of the reference to “Womanhood”: “The passionate and plaintive beauty of this poem needs no praise of ours. It is the expression of a mood of utter world-weariness, which, keenlier than any man, a woman in a social order such as ours must often feel; and it is, as any person not utterly besotted with stupidity must recognize, purely a woman’s poem, its sentiment distinctively feminine, and such as would neither be possible nor becoming to one of the ruder sex. This alone is conclusive against Mr.  Ball.” 79 The poem is “a woman’s poem,” then, in part because of the degree of suffering expressed therein, and in part because of its sentimentality, which is “distinctively feminine.” Ball is mocked for the position in which this places him as both poet and speaker in the poem (a conflation that he encourages by insisting that the poem is about his relationship with his long-dead mother); the sentiment in the poem, O’Connor insists, is neither “possible nor becoming” in a man. Similarly, one parody of “Rock Me to Sleep” that is said to be from Ball’s point of view has him yearning to be a breastfeeding infant again, rejecting solid food and begging, “Give me some teat mamma, give me some teat.”80 Oddly enough, the reference to “Womanhood” and what seemed to other critics to be the clearly feminine style and point of view of “Rock Me to Sleep” did not bother the critics who supported Ball’s claim. In fact, neither the Round Table nor the Nation paid any attention to the question of whether or not the gender of the author could be identified from an analysis of the poem itself. Rather, they allowed the discussion of Ball’s femininity to pass in order to focus on the letters attesting to Ball’s authorship—letters, it must be

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noted, that he obtained because of the gender and class privilege that he pretended to eschew in his assumption of femininity. Almost none of the newspapers or magazines that supported Ball were willing to pronounce him a talented writer, however. In fact, the eventual dismissal of the controversy was framed by a simultaneous denigration of the quality of the poem in question and the rhetoric of emotion upon which the controversy depended. The Round Table declared the Vindication “the last word . . . in a squabble of which everybody is thoroughly tired,” and claimed that “Rock Me to Sleep,” “though plaintive and pretty, is by no means worth the hard feeling that it has caused, and the scandalous claim which has been made in very positive terms by either Mr. Ball or Mrs. Akers.”81 Thus the poem and the controversy it has caused were written off as excessive and wearisome, the products of too much “feeling” one way or the other. While this seemed not to matter to Ball (who was, after all, publicly claiming that the poem originated in the depth of his emotions), it mattered greatly to Akers Allen, who constantly rejected efforts to locate the origins of a woman’s poetic ability in her suffering or to mine a poet’s personal experiences in order to pinpoint the inspiration for particular poems. Other professional writers supported her in this. In 1868, for example, Mark Twain published a piece in the Sporting Times in which he insisted, “I wrote ‘Rock Me to Sleep, Mother’ myself”: “I did it in a lucid moment in 1831—before Akers was born; before Percy was born; before the blacksmith had acquired the charm of electricity; before Ball’s mind became affected; it was suggested by a remark I once made to my mother, when I was about to retire to rest. At that time I was in the habit of being rocked to sleep every evening; but it has been weary years now since I received an attention of that kind. They tried to rock me to sleep once in the far West, for perpetrating a joke that was uncommonly bad, but I dodged the projectiles.”82 Here Twain skillfully mocks Ball’s effort to predate his own version of “Rock Me to Sleep” and to ground it in an intimate relationship with his mother. He goes on to claim that “one cannot write feelingly of that which he has not experienced” and, ignoring his own claim to having had such an experience with his own mother, insists that Ball’s claim to having been rocked by his mother is ridiculous: “Think of that great, overgrown infidel in a cradle, with his heels in the air, taking syrup of squills through an India-rubber pipe, and getting himself rocked to sleep” (3). After the authorship controversy was settled, Akers Allen similarly mocked critics’ efforts to read and interpret poetry as the expression of personal emotion. Having read that “Rock Me to Sleep” was composed while she

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was “a factory girl in Maine, upon the sheet of coarse brown wrapping paper in which she had brought her noon-time lunch,” Akers Allen responds: The careful particularity of detail visible in this bit of news gives it a smack of authenticity which is almost irresistibly convincing. In fact, I could almost believe it myself, had I not been previously informed by an equally veracious newspaper correspondent that I wrote the poem by the bedside of my dying little boy, in Boston, when, under the heaviest pressure of misfortune and poverty, I was earning a pinched living for him and myself by doing slop-work without a sewing machine. I was naturally enough surprised at this, for I never lived in Boston, I never did slop-work without a sewing machine, I never earned my little boy’s living, I never wrote verses by his bedside, my little boy never died, and I never had a little boy. Still I did not dispute the story, for I consider contradiction suggestive of ill-breeding, and an alternative to be resorted to only in extremities.83 Akers Allen acknowledges the allure of such origin narratives but deftly insists on the necessity of rejecting them. While she “did not dispute the story” when she first heard it, her published response effectively negates its every detail. After reviewing the other stories she has heard about the poem’s origins, as well as the many claims by others to have written “Rock Me to Sleep,” Akers Allen places her own composition of the poem in the context of her career as a professional writer: I must admit that I did not know I had suffered so much until informed of it by the sympathetic newspaper correspondent. For journals and journalists I have a sincere respect, and even a family affection, but what offense have I ever committed against that ubiquitous person, the newspaper correspondent, that in all his flights of fancy he invariably describes me as in the depths of poverty, distress, and disgrace, and incapable of earning a respectable living? . . . Why not, instead of calling me a pauper, . . . why not sometimes allow me to be a favorite of fortune, a lady of fashion, or—if it be not too much to ask—a newspaper correspondent? Here Akers Allen rejects the labor of “doing slop-work without a sewing machine” in favor of that of writing poetry, which, she implies, rendered her

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capable “of earning a respectable living.” She not only claims an identity for herself as a professional writer but positions her poems in her larger body of work as “newspaper correspondent,” perhaps even referring to the fact that she sent “Rock Me to Sleep” to the Saturday Evening Post when she was in Italy as a correspondent to the Transcript. Read in this way, “Rock Me to Sleep” is a product of Akers Allen’s sophisticated understanding of the collaborative process of rendering poetry into print. Yet even as Morse publishes Ball’s version of “Rock Me to Sleep,” he rejects the idea that print has anything to do with “real” poetry. According to Ball and his defenders, Akers Allen’s identity as an “authoress” and her shameless association with Ticknor and Fields render her a public woman, no better, they imply, than a prostitute. As if to highlight the corrupting nature of this relationship, Morse refers to Akers Allen’s version of “Rock Me to Sleep” as belonging to “Mrs. Akers and Messrs. Ticknor and Fields.”84 Unlike Ball’s version of the poem, which has been inspired by the love of his mother and unselfishly shared with friends and family, Akers Allen’s poem is an industrial product, the shared property of two professional entities. Ball’s construction and subsequent denigration of Akers Allen as professional author are intended to give her no position from which to take a stand; Akers Allen refuses, however, to engage with Ball and his defenders on the ground they have chosen. Rather than claiming amateur status for herself, or arguing for the depth of her emotions, she argues as a professional author against Ball’s claim, going so far as to insist that amateur authorship is merely a pose in a rapidly professionalized literary marketplace. Ultimately, she embraces her identity as a professional whose relationship with other professionals proves her authorship of “Rock Me to Sleep.” Soon after the publication of the Vindication, Akers Allen wrote a letter to Ball that he promptly printed in the New York Tribune, along with his response. Here Akers Allen baldly states, “You know that [the poem] is not yours; that you never saw it until you saw it in print. I know that it is mine, and mine only.” She goes on to enumerate the damage that has been done by Ball’s deception, not only to her honor but to her livelihood as a writer. So far as your influence reaches and convinces[,] so far as your published pamphlet is read and believed, I stand before the world guilty of falsehood and theft. . . . And there is another phase of the wrong. It has been said by or for you that you have not habitually published your poems, partly because of your modesty, and partly because you

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have been so favored by fortune as never to have been obliged to write for money, like a professional poet. . . . Happy is he whose worldly circumstances allow him to keep his talent “laid up in a napkin” to be glossed over in secret. I admit, however, that I have been less fortunate than yourself; that it has been necessary for me to place a money value on my literary labor, and to receive payment therefore. Do you not see, then, that in addition to this gross slander on my private character, this accusation of dishonesty and falsehood, you have done me the serious injury of damaging, if not ruining, my means of subsistence? For what editor or publisher, convinced by your pamphlet, would thereafter purchase my work? Would not every one, of course, utterly refuse to accept or pay for articles, which he believed might turn out to be not only old, but stolen?85 Thus by pointing out the difficulties that Ball’s claim might cause her in her writing career, Akers Allen demonstrates her sophisticated understanding of the writing and publishing of poetry as a profession. Ball’s insistence on the private circulation of manuscripts assumes that his audience actually prefers “the arena of manuscript publication” over the literary marketplace; as David  S. Shields points out, the first depends upon “an economy of gift” and the second, “a market” to determine the value of a text.86 Akers Allen’s supporters rather mercilessly skewer Ball for his efforts to privately circulate his poetry via recitation and manuscript dissemination. One reviewer of the Vindication who is skeptical of Ball’s claim sympathizes with his “hapless visitors,” subjected to his poetry that is described as “all one mutual cry of ‘Mother, mother, mother.’ ”87 Similarly, the Atlantic Monthly reviewer sarcastically refers to “the rapture with which people listen to poets who read their own verses aloud,” and suggests that “these listeners . . . were carried too far away by their feelings ever to get back to their facts.”88 Akers Allen and her defenders attempt constantly (and, for the most part, unsuccessfully) to reinsert Ball into the public discourse of business and professionalism from which he distances himself. The New Jersey Review, for example, emphasized Ball’s success “as a business man—having formerly been one of the firm of Benedict & Ball, harness makers,” while Akers Allen herself explained that “a lucky war contract in the harness and saddle line” had rendered Ball “a moneyed man.”89 As a “newspaper correspondent” and “professional poet,” Akers Allen claims that she must send

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her work out to publishers and concern herself with issues of payment. The question is whether she is actually “less fortunate” than Ball, or simply more talented and therefore able to find an audience, a market, outside of her personal friends and family. Akers Allen also implies, of course, that Ball’s talk of “modesty” is not only a privilege of class and fortune but also a cover for the fact that he is a second-rate poet who believes, as she later writes, that he can buy “literary glory, without possessing a single requisite for its attainment.”90 Ball’s wealth allows him to comfortably compose and circulate poetry without any concern for his own subsistence or that of his family. It also funds his ability to entertain influential critics, purchase advertising space in periodicals, and, finally, publish his Vindication in imitation blue and gold. She, on the other hand, can’t afford to self-publish or to circulate her poetry informally and must navigate the literary marketplace based upon her years of experience as a professional poet. In a later reflection on the controversy, Akers Allen mounts an incisive critique of Ball’s literary delusions as well as the strategic use of class in the Vindication: “[Ball’s] somewhat sudden wealth brought with it, as often happens, an altogether exaggerated idea of the power of money. Because it would buy houses, horses, plate, carriages and fine dinners, he thought it could also buy literary fame. The constant allusions to his financial condition, in his ‘Vindication,’ show that he considered it an argument on his side. He had ‘never been obliged’ to ‘write for money.’ But is it not as well to write for money, as to make harnesses for money?” (37–38). A poem is similar to a harness in that both are made and marketed by professionals, Akers Allen argues, but that does not mean that money should be able to purchase “literary fame.” Poetry and harnesses are both the products of labor for which those responsible for them should receive appropriate payment, but Ball should no more expect to write marketable poetry than she should expect to fashion a profitable harness. Ball’s defenders, it is implied, only value his poetry because it is his; they only come to his defense because they are his friends; and they are only his friends because he is wealthy. Akers Allen’s poetry, on the other hand, has value because of its literary quality and because of its repeated publication in journals and magazines as well as the 1866 Poems. Thus, in a rather twisted fashion, the circulation of her poetry is offered as proof of her authorship in a controversy that is caused by the circulation of her poetry. In a move that is reminiscent of Poe’s critique of Sigourney, it is also the circulation of her poetry that renders her suspect in the eyes of Ball and his defenders.

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Despite Akers Allen’s effort to shift the argument to the issue of professionalism within the mid-nineteenth-century literary marketplace, this had very little to do with how the controversy was actually settled—to the extent that it ever was. While important literary journals like the Nation were initially inclined to support Ball’s claim to “Rock Me to Sleep,” they eventually backed off this position—but not because of the detailed critiques of Ball’s poetry or the “evidence” provided by the copyrighted appearance of “Rock Me to Sleep” in Poems. Critics were most swayed, it seems, by proof that Ball had plagiarized from another poem by another woman poet: “A Still Day in Autumn” by Sarah Helen Whitman. The argument regarding Whitman’s poem was just a small part of O’Connor’s elaborate critique of the Vindication in the New York Times, but it received more attention from other newspapers and journals than any other point.91 Following this exposure of Ball’s habit of plagiarism, most reviewers seemed to agree that “he who steals one woman’s verses will steal another.”92 The Nation admitted to finding the evidence of the Whitman plagiarism disturbing and offered a very cagey modification of their original support for Ball: “We dare say Mr. Ball wrote ‘Rock me to Sleep;’ but we doubt if he may not as well hold his tongue hereafter. He is either a miraculously unfortunate man, or he is a literary offender of no common sort, and in either case silence is his best policy.”93 Their recommendation of silence as the solution necessarily applied to Akers Allen as well as Ball because neither they nor the Round Table were willing to admit that they had been either wrong or at fault for providing momentum to Ball and his defenders. Akers Allen saw herself as having no choice but to keep the controversy before the public eye. In a letter written immediately after the publication of O’Connor’s review, Whitman herself gleefully tells Akers Allen about an “apologetic note” she had received from Ball and adds, “That poor man has got himself into such a tight place between his two poetesses that I could almost pity him.”94 Whitman’s delightful image of Ball caught “between his two poetesses” reveals the performative passivity of the female poet; “poetesses” were certainly aware of societal expectations, but this did not mean they were weak or powerless. While Akers Allen understood the price of public speech for a woman, and therefore attempted to minimize the appearance of excessive public intervention in the controversy, she was, by no means, comfortable with leaving the management of her defense to others. She was encouraged to do so by her own defenders; after writing the letter to Ball that he published in the New York Tribune, O’Connor recommended that Akers Allen step back and let

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him attack Ball, lest she be “placed in a false position by the malicious and petty vermin of the press, accused of ‘squabbling,’ &c.”95 He went on to publish “The Ballad of Sir Ball,” a mock-epic that framed the “Lady Florence Percy” as the singer of a “magic song,” predictably indistinguishable from the nightingale. O’Connor himself is front and center here, as the “bold Sir Doubleyoo” (a reference to O’Connor signing his pieces as “W.”) who defeats Sir Ball and saves his lady’s honor.96 In reality, however, the “Lady Florence Percy” was much more active in her own “vindication” than she appeared to be. She personally wrote to every individual who made some public claim to authorship, as well as any number of critics and editors who were in a position to influence public opinion. She also carefully documented the controversy, soliciting clippings from friends across the country and vigilantly scanning the newspapers for relevant articles. Her scrapbook, maintained throughout the controversy and resumed briefly after Ball’s death in 1879, is a carefully edited and annotated document, a reclaiming of an experience that she felt had cost her dearly.97 Akers Allen continually lamented the extent to which “Rock Me to Sleep” came to represent her entire poetic corpus; in late 1864, she seems to have resisted the idea of naming Poems something like Rock Me to Sleep, and Other Poems, and throughout her life she delighted in readers’ expressions of admiration for any of her poems other than “Rock Me to Sleep.”98 Sadly, however, the controversy dominated much of the rest of her life, appearing in correspondence and other personal writing as late as the first decade of the twentieth century.99 In 1902, she wrote to her friend Gilbert Tracy about the reprinting of “Rock Me to Sleep” in The Sunset-Song and Other Verses; appearing as the last poem in the volume, it was prefaced by a statement from her publishers regarding the controversy. “Truth has outlived falsehood,” they wrote, “and the unjust claims of other years are but a cruel memory, and the English-speaking world today delights to render Mrs. Akers the homage due for her immortal poem, the authorized version of which we take great pleasure in presenting.”100 There was no delight in the memory for Akers Allen. The preparations for The Sunset-Song coincided with the last days of Luther R. Marsh, who had written the “Introductory Note” to the Vindication. To Tracy, she wrote, “I see that old Marsh, who was Ball’s defender at that time, is now dying, in his dotage. Up to the last time I heard of him, he was still pleading Ball, and calling me an ‘imposter.’ He ought to have been made to pay for that—he and Ball too, and every other person who shamefully and causelessly abused me in print. I have never forgiven it.”101 Nor did

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she seem to forgive those who did not, as she saw it, sufficiently come to her defense—most particularly, the editors and publishers who benefited most from her success as a poet while her own career suffered. The American literary marketplace had changed significantly between the initial publication of “Rock Me to Sleep” in 1860 and the publication of the Vindication in 1867. As critics such as Kenneth Lynn, Richard Brodhead, and Anne E. Boyd have argued, Ticknor and Fields played a larger role in these developments than almost any other publisher. After the Civil War, for example, during which they and other publishers focused primarily on diverting the attention of readers from the battlefield, Ticknor and Fields began to tighten the selection criteria for the Atlantic Monthly in an attempt to differentiate themselves from new competitors such as the Galaxy and Lippincott’s.102 Their effort to corner the market on high literary culture was largely successful, thanks in part to the intimate relationship between the Atlantic and the stable of authors published under the Ticknor and Fields imprint (and later, Fields, Osgood, & Co.). Fields was also well known for his marketing strategies, exemplified most strongly during this period by his blue-and-gold series. Akers Allen fully expected Ticknor and Fields to weigh in on the debate over “Rock Me to Sleep,” lending the strength of the firm to her claim to authorship if only because their reputation seemed to be on the line as well. Prior to the publication of Poems, Howard M. Ticknor advised Elijah Allen to take legal action against Ball, insisting, “I believe it would be held in an intelligent court that such conduct was at once a defamation of character and a detriment to the profession of literature as followed by Mrs. Allen.”103 On June 4, 1867, immediately following the publication of the Vindication, Ticknor assured her that Ticknor and Fields “do not mean to let such an attack— foolish as it is—pass without rejoinder.”104 However, while the 1867 review of the Vindication in the Atlantic Monthly certainly ridicules Ball’s claim, it carefully avoids any discussion of Akers Allen’s merits as a poet, calling “Rock Me to Sleep” only a “very graceful and touching poem.”105 Furthermore, in contrast to James T. Fields’s usual practice of using the Atlantic to advertise and review the firm’s books, Akers Allen’s Poems is mentioned only once, in a brief statement in May 1867 that she “has been left in undisputed possession of her right and title to the authorship of her poem” and announcing a second edition of the “ little blue and gold book.”106 Akers Allen seems to have suffered from the high-culture aspirations of Ticknor and Fields, as did several other women writers of the period. According to Boyd, Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Julia Ward

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Howe all disappeared from the pages of the Atlantic during this period; she proposes that their dismissal was due to their seemingly indiscriminate desire to target a broad range of publishers and readers with their writing: “The message they received from Fields was that they could no longer straddle the two literary realms; they had to distinguish themselves as artists or be confined to inferior publications for the masses.”107 Akers Allen’s broad popu lar appeal as “Florence Percy” ultimately rendered her too popu lar for the firm. Moreover, Fields’s best-known conflict with a woman writer, detailed in Mary Abigail Dodge’s A Battle of the Books (1870), revealed a refusal to properly compensate women for their work or to engage fairly with them when they registered complaints regarding their treatment. For most of these authors, being underpaid by Ticknor and Fields is what led them to seek publication in other venues; Fields’s complaints about these women seem to be a convenient way to get rid of them in order to cultivate male poets and writers. Akers Allen’s relationship with Ticknor and Fields confirms the fact that the publishers were jettisoning their female talent as they shaped and then marketed an American literature of distinction. This is not to say that Ticknor and Fields were somehow responsible for the “Rock Me to Sleep” controversy; it is, rather, to acknowledge that the publishers worked with the same set of gendered assumptions about authorship as Ball and his defenders. This might explain why Ball’s claim, as ridiculous as it seems, was given such serious consideration. Writing in 1905, Akers Allen lamented the inability of Ball’s defenders to take responsibility for what they had done, even after the exposure of Ball’s plagiarism of Whitman’s “A Still Day in Autumn”: There were many persons left unconvinced—some because of blind partisanship, some because of personal friendship for Ball—it is so easy to be fond of a half-millionaire!—and some, alas, because of the jealousy which many literary men feel toward a woman—a feeling then, perhaps stronger than now—(even Hawthorne, you know, sneered disagreeably at “scribbling women,”—)—which led them to espouse the men’s sides, right or wrong. . . . The verses themselves were not the question at issue—that was whether a writer who had been for years at work, and earned a respectable name, was really a swindler and a liar—and whether, not being either, she could be not only wronged of her own, but utterly ruined and discredited by a wealthy ignoramous;—compelled to lose not only her literary property, but her

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good name, her place in respectable society, her means of subsistence, and the respect of those who had been her friends, simply because she hadn’t half a million.108 Akers Allen’s clear understanding of the workings of class and gender in the “Rock Me to Sleep” controversy allows her, quite accurately, I think, to see that the poem itself was “not the question at issue” (or at least not entirely). What matters here, she insists, is whether sexism in the literary marketplace can deprive a professional woman author of all that she has achieved over the course of her career. But given that “Rock Me to Sleep” represented a whole host of things about women’s poetry and women poets that the literary establishment was coming to reject, it is, in fact, “at issue.” The issue, as I’ve identified it here, was Akers Allen’s deployment of a relational poetics that had functioned quite well for women poets throughout the antebellum period. Composed out of an intimate relationship with her readers that Akers Allen cultivated in collaboration with a range of male partners (including her husbands, editors, and publishers), “Rock Me to Sleep” was published as the work of “Florence Percy” and was widely reprinted. As I’ve argued, “Rock Me to Sleep” invited engagement from readers, who read, recited, sang, copied, imitated, parodied, and plagiarized the poem with abandon, rendering it one of the most popular poems in nineteenth-century America. The rampant “social life” of this poem (to borrow a phrase from Michael C. Cohen) was both boon and catastrophe for its author, who found the post–Civil War literary marketplace very different from that of the antebellum period in which she began her career. It also presented problems for publishers like Ticknor and Fields, who only benefited from the popularity of a poem if the author and publishing firm were attached to it, and editors, who increasingly became the arbiters of literary taste, thereby mediating in the relationship between poems (and poets) and their readers. There was no single moment when women’s deployment of a relational poetics was phased out—I don’t mean to claim the existence of such a strict historical trajectory—but the “Rock Me to Sleep” controversy marks a moment in its cultural decline. Akers Allen was probably aware of this before anyone else, and her attempts to salvage her hard-won career began even before the publication of her 1866 Poems. In a letter to Ticknor and Fields written after an advertisement announcing a new book by “Florence Percy,” Akers Allen asked to be known as “Elizabeth Akers.” “Florence Percy,” she insisted, was a “feigned name . . . unwisely adopted when a school girl of fifteen.”109 Clearly unwilling

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to give up the cultural capital represented by the pseudonym, Ticknor and Fields agreed to publish Poems under the name Elizabeth Akers but included “Florence Percy” in parentheses on both the title page and the binding of the volume. This desire to have it both ways demonstrates the lasting effects of an antebellum literary culture in which authorial identity for women was fluid, as well as the growing emphasis placed on individual, identifiable, and commodified authorship in the postbellum years. As poetry became more associated in the public mind with its author, it became necessary for women poets like Akers Allen to claim their fugitives and to insist on a oneto-one relationship with their work. The intimate relationship between poem and author took priority over all other, eclipsing engagements with other actors in a variety of print-cultural contexts. This came at a cost to American women poets, especially those like Akers Allen who began their careers in a climate that provided space for a varied and culturally situated enactment of authorship. To recover this form of authorship allows not only for a reassessment of antebellum women poets and their work but also for a resituating of what we know as authorship as just one option among many in nineteenthcentury America.

CONCLUSION

Recovering the Unremarkable

In the summer of 2015, Johanna Ortner published a piece in Commonplace, an online venue for work on early American literature and culture, announcing that Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s first collection of poems, Forest Leaves, was “Lost No More.” Scholars had long lamented the seeming disappearance of Forest Leaves, published by Baltimore printer James Young sometime in the late 1840s. Ortner’s surprising discovery of the pamphlet at the Maryland Historical Society thrilled scholars of nineteenth-century African American literature, as did her decision to share the find on Commonplace. Alongside an introduction to the work’s significance, Ortner published digital images of the text, which consists of nineteen poems.1 Many of these poems are earlier versions of work published in periodicals and in various editions of Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects. For example, “Ethiopia,” the poem that opens the collection, is reprinted with minor changes in the 1854 Poems. “Ruth and Naomi,” on the other hand, is not included in Poems until the 1857 edition. Its existence in Forest Leaves raises interest ing questions about Harper’s organizational principles in these early collections of her work. How did she decide what to include in each collection, given that her body of available work was apparently larger than scholars had thought? Why did she decide to leave some poems out or to include some poems in a collection and not others? And what might this tell us about Harper’s early development as a writer and an activist? Ten of the poems in Forest Leaves are new to scholars. Interestingly, none of these poems refer directly to issues of race, slavery, or any of the other political subjects for which Harper’s poetry has come to be known. While half are religious, the others are pastoral, romantic, or sentimental, demonstrating Harper’s active engagement with popular periodical poetry. “Yearnings for Home,” for example, is about the speaker’s longing for her “native air” and

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her “home among the distant hills” where her “mother pray’d.” However, in its description of “eternal snow / Round threat’ning craters” and “Alpine forests,” the poem clearly echoes the British Romantic exploration of the sublimity of nature. Similarly, in “Let Me Love Thee,” the speaker uses the heightened rhetoric of sentimental poetry to express her desire for a new relationship to compensate for the pain of past disappointments. Each of the poem’s six stanzas begins with some repetition of the title phrase, conveying the speaker’s deep longing for reciprocal affection. These poems may be autobiographical or they may be performances, but they are definitely imitations, and they demonstrate Harper’s flexing of her poetic muscles in her early work. I want to conclude Fair Copy by discussing yet another poem in Forest Leaves because, of all of these “new” poems, it is the most unremarkable, the most conventional, but also distinctive from what we have come to know as the work of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. While “Yearnings for Home” and “Let Me Love Thee” are new to scholars, much about these poems is familiar. The scan of the natural landscape in “Yearnings for Home” is similar to that of poems written at roughly the same time, such as “Ethiopia,” as well as later poems like Moses: A Story of the Nile.2 The first-person speaker of “Let Me Love Thee,” whose past is marked by betrayal and suffering, presages the speakers of poems like “The Mother’s Blessing,” published in the AngloAfrican in 1865, or even “The Fugitive’s Wife,” which appears in Poems.3 The poem I’ll be focusing on here, “An Acrostic,” stands out for two reasons: first, the acrostic form, which Harper does not use in any other published poem; and second, the poem’s naming of Adel Martin, with whom Harper seems to have shared a friendship while living in Baltimore. In what follows, however, I’ll use this unremarkable poem as an entry point to, rather than a diversion from, the other work in the collection, as well as the work of other antebellum African American women poets and antebellum American women poets in general. Many of the poems I’ve discussed in Fair Copy are unremarkable poems— poems that, if they were addressed at all, would be alternately referred to as unoriginal, ordinary, occasional, even boring. Even though they were likely read, enjoyed, and perhaps even loved in their own day, they have generally not been seen as worthy of the attention of scholars. For example, I began this study with a discussion of Charlotte Jerauld’s “Charity Hymn,” a poem whose suitability for the occasion in which it was written is precisely what renders it uninteresting to modern readers. Similarly, as I discussed in Chapter 2, the

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poems of the Lowell Offering have traditionally been regarded by scholars as unworthy, because they are unremarkable both aesthetically and politically. And while I have attempted to point out the distinctiveness of Sarah Forten’s work for the Liberator, her poetry is very similar to and sometimes mistaken for the work of other young African American women in her circle and white abolitionists like Elizabeth Margaret Chandler and Eliza Earle. Indeed, the poetry of working-class white women and African American women of all classes is so often called unremarkable that a reevaluation of our terms and standards seems overdue. Such a reevaluation has been accomplished, to some degree, on an authorby-author basis for poets like Lydia Sigourney, Sarah Piatt, and Frances Harper, which often means that the most unremarkable poem is rendered remarkable by being attributed to one of these poets. But I am reluctant to see this as the point of recovery, given that it makes very little room for the work of other women poets. In this framework, Sigourney, Piatt, and Harper are remarkable, and others are notable only to the extent to which they resemble the work of those poets. This is true even for those who published a large body of work. Those who published a handful of poems or a single poem are barely seen as worthy of scholarly attention, especially if these poems are short, occasional, and conventional, like the majority of poems published by antebellum American women poets.4 This is often compounded if the work is signed with a pseudonym or not signed at all. If these poems were the majority, however, if they represent what poetry meant to most antebellum American consumers and producers of poetry, then shouldn’t we read them, instead of passing them over? How might they guide us to new ways of reading, new ways of interpreting poetry? What will happen if we place the unremarkable at the center of our recovery efforts? This is what I’ve attempted to do throughout Fair Copy as the relational is often very closely related to the unremarkable. A refocusing of our critical attention is, I believe, central to the flourishing of the field in general, but it is particularly important in the recovery of antebellum African American women poets. Scholarship on the work of such poets other than Harper is scant, in part, I would suggest, because of a critical unease with the unremarkable and a lack of methodological tools to approach this work. It is this that I attempt to remedy in this conclusion. I begin this thought experiment with “An Acrostic,” the eighteenth poem in Forest Leaves, appearing in between another new poem, “Crucifixion,” and “For She Said If I May But Touch of His Clothes I Shall Be Whole,” a poem

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that is retitled “Saved By Faith” and reprinted in Poems. Like many acrostics published in periodicals in early America, Harper’s “An Acrostic” is identified primarily by its genre rather than, as we see in much of Harper’s poetry, its subject matter (“The Slave Auction,” “Advice to the Girls”) or its addressee (“To Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe,” “To the Cleveland Union-Savers”). While much of Harper’s poetry in Poems was intended to be read aloud, performed to audiences as Harper traveled the abolitionist lecture circuit, “An Acrostic” is distinctly visual. The title directs her audience to a particular way of reading, one that would, perhaps, have been more clear in manuscript acrostics, where a poet might write the letters of the person’s name larger than the rest of the letters in the poem or even use a different color pencil for the name. Printed acrostics may not have allowed for this sort of visual exaggeration, but extant evidence suggests that readers knew how to engage with such poems. The poem’s success relies on the reader’s recognition of the genre’s constraints. As in other acrostics, Harper uses the letters of her subject’s name to begin each line of the poem, and the first and last names determine the number of lines in each stanza. Angels bright that hover o’er thee, Deem thee an object of their care; Ever watchful they surround thee, Lending aid when danger’s near. May this life, thus guarded, sister, Always feel thy Saviour near; Render him thy heart’s devotion— Trust his goodness, seek his care; In these vales of grief and sorrow, Nought shall harm while God is near.5 In the first stanza, Harper describes the actions of the angels—hovering over Martin, watching her, surrounding her, “lending aid”—and in the second she speaks to Martin more directly. Harper highlights their relationship by calling her “sister” and claims that the angels are evidence of God’s protection over her. Using Martin’s name to structure the poem renders what might be a very conventional message, intended for all readers—“God is watching over you”—far more personal—“God is watching over Adel Martin, my ‘sister.’ ” Of course the creative imagining of these angels is Harper’s own doing, as is

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the publication of the poem in Forest Leaves. Both indicate Harper’s own watchfulness over her “sister,” drawing attention to and even “lending aid” to God as he cares for this young African American woman. Reminiscent of Forten’s “On viewing the lifeless Remains of a very dear Friend,” with its gesture to the physical body of the deceased, Harper’s insistence on Martin’s protected status renders her worthy of such shelter in a society that does not always value the lives of young African American women. Scholars have lamented the paucity of materials regarding the first twentyfive years of Harper’s life. For this reason, in an early response to the recovery of Forest Leaves, also published in Commonplace, Eric Gardner notes his interest in not only “the poems but their people, their places, their connections.” Noting the spelling out of the name of Adel Martin in “An Acrostic,” he asks, How, I’m wondering, did this poetic figure, literally sitting so close to the margins of nineteenth-century American poetry, connect to the Adel Martin listed in the 1850 Census of Baltimore’s Fourteenth Ward, whom the white census-taker quickly ticked off as 20 years old, an “F” (“female”) and an “M” (“mulatto”)? Listed as a “teacher”—like Harper’s uncle William Watkins and his four grown sons only a few blocks away in the Sixteenth Ward—this Adel Martin lived with her father Henry (a porter), mother Mary, and younger brother Alexander (also a porter).6 As Britt Rusert and others point out, Harper’s years of schooling at the Watkins Academy for Negro Youth, headed by her uncle, William Watkins, would have “immersed [her] in a curriculum that focused on the study of the Bible, but also history, geography, mathematics, English, rhetoric, and oratory, among other fields.”7 The young Frances Watkins may have thought of herself as preparing for the classroom, like her friend Adel Martin. After leaving her uncle’s school in 1838, however, at the age of thirteen, she went to work for a bookseller, where, according to William Still, “she was taught sewing, took care of the children, &c.; and at the same time, through the kindness of her employer, her greed for books was satisfied so far as was possible from occasional half-hours of leisure.”8 It is entirely possible that Harper’s responsibilities were far more onerous than Still allows. She likely worked for Robert Armstrong, of Armstrong & Berry, booksellers and publishers.9

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Achsah and Robert Armstrong had four children who would have been approximately five, seven, eight, and ten years old in 1846, the first year of the roughly five-year period in which Ortner has proposed that Forest Leaves was printed.10 If she went to work for the Armstrongs directly after leaving school, then she would have helped care for the two youngest children as infants. Moreover, as Hilary J. Moss explains, the responsibilities of African American domestic servants may have included “emptying chamber pots, . . . scouring floors, or preparing meals,” in addition to the responsibilities enumerated by Still, and would not have paid well at all.11 As was the case with Maria James, Harper’s employer took note of her “remarkable talent for composition” and encouraged her writing. Also like James, the young Frances Watkins was said to be “noted for her industry, rarely trifling away time as most girls are wont to do in similar circumstances” (756). For whatever reason, Harper did not follow William Watkins and his family when they moved to Canada after the forced closure of the Watkins Academy, but she clearly saw their departure as a reason to leave Baltimore. In 1851, she moved to Ohio to teach sewing at Union Seminary, established by the A.M.E. Church in 1847. She never returned to live in Baltimore. Adel Martin, on the other hand, seems to have lived in Baltimore for the rest of her life, continuing to teach African American children and raising a family. As Gardner notes, in 1850, she was unmarried and living with her parents and brother. In the 1860 census, Adel Jackson is listed as thirty-seven years old, married to James Jackson, a porter, and living next door to Henry and Mary Martin and their thirty-year-old son. While no occupation is provided for Adel, she is identified as a teacher in the American Freedman in 1866 and in the 1867 Baltimore directory.12 In 1914, the Afro-American Ledger recounted the history of private education for Black children in Baltimore, noting especially one “run by the late Mrs. Adele Jackson on West Biddle street, conducted by her daughter, Mrs.  Adele Duffin.”13 Harper’s acrostic marks the beginning of a long teaching career for Martin (soon to be Jackson), one undertaken in the midst of white hostility to Black education and civil rights. As Meredith McGill notes, in naming Adel Martin, Harper’s acrostic also hints at the “local circulation” of Forest Leaves.14 While it isn’t clear exactly who Harper’s readers would have been or even how large the print run was, it is almost certain that circulation would have been limited to some portion of the African American community in Baltimore. (Robert Armstrong’s wife

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is said to support Harper, but it is impor tant to note that although he is a publisher, she doesn’t turn to him to print her pamphlet—or else she did, and he refused.) It is likely that readers of Forest Leaves would have known Martin, or at least would have been familiar with her family. The intimacy between the two bright young women might have been a source of pride for the Baltimore Black community. As acrostics were often presented as gifts to friends and shared within literary circles, “An Acrostic” also points intriguingly to Harper’s potential participation in the sorts of African American literary societies researched by Elizabeth McHenry. One can imagine “An Acrostic” being circulated in this way, perhaps gifted at first to its addressee, and then passed between friends and acquaintances as evidence of Harper’s talent as a poet. Evidence of such exchanges exists in the Philadelphia Female Literary Association, as well as the Cassey and Dickerson friendship albums held by the Library Company of Philadelphia. These interlocking communities of readers and writers led, of course, to publication for Sarah Forten and other young African American women. The same was likely true for Ann Plato in Hartford, Connecticut, whose poem “Advice to Young Ladies” begins with the following request for her audience—perhaps students or fellow teachers—to share their work with her: Day after day I sit and write, And thus the moments spend— The thought that occupies my mind,— Compose to please my friend. And then I think I will compose, And thus myself engage— To try to please young ladies minds, Which are about my age. The greatest word that I can say,— I think to please, will be, To try and get your learning young, And write it back to me.15 Considering Harper within such an exchange—in Baltimore, rather than Philadelphia, and with working African American women like herself and Martin—offers a fresh perspective on her life prior to leaving Baltimore.

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It is equally exciting to imagine that Harper’s acrostic might also point outward to other unremarkable poems written and published by antebellum African American women—to others whose relational manuscript exchange practices may have led them to print. Harper has dominated the study of nineteenth-century African American women’s poetry and for good reason: she published more poems than any other African American woman poet; she published under her own name or initials, rendering her work relatively easy to locate and collect; and she was connected with a web of writers and activists whose extant papers support a reconstruction of her life and career. As I discussed in Chapter 2, however, poems by other African American women have received very little attention. The lens of relationality and a willingness to approach—perhaps even embrace—the unremarkable might be just what we need in order to engage this body of work. Ortner writes that the discovery of Forest Leaves “represents a new vista for scholarship on Frances Ellen Watkins Harper by not only expanding the cannon [sic] of her literary work, but also by adding to a broader genealogy of antebellum Black women’s literature.”16 The latter can only happen, however, if we think critically about our enthusiasm for these “new” poems of Harper’s and turn to the work by other African American women that has been in front of our eyes (and in our databases) all along.17 As Foster, Gardner, Mitch Kachun, and others have shown, Black-owned and Black-operated periodicals are key here, providing access to print for women writers who might not other wise have imagined submitting their work to an editor. We might begin by looking for writers who published multiple poems in African American periodicals. For example, “Rosa” published a short prose piece titled “Music” and three poems in Freedom’s Journal between October 1827 and February 1828; her silence after that prompted “Frere” to write “To Rosa,” in which he entreated, “Sweet minstrel, take thy harp again, / And breathe upon it chords of fire.”18 Miss A. E. Chancellor similarly published four poems in the Weekly Anglo-African between December 1859 and April 1860, including one, the fifty-two-line “Lines Inspired by a Cold Interview with an Abolitionist,” that was reprinted in the Anglo-African Magazine in February 1860. This pattern is similar to that of Lizzie Hart, author of four poems and nineteen letters published in the Christian Recorder between February  1864 and December  1865 and reprinted by Gardner in Legacy in 2010 as “an example of the riches scholars might find if they turn to women who wrote for the early Black press.”19 Patterns like these indicate that African American women poets may have submitted several poems at the

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same time or have been prompted by the success of one poem to quickly offer another to an encouraging editor. Given that they had several poems to hand, however, it is entirely possible that Rosa, Miss Chancellor, and Lizzie Hart were both sharing their work privately and submitting it to other periodicals. These writers and others like them merit further attention. Who were they? How did they get their work published? And what did it mean to them to see it in print? Of course this methodological approach is difficult when a contributor has only published a single poem or when a poem or series of poems is published under a pseudonym or initials or no name at all. How do we contend with this body of work?20 As scholars, how do we move beyond authorship to say more about how such poems were written, read, published, and circulated? Moving beyond authorship, of course, draws our attention to individual poems, rather than (or in addition to) poets. If we return to Harper’s tribute to Adel Martin, we can see that reading acrostics requires that we pay attention to multiple things: authorship, yes, but also audience, form, materiality, circulation, social and historical context. Daunting, perhaps, but also exciting, in that there are multiple ways to take hold of a poem, to make sense of it. Let’s see, then, where Harper’s acrostic can take us. We might turn productively to additional poems written by women poets for and about other women: Harper’s relationship with her sister-friend is echoed over and over again in this body of work. In “Yes, Oft I Think of Thee,” for example, Theodocia Dalton addresses her “Dearest Ellen,” insisting that her thoughts are with her friend at all times of day, even when seemingly distracted by “mirth’s gay hours.” Like Harper, she assures her friend of God’s protection, here elicited by Dalton’s prayers: Through all the hours of blessed light[,] Amid my daily toil and care, And through the watches of the night For thee to Heaven ascends my prayer;21 The poem’s title, beginning with a “yes” to an unspecified question, may indicate a conversation with Ellen herself—likely a request for some assurance of her significance to the poet. Published in November 1861, in the same issue of the Weekly Anglo-African as an installment of Martin Delany’s Blake;

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Or, the Huts of America and alongside a call for the “Formation of Colored Regiments,” Dalton’s poetic declaration of affection for her friend is a reminder of the more private, domestic lives of African American communities before and during the Civil War. This depiction of the devotion between women is evident in a number of poems, including an intriguing precursor for Harper’s “Ruth and Naomi,” the earliest version of which we now know was published in Forest Leaves. Published in the Liberator in 1834 and identified by Garrison as “By a Colored Lady,” “Naomi and Ruth” is written by B. A. S., from Philadelphia, perhaps a member of the same social circle that included Sarah Forten and Sarah Mapps Douglass.22 As I discussed in Chapter 3, women’s elegies for other women presented an opportunity for poets to publicly value African American life, making public, or even national, the personal and local.23 Indeed, much of the poetry in these periodicals is elegiac. Some of the poems, like Rosa’s “Lines, On Hearing of the Death of a Young Friend,” are published in the “Poetry” column, while others, like Mollie Archer’s tribute to ten-year-old Sarah Jane Bridges, appear among the obituaries.24 These poems are often printed alongside elegies for prominent male figures, like Harper’s poem on the death of J. Edward Barnes, Chancellor’s “Lines, to the Memory of John I. Gaines,” and Angeline S. Demby’s “Lines Respectfully Dedicated to the Memory of our Much Beloved and Martyred President, Abraham Lincoln.”25 In other words, private grief is given as much space in African American women’s poetry as mourning for public figures. In Hester A. B. Jay’s “On the Death of a Sister,” published in the Christian Recorder in February 1863, the speaker attempts to come to terms with the fact that she will never hear her sister’s voice, see her “bright eyes,” or kiss her lips. The loss is compounded by the fact that Jay was not able to be by her sister’s side and seems to have only heard that her sister was ill after she had died: ’Tis so, alas, and far away, The solemn tidings reached my ear, I could not watch her swift decay, Nor know my sister’s end was near.26 Published in the midst of the Civil War, this poem may have resonated for African American families losing husbands, sons, and brothers in the war— soldiers who, as a Washington correspondent reminded Recorder readers in

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the same issue, were not being compensated equally with white soldiers.27 But, like Dalton’s poem, it is also a reminder that the seemingly private losses of mothers, daughters, and sisters carried as much significance to the individuals and communities that bore them. The vulnerability of African American life is dramatically rendered in Martha T. Poor’s “ ‘Not Fully Identified,’ ” a poem published in the Weekly Anglo-African in March 1860.28 The poem opens with the speaker repeating a phrase that they have heard; the situation in which this happened is made clear as the stanza progresses: “Not fully known!” Oh[,] friends who gather round her[,] Amid the anguish of this hour of fear, Through all the horrors of the fate that bound her. Was this the form that ye have held so dear?29 The poem then proceeds to address different people who have loved the dead woman—lover, mother, father, sister, brother—asking them if they can recognize their loved one in “this wreck of what was beauty”: “Come, look upon her now: can this be she?” There is no clue as to what has marred the beauty of the deceased or what has killed her; it could be illness or violence, but as in “On the Death of a Sister,” the sense is that it happened far from those who loved her. The poem concludes with the speaker’s assurance that to God, “All this dark hour is bright with infinite truth,” and that after death, all shall be “ ‘fully known’ ” to them as well. Without underestimating or undermining the comfort that such depictions of the afterlife provided, it is also possible to read anger, frustration, and fear in this representation of the violence enacted on the body of a young African American woman and, by extension, on her family. In a fascinating parallel, an obituary of Frederick Douglass’s ten-year-old daughter, Annie, appears on the page following Poor’s “‘Not Fully Identified.’” The youngest of Douglass’s children, Annie is said to have been “a child of great promise.” Thoughtful beyond her years, she seems to have taken into her mind something of the agitation of the times attendant upon the Harper’s Ferry emuete, and the supposed connection of her father therewith, and the consequent harm that would come to her father because of it.

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Her mind, we are told, haunted with this idea entered in a cloud of grief, and she drooped, and faded, and died. It was perhaps mete that this child of the friend of the Martyrs of Harper’s Ferry, should thus die at this time as the crowning sacrifice to the Moloch of American slavery. When that little grave is covered, and the sod grown, then let that little white stone be raised over it with this epitaph inscribed thereon: “Here lies the remains of one of the first young spring flowers of liberty, nipped by the untimely frost of American wrong and injustice.”30 In attributing Annie’s death to “the Moloch of American slavery,” the Weekly Anglo-African renders the young girl a martyr herself, belonging to her people, as well as her parents. Despite being born free and raised in Rochester, New York, Annie remained vulnerable and finally succumbed to the violence of slavery. Like the young woman whose body is unidentifiable in Poor’s poem, Annie is not afforded the protection she deserves; both become something other than what their loved ones had imagined for them: a “wreck,” a “sacrifice.” As this coverage of Annie’s death demonstrates, the separation of the public and private spheres was a luxury for African Americans, one they were not allowed and could not afford. This is reflected in poems like Ellen Malvin’s “Mistress and Slave,” published in the Christian Recorder in December 1863. From the first-person perspective of an enslaved woman, this poem tells the story of her victimization at the hands of her enslaver’s lover, who threatens her even as he comes to woo the white woman. While the poem creates a vivid picture of the trio, it focuses on the speaker’s pride and anger: Darkly rose my doom before me, Slave and victim as the rest: She, a blossom to be gathered Just to wither on his breast. I, a queen to be dethroned And ground beneath his heel in jest. I a queen by right of beauty, I a slave by wrong of birth, Lips and eyes and braided tresses Valued at their market worth.31

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Despite being vulnerable to the machinations of all white men, this “queen” sees through the racist economic structures that itemize her beauty and devalue her humanity. Written in the midst of the Civil War, the poem concludes with a vision of God’s vengeance upon the South: Not in vain our cries are cleaving Upward to the throne of God. Long her sons shall writhe in anguish Under the avenging rod. Ere the woful sheaves are garnered And the bloody vintage trod. (197) Similarly, Chancellor’s “Lines, (Inspired by a Cold Interview with an Abolitionist)” opens with an observation of an African American man whose many gifts and talents are seemingly effaced by the fact that “Burning upon his soul, are found the words—/ I AM A NEGRO!”32 The speaker insists that God will not only “judge with impartiality all kind” but ensure that “a day of reckoning shall come / When mysteries and wrongs shall be unveiled” (60). Given the devaluing of African American life by white people, encomiums to Black public figures within the Black community take on added significance. Frederick Douglass was frequently the subject of such poems. Published in the North Star, “An Acrostic,” by “Ella,” uses the name of Frederick Douglass to structure her poem about the newspaper’s editor. The acrostic is an interesting choice, of course, because, as any reader of his Narrative knew, “Douglass” had not always been his last name; while he was born Frederick Bailey, he had changed his name first to Stanley, then to Johnson, and finally to Douglass, the name by which his story becomes public and he becomes an abolitionist, a public speaker, and a published writer. Ella intertwines her response to that history with the letters of his name, rendering the two inseparable. She also adds more accolades, calling him “Freedom’s Champion,” and commends him for “striving” “for the oppressed.”33 Yet he is not simply a fighter; he is also represented as “Comforting the poor enslaved ones” and “Kindly cheering those that mourn.” The final letters of Douglass’s first name might be seen here as pushing Ella to frame this “champion” differently than other poets have—as “Charlotte” does in a poem that focuses on Douglass as orator:

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We’ve listened to thy words of fire, And felt our pulses thrill, And now we woo thee with the lyre To linger with us still. Oh! let us hear those wrongs once more— Thy eloquent appeal: Oh! thou hast spoke to woman’s heart, And woman too can reel. A boon we crave; we call thee back— Oh! let thy voice be heard, That many a true heart on thy track May echo back thy word.34 Charlotte’s tribute to Douglass points to the way in which women often felt authorized to publish their work when it spoke to the public work of men in the abolitionist cause and the larger African American community. The way in which such tributes enable the education and self-improvement of women is spelled out in H. Martha Johnson’s “To the Daniel A. Payne L.S. of Buffalo,” published in the Christian Recorder in 1864. Payne was a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and one of the founders of Wilberforce University in Ohio; he also became president of the university—and the first African American president of a college in the United States—in 1863, the year before Johnson’s poem is published. His success prompted Johnson’s church to form a Daniel  A. Payne Literary Society, which Gardner explains “encouraged reading and study in part through conversation, but also in part through writing—sometimes with an eye toward publication.”35 After celebrating Payne as “A noble, selfmade man!” Johnson goes on to show how Payne provides a model for other African Americans, as well as authorization of their more public endeavors: The foe he trampled ’neath his feet, And held it firmly there. While in his mind he knowledge stored; Can we with him compare?

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Oh, yes, we can, if we but try, As we have now begun, To never let a moment fly, Till wisdom’s summit’s won.36 Johnson proclaims with confidence that members of the literary society can, with effort and an efficient use of time, “compare” with Payne, a teacher, college administer, bishop, and poet, who self-published The Pleasures and Other Miscellaneous Poems in 1850.37 Her passion for learning and for print is echoed in a letter to the editor written by Hester A. B. Jay, published in the Recorder on November  22, 1862, three months before her poem “On the Death of a Sister”: “It is but three weeks since I was informed that there was such a paper as The Christian Recorder. I have purchased three of Bro. Shreeves, and, indeed, I have become very much interested in this paper; and I am happy, indeed, to see that our people, who, for many years, have been ground down to the earth by the iron heel of affliction, are not ashamed nor afraid to come up and let their enemies know that they are a people that are not brutes; but men and women, possessing intellects as well as themselves.”38 Jay clearly sees Black periodicals like the Christian Recorder as not only evidence of African American intellectual accomplishments but weapons against “enemies” who doubt their humanity. Similar to the “foes” who erect “barriers [that] surround / The hero of [Johnson’s] song,” these “enemies” can be overcome and “trampled” by the achievements—literary and other wise—of African Americans. Black print thus becomes the property not just of those who produce it but of those who circulate and consume it as well, with readers then becoming contributors and distributors themselves. Jay’s authorship of her poem, “On the Death of a Sister,” is not only made possible but given meaning by the Recorder. We might even say that, given the forces working against African American education, culture, and empowerment—indeed, against African American life in general—Jay’s poem and her claim to print are rather remarkable. Despite the title of this conclusion, I’d like to close by suggesting that such assessments are ultimately meaningless when it comes to the recovery of antebellum African American women poets, as well as antebellum American women’s poetry generally. How do we even know how to evaluate this work— how to say what is remarkable or unremarkable—if we aren’t reading it, if we aren’t thinking about it in the contexts in which it was published? Remarkable or unremarkable, we can’t understand why poetry mattered or how it

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actually functioned unless we relinquish hidebound critical standards and reevaluate our methodological approaches to the materials. And while I, along with so many other scholars, enthusiastically celebrate the survival of that single copy of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Forest Leaves, I am equally excited by the work of Rosa, Dalton, Malvin, Jay, and other antebellum African American poets. Where will these poems take us, if we follow their lead?

NOTES

Introduction 1. My notion of relational poetics is distinct from, but not entirely unconnected to, Caroline Wigginton’s theorization of “relational publication” in In the Neighborhood. Like Wigginton, I highlight the interpersonal and relationship-building aspects of producing and circulating texts. Looking at an earlier period in American history, however, Wigginton focuses on non-print publications—manuscript texts, objects, and performances—within a local geography that she identifies as the neighborhood. In Fair Copy, I am interested in how women poets entered into and engaged with print, establishing and maneuvering relationships between people and texts as part of this process. 2. My work depends on this thirty-year tradition, especially the work of Cheryl Walker, Emily Stipes Watts, Paula Bernat Bennett, Eliza Richards, Mary Loeffelholz, Janet Gray, Mary Louise Kete, Elizabeth Petrino, Frances Smith Foster, Eric Gardner, Karen Kilcup, Faith Barrett, and Alexandra Socarides. 3. Neither is Jerauld included in the three mid-nineteenth-century anthologies of women’s poetry edited by Caroline May, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, and Thomas Buchanan Read, despite their being published several years after Jerauld’s death. Jerauld is mentioned in two reference books on American women writers: Davis and West, Women Writers in the United States, 74, and Faust, American Women Writers, 346–47. 4. Walker, “Feminist Literary Criticism,” 571. 5. Bacon, “Memoir,” 30. 6. Bacon’s “Memoir” is somewhat ambiguous about Jerauld’s life between the ages of fifteen and twenty-two, when she is discovered to be “Charlotte.” He notes later that “ little more than three years form the period of her life as a writer for the public eye” (36). 7. The Ladies’ Repository was not the only periodical to ask that contributors model their own work on that of previously published poets, although few articulated this expectation as clearly as the Christian Parlor Book, which stated in 1849, “We are very nice—notional, possibly—in the matter of poetry. Not that we are disposed to place all who pay their devoirs to the muse upon the iron bedstead, and make them conform exactly to our own taste. But poetry must conform pretty closely to the canons usually recognized among our best writers, or it cannot pass the ordeal.” The Parlor Book denounces an editing style modeled after Procrustes, who would murder his victims by stretching them or mutilating them to make them fit his iron bedstead. Yet it is clear that they expect ambitious poets to be familiar with their periodical—the work published there, the expectations of editors and readers—and model their submissions accordingly. Therefore while the circumstances of Jerauld’s initial publication in

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the Ladies’ Repository appear to be unique, the imitative poetics by which she achieved print is not. See “Editor’s Miscellany.” 8. Charlotte Fillebrown married J. W. Jerauld on November 19, 1843. See Bacon, “Memoir,” 65. 9. In Handwriting in America, Thornton positions handwriting “as something apart from both orality and print” and “something other than a medium incidental to reading” in nineteenth-century Amer ica (xii). What interests me in Bacon’s representation of Jerauld’s handwriting is the way in which it denies this middle ground, identifying Jerauld entirely with print. 10. Charlotte A. Jerauld, “Charity Hymn,” in Poetry and Prose, 133. In his “Memoir,” Bacon notes that the poem written in response to Tompkins’s request “can be found in this volume, page 133” (31). 11. See Stokes, “Women Writers and the Hymn,” 361–62. 12. I am influenced here, of course, by recent work on the “lyricization of poetry,” most notably Jackson’s Dickinson’s Misery. 13. Rohrbach, Thinking Outside the Book, 5. 14. Winship, American Literary Publishing, 7. 15. McGill, “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the Circuits of Abolitionist Poetry,” 53. 16. McGill acknowledges that her use of “format” “loosens the term a bit from its strict bibliographic usage” but insists that “thinking in terms of format can help disaggregate print into smaller units: rather than considering how poets position their work in relation to manuscript, print, recorded sound, or digital media, we can ask how different kinds of print mobilize poetic genres” (“Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the Circuits of Abolitionist Poetry,” 55). See also McGill, “Format.” 17. Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery, 7. 18. Qtd. in Jackson, “Lyric,” 831. 19. See Stokes, Old Style; Emerson, “Nature,” 7. 20. See Howell, Against Self-Reliance, and Tawil, Literature, American Style. 21. Socarides, In Plain Sight, 2. 22. Larson, Imagining Equality, 77. 23. See Davis, Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature. 24. Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” 259. 25. Wells, Poetry Wars, 4. 26. Richards, Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle, 1. 27. Williams, Reclaiming Authorship, 3. 28. In my emphasis on the gendered construction and reception of authorship, then, my study is similar to and overlaps with work on the nineteenth-century American Poetess. Richards points out that the poetess “constituted a lyric public sphere through exchanges in which gendered poetic convention is distinct from the author’s gender” (Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle, 6). Yet as Yopie Prins writes, the poetess is a “repeatable trope, a personification” both shaped by and with par ticu lar consequences for women poets (“Poetess,” 1052). That is not to say that the figure can’t be flexible, even malleable, as Lootens’s recent study, The Political Poetess, demonstrates. It is to say that we risk eliding the specifics of women’s authorship and women’s poetry as a category if we work too hard to integrate our analyses of men’s and women’s poetry.

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29. Jackson and Richards, “ ‘The Poetess’ and Nineteenth- Century American Women Poets,” 2. 30. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters, 115; Jackson, The Business of Letters, 3. 31. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 19. 32. See Coultrap-McQuin, Doing Literary Business; Boyd, Writing for Immortality; Homestead, American Women Authors and Literary Property; and Williams, Reclaiming Authorship. Writers considered in these studies who also published a substantial amount of poetry include Louisa May Alcott, Helen Hunt Jackson, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Elizabeth Stoddard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Constance Fenimore Woolson. 33. Coultrap-McQuin, Doing Literary Business, xii–xiii. 34. For an excellent example of this type of exchange, see Richards’s reassessment of the relationship between Edgar Allan Poe and Frances Sargent Osgood in “Frances Sargent Osgood, Salon Poetry, and the Erotics of Print,” in Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle, 60–106. 35. For a discussion of the myriad ways in which nineteenth-century Americans engaged with poetry, see Cohen, “Poetry.” 36. Baym, “Rewriting the Scribbling Women,” 146. 37. For a discussion of the importance of learning how to read nineteenth-century poems, see Historical Poetics Reading Group, “About.” 38. Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery, 7. In The Business of Letters, Leon Jackson traces a similar trajectory, arguing that “the crucial transformation of nineteenth-century authorial activity was not the professionalization of writing but, rather, its social disembedding. Over the course of the nineteenth century, that is to say, the economies through which authors worked became detached from the dense social worlds of which they were a part, and which they in fact helped to create” (3). 39. Mayo, “The Poetess,” 160. 40. Mayo, “Cousin Edith,” 55. 41. Jackson, “The Poet as Poetess,” 59. 42. D. D. W., “Rhymeless Poets.” 43. May, The American Female Poets, vi. 44. Griswold, “Preface,” 9. 45. Kete and Petrino, “Lydia Sigourney,” 21. 46. “Collaboration.” Oxford English Dictionary. https://www-oed.com.proxy.wm.edu/view /Entry/36197?redirectedFrom= collaboration#eid.

Chapter 1 1. For more on The Ladies’ Wreath, see Finnerty, “Women’s Transatlantic Poetic Network.” 2. Hale, “Preface,” 3. 3. Hale, “Preface,” second edition, 8. 4. Hale, “Preface,” 4. 5. Griswold, “To The Reader,” 9. 6. See Wolfson, “Introduction,” xiii. 7. Hale, The Ladies’ Wreath, 13. The American Monthly Magazine reviewer calls this portrait “positively hideous” but says that “it is no objection to the book; for, by applying the thumb and forefinger to each side of the upper left-hand corner and twitching, it will come off; then

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you can burn it without detriment to the volume. We tried the experiment, and ought to know” (185). 8. Hale most likely refers here to Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s “Stanzas on the Death of Mrs. Hemans” (1835), which refers to Hemans as a “red rose” who has “waste[d] itself in sighs” so that others may benefit from its “sweetness” (477–78). The elegy’s epigraph is from Hemans’s own “The Nightingale’s Death-Song” (1829): “The rose—the glorious rose is gone” (475). 9. Hale, “Mrs. Hemans’ Poetry,” 70. 10. For work that considers Sigourney’s reputation as the “American Hemans” through a transatlantic lens, see Kelly, “Gendered Atlantic” and “ ‘you sink the woman, & the wife, in the writer’ ”; and Dean, “ ‘Exil’d murmurings.’ ” 11. Combe, “Notes on the United States,” 319. 12. “Editor’s Table.” 13. Lootens looks at Hemans’s American legacy in “Hemans and Her American Heirs,” but unlike nineteenth-century reviewers, who made these comparisons based on traditionally feminine characteristics like piety and modesty, she focuses on the intersection of “concerns with the commerce, with the state, and with domesticity” in Hemans’s poetry and that of Sigourney and Frances  E.  W. Harper, whom she identifies as Hemans’s “American Heirs” (243). 14. Hale, The Ladies’ Wreath, 274. 15. Sigourney, “The Unchanged of the Tomb.” 16. Beecher, “Mrs. Lydia H. Sigourney,” 560–61. 17. Kete, “The Reception of Nineteenth-Century American Poetry,” 19. 18. Dolan and Bercovitch, “Introduction,” 5–6. In “American Verse Traditions,” Packer elaborates on the same point: “Laments over the impossibility of writing poetry in a landscape devoid of every thing poetic would be heard again and again in American poetry. Access to its system of generalized description promised to free the provincial writer from isolation. Like the Romes and Ithacas and Syracuses incongruously planted in the American wilderness, the conventions of literary neoclassicism linked the uncivilized present to the civilized past in a single universe of discourse” (31). 19. MacFarlane, Original Copy, 22. 20. Drake, “The Mocking-Bird,” 204. 21. Kete, “The Reception of Nineteenth-Century American Poetry,” 22. 22. Emerson, “Divinity School Address,” 89. 23. Drake, “To a Friend,” 213. 24. L. M. P., “Necessity for a National Literature,” 421. In the same year, Poe questioned the rationale behind “home subjects,” writing in the Broadway Journal, “That an American should confine himself to American themes, or even prefer them, is rather a political than a literary idea—and at best is a questionable point” (qtd. in Silverman, Edgar A. Poe, 249). 25. Qtd. in Ruland, The Native Muse, 296. 26. “Introduction,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review, 14. 27. Larson, Imagining Equality, 77–78. 28. Griswold, “To The Reader,” in The Poets and Poetry of America, v. 29. Fuller, “American Literature,” 122. 30. According to Kohler, “Fuller . . . wrote over 100 poems that we know of, most of them between 1835 and 1844 during her most intense involvement with the New England Transcendentalists and before her moves to New York and Italy. The great majority of these poems

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were unpublished during her lifetime, in large part because she regarded her poetry as a private exercise for spiritual growth, part of the journaling that was so impor tant to Transcendentalist practices of ‘self-culture.’ She did, however, print some of her own poems in the first issue of The Dial and within her major prose works, and she circulated others in letters” (“Women, Transcendentalism, and The Dial,” 142). Given her critique of the state of American poetry in “American Literature,” it also seems possible that she was not interested in publishing her poetry “till this nation shall attain sufficient moral and intellectual dignity to prize moral and intellectual, no less highly than political, freedom.” 31. Fuller’s critique of imitation as producing that which is fashionable, rather than that which is original, can be usefully compared to James Russell Lowell’s better-known metaphor of literary production as agricultural production in A Fable for Critics. Here Lowell mocks the imitative tendencies of American writers in a marketplace that treated literature as a commodity, like the corn or cotton crops privileged in the commercially successful but artistically stunted United States: With you every year a whole crop is begotten, They’re as much of a staple as corn is, or cotton; Why, there’s scarcely a huddle of log-huts and shanties That has not brought forth its own Miltons and Dantes; I myself know ten Byrons, one Coleridge, three Shelleys, Two Raphaels, six Titians (I think), one Apelles, Leonardos and Rubenses plenty as lichens, One (but that is plenty) American Dickens, A whole flock of Lambs, any number of Tennysons. (72–73) Both Fuller and Lowell are complaining of the production of literary commodities that are not original (either to the nation or to the individual) and are therefore not contributing to a national literature. 32. In Black Frankenstein, Young insists that “American Literature,” which was published one year after Woman in the Nineteenth Century, “reflects her feminism,” at least in part because she “praises the contemporary women writers Catherine [sic] Maria Sedgwick and Caroline Kirkland, and she singles out for commendation a play called Witchcraft, a Tragedy for ‘resting the main interest upon force of character in a woman’ ” (37). While I don’t mean to diminish Fuller’s feminism, especially in Woman, it seems impor tant to note that both Sedgwick and Kirkland were widely lauded by proponents for a home literature; her praise for these two writers seems to me less impor tant than her silence on the many other women writers publishing prose and poetry at the time her essay was published. 33. Capper echoes Fuller’s dismissal of the majority of her female peers, explaining that “she ignored or dismissed the great mass of commercial polite novels, tales, poems, and essays published in mass-circulating magazines like Godey’s Lady’s Book. She passed over the enormously popu lar lugubrious poetry of Lydia Sigourney, the ‘American Mrs. Hemans’ (except for an extended swipe at her ‘apologetic tone’ about those ‘peculiar’ or ‘crazy’ souls who contemplate nature). With the smaller sentimental fry, she was beyond dismissive” (Margaret Fuller, 247). The next paragraph begins, “With official American literary culture, she was more appreciative but underwhelmed” (248). Capper’s own prejudices against sentimentality and popu lar literature, I would argue, make it impossible to see that Fuller does, in fact, critique both Godey’s and Sigourney in “American Literature.”

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Notes to Pages 32–42

34. Griswold, “Preface,” 7. 35. Kete and Petrino, “Introduction,” 1. 36. Baym, “Reinventing Lydia Sigourney,” (Other) American Tradition, 54. An earlier version of this essay was published in American Literature in 1990. 37. While this review has been largely ignored in Poe scholarship, it has played a large role in the scholarly reception and treatment of Sigourney. Gordon Haight’s 1930 Mrs. Sigourney: The Sweet Singer of Hartford, which is widely condemned as dismissive of Sigourney’s work but is still relied upon for basic biographical information, might be said to base its entire assessment of Sigourney’s work on Poe’s criticisms in this review (treating later letters from Poe to Sigourney and a later review of her work as a facetious effort to solicit her work for Graham’s, which he edited from 1841 to 1842). 38. Ash, “Preface,” viii. 39. “Contemporary Poetry,” 233. 40. Kettel, Specimens, 207. 41. Sigourney, “Felicia Hemans,” 298. 42. Henderson, “The Friendship Elegy,” 115. 43. In “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe writes that “the death . . . of a beautiful woman is unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world—and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such a topic are those of a bereaved lover” (19). 44. Poe, “Critical Notices,” 875. Of course Poe would go on three years later to level a similar charge against Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, beginning with a review of Hyperion: A Romance in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine. In a review of Voices of the Night, published in February 1840, he wrote, “We have no idea of commenting, at any length, upon this plagiarism; which is too palpable to be mistaken; and which belongs to the most barbarous class of literary robbery; that class in which, while the words of the wronged author are avoided, his most intangible, and therefore his least defensible and least reclaimable property is purloined” (678). For more on what would come to be known as “the Longfellow War,” see Silverman, Edgar A. Poe, 145–46, 234–37, 250–57; Calhoun, Longfellow, 158–62; McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 204–14; and Kilcup, Who Killed American Poetry?, 112–34. 45. Lydia Huntley Sigourney to Edgar Allen Poe, April 23, 1836, 34–35. 46. In the next paragraph of the review, Poe elaborates on his critique of the use of “mottos or quotations . . . prefixed to nearly every poem” (“L. H. Sigourney,” 874). Interestingly, given his apparent disapproval of the circulation of material throughout the body of an individual’s work, Poe recycles this paragraph, with very minor revisions, in a review of Longfellow’s Ballads and Other Poems published in Graham’s Magazine in April 1842. 47. Sigourney to Poe, April 23, 1836, 34. 48. Johnson, Antebellum American Women’s Poetry, 82. 49. Kettel, Specimens, 206. 50. Sigourney, “Death of an Infant,” in Specimens. 51. Kelly, “Introduction,” in Lydia Sigourney, 22. 52. Charles Sigourney to Lydia Huntley Sigourney, October 1827. 53. Poems was published without the knowledge of Sigourney’s husband, which caused serious problems between the two. After Sigourney asked for a formal separation, her husband addressed his epistolary appeal to her, asking her to relinquish her literary work and devote herself to their marriage. Kelly notes that Sigourney gave in to her husband’s wishes

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and went on to have two children in the following two years. “She continued publishing, and with increasing frequency, but did so anonymously for the next few years. She continued publishing poetry and literary prose in magazines and in books, but she also published books on acceptably feminine subjects such as education, moral reform, and female conduct. She posed as a part-time author, telling editors, publishers, and other correspondents that her literary activity was carried out in spare moments from domestic duties” (“Introduction,” 23). 54. Examples include Alonzo, “Lines on the Death of an Infant”; “Death of an Infant”; and Taylor, “On the Death of an Infant.” 55. Kelly, “Introduction,” in Felicia Hemans, 44. 56. Sigourney, Select Poems, 24. Haight predictably claims that Sigourney was “pleased by the incident” of “Death of an Infant” being attributed to Hemans. As evidence, he claims that “for many years she wrote Death of an Infant, with several felicitous changes, in young ladies’ albums. And the reviewers were soon echoing ‘the American Hemans’ back and forth whenever there was occasion to mention Mrs. Sigourney” (Mrs. Sigourney, 79). 57. “The Literary World,” 383. 58. The publication of this letter in the New World is intriguing. Along with its predecessor Brother Jonathon, the New World was famous for reprinting British novels without permission in the form of “mammoth weeklies” that were then sold cheaper and more quickly than books could possibly be. Clearly, Benjamin—and probably Griswold—are committed to crediting the author for his or her work, especially as this brings attention to their periodicals, but not to financially rewarding him or her for its publication. 59. Roberts, “ ‘the little coffin,’ ” 151. 60. Jackson, “The Poet as Poetess,” 67. 61. Sigourney, “Death of an Infant,” in Select Poems. 62. “On the Death of an Infant.” 63. W. B. C., “On the Death of an Infant.” This poem is identified as having been published originally in the London Christian Remembrancer. 64. Jackson, “The Poet as Poetess,” 67. 65. Richards, Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle, 66. 66. Sanchez-Eppler, Dependent States, 109. 67. Griswold, “Lydia H. Sigourney.” 68. Review of Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse. 69. Bennett, “Was Sigourney a Poetess?” 272. 70. Timothy Dwight, “Mrs. Sigourney,” New Englander 25 (April 1866): 335–36. 71. Griswold, The Female Poets of Amer ica, 93. 72. Sigourney, Letters of Life, 368. 73. Dwight, “Mrs. Sigourney,” 331–32. 74. Sigourney, Letters of Life, 370. 75. According to Larson, the child elegy “was arguably the first manifestation of a legitimately democratic taste in the United States” (Imagining Equality, 85). 76. “The Unchanged of the Tomb.” 77. Richards, Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle, 67. 78. For a more detailed discussion of how Letters of Life has shaped the critical understanding of Sigourney’s poems written to order, see my “Remodeling the Kitchen in Parnassus.”

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Notes to Pages 52–63

79. Lydia Huntley Sigourney to Mrs. A[melia] P. Champlin, December 24, 1831. 80. Sigourney to Champlin, December 24, 1831. 81. Sigourney, “The Lost Darling,” manuscript poem. 82. Sigourney, “The Lost Darling,” Ladies’ Magazine and Literary Gazette. 83. Sigourney, “The Lost Darling,” Religious Intelligencer. 84. Sigourney, “The Lost Darling,” Poems, 219. 85. Mrs. T. L. A. Gooking to Lydia Huntley Sigourney, November 19, 1846. 86. Gooking to Sigourney, November 19, 1846. 87. Gooking to Sigourney, November 19, 1846. 88. Sigourney, “The Daughter’s Dream,” 28. This poem was located because of a note that Sigourney had written on Gooking’s letter, indicating that she had sent “a poem to the ‘Mother’s Mag’ entitled ‘The Daughter’s Dream.’ ” 89. Sigourney, “The Daughter’s Dream.” 90. Gooking to Sigourney, November 19, 1846. 91. Gooking to Sigourney, November 19, 1846. 92. Sigourney, “Preface,” in Poems. 93. Hale, The Ladies’ Wreath, 245. 94. Bennett, “Was Sigourney a Poetess?” 273.

Chapter 2 1. Larcom, A New England Girlhood, 221. 2. Histories of the New England textile factories include Josephson, The Golden Threads; Ware, The Early New England Cotton Manufacture; and Zonderman, Aspirations and Anx ieties. Studies of women’s work in the factories include Dublin, Women at Work, and Moran, The Belles of New England. For collections of the writing of female factory operatives, see Foner, The Factory Girls; Eisler, The Lowell Offering; and Dublin, Farm to Factory. 3. Thomas, “Editorial Corner.” 4. Ranta, Women and Children, 47. 5. See Williams, Reclaiming Authorship. 6. Curtis and Farley, “The Lowell Offering.” 7. Josephson, The Golden Threads, 189. 8. Eisler, The Lowell Offering, 113. 9. Cook, Working Women, Literary Ladies, 46. 10. Merish, Archives of Labor, 22. 11. Petrino, “Presents of Mind,” 89. 12. In her autobiography, Loom and Spindle, Robinson acknowledges the relationship between the Offering and gift books: “Though the literary character of these writings may not rise to the present standard of such productions, yet at that season of intellectual dearth they must have had a certain influence on contemporary literature; and viewed by the critical eye of a later date, it is found that the selections from The Lowell Offering will compare quite favorably with those in the ‘Ladies’ annuals’ of the same date, as, for instance, The Lady’s Repository, The Rose of Sharon, The Lily of the Valley, Gems of Beauty, The Opal, and other like literary curiosities, of which The Lowell Offering might be ranked as one, and with which, no doubt, it will hold its place in the history of American publications” (116). The Offering was not the only working-class women’s magazine or newspaper of the time to occupy this liminal

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space; other titles include Factory Girl’s Garland (1844–46); Factory Girl’s Album (1846–47); and Olive Leaf and Factory Girl’s Repository (1843). 13. My argument here is influenced by Leon Jackson’s insistence on the coexistence of multiple literary economies, in which “not only money, but other desireables such as knowledge, honor, prestige, and legitimacy, can be interpreted to great advantage as forms of capital that are produced, circulated, and exchanged” (The Business of Letters, 32). 14. Dora, “An Acrostic,” 12. 15. “The Lowell Offering,” 537. 16. Farley, “Editorial,” 164. 17. Untitled editorial note, Lowell Offering 1, no. 7 (September 1841): inside back cover. 18. Untitled editorial note, September 1841. 19. Untitled editorial note, Lowell Offering, 1, no. 5 (July 15, 1841): inside front cover. Adelaide’s poem “The Tomb of Washington,” originally published in the Offering on October 1840, was apparently popu lar with readers. An article from the Mercantile Journal reprinted in the Trumpet and Universalist Magazine on December 12, 1840, requested that “The Tomb of Washington” be reprinted in order to demonstrate the ability of the “fair operatives at Lowell” to “turn us out such golden threads of poetry as that” (“The Lowell Offering”). The poem was also reprinted in the Offering in January 1842; this is the only reprinted poem in the Offering. 20. Untitled editorial note, July 15, 1841. 21. “To Correspondents.” 22. Parker, “Tell Ye the Daughter of Sion.” 23. Qtd. in untitled editorial note, July 1845. 24. Untitled editorial note, Lowell Offering, 5, no. 7 (July 1845): inside front cover. 25. Farley, “The Graves of a Household.” 26. Farley, “The Graves of a Household.” See the slightly different couplet in Hemans, “The Graves of a Household,” 305. 27. Larcom, “The Wasted Flowers.” 28. Qtd. in untitled editorial note, Lowell Offering, 5 (May 1845): inside front cover. 29. Larcom, A New England Girlhood, 175–76. 30. Robinson, Loom and Spindle, 46. 31. “The Mouse’s Visit,” 93. 32. Burns, “To a Mouse,” 27. 33. Hall, “Old Ironsides,” 105. 34. A second essay with the same title, responding to critiques of the original piece, appeared in the Review in October. 35. Brownson, Laboring Classes, 11. 36. Farley, “Factory Girls,” 17, 19. 37. Campbell, “Hohenlinden,” 74; Hall, “Lowell.” It is typical of the lack of attention paid to poetry in the Offering that Hall’s parody has not been noted as a response to Brownson. 38. Campbell, “Hohenlinden,” 74. 39. Hall, “Lowell,” 26. 40. E. L., “The Lowell Offering.” 41. E. L., “The Lowell Offering.” 42. Farley, “Factory Blossoms,” 1. 43. Zonderman, Aspirations and Anxieties, 67.

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44. On the inside front cover of the same issue in which Farley’s “Factory Blossoms” was published, an editorial note explains that “the first article in the present volume was suggested by Miss Gould’s ‘American Wild Flowers for Queen Victoria.’ ” 45. Gould, “American Wild-Flowers.” 46. Griswold, The Female Poets of America, 155. 47. Loeffelholz, From School to Salon, 14, 22. 48. Griswold, The Female Poets of America, 155. 49. Poe, review of Poetical Remains, 304. For more on poetic conventionality in Lucretia Davidson’s work, see Stokes, “The Poetics of Unoriginality.” 50. Review of Biography and Poetical Remains, 273. 51. “Margaret Miller Davidson, 1823–1838.” 52. Kindilien, “Lucretia Maria Davidson,” 437. 53. Davidson, “Dedication.” 54. Greene, “To M. M. Davidson,” 181. 55. Irving, “Biography,” 74. 56. Davidson, “To die and be forgotten,” 94. 57. Green, “To M. M. Davidson,” 181. 58. Green, “Letter from Vermont,” 231. The first part of this letter was published in September 1845. 59. Lucretia Davidson is buried in the Riverside Cemetery in Plattsburgh. Margaret Davidson is buried in the Greenridge Cemetery in Saratoga Springs, New York, alongside her father, mother, and two brothers.

Chapter 3 1. While Ann Plato’s work has not received the scholarly attention it deserves, Wellburn’s recent book, Hartford’s Ann Plato, provocatively suggests that it should be read in light of Plato’s mixed African and Native American heritage. Parker has responded to this argument in “Braided Relations.” Plato’s volume was followed by the publication of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Forest Leaves in the mid- to late 1840s. There is a large body of scholarship on Harper’s life and work. The recent recovery of Forest Leaves, which was long thought to be lost, will surely prompt a new wave of research on her development as a poet. For more on the discovery of Forest Leaves, see Ortner, “Lost No More.” 2. Kete, “Claiming Lucy Terry Prince,” 18. 3. Gernes provides what seems to me an accurate list of Forten’s known output (with the exception of the Freedom’s Journal poems) in “Poetic Justice,” 246. 4. See especially Gernes, “Poetic Justice,” 254–64. 5. Yellin and Bond, The Pen Is Ours, 257–59. 6. Earle, “Lines,” 255. 7. Yellin and Bond, “Introduction,” 3. 8. Leonard, Fettered Genius, 3. 9. Cavitch, “Slavery and Its Metrics,” 94–95. 10. Foster, “Creative Collaborations,” 17. 11. Winch, Philadelphia’s Black Elite, 2. In 1820, Pennsylvania had the largest free Black population in the country, with New York running a close second. Many of Pennsylvania’s free Blacks were born into slavery but freed by the Gradual Abolition Act of 1780. The Act

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dictated that any person born enslaved on or before March 1, 1780, would remain enslaved for life, but any person born enslaved after that date would be freed at age twenty-eight. In 1820, 12,110 free Blacks lived in Philadelphia, and more were drawn to the city throughout the decade by a search for employment and community. By 1830, there were 14,554 free Blacks in the city and only eleven enslaved people. 12. “First Colored Convention.” 13. Otter, Philadelphia Stories, 125. 14. Sumler-Lewis, “The Forten-Purvis Women,” 282. 15. Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 271. 16. For the most recent example of this sort of discourse applied to Douglass, see Blight, Frederick Douglass. 17. Forten, “Prayer.” 18. James Forten to William Lloyd Garrison, February 23, 1831. 19. Bruce, The Origins of African American Literature, 186. Victor Ullman estimates that about 75 percent of Liberator subscribers were African American (Martin Delany, 16). 20. Untitled editorial note, Liberator 4, no. 50 (December 13, 1834): 199. 21. Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 101. 22. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 59. 23. See Gardner, Black Print Unbound. 24. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 36. 25. In this, I am influenced by the work of Gardner and of Barrett, who calls such strategies “voice-effects” in To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave (10). 26. Gardner, Black Print Unbound, 198. 27. Forten, “Recollections of Childhood.” 28. Rosa, “Stanzas.” 29. Forten, “On viewing.” 30. Bacon, Freedom’s Journal, 3. 31. Foster, Written by Herself, 24. 32. See Casey, ENAP. 33. Pelaez, “Introduction,” 1. 34. Cohen, The Social Lives of Poems, 60. 35. Forten, “The Grave of the Slave.” 36. Smith, To Serve the Living, 40. 37. McHenry, Forgotten Readers, 47. 38. Liberator 1, no. 4 (January 22, 1831): 14. 39. “Spirited Sentiments,” Liberator 1, no. 4 (January 22, 1831): 15. 40. Chandler, “Think of Our Country’s Glory.” 41. Chandler, “The Kneeling Slave.” 42. Chandler, “American Females.” Chandler did not sign “American Females,” but it is likely that she wrote the majority of the material appearing in the “Ladies’ Repository,” which she edited. 43. See also Forten’s “Prayer.” 44. Jones, Francis Johnson, 150. 45. Nash, Forging Freedom, 151; “Francis Johnson (1792–1844).” 46. James Forten to William Lloyd Garrison, February 2, 1831. 47. Jones, Francis Johnson, 51.

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Notes to Pages 109–124

48. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 145. 49. May, Some Recollections, 261. 50. For more on the Hutchinson family, see Gac, Singing for Freedom. 51. See Krush, liner notes, 14. 52. Forten, “Past Joys.” 53. Bennett, Nineteenth- Century American Women Poets, 76–77. 54. Qtd. in May, Some Recollections, 287. 55. “A Voice From Philadelphia,” 9. 56. Forten, “The Colonization Crusade.” 57. Forten, “The Slave Girl’s Address to Her Mother.” 58. See Patterson, Slavery and Social Death. 59. Forten’s other poem written from the point of view of a “slave girl” is “The Slave Girl’s Farewell.” 60. “Slavery Record.” 61. Qtd. in “Mental Feasts,” 114. 62. Sarah Louisa Forten to Angelina E. Grimké, April 15, 1837. 63. Wood, “Abolition Poetry,” xlvi. 64. Walters, The Antislavery Appeal, 137. 65. Forten, “The Slave.” The second and fourth lines of “The Slave” are the only ones indented in the twenty-eight-line poem. It is unclear whether this was Forten’s intention or a printer’s error. 66. Qtd. in “Spirited Sentiments.” 67. R., “Liberia Herald.” 68. Forten, “My Country.” 69. For more on “voice-effects,” see Barrett, To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave. 70. For example, in a letter to Edward Jones written from Liberia on March 20, 1830, and published in the ACS’s African Repository in 1830, Russwurm insists, “I long for the time when you . . . shall land on the shores of Africa, a messenger of that Gospel which proclaims liberty to the captive, and light to those who sat in great darkness! Oh, my friend, you have a wide career of usefulness before you, and may that Being who has promised his support to his followers ever be nigh to you, and strengthen and make you a second Paul to this Gentile people!” (72, 74). 71. Stuart, “American Colonization Society.” 72. Qtd. in Garrison, Thoughts on African Colonization, 112–13. 73. Forten to Grimké, April 15, 1837, 222. 74. Douglass, letter dated February 23, 1832. 75. Douglass, “Our Paper and Its Prospects.”

Chapter 4 1. Potter, “Introduction,” 14. Potter’s assertion that James’s poems were printed without revision by her patrons is confirmed by a letter from Margaret Livingston to Catharine Maria Sedgwick, in which she explains, “I fear [James’s book] will be ushered into the world with all its imperfections on its head, and although it contains many original & highly poetical ideas, many exquisite pieces, exhibiting talent, feeling & delicacy of taste, yet they all require more or less fixing, to use Julia Sand’s phrase; and Maria James’ friends are too scrupulous to allow

Notes to Pages 124–134

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this to be done for her, they will therefore receive no corrections, but such as she is herself capable of making” (September 1837). 2. Potter, “Introduction,” 13. 3. Qtd. in Potter, “Introduction,” 37. Wilson misreads the introduction to Wales and explains that James “published one poem in the New York American, ‘The American Flag,’ and had signed it deferentially . . . ‘Croaker and Company.’ . . . An ‘Ode on the Fourth of July’ was published (we are now in 1833) in Album, one of the typical gift-book publications popu lar in those decades” (“Patrons and the Patronized,” 36–37). I have not been able to identify the original site of publication for the “Ode,” but Wilson clearly misreads James’s poem “The Album” to say that James had published the “Ode” in a gift book called The Album. The poem seems to me to be about James being asked to make a contribution to a friendship album of some sort belonging to the “Miss J. L. M—h of N.Y.” identified in the poem’s subtitle. Nowhere in Wales is the “Ode” connected to the poem included in this album. 4. James, “What is Poetry?” in Wales. 5. Note, Wales, and Other Poems, inside back cover, Harvard Libraries. Thanks to Colleen Bryant, Library Assistant at Harvard Library, for scanning a copy of this note for me. 6. It is worth noting that this sort of exceptional memory is also attributed to other marginal poets. In his study of George Moses Horton, for example, Leon Jackson writes, “Immersed in the New Testament and the Methodist hymns he read and heard sung, Horton began to compose hymns and devotional poems himself, which, he later recalled, ‘I retained in my mind, for I knew nothing about writing with a pen’ ” (The Business of Letters, 54). While Horton’s memorization of his own poems is represented as a necessity, given his inability to write, James’s is connected to the nature of her labor. 7. Howell, Against Self-Reliance, 12. 8. See especially Brooks, “Our Phillis, Ourselves.” 9. Wilson, “Patrons and the Patronized,” 43. 10. Lauter, “Under Construction,” 70–71. 11. Coles and Zandy, “Introduction,” xxii. 12. In The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson writes that “class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born—or enter involuntarily. Class consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas, and institutional forms” (9–10). 13. Dudden, Serving Women, 8. 14. Although Sarah Maria Potter was known as “Maria,” I call her “Sarah Maria” in this chapter so as not to confuse her with Maria James. 15. Mary Rutherford Garrettson to Sarah Maria Potter, September 11, [1837]. 16. Potter, “Introduction,” 21. 17. Lenhart, The Stamp of Class, 14. 18. Southey, “Introduction,” 44, 35. 19. “Uneducated Genius”; “Uneducated Poets.” 20. “Uneducated Poets.” 21. “African Anecdotes,” 90, 91. 22. Review of Memoir and Poems, 173.

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Notes to Pages 135–147

23. For a useful summary of Freeborn Garrettson’s importance to the early Methodist church, see Straker, “Social Status,” 156. 24. Lawrence, One Family Under God, 163. 25. According to Adelson, none of the Garrettson Family Papers refers to Mary’s dwarfism (The Lives of Dwarfs, 383n61). Obituaries of Mary Garrettson refer obliquely to her “diminutive stature,” but without any awareness of Mary’s condition, it would be impossible to know what these writers are talking about (“Mary Rutherford Garrettson,” 338). 26. Wigger, Taking Heaven by Storm, 168. 27. Lawrence, One Family Under God, 80. 28. Straker, “Social Status,” 158. 29. Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 155. 30. Lawrence, One Family Under God, 92. 31. Dudden, Serving Women, 20. 32. Later, Garrettson does recall that Maria “read as much as she had opportunity. Her work of course became heavier as she advanced in years; but it was always sufficiently light to give her some leisure” (Potter, “Introduction,” 40–41). 33. Margaret Livingston to Mrs. Rawlins Lowndes. 34. Qtd. in Potter, “Introduction,” 37. 35. “Poems by Maria James of Rhinebeck,” 3. 36. Livingston to Lowndes. 37. Livingston to Lowndes. 38. Livingston to Lowndes. 39. Qtd. in Potter, “Introduction,” 42. 40. For James poems marked as “Written For The Bazaar,” see the following in Wales: “Summer” (132–33); “The African Doves” (134); “A Poet’s Dream” (135–36); “The Boy’s Lament” (137); “The Girl’s Lament” (138); “Sheep Sorrell” (139–40); “Old Gray” (140–41); and “To a Butterfly” (144–45). The prose piece in Garrettson’s papers is in Folder 25, Garrettson Family Papers. 41. An elegy titled “Memorial To An Affectionate Aunt” and prefaced by a note explaining that the poem is “On the death of a beautiful little girl, eight years old,” indicates that the elegy is not reserved in James’s work for members of the elite (116). 42. James, “Requiem,” 122. 43. James, “Friendship,” 64. 44. James, “The Bride’s Welcome,” 120. 45. Qtd. in Potter, “Introduction,” 42. 46. James, “Lines, Written on a Blank Leaf of the Life of the Reverend F. Garretson.” 47. Shepherdess, “Lines Written on a Blank Leaf of a Bible.” 48. L., “Lines Written on a Blank Leaf of the Memoirs of Harriet Newell.” 49. Bangs, The Life of the Reverend Freeborn Garrettson, 340. 50. Alonzo Potter to Mary Rutherford Garrettson, [January?] 17, [1838]. 51. While the Harpers had published roughly a book a week in the early 1830s, their output went down from 1837 to 1839 and again in 1842 (Exman, The Brothers Harper, 23). They were particularly reluctant to publish “the works of poets unless their names were well established” (138). 52. Alonzo Potter to Mary Rutherford Garrettson, April 17, 1838. 53. Potter to Garrettson, April 17, 1838.

Notes to Pages 147–155

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54. See Ann Caroline Bayard to Mary Rutherford Garrettson, January 22, [1839]. 55. Caspar, “Other Variations,” 220. 56. Carretta, Phillis Wheatley, 83. 57. Proposal for Wales, and Other Poems, handwritten, Garrettson Family Papers, Methodist Collection, Drew University, Madison, NJ. 58. Seymour Landon to Mary Rutherford Garrettson, April 23, 1838. It is unclear whether Potter and Garrettson used other methods of obtaining subscribers. On April 28, 1838, Potter wrote to Garrettson explaining that, on her recommendation, he had met with a professional agent who might be able to help them circulate the book more widely: “In regard to the agency of which you speak, I should wish to be guided altogether by your judgement. Mr Levings [?] sent a person to me some days since, who is engaged in collecting subscriptions for different works & who is a worthy member of your society. I declined giving him any answer as I was not apprised what might be your views of this mode of obtaining subscribers. I shall see him before long & will furnish him with papers. It might be well to take advantage of the meeting of your annual conference to get some of the Clergy interested in giving circulation to the work.” Potter may be recommending that Garrettson herself talk about James’s book with clergy at the Methodist Annual Conference or he may be suggesting that the agent, who is “a worthy member” of the church, do so himself. 59. James, “The Picture.” 60. Alonzo Potter to Mary Rutherford Garrettson, March 13, [1838]. 61. Cora Livingston Barton to Mary Rutherford Garrettson, April 4, [1838]. 62. “Poetry.” “The Wreck of the Home” is simply called “The Wreck” in Wales, and Other Poems. 63. This note from Mary Rutherford Garrettson is appended to Catherine Garrettson to Cora Livingston Barton, March 14, 1838. 64. Margaret Livingston to Catharine Maria Sedgwick, September 1837. 65. James, “What is Poetry?” United States Magazine. 66. Julia Lynch to Mary Rutherford Garrettson, March 25, 1839. 67. Lydia Huntley Sigourney to Mary Rutherford Garrettson, May 30, 1839. 68. Proposal for Wales, and Other Poems. 69. Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 55. 70. Sutherland, Americans and Their Servants, 39–40. 71. Dudden, Serving Women, 112, 115. 72. Catharine Maria Sedgwick to Mrs. K. S. Minot, June 13, 1845. 73. Livingston to Lowndes. 74. This undated letter is misidentified by the United Methodist Archives and History Center as being addressed to Sarah Maria Nott Potter, Alonzo Potter’s wife and Garrettson’s lifelong friend. This misidentification is reproduced in Adelson, The Lives of Dwarfs, 63. 75. Mary Rutherford Garrettson to Maria [James]. 76. Proposal for Wales, and Other Poems. 77. Garrettson to [James]. 78. Dudden, Serving Women, 44. 79. Review of The Poor Rich Man, 475. 80. Qtd. in Potter, “Introduction,” 39–40. 81. U.S. Federal Census, 1830 and 1840. 82. Stansell, City of Women, 158.

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Notes to Pages 155–171

83. Garrettson, Little Mabel and Her Sunlit Home, 58, 59. 84. Garrettson, Little Mabel’s Friends, 134–35. 85. Several sources claim that a formerly enslaved woman actually lived with the Garrettsons when Mary was young; as far as I can tell, that story comes from the authors’ autobiographical readings of Little Mabel and Her Sunlit Home. 86. Garrettson, Little Mabel and Her Sunlit Home, 30. 87. Qtd. in Potter, “Introduction,” 39. 88. Garrettson to [James]. 89. Garrettson to [James]. 90. James, “The Broom,” 162. 91. Bishop, Avery, and Wells, Testimonies, 260. 92. James, “Motto.” 93. Wolosky, “Poetry and Public Discourse,” 156. 94. James, “Reflections,” 98. 95. New York State Census, 1865.

Chapter 5 1. The writer Elizabeth Akers Allen (1832–1911) was known by a number of different names at different—and sometimes overlapping—times in her life: Elizabeth Chase, Florence Percy, Lizzie Taylor, Elizabeth Akers, Elizabeth Akers Allen. While this proliferation of names makes it difficult to know exactly how to refer to her in a discussion that spans more than twenty years, I have decided to call her “Akers Allen” throughout this chapter because that is how she was best known and how she referred to herself throughout most of her life. 2. Qtd. in Morse, Vindication, 10–11. 3. Swisshelm, “Rock Me To Sleep, Mother.” 4. “Solving Some Secrets.” 5. “Leave Me to Sleep, Biddy.” 6. Advertisement. 7. In 1903, the Worcester Daily Spy reported that the song’s first publishers made $5,000 for the song in the first six months, while Akers Allen herself received only $5 for the poem’s publication (“Out and About”). For Akers Allen’s comparison of her own remuneration for the poem and that of the song’s many publishers, see Akers Allen, Notebook, 12–13, 47. 8. Homestead, American Women Authors, viii. 9. “Literary,” Nation (May 2, 1867). 10. Cohen, “Poetry,” 453. 11. Sanborn, Plagiarama! 19. 12. Akers Allen, “History.” 13. It is around the time of Akers Allen’s employment at the book bindery that the cost of postage shifted from the recipient of a letter to the sender. Prior to 1845, “letter postage . . . was assessed based on distance and the number of sheets enclosed” and “could be extremely costly” (Henkin, The Postal Age, 18). Changes in the assessment of postage began in 1845 (22). 14. Akers Allen, “History.” 15. Akers Allen, “History.” 16. Aldrich, The Life and Times of Azro B. F. Hildreth, 60–62.

Notes to Pages 171–183

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17. In American Paper Mills, Bidwell explains that “newspaper proprietors took a special interest in [the papermaking] business because they relied on it to supply newsprint at prices they could afford, and many of them invested in it to ensure that they would have adequate properties on hand” (xxx). 18. Akers Allen, “Childhood.” 19. Power, Shelley in Amer ica, 30. 20. Engberg, The Making of the Shelley Myth, 3. 21. “Shelley: His First Love,” 39. 22. As far as I can determine, Akers Allen’s sole reference to Shelley in print is in a piece called “Reminiscences of Rome.-No. 2,” which was published in the Portland Transcript on June 14, 1862. Reflecting on her visit to the graves of Shelley and Keats, Akers Allen only subtly indicates that the purpose of her visit was to pay tribute to Shelley; in the midst of a description of the “strange foreign flowers whose names I had not learned,” she is interrupted by a “friend” telling her “ here is the grave you are seeking.” It is only after this, as they pass into “the former burial ground,” that an Italian guide follows them in order to tell her, “Ecco signorina, . . . here is the grave which you English strangers are always seeking” (84). 23. It is not clear whether Taylor was a writer prior to meeting Akers Allen. Nor is it clear how they met. Yet by 1850, both were writing for the Carpet-Bag, a Boston-based humor magazine owned and operated by three men, one of whom, Samuel Pickard, would go on to edit the Portland Transcript, for which Akers Allen began to write in 1851. 24. “Poems By Florence Percy.” 25. Akers Allen, “History.” 26. In a letter published in the Carpet-Bag on November 12, 1853, Taylor explains that his “present employment is teaching the art of penmanship” (“Letter from California”). Fourteen years later, in the latest piece of evidence I have been able to locate regarding Taylor’s life after his arrival in California, his voter registration for 1867 lists him as a teacher (California, Voter Registers, 1866–98). 27. Samuel F. Pickard to Florence Percy McIntyre, January 21, 1914. 28. Akers Allen, “History.” 29. “The Transcript and Eclectic.” 30. “Forest Buds.” 31. “The Transcript for 1860.” 32. “Who is Florence Percy.” 33. Pickard to McIntyre, January 21, 1914. 34. Akers Allen, “My Name,” 155. 35. Ingomar, “Response to Florence Percy.” 36. Akers Allen, “To My Namesake.” 37. Wolosky, “Poetry and Public Discourse,” 163. 38. John Burroughs to Elijah Allen, May 16, 1863. 39. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 2. 40. Akers Allen, “History.” 41. Akers Allen, Scrapbook, loose page in between pages 60 and 61. 42. Akers Allen, “Rock Me to Sleep.” 43. See Kete, Sentimental Collaborations, 5, and Petrino, Emily Dickinson, 101. 44. Kete, Sentimental Collaborations, 47.

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Notes to Pages 183–194

45. In “Who Wrote ‘Rock Me to Sleep,”’ Sorby takes this point further, claiming that “Rock Me to Sleep” represents a longing “for the naked helplessness of infancy,” as compared to other nineteenth-century poems that long for the “barefoot freedom of youth” (423). Using Marianne Noble’s notion of “sentimental masochism,” she goes on to read this fantasy as masochistic (425). See also Julio C. Avalos Jr., “ ‘An Agony of Pleasurable Suffering’: Masochism and Maternal Deprivation in Mark Twain,” American Imago 62, no. 1 (2005): 35–58. 46. Roberts, “A Poetic E Pluribus Unum,” 180, 181, 182. 47. The poem’s appeal was certainly not limited to women, as its popularity during the war demonstrates. According to one of Akers Allen’s publishers, “Rock Me to Sleep” was printed on leaflets and distributed to soldiers in both the Union and the Confederate armies (Sunset Song, 309). The song versions of “Rock Me to Sleep” rendered the poem familiar to those who, owing to geographical isolation or a lack of education, were outside the wide parameters of the culture of reprinting. Both the poem and the song became part of a larger sentimental tradition of war poetry, much of which featured soldiers appealing to their mothers from the battlefield. See Fahs, The Imagined Civil War, 103–9. For more on Civil War poetry, see Barrett, “Introduction.” 48. Tracy Robinson to Elizabeth Akers Allen, December 19, 1883. 49. Garvey, Writing with Scissors, 4. 50. Untitled, Saturday Evening Post (April 6, 1861): 3. 51. “Story of a Poem.” 52. “Notes and Comments.” 53. “Rock Me To Sleep, Mother,” Wisconsin State Register. 54. Akers Allen, “History.” 55. Wadsworth, In the Company of Books, 175. 56. Qtd. in Morse, Vindication, 25. 57. Akers Allen, Notebook, 28. 58. As Wadsworth notes, other publishing firms brought out knockoffs of the blue and gold series, in an effort to invest their own publications with the status achieved by those in the Ticknor and Fields series (In the Company of Books, 179). 59. O’Connor, “Who Wrote ‘Rock Me to Sleep’?” 60. “Who Wrote ‘Rock Me To Sleep, Mother’?” 61. Morse, Vindication, 12. 62. Leavenworth, “Preface,” in Vindication, iii. Leavenworth seems to have bound Morse’s 1867 Vindication with his own preface in 1870. 63. Marsh, “Introductory Note,” 6. 64. Morse, Vindication, 22. 65. Richards, Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle, 52. 66. Coultrap-McQuin, Doing Literary Business, 13. 67. See also Mitchell, Emily Dickinson, 155. 68. In the Vindication, these letters are signed only with initials. In “Who Wrote ‘Rock Me to Sleep, Mother’?” the author adds the names of the letter writers in order to counter accusations that the letters had been made up (16). 69. Qtd. in Morse, Vindication, 27. 70. “Literary,” Nation (May 30, 1867). 71. Morse, Vindication, 36.

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72. Griswold, Female Poets, 7. 73. Morse, Vindication, 46. 74. Qtd. in Morse, Vindication, 19. 75. Akers Allen repeatedly objected strongly to Ball’s rendering of her poem. In a late letter to McIntyre, for example, she explains, “There is not in the whole six stanzas, a single allusion to ‘heaven,’ or to ‘spirits,’ or anything supernatural; the mother was not desired to come back as an ‘angel,’ with a convoy of angels—but simply to return and be, for a little precisely what she used to be. Whereas, in Ball’s nine additional stanzas, every one teems with spiritualistic allusions. . . . This marked difference makes the bad stanzas stand out as clearly from the others as would yellow patches on a purple garment—it is a distinct, evident shouting difference” (March 24, 1905). 76. “Who Wrote ‘Rock Me to Sleep, Mother’?” 23. 77. Qtd. in Morse, Vindication, 16. 78. Akers Allen, Scrapbook, 14. 79. O’Connor, “Who Wrote ‘Rock Me to Sleep’?” 80. “Curiosities of Literature,” in Akers Allen, Scrapbook, 70–71. 81. “Literariana,” 285. 82. Twain, “A Grave Literary Question.” 83. Qtd. in “Rock Me To Sleep, Mother,” Boston Daily Advertiser. 84. Morse, Vindication, 33. 85. Qtd. in “Who Wrote ‘Rock Me To Sleep, Mother’?” 3–4. 86. Shields, Civil Tongues, xxx–xxxi. 87. O’Connor, “Who Wrote ‘Rock Me to Sleep’?” 88. Review of Vindication, 253. 89. “The Ball in Motion,” in Akers Allen, Scrapbook, 17; Akers Allen, Notebook, 24. 90. Akers Allen, Notebook, 37. 91. The Whitman plagiarism had been noticed by Akers Allen at the same time that O’Connor was writing his review of the Vindication, which appeared in the New York Times on May 27, 1867. On May 23, 1867, Akers Allen wrote to Whitman, asking her for a copy of “A Still Day in Autumn” and explaining her suspicion that Ball had plagiarized the poem, just as he had “Rock Me to Sleep.” This letter was soon published in the Providence Journal, along with a summary of O’Connor’s review. See Akers Allen, Scrapbook, 18–19. 92. Akers Allen, Scrapbook, 63. 93. “Literary,” Nation (May 30, 1867). 94. Sarah Helen Whitman to Elizabeth Akers Allen, May 31, 1867. 95. William Douglas O’Connor to Elizabeth Akers Allen, June 9, 1867. 96. O’Connor, “The Ballad of Sir Ball,” 328. 97. All of these documents are available in the Akers Allen Collection. 98. For Akers Allen’s resistance to naming her book after “Rock Me to Sleep,” see Francis A. Copcutt to Elijah Allen, December 22, 1864. For an example of Akers Allen’s writing about readers admiring poems other than “Rock Me to Sleep,” see Elizabeth Akers Allen to Gilbert Tracy, July 4, 1901. 99. For an example of a late letter in which Akers Allen writes about the “Rock Me to Sleep” controversy, see Zellinger, “ ‘Force Them into Fair Dealing,’ ” which reprints letters to Gilbert Tracy dated March 25, 1902, and June 13, 1902.

244

Notes to Pages 203–212

100. Akers Allen, Sunset-Song, 311. 101. Elizabeth Akers Allen to Gilbert Tracy, July 1902. 102. See Lynn, William Dean Howells; Brodhead, The School of Hawthorne; and Boyd, “ ‘What! Has she got into the Atlantic?’ ” 103. Howard M. Ticknor to Elijah Allen, July 18, 1866. 104. Howard M. Ticknor to Elizabeth Akers Allen, June 4, 1867. 105. Review of Vindication, 252. 106. Untitled, Atlantic Advertiser & Miscellany, no. 125 (May 1867): 3. In Akers Allen, Scrapbook, 29, Collection of Elizabeth Akers Allen Materials, Colby College Special Collections, Waterville, ME. 107. Boyd, “ ‘What! Has she got into the Atlantic?’ ” 19. 108. Elizabeth Akers Allen to Phillip Willis McIntyre, March 24, 1905. 109. Qtd. in Winterich, “Elizabeth Akers.”

Conclusion 1. Six other scholars of nineteenth-century African American literature and culture— Melba Joyce Boyd, Eric Gardner, Meredith McGill, Carla Peterson, Britt Rusert, and Manisha Sinha—published pieces alongside Ortner’s introduction, examining Forest Leaves from a number of different angles. 2. Faith Barrett, email communication with author, July 28, 2020. As Foster points out in A Brighter Coming Day, the only extant text of Moses is a second edition dated 1869. “Since no earlier copies are known to exist, the date of first publication is unknown,” Foster writes, “but it is unlikely that Moses was created before 1865” (138). 3. Boyd calls “Let Me Love Thee” evidence of a “new genre—unabashedly romantic poetry” in Harper’s body of work and also calls it a “love poem.” She reads it as evidence of a romantic relationship prior to Harper leaving Baltimore and becoming an activist (“The Mystery of Romance”). I don’t think that it is necessary to read the speaker in “Let Me Love Thee” as Harper herself, especially given the frequency with which she takes on other voices in her poetry. Even if we do read the speaker as Harper, it seems as likely that she is addressing a female friend as it is that she is addressing a male lover. 4. Notable exceptions are Bennett, Nineteenth- Century American Women Poets; Gardner, “‘Yours, for the cause’” and Black Print; Roberts, “‘the little coffin’”; and Socarides, In Plain Sight. 5. Harper, “An Acrostic.” 6. Gardner, “Leaves, Trees, and Forests.” 7. Rusert, “ ‘Nor wish to live the past again.’ ” 8. Still, The Underground Railroad, 756. According to a study of the education of African American schoolchildren in Baltimore’s Ward 17  in 1850, approximately twelve years after Harper left school, girls’ school attendance dropped off dramatically after the age of thirteen. “On the whole,” Moss writes, “these figures suggest that while Black parents sought some schooling for all of their children, they faced difficult choices. In general, they gave their sons longer and thus probably more advanced instruction than their daughters” (109). In the same year, in Ward 16, William Watkins’s sixteen-year-old son Henry was no longer a student but was working as a teacher at the Watkins Academy. His fourteen-year-old daughter Henrietta was still attending school.

Notes to Pages 212–220

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9. Matchett’s Baltimore Directory for 1835–36 lists the booksellers and stationers Armstrong & Berry as located at the intersection of Baltimore and Eutaw Streets, with Robert Armstrong’s address as 9 South Eutaw Street. Wright also identifies Armstrong as Harper’s potential employer in Black Girlhood (210n20). Louis Filler seems to have been the first to name the Armstrong family as Harper’s employers, but his essay in Notable American Women, published in 1971, does not provide any details as to where he got this information. Foster repeats this claim in A Brighter Coming Day, 8. 10. United States Federal Census, 1860. In 1860, Armstrong is listed as a “book dealer” and lives with his wife, Achsah, 57 years old; their children Rebecca (24), Dorsey (22), Robert (21), and Benjamin (21); and two African American servants, Julia Johnson (44) and Jane Johnson (22). 11. Moss, Schooling Citizens, 79. According to Moss, “servants’ wages were so low in Baltimore they made even day labor seem promising. In 1850, the average weekly wage for a domestic in the city was $1.40” (79). 12. “List of Teachers,” 142; Woods Baltimore City Directory, 593. 13. “25th Anniversary.” 14. McGill, “Presentiments.” 15. Plato, “Advice to Young Ladies.” 16. Ortner, “Lost No More.” 17. Thinking along similar lines, Gardner asks, “What other works by Harper have we not yet recovered? And what about the texts by the growing chorus surrounding her?” (“Leaves, Trees, and Forests”). 18. Frere, “To Rosa.” 19. Gardner, “ ‘Yours, for the cause,’ ” 367. 20. I should also ask how, in the case of “Rosa” and other pseudonymous poets, we can assert with any certainty that this work was written by an African American woman? For me, this has required a careful calculation on the basis of the periodical in which the work is published, editorial statements about African American authorship (of the poem itself or of other pieces in the periodical), subject matter, and other indicators. 21. Dalton, “Yes, Oft I Think of Thee.” 22. B. A. S., “Naomi and Ruth.” 23. Gardner, Unexpected Places, 158. 24. Rosa, “Lines”; Archer, untitled poem, 23. 25. Harper, untitled poem; Chancellor, “Lines,” [4]; Demby, “Lines.” 26. Jay, “On the Death of a Sister.” 27. H. M. T., “Washington Correspondence.” 28. “ ‘Not Fully Identified’ ” is not preceded by the “For the Weekly Anglo-African” note that usually indicates original submissions. Neither is it identified as a piece clipped from another publication. Without more information about Martha T. Poor, I am unable to state definitively that she is an African American author. I proceed on that assumption, however, based upon the subject matter of the poem and the prefacing of her name with a “Miss,” implying that the editor may have known her age and marital status. 29. Poor, “ ‘Not Fully Identified.’ ” 30. Obituary of Annie Douglass. 31. Malvin, “Mistress and Slave.” 32. Chancellor, “Lines,” 60.

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Notes to Pages 220–222 33. Ella, “An Acrostic.” 34. Charlotte, “To Frederick Douglass.” 35. Gardner, Black Print Unbound, 149. 36. Johnson, “To the Daniel A. Payne L.S.,” 205. 37. The volume was printed in Baltimore by Sherwood & Co. 38. Jay, Letter.

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INDEX

abolition and abolitionists, 103, 106–7, 112–13, 221; African American, 101, 108, 110, 121, 211, 220–21; and the Forten family, 94, 96; and Forten’s poetry, 95, 101; and Revolutionary rhetoric, 117; and songs, 109. See Sarah Louisa Forten abolitionist poetry, 16, 104, 111, 117, 210; and African American poets, 110; conventions and tropes, 94, 95, 100, 102, 108; invisibility of free African Americans, 101; and the Liberator, 104–5. See also Sarah Louisa Forten abolitionist press, 93, 96, 110, 162. See also Genius of Universal Emancipation; The Liberator acrostic, 63, 65, 209–15, 216, 220 Adelaide. See Lydia Sarah Hall Adelia. See Harriet F. Farley African American women poets, 92, 94, 102, 209–10, 214–23. See also Sarah Louisa Forten; Frances Ellen Watkins Harper; Ann Plato; Phillis Wheatley Akers Allen, Elizabeth, 19–20, 24–25, 93, 164–207; “Autumn Thoughts,” 171; “Childhood,” 171–72; “Flora,” 171; Forest-Buds, From the Woods of Maine, 175–76, 177; “History of One Woman’s Financial Experience,” 169–71, 175; and labor in book-bindery, 170–71; “My Name,” 176–77, 180; Poems, 19, 165, 187, 201, 203, 204, 206; as professional author, 167–68, 190–91, 195–201; prospectus for first book, 173–75; and pseudonymity, 93, 164, 172–79; “Rock Me to Sleep,” 164–69, 176, 179–207, 240, 242, 243; “To My Namesake,” 177; Sunset Song and Other Verses, 19, 165, 203; “A Week-Day Sermon” (Mist), 177 Alcott, Louisa May, 204–5

Allen, Elijah, 178–79, 187, 204 amateur authorship, 167, 190–96, 199–201. See also parlor authorship American Anti-Slavery Society, 96, 113, 119, 162 American Colonization Society, 112, 118, 119, 120 Andrews, Dee, 136 Anderson, Benedict, 100, 109 Archer, Mollie, 217 Armstrong, Robert, 212–14, 245 Ash, Thomas, 34, 42, 43–44 B. A. S., “Naomi and Ruth,” 217 Bacon, Henry, 4–8, 225 Bacon, Jacqueline, 104 Ball, Alexander McWhorter, 19–20, 167, 169, 187–97, 199–203, 205–6 Bangs, Nathan: The Life of the Reverend Freeborn Garrettson, 144–46 Barbadoes, James G., 106 Barton, Cora Livingston, 149, 150 Barrett, Faith, 235 Bayard, Ann Caroline, 150 Baym, Nina, 13, 33, 34 Bazin, J. S., 175 “Beautiful Snow,” 166 Beecher, Catharine, 24 Beers, Ethel Lynn, “All Quiet Along the Potomac,” 166 Bell, Phillip A., 104 Benjamin Sr., Park, 43–44 Bennett, Paula Bernat, 13, 47–48, 57, 111 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 26 Bidwell, John, 241 Bond, Cynthia D., 94 book bindery, 5–7, 170–71 Boyd, Anne E., 204–5

266

Index

Boyd, Melba Joyce, 244 Bray, Anna Eliza, 133 Brodhead, Richard, 12, 204 Brown, Charles Brockden, 10 Brown, Henry, 175 Brownson, Orestes, 75–76 Bruce, Dickson D., Jr., 98 Bryant, William Cullen, 27; “The African Chief,” 105 Burns, Robert: “To a Mouse,” 73–74 Burroughs, John, 178–79 Campbell, Thomas, “Hohenlinden,” 74–79 Capper, Charles, 229 Carretta, Vincent, 148 Caspar, Scott E., 147–48 Cassey, Amy Matilda, 93 Cavitch, Max, 95 Champlin, Amelia, 52–53 Chancellor, A. E., “Lines Inspired by a Cold Interview with an Abolitionist,” 215–16, 220; “Lines, to the Memory of John I. Gaines,” 217 Chandler, Elizabeth Margaret, 94, 98, 210, 235; “The Kneeling Slave,” 109; “Think of Our Country’s Glory,” 107–8 Charlotte, “To Frederick Douglass,” 220–21 Civil War, 20, 165, 184, 204, 217, 220 class, 130; and African Americans, 96, 108; and Forten, 96, 98; and James, 126, 129, 131, 140–42, 151–55, 157–58; and the Lowell Offering, 60–62, 65, 68–69, 72–73, 78–84, 90–91; and Methodism, 136; and poetry, 2, 11–12, 14–16, 60–62, 129–30, 131–35, 137–46, 171; and the “Rock Me to Sleep” controversy, 167, 191–97, 201; and Sigourney, 47–48, 56–57. See also Charlotte Jerauld Cohen, Michael, 104, 167, 206 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 56, 170 Coles, Nicholas, 129 collaboration, 1, 8, 9, 19, 97, 168; and African American authors, 95–96; and Akers Allen, 168, 173, 206; and Davidson, 86; and Forten, 18, 97, 101; and James, 19, 128–31, 163; and the Lowell Offering, 65, 71, 84, 86, 88; and periodicals, 18; and Sigourney, 17, 24, 49–57. See also Maria James Colling, Maria, 133, 135

colonization, 18, 112–14, 117–22 commonplace book, 19, 59, 165, 171, 185 community, 1, 8, 9, 20; and African American authors, 95–96; and African Americans, 96, 100–101, 105–6, 214, 220–21; and the elegy, 51, 55, 102–10; and Forten as author, 18–19, 93, 97–101; and Forten’s abolitionist poetry, 102–10, 110–23; and James, 19, 129–31, 142, 143, 144–46; and the Lowell Offering, 18, 62, 63–65, 76–77, 81, 83–84; and the Lowell textile mills, 72, 80–81; and periodicals, 18; and “Rock Me to Sleep,” 166, 168, 184–85 Cook, Sylvia J., 61–62 Cooper, James Fenimore, 34 Cornish, Samuel E., 104 Coultrap-McQuin, Susan, 191–92 Croaker & Co., 126, 127–28 Curtis, Harriott, 73; as editor of the Lowell Offering, 59, 60, 66, 67–69; “Lament of the Little Hunchback,” 73 Custis, George Washington Parke, 120 D. D. W., “Rhymeless Poets: Written To One Who Professed Not To Be a Poetess,” 14 Dalton, Theodocia, 223; “Yes, Oft I Think of Thee,” 216–17, 218 Davidson, Lucretia, 84–86, 88, 89, 234 Davidson, Margaret Miller, 84–90, “Lenore,” 86; “A Moonbeam,” 88; “To die and be forgotten,” 87, 89 Davis, Rebecca Harding, 204–5; “Life in the Iron Mills,” 130 Davis, Theo, 10 Delany, Martin, 216–17 Demby, Angeline S., “Lines Respectfully Dedicated to the Memory of our Much Beloved and Martyred President, Abraham Lincoln,” 217 Dickinson, Emily, 1–2, 20 Dodd, Moses Woodruff, 162 Dodge, Mary Abigail, 205 Dolan, Neal, 26 domestic ser vice, 130, 137–38, 151–54, 212–13. See also Maria James Dora, “An Acrostic,” 63, 65 Douglass, Annie, 218–19 Douglass, Frederick, 97, 122–23, 218–19, 220–21

Index Douglass, Sarah Mapps, 116, 121, 217 Drake, Joseph Rodman, 128; “The MockingBird,” 26–27, 48; “To a Friend,” 28. See also Croaker & Co. Dudden, Faye E., 130, 137–38, 151, 153 Dwight, Timothy, 48, 50–51 E. L., “The Lowell Offering,” 78–79 Earle, Eliza, “Lines, Suggested on Reading ‘An Appeal to Christian Women of the South,’ by A. E. Grimke,” 93–94; 210 Eisler, Benita, 60–61, 69 elegy, 24, 34–35, 44, 142–43, 183; and African American women poets, 217–219; and Forten, 101–10, 112; and Sigourney, 17, 34–35, 40–41, 44–47, 49–56 Ella, “An Acrostic,” 220 Elliott, Ebenezer, 140–41 Elwell, Edward, 175, 180 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 9, 10, 28, 187 Engberg, Karsten Kleis, 17 enslaved African Americans: in Chandler’s poetry, 107–8; in Forten’s poetry, 100–101, 105–10, 111–12, 114–16; in Malvin’s “Mistress and Slave,” 219–20; in print, 103. See also Lucy Terry Prince Farley, Harriet F.: as editor of the Lowell Offering, 59, 60, 66, 67–69, 79–80; “Factory Blossoms for Queen Victoria” (H. F.), 79–84, 87, 89, 190, 234; “Factory Girls” (A Factory Girl), 75–76; “The Graves of a Household” (Adelia), 69–71, 84, 88, 101–2. See also “The Mouse’s Visit” Few, Matilda, 143 Fields, James T., 204 Foner, Philip S., 60 Forten, Charlotte, 96 Forten, James, 96, 118, 120; and colonization, 112–14; correspondence with Garrison, 97–98, 109, 118; friendship with Frank Johnson, 109; publication in the Liberator, 107, 118 Forten, Sarah Louisa, 14, 18–19, 20, 91, 92–123, 130, 165–66, 184, 214, 217; “The Abuse of Liberty” (Magawisca), 97; correspondence with Angelina E. Grimke, 117, 121; “The Grave of the Slave” (Ada), 105–10, 111, 112, 114, 116, 121; “Hours of Childhood” (Ada), 102, 111; misattribu-

267

tion of “Lines, Suggested on Reading ‘An Appeal to Christian Women of the South,’ by A. E. Grimke,” 93–94; “My Country” (Ada), 117, 119–22; “On viewing the lifeless Remains of a very dear Friend” (Louisa), 102–4, 105, 106, 110, 112, 212; “Past Joys” (Ada), 110–14, 116, 121; “Prayer” (Ada), 97, 99 (fig.); “Productions of Slavery” (A.), 98; and pseudonymity, 93–94, 97–98, 102; “Recollections of Childhood” (Louisa), 102–4, 111; recovery of, 92–94, 210; “The Slave” (Ada), 117–18, 119, 121; “The Slave Girl’s Address to Her Mother” (Ada), 114–17; use of “I,” 103–4, 119, 121–22; use of “we,” 100–101, 106–7, 110–11, 121, 183 Foster, Frances Smith, 11, 95–96, 104, 215, 244 Foucault, Michel, 98 free African Americans, 18; abolitionist activity of, 96, 112; absence in colonizationist rhetoric, 120–21; in Garrettson’s Little Mabel’s Friends, 156–57; vulnerability of, 116–17, 218–19. See also Sarah Louisa Forten Freedom’s Journal, 11, 93, 96, 102–4, 105; and John Russwurm, 112 Frere, “To Rosa,” 215 Fuller, Margaret, 34, 38, 40, 47, 229; and a national literature, 30–31; and newspaper poetry, 31–32, 40; and women poets, 32, 33 Gardner, Eric, 11–12, 100, 102, 212, 213, 215, 221, 245 Garrettson, Catherine Livingston, 124, 135–37, 143, 152, 159, 160; and employment of domestic servants, 155; as “Mistress” of Wildercliffe, 156; assistance with publication of The Life of the Reverend Freeborn Garrettson, 145 Garrettson, Freeborn, 135–36, 144–46; transcription of James’ poetry, 139–40 Garrettson, Mary Rutherford, 124, 152–58, 160, 161, 162–63, 238; assistance with publication of The Life of the Reverend Freeborn Garrettson, 145; assistance with publication and sales of Wales, and Other Poems, 19, 131, 134, 146–50; birth of, 135; dwarfism of, 136; and encouragement of

268

Index

Garrettson, Mary Rutherford (continued) James’ writing, 141–42; and James as companion to, 137–39; in “Introduction” to Wales, and Other Poems, 137–40, 154–55, 156; Little Mabel and Her Sunlit Home, 155; Little Mabel’s Friends, 155–57 Garrison, William Lloyd, 100, 109, 110, 118, 122; and African American contributors, 98, 106–7, 110, 122; and Forten, 97–98, 102; and poetry, 104–5; “Slavery Record,” 116 Garvey, Ellen Gruber, 185 Genius of Universal Emancipation, 106, 110; and Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, 107; publication of poetry, 105, 110 Gernes, Todd, 93–94 gift book, 63, 65, 81, 232–33 Godey’s Lady’s Book, 21, 31–32, 53 Gould, Hannah F., 22, 94; “American Wild Flowers, For Queen Victoria,” 81–84, 190; “The Black at Church,” 105 Green, Miriam R.: “Letter From Vermont,” 89–90; “To M. M. Davidson,” 84–89 Grimké, Angelina E., 117, 121 Griswold, Rufus Wilmot 43, 50; Female Poets of America, 11, 15–16, 32–33, 40, 48, 84–85, 194; Gems From American Female Poets, 22; Poets and Poetry of America, 22, 29, 43–44, 47 Haight, Gordon, 230, 231 Hale, Sarah Josepha, 53; Ladies’ Wreath, 21–23, 37, 56–57, 227–28 Hall, Lydia Sarah, 66–67, 74; “Lowell—A Parody on Hohenlinden” (L. S. H.), 74–78, 81; “My Country’s Flag” (Adelaide), 74; “Old Ironsides” (Adelaide), 74, 75, “The Tomb of Washington” (Adelaide), 74, 233 Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 128. See also Croaker & Co. Harper & Brothers, 146–47, 238 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins, 1, 9, 11, 210; “Advice to the Girls,” 211; “An Acrostic,” 209–15, 216; “Crucifixion,” 210; elegy for J. Edward Barnes,” 217; “Ethiopia,” 208, 209; “For She Said If I May But Touch of His Clothes I Shall Be Whole,” 210–11; Forest Leaves, 208–17, 215, 223, 223; “The Fugitive’s Wife,” 209; “Let Me Love Thee,” 209; Moses: A Story of the Nile, 209; “The Mother’s Blessing,” 209; Poems on

Miscellaneous Subjects, 208, 209, 210–11; recovery of, 1–2, 92; “Ruth and Naomi,” 208, 217; “Saved By Faith,” 210–11; “The Slave Auction,” 211; “To Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe,” 211; “To the Cleveland Union-Savers,” 211; “Yearnings for Home,” 208–9 Hart, Lizzie, 215–16 Hartman, Saidiya, 100, 109 Hemans, Felicia, 17, 180; compared to Sigourney, 23; elegy by Sigourney, 101; “The Graves of a Household,” 69–71, 101–2; in Hale’s The Ladies’ Wreath, 22–23; published in the Liberator, 105; Records of Woman: With Other Poems, 69; and Sigourney, 25, 33–40, 42–43, 44–45, 57, 62, 165 Henderson, Desirée, 35 Hildreth, Arzo Benjamin Franklin, 171 Homestead, Melissa, 166 Hood, Thomas, 104 Howe, Julia Ward, 204–5 Howell, William Huntting, 9 Howit, Mary, 22 Huntley, Ezekial, 47 hymn, 5–8, 141–42 imitation, 1, 8, 9–10, 10–11, 20, 167–68, 190, 225–26; and African American authors, 95; and Forten, 94–95, 102–3, 117; and Harper, 208–9; of Hemans, 23, 35–40; and James, 19, 127, 129, 130, 140–42; and literary nationalism, 24, 25–33; and the neoclassical aesthetic, 26–28; and the “Rock Me to Sleep” controversy, 188, 190, 201; and Sigourney, 16, 24, 25, 33–34, 35–40, 42, 45, 57; in Lowell Offering, 17–18, 60, 61–62, 63, 69–91, 101–2, 130; and women poets, 24, 25 Ingomar, “A Response to Florence Percy,” 176, 178 Irving, Washington, 34, 84 Jackson, Leon, 12, 227, 233, 237 Jackson, Virginia, 9, 13, 14, 46, 49 James, Maria, 14, 19, 20, 123, 124–63, 166, 168, 171, 191, 213; “The Bride’s Welcome,” 143–44; “The Broom,” 158–62; “Children’s Hymn, For New-Year, For Sunday Scholars,” 142; as domestic servant, 124,

Index 127–28, 135, 137–39, 151–55, 157–58; death of, 162; education of, 138–39; family of, 135; “Friendship,” 143; “Good Friday,” 149; in Griswold, Female Poets of Amer ica, 15; “Hymn, For the Sunday Scholars, on New-Year,” 142; “Lines, Written on a Blank Leaf of the Life of the Reverend F. Garretson,” 144–46; “Motto,” 161; “Ode, Written for the Fourth of July, 1833,” 124, 126–28, 140; “On Seeing a Bust of the Late Hon. Edward Livingston,” 159; “The Picture,” 148–49; and publication and sales of Wales, and Other Poems, 124, 128, 146–52; “Reflections,” 162–63; “Requiem,” 142–43; “To Constance,” 143; “To Harriet,” 143; “To Winnifred,” 143; Wales, and Other Poems, 125 (fig.), 239; “What is Poetry?,” 126–27, 128, 144, 149; “The Wreck of the Home,” 149; “Written on Seeing a Bust of the Late Edward Livingston,” 149 Jay, Hester A. B., 222, 223; “On the Death of a Sister,” 217–18 Jerauld, Charlotte Fillebrown, 2–8, 3 (fig.), 14, 168, 171, 225; “Charity Hymn,” 7–8, 209 Johnson, Frances (Frank), 109 Johnson, H. Martha, “To the Daniel A. Payne L. S. of Buffalo,” 221–22 Johnson, Wendy Dasler, 39 Josephson, Hannah, 60 Kachun, Mitch, 215 Kelly, Gary, 41, 42, 230–31 Kessler-Harris, Alice, 151 Kete, Mary Louise, 16, 27–28, 33, 92, 183 Kettel, Samuel, 29, 34, 40 Kindilien, Carlin T., 86 Kohler, Michelle, 228–29 L., “Lines Written on a Blank Leaf of the Memoirs of Harriet Newell,” 145 Landon, Letitia Elizabeth, 22, 228 Landon, Seymour, 148, 150 Larcom, Lucy, 12; in Griswold, Female Poets of Amer ica, 15; A New-England Girlhood, 56, 59, 72; “The Wasted Flowers” (Rotha), 71 Larson, Kerry, 10, 29, 231 Lauter, Paul, 129 Lawrence, Anna M., 135, 136

269

Leavenworth, Elias Warner, 190 Lee, Mother Ann, 160–61 Lenhart, Gary, 132 Leonard, Keith, 95 Leslie, Ernest, 165 Liberator, 18, 96–101, 106, 116, 121; publication of Forten’s work, 93, 97–98, 102, 105, 114, 119, 122; publication of poetry, 94–95, 104–5; subscribers to, 98, 109. See also Sarah Louisa Forten literary nationalism, 17, 23–24, 25–33 Livingston, Edward, 159 Livingston, Margaret, 139, 141–42, 149, 152, 159, 236–37 Livingston, Robert, 143 Loeffelholz, Mary, 13, 84–85 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 180, 187, 230 Lootens, Tricia, 228 Low, Asa, 170–71 Lowell, Frances Cabot, 56 Lowell, James Russell, 229 Lowell Offering, 14, 16, 17–18, 57, 58, 60, 58–91, 130, 171, 210; cover of, 63 (fig.); cover pages of, 66–68, 71, 78; critical dismissal of poetry in, 60–62, 209–10; final issue of, 168; first issue of, 84; history of, 59; and poetry, 60; title of, 63–64 Lowell Offering poets, 57, 93, 97, 166, 171 Lundy, Benjamin, 105 Lynch, Julia, 150 Lynn, Kenneth, 204 lyric, 9, 14, 24 MacFarlane, Robert, 26 Malvin, Ellen, 223; “Mistress and Slave,” 219–20 manuscript poetry, 7, 19, 124, 126, 129, 139–40, 145–46; and African American literary societies, 214; and “Rock Me to Sleep,” 193, 200; and elegy by Sigourney, 52–53 Marsh, Luther, 190–91, 203 Martin (Jackson), Adel, 209, 211–13, 216 Matthews, Cornelius, 29 May, Caroline, 11, 15–16 May, Samuel, 109, 112–13 Mayo, Sarah Car ter Edgarton, 14 McGill, Meredith, 8–9, 12, 13, 180, 213, 226 McHenry, Elizabeth, 106, 214 Merish, Lori, 61–62

270

Index

Methodism, 135–36, 137, 142, 146, 148, 150, 154–55, 160, 166 Mill, John Stuart, 9 Moore, Charity Clarke, 148–49 Moore, Clement Clarke, 127–28, 148 Morse, Oliver, 187, 190, 191, 192, 193–94, 195, 199. See also A Vindication of the Claim of Alexander M. W. Ball, of Elizabeth, N. J., to the Authorship of the Poem, Rock me to Sleep, Mother Moss, Hilary J., 213, 244, 245 “The Mouse’s Visit,” 73–74 O’Connor, William Douglas, 188, 196, 202–3 O’Sullvan, John L., 149–50 Odell, Margaretta Matilda, 132 “On The Death of an Infant,” 46 Operative’s Magazine, 59 originality, 1, 6, 17; and Margaret Davidson, 85–86; and neo-classicism, 26–27; and literary studies, 10–11; and literary nationalism, 17, 28–29, 30, 31, 32–33; in Lowell Offering, 62, 63–69, 84; and post-Civil War American literature, 20; and Romanticism, 27–28; and Sigourney, 25 Ortner, Johanna, 207, 213, 215 Otter, Samuel, 96 Packer, Barbara, 228 Parker, Harriet, “Tell Ye the Daughter of Sion, Behold, Thy King Cometh,” 67 parlor authorship, 59, 68–69, 72–73 Patterson, Orlando, 115 Parker, Harriet, 67 parody, 18, 74–78, 165, 196 Payne, Daniel, 221–22 Pelaez, Monica, 104 Petrino, Elizabeth, 16, 33, 63 Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, 96 Philadelphia Female Literary Society, 116 Piatt, Sarah Morgan Bryan, 1–2, 20, 210; recovery of, 92 Pickard, Samuel, 175, 176, 241 plagiarism, 19–20, 69, 70, 166–69, 190, 202, 205, 206 Plato, Ann, “Advice to Young Ladies,” 214; Essays; Including Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Poetry, 92

Poe, Edgar Allan, 191, 201, 228; and Margaret Davidson, 85; and Sigourney, 17, 33–40, 41, 42, 47, 50, 201, 230; and Longfellow, 230 poetess, 14, 202, 226 Poor, Martha T., “Not Fully Identified,” 218, 245 Portland Transcript, 175–77 Potter, Alonzo, 19, 128, 145, 149, 157–58, 162; “Introduction” to Wales, and Other Poems, 124, 131–35, 137–39, 155; and publication of Wales, and Other Poems, 19, 146–47; support of the working classes, 131 Potter, Sarah Maria, 131, 138, 162 Prince, Lucy Terry, 92 Prins, Yopie, 226 pseudonymity, 210; and Forten, 93–94, 97–98, 102; in the Lowell Offering, 65; and Akers Allen, 164, 168, 172–79, 186, 206–7 Purvis, Joseph, 97 Ranta, Judith, 59 Ray, Charles Bennett, 104 Read, Thomas Buchanan, 11 recovery, 1–2, 4, 11–12, 14, 20, 92–93; and African American authors, 95–96, 97; of American American women’s poetry, 215, 222–23; of unremarkable poetry, 209–10, 216 relational poetics, 8, 10, 13, 18, 20, 25, 62, 88, 129, 166; and Akers Allen, 167–69, 206; and Forten, 101; in the Lowell Offering, 18; plagiarism an extension of, 168; and Sigourney, 16, 24, 49; as theory and methodology, 1–2; and women poets, 25. See also collaboration; community; imitation Richards, Eliza, 10–11, 12, 13, 191, 226; on Sigourney’s “Death of an Infant,” 47, 51–52 Roberts, Jessica, 44, 45, 184–85 Robinson, Harriet H., 72, 90, 232–33 Rohrbach, Augusta, 8 Rosa (Freedom’s Journal), 215–16, 223; “Lines, On Hearing of the Death of a Young Friend,” 217; “Stanzas,” 103 Rusert, Britt, 212 Russwurm, John, 112, 118, 120, 236

Index Sanborn, Geoffrey, 168 Sanchez-Eppler, Karen, 46–47 Saxe, John G., 173 Schouler, William, 59 scrapbook, 59, 165, 185, 203 Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, 147, 149, 151, 154 sentimentality: and African American women poets, 104; and Akers Allen’s poetry, 166, 168, 171, 180–81, 183, 186, 196; and amateur authorship, 167; and the child elegy, 45, 55; and Farley’s “The Graves of a Household,” 70; and Forten’s poetry, 102, 105, 111, 114; and Hall’s “Adelaide” poems, 75; and Harper’s Forest Leaves, 208–9; and Jerauld’s “Charity Hymn,” 18; and the Lowell Offering, 65; and the reading of poetry, 185–86; and women poets, 23 Shelley, Mary, 172 Shelley, Percy, 172, 241 Shelley, Percy Florence, 172 Shepherdess, “Lines Written on the Blank Leaf of a Bible,” 145 Sherman, Joan R., 11 Shields, David S., 200 Sigourney, Charles, 41 Sigourney, Lydia Huntley, 1, 10, 16, 21–57, 93, 94, 97, 129, 132, 180, 191, 201, 210; as the “American Hemans,” 17, 23, 25, 33–40, 57, 132; “The Daughter’s Dream,” 53–55, 56; “Death of an Infant,” 17, 40–49, 52, 164–65; “Felicia Hemans,” 34–35, 101; and gift books, 63; and imitation, 62; Letters of Life, 24, 48, 49–51, 52, 56; “The Lost Darling,” 52–53, 56; Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse, 41, 47; and Poe, 201; Poems, 41–42, 53, 56; published in the Liberator, 104–5; recovery of, 1–2, 92; Select Poems, 42–43, 44–45, 164–65; signatures published under, 93; “The Unchanged of the Tomb,” 51; and Wales, and Other Poems, 150; as working-class poet, 12 Smith, James McCune, 104 Smith, Suzanne E., 105–6 Socarides, Alexandra, 10 song: “The Grave of the Slave,” 109–110; “Rock Me to Sleep,” 20, 165, 168 Sorby, Angela, 242 Southey, Robert, 132–33 Stansell, Christine, 155 Still, William, 212, 213

271

Stokes, Claudia, 9 Stuart, Charles, 119 subscription publishing, 146–52, 173, 239 Sumler-Lewis, Janice, 96 Taylor, Jane, 22 Taylor, John, 133 Taylor, John S., 124, 147, 151, 162 Taylor, Marshall, 173, 175, 241 Tawil, Ezra, 9 textile mills, 58–59 Thomas, Abel C., 59, 66–67, 74 Thompson, D. P., 173 Thompson, E. P., 130, 237 Thornton, Tamara Plakins, 226 Ticknor & Fields, 187, 188, 191, 199, 204–5, 206–7 Ticknor, Howard M., 204 Tillotson, John C., 143 Tompkins, Abel, 5 Tuckerman, Henry T., “Love and Fame,” 177 Tracy, Gilbert, 203 Twain, Mark, 197 Tyng, Stephen H., 149 Van Ness, Matilda E., 150 Vindication of the Claim of Alexander M. W. Ball, of Elizabeth, N. J., to the Authorship of the Poem, Rock me to Sleep, Mother, 19–20, 167, 187–201, 190 (fig.), 204 W. B. C., “On the Death of an Infant,” 46 Wadsworth, Daniel, 47 Wadsworth, Sarah, 187, 242 Walker, Alice, “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens,” 92 Walker, Cheryl, 4 Walker, David, 106 Walters, Ronald G., 117 Watkins, William, 212, 213 Weekly Anglo-African, 11, 216, 218–19 Wellburn, Ron, 234 Wells, Anna Maria, 94 Wells, Colin, 10–11 Wheatley, Phillis, 10, 129; 1834 edition of her poems, 132, 134, 135; death of, 92; in Griswold, Female Poets of America, 15; mentioned in Potter’s “Introduction” to Wales, and Other Poems, 132; published in the Liberator, 104

272 Whiting, Nathan, 42 Whitman, Sarah Helen, 202, 205, 243 Whitman, Walt, 178 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 94, 104–5, 187 Wigger, John H., 136 Williams, Susan S., 11, 59 Willson, Joseph, 96 Wilson, William, 129, 237 Winch, Julie, 97 Winship, Michael, 8 Wigginton, Caroline, 225

Index Wolosky, Shira, 161–62, 177–78 Wood, Marcus, 117 Wordsworth, William, 102, 104, 180 working-class literature, 62, 129–30 Wright, Jr., Elihu, 119–20 Yellin, Jean Fagan, 94 Young, Elizabeth, 229 Young, James, 208 Zandy, Janet, 129 Zonderman, David A., 80