Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835–1874 2020945982, 9780192894557, 9780192647313

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Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835–1874

Evelev, John. Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874, Oxford University Press

oxford studies in american literary history Gordon Hutner, Series Editor Afer Critique Mitchum Huehls Unscripted America Sarah Rivett Forms of Dictatorship Jennifer Harford Vargas Anxieties of Experience Jefrey Lawrence White Writers, Race Matters Gregory S. Jay Te Civil War Dead and American Modernity Ian Finseth

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Te Puritan Cosmopolis Nan Goodman Realist Poetics in American Culture, 1866–1900 Elizabeth Renker Te Center of the World June Howard History, Abolition, and the Ever-­Present Now in Antebellum American Writing Jefrey Insko Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the Gilded Age Nathan Wolf Transoceanic America Michelle Burnham

Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States Travis M. Foster Modern Sentimentalism Lisa Mendelman Speculative Fictions Elizabeth Hewitt Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth-Century US Literary History Maria A. Windell Jewish American Writing and World Literature Saul Noam Zaritt Te Archive of Fear Christina Zwarg Violentologies B.V. Olguin Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction Tomas J. Ferraro Te Latino Continuum and the Nineteenth-­Century Americas Carmen Lamas Time and Antiquity in American Empire Mark Storey

Evelev, John. Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874, Oxford University Press

Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835–1874

Copyright © 2021. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved.

John Evelev

1

Evelev, John. Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874, Oxford University Press

1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © John Evelev 2021 Te moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2021 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020945982 ISBN 978–0–19–289455–7 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894557.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, cr0 4yy

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Evelev, John. Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874, Oxford University Press

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{ Acknowledgments }

Any lengthy book, especially one that took as long as this one did to complete, accrues many debts. Early support in the form of a teaching release was ofered by the Research Council of the University of Missouri. Te cohort of the Midwest Nineteenth-­ Century Americanists (especially Melissa Homestead and Laura Mielke) read numerous chapters, ofered helpful commentary, and provided much-­needed camaraderie. My MU colleague Alexandra Socarides was a supportive reader at key moments of the project. Carli Sinclair helped with footnotes and the bibliography. Justine Murison kindly read a chapter at a crucial moment. Maura D’Amore was a generous reader of several chapters and has been a sustaining intellectual friend, helping me to think through the intersections of scholarship, pedagogy, and family life. At Oxford University Press, Katie Bishop was helpful and efcient at every stage of the process. Te book benefted greatly from the critical acumen and generosity of the press readers, Tomas Augst and Christopher Hanlon. Te series editor, Gordon Hutner, was an exacting reader, but also unfailingly patient and supportive. My children have been witnesses to this process; indeed, my daughters, Sarah and Louise, have never not had a father not working on this book. We will all just have to see what comes next. I’d most like to thank Emma Lipton, who read the whole manuscript more times than anyone should have had to and whose support throughout the whole writing process and our lives together made everything better. Earlier portions of the book were published in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Early American Studies and in the essay collection Class and the Making of American Literature: Created Unequal, ed. Andrew Lawson (New York: Routledge, 2014).

Evelev, John. Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874, Oxford University Press

Copyright © 2021. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved. Evelev, John. Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874, Oxford University Press

{ Contents }

Introduction

1

1. Te Travel Sketch: Picturesque History and American Exceptionalism on the Landscape

24

2. Te City Sketch: Walking the Picturesque City

69

3. Te Park Movement: Picturesque Rus in Urb

105

4. Te Country Book: Masculinity, Domesticity, and the Rise of American Suburbs

129

5. Te New England Village Novel and Picturesque Reform

162 211

Notes Works Cited Index

221 251 265

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Epilogue: In Search of the Picturesque

Evelev, John. Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874, Oxford University Press

Copyright © 2021. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved. Evelev, John. Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874, Oxford University Press

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{ Introduction } Tis book charts the rise and fall of a relatively brief cultural moment marked by a surge in the popularity of picturesque literary landscape genres in the United States from the 1830s into the 1870s. Tese literary genres range from aesthetic treatises and design manuals to travel and city sketches, to novels about New England villages, and to “country book” memoirs of suburban life. Previous scholars have tended to dismiss these genres as “sentimental” or “genteel” or to depict the canonical authors of the period as “transcending” or “subverting” the clichéd conventions of picturesque descriptions of American landscapes.1 Instead, the present work integrates analyses of canonical authors such as Hawthorne, Toreau, Emerson, and Melville, with well-­ known but less studied writers such Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Sylvester Judd, Henry Ward Beecher, Donald Grant Mitchell, Cornelius Mathews, Margaret Fuller, Lydia M. Child, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Nathaniel Parker Willis, along with a host of others who have now disappeared completely from our narrative of U.S. literary history. All of these authors are discussed in the context of the landscape design discourse of the period, made most famous by fgures such as Andrew Jackson Downing and Frederick Law Olmsted. Although the literature itself has largely been forgotten, the spaces constructed out of these literary imaginations are far from obscure. Te mid-­nineteenth-­century literature of picturesque America shaped many of the dominant spaces we inhabit in a modern and even postmodern United States: from the transformation of wilderness into codifed, protected, and commodifed objects of picturesque tourism to the imaginative reconstruction of the New England village into a symbolic expression of the national community, to the development of the suburbs as a privileged site of American manhood, and to the invention of public parks as a solution to urban social problems. In neglecting this literature, we ignore the story of how so-­called minor landscape genres helped invent a radically new sense of the nation’s spaces. Tis study restores the Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835–1874. John Evelev, Oxford University Press (2021). © John Evelev. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894557.003.0001

Evelev, John. Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874, Oxford University Press

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2

Picturesque Literature and the American Landscape

s­ ignifcance of this landscape literature as crucial to changed notions of space in the nineteenth century and to the creation of what became the landscape of the modern United States. Considering the picturesque not just as an aesthetic model but as a multivalent social form—combining ideology, taste, and visual discipline—this study explains how an emergent middle class used the picturesque to remake the U.S.  landscape according to their ideals and values. As many have observed, the American middle class was forged out of the economic and social structures of urban life in the antebellum era.2 Tat class perspective, however, was transported from the city to a variety of diferent spaces in the period: Rural areas were turned into tourist sites, farmland and rural villages were converted into suburbs, and even spaces within the city were converted into rural zones for public parks (such as New York’s Central Park). All of these sites expressed the social logic of an emergent middle class that saw landscapes as spaces for the ­cultivation of picturesque “taste.” Far from the typical bland associations it now carries, the vision of the picturesque embraced by the new middle class of the midcentury was authoritative in relation to the landscape and was diferentiated from the more utilitarian and materialist understandings of capitalist property owners on the one hand and from the views of property held by the working class, whether farmers or laborers, on the other. Tere are few elements of modern notions of U.S. space that were not forged in this moment, and many of our modern notions of environmentalism and cultural reform were articulated through the picturesque in this midcentury moment. Picturesque literary genres consolidated the values of a middle-­class identity and transformed the national landscape. Despite its prominence and its pervasive efect on the landscape of the era, the picturesque enjoyed only a relatively brief moment of cultural authority in the United States. Picturesque Literature moves across literary genres and attitudes toward spaces from the mid-­1830s through the mid-­1870s, exploring how middle-­class investment in a quasi-­professionalized notion of landscape “taste” reshaped national spaces. By the end of this period, the picturesque would ultimately be replaced by more defnitive forms of professionalism (including the vocational professionalization of architecture and landscape design, city planning, and social work) that characterized late nineteenth- and twentieth-­century American middle-­class values and identity. Brief

Evelev, John. Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874, Oxford University Press

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Introduction

3

as the moment of this vogue for picturesque literature may have been, this book shows its centrality to a reshaped physical and social landscape and demonstrates the important role literature played in this process. Focusing on the socially constructed nature of the picturesque landscape and the dialectical role literature plays in both imagining and materially shaping the landscape, this book draws on the theoretical frameworks of social geography and spatial theory by Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, W. J. T. Mitchell, and others. Te construction of so-­called natural scenery and its emphasis on the viewer’s gaze as an active part in the creation of idealized landscapes overtly stage the complex work of making space. My understanding of the picturesque partakes of Lefebvre’s triadic distinction between lived, perceived, and conceived space, complicating the lines between some supposedly “real” space and that imagined in narratives containing picturesque description of landscapes. Although it is now typically relegated to the aesthetic realm of postcards and anodyne landscape scenery, the picturesque, when examined closely, reveals a more complex story. Studying the picturesque shows the ways aesthetics, subjectivity, and the social shape the landscape, complicating any easy distinctions between human and nature. As Mitchell explains: “Landscape is a natural scene mediated by culture. It is both a represented and presented space, both a signifer and signifed, both a frame and what a frame contains, both a real place and its simulacrum, both a package and the commodity inside the package.”3 Just in being conceived as a “landscape,” the picturesque implicates the viewer as both producer and consumer of the reifed space. Likening landscape to “money,” an abstracted or symbolic “medium of exchange,” Mitchell can help us see the midcentury U.S. picturesque landscape as a cultural nexus where people negotiate social values. Being able to identify a landscape as picturesque becomes a kind of accomplishment and a claim to authority. As David Harvey suggests, landscape “is a form of power, it is a mode of formation of beliefs and desires, it is an institution, a mode of social relating, a material practice, a fundamental moment of experience.”4 Both in the mid-­nineteenth century and now, the picturesque hides in plain sight as a discourse of meaning; as Mitchell suggests more broadly, landscape is “a social hieroglyph that conceals the actual basis of its value. It does so by naturalizing its conventions and conventionalizing its nature.”5 Perhaps no mode of “nature” was as conventionalized as the picturesque in

Evelev, John. Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874, Oxford University Press

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Picturesque Literature and the American Landscape

the mid-­nineteenth-­century United States, and, in conventionalizing itself, it obscured its ideological uses. Te almost obsessive attention to picturesque landscapes and design in the literature of the period hints at its importance, but its focus on the nonhuman landscape scenes implies that its concerns are separate from the social world. Following the work of social geographers and spatial theorists, I argue that literary depictions of picturesque landscapes abstracted the social values that lay beneath them at the same time that they helped instantiate those values physically upon those spaces by encouraging development of U.S.  rural and urban locales along picturesque lines.

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Te Politics of the Picturesque Taste in England and the United States Tis book is an outgrowth of scholarship that has elaborated the complicated histories and social meanings of the development of picturesque landscape taste in British Romantic literature. Martin Price’s “Te Picturesque Moment,” a well-­known 1965 essay on the rise and fall of the picturesque in English Romanticism, opens by asserting: “Te picturesque, like so much aesthetic theory, was an attempt to win traditional sanctions for new experience.”6 Price’s claim, like that of many other English scholars of the picturesque who followed him, draws attention to the social meaning of landscape aesthetics, and particularly to the uses of the picturesque by a new English middle class in the eighteenth century. Tis new social class brought a new logic to bear upon the English country landscape, claiming a diferent relation to that landscape from that of the aristocracy and peasantry. Tis book fnds a parallel project in the United States in the mid-­nineteenth century. Te new American middle class turned to the picturesque to “win traditional sanctions for [their] new experience,” fnding new ways to imagine and construct the American landscape from within the inherited aesthetic of the picturesque.7 Te aesthetic terms and qualifcations of the picturesque were frst formalized and debated in late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcenturies in England by such fgures as William Gilpin, Uvedale Price, and Richard Payne Knight, who argued at great length—and

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Introduction

5

without much agreement—about what made an object or landscape picturesque and what was its impact on the viewer.8 All commentators agreed that the picturesque required an uncultivated and rough landscape (if it contained elements of ruin or decay, so much the better) and a self-­conscious viewer taking a distanced, purposeful stance in relation to that landscape. Not simply a passive activity, picturesque viewing involved the imaginative reconstruction of the landscape, albeit through very conventional and predetermined “principles of composition” which were so popular as to be almost unconsciously accepted.9 Imaginatively adding or subtracting from the view as required by the rules of picturesque composition, the picturesque ofered an “improved and selected nature.”10 Despite various attempts to theorize and defne it, there was no true consensus about what defned the picturesque. As a result, it is best understood less as a fxed aesthetic category and more as an overarching attitude taken in relationship to the landscape.11 Dependent upon an active gaze and an imaginative engagement with a natural landscape seen from an authoritative distance, the picturesque became a generic stand-­in for landscape appreciation and for culture more generally.12 As one modern scholar of the picturesque concluded: “[T]he picturesque became the nineteenth century’s mode of vision.”13 For many scholars of English Romanticism, the picturesque was an empowering discourse for an emergent middle class, and they associated its aesthetic organizing principles with the imposition of a middle class’s “imagination of management” onto the English countryside.14 Once seen simply as a formulaic element of Romantic aesthetics, the picturesque came under politicized scrutiny with the publication of John Barrell’s Te Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place (1972) and Raymond Williams’s Te Country and the City (1973), both of which linked the rise of literary and pictorial interest in “rough” and “natural” landscape with the concurrent, and seemingly contradictory, push toward enclosure in the English countryside, whereby wooded areas—by longstanding tradition available for “common” use—were converted into farmland.15 For Barrell, the two phenomena were analogous, refective of a shared “desire to impose an order on landscape, by laying a structure upon it, or by applying to it abstract, general rules”16 Since then, many scholars studying English Romantic landscape literature and art have elaborated what Ann Bermingham later called an “ideology of landscape,”

Evelev, John. Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874, Oxford University Press

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Picturesque Literature and the American Landscape

highlighting the economic and social values expressed by these forms of representation.17 Within this ideological interpretation of the landscape, the picturesque has been associated with bourgeois managerial labor and with an investment in the “control over valuable cultures.”18 Accordingly, the shif to the picturesque in England has been linked to the rise of new land-­management practices that the bourgeoisie transferred from urban settings. Alan Liu avers,

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Seen in overview, the picturesque was the deep imagination of the economic institutions then transforming feudal notions of property into the new sense of exchangeable proprietorship that Williams has called the “rentier’s vision.”. . . It was the imagination of a whole method of managing and ultimately policing the rural landscape cognate with new methods of administration learned in industrial centers.19

Tis mode of land management took the form of “the supervision of a precisely disciplined liberty—free, yet never too free,” which was transformed into a bourgeois leisure activity in the form of picturesque domestic design and tourism.20 Seen as an early form of “popular” or “consumer” culture, the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-­century English vogue for picturesque tourism restricted “itself to humble English rural scenery, represented a landscape both familiar and accessible.”21 Although domestic landscape tourism required some degree of economic surplus, leisure, and mobility to reach the picturesque sites, the same aristocratic levels were not required for the Continental tour, which is ofen thought to have instituted the English interest in landscape.22 If the domestic settings of the picturesque were more available to the English bourgeoisie, the particular conventions and protocols of picturesque landscape viewing, with its emphasis on “technique as something that warrants professional cultivation,” ft the specifc demands of a new professional middle class that defned itself through its manipulation of abstracted knowledge.23 As Tomas Pfau argues, “Above all, professionalization involves the elaboration of a distinctive ethos, a new symbolism designed less to display wealth, afuence, and material possession than to signal the profciency of its practitioners— and, in doing so, to facilitate their mutual afrmation as legitimate members in an identifable community.”24 Te picturesque, with its protocols and generic formulas, was a multivalent disciplinary

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Introduction

7

technique like so much of the culture of professionalism. As Liu suggests, the picturesque was a discipline that created authority through subjection: “Te object of the picturesque was ‘command’ [of the landscape], which, frst of all, required the regimentation of the viewer. . . . Command over the viewer was then interchangeable with the viewer’s own command over the landscape.”25 Te practitioners of picturesque sensibility subjected themselves to its protocols, to its regimented and formulaic way of seeing the landscape, but as a result of this discipline, they could imaginatively (and also sometimes literally) take control of the landscape and dominate its meaning. Te English bourgeois appropriation of the “symbolic” or “cultural capital” of picturesque aesthetic discourse can be understood as an “imaginative appropriation” of the countryside from the two social classes previously associated with it: the poor rural farmers or laborers and the wealthy aristocratic gentry.26 Te rise of interest in landscape has been long understood as part of a project of cultural nationalism, as part of the articulation of American exceptionalism. In her study of nineteenth-­century American landscape painting, Te Empire of the Eye, Angela Miller identifes this art as “a form of symbolic action” that sought to resolve “[c]onficts between freedom and order, change and continuity, growth and stability” and thus reinforce national unity.27 One of the seminal statements of this rise of landscape appreciation was Tomas Cole’s “Essay on American Scenery” (1835), which aimed to instill an appreciation of landscape and to foster national pride. As Cole exhorts his readers: [Scenery] is a subject that to every American ought to be of surpassing interest; for, whether he beholds the Hudson mingling waters with the Atlantic—explores the central wilds of this vast continent, or stands on the margin of the distant Oregon, he is still in the midst of American scenery—it is his own land; its beauty, its magnifcence, its sublimity—all are his; and how undeserving of such a birthright, if he can turn towards it an unobserving eye, an unafected heart!28

For Cole, sensitivity and appreciation of American landscape scenery was a “birthright” as well as a test of one’s national identity. Paradoxically, appreciation of distinctive American scenery both formed and tested national identity. In the opening essay of his 1852 collection of essays and engravings entitled Te Home Book of the

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Picturesque Literature and the American Landscape

Picturesque, E. L. Magoon explained that “[t]he diversifed landscapes of our country exert no slight infuence in creating our character as individuals, and in confrming our destiny as a nation.”29 Antebellum advocates of landscape art made appreciation of American landscape an overdetermined symbol of national identity. Following British scholarship on the ideology of landscape, American art historians have also studied the social signifcance of American landscape art, linking its rising popularity in the nineteenth century to the rise of an American middle class.30 Angela Miller argues that the “disinterested” eye of the viewer of the landscape occludes the self-­interested individual of the emergent market culture, helping members of the new American middle class to justify their position within society and solidify social distinctions. She identifes this ideological project of American middle-­class landscape taste, of which the picturesque was a central element, as “a conservative endeavour.”31 Although Miller points out the ways that the aestheticized protocols of landscape appreciation enforced American middle- and upper-­class social distinctions, especially in relation to the presumed utilitarian approach of the working class, she also notes the irony that this aestheticized denial of landscape use-­value was in tension with the broader middle-­class investment in a market culture.32 Although ostensibly a conservative power move that stabilized middle-­class identity, the picturesque, as further chapters will demonstrate, was also used to critique some of the central elements of that identity, resulting in stances such as nascent environmental conservationism and a range of other antimarket reformist attitudes that had the potential as much for radically destabilizing the status quo as for conservativism. Tis does not mean that the picturesque was a radical force in midcentury U.S. life; it would be more accurate to say that the particular confguration of its concerns worked to remake the nation’s space to refect the deeply ambivalent relationship that the new middle class had to the market in this period. Perhaps no one fgure encapsulated these political tensions around the picturesque more than Andrew Jackson Downing, who, as landscape architectural historian David Schuyler claims, promoted “the emergence of a picturesque aesthetic in architectural and landscape design” and “more than any other individual, shaped middle-­class taste in the United States during the two decades prior to the Civil War.”33 Although the central premise of Downing’s major work,

Evelev, John. Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874, Oxford University Press

Introduction

9

A Treatise on the Teory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America (1841), was to promote landscape gardening as a fne art, he also defended the picturesque over the beautiful, privileging a model of design that emphasized neither artifcial polish nor an imitation of nature. Instead, it prized a “nature improved by art.”34 Downing was the great popularizer of the picturesque in the midnineteenth-­century United States. Although his work refected a deep commitment to the English tradition of the picturesque, he was committed to establishing a distinctively American version of the landscape style. Downing ofered a model of landscape exceptionalism, positing an American republican ideal in contrast to European models:

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Here the rights of man are held to be equal; and if there are no enormous parks, and no class of men whose wealth is hereditary, there is, at least, what is more gratifying to the feelings of the philanthropist, the almost entire absence of a very poor class in this country; while we have, on the other hand, a large class of independent landholders, who are able to assemble around them, not only the useful and convenient, but the agreeable and beautiful, in country life.35

Far from the grand estates of European aristocrats, Downing’s idealized picturesque country home was a symbol of democracy, a mode of living available to a wider range of Americans. At the center of Downing’s vision of distinctively American space was the republicaninfected “independent landholder” whose land ownership was integral to his vision of American subjecthood.36 Although later works such as Cottage Residences (1850) ofered patterns for more modest designs suitable to lower-­income home builders, Downing’s design vision was most clearly directed to “the emerging middle class that aspired to the tasteful dwellings and the associations of home he promoted.” Some contemporaries critiqued him for his privileging of a meticulous private domestic realm that was unattainable by most Americans.37 In addition to designing plans for rather more modest houses later in his career, Downing also became an important voice for creating public parks, though, as we will see in Chapter 4, this efort to create democratic public spaces of picturesque design had its social complications. Even before these more explicitly egalitarian design projects, Downing touted his design ethos as a general contribution to the public good. Whether beautiful or picturesque, Downing’s design

Evelev, John. Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874, Oxford University Press

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Picturesque Literature and the American Landscape

entailed not merely aesthetic appreciation and private enjoyment, but social infuence:

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Our country residences, evincing that love of the beautiful and the picturesque, which, combined with solid comfort, is so attractive to the eye of every beholder, will not only become sources of the purest enjoyment to the refned minds of the possessors, but will exert an infuence for the improvement in taste of every class in our community.38

Te beneft of picturesque design was not merely private pleasure, but the public good of generally improved taste throughout the community. Tis was a common theme in Downing’s vision of picturesque design. In response to a reader’s letter to his magazine, Te Horticulturalist, complaining about a “GRACELESS VILLAGE” in which he had recently settled, Downing argued that landowners who built an attractive home under the proper guidance could function as “apostles of taste,” encouraging a general improvement in village life.39 Te previous year, in another article for the same magazine, entitled “Moral Infuence of Good Houses,” Downing asserted: “We believe in the bettering infuence of beautiful cottages and country houses—in the improvement of human nature necessarily resulting to all classes, from the possession of lovely gardens and fruitful orchards.”40 Downing’s vision of picturesque taste promoted exceptionalist nationalism, which argued that in the United States, unlike in Europe, domestic home improvements engendered by picturesque design could be experienced by “all classes.”41 But while Downing’s reformist perspective made the professionalized knowledge of landscape gardening and architectural design a discourse for enacting social change, he also emphasized the cultural authority of those who executed picturesque design on the landscape, whether in the form of nascent design professionals like himself or those (implicitly upperand middle-­class readers) who read his works and applied the sensibility to landscape design. Downing authorized his middle-­class readers to transform American culture through picturesque design. Tis exercise of cultural authority made Downing and the picturesque crucial to middle-­class midcentury Americans. Downing’s work joined a host of other writings that explicitly instructed readers that appreciating picturesque American landscape scenery constituted a distinctive didactic discourse and form of cultural authority. Examples include N. P. Willis and William Bartlett’s

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Introduction

11

American Scenery (1840), a multivolume collection of engravings of landscape scenery and descriptive commentary, and Te Home-­Book of the Picturesque (1852), a collection that paired engravings of landscape scenery, descriptive commentary and theoretical meditations on landscape aesthetics. Warren Burton’s aesthetic treatise SceneryShowing (1852), which carried the subtitle “Word Painting of the Beautiful, the Picturesque, and the Grand in Nature,” overtly claimed that the didactic project could be used “to awaken perception and relish by presenting appropriate objects” in its readers.42 Burton was at great pains to demonstrate that scenery appreciation is a skill to be learned and practiced: “It is remarkable how a taste for scenery will grow, with pleasure deepening upon pleasure, if it is only steadily and repeatedly directed.”43 Explicitly pedagogical, Burton half-­joking asserted that “we truly wished that there might be such an establishment as a Scenery School, and that we could be appointed Professor of the charming science of the Picturesque” (231). Over the course of his argument, Burton plotted out techniques for encouraging people to appreciate landscape scenery, telling stories of successes he had had in teaching children in “scenery-­seeing” (230). Describing the process, he observed: “Tey seemed interested in the sight. At any rate they looked, and looking was a discipline that would lead into pleasure” (230). Burton’s claim perfectly encapsulates the ideological dynamics of the picturesque that Liu described in his analysis of the English picturesque: Te subjection to discipline of the viewer in learning how to appreciate the picturesque landscape is exchanged for the pleasure of commanding that landscape.44 Tis progression from pedagogy through aesthetics to (private) pleasure and (public) authority constitutes the core dynamic of midcentury literary landscape literature and is traced throughout this book in a host of literary genres of the period, from travel writing to novels and from city sketches to texts about public parks. Angela Miller described the nineteenth-­century rise of American landscape sensibility as part of a “conservative endeavour,” but it is more appropriate to link Downing and the picturesque sensibility to the ambiguous social politics of midcentury middle-­class “selfculture.”45 Tat project entailed acquiring education and cultural authority beyond the traditional classroom that ofen took the form of reading “enriching” literatures such as conduct, technical (scientifc and aesthetic), and philosophical treatises, and attending cultural

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Picturesque Literature and the American Landscape

institutions of “moral entertainment” such as Mechanics and Young Men’s Institutions, Mercantile Libraries, and the Lyceum circuit (Burton’s text was originally given as a series of lyceum talks), where the proliferating moral, historical, scientifc, and aesthetic discourses of the period were presented. Originally aimed at young American men to encourage “the cultivation of an internalized system of morality,” the ethos of self-­improvement and the acquisition of authoritative discourses connected self-­culture to the broader realm of what would later be understood as middle-­class professionalism.46 Te politics of antebellum self-­culture refect the ambiguous place of the middle class within the contested claims to authority from Jacksonian populist democracy, traditional elite cultural authority, and a nas­ cent professional authority. Although Downing’s writings are a career-­long argument for the professional authority of the landscape designer, the dissemination of his ideas outward into mid-­nineteenth-­century America made them more subject to appropriation for diferent purposes. Not eve­ ry­one could own a country estate or design the landscape and buildings to maximize the picturesque efect, but not having such estates would not matter to the imagination of the newly self-­cultivated American. As Ralph Waldo Emerson, the designated philosopher of the midcentury middle class, famously asserted in “Nature” (1836): “Te charming landscape which I saw this morning . . . no one has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is the poet.”47 Te proliferation of discussions of the picturesque made the process of visually integrating the landscape available not only to the landowner or the poet (each a kind of elite position), but also to anyone willing to read Downing or any of the many popular writings on the picturesque. Advocates envisioned the picturesque as a readily transmissible and widely disseminated skill that transferred authority to the most basically trained viewer; they also saw the picturesque as a shif from material to symbolic authority that suited the middle-­class investment in nonmaterial capital as a source of status in the period. Middle-­class advocates of the picturesque imagined a discourse that could be readily transmitted to the working class as well. As we will see later, proponents of the development of urban public parks saw them as an ideal way to cultivate a broader appreciation of landscape and refnement more generally. Tere is little doubt, however, that the picturesque, with its contradictory mix of reform and conservatism,

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Introduction

13

worked most to legitimate middle-­class status and authority within the conficted social world of nineteenth-­century America.

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Recovering the Picturesque and the Utopian/Ideological Cultural Work of Literary Landscape Genres Tis book examines the distinctive literary prose genres of the picturesque and the American spaces that they helped to construct, both imaginatively and materially, at midcentury. It attempts to understand why literary landscape genres were popular and why such a range of authors and readers within this particular period so seriously engaged with the picturesque. Te formulaic category of the picturesque (along with its related categories of the beautiful and sublime) dominated depiction of the landscape, producing a huge body of literature that ofen appears to modern readers to be generic, in the sense of being repetitive, unoriginal, and even trite. Picturesque literary genres devoted substantial time to self-­conscious viewing of formulaic landscapes at the expense of character development, plot, and social observation, which are the standard elements of the kinds of nineteenth-­ century writing now deemed most praiseworthy. Modern readers can rightfully ask: Why did midcentury American readers like this stuf? I see an answer in the power of the genre itself, especially in the formulaic protocols of landscape viewing that the picturesque inculcated. Lauren Berlant argues that the “[s]uccessfully accomplished genre is a utopian performance, a scene of mastery in contrast to disappointing life, with its rhythm of failed experiments.”48 Te imaginatively constructed picturesque landscapes in their generic familiarity (whether in the observer’s gaze or in the writer and reader’s literary experience) reveal the power of mastery over a formula, the “utopian performance” of seeing exactly what one expects to see, or, even more importantly, of the ability to take an undiferentiated space and transform it into a landscape to ft one’s needs and purposes. If modern readers see tedious repetition in the recurrence of lengthy descriptions of picturesque landscapes in midcentury texts, readers of the day found a more complex process that blended discipline with enjoyment, as I noted earlier in Burton’s explanation in “Scenery-­Showing”: “[L]ooking was a discipline that would lead into pleasure.” Subjecting themselves to the discipline of reading

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Picturesque Literature and the American Landscape

generic landscape descriptions, midcentury readers of picturesque landscape genres reveled in their mastery of the conventions, associating themselves with the texts’ ability to claim the cultural authority to impose the self on the landscape. Tis book studies a range of American texts beyond design manuals and aesthetic treatises, in which the shaping of picturesque landscape scenery is a central or constitutive element of the narrative. Each chapter focuses on a specifc genre and the particular kind of space with which it was associated, whether it be rural tourist sites, cities, the suburbs, urban public parks, or New England villages. Although each genre has its own qualities and constitutive elements, extensive descriptions of the picturesque are a shared formal and thematic concern. Tese genres were conventional for their period: Readers knew what they were looking for and actively sought out the experience of reading picturesque landscape descriptions. Some of these genres were relatively short-­lived, while others remain common even in our present-­day literature. Yet the purpose of the project is not to map out, in Hans Jauss’s formulation, “the horizon of expectation” of these genres, neither categorizing nor classifying the distinctive formal traits of each genre.49 Instead, my primary concern is to explore the social meanings of literary landscape genres, however loosely confgured, that were associated with a specifc site or type of space in the period; to map out the representation of that space; and to explore how the genre might have afected or shaped contemporaneous understandings of that space. Tis project reads literary genres as “essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specifc public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact.”50 Reading literary landscape genres in this way, this book charts the ways the textual staging of the picturesque sensibility helped an emergent U.S. middle class not just to see the landscape in a particular way, but also to cope with, even possibly actively control, the new formations of space being constructed at the moment. Te frst two chapters focus on the literary form most commonly associated with the picturesque: the sketch. Te literary sketch, the short form refecting the picturesque’s investment in informality, self-­conscious framing, and visual contrast, was an enormously popular form in nineteenth-­century United States.51 Although initially associated with short nonfction, the popularity of Washington Irving’s

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Introduction

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1819 Te Sketch Book of Geofrey Crayon demonstrated how the sketch could migrate into fction and even longer narrative forms, including the novel and the travelogue. Appearing primarily in magazines and newspapers, the literary sketch tended to be identifed particularly with the experience of place and space, whether it be rural or urban. As the frst two chapters of this book demonstrate, the midcentury literary sketch worked to normalize middle-­class understandings of urban and rural spaces, using the picturesque to privilege middle-­class perspectives and uses of these spaces. Perhaps the most stereotypical spaces of the picturesque are rural locales with notable landscape features turned into tourist sites. Te increased leisure and assets of the midcentury American urban middle class sparked the rise of a domestic tourism industry, creating conventionalized tourist routes in the Northeast that identifed the meaning of the rural landscape in its scenic possibilities. Picturesque tourists claimed a superior appreciation of an aestheticized rural landscape that they neither owned nor worked, in comparison to those economically above and below them, who could only see its material properties and economic possibilities. In claiming this privileged perspective on the landscape and its meanings, the picturesque travel sketch empowered the urban bourgeoisie to redefne U.S. rural space as something other than a frontier to develop. Tis picturesque transformation in the understanding of rural space was bolstered by a steady fow of picturesque travel sketch writing in the periodical print culture and beyond. Te travel sketch was didactic, modeling the proper way to experience the picturesque to its middle-­class readers, and repetitive, ofen reproducing very similar descriptions of the most common sights on the tour routes. As a result, the travel sketch genre has largely been neglected in literary critical studies. Even in its midcentury heyday, the American picturesque travel sketch started from a defensive position: Many European, British, and even some domestic commentators claimed that the lack of historical associations and ruins on the American landscape rendered it uninteresting and largely unsuitable for picturesque tourism. I examine the way American travel writers responded to this charge in my frst chapter, “Te Travel Sketch: Picturesque History and American Exceptionalism on the Landscape.” Although modern scholarship has tended to dismiss the picturesque travel sketch as

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Picturesque Literature and the American Landscape

superfcial, this chapter demonstrates how writers used the picturesque to consider how the American past was indeed inscribed onto the rural landscape, how demographic shifs might transform the American land in the future, and whether America could be picturesque without recapitulating European histories of dramatic class diferences and national and religious conficts. Te chapter studies three well-­known American Romantic authors who might not be most commonly associated with travel writing: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Toreau. It is notable that all three turned to picturesque travel writing early in their careers. Tey published (or at least sought to publish) their frst books within this genre, suggesting the ways that the popularity of the genre might have made it appealing as a way to reach a wider audience, but also the ways that the genre allows the writers to think deeply about issues within the U.S.  landscape. Te chapter begins with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s early picturesque travel writing in the 1830s, initially produced for his unpublished early book project “Te Story Teller,” which imagined the efects of picturesque travel on the art and consciousness of an aspiring American writer. Seldom examined now, Hawthorne’s early picturesque domestic travel sketches respond to the residual presence of the violence of the American past on the touristic landscape and to the threats that immigration posed for the future American landscape. Te second section of the chapter ­focuses on Margaret Fuller’s, Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 which embraces the picturesque as a response to the utilitarian ethos of frontier development and considers its efect on the future of the nation. In the process, Fuller must try to deal with the limitations of the picturesque in the failed example of Native Americans, whose ghostly traces and remnants in the landscape haunted her travels. Te fnal section focuses on some of Toreau’s earliest travel writing, starting with his frst non-Dial publication, “A Walk to Wachusett” (1843), and then examining his frst book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). Although Toreau’s interest in the picturesque was frst noted in the 1930s, scholars have largely dismissed it, fnding the supposedly superfcial aesthetic concerns of the picturesque at odds with Toreau’s idealism. My reading argues against this attitude not only in regards to Toreau, but also for Fuller and Hawthorne. For all three, the picturesque was critical to understanding the American landscape and history. Tese writers applied its

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Introduction

17

spatiotemporal protocols to think through the relationship of human to natural time, the resonances of the national past on the present (particularly in the residual presences of Native Americans and the colonial past), and the future efects of spatial expansion and new people (particularly immigrants) on the American landscape. Most ofen associated with rural or country views, the picturesque sketch was also applied to urban settings, playing an important role in shaping how the city was understood during the mid-­nineteenth century, when urban populations were undergoing unprecedented growth. Te antebellum city has been identifed as the site of formation of an American middle-­class identity in the context of historical attention to class divisions in American life, but relatively little attention has been paid to the role played by the picturesque city sketch. Instead, scholars of nineteenth-­century U.S. literature typically saw midcentury writing about the city as dominated by the sensationalist mode, with both fctional stories and nonfction sketches portraying the city as dark and treacherous. By contrast, in Chapter 2: “Te City Sketch: Walking in the Picturesque City,” I explore the place of the picturesque in the midcentury city sketch, both in the nonfction forms that proliferated in New York City newspapers in the period and in the fction that derived from these sketches. I argue that the city sketch played a role in articulating the new middle-­class identity by establishing a distinctive position in city life between the wealthy and the working class. Te city sketch normalized a middle-­class perspective through the persona of the sketcher whose walks through the city turned the other classes, their behaviors and practices, into spectacles and objects of their gaze. Finding beauty and pleasure in the variety of surfaces and people in urban life, the urban picturesque presented a far less antagonistic relationship to city life than sensationalism. Te picturesque articulated a perspective on the widening divide between wealthy and poor in the city, imagining an abstract in-­betweenness that came to defne the complexities of a middle-­class identity. Tis chapter examines the urban picturesque in mid-­nineteenth century city-­sketch writing, including the work of Lydia Maria Child (Letters from New-­York [1841–1843]) and Margaret Fuller (as book editor for Horace Greeley’s New-­York Tribune, 1844–1846) and even a writer more associated with sensationalism such as George G. Foster (New-­York in Slices [1849] and New-­York by Gaslight [1850]). In addition, the chapter studies fction that appropriated city

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Picturesque Literature and the American Landscape

sketch forms, such as Edgar Allan Poe’s famous story “Te Man of the Crowd” (1840), Cornelius Mathews’s novel-­in-­sketches, Big Abel and Little Manhattan (1845), and Solon Robinson’s Hot Corn: Life Scenes in New York Illustrated (1853). Although this project begins with the picturesque travel writing, the picturesque city sketch was in some ways more seminal because it was this urban-­centered middle class whose investment in picturesque viewing inspired the picturesque reshaping of the other American spaces covered in the book. Tis chapter explores how the picturesque city sketch helped articulate that middle-­class identity, with its ambivalent connections to social reform and the reassertion of social hierarchies. A similar set of distinctly social concerns about city life contributed to the calls for creating public urban parks, as I explain in Chapter  3: Te Park Movement: Picturesque Rus in Urbe. Here I study the links between reformist impulses of the project to insert picturesque landscapes into American cities in the form of public parks with a bourgeois male impulse to reclaim authority over domestic and public life in the city. Perhaps the most famous example of the rus in urbe (a term that comes from the Latin meaning “country in the city”) project is New York City’s Central Park, which is ofen considered the ultimate expression of the picturesque sensibility in its efort to construct a natural landscape in the midst of city life. Central Park and the American park movement have been signifcant objects of study, especially in the last 30 years, in scholarly disciplines ranging from landscape design, geography, and urban planning to social and art history. It is notable, however, that the park movement itself has not proved more important to literary studies, given the signifcance of writings about the park, both in advocating for the park and describing its efects. Te antebellum literary world and the park movement were intimately connected: Te frst recorded advocate for New York’s park was the well-­known poet and editor William Cullen Bryant, and Frederick Law Olmsted was the most prominent fgure of the U.S.  park movement, best known as a travel writer and editor before the “Greensward” Plan that he and Calvert Vaux proposed for Central Park was selected in 1858. Te New York City committee that selected Olmsted and Vaux included Bryant, the historian George Bancrof, and New York’s premier man of letters, Washington Irving. Although the space of the park itself was imagined as the primary means of changing the social experience of urban life, park movement

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Introduction

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advocates saw print as an equally important venue for this public transformation. Consequently, this chapter draws parallels between the public park and the various literary forms through which the park was promoted and justifed before its culmination as Central Park. In addition to analyzing nonfction writings by park advocates and designers, such as Bryant, Emerson, Willis, Downing, and Olmsted, I recover Sylvester Judd’s 1850 novel Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family, a work that emblematizes reform through park design. All of these forms were important parts of the cultural project seeking to legitimate the building of urban parks in the midcentury by casting their creation as central to the development of a new urban experience. Examining a range of park writings, this chapter argues that, although the park was ostensibly envisioned as an egalitarian instrument of social reform, bringing together the genders and classes in an idealized intimate public sphere, the literature of the park movement ultimately most fully addressed bourgeois male anxieties about their authority over female-­dominated domestic spaces and working-­class men’s domination of the city streets. Many of the genres studied here are now obscure, some completely forgotten, and many of the authors have also been neglected. Even examples from better-­known writers are sometimes ignored by modern critics. Taken together, the chapters of this project seek to recover an important moment in American literary history. In the efort to recover the period-­specifc meaning of literary picturesque landscape descriptions, I found that my subject was related to a signifcant American literary recovery project of the last 30 years: midnineteenth-­century women’s literary sentimentalism.52 In fact, many of the more obscure writers this book covers were last grouped together only in Ann Douglas’s Te Feminization of American Culture (1977). For Douglas, the ministers-­cum-­novelists Sylvester Judd and Henry Ward Beecher were emblematic fgures of the decline of Calvinist intellectual rigor into sentimental feminization. Here they are used to tell a diferent story. While Douglas lumps many of the authors studied into the category of “male sentimentalists,” I see the investment in literary landscape genres as a male-­dominated midcentury mode, a tradition of domesticity and interest in landscape and design that is related to but distinct from women’s sentimentalism. In some chapters of this project, men and women’s writings intermingle, refecting the participation of both genders in the production of certain landscape genres in the period; others show the dominance

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Picturesque Literature and the American Landscape

of male voices. Tis book explores why the picturesque sensibility became such a crucial discourse for American middle-­class masculinity and argues that it was not just a failed protest against the “market” (as Douglas suggested), but a largely successful project to reshape American spaces. Te strongest conjunction of literary genre, masculinity, and space can be found in Chapter  4: “Te Country Book: Masculinity, Domesticity, and the Rise of American Suburbs.” Tis chapter explores how picturesque aesthetics and an increased focus on men’s domestic life shaped the rapid growth of the suburbs in the mid­nineteenth century, one of the most signifcant reconfgurations of how Americans understood their national space. It was in this explosion of suburban development that the picturesque landscape and architectural aesthetic of Andrew Jackson Downing found its most signifcant cultural manifestation. Many middle-­class Americans turned to his architectural pattern books (Cottage Residences [1842] and Te Architecture of Country Houses [1850]), as well as to his journalism about “country living” (Downing edited and contributed heavily to Te Horticulturalist [1846–1852]) for information on how to live in the suburbs. Downing was not the only one writing about the suburbs: Suburban development had its own literary genre, the once-­familiar, but now largely forgotten “country book.” Country books took many forms, ranging from diaristic or epistolary narratives of country living to satires of domestic ineptitude, to Toreau’s philosophical Walden. Despite their diferences, all focus on the male domestic experience in the “borderland,” to use John Stilgoe’s seminal description of the liminal residential landscape between the city and the agricultural rural areas that transformed the United States during this period.53 Authors who wrote in the country book genre include not only Toreau, but also Nathaniel Parker Willis, Donald Grant Mitchell (Ik Marvel), L. W. Mansfeld, John Gray, even Herman Melville, whose contributions to Putnam’s in the 1850s joined in with other fction and nonfction about male domesticity in the countryside. Many country books took an epistolary form and explicitly hailed the (presumed) male reader into an intimate relation with the author and protagonist and his domestic experience. Although the country book ofen frames picturesque suburban domesticity as an idealized space for both male privacy and masculine friendship, the texts also ofen feature deferrals, debility, and even death that threaten both male privacy and intimacy. Te picturesque lifestyle of

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Introduction

21

the suburbs promised an idealized masculine experience, but the country book both promoted suburban development (or at least imaginative investments in that project) and hinted at the contradictions at the heart of middle-­class masculine identity that would foreclose on that dream. Te fnal chapter sums up the project by examining “Te New England Village Novel and Picturesque Reform,” examining this picturesque literary genre within U.S. literary and social history. Tough largely forgotten now, the New England village novel was a pres­tig­ ious subgenre within the nineteenth-­century American novel. In one of the few critical assessments of these works as a genre, Lawrence Buell suggested that they “belong to a tradition of attempts at the great American novel, New England style.”54 From its inception in the 1820s, with Catharine Sedgwick’s A New England Tale, the genre was largely concerned with tracing the decline of orthodox Calvinism theology. In the midcentury, however, it took on a far more ambitious scope to the extent that such once-­heralded novels as Judd’s Margaret (1845), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Kavanagh (1849), Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Elsie Venner (1861), and Henry Ward Beecher’s Norwood (1869) were considered seriously by contemporary critics in their attempt to imagine what qualities would be constituted within American literature. Te fact that these novels seldom fgure in histories of the American novel is indicative of the ways in which picturesque literary genres have been excluded from our narrative of nineteenth-­century American literature, a gap that this project seeks to fll. In addition to its signifcant commentary on the canon and literary history, the New England village novel tells us about middle­class social values and their investment in reform over the course of the midcentury. By ofering the village as a model for the nation as a whole, the genre consistently imagined the picturesque village as a space of idealized social reform. In all of these novels, the characters (and readers) are inculcated in the aesthetic practice of picturesque landscape appreciation, submitting themselves to the discipline of the picturesque. Trough that discipline, they acquire authority over the landscape, an authority that, in turn, underlies their ambitious social reformist visions. Tis chapter explores some of the contradictions inherent in locating idealized theological and social change within the residual space of the New England village, linking these contradictions to work by historians and social geographers who see

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Picturesque Literature and the American Landscape

the New England village as a largely “invented” or “conceived” space. In fact, it is a space created by writers and members of local history societies infuenced by the aesthetics and design protocols of the picturesque. As a consequence of these contradictions, the utopia of the New England village novel becomes literally “no place,” frozen between nostalgia for a unifed national community that never existed and a community that had not yet been created but through reform could fulfll utopian possibilities for the nation. Te span of this chapter also points to the transformation of attitudes toward social reform from the picturesque utopianism of Judd’s Margaret to a much narrower vision of the transformative possibilities of the picturesque in Beecher’s post-­Civil War novel, Norwood, a quarter of a century later. Beecher’s story of transformation not only reveals the importance of the picturesque to an alternative history of the mid­nineteenth-­century American novel, it also traces the rise and decline of middle-­class use of the picturesque as an authoritative discourse to reshape spaces and enact social change in American life. Tis last chapter ends with a discussion of Gnaw-­wood, a contemporaneous parody of Beecher’s Norwood that also hints at changed attitudes toward the picturesque as a mode for reshaping and reimagining American spaces. In a brief epilogue, “In Search of the Picturesque,” I investigate the reasons for this change. In 1872, Constance Fenimore Woolson, soon to be well known as a regionalist writer, published the short story “In Search of the Picturesque” in Harper’s Monthly. Te story tells of how two young female citydwellers, having been inculcated in their grandfather’s tales of picturesque rural travel, take a humorously ill-­fated trip into the nearby countryside. From the absence of fresh food (all the local produce has been sent to the city market) to the country women’s curiosity about the newest fashion trends, to choking on coal smoke on the roads, their “search for the picturesque” is an unmitigated disaster. At nearly the same time as Woolson published this tale, a massive publishing undertaking was underway: the monumental illustrated guide to American scenery, Picturesque America (published in two lavishly illustrated volumes in 1872 and 1874). Nominally edited by William Cullen Bryant, Picturesque America was the work of many hands, with many writers and illustrators spanning the country to capture an encyclopedic survey of the United States’ landscapes. Aiming to encompass all of the country, including both the far West (newly accessible via completion of the transcontinental railroad)

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Introduction

23

and the South (even as it was recovering from the devastation of the Civil War), Picturesque America was explicitly a work of Reconstruction unifcation. Sold by subscription, it became a best-­seller, ofering a popular vision of a nation unifed by a shared landscape. Although Picturesque America could also be seen as a companion to earlier works that instructed American readers in patriotic landscape appreciation, like Willis’s American Scenery (1840), the colossal Picturesque America stripped the “picturesque” of its earlier signifcance as an aesthetic distinction, ultimately becoming nothing more than just a series of landscapes worth contemplating in a nonhierarchical aggregate: If Yosemite was picturesque, so was Cleveland. My epilogue argues that this undiferentiated association between “picturesque” and “landscape” in Picturesque America refects an historical shif away from the picturesque’s midcentury meaning as an aesthetic distinction that fueled a class identity and a cultural politics. Tis change refects a shif of attitude among bourgeois Americans in the 1870s away from the authority of picturesque “taste” toward other forms of professionalized authority regarding U.S. spaces. Despite the modern association of the picturesque with “quaintness” and the “banal,” the spaces it imagined in the mid-­nineteenth-­century United States are now dominant. Some of the spaces that can be associated with the picturesque approach to the landscape in the mid-­nineteenth century include the wilderness as tourist-­oriented park land organized for scenic appreciation; the suburbs as the ideal domestic setting; the city as a site of nostalgia for ethnic and architectural diversity in the face of commercial development; and urban public parks as the ideal expression of the city community. In their spatial conceptions of rural and urban, in their vision of social relations in the landscape and their self-­conscious framing of the scenic gaze, the picturesque literary genres of the midcentury express the voice of a middle class seeking to transform American space to suit its ideological needs and purposes. Although this middle class ultimately abandoned the picturesque as an adequate vehicle for expressing their need for cultural authority, the four decades or so covered in this study not only reveal how important the picturesque was in the imagination of midcentury American social values, but also show the debt that the physical landscapes of the twentieth century and beyond owe to this moment and its vision of the picturesque. Te midcentury U.S. writers did not make utopia out of picturesque landscapes. Instead, they made modern America.

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{1}

Te Travel Sketch picturesque history and american exceptionalism on the landscape

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For much of U.S. history, undeveloped, rural, and wilderness terrain has played a central role in our self-­defnition as a nation: Mythic America has typically been defned by westward expansion along the frontier and by the economic opportunity ofered by the seemingly endless undeveloped land. Tis vision was famously formalized at the end of the nineteenth century in Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 essay, “Te Signifcance of the Frontier in American History.” Turner argued that the continual renewal of rural development was a central feature of American history and character: American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. Tis perennial rebirth, this fuidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character.1

What became known as Turner’s “Frontier Tesis” formalized the mythic exceptionalist notions of American society that were central to the colonization of North America and to the republican ideals of the early nation, when the best hope for democracy was seen in westward expansion and in a continual return to an agrarian mode of living.2 Turner’s vision (and those of his precursors) of the regenerative role of access to undeveloped land on the American character was based on a utilitarian vision: Undeveloped land had social value because the work of developing it inculcated independence and forestalled overcivilization. Tis “continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society” was America’s insurance against falling prey to a Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835–1874. John Evelev, Oxford University Press (2021). © John Evelev. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894557.003.0002

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Te Travel Sketch

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host of problems associated with European culture, most signifcantly, class confict and sectarian violence. Marking the end of the frontier and contemplating the resulting end of “[t]his perennial rebirth,” Turner’s thesis struck an elegiac note that registered the possible end of American exceptionalism and, concomitantly, fears of what might follow. Te mid-­nineteenth century, however, also saw the increasing popularity of a distinctly diferent way of perceiving and understanding the American undeveloped landscape: the picturesque. Emphasizing the landscape’s aesthetic, rather than utilitarian, value, the picturesque ofered a dramatic reorientation in the understanding of rural America as a space to visit in order to experience the beauty of a landscape feature. Tis touristic interest in the American landscape started at the turn of the eighteenth century but gained momentum in the 1820s and was broadly popularized by the 1830s and 1840s, refecting the common historical timeline of the emergence of an urban middle class.3 Like the picturesque itself, touristic travel became a social signifer, an element of bourgeois social distinction.4 Te most common tourist trip in this period was the “Northern tour” (also called the “Fashionable tour”), which included the Hudson River Valley and the Catskills, the White Mountains, and Niagara Falls (along with various detours). By the 1830s, a traveler on the Northern tour could beneft from an infrastructure that included guidebooks to plan the trip, stagecoach and steamboat routes (with trains soon to follow), and inns to help the largely northeastern urban bourgeois travelers appreciate the picturesque landscapes.5 Te Northern tour route expanded west to include travel on the Great Lakes, ultimately opening up frontier regions of Michigan, Illinois, and Ohio to tourists. Even traveling to the frontier had a different meaning for members of the urban bourgeoisie, who came to take in the sights and view the developments rather than to seek economic opportunity.6 Margaret Fuller, for example, traveled west to “woo the mighty meaning of the scene.” Tis abstracted goal was far diferent from those of the settlers she met along the way in her Summer on the Lakes, in 1843.7 Picturesque tourism ofered a dramatically diferent perspective on America’s rural landscape, American materialism, and American exceptionalism. Picturesque tourism bolstered an infrastructure of transportation and hospitality, as well as a literary market for travel sketches. Demand

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for travel sketches remained relatively constant in the periodical culture of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. Related to tour guides, with their advice about infrastructure, and to scenery books, with their illustrations and carefully rendered landscape description, the travel sketch captured travelers’ personal travel experiences, particularly their aesthetic experience of the landscape. Under the infuence of the picturesque, travelers were encouraged to sketch (whether vis­u­ ally or verbally) the views they took in, but whether or not they had already traveled to a view, reading or looking at a sketch had value: Tey reminded the reader of what they had already seen if they had traveled there or trained them in what to look for if they had not yet visited. Te most famous example of the picturesque travel sketch in nineteenth-­century U.S. literature was Washington Irving’s Te Sketch Book of Geofrey Crayon (1819), but the genre only gained in popularity throughout the midcentury.8 Implicitly didactic but also impressionistic, the travel sketch modeled the proper way to experience the picturesque, ofen by reproducing similar descriptions of the most common sights on the Northern tour route. Whether reading aspirationally about travel or traveling to the same sights to reconfrm their appreciations, picturesque tourists claimed an appreciation of the landscape superior to those who could only see its material properties and economic possibilities. Tis refected the picturesque’s role in legitimating bourgeois understandings of American space. Te popularity of the travel sketch genre also created opportunities for more prestigious (and potentially more lucrative) book publication. In fact, the writers studied in this chapter—Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Toreau—turned to picturesque travelogues for their early work and frst books (or attempted books). Although Toreau wrote many travel sketches, he is not best known to modern readers as a travel writer, and particularly not as a writer of picturesque travel texts. And as for Hawthorne and Fuller, they are generally associated completely with other genres. Yet all of them turned to picturesque travel writing early in their ­careers with hopes of taking advantage of its wide audience and the capaciousness of the genre that allowed a great range of other writings that could be included along with the expected narratives and descriptions of landscape. Te picturesque sketch sought dramatic rural scenery, but especially visual contrasts, particularly between natural and human elements in the landscape. Te picturesque traveler was also invested in evidence

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of the human past upon the land, most notably in the form of ruins, which spoke to a slippage between the distinction between the human and the natural. Such picturesque forms were to be found in profusion in Europe and England, but for many observers American landscape lacked the historical associations and ruins that made for picturesqueness. As this picturesque evidence of the human presence on the European landscape ofen evoked class and sectarian confict, some midcentury commenters noted that what made the United States exceptional (its open territory, its lack of historical remnants, its “perennial rebirth”) would disqualify it from being ­picturesque. As a result, mid-­nineteenth-­century writers seeking to celebrate American scenery struggled to balance claims for the ­exceptionality of its landscape (and the social values it bolstered) and the possibility of an American picturesque. In part because of their continued investment in this mythic notion of the United States as a frontier nation, literary scholars have tended to neglect picturesque travel writing, viewing it as uncharacteristic of American culture. For example, Lawrence Buell, in writing about U.S.  environmental literature, associates “the picturesque essay” with “genial urbanity verging on fipness.”9 Far from reading the travel sketch as “genial” or “fip,” this chapter argues that some writers used the midcentury picturesque travel sketch to seriously contemplate the issue of whether the possibility of a picturesque American landscape signaled the end of exceptionalist democracy or a new way to understand history. Tis chapter frst examines Nathaniel Hawthorne’s early picturesque domestic travel writing in the 1830s, which was initially produced for his unpublished early book project, “Te Story Teller.” Tis project imagined the efects of picturesque travel on the art and consciousness of an aspiring American writer. Seldom examined now, Hawthorne’s picturesque domestic travel sketches respond to the residual presence of America’s violent past on the touristic landscape and to the threats that immigration posed for the future national landscape. Tis chapter next focuses on Margaret Fuller’s frst book and her only travel narrative, Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (1844), which embraces the picturesque as an alternative to the utilitarian ethos of frontier development and considers its efect on the future of the nation. Fuller sought to deal with the limitations of the picturesque in the example of Native Americans, whose ghostly traces and picturesque remnants in the landscape haunted her travels.

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Te fnal section examines Toreau’s early travel writing, including his frst non-Dial publication, “A Walk to Wachusett” (1843), and his frst book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). Tese works apply picturesque aesthetics to the landscapes he traversed in order to meditate on the relation of national history to alternative time schemes, from mythology and geological “deep time” to folk tales. For Hawthorne, Fuller, and Toreau, the picturesque was crucial to understanding the U.S. landscape. Tey applied its spatiotemporal protocols to think through the relationship of human to natural time, to study the resonances of the national past on the present (particularly in the residual presence of Native Americans and the colonial past), and to gauge the future efects of spatial expansion and new people (particularly immigrants) on the landscape.

American Picturesque Travel: Exceptionalism and History

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But among all the objects of art, the picturesque eye is perhaps most inquisitive afer the elegant relics of ancient architecture; the ruined tower, the Gothic arch, the remains of castles and abbeys. Tese are the legacies of art. Tey are consecrated by time; and almost deserve the veneration we pay to the works of nature itself.” —William Gilpin, “On Picturesque Travel” (1792)10

Time, particularly human time, was used to articulate the spatial logic of picturesque landscape aesthetics. Although picturesque travel focused on the scenery of natural landscapes, the presence of ruins, which added a layer of human time to the landscape, was also valued. Te seminal English theorist of picturesque travel, William Gilpin, argued that human ruins, “consecrated by time,” become equivalent to “the works of nature itself.” Discussing the picturesque’s interest in ruins in English literature, Anne Janowitz argues that the “peculiar pleasure” of the picturesque ruin came from “the contemplation of absolute pastness of the past within the aesthetically controlled shape of temporal transience.”11 Controlling the view of the ruin through picturesque protocols allowed the viewer to turn art into nature, but also the human past into nature, managing time through aesthetics. In this way, the picturesque ruins dotting the English countryside worked to aestheticize and naturalize ­national history.

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Across the Atlantic, though, in the mid-­nineteenth century, the notion that the North American landscape could be picturesque was controversial. It was a common refrain that, without the ruins or the associations of literature and history connected to sites in England and Europe, the U.S. landscape was lacking in picturesque qualities. In 1835, Sarah J. Hale made this characteristic charge in an essay entitled “Te Romance of Travelling,” complaining of the “barrenness” of her native scenery, “the vacancy, painfully felt by the traveler of taste and sentiment” that “arises from the want of intellectual and poetic associations with the scenery he beholds.”12 In his well-­known “Essay on American Scenery” (published the same year as Hale’s), the landscape painter Tomas Cole (1801–1848) complained of this assessment:

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Tere are those who through ignorance or prejudice strive to maintain that American scenery possesses little that is interesting or truly beautiful—that it is rude without picturesqueness, and monotonous without sublimity—that being destitute of those vestiges of antiquity, whose associations so strongly afect the mind, it may not be compared with European scenery.13

Accusing those who rejected the possibility of American picturesqueness of “ignorance or prejudice,” Cole defended the picturesque possibilities of the American past even without “those vestiges of antiquity” that Europe possessed. In its defense, he argued: “Yet American scenes are not destitute of historical and legendary associations—the great struggle for freedom has sanctifed many a spot, and many a mountain, stream, and rock has its legend, worthy of poet’s pen or the painter’s pencil.” Seeking associations with the past to validate claims for an American picturesque, Cole identifed the Revolution and Native and Colonial American “legends” as viable sources for a past upon which to locate picturesque landscape. In making such a claim, Cole was not necessarily innovative. Washington Irving’s Te Sketch Book (1819–1820) had become a transatlantic success more than a decade earlier by applying a similar approach to fction about the New York Catskills region, invoking revolutionary, Native American, and colonial associations to help imagine an American picturesque.14 Irving reafrmed his commitment to this impulse to defend the picturesque qualities of American landscapes when he contributed to Te Home-­Book of the Picturesque

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(1845), with an entry on the Catskill Mountains. He called the Catskills “the great poetical region of our country,” described the wildness of that area, and claimed it was a “rallying point for romance and fable.”15 In that same piece, Irving described his frst childhood experience traveling to the Catskills up the Hudson River, recounting meeting “a veteran Indian trader.” Tis trader told him “Indian legends and grotesque stories of every noted place on the river.” In the essay, Irving continued by adding his own legends of Dutch discoveries of gold in the mountains.16 When Cole invoked these associations for the American landscape, he took up Irving’s model for legitimating the nation through the picturesque. Despite his defense of the picturesque nature of the American past, Cole associated this landscape primarily with “the present and future”:

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But American associations are not so much of the past as of the present and the future. Seated on a pleasant knoll, look down into the bosom of that secluded valley, begin with wooded hills—through those enameled meadows and wide waving felds of grain, a silver stream winds lingeringly along—here, seeking the green shade of trees—there, glancing in the sunshine: on its banks are rural dwellings shaded by elms and garlanded by fowers—from yonder dark mass of foliage the village spire beams like a star. You see no ruined tower to tell of outrage—no gorgeous temple to speak of ostentation; but freedom’s ofspring—peace, security, and happiness, dwell there, the spirits of the scene.17

Cole’s vision refects the republican ethos of agrarian virtue and prefgures Turner’s notion of “perennial rebirth” on the frontier. Cole’s picturesque of the “present and the future” connects to the exceptionalist claim that, because of the frontier, American society remains in “continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society.” Cole contrasts the American picturesque present to a European past of “ruined tower” and “gorgeous temple.” Consciously or not, Cole quotes Gilpin, who celebrated the picturesque “ruined tower” as a “legacy of art,” but instead of celebrating it, Cole’s ruined tower “tell[s] of the outrage” of class hierarchy and war, while the “gorgeous temple . . . speak[s] of ostentation.” Unlike the European picturesque landscapes, with their relics of injustice, Cole imagines a picturesque America of idealized republican virtue. Although his view is idealized, it also carries a hint of trouble on the horizon:

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On the margin of that gentle river the village girls may ramble unmolested—and the glad school-­boy, with hook and line, pass his bright holiday—those neat dwellings, unpretending to magnifcence, are the abodes of plenty, virtue, and refnement. And in looking over the yet uncultivated scene, the mind’s eye may see far into futurity. Where the wolf roams, the plough shall glisten; on the gray crag shall rise temple and tower—mighty deeds shall be done in the now pathless wilderness; and poets yet unborn shall sanctify the soil.18

Cole’s American picturesque is a present of idealized rural villages and a future in which “pathless wilderness” will be transformed. His vision of that future, however, is not simply an extension of the rural ideal. He predicts that the “uncultivated scene” of the “gray crag” will be replaced by “temple and tower,” the very images that evoked the problematic European history of social hierarchy, confict, and religious excess. In this projection, Cole implies that the problems of European history might be ahead for the United States; or at least he conveys misgivings that the nation can avoid the problems of Europe. With his ambivalent vision of progress and the fragility of republican agrarian virtue, Cole hints at the anxieties about the future that were present in U.S. picturesque travel writing in the midcentury.19 Tis anxiety was not a problem unique to U.S. picturesque landscapes: Anne Janowitz argues that attention to picturesque ruins helped to fx the association of the English countryside with national identity in the Romantic era, but also revealed anxieties about imperial expansion in the period.20 In the readings that follow, we will see a similar efect, as midcentury U.S. travel writers used evidence of the past in the landscapes they traversed to legitimate their attention to those spaces, but that past raised concerns about the future. Unlike English imperial anxieties, though, the ruins, relics, and associations of the picturesque American landscape, which link national identity to the countryside, also threatened to destabilize exceptionalist notions of national history. Te long story of the dispossession of Native Americans, ofen elided in the notion of virtuous “perennial rebirth” on the frontier, raised the specter of violence and injustice in the national history. Te geographical expansion, especially that fueled by immigration, threatened the dilution of a distinct U.S.  political and racial identity. Picturesque vistas in the rural landscape not only revealed beauty, it also spoke to the problems of a past and future that could not escape European-­style “temple and tower” and its conficts.

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Hawthorne on the Northern Tour: Te Picturesque, Tourism and Time in “Te Story Teller” Travel Sketches Over the course of his literary career, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) tried his hand at most popular literary genres, including the picturesque travel sketch. Although Hawthorne’s travel writing is now seen as a minor adjunct to his fction, there was a moment in the early 1830s when Hawthorne imagined the travel sketch as central to his literary career. Afer traveling on the Northern tour route in 1832, he conceived of a new major project, “Te Story Teller,” a complex and ambitious Entwicklungsromane (autobiographical novel of development) tracing the life and artistic maturation of a literary persona named “Oberon” (who resembled but was not intended as a direct refection of Hawthorne himself) and containing a multitude of Hawthorne’s early stories and travel sketches.21 An introduction to “Te Story Teller” written in the persona of Oberon, shows how the fction emerged out of the writer’s direct experience of the American landscape and privileged the travel sketch in relation to the fction:

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With each specimen will be given a sketch of the circumstances in which the story was told. Tus my air-­drawn pictures will be set in frames, perhaps more valuable than the pictures themselves, since they will be embossed with groups of characteristic fgures, amid the lake and mountain scenery, the villages and fertile felds, of our native land.22

Emphasizing the picturesque qualities of his stories by calling them “air-­drawn pictures,” the narrator suggests that the travel sketch frames, with their focus on landscape description, are “perhaps more valuable than the pictures themselves.” In this way, Hawthorne’s ambitious vision for this early major project was overtly shaped by the aesthetics of the picturesque travel sketch. Tis section will examine the travel sketches associated with Hawthorne’s “Te Story Teller” and show the way Hawthorne uses the picturesque to express anxiety and to stabilize his notions of American exceptionalism.23 Although we do not have the itinerary for Hawthorne’s 1832 trip on the “Northern tour,” published pieces derived from the trip describe visits to the White Mountains, Niagara Falls, the Erie Canal, Rochester, Lake Champlain, and the Great Lakes—all standard stops

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of the extended tour. At the time, Hawthorne was an aspiring writer with multiple failed projects in his recent past. He envisioned the tour as both a vacation and source material for a new, ambitious literary project. In a letter to his college friend (and future president), Franklin Pierce, he explained, “I am very desirous of making this journey on account of a book by which I intend to acquire an (undoubtedly) immense literary reputation, but which I cannot commence writing till I have visited Canada.”24 However facetious Hawthorne may have been in predicting his future literary success, the proposed travel-­infuenced project became “Te Story Teller,” a narrative of a New England writer whose work is inspired by travel on the Northern tour. Afer it was rejected for publication as a book, Hawthorne published parts of the collection as discrete stories and travel sketches.25 Separated from the elaborate conceits of the book concept, Hawthorne’s travel sketches of the Northern tour ft easily into conventional literary expectations of the picturesque travel sketch. Within these conventions, Hawthorne’s travel sketches use the picturesque’s visual framing and temporal shifs to comment on social concerns in U.S. history. When Hawthorne’s early travel sketches were frst published in magazines, his editor emphasized their adherence to the protocols of picturesque aesthetics and highlighted the social function of picturesque travel as a shared class experience. Afer rejecting “Te Story Teller,” Park Benjamin selected a number of its pieces for separate publication in magazines. He published the frst batch of Hawthorne’s travel sketches anonymously in the New-­England Magazine as “Sketches from Memory. By a Pedestrian” in November 1835. In introducing these sketches to readers, Benjamin explicitly framed them through the lens of picturesque travel: We are so fortunate as to have in our possession the portfolio of a friend, who traveled on foot in search of the picturesque over New-­England and New-­York. It contains many loose scraps and random sketches, which appear to have been thrown of at diferent intervals, as the scenes once observed were recalled to the mind of the writer by recent events and associations. He kept no journal nor set down any notes during his tour: but his recollection seems to have been faithful, and his powers of description as fresh and efective as if they have been tasked on the very spot which he describes. Some of his quiet delineations deserve rather to be called pictures rather than sketches, so lively are the colors shed over them.26

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Identifying the writer as a picturesque tourist, Benjamin’s construction of Hawthorne’s text diverges from Gilpin’s ideal only in describing the “loose scraps and random sketches” as the work of “recollection” rather than as immediate impressions, but Hawthorne’s “powers of description” are so “fresh and efective” that they still fulfll Gilpin’s ideal. Perhaps they even transcend Gilpin’s ideal, as Benjamin proclaims them to be more deserving of the title “pictures” than “sketches,” suggesting that their details go beyond the hastily drawn sketch. Closing the introduction, Benjamin announces that the frst sketch will describe a visit to the White Mountains and, in a classic articulation of the logic of picturesque travel writing, “will revive agreeable thoughts in the minds of those tourists who have but just returned from a visit to their sublime scenery.”27 Benjamin depicts Hawthorne’s sketches as an aid to memory of the experiences of Northern tour travelers, demonstrating the ways that picturesque travel writing in the mid-­nineteenth century reconfrmed and bolstered the social status of bourgeois Americans. Although Benjamin published Hawthorne’s travel sketches on U.S. sites conventionally seen as sublime, such as the White Mountains and Niagara Falls, the published sketches reveal Hawthorne’s struggle in writing about these landscapes.28 Even his editor seemed happier with his picturesque sketches. When Benjamin introduced the second group of Hawthorne’s travel sketches published in the New-­England Magazine, he highlighted two works, “An Afernoon Scene” and “A Night Scene,” which he praised by saying “more clearly than those of the last month, shew the truth of our remark, that, like careless drawings of a master-­hand, they shadow forth a power and beauty, that might be visibly embodied into life-­like forms on the canvass.”29 Benjamin favorably compared these sketches to those on the more sublime White Mountains, refecting the preference for the informal, unfnished representation of the sketch as the ideal expression of the picturesque aesthetic. Although Benjamin praised these sketches for their aesthetic qualities alone, Hawthorne used the picturesque sketch to explore time on the American landscape both in an abstract philosophical sense and in more politically charged contexts, indicating how the violence of the national past continued to afect the present moment, shaping such questions as how immigration might transform contemporary American society. Te frst sketch, “An Afernoon Scene,” explores the sensuous experience of time in a picturesque landscape, posing human m ­ easurements,

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like the seasons, against a more undiferentiated nature. It was originally the frst paragraph taken from “My Return Home,” a story that narrates the end of Oberon’s travels in Te Story Teller. Tere’s no reason to believe that Hawthorne imagined the sketch as a standalone piece of writing. In fact, its publication as a fragmented sketch could be said to refect Benjamin’s aesthetic principles as editor rather than Hawthorne’s preferences as author. Yet Benjamin singled out this piece to exemplify the depiction of a particular kind of travel experience. Te experience described in “An Afernoon Scene” is not identifed with a particular place, but refers repeatedly to time, particularly to the cycle of the seasons: “Tere had not been a more delicious afernoon than this, in all the train of summer—the air being a sunny perfume, made up of balm and warmth and gentle brightness.”30 Located in fall (“in all the train of summer”), the sketch ­unsettles the spatiotemporal orientation of the writer, as the second sentence notes, “Te oak and walnut trees, over my head, retained their deep masses of foliage, and the grass, though for months the pasturage of stray cattle, had been revived with the freshness of early June, by the autumnal rains of the preceding week” (47–48). Indeed, the sketch continues the theme of deceptive references to seasons by noting that “[t]he garb of Autumn indeed resembled that of Spring” (48). It describes blooming “[d]andelions and buttercups” and “one wild rose-­bush.” Te narrator observes that “[t]he same tokens would have announced that the year was brightening into the glow of summer” (48), while the end of the sketch reasserts the season: “But the breath of September was difused through the mild air, whenever a little breeze shook out the latent coolness” (48). Te one-­paragraph sketch is focused on capturing the ways that seasonal time is expressed in our experience of a landscape, from the colors of foliage to the subtle feel of the air, and on the nuances and mixed messages that a landscape can express about time. Te conficting temporal messages of the picturesque landscape encourage the narrator to refect on the various overlapping pleasures of the seasons from the “freshness of early June” to the “latent coolness” of September. Te seasonal confusion celebrates the leisure and sensibility of the traveler who can appreciate close attention to the forms of nature.31 If “An Afernoon Scene” uses the picturesque gaze to dwell upon the pleasures of temporal uncertainty generated by seasonal ambiguity, a not-­displeasing confusion with the order of nature, “A Night Scene” ofers a darker view, focusing on fears about the future of

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American society. More stylized than “An Afernoon Scene,” “Te Evening Scene” also has a more specifc temporal and spatial setting. Te sketch takes place at night during a steamboat voyage to Detroit, when the boat is stopped for repairs. Te narrator observes “[s]ome wild Irishmen . . . replenishing” the boat’s “stock of wood” who make a great bonfre “to illuminate their labors” (48). He notes that the evening light hightens his experience of the scene: “As the evening was warm, though cloudy and very dark, I stood on the deck, watching a scene that would not have attracted a second glance in the day-­time, but became picturesque by the magic of strong light and deep shade” (48). Te passage meditates on the picturesque efects of frelight in the darkness and on the equally picturesque fgures of the Irish workers, whose presence in the U.S.  landscape repeatedly troubles the narrator of Hawthorne’s Te Story Teller sketches. “A Night Scene” describes a dark picturesque that invokes class diference. Te narrator evokes the work of the Italian Baroque painter and poet Salvator Rosa (1615–1673), replacing Rosa’s paintings of Italian banditti with “these wild Irish, distorted and exaggerated by the blaze, now bursting into sudden splendor, and now struggling between light and darkness, formed a picture which might have been transferred, almost unaltered, to a tale of the supernatural” (49).32 Te sketch’s chiaroscuro—the contrast between light and dark—refects the formalist elements of picturesque aesthetics, but, as Beth L. Lueck suggests, the Irish function like the English and Scottish peasants in Gilpin’s tours: as picturesque additions to the landscape views that also raise the issue of class diference.33 In this scene, the Irish workers do not simply add visual interest; they are the focus of the scene, which is stripped of landscape altogether and is transposed to a nonplace, a supernatural realm characterized by the interplay of light and dark. Tis eerie, supernatural picture, Hawthorne’s narrator suggests at the end, might lead “the least imaginative spectator” to “at once compare them to devils, condemned to keep alive the fame of their own torment” (49). Although the narrator disavows this fnal vision of the Irish as devils undergoing punishment in Hell (ascribing this view to “the least imaginative spectator”), the sketch refuses to humanize them, referring to them as “imperfect creatures” and “shadow-­like” grotesques (48). Like “An Afernoon Scene,” “A Night Scene” depicts a picturesque landscape marked by an uncertainty that hinges on the ambiguous humanity of the Irish

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laborers. Recalling Cole’s predictions of ruined “towers and temples,” these picturesque immigrants represent the threat of an imposition of European history on the U.S. landscape that puts the exceptional American future at risk. In this and other sketches from Hawthorne’s Northern tour experiences, the narrator espouses conventionally prejudiced views on the Irish.34 For example, in the sketch “An Ontario Steam-­Boat,” he describes Irish immigrants traveling in steerage: “[T]hey were exiles of another clime—the scum which every wind blows of the Irish shores—the pauper-­dregs which England fings out upon America” (49).35 Te narrator of this sketch fgures the steamboat with its different grades of travelers as a microcosm through which to study “the characteristic of diferent nations, and the peculiarities of diferent castes” (50). Highlighting the ship’s enforcement of social distinctions, the narrator notes:

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Here, therefore, was something analogous to that picturesque state of society, in other countries and earlier times, when each upper class excluded every lower one from its privileges, and when each individual was content with his allotted position, because there was no possibility of bettering it.  (50)

Here the picturesque stands in for a more rigidly hierarchical social system than imagined in the United States, one that might be present “in other countries and earlier times.” Te picturesque is understood as historical association, like Cole’s invocation of the “ruined tower” and “gorgeous temple” as picturesque relics of European feudalism. Jennifer Baker reads this sketch as a demonstration of the “tendency of the picturesque [to] confict . . . with the idea of social mobility, which, [Hawthorne] believes, requires permeable boundaries between classes.”36 As in Cole’s vision in “Essay on American Scenery” that imagined an American landscape threatened with the possibility of recapitulating European injustices, Hawthorne’s steamboat embodies a “picturesque state of society,” a social vision of the European past that haunts the present and future of the United States. Although the picturesque threatens American democracy in this sketch, Hawthorne also deploys the visual conceits of the picturesque to reassure himself and his readers about the future. Much of the rest of the “Ontario Steam-­Boat” sketch is devoted to the narrator’s

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description of the immigrants in the steerage of the steamboat. While he fnds much to disturb him, the fnal scene in the steerage focuses on a family, who despite their “very straightened[sic] circumstances, yet preserv[e] a decency of aspect” (53). Sitting “near one of the furnaces,” the family is illuminated in a chiaroscuro tableau of domesticity: “the light . . . was thrown upon their sober, yet not uncheerful faces, so that they looked precisely like the members of a comfortable household, sitting in the glow of their own freside. And so it was their own freside” (53). In contrast to the Irish laborers in “A Night Scene,” where the frelight threatens to transform them into “devils,” this family’s ability to reconstitute the domestic space of the freside amidst the other unsettled immigrants reassures the narrator that this is “a sure prophecy of better days to come” (53). Te picturesque frelight illuminates a consoling scene of domestic afection, ofering at least the possibility of a more optimistic future. Te sketch ends with Hawthorne’s narrator pacing the steamboat promenade, “meditating on the varied congregation of human life that was beneath me” and asking about their future lot: “What was to become of them all, when not a single one had the certainty of food or shelter, from one day to the next?” (54). Te picturesque history of European class diferences these immigrants bring with them and their precarious future in the United States create anxiety. Te narrator fnds his consolation in a vision of a divinely sanctioned “destined port . . . a home in futurity” where American “moral infuences, difused throughout our land” would be “large enough to absorb and neutralize so much of foreign vice” (54). Te picturesque in Hawthorne’s sketches of immigrants represents both the threat that the past and foreign social models pose to American values and the aestheticizing visual distancing that might defuse it. Far less ambivalently, Hawthorne’s “Old Fort Ticonderoga: A Picture of the Past,” uses the picturesque to connect to a national past. Tis historical version of the picturesque is less troubling than the narrator’s linkage of the picturesque to the rigid social hierarchy of a European past. Te historical associations that Gilpin so valued were famously problematic in U.S.  travel, with many observers claiming that the youth of the nation rendered its landscape devoid of the history that created picturesque associations. Te “picturesque” fxed-­ class system that the Irish travelers he feared brought with them to the Great Lakes frontier was at least accompanied in their native land by castles and ruins largely absent from the U.S. landscape. On his tour,

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Hawthorne’s narrator was forced to draw upon far less noble historical associations, as in the sketch “Rochester,” where the narrator dwells on “a legend” of the daredevil Sam Patch, who died in a dive from the falls at the Genessee River in 1829. Te narrator predicted that Patch’s death “will become poetical in the lapse of years, and was already so to me” (45). Such associations, however, hardly seem best suited to elevating the American landscape as picturesque or to celebrating national history. Unlike Hawthorne’s strenuous efort to make Syracuse and its dead daredevil appear worthy of a touristic gaze, Fort Ticonderoga was a more conventional picturesque site. A ruined fortress where once a number of important colonial and Revolutionary era battles had been fought, Fort Ticonderoga was a common detour of the main route of the Northern tour on the coast of Lake Champlain. Perhaps Cole had Fort Ticonderoga in mind when he proclaimed in “Essay on American Scenery” that “American scenes are not destitute of historical and legendary associations—the great struggle for freedom has sanctifed many a spot.” In fact, Cole’s essay was published in the same American Monthly Magazine in which Hawthorne had published his “Fort Ticonderoga: A Picture of the Past” only one month before. In his sketch of the fort, Hawthorne argues for the viability of a picturesque American past as a resource for travelers and writers. Hawthorne imagines a process of Americanization in which the historical time and spaces of European colonial confict lapse into “natural” ruins. By showing how all the past conficts of the Fort are subsumed in the ruin rapidly being overtaken by nature, Hawthorne’s sketch, to use Ann Janowitz’s phrase, “naturalizes the violence of nation-­making.”37 In the process, this picturesque sketch constructs the national present as a natural and peaceful resolution to the multiple conficts of the colonial past. Hawthorne’s sketch both acknowledges and defuses the colonial and Revolutionary violence that underlies the history of Fort Ticonderoga. Hawthorne’s “Fort Ticonderoga: A Picture of the Past” should be read as akin to “An Afernoon Scene” in the way the narrator allows himself to be absorbed into a reverie by the landscape, where specifc time frames are subsumed by peace in nature. Te frst time the narrator visits the fort, he sees it in the company of “a young lieutenant of engineers, recently from West Point” (66). In contrast to the army engineer, who observes the fort through the lens of mathematics (“His description of Ticonderoga would be

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as  accurate as a geometrical theorem” [66]), the narrator sees it through history:

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I viewed Ticonderoga as a place of ancient strength, in ruins for half a century; where the fags of three nations had successively waved, and none waved now; where armies had struggled, so long ago that the bones of the slain were mouldered; where Peace found a heritage in the forsaken haunts of War.  (66)

Rather than emphasizing the violent history of the space, Hawthorne imagines a “heritage of Peace” defned by the ruinous state of the place of battle, where confict has given way to calm nature. Hawthorne’s careful framing of the fort’s picturesque decay enables this transformation of a battle site into a place of peace. Returning to the site of the fort alone for the second visit in the sketch, the narrator sits “in one of the roofess barracks” (67). Observing the details of the decay of the buildings and the “luxuriant crop of weeds” that have invaded them, he focuses on a ruined hearth, where “a verdant heap of vegetation . . . cluster[ed] on the very spot where the huge logs had mouldered to glowing coals,” noting that “I felt that there was no other token of decay so impressive as that bed of weeds in the place of the back-­log” (67). It is certainly odd to select weeds replacing logs in a barrack freplace as the “most impressive” mark of ruin in a storied place of military history, but the logs tell a diferent story about decay and ruin than any conventional narrative about war. “[H]uge logs” turn into “glowing coals,” but instead of being wholly consumed by fame, they are transformed into “a verdant heap of vegetation”: Tis choice for an object of contemplation fts Hawthorne’s pattern of supplanting images of human confict with the generativity of nature. Tis image of picturesque decay as natural generation inspires a series of images of the fort throughout its history, from untouched natural site to Native American presence, through French colonial involvement and British control. Framed by the present-­day calmness, the violence of this history is diminished. Te narrator controls the reverie, marking the choices that elide violence: I tried to make a series of pictures from the old French war, when feets were on the lake and armies in the woods . . . but being at a loss how to order the battle, I chose an evening scene in the barracks afer the fortress had surrendered to Sir Jefrey Amherst. What an immense

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fre blazes on that hearth, gleaming on swords, bayonets, and musket barrels, and blending with the hue of the scarlet coats till the whole barrack-­room is quivering with ruddy light!  (68–69)

Despite the fort’s storied history as the site of several important battles, the narrator decides not to imagine any of them, focusing on frelight refecting of weapons and coats so that the red of battle (blood or gunfre) is purely symbolic. Te only battle scene imagined in “Fort Ticonderoga” is the fnal image of the narrator’s reverie, set during the Revolutionary War, when Ethan Allan and the “motley throng” of the Continental Army defended the fort against attack by British soldiers. Before his imagination of the battle even begins, however, the reverie is shattered by “the ringing of a bell on the lake,” issuing from a steamboat letting one traveler of before traveling on to Canada, reminding the narrator of the touristic context for this experience (69). Te bell brings the narrator back to the present. Opening his eyes, he “behold[s] only the gray and weed-­grown ruins. Tey are as peaceful in the sun as a warrior’s grave” (69). Te violence of the past has disappeared, replaced by a natural peacefulness. “Fort Ticonderoga” reveals the contradictory ideological work of the picturesque ruin that asserts both impermanence and permanence, creating a space that marks the past violence that created the nation and the naturalized peace of the present. Abstracting, distancing, and diminishing the violence of colonial conficts, the peaceful ruins of “Fort Ticonderoga” both assert American “antiquity” and absolve the nation from this confict-­ridden history. In this way, “Fort Ticonderoga” is much like “An Afernoon Sketch”: Te two sketches use the protocols of the picturesque to unpack human time frames and to invoke a peacefulness of natural time scales that reposition our attempts to order our experience. Te distinctions between Native, French, British, and American soldiers who fought at Fort Ticonderoga are as arbitrary as our attempts to label the seasons: Neither impacts the essence of the landscape. In “Fort Ticonderoga,” the picturesque unsettling of time allows Hawthorne to associate the peacefulness of the natural landscape with the nation that replaced all the European conficts over the territory. In “Fort Ticonderoga,” Hawthorne uses the picturesque to claim both the reassurance of history and the promise of American exceptionality. In Te Story Teller sketches of the 1830s, Hawthorne negotiates this tension between history and exceptionality on the picturesque U.S. touristic landscape. Te assertion of the presence of the picturesque

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requires him to acknowledge European-­style class diference, which appears as a kind of visually compelling social variety, embodied, on the one hand, by the Irish immigrants he encounters and, on the other, by “antiquity,” manifested in the ruins of colonial conficts. Although the presence of these picturesque forms on the landscape of the Northern tour occasion some anxiety on Hawthorne’s part, the sketches ultimately work to naturalize the American picturesque while reminding the viewer that the conditions of American exceptionality still pertain. If immigrants threaten to bring their “picturesque” Old World social hierarchies to the United States and create a permanent underclass, traveling to the frontier and mixing with more established “Americans” will instill them with democratic values in Turner’s cycle of “perennial rebirth.” If ruins tell a story of persistent violence and confict on the national landscape, Hawthorne relegates this entirely to the prenational past, fnding reassurance in the peacefulness of a touristic landscape where the steamboat’s bell, notifying travelers of their stop, replaces the claxon of battle. Despite the difculties of this process, Hawthorne’s 1830s domestic travel sketches legitimate both picturesque tourism and American exceptionalism.

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Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, in 1843: Te Picturesque and Native Americans in Western Travel One of the distinctive developments of the Northern or Fashionable tour in the 1820s and beyond was that it opened up travel as a leisure activity for U.S. women. Women had traveled as part of regional migrations throughout the history of colonization and during the early republic and, in rare instances, as agents in business in their own right. However, travel as a leisure activity for women only became more possible with the buildup of a tourist infrastructure with commercial travel routes and inns such as followed the vogue for picturesque travel on the Northern tour. Hawthorne’s mid-­1830s sketches ofer numerous mentions of the presence of women on the Northern tour in a manner that suggests not only a signifcant number of women traveling, but also the relative novelty of the practice. Women’s touristic travel ofered the possibility of transgressing their restrictive existence in the domestic realm, but also reafrmed their

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conventional status as fgures of sensibility, especially in contrast to the period’s stereotypical vision of utilitarian and business-­like masculinity. For this latter reason, travel became a common subject for women writers of the period, whose travel writing appeared in “women’s” magazines such as Godey’s Lady’s Book, as well as more “general-­interest” or “serious” (i.e., male-­dominated) magazines such as Putnam’s. In addition to frequent magazine publication, sketches were regularly pulled together into books such as Caroline Gilman’s Te Poetry of Traveling in the United States (1838) and Lydia Sigourney’s Scenes in My Native Land (1844), suggesting a signifcant audience for narratives of women’s domestic travel.38 Although women writing about the Northern tour was relatively conventional in the 1830s and 1840s, the same could not be said about travel to the West. Te West did not have the same established checklist of tourist sites, nor did it have the infrastructure of the Northern tour. As a result, women tourists were relatively few, and so Western travel narratives by women were comparatively rare. In their Western travel narratives, Washington Irving (Tour of the Prairies [1835]) and Francis Parkman (Te Oregon Trail [1849]) presented the West as the site of a masculinized exploration, but some of the most successful women writers of the Western experience, including Caroline Kirkland, (A New Home; Who’ll Follow? [1839] and Forest Life [1842]) and Eliza Farnham (Life in the Prairie Land [1846]), emphasized the experience of settlement, focusing on frontier domesticity rather than adventure.39 As a woman’s narrative of Western tourism and exploration, Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (1844) stands out in this period. Despite the distinctiveness of a woman writing about travel in the West, Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) could be said to be tapping into the broader popularity of travel writing in publishing Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. Like Hawthorne, who tried (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) to publish his frst book by aligning it with the travel sketch genre, Fuller in her frst book attempted to establish her literary professional credentials and reach a wider audience. Previously, her publications had been more esoteric or scholarly, and when she decided to write a narrative afer traveling to the Great Lakes region, she became a student of travel writing, examining other published narratives of travel to the area at the Harvard library.40 Like Hawthorne, Fuller depicted this project not as a trivial or genial

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description of attractive scenery, but instead proclaimed her goal was to “woo the mighty meaning of the scene, perhaps to foresee the law by which a new order, a new poetry is to be evoked from this chaos.” Fuller imagined her traveling as an act of interpretation, one that could bring “order” to the “chaos” of the West.41 One of the main tools of Fuller’s interpretation of the West was the picturesque. Fuller used the picturesque not merely as an aesthetic frame through which to appreciate attractive landscapes, but as a design ethos that ofered the best possible response to the problems she saw in the Western section of the nation. Tese included ramp­ ant materialism, destruction of the landscape, sexism against women on the frontier and in society more generally, and racism against Native Americans. Fuller ofered the picturesque as a way for the West to fulfll the utopian possibilities of U.S. life, fnding positive examples in settlers who adapted picturesque design to frontier life and in a Western landscape that resembled picturesque European models without their history of social inequality. Fuller’s narrative rejects many of the conventional forms of mid-­nineteenth-­century travel literature, mixing travel experience with poems, dialogues, interpolated stories, and long discussions of texts read during the trip and aferward.42 Although some contemporary critics praised Fuller’s far-­ranging text, others complained about its digressive structure. Most famously, Orestes Brownson found that Fuller’s text lacked “that tidiness we always look for in woman.”43 When Summer was reissued afer Fuller’s death, her brother expurgated many of the supposed digressions, leaving mainly a more conventional travelogue. Summer’s original complicated non-­narrative structure, however, has been central to its modern recovery as an important work of U.S. Romantic literature, as scholars have read it through the lens of genres and forms such as the “excursion” or the “fragment.”44 Scholars have also studied the interplay between the travel narrative and discussions of women’s lives, mysticism, and Native Americans, seeing these elements as carefully woven together by intentional juxtaposition and dialogue.45 One ironic consequence of the critical interest in Fuller’s text in all of its complexity is that the travel writing itself, containing long descriptions of the Midwestern landscape, is full of the devices of the picturesque sensibility that has largely been neglected or even derided as an example of the superfcial, formal, and purely aesthetic kind of writing and attitude toward

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travel that Fuller did not want to propagate.46 However, Fuller used the picturesque not simply as a way to self-­consciously frame scenery, but as a means of modeling idealized ways to interact with the Western landscape and its inhabitants, both the settlers and Native Americans. Like Hawthorne’s work, Fuller’s travel narrative is dominated by the picturesque mode, punctuated with ambivalent encounters with the sublime. Fuller begins with a visit to Niagara Falls, casting it as “this magnifcent prologue to the, as yet, unknown drama” of the Western tour (3). Fuller struggles to have the expected sublime experience of the Falls, noting that her frst reaction was to feel “nothing but a quiet satisfaction” at the resemblance of the Falls to “drawings, the panorama, &c” she had already encountered: “I knew where to look for everything, and everything looked as I thought it would” (4). She ultimately does achieve her sublime experience, overcoming her “superfcial” preconceptions and fnally achieving “a proper foreground for these sublime distances” (4). Fuller’s sublime experience of the Falls is unsettling, however, because it refects a vision of nature as a destructive force that “inspire[s] an undefned dread” (4). Linking the sublime sensation to a near-­death experience, Fuller associates the power of the Falls with the “identity of that mood of nature . . . with that in which the Indian was shaped on the same soil” and describes being “haunted” by “unsought and unwelcome, images . . . of naked savages stealing behind me with uplifed tomahawks” (4). Fuller’s discomfort with her own stereotypical image of violent “savages” refects the difculty she faces in discussing Native Americans. Fuller confronts both the essential injustice of the treatment of Native Americans by the U.S. government and Western settlers and her own feelings that the extinction of Native Americans and their disappearance from the landscape is inevitable.47 Her association of Niagara with Native Americans, and their common “identity” in a natural “mood” of sublime dread and violence, connects the sublime with a landscape that cannot be altered or adapted and thus expresses a radical Otherness to white settlement. Afer the Niagara chapter, Fuller eschewed the sublime in her narrative, focusing extensively on the picturesque as a preferred mode for understanding the Western landscape and as more suitable to the manipulation of the landscape and to the work of adapting the landscape to human needs. Nonetheless, Fuller’s picturesque vision for the

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West is haunted by the history of U.S. treatment of Native Americans, a history that unsettles any vision of American exceptionalism. References to the picturesque abound in Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 in ways that seem merely superfcial or “conventional,” but they reveal that the picturesque is not superfcial in the least. From an early dialogue between Fuller and her traveling companions waiting for a steamboat to depart Bufalo in Chapter  2 (“all river-­crafs, sea-­crafs, are picturesque” [11]) to a description of a disheveled girl operating an Illinois ferryboat (“unfortunately of the most picturesque appearance” [41]), to her late description of Mackinaw Island (“crowned most picturesquely, by the white fort with its gay fag” [107]), citations of the picturesque help to fll out the descriptive elements throughout the narrative. But it also uses the picturesque’s interest in a hybridized landscape, which merges nature and culture seamlessly, to imagine a better future for the West and to consider the region’s past. Fuller’s picturesque is more than just a “purely visual” descriptor, as Jefrey Steele claims in his reading of Summer on the Lakes: Rather, it is a complex and multivalent aesthetic sensibility through which she imagines what Lance Newman calls “an organic utopia, an alternative to the steady expansion of capitalism.”48 Beyond beauty, Fuller’s picturesque landscape expresses an idealized U.S. political and social possibility. Fuller seems aware that during this period of time the picturesque was ofen used blithely and superfcially. When the term is frst mentioned in the text, in the aestheticized efusions about the innately picturesque qualities of all things associated with the water by J (her companion, John Freeman Clarke), Fuller records her own terse response: “Te reasons for that are complex” (11). Fuller is unwilling to treat the picturesque as purely pictorial. She is interested in pondering not only what defnes the picturesque, but also what the term might mean socially and politically as well as aesthetically. In the same chapter, while traveling on the lakes to Chicago, Fuller considers the Western landscape and writes about learning to “appreciate the lake scenery” not with an appropriative gaze of “impertinent curiosity,” but through a child-­like “daily and careless familiarity,” noting that “nature always refuses to be seen by being stared at”(17).49 Describing the Manitou Islands, where steamboats stop to take on more wood, a scenario similar to the one described in Hawthorne’s “A Night Sketch,” Fuller poses her preconception of the site—the “ideal beauty” of a place that mixes “profound solitude with service

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to the great world”—against the reality of “seeing the woodcutters and their slovenly huts” (18). Instead of being disillusioned (or instead of turning the Irish woodcutters into supernatural fgures, as Hawthorne did), Fuller insists upon the beauty of the site (“I think so still”). Faced with the “mushroom growth” of the West, “where ’go ahead’ is the only motto,” Fuller rejects not only the dominant settler values of utilitarianism but also the poetic and painterly project of “adding the beauty and leaving out the dirt,” instead seeking “by reverent faith to woo the mighty meaning of the scene, perhaps to foresee the law by which a new order, a new poetry is to be evoked from this chaos” (18). Although Fuller describes the problems she sees in the West, she keeps looking for examples of what might succeed, replace, or improve the ugliness she encounters. Tose successful examples consistently take the form of picturesque landscapes and design. On her travels through Illinois, Fuller repeatedly focuses on settlers’ homes that could easily ft the design criteria established by picturesque landscape designers like Andrew Jackson Downing.50 Traveling from Geneva, Illinois, Fuller describes the home of an “English gentleman” who had read extensively of the country before settling and found exactly what he sought. Tis thoughtful and well-­prepared settler’s home is a paragon of picturesque design: A wood surrounds the house, through which paths are cut in every direction. It is, for this new country, a large and handsome dwelling; but round it are its barns and farm yard, with cattle and poultry. Tese, however, in the framework of wood, have a very picturesque and pleasing efect. Tere is that mixture of culture and rudeness in the aspect of things as gives a feeling of freedom, not of confusion. . . . Te habitation of man seemed like a nest in the grass, so thoroughly were the buildings and all the objects of human care harmonized with what was natural.  (24)

Fuller is clear in articulating her theory of picturesque design as “that mixture of culture and rudeness” and the harmony between “objects of human care” and nature. In Fuller’s formulation, the picturesque does not simply produce an aesthetic response, but a social and cognitive one, producing a “feeling of freedom, not confusion.” Troughout Summer, picturesque design becomes both a social and an aesthetic model for Western settlement.

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At the same time that Fuller advocates for adapting the Western landscape to picturesque design, she imagines the Western landscape as already picturesque, not just in the sense of its untouched roughness and variety, but also, paradoxically, in its sense of history. Like other travel writers who sought to legitimate the picturesqueness of American scenery, Fuller observed that, despite the absence of feudal history in the United States, the landscape still conveyed the feel of an ancient history:

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Of Illinois, in general, it has ofen been remarked that it bears the character of country which has been inhabited by a nation skilled like the English in all the ornamental arts of life, especially in landscape gardening. Tat the villas and castles seem to have been burnt, the enclosures taken down, but the velvet lawns, the fower gardens, the stately parks, scattered at graceful intervals by the decorous hand of art, the frequent deer, and the peaceful herd of cattle that make picture of the plain, all suggest more of the masterly mind of man, than the prodigal, but careless, motherly love of nature. Especially is this true of the Rock river country. Te river fows sometimes through these parks and lawns, then betwixt high blufs, whose grassy ridges are covered with fne trees, or broken with crumbling stone, that easily assumes the forms of buttress, arch and clustered columns.  (27–28)

As Lance Newman suggests, this passage calls up an “enchanted landscape [that] is markedly empty of both architectural monuments to the Old World ruling class and the hedges that were the main mechanism of early capitalist agricultural rationalization in England.”51 Depicting a place where picturesque ruins of castles (the sites of feudal authority and violence) are replaced by natural river blufs, Fuller jettisons the history of inequality that lies beneath the landscape of England and Europe and imagines the Rock River scenery as an exceptionalist picturesque, a distinctly American space in which nature and culture are already joined without a history of violence. For all of her desire to imagine the West as picturesque landscape of exceptional American social freedom and justice, however, Fuller repeatedly encounters traces of the Native American presence during her travels in the Rock River region that challenge her utopian prospects for settlement of the West. As Christina Zwarg notes, the Rock River landscape Fuller traverses was the site of confict in the 1830s as Native Americans protested their forcible removal.52

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At the beginning of her travels in the Rock River area, Fuller notes that “these beautiful regions” had been home to Black Hawk, a famous leader of the Sauk tribe who fought against his tribe’s removal west of the Mississippi in the early 1830s. Fuller imagines Black Hawk as unable to “resist the longing, unwise though its indulgence might be, to return in summer to this home of beauty,” and so he “drew upon himself the warfare in which he was fnally vanquished” (27). Although she imagines the picturesque beauty of this landscape as both an appeal to settlers and a possibility for utopian social equality, Black Hawk’s apparent aesthetic “longing” to return to it is a weakness (an “indulgence”) that makes him responsible for his defeat. Fuller consistently fgures the Native American relationship to the Rock River landscape as aesthetic. Later in the chapter, when she encounters “an ancient Indian village, with its regularly arranged mounds,” Fuller notes, “As usual, they had chosen with the fnest taste” (33). Troughout her chapter on the idealized Rock River region, Fuller notes the vestigial presence of Native Americans: “How happy the Indians must have been here! It is not long since they were driven away, and the ground, above and below, is full of their traces” (32–33). At another point Fuller’s group of travelers recover their way afer being lost by “following an Indian trail.” Noting that it was formerly “Black Hawk’s” and observing “How fair the scene through which it led!,“ she asks, “How could they let themselves be conquered with such a country to fght for!” (31). Te settlers guided by picturesque design may be kindred spirits or inheritors of the Native Americans, whose presence ofers both a picturesque history for the landscape and a model of picturesque taste, but the traces of the Native American presence also show the threatening limitations of the picturesque as a cultural force in the West. Te Native Americans’ picturesque “taste” was not enough to stop “letting themselves be conquered.” Fuller’s narrative refects the deeply ambivalent attitude that made Native Americans both superior to white settlers (at least those not acting upon the principles of ­picturesque design) and savages who must inevitably disappear from the landscape.53 Over the course of her travels, Fuller becomes uncomfortable with her idealized vision of an immaculate picturesque landscape, but she does not wholly give up on her investment in the picturesque. One of her last stops on the tour is Mackinaw Island, where she fnds a

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picturesque that foregrounds, rather than hides, its history and includes, rather than occludes, its racial diversity. Fuller visits the island during the period when members of the Chippewa and Ottawa tribes come to “receive their annual payments from the American government” (105). In addition to being a moment when Fuller is most able to meet with and move among Native Americans and observe their interactions with settlers, Fuller fnds Mackinaw Island, with its long history of white settlement, an appealing contrast to the new development of the West:

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It is crowned most picturesquely, by the white fort with its gay fag. From this, on one side, stretches the town. How pleasing a sight, afer the raw crude, staring assemblages of houses, everywhere else to be met with in this country, an old French town, mellow in its coloring, and with the harmonious efect of a slow growth, which assimilates, naturally, with objects around it. Te people in the streets, Indian, French, half-­breeds, and others, walked with a leisure step, as of those who live a life of taste and inclination, rather than the hard press of business, as in American towns elsewhere.  (107)

As Stephen Adams suggests, Fuller presents Mackinaw Island as an example of “ideal, harmonious landscapes and opposites joined.”54 Earlier in the narrative, she drew attention to the picturesque homes of new settlers or the old abandoned camps of Native Americans in the Rock River chapters: attractive landscapes but ones in which Natives and settlers did not coexist. Mackinaw fort and its town, with its history that registered through its picturesque “mellow” tinting, presented a place and people that were “assimilated” to each other by “slow growth.”55 Mackinaw’s “slow growth” is opposed to the “mushroom growth” seen elsewhere on Fuller’s Western travels. In contrast to the exceptionalist vision of the American West, depicted early in the narrative as a place where picturesque beauty could be had without violence or inequality, Fuller’s vision of a picturesque Mackinaw Island embraces the history of European colonization and the continued presence of Native Americans. Te presence of Native Americans on Mackinaw is a notable shif from the narrative’s earlier idealized vision of the Illinois landscape in which the Native Americans had been removed, except for a few picturesque traces. Te “assimilation” that Fuller associates with the Mackinaw scenery is metonymically (and more literally) a human

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process of racial assimilation, whereby the “Indian” and “French” have merged to produce “half-­breeds.” Fuller’s picturesque Mackinaw combines the positive efects of human history on the landscape with the positive efects of racial diversity and hybridity. Despite Fuller’s positive association of the picturesque with assimilation, the fnal chapters of her travel narrative focus extensively on her belief that Native Americans were destined to disappear and that racial mixing of Natives and settlers was no solution. In the same chapter as her description of Mackinaw, Fuller interpolates the story of “Muckwa, or the Bear,” a supposed Native story (“which has not before appeared in print” [125]) in which an Indian man, renowned for his skill at bear hunting, encounters a “tribe” of bears and takes a bear-­wife, promising never again to hunt bears, only to break his promise and kill his bear sister-­in-­law. Muckwa is expelled from his bear community, and its leader tells him “Te Indian and the bear cannot live in the same lodge, for the Master of Life has appointed for them diferent habitations” (126). Critics have read this story as an allegory of Native and White relations (as well as about the dissymmetry of male/female relations), signaling skepticism about the future of racial mixing as a way to preserve Native American life.56 Te picturesque scenery and community of Mackinaw Island may represent an alternative ideal for the West, but it is one that Fuller has no greater confdence will come to pass than the general development of the frontier along Downing’s picturesque design principles. Fuller’s narrative ends in a tone of resignation, whereby the thoughtful settlers, Native Americans, and the “slow growth” of places like Mackinaw must give way to the inevitable dominance of “mushroom growth” in the West. Te shif in Fuller’s ideal from Illinois picturesque landscape design to Anglo/French/Native fort town could be said to mark her shifing hopes for U.S. social renewal. In the Illinois chapters, settler “taste,” manifested through an understanding of picturesque design in dwelling construction, was associated with “freedom.” In the Mackinaw Island description, “taste” remains important but is manifested through the urbane activity of the “leisure step,” which is contrasted to the utilitarianism of American life. Urbane leisurely strolling, albeit in its idiosyncratic form on Mackinaw Island, is a practice of “inclination” that contrasts the freedom of personal choice against “the hard press of business, as in American towns elsewhere.”

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Disappointed by her experience in the West, Fuller ofers a ­picturesque alternative that looks far more like urban life than anything that was likely to emerge from the immediate settlement of the West. It is no coincidence that afer the travels of Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, Fuller moved to New York City and began writing for Horace Greeley’s Daily Tribune. As I discuss in the next chapter, Fuller’s next writing project would examine New York City life through the genre of the city sketch and the lens of the urban picturesque. Fuller did not give up on the possibilities of the picturesque to express an American social ideal, but she considered that an urban picturesque might be a better alternative than that expressed by the West.

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Toreau and Picturesque Travel Although Henry David Toreau (1817–1862) is best known to modern readers as the author of Walden, to his contemporary readers he was most familiar as a travel writer. From “A Walk to Wachusett” (1843) to “Ktaadn” (1848) and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), through “A Yankee in Canada” (1853) and “Cape Cod” (1855) and “Chesuncook” (1858), most of Toreau’s most widely circulating publications took the form of travelogue. His travel writing refected many of the conventions of his time, most especially his interest in picturesque scenery, but because of the general devaluation of the genre, his work has seldom been studied in this context.57 Te infuence of the picturesque on Toreau’s work has been a  critical controversy since the 1930s, when William Templeman ­observed that in his journals Toreau mentioned William Gilpin more than any other writer aside from personal acquaintances.58 Templeman’s claims about the infuence of the picturesque on Toreau’s work were immediately and repeatedly repudiated by scholars who have claimed that Gilpin’s formalist and superfcial aesthetics of the picturesque could not be important to Toreau’s serious-­minded idealism.59 Tis critique is not without merit: Although Toreau’s engagement with Gilpin in his journals was intense, it was also a relatively short-­lived phenomenon and occurred relatively late in his career, starting in 1852 and ending in 1854. By 1854, Toreau was criticizing Gilpin, complaining that “he is superfcial. He goes not below the surface to account for the efect of form

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and color, etc.”60 Neither Toreau’s embrace or disavowal of Gilpin, however, encompasses the entirety of Toreau’s engagement with the picturesque: On the contrary, Toreau’s commitment to the picturesque was neither short-­lived nor a capitulation to the superfcial demands of the popular genre of travel writing. When Toreau criticized Gilpin in 1854, he noted that Gilpin’s discomfort with associating the views of the landscape with “moral sentiments, . . . various feelings, and sensations of the mind” was “not modesty merely, but a low estimate of his own art.”61 Tis is certainly a critique of Gilpin’s view of the landscape, but it also clarifes Toreau’s own more ambitious vision of the picturesque. For Toreau, the picturesque was a visual frame that spoke not only to the efects of light and dark, but also to our understanding of history through picturesque viewing of place. Toreau was deeply invested in the picturesque as a way of understanding the efect of the natural and the national past upon present lives and also as a way to chart a future for the U.S.  landscape. Although elements of the picturesque can be found in all of Toreau’s travel writing, our focus here is on some of his earliest works—“A Walk to Wachusett” and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack—in which Toreau was initially and then more extensively working within the genre of picturesque travel writing and explicitly seeking a wider audience. In these works, the picturesque mode is most central to the project, and Toreau uses the picturesque to think about the future of Western expansion and the presence of the Puritan past, but also he wants to consider other forms of history—including mythology and geology— that dwarf national time schemes. Yet in using the picturesque to ofer these multiple time frames through which to read the landscape, Toreau replays the tensions that have shaped the picturesque challenge to American exceptionalism for Hawthorne and Fuller. He is pulled between a vision of unending progress (Turner’s “perennial rebirth”) and the threat of recapitulating Europe’s history of injustice. Toreau’s early travel writing can be read as an exploration of these questions, engaged with through the lens of the picturesque. Te picturesque had been a tool in Toreau’s interpretation of landscape long before reading Gilpin in the 1850s. Even as early as 1837, shortly afer Emerson famously encouraged Toreau to start a journal, he applied picturesque viewing methods to his local landscape in the journal:

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I am pleased to see the landscape through the bottom of a tumbler, it is clothed in such a mild, quiet light, and the barns and fences checker and partition it with new regularity. Tese rough and uneven felds stretch away with lawn-­like smoothness to the horizon. Te clouds are fnely distinct and picturesque, the light-­blue sky contrasting with their feathery whiteness. Tey are ft drapery to hang over Persia. Te Smith’s shop, resting in such a Grecian light, is worthy to stand beside the Parthenon. Te potato felds are such gardens as he imagines who has schemes of ornamental husbandry. If I were to write of the dignity of the farmer’s life, I would behold his farms and crops through a tumbler. All the occupations of men are ennobled so. Our eyes, too, are convex lenses, but we do not learn with the eyes; they introduce us, and we learn afer by converse with things.62

Making a homemade version of the famous “Claude glass” with his inverted tumbler, Toreau adopts the role of the picturesque viewer who seeks an “improved and selected nature.”63 Tis local landscape, seen through the picturesque lens, is “ennobled,” likened to ancient Persian and Greek settings, providing the United States with ancient associations that rendered it picturesque, even by European standards. Far from rejecting picturesque artifce, this passage embraces its protocols for landscape appreciation and naturalizes its devices. Tis fascination with self-­consciously artifcial picturesque framing of the landscape view could be likened to Gilpin’s aestheticized mode, but for Toreau’s fnal observation: “Our eyes, too, are convex lenses.” With this comment, Toreau collapses the distinction between the picturesque’s “artifcial” Claude glass and “normal” vision: Toreau demonstrates his understanding that vision is always mediated, as the eye itself is merely a lens that takes in the view, but meaning comes only with the “converse with things,” that is to say, thought and engagement with the view. Tis 1837 observation on the picturesque is similar to Toreau’s 1854 critique, when he chided Gilpin for disconnecting the picturesque landscape from “sensations of the mind.” Toreau continued by disputing Gilpin’s assertion that “the eye, which has nothing to do with moral sentiments, and is conversant only with visible forms, is disgusted” is “any more [true] than a telescope is disgusted! As if taste resided in the eye! As if the eye, which itself cannot see at all, were conversant with surfaces!”64 Tese journal entries from 1837 and 1854 suggest that Toreau was con­sist­ently

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interested in picturesque visual techniques for understanding the landscape. However, instead of seeing them as merely aesthetic or superfcial, he showed them as always related to or contingent upon “sensations of the mind.” Toreau persistently understood the picturesque as a tool to gain insight into the interaction of perception, landscape, and history. Troughout his writing career, Toreau embraced the form of picturesque travel writing to meditate upon the experience of time and history in the U.S. landscape. His frst publication outside of Concord and Te Dial, “A Walk to Wachusett” (1843), is a clear example of Toreau’s commitment to the picturesque in his travel writing, but scholars have tended to downplay it or to suggest that Toreau transcends the form.65 Although “A Walk to Wachusett” narrates a short trip to a nearby peak from his Concord home made in July 1842, Toreau considers the trip an archetype of Western travel, hailing the peak itself in an introductory poem as a “western pioneer.”66 “A  Walk to Wachusett” addresses frontier development as both a physical and philosophical state, but in doing so, Toreau’s sketch recapitulates many of Cole’s notions about picturesque American ­exceptionalism and the promises and threats of the national future. Toreau hails the mountain landscape of Wachusett as picturesque, both directly and by inference. Approaching the mountain, Toreau notes, “It was only four miles to the base of the mountain, and the scenery was already more picturesque” (37). Te mountain scenery refects the aesthetically composed picturesque vista and not overwhelming sublimity: “Tere was little of the sublimity and grandeur which belong to mountain scenery, but an immense landscape to ponder on a summer’s day” (41). Explicitly rejecting Wachusett’s status as a sublime mountain, Toreau notes that its primary efect is not the awe associated with the sublime, but a more contemplative state associated with picturesque; it is a “landscape to ponder.”67 Toreau also invokes historical associations on his trip, making claims to a picturesque colonial antiquity in the landscape. Toreau travels through Lancaster on his way back from the mountain and reminds readers that this was the site of the capture of Mary Rowlandson during King Philip’s War in 1675. Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, Te Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682), was a popular work on both sides of the Atlantic that remained in print into the nineteenth century. As the scene of Rowlandson’s historical

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associations, Lancaster may justify the picturesque qualities of the New England landscape, but it also recalls Puritan–Native confict, part of a history of violence that threatens exceptionalist notions of U.S. history. Like Hawthorne at Fort Ticonderoga, Toreau sought to both invoke this picturesque history and demonstrate how it had been rendered unproblematic: “[B]ut from this July afernoon, and under that mild exterior, those times seemed as remote as the irruption of the Goths. Tey were the dark age of New England” (44). In an American context, Mary Rowlandson’s Lancaster is equivalent to the Gothic Middle Ages for European scenery: a national past made picturesque by its distance and indistinctness. Toreau’s encounter with Lancaster reminds him that this association with the “dark age” is merely a fgure of speech:

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On beholding a picture of a New England village as it then appeared, with a fair open prospect, and a light on trees and river, as if it were broad noon, we fnd we had not thought the sun shone in those days, or that men lived in broad daylight then. We do not imagine the sun shining on hill and valley during Philip’s war, nor on the war-­path of Paugus, or Standish, or Church, or Lovell, with serene summer weather, but a dim twilight or night did those events transpire in. Tey must have fought in the shade of their own dusky deeds.  (44)

Te picturesque association of the landscape with a “dark” New England past is belied by the reality of the sunshine that illuminates the village during Toreau’s travels and the realization that the same sunshine shone on it then. Te serenity of the scene undercuts its historical associations with confict and violence, ofering instead a more optimistic vision of New England as a space of prospective settlement and development.68 Despite the fact that the New England landscape that Toreau traverses is marked by picturesque historical associations of long-­ago settlement, “A Walk to Wachusett” explicitly and repeatedly frames the trip as one that is “Western” in spirit, as if Toreau were traveling to the actual frontier instead of merely to the Western horizon line from his Concord home. Addressing the mountain itself in the introductory poem, Toreau claims that “With frontier strength ye stand your ground.” Te poem suggests that, as an emblem of the frontier/Western spirit, the mountain can embody the exceptionalist vision of endless progress and rebirth:

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I fancy even Trough your defles windeth the way to heaven; And yonder still, in spite of history’s page, Linger the golden and the silver age; Upon the laboring gale Te news of future centuries is brought, And of new dynasties of thought, From your remotest vale. (30)

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Despite its presence on “history’s page,” Wachusett has escaped the cycle that would lead to Cole’s “ruined tower” or temple, evoking instead the agrarian ideal to which “news of future centuries is brought.” Toreau’s opening poem imagines Wachusett remaining perpetually in “the golden and the silver age,” like the exceptionalist ideal of American “perennial rebirth” into virtuous simplicity. Toreau tests this vision of perpetual virtue on the frontier when he and his companion (by coincidence, Margaret Fuller’s brother) come upon a new village on the way to the mountain. Toreau’s description connects picturesque attitudes toward scenery with frontier development: We fancied that there was already a certain western look about this place, a smell of pines and roar of water, recently confned by dams, belying its name [Stillwater], which were exceedingly grateful. When the frst inroad has been made, a few acres levelled, and a few houses erected, the forest always looks wilder than ever. Lef to herself, nature is always more or less civilized, and delights in a certain refnement; but where the axe has encroached upon the edge of the forest, the dead and unsightly limbs of the pine, which she had concealed with green banks of verdure, are exposed to sight.  (35)

Tis complex passage plays on an irony in the picturesque attitude toward natural scenery: Te most picturesque landscape was the “improved and selected nature,” which might seem more “natural” than untouched nature itself. Compared to the picturesque settlement with its mix of wild and cultivated, untouched nature is more symmetrical and uniform, appearing more “civilized” and “refned” in its untouched state, with the axe of settlement revealing the dead pine limbs, making the landscape “wilder than ever.” Tis passage explores ideas that were also expressed in nineteenth-­century American landscape painting, which ofen portrayed the scenery of the “frst

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inroads” of settlement beside the forest, with scenery that ofen foregrounded the work of the axe in shaping the view. Barbara Novak suggests that the picturesque landscape paintings of frontier development captured the ambivalence Americans felt toward this process: “National identity is both constructed and threatened by the double-­edged symbol of progress, the axe that destroys and builds, builds and destroys.”69 Midcentury paintings of frontier development largely did not deplore settlement, fnding the contrast between wilderness and settlement visually appealing, inherently picturesque. In an inversion of the conventional divide between pristine nature and frontier development, Toreau fnds this nascent village wilder than the “refned” nature. Ironically, though, Toreau and his companion fnd the inhabitants of the small villages taking up positions of cultural superiority to themselves, as if they were sophisticated or civilized, and the travelers were the more naive:

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In the villages which we entered, the villagers gazed afer us, with a complacent, almost compassionate look, as if we were just making our debut in the world, at a late hour. “Nevertheless,” did they seem to say, “come and study us, and learn men and manners.” So is each one’s world but a clearing in the forest, so much open and inclosed ground. (36)

Although this passage seems to be gently mocking the “complacent” parochialism of the villagers, its ending suggests something more universal—that all of us exist within “a clearing in the forest, so much open and inclosed ground,” that our worlds are defned by the space we’ve cleared, and that frontier settlement is a metaphor for internal development and consciousness. In that context, greater “clearing” would correlate to greater internal development. Toreau sees a reciprocity in this dynamic, as when he inverts the tenor of his “clearing” metaphor earlier in the essay: “Te landscape lies far and fair within, and the deepest thinker is the farthest travelled” (31). In “Walk to Wachusett,” thought symbolizes travel (an internal landscape traversed by thinking), and the cleared material landscape of settlement symbolizes individual consciousness. For Toreau, both picturesque tourism and settlement are metaphors for expanded consciousness. Although he would publish additional essays and travel sketches, it is notable that Toreau’s frst book took the form of a travel narrative,

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A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). Stephen Fink speculates that Toreau may have been inspired by Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes. Not only was Fuller a close acquaintance of Toreau’s, but what Fink describes as Fuller’s “desultory and digressive travelogue” might have ofered a model for his book.70 Toreau’s most substantial or extended travel narrative, A Week deepens his investment in the picturesque as a tool for thinking through the manifestation of time on the American landscape.71 As numerous critics have observed, A Week is centrally concerned with time, history, and its relationship to nature, but less noted is the fact that the picturesque is a central device in Toreau’s thinking about all of these.72 Ostensibly structured by the human time of the week, Toreau’s narrative transgresses against its temporal frame in numerous ways—frst by arbitrarily imposing the structure of a week on a trip that didn’t occur in that time, then by adding in descriptions of additional trips that didn’t occur during the original trip among other twists, all of which highlight the arbitrariness of human standards of time. Toreau’s meditations on time in A Week, however, are ofen expressed through the picturesque’s interest in landscape vistas and the role of ruins in fguring the human understanding of nature. In A Week, the aesthetics of the picturesque, with its formalist preference for landscapes with sofened contrasts, is held up as a model for thinking about time. In the “Monday” chapter, Toreau poses the arbitrary time of human history against the natural cycle of the seasons and mythology. In a long digression on the Brahmin Vedas, Toreau endorses “the very indistinctness of their theogony” as an alternative to the positivist narratives that live as “history.”73 Seeking a metaphor to describe his ideal approach to the past in the midst of this digression, Toreau invokes the picturesque attitude toward landscape: We should read history as little critically as we consider the landscape, and be more interested by the atmospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create, than by its groundwork and composition. It is the morning sun now turned evening and seen in the west,—the same sun, but a new light and at­mos­phere. Its beauty is like the sunset; not a fresco painting on a wall, fat and bounded, but atmospheric and roving or free. In reality, history fuctuates as the face of the landscape from morning to evening. What is of moment is its hue and color. Time hides no treasures; we want not its then, but its now. We do not complain that the mountains in the horizon are blue and indistinct; they are more like the heavens.  (A Week, 124)

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Troughout this passage, Toreau’s notion of a proper relation to the past is fgured through the picturesque viewer’s investment in tinted, difused, and mediated light and colors. History “fuctuates as the face of the landscape from morning to evening.” Te ostensibly superfcial aesthetic frame of the picturesque becomes a visual analogue to a more spiritual and hopeful vision of history. Toreau proclaims that our attitude to the past should be like that of the viewer of a distant mountain scene: its blue tint and indistinctness make it “more like the heavens.” “If we will admit time into our thoughts at all,” Toreau tells his readers, we should embrace “the mythologies, those vestiges of ancient poems, . . . the world’s inheritance, still refecting some of their original splendor, like fragments of clouds tinted by the rays of the departed sun” (127). Toreau might have eventually critiqued Gilpin’s narrow aestheticism, but in A Week he embraces the picturesque as a way to proclaim optimism in human future: “We will not be confned by historical, even geological periods which would allow us to doubt of a progress in human afairs” (127). Toreau uses the picturesque to imagine a progressive model of history. Toreau’s reference to geological periods in the quotation above gestures toward his later meditation in the “Wednesday” chapter in A Week in which he touches on the role of the ruin in the picturesque landscape. As noted earlier, American travel was ofen slighted because its landscapes lacked the historical associations that the ruins of Europe provided. Te picturesque ruin represented an ambivalent image of the past, signaling both transience and permanence as an instance of human culture lapsing into nature. In A Week, Toreau explores the trope of the ruin, with its ambivalent associations of decay and persistence, and nature and culture. In the “Wednesday” chapter, a description of the particularities of the formation of “pot-­holes” at Amoskeag Falls, in which small rocks, unceasingly swirled by the water’s current, create holes in the river’s solid rock bed, leads Toreau to observe that “[t]hese, and such as these, must be our antiquities, for lack of human vestiges” (203). Noting the absence of Native American antiquities (any “monuments of heroes” or “temples of the gods which may once have stood on the banks of this river are now, at any rate, returned to dust and primitive soil” [203]), Toreau fnds an alternative to Greek and Roman antiquities in nature itself. If we cannot observe the traces of “the shields taken

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from the enemy in the Persian war,” suspended on “the walls of the temple of Minerva,” in our native scenery, “[t]he lichen on the [American] rocks” (204) will have to sufce. As Joan Burbick describes of this passage, “Antiquity becomes infused in the American landscape.”74 Countering the privileging of the foreign picturesque, Toreau argues for an American picturesque in which natural processes model the passage of time, with ruins that blur distinctions between nature and culture, ruin and geological processes:

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Our own country furnishes antiquities as ancient and durable, and as useful, as any; rocks at least as well covered with lichens, and a soil which if it is virgin, is but virgin mould, the very dust of nature. What if we cannot read Rome, or Greece, Etruria, or Carthage, or Egypt, or Babylon, on these; are our clifs bare? Te lichen on the rocks is a rude and simple shield which beginning and imperfect Nature suspended there. Still hangs her wrinkled trophy. And here too the poet’s eye may still detect the brazen nails which fastened Time’s inscriptions, and if he has the gif, decipher them by this clue. Te walls that fence our felds, as well as modern Rome, and not less than the Parthenon itself, are all built of ruins. (204)

In this passage, Toreau name-­checks ancient civilizations whose ruin-­ laden landscapes were classic sites for foreign picturesque travel. He also posits the natural landscape of the United States as equally suited for contemplation because nature itself, in the form of rocks and lichen, is also the product of history. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-­century geological studies led to the understanding of what has been called “deep time,” recognizing that natural processes like the formation of rock and soil took place over spans of time that dwarfed even the most ancient human civilizations.75 Tomas M. Allen describes how conventional picturesque notions of the ruin as an embodiment of time were challenged by geological understandings of deep time, both in its scope and its ongoing progressive development.76 Antebellum  U.S.  geologist Benjamin Silliman explained this to readers in 1833: Te earth is unlike Memphis, Tebes, Perspolis, Babylon, Balbec or Palmyra, which present merely confused and mutilated masses of colossal and beautiful architecture, answering no purpose except to gratify curiosity, and to awaken a sublime and pathetic moral feeling;

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it is rather like modern Rome, replete indeed with the ruins of the ancient city, in part rearranged for purposes of utility and ornament, but also covered by the regular and perfect constructions of subsequent centuries.77

Silliman argues that the earth is not like a picturesque ruin, “merely confused . . . masses” of purposeless architecture that awakened “pathetic moral feeling”; it was more like modern Rome, in which ruins were integrated with modern construction and the relation ­between past and present was ongoing. Allen suggests that if the picturesque topos of the aestheticized ruin sought to control or manage time for antebellum Americans, the geological notion of deep time, with its seemingly immeasurable scope and ongoing nature, threatened to overwhelm them and was more suited to the sublime than the picturesque.78 In A Week, however, we see Toreau embracing this notion of deep time and natural processes as a way of thinking through picturesque attitudes toward the landscape. Recapitulating Silliman’s trope of modern Rome as a landscape “all built of ruins,” Toreau imagines its analogue not in some sublime landscape, but in “[t]he walls that fence our felds.” New England’s stone fences refect the history not only of the people who made them, but also of the geological processes that formed them. American rocks, with “lichen” analogous to ancient shields and natural signs of “the brazen nails which fastened Time’s inscriptions, ofer to “the poet’s eye” a vision of a picturesque deep time that is grounded in the region and nation, but also transcends them to think about global geological processes. Continuing this logic, Toreau interprets not the ruins of human antiquity, but nature itself, embodied in forms that speak to both past and future: Here is the gray dawn for antiquity, and our to-­morrow’s future should be at least paulo-­post to theirs which we have put behind us. Tere are the red-­maple and birchen leaves, old runes which are not yet deciphered; catkins, pine-­cones, vines, oak-­leaves, and acorns; the very things themselves, and not their forms in stone,—so much the more ancient and venerable.  (204)

When Tomas Cole imagined the future of the American picturesque in 1835, he ambivalently pictured a landscape in which the uncultivated “gray crag” was replaced by “temple and tower,” buildings that signaled

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emergent religious pomp and aristocratic social dominance that threatened American virtue. Toreau rejects this vision of the United States destined to replay the cycle of European development and ruin, imagining an alternative national “paulo-­post-­future.” Toreau’s use of this phrase is itself a kind of commentary on ruins and the “pastness” of the past.79 (Paulo-­post future is an obscure English grammatical term from the Latin phrase paulo post futurum [“the future afer a little”] to “designat[e] a tense of the passive voice of Greek verbs to indicate that an event will take place immediately” that was also called the “third future” or “future perfect.”) Created in the nineteenth century by English grammarians borrowing from both Latin and Greek, “paulo-­post-­future” reveals language in ­development, a melding of temporal and cultural processes, like modern Rome or New England stone fences which fused time, culture, and biology. Te immediate future that Toreau imagines is not antiquated “ruins,” but “runes” in the form of leaves, acorns, and other botanical confgurations, “old runes not yet deciphered.” Toreau uses wordplay to link the similar-­sounding words “ruin” and “rune” in order to illustrate how ruins ofer themselves up for interpretation. Modern peers sought to understand the “old runes” of ancient civilizations, with Egyptian hieroglyphics as the foremost example. But Toreau imagines nature itself (“the very things themselves, and not their forms in stone”) as an alternate object for examination, forging a connection to the “more ancient and venerable” past of the formation of the earth and its natural constituent parts.80 Invoking the afective and epistemological appeal which is at the heart of the picturesque’s fascination with the aesthetics of relics and ruins, Toreau’s turn to nature unsettles the distinctions between nature and culture, past and future. Whether contemplating the frontier, looking for American ruins, or traversing locales where colonial history took place, Toreau’s early travel writings are grounded in the central concern of the travel sketch genre, which is to negotiate between an American exceptionalist history and the picturesque. However, in his depiction of the Western frontier as a space of expanded consciousness in “A Walk to Wachusett,” and in his meditation upon cosmology, American ruins, and geological deep time in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Toreau’s picturesque travel moves beyond nation. Toreau

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leverages the picturesque to put that landscape in the context of “Universal History,” mythology, and geological deep time that transcends the nation. And yet, the efect of this more transcendental time scale might ultimately have a similar efect to more conventional U.S.  picturesque travel sketches. Like Hawthorne’s vision at Fort Ticonderoga in which the picturesque naturalizes and elides the violence of the past, Toreau’s mythological, cosmological, and geological time scales strip away the violence of confict or the danger of development that threatened American exceptionalism. Without explicitly endorsing exceptionalism, Toreau’s early travel writings depict a picturesque landscape that liberates the United States from the historical pitfalls embodied by the scenery of Europe and England. To a greater or lesser extent, all three of the writers studied here embraced the picturesque travel sketch as a way to think through notions of time as expressed within a landscape. In the process, they all negotiated the seeming divide between the picturesque’s investment in a landscape that expresses a human history (and perhaps inevitably a history of confict and injustice) and notions of American exceptionalism that imagined the continent’s “new,” “wild,” or “rural” landscapes as a perpetual escape from the dangers of that history. It is not surprising, perhaps, that Hawthorne is the most conservative of these three writers, the one most haunted by immigration and most consoled by a picturesque that imagines the benefcial efects of an exceptional national landscape that projects a peace that could transcend its violent colonial origins. Nor is it surprising that Toreau is the most abstractly optimistic of the three, using the picturesque to perceive a deeper history of myth and geological time that still ofers the consolations ofered by merging culture and nature. And again not surprisingly, Fuller is the most political of the three writers, initially using the picturesque to imagine a future on the Western frontier that would fulfll exceptionalist hopes. However, unlike Hawthorne and Toreau, Fuller comes to recognize that this idealized vision of a “new” American landscape was built on its own history of injustice: the removal of Native Americans, which creates its own picturesque history of injustice and outrage that recapitulates European injustices. Tis, in turn, hollows out American exceptionalism for Fuller. Yet, for Hawthorne, Toreau, and Fuller, the picturesque travel sketch is the literary medium through which they consider these national possibilities. Although conventionally seen

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as superfcial, the picturesque travel sketch ofered its practitioners a  tool for social analysis and a lens through which to develop a philosophy of history.

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Conclusion: Toreau, the U.S. National Park System, History, and the Picturesque Although part of this chapter has focused on Toreau’s picturesque travel writing, his most famous travelogues are more associated with the sublime qualities of more dramatic wilderness scenery. For example, “Ktaadn” (1848), initially published between “A Walk to Wachusett” and A Week, addresses a far wilder landscape than those covered in this chapter. Toreau’s role as theorist and spokesman for the sublime wilderness, rather than his embrace of the picturesque, has secured his modern status as an environmentalist.81 In his 1851 lecture “Walking,” Toreau announced: “I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness,” and he asserted that “in Wildness is the preservation of the World.”82 For this statement and many others, Toreau is ofen hailed as the father of the movement to preserve the U.S.  wilderness. Historians of the national park system, for example, ofen draw attention to Toreau’s conclusion to “Chesuncook” (1858; one of his series of Maine travelogues and the fnal travelogue published before his death) in which he calls for the creation of “national preserves.”83 Although Toreau’s idea of creating “national preserves” has received a lot of attention from environmentalists, it also exemplifes some of the complications of picturesque landscape and history. In the fnal paragraph of “Chesuncook,” Toreau explicitly invokes an exceptionalist vision of the American landscape, comparing the ideal possibilities of U.S. national preserves to an English tradition: Te King of England formerly had their forests “to hold the king’s game,” for sport or food, sometimes destroying villages to create or extend them; and I think that they were impelled by a true instinct. Why should not we, who have renounced the king’s authority, have our national preserves, where no villages need be destroyed, in which the bear and the panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be ‘civilized of the face of the earth,’—our forests, not to hold the king’s game merely, but to hold and preserve the king

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himself also, the lord of creation,—not for idle sport or food, but for inspiration and our own true re-­creation? or shall we, like villains, grub them all up, poaching on our own national domains?”  (712)

Identifying the source of his notion of a national wilderness preserve in the tradition of English royalty, which designated forests as game parks (“a true instinct”), Toreau notes the heritage of injustice in the practice—“sometimes destroying villages to create or extend them.” He claims, however, that the United States, “having renounced the king’s authority,” could have its wilderness preserves with “no villages destroyed.” Tese wilderness areas, he said, would preserve not the king of England but the works of God, “the king himself also, the lord of creation,” not for entertainment or food, but for “inspiration and true re-­creation,” that is to say, for self-­transformation. Toreau opposed this symbolic use of the wilderness landscape to material uses of the land, “grub[bing] them all up,” akin to the “poaching” from our national resources. In “Chesuncook,” he imagined U.S. national parks as an alternative to the English and European aristocratic traditions of land ownership, as a symbolic resource for self-­transformation, instead of as a debased utilitarian development. Toreau’s call invokes many of the arguments that ultimately led to development of the modern U.S. park system. Tis particular individualistic and anti-­utilitarian vision of a “national preserves” system was refected in the writing and wilderness advocacy work of John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club. Muir openly admitted his debt to Toreau in the creation of Yellowstone as the frst national park in the United States in 1872 and the development of a national park system in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.84 Although the landscape of these wilderness preserves was envisioned as radically diferent from the picturesque landscapes of the mid-­nineteenth century, like the “Northern route,” even Toreau’s “national preserves” cannot escape some of the concerns that shaped the travelogues studied in this chapter. Like Fuller in picturesque Illinois, Toreau imagined a U.S. wilderness landscape that would be free from the English history of injustice and would not force the displacement of any villages. Tis vision made no mention of the Native populations, except for Toreau’s imagining of a vestigial presence of Natives (“some even of the hunter race”) that would accompany “the bear and the panther” in his parks—as if they would

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be preserved within the boundaries of the park as necessary accessories of the wilderness landscape. Although Fuller quickly came to realize that her vision of a pristine landscape free of European history of oppression was contingent on erasing Native Americans as a living presence on the land, Toreau seemed to be largely ignorant of his own racist fantasy of removing Native peoples (or allowing a symbolic remnant) from the wilderness lands to make space for white “inspiration and true re-­creation.” Unfortunately, this element of Toreau’s vision of “national preserves” also became a central part of the modern U.S. park system. Te history of the U.S. national park system is a narrative of the mistreatment of Natives and repeated appropriations of Native land that were reconstituted as pristine wilderness.85 Only in relatively recent years have the national parks begun to integrate the stories of the Native peoples who once resided on the land—long before white exploration and settlement—into the public narrative of the park. In a sense, then, modern U.S. national parks have begun to negotiate some of the same concerns that confronted picturesque tourists in the mid-­nineteenth century. In truth, although most scholars associate the birth of the modern U.S.  park system with Toreau’s wilderness environmental ideals, the design and experience of the spaces of the park are more aligned with mid-­nineteenth-­century picturesque tourism. Te year 1858, the date of “Chesuncook” and Toreau’s call for the creation of national parks in the United States, is also the year in which Frederick Law Olmsted’s and Calvert Vaux’s “Greensward Plan” was chosen for New York’s Central Park. As we will see in Chapter 3, Olmsted and Vaux’s plan explicitly evoked picturesque principles to address problems of mid-­century urban life. While Toreau’s call for wilderness “national preserves,” with its purpose of “inspiration and true ­re-­creation,” has been deemed crucial to the development of the national park system, we might also look to Olmsted’s 1865 plan for the development of Yosemite as a “landscape park” as equally (or perhaps even more) meaningful to the modern national park system.86 In contrast to Toreau’s abstract defense of the benefts of wilderness, Olmsted’s vision for Yosemite was more narrowly focused on the benefts of scenery. As Ethan Carr explains, quoting Olmsted: “Since the reason Yosemite was ‘treated diferently from other parts of the public domain . . . consists wholly in its natural scenery, the ‘frst point to be kept in mind’ was ‘the preservation and maintenance

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as exactly as possible of the natural scenery.’”87 Tis vision of a park was explicitly oriented toward preserving “natural scenery,” not necessarily as wilderness alone, but for its aesthetic properties. As we will see in Chapter 3, however, the purpose of the landscape park was never merely aesthetic. Toreau’s ideas have inspired generations of environmentalists who have advocated for the defense of U.S. wilderness lands and the creation of national parks. It is Olmsted’s vision of the landscape park, however, that ultimately shaped the development of Yellowstone, the frst national park, as a site of “landscape engineering.” In this park, wilderness landscapes would be developed and managed to ensure safety, and access to scenery would set a pattern for the many national parks that would follow in the twentieth century.88 Empirical evidence of national park usage suggests that the overwhelming majority of modern visitors to the parks access the scenery made available by the landscape engineering of the park service, with a minority accessing the undeveloped backcountry. As a result, modern Americans have experienced the parks much as Olmsted imagined them and as more similar to the mid-­nineteenth-­century picturesque tourists of the Northern tour than Toreau’s vision of pristine wilderness. Tis is our frst example of the many ways the mid-­nineteenth-­century picturesque set a pattern for how the spaces of the modern United States would be confgured and experienced.

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Te City Sketch walking the picturesque city You will, at least, my dear friend, give these letters the credit of being utterly unpremeditated; for Flibbertigibbet himself never moved with more unexpected and incoherent variety.

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—lydia maria child, Letters from New-­York (1844).1

At the close of her frst “Letter” in her city sketch serial Letters from New-­York, Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) half-­apologized for the “unpremeditated . . . unexpected and incoherent” form of her writing. Far from unique, Child’s comment shows that the city sketch, like many of the travel sketches discussed in the previous chapter, also emulated the subjectivity, brevity, and spontaneity of the visual sketch.2 With a heavy emphasis on description of scenery and people, the city sketch ofered itself as a spontaneous view on urban life. It ofen took the form of a letter or guide that directly addressed its readers—as in the case of Child’s frst letter—suggesting that the author was writing to a peer, inviting the reader into an implied intimacy and equality. Drawing on this connection to the reader, the genre shared episodic and highly subjective descriptions of an individual’s movements within the city, ofen through distinct spatial and temporal units of experience (a walk, a day, a night, etc.). Te city sketch’s ephemeral form implied that the city resisted a comprehensive vision; by implication, its fragmentary quality spoke to the conditional nature of the urban experience. For that reason, critics have seen the genre as an expression of the experience of modernity, a response to the increased density of population and accelerated pace of urban life.3 However much individual city sketches refected the fragmenting efect of urban modernity, individual sketches tended to be part of a series published in newspapers and magazines Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835–1874. John Evelev, Oxford University Press (2021). © John Evelev. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894557.003.0003

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with subscribing readers who would read each one. Although an ­individual sketch might ofer a fragment, the collected sketches, whether read in sequence in a serial publication or later in book form, ofered a more comprehensive and reassuring perspective on urban life. For example, George Foster’s series, “New York in Slices,” was published initially in Horace Greeley’s newspaper, the New York Tribune and then as a book in 1849. Each sketch was avowedly only a “slice,” but, when Foster put them together, the compilation presented an authoritative view of the city. Just as he converted the periodical series, New York in Slices, into a book, Foster did the same for New York by Gaslight (1850). Te collected edition of Child’s Letters from New-­York (including a frst and second series) was one of the more successful books of her career.4 Te city sketch was also ­appropriated by other genres that ofered a coherent vision of city life; these genres included sketch–novels such as Cornelius Mathews’s Big Abel and Little Manhattan (1845) and Solon Robinson’s Hot Corn: Life Scenes in New York Illustrated (1853), or city guides such as Asa Greene’s A Glance at New York: Embracing the City Government, Teatres, Hotels, Churches, Mobs, Monopolies, Learned Professions, Newspapers, Rogues, Dandies, Fires and Firemen, Water and Other Liquids, & C., & C (1837) and Joel Ross’s touristic guidebook, What I Saw in New York (1851). Along with acknowledging the fragmentary nature of American urban modernity, the city sketch also sought to compensate for the alienation that came from mushrooming urban growth by establishing a compensatory personal relationship between writer and reader, as well as providing a comprehensive view of city life. Te sketch ofered strategies that would help its readers understand the city and their place in it. Te mid-­nineteenth-­century American city sketch has long been associated with sensationalism, or what David Reynolds has called “dark reform”—the prurient attitude that imagined the city to be an ominous space full of dangerous crowds that threatened to overwhelm the individual’s identity in an urban version of the sublime.5 One of the most famous embodiments of this sensationalism was George G. Foster’s 1849 popular sketch serial, “New York by Gaslight.”6 At the beginning of the frst sketch in this series, Foster promised his readers to “penetrate beneath the thick veil of night and lay bare the fearful mysteries of darkness in the metropolis.”7 Te city sketch’s sensationalism ofered an ambivalent message to its readers: Te city was a scary place where they could be deceived, robbed, or be killed,

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but nonetheless reading the sketches could help them “penetrate ­beneath” the dangerous city’s surfaces and “lay bare the [city’s] fearful mysteries.” Tis sensationalism presented the city as both a threat and a place that could be mastered by the powerful authoritative gaze. Sensationalism was one element of the city sketch, but the picturesque was arguably more central to the genre. Although Foster’s “gaslight” sketches that focus on the seedier elements of the city at  night are now his most famous, his other New York city sketch ­serials—New York in Slices; by an Experienced Carver (1848) and Fifeen Minutes Around New York (1854)—promised the same authoritative insight into the city as the “gaslight” sensationalism, but instead focused on the picturesque appeal of the urban experience. Foster was joined by a host of other writers in the midcentury who used the sketch form to write about picturesque people and scenes in New York City. Many of these writers were better known for their other kinds of literary production. In addition to Child, Margaret Fuller and Walt Whitman also wrote city sketches that eschewed sensationalism for a more picturesque perspective on urban life. Child’s “Letters from New-­York” were perhaps the most popular, appearing frst in newsprint and then in books that were repeatedly reprinted in midcentury. Tese picturesque city sketches focused on the diversity of New York’s population and the city’s moments of beauty, and while they ofen acknowledged crime and class diference, they were worlds away from Foster’s sensationalized promises to reveal “mysteries of darkness” in the city that typifed the genre. Likewise, the characters of Mathews’s sketch–novel, Big Abel and Little Manhattan wander through New York City’s streets in their attempt to understand the city’s essential character, fnding picturesque neighborhoods rather than darkness and criminality. In contrast to the sensationalism that stoked fears about the city, the mid-­nineteenth-­century New York city sketch generated an urban picturesque that helped manage anxieties about class division, ethnic diversity, and modernity. In addition, it specifcally legitimized a privileged place for an emergent middle class in the space of New York City’s streets. Te urban picturesque sketch gave its writers and readers an aestheticized position from which the social extremes of poverty and extreme wealth in city life could be viewed, helping to construct social values and positions that formalized a middle-­class identity. Te supposedly spontaneous forms and intimate address of the city sketch naturalized this middle-­class perspective and interpellated its

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readers into its vision of urban life. But the midcentury picturesque city sketch also registered the persistent threats made against the middle-­class vision of a stable and ordered place for itself within the city. Te urban picturesque’s interest in unusual individuals and the tableaux of striking urban scenery was put under stress by the press of the urban crowd and the unremitting drive of urban development. Under this pressure, the reassuring picturesque could give way to something that was more akin to the sublime, with its threat of overwhelming the viewer and a consequent loss of stable selfood. For all the promises the picturesque ofered as a means to establish the middle class’s place in urban life, the self-­conscious scenic pose of the city sketch threatened to lead them to a place where the city dissolved all social distinctions and subsumed the writer and readers into an indeterminate crowd. Tis chapter demonstrates that the city sketch articulated an American middle-­class urban selfood. By adapting English and European models, the American city sketch of the mid-­nineteenth century reveals the particularities of American class consciousness in the period. Presenting city life (implicitly and explicitly) from the perspective of the “great middle class,” the antebellum city sketch explored the middle class’s negotiation of an increasingly classdivided urban environment and sought solutions in both bourgeois elite and working-­class class values. Te chapter considers how the city sketch and hybrid sketch–fction used the picturesque as a tool to validate the middle class’s understanding of the city. Although the picturesque was a crucial tool for envisioning a middle-­class city, the sketch and hybrid sketch–fction had their limitations: Tey exposed both the privilege of who observed whom in the city and the possibility that the picturesque could not resist the crowd’s capacity to strip middle-­class individuals of their own sense of distinctiveness.

Te City Sketch: A Middle-­Class Genre Te city sketch is a minor genre that exists on the margins of nineteenth-­century American literary history. Its generic forms, repeated topics, and ephemeral medium of publication all mark its ­literary inferiority, especially in contrast to the novels that are typically part of the pantheon of American literature. Nonetheless, the

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­ idcentury city sketch helped to articulate the meaning of m middle-class identity, explicitly celebrating “the great middle class.” Te city sketch sought to give literary voice to middle-­class social values amidst the competing claims to dominance by the urban working class and bourgeois elites, all of whom had their own social and cultural institutions. It featured a middle-­class observer moving through the extremes of the city, ofering populist working-­class critiques of elite economic capitalist practices and bourgeois elite ­critiques of the disorderly and sometimes violent cultural practices of the working class. As a result, the city sketch modeled a sociocultural position that was neither wholly distinct from, nor allied with, either the working class or bourgeois elites. While the midcentury city sketch sought to defne the middle class for its readers, the genre depicted the ambivalence and shifing allegiances that have made it so difcult for American historians to come up with a precise defnition of the middle class. Tis section will chart the complications of the city sketch’s attempt to represent a middle-­class perspective on the ­mid-­nineteenth-­century American city. Te modern historiography of the American middle class was long shaped by a “liberal consensus” among American historians who saw the nation as universally “middle class,” fnding its individualistic, market-­oriented values everywhere.8 By the 1980s, however, it became a relative commonplace to see the mid-­nineteenthcentury city as the birthplace of an American middle class that could be distinguished from the working class and bourgeois capitalists or elites.9 Despite the consensus about the rise of this middle class in the antebellum city, scholars continue to debate both who should be included in this group and the nature of their shared identity. Was their identity defned by vocational and economic status or by  less material investments in social and cultural behaviors and ­distinctions?10 American literary history has struggled to articulate a nuanced sense of the mid-­nineteenth-­century middle class. Te assumption has been that, aside from the penny press and the more sensationalistic best-­sellers, literature was so overwhelmingly the domain of the middle class that not referring to class in a work could be a sign of its middle-­class identifcation.11 In contrast to this vision of an American literature that eschewed class signifers, city sketches in the midcentury were full of the language of class distinctions in the period.

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Te city sketch became an increasingly popular genre in newspapers and magazines in the 1840s and 1850s, particularly in New York City. Tis popularity was a response to the dramatic urban development and population growth in this period. Te United States’ urban population increased by over 90 percent during the 1840s, with New York City’s population tripling in the period from 1825 to 1850.12 With its central conceit of an individual exploring the city, the sketch refected a concern about knowing or understanding the ballooning and confusing metropolis.13 One of the central ways the genre understood the city was by articulating class distinctions. City sketches were flled with references to the “upper ten” (a term associated for the 10,000 richest New Yorkers, who were imagined as a class of bourgeois capitalists); to the “class of journeymen butchers, mechanics and artisans” (the working class); to the indigent poor of the Five Points; and to the “great middle class.” Tis last category received the most praise and seemed to be the implied audience of the genre, existing somewhere amidst these other categories. Tus, the antebellum city sketch was explicitly constructed around defning the class experience of the nineteenth-­century city. Te genre came to urbanizing antebellum America with its own complex social history from Europe and England. From its origins in sixteenth-­century England, where it frst appeared in the form of carnivalesque guides to the chaos and criminality of urbanizing London, by the eighteenth century, the city sketch had evolved into the episodic short essays of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, whose magazine, Te Spectator, described wandering the streets of London.14 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have argued that Te Spectator essays played an important role in tidying up the city through “the creation of a sublimated public body without smells, without coarse laughter, without organs, separate from the Court and the Church on the one hand and the market square, alehouse, street and fairground on the other, this was the great labour of bourgeois culture.”15 Te Spectator’s sanitizing strolling gave way to the nineteenth-­century faneur of Parisian streets, described most pointedly in Charles Baudelaire’s Te Painter of Modern Life. Te faneur of 1830s Parisian newspaper serial columns was in Baudelaire’s terms “the passionate spectator,” “the lover of life [who] makes the whole world his family,” whose idle urban peregrinations turned chaos into order.16 Walter Benjamin, the faneur’s most famous theorist,

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claimed that this fantasy vision obscured social relations, replacing the threateningly competitive and commodifed relations of the nineteenth-century mercantile city with knowable eccentrics and oddballs.17 Te city sketch emerged as the dominant genre that ­articulated the bourgeois understanding of the emergent metropolis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-­century Europe. Although some critics have argued that the American city sketch retained this bourgeois perspective when it began appearing in print in the 1840s and 1850s, close analysis of the texts themselves reveals the more subtle and complex distinctions of middle-­class values in the period. In its transfer to America, the city sketch was transformed to refect U.S.  class dynamics rather than European and English models. In the dominant study of mid-­nineteenth-­century American city sketches, Dana Brand has argued that the genre became an expression of the American “pride of the bourgeoisie in the kind of world that they and the economic system associated with them were able to create.”18 Tis claim suggests that what constituted the bourgeoisie in Europe had a direct equivalent in the United States, despite the absence of an American hereditary aristocracy. As Sven Beckert argues, the American bourgeoisie of the mid-­nineteenth century was divided between a propertied bourgeoisie—large-­scale merchants, industrialists, and business owners—and those who in Europe would be called the petit bourgeoisie—shop owners, ofce workers, successful artisans, and some professionals.19 In the language of the city sketch, the bourgeois capitalist class was alternately called “the wealthy,” “the upper classes,” “the fashion,” “the codfsh aristocracy,” or “the upper ten.” Tis bourgeois capitalist “upper ten” was consistently criticized within the city sketch. If the social perspective of the city sketcher was distinct from that of the bourgeois capitalist “upper ten,” it also difered greatly from the working class, which George G. Foster called “that immense and important class of our population . . . living—somehow—from day to day and week to week—upon the labor of their hands.”20 Foster compared the “upper ten” to the urban working class, which he ironically called “the whole Upper Ten Tousand of the world of Red Flanneldom” (associating the working class with men who wore the red fannel shirts of neighborhood fre companies). In this way, Foster set up parallel realms of “upper tendom” which, at one level, was surely a satire of upper-­class exclusivity but, at another level, was his hint of the foreignness of

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both the working-­class and bourgeois elite social worlds for his ­readers.21 In between these two opposed social realms, Foster reserved his praise for

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the substantial tradesmen, mechanics and artizans of the city, the great middle class, whose aspirations, reach the full standard of ­well-­to-­do content, wisely fall short of that snobbish longing afer social notoriety. . . . Tey live easily, but are not ashamed to work and work well. Tey visit and make feasts and festivals, and have holidays and nights sacred to pleasure. Tey eat well, sleep well, digest well and have easy consciences and no envy.22

Mixing work with pleasure and modest aspiration with contentment, Foster’s “great middle class” represents an idealized alternative to both “upper tens,” whether the bourgeois capitalists or the working class. If the city sketch came over to the United States as a bourgeois genre, it took on a more focused social nuance in antebellum America, issuing more defnitively from and directed more clearly to a middle class that distinguished itself from bourgeois elites. Although it is unclear to what extent the authors of antebellum United States ft in this category, the city sketch’s address to its middle-­class readers assumed a common cause. Te antebellum American city sketch was most defnitely not a celebration of the bourgeois capitalist system. Instead, the American version of the genre critiqued bourgeois elites and their lack of productive labor, and drew extensively upon the populism of the urban working class, whose embrace of the labor theory of value galvanized the popular urban politics of the period.23 Although the city sketch did not ofen focus on scenes of labor or the world of work, the kind of labor by which one earned wages itself was an important distinction for the genre, especially in its critique of the bourgeois capitalist class in urban New York. In his attempt to distinguish mid-­ ­ nineteenth-­ century American middle-­ class values from the bourgeois capitalists of the period, Beckert described a middle-­class “moral economy” that valued “productive work” as distinct from “profts earned from trade, fnancial transactions, or even the labor of others.”24 Lydia Maria Child invokes this moral economy in her opening description of New York City life in her frst sketch for “Letters from New-­York”: Te din of crowded life, and the eager chase for gain, still run through its streets, like the perpetual murmur of a hive. Wealth dozes on

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French couches, thrice piled, and canopied with damask, while Poverty camps on the dirty pavement, or sleeps of its wretchedness in the watch-­house. Tere, amid the splendor of Broadway, sits the blind negro beggar, with horny hand and tattered garments, while opposite him stands the stately mansion of the slave trader, still plying his bloody trade, and laughing to scorn the cobweb laws, through which the strong can break so easily.25

Child associates the wealth of the urban bourgeoisie with the slave trade’s appropriation of the labor of others. Troughout her “Letters,” Child questioned the moral standing of the capitalist class, pointing out the potential immoral source of their wealth. In “Letter XXIX,” Child described her visit to the prison on Blackwell’s Island, which at the time was a common tourist attraction and a frequent stop for fellow city sketchers such as Fuller and Ross. Pondering the nature of American attitudes toward criminals, Child tells a parable of two men, both raised dishonestly “by the maxims of trade, the customs of society, and the general unrefecting tone of public conversation.” One becomes a successful merchant by using deceitful, but legal, fnancial practices, while the other, a clerk more constrained by economic necessity, takes from his employer’s drawer and ends up in prison. Te middle-­class ofce worker is labeled a criminal, while the bourgeois capitalist, “Society calls . . . a shrewd business man, and pronounces his dinners excellent; the chance is, he will be a magistrate before he dies.”26 Child suggests that trade sets up a double standard whereby what is criminal for the middle class is “shrewd” business practice for the capitalist class. Foster notes a similar double standard in his sketch of Wall Street and the Merchants’ Exchange” in Fifeen Minutes Around New York: “We will not descend to the particulars of the various transactions which go to make up the sum of that profession known as trade. Sufce it to say, that the foundation of it all, the secret of success, the key to wealth and power, is the cautious over-­reaching of the neighbor.” Although the “foundation” of trade is taking advantage of “neighbor[s],” Foster notes that as long as the trader’s bank account is good and his credit untainted in “the street,” no matter how savagely he may oppress the poor man within his power, he is still considered “one of the most respectable of our citizens.”27 Te city sketch views capitalist exchange as inherently mendacious and criminal, with its benefciaries absolved from punishment only by the hypocrisy of the bourgeois capitalist class that associates morality with wealth or good credit.

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Te anticapitalist bias of the city sketch is clear even when the writer defends the bourgeois elite. Margaret Fuller wrote a city sketch entitled “Te Rich Man—An Ideal Sketch,” a “reverie” inspired by “the sight of spacious and expensive dwelling houses now in the proc­ess of building” during her “walks through this City,” which tried to imagine how a virtuous member of the upper ten could live.28 Picturing a man who balances the “precepts of Jesus” with business practice, Fuller projects a whole value system and lifestyle for her ideal “Rich Man,” while refuting an imagined antagonist within her sketch who proclaims: “Such a man would never get rich, or even get along.”29 Although Fuller argues for the practicality of her vision of an ethical life for a member of the bourgeois capitalist class, her defensive comment and the consistent critique of the wealthy in other city sketches makes clear that an ethical life and wealth were typically portrayed in the genre as incompatible, or at least in tension with each other. Te consistent critique of midcentury capitalist trade in the city sketch demonstrates that members of the middle class defned themselves in distinction to the bourgeois elites, who most benefted from the fantastic economic growth of the period. Although the city sketch’s middle-­class investment in a moral critique of bourgeois elite economics of trade and fnance aligned it with the populism of the working class, the genre distinguished middle-­class cultural values from those of the working class. As Beckert argues, “[c]ulture was ofen the only ticket to distinction” for the middle class.30 Aligned with the working class on economic values, members of the middle class were careful to use the realm of culture to distance themselves from the working class. Not only education and domestic rituals (which the city sketch largely ignored), but also social behavior in the streets and patronage of museums, theaters, and eating establishments (which the city sketch extensively covered) were increasingly important signs of class identity in the period.31 Te city sketch modeled the middle class’s emphasis on cultural distinctions in its depiction of urban cultural institutions and social interactions, highlighting the sometimes subtle diferences that helped defne middle-­class identity in the period. Despite their populist critique of the economic practices of the upper capitalist class, the city sketches revealed a consistent commitment to bourgeois elite cultural values. Te ultimate symbol of the rise of bourgeois cultural values in the mid-­nineteenth century was the 1849 Astor Place Riots, which cast the working-­class audiences of

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American actor Edwin Forrest against the bourgeois audience of English actor Charles Macready.32 Macready performed at the Astor Place Opera House, a sumptuous theater that had recently been built uptown to house performances of Italian opera for a reverent and quiet “upper ten” audience. In contrast, Forrest’s supporters were strongly associated with the Bowery and Chatham theaters, venues that expected loud and raucous behavior from their largely workingclass audiences. A continuation of a feud between the actors spilled out into the city streets, with the elite audience in the theater labeled the “codfsh aristocracy” and the populist protesters called an unruly “mob.” Te feud ended with state militia killing more than 20 members of the protesting crowd outside of the opera house. Te city sketch registered the Astor Place Riots through its depiction of the divided social world of theaters and audiences in the late 1840s. Given Foster’s consistent criticism of the “codfsh aristocracy” throughout his sketches, it is notable that he defended the Astor Place Opera House, arguing that its

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amphitheater with its two-­shilling admittance afords an opportunity of listening to good music to a large class of population. . . . Tis truly democratic characteristic of the Astor Place Opera-­House makes it a great favorite with the intelligent and ambitious among the great middle class, who nightly fll the spacious amphitheater, and form by no means the least important portion of the audience.33

Te rioters’ populist critique was that the Opera House was an elite, antidemocratic institution, but Foster argued the opposite. He associated democracy with the “great middle class,” who showed their intelligence and ambition through their decorum and appreciation of opera performances in a display of taste that made them equal to their wealthier bourgeois peers. In addition to the Opera House, city sketches ofen featured profles of Art Unions, art galleries that were precursors to the museums such as the Metropolitan Museum, established by the wealthiest capitalists in northeastern cities later in the century.34 Writing for the Brooklyn Eagle, Walt Whitman’s city sketch, “Matters Which Were Seen and Done in an Afernoon Ramble,” described a visit to the Art Union, “advis[ing] our Brooklyn folk to visit ofen: it will cost them nothing, and there are always good things there.”35 City sketches were far more likely to identify and praise solidly bourgeois institutions

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like the Astor Place Opera House or the American Art Union than cultural institutions of the working class. In fact, city sketches ofen focused on popular theaters that catered to working-­class audiences, introducing middle-­class readers to their ostensible exotic and uncouth behavior. During the Astor Place Riots, the working-­class or populist rioters invoked the longheld tradition of audience participation, viewing the audience members’ active engagement—hissing villains and praising heroes, asking favored performers to repeat soliloquies or songs, and punishing unsatisfactory performances with hurled rotten food—as inherently democratic, as expressing the voice of the people. In the afermath of the Riots, however, bourgeois observers increasingly criticized such behavior.36 We can see this shif in Foster’s city sketches. He describes the Bowery Teater in two sketch serials, New York in Slices (1849) and New York by Gaslight (1850), published before and afer the Astor Place Riots. Foster highlights the unruly working-­class audience in both sketches, but while the pre-­Astor Place Riots New York in Slices simply describes the rowdy audience, the post–Riots New York by Gaslight ofers far more critical language: Te loud and threatening noises from the pit, which heaves continually in wild and sullen tumult, like a red-­fannel sea agitated by some lurid storm—the shufing and stamping of innumerable feet in the lobbies—the unrepressed exuberance of talking, the laughing, children-nursing, baby-­quieting, orange-­sucking, peanut-­eating, lemonade-­with-­a-­stick-­in-­it-­drinking unconventionality of the “dress circle”—with the roaring crush and clamor of tobacco-­chewing, great-­coat-­wearing second tier—the yells and screams, the shuddering oaths and obscene songs, tumbling down from the third tier— mingling with the convulsive howls and spasmodic bellowings of the actors on the stage—such are the elements from which . . . we might create a picture of the Bowery Teater.37

Moving up from the cheapest seats in the pit to the third tier, Foster presents the “unrepressed” Bowery Teater audience as intensely embodied, characterized by their “peanut-­eating” and “yells and screams.” Tis embodiment is the antithesis of the sanitized bourgeois city instituted by Addison and Steele’s Spectator. Foster fgures the Bowery pit audience as more than just a distraction or an audience characterized by lapses of taste, but as a “sea agitated by some lurid storm.” Foster imagines the Bowery audience as a threatening

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mob, refecting the increasingly strong divisions between kinds or classes of audiences in the antebellum era. Audience behavior became a crucial index of identity in the period, with middle-­class status associated with proper bourgeois decorum and propriety.38 As a genre that sought to capture the city experience, the city sketch participated in a broader project to normalize socially coded behavior, creating standardized and class-­divided attitudes toward art and culture. Even more meaningful than conduct in the theater for the city sketch was behavior on the streets and encounters with people of different social classes there. Te narrator of Solon Robinson’s city sketch/novel hybrid Hot Corn, for example, opens the story by hailing his readers in a classic gesture of the city sketch: “Come, walk with me, of an August evening, from the Battery to Union Square, and you shall see all the characters of a romance.”39 Public life was enacted on the streets, and the city sketch brought its readers out to experience it. A central project of the genre was to meditate on the public behavior of a whole social range of urban individuals and to model proper ways of being in the city and interacting with others. In this way, the genre both implicitly and explicitly considered a host of questions, including: to what extent could or should one claim to know another person on the streets of the city? What were the social or ethical responsibilities of one person to another in the public life of the city? Although the city sketch was consistent in its seemingly schizophrenic endorsement of populist economic values and bourgeois cultural values, its vision of the proper way of inhabiting the city and its streets was somewhat in dispute. Should the urban middle class be guided by the bourgeois elite or by more working-­class attitudes toward the streets and public life? Bourgeois elite street life was best embodied by Broadway, which was almost certain to eventually appear in any antebellum city sketch of New York. Characterized by its culture of display of bourgeois attire and manners, Broadway was respectable, bound by rules of politeness and established acceptable standards of behavior.40 It was not uncommon to fnd critiques of Broadway’s bourgeois conventionality in city sketches. George Foster’s frst sketch in New York in Slices (1849) ends with a lengthy “apostrophe” from a friend who concludes of Broadway habitués: “Tere are hundreds and thousands in New York who cannot live out of Broadway: who must breathe its air at least once in the day, or

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they gasp and perish. Tey are creatures of conventionality, whose sole luxury, whose chief enjoyment in this world, is to have certain hats touched to them every day in their life in Broadway.”41 Walt Whitman was more gentle in his critique for the Brooklyn Eagle, noting the “pleasure in walking up and down there awhile” amidst the “fascinating chaos [that] is Broadway,” ending by noting “But alas! what a prodigious amount of means and time might be much better and more proftably employed than as they are there!”42 While the display of Broadway was an object of undoubted fascination in city sketches, its rigidity and superfciality were ofen faulted. Although city sketches frequently criticized Broadway’s rulebound politesse, some city sketchers defended bourgeois social values. Margaret Fuller entitled one of her sketches for Te Tribune “Prevalent Idea Tat Politeness Is Too Great a Luxury to Be Given to the Poor” and ofered bourgeois social rules as an ideal model for city life. In the sketch, Fuller recounted the experience of a “lady” (presumably Fuller herself) who witnessed a “poorly dressed” young boy carrying a sickly infant on a ferry being interrogated by a “welldressed woman” about his motives, his place of residence, and his truthfulness.43 For Fuller, the problem here was not the bourgeois social values of politeness, but the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie failing to apply their own values to the urban poor. Fuller regretfully recounts how [t]he bystanders stared at both [the poor boy and the wealthier woman]; but among them all there was not one with sufciently clear notions of propriety and moral energy to say to this impudent questioner: “Woman! do you suppose, because you wear a handsome shawl, and that boy a patched jacket, that you have any right to speak to him at all, unless he wishes it, far less to prefer against him those accusations. Your vulgarity is unendurable; leave the place or alter your manner.”  (128)

Although Fuller is criticizing a bourgeois woman, she invokes rules of “propriety,” that is to say, conventionally bourgeois codes of social behavior, to judge the woman and “bystanders” who fail to intervene and stop the “accusations.” Te sketch turns into an interrogation of class privilege in urban social interactions, questioning the authority of the bourgeoisie to violate the privacy of the poor. It is not, however, a rejection of bourgeois “propriety” itself, but rather a criticism

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of its uneven practice among the bourgeoisie, especially in relation to those of lower economic status. For Fuller, this instance is representive of classist urban attitudes more generally. She presents this moment as one of many instances of “insolent rudeness or more insolent afability founded on no apparent grounds, except for an apparent diference in pecuniary position” she had encountered in the city (128–29). Later in the sketch, Fuller recruits an acquaintance to express regret for his earlier behavior as a missionary to the urban poor:

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“When I recollect,” said he, “the freedom with which I entered their houses, inquired into all their afairs, commented on their conduct and disputed their statements I wonder I was never horsewhipped and feel that I ought to have been; it would have done me good, for I needed as severe a lesson on the universal obligations of politeness in its only genuine form of respect for man as man, and delicate sympathy with each in his peculiar position.”  (129)

Fuller’s sketch interrogates the common practices of antebellum urban reform organizations, which privileged “home visits” by the bourgeoisie to the private spaces of the poor as the best means of moral improvement.44 For Fuller, the bourgeois code of politeness is not some arbitrary or superfcial code, but an idealized “universal obligation . . . of respect” that does not create arbitrary distance, but instead fosters “delicate sympathy.” Tough unevenly applied in the practice of antebellum city life, bourgeois politeness still contained an ideal model for urban social relations. Like Margaret Fuller, Lydia Maria Child sought to bring idealist philosophical principles to her city sketches. But despite her similar investment in Transcendentalist philosophy, Child rejected bourgeois propriety in her vision of idealized urban social behavior. In her “Letter XXX,” Child railed against bourgeois social rules, arguing that “there is a false necessity with which we industriously surround ourselves . . . [t]his is the pressure of public opinion; the intolerable restraint of conventional forms.”45 Asking “What is there of joyful freedom in our social intercourse?” Child fnds little: “We meet to see each other; and not a peep do we get under the thick, stifing veil which each carries about him” (135). Unable to fnd any positive examples in bourgeois social life, Child fnds “but one instance” of “perfect social freedom” in the behavior of a homeless

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­ ulatto boy. Child tells the story of this young boy, who speaks of m himself in the third person as “a little boy that run away from Providence” and simply invites himself into the home of a Boston doctor for dinner: “I want some dinner, and I thought you would give me some” (135). Taken into the doctor’s home, the boy disappears when an attempt is made to fnd work for him. Tey later learn that he went to another part of the city and made the same request with the same friendly result. Afer the boy disappears afer another attempt to fnd him some employment, he is discovered in Boston months later and tells a story of travels to New York and Philadelphia where he received similarly kind treatment, reporting “Every body is good to me, and I like every body” (136). Resolutely antibourgeois in his rejection of a work ethic and in his refusal to be bound by the “intolerable restraint of conventional forms,” the “boy that run away from Providence” becomes an expression of “perfect social freedom” in Child’s sketch. Child romanticizes the poor black boy as an idealized model of city socializing, not only for his “artless freedom,” but particularly for the “perpetual kindness” that his rejection of propriety makes possible: “Oh, if we would but dare to throw ourselves on each other’s hearts, how the image of heaven would be refected all over the face of this earth” (136–37, italics in original). Child imagines that the boy’s social freedom calls for a similar freedom from his benefactors, encouraging them to act from “kindness,” rather than out of “fear of what Mrs. Smith, or Mrs. Clark, will say” (134). Te city sketch’s critique of the bourgeoisie ofen harped on their superfciality and anxious social aspirations. Te utter lack of concern with social status or rules of conduct on the part of the “boy that run away from Providence” refects Child’s rejection of bourgeois social codes. Te diferences in Fuller and Child’s city sketches and their reactions to urban social behavior reveal some of the ambivalences and uncertainties about the middle-­class experience in the city, although the city sketches of 1840s and 1850s New York conveyed a surprising coherence that speaks to a relatively unifed middle-­class perspective and identity. Te relational quality of the city sketch’s modeling of middle-­class values, which rejected both bourgeois elite economic values and working-­class cultural values, lef a hollow space for the middle class to occupy. With its critique of the hypocrisy of capitalist exchange and its investment in subtle distinctions of cultural behavior, the city sketch marked an identity that defned itself more

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r­elationally to the class cultures above and below it than to some ­inherent core values of its own.

The Urban Picturesque and the Antebellum City Sketch Our American cities are not usually picturesque. Teir sites were selected for commercial convenience; hence they are generally fat. Time has not yet mellowed their tints, nor age given quaintness to their structures. Long rows of handsome business facades, and avenues of embowered cottages, however gratifying to their citizens, do not supply the stuf which the soul of the artist hungers for.

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—o. b. bunce, “chicago & milwaukee,” Picturesque America (1874)46

O. B. Bunce, the main editor for the massive 1874 Picturesque America project, was only reconfrming a common judgment of the nineteenth century when he asserted that “[o]ur American cities are not usually picturesque.” Bunce’s observation explains the reasons behind this lack of the picturesque in American cities: Cities were made for “commercial convenience” rather than visual appeal, and their relative newness made it so that the work of time had not “mellowed” or given “quaintness” to the structures. Although the picturesque is not typically associated with urban spaces and views, this section demonstrates how the city sketch embraced the picturesque to create a privileged perspective for an emergent middle class of city dwellers from which they could view city life and imagine their place within it. Malcolm Andrews describes a mid-­nineteenth-­century British vogue for what he calls the “metropolitan picturesque.” Tis took the form of writings and illustrations that decried the modernization of British cities, with their wholesale destruction of older neighborhoods and buildings, marginalization of the working classes, and the resulting bourgeois cultural homogenization. Advocates of the “metropolitan picturesque” sought out “natural picturesque variety and individuality in the social . . . context [where it] was thought to have survived only outside the culturally dominant middle classes, and particularly amongst the poorer classes, where there were apparently no such homogenizing cultural constraints.”47 Attempting to describe an American urban picturesque, Carrie Tirado Bramen sees a similar social focus, arguing that in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-­centuries “New York best satisfed

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the material requirements for the picturesque, namely a dramatic chasm between rich and poor combined with ethnic heterogeneity.”48 Both Andrews and Tirado Bramen emphasize the role of urban social “variety” in making application of the picturesque to the city possible. Tis section explores the urban picturesque in antebellum American city sketches, fnding not only the celebration of social diversity that Andrews and Tirado Bramen associated with British and later American city sketches, but also a desire to legitimize middleclass observers. Tis celebration of the urban picturesque was deployed to control urban space and its subjects and to legitimize the authority of the picturesque viewer. Just as picturesque observers of touristic rural spaces subjected the landscape to a disciplinary gaze, so did the city sketcher. As with its rural counterparts, the city sketch modeled the picturesque as a discipline that could be learned by readers and then applied to their own experience of the city. In his 1852 landscape appreciation treatise Scenery-­Showing, Warren Burton asserted about picturesque rural landscapes that “looking was a discipline that would lead into pleasure.” Tis statement was equally true of the picturesque cityscapes described by city sketchers:49 Te pleasure of picturesque city sketches could be that of learning to see the beauty in a variety of urban people and places, but it could also be the satisfaction of subjecting these people and places to the discipline of their gaze. One of the more popular versions of the city sketch can reveal how these pleasures are manifested. Lydia Maria Child’s Letters from New York demonstrates that applying the discipline of the urban picturesque created a role for her as observer of social, ethnic, and racial diversity. In diferent sketches, Child presented her readers with observations of Jewish religious ceremonies, of a meeting with Julia Pell, an African American Methodist lay preacher, and of a visit with Jane Plato, an African American woman whose garden inspired Child to spin out an allegory of sectarianism. Child’s narrative sojourns in the city ofen depended on using vivid contrasts between urban wealth and poverty to construct picturesque tableaux. For example, in “Letter XIV,” Child describes a view of “two young boys fghting furiously for some coppers, that had been given them and had fallen on the pavement” (61). Her gaze drawn to them, she notes their exotic appearance: “Tey had matted black hair, large, lustrous eyes, and an olive complexion. Tey were evidently foreign children,

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from the sunny clime of Italy or Spain, and nature had made them subjects for an artist’s dream” (61). Te exotic, impoverished boys represent a classic picturesque subject (perfect “subjects for an artist’s dream”), but Child’s gaze travels from them to “a ragged, emaciated woman, whom I conjectured, from the resemblance of  her large dark eyes, might be their mother,” whose apathetic demeanor and inability to communicate with Child leads the writer to meditate on charity as an inadequate response to poverty: “Pence I will give thee, though political economy reprove the deed. Tey can but appease the hunger of the body; they cannot soothe the hunger of thy heart; that I obey the kindly impulse may make the world none the better—perchance some iota the worse; yet I must needs follow it— cannot other wise” (61). From these thoughts, Child’s gaze travels behind the immigrant woman and her children to the city background, where she notices

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the window of clear, plate glass, large vases of gold and silver, c­ uriously wrought. Tey spoke signifcantly of the sad contrasts in this disordered world; and excited in my mind whole volumes, not of political, but of angelic economy. “Truly,” said I, “if the law of love prevailed, vases of gold and silver might even more abound—but no homeless outcast would sit shivering beneath their glittering mockery. All would be richer, and no man the poorer. When will the world learn its best wisdom? When will the mighty discord come into heavenly harmony?” I looked at the huge stone structures of commercial wealth, and they gave an answer that chilled my heart.  (61)

Faced with the “mighty discord” between urban wealth and poverty, Child may fnd no “heavenly harmony,” but her tableau enables her to construct a stable position for herself as an island between these forces. Child’s “chilled heart” facing class “discord” is clearly not pleasurable, but the picturesque’s aesthetic privileging of “contrasts” “excites” her mind, inspiring thoughts about “angelic economy.” Child’s aestheticized tableau of urban social extremes is a disciplined gaze whose pleasure comes from rejecting association with either the social disempowerment of the poor or the materialism of the bourgeoisie elite. Some element of the pleasure of the antebellum urban picturesque seems to come from the possibility of middleclass viewers transforming potentially painful or sad urban social conficts into aestheticized scenery.

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In Big Abel and the Little Manhattan (1845), Cornelius Mathews calls this urban picturesque afect “gentle melancholy.” Tis sketch– novel hybrid uses the picturesque sketch form in a fctional narrative that transposes antebellum urban class confict on to the island’s history and development. In the novel, descendants of Henry Hudson, the English explorer who frst mapped the island of Manhattan, and the Native chief who legendarily sold the island, seek to resolve a mythic court case over possession of Manhattan by walking through the city, dividing it into “civilized” or “primitive” elements. Te descendants, called Big Abel and Little Manhattan, agree to bestow sole ownership on whomever can lay claim to the greater part of the city’s spirit. Te novel’s structure mimics the picturesque city sketch, with each chapter covering a single day’s walk through a diferent section of the city. Te chapters focus on the main characters’ encounters with the city’s diverse population as they explore the mix of old and new development in Manhattan. Contemporary readers duly noted the novel’s use of the picturesque: Te reviewer for Te American Review touted the novel’s discovery of “the picturesque in very common occurrences, and feeling the poetry attached to very ordinary matters.”50 Like the cumulative efect of the city sketch’s serial publication, Mathews’s novel purports to capture the urban totality, as the characters lay claim to Manhattan’s diferent neighborhoods with an eye toward mastery over the city: a kind of picturesque “winner takes all.” Big Abel and the Little Manhattan shifs its vision of antebellum urban class confict from present-­day Manhattan to the island’s history and development, relocating the popular genre of the frontier romance—with its narrative of confict between white settlers and Natives and its culmination in the tragic inevitability of Native disappearance on the frontier—to the antebellum cityscape.51 Just as the Native characters must ultimately give way to the white settlers in the frontier romance, there is little doubt lef as to which character is destined to inherit the city. Big Abel, Hudson’s descendant, claims all development in the city, from churches and schools to trade. Te novel presents New York City as “fooded” by modern commercial growth: “Big Abel began to see his way clearly; for wherever they went he saw, shops, shops; the trade that frst set foot upon the soil with Henry Hudson, carrying all before it in a food.”52 Big Abel’s triumphant progress through the city enacts the inevitable victory of commercial capitalism to which the urban bourgeoise elite was com-

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mitted, but to which the middle class might have reason to respond more ambivalently. Little Manhattan’s movement through the city is more ftful than Big Abel’s, as he claims old sites where the slightest revenants of Native history might be encountered and where the two encounter racial and ethnic diversity. For example, Little Manhattan claims not only Potter’s Field where the city’s poorest are buried as the longforgotten site of a Native battle, but also the Jews of Chatham Street and a “Negro schoolboy” named Pompey Smith. Watching the young boy’s walk to school, the narrator proclaims: “Te day was brighter, and bluer, and happier altogether, for that cheerful negro-­ boy, depend on it! (22–23). In addition to claiming places where racial and ethnic diversity thrives, Little Manhattan draws attention to the parts of the city that must inevitably be swept aside by the capitalist development embodied by Big Abel, as can be seen in a lengthy description of an old rookery in the Five Points: And now, silently, they came upon a region where there were a great number of little sooty shops; plump poultry, hopping about on sheds, half-­asleep in grocers’ wagons—under cover from the sun—or loitering near little rickety feed-­stores, waiting the chances of business. . . . A region where, intending, with the truest heart, to enter one store alone, you fnd yourself (there’s something marvelous in the doors that open thereabout) in two; going up stairs to a family of your own chose friends, as you suppose, you are visiting, in the spirit of a wide philanthropy, a neighborhood; all ear to any alms you have to give in the way of talk or gossipry.  (Mathews, 76–77)

It was common in writings of this period to see the Five Points through a sensational lens as a place of vice and crime. Instead, Mathews’s vision of Little Manhattan’s favored urban sites refects Malcolm Andrews’s vision of a “metropolitan picturesque” associated with neighborhoods of the poor that had resisted the homogenization of bourgeois redevelopment. Te novel’s description is imbued with the picturesque, depicting an archaic mixed-­use neighborhood of desultory commerce, with its “little sooty shops,” and ramshackle homes full of active communal spirit, where planning to visit one family results in visiting a whole neighborhood. Such Manhattan neighborhoods were the kind of spaces that would be torn down in the next immediate decade, with the frst generation of

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tenement buildings rising to replace them.53 Little Manhattan’s ­picturesque people and neighborhoods are precisely those elements imagined being “carried away in the food” of Big Abel’s relentless drive to develop the city. Like Child’s mournful picturesque framing of the begging children and their immiserated mother, Mathews’s appreciation of the Five Points “rookery” justifes the position of the urban middle class, whose distance from both poverty and the larger capital interests driving urban growth ratifes their status as the best able to appreciate all elements of city life. Although Big Abel and Little Manhattan represent simplistic allegories of the forces of “civilization” and the “primitive” that they respectively embody, Mathews’s choice of character appropriates the afective work that Native Americans embodied in antebellum American culture, instead, using them to model the attitude required of his readers to properly experience the urban picturesque. As Laura Mielke observes, antebellum frontier romances and other texts ofen foregrounded sympathetic encounters between Euro-­American and Native American characters on contested frontier landscapes. Mielke notes that this sympathy authorized “white” replacement of Natives, and also allowed readers to feel emotionally connected to those they supplanted.54 Big Abel and Little Manhattan enact this process of negotiating rights, not to the frontier, but to the cityscape and urban history. In presenting the story of the inevitable failure of Little Manhattan’s claim to the picturesque city, Big Abel and Little Manhattan’s narrator evokes sympathy for the disappearance of not only the city’s past, but also its racial, ethnic, and class diversity. At the close of Mathews’s novel, afer everyone acknowledges that Big Abel has “won” the city, the narrator addresses Little Manhattan’s obsolescence and predicts that his spirit will reappear whenever the city experiences “Indian summer-­time, when air and earth, and all things on them, share the gentle melancholy of your spirit, and nature shades her beauty and the brightness of her eye, in sympathy with you” (92). Dematerializing the urban past into the evanescent “Indian summer-­time” season, Mathews fgures the sympathetic ­reaction toward those picturesque elements of Manhattan life that will be eliminated by the forces of “progress,” “civilization,” and capitalist development as “gentle melancholy.” Like Child’s “excited” thoughts at the prospect of urban inequality, Mathews’s “gentle melancholy” is a not-­altogether-­unpleasant sadness, a kind of happy sadness. Tis feeling justifes the presence of the middle class as those able to

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a­ ppreciate both sides of the urban conficts: the impulse to preserve and to develop, the appreciation of racial and ethnic diversity, and the desire for homogeneity.55 Te picturesque ofers city sketch writers like Child and Mathews (and their readers) a way to sympathize with picturesque elements of city life without also being swept away themselves, inevitably to disappear amidst the food of urban capitalist development. Although Mathews’s main narrative demonstrates the way the picturesque creates a privileged aestheticized position for the middle class from which to view some of the threatening social and economic conficts of American urban life of the 1840s, a side-­plot of Big Abel and Little Manhattan, featuring the character of William, a struggling author fgure ofen called “the Poor Scholar,” reappears to interrupt both the novel’s main narrative strand and the city sketch’s consoling position for the middle class. Mathews is now best known in American literary history not for his fction, but for his connection to the nationalist Young America literary movement, as well as for his tireless advocacy for American copyright law.56 Te repeated appearance of the character of William in the novel reveals how Mathews’s concerns about the American literary marketplace complicate the city sketch’s privileging of the middle class’s urban life. As Big Abel and Little Manhattan pursue their project of dividing up the city into neat categories of “civilized” and “savage,” they keep meeting up with William, who speaks of his struggles to fnd a publisher and to be paid enough for his writing labors to allow him to marry his fancée, Mary. Big Abel and Little Manhattan frst encounter William on the evening of their frst day, wandering distractedly on the city’s outskirts: “Te Poor Scholar . . . had wandered out into the open country, and the clear night, to coax away certain cares that pressed at his heart . . . and to call up as he wandered on a fair shape whose shadowy hand he sought in vain, for it few away ever as he stretched his own toward it” (11). Te “fair shape” William “sought in vain” ends up not being a woman, but a publisher for his manuscript and fnancial security in the city that continually escapes him. Tis side plot of William’s struggles as an author dramatizes Mathews’s persistent complaint that the lack of copyright laws created an unfair American literary marketplace in which American authors were at a disadvantage to foreign writers. Later in the novel, William’s fancée, Mary, asks about the status of his manuscript, which had been submitted to a publisher, and William explains ironically that his work

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must wait because “[t]here’s a great book just arrived from England!” and “[it must be printed; it must be published; it must be circulated; and all for the beneft of the people of the United States, who’d complain if they were neglected” (43). William’s story could be seen as an irrelevant digression to the main characters’ proprietary strolls through the city, refecting Mathews’s pertinacity about copyright, but with each appearance it becomes clearer that he represents a middle-­class social interest that exists outside of Big Abel’s capitalist development or Little Manhattan’s past of racial diversity and underdevelopment. Unlike every other neighborhood or individual in the city encountered in the novel, neither Big Abel nor Little Manhattan claims William. As a middle-­class author, William seems to have an anomalous place in the economic and social geography mapped out by the novel, raising questions about the place of the middle class in this urban economy. Although middle-­class William is neither a revenant of the past nor a representative of a racial or ethnic minority, he too is under threat of being swept away by the forces of urban capitalism in the novel. When the two main characters frst encounter him, Big Abel recognizes William, remembering that he “had a case in Court once, I recollect. It was all about a book, and the judge said it was a glorious thing to write a book; and that’s all he got for it!” (12). Big Abel’s story suggests that William was suing to get paid for his book and the judge rejects the notion that the work of writing necessarily ­deserves payment: Te judge implies that publication of the book itself is reward enough. Like the native inheritor Little Manhattan, William is lef out in the food of commercial development in the city, with no economic recompense for his efort. In its depiction of symbolic Indians and the place of the writer within a commercial society, Mathews’s novel prefgures some of the ideas Toreau explored in his far more well-­known fable of the Indian’s baskets in Walden’s “Economy” chapter. In that scene, the “strolling Indian” tries to sell baskets at the home of “a well-­known lawyer in [Toreau’s] neighborhood.”57 Afer the “Indian” becomes indignant when his goods are not purchased, Toreau chides the native’s misunderstanding of exchange: “He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other’s while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy.”58 Toreau uses this episode to justify his own life on Walden Pond as a strategy for writing while “avoid[ing] the necessity

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of selling.” Toreau’s measure of success is how efectively he avoids shaping his work to market demands.59 Unlike Toreau in Walden, however, William is not seeking an escape from the world of exchange, but is instead deeply committed to entering into it. Far from a rejection of the marketplace, William’s narrative in Big Abel & Little Manhattan is about the middle class’s need to be included in the urban economy and about the dangers of being excluded. William represents the writer’s lack of autonomy within the world of urban commerce, but he also symbolizes the threat, like Little Manhattan’s failed claims to the city, that there is no place outside of the “food” of urban development. As a result, William’s recurrent presence in the narrative and throughout the city has a haunting efect, akin to Little Manhattan’s repeated discoveries of the spectral Native history in the cityscape. In the novel, the ever-­expanding commercial city threatens not only racial and ethnic minorities and the past, but also members of the white middle class like William and his fancée, Mary. Like William, Mary fgures the anxiety of subjection to urban commerce, as her hopes to wed William are tied to the prospect for publication of his book: “[S]he was clearly not at ease. She moved about, singing sometimes as before, then silent, glad, pensive, hopeful, despairing, as a scholar’s mistress, in this land of ours, well may be” (Mathews 25). Te narrative uses the side-­plot of William and Mary to signal the web of afective relations mediated by urban commerce. A hastily added happy ending—in which William’s book is published and the two are married—does not fully dispel the weight of anxiety that results from their precarious place in the urban economy. Te would-­be author and his fancée do not represent some primitive spirit or archaic mode of exchange, but, rather, white middle-­class urbanites who, despite their ideological investment in commercial capitalism, are also threatened with being rendered obsolete by the “food” of trade and commerce. Te Poor Scholar’s dogged reappearance throughout the city creates an undercurrent of anxiety beneath the map that Big Abel and Little Manhattan make in their division of the city and marks the tensions within the city sketch’s use of the picturesque to legitimate the middle class’s social position in the midcentury American city. Te city sketch’s urban circumambulation and its competition ­between urban commerce and the past, together with its embodiment in racially and economically marginalized people, could be said to reassure its middle-­class readers of the inevitable success

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of commercial capitalism and allow them the pleasures of the ­metropolitan picturesque. At the same time, William’s story-­line in Big Abel and Little Manhattan raises the frightening prospect that they might be included among the list of “losers” in this narrative gambit of urban “winner-­takes-­all.” Tis anxiety complicates the “gentle melancholy” that ostensibly dominates the urban picturesque, revealing a threatening future in which the developing city does not legitimate middle-­class identity so much as it envelopes and subsumes it. Tis suggests an underlying concern beneath the city sketch’s urban picturesque, one that reveals not merely the limitations of middle-­class empathy for the poor, but also the threat that, however much the picturesque legitimates middle-­class conceptions of space, social relations, and their own privileged position in the city, merely ­ ­deploying the picturesque does not guarantee that they could not lose that position. In its narrative undercurrent of white middle-­class economic disenfranchisement and downward mobility, insistently raised and only partially answered, Big Abel and Little Manhattan gestures toward another mode that jostles with the picturesque in city sketch writing: the sublime. As we will see in the next section, the urban sublime lurks at the edge of the picturesque in the city sketch, in threats that the city is not knowable, that the middle class’s position is insecure in the city’s social and economic forms, and that members of the urban middle class could at any moment be swallowed up by the crowd and become no one.

The City Sketch and the Crowd: The Urban Sublime Te city sketch helped to articulate an urban middle-­class subject, and the picturesque was the ideal mode to express that class subjectivity, but at the limits of the urban picturesque lay the sublime, which threatened to undermine everything. Te sublime is typically associated with rural landscapes, with the roughness and variety of the picturesque countryside taken to greater levels of wildness and danger: rugged mountain peaks, waterfalls, et al. In an urban ­context, the sublime also represents an amplifcation of the wildness of the city, most typically embodied by the urban crowd. As Mary Esteve suggests, the urban sublime refects the way that the city—and most notably the city crowd—can take on “qualities of startlingly powerful

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nature, through its inanimacy, impersonality, and size.”60 Under the sign of the sublime, rather than settling into a composed and vivid picture, the city crowd threatens to overwhelm the city sketcher, unsettling the city sketch’s vision of the city as relatively easily knowable or manageable. Writing about the urban sublime in late nineteenthcentury American literature, Christophe Den Tandt asserts that “the politics of the urban sublime revolves around legibility—the readability of city space, which conditions both the sociological and narrative gaze.”61 Treatening the legibility of the city and its population, the urban sublime suggests that the city is beyond the comprehension of any single observer or group. Tus, the urban sublime can represent a threat to the city sketch genre’s project of reassuring its middle-­class readers of their relatively secure position as privileged viewers of the antebellum city. As R. H. Byer suggests, the attempt to make sense of the “perplexing and threatening, if fascinating, spectacle” of the city by writers and social thinkers led to a “convergence and confusion of aesthetic, moral and ideological purposes.”62 Whether the urban sublime undermines the city sketch’s social project or simply represents an alternative mode of aestheticization, there is little question that the sublime represents an important terminal point for the genre: Te extreme end of the self-­conscious response of the ­observer on city life.63 Te most famous instance of the urban sublime in nineteenthcentury American literature comes from a work of fction modeled on the sketch. Despite being set in London, Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Te Man of the Crowd” (1840) has been considered the most canonical American city sketch and has historically overshadowed other antebellum city sketches. Poe’s story predates most other examples of the American city sketch, and its fctional form and its setting in London challenge its continuity with other American city sketch literature, which at least start with the narrative encounter of an individual with the American cityscape. Despite the fact that “Te Man of the Crowd” is not about an American city, its issues resonate with a host of actual American city sketches, particularly in its depiction of the aesthetics, morality, and politics of the middle-­class city sketch observer’s relationship to the city. Poe’s story also refects on the relationship of the picturesque to the sublime as ways of making sense of the city. Poe’s story frames the city as a text to be read but as a problematic text that resists interpretation. In doing so, Poe hints at the problems

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of sketching the city. To frame this interpretative difculty, Poe begins the story with two foreign language epigraphs: one in French that asserts that the inability to be alone is a “great misfortune” and the other in German about a book that “does not permit itself to be read” (“er lasst sich nicht lessen”).64 Tis illegibility is associated with criminality (“the essence of all crime is undivulged”), ultimately setting up the story’s fnal accusation that the titular man of the crowd is “the type and the genius of deep crime” (239). Although Poe’s story initially resembles a conventional city sketch, these associations of criminality, illegibility, and the inability to be alone lead the reader to question the impulse to “read” the city or reconstitute it as a picturesque tableau. In contrast to city sketches, in which the urban picturesque works to remediate against the threat of the city, in Poe’s story it is the failure of urban picturesque observation that inspires the threat of sublimity. Te narrator of Poe’s story introduces himself as a leisured observer, a convalescent with “a calm and inquisitive interest in every thing” (232) that refects the city sketcher’s authoritative gaze upon the city. From his viewpoint through a cofee shop window, the narrator turns his gaze on the London crowd surging past him:

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“At this particular period of the evening I had never before been in a similar situation, and the tumultuous sea of human heads flled me, therefore, with a delicious novelty of emotion. I gave up, at length, all care of things within the hotel, and became absorbed in contemplation of the scene without”  (233).

Poe’s invocation of the urban crowd as a “tumultuous sea of human heads” is a cliché of the urban sublime. We have already seen this trope in George Foster’s 1849 description of the Bowery Teater’s pit audience in New York by Gaslight: “Te loud and threatening noises from the pit, which heaves continually in wild and sullen tumult, [is] like a red-­fannel sea agitated by some lurid storm.”65 Lydia Maria Child invokes this same urban sublime trope in her “Letter X” in which she describes the city: Tere is something impressive, even to painfulness, in this dense crowding of human existence, this mercantile familiarity with death. It has sometimes forced upon me, for a few moments, an appalling, night-­mare sensation of vanishing identity; as if I were but an unknown,

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unnoticed, and unseparated drop in the great ocean of human ­existence; as if the uncomfortable old theory were true, and we were but portions of a great mundane soul, to which we ultimately return, to be swallowed up in its infnity.  (44)

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Child’s urban sublime invokes the oceanic force of the city crowd and extends its efect to depict it, threatening to overwhelm the individual. Te “appalling, night-­mare sensation of vanishing identity” exemplifes the urban sublime’s perspective on the limitations of the subject to stand outside of the crowd, to be a separate viewer and retain an identity. Poe’s narrator’s response to the potentially sublime “sea” of the urban crowd is not initially to be overwhelmed, but rather to subject it to his analytic gaze. Moving from “an abstract and generalizing turn,” the narrator begins to focus on “details, and regarded with minute interest the innumerable varieties of fgure, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance” of individuals (233). Tis attention to social “variety” of urban experience was a crucial element of the urban picturesque, another common trope of the genre. For example, Child begins “Letter X” by noting that “in a great metropolis like this, nothing is more observable than the infnite varieties of character” (43). Amidst this urban variety, Child highlights the possibilities for criminality amidst the anonymous crowd: Te enterprising, the curious, the reckless, and the criminal, fock hither from all quarters of the world, as to a common centre, whence they can diverge at pleasure. Where men are little known, they are imperfectly restrained; therefore, great numbers here live with somewhat of that wild license which prevails in times of pestilence. Life is a reckless game, and death is a business transaction.  (44)

Like Child’s vision of the crowd in her sketch, Poe’s narrator of “Te Man of the Crowd” highlights the sensational potential for criminality within the urban crowd, but also the dangerous efect of contemplating it. Staring at the crowd, the narrator fnds himself focusing on members of the lower and criminal classes, identifying the criminal professions of diferent individuals by a host of superfcial traits: Te pickpockets can be known by “their voluminousness of wristband, with an air of excessive frankness” or the gamblers by their “more than ordinary extension of the thumb in a direction at

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right angles with the fngers” (234). Te narrator confdently attributes criminality to individuals seen in a moment and bases such claims on the most superfcial of details. Te superfcial authority of the narrator’s accusatory gaze in Poe’s story, intuiting the criminality of those who pass before him in the crowd, could be a critique of the city sketch as a whole, with its claim to ofer insight into urban social life from a privileged gaze.66 Amidst this crowd, Poe’s narrator is particularly drawn to a picturesque individual. Seeing an unusual old man, the narrator fnds that his “whole attention” is “arrested and absorbed . . . on account of the absolute idiosyncracy” of the countenance of a “decrepit old man” (236). Te narrator’s “frst thought” at seeing the man is to imagine him as a superior example of a German painter’s “pictorial incarnations of the fend” (235–36), casting him explicitly as a picturesque object of his gaze: a sinister but worthy object for pictorial representation. In this way, the man is a parallel to Child’s two immigrant boys whom “nature had made . . . subjects for an artist’s dream” (61). Unlike Child’s picturesque immigrant children, however, in Poe the narrator’s gaze is drawn to this particular picturesque individual because he is unable to appropriate him into his catalog of urban types. Te narrator’s “survey” of the man, which seeks “to form some analysis of the meaning conveyed,” yields a wide array of confused and contradictory qualities: “vast mental power,” “caution,” “penuriousness,” “avarice,” “coolness,” “malice,” “bloodthirstiness,” “triumph,” “merriment,” “excessive terror,” and “supreme despair” (236). In addition to the seemingly paradoxical emotional registers of the man, the narrator observes his personal appearance, noting that, although his clothes were “flthy and ragged,” they were “of beautiful texture” (236). Te distinctly picturesque sense of decay and the vivid contrast of social extremes embodied by the man’s clothing are amplifed by the narrator’s “glimpse both of a diamond and of a dagger” inside the man’s cloak (236). While Child found a kind of picturesque beauty and social meaning in the visual contrast between the impoverished immigrants and urban commercial display, Poe’s narrator is jarred and unsettled by the man’s singular embodiment of the urban picturesque’s social contradictions. Poe’s narrator is unable to place and understand the picturesque man, speculating to himself “How wild a history . . . is written within that bosom!” (236). Compelled to understand, the narrator follows

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the man around the city for a full day, weaving through various ­districts dominated by distinct social groups and classes, always amidst a crowd. Each environment inhabited by a diferent crowd is carefully described in the story, but the man’s behavior remains largely unchanged. Te man’s mostly afectless meanderings vary only when the crowd in his midst begins to disperse. Faced with the loss of one crowd, the man seems to panic and rush to another city space where a crowd mills about. Te narrator describes how the man “gasp[s] as if for breath while he threw himself amid the crowd,” and “the intense agony of his countenance” when separated from a crowd abates once he rejoins another one (237). Poe’s man’s condition only literalizes other city sketches’ vision of urban idiosyncrasies. Like Poe’s man of the crowd, George Foster’s Broadway habitués in New York in Slices must “breathe its air at least once in the day, or they gasp and perish.”67 But if Foster’s bourgeois promenaders on  Broadway are “creatures of conventionality” and are readily knowable, Poe’s man of the crowd is inscrutable. Despite “an interest all-­ absorbing” (238), the narrator never learns any more about the man despite his lengthy sojourn with him. Te threat for Poe’s narrator seems to come not from the crowd, but from the picturesque individual who cannot be appropriated. Given the man’s idiosyncratic illegibility, we could read this story as a meditation on the limitations of the urban picturesque sensibility. Amidst a city full of types, the man of the crowd represents a striking idiosyncrasy, one that resists the narrator’s attempt to impose meaning upon him. Perhaps even more problematically, not only does the man resist the narrator’s attempt to interpret him, he refuses to acknowledge the narrator’s presence as somehow distinct from any other member of the urban crowd. Te narrator only stops pursuing the man when he confronts him and is unacknowledged: “And, as the shades of the second evening came on, I grew wearied unto death, and, stopping full in front of the wanderer, gazed at him steadfastly in the face. He noticed me not, but resumed his solemn walk, while I, ceasing to follow, remained absorbed in ­contemplation” (238–39). Te narrator is taken aback by the man’s failure or refusal to ­acknowledge him. Te man of the crowd was distinctive, as he stood out amidst the crowd, but, conversely, the narrator does not stand out as an individual to the man of the crowd. If the narrator began following the man of the crowd to complete his project of understanding

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the constituent parts of the urban crowd and establish his distinction from and superiority to that crowd, his inability to discern the man’s purpose, and the man’s failure to notice him, empty out that distinction. Far from legitimating the narrator’s special status as skilled and objective city observer, the process of following the man of the crowd threatens the narrator with a loss of identity, with making him part of the crowd. Tis is the true moment of urban sublime horror for Poe’s story. Te narrator fnds that his engagement with the man of the crowd and, through him, the city has threatened his own selfood. Mary Esteve calls the idiosyncrasy and illegibility of the man of the crowd a “sublime anonymity,” as the man’s resistance to interpretation takes on the weight and signifcance of the overwhelming power of nature in urban life.68 Te sublime terror is not simply the resistance to interpretation, but, more particularly, the possibility that this anonymity is contagious or transferable through engagement with the urban crowd: We can all become men of the crowd. Tis prospect of middle-­class vulnerability to being rendered anonymous by the city creates a panic in the story. Immediately afer this confrontation, the story ends suddenly with a kind of phobic rejection of the man and the crowd he symbolizes. Te man’s re­sist­ ance to interpretation and refusal to acknowledge the narrator seems to inspire the narrator’s accusation that “[t]his old man . . . is the type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd” (239, emphasis in the original). Te sequencing of these assertions is hard to follow, perhaps refecting the narrator’s confused thoughts in response to the sublime threat posed by his encounter with the man. Te initial judgment of his criminality seems to be tied to the second claim that he “refuses to be alone” (although the story does not validate the implication in this phrase that the man makes a conscious choice), followed by the label (“He is the man of the crowd”). Ultimately, this is simply a judgment, not an analysis or explanation. Justifying this logic of criminal judgment, the narrator concludes by fguring the man of the crowd as an evil book that mercifully cannot be read: “Te worst heart is a grosser book than the ‘Hortulus Animae,’ and perhaps it is but one of the great mercies of God that ‘er lasst sich nicht lesen’” (239). Closing the story with a restatement of its opening lines, the narrator justifes the failure of his interpretative project, now reconfgured as a fortunate fall, a “mercy” that saves us from knowledge of the sublime horror that lies

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within the soul of each person in the city. Tis rejection of the apparent sublime unknowability of the city, where picturesque diversity is replaced by unassimilable diference, tells us more about the narrator than about the man of the crowd. Poe’s story “Te Man of the Crowd” shows that while middle-­class urban observers might look to the city to reafrm their authority and legitimize their social position, they do so at the risk of revealing the arbitrariness of that authority and the uncertainty of that social position. Te concerns of Poe’s narrator are present in other versions of the city sketch, refecting the dangers of the sublime for the city sketcher. Like Poe’s narrator, when, in “Letter X,” Child imagined the city as an oceanic force in which she might disappear (“as if I were but an unknown, unnoticed, and unseparated drop in the great ocean of human existence”), she rejects not only the crowd itself, but even thinking about the topic:

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But such ideas I expel at once, like phantasms of evil, which indeed they are. Unproftable to all, they have a peculiarly bewildering and oppressive power over a mind constituted like my own; so prone to eager questioning of the infnite, and curious search into the invisible. I fnd it wiser to forbear infating this balloon of thought, lest it roll me away through unlimited space, until I become like the absent man, who put his clothes in bed, and hung himself over the chair; or like his twin-­brother, who laid his candle on the pillow, and blew himself out.  (44)

Ofering variations to Poe’s man of the crowd, Child presents “absent” urban men who have lost some essential quality of their identity through their involvement in city life. Confusing the distinction between the self and an object (clothing or a candle), the absent men commit a form of suicide (“hung himself ” and “blew himself out”). Like Child’s symbolic “absent men” whose engagement with the city causes them to lose themselves or mistake their exterior for interior, Poe’s man of the crowd is a cipher whose engagement with the city has apparently stripped him of some essential human quality. In Poe and Child’s vision of the urban sublime, engagement with the city, following the ideas inspired by the sublime ocean of the city crowd, can lead to confusion over what constitutes one’s self, a difculty of determining the proper boundaries of individuality. Tis urban sublime is likened to both suicide and crime. Like Poe’s narrator, who

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ends his encounter with a vehement, but not totally justifed, ­rejection on the basis of the man’s criminality, Child rejects the threat of the urban sublime: “But such ideas I expel at once, like phantasms of evil, which indeed they are.” She would rather not even think about the urban sublime at all rather than risk the consequence of the loss of coherent selfood. Te urban sublime represents a threat to the city sketcher’s individuality that must be rejected at all costs, revealing the genre’s core project of bolstering the middle-­class observer’s identity against the threats posed by the city and its crowds. Te urban picturesque resists the threat of the urban sublime. Although Poe’s story ends his narrator’s failed attempt to “place” the frst picturesque, then sublime, man of the crowd, Child reafrms her commitment to the picturesque in “Letter X.” Immediately afer the negated efort to understand the city crowd, with its threat to turn her into an “absent man,” Child shifs the focus of her letter to picturesque individuals, as if the picturesque could restore order and reestablish her sense of self and place in the city: I have wandered almost as far from my starting point, as Saturn’s ring is from Mercury; but I will return to the varieties in New-­York. Among them I ofen meet a tall Scotsman, with sandy hair and high cheek-­bones . . . with a tartan plaid and bag-­pipe. And where do guess he most frequently plies his poetic trade? Why, in the slaughterhouses! Of which a hundred or more send forth their polluted breath into the atmosphere of this swarming city hive! Tere, if you are curious to witness incongruities, you may almost any day see grunting pigs or bleating lambs, with throats cut to the tune of Highland Mary, or Bonny Doon, or Lochaber No More.”  (44)

In contrast to the intimidating sublime vision of the New York crowd as a sea in which the individual loses him- or herself, Child ofers an alternative and consoling vision of picturesque urban “variety.” Te kilted Scottish bag-­piper who plays in slaughterhouses is exactly the  kind of quaint picturesque idiosyncrasy that can reestablish the ­possibility of individuality within the city. Te existence of the slaughterhouse bag-­piper not only afrms his own individuality; he prophylactically afrms Child’s individuality as middle-­class city sketcher whose apprehension of picturesque individuals legitimates her own unique capacity to see the city in all of its diversity. Faced with the sublime urban threat of becoming “absent,” “an unknown,

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unnoticed, and unseparated drop in the great ocean of human ex­ist­ence,” Child afrms the power of the picturesque to reassure middle-class city observers of the possibility of their own unique individuality. Poe’s sketch-­story and Child’s sketches show the dialectical relationship of the picturesque and the sublime in the midcentury urban experience. In Poe’s story, the failure of picturesque viewing gives way to the threat of the identity-­destroying sublime, but in Child’s sketches the threat of the sublime can be ameliorated by a consoling return to the picturesque. Tis tension suggests the relative precariousness of the middle-­class’s sense of its place in the mid-­nineteenthcentury city. Like Mathews’s “poor scholar” William, middle-­class urbanites found themselves ambivalent about the city, attracted to the notion that their status between the social extremes of the working class and bourgeois elite gave them a privileged position to comment on city life, but also concerned that the pressures of urban development might destroy that privilege and they might be swallowed up by the crowd. Te picturesque city sketch celebrated the middle-class experience of the city but also revealed its fears. Te next two chapters concern spaces and genres that the urban bourgeoisie and middle class constructed to respond to their fears about the city. Chapter 3 studies the American park movement—the call to insert picturesque landscapes into urban settings as a way to address social problems. Te chapter focuses not only on park designs, but also on the print discourse that surrounded this impulse to build city parks, especially New York’s Central Park. Texts to be studied include essays about parks by Andrew Jackson Downing and Frederick Law Olmsted, as well as lectures by Ralph Waldo Emerson and a novel by Sylvester Judd. If public parks were one way that the bourgeoisie and middle class sought to address their concerns about urban life in the mid-­nineteenth century, another signifcant response was the development of suburban living. Chapter 4 examines the most popular genre of suburban life in the period, the “country book.” Country books were largely autobiographical narratives (both fctional and nonfctional) that focused on male domesticity in the suburbs. With their domestic focus, country books imagined the suburbs as an ideal space for American manhood, set aside from the competitive spaces of the city’s public streets and female dominance over the domestic sphere. In fact, Chapter 3 will demonstrate the ways that the park movement also explicitly addressed concerns

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about masculinity, using the picturesque landscape of the park to address concerns about bourgeois male authority in the city. Te two chapters pair to focus on the particularly male bourgeois concerns and how they created new spaces in American life to address those concerns.

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Te Park Movement

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picturesque rus in urb Te broad cultural project launched to introduce country landscapes into U.S. cities through the creation of public parks has been called the “American park movement.” It began in the 1840s with initial calls for a “New York Park” (later Central Park) and continued into the 1880s as urban development spread westward across the nation.1 Perhaps the most famous expression of the period’s interest in landscape design, the rus-urban park (derived from the Latin rus in urbe, meaning “country in the city”) was dominated by pastoral and picturesque landscape modes. Tis nineteenth-century ideal of the public park transformed the urban landscape to create “natural” scenery, explicitly encouraging its visitors to cultivate landscape appreciation.2 Although the public park was a material construction that dramatically transformed the urban landscape, advocates of the park movement were even more interested in the symbolic efects of scenic landscape on people. As Frederick Law Olmsted, the central fgure of the American park movement, explained, “A park is a work of art, designed to produce certain efects upon the mind of men.”3 He also asserted: “A great object of all that is done in a park, of all the art of a park, was to infuence the mind of men through their imagination.”4 Te park movement harnessed the power of the picturesque and of landscape design more broadly to reshape both the physical space of the city and the imaginations of urban Americans. Te American park movement has been a signifcant object of study in scholarly disciplines that range from landscape design, geography, and urban planning to social and art history.5 Tese disciplines have studied not only the parks and their design plans, but also the literature of the American park movement, an extensive

Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835–1874. John Evelev, Oxford University Press (2021). © John Evelev. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894557.003.0004

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body of writings that advocate the building of public parks. Tese writings consist primarily of newspaper and magazine essays, scholarly addresses, and travelogue descriptions of English and European parks. Given the importance of the park movement to these other disciplines, it is notable that these writings have not been more central to literary studies.6 Tere was, in fact, an unusual degree of connection between the literary world and the park movement. Te frst recorded advocate for New York’s park was the well-known poet and editor William Cullen Bryant. Olmsted himself was best known as a travel writer and editor before his 1858 “Greensward Plan” was selected for Central Park.7 Te New York City committee that selected the plan included the authors Bryant, editor and novelist Charles F. Briggs, historian George Bancrof, and Washington Irving. Other writers who participated in the planning or designing of city parks included Andrew Jackson Downing, George Curtis, Horace Bushnell, and Donald Grant Mitchell.8 Although the greater number of urban public parks were not constructed until later, the literary arguments of the 1840s and 1850s helped defne the role of the park and teach the U.S. populace to imagine what parks could do. For this reason, Olmsted himself dated the start of the park movement to Andrew Jackson Downing’s essays of the late 1840s, a decade before construction began on Central Park.9 As Downing asserted in 1848: “[I]t is the province of the press—the writers who have the public ear—to help those to see (who are slow to perceive it), how much these outward infuences [of a park] have to do with bettering the condition of a people, as good citizens, patriots, men.”10 If parks were crucial to improving U.S. urban life, midcentury writers were essential to the persuasion of citizens to build those parks. Tis chapter envisions the various kinds of writings—lectures, essays, newspaper and magazine columns, and even fction—that ­legitimized the building of urban parks in the mid-nineteenth century as a genre. Park movement literature shared a common agenda: to imagine the tools of landscape design as a way to reshape Americans’ understanding of urban space and to reconceive their social roles within it. Park movement literature also shared a number of arguments and tropes. Tus, in addition to looking at nonfction writings by park advocates and designers—such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Parker Willis, Andrew Jackson Downing, and Frederick

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Law Olmsted—this chapter examines Sylvester Judd’s 1850 novel, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family. Tis work of fction makes the creation of a public park central to its plot and integrates the logic of the park movement into its literary project. Te novel’s plot is a reasonably conventional story of a poor young man’s social rise through virtuous participation in urban reform, but landscape design and the construction of an urban park also express its protagonist’s virtue and provide a means of social reform. In addition, Judd makes insistent parallels between the process of constructing parks and constructing novels by connecting the aesthetic project of combining the disparate parts of a written narrative with the project of constructing a picturesque urban park. Reading Judd’s reform novel in the context of the nonfction writings of park advocates shows that the park movement was part of a project to create what Lauren Berlant has called an “intimate public” in the antebellum era.11 Te park movement’s ideological project correlated parks, landscape design, and manhood to legitimize the bourgeois male urban experience. When, at Richard Edney’s end, Judd suggests that this story of reformist landscape design “indicates what may be expected of a man,” he makes overt the gender issues that are implicitly central to the American park movement.12 Te park was ofen fgured as a distinctly masculine “intimate public” social space; the men who wrote about and designed parks created “a porous afective scene of identifcation that promises a certain experience of belonging and provides a complex of consolation, confrmation, discipline and discussion about how to live.”13 As imagined in the fgurative spatial language of its advocates and designers, the park became the city’s “parlor” or “drawing-room,” an idealized hybrid of public and private space. Te men who discussed and designed parks imagined that in this hybrid space bourgeois women could restore their health, which had been destroyed by the indoor life of domestic femininity, and the poor could share in happy recreation. Te midcentury park movement envisioned the park as a tool of egalitarian social reform, bringing together the genders and classes in an idealized intimate public sphere. Coming together as a unifed urban community in the park, however, required moving “private” domestic experience outside of the home and away from control of bourgeois women and redefning a “public” urban experience distinct from the loitering, drinking, and fghting (and political protest) that

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typifed antebellum working-class masculinity. Te park movement’s deeply conficted defnition of the park spoke to bourgeois men’s anxieties about their place in the gender- and class-determined spaces of the antebellum city. Te male landscape designers and writers of the 1840s and 1850s voiced those concerns, and public parks ofered a vehicle through which bourgeois men could assert their dominance over city space. Tis process has persisted since the nineteenth century and has profoundly afected U.S. political and social life to this day.

Writing about Parks: Popular Refnement and Te Social Meaning of the Park Tere is no feature of the old countries that strikes an American with more agreeable surprise than the beautiful gardens of Europe.

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—ralph waldo emerson, “Te Young American”

When Emerson praised European “public gardens” such as “the Boboli in Florence, the Villa Borghese in Rome, the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, the gardens in Munich, and at Frankfort on the Maine” to an audience at Boston’s Mercantile Library Association in 1844, he meant to encourage Americans to construct similar gardens themselves. His reasons were not merely aesthetic: “[Tese] works [could be] easily imitated here, and . . . might well make the land dear to the citizen, and infame patriotism.”14 If this lauding of European landscapes as a model for forging U.S. patriotism is surprising to hear from Emerson, it was hardly unusual in the mid-1840s and into the 1850s. As the American park movement got underway, writers began to call for the creation of public parks in U.S. cities, ofen using the example of European parks. European cities, with their carefully designed public parks that fostered the free circulation of people of all classes, were seen as superior to U.S. cities, where increasing class division was readily apparent on the unremittingly commercial streets. Tis praise of European urban parks was present not only in William Cullen Bryant’s early calls for a “New-York Park” in 1844–1845, but also in travel writing by Carolyn Kirkland and Catharine Maria Sedgwick.15 European parks, whose designs educated the masses in the pleasures of landscape appreciation, ofered a model of what Andrew Jackson Downing, the period’s most important park advocate,

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called “popular refnement”: the difusion of cultural knowledge from elite society downward to the masses. Tis popular refnement became the central element of the American park movement’s social reformist project and, more broadly, part of bourgeois urban reformism in the antebellum era.16 Downing lef an indelible mark on U.S. park design through his writings in support of parks. In addition to his many publications, he was commissioned to design what became the Washington Mall shortly before his death in 1852 and, although his plan was ultimately not implemented, its infuence remained. His partner, Calvert Vaux, later teamed up with Olmsted to design Central Park in 1858. In the pages of his magazine Te Horticulturist, Downing repeatedly took up the subject of public parks and a New York park in particular. From his literary dialogue in the 1848 “A Talk about Public Parks and Gardens” and his 1849 essay on “Public Cemeteries and Public Gardens” to his 1850 travelogue description of “London Parks” and his 1851 “Te New-York Park,” Downing used a variety of literary modes to argue for the beneft of U.S. urban parks. While many advocated for the sanitary benefts of the park in contrast to commercial interests, Downing focused primarily on the social efects of the park on an increasingly class-divided U.S.  urban population. As Downing asserted in “Te New-York Park,” “the social infuence of . . . a great park in New York . . . is really the most interesting phase of the whole matter.”17 For Downing, the park promised not only to transform the daily experience of urban life, but also to alter notions of the national social order. Downing’s frst essay in support of parks, “A Talk about Public Parks and Gardens,” presented a dialogue between two men: “Editor” (presumably Downing in his role as editor of the magazine) and “Traveler,” an expatriate of fve years returning to the United States (most likely also a fctional mouthpiece for Downing). Published in Te Horticulturist in October 1848, the essay opens with the Traveler’s return to the United States in the afermath of the European revolutions, which are characterized as an “unsatisfactory movement” with “tumult” and “bloodshed on every side,” and with “people continually crying for liberty—who mean by that word, the privilege of being responsible to neither God nor governments.”18 Although the Traveler ofers a conventional conservative critique of the 1848 European revolutions and praises the United States, he goes on to explain that

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“difcult as [European nations] fnd it to be republican, in a political sense—[they] are practically far more so, in many of the customs of social life, than Americans” (139). As Downing’s primary example of European social republicanism, Traveler praises their public parks and gardens, “provided at public cost, maintained at public expense, and enjoyed daily and hourly, by all classes of persons,” ­arguing that “out of this common enjoyment of public grounds by all classes grows also a social freedom, and an easy and agreeable intercourse of all classes.”19 If Traveler’s experience of the 1848 revolutions highlights the political limitations of European republicanism, the “social freedom” of European public parks highlights the failure of U.S. social democracy. As the narrator explains: “With large professions of equality, I fnd my countrymen more and more inclined to raise up barriers of class, wealth, and fashion . . . and we owe it to ourselves and our republican professions to set about establishing a larger and more fraternal spirit in our social life.”20 Downing believed that public parks would address problems of social inequality in the United States and fulfll the promise of political republicanism. Downing saw the cultural work of popular refnement cultivated by parks as the primary solution to the problem of social inequality. In his 1851 essay “Te New-York Park,” Downing argued that Europe’s “galleries of art, public libraries, parks and gardens” all refected the project of popular refnement that “takes up popular education where the common school and ballot-box leave it, and raises up the working-man to the same level of enjoyment with the man of leisure and accomplishment.”21 Public education and the franchise were institutions of U.S. democracy, but institutions of popular refnement (i.e., libraries, art galleries, and parks) could enable the working class and elites to share the same pleasure. Downing argued that to reject the parks in the United States was to deny that all Americans could learn from the landscape: “Shame upon our republican compatriots who so little understand the elevating infuences of the beautiful in nature and in art, when enjoyed in common by thousands and hundreds of thousands of all classes without distinction!”.22 Downing faults those “republican compatriots” who fail to understand the role that aesthetics could play in social equality. He conceived parks as a means of elevating the cultural and social status of all: “Te higher social and artistic elements of every man’s nature lie dormant within him, and every laborer is a possible gentleman, not by the possession of money or fne clothes—but through the refning infuence of

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intellectual and moral culture.”23 Social elevation could come not through material acquisition, but through the acquisition of symbolic capital such as “intellectual and moral culture.” For Downing, the creation of public parks would allow “common enjoyment for all classes in the higher realms of arts, letters, science, social recreations, and enjoyments” and these cultural accomplishments were to be a crucial step in “banish[ing] the plague spots of democracy.”24 As Downing claimed in another Horticulturalist article, popular refnement through parks and other cultural forms was a fulfllment of national values: “Let us next take up popular refnement in the arts, manners, social life, and innocent enjoyments, and we shall see what a virtuous and educated republic can really become.”25 Downing envisioned the popular refning efects of parks as a fulfllment of political and social ideals. Downing’s infuence on Olmsted and the design of Central Park is well documented, but Sylvester Judd’s 1850 novel, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family, reveals the popular difusion of Downing’s ideas. In the middle of Richard Edney, Judd interrupts his story to introduce a chapter of meditations on urban planning, including citations to the 1849 report on Boston’s cholera epidemic and a précis of the plan of “Mr. Downing, in a recent Horticulturist . . . for the more specifc distribution of houses and streets, which combines much taste, neatness and utility.”26 Judd’s willingness to break with the conventional plot of his narrative to cite landscape design authorities is a clear sign of his novel’s didactic, reformist intent, but it is by no means the only sign of its investment in the park movement’s social project. Te novel as a whole refects the goal of developing popular refnement by making landscape sensibility the ground of an idealized egalitarian social vision embodied by the hero and the novel’s plot. Popular refnement and the social benefts of landscape design are central to Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family. Te novel’s hero, Richard, comes from the New England countryside to a fctionalized version of Augusta, Maine (where Judd was a Unitarian minister) to become an “operative,” a lumber mill factory worker. His status as a member of the lower class is mitigated, however, by his participation in reform, especially in the temperance movement, but even more importantly by his knowledge of landscape aesthetics and his propensity to garden. When a burst dam closes down the mills in town, Richard throws himself into “ornament[ing] and improv[ing]” his

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married sister’s property, turning it into a garden which he renames with the properly picturesque title “Willow Crof.”27 Afer describing Richard’s design eforts, the narrator responds to implied skepticism that a young working-class man might have any interest in landscape design by suggesting that if Richard was “in advance of his age and rank in this” work of landscape design “he was not in advance of the newspapers . . . to say nothing of his own taste.”28 Richard embodies Downing’s notion of popular refnement, refecting the role that “the press—of writers who have the public ear” could play in transmitting elite aesthetic and cultural values to the masses and promoting the social benefts that would accrue from this process. Richard’s picturesque landscape sensibility and design eforts are essential to his suitability as a mate to Melicent, the governor’s daughter, whom Richard eventually marries, despite their class differences. In one of their early encounters, while Richard serves as coach driver to her family for a countryside vacation, the two launch into a lengthy exchange on the landscape. Beginning with the banal opening assertion “It is a fne day,” they end up meditating on the aesthetic efect of the horizon’s framing: Richard suggests that one could argue for “an earth-line of the sky, as well as a sky-line of the earth.”29 When Melicent “wondered that a mill-boy and hack-driver should be so well informed” about landscape aesthetics, the narrator again leaps to his defense: “Tere was no wonder about it. He had had a good village education, and improved on what he was taught.”30 Judd’s connection between Richard’s access to public education and his familiarity with landscape aesthetics directly refects Downing’s vision of popular refnement, which depicted the park as an extension of such republican institutions as “the common school and the ballot-box.” Despite the obvious class diferences between Richard and Melicent, the language of landscape appreciation becomes a ground of cultural equality for them. Richard’s facility with landscape aesthetics fulflls Downing’s claim that “every laborer is a possible gentleman . . . through the refning infuence of intellectual and moral culture.” Richard and Melicent’s union reafrms American equality, made possible by the refning efects of picturesque landscapes. Judd’s novel is thoroughly invested in the political and social benefts of picturesque landscape appreciation and design. Just as Richard and Melicent’s democratic union is made possible by landscape appreciation, the novel shows how the construction of a city park, guided by Richard, yields benefcial social efects for the

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community. Before the creation of the park, the city itself is radically divided between the “New City,” home to the new development and wealthy residents, and “Knuckle Lane,” the home of the poor, “a deep gorge . . . sinuous, jagged, damp and dark . . . the slag and dross of the city refnement.”31 As soon as Richard is elected to the city council, he begins the project of landscape reform, by creating an urban park. Named “May-fower Glen,” it “became a favorite resort of the citizens . . . here the rich and poor met together in ways at once fraternal and respectful, joyous and refned.”32 At the end of the novel, Richard and Melicent celebrate their marriage at May-fower Glen in “a sort of bridal party thrown open to the public” that all elements of the city attend: “River Drivers and Islanders . . . the clergy and their deacons, representatives from [the wealthy] Victoria Square and La Fayette-street, parents and children, enthusiastic young men, and a fowery group of young girls, were there.”33 As a close to the novel, this wedding symbolizes the ideal imagined efects of the park movement: the broad difusion of aesthetic principles and the unifcation of an urban community. Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family refects the broader investment of the park movement in thinking about parks as, in Downing’s words, capable of “social infuence.” In its fnal vision of a community unifed through the public park, Richard Edney imagines the result that Olmsted celebrated in his 1870 speech, “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns”: Consider that the New York Park and the Brooklyn Park are the only places in those associated cities where, in this eighteen hundred and seventieth year afer Christ, you will fnd a body of Christians coming together, and with an evident glee in the prospect of coming together, all classes largely represented, with a common purpose, not at all intellectual, competitive with none, disposing to jealousy and spiritual or intellectual pride toward none, each individual adding by his mere presence to the pleasure of all others, all helping to the greater happiness of each. You may thus ofen see vast numbers of persons brought closely together, poor and rich, young and old, Jew and Gentile. I have seen a hundred thousand thus congregated, and I assure you that though there have been not a few that seemed a little dazed, as if they did not quite understand it, and were, perhaps, a little ashamed of it, I have looked studiously but vainly among them for a single face completely unsympathetic with the prevailing expression of good nature and light-heartedness.34

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Te aesthetic sensibility behind park design was imagined as cultural capital that could be attained by all members of society, creating a common language or argot of cultural communication that would forge cross-class connections. Even for those Manhattanites or Brooklynites Olmsted imagines as “dazed” and not quite able to “understand” the logic of park design, the public park nonetheless creates unprecedented possibilities for cohesion and happiness. But the point of Olmsted’s observation is, of course, that most park-goers will learn both to read the park landscape and fnd happiness as part of a unifed urban community. For advocates of the park movement like Downing, Olmsted, and Judd, the public park ofered the fulfllment of the utopian promise of U.S. democracy.

Figuring the Park: Gender in the Public Urban Space Te arts . . . of gardening, and domestic architecture . . . [are] the fne art[s] . . . lef for us, now that sculpture, painting, and religious and civil architecture have become efete.

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—ralph waldo emerson, “Te Young American.”35

Tis surprising quote from Emerson’s 1844 lecture refects the common association of landscape design with masculinity in the period. Although Emerson is vague about the causes that made the other arts “efete,” he was not alone in seeing masculinity in crisis and landscaping as a particularly masculinizing act.36 Tis crisis was resolved, or at least provisionally addressed, for many urban bourgeois men through landscape design. Nathaniel Parker Willis’s 1838 memoir of life in the nascent suburbs, A L’Abri, suggested planting and living among trees to those “men in the world whose misfortune it is to think too little of themselves.” For such men “[t]his suggesting to nature—working, as a master-mind, with all the fne mysteries of  root and sap, obedient to the call—is very king-like.”37 While Emerson and Willis are seldom yoked together, their comments hint at the way landscaping became associated with masculinity in the period. In particular, the park movement was a response to the perceived disempowerment by bourgeois men in the competitive world of commerce and to female dominance over the domestic realm. Tis context helps to explain why the park movement was dominated by men.38 Te future of urban public parks in the antebellum

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era was negotiated not just in print advocacy, where the male voice on this topic was dominant, but also in the traditionally bourgeois male worlds of mercantile property ownership and civic bureaucracy. Te predominance of male support of parks puts it in contrast to some of the other urban reform movements of the period, such as temperance and the urban visiting societies, which featured female participation.39 Responding to a conventional divide that pitted the male “public” world of the city’s commercial streets against the feminine “private” realm of the domestic home, the literature of the park movement depicted the park as idyllic space that synthesized the best elements from both spheres, benefting both men and women in a utopian fusion of public and private. A closer examination of the texts and their representations of gendered experiences of the park, however, suggests a more complicated narrative. Ostensibly responding to the detrimental efects of women’s privatized urban domesticity, the logic of the park also challenged feminine authority over the domestic sphere by moving the family out of the home and into the park, which was understood as both a male-dominated and domestic space, the city’s “drawing-room.” Te park movement paid special attention to the place of women and domestic life in the city. Writers and park designers imagined that women in particular would beneft from the creation of public parks. In his retrospective examination of antebellum urbanization and the need for parks, “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns”(1870), Frederick Law Olmsted identifed women as the primary motivators for urban development: “We all recognize that the tastes and dispositions of women are more and more potent in shaping the course of civilized progress, and again we must acknowledge that women are even more susceptible to this downward drif than men.”40 If women were the “potent” force in driving the greater sophistication and convenience of urban life, however, the park movement also saw them as the major victims of the city’s increasing divide between the commercial public and domestic private spheres. In “A Talk about Public Parks and Gardens,” Downing imagined the lives of U.S.  urban women as particularly limited because they were hemmed in by the interior spaces of their domestic lives. He believed that they sufered from an “apparent universal want of health” due to the “many sedentary, listless hours which they pass within doors.” Te private domestic space ofered only “a listless lounge upon a sofa

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at home, over the last new novel or pattern of embroidery,” while the park ofered “exercise in the pure open air” and “room and space enough for pleasant little groups or circles of all sizes.”41 Excluded from the public world of commerce, the life of the urban woman was imagined as too private; the park was the perfect solution to this problem. In his 1850 “Te New-York Park,” Downing imagined the feminized home space as opposed to the social world of the park: “Drawing-room conventionalities are too narrow for a mile or two of spacious garden landscape, and one can be happy with ten thousand in the social freedom of a community of genial infuences, without the unutterable pang of not having been introduced to the company present.”42 Tese passages portray the urban park as a counter to urban domestic space, pitting the “spacious” park, with its healthful activity and “social freedom,” against the “narrow” domestic space and its social conventions. It is too simple, however, to suggest that the park movement devalued the domestic sphere and imagined women as victims of city life. In fact, Olmsted frequently associated parks with a positively imagined domestic space. Even before he had begun to design parks, Olmsted praised German public parks and their afrmation of family life in a personal letter to Downing in 1850: Te custom of taking meals in the gardens or summer houses is very common; and it seemed to me the middle classes at least lived in the open air more than even the English. Nor did it seem to me, as is frequently asserted, that their habits in this respect injured the family infuence, or made Home any less homelike and lovable, but the contrary.43

Rejecting the claim that dining outside diminished European family life, Olmsted sought to bring the domestic sphere outside in his park designs. Troughout his writings, he envisioned the park as an extension of the domestic realm. In “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns,” he ofered the “familiar domestic gathering” as an example of the kind of social interaction, which he termed “gregarious receptive recreations,” that would counteract “the prevailing bias to degeneration and demoralization in large towns.”44 Promising to bring domestic life out into the public in the park, Olmsted ofered an idealized vision of domesticity as a contrast to urban social life as either commerce or ostentatious display:

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[Te park is] where the prattle of children mingles with the easy conversation of the more sedate, the bodily requirements satisfed with good cheer, fresh air, agreeable light, moderate temperature, snug shelter, and furniture and decorations adapted to please the eye, without calling for profound admiration on the one hand, or tending to fatigue or disgust on the other . . . stimulate and keep alive the more tender sympathies, and give play to faculties such as may be dormant in business or on the promenade.45

From the mix of children talking with adult conversation to “furniture and decorations,” Olmsted’s vision here closely parallels the antebellum domestic ideology of advocates like Catharine Beecher but transfers the domestic pleasures of family life into the public realm through construction of the public park.46 Olmsted’s park was intended to foster a domestic social experience that provided an alternative to an urban public sphere dominated by commercial and utilitarian values. He asserted:

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We want the greatest possible contrast with the streets and the shops and the rooms of the town which will be consistent with convenience and the preservation of good order and neatness. We want, especially, the greatest possible contrast with the restraining and confning conditions of the town, those conditions which compel us to walk circumspectly, watchfully, jealously, which compel us to look closely upon others without sympathy.47

As Betsy Klimasmith suggests, Olmsted’s vision of the park “distills the disciplinary power of domesticity and broadcasts it on a carefully constructed screen of nature.”48 While Olmsted’s sentimental vision of the city’s commercial streets as “restraining and confning” seems opposed to Downing’s vision of the unhealthful and confning urban domestic space, in fact, both saw the public park as an idealized space, where both “social freedom” and intimate “gregarious recreation” could truly be experienced. Both Downing and Olmsted saw the virtue of claiming the urban park as a hybridized public/private space. Te park’s hybrid status refects the deeply conficted bourgeois attitudes toward public and private spheres in the mid-nineteenth century. For example, Downing was comfortable calling European parks “the pleasant drawing-rooms of the whole population; where they gain health, good spirits, social enjoyment, and a frank and cordial bearing towards their neighbor, that is totally unknown . . . in

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America.”49 Tis characterization of the public park as both “the pleasant drawing-rooms of the whole population,” with its association of urban democratic social intimacy, is at odds with his earlier cited critiques of urban domesticity, with its “Drawing-room conventionalities.” Downing’s repeated fgurative invocation of the “drawing room” to discuss the public park uses the ostensibly “private” context of domestic architecture to explore “public” life in the city, hinting at the park movement’s broader engagement with public and private spaces. During the mid-nineteenth century, the drawing room, a shortening of “withdrawing room,” served as a wholly private space for familial socializing. Tis was a development from earlier domestic interiors, which made fewer distinctions about private and public spaces within the home. Te mid-nineteenth-century drawing room was also ostensibly an alternative to the parlor, another space for socializing within the domestic space, but it was more complexly confgured for company beyond the domestic circle.50 John Kasson suggests that the parlor was “an elaborate social statement . . . a family’s major act of self-representation.”51 Te parlor was a central expression of the new complexly intermingled “public” and “private” life of the mid-nineteenth-century U.S. middle-class family and, with it, generated new anxieties about the corruption of domestic life by social concerns. Te reconfguration of middle-class domestic space not only increased distinctions between public and private modes, but also distinctions between genders associated with domestic spaces.52 Antebellum writings about the urban park suggest an impulse by men to reconfgure domesticity, whereby the park became a maledominated surrogate for the female-dominated domestic parlor, fnding a new way to imagine the idealized private/public social interactions. Tis concern with the relationship of landscaped exterior spaces to domestic interior social spaces also appears in Judd’s Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family, a novel that hints at the ways this concern was central to the park movement at midcentury. Richard Edney clearly exposes the social stakes wherein the park movement’s vision of a masculinized design for park space trumps a feminized domestic authority in the home. When Richard comes to the New England mill town, he moves in with his sister, Roxy, who is married to an amiable stable owner and is also mother to two cute and happy young daughters. Despite this pleasant domestic context, Roxy is

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always dissatisfed. She is anxious about her social status, and she frets that her children’s behavior does not ft with conventional models of domestic propriety. When faced with any domestic challenge, Roxy begins by prefacing her comments with the phrase, “I always said if I ever had.”53 Tis phrase refects a vision of domesticity as structured by fxed preconceptions, exemplifying the “drawing-room conventionalities” that Downing decried. It is no coincidence that Roxy’s domestic trials in the novel culminate in a scene in her parlor, the conficted space of bourgeois propriety in the period. In the chapter “Household Words,” Judd compares Roxy’s parlor to Richard’s park-like landscape design, Willow Crof, to highlight the diference between a liberatory male park design and constrained feminine domesticity. Roxy’s parlor is the best room of the house, “the largest and the pleasantest,” but it is never used for fear that it  will be soiled and will no longer be suitable for visitors.54 It is ­described as “a hidden room,—an inner sanctum” and, in a telling reversal of gender dynamics, as “Bluebeard’s chamber,” as if it contained hidden domestic horrors.55 Roxy’s parlor fts Calvert Vaux’s ironic description in his 1857 domestic architectural pattern book, Villas and Cottages. Te parlor, Vaux states,

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becomes a sort of quarantine in which to put each plague of a visitor that calls; and one almost expects to see the lady of the house walk in with a bottle of camphor in her hand, to prevent infection, she seems to have such a fear that any one should step within the bounds of her real every-day home life.56

In Judd’s novel, the parlor becomes a site of crisis when Roxy and her family receive a visit from Mrs. Mellow, the wealthy “Secretary of the Home Inspection Society,” a feminine reform group that ofers domestic advice and distributes Christian tracts. Te parlor is opened for Mrs. Mellow, and Roxy’s children, who are rarely ofered the treat of entering the tabooed room, promptly misbehave, shaming Roxy in front of her wealthy visitor. When Roxy complains about her children’s behavior, Mrs. Mellow scoldingly asks, “Do you teach them obedience?” and instructs the frustrated mother that “[o]ne should never give up to children. . . . When you have laid down a rule, adhere to it.”57 Inserting himself into this feminine exchange, Richard asks, “What if the rule is a bad one?” and Mrs. Mellow ofers him “a tract, which she said she hoped would teach him humility and the fear of

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God.”58 Roxy’s respect for Richard leads her to question Mrs. Mellow’s authority and to consider Richard’s assertion that “the best room [is] that which answers its purpose best, and contributes most to the enjoyment of the family.”59 Richard encourages his sister to consider that if she expects her children to treat the parlor with respect, she must allow them to be familiar with it, explaining, “It is the rarity of entrance that leads the children to abuse it so. . . . [T]he more you hide things from people, the more they want to see them.”60 At the conclusion of this exchange, Roxy decides to open up the parlor for regular family use. Tis scene is relatively conventional in the domestic fction and advice literature of the period, where a woman’s social aspirations are critiqued and the primacy of her private, domestic role as wife and mother is reafrmed.61 In Judd’s novel, however, this discussion of the problems of the parlor are paired with the social benefts of exterior landscape design. In Judd’s novel, the opposite of Roxy’s rule-bound domestic parlor is Willow Crof, the park-like product of Richard’s landscape designs. Te “Household Words” chapter begins not in the home, but in Willow Crof. In contrast to Roxy’s parlor, with its elaborate and formal designs that can only function properly without human presence, Willow Crof is carefully designed to encourage human activity and interaction in a landscape that owes much to picturesque park planning: Richard had set the trees, not at the corners of the yard, not in straight lines, but in groups and curves; thus creating many little in-and-out places for caprice and pastime to practice in. “Look at the children among the trees,” he called to his sister. She did look, and smiled. Tey were nothing but her children, and these were nothing but trees; they were children, too, who, in the house, were so ofen a sigh on her heart, or an annoyance to her hands; but now they were pretty,—simply pretty, exquisitely pretty. She felt this, and so did Richard; and they showed it by their looks, since neither spoke.62

Unlike the parlor, which is designed only for display of adherence to social norms, Willow Crof is carefully designed and planned to encourage “caprice and pastime.” Roxy learns to appreciate her family through the landscaping of Richard’s Willow Crof in contrast to her home, where the arbitrary rules of domesticity limit her ability to enjoy the happiness of her pretty children. Te irony of the “Household Words” chapter—whose title seems to invoke domestic

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advice literature of the sort Mrs. Mellow and her ilk would produce—is that Judd fnds the solution to Roxy’s family problems not in the “household” at all, but outside in the designed park landscape. Te midcentury public park was intended to resolve these tensions between a domestic interior and public exterior by taking the intimacy of family life out into the public. In the process, however, the male designers of the park claimed a privileged authority over both the social life of the city and the domestic life of home, once designated as the woman’s sphere. Te change was not seen solely in Judd’s novel. For example, in “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns,” Olmsted imagined the ideal use of the park, and he constructed a scenario in which

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[a] man of any class shall say to his wife, when he is going out in the morning: “My dear, when the children come home from school, put some bread and butter and salad in a basket, and go to the spring under the chestnut-tree where we found the Johnsons last week. I will join you there as soon as I can get away from the ofce. We will walk to the dairy-man’s cottage and get some tea, and some fresh milk for the children, and take our supper by the brook-side”; and this shall be no joke, but the most refreshing earnest.63

Tis is surely a vision of an idealized intimate public, but the wife’s domestic authority is blithely appropriated by the “man of any class,” as he sets the agenda for the evening meal and family activities. Many contemporary observers and historians have noted that the creation of Central Park was a transformative moment in the lives of bourgeois New York women, opening up social opportunities for women who had the leisure to make use of the park, very much fulflling Downing’s vision for the park.64 When the park becomes the city’s “drawing room,” however, this public appropriation of domesticity brings a complex reapportioning of gendered cultural authority in mid-nineteenth-century America, as Olmsted suggested.

Dislodging Mose and Sam: Public Parks and the Treat of Working-Class Masculinity Te public urban park responded to a host of perceived threats to middle-class male authority in the midcentury. In addition to the commercialization of the city’s social life and the female dominance

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over the domestic realm, park advocates and designers identifed working-class men as another looming threat to mid-nineteenthcentury U.S. urban life. As we saw in Chapter 2, urban working-class masculinity was associated with a series of stereotypical attitudes and traits: in addition to the style of dress and entertainment choices, strong presence on the city streets that city sketchers observed, we can also add a host of other stereotypical traits, including aggressively populist Democratic political partisanship, and pugnaciousness, especially directed at men of the higher classes.65 Te most famous example was Bowery habitué Mose the Fireboy, popularized in Benjamin Baker’s 1848 play “A Glance at New York,” who became a standard fgure in literary and theatrical representations of New York city life in the antebellum era. Te real-life Moses of the Bowery used their aggressive presence on the city streets to afrm residual notions of republican selfood that authorized more direct representational notions of politics that manifested themselves not just in loitering on the streets or confronting the wealthy but also in staging large-scale political protests.66 For this reason, the urban working-class young man was ofen portrayed as a challenge to “moral order,” a common term used to characterize the bourgeois dominance over U.S.  public space. Historians have demonstrated the ways in which politicians and reformers sought to delegitimize and defuse the collective presence of working-class men on city streets throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.67 Te park movement refected these political and social conficts and explicitly worked to address the physical presence of the workingclass male on the city’s streets and parks. Fears that they would take over the public park space were common in the early years of the movement. Downing addressed this concern in 1850 as a charge against the viability of the park from wealthy park detractors, who worried that “a park in this country would be ‘usurped by rowdies and low people’.”68 Similarly, looking back on the birth of the park movement from the perspective of life in the year 1870, Olmsted quoted an 1857 article from the New York Herald that articulated the bourgeois fear that the park would become merely a new space for young working-class men to colonize: It is all folly to expect in this country to have parks like those in aristocratic countries. When we open a public park Sam will air himself in it. He will take his friends whether from church, street, or elsewhere.

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He will knock down any better dressed man who remonstrates with him. He will talk and sing, and fll his share of the bench, and firt with the nursery-maids in his own coarse way. Now we ask what chance have William B. Astor and Edward Everett against this fellowcitizen of theirs? Can they and he enjoy the same place? Is it not obvious that he will turn them out, and that the great Central Park will be nothing but a great beer-garden for the lowest denizens of the city, of which we shall yet pray litanies to be delivered?69

Olmsted took seriously Te Herald’s vision of “Sam” and his ilk beating up and driving out the city’s wealthy and powerful men and turning Central Park into “a great beer garden.” He explained that “[t]he difculty of preventing rufanism and disorder in a park to be frequented indiscriminately by such a population as that of New York, was from the frst regarded as the greatest of all those which the commission had to meet.”70 Te park was designed to prevent working-class male “rufanism and disorder,” but it was also intended as a way to transform their behavior. Te park movement was a reformist project to repossess the city’s streets from working-class young men and restore moral order to the city.71 For park advocates, the “problem” of urban working-class young men was understood as the antithesis of the “problem” of the domestic woman in the city. Having argued that the antebellum city made the bourgeois woman too private and domestic, it conversely claimed that working-class young men were not domestic or private enough. In “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns,” for example, Olmsted asked his audience to picture a typical city street scene: [C]onsider how ofen you see young men in knots of perhaps half a dozen in lounging attitudes rudely obstructing the sidewalks, chiefy led in their little conversation by the suggestions given to their minds by what or whom they may see passing in the street, men, women, or children, whom they do not know, and for whom they have no respect or sympathy. Tere is nothing among them or about them which is adapted to bring into play a spark of admiration, of delicacy, manliness or tenderness. You see them presently descend in search of physical comfort to a brilliantly lighted basement, where they fnd others of their sort, see, hear, smell, drink, and eat all manner of vile things.72

In Olmsted’s passage, the objects of the stereotypically working-class young men’s aggression are not just other men, but also “women or children.” For Olmsted, the public socializing of the working-class

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male was a rejection of the domestic and the more private values of “sympathy,” “delicacy,” and “tenderness.” Guided only “by the suggestions given to their minds by what or whom they see passing in the street,” the working-class young men reject any private moral promptings in favor of a purely public existence. Envisioned as exclusively inhabiting the city streets (as if they had no homes) and deriving all their insight into the world from that same source, young working-class urban men were seen as an expression of a selfood that was anti-domestic and wholly public. Te park movement’s solution to the problem of the aggressively “lounging” public young men was to use the park to induce more domestic social impulses. Continuing his observations on young men on the streets, Olmsted notes that “[w]hether on the curbstones or in the dram-shops, these young men are all under the same infuence of the same impulse which some satisfy about the tea-table with neighbors and wives and mothers and children, and all things clean and wholesome, sofening and refning.”73 Presenting the threatening presence of working-class men on city streets as derived from the same social impulse as “clean and wholesome” bourgeois domestic relations, Olmsted seems to refuse to demonize either Sam or Mose. But it also delegitimizes the distinctive practices of working-class masculine social life. Te working-class male investment in an authoritative public presence on the city’s “curb-stones” was not simply a perversion of the domestic social impulse. Asserting the political and social value of a physically embodied presence on the city streets, this working-class practice had its own history and legitimating ideology. In his essay, Olmsted seeks to submerge this residual republican ideology of embodied public presence into a universalizing liberal bourgeois norm of disembodied social refnement. Te park movement’s concern over how to deal with the challenge of antebellum working-class men dominating the park helps to explain the presence of what is surely the most notable oddity in Judd’s novel: the depiction of Richard’s fellow sawmill worker, Clover. From the description of “his lower lip rowdyishly protrud[ing] . . . with a quid of tobacco as large as a pullet’s egg,” to his hat “tilted so much on his head, it seemed as if it would fall of,” to his menacing habit of fourishing his fsts, Clover is a walking catalog of the mid-nineteenth-century working-class urban male of the stereotype.74 In the novel, Clover is

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the antitype to Richard’s virtues of Christian reformism, to his romantic landscape sensibility, and to his bourgeois work ethic. Instead, Clover expresses a hyperbolic version of the aggressive imperialist individualism of the antebellum Democratic Party, which, afer President Andrew Jackson, was most commonly seen as the political voice of the urban working class. More than just a portrait of workingclass masculinity, Clover is a strangely allegorical character who constantly refers to himself in the third person. He explains himself when he frst meets Richard: “Enlargement, aggrandizement, glory, fame, are natural to the human breast; they are natural to my breast. Power, might, are honorable; and these I study to exercise.”75 Clover repeatedly associates his personal behavior with the aggressively imperialistic U.S. nationalism in the age of Manifest Destiny, unproblematically likening himself to those who appropriated Native American land, to those who sold the children of slaves, and to General Winfeld Scott of the recently conducted Mexican War: “Might makes right. . . . Behold the majestic Scott cutting his way through the heart of Mexico;—veins, arteries, legs, arms, like sawdust, lie on either side of him; he arrives at the Halls of Montezumas in a foam of blood! that proud nation is humiliated at our feet!”76 Clover’s bloodthirsty self-aggrandizement is insistently associated with aggressive U.S. military behavior. When Richard faults Clover’s reactions to his co-workers, Clover returns to geopolitical metaphors: “I know I am on the borders of my land. I do not wish to get up a fght with you, or any one; but if your nose happens to come within the radius of my fst,—. . . why, take care of yourself, Sir, take care of yourself!”77 When Richard follows Clover’s metaphor by suggesting that “I think you trespass on neighbor’s right a little. . . . At least you are on disputed territory,” Clover retorts “I know I am. . . . WHERE WAS PALO ALTO? Tere is no great action except on disputed territory; no reputation is acquired anywhere else.”78 In what can only be seen as a caricature of Jacksonian Democratic justifcations of the national territorial imperative, Clover articulates a model of imperial selfood: “I must be sovereign within my own sphere; and my sphere is what my abilities naturally comprise; or what my endeavors can conquer. I AM FATED TO SPREAD,–I AM FATED TO SPREAD, Edney!” Clover attempts to seduce Richard to his way, assuring him that “you don’t know the dear, lovely charming sense of power.”79 But Richard stays true to his reformist credo “To

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do good and be good” and Clover’s eforts are thwarted at every turn. Afer Richard and Melicent celebrate their marriage in the public park, we fnd Clover with a crew of drunken cronies exiled to the edge of town as a result of the success of Richard’s temperance efforts. Returning to town in the midst of a torrential downpour, Clover asserts his heroic selfood to the skies—“Ye powers of heaven, or hell, I HAVE COME!”80 and is promptly struck dead by lightning. Clover’s death seems to be a notably dramatic conclusion to the novel, but it also refects the stark challenge that urban working-class masculinity ofered to the logic of the park movement. If they cannot be integrated into a unifed urban community in the park, there is no place for them. Judd must literally kill of Clover to envision a happy ending for his novel. Judd’s version of Clover as symbolic of the threat of the workingclass urban male is a variant of Te Herald’s 1857 vision that Olmsted cited, of “Sam” going around knocking down Astor and Everett in Central Park. And yet it correlates with the park movement’s broader concern with a working-class masculine culture that associated embodied individual selfood with public identity. Tere is no place for Clover’s aggressive, imperialist selfood in Judd’s fnal vision of the reconstituted urban community joined together by a shared presence in the public park. In the shared logic of the novel and the park movement, Clover’s sovereign self must be merged into the park collectivity. In contrast to Clover’s embrace of an American imperial selfood embodied by the Mexican War where the act of invading new territories becomes an expression of national identity, the American park movement expresses itself territorially through landscape design and through the construction of a homogeneous bourgeois public whose best expression is in a hybridized public and private park crowd.

Conclusion: How Is a Novel Like a Park? Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family is a strange mish-mash of sentimental story and reformist polemic peopled with a startling blend of naturalistic and symbolic characters. As such, it hardly corresponds to modern aesthetic notions of unity or characterization. Nonetheless, Judd matched his literary form directly to the logic of

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the park as it was developed in the mid-nineteenth century. In his preface to the novel, he disavowed conventional metaphors of narrative structure for imagery of landscaping: A Tale is not like a house, except in its door-plate, the title-page. It does not require an entry or reception-room. It is rather like a rose, the sum of the qualities of which are visible at a glance; albeit it will repay a minute attention, and afords material for prolonged enjoyment. It is like a landscape, which appeals in like manner to a comprehensive eye, rather than a critical inquiry. We incline, then, to the rose and the landscape, notwithstanding there may be a defective leaf in the frst, or a rude hut in the last.81

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Rejecting the metaphor of the domestic interior for the structure of his novel, Judd ofers instead “a landscape” that demands “a comprehensive eye,” like that of the park-goer gazing upon aspects of park scenery. Later in the novel, Judd compares his tale to the distinct sections of a “garden” (i.e., kitchen, grains, fruit, etc.): [T]e connection between the several parts [of the garden] consists of naked paths alone; yet it is a garden,—Horticulture enforces its principles and maintains its dignity throughout, and the innate garden-love is satisfed. So a Tale may have its various departments, the only apparent connection between which shall be the leaves of the book and the enumeration of the chapters, and still please Historical taste. Tere is a real connection in both instances;—in the frst, it is that of the brooding and immanent power of Nature, which is always a unity and beauty; in the last, it is the heart of the Author, which is likewise a unity and should be a beauty.82

Again, Judd imagines his narrative as a cultivated landscape, unifed by its origins in “Nature” and the “Author,” an originating unity that trumps its visual or literary fragmentation. Just as the park was intended to change its visitors through the power of landscape design, Judd imagines the structure of his novel changing the social attitudes and values of his readers. To read Judd’s 1850 novel is not just to trace an argument in favor of urban public parks, but also to experience the mid-nineteenth-century U.S. urban park in all of its aesthetic, social, and moral principles in literary form. Justifying the oddly allegorical quality of the character of Clover in the novel, Judd asserted in an epilogue, “Let

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it be ­incarnated, and reside in our houses, and see how it looks!”83 Te same could be said of Judd’s novel as a whole. With its landscaping hero, attitudes toward bourgeois women and domestic space as well as toward working-class men and public spatial imperialism, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family incarnates the antebellum logic of the park movement, letting us “see how it looks” before the parks were constructed and integrated into U.S. urban life. Just as Judd’s novel leveraged the power of emotions and deeply conficted private and public notions to reshape nineteenth-century urban life, the American park movement sought to embody a bourgeois masculine vision of urban social order. In its vision of a hybridized private and public space where all would invest themselves and partake of the cultural capital of “public refnement” and where the male-directed bourgeois domestic social order could be displayed in public and shared by all, the park movement revealed a utopian vision of urban social order. In this vision, however, urban constituencies (most notably working-class male and bourgeois women) had to be taught to appreciate the picturesque rus-urban landscape of the urban park or risk being excluded from it and from the broader social vision of urban life that it imagined. As works of mid-nineteenthcentury U.S. “art” and “imagination,” both the parks and the literature that preceded them instantiated a vision of the public sphere that became increasingly powerful over the course of the nineteenth century and beyond. Although the park and its social vision was contested at its origin, examples like Central Park have since consistently stood as an idealized space of urban life and community in the modern U.S. experience. Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar conclude their magisterial history, Te Park and the People: A History of Central Park (1992) with the claim that “Central Park is still ‘the most democratic space’ in New York, if not in the United States.”84 Tis is not to suggest that Central Park as planned and discussed in the 1850s has simply ­remained monolithically in place: As Rosenzweig and Blackmar demonstrate, the history of Central Park has been one of continual negotiations between diferent urban constituencies, and the ways the park has been used by these constituencies have ofen diverged greatly from how Downing, Olmsted, Vaux, and other midcentury park advocates imagined. And yet it remains a potent symbol of the way practitioners of the picturesque helped to reimagine U.S. spaces, and in doing so, it helped to create the modern nation.

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masculinity, domesticity, and the rise of american suburbs In the preface to Up the River, his 1853 memoir of domestic life in the Hudson River Valley, a formerly rural area rapidly becoming a suburb of New York City, F. W. Shelton apologized to readers for the familiarity of his book’s form and content, admitting that “many books have already been written of the like design.”1 Tis apology might come as a surprise to modern readers: Books about male domesticity in the suburbs do not play much of a role in our literary history of the period. Instead, domesticity is still largely seen as a topic of women’s writing of that time.2 Shelton’s contemporaries, however, would probably have recognized the truth of his observation about his book, as men wrote many memoirs about rural and/or suburban domestic life on the outskirts of northeastern urban areas in this period. In fact, so many such works were produced that the kind of book Shelton was referring to was its own genre: the country book.3 Despite its present obscurity, the country book and its depictions of male domesticity amidst the picturesque domestic and landscape settings of the suburbs were central to the formation of modern American ideals of bourgeois masculinity, a contradictory mix of privacy and male friendship, intimacy and phobic homosociality. If the country book genre has largely disappeared from our understanding of mid-nineteenth-century American literature, its vision of an American manhood tied to suburban domesticity remains crucial. Te country book took multiple forms. Like the sketches discussed in the previous chapters, it ofen originally appeared as a periodical column or serial, but it was popular enough to see fnal published

Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835–1874. John Evelev, Oxford University Press (2021). © John Evelev. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894557.003.0005

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form as a book. It was almost always a frst-person narrative, most commonly written by men, and it focused on life in the suburbs or borderland rural areas where agriculture was giving way to residential development. Te genre paid particular attention to descriptions of local scenery, domestic architecture, and landscaping as well to family life, but it ofen placed even more emphasis on male friendship. Country books began appearing in the late 1830s. One of its earliest examples was N.  P.  Willis’s “A L’Abri, or the Tent Pitched,” ­serialized letters that appeared in New York’s Te Daily Mirror starting in 1838. It was later published as a book in 1839 and then again in 1844 as Letters from under a Bridge. Te genre fourished through the 1860s and included such works as Donald Grant Mitchell’s My Farm at Edgewood: A Country Book (1863, followed by Wet Days at Edgewood [1865] and Rural Studies [1867]). Te form of country books varied quite signifcantly. Some took a diaristic form, such as the rare woman-authored country book, Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours (1850) and Henry Carmer Wetmore’s, Rural Life in America; or Summer and Winter in the Country (1856). Others were epistolary, including A L’Abri and L. W. Mansfeld’s UpCountry Letters. Still others were structured by the seasons (shaped, like Up-Country Letters and Toreau’s Walden [1854]) to encompass nature’s annual cycle. Although ofen autobiographical, many used the devices of fction, whether creating a fctional narrator or adding interpolated stories and other narrators to move the narrative beyond the local frame. Some country books adopted a satirical or comical tone, such as Frederic Cozzens’s popular Te Sparrowgrass Papers; or Living in the Country (1856), which generated humor from the narrator’s repeated failures to fulfll his idealized fantasy of country life away from the city, while others conceived of the genre’s purpose more seriously and ofered extensive and detailed advice on how best to establish a country home. (Mitchell’s Edgewood narratives are notable for their largely non-narrative form and didactic tone.) Despite diferences of form and tone, country books were marked by a decided lack of emphasis on plot or narrative events. Instead, they were typically structured episodically and dominated by descriptions of thoughts, reveries, and fights of fancy of the male suburban narrator. Tis may be antithetical to our modern notions of books particularly aimed at a male audience, but the popularity of the country book suggests a vision of American masculinity that difers from our

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c­ urrent stereotypes. Toreau’s Walden is probably the only country book familiar to modern readers, though they are typically unaware of its generic afliation. Tis lack of modern recognition of the country book should not blind us to its signifcance, since the genre articulated a model of male domesticity through extensive use of picturesque design to instantiate the spatial imaginary of the American suburbs that is still with us today. Figuring the suburban home as an expression of masculine selfhood, the country book imagined a diferent kind of domestic space from that dominated by women. In this way, the country book and its suburban landscape were related to the urban park and the literature that accompanied it: Both used picturesque design to legitimate bourgeois male authority over domestic experience. Although ­suburban masculinity was centered in a home whose interior and exterior design was imagined by Downing and other landscape and architectural designers of the period, it was not exclusively as private or family-oriented as female domesticity is ofen depicted. In her study of the literature of antebellum male domesticity, Millette Shamir identifed Walden as the most notable example of a literary mode that privileged depersonalized intimacy between male writer and reader as an idealized vision of the new suburban masculinity.4 But as we will see in the many country book narratives of suburban life written by men in the mid-nineteenth century, suburban life was ofen fgured as an idealized space to foster not only male privacy, but also male social bonds, particularly the kinds of intimate male friendships foreclosed upon in the urban world of competitive work and public spaces. Te country book’s male domesticity claims authority over a private space ofen seen as dominated in the period by women, but also itself feels threatened by urban and commercial masculinity. As such, the country book hints at the complex balance of gender, pleasure, and power at play in suburban domesticity.5 Locating Walden in the context of the country book and examining other country books, this chapter ofers a vision of the suburbs as a complex site of negotiated masculine authority, intimacy, and selfexpressive possibilities. But while the country book constructed the mid-nineteenth century picturesque suburbs as an idealized space for an American manhood and an alternative to urban masculinity, it also revealed unresolved tensions between conficting desires for male privacy and intimacy in American life.

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Suburbia, the Picturesque, and American Manhood

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[I]t is a pity that every man’s house cannot be really his own, and that he cannot make all that is true, beautiful, and good, in his own ­character, tastes, pursuits and history, manifest in it. —frederick law olmsted, Walks and Talks of an American Farmer (1852)6

Olmsted’s complaint about the failure of the home to express the best qualities of a man was common in the period, as was the interest of a man in domesticity. Tis impulse to make a man’s house “really his own” contributed to the explosion of interest in domestic landscape and interior design and to the rising popularity of the suburbs in the midcentury. Te country book expressed this idealized impulse for bourgeois men to express themselves through suburban domestic experience in the mid-nineteenth century. Kenneth Jackson’s seminal history of the American suburbs, Crabgrass Frontier (1985), argues that the residential neighborhoods on the periphery of cities have “become the quintessential physical achievement in the United States. It is more representative of its culture than big cars, tall buildings, or professional football.”7 Although the development of this quintessential national space did not begin in the mid-nineteenth century, this period marked the suburb’s most signifcant emergence as an idealized residential space in U.S.  life. Te antebellum emergence of the suburbs is a well-documented historical phenomenon, with a host of economic, infrastructure, and cultural forces converging to inspire frst wealthy and later middleclass Americans to leave the city for what John Stilgoe called the “borderlands,” an idealized liminal zone between the “hectic” city and the “slovenly” rural area.8 Te early development of the U.S. suburbs was, in the words of historian Dolores Hayden, “a sustained economic confict between those who viewed the landscape as a place to rest from profting elsewhere and those who viewed the landscape as a place to make a proft.”9 Suburbanization refected the ways that the American bourgeoisie transformed the value of some selected portions of the rural landscape from the utilitarianism of farming to the symbolic capital of aesthetics. Suburban development shifed from wealthy individuals purchasing former farms in the 1820s and 1830s to ‘picturesque enclaves,’ planned suburban developments for the upper middle classes in the 1850s, to more humble middle- and working-class

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neighborhoods at the outer limits of urban mass transit in the 1870s. Te cultural project of the suburbs reshaped the physical landscape of mid-nineteenth century United States, privileging the picturesque sensibility of semidomesticated nature and Gothic architecture. Te picturesque was promulgated most famously by Downing, but also by a host of other architects, landscape designers, and other ‘theorists” of country living who became increasingly oriented toward the suburbs.10 Country books and suburban design discourse imagined the picturesque as a distinctly masculine way to transform the American landscape from the late 1830s through the 1860s. Te impulse toward suburbanization also reshaped the social landscape. Although the suburbs have long been associated with distinctively bourgeois domestic concerns such as home ownership, privacy, and family life, mid-nineteenth-century suburban domesticity difered from the domesticity we commonly associate with women in this period. Despite the preponderance of domestic arguments in favor of suburban living, men, not women, were the most vocal advocates of suburbia. Margaret Marsh notes that women consistently complained that the suburbs were socially isolating and that the move to suburban neighborhoods wrenched them from the urban world of female consumption and sociability, relegating them to the more narrowly domestic realm of widely separated homes.11 Suburban masculine domesticity increased the emphasis on men’s role in home life, including greater interest in diet and parenting, and the arrangement of space. Te design and layout of the suburban home were of unprecedented interest in the 1840s through the 1860s.12 Male involvement in both the discourse around suburbanization and the design of suburban homes draws attention to the ways that men in this period began associating their manhood with domesticity, making the home a crucial site of male identity. When Ralph Waldo Emerson moved in 1834, he found a home outside of the borders of Concord, but newly in reach of that city by rail. His move refected the suburbanizing impulse of the period. In a journal entry from 1851, Emerson expressed the shifing sense of male responsibility for domestic life that was characteristic of suburbanization: “A man is a housekeeper,—yea, verily, he builds a house, and it is his task thenceforward whilst he lives to paint, shingle, repair, enlarge & beautify that house.”13 Te picturesque spaces of suburbia (both interior and exterior) encompassed and helped create emergent ideals of bourgeois masculinity in the midnineteenth century.

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Te argument for suburban living fostered a masculinity distinct from the nineteenth-century masculinity commonly associated with active, public, and commercial activities. Te mid-nineteenth-century ideal of suburban masculinity was domestic, focused on designing and creating the properly picturesque setting in which to live and on what might now be identifed as “lifestyle,” in which the forms and practices of daily private domestic life were understood as an expression of selfood. As Downing proclaimed in his 1850 pattern book, Te Architecture of Country Homes, “man’s dwelling, in its most complete form, may be regarded as the type of his whole private life.”14 Te prominent minister and country book columnist Henry Ward Beecher seconded this sentiment when he explained in his column on “Home Building” in the New York Independent in the mid 1850s:

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“A house is the shape which a man’s thoughts take when he imagines how he should like to live. Its interior is the measure of his social and domestic nature; its exterior, of his esthetic and artistic nature. It interprets, in its material forms, his ideas of home, of friendship, and of comfort.”15

Deeply symbolic, the home became “the type” or “measure” of the bourgeois man’s selfood. Emerson, Downing, Beecher and many other men of the mid-nineteenth century were more than happy to invest the suburban home with emblematic meaning as a symbol of male identity. Historians universally hail Downing as the most important advocate of suburban living.16 Unstinting in his praise of country living, Downing argued that “the house in the countryside” would ground family life in “truthfulness, beauty, and order” and that [t]he love of country is inseparably connected with love of home. Whatever, therefore, leads men to assemble the comforts and elegancies of life around his habitations, tends to increase local attachments, and render domestic life more delightful; thus not only augmenting his own enjoyment but strengthening his patriotism and making him a better citizen.17

Downing’s Republican vision of country living imbued picturesque residential space with meaning as the source of public and private virtue. Te picturesque homes and spaces he described in his earliest

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works, however, belonged to wealthy families of his native Hudson River Valley, not to Jefersonian farmers. As momentum for suburbanization picked up during the 1840s, Downing explicitly ofered advice to a more bourgeois suburbanizing vanguard, middle-class urbanites who were moving into agricultural villages and transforming farm properties into residential ones. Ofering advice on planting trees along roadsides and suggesting proper paint colors, Downing hoped to turn the former agricultural and utilitarian “GRACELESS VILLAGES” into beautiful suburban residential communities.18 Trough the 1840s and until his death in 1852, Downing increasingly focused on more modest home and landscape designs, refecting the transportation and development changes that made the suburban dream available to a wider range of Americans. Despite this shif, many held that Downing’s picturesque vision of country living was aspirational at best and unrealistic at worst. Dolores Hayden, for example, suggested that Downing “addressed a middleclass audience by talking about upper-class and upper-middle-class properties.”19 Downing’s cultural politics are still debated, but the consensus is that the potent infuence of his vision of picturesque country living set a standard for suburban development in midnineteenth-century America.20 Te picturesque lifestyle of mid-nineteenth-century suburban ­development was distinctly oriented toward men. Although scholarship implied that women’s interests and concerns dominated the ­ private sphere, the work of male architects and designers, including Downing, but also Andrew Jackson Davis and Downing’s colleague Calvert Vaux, reshaped the bourgeois home to privilege male privacy.21 It was men who largely encouraged resettlement into the suburbs and, in doing so, established a vision of manhood in contrast to that which privileged male activity in the public sphere. Te picturesque sensibility of the mid-nineteenth-century suburbs constructed one element of male agency through landscape design. Contrasted to the conventional standards of nineteenthcentury masculinity, with its emphasis on vocational status and commercial standing, suburban picturesque masculinity ascribed value to aesthetic appreciation and mastery of the environment through landscape design. Downing explained this in his Treatise on the Teory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America (1841):

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It requires more and diferent qualities to make a country-place than are required for any other profession. For while industry, knowledge, prudence, sagacity, are generally all that are necessary for a merchant, or lawyer, or doctor, the landscape gardener must have not only these but also taste—a knowledge of the beautiful, and a perception of the harmony of form and color; in other words, he must be an artist.22

Downing’s comment hints at his career-long project to raise “landscape gardener” to professional status in mid-nineteenth-century America. It also expressed the manliness of picturesque “taste” that put its practitioners not only on a level with the “merchant, or lawyer, or doctor,” but even above him. In this way, suburban men or men who aspired to professional status could imagine their work of ­manifesting picturesque sensibility in the suburban landscape as an elevated masculine agency. We can see this logic articulated in one of the early country books, Nathaniel Parker Willis’s A L’Abri (1838). Tere is no small irony that Willis was a central fgure in the country book genre, writing two popular versions at diferent points in his career. Te paragon of U.S.  urbanity, Willis’s mid-1830s sketches of European travel and English aristocratic and fashionable society, collected under the title of Pencillings by the Way, were the making of his national reputation, but for many readers these writings gave him a negative reputation as a dandy and a gossip.23 Te current critical understanding of Willis’s career portrays him as the urban male par excellence, and, as a result, the repository for all of the contradictory attitudes held about urban masculinity. Accused of being a seducer of women, he was also deemed efeminate at other points in his career.24 In any case, relatively quickly upon his return to the United States in 1836, Willis took up residence in western Pennsylvania on a 200-acre property purchased from a college friend. Willis resided on this property, which he named Glenmary (afer his English wife, Mary Stace Willis), for fve years. Te dandy became a country gentleman. Willis’s nineteenth-century biographer Henry Beers proclaimed Letters “Willis’ happiest book . . . refect[ing] the happiest part of life,” but he also asserted that “Willis was something of a cockney in the presence of great Nature. He viewed her more as a landscape gardener than as a naturalist,” and Beer compared Willis’s attitude unfavorably to that of Wordsworth and Toreau.25 Beers’s perspective refects the late-nineteenth-century rejection of the antebellum

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­ icturesque ideals embodied by fgures like Downing, who himself p defned “Cockneyism in the Country” in an 1849 Horticulturalist article as the inappropriate imposition of formal urban social attitudes and architectural designs onto the country landscape.26 For both Downing and Willis, picturesque landscape design was not a lesser or degraded appreciation of nature, but the highest possible role for man to attain in relationship to the landscape. Predating Downing’s A Treatise on the Teory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, by a few years, Willis’s A L’Abri shared the attitude of Downing’s writings, presenting Willis’s eforts at landscape designing in Glenmary practices of artistry and elevated manhood. Te frst letter describes “a liberty” Willis takes with nature, rerouting the course of a brook back to the main river, thereby eliminating a swamp near his house.27 Willis’s own participation in the landscape becomes transcendent: “In planting a tree (I write it reverently), it seems to me working immediately with the divine faculty. Here are two hundred forest trees set out with my own hand. Yet how little is my part in the glorious creatures they become!” (15). In his second letter, Willis describes seeing an “oriel sitting upon a dog-wood of [his] planting” from his customary outdoor writing post (22). Tis inspires the “easy delusion” of his importance to the beauty of the tree, the bird song, and the view as a whole: [T]he fair picture it makes to my eye, and the delicious music in my ear, seem to me no less of my own making and awaking. Is it the same tree, fowering unseen in the woods, or transplanted into a circle of human love and care, making a part of a woman’s home, and thought of and admired whenever she comes out from her cottage, with a blessing on the perfume and verdure?  (22)

Willis’s sense of the landscape as a “fair picture” of his “own making and awaking” refects what John Barrell has called “the improved and selected nature” of the picturesque.28 By transplanting the tree, Willis has transformed it, making it no longer simply “nature,” but part of a domestic “circle of human love and care.” Although Willis identifes this domesticity with “a woman’s home,” he was careful not to describe landscape design as a feminizing activity. Quite the ­opposite: He casts his landscape work at Glenmary as an artistic ­production of a particularly manly and heroic sort. Troughout the letters, Willis presents forest management and landscaping as artistic

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expressions, repeatedly likening the process to “forest-sculpture” (95), like bringing forth marble from “the caves of Pentelicus” (22). Like Downing, Willis claims that such work cannot be accomplished “without much study of the spot, let alone a taste for the sylvan” (95). Willis’s privileged vision of the shaping role of human consciousness through encounters with the picturesque landscape leads him to suggest planting and living among trees to those “men in the world whose misfortune it is to think too little of themselves” (23): “Tis suggesting to nature—working, as a mastermind, with all the fne mysteries of root and sap, obedient to the call—is very king-like” (23). In encouraging picturesque landscape design to men who “think too little of themselves,” Willis frames the suburbs as a recuperative space for men who perhaps feel themselves to be failures by the conventional standards of urban masculinity. Although Willis’s A L’Abri assiduously avoids describing life inside his country home (explicitly identifying it as the woman’s space), other country books and design manuals of the period masculinized the domestic space of the suburban home. Te association of women with domestic authority has long been a truism of nineteenthcentury culture, but examination of the literature of the suburban design and country books points to an alternative model that privileged male experience of domestic space. In contrast to female models, which emphasized order and method, focusing primarily on the private realm of the family, the country book used the picturesque to imagine a masculine domesticity that was at once at ease and autonomous, private and sociable. Te country book refects some of the transformations in bourgeois domestic architecture of the period that privileged male privacy. Over the course of the nineteenth century, domestic architecture allotted more private space within the home’s interior, creating more distinctions between public and private life.29 One of the most signifcant transformations in mid-nineteenth century domestic architecture was the reconfguration that associated gender with specifc spaces in the bourgeois home. As we saw in the previous chapter’s discussion of Judd’s novel Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family, the parlor was the room most associated with bourgeois women; it was a fraught space that was the woman’s room, but also the primary social space in the house. Tis double meaning of the parlor efectively cut women of from access to privacy outside of the bedroom.

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By contrast, the male equivalent of the bourgeois woman’s parlor was the man’s library, a room set aside that was both male and private.30 Te country book ofen staged this dissymmetrical domestic reconfguration, revealing masculine investment in claiming a private domestic space. In Barry Gray’s Out of Town (1866), the male narrator describes the challenge the family faces in moving their household from the city to a small cottage in the suburbs of Fordham and matching the space to his priorities:

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I found it a work of much difculty to get all my household efects into its apartments. Te main thing with me was to obtain a place for my books. So I selected the largest and best room in the house for my library, and told my wife that all the others were at her disposal. She seemed to think, however, that I had taken the lion’s share, and asked me what she should do for a parlor.31

In response to his wife’s question, Mr. Gray frst ofers a host of inappropriate alternative rooms as spaces for the parlor (including the kitchen and upstairs bedrooms) and then proclaims the library as “a much better place” to “entertain our friends in” (4). Rapturously describing the benefts of the library over the parlor, however, Mr. Gray quickly shifs from imagining the library as a public domestic space to a private one, particularly well suited to domestic male solitude: “When surrounded by books we never feel lonely. Tey are silent but agreeable companions, and in their society we may obtain both amusement and instruction” (4). Dismissing the parlor, “with its collection of knicknackeries,” as “only remind[ing] one of the fashionable frivolities of life” (4), Mr. Gray proposes to build a new wing to the cottage to house his collection at some (unspecifed and never depicted) future date. With its characteristic mild comical exchange between a long-winded husband with his domestic plans and a longsufering but tolerant wife, Out of Town demonstrates the country book’s refection of a realignment of domestic authority in the suburbs. In this way, country books were ideologically aligned with the more conventionally male-oriented architectural designs that dominated mid-nineteenth century suburban development by Downing, Andrew Jackson Downing, and Calvert Vaux. Tis masculine domesticity shared with more traditional female models an emphasis on home life, companionate marriage, and child rearing, but also identifed the home as a site of leisure, “self-nurture,”

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and cheerful disorder, explicitly contradicting the instructions of feminine domestic advice literature, which frequently advocated order and system as key to happy households. Writing as Ik Marvel, Donald Grant Mitchell published the enormously popular Reveries of a Bachelor (1850), which depicted a man imaginatively debating whether or not to marry while in his bachelor home outside the city. Te titular bachelor saw the greatest problem associated with marriage to be the loss of his domestic autonomy and ease, and a fear that the clutter and leisure of his bachelor home would be replaced with a feminized efciency and order.32 Henry Ward Beecher also explored this rejection of feminine domesticity in a column for the New York Ledger entitled “Te Good of Disorder,” posing the rigidity of female domesticity against a masculine model that explicitly drew upon the picturesque. Tis essay, part of a regular column in which Beecher addressed suburban living (and later collected in book form as Eyes and Ears[1862]), suggests that domestic disorder is not the absence of order, but “simply arrangement according to some other notion.”33 Praising the scattering of chairs in a parlor versus arranging all the chairs in a row, Beecher associates this disorder with a more natural form of arrangement, explicitly invoking landscape design and the picturesque: Te same is more remarkably true in gardens and pleasure-grounds. Formerly, grounds were arranged by geometric principles. Everything was squared and mated. Te French gardens might be said to be geometry in blossom. Against this has come up what is called the Natural Style. And what is the natural or picturesque style of landscape gardening? It aims to reproduce the beauty of nature, together with its negligence and graceful disorder. It is a system based upon the rejection of any absolute rule. It aims to arrange things just as they would be if they never had been arranged at all.  (414)

Beecher advocates the picturesque as not just a landscape sensibility, but as the true expression of nature, a natural disorder that is put against the “unnatural” feminine domestic impulse to organize and order: Nothing is orderly till man takes hold of it. Everything increation lies around loose, or is mixed up in the most inextricable disorder. Not in confusion. Disorder is never to be confounded with confusion. If our housekeepers had had the making of Nature, the world would have

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been a vast bureau, and every drawer would have had its appropriate specimens in lamentable regularity. . . . As it is, thank Nature! things are scattered about all the world splendidly, and no housekeeper was ever created to put this world “to rights.”  (415)

It is hard not to imagine Beecher’s comment on female domesticity turning nature into “a vast bureau” as a critique of his sisters, Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who published a popular domestic manual that explicitly preached order and efciency, going as far as to prescribe how diferent items should be stored in kitchens and bedrooms, and to assert that this storage plan was the route to domestic happiness.34 Henry Ward Beecher claims male picturesque disorder in contrast to a rigid and unnatural female domestic order: “Our way of arranging is to put everything down on the top, just as it comes. Hers is just the other way” (415). Beecher expresses (humorously, but pointedly) gendered concern that if a man leaves the home, his domestic disorder will be destroyed. Having once had his picturesque piles organized in his absence, he describes living in “fear . . . that, in an unguarded hour, the same calamity will sweep through the room again, and where it found all, everything in disorder and loneliness, leave everything blasted with regularity and order!” (418). Beecher’s semi-ironic fear of female destruction of his picturesque masculine domesticity evokes Herman Melville’s story “I and My Chimney” (published in 1856 in Putnam’s Magazine) in which an elderly man becomes something of a captive in his rural home for fear that if he leaves it, his wife and daughters will pull down his much-beloved (and obvious phallic symbol) chimney, to be replaced by a modern parlor. Like Beecher’s ironic claims of “living in fear” of female tidying, Melville’s narrator closes his story by admitting that [i]t is now some seven years since I have stirred from home. My city friends all wonder why I don’t come to see them, as in former times. Tey think I am getting sour and unsocial. . . . Te fact is, I am simply standing guard over my mossy old chimney; for it is resolved between me and my chimney, that I and my chimney will never surrender.35

From Mitchell to Melville to Beecher, works associated with the country book in form or content frequently depicted male picturesque domesticity in confict with a feminized order and efciency.

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Te most famous discussion of masculine domesticity in mid-nineteenth century U.S.  literature is surely Henry David Toreau’s Walden; or a Life in the Woods (1854), which explores the possibilities for self-discovery. Toreau lived on the outskirts of Concord, a Massachusetts village town that was quickly turning into a Boston suburb in the period.36 Toreau himself ofers an overdetermined range of potential target readers for his narrative, but whether it is “young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle and farming tools” or urban clerks with unrealistic fantasies of building suburban homes, Toreau’s imagined readers were unquestionably men.37 Ofering detailed practical advice and theoretical musings on architecture and lifestyle to a distinctly masculine readership considering the merits of country living, Toreau’s Walden is, like its country book brethren, a masculine domestic manual.38 Walden is, however, ofen read as a critique of the architectural theory and designs of Downing and his pattern book peers, with scholars drawing attention to such claims in “Economy”: When I consider how our houses are built and paid for, or not paid for, and their internal economy managed and sustained, I wonder that the foor does not give way under the visitor while he is admiring the gewgaws upon the mantel-piece, and let him through into the cellar, to some solid and honest though earthy foundation. I cannot but perceive that this so called rich and refned life is a thing jumped at, and I do not get on in the enjoyment of the fne arts which adorn it, my attention being wholly occupied with the jump.”  (29)

Toreau critiques the superfcial or “ornamental” quality of conventional notions of the house’s emblematic representation of the self. Rather than focusing on the “gewgaws on the mantel-piece,” or more abstractly “the refned life” that the house adorned with “fne arts” embodies, Toreau is interested in the “solid and honest though earthy foundation.” He contrasts the honest earthiness of the foundation with the aspirational quality of the ornamented house, whose refnement is “a thing jumped at”: Rather than emphasizing the qualities of the ornamentation, Walden focuses attention on the social impulse, the aspirational “jump.” Although scholars such as the Mastellers and Stephen Fink note some afnities between Downing and Toreau’s privileging of country living and the desire

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to make the home a powerful emblem of selfood, they argue that Toreau critiques Downing’s theory of architectural ornamentation and the underlying assumption that a house’s exterior can express its owner’s interior.39 If Toreau invests energy to critique suburban architectural designs, however, he does not reject its advocacy of the picturesque possibilities of country living:

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What of architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown from within outward, out of the necessities and character of the indweller, who is the only builder,—out of some unconscious truthfulness, and nobleness, without ever a thought for the appearance; and whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined to be produced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of life. Te most interesting dwellings in this country, as the painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble log huts and cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the inhabitants whose shells they are and not any peculiarity in their surfaces merely, which makes them picturesque; and equally interesting will be the citizen’s suburban box, when his life shall be as simple and as agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little straining afer efect in the style of his dwelling. (36; emphasis in the original)

Unlike the pattern book homes whose ornamentation reveals the strain of efort, the owner’s aspirational “jump” toward a “rich and refned life,” Toreau privileges those houses in whose design the aesthetic impulse is “unconscious.” Te picturesque residences are “humble log huts and cottages of the poor,” constructed “without ever a thought for appearance.” Despite the obvious diferences in their contexts for thinking of domesticity, Toreau’s defnition resembles Beecher’s defnition of the picturesque as idealized disorder, as the passage cited earlier from Beecher’s “Te Good of Disorder” illustrates: “It aims to reproduce the beauty of nature, together with its negligence and graceful disorder. It is a system based upon the rejection of any absolute rule. It aims to arrange things just as they would be if they never had been arranged at all.”40 Like Beecher’s vision of the picturesque as a “natural” organic model of disordered domestic order, Toreau’s vision of domestic aesthetics mirrors the “unconscious beauty of life.” Toreau closes his discussion of domesticity and aesthetics by invoking the “citizen’s suburban box” (36). At one level, this is presented

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as the negative example, the suburban home being most characterized by the highly ornamented style advocated by Downing and his peers. At another level, though, it preserves the utopian possibility of suburbia: “equally interesting will be the citizen’s suburban box, when his life shall be as simple and as agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little straining afer efect in the style of his dwelling” (36). Te problem with suburban domesticity is not suburban home design per se, but the relationship between the inner life and its outward expression in the design of the home: When the interior life of the suburbanite is picturesque, so too will be his home. Like Downing, Willis, and Beecher, Toreau’s vision of suburban domesticity is specifcally masculine, as expressed in his use of pronouns (e.g. “his life,” “his dwelling”), refecting a common interest in imagining the picturesque suburbs as a possible ideal site for masculine self-expression. Te picturesque aesthetics of mid-nineteenth-century suburbia and its expression in landscape and interior design ofered bourgeois men opportunities to empower themselves to create an alternative masculinity that occupied a space between dominant norms for male and female behavior in the period. If the mid-nineteenth-century suburbs represented an idealized space in which to imagine a version of bourgeois manhood, the country book was the ideal literary expression of this manhood.

Te Country Book: Suburban Masculinity, Intimacy, and Privacy Bourgeois manhood in the United States of the mid-nineteenth century was divided between what came to be understood as opposed impulses: on one hand, to be private, solitary, self-possessed, and, on the other hand, to be intimate and feel emotional connection to other men.41 Te country book ofered a possible solution, imagining that from within the spaces of suburbia a manhood could be created that balanced conficting demands for male homosocial intimacy and male privacy. Te country book became an expression of masculine ideals in the mid-nineteenth century, ofering visions of suburbia as an idealized space that could allow for both male privacy and male friendship. Promising the seemingly contradictory experiences of privacy and community, the country book was the expression

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of the impossible fantasy of contradictory middle-class masculine ideals in the period. Te country book was structured around the premise that residential rural or suburban living ofered an idealized alternative to urban masculinity of competition, which compromised autonomy and required social conformity. Te retirement of suburban life seemed to ofer masculine autonomy, the privilege of leisure and thoughtfulness, and the connection to nature and natural models of time. Tis emphasis on leisure, contemplation, and natural time scales in the country book produced narratives that were short on plot events or action. Modern readers are familiar with Toreau’s largely plotless Walden, but similar impulses and emphases were common throughout the country book genre. In fact, although modern readers are unlikely to yoke them together, Nathaniel Hawthorne was comfortable recommending both Walden and L. W. Mansfeld’s Up-Country Letters to an English correspondent as “not merely good, but . . . original, with American characteristics, and not generally known in England.” Of Up-Country Letters, Hawthorne would also say that “[w]e have produced nothing more original nor more genuine.”42 Up-Country Letters is perhaps the most emblematic or representative example of a rather sprawling genre. It relates the largely uneventful rural life of Zachariah Pundison, ofen called “Pun.” Pun describes a leisurely life punctuated by mealtimes, naps, and Sunday church-going. Like Walden, the novel is structured by the seasons, capturing the various pleasures of rural domesticity, from strolling to the piazza and listening to thunderstorms during the summer to the pleasures of a nice nap by the freside afer dinner on a snowbound winter’s day. Intensely involved in the repetitious structure of pleasant daily and seasonal rituals, Up-Country Letters argues for the superiority of a life lived away from cities in greater connection to nature and the seasons: Almost everything that happens here [in the country], happens properly, and with a grace; almost everything that is done in great cities, is done hurriedly; or with great efort, which is tiresome; and awkwardly, which is inharmonious; and confusedly all, crossing, and criss-crossing, and competing, from which result envy, strife, and ­uncharitableness. But the rain and snow, and the night-dews, and the early frosts, all come quietly, and subserve, always, some good

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­ urpose. Te budding, and leafng, and fowering, and, at last, the p fruit-making—how gently it is done. . . . Here, in the country, I keep a little advance of things, always; and am thus able to look each day full and fair in the face: and so with the seasons—the changes of the year. I delight, for instance, in having arrived at my winter routine before December has come. With my winter work, if I have any, already begun; all household arrangements complete, and perfected, and proved, so to speak; and provisos make for break-downs, as loose spars are carried at sea; in this happy case, don’t you see, sir, that the whole month is before us, in all its richness?43

Pun argues that life lived in the country with greater connection to natural seasons allows for a kind of self-possession, contrasting it to life in “cities” where hurrying and competition “result [in] envy, strife, and uncharitableness.” Living out away from densely populated cities, Pun is “able to look each day full and fair in the face,” mimicking nature and the seasons themselves. Te complacent tone and unhurried pace of Pun’s explanation here, and in the narrative as whole, embody the appeal of the country book, which ofered its readers a vision of a contented suburban manhood in sync with nature. Te passage above exemplifes the country book’s vision of suburban manhood explicitly defned and posed against urban manhood. Pun’s vision of self-possessed country manhood posited itself against an urban masculinity characterized by competition and confict, but other country books would extend this critique, associating urban or more densely populated spaces with attacks on masculine mental and bodily integrity. In A L’Abri, Willis reports to his correspondent: Te objection I have to a city, is the necessity, at every other step, of passing some acquaintance or other . . . some man . . . whom I neither love, nor care to meet; and yet he is thrust upon my eye, and must be noticed. But to notice him with propriety, I must remember what he is—what claims he has to my respect, my civility. . . . A man with but a moderate acquaintance, living in a city, will pass through his mind each day, at a fair calculation, say two hundred men and women, with their belongings. What a tax on the memory! What fatigue (and all proftless) to them and him! “Sweep me out like a foul thoroughfare!” say I.  “Te town has trudged through me!”

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I like my mind to be a green lane, private to the dwellers in my own demesne. I like to be bowed to as the trees bow, and have no need to bow back or smile.  (23–24)

Willis’s country book depicts the city as a space of violent scopic male exchanges. In Willis’s city, men are “thrust upon [his] eye,” a sexualized image of male vulnerability that culminates in a vision of bodily sexual permeability and deflement: “Sweep me out like a foul thoroughfare! . . . Te town has trudged through me!” Tis passage ofers penetrative sexual associations of bodily contamination in urban male visual social interactions. Tis anxiety at being exposed to a collective male gaze fgured as sexual violence can be understood as a reaction to the homophobic regime of male homosociality in mid-nineteenth-century America.44 Te homophobic association of the urban crowd with sodomy was a commonplace in the midnineteenth century and appeared in the work of a host of writers, including Emerson.45 Willis’s homophobic vision of urban masculine vulnerability to sodomy is contrasted with his idealized vision of bodily and mental integrity, with his mind likened to one of the design features that became a central element of the new picturesque suburban landscape, the “green lane, private to the dwellers in my own demesne.” Downing proposed such driveways in his plans for transforming the utilitarian farmstead into a new suburban picturesque home: A new picturesque curving driveway was an easy ­replacement for the straight road of the former farmhouse. Te ­decorative, rather than utilitarian, driveway also helped to enforce homeowner privacy by obscuring a view of the home from the road. In the city street, Willis must bow to the many men he meets, but his “private” suburban driveway selfood represents a kind of regal masculinity: Te trees bow to him and he needn’t acknowledge. Willis’s vision of the idealized male “mind” embodied by a suburban private driveway imagines it as an alternative embodiment to the city’s “foul thoroughfare”: suburban masculine privacy contrasted with urban male vulnerability. As Willis would explain in A L’Abri: “You must live in the country to possess your bodily sensations as well as your mind, in tranquil control” (97–98; emphasis in original). For Willis and the country book more generally, privatized country living allowed for a masculine bodily and mental autonomy. Modern readers may be more familiar with this formulation through Toreau’s “Te Village” chapter in Walden. Although historians have

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noted that Toreau’s Concord underwent a transformation into a suburbanized bedroom community for men who worked in Boston with the arrival of the railroad, it retained the structure of a village in the 1840s, with a central mercantile area that was in contrast to the suburban ideal of more dispersed residential spaces. Like Willis’s vision of the city, Toreau famously describes his forays into Concord as “run[ning] the gantlet [where] every man, woman and child might get a lick at him” (116), with men “leaning against a barn with their hands in their pockets,” waiting “with a voluptuous expression” to gather news or gossip from whomever passes them (115–16). Te village represents a violent homoeroticism that threatens Toreau, leaving him thankful for having “escaped to the woods again” (116) at the end of his visits. Toreau’s phobic response to being the subject of masculine gaze on Concord’s streets refects David Greven’s argument that antebellum manhood “makes sense of itself through an ever-vigilant system of defenses against being recognized as potentially available, looked at, appraised, scrutinized, discerned, d ­ esired.”46 In this chapter, Toreau argues for the necessity of domestic isolation and rural retreat for male self-possession, describing the pleasures of getting lost in the night-time walk from Concord to his home at the pond: “Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to fnd ourselves, and realize where we are and the infnite extent of our relations” (118). Far from signaling a retreat from social relations, Toreau argues that only through the movement away from the threatening scopic interactions of the village can a man attain both self-knowledge and greater social connection (“the infnite extent of our relations”). Tis seemingly paradoxical process described by Toreau whereby the sphere of man’s relations is expanded by withdrawal into rural privacy is central to this model of what Millette Shamir calls “depersonalized intimacy.” However, this reading deemphasizes the role that male friendship plays in Walden and suburban manhood more generally in the mid-nineteenth century, which represents an alternative to the isolated, inviolate model of manhood that Shamir and Greven identify as the dominant norm.47 Although the narrators of country books are alone much of the time in order to gain a better understanding of themselves and to connect to nature, country books also ofer extensive evidence that male companionship is one of the perks of suburban life. Even in

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Walden, which is famously lacking in depictions of Toreau’s contact with others, the chapters “Visitors” and “Brute Neighbors” draw ­attention to Toreau’s extended contact with other men. “Visitors” describes extensive conversations between Toreau and an unnamed Canadian lumberjack (identifed as Alek Terein). Although at times Toreau seems dismissive of or condescending toward Terein, he also notes that “I occasionally observed that he was thinking for himself and expressing his own opinion, a phenomenon so rare that I would walk any day ten miles to observe it, and it amounted to the re-origination of many of the institutions of society” (104). Peter Coviello observes that readers seeking to explore “the possibilities of a queer reclamation of Toreau” have drawn particular attention to Toreau’s relationship with Terein. Coviello himself reads the relationship through “obliquity, or an instability of registers” that signal Toreau’s discomfort with desire and its manifestation in objects on either side of the emerging binaristic divide of homo- versus heterosexuality.48 Tat discomfort, however, does not wholly preclude the possibility of intimacy between men. Te chapter “Brute Neighbors” also frames Toreau’s sojourn in the woods as a space for intimate connection between individual men, as it begins with a lyrical and wide-ranging dialogue between the “Hermit” (Toreau himself) and the “Poet” (widely believed to be Toreau’s friend, Ellery Channing). Te two men’s conversation, weaving between abstract philosophy and practical matters, serves as an introductory frame to the chapter’s meditation on man’s relationship to animals, with far more famous sections on battling ants and Toreau’s battle of wits with a loon on the pond. Te introductory dialogue, however, reveals how Toreau envisions male companionship away from the village as generative and sustaining. Toreau was far from alone in this celebration of male companionship, as the country book ofen celebrated the borderland or suburban space as an ideal place for male friendship and intimacy that ­escapes or at least contests the homophobic proscriptions that structure their vision of male social relations in the urban setting. Although most country books depict conventional heterosexual domestic life in the suburbs, the women—typically wives and sisters—are largely ciphers: sensible, patient, and tolerant of their husbands’ eccentricities, but vague and undefned characters. Far more attention is paid to male friendships and the possibility of greater male intimacy outside

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of the city. For example, Barry Gray’s Out of Town depicts suburbia’s access to superior food ingredients, not simply for its own sake, but as a means of enjoying masculine “good-fellowship”:49

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When, one rainy Saturday, not long since, I neglected to report at the granite building in Wall Street, and remained at home, ostensibly to do a little weeding, but really to recruit my exhausted system,—exhausted by too close application to governmental work,—by making a lounging time of it, the savage literary friend, referred to in a former sketch, who came to see me, insinuatingly suggested that an egg-nog would not be a bad thing to take. Tereupon my freshest-laid eggs came into use; the ancestral punch-bowl was brought out; a bottle of old Jamaica . . . was opened; a quart of pure milk, with the cream beginning to rise on the surface was obtained; and, with a quantum sufcit of sugar and nutmeg, a drink worthy of being commemorated in verse by Tom Moore was concocted and quafed, while conviviality and good-fellowship ruled the hour. Now, for the moral: You may make and drink egg-nog in the city as ofen as you please, and you may regard it as very fne; but until you make and drink it in the country, using fresh eggs and new milk in its composition, you can have no idea of its excellence. It is then a draught ft for the best of good fellows. (Out of Town, 14)

Te lovingly described details of egg-nog production are at the serv­ ice of Cofn’s celebration of suburban male “good-fellowship,” conditions that are impossible in an urban setting.50 Country books fgure the conditions of male intimacy in the suburbs as being profoundly diferent from those of the city. In country books, there is a liberation of some of the homophobic proscriptions against male afective bonds that dominated the culture, and suburbia is imagined as a privileged place for male intimacy. In Up-Country Letters, Mansfeld devotes a great deal of the text to the friendship between Pun and Frank Bryars, a 25-year-old “upcountry” neighbor, who, like Pun, lives away from the city due to a debility (in Frank’s consumption, in Pun’s neuralgia). At one point, Pun explains the nature of his bond to Frank: “We interchange thus, every thing, even to gems of the frst water. What is mine is his, and what is his is mine, to the bottom of our pockets: and when he dies (and may the sweet Heavens keep the day far distant), I fancy I shall not stay long away from him” (95). Tis discourse of intimate male friendship, from the sharing of “gems” to the fantasy of conjoined lifespans, poses male intimacy as

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a direct parallel to romantic love. While it might be common to depict a heterosexual couple as soul-mates conjoined in death as in life, Pun never describes his relationship to his wife in anything nearing this intensity. Te language and feeling presented here refect a model of antebellum male homosociality that is free from the kinds of phobic proscriptions we saw in country book depictions of urban masculinity.51 Frank and Pun’s conversations and correspondence range widely and form the backbone of the narrative, but their friendship is solidifed around their rejection of urban masculinity. Because of his illness, Frank has reconciled himself to an early death and contrasts his own state of mind to “the important hurry and bustle of the world” embodied in masculine efort:

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“Tere is a man,” he will say, speaking of some one who is constantly building and planning for future years,—“the surprise to that man when he comes to die will not be so much that he is dead, as that he cannot go right on with the matter he had in hand. But what will be his consternation at that! so petty, so annoying, such a monstrous impertinence!—‘what is all this,’—he will say: and doubtless it will be,—what is all this?”  (77)

By the logic of the narrative, it is Frank’s suburban withdrawal from competitive, commercial urban masculinity that marks him as “a happy and cheerful-hearted man” (78). For the suburban men of UpCountry Letters, “Money is nothing . . . books only and friends, are something; . . . [i]s it so with your men of business, and care and infnite botherations, moneyed or political or whatsoever?” (78). Troughout the narrative, this suburban masculinity is held up as a superior alternative to the more conventional one, as Pundison asserts: “let us hope, sir, it is no refection upon one’s manhood, if, afer trying our hand in the world’s doings, we step aside for a little while, and look on” (158–59). Te country book in general ofers a model of masculinity that seems not only to critique the restless competitive masculinity of urban bourgeois life, but also to ofer an ideal that joins individualistic qualities of privacy, autonomy, and self-possession with more social virtues of intimacy and community. In its idealized form, the country book imagines the suburbs as a space to reconcile American manhood’s contradictory impulses, allowing men to ­unproblematically be both alone and in company with other men.

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Suburban Masculinity and Epistolarity Of course, the reconciliation or resolution of such deeply divided impulses within American masculinity is not so easily achieved, even in the idealized fctionalized realm of country book narratives. Julie Ellison has argued that men’s literature in the mid-nineteenth century was in the “constant process of rearranging masculine emotion in order to accommodate homophobic anxieties, homosocial desires and class diferences.”52 More than just responding to these pressures on masculine identity and emotions, Caleb Crain argues that literature itself “came forward as a way to exchange emotions between increasingly separate men.”53 Te country book ofered embodied models of male sociability, with the space and pace of suburban life allowing men to be together without the homophobic fears that urban experience seemed to generate. Nonetheless, even country books that seem to ofer a far more unproblematic conjunction of suburban male privacy and male intimacy than Walden still register some of the pressures on these possibilities. Even the country books that idealize suburbia as a masculine ideal reveal the contradictions within competing visions of bourgeois masculinity. Tese contradictions are made clear in one of the dominant literary forms of the country book: the epistolary text. Whether as nonfction or fction, many country books structured their narrative as a correspondence, ofen as one side of an exchange between men. Unlike Toreau’s depersonalized address to overdetermined and overlapping categories of men in Walden, epistolary country books were directed to a particular real or imagined individual male audience, fgured as a friend. Te one-sidedness is important because, whether the correspondent was real or imaginary, the efect of this version of the epistolary text was to place the (implied male) reader in the role of intimate friend of the narrator. Te one-sided epistolary text leaves a gap to be flled afectively by the reader so that the text creates an experience of having a friend living in the country, a friend who ofen beckons you to join him. Te repeated use of this epistolary form suggests that an element of the popularity of the country book could have been its interpellation of the reader into the role of intimate friend of the male author or narrator. Even if the epistolary text included both sides of a cor­re­spond­ ence, it still highlighted the communication between men made

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­ ossible by life in the suburbs. Although the directness and intimacy p of this address is diferent from Toreau’s “depersonalized intimacy,” it is still notable that a fction or a literary conceit substitutes for real, embodied male intimacy that could happen if reader and author were physically together in the suburbs: In Crane’s terms, it is still “a way to exchange emotions between increasingly separate men” (152). So while the letters seem to ofer a possibility of actual male suburban camaraderie, it is still just a fction. Moreover, the epistolary country books ofen undermine or complicate this fctive promise; as within the narratives themselves the correspondence’s promise of real intimacy is brought under question, promised meetings between correspondents are endlessly deferred or other crises emerge. Te epistolary form seems an ideal compromise between male privacy and male intimacy, but ultimately it only highlights the tensions and anxieties that underpin suburban manhood’s claim to be a viable alternative to mainstream, urban masculinity. Te decision to write the country book in the epistolary mode conjoins intimacy and publicity. Tis refects Jurgen Habermas’s famous formulation of letter-writing as an expression of “audienceoriented privacy” that was characteristic of eighteenth-century bourgeois culture. Habermas regards the letter as an expression of the seemingly contradictory quality of bourgeois privacy, with the “always already” public orientation of bourgeois subjectivity conveyed through the favored private expressive form of the letter.54 Habermas argues that both the narrative forms of the letter and the diary (another common form for the country book) functioned as “experiments with . . . subjectivity” that helped shape how members of the bourgeoisie understood themselves.55 Te epistolary country book seemed to ofer a view into the private life of the suburban male, but the country book’s performance of suburban domesticity suggests that this privacy was always already public. Whether fctional or nonfctional, epistolary country books celebrated the possibilities of writing to foster male intimacy. N. P. Willis’s A L’Abri purported to present one side of Willis’s correspondence with his New York friend, Dr. T. O. Porter, published for the New York Mirror. Te archness and loquaciousness of Willis’s letters suggest that they were written with publication in mind rather than simply as communication between friends. At the end of “Letter II,” Willis signs of with this distinction: “Adieu, dear Doctor; you may

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call this a letter if you will, but it is more like an essay” (A L’Abri 4). Despite this admission of genre confusion, the choice of epistolary form is meaningful, as Willis explains the importance of cor­re­spond­ ence for men within the text itself:

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[A]fer some consideration, I have made up my mind that a man who is at all addicted to revery, must have one or two escape-valves—a journal or a very random correspondence. For reasons many and good, I prefer the latter; and the best of those reasons is my good fortune in possessing a friend like yourself, who is above “proprieties” (prosodically speaking), and so you have become to me, what Asia was to Prometheus— “When his being overfowed, Was like a golden chalice to bright wine, Which else had sunk into the thirsty dusk.”  (A L’Abri 39)

Correspondence with a male friend becomes a compromise between the “pressure” of rural privacy and isolation, and the city’s threats on male autonomy and bodily integrity discussed in the earlier section. Figuratively, this passage also departs from Willis’s depiction of men in the city: while his metaphor of male relations in the city invoked fear or phobic rejection of sodomy (“Sweep me out like a foul thoroughfare!” say I. “Te town has trudged through me!”), the epistolary relationship is, via the quote from Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound,” an unproblematized image of generativity in which the male friend becomes the recipient of male (creative/spermatic) excess, the “chalice” to catch the “overfow” of his solitary country reveries. Te letter, written from the suburbs to an urban male friend, becomes an idealized version of male intimacy. Willis fnds the letter form helpful not just to put readers into the position of male friend in A L’Abri, but also to help readers imagine themselves as potential owners and country or suburban residents. A later edition of A L’Abri, published in 1844 and entitled Letters from Under a Bridge, ends with a separate letter, this one addressed to “the Unknown Purchaser and Next Occupant of Glenmary,” which was originally published afer the completion of the magazine series. If the rest of the book hails the reader into the role of an intimate friend, this fnal letter seeks to initiate the reader into Willis’s picturesque taste, to imagine himself as the proper inheritor to Glenmary’s glories. Like Toreau, who begins the “Where I Lived, and What I Lived

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For” chapter of Walden by decrying the appropriation of nature, Willis’s letter initially poses land ownership as an “impertinent audacity”:56 How you can buy the right to exclude at will every other creature made in God’s image from sitting by this brook, treading on that carpet of fowers, or lying listening to the birds in the shade of these glorious trees. —how I can sell it to you, is a mystery not understood by the Indian, and dark, I must say to me.  (31–32)

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Willis’s questions point to the appropriative nature of private property and also to its racism (it is a mystery “not understood by” Native Americans and people of color, populations largely excluded from property rights by traditions or laws in the period). Although Willis’s letter begins by questioning the privilege of private property ownership, it is ultimately a profound celebration of the intimate connection that an owner can have to his property. It hails the man who buys Glenmary (and he assumes it will be a man, of course) into the same sentimental relationship Willis has to its fora and fauna, making it a rapturous paean to the pleasures of property: “Lord of the soil,” is a title which conveys your privileges but poorly. You are master of waters fowing at this moment, perhaps, in a river of Judea, or foating in clouds over some spicy island of the tropics, bound hither afer many changes. Tere are lilies and violets ordered for you in millions, acres of sun-shine in daily instalments, and dew nightly in proportion. Tere are throats to be tuned with song, and wings to be painted with red and gold, blue and yellow; thousands of them, and all tributaries to you. Your corn is ordered to be sheathed in silk, and lifed high to the sun. Your grain is to be duly bearded, stemmed. Tere is perfume distilling for your clover, and juices for your grasses and fruits. Ice will be here for your wine, shade for your refreshment at noon, breezes and showers and snow-fakes; all in their season, and all “deeded to you for forty dollars the acre! Gods! what a copyhold of property for a fallen world!”  (31–32)

Revisiting his earlier claim that landscape design was well suited for “men in the world whose misfortune it is to think too little of themselves” and “very king-like,” this fnal letter casts rural ownership as a kind of Edenic mastery in which all of nature’s bounty is for the

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buyer or reader (a “privilege” of purchase). Willis goes on to list the various parts of Glenmary that he has manipulated or particularly appreciated, encouraging his successor to acknowledge and appreciate them as well: the creek, the trees, his favorite birds, squirrels, and one noted toad (“In the cutting of the next grass, slice me not up my fat friend, sir! Nor set your cane down heedlessly in his modest domain. He is ‘mine ancient,’ and I would fain do him a good turn with you” [32].). Directly addressing the unnamed actual man who purchases Glenmary, Willis implicitly encourages his male readers to imagine what it would be like to be that man, to enjoy the pleasures of domesticity outside the city:

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And now, sire, I have nothing else to ask, save only your watchfulness over the small nook reserved from this purchase of seclusion and loveliness. In the shadowy depths of the small glen above you, among the wildfowers and the music, the music of the brook babbling over rocky steps, is a spot sacred to love and memory. Keep it inviolate, and as much of the happiness of Glenmary as we can leave behind, stay with you for recompense.  (32)

Although one might read this as a less than generous relinquishing of possession of the home and estate, Willis’s letter conveys his deeply emotional connection to the property, identifying possession of such a place as a source of happiness. An early biographer of Willis notes that this letter was enormously popular, refecting both the appeal of this suburbanizing impulse and the role that the epistolary form had in hailing bourgeois men into the real or imagined role of suburban homeowner.57 Like Willis’s Letters, Mansfeld’s Up-Country Letters also ofers a one-sided epistolary form and argues for the importance of a male correspondent, but it ultimately delves into some of the anxieties that underpin the suburban rejection of urban masculinity. UpCountry Letters is conveyed through Pun’s correspondence with a distant male friend, an unnamed Professor of Astronomy. Te frst lines of the novel ask: Dear Prof.:—Have you a friend whose presence is as a cordial to you—a tonic—a fortifer; who builds great walls about you against the enemy; who lifs you when you fall, and strengthens your kneejoints; who is as a mountain against all moral north-easters and unexplainable calamities; who brings to you always calm weather?  (13)

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Where Willis’s correspondent was fgured as a receptacle for his reveries, an “escape-valve” against excessive creativity and solitary thoughts, “Pun” emphasizes the male friend correspondent as a support or defense against “the enemy” or “unexplainable calamities,” a protection against fgurative threats on his manhood. Te literal threat that lies behind these fgures is never explained, though Pun is drawn to men of science who counter his own “questionable wanderings in speculative matters” (15). Te occasion of Pun’s initiation of this correspondence with the unnamed Astronomy professor that structures Up-Country Letters is the recent departure from “upcountry” of a friend, a professor of mathematics and a “man of facts and opinions, and principles” (14). Announcing himself “distrait— from this loss,” Pundison asks his potential correspondent to take up the role of the lost friend, ofering male correspondence as a replacement for male proximity or closeness: “Let us, also compare notes. Let us sit down at these magnifcent distances . . . and be a committee of one, in each place, to decide upon matters and things in general. Shall it be so?” (18). In his vision of a male community created through letters conveyed across “magnifcent distances,” Pun’s cor­re­ spond­ence refects the fantasy of a male intimacy enabled by the medium of writing and literature. Despite his rosy vision of a supportive male correspondence, ­Up-Country Letters reveals some of the anxieties of this social interaction. In the middle of the narrative, Pundison begins a letter by telling the story of “dining at a public table” when a “young lady” came in and “began to push against my feet, and to pound them this way and that, with considerable force” (147). Seeing “that she was wholly unconscious of what she was about, but having nothing else to do, I concluded to wait till her consciousness returned” (147). Afer “talking a perfect rattle of nonsense with her lef-hand neighbor,” she realizes that she has been kicking “the boots of a man,” resulting in embarrassment embodied in a face turned “scarlet . . . fxed for the day” (148). Pundison poses this experience as an analogue to his cor­ re­spond­ence, observing that “I have been sending you all manner of detail and prosy what-nots of family and neighborly matters in a kind of exuberance of material; and, as it were, for the sake of pounding somebody” (148). Tis comparison leads him to ask if the Professor really wants to read his letters: “Suddenly it has occurred to me to query, if you really care to be so pounded: not unlikely you may wish to dine quietly, and in your old way. If so, say the word, and I cease”

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(148). Pun raises the explicit parallel between the young woman and himself, between female speech (“perfect rattle of nonsense”) and the content of his correspondence (“prosy what-nots”). Implicit in this query is the possibility that Pun could be labeled e­ feminate, acting not like a man, but more like the young woman in his “unconscious . . . exuberance,” particularly in his focus on what could be seen as feminized “family and neighborly” topics. Efeminacy, as Alan Sinfeld argues, “is a male falling away from purposeful reasonableness that is supposed to constitute manliness, into the laxity and weakness conventionally attributed to women.”58 Pun’s comparison of his letters to the young woman’s discourse and his ofer to release his friend from the correspondence could be said to function as a kind of masculine self-policing or censorship, but it could be seen as absolving or liberating the correspondence from an external judgment: Because Pun has explicitly raised the question of whether his correspondence is feminizing him, it defuses external homophobic judgment. Te fact that Pun’s silent correspondent continues to write back (and the male reader presumably continues to read) works to clear Up-Country Letters of its self-consciously framed questions about its masculinity. Tis letter hints at some of the complications within the country book’s vision of male intimacy. Even in his intimate man-to-man conversations, Pun raises doubts about his lifestyle choices. In a chapter that toys with the limitations of epistolary narrative form, Mansfeld sends Pundison and Frank out for a companionable walk and intimate talk. By way of introduction, Pundison suggests to his correspondent: It is pleasant, sir, to escape from this inevitable I. Let us say we, as ofen as may be convenient. For we, thou, he, she, or it, are always better—are they not—than whatever I? Doubtless: and this is why it is pleasant to ride, walk, play at wicket, or mingle in city crowds: so, to escape this intense personality, this perpetual introversion; and see other things than I.  (90)

Casting the privacy of the “inevitable I” as a problem, Pun questions the very core of his lifestyle choice, suggesting that suburban privacy might be something that should be escaped. When these ideas are posed to Frank on the walk, however, he rejects them, arguing: “Do we not rather return, always, from mingling with the great crowd, with a still heartier liking for the home which is so concentred in I. . . . ? Oh no, Pun, let us love the country, only remembering always,

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that towns are, and that thereby we have the morning papers” (91). Here, Frank articulates the classic logic of the suburbs, claiming its superiority is due to its focus on domestic experience, while allowing enough proximity to still receive news from the cities. It is precisely the suburban experience—as a middle ground between rural isolation and urban crowds—that supposedly made it the perfect place for male intimacy. And yet the narrative reveals the dangers of male intimacy more generally. Te celebrated intimacy between Pun and Frank Bryars is made possible by their shared debilities which make conventional male professional pursuits impossible. Amidst his battles with neuralgia, Pun witnesses Frank’s decline, and, despite traveling in hopes of recovery, Frank’s death and Pun’s resultant grief mark the end of the narrative. Te elegiac tone associated with the endings of both Willis’s Letters from under a Bridge and Mansfeld’s Up-Country Letters hint at ambivalence toward the idealization of suburban/rural domesticity as a haven for American manhood, but also point to the pleasurable sadnesses of sentimental culture in the period. It is precisely in the utter idiosyncrasy and lack of plot in Upcountry Letters and other country books that we see so clearly the unresolved tensions within masculine ideology of the period and, with it, the uncertainty as to how to present a model of American manhood that allows for both privacy and intimacy. In one particularly dizzying sequence of chapters in the novel, Pundison responds to a query from the professor about “the long lapse in our cor­re­ spond­ence” and a “tender inquiry” as to whether he is “too ill to write” by announcing that he is “uproariously well” and countering by asking, “sir, do you expect this [healthy] man will be content to spin out his mornings in sending you up-country moralities and fddle-de-dees?”(243). If this seems like a complete rejection of all that has come before in the narrative, his health quickly gives way and by the next letter Pundison beckons to his correspondent: “Oh, come to me, my great friend, my quondam, come, come, come quick; for every thing is wrong” (248). Te anxious or serious tone found here quickly gives way, and in the next chapter Pundison looks back on his brief stint of health ironically, complaining that “I was not only getting common, but I was becoming responsible. . . . [I]n health, I was expected to do things. I was elected vestry-man. I was made chairman of a committee. I was requested to address the _______ Society!” (250). He concludes, “I look upon myself, sir, during these ebullient weeks, as upon an animal—a baboon! a wandering nightmare!

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an embodied cruelty, with a heart like the nether mill-stone” (251). Te rapid shifs between ebullience, paralyzing anxiety, and ironic distance highlight the narrative’s tension with itself and its vision of masculinity, but it is precisely these tensions that make Mansfeld’s narrative interesting and expose conficts in the mid-nineteenthcentury masculine identity. As if the goings-on inside the text of Up-Country Letters weren’t dizzying enough, there is an “editorial” preface, ostensibly written by the astronomy professor who is the recipient of all the other letters. Suggesting that there has been discussion as to the “propriety” of publishing the letters, he includes a note from Pun in which he explains that he is “now so occupied . . . with health and something to do, that my foregone objections to the book seem as unimportant as the letters themselves” (4). Confdently disavowing the contents, Pun proclaims:

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Briefy, sir: the letters are trifes. If you choose to throw them up to the wind, I do not know that there is any bad seed in them that will grow into mischief; but they will scarcely grow corn or potatoes. . . . I look back upon the few past years as upon a dream-vista, from which I am happily escaped. Dreams are very well, but action is better. And illness has its uses, but health only is glorious, and the fulfllment of God’s design.  (4)

It is hard to calculate the efect of this claim on the structure of the narrative as a whole: Reading this frst, does a reader reconsider all claims made within the text in light of this preface? Surely not, though Mansfeld’s use of the preface seems to extend the dizzying shifs that swirl within the narrative about the proper stance of American manhood. Mansfeld’s narrative reveals not only the impulse to establish suburban masculine privacy and the anxieties of feminization associated with intimacy, but also the pleasures of male domesticity and intimacy and precisely what is lost in its disavowal through depersonalization. Constructing his narrative as he does, with its “prosy what-nots” and “up-country . . . fddle-de-dees” but also framed by its “healthy” manly disavowals, Mansfeld absolves himself and his male readers from any charges of feminization or moral turpitude. Tese confusing narrative gestures suggest that Mansfeld (and his readers) may not have been wholly comfortable with the critique of urban masculinity, yet they were still drawn to the vision of a leisurely, intimate suburban masculinity.

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Although Up-Country Letters and its many country book peers have largely disappeared from our literary history and cultural consciousness, their contemporary popularity can tell us much about under what terms the suburbs were imagined. Te bourgeois male fantasy of living outside the limits of the city ofered a host of imagined rewards. Te suburban man’s mastery over the landscape was seen as an expression of picturesque taste whose value was rated higher than professional vocational standing (and well suited to “men in the world whose misfortune it is to think too little of themselves”). It also gave them access to a picturesque domesticity in which male leisure and ease supplanted organized and efcient feminine domestic authority. Suburban life ofered the leisure and privacy to really experience nature, but also the possibility of homosocial intimacy beyond the limitations imposed by urban masculinity. As Toreau promised as he lef the village: “not till we have lost the world, do we begin to fnd ourselves, and realize where we are and the infnite extent of our relations” (118). Tese masculine fantasies galvanized the development of suburbs, one of the most signifcant transformations of the nation’s physical and social landscapes. Te suburbs remain a potent ideal of U.S. domestic life, and, though much has changed, persistent remnants of its country book ideals can be found in our time. Perhaps the library has been replaced by the television-dominated “man cave,” but the suburban home has retained its prioritization of male private domestic space. To this day, landscaping the suburban property retains its signifcance as validating and empowering masculine efort. Te country book’s advice on how to reshape private landscapes has now been replaced by endless television shows on cable networks such as HGTV. Barry Gray’s rhapsodic description of suburban “egg-nog” making is uncannily echoed in contemporary American food writing: Antebellum suburban men were the frst “locavore foodies.” Gray’s egg-nog was made to celebrate male friendship, with the suburban home serving as an idealized space of homosocial intimacy, and the modern suburban home still imagined as an ambivalent refuge from the competitive masculine world of work. Te persistence of these formations hints at the importance of the country book to understanding how the picturesque sensibility reshaped the physical and social landscape of midnineteenth-century United States, a transformation whose resonances are still present in our contemporary lives.

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Te New England Village Novel and Picturesque Reform Te New England village was a common locale for nineteenth-­century American fction, but it is primarily associated with the post-­Civil War literature of regionalism. From the ambivalent nostalgia of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Old Town Folk (1869) to the critically acclaimed short fction published in the elite literary magazines of  the late nineteenth century by such authors as Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and others, infuential critics have labeled the regionalist focus of New England village fction a “women’s tradition.”1 Although the New England village of regionalist fction has traditionally been read as an explicitly marginalized and “minor” setting, where the major concerns of American life in the period— such as politics, racial and ethnic diversity, labor and social class confict—were largely excluded, recent criticism has drawn attention to the ways that race, ethnicity, industrial production, and trade are important subtexts.2 Tis post-­Civil War New England regionalist fction, which somewhat minimized politics, dominates our understanding of the meaning of nineteenth-­century New England village life as a literary subject. However, there is an earlier nineteenthcentury tradition of novels that depicted the New England village as a crucially important space for articulating American social and ­religious values. Tese novels constitute a largely forgotten mid-­nineteenth-­century genre that belongs, in the words of Lawrence Buell, “to a tradition of attempts at the great American novel, New England style.”3 Unlike the short forms or sketches that dominated late nineteenth-­century regionalist depictions of New England, these novels were ofen large, sprawling, and ambitious. Examples of the genre include Sylvester

Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835–1874. John Evelev, Oxford University Press (2021). © John Evelev. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894557.003.0006

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Judd’s Margaret (1845), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Kavanagh (1849), Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Elsie Venner (1861), and Henry Ward Beecher’s Norwood (1869). Although these novels are now largely forgotten, they were collectively hailed by contemporary critics as exemplary of American literary possibilities. Whether set in the past or present, these novels imagined the New England village transitioning from traditional Calvinist theology toward diferent shades of liberal Protestantism. Te trajectory of this transition varied, but in all of the novels, the theological crisis of the New England village was both a local concern and a crucial place to work out the new possibilities of American national life. Tese novels identifed the New England village as the ideal site for American social regeneration. To defne what it means to try to write “the great American novel, New England style,” this chapter shows that these writers constructed ­self-­consciously ambitious narratives of the “national imaginary” set in the context of the New England village, making this space a symbol of American nationhood that addressed theological, social, and cultural problems of both past and present.4 Central to this impulse to address national issues within the ­mid-­nineteenth-­century village novel was the concept of the picturesque. Depictions of New England in literature, visual arts, and even materials promoting tourism in the region depended on picturesque description.5 Tis association between New England and the picturesque is central to Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s A New-­England Tale (1822), one of the earliest expressions of the New England village novel. Early in the novel Mr. Lloyd, the Quaker widower who will become mentor and ultimately husband to the novel’s Cinderella-like heroine, explains his choice to remain in the unnamed Berkshires village because of his own and his soon-­to-­be dead wife’s preference for the picturesque scenery: “I, too, prefer this scenery,” said Mr. Lloyd, seeking to turn the conversation, for he could not yet but contemplate with dread, what his courageous wife spoke of with a tone of cheerfulness. “I prefer it, because it has a more domestic aspect. Tere is, too, a more perfect and intimate union of the sublime and beautiful. Tese mountains that surround us, and are so near to us on every side, seem to me like natural barriers, by which the Father has secured for His children the gardens He has planted for them by the river side.”6

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Refecting the picturesque’s hybrid aesthetic status, Mr. Lloyd praises the Berkshire landscape for its “union of the sublime and beautiful.” Afer his wife’s death, he remains in the town, buying the young ­heroine’s home (sold as a result of her dead father’s impecunious behavior) because he and his wife “had together admired its secluded and picturesque situation” (Sedgwick 34–35). Like Sedgwick’s novel, Sarah J. Hale’s 1827 novel Northwood uses picturesque New England village scenery primarily as descriptive context.7 For these early novels, the New England village becomes synonymous with the picturesque, but very much as background. Only in 1840s, when the vogue for the picturesque and its protocols of landscape or scenery appreciation became an important tool of American bourgeois culture, do we see a very diferent kind of New England village novel. Starting with works like Sylvester Judd’s Margaret (1845), novels contained extensive literary treatment of the picturesque New England village and did not just use them as background scenery. Tese novels made explicit connections between the process of learning to read the picturesque New England landscape properly and the process of fnding solutions to the problems within the village and the nation. Tese midcentury New England village novels ofen have extensive prefaces, lengthy narratorial asides, and authorial stand-­ins who speak about interpretation of the landscape, training both their protagonists and readers in the protocols of the picturesque and in their application to American social problems. Te picturesque enabled the novels’ characters and readers to interact with the landscape and shape it to their desires and needs, ­addressing such topics as temperance, pacifsm, utopian communalism, the nature of middle-­class social responsibility, threats to the traditional social and racial hierarchies, and the restoration of national order in the wake of the Civil War. Despite its cameo role in modern American literary history, the midcentury New England village novel used the picturesque to change how Americans understood both a regional landscape and the nation. Amidst the variety of their ambitions and concerns, these novels’ shared central interest in the picturesque hints at its role as an enabling heuristic for shaping spaces and addressing social problems in mid-­nineteenth-­century America. Te mid-­nineteenth-­century New England village novel’s use of the picturesque speaks to the middle-­class embrace of the

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a­ esthetic form to address the largest issues within American life and reshape its physical, social, and moral landscape.

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Te New England Village and the Picturesque: An Invented Tradition Te New England village is one of the great mythic spaces of American life, an archetypal version of the American small town and its association with religious, political, and social virtues.8 During the nineteenth century, the New England village became an idealized embodiment of collectivity, a nostalgic representation of American cohesion and consensus amidst the dominant ideology of liberal individualism. In 1824, the Massachusetts politician and orator Edward Everett ofered a characteristic vision of the village, emphasizing the role of its institutions in fostering the virtues of American political life: “Te village school-­house and the village church are the monuments of our republicanism; to read, to write, and to discuss grave afairs, in their primary assemblies, are the ­licentious practices of our democracy.”9 With its stereotypical institutions of church, school, shops, and homes constructed around a village green or common, this village fgures strongly in Everett’s sense of American national identity. Harriet Beecher Stowe predicted its continuing infuence in her preface to Old Town Folk (1869), when she described the New England village as “the seed-­bed of the great American Republic, and of all that is likely to come of it.”10 Lawrence Buell attests to the importance of New England villages, arguing that “[t]o study the cult of the New England village is to study the most distinctively New Englandish contribution to the American social ideal.”11 Tis version of New England village life has become a persistent motif of American national identity from Puritan religious congregationalism to Revolutionary battles for ­independence to modern nostalgic visions of families gathering ­together for Tanksgiving and Christmas. However important it has been to our vision of the American Republic, the New England village depicted by nineteenth-­century writers as the “seedbed of democracy” was an invented tradition, a conceived space largely created over the course of the nineteenth

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century. It was created by landscape designers who constructed the spaces, by members of local historical societies who helped to create a sense of a past that never fully existed, and by writers whose literary works facilitated this reconception of the New England village space.12 All of these agents constructed the tradition of the New England village. As cultural geographer Joseph Wood notes, “Like most traditions, the village tradition is a deeply held idea standing in stark contrast to the actual landscape.”13 Combining forces to revise regional history and reimagine the spaces, these various agents created a New England village tradition. Tis anachronistic spatial vision, which was based on an imagined history invented in the nineteenth century, was instantiated on the landscape of New England over the century, becoming an idealized model for the ­development of small towns, suburbs, and “new urban” developments across the United States and to the present day. Te realities of the New England village past did not match the imagined space or the communal ideals envisioned by the midnineteenth century. Te agricultural economy of the New England village of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries made signifcant distances between households necessary, resulting in a widely dispersed layout in which community life was very limited. Only in the nineteenth century, as mercantilism and industrialism came to fgure more centrally in the regional economy, did the New England village acquire its present meaning as a nucleated settlement associated with the archetypal “center village.”14 Wood notes that while the New England village was being physically reshaped into the center village from its more dispersed form, writers and orators were imaginatively reconstructing New England village life by inventing historical connections to the Puritan and Revolutionary eras past. For example, Horace Bushnell’s 1851 speech “Te Age of Homespun,” given on the occasion of the centennial celebration of the settlement of Litchfeld, Connecticut, used the trope of homespun, the domestic production of fabric, to ofer a nostalgic pastoral vision of New England village life: “And so it will be seen that our homespun fathers and mothers made a Puritan Arcadia among these hills.”15 Litchfeld was the birthplace of Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Te town’s Puritan past and center village present would be depicted in Old Town Folk and Norwood, refecting the nostalgic and artifcial model of village life reinforced by fction written about these places. Litchfeld was bypassed by the railroad in the midcentury and became

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a “village” enclave for wealthy summer vacationers by the end of the nineteenth century. By physically and imaginatively ­reconstituting center villages, “Romantic New Englanders built their own worlds,” inventing a tradition that simultaneously posited their vision of the New England landscape and geography back into the past and legitimated their contemporary vision of community through its imaginary connection to the Puritan and Revolutionary era past.16 At the center of this nineteenth-­century re-­envisioning of the New England village was the picturesque, with its disciplines of active viewing and redesigning the landscape to take a “natural” form. In an essay entitled “A Dissolving View,” which she wrote for inclusion in the collection Te Home-­Book of the Picturesque (1849), Susan Cooper contemplates a contemporary village scene and imaginatively alters it, returning it not to a natural state but to an imaginary earlier state of settlement, describing it as “dwindled to a mere hamlet,” with “low, picturesque cottages . . . irregularly grouped along a wide grassy street, and about a broad green which formed the centre of the village.”17 Cooper’s “dissolving” view reshapes the town into center village form with an anachronistic shape that it had never had before.18 Tis process of picturesque viewing was literalized in village design, as local New England historical societies throughout the mid-­nineteenth century sought to preserve an older architecture that best refected the picturesque aesthetics of contemporary taste and to encourage new development that ft within the anachronistic model of the center village.19 Calling for “the improvement of country villages” in columns for his Horticulturalist magazine at the midcentury, Andrew Jackson Downing repeatedly advocated designs based on the center village form with tree-­lined streets, cottages, and a landscaped common or park area that refected core picturesque design sensibilities and fulflled the fantasy of a New England village past.20 Refecting Downing’s values, mid-­nineteenth-­century designers described the center village as a “restoration” and “reconstruction,” although they were actually creating a present-­day picturesque version of the New England geographical past. Although Wood suggests that we can look to the mid-­nineteenthcentury literature to understand the process whereby the New England village became such a symbol of the “inherited ideals of  stable puritan community and democratic society,” the midnineteenth-­century New England village novel tells a more complex story in which the relationship to the spaces and values of the past

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are far more ambivalent. Wood presents midcentury New England village literature as the product of nostalgic elites re-­creating a stable past for the nineteenth-­century present, but the genre was never simply nostalgic for the community of the Puritan past.21 Whether set in the past or the present, these novels imagined the New England community in a state of crisis and in transition from traditional Calvinist theology toward diferent shades of liberal Protestantism. However, writers used the picturesque to reshape the New England village landscape and imagine ways of addressing the problems of nineteenth-­century American life. Tey also had to contend with contradictory forces within the picturesque, such as between the organic and manufactured, the old or decayed and the newly made, in order to connect their new vision of American life to the traditions of New England’s village communities and spaces. How could the picturesque simultaneously embrace the aesthetic logic of the past and embody a reformed, renovated present? How could the deeply individual practice of picturesque landscape appreciation and design taste become a model for idealized community life? Te social contradictions of these novels did not merely indicate the problems of the picturesque per se, they also exposed the distinctive ideological project of the middle class that the American picturesque embodied in the period. Spanning from the 1840s through the end of the 1860s, this fnal chapter chronicles transformations not only in attitudes toward the picturesque, but also in middle-­class social ideals and values more generally. Moving rapidly from utopian idealism in the 1840s to a more conservative social vision in the 1860s, the picturesque New England village novel refects the social contradictions of middleclass reformism and reveals the tensions that would signal the end of particular popularity of the picturesque.

Judd’s Margaret and the Rise of Picturesque Utopia Sylvester Judd’s ambitious New England village novel, Margaret: A Tale of the Real and the Ideal, Blight and Bloom (1845), is perhaps the best novelistic expression of the optimistic spirit of 1840s idealist reformism in the United States, refecting the importance of the New England village novel to midcentury American literature. In this period, the northeastern United States experienced the hopeful

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fowering of perfectionist reformism, from the spread of Garrisonian abolitionism to the emergence of the Washington Temperance Society to the founding of Brook Farm and other utopian communities.22 Nathaniel Hawthorne’s curdled narrative of his Brook Farm experience, Te Blithedale Romance (1852), may have become the representative fctional meditation on this utopian reform moment, but it was Judd’s novel that contemporary critics held up as emblematic.23 Margaret does not refect modern aesthetic values in its sprawling fusion of historical fction, carefully rendered New England regional dialect and description of landscape, fora and fauna, preposterous romance plotting, and lengthy epistolary description of a utopian community.24 Despite (or perhaps because of) its odd joining of ­disparate literary forms and modes, Margaret was regarded by contemporary readers as one of the most important works of American literature. In her review of the novel in the New York Tribune, Margaret Fuller enthusiastically asserted: “Of books like this, as good or still better, our new literature shall be full.”25 Both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Teodore Parker privately recommended it to English friends, proclaiming it, respectively, “intensely” American and “the most original and characteristic book that would appear here for 20 years to come.”26 In a survey of the American novel written upon the publication of Longfellow’s Kavanagh in 1849, James Russell Lowell wrote: “Te story of Margaret is the most emphatically American book ever written.27 Although never hugely popular, Margaret was repeatedly reprinted in the nineteenth century (a ­revised edition appeared in 1851 and reprints in 1857, 1871, and 1891, along with an “Outline” edition, with engravings from the famous illustrator Felix Darley in 1856). Judd’s novel was a literary touchstone and demonstrates the centrality of the New England village novel to American literature in the period. It also reveals the centrality of the picturesque to the New England village’s role as the ideal expression of American social possibilities. New England’s picturesque landscape and the characters’ relationship to it is a central feature of Judd’s novel. Margaret is, in its broadest outline, a bildungsroman. Over the course of 600 plus pages, Judd narrates the development of a pretty young girl in late eighteenthcentury New England. Margaret Hart, raised in rural poverty and deeply sensitive to the beauty and spirituality of nature, thrives despite the alcoholism of her parents and the rigid Calvinism of her village. In the novel, she grows into a beautiful young woman who

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resists the temptations of Boston and converts to Christianity through the Unitarian infuence of a visitor to the area, Charles Evelyn (who later becomes her husband). She then learns that she is, in fact, an heiress, and, with her money and religious example, she converts her village into a utopian community. Despite the many twists and turns of the plot, Judd described Margaret in his 1851 preface as “a tale not of outward movement, but inward development.”28 In her development from child of nature to benefactress of a utopian community, Margaret “shows what, in given circumstances, a woman can do”: She represents the idealized example of the feminine ­reformist infuence, a model that Judd’s readers are encouraged to emulate.29 In Margaret, this infuence is manifested through the picturesque appreciation and design of the New England landscape, which ­ ­becomes the means to inculcate both the heroine and the reader into the values of Unitarian idealist reform. Unlike Sedgwick’s stereotypical rendering of the picturesque as a descriptive background in A New-­England Tale, Judd’s version of the picturesque was a specifc sensibility, a way of seeing the world that validated his reformist vision. Afer the initial publication of Margaret, some reviewers complained of the “vulgarity” of his depiction of rural poverty, drunkenness, and violence in New England life. In the second edition of the novel, Judd cut out some potentially ofensive material but justifed his choice of topic in a preface that directly invoked the picturesque as exemplifying his novelistic project as a whole.30 He explicitly likened what had been deemed his problematic narrative material to a picturesque landscape: What is vulgar, and what is refned, what noble and what mean? Tere are standards of taste valid and needful. But is not the range of their applications too limited? May not rough rocks have a place in the fairest landscapes of nature or art? May not a dark pool of water in a forest, with its vegetable and animal adjuncts mirror the stars? Have we not seen or heard of a cascade that starts, say, from the blue of the skies, pours down a precipice of rusty rock, and terminates in drifwood and bog? Is that water bathetic? Tese are questions we do not care to argue here and now. Are they not worthy of consid[e]ration? Have they no pertinence to the subject in hand?  (M 1:iv)

Tis passage slips between narrative and landscape, so that aesthetic models of landscape appreciation are applicable to narrative, making

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novel and landscape analogous. In noting that elements of roughness and harshness can impart aesthetic value and beauty to a landscape, Judd invokes the commonplaces of the picturesque, connecting his narrative to well-­established conventions of aesthetic “standards of taste.” Te sensibility of the viewer joins the “dark pool” to the “stars” or the “blue of skies” to “drif-­wood and bog,” so that the aesthetic meaning of the landscape comes from the unifcation of roughness and beauty within the comprehensive picturesque gaze. Te picturesque ofers a model of aesthetic synthesis that implicitly authorizes Judd’s novel’s combination of the more tawdry elements of New England life (such as alcoholism and violence) with its landscape beauty. Judd appropriates the picturesque sensibility to legitimize his novel, implying that negative judgments by critics are no more valid than criticism of a picturesque landscape: “Is that water bathetic?” Acknowledging the validity of “standards of taste” such as the picturesque allows Judd to expand them beyond just the landscape: “is not the range of their applications too limited?” If we can apply the picturesque to the landscape, fnding aesthetic merit in the conjunction of roughness and beauty, why not in a novel as well? In the preface and throughout the novel, Judd invokes the imaginative, synthetic, and ordering gaze of the picturesque as the central logic through which the heroine (and reader) must be trained to institute Christian idealist social reform from the mix of roughness and beauty that is New England life. Margaret is a story of a developing consciousness that discovers Christian idealism through encounters with nature. Before Margaret can demonstrate the reformist possibilities of feminine infuence, she must test her sympathetic bond with nature against the limitations of her late eighteenth-­century New England community. As a young child, Margaret is deeply attuned to nature: One episode in her childhood involves her successful dowsing for water for a local farm. Early in the novel, she joins others in a trip into the woods to collect herbs and honeycomb for the local medicine woman. Judd describes the forest’s efect on her: It was, as we might say, a new scene to Margaret. She had never gone so far into the forest before. She was susceptible in her feelings and fresh as susceptible. Te woods . . . green, sweet-­smelling, imparadisical, inspiring, suggestive, wild, musical, sombre, superstitious, devotional, mystic, tranquilizing;—these were about the child and over her.

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Tat we must know in order to know, that we must feel in order to feel, was a truth Margaret but little realized. She was beginning to know and to feel. Could the Immortal Spirit of the Woods have spoken to her?—but she was not prepared for it; she was too young; she only felt an exhilarating sensation of variety, beauty, grandeur, awe. (1:30–32).

Te novel depicts Margaret’s developing knowledge and feelings, both of which unfold in direct relation to her “susceptible” experiences in nature. She must be open to the various conventionalized sensations that the landscape produces for the Romantic landscape sensibility (i.e., “variety, beauty, grandeur, awe”), but for Judd this is only the beginning of a process that will culminate in more active reshaping of the landscape for reformist purposes. Te picturesque becomes the central tool for spiritual renewal in the novel. Living outside of the village, Margaret is raised amidst the distinctly picturesque scenery of the Pond and the local mountain, Indian’s Head. Tis feature is characterized by its “surface [that] was ragged and rocky and interspersed with various kinds of shrubs” and given the name “from a rude resemblance to a man’s face” (1:21). It is no coincidence that this site is also directly connected to Margaret’s spiritual awakening into Christianity. While overlooking the whole region and the community in the sunset on a Sunday from Indian’s Head, afer she has been thrown out of the meeting house when she tries to bring in a wildfower bouquet to her frst service, the child Margaret has her frst intimations of Christian revelation. In a dream-­vision, she gives her rejected wildfower bouquet to Christ and Christ tells her that “the Church has fallen” and that she will be his “co-­worker” in its redemption (1:173). Later in the novel, afer she has been fred from her position as village schoolteacher for her ­refusal to teach the Calvinist creed, she also meets Mr. Evelyn atop Indian’s Head. A liberal Protestant (his precise denomination is unspecifed, but, like Judd himself, he largely espouses Unitarian principles) Margaret’s future husband shows her another version of Christianity, one that fts in with her vision of nature. Afer she learns her secret family heritage that makes her an heiress, Margaret sets about converting her native village of Livingston, renaming Indian’s Head “Mons Christi” and topping its summit with a 20-­foot-­high white marble cross (2: 229). Te transformation of Indian’s Head into

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Mons Christi literalizes Judd’s vision of the liberal Christianizing ­infuence of a picturesque sensibility. Although Judd associates it with appreciation of a spiritualized landscape in Margaret, the picturesque is also connected to poverty, alcoholism, and violence in New England village life. Avowedly an advocate for temperance, Judd contrasts the present days of “comparative abstinence and general sobriety” with the past. He notes that in the past alcohol was a decorative part of village life: “While we expel rum from our houses as a pestilence, an earlier age was wont to display it with picturesque efect, and render it attractive by environments of mahogany and silver” (M 1:56). Highlighting the picturesque qualities of alcohol, the novel describes a variety of traditional New England holidays, including Tanksgiving, “Husking Bees,” and militia Training Days, in which the picturesque rituals ofen culminated in drunkenness and violence. In his nostalgic oration on “Te Age of Homespun,” Horace Bushnell goes out of his way to disavow these “rude and promiscuous gatherings connected so ofen with low and vulgar excesses.” While acknowledging their place in traditional New England life, Bushnell much prefers more sedate and domestic social gatherings such as “apple-­pearing and quilting frolics.”31 Unlike Bushnell’s speech, Judd’s novel acknowledges the centrality of alcohol to traditional New England village life. Te narrator observes early on that Livingston had fve cider-­brandy distilleries and that alcohol “found its way into every family . . . all denominations of men bowed to its supremacy” (M 1:56–57). Margaret’s adoptive parents—rustics named Pluck and Brown Moll—are impoverished alcoholics and her brothers are both punished for behavior associated with consuming alcohol to excess during celebrations. Her brother Hash, along with her father, is pilloried for public drunkenness during a militia day, and her brother Chilion is executed for murder afer killing a drunken man who tried to assault Margaret sexually during a “Husking Bee.” It is precisely these “vulgar” and “mean” elements of New England village life that Judd, in his 1851 preface, justifes representing in the novel.32 Unlike Bushnell, who preferred sweeping these elements out of view in his look back, Judd acknowledged the darker elements of New England village life, which also contributed to its picturesque quality. If alcohol had a “picturesque efect” within traditional New England village life in Margaret, Judd responded to it with more of

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the same or with an alternative version of the picturesque. Te third section of the novel, entitled “Womanhood,” makes a radical shif in literary form from third-­person narrative to epistolary fction in which Margaret, now a wealthy heiress and married to Charles Evelyn, describes her work as reformist proprietor of her village community, which has now been turned over to temperance and pacifst principles. In reforming the village, Margaret and her husband do not reject the picturesque. Rather, they reorient it in a practice of landscape design that hints at some of the anachronisms and contradictions inherent in the mid-­nineteenth century cultural logic that made the New England village such a potent symbol for American social, theological, and political life. Although Livingston, with its rugged scenery, its traditional New England holidays and its fve cider-­brandy distilleries, is distinctly “picturesque” throughout Judd’s novel, in the fnal section Margaret describes the elaborate process of social reform enacted through reshaping the Livingston landscape by picturesque design protocols: paradoxically making picturesque what was already identifed as picturesque. A perfect example of this process is Margaret and her husband’s efort in the impoverished Livingston neighborhood called “No. 4,” a part of the village dominated by Smith’s Tavern and distillery. Te tenant farmers of the area, under the infuence of ­alcohol, became “loungers about the tavern, which seemed to have exhausted the life of the place, and to have difused over it instead, indolence, dreariness, and sterility” (M 1:86). In the reformed Livingston, however, picturesque landscaping redeems No. 4: Mr. Evelyn had their houses repaired and painted, sent men to clear out their intervals, planted a row of trees along the street, and had a beautiful statue of Diligence set up at the corner. He then assumed their debts, and said he would give them no trouble for three years, provided they would pay the interest punctually. (M 2:224)

In his attention to the homes of the indigent farmers and to planting trees along the street, Mr. Evelyn takes up Downing’s call to evangelize American domestic life and become an “apostle of taste.”33 In his journalism, Downing asserted his belief in “the bettering infuence of beautiful cottages and country houses—in the improvement of human nature necessarily resulting to all classes, from the possession

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of lovely gardens and fruitful orchards.”34 Mr. Evelyn’s assumption of debts and the none-­too-­subtle message of the statue of “Diligence he contributes to No. 4’s neighborhood hint at paternalism and social control that many saw in Downing’s picturesque designs.35 Yet Judd’s vision of utopian Christian reform fnds the poor tenants inspired to embrace the picturesque so that beauty and virtues are difused throughout the community: When they had new door-­yards, the girls began to ornament them with fowers and shrubs. We let Dorothy go into the woods two days for this purpose; and that hamlet has now a truly picturesque appearance. . . . God made it a beautiful spot, and man has restored its fallen image. Nor is this efect confned to No. 4; it has reached the village, and is more or less distributed into every part of the town.

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(M 2:224–25)

Te reformist logic in the fnal section of Judd’s novel is that of picturesque design in which the active and imaginative reshaping of the natural scenery is used to “restore its fallen image.” Tis notion of picturesque design as restoration empowers radical reform in the life of the village. For Judd, embracing the picturesque leads to theological and social reform for the residents of Livingston, including imposing universal temperance, disbanding the militia, and establishing equality between the sexes.36 Judd imagines the broad efects of this picturesque reformism inspired in part by the private and domestic design eforts of Margaret and her husband. Te end of the novel spends as much, if not more, time on their architectural and landscape design eforts. Near the beginning of Part III, Margaret describes the plans for their new home; this is decidedly a Downingesque in its attention to artfully arranged vistas: “Trough avenues that we shall cut in the Maples will be seen the Village, the River, the Meadows, the champagne country, and mountains beyond” (M 2:215). Margaret is equally attentive to the materials (constructed of local granite) and Gothic style that Downing’s architectural pattern books popularized37: Of the style I shall say but little, nor repeat the discussions we have had on the subject, nor tell what a world of ideas has burst like a ­revelation on a rustic girl’s mind in the shape of buttresses, wings, bow-­windows, verandas, views here, efects there, good old Queen

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Bess, and what not. . . It will have, I fancy, a slightly castellated appearance; so at least it looks on paper. (M 2:215)

Tis elaborate attention to architectural and landscape design at the end of the novel identifes the picturesque sensibility as an important tool of social reform. Margaret asserts near the end that “[t]he power of Beauty over what is known as the common mind, our house and grounds, our statuary and paintings furnish instances of, every day” (M 2:289). In the novel’s fnal section, Margaret’s picturesque landscape designs represent the fulfllment of her journey from a young girl who “only felt an exhilarating sensation of variety, beauty, grandeur, awe” in nature (M 1:30) to a woman whose aesthetic taste can transform a New England village into a utopia. Margaret’s “inward development” that can lead to idealized reform traced by the novel is a movement toward a picturesque sensibility that not only observes the landscape but actively reshapes it to utopian purposes. Ironically, if Margaret’s new home, with its “castellated appearance,” represents the picturesque ideals of Downing’s “apostles of taste” and the “power of Beauty” to efect social change, it is also somewhat redundant. Te new house, with its archaic picturesque design, mirrors the already picturesque aesthetics of Livingston as described at the beginning of the novel, with its “high-­pitched roofs,” “jutting upper stories,” and “chimneys like castles, large, arched, corniced” (M 1:46). By building a new Gothic picturesque home, Margaret and her husband re-­create what was already present in their New England village life. Tis aesthetic doubling-­ back of Livingston, with Margaret and Mr. Evelyn making a picturesque through design what was already made picturesque by the processes of history, refects some of the contradictions of the reformism of the picturesque. Te redundancy of Margaret’s picturesque home design mirrors the paradoxical project of ­mid-­nineteenth-­century advocates of the New England village who sought to connect the present to an idealized version of the past by linking it to an anachronistic version of New England ­village space and design. In this way, Judd’s ambitious novel recapitulates some of the central problems of antebellum reformism, which joins change with continuity. At the close of the novel, Margaret describes a debate she has with a visitor to Livingston, in which the visitor asserts that “[g]reat reforms must be gradual” and it is “easier to tear down than to build up; easier to remove an error than supply a truth” (M 2:302).

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Margaret replies, “we had not sought to pull down anything, but rather to put life into what was dead, and reinstate Christ in his own Church” (M 2: 302). Margaret’s interlocutor readily agrees with this claim, and the novel quickly closes. For Judd, the utopian reform imagined in his novel is but a simple “reinstatement” of Christian values, physically enacted by creating picturesque spaces where they already exist. Te picturesque New England village of the past is both the space of theological and social injustices and the source of new utopian possibilities “reinstated” on the same spaces and aesthetic models.

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Kavanagh, A Tale: Te Picturesque, Christian Sympathy, and Social Responsibility However idiosyncratic Judd’s novel might seem, its setting and concerns were refected in Longfellow’s third and last foray into prose fction, the far more conventional novel, Kavanagh, A Tale (1849). Unlike Margaret (to which it was compared by their contemporaries), Kavanagh is a brief romance tale with a much narrower scope than Judd’s novel. It is, however, like all of the other novels discussed in this chapter, focused on a moment of transition in the spiritual life of the New England village away from traditional Calvinism. Like Margaret, Longfellow’s novel imagines this spiritual shif within the isolated New England community as part of an ambitious social vision. Tis is dramatized in the arrival of a new minister to the village of Fairmeadow—the young Arthur Kavanagh, a spiritual seeker who ultimately envisions for himself a “sacred mission” to bring about “the union of all sects into one universal Church of Christ.”38 Unlike Margaret, Longfellow’s novel does not imagine the theologically liberalized New England village as the utopian embodiment of this religious project, but instead ends with Kavanagh still very much at the start of his process. Te plot encompasses a romantic triangle between Kavanagh and the village’s wealthy heiress, Cecilia Vaughan, and Cecilia’s girlhood friend, Alice Archer (who ultimately dies of  consumption) and a counter to Kavanagh in the fgure of Mr.  Churchill, the local schoolteacher with abortive literary aims. Filtered through all of this, Kavanagh demonstrates that a proper attitude toward the picturesque landscape of New England ofers a model for social engagement and regeneration.

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Like Margaret, Kavanagh was deemed an important admirable work by Longfellow’s New England literary contemporaries. Emerson, for example, called it “the best sketch we have seen in the direction of the American novel.”39 James Russell Lowell used its publication as an occasion to ofer a lengthy meditation on nationalism in American literature, concluding “All who love purity or tone, tenderness and picturesque simplicity, have incurred a new obligation to the author of ‘Kavangh.’”40 Te terms of Lowell’s praise are pointed, refecting a preference for the milder aesthetics of “picturesque simplicity” over the strident literary nationalism ofered by New York’s Young America writers.41 Early in his essay, Lowell mocks the literary nationalist impulse to link the larger scale of American spaces to a new American literature.42 Longfellow’s also novel mocks this impulse to link national geography and literature, when he stages an encounter between Churchill and a Mr. Hathaway, editor of a new proposed magazine, Te Niagara, who asserts bombastically that “we want a national literature commensurate with our mountains and rivers,— commensurate with Niagara, and the Alleghenies, and the Great Lakes!”43 Longfellow’s choice of the modest New England village setting and its picturesque scenery overtly rejects the association of American literature with Young America’s preferred mode of the sublime. Te scope and ambitions of American literary nationalism has been crucial to the formation of a canon of mid-­nineteenthcentury American authors and, with it, the decanonization of other writers, including Longfellow and certainly his picturesque village novel, Kavanagh. What Lowell praised as the “picturesque simplicity” of Longfellow’s novel has ironically marked it as minor and insignifcant to modern readers. Unsurprisingly, twentieth-­century critics of Kavanagh tend to fnd at best only minor virtues in the work. Longfellow biographer Newton Arvin suggested that “the merest puf from the lips of criticism would shatter it” and called for it to be read with “indulgent criticism.”44 Such “indulgent” critics saw Kavanagh as a predecessor to the local color movement and as a meditation on the theme of nationality in literature. Other critics have read it as an autobiographical depiction of Longfellow’s own frustrated attempts to balance writing with other work and family, and in the handsome Kavanagh some critics have seen a portrait of Hawthorne.45 John Seelye has called it “a major document of New England Unitarianism, having been written to demonstrate, even ­illustrate, its sectarian commitment to charity in all its complex

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manifestations.”46 Seelye’s reimagination of Kavanagh’s ambitions acknowledges the ambitions of the New England village novel within its own historical moment, an ambition that modern scholars largely fail to see because its focus on such things as the village and picturesque landscape description is now seen as intrinsically minor or unliterary. To read Kavanagh as a New England village novel is, however, to recover its ambitions and to reveal how the proper attitude toward the picturesque landscape was central to another tradition of American literary nationalism. Kavanagh leans heavily on religious reform, focusing on the utopian possibilities of the liberalization of Calvinism. Arthur Kavanagh enters the life of the village of Fairmeadow as a possible replacement for the orthodox Calvinist minister, Pendexter, whose retirement sermon asserts that his “own shortcomings had been owing to” the community’s failure to support him adequately. Pendexter concludes by claiming “that no reformation was to be expected in them under his ministry, and that to produce one would require a greater exercise of Divine power than it did to create the world” (718). In contrast to Pendexter’s comical Calvinist sternness, Kavanagh’s gentle and “beautifully written” sermons encourage his parish, presenting the notion that “every good thought, word, and deed of a man, not only was an ofering to heaven, but likewise served to light him and others on their way homeward!” (727). In the composition of the novel, Longfellow added another chapter to describe Kavanagh’s life before coming to Fairmeadow and his spiritual journey to his Unitarianism, labeling it “the keystone into the arch” of the book.47 In making Kavanagh’s spiritual biography the “keystone” of the novel, Longfellow shifs the emphasis of the story away from the romance between Kavanagh and Cecilia Vaughan that gives it the most narrative propulsion. Instead, he narrates Kavanagh’s journey from Catholicism to Unitarianism. Te book dwells at length on the lesson of the story of St. Christopher, told as a legend that “entirely captivated the heart of the boy” Kavanagh (744) and that would become crucial to his later calling as a minister, “remain[ing] forever in his mind as a lovely allegory of active charity and willingness to serve” (745). Kavanagh’s vision of his ministry and of Christian manhood, derived from the lesson of St. Christopher, is defned by its reformist activism: “the life of man consists not in seeing visions, and in dreaming dreams, but in active charity and willing service” (746). Tis active Christian reformism refects an impulse similar to that of Judd’s novel.

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As in Margaret, in Kavanagh, Longfellow connects the protocols of the picturesque gaze to a Christian vision of charity and service. Kavanagh comes from “that wild and wonderful sea-­coast of Maine, which, even upon the map, attracts the eye by its singular and picturesque indentations” (743). More than just being from a picturesque locale, Kavanagh himself exhibits a strong attraction to picturesque views. Early in his tenure as minister, Kavanagh discovers “in the tower of the church a vacant room” which he takes as his study. From this “retreat,” with its

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[f]our oval windows, fronting the four corners of the heavens, he could look down upon the streets, the roofs and gardens of the ­village,—on the winding river, the meadows, the farms, the distant blue mountains. Here he could sit and meditate, in that peculiar sense of seclusion and spiritual elevation, that entire separation from the world below, which a chamber in a tower always gives.  (733)

From his tower-­study with its distinctly picturesque views of pastoral landscape, river, and distant mountains, Kavanagh imagines his reformist life goal: “the great design and purpose of his life, the removal of all prejudice, and uncharitableness, and persecution, and the union of all sects into one church universal” (750). Te seclusion and aloofness of his picturesque perspective are not seen as contrary to this utopian spiritual project, but as actually aiding or forwarding his Christian sympathies: “From this tower of contemplation he looked down with mingled emotions of joy and sorrow on the ­toiling world below. Te wide prospect seemed to enlarge his sympathies and his charities.” (751). Far from encouraging passivity or detachment, Kavanagh’s picturesque perspective encourages an activist idealism. For Longfellow, Kavanagh’s combination of picturesque sensitivity, Christian idealism, and service produces the ideal vision of American manhood. Te novel also demonstrates the alternative by dramatizing the negative consequences of a rejection of the picturesque and a preference for the sublime. In contrast to Kavanagh’s picturesque Christian sympathy, Longfellow presents Mr. Churchill, a schoolteacher who yearns to become an author. Churchill is a failure not merely because he is unable to complete the projected “Romance” of an exotic world far away from Fairmeadow, but because his futile investment in this literary endeavor refects a greater failure to direct his sensibility and

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link sensibility to sympathy and action. Like Kavanagh, Churchill is a seeker. As the narrator asserts: “Life presented itself to him like the Sphinx, with its perpetual riddle of the real and ideal” (705). Just as Kavanagh was forced to reconcile his inner promptings of faith with his alienation from Catholicism, Churchill is introduced as experiencing “a discord between his outward and inward experience”: “Nature had made Mr. Churchill a poet, but destiny made him a schoolmaster” (705). Unlike Kavanagh, Churchill is unable to reconcile “inward” and “outward” experience. In the novel’s logic, however, Churchill’s problem is one of sensibility, not idealism. Faced with the same landscape that inspires Kavanagh’s visions of Christian charity and service, Churchill rejects Fairmeadow’s picturesque New England scenery, preferring a more distant, exotic, and sublime setting. When we frst meet him in the novel, coming back home afer a day at the school, Churchill imaginatively transforms the New England landscape, turning a sycamore into a gigantic “Lycian planetree.” Te sounds of the wind in the trees and a stream transport him to “the broad prairies of the West” and “the measureless sea” (704–75). Churchill’s eagerness to convert the landscape of inland New England into exotic and distant forms refects his dissatisfaction with the picturesque and his preference for the sublime. Unable to see the narrative possibilities of his home scenery, but also underprepared to write about an exotic world away from New England that he only knows from books, Churchill is destined to fail. Te narrator of the tale makes clear that the story of Kavanagh is itself the “romance” Churchill should have written: What Mr. Churchill most desired was before him. Te Romance he was longing to fnd and record had really occurred in his neighborhood, among his own friends. It had been set like a picture into the frame-­work of his life, enclosed within his own experience. But he could not see it as an object apart from himself; and as he was gazing at what was remote and strange and indistinct, the nearer incidents of aspiration, love, and death, escaped him. Tey were too near to be clothed by the imagination with the golden vapors of romance; for the familiar seems trivial, and only the distant and unknown completely fll and satisfy the mind.  (780)

Unlike Kavanagh, whose encounter with the “prospect” of the picturesque New England landscape “seemed to enlarge his ­

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s­ ympathies,” Churchill is invested in the “remote and strange and indistinct,” thereby trivializing what goes on in his own life. Failing to see the narrative possibilities of his own New England life which “had been set like a picture into the frame-­work of his life” and unable to write about experiences that are distant, albeit “clothed in the imagination with the golden vapors of romance,” Churchill fails to write anything at all. Ironically, modern critics who claim that Longfellow’s novel might disappear at the “merest puf of criticism” are, in a way, recapitulating Churchill’s inability to see the narrative possibilities within New England village life. Longfellow’s investment in picturesque New England is not (as he saw it, at least) an embrace of a minor narrative scope, but points to “incidents of aspiration, love and death” and the possibilities of enlarged sympathies and charity in American life. In the novel, the lesson of Mr. Churchill’s failure is not exclusively literary. His literary sensibility is also his moral sensibility, so that his interests, instead of being oriented toward charity, sympathy, and service within his community, are directed to distant and irrelevant objects. Aside from his thwarted exotic “Romance,” Churchill promises to write two other works. One is “a series of papers on Obscure Martyrs,—a kind of tragic history of the unrecorded and life-­long suferings of women, which hitherto had found no historian, save now and then a novelist” (760). Tis series, promised for the fctional Young American literary magazine, Te Niagara, is never written. Te other work is a lyceum lecture, entitled “What Lady Macbeth Might Have Been, Had Her Energies Been Properly Directed” (781). However ironically we might read Churchill’s lyceum lecture title, both of these projects evince concern for women’s rights or the unfair treatment of women across history. Yet when it comes to applying this reformist idealism to his own life or community, Churchill is particularly unperceptive. Tis is clear in the commentary on the death of Alice Archer, whose end is forecast early in the novel but is hastened by the engagement of Cecilia and Kavanagh, both of whom she is described as loving:48 “Mr. Churchill never knew, that, while he was exploring the Past for records of obscure and unknown martyrs, in his own village, near his own door, before his own eyes, one of that silent sisterhood had passed away into oblivion, unnoticed and unknown” (780). Churchill’s interest in and investigations of the suferings of women in the past preclude him from realizing that

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Alice’s life has also been thwarted by the limitations of women’s ­opportunities in his own time. Alice Archer is not the only woman Churchill neglects to sympathize with or aid despite his avowed interest in women’s plight within society. In his own home lives the servant Lucy, “a girl of ffeen, who had been taken a few years before from an Orphan Asylum” and had “Milesian blood in her veins” and “a gypsy look” (708). At the beginning of the novel, when Mrs. Churchill expresses a concern that Lucy might get into “trouble,” her husband completely ignores his responsibility, puzzling instead over what a man who comes to the village to collect old shoes does with them. Tis man will prove to be Lucy’s seducer, and she runs of with him. Later in the novel, “the forlorn, forsaken” Lucy returns “in destitution and despair” and is “ofen heard” to speak of committing suicide in “the grief of a broken heart and a bewildered brain,” exclaiming “Oh, how I wish I were a Christian! If only I were a Christian, I would not live any longer; I would kill myself!” (764). Lucy’s despair corresponds with the rise of a Millerite camp-­meeting in the village. Akin to Mormonism and Adventist movements, Millerites believed that the Second Coming of Christ and the end of the world were immanent in the early 1840s and the movement had a brief burst of popularity in the period. In Longfellow’s novel, the millennialist fervor of the community only adds fuel to her suicidal inclinations. One day, as Churchill and Kavanagh pass one of the revival meetings, they comment on millennialism’s refection on the unchristian fear of death: “Why should we fear [the end of the world]? . . . [S]hall we fear to mount the narrow staircase of the grave, that leads us out of this uncertain twilight into the serene mansions of the life eternal?” (770). Meanwhile, the two men unwittingly walk by as Lucy quietly drowns herself in the village stream. More so than even the death of Alice, the death of Lucy passes beneath Churchill’s awareness, despite his clear social obligation as the Christian middle-­class employer of a lower-­class orphan servant to sympathize with and protect her. Although the novel places some responsibility for Lucy’s death on the fervid and morbid faith of the Millerites, the suggestion that Lucy’s suicidal wishes are tied to her “bewildered” misunderstanding of Christianity highlights Churchill’s failure as a Christian to ofer real sympathy or charity. Lucy’s suicide condemns Churchill far more seriously than his failure to complete any of his writing projects.

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Te suicide implicates more than just Churchill, however: Its ­depiction invokes the aesthetic forms of the picturesque and questions the belief that Kavanagh asserted earlier that the picturesque gaze could “enlarge his sympathies and his charities.” Unlike the moment in Kavanagh’s tower room where we watch alongside him as he learns to appreciate the picturesque inland New England landscape, Lucy’s suicide is presented as a picturesque tableau:

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Her bonnet and shawl were lying at her feet; and when they passed, she waded far out into the shallow stream, laid herself gently down in its deeper waves, and foated slowly away into the moonlight, among the golden leaves that were faded and fallen like herself,—among the water-­lilies, whose fragrant white blossoms had been broken of and polluted long ago. Without a struggle, without a sigh, without a sound, she foated downward, downward, and silently sank into the silent river.  (771)

With its natural elements of the “shallow stream” and decay (faded “golden leaves” and broken water-­lilies) paired with the silent, peaceful death of the “fallen” woman, the scene exemplifes the pictorial qualities of picturesque description. Te passage is dominated by its aestheticized attempt to capture the scenic efect and to dramatize the analogy between autumn’s faded fora and the “polluted” poor young woman. Does this picturesque scene “enlarge sympathies,” or does it merely aestheticize her death? Lucy is never mentioned again in the novel: Her death goes completely unremarked by the characters. If there is a moral to be derived from Lucy’s story, the novel makes no explicit efort to establish it. Although Longfellow seems perfectly content to chide Churchill for his failure to perceive Alice’s “martyrdom,” Lucy’s tragedy of abused and discarded lower-­class womanhood seems signifcant only for its picturesque scenic possibilities.49 Tis is ironic, as Lucy’s situation, far more than Alice’s, calls for the application of Christian sympathy and charity. Tis failure of sympathy implicates Kavanagh and the readers of the novel, for whom Lucy functions primarily as picturesque scenery. How successful will Kavanagh’s evangelizing plan of “active charity and willing service” be if he cannot even acknowledge the sufering within this small New England village community? Although the novel embraces the reformist possibilities of the picturesque, it also opens itself up to some of the longstanding critiques

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of the morality of the picturesque. With its primarily aesthetic focus, Lucy’s picturesque death seems to ft John Ruskin’s concern that the picturesque was “heartless”:

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[T]he lover of [the picturesque] seems to go forth into the world in a temper as merciless as its rocks. All other men feel some regret at the sight of disorder and ruin. He alone delights in both. . . . Fallen cottage—deserted village—blasted heath—mouldering castle—to him . . . all sights are equally joyful. . . . What is it to him that the old man has passed seventy years in helpless darkness and untaught waste of soul? Te old man has at last accomplished his destiny, and flled the corner of a sketch, where something of an unshapely nature was wanting.50

Although Longfellow is at pains to link the picturesque sensibility to enlarged sympathies and active charity, Kavanagh reveals the dangerous tendencies within the picturesque to replace sympathy and charity with aestheticized fascination for the spectacle of poverty, decay, and death among the rural poor. Like Ruskin’s old man in a fallen cottage, Lucy’s death “flls a corner,” serves an aesthetic purpose, in Longfellow’s New England village novel and demonstrates the distinct limitations of bourgeois sympathy within the picturesque sensibility. Tis aestheticization of poverty is explicitly addressed in Melville’s satirical novel Pierre; or the Ambiguities (1852), a work that could be read as an engagement with the New England village novel genre. Melville highlights the aestheticization of poverty and deprivation within the picturesque. Discussing the Millthorpe family, impoverished tenant farmers on Pierre Glendinning’s ancestral lands, the narrator explains: If the grown man of taste, possess not only some eye to detect the picturesque in the natural landscape, so also, has he as keen a perception of what may not unftly be here styled, the povertiresque in the social landscape. To such an one, not more picturesquely conspicuous is the dismantled thatch in a painted cottage of Gainsborough, than the time-­tangled and want-­thinned locks of a beggar, povertiresquely diversifying those snug little cabinet-­pictures of the world, which, exquisitely varnished and framed, are hung up in the d ­ rawing-room minds of humane men of taste. . . . Tey deny that any misery is in the world, except for the purpose of throwing the fne povertiresque element into its general picture.51

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Melville mocks the connection of picturesque taste with the “perception” and appreciation of a parallel taste for scenes of poverty “in the social landscape,” marking both the aestheticization and limits of sympathy toward the poor as central to the picturesque. Visiting the Millthorpes and seeing the true misery of their impoverished lives, young Pierre has “some boyish inklings of something else than the pure povertiresque in poverty, some inklings of what it might be, to be old, and poor, and worn, and rheumatic, with shivering death drawing nigh, and present life but a dull and a chill!”52 Melville’s satire ofers a critique of the picturesque as a social reformist logic. Melville has a number of literary scores to settle in Pierre, but it is likely that the New England village novel was one of the genres with which he engaged. Where Judd and Longfellow imagined the picturesque as a means to inspire Christian sympathy and social reform, Melville fnds only callous aestheticization. In Te Feminization of American Culture, Ann Douglas saw the mid-­nineteenth-­century rejection of Calvinism as a failure, adding to the list of reasons why modern readers should embrace Melville over the work of “male sentimentalists,” such as Judd, Longfellow, and the other novelists discussed in this chapter.53 But our modern understanding of the work of these authors and the genres in which they wrote derives far too commonly from satires of them or scholarly dismissals. Judd’s Margaret, for example, hardly denies the realities of New England poverty, but it chooses to see the picturesque not merely as an aesthetic for fxing the poor into pleasing tableaux, but also as a tool of social renovation. Te combination of Margaret and Kavanagh reveals how American novelists in the 1840s imagined the New England village as a space from which to enact radical theological and social transformation.

Elsie Venner: Treatening Landscapes and the “Conservative Revolution” of the Picturesque A signifcant political shif occurred between the New England village novels of the 1840s and works produced in the later 1850s and 1860s, with the later works ofering more conservative and nostalgic visions. If Judd’s Margaret could propose the New England village as the space of utopian spiritual and social renovation and Longfellow’s

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Kavanagh could also imagine the picturesque village landscape as transformative (while perhaps also signaling the limitations of its sympathy and charity), later novels refect a more conservative bent, concerned instead with the village as a place of stability in the face of transformation. In this way, these ambitious novels refect a con­serv­ a­tive turn among northern bourgeois elites in the period leading up to the Civil War. George Fredrickson argued that the bourgeoisie sought to “avert social and moral ‘anarchy’” by calling for “a greater stress on the value of institutions, and in some instances, for the ­acknowledgment of an intellectual elite which would provide con­ serv­a­tive leadership in thought and opinion by being in some way ‘established,’ like the clergy of the past.”54 Tis intellectual elite was, for the most part, drawn from a new class of bourgeois professionals, who sought to legitimize their authority through a new set of rigorous educational standards and professional practices.55 One of the most prominent fgures of this newly professionalized intellectual elite described by Fredrickson was the physician and Harvard professor Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose novel, Elsie Venner; A Romance of Destiny, was serialized in Te Atlantic Monthly starting in 1859 and completed in 1861. Holmes’s novel imagines the New England village threatened by the decline of theological coherence, the reordering of the traditional social hierarchy, and the end of American “white” racial homogeneity, but he uses the protocols of picturesque landscape appreciation to restore order. Elsie Venner is best known for its use of medical principles, but picturesque landscape aesthetics are equally central to the novel. Te narrative is most famous for its fantastic conceit: Te title character literally exhibits snake-­like traits as a result of a rattlesnake’s bite of her mother in the late stages of her pregnancy. Tis premise allows Holmes to, as he put it, “test the doctrine of ‘original sin’ and human responsibility for the disordered volition coming under that technical denomination.”56 Holmes called his novel “medicated” (EV 9) to indicate its dependence on medical science as the dominant discourse to “test” the issues with which it engages. As a result, criticism of the novel has justly drawn attention to the role of Holmes’s notion of a professionalized medical practice in his narrative.57 Tis ­emphasis on medicine embodied by the observational practice of the ­village doctor, Dr. Kittridge, however, has overshadowed the other discourses central to the novel’s “solution” to the myriad problems

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embodied by Elsie’s snake-­like condition. Although seemingly ­designed to question Calvinist notions of Original Sin, the novel argues that the village’s older Calvinist minister, Reverend Dr. Honeywood, is better adapted to confront the problem of Elsie than the more liberal Reverend Fairweather, whose concerns with reformist charities and moral failings render him useless to the community. Alongside and perhaps above the medical and theological approaches to Elsie, however, is the picturesque, which appears not only in extensive landscape and scenery descriptions throughout the novel as a corollary to medical and theological interpretative gazes, but also in the novel’s fnal vision. Troughout the novel, the character of Elsie symbolizes the threat to the traditional social order of the New England village, and ultimately her death ends the threat. But, along with Elsie’s death, the novel ends with a cataclysmic earthquake that destroys a sublime and threatening mountain that looms over the fctional Berkshires village of Rockland. Tis earthquake causes no harm to the village, instead rendering the village scenery uniformly picturesque in a coup that the narrator describes as “one of Nature’s conservative revolutions” (EV 381). Tis “conservative revolution” that transforms the sublime into the picturesque in the New England village landscape suggests that the picturesque sensibility becomes an expression of a distinctly conservative social vision that can impose an order shaped by the nostalgic vision of the village as “naturally” run by the traditional professional elites, including the country doctor, the Congregational minister, and the traditional landowner. Perhaps more than other novels in this genre, Elsie Venner refects the bourgeois and mercantile reality of the nineteenth-­century New England village. In the early chapter self-­consciously entitled “An Old-­Fashioned Descriptive Chapter,” the narrator describes the archetypal “Elm Street” with its eponymous trees, asserting that “nobody knows New England who is not on terms of intimacy with one of its elms” (58). Elm Street is where the bourgeois inhabitants of Rockland live, including Colonel Hezekiah Sprowle, a retired shopkeeper who has built an ugly new mansion. Te newly wealthy Sprowle’s “mansion-­ house” and the other Elm Street “’genteel’ houses,” with their “tomb-­ like, melancholy” parlors inside and smothering bushes fronting the near street outside (EV 59–60), ­represent a bourgeois mercantile present that Holmes satirizes. Far more to his taste are the more traditional components of the village,

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ranging from “the real old-­fashioned New England meeting-­house” (62) to old farmhouses, “unpainted, but turned by the slow action of sun and air and rain to a quiet dove- or slate-­color” (EV 61) and the equally picturesque “Dudley” mansion, home to Elsie and her father, Dudley Venner. Te mansion’s name invokes the traditional Puritan heritage of the family, descended from a colonial governor of Massachusetts, and the mansion itself is described as “somewhat neglected, but not in disgrace” (EV 125). Fitting with the nostalgia for an anachronistic antique center village, Holmes’s favored older elements of the New England village are imbued with an authentic picturesque quality, contrasted to the newer bourgeois forms, including a newer “liberal” meeting-­house. Tis last-­named form is done “in what may be called the forid shingle-­Gothic manner” (63), an elaborate and artifcial picturesque mode that lacks the authenticity of New England tradition and history. One of the central conficts within the novel is over whose authority will dominate the future of Rockland: the traditional elites (Puritan descendants, Congregational ministers, country doctors, etc.) with their authentic picturesque ­architectural settings or the mercantile bourgeoisie, with their imitation English mansions and faux-­gothic churches. In efect, it is a confict of dueling picturesque modes: one, archaic and naturalized, the other new and designed. Holmes makes very clear that his preference is for the former. Te novel’s initial description of the village architecture establishes a social confict within the community between the mercantile bourgeoisie and traditional New England elites, but the landscape descriptions of Rockland set up another set of concerns. Unlike the stereotypical descriptions of New England village landscapes, conventionally dominated by the picturesque details of mixed settled and wild land, gentle mountains, forests and small rivers, the town of Rockland is “ennobled by lying at the foot of a mountain” (EV 47). Rockland’s distinctively sublime mountain, described as “[b]eautiful, wild, invested with the mystery which belongs to untrodden spaces, and with enough of terror to give it a dignity,” bestows upon the town “its character, and redeemed it from wearing the commonplace expression which belongs to ordinary country-­villages” (EV 56). Rockland’s mountain is most notable for one feature that “shed the brownest horror on its woods” (EV 48), Rattlesnake Ledge, home to the eponymous reptiles who periodically threaten the village (and bit Elsie’s mother during pregnancy). Tis sublime mountain, along with

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its dangerous snakes, looms menacingly over the village: “It seemed as if some heaven-­scaling Titan had thrown his shaggy robe over the bare, precipitous fanks of the rocky summit, and it might at any moment slide like a garment fung carelessly on the nearest chance-­support, and, so sliding, crush the village out of being” (EV 56–57). Rockland’s “Titanic” sublime mountain sufuses the community with an “air of menace blended with their wild beauty” (EV 56) that raises questions about man’s place in the landscape and divine intentions toward man. When the characters of Sedgwick’s New-­England Tale (1822) praised the regional picturesque landscape, they imagined the particular scenic formation refecting God’s protective relation to man and New England more generally: “Tese mountains that surround us, and are so near to us on every side, seem to me like natural barriers, by which the Father has secured for His children the gardens He has planted for them by the river side.”58 By contrast, Rockland’s sublime mountain raises the prospect of a more indiferent, “careless,” or even inimical, divine attitude toward the New England village community in Holmes’s novel at the end of the 1850s. Rockland’s mountain and its Rattlesnake Ledge, however, are countered by a more traditional picturesque landscape in the village locale, including “swamps set thick with dingy alders, where the three-­leaved arum and the skunk’s-­cabbage grew broad and succulent” (EV 51) and an old forest with a variety of rough and scarred trees, elaborately described. Aside from the mountain, Rockland is a distinctly picturesque place; the novel is flled with careful landscape descriptions that suggest that Holmes, like the other writers of New England village novels, was very familiar with the protocols of picturesque landscape appreciation. In fact, Holmes was a careful reader of William Gilpin, calling him “Daddy Gilpin” in diferent works. In Te Autocrat at the Breakfast Table (1857), Holmes writes: “Did you ever read old Daddy Gilpin? Slowest of men, even of Englishmen; yet delicious in his slowness, as is the light of a sleepy eye in woman.”59 If Holmes seems somewhat condescending in his praise of Gilpin, his novel not only shows evidence of his familiarity with the protocols of Gilpin’s picturesque landscape sensibility, but also makes the paradoxical active passivity of picturesque landscape appreciation— carefully studying the landscape’s forms but not necessarily ­intervening in that landscape—a master trope and central diagnostic ­approach to the problems facing Rockland.

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As the only daughter and heiress of the most prominent Puritandescended family in Rockland, Elsie Venner represents the future of the community, and her problematic behavior, whether caused by the prenatal snake bite or her mother’s unspecifed Latin heritage, fgures as a community problem that many of the adult characters in the novel seek to interpret, understand, and solve.60 Unsurprisingly for this genre, the process of understanding Elsie is extensively mediated through landscape sensibility. Helen Darley and Brandon Langdon, Elsie’s teachers at the Apollonian Academy—the girls’ school for the most prominent families in Rockland—are examples of what Holmes famously characterized as the “Brahmin caste,” scions of established New England families whose Colonial-­era conjunction of clerical, political, and mercantile power has declined to the point that they are primarily defned by their pale skins and academic credentials.61 Darley and Langdon’s largely sympathetic attempts to understand Elsie are mediated through the landscape. One of the frst examples of Elsie’s unsettling efect on people is Helen Darley’s experience in reading one of Elsie’s essays for school: Te subject of the paper was Te Mountain, —the composition being a sort of descriptive rhapsody. It showed a startling familiarity with some of the savage scenery of the region. One would have said that the writer must have threaded its wildest solitudes by the light of the moon and stars as well as by day. As [Helen Darley] read on, her color changed, and a kind of tremulous agitation came over her. Tere were hints in this strange paper she did not know what to make of. Tere was something in its descriptions and imagery that recalled, —Miss Darley could not say what, —but it made her frightfully nervous.

(EV 71)

Te “descriptive rhapsody” demonstrates both Elsie’s “familiarity” with the landscape of the sublime mountain and the efect of landscape description. Elsie’s essay enacts the sublime threat of nature (which is also metonymically associated with Elsie herself), generating an unspecifable nervousness in Helen Darley. Te text uses landscape description to depict the larger issues within the narrative and village community, insistently rendering this uncomfortable link between Elsie and the mountain as a threatening, nervous, and nervous-­making landscape demanding interpretation.

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Te only person not overwhelmed by Elsie’s snake-­like sublimity is the old village doctor, Dr. Kittredge, who, as many critics have observed, models a practice of professionalized medical examination that is given special authority as a narrative mode.62 One of Dr. Kittredge’s defning traits is his observational practice. He is frst assigned this trait upon his introduction in the novel: “Dr. Kittredge, the leading physician of Rockland, was a shrewd old man, who looked pretty keenly into his patients through his spectacles, and pretty widely at men, women and things in general over them” (EV 90–91). In his treatment of Elsie, Kittredge prescribes not drugs or restraint, but careful observation: “Some, of course, said she was a crazy girl and ought to be sent to an Asylum. But old Dr. Kittredge had shaken his head, and told them to bear with her, and let her have her way as much as they could, but watch her, as far as possible, without making her suspicious of them” (EV 129). Kittredge does not ­actively intervene in the story, yet the habits of his traditional professional practice—most particularly his diagnostic habit of detached but thoughtful observation—help him to guide the village back to its picturesque stability. Tis detached, assessing gaze is not merely medical: It also seems to draw substantially from protocols of landscape observation. Dr. Kittredge, and the narrator who ofen observes from Dr. Kittredge’s perspective, are keen observers of nature and landscape. Te novel frst describes the “Dudley” mansion as the doctor approaches for one of his observational “consultations” with Elsie. It is his “practiced eye” that fnds the sheep paths that cross the mountain above the mansion, where “[i]t seemed almost too steep to climb” (EV 124); the doctor knows that Elsie uses these paths. Although shaped by a diagnostic bent, Dr. Kittredge’s observational mode is equally attuned to architectural and landscape design: “As the Doctor turned an angle in the road, all at once the stately house rose before him. It was a skillfully managed efect, as well it might be, for it was no vulgar English architect who had planned the mansion and arranged its position and approach” (EV 125). Trough the doctor’s observational practice, we see the Dudley mansion and its grounds as a “skillfully managed efect,” refecting picturesque design that persists despite centuries of neglect and the ominous threat of the sublime mountain above. In the same way, Dr. Kittredge’s medicated gaze not only observes Elsie and others in the novel, but also imposes order

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on the village: Both medical gaze and landscape taste combine to solve the problems of Rockland. Te novel instructs readers in this gaze, teaching them not only to examine people, but also to study the landscape and to discover signs of disease and tension, as well as signs of design and order. Holmes’s picturesque instruction in viewing for readers is elaborated later in the novel when Brandon Langdon, a medical student on leave and teacher who serves as the uncomfortable object of Elsie’s school-­girl crush, seeks the source of a rare fower lef in his copy of Virgil’s Aeneid. Correctly suspecting that Elsie lef the fower for him and knowing her habit of spending time on the mountain, Langdon climbs it. Like Helen Darley, Langdon fnds the mountain forest landscape unsettling and requiring interpretation. Unlike the passage on Elsie’s essay, however, in this commentary the narrator ofers direct instruction not just to Langdon but also to readers on how to interpret this landscape. Tis mode of scenery appreciation helps us to understand both the mountain and Elsie: Strange! Te woods at frst convey the impression of profound repose, and, yet, if you watch their ways with an open ear, you fnd the life which is in them is restless and nervous as that of a woman: the little twigs are crossing and twining and separating like slender fngers that cannot be still; the stray leaf is to be fattened into its place like a truant curl; the limbs sway and twist, impatient of their constrained attitude; and the rounded masses of foliage swell upward and subside from time to time with long sighs, and, it may be, the falling of a few rain-­drops which had lain hidden among the deeper shadows.

(EV 161)

Encouraging a paradoxical sensory receptiveness (“watch . . . with an open ear”), the narrator instructs the reader in a scenic interpretative mode. Te narrator extends Dr. Kittridge’s medicalized observational approach from people to the landscape, fguring the forest as a nervous woman, a common trope of masculine medicalized authority that Charlotte Perkins Gilman critiqued in her story Te Yellow Wallpaper (1888). Te forest landscape is also picturesque, resisting the order of the beautiful for the tangle of picturesque variety. Encouraging readers in the careful gaze of the picturesque sensibility, the ­mountain’s woods convey the same physical symptoms of restlessness

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and dissatisfaction that reveal Elsie’s sickness throughout the novel. Like the trees fghting against restraint in the sublime mountain forest, Elsie dances “wild Moorish fandangos” in the privacy of her room. Dr. Kittredge once observes this, concluding that “[s]ome passion seemed to exhaust itself in this dancing paroxysm” (EV 129). Te attention to landscape advocated in the descriptive passage refects Kittredge’s model for the medical treatment of Elsie: Te novel models landscape observation as a corollary to professionalized medical observation that bestows authority upon its prac­ti­tioner. Explicitly instructing readers in the “practiced eye” of the picturesque landscape sensibility, Elsie Venner makes the picturesque into one of the kinds of authoritative discourses that gave professionals new power in the second half of the nineteenth century in the United States. At the same time that Elsie Venner makes picturesque landscape appreciation one with other professionalized authoritative discourses (like medicine), the novel obscures the authority claimed by all of these discourses by limiting them to observation, never requiring the trained observers to take action. Te novel fnds resolution for all of the looming threats in observation. Dr. Kittridge continues merely to observe Elsie as she sickens and dies, not as a fandango-­dancing snake-­woman, but in the conventional and properly sentimental feminine role of a young woman whose immature love for Langdon is not returned. It’s an odd stand­ ard of medical success, but the novel advocates for the efectiveness of observation over any action. Afer Elsie’s death, her father Dudley marries the young Brahmin Helen Darley, ofering at least the possibility of reestablishing a pure New England racial line.63 With Elsie’s death, the implied racial threat to New England’s white dominance embodied by her status as heiress is negated. Te novel ends with a landscape transformation that mirrors the social one. Just as Elsie’s death at the end resolves the social concerns within the novel, Rattlesnake Ledge is paradoxically stabilized by an earthquake that suddenly occurs afer Elsie’s death and destroys the dangerous elements of the mountain: It was indeed one of Nature’s conservative revolutions; for the fallen masses made a kind of shelf, which interposed a level break between the inclined planes above and below it, so that the nightmare-­fancies of the dwellers in the Dudley mansion, and in many other residences under the shadow of Te Mountain, need not keep them lying awake

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hereafer to listen for the snapping of roots and the splitting of the rocks above them. (EV 381)

Landscape change recapitulates social change in the novel’s elaborate parallel between Elsie and the mountain. By eliminating the threat of more violent change, the natural transformation of the sublime mountain to a more picturesque form imagines the picturesque as a kind of “conservative revolution.” Tis landscape transformation is consonant with the period’s picturesque landscape design ethos of “improved” nature: “revolution” as restoration to a better, yet still “natural” state. We can see this same logic articulated by Frederick Law Olmsted, who complained of the prominence of a famous feature of the White Mountains: the Old Man of the Mountain, a rock face that took the appearance of a human profle. While undertaking a landscaping project for a railroad, Olmsted wrote to his client:

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I have no doubt at all about the misfortune of the profle, and stand ready to contribute to blow its nose of with gunpowder without waiting for an earthquake. . . . Tis is precisely what landscape gardening should do, I think, make improvements by design which nature might by chance make through the action of earthquakes, storms, frosts, birds and insects.64

Olmsted’s vision of “landscape gardening” as making “improvements by design” what nature might itself alter through earthquakes is an uncanny parallel to Holmes’s narrative resolution. It is not merely coincidental, however, since both refect the logic of picturesque design, with its paradoxical combination of human and natural design. As we saw in Chapter 3, Olmsted also saw social meaning in the picturesque manipulation of landscape to make it seem “natural” in Central Park. In Holmes’s narrative, this version of picturesque transformation is almost totally seamless. Te sublime mountain altered by “one of Nature’s conservative revolutions” is almost instantly integrated into the inhabitants’ perception of their village: “Twenty-­four hours afer the falling of the clif, it seemed as if it had happened ages ago” (EV 381). Like the real-­life midcentury New England villages, upon which were imposed contemporary picturesque values and center village designs as if they were “traditional” and had always already been

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there, the newly pure picturesque fctional village of Rockland ­depends on an amnesia. With Elsie’s death and the destruction of the threatening landscape elements, Rockland could reassert its traditional professional “Brahmin caste” social authority and picturesque scenery as an unthreatened tradition. Just as the landscape falls naturally back into picturesque stability afer the earthquake, so the social order of the New England village regained an anachronistic traditional form in the wake of Elsie’s death, by fguring “revolution” as picturesque restoration of the way the landscape never was enacted by no human actions. Te “return” to a picturesque order that never was is, indeed, as the narrator suggests “one of Nature’s conservative revolutions.” And yet, the novel’s enactment of this “revolution,” the deus ex machina of Elsie’s illness and the earthquake signals just how much was needed to change to enact the picturesque vision of the traditional New England village in mid-­nineteenth-­century America. Although the “conservatism” of Holmes’s vision of the New England village order contrasts with Judd’s utopian reformist vision in Margaret, both narratives construct their social vision through the sensibility of the picturesque landscape, which imposes order through an anachronistic and paradoxical process whereby a “­ revolution” can also be a “restoration.”

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Norwood: Te End of the New England Village Novel Begun in 1858 and published in complete form in 1861, Elsie Venner’s period of composition encompassed the looming catastrophe of the Civil War. With its focus on a New England village and the threats to its identity ofered by racial, social, and theological change, the novel resolutely ignores the threat of sectional confict that would lead to war in 1861. By contrast, Henry Ward Beecher’s 1867 novel Norwood; or Village Life in New England integrates the war into its New England village novel plot and, in doing so, reasserts the value of the village to national identity amidst the looming catastrophe of national dissolution. It does so, however, by integrating New England regional stereotypes with a vision of a modern bureaucratic American nation. Beecher’s Norwood is as deeply invested in the role of the picturesque in its vision of the New England village novel as the other novels considered here, but Beecher’s vision of the theological and social

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work of the picturesque is greatly transformed, marking larger shifs in the cultural work of the picturesque and hinting at the end of the authoritative use of the picturesque by bourgeois Americans in the era. Although Norwood is largely forgotten now, it was not just a popular novel, but also something of a cultural phenomenon when frst published. Despite being the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, one of the most popular novelists of the period, Beecher was best known as a minister. As we saw in Chapter 4, however, he reached a wide print audience through his published sermons and regular columns for New York newspapers written on amateur farming, country life, and travel. Tis print presence aside, Beecher had never published any fction when Robert Bonner, publisher of the New York Ledger, commissioned him to write a serialized novel, paying him $30,000, a lordly sum that was widely commented on at the time.65 Norwood was a popular success in serialization: Before the novel was even published in its complete form, Augustin Daly, the foremost playwright and theater manager of his era, adapted it for the stage. Once published, it was quickly reprinted several times and remained in print through 1887. It was so popular and became so representative of the idealization of New England village life that when the burgeoning town of Dedham, Massachusetts, decided to divide into two municipalities in 1872, it named the new portion Norwood.66 Although the novel’s scope was decidedly ambitious—taking in not only the conventional post-­Calvinist spiritual crisis and romance threads of the New England village novel, but also the Civil War—contemporary critics tended mostly to note its careful depiction of regional life. Te novel returned to popular attention in 1875 when it was revealed that Beecher had read drafs of it aloud to Elizabeth Tilton, the wife of one of his associates, who then accused Beecher of adulterous seduction. Tis information came out during what became one of the most notorious court cases of the period, Tilton v. Beecher. Modern attention to the novel has largely focused on this context.67 Aside from discussing its connection to the scandal, some scholars have read the novel as a signifcant moment in American theological and cultural history. William McLoughlin asserted that “[i]n Norwood the last vestiges of New England Calvinism disappeared fnally and forever, and in its place the new theology of liberalism at last emerged in terms which everyone could understand.”68 In Te Feminization of American Culture (1977), Ann Douglas called

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Norwood “one of the crucial documents of the period, although a perusal of it today might not at once explain its signifcance.” Douglas viewed the novel as the embodiment of many of the negative traits of the mid-­nineteenth-­century move away from the intellectual rigor of Calvinism toward the embrace of feminized sentimentalism.69 Unsurprisingly, Beecher’s interest in landscape design and appreciation have not fgured prominently in assessments of the novel, but Norwood’s depiction of the picturesque scenery of New England signals an important shif in the politics of the picturesque in the New England village novel. Tis shif fnalizes the turn away from the picturesque as a tool of reformist social impulses and moves toward a more narrowly privatized vision of social responsibility. Arguably the most ambitious of the New England village novels discussed in this chapter in its inclusion of the Civil War in its narrative of regional life, Beecher’s Norwood ofers a vision of the importance of New England to a modern liberal nation. What distinguishes Norwood from other New England village novels, however, is not only its literary and theological project, but the way that it functions as a culmination of the picturesque reformist sensibility. Te picturesque leads Beecher to a vision of reformist social behavior that ­articulates a divide between investment in the private home and commitment to social work enacted primarily through a bureaucratized system of assistance. Norwood is not just the culmination of a proc­ess of liberalization of Protestant theology; it also maps out the trajectory of nineteenth-­ century American Romantic reformism into the modern middle-­class professionalization of social welfare. Norwood can be read as the culmination of the development of the mid-­nineteenth-­century New England novel because of its seemingly encyclopedic inclusion of all the elements (what some might call the “clichés”) present in other examples of the genre. Rose Wentworth, the novel’s New England girl, is a child of nature like Judd’s Margaret. Barton Cathcart, the young scion of successful New England farmers, is a spiritual seeker trying to balance the virtues of traditional religious belief with more modern values like Longfellow’s Kavanagh. Dr. Reuben Wentworth, Rose’s father and the village’s medical doctor who embodies an ideal balance between religious faith and scientifc enlightenment, is the author’s stand-­ in like Holmes’s Dr. Kittridge. Nowhere is it more in debt to the generic expectations of the New England village novel, though, than in its recourse to the picturesque sensibility. Tis sensibility not only adds

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descriptive texture to the novel, but also forms the core of the novel’s response to the spiritual, social, and political problems of the story. In the frst chapter of the novel, Beecher frmly locates Norwood within the picturesque stereotypes of New England, characterizing the region as “picturesque rather than grand.”70 In addition to including the descriptive signifers of a picturesque setting, Norwood explicitly trains its characters (and implicitly its readers) in the protocols and logic of the picturesque throughout the novel. Te narrator does not just describe the landscape; he guides and instructs the reader:

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Look with my eyes, good reader, upon the town of Norwood, which, refusing to go down upon the fat bottom-­lands of the Connecticut, daintily perches itself upon the irregular slopes west, and looks over upon that transcendent valley from under its beautiful shade trees, and you will say that no fairer village glistens in the sunlight, or nestles under the arching elms! (N 3)

Like many other New England village novels, Beecher’s Norwood promises to reward the reader not only with pleasant vistas, but also with a kind of knowledge or understanding of the landscape if they submit to the narrator or author’s stand-­in as they elucidate the protocols of picturesque landscape appreciation. In Norwood, the primary agent of this education is Dr. Wentworth, who embodies an idealized middle position between the well-­intentioned but overly rigid and traditional Congregational minister Dr. Buell and the enlightened but cynical Judge Bacon in the village’s professional elite, recasting Holmes’s traditional New England professional triumvirate. Barton Cathcart and the other young people in the novel regularly turn to Dr. Wentworth for advice. His counsel in support of an idealist-­tinged and Transcendentalist-­infected faith is usually fltered through the picturesque. Barton’s father, Abiah Cathcart, is a traditional New England farmer who experiences unusual success that enables his son to pursue an education at Amherst College. While at Amherst, Barton is exposed to scientifc thought that leads him to question his faith, inspiring a crisis that shapes the middle of the novel. Before his graduation, Dr. Wentworth and Rose join Barton to see “a sunrise from [Amherst’s] chapel-­tower” (N 231). From this viewpoint they see Mt. Holyoke and Mt. Tom, the Connecticut River Valley, and “white-­housed villages gleamed from

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among the trees on the far hill-­sides” (N 232). Comparing this vista to the more sublime landscapes of the Swiss Alps, Dr. Wentworth didactically explains the benefts of the picturesque to Rose and Barton:

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[Te Swiss mountains are] a sight of unequalled grandeur; but from high mountains the landscape is generalized by its distance from the eye. It excites the imagination more than the feelings. It inspires a kind of separateness and lonesomeness, which seem to be constituent elements of grandeur. But if one would feel nearness and afection—perhaps lower but more pleasurable emotions—he must be near the objects seen. A hill for prospect should be so placed as to get a wide view without great elevation. (N 232)

Tis observation leads to a lengthy discussion on appreciation of landscape scenery and faith. While acknowledging the spirituality of sublime nature, this discussion privileges instead an appreciation of “this habitable globe, its generous tones, its munifcent seasons, its pictorial scenery, its marvelous processes, its gorgeous imagery, its days and nights, summers and winters, its oceans and air, and sun and sunlight” (236). For Wentworth and Beecher, the picturesque embodies a gentler and more benign nature and deity, refecting the theological shif away from a more austere Calvinism. In addition to putting the picturesque in service of Barton Cathcart’s spiritual questioning, Dr. Wentworth uses it to respond to the vocational crisis of another young man in the novel: Frank Esel, a young artist who afer an illness and rejection by Rose, considers taking up the ministry. In a long letter, Dr. Wentworth encourages Frank to consider the social and spiritual benefts of art, noting that [a] sweet landscape, painted by one who saw a soul in nature, and not merely forms, hanging in a sick-­room for long months, cheers the declining invalid and becomes a minister of consolation. . . . I can easily imagine a simple landscape wrought out in the spirit of love by a skillful hand, which shall difuse more happiness than most do in a whole life-­time. (N 302)

Continuing, Wentworth discusses the spiritual possibilities of teaching art classes and, unsurprisingly, under the logic of the picturesque, landscape design. He asserts:

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I have ofen marveled that, in a time of such taste and liberality, so little should be done with trees. New England might be made a magnifcent park, with but a slight expense, if only one dedicated himself to doing good through the love of beauty. Every great road, every bye-­road, connecting towns and villages, or neighborhoods, if concert were secured, might not only be judiciously planted, but, by a little study and care in the selection, all the fne trees might in time be employed, one road being lined with oaks, another with elms, another with pines or spruces, another with maples, another with purple beeches, and so on, until every county would become an arboretum. Such is the spirit of emulation that, if a single town would perfect this work, other towns would catch the inspiration, and the work would go one with energy until an unclothed road would become a reproach. All this is a part of the work of true benevolence. (N 303)

Wentworth’s landscape ethos refects the uplifing social reformist impulse of American picturesque design, whereby picturesque beauty is spread throughout the region and country by a “spirit of emulation” that leads others to imitate the landscaping of “apostles of taste” that Andrew Jackson Downing hoped would renovate American village life. Tis same vision of landscape design inspired Judd’s utopian vision of the New England aesthetic and social regeneration in Margaret, but was distinctly tied to imagined reformist eforts and social transformation in Judd’s novel. Te process of social transformation is much more abstracted and mystifed in Beecher’s novel. Earlier in this chapter, we saw that Judd’s Margaret embodied Andrew Jackson Downing’s larger project of social renovation, connecting the eforts of individual owners instituting good picturesque design in their own homes to the dissemination of positive aesthetic, social, and political values in their communities. In Margaret, this project results in the creation of a utopian community built out of the pieces of New England village life. In Norwood, Beecher discusses these same principles, though the novel culminates in a more limited social vision. A chapter in the middle of the novel, entitled “A Talk about Enjoying Money,” introduces a new character to Norwood: Mr. Brett, “an eccentric merchant and manufacturer . . . whose whole life was pragmatically benevolent, and whose conscience was always fying at him and teasing him for not being more benevolent” (N  209). In the chapter, constructed as something of a Socratic

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­ ialogue, the diferent central authorities of the village discuss how Mr. d Brett should best spend his money. Te cynical Judge Bacon mockingly tries to persuade Mr. Brett of the virtues of the “selfsh” project of adding a greenhouse to his property. However, instead of being rebuked (as he ofen is throughout the novel), Dr. Wentworth agrees with him, arguing that “[a] man who builds a noble house does it for the whole neighborhood, not for himself alone” (N 213). Continuing, Wentworth argues that “Nothing is more remote from selfshness than generous expenditure in building up a home, and enriching it with all that shall make it beautiful without and lovely within” (N 213). In an argument that mimics Downing’s defense of the public benefts of domestic architectural and landscape design as spurs to emulation, Wentworth asserts the communal value of judicious investment in the domestic sphere: “A community needs examples to excite its ambition. A noble dwelling is, in part, the property of all who dwell near it. Fine grounds not only confer pleasures directly on all who visit or pass by, but they excite every man of spirit to improve his own grounds” (N 215). Under Beecher’s privatized social logic, this investment in family and domestic life is the ultimate public serv­ice: “He that actually rears good citizens presents to the State better properties, far nobler, than ample funds or costly buildings” (N 213). In her typically pithy fashion, Ann Douglas described Norwood’s social logic as confusing “duty with spending money on oneself.”71 Although Douglas glibly claims that Beecher is “confused” about the relationship between social duties and “spending money on oneself,” the chapter earnestly seeks to prove the truth behind Judge Bacon’s cynical summary (which could easily pass as Douglas’s summary): “Let me see: spending money on one’s self is a virtue; on one’s family a public benediction!” (N 217). Troughout the novel, Beecher asserts the importance of the picturesque landscape sensibility to religious and social insight so it is only apt that he closes the chapter on “enjoying money” by having Wentworth describe the pleasures of his greenhouse: “Besides, what picture of landscape was ever so charming, as to sit across the room and look through the door upon such green and blossoming vegetation?” (N 219). Tis imagined scene privileges the forms of the picturesque that join the domestic and artifcial or man-­made (sitting in a room, looking into a greenhouse) to the natural (“such green and blossoming vegetation”), making them into a visual construct that emulates a painting

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(“picture of landscape”). If the pleasures of this picturesque vista seem overly private, Wentworth adds, “every man that ever loved fowers knows that the chief delight consists in giving them away” and discusses the medicinal benefts of fowers to his patients (N 219). Douglas can be forgiven for being skeptical about Beecher’s social logic here, as the public benefts of the private greenhouse are largely abstracted or fairly minor (sharing fowers) in contrast to the more focused, private, and aesthetic experience of picturesque sensibility. In addition to arguing for a more abstracted social beneft of domestic picturesque design, Beecher uses this chapter to consider the New England regional stereotype. In contrast to Holmes’s half-­ironic, half-­nostalgic vision of the “Boston Brahmin,” which cast the traditional New England elite as a dying breed, a faded aristocracy soon to disappear from the national scene, Beecher argues for the preeminence of the New England personality, presenting it as spreading throughout the nation through education and religion: “Schools in the thousands over the West and South, academies in every State where her sons have emigrated, churches, colleges, and all institutions of religion, from end to end of this continent, are the ­witnesses of what men are pleased to call the narrow spirit of New England” (N 217). Wentworth folds New England into his vision of liberal private virtue, claiming that “one reason why the Yankee is stigmatized as stingy” is because of the Yankee’s domestic investment in “[t]he idea of family, of comfort at home, of respectable appearance, of education for all the children, of neatness and some sort of beauty” (N 217, 216). Beecher’s defense of the purported “narrow spirit of New England” is a far cry from Judd’s vision of New England picturesque design as a blueprint for utopian renovation. Despite this diference, Beecher’s defense of his New England village and its “stingy” inhabitants shares with Margaret and the other novels in this genre a broader vision of the picturesque and an aestheticized investment in a domestic realm as a central component in reforming the life of the American citizen. Beecher’s novel inclusion of the Civil War in the New England village novel genre expands the scope beyond the region and village confnes. But in doing so, it both reafrms the importance of the New England village as central to American life and connects

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the New England character to a model of reform that would replace the social vision embodied by the picturesque. Histories of American reformism typically claim that the Civil War marked a shif in the method of humanitarian reform discourse from moral persuasion to discipline and efciency.72 Emotional pleas to individual conscience to bring about social change gave way to calls for efcient and ra­ tional management of the business of humanitarian aid. Norwood’s interest in private involvement in reform fnds its fulfllment in its depiction of the war, where the abstracted public benefts of picturesque design give way to a spirited defense of professionalized, bureaucratic reform. Te novel’s narrative of the war links the picturesque distinctiveness of New England with modern bureaucracy. Te second half of the novel moves swifly away from the narrow confnes of Norwood village life, as the resolution of Barton Cathcart’s spiritual crisis and the inevitable union of Barton and Rose Wentworth are suspended by the start of the Civil War. Te novel describes the progress of the war as Barton volunteers and, with improbable speed, rises to the rank of general. Afer the Wentworths’s son, Arthur, dies in battle, Rose and the family’s stereotypically efcient New England spinster servant, Agate Bissell, sign on with the United States Sanitary Commission. Te Sanitary Commission has a notable place in the history of American philanthropy and reform. An adjunct to the Medical Bureau of the Army, the Sanitary Commission grew out of the Women’s Central Association of Relief for the Sick and Wounded of the Army (founded in 1861), a charitable organization that depended on voluntary contributions of food and medical supplies to the war efort. In Norwood, Beecher described the Sanitary Commission as “the most magnifcent voluntary charity ever recorded” (433). Beecher’s comments refect the Commission’s legendary status in the postwar era as the embodiment of the North’s “humane and philanthropic spirit.”73 Te Sanitary Commission, however, departed from the perfectionist idealism and benevolent volunteerism of earlier nineteenth-­century reformism. Emphasizing the virtues of efciency, discipline, and order, the members of the Sanitary Commission—including Frederick Law Olmsted—positioned themselves against the previously dominant modes of reform, as they explained in the Commission’s frst bulletin: “Only the most persistent and strenuous resistance to an impulsive benevolence, the

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most earnest and obstinate defense of a guarded and methodized system of relief, can save the public from imposition, and the Army from demoralization.”74 Instead of depending on volunteer workers, the Commission paid its nurses and administrators, a practice justifed by a belief in the superiority of professionals over benevolent volunteers. Tis led to a protracted confict with more traditional reformist organizations, including the Christian Commission, funded in part by the American Tract Society, which also supplied medical and humanitarian services to wounded soldiers through volunteers and actively debated the social logic of the Sanitary Commission’s bureaucratic professionalism. Te legendary status of the Commission in the postwar era hints at the shif in American ideas of social reform toward a professionalized, bureaucratic model in which the middle class would become the crucial agents of American social work. Norwood does not explicitly emphasize this bureaucratic and professional logic of reform, but it still argues for efciency and bu­ reauc­racy. Rose’s service to the Commission is described as a decidedly conventional Christian “self-­sacrifcing Benevolence” (N 439). While serving in the organization, Rose performed work that consisted primarily of extending Christian feminine sympathy and ­nurturing the ill, which seemed a holdover of traditional romantic notions of the woman’s role in reformist service: “Te evangelists of a true gospel were they, sowing the good seeds of peace in the furrows of war!” (N 448). In this respect, Rose seems typical of popular depictions of women’s service during and afer the war, if counter to the logic of the Sanitary Commission and the women nurses who established their professionalism through their service.75 Beecher’s depiction of Agate Bissell, however, is more refective of the systematic logic of the Sanitary Commission. Beginning service at a hospital in Washington “which sufered from the incompetence both of nurses and surgeons” (N 442), the stereotypical New England spinster maiden Agate is quickly named “superintendent and matron.” She runs the hospital under a new logic of efciency and economy in which the regional cliché of the New England spinster maid and new bureaucratic logic of social service are merged: Agate’s zeal of neatness had the eagerness of the hunting instinct. She brought everything to order. She established a method for all things,

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and compelled its observance, or dismissed the refractory. She stood very little upon ceremony. She expressed her opinion upon persons just as unhesitatingly as upon things. Every day her heart yearned more and more for “her boys,” as she called the patients. In a month's time a perfect revolution had taken place. Te hospital, which was the very worst, had risen to become a model. (N 445)

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Agate is the perfect modern nurse for the Sanitary Commission. She is not like the angelic Rose, whose service is explicitly Christianized. Rather, she is instinctually neat, orderly, and methodical, which is exactly what is needed. Tis scenario could be seen as a reversal of the treatment of the New England spinster maid in the novel written by Beecher’s sister’s, the much more famous Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851). In that novel, Ophelia St. Clare, the embodiment of the stereotype of the New England spinster maiden, undergoes a Christian reform that sofens her pitiless efciency and racist tendencies. But in Norwood, Agate’s spinster maid traits are presented as ideally suited to the reformist service of the Sanitary Commission. Agate Bissell’s idealized care is threatened when she chides an assistant surgeon for drunkenness and is temporarily replaced. Proper order is restored when Agate personally visits the president and asks him to intervene: “Oh! Mr. President, how can anybody doubt the doctrine of total depravity when they see the wretches robbing wounded soldiers, eating the delicacies sent to them, and drinking their cordials, and letting their wounds stink and rot, from carelessness? It’s enough to touch a stone’s heart.” Mr. Lincoln’s heart was no stone. (N 447)

Agate marks her New England credentials in her invocation of the Calvinist “doctrine of total depravity” to Lincoln, but here the ­emphasis is more stereotyped regional character than theology. Persuaded by the woman’s earnestness, Lincoln writes: “Dr. —. Please hear this woman's statement, and make inquiry in person, and if it is true, put her back, and pray for twenty more such women. A. Lincoln” (N 447). Te traditional values of New England ft seamlessly into the new logic of system and bureaucracy, naturalizing the modern system of professionalized social reform as always already part of American identity.

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Beecher appropriates the traditional status of the New England community, with its persistent stereotypes of “stinginess,” and orderliness and efciency, and transforms them into solutions to American social problems. Tus, in Beecher’s vision, the New England character is not a problem to be solved; nor is it a series of traits to be reformed. Instead, it is a template for a broader social vision that would help reunite the nation in the afermath of the Civil War. Joining the picturesque sensibility to a social vision in which individuals forsake public charity for private investment and replace local benevolent societies with efcient, bureaucratic professional systems, Beecher’s Norwood exemplifes a logic that would come to dominate American life from the end of the nineteenth century and well into the twenty-­frst.

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Norwood, Gnaw-­Wood, and the End of the New England Village Novel Although Norwood is only a footnote in our literary history of the nineteenth century, its contemporary popularity indicates its outsized signifcance to its moment. Perhaps the greatest (or at least the funniest) indicator of Norwood’s cultural signifcance was not its sales or quick adaptation to the stage, but the publication of a parody, Gnaw-­Wood; or Village Life in New England (1868).76 Gnaw-­Wood reduces the energetic plot of the nearly 600-­page Norwood to a breathless 23 pages, with an ironic repetition of the seemingly endlessly proliferating characters in the novel with names slightly altered (Dr. Wentworth becomes “Wentforth,” etc.) and humor generated primarily by simply retelling the original plot’s many complications in an abbreviated fashion. But rather than engaging substantially with the humor, here I want to draw attention to a moment in the introduction of Gnaw-­wood; or New England Village Life for insight into the critique of the picturesque that would emerge in the 1870s, signaling the end of the New England village novel“s claim as ‘the great American novel” and the end of the privileging of landscape appreciation as a powerful discipline to reshape American space and social attitudes. Gnaw-­wood explicitly mocks the didactic form that landscape ­description takes in picturesque narratives. Revisiting the novel’s

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­ eginning, we can recall that Beecher hails his “good readers” and b encourages them to “[l]ook with my eyes . . . and you will say that no fairer village glistens in the sunlight, or nestles under the arching elms!” Tis kind of guided vision refects a social impulse of the picturesque sensibility, which insisted that if readers submitted themselves to instruction on how to see the landscape, they would be ­empowered to view and control it themselves. As Alan Liu explains, “Te object of the picturesque was ‘command’ [of the landscape], which, frst of all, required the regimentation of the viewer. . . . Command over the viewer was then interchangeable with the viewer’s own command over the landscape.”77 Tis exchange of authority guided the lengthy didactic discussions of how to read the landscape that flls New England village novels in this genre, registering the appeal of landscape description in mid-­nineteenth-­century American culture not as simply generic fller, but as a promise of mastery over the landscape and cultural authority. Gnaw-­wood mocks this implied social logic of the writer–reader interaction in landscape description in its parody of Beecher: “Look with my eyes dear reader upon Gnawwood. Don't look with your own eyes or you may not like it quite so well.”78 Te parody mocks the tacit passivity and acquiescence to narratorial authority required of the readers of New England village novels who “might not like it quite so well” if they actually used their own perspective on the scenery. Of course, the point is that readers indeed might not like or be interested in the scenery if lef to their own devices or perspective, but embracing the New England village novel genre and its picturesque conventions means submitting to didactic narrators and their prescriptive visions. Gnaw-­wood suggests that the vision of New England in the village novel is merely a hollowed-­out list of place names and trees that invoke a regional experience: Gnawwood has streets. It also has a Main street. Tere are Elm trees in Gnawwood. Gnawwood, or Conway, or Lancaster without Elms, would be like Christmas without egg-­nog. Hadly without Elms, would be Hamlet with the part of the Dane omitted. Hatfeld or Northampton without Elms would be horrible. Springfeld without Elms would be a failure. New Haven without them would be as great a humbug, as Jupiter without his mustache and beard. Oh glorious Elms! grand Elms!! Magestic [sic] majestic Elms!!! beautiful Elms!!!!

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graceful Elms!!!!! wide spreading Elms!!!!!! tall Elms!!!!! handsome Elms. “Oh magnifcent vegetable of the Temperate Zone.” Oh Elms! Elms!! Elms!!! Elms!!!! Oh Elm-­trees! Elm-­trees!! Elm-­trees!!! Elm-­trees!!!! Let us now enter Gnawwood through an avenue of Elms. Elms! Elms!! Elms!!! Elms!!!! Elms!!!!!79

Few would step up to defend Beecher’s writing, but this parody also  takes in Holmes’s Elsie Venner, which also proclaimed that “[n]obody knows New England who is not on terms of intimacy with one of its elms” and asked its readers to enter into its fctional village through Elm Street and its archway of trees. Stripped of the promise of any kind of cultural authority, this vision of the New England village novel is reduced to an emphatic listing of names of towns and trees. Although critics had long satirized the artifciality of the picturesque, Gnaw-­wood suggests that the promise of landscape sensibility, the possibility of acquiring the cultural capital to properly assess and visually take control over the landscape, was hollow. Te kind of satire of the authority of picturesque narration ofered in Gnawwood is hardly new, but we can read Beecher’s novel as a terminal point for the New England village novel and the genre’s status as a serious intervention in American literature and culture. Modern readers have found all of the New England village novels studied here to be eccentric, odd, or simply tedious, with their extensive focus on landscape taken as a prime example of what makes them difcult to read now. Te picturesque and landscape appreciation are no longer signifcant disciplines that establish cultural authority. Since we are now disinvested in the cultural capital associated with mastery over picturesque landscape protocols, we modern readers are surprised by the idea that anyone would fnd these works compelling, interesting, or noteworthy. Te picturesque landscape vision ofered by these novels, however, was not simply of “Elms! Elms!! Elms!!! Elms!!!! Elms!!!!!” but of American society more broadly, and it considered ways to harness the community values and space of the New England village as a means to reshape American experience. By the time Beecher published Norwood, the scope of that reformist vision had altered dramatically, so that the trajectory from Judd and Longfellow to Holmes and Beecher represents a shif from deeply idealistic reformism through the picturesque to a more

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con­serv­a­tive, private, and domestic vision of the role of the New England village in American public life. Te trajectory of the midcentury New England village novel charted in this chapter indicates a larger shif within bourgeois culture from one kind of “valuable culture” to another, but the chapter as a whole also recovers an alternative history of the midcentury American novel. To read the New England village novel as an important part of American literary culture is to perceive a strand that is neither the “dark” and metaphysical literary nationalism that was canonized by F. O. Matthiessen in the 1940s (and still remains largely dominant), nor the women’s sentimental tradition recovered in the 1970s and 1980s. Grounded in the picturesque, simultaneously nostalgic and forward-­looking, steeped in liberal Protestantism, and guided by an overt social agenda, the New England village novel represents a signifcant literary expression of midcentury American bourgeois values and ideals. Reading these works together (rather than as interesting literary idiosyncrasies) tells a story about the American middle class and its use of distinctively American spaces to manifest its values, aspirations, and blind spots. Tis book is not intended as an unproblematic celebration of the cultural work of picturesque literary landscape genres, but in recovering these works I have, I hope, added to our understanding of both the literary culture of the mid-­nineteenth century and the role that such “minor” literature played in shaping the environment and landscape of the modern United States.

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{ Epilogue } in search of the picturesque I do not remember that I was ever more weary of any literary task, for the mere description of places is the most tedious of all reading.

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—william cullen bryant, writing privately about his experience as editor of Picturesque America1

In the broadest sense, this study has studied the wide scope of literary representations of the picturesque during the mid-­nineteenth century and considered the picturesque’s efect on Americans’ understandings of their national space. Starting in the mid-­1830s, literary genres associated with new conceptions of rural, urban, and suburban spaces made the picturesque the central discourse for imagining how middle-­class Americans should live within their landscape. Although the moment of the picturesque was relatively short-­lived, seemingly ending in the 1870s, the spaces imagined by writers of these picturesque genres continue to be signifcant in contemporary American life. Tis epilogue briefy shows that bourgeois Americans, while continuing to develop picturesque suburban neighborhoods and urban parks, largely abandoned the picturesque as an authoritative discipline for reshaping the American social landscape in the 1870s. Scholarly narratives of American history and literature tend to  mark the Civil War as the crucial dividing point between eras. Although the majority of the works studied in this book were published before 1860, a number of the genres persisted beyond the war and the picturesque remained signifcant to the spaces imagined in these texts. However, the picturesque lost much of its meaning as a tool of landscape design and social imagination in the 1870s. To chart this change, this epilogue looks at two works. First, I discuss the massive “cyclopedia” of American landscape description and ­illustration, Picturesque America (1874), in which the picturesque

Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835–1874. John Evelev, Oxford University Press (2021). © John Evelev. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894557.003.0007

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became less a particular way of reimagining the landscape and more of an empty category in the service of national reunifcation. Ten, I consider Constance Fenimore Woolson’s 1872 short story “In Search of the Picturesque,” which mocks picturesque tourism and lays the groundwork for the shif to post-­Civil War American literary regionalism. Tese two texts are emblematic of the changing attitudes of middle-­class Americans toward the picturesque in the 1870s, representing both a dilution of its meaning as a discipline and a rejection of its values. Picturesque America (1870–74) was a hugely ambitious publishing venture that sought to combine high-­quality illustrations and extensive written descriptions of landscapes to ofer “a splendid pictorial cyclopedia of American life, scenery, and places,” as a back-­wrapper advertisement attested.2 By the time of its publication as a massive two-­volume book, Picturesque America had been an ongoing venture for years, frst as a series within Appleton’s Journal in 1870, being part of an ambitious attempt by the Appleton publishing house to draw readers to the new magazine, and second as a stand-­alone subscription serial publication starting in 1871. By 1880, nearly 100,000 subscriptions of Picturesque America had been sold, and it remained popular through the rest of the century, eventually selling an estimated one million copies.3 Publishing an American scenery book in 1874 hardly seemed innovative, but Picturesque America was diferent from earlier versions of this genre. Te idea of a book of descriptions and engravings of picturesque American landscapes seemed to hark back to N. P. Willis’s two-­volume American Scenery (1840) or Te Home-­ Book of the Picturesque (1852). Tese and other American scenery books defended the nation against claims from both foreign and domestic ­observers that the United States lacked scenery or did not have the necessary elements to be picturesque. Hiring the 78-­year-­old William Cullen Bryant in 1872 as editor of Picturesque America also seemed to associate the project with an earlier generation.4 Picturesque America mainly repeated the claims of the earlier works that American scenery deserved attention, but it also proclaimed its novelty through greater geographic scope. With more of the nation now easily accessible due to the establishment of the transcontinental railroad line, Picturesque America included landscapes not covered in earlier books, as Bryant explained in his preface: “By means of overland

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communications lately opened between the Atlantic coast and that of the Pacifc, we now have easy access to scenery of a most remarkable character.”5 Although Bryant was here emphasizing the greater ease of access to Western landscapes, Picturesque America also included Southern landscapes, suggesting that its encyclopedic project could be linked to the impulse to restore national integrity in the afermath of the Civil War’s sectional confict.6 Te subtitle of Picturesque America, “Te Land We Live In,” reafrms this impulse by encouraging its readers to identify with an inclusive geographic vision of national unity. Although related to the scenery projects of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s that sought to encourage an appreciation of domestic landscapes among Americans, Picturesque America’s comprehensive scope suggests that including the entire nation was more important than focusing on the sites that best exemplifed picturesque aesthetics. As a result of this unifying focus, Picturesque America has been studied as an expression of Reconstruction, the political, economic, but also aesthetic and imaginative policy enacted to reunify the nation afer the Civil War.7 Tis impulse to include more of the nation under the picturesque rubric becomes clear in Bryant’s preface when he notes that the multiple volumes of Picturesque America are not limited to rural or wild landscapes: It includes, moreover, the various aspects impressed on it by civilization. It will give views of our cities and towns, characteristic scenes of human activity on our rivers and lakes, and will ofen associate, with the places delineated, whatever of American life and habits may possess the picturesque element.  (iv)

Picturesque America’s attention to the cityscapes of Louisville, Cincinnati, Boston, or Albany is very diferent from the urban picturesque explored by New York City sketches in Chapter 2. While the city sketch genre articulated an important role for the picturesque middle-­class observer within city life, the entries of Picturesque America reduce the quality of picturesqueness to simply being attractive or notable. When Bryant assures readers that the book will include “whatever of American life and habits may possess the picturesque element,” the book implies that everything is picturesque: “Coastal Maine” and “Lake Superior” are picturesque, but so is “Te City of Cleveland,”

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“Te City of Bufalo,” and the Ohio River. Te structure of Picturesque America emphasizes this comprehensiveness and lack of distinction between examples. Te book intentionally mixes landscapes and regions throughout, with descriptions of disparate places written by a host of diferent authors and illustrated by a number of diferent artists juxtaposed with each other, seemingly at random. For example, the entry on “Yosemite Valley” is followed by “Providence and Vicinity.” Although the scope of the project necessitated multiple creators, the mixing of writing styles combined with the mix of geographies and landscape types created a nonhierarchical portrait of the country’s landscapes that unifed the nation through the label of the picturesque. Tis is a very diferent efect from the attempts by Margaret Fuller and Nathaniel Hawthorne to apply the picturesque to their travels in what we would now call the Midwest, as discussed in Chapter 1. For Fuller and Hawthorne, the picturesqueness of the developing frontier region represented not simply attractive and diverse scenery, but also the promise and threat of development. Reckoning with the history of confict with Native Americans and with the infux of impoverished European immigrants, Fuller and Hawthorne’s travel sketches used the picturesque to consider the social and political future of the nation. But the diversity of the entries and the scope and structure of Picturesque America render the “picturesque” a largely hollow term. When everything is picturesque, the term means nothing. During the midcentury, the proliferation of picturesque landscape genres indicated their popularity. Middle-­class Americans read landscape descriptions in all sorts of print media: in travel and city sketches in magazines and newspapers, in landscape design manuals and aesthetic treatises, in novels and memoirs. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, as literary landscape genres would fade in popularity, Bryant’s private complaint that editing the book version of Picturesque America was a “weary[ing] . . . literary task” and that “the mere description of places is the most tedious of all reading,” would be increasingly common. It is ironic, though, given that the project of calling attention to scenes of American natural landscapes was crucial to Bryant’s long literary career and to a whole tradition of literature. If Picturesque America could claim to be the most comprehensive American scenery book, however, Bryant’s comment also suggests that by 1874 the meaning of the picturesque had been reduced to “mere description.” Picturesque America heralded a new era

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in which the picturesque lost much of its meaning as an aesthetic protocol that legitimated middle-­class authority and reshaped the landscape of the United States. Tis does not mean that the middle class lost interest in cultural authority or in thinking about the spatial meaning of the national landscape, but rather that it turned instead to the interpretative practices and cultural priorities codifed under the rubric of regionalism and to positivist discourses of professionalism. One of the few women authors to contribute to Picturesque America was Constance Fenimore Woolson, whose great uncle, James Fenimore Cooper, had contributed to the much smaller-­scaled American scenery book, Te Home-­Book of the Picturesque, 20 years earlier.8 Woolson published three sketches on the Great Lakes region for Picturesque America, but she also published a short story in Harper’s Monthly in 1872 entitled “In Search of the Picturesque,” which ofers a more ironic statement on the picturesque. In the satirical story, two young women accompany their grandfather from an unnamed city to nearby rural areas “in search of the picturesque.” As might be expected, instead of the picturesque, they fnd an ­increasingly industrialized countryside that is no longer culturally distinct from the city. With its particular interest in the cultural ­homogenization of American spaces, Woolson’s story shows that the midcentury’s interest in distinctively picturesque landscapes was supplanted by the post-­Civil War’s concern about the disappearance of the cultural distinctiveness of rural regions, a concern that came to be associated with regionalism.9 “In Search of the Picturesque” is a refutation of picturesque tourism. Te story begins by celebrating the female narrator’s grandfather: “In America a genuine old-­fashioned grandfather is a rare blessing.”10 Citing “the sage wisdom of a grandfather” as “almost an unknown language—one of the lost treasures of the past” (161), the narrator describes how she and her sister have listened to their grandfather’s stories and embraced his viewpoint on American life: We were brought up to believe in the degeneracy of cities with their follies and false ideas of pleasure, and to admire rural life with its simplicity and rational enjoyment. We were never weary of hearing tales of the deep chimney with its fre of logs, the dairy and springhouse with their stores of cool milk and golden butter, the rustic gatherings, and the long journey at no greater speed than two good

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horses could attain. We cherished a secret scorn for our modern range, we condemned the locomotives as prosaic, we despised modern society for its false pretenses, and longed for the naïve simplicity of country life.  (162)

As a result of this nostalgic training, the sisters gladly assented when their grandfather proposed the trip: “Now I propose, my child, that we take the open carriage, and ride leisurely into the country, enjoying the broad sky and changing clouds, the varying landscape, and the good plain fare of the village inns” (162). Soon they head of: “[B]efore many days had passed we started for Arcadia, the light carriage drawn by Bob and Sultan, our handsome bays; grandfather driving, and Sue and I on the back seat, in search of the picturesque” (162). Needless to say, the trip does not fulfll the city travelers’ expectations. Te roads are difcult, the views obscured by smoke and dust from coal mines, and the farms don’t have any fresh produce, having already sent their harvest to the city markets. Te country people thwart expectations in a variety of ways but mostly by being so invested in city life. One young rural woman they encounter eagerly follows urban fashion trends and, when she notes the sisters’ simple attire, asks, “ ‘You’re female sufragers, ain’t you?’ At the sisters’s vehement demurral, the young woman blandly replied, ‘No ofense, Sis; I only thought so because the sufragers mostly pays no attention to the fashions. Good-­day’ ” (165). Te country people repeatedly fail to recognize that the travelers might be “in search of the picturesque,” mistakenly identifying them as traveling salespeople or even members of a circus: At one inn, they fnd the whole town has gathered to see “the ladies as rides in the circus” (165). Te fnal straw is the night they room at a country house where the mother asks if they had attended the recent execution of “Foot, the murderer” in their home city. When the sisters proclaim their horror, the woman is surprised: “You didn’t go! Laws, ain’t that strange? Why, I’d good thoughts of going up to Marathon myself on purpose, and taking Timothy John; it ain’t ofen one gets such a chance. I read his confession out loud to all the children last night. I thought it ud be a warning to them. I suppose there’s lots of fres and fghts up to Marathon ‘most every night, ain’t they? I always read all I can get hold of about them; its’s something lively to think of in this dull place. Wa’al, good-­night, ladies; I hope you’ll sleep well.”  (168)

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By the next day, the sisters and their grandfather were on the “noon train” back to the city. Woolson’s story is hardly the frst to make fun of picturesque tourism, with its optimistic vision of rural scenery thwarted by less than favorable conditions and naïve preconceptions of rural life upended by contact with real people. But the particular confguration of Woolson’s satire refects concerns of the post-­Civil War era about a transformed nation, particularly the role that modernization through transportation and the spread of media played in creating a more culturally homogeneous nation. Bryant’s 1874 preface to Picturesque America celebrated the fact that developments in communication and travel made all parts of the nation more easily accessible; the work’s list of picturesque sites included “the various aspects impressed on it by civilization.” Picturesque America’s Reconstruction project of unifying the nation under the rubric of the picturesque models this homogenization. Woolson’s story satirizes the principles celebrated by the publication of Picturesque America, with its evocation of a national landscape (north and south, east and west) unifed by the picturesque. In the years afer Picturesque America, Woolson’s literary production came to be associated with a contravening impulse: the regionalist project to illuminate the cultural diferences between some of the underdeveloped regions of the United States. Starting with the Great Lakes region of her childhood with Castle Nowhere: Lake Country Sketches (1875) and later in the South with Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches (1880), Woolson’s regionalist fction emphasized the distinct cultures of these regions, with landscape scenery secondary to a focus on regional accents and local cultural practices and traditions.11 Instead of drawing upon the protocols of Romantic landscape aesthetics, American regionalist fction enlisted the nas­ cent social sciences, particularly anthropology and ethnography.12 Richard Brodhead asserts that “regional fction is nineteenth-century ethnography.”13 As in Woolson’s story, the regionalist e­mbrace of social science discourses implicitly scorned what seemed like the naive aestheticism of the picturesque. Although the regionalist writers saw their intervention as distinct from the picturesque, their work was more like it than it might frst seem. If regionalism emphasized social and cultural diference in contrast to the picturesque’s homogenizing formalist principles,

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some scholars of regionalism argue that it had a similar audience and function to that of the earlier picturesque mode: to legitimate American culture and justify the middle class as authoritative observers of American life.14 One could even say that the social science discourses of anthropology and ethnography that regionalism embraced constituted an alternative form of middle-­class cultural capital, replacing the previous generation’s relatively easy-­to-­learn protocols of picturesque landscape appreciation with another “valuable culture,” another “technique” to be cultivated that establishes middle-­class authority.15 Te replacement of the picturesque with anthropology and ethnography could be read as a shif toward positivism, signaling the greater investment of middle-­class Americans in science in the later third of the nineteenth century. Landscape appreciation treatises and design manuals were replaced by natural history museums and World’s Fair displays.16 Regionalism’s shif to the social science discourses of ethnography and anthropology indicates a broad transformation of middle-­class discourses of authority in the latter portion of the nineteenth century. As the most prominent advocate for picturesque design in the antebellum era, Andrew Jackson Downing spent much of his career both popularizing the picturesque and seeking to legitimate his vocation of landscape architect as an elevated profession. In post-­Civil War America, landscape architecture did become a profession, one that required formal training and even had its own professional organization.17 Historians have observed this process of middle-­class professionalization beginning in the mid-­nineteenth century and accelerating over the course of the latter part of the century, with increasing enrollment in colleges and universities and further development of professional credentialing in a variety of vocational felds.18 Although the aesthetics of the picturesque were an important part of “self-­culture” and an element of the middle-­class re­or­ gan­i­za­tion of social status in the midcentury, the picturesque and self-­culture did not partake of the same culture of professionalization. Tus, Warren Burton could only joke in his aesthetic treatise Scenery-­Showing (1852) that “we truly wished that there might be such an establishment as a Scenery School, and that we could be appointed Professor of the charming science of the Picturesque.”19 Although the picturesque was an analytic discourse, an enabling and privileged discipline for midcentury middle-­class Americans, there

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were no “Professor[s] of the charming science of the Picturesque.” Instead, the picturesque was replaced by discourses associated with science and other credentialed and institutionally sanctioned forms of knowledge by a new generation of the middle class. Despite its wide scope and general infuence in the midcentury, the picturesque inevitably came to seem rather archaic for the professionalizing members of the late nineteenth-­century middle class. As in Woolson’s story, it quickly became “one of the lost treasures of the past” (Woolson, 161): a quaint, nostalgic, and largely false understanding that could be associated with “grandfathers.” A central goal of this book has been to recuperate the picturesque from this association that it acquired beginning in the latter part of the nineteenth century. As I have shown, the popularity of the picturesque in the mid-­ nineteenth century helped middle-­ class Americans to reshape the national landscape to their ideological needs; to create new spaces like the suburbs and public urban parks; to transform traditional spaces like the New England village to express their political and social values; and to carve out new privileged roles for themselves in rural and urban spaces as picturesque observers. Although the picturesque as it was used in the midcentury may now feel, as Woolson suggests, like “almost an unknown language” (161), the spaces it created and the social attitudes toward those spaces it developed are far from archaic: Tey are very much the American spaces we live in. Tis book has demonstrated the ­historical impact of the mid-­nineteenth-­century picturesque—and the ofen neglected writers of picturesque literary genres—on our ­national spatial imaginary.

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{ Notes }

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Introduction 1. Ann Douglas identifes several authors in this project as central embodiments of her vision of “male sentimentalism” in Te Feminization of American Culture (New York: Macmillan, 1977). For an example of the genteel model, see Adam Sweeting, Reading Houses and Building Books: Andrew Jackson Downing and the Architecture of Popular Antebellum Literature, 1835–1855 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1996). For a study of Hawthorne, Poe, and Toreau’s use of picturesque travel writing conventions, see Beth L. Lueck, American Writers and the Picturesque Tour: Te Search for National Identity, 1790–1860 (New York: Garland, 1997). On Poe and the picturesque, see Ken Ljungquist, Te Grand and the Fair: Poe’s Landscape Aesthetics and Pictorial Techniques (Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1984). On Toreau and the picturesque, see Richard Schneider, “Toreau and Nineteenth-­Century American Landscape Painting,” ESQ 31 (1985), 67–88 and James Southworth, “Toreau, Moralist of the Picturesque,” PMLA 49 (1934), 971–74; on Melville and the picturesque, see Richard Moore, Tat Cunning Alphabet: Melville’s Aesthetics of Nature (Amsterdam: Rodophi, 1982) and Samuel Otter, “Te Eden of Saddle Meadows: Landscape and Ideology in Pierre,” American Literature 66 (1994), 55–81. 2. On the rise of the middle class and categories of class distinction in antebellum U.S. cities, see Stuart Blumin, Te Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 3. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 5. 4. David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Diference (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 31. Italics in original. 5. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” 5. 6. Martin Price, “Te Picturesque Moment,” in From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick  A.  Pottle, ed. Frederick  W.  Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 259. 7. Despite the fact that the ideas of the picturesque came to the United States through England, my project does not explore the ways that the picturesque functioned as a means of negotiating transatlantic cultural values. My focus is more on domestic theories and attitudes toward an American picturesque. Christopher Hanlon’s America’s England: Antebellum Literature and Atlantic Sectionalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) more fully explores the picturesque as a transatlantic concept, also drawing important distinctions between uses of the English picturesque by northeastern and southern American writers. 8. On the eighteenth-­century English aesthetic debates about the picturesque, see Christopher Hussey, Te Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View (London: Putnam, 1927) and Walter J. Hipple Jr., Te Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-­Century British Aesthetic Teory (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957).

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Notes

9. Te Claude glass—a tinted mirror that practitioners of the picturesque could use to facilitate achieving the proper hazy tint—was emblematic of the picturesque’s aesthetic manipulation of the landscape view. John Barrell, Te Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 6. 10. Barrell, Te Idea of Landscape, 12. 11. In this point, my project diverges signifcantly from John Conron’s American Picturesque (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000) which examines landscape design, visual art, and literature and defnes the picturesque primarily through the aesthetic efects of its expressive style and the drama of its scenic narration (3–8). Tis formalist approach leads to a very capacious and inclusive understanding of the place of the picturesque in American art and discourse, perhaps overly inclusive. 12. As William Blake suggested in a marginal comment, “Perhaps, Picturesque is somewhat synonymous to the word Taste.” Cited in Tomas Pfau, Wordsworth’s Profession: Form, Class, and the Logic of Early Romantic Cultural Production (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 21. 13. Christopher Hussey, Te Picturesque (London: Cass & Co., 1967), 2. 14. Alan Liu, Wordsworth: Te Sense of History (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 96. 15. Barrell, Te Idea of Landscape and Raymond Williams, Te Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 16. Barrell, Te Idea of Landscape, 58. 17. Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: Te English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (London: Tames and Hudson, 1987), 3. For a sampling of scholars working in this vein, see Te Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics Since 1770, ed. Stephen Copley and Peter Garside (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 18. On middle-­class analytic discourses as “valuable cultures,” see Alvin Gouldner, Te Future of Intellectuals and Rise of the New Class (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), 21. 19. Liu, Wordsworth, 94, 96. 20. Liu, Wordsworth, 91. 21. Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology, 85. 22. On the role of the Continental tour and the particular infuence of travel to Italy, see Elizabeth Wheeler Mainwaring, Italian Landscape in Eighteenth-­Century England (New York: Oxford University Press 1925). On the rise of domestic landscape tourism in England, see Malcolm Andrews, Te Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989). 23. Pfau, Wordsworth’s Profession, 30. 24. Pfau, Wordsworth’s Profession, 25. 25. Liu, Wordsworth, 95–96. 26. Pfau, drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, sees the picturesque as an example of cultural capital, while Bermingham discusses the English middle class’s “imaginative appropriation” of the countryside (72). 27. Angela Miller, Te Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 14. 28. Tomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery” (1835) http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/ detoc/hudson/cole.html (accessed June 21, 2018). 29. E. L. Magoon, “Scenery and Mind,” Te Home Book of the Picturesque: or, American Scenery, Art, and Literature (1852; Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1967),

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3. Magoon himself was a noted collector of American landscape art. Ironically, the essay would go on to describe the infuence of landscape in almost all contexts outside of the United States. 30. Angela Miller, “Landscape Taste as an Indicator of Class Identity in Antebellum America,” in Art in Bourgeois Society, 1790–1850, ed. Andrew Hemingway and William Vaughan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 340–61. 31. Miller, “Landscape Taste,” 343. 32. Miller, “Landscape Taste,” 351. In this context, Christopher Hanlon’s discussion of antebellum American uses of the picturesque makes an important argument for the diferent uses of the English landscape aesthetic in the sectional divide between the Northeast and the South in the period, suggesting that there was no one “politics” of the  American picturesque. See America’s England: Antebellum Literature and Atlantic Sectionalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Antebellum southern uses of the picturesque, as discussed by Hanlon, are particularly concerned with defenses of the plantation economy, indeed a kind of “conservative endeavor,” but one that is quite diferent from the conservatism that Miller is describing in her essay on landscape taste and class. On antebellum southern uses of the picturesque, see Hanlon, America’s England, 97–124. 33. David Schuyler, Apostle of Taste: Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815–1852 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 7. 34. Schuyler, Apostle of Taste, 42. 35. Andrew Jackson Downing, A Treatise on the Teory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America; with a View to the Improvement of Country Residences (New York: A. O. Moore, 1859), 23. 36. On Downing’s republicanism, see Schuyler, Apostle of Taste, 6. William Gleason demonstrates how slavery problematizes Downing’s “national” vision of architectural design in Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature (New York: New York University Press, 2011). Studying nineteenth-­century African American authors’ depictions of architecture, Gleason shows how these writers sought to imagine or create space for themselves in their texts as a counter to their elision in the architectural designs and manuals of the period. Tis study will explore the ideological work of the picturesque, which legitimated white middle-­class values, ofen against the experiences and values of racial and ethnic minorities and both the wealthiest and poorest white Americans. 37. Schuyler, Apostle of Taste, 74. 38. Downing, Treatise, 352. 39. Downing, “On the Improvement of Country Villages,” in Rural Essays (New York: George A. Leavitt, 1869). 40. A. J. Downing, “Te Moral Infuence of Good Houses,” in Rural Essays (New York: George A. Leavitt, 1869), 210. 41. However, we will see in Chapter 3 that Downing saw an exception to this American exceptionalist distinction to Europe in the form of public parks, which he thought were far in advance of those of the United States. 42. Warren Burton, “Scenery-­ Showing,” Te District School as It Was (Boston: T. R. Marvin, 1852), 224. 43. Burton, “Scenery-­Showing,” 225. 44. Christopher Hanlon also reads this moment in Burton, also drawing attention to the role of discipline, but emphasizing how awareness of the work of picturesque viewing disappears beneath the pleasure in seeing (Hanlon, America’s England, 87–88). Hanlon sees

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the appeal of the antebellum picturesque more broadly among its northeastern adherents in its “currents of afect and wonder” (87) and capturing of the “varied labors of natural beholding” (88). 45. Burton’s Scenery-­Showing ofered a dedication to “SELF-­ CULTURALISTS, to PARENTS, to SCHOOL-­TEACHERS and to those SCENERY-­SEEKERS who can already say ‘with a pervading vision—Beautiful! How beautiful is all the visible world!’” Te District School as It Was, n.p. 46. On the rise of the middle-­class culture industry in the period, see Mary Kupiec Cayton, “Te Making of an American Prophet: Emerson, His Audiences, and the Rise of the Culture Industry in Nineteenth Century America,” American Historical Review 92 (1987), 605. On the antebellum world of self-­culture, see John Cawelti, Apostles of the Self-­Made Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 39–98. See also Tomas Augst, Te Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-­Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 47. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 9 48. Lauren Berlant, Te Female Complaint: Te Unfnished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 220. 49. On Jauss’s notion of genre and reception, see Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). 50. Fredric Jameson, Te Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 106. 51. On the popularity of the sketch in nineteenth-­century United States, see Kristie Hamilton, America’s Sketchbook: Te Cultural Life of a Nineteenth-­Century Literary Genre (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998). 52. Te scholarship on nineteenth-­century American sentimental literature is too great to cite briefy, but the work was galvanized by Ann Douglas’s critique in Te Feminization of American Literature (New York: Knopf, 1977) and Jane Tompkins’s more celebratory retort in Sensational Designs: Te Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). For a representative sampling of the range of scholarship on American sentimental literature and culture, see Te Culture of sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-­Century America, ed. Shirley Samuels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 53. John Stilgoe, Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820–1939 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988). 54. Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture from Revolution through Renaissance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 295.

Chapter 1 1. Frederick Jackson Turner, “Te Signifcance of the Frontier in American History,” Te Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1920). Accessed online Making of America: quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moa/ABL0350.0001.001?rgn=main;view=fulltext. 2. For a discussion of the frontier myth and its role in early American history and in the nineteenth-­century United States, see Richard Slotkin, Te Fatal Environment: Te Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (New York: Athaneum, 1985).

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3. On the rise of American tourism and its association with the expansion of the middle class, see Richard Gassan, Te Birth of American Tourism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008). 4. Te picturesque is commonly associated with the rise of a commercialized, bourgeois tourism industry. Lynne Withey, “Touring in Search of the Picturesque,” Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750 to 1915 (New York: Morrow, 1997), 32–57. 5. On the development of the Northern tour, see Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1995), 6. In this way, I difer from Kris Fresonke, who argues for the compatibility of the picturesque with geographical conquest in West of Emerson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 87 n.31. For travel sketch writers, especially those traveling to the frontier, the picturesque became a tool for contemplating expansion and development, but seldom from an unproblematically supportive position. 7. Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1991). 8. On the popularity of the sketch genre, see Kristie Hamilton, America’s Sketchbook: Te Cultural Life of a Nineteenth-­Century Literary Genre (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998). 9. Lawrence Buell, Te Environmental Imagination: Toreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 411–12. For an alternative, more serious approach to the genre, see Beth L. Lueck, American Writers and the Picturesque Tour: Te Search for National Identity, 1790–1860 (New York: Routledge, 2013). 10. William Gilpin, “On Picturesque Travel,” Tree Essays (London: Blamires, 1794), 46. https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=5kwJAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg= GBS.PA46 (accessed June 21, 2018). 11. Anne Janowitz, England’s Ruin: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 49. 12. Sarah  J.  Hale, “Te Romance of Travelling,” Traits of American Life (Philadelphia: E. L. Carey & A. Hart, 1835), 189. 13. Tomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery” (1835), http://xroads.virginia. edu/~hyper/detoc/hudson/cole.html (accessed June 21, 2018). 14. But even this was equivocal: In a footnote to “Rip Van Winkle,” Geofrey Crayon, Irving’s narrative persona for Te Sketch Book, implies that Diedrich Knickerbocker, another of Irving’s narrative personae and the ostensible author of the story, may have stolen the folk legend of Hedrick Hudson and his crew appearing in the Catskills from “a German superstition about the Emperor Frederick der Rothbart and the Kypphauser mountain.” Although Knickerbocker denies this claim, Crayon’s footnote hints at the sense that the legends and historical associations that make the American landscape picturesque are ultimately derived from European sources. Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle,” in Te Sketch-­Book (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 48. 15. Washington Irving, “Te Catskill Mountains,” in Te Home-­Book of the Picturesque (New York: Leavitt & Allen, 1852), 72. Matthew Redmond discusses this sketch and its negotiation of Gilpin’s aesthetics of picturesque travel in “Trouble in Paradise: Te Picturesque Fictions of Irving and His Successors,” ESQ 62, no. 1 (2016), 7–13. 16. Irving, “Te Catskill Mountains, 73–78.

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17. Cole, “Essay on American Scenery.” 18. Ibid. 19. On Tomas Cole and Republicanism, see Angela Miller, “Tomas Cole and Jacksonian America: Te Course of Empire as Political Allegory,” Prospects 14 (October 1989), 65–92, and Ross Barrett, “Violent Prophecies: Tomas Cole, Republican Aesthetics and the Political Jeremiad,” American Art 27, no. 1 (Spring 2013), 24–49. 20. Janowitz, England’s Ruins, 1–19. 21. Like the earlier “Tales of My Native Land,” “Te Story Teller” was envisioned as a way to package Hawthorne’s short work into a potentially more lucrative book publication. As with the earlier project, editors rejected “Te Story Teller,” and, as will be discussed later, its individual pieces were published separately. Discussions of “Te Story Teller,” its contents and its signifcance to Hawthorne’s career, can be found in Alfred Weber, “Te Outlines of the ‘Te Story Teller,’ Te Major Work of Hawthorne’s Early Years,” Te Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 15 (Spring 1989), 14–19, Arlin Turner, Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 69–79; Nina Baym, Te Shape of Hawthorne’s Career (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976), 39–50. 22. Quoted in Alfred Weber, “Hawthorne’s Tour of 1832 through New England and Upstate New York,” Hawthorne’s American Travel Sketches (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1989), 4. 23. Jennifer Baker, examining Hawthorne’s domestic and foreign travel writing, and focusing more closely on his late Civil War essay, “On Chiefy War Matters,” argues that Hawthorne’s vision of the picturesque was in confict with his notion of American identity being linked to “social, economic, [and] geographic” mobility. See “Hawthorne’s Picturesque at Home and Abroad,” Studies in Romanticism 55, no. 3 (Fall 2016), 414–44. Proquest literature-­proquest-­com.proxy.mul.missouri.edu/searchFulltext.do?id=R05473443&divLev el=0&queryId=3102230004923&trailId=1688B29D9B1&area=abell&forward=critref_ft. Although my reading of Hawthorne’s anxious fear of Europeanized picturesque owes a debt to Baker’s, I fnd other elements in Hawthorne’s domestic picturesque travel writings of the 1830s worked to stabilize exceptionalist notions of American history. 24. Quoted in Weber, “Hawthorne’s Tour of 1832,” 2. All citations to Hawthorne’s travel sketches are from this volume and will be cited parenthetically hereafer. 25. Te travel sketches were published in the New-­England Magazine and Te American Monthly Magazine (both edited by Park Benjamin) from 1835 to 1837, then later repurposed and retitled as “Sketches from Memory” and “Fragments from the Journal of a Solitary Man.” Tey were to be included in Twice Told Tales (1837) and the 1854 edition of Mosses from an Old Manse. On the publication history of “Te Story Teller” sketches, see Weber, “Hawthorne’s Tour of 1832,” 182 n.10. 26. Qtd. in Hawthorne’s American Travel Sketches, 27. 27. Ibid. 28. Two sketches on the White Mountains constitute the frst installment of “Sketches from Memory,” and “My Visit to Niagara” was published in the New-­England Magazine in February 1835. For a discussion of Hawthorne’s sketch of Niagara and his struggle with the conventions of the sublime, see Elizabeth McKinsey, Niagara Falls: Icon of the American Sublime (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 191–200. 29. Qtd. in Hawthorne’s American Travel Sketches, 35.

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30. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “An Afernoon Sketch,” Hawthorne’s American Travel Sketches, 47. All further references to Hawthorne’s travel sketches are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically. 31. Tis sensuous, picturesque exploration of the seasons and natural time hints at ideas expressed further in the more searching meditation on human versus natural time in Toreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (to be discussed later in this chapter). It points to the ways in which the space of picturesque travel was deeply imbricated into notions of time as well. 32. On this scene’s association with the mode of Salvator Rosa, see Beth  L.  Lueck, “‘Meditating on the Varied Congregation of Human Life’: Immigrants in Hawthorne’s Travel Sketches,” Te Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 14, no. 2 (Fall 1988), 3. 33. Lueck, “‘Meditating on the Varied Congregation of Human Life.’” 34. “‘Meditating on the Varied Congregation of Human Life,’” 1–4. On stereotypical attitudes toward the Irish in the antebellum era, see Dale T. Knobel, Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality in Antebellum America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1986). 35. Tis sketch was published in the New-­England Magazine, unlike most of the other “Story Teller” travel writings. Tus, there are questions as to whether or not it was ever an intended part of the collection. 36. Baker, “Hawthorne’s Picturesque at Home and Abroad,” 428. 37. Janowitz, England’s Ruins, 4. 38. For a discussion of the traditions within antebellum American women’s travel writing, see Susan  L.  Roberson, Antebellum American Women Writers and the Road: American Mobilities (New York: Routledge, 2011). 39. On Irving and Parkman’s masculine ethos, see Beth  L.  Lueck, “Te Search for Manliness in the West: Irving and Parkman,” American Writers and the Picturesque Tour. On Kirkland and women’s domestic writing on the West, see Annette Kolodny, Te Land before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). 40. Fuller’s book acknowledges or quotes numerous other travel writers, refective of the research she did. On this research, see Susan Belasco Smith, Introduction to Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1991), xi. 41. Fuller, Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, 18. All further citations will be to this text and will be made parenthetically 42. On the efect of Fuller’s reading practices on the structure of the narrative, see Nicole Tonkovitch, “Traveling in the West, Writing in the Library: Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes,” Legacy 10, no. 2 (1993), 79–102. 43. Quoted in Stephen Adams, “‘Tat Tidiness We Always Look for in Woman’: Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes and Romantic Aesthetics,” Studies in the American Renaissance (1987): 247. 44. On Summer as Romantic “excursion,” see Lawrence Buell, Literary Transcendentalism: ‘Style and Vision in the American Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973), 191, and as “fragment,” see Adams, “‘Tat Tidiness We Always Look for in Woman,’” 247–64. 45. On Summer’s depiction of women’s lives, see Kolodny, Land before Her, 112–30; Joan Burbick, “Under the Sign of Gender: Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes,” Women and

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the Journey: Te Female Travel Experience, ed. Bonnie Frederick and Susan  H.  McLeod (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1993), 66–80; Christina Zwarg, Feminist Conversations: Fuller, Emerson, and the Play of Reading (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 97–124; Cheryl J. Fish, Black and White Women’s Travel Nnarratives: Antebellum Explorations (Gainesville: University of Florida University Press, 2004), 96–129. On Summer’s construction as dependent on juxtaposition and dialogue, see Adams, “‘Tat Tidiness We Always Look for in Woman,’” 251. 46. Jefrey Steele, Transfguring America: Myth, Ideology and Mourning in Margaret Fuller’s Writing (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 138–48. 47. Zwarg, Feminist Conversations, 108–13. 48. Steele, Transfguring America, 144; Lance Newman, Our Common Dwelling: Henry David Toreau, Transcendentalism and the Class Politics of Nature (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 67. 49. Anne Baker discusses Fuller’s meditations on the “moral implications of seeing” in “A Commanding View: Vision and the Problem of Nationality in Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes,” ESQ 44, no. 1–2 (1998), 61–77. 50. Adams, “‘Tat Tidiness We Always Look for in Woman,’” 258. 51. Newman, Our Common Dwelling, 57. 52. Zwarg notes how Fuller’s citation of Black Hawk is associated with the threat of annihilation. Tis suggests a potential danger for Fuller in taking on the perspective of the Native American. See Zwarg, Feminist Conversations, 104. 53. For discussions of the contradictions in Fuller’s vision of Native Americans in Summer, see Zwarg, Feminist Conversations, 108–13; Fish, Black and White Women’s Travel Narratives 118–25; Lara Romero, “Vanishing Americans: Gender, Empire, and New Historicism,” American Literature 63, no. 3 (September 1991), 388–89. 54. Adams, “‘Tat Tidiness We Always Look for in Woman,’” 256. 55. Baker, “A Commanding View,” 72. 56. Tonkovitch, “Traveling in the West,” 17; Zwarg, Feminist Conversations, 122. 57. Beth L. Lueck discusses Toreau’s travel writing in the context of the picturesque in “Excursion in New England: Toreau as Picturesque Tourist,” American Writers and the Picturesque Tour, 169–84. Stephen Fink also discusses Toreau’s work within the travel sketch genre throughout his study of the author’s engagement with the literary marketplace of the period. See Te Prophet in the Marketplace: Toreau’s Development as a Professional Writer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 58. In 1932, Templeman observed that in terms of number of comments in Toreau’s journal, Gilpin is—aside from personal acquaintances—the author with which Toreau most frequently engaged. William Templeman, “Toreau, Moralist of the Picturesque,” PMLA 47, no. 3 (September 1932), 864–89. 59. In 1934, James G. Southworth responded to Templeman’s argument in PMLA, arguing that the picturesque was only an aesthetic mode and not central to Toreau’s reaction to nature. James G. Southworth, “Toreau, Moralist of the Picturesque,” PMLA 49, no. 3 (1934), 971–4. Forty years afer Templeman’s claim, Gordon  V.  Boudreau also wrote to reject the signifcance of the picturesque to Toreau’s work, seeing the formalism of the picturesque as antithetical to Toreau’s idealism: “H.D.  Toreau, William Gilpin, and the Metaphysical Ground of the Picturesque,” American Literature 45, no. 3 (November 1973), 357–69.

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60. Qtd. in Templeman, “Toreau, Moralist of the Picturesque,” 884. 61. Qtd. in Templeman, “Toreau, Moralist of the Picturesque,” 885. 62. Qtd. in Templeman, “Toreau, Moralist of the Picturesque,” 870. 63. For this characterization of the picturesque, see John Barrell, Te Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 12. 64. H.  D.  Toreau, January 8, 1854, Writings: Journal, v. 12 (New York: AMS Press, 1968), 59. 65. Stephen Fink notes that “A Walk” “obviously conform[s] to conventions of picturesque travel narratives,” he argues that it was not exactly a purely conventional travel narrative: “Toreau is not so much departing from convention as he is exploring more explicitly than usual the issues implicit in those conventions.” Fink, Te Prophet in the Marketplace, 67–68. 66. Henry David Toreau, “A Walk to Wachusett,” Excursions, ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 31. All further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically. 67. On the peak’s scenery as picturesque, see Fink, Te Prophet in the Marketplace, 74. 68. David M. Robinson examines this passage as an example of Toreau’s engagement with the burden of history in “Te Written World: Place and History in Toreau’s “A Walk to Wachusett,” in Toreau’s Sense of Place: Essays in American Environmental Writing, ed. Richard J. Schneider (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000), 90. 69. Barbara Novak, “Man’s Traces: Axe, Train, Figure,” Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 135. 70. Fink, Te Prophet in the Marketplace, 129. 71. By contrast, Joan Burbick reads A Week as a refutation of the picturesque conventions of seeing. She views him as opting instead for “techniques of observation pioneered by the natural sciences and the technologies of cartography and surveying.” Joan Burbick, Toreau’s Alternative History: Changing Perspectives on Nature, Culture, and Language (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 22. 72. On the theme of seasonal/natural versus human measurements of time in Toreau’s A Week, see H.  Daniel Peck, Toreau’s Morning Work (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 31–33 and Paul David Johnson, “Toreau’s Redemptive Week,” American Literature 49 (1977). 73. Henry David Toreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (New York: Library of America, 1983), 123. All further citations to this edition will be made parenthetically. 74. Burbick, Toreau’s Alternative History, 29. 75. Noah Heringman explores the relationship between geological discoveries in the period and English Romantic literature in Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). 76. Tomas  M.  Allen, A Republic in Time: Temporality and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-­Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 146–85. 77. Benjamin Silliman, “Supplement by the Editor,” in An Introduction to Geology, by Robert Bakewell (1833). Quoted in Allen, A Republic in Time, 180–81. 78. Allen ofers as the primary literary example of nineteenth-­century representation of deep time Toreau’s sublime experience in “Ktaadn.” See Allen, A Republic in Time, 172. 79. “Paulo-­post-­future” Q.v., Oxford English Dictionary.

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80. On the antebellum fascination with Egyptian hieroglyphics, see Robert  T.  Irwin, American Hieroglyphics: Te Symbol of Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980). 81. Buell, Te Environmental Imagination. See also Joshua Bowman, Imagination and Environmental Political Tought: Te Afermath of Toreau (New York: Lexington Books, 2018). 82. Henry David Toreau, “Walking,” Excursions, ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 185, 202. 83. For a seminal statement of Toreau’s role as the philosopher of American wilderness and his place in a historical narrative toward the creation of the national parks and the Wilderness Act of 1964, see Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (1967; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 84–95, 102. 84. On Muir, his debt to Toreau, and his advocacy for national wilderness preservation, see Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 122–40. Histories of the U.S. national park system ofen trace a genealogy from Toreau through John Muir to the earliest national parks and onward to the Wilderness Act of 1964. For an example, see Doug Scott, Te Enduring Wilderness: Protecting Our Natural Heritage through the Wilderness Act (New York: Fulcrum Press, 2004) 85. On the creation of National Parks and the dispossession of Native Americans, see Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) and Philip Burnham, Indian Country, God’s Country: Native Americans and the National Parks (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2000). 86. Olmsted had moved out West to manage the Mariposa mine in 1863, had visited Yosemite, and was commissioned to design the park afer California purchased the land to preserve it from development. On Olmsted’s role in laying out the plan for Yosemite, see Ethan Carr, Wilderness by Design: Landscape Architecture and the National Park Service (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 26–34 87. Carr, Wilderness by Design, 29. Quotes from Olmsted come from his 1865 Yosemite report. 88. Although Olmsted’s plan for Yosemite was not adopted and Yellowstone was not truly developed until years afer its 1872 designation as federal park land, Carr notes that by the end of the nineteenth century, management of Yellowstone by the Army Corps of Engineers sought to prioritize safety and scenery in its development of roads, bridges, and other infrastructure with the park. See Carr, Wilderness by Design, 32–34.

Chapter 2 1. Lydia Maria Child, Letters from New-­York [1843], ed. Bruce Mills (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 44. 2. For a description of the sketch genre’s afnities to scenery, see Kristie Hamilton, America’s Sketchbook: Te Cultural Life of a Nineteenth-­Century Literary Genre (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), 13–35. 3. On the city sketch as a response to urban modernity, see Dana Brand, Te Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-­Century American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1–13; and Hamilton, America’s Sketchbook, 132–49.

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4. Afer its initial serialization, Child’s “Letters” were collected into a book that went through seven reprintings in the decade afer its 1843 publication and was followed by a sequel, Letters from New-­York: Second Series (1845), another collection that included sketches originally published by the Boston Courier. 5. On “Dark reform,” see David Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance (New York: Knopf, 1988), 59–84. Reynolds discusses the infuence of popular literary forms on more canonical literature, with relatively little interest in nuancing the class politics of literature in the period. Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and WorkingClass Culture (London: Verso, 1987) and David Stewart, Reading and Disorder in Antebellum America (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011) discuss sensationalism as an expression of working-­class values in the period. 6. For background on Foster’s career, see Stuart Blumin, “Introduction: George G. Foster and the Emerging Metropolis,” New York by Gas-­Light and Other Urban Sketches by George G. Foster (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 1–61. 7. George G. Foster, “Letter I: Broadway at Evening,” in New York by Gas-­Light (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 69. 8. Te classic articulation of this perspective is Louis Hartz, Te Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Tought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955). 9. On the antebellum city and the formation of the middle class, see Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: Te Family in Oneida County, New York, 1780–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981) and Stuart Blumin, Te Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 10. On some of the contradictions in historians’ attempts to map out middle-­class identity across economic and social formations, see Debby Applegate, “Henry Ward Beecher and the ‘Great Middle Class,’” in Te Middling Sorts: Explorations in the History of the American Middle Class, ed. Burton  J.  Bledstein and Robert  D.  Johnson (New York: Routledge, 2001), 108–10. 11. Michael T. Gilmore’s essay, “Hawthorne and the Making of the Middle Class,” which notes that “the middle class is never mentioned in Te Scarlet Letter,” is characteristic of this notion of an absence of class in nineteenth-­century American literature. Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formations, ed. Wai-­Chee Dimock and Michael T. Gilmore (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 218. Scholars of class in American literature have ofen focused on distinctions between kinds of work, with an emergent divide between manual and nonmanual labor in the antebellum era crucial to class notions in literature. Examples that explore how literature fgures middle-­class labor include Nicholas Bromell, By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Cindy Weinstein, Te Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature: Allegory in Nineteenth-­Century American Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Michael Newbury, Figuring Authorship in Antebellum America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). 12. For statistics on antebellum urban population growth, see Allan Pred, Urban Growth and City-­Systems in the United States, 1840–1860 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). 13. On the city sketch as a response to urban modernity, see Dana Brand, Te Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-­Century American Literature (New York: Cambridge University

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Press, 1991), 1–13; and Kristie Hamilton, America’s Sketchbook: Te Cultural Life of a Nineteenth-­Century Literary Genre (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), 132–49. 14. Brand, Te Spectator and the City, 14–41. 15. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, Te Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 93–94. 16. Charles Baudelaire, “Te Painter of Modern Life” in Te Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964), 9. 17. Walter Benjamin, “Te Flaneur” in Charles Baudelaire: Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: New Lef Books, 1973), 35–66. 18. Brand, Te Spectator and the City, 77. 19. Beckert argues for a model in which there is a distinction between the bourgeoisie, who occupy an elite position, and the lower middle class. See Sven Beckert, “Propertied of a Diferent Kind: Bourgeoisie and Lower Middle Class in the Nineteenth-­Century United States.” Te Middling Sorts, eds. Burton Bledstein and Robert  D.  Johnson (New York: Routledge Press, 2001), 285–95. In Te Monied Metropolis, his study of New York bourgeois culture, Beckert argues that over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie/elites were able to overcome the ideological diferences between themselves and the lower middle class and create a more unifed bourgeois ideology that served bourgeois elite ideological purposes. 20. George  F.  Foster, “No. X: Teaters and Public Amusements,” “New York by GasLight” in New York by Gas-­Light and Other Urban Sketches, ed. Stuart Blumin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 155. 21. Foster, “No. XI: Te Light Fantastic Toe,” New York by Gas-­Light, 167. 22. Foster, “No. VIII: Te Ice-­Creameries,” New York by Gas-­Light, 137–38. 23. On urban working-­class populist politics, see Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Peter Adams, Bowery Boys: Street Corner Radicals and the Politics of Rebellion (Westport, CT: Praeger Books, 2005). 24. Beckert, “Propertied,” 291. 25. Lydia Maria Child, “Letter 1,” Letters from New-­York [1843], ed. Bruce Mills (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 9. 26. Child, Letters from New-­York, 127. 27. Foster, “Wall Street and the Merchants’ Exchange,” from Fifeen Minutes Around New York in New York by Gas-­Light, 226. 28. Margaret Fuller, “Te Rich Man—An Ideal Sketch,” in Margaret Fuller, Critic: Writings from the New-­York Tribune, 1844–46, ed. Joel Myerson and Judith Mattson Bean (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 359. 29. Fuller, “Te Rich Man—An Ideal Sketch,” 359, 361 (emphasis in original). 30. Beckert, “Properties of a Diferent Kind,” 290. 31. On the complications of urban social behavior in the period and their importance to middle-­class identity, see Karen Halttunen, Confdence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-­Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982) and John Kasson, Rudeness and Civility; Manners in Nineteenth-­Century Urban America (New York: Hill & Wang, 1990). 32. Te most substantial study of the Astor Place Riots remains Peter Buckley’s unpublished dissertation, “To the Opera House: Culture and Society in Antebellum New

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York, 1820–1860” (PhD diss., SUNY-­Stony Brook, 1984). Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/ Lowbrow: Te Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988) made an infuential argument for the cultural importance of the Riots. Other studies that invoke the importance of the Astor Place Riots for the class cultural landscape of the United States include Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850, and Eric Lott, Love and Tef: Blackface Ministrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). 33. Foster, “No. X: Teaters and Public Amusements,” New York by Gas-­Light, 159. 34. Controversial because of its use of a subscription/lottery system (each member received a print selected by a committee, but the major works exhibited were “won” by members selected via lottery), the American Art Union demonstrates how cultural institutions such as art museums grew out of entrepreneurial models associated with the bourgeoisie in the mid-­nineteenth century. On the American Art Union, see Rachel Klein, “Art and Authority in Antebellum New York City: Te Rise and Fall of the American Art Union,” Journal of American History 81, no. 4 (March 1995). On the rise of museums and other bourgeois cultural institutions in the nineteenth century, see Paul Dimaggio, “Cultural Entrepeneurship in Nineteenth-­Century Boston: Te Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America,” Media, Culture and Society 4 (1982), 33–50, 303–22. 35. Walt Whitman, “Matters Which Were Seen and Done in an Afernoon Ramble,” November 19, 1846; Te Collected Writings of Walt Whitman: Te Journalism, ed. Herbert Bergman (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), II:125. 36. On the afermath of the Astor Place Riots and the rise of high/low cultural distinctions, see Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow. 37. Foster, “No. X: Teaters and Public Amusements,” New York by Gas-­Light, 155–56. 38. Catherine Cocks, Doing the Town: Te Rise of Urban Tourism in the United States, 1850–1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 3. 39. Solon Robinson, Hot Corn: Life Scenes in New York Illustrated (New York: DeWitt and Davenport, 1854), 15. 40. David Scobey, “Anatomy of the Promenade: Te Politics of Bourgeois Sociability in Nineteenth-­Century New York,” Social History 17, no. 2 (1992), 203–27. 41. George Foster, “Slice I: Broadway,” in New York in Slices (New York: W. F. Burgess, 1849), 13. Retrieved from https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=VctTOs_UiEMC&print sec=frontcover&output=reader&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA13. 42. Whitman, “Matters Which Were Seen and Done in an Afernoon Ramble,” 124–25. 43. Fuller, “Prevalent Idea Tat Politeness Is Too Great a Luxury to Be Given to the Poor,” Margaret Fuller, Critic: Writings from the New-­York Tribune, 1844–46, ed. Joel Myerson and Judith Mattson Bean (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 127. All further references to this text will be cited parenthetically within the text. 44. On the home visit and bourgeois women’s reform eforts in northeastern cities, see Carroll Smith-­Rosenberg, Religion and the Rise of the American City: Te New York City Mission Movement, 1812–1870 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971) and Lori Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics and Class in the Nineteenth-­century United States, 1820–1885 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). 45. Child, Letter XXX, Letters from New-­York, 134. All further citations are to this letter and will be cited parenthetically in the text.

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46. O. B. Bunce, “Chicago and Milwaukee,” Picturesque America (1874; Rpt. Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1974), 516. Tis work will be discussed further in the epilogue of the present volume. 47. Malcolm Andrews, “Te Metropolitan Picturesque,” Te Politics of the Picturesque, ed. Stephen Copley and Peter Garside (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 287. 48. Carrie Tirado Bramen, Te Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the Quest for National Distinctiveness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 156. 49. Warren Burton, “Scenery-­ Showing,” Te District School As It Was (Boston: T. R. Marvin, 1852), 230. 50. Reviews cited in Donald Yannella’s foreword to the reprint edition of Big Abel and the Little Manhattan (1845; Rpt. New York: Garrett Press, 1970), xii. 51. On the frontier romance, see Ezra Tawil, Te Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the Frontier Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 52. Cornelius Mathews, Big Abel and the Little Manhattan (1845; Rpt. New York: Garrett Press, 1970), 22. All further references are cited parenthetically. 53. On the development of tenements and the destruction of older neighborhoods in New York City, see David Scobey, Empire City: Te Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002). 54. Laura Mielke, Moving Encounters: Sympathy and the Indian Question in Antebellum Literature (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008). 55. Child also considers Native Americans in her Letters from New York, but her focus is a more conventional consideration of Native American racial diference and their place on the frontier. In Letter XXXVI, Child describes a visit to Barnum’s American Museum to see Natives on display. Although she disputes the racial science that justifes white superiority over Native Americans, she articulates other racist hierarchies while defending problematic stereotypes of Native Americans. Unlike Mathews, Child thinks about Native Americans on the western frontier and imagines the city as the antithesis to their space, going so far as to argue that city life is deadly to them. Both Child and Mathews’s Native characters are symbolic, but whereas Child wants to use them as symbols of Romantic racial theory, Mathews appropriates this context to think about New York urban space and development. 56. On Mathews and his advocacy of American copyright in the context of the Young America literary movement, see Perry Miller, Te Raven and the Whale: Te War of Wits and Words in the Era of Poe and Melville (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956). 57. H. D. Toreau, Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Other Writings (New York: Norton, 2008), 16. 58. Walden, 16. 59. On Toreau’s fable of the Indian’s baskets and the literary marketplace, see Michael  T.  Gilmore, “Walden and the ‘Curse of Trade,’” American Romanticism and the Marketplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 35–51. 60. Mary Esteve, Te Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd in American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 16–17. 61. Christophe Den Tandt, Te Urban Sublime in American Literary Naturalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 6. 62. R. H. Byer, “Mysteries of the City: A Reading of Poe’s ‘Te Man of the Crowd,’” in Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 222.

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63. On the sublime and the aestheticization of the urban experience, see Andrew Smith, “Te Urban Sublime: Kant and Poe,” in Gothic Radicalism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). 64. Edgar Allan Poe, “Te Man of the Crowd,” in Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. G. R. Tompson (New York: Norton, 2004), 232. All further references to the story will be cited parenthetically. 65. Foster, “No. X: Teaters and Public Amusements,” New York by Gas-­Light, 156. 66. Steven Rachman suggests that Poe is criticizing this mode of attention, equating the kind of authority to see into the criminality of the city individuals that the narrator claims as his relation to the crowd “with a predatory, appropriative style of reading.” Rachman, “Es Lasst Sich Nicht Schreiben: Plagiarism and ‘Te Man of the Crowd,’” Te American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 79. 67. Foster, “Slice 1: Broadway,” in New York in Slices, 13. 68. Esteve, Te Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd, 46.

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Chapter 3 1. Frederick Law Olmsted called the mid-­nineteenth-­century project to construct urban parks a “park movement” in an address, later published in pamphlet form as A Consideration of the Justifying Value of a Public Park (1881). Olmsted, Frederick Law Olmsted: Essential Texts, ed. Robert Twombly (New York: Norton, 2010), 293. George F. Chadwick’s seminal study, Te Park and the Town (New York: Praeger, 1963), followed Olmsted in his chapter “Te American Park Movement.” 2. On the nineteenth-­century public park’s debt to the picturesque sensibility formulated by eighteenth-­century English landscape designers Humphrey Repton and John Claudius Loudon, see Chadwick, “Te American Park Movement,” 163–83. 3. Olmsted, “Address to the Prospect Park Scientifc Association,” Frederick Law Olmsted, 200. 4. Olmsted, “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns,” Frederick Law Olmsted, 233. 5. For representative examples of parks and landscape design history, see George F. Chadwick, Te Park and the Town (New York: Praeger, 1966), and David Schuyler, Te New Urban Landscape (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 59–146. On urban, social, and intellectual history, particularly of Central Park, see Tomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth-­Century America (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975), 159–87 and Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, Te Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), David Scobey, Empire City: Te Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 227–40. In art history, see Angela Miller, Te Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). 6. Notable exceptions include James Machor, Pastoral Cities: Urban Ideals and the Symbolic Landscape of America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), which examines writings by Emerson and Olmsted, and Betsy Klimasmith, At Home in the City: Urban Domesticity in American Literature and Culture, 1850–1930 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2005), which reads writings about Olmsted’s Central Park in conjunction with Henry James’s Te Bostonians.

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7. Olmsted’s co-­designer was Calvert Vaux, Andrew Jackson Downing’s former partner. Olmsted was a close friend of Downing before his death in 1852. 8. For a brief history of the involvement of writers in the construction of Central Park, see Adam Sweeting, “Writers and Dilettantes: Central Park and the Literary Origins of Antebellum Urban Nature,” in Te Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban Environments, ed. Michael Bennett and David  W.  Teague (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999), 93–110. 9. Frederick Law Olmsted, “A Consideration of the Justifying Value of a Public Park” (1881) in Frederick Law Olmsted, 293. 10. Andrew Jackson Downing, “A Talk about Public Parks and Gardens” (1848), Rural Essays (New York: George A. Leavitt, 1869), 146. All future references to this essay will be cited parenthetically in text. 11. On the sentimental project of “national intimacy,” see Lauren Berlant, Te Female Complaint (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 12. Sylvester Judd, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1850), 467.. 13. Berlant, Te Female Complaint, viii. 14. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Te Young American,” Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 215. 15. Bryant’s writings calling for a park include the 1844 New York Post column “A New York Park” and an 1845 Evening Post travel piece on London, later included in his volume of travel writings, Letters of a Traveller; or Notes of Tings Seen in Europe and America (1851). Similar calls for a New York park based on experiences traveling in Europe can be found in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1841) and Caroline Kirkland, Holidays Abroad (New York: Baker & Scribner, 1849). For a discussion of American travel writings and parks, see David Schuyler, Te New Urban Landscape: Redefnition of City Form in Nineteenth-­Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 62–65. 16. Downing, “Te New-­York Park,” Rural Essays, 152. On the general process of public refnement and its difusion in mid-­nineteenth century America, see Richard Bushman, Te Refnement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage, 1993). 17. Downing, “Te New-­York Park,” Rural Essays, 151. 18. Downing, “A Talk about Public Parks and Gardens,” Rural Essays, 138. All future references to this essay will be cited parenthetically in text. Downing’s response is fairly typical of attitudes toward the 1848 revolutions in Europe, at least afer the frst optimistic response. On attitudes toward these events among American writers of the period, see Larry  J.  Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988). 19. Downing, “A Talk about Public Parks and Gardens,” 140, 141. 20. Downing, “A Talk about Public Parks and Gardens,” 142. 21. Downing, “New-­York Park,” 152. 22. Downing, “New-­York Park,” 151. 23. Downing, “New-­York Park,” 152. 24. Downing, “New-­York Park,” 152. 25. Downing, “Our Country Villages” [June 1850], Rural Essays, 243.

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26. Judd, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family, 324. 27. Judd, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family, 226. 28. Judd, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family, 226. 29. Judd, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family, 250. 30. Judd, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family, 252. 31. Judd, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family, 292. 32. Judd, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family,315. 33. Judd, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family, 450–51. 34. Olmsted, “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns,” Frederick Law Olmsted, 225–26. 35. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Te Young American,” Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 215. 36. Emerson’s usage of the term efete comes at a moment when its meaning was shifing to include not only having “exhausted its vigour and energy; incapable of efcient action,” but also “efeminate.” Oxford English Dictionary (q.v.). 37. Nathaniel Parker Willis, A L’Abri, or Te Tent Pitch’d (New York: Samuel Colman, 1839), 23. Hathi Trust Collection, March 14, 2018. Willis’s text and others in this same genre will be the focus of the next chapter. 38. Although Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar note the importance of the early infuence of the wife of a prominent New York merchant and property owner on the push to create a New York park, it is undoubtedly the work of New York politicians and wealthy property owners—all male—that forwarded the plan that became Central Park over the course of the 1850s. On the early infuence of Anna Minturn, see Rosenzweig and Blackmar, Te Park and the People, 17. 39. On women’s role in antebellum reform movements, see Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-­Century United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 40. Olmsted, “Public Parks and Enlargement of Towns,” Olmsted: Essential Texts, 208. 41. Downing, “A Talk about Public Parks and Gardens,” 143. 42. Downing, “New-­York Park,” 151. 43. Frederick Law Olmsted, “To Andrew Jackson Downing,” November 23, 1850, Te Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, vol. 1 (Te Formative Years: 1822–1852), eds. Charles McLaughlin and Charles Beveridge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 362–63. 44. Olmsted, “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns,” 227. 45. Olmsted, “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns,” 230. 46. Klimasmith, At Home in the City, 56. 47. Olmsted, “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns,” 231. 48. Klimasmith, At Home in the City, 61. 49. Downing “A Talk about Public Parks,” 142. 50. Karen Halttunen, “From Parlor to Living: Domestic Space, Interior Decoration and the Cult of Personality,” Consuming Visions, ed. Simon  J.  Bronner (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989). 51. John Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-­Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), 174. 52. Milette Shamir, Inexpressible Privacy: Te Interior Life of Antebellum American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 36–44.

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53. Judd, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family, 86. 54. Judd, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family, 286. 55. Judd, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family. 56. Calvert Vaux, Villas and Cottages: A Series of Designs Prepared for Execution in the United States (1857; rpt: New York: Da Capo Press, 1967), 97. 57. Judd, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family, 287, 288. 58. Judd, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family, 59. Judd, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family, 289. 60. Judd, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family, 290. 61. On the mid-­nineteenth-­century didactic literature on women and their parlors, see Shamir, Inexpressible Privacy, 40–42. 62. Judd, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family, 290. 63. Olmsted, “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns,” 229. 64. On elite women as early adopters of the park and its liberatory efect on their lives, see Rosenzweig and Blackmar, Te Park and the People, 219–22. Tis sense of the park is central to Betsy Klimassmith’s reading of the park in At Home in the City, the most signifcant literary/cultural study of the literary representations of the park movement. Klimasmith reads the park as an expansion of the urban domestic sphere with liberating efects for postbellum women, with Henry James’s ambivalent response to Central Park in his novel Te Bostonians as an expression of James’s greater ambivalence toward the women’s sufrage movement and nostalgia for the home as a site of containment for women (51–89). I read the domesticity of Olmsted and the park movement in a more skeptical way, although it could be argued that whatever the park movement’s intent, bourgeois women found the park a liberating space. 65. Richard Stott, Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity, and Youth in Antebellum (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). 66. For a formative statement of this view, see Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). For a more specifc history of the connection between workingclass street presence and politics, see Peter Adams, Bowery Boys: Street Corner Radicals and the Politics of Rebellion (Westport, CT: Praeger Books, 2005). 67. On the antebellum “moral order,” see Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in  America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978). On the delegitimatization of the collective presence in American politics over the course of the nineteenth century, see Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 68. Downing, “New-­York Park,” 151. Downing makes this observation in the context of a broader complaint against social criticism of the park, noting that “the million” believe “that the park is made for “the upper ten.” Adopting a middle stance between “the upper ten” and “the million,” Downing criticizes all park detractors for failing to “understand the elevating infuences of the beautiful in nature and art” (“New-­York Park,” 151). 69. “Te Central Park and Other City Improvements,” New York Herald, September 6, 1857. Cited in Olmsted, “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns,” 238–39. 70. Olmsted, “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns,” 245. 71. For a formative statement on Central Park as an institution of reform, see Bender, Toward an Urban Vision, 162–87.

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72. Olmsted, “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns,” 228. 73. Olmsted, “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns,” 228. 74. Judd, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family, 98. 75. Judd, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family, 100. 76. Judd, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family, 106. 77. Judd, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family, 102. 78. Judd, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family, 102. 79. Judd, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family, 107. 80. Judd, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family, 458. 81. Judd, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family, vi–vii. 82. Judd, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family, 307. 83. Judd, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family, 464. 84. Rosenzweig and Blackmar, Te Park and the People, 530.

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Chapter 4 1. F.W. Shelton, Up the River (New York: Charles Scribner, 1853), xiii. 2. Critical studies of female domesticity and its larger connection to sentimentalism in antebellum American literature and culture abound. Seminal works on the topic include Barbara Welter’s “Te Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1966); Ann Douglas, Te Feminization of American Culture (1977); and Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: Te Cultural Work of American Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Te recovery of nineteenth-­century American women’s writing in the 1980s led to an explosion of scholarly work on women’s domesticity. For a representative collection on the kinds of approaches brought to bear on the subject, see Te Culture of Sentiment, ed. Shirley Samuels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 3. Although the term was in relatively common use during the mid-­nineteenth century, twentieth-­century critical discussions of the country book genre do not appear until Edward Halsey Foster, Civilized Wilderness: Backgrounds to American Romantic Literature, 1817–1860 (New York: Free Press, 1975). More recently, Maura D’Amore has focused on this genre in her Suburban Plots: Men at Home in Nineteenth Century Print Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014). 4. Millette Shamir’s Inexpressible Privacy: Te Interior Life of Antebellum Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Other works that examine Walden in the context of domesticity (but not the country book) include Douglas Anderson, A House Undivided: Domesticity and Community in American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 71–96; and Cecelia Tichi, “Domesticity on Walden Pond,” A Historical Guide to Henry David Toreau, ed. William E. Cain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 95–121. 5. My sense of the complexity of domesticity’s hegemonic power relations owes a debt to the work of Lora Romero. See Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 6. Frederick Law Olmsted, Walks and Talks of an American Farmer (New York: George P. Putnam, 1852), 84. 7. Kenneth T. Jackson, Te Crabgrass Frontier: Te Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 4.

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8. John Stilgoe, Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988). 9. Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820–2000 (New York: Pantheon, 2003), 22. 10. On Jackson’s infuence on domestic architecture, especially that of the new suburbs, see David Schuyler, Apostle of Taste: Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815–1852 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Adam W. Sweeting discusses the importance of domestic architecture in the writings of the mid-­nineteenth century in Reading Houses and Building Books: Andrew Jackson Downing and the Architecture of Popular Antebellum Literature, 1835–1855 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1996). 11. See Margaret Marsh, “From Separation to Togetherness: Te Social Construction of Domestic Space in American Suburbia, 1840–1915,” Journal of American History 76, no. 2 (1989), 506–27. 12. Hayden, Building Suburbia, 22–44. 13. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Te Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1848-­1851 (Harvard University Press, 1975), 446. 14. Andrew Jackson Downing, Te Architecture of Country Homes (1850; New York: Da Capo, 1968), 22 15. Henry Ward Beecher, Star Papers; or, Experiences of Art and Nature (New York: J. C. Derby, 1855), 285. 16. See Jackson, Te Crabgrass Frontier, 63–66, and Hayden, Building Suburbia. 17. Downing, Te Architecture of Country Houses, 276–78 and Downing, A Treatise on the Teory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (New York: A. Moore, 1859), ix. 18. Downing wrote many articles in Te Horticulturalist magazine through the 1840s on such topics as “Citizens Retiring to the Country,” “On the Mistakes of Citizens in Country Life,” and “How to Choose a Site for a Country-­Seat.” 19. Hayden, Building Suburbia, 27. 20. Hayden demonstrates the infuence of Downing’s views on early suburban developments—which she calls “picturesque enclaves” of the 1850s. See Hayden, Building Suburbia, 45–70. 21. For example, Dolores Hayden focuses on Catharine Beecher’s design ideas in her discussion of suburban domesticity. See Hayden, Building Suburbia, 35–42. On masculine privacy and domestic design, see Shamir, Inexpressible Privacy, 20–55. 22. A. J. Downing, A Treatise on the Teory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America; with a View to the Improvement of Country Residences (1841; New York: A. O. Moore, 1859), 547. 23. On Willis’s controversial career as literary gossip, see Tomas N. Baker’s Sentiment and Celebrity: Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Trials of Literary Fame (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 24. On the cultural work of Willis’s dandyism, see Sandra Tomc, Industry and the Creative Mind: Te Eccentric Writer in American Literature and Entertainment, 1790–1860 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 154–91. 25. Henry A. Beers, Nathaniel Parker Willis (Boston: Houghton, Mifin, 1888), 224, 225. 26. Downing, “Cockneyism in the Country,” in Rural Essays (New York: G. A. Leavitt, 1869), 224–28.

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27. Nathaniel Parker Willis, A L’Abri, or Te Tent Pitch’d (New York: Samuel Colman, 1839), 15. Hathi Trust Collection, March 14, 2018. All further citations will be to this edition (unless otherwise specifed) and will be cited parenthetically in the text. 28. John Barrell, Te Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972),12. 29. On the social history of changes in domestic architecture, see Cliford E. Clark, Te American Domestic Home (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986). 30. On the confict over gender-­coded spaces of the parlor and the library, see Shamir, Inexpressible Privacy, 36–52. 31. Barry Gray, Out of Town: A Rural Episode (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1866), 3. “Barry Gray” was the pseudonym of Robert Barry Cofn, who ofered a lightly fctionalized version of his own suburban life in a series of country books following the success of Out of Town, including Cakes and Ale at Woodbine (1868) and Castles in the Air and Other Phantoms (1871). All further references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically. 32. Maura D’Amore discusses Marvel’s masculine domesticity in “A Man’s Sense of Domesticity: Donald Grant Mitchell’s Suburban Vision,” ESQ 56, no. 2 (2010), 135–62. 33. Beecher, “Te Good of Disorder,” Eyes and Ears (Boston: Ticknor and Sons, 1862), 414. All further citations will be to this edition and cited parenthetically. 34. Te Beecher sisters co-­wrote the domestic manual, Te American Women’s Home (1869), but Catharine Beecher had earlier published A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841), which emphasized the virtues of running the home on rational, orderly terms. On Catharine Beecher’s investment in a rationalized, orderly domesticity, see Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: Norton, 1976). 35. Melville, “I and My Chimney,” Putnam’s Magazine 7, No. 39 (March 1856), 283. Accessed Hathi Trust June 24 2018. On “I and My Chimney” and male domestic privacy, see Shamir, Inexpresssible Privacy, 79–86. 36. On suburbanizing Concord, see D’Amore, “A Man’s Sense of Domesticity,” 180 n.13. 37. Henry David Toreau, Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Other Writings (New York: Norton, 2008), 6. All further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically. On the masculine address of Walden, see Sarah Ann Wider, “‘And What Became of Your Philosophy Ten?’: Women Reading Walden,” More Day to Dawn: Toreau’s “Walden” for the Twenty-­frst Century, ed. Sandra Harbert Petrulionis and Laura Dassow Walls (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007). 38. On Toreau and women’s domestic manuals, see Tichi, “Domesticity on Walden Pond,” 95–121. 39. Jean Carwile Masteller and Richard  N.  Masteller, “Rural Architecture in Andrew Jackson Downing and Henry David Toreau: Pattern Book Parody,” New England Quarterly 57, no. 4 (December 1984), 483–510, and Stephen Fink, “Toreau and the American Home,” Prospects 11 (1987), 327–65. 40. Beecher, “Te Good of Disorder,” 414. 41. Milette Shamir reads Walden as characteristic of the new suburban vision of masculinity, characterized by a “hard” or rigorous privacy that is “inexpressible or intractable” and an intimacy that is “depersonalized, arguing that “Toreau warns against the way sentimental novels contaminate private existence by invading, publicizing, and

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conventionalizing it’ (224). By contrast, Maura D’Amore’s Suburban Plots locates Walden within the broad range of the suburban country book genre within sentimental culture, especially in its deployment of an insistently autobiographical form that promised to ofer insight and emotional connection to the private lives of the suburban men. 42. Cited in Harold Blodgett, “Hawthorne as Poetry Critic: Six Unpublished Letters to Lewis Mansfeld,” American Literature 12, no. 2 (1940), 175. 43. L.W.  Mansfeld, Up-­Country Letters (New York: D.  Appleton, 1852), 160–62. All further citations will be to this edition and cited parenthetically. 44. Te central theorization of the homosocial and homophobia can be found in the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) and Te Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 45. On the association of urban crowds and sodomy, see Christopher Newfeld, Te Emerson Efect: Individualism and Submission in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 93–105. 46. David Greven, Men beyond Desire: Manhood, Sex, and Violation in American Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 10 (emphasis in original).. 47. Shamir describes a logic of male social relations “based upon physical distance rather than proximity, on concealment rather than revelation, on silence rather than speech.” See Shamir, Inexpressible Privacy, 222. 48. Peter Coviello, Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-­Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 33–35. 49. Te author of the Barry Gray books, Robert Cofn was an assistant editor at N. P. Willis’s Home Journal and later edited a food-­oriented magazine entitled Te Table. Cofn’s interest in culinary matters came to dominate his second country book, Cakes and Ale at Woodbine. 50. Gray’s country books are increasingly structured by their interest in food, but his interest in food as a means of facilitating male bonding is not unique in country books. In L.W. Mansfeld and S. H. Hammonds’ jointly authored Country Margins and Rambles of a Journalist (New York: J. C. Derby, 1855), an epistolary friendship is constructed over plans for a dinner in the country, with details of food lovingly described alongside incredibly lengthy discussions of all sorts of matters. 51. For discussions on writing and the erotically charged discourse of male friendship from the early national period to the mid-­nineteenth century, see Caleb Crain, American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). 52. Julie Ellison, “Te Gender of Transparency: Masculinity and Te Conduct of Life,” American Literary History 4, no. 4 (1992), 601. 53. Crain, American Sympathy, 152. 54. Jurgen Habermas, Te Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Tomas Burger (1962; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 49. 55. Habermas, Te Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 49, 50–51. 56. N. P. Willis, Letters from under a Bridge (New York: Morris, Willis & Co, 1844), 31. Hathi Trust Collection, March 14, 2018. All further citations are to this edition, cited parenthetically in the text.

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57. On the popularity of Willis’s postscript, see Tomas  N.  Baker, Sentiment and Celebrity: Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Trials of Literary Fame (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 159. 58. Alan Sinfeld, Te Wilde Century: Efeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer Moment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 26.

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Chapter 5 1. Josephine Donovan, New England Local Color Literature: A Women’s Tradition (New York: Ungar, 1983) and Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse, Writing Out of Place: Regionalism,Women, and American Literary Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). 2. We can see this emerging particularly in the scholarship on the work of Sarah Orne Jewett. See, for example, Elizabeth Ammons, “Material Culture, Empire, and Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs,” in New Essays on the Country of the Pointed Firs, ed. June Howard (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 81–100; Hsuan Hsu, Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-­Century American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 164–95; Patrick Gleason, “Sarah Orne Jewett’s ‘Te Foreigner’ and the Transamerican Routes of New England Regionalism.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, 28, no. 1 (2011), 24–46. 3. Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture from Revolution through Renaissance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 295. 4. Afer his comment about these novels as early attempts at “the Great American novel” in his New England Literary Culture, Buell went on to write more extensively about the subject in Te Dream of the Great American Novel (2014). It is notable, however, that Buell doesn’t mention any of these novels in his later book. He discusses the national imaginary “as ongoing activity, partly conscious but mostly unconscious, of collective imagination about nation and nationness by those who feel themselves connected to that collective, whether citizens or not—a fuid and shifing process rather than a fxed state that encompasses a sense of national heritage as well as anticipated future.” Buell, Te Dream of the Great American Novel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 469 n.17. 5. For discussions of the importance of New England villages to these contexts, see Sarah Burns, Pastoral Inventions: Rural Life in Nineteenth-­Century American Art and Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995); and Joseph  S.  Wood, Te New England Village (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 6. Catharine Maria Sedgwick, A New-­ England Tale (1822; New York: Penguin Press, 2003). 7. Sarah J. Hale, Northwood: A Tale of New England (Boston: Bowles & Dearborn, 1827) was republished in 1852 to capitalize on the increasing popularity of abolitionist fction. 8. Page Smith, As a City upon a Hill: Te Town in American History (New York: Knopf, 1966), 1, 13. For discussions of the importance of New England villages to these contexts, see Sarah Burns, Pastoral Inventions: Rural Life in Nineteenth-­Century American Art and Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); Dona Brown, Inventing New England:

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Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995); and Wood, Te New England Village.. 9. Everett, An Oration Pronounced at Cambridge. Cited in Wood, Te New England Village, 138. 10. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Old Town Folk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 47. 11. Buell, New England Literary Culture, 305. 12. Wood, Te New England Village, 136. On the notion of “conceived space,” see Henri Lefebvre, Te Production of Space (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 13. Wood, Te New England Village, 139. 14. Wood, Te New England Village, 139. 15. Horace Bushnell, “Te Age of Homespun,” in Litchfeld Country Centennial Celebration (Hartford, CT: Edwin Hunt, 1851), 114. Hathi Trust Collection 15 March 2018. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=miun.aja2173.0001.001&view=1up&seq=3 16. Wood, Te New England Village, 157, 171. 17. Susan Fenimore Cooper, “A Dissolving View,” in Te Home-­Book of the Picturesque; or, American Scenery, Art, and Literature (New York: Putnam, 1852), 92. 18. Samuel Otter observes that Cooper includes elements such as “an old country house” and “a castle of grey stone” that hint that this picturesque vision is one that dissolves not only the distance between past and present, but also America and Europe in a fashion that unsettles the exceptionalist claims of American diference from Europe and its class structures. See Samuel Otter, Melville’s Anatomies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 193. 19. Wood, Te New England Village, 173–76. 20. See Downing, “On the Improvement of Country Villages” [June 1849] and “Our Country Villages” [June 1850], Rural Essays (New York: G. A. Leavitt, 1869), 229–43. 21. Wood, Te New England Village, 141. 22. For a formative collection that summarizes early historical work on the rise of perfectionist and immediatist reform, see the Romantic Reform in America, 1815–1865, ed. John L. Tomas (New York: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1965). 23. Hawthorne’s novel is ofen read as a commentary on the reformist ethos of the period. See Robert Levine, “Sympathy and Reform in Te Blithedale Romance,” in Te Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Richard  H.  Millington (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 207–29. and Winifred Fluck, “1852: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance Reconsiders the Transcendentalist Living Experiment at Brook Farm: A More Natural Union,” A New Literary History of America, eds. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollers (Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press; 2009), 292–97. On the utopian reformism of Judd’s novel, see Gavin Jones, “Te Paradise of Aesthetics: Sylvester Judd’s Margaret and Antebellum American Literature,” New England Quarterly 71, no. 3 (1998), 449–72. 24. See Richard D. Hathaway, Sylvester Judd’s New England (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981). Lawrence Buell sees Margaret within a New England literary tradition and attributes its “aesthetic muddle” to Judd’s contradictory impulses toward realistic depictions of New England life, language, and landscape and Unitarian reformist idealism (see Buell, New England Literary Culture, 313–14).

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25. Fuller, Papers on Literature and Art (1846; New York: AMS Press, 1972), II: 137. 26. Cited in Hathaway, Sylvester Judd’s New England, 13–14. 27. James Russell Lowell, “Longfellow’s Kavanagh: Nationality in Literature.” North American Review 69, no. 144 (July 1849), 209. 28. Sylvester Judd, Margaret: A Tale of the Real and Ideal, Blight and Bloom (Boston: Phillips, Sampson & Co., 1857), iv. All further references are to this two-­volume edition, and page references will be cited parenthetically by volume and page number. 29. Judd explains his vision of the character of Margaret at the end of his second novel, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family (1850), a “rus-­urban” and masculine counterpart to Margaret. See Sylvester Judd, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family. A Rus-­Urban Tale, Simple and Popular, Yet Cultured and Noble, of Morals, Sentiment, and Life, Practically Treated and Pleasantly Illustrated. Containing, also, Hints on Being Good and Doing Good (Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1850), 467. Tis novel is discussed at greater length in Chapter 3. 30. Tis reprint of the 1851 revision refects Judd’s response to critics but does little to alter the overarching logic of the narrative. 31. Bushnell, “Age of Homespun,” 115. 32. In response to criticism for its depiction of execution in the frst edition, Judd amended the depiction of Chilion’s execution in the second edition. He did not completely accede to public pressure, however. Instead of deleting the passage, Judd blacked out the passage that described the executionto register its absence. On Judd’s critique of capital punishment in the novel, see Paul C. Jones, Against the Gallows: Antebellum Writers and the Movement to Abolish Capital Punishment (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), 78–79, and John  C.  Barton, Literary Executions: Capital Punishment and American Culture, 1820–1925 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 126–34. 33. Andrew Jackson Downing, “On the Improvement of Country Villages,” Te Horticulturalist (June 1849). Rpt. in Rural Essays (New York: Geo. A. Leavitt, 1858), 229. Judd displayed his familiarity with Downing’s ideas in his later novel, Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family (1850), which openly cites Downing’s articles in Te Horticulturalist about the social benefts of city parks and picturesque landscapes in a chapter that breaks from the story to ofer commentary on the subject. See Richard Edney (Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1850), 324. For a more substantial discussion of Richard Edney, see Chapter 4 this volume. 34. Downing, “Moral Infuence of Good Houses,” Te Horticulturalist (February 1848), Rpt. in Rural Essays, 210. 35. For a discussion of the politics of Downing’s vision of the moral infuence of aesthetics, see Adam Sweeting, Reading Houses and Building Books (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 1996), 93–121. 36. For the most substantial discussion of the evolution of Judd’s religious beliefs, see Hathaway’s Sylvester Judd’s New England (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981). 37. Downing is, perhaps unfairly, blamed for the popularity of Gothic architecture in antebellum America. Although he touted the virtues of Gothic designs in his architectural pattern books, Cottage Residences (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1842) and Te Architecture of Country Homes(New York: Appleton, 1850). Downing also argued against the “absolute

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and indiscriminate employment of the Gothic cottage in every site and situation in the country” (Rural Essays, 207). 38. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Kavanagh, A Tale, in Poems and Other Writings, ed. J. D. McClatchy (New York: Library of America, 2000), 782. All further references will be to this edition and will be cited parenthetically. 39. Cited in Newton Arvin, Longfellow: His Life and Work (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963), 124. 40. Lowell, “Longfellow’s Kavanagh,” 214. 41. On the debates between Young America’s literary nationalists and their varied opponents in antebellum literature, see Perry Miller, Te Raven and the Whale: Te War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956). For a more substantial meditation on the political and social thought of Young America, see Edward L. Widmer, Young America: Te Flowering of Democracy in New York City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 42. Lowell, “Longfellow’s Kavanagh,” 198. 43. Perry Miller argues that this episode is a satire on Melville’s associate Cornelius Mathews. See Te Raven and the Whale: 251–52. 44. Arvin, Longfellow: His Life and Work, 124. 45. For a discussion of some of these readings, see Edward Wagenknecht, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: His Poetry and Prose (New York: Ungar, 1986), 46–53. 46. John Seelye, “Pierre, Kavanagh, and the Unitarian Perplex,” in Melville’s Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays, eds. John Bryant and Robert Milder (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997), 385. 47. Cited in Wagenknecht, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 47. 48. Te narrator says that Alice and Cecilia are “in love with each other” (720). Lillian Faderman compared their relationship to Verena Tarrant and Olive Chancellor’s in Te Bostonians and read it as a depiction of lesbianism. See “Female Same-­Sex Relationships in Novels by Longfellow, Holmes, and James,” New England Quarterly 51, no. 3 (1978), 309–32. Longfellow concludes his comment on their being in love by saying “It was, so to speak, a rehearsal in girlhood of the great drama of woman’s life” (720). 49. One might read the grotesque description of Zenobia’s drowning by suicide in Hawthorne’s Te Blithedale Romance (1852) as a retort to Longfellow’s aestheticization. Te narrator, Miles Coverdale, uncharitably suggests that Zenobia’s suicide was a romanticized afectation: “Zenobia, I have ofen thought, was not quite simple in her death. She had seen pictures, I suppose, of drowned persons, in lithe and graceful attitudes. And she deemed it well and decorous to die as so many village-­maidens have, wronged in their frst-­love, and seeking peace in the bosom of the old, familiar stream—so familiar that they could not dread it—where, in childhood, they used to bathe their little feet, wading mid-­leg deep, unmindful of wet skirts.” Te Blithedale Romance (New York: Penguin, 1983), 236. 50. John Ruskin, “On the Turnerian Picturesque,” in Modern Painters, vol. 4 (5:12) (1843), Accessed online: Project Gutenburg,March 16, 2018. http://www.gutenberg.org/ fles/31623/31623-­ h/31623-­ h.htm Critiquing the tendencies of the picturesque toward heartlessness in 1854, Ruskin famously sought to distinguish between “low” and “high” versions of the aesthetic, distinguishing between the two by their degree of sympathy. On Ruskin’s attitudes toward the picturesque, see Martin Price, “Te Picturesque Moment,” in From Sensibility to Romanticism, ed. Frederick  W.  Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York:

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Oxford University Press, 1965), 263–64 and John Macarthur, “Te Heartlessness of the Picturesque: Sympathy and Disgust in Ruskin's Aesthetics,” Assemblage 32 (1997), 126–41. On Ruskin’s infuence on Downing and American aesthetics, see David Schuyler, Apostle of Taste (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 136–37. 51. Herman Melville, Pierre; or the Ambiguities (1852; New York: Penguin, 1996), 276–77. 52. Melville, Pierre, 277. Samuel Otter discusses Melville’s satire of the picturesque in Pierre in “Te Eden of Saddle Meadows: Landscape and Ideology in Pierre,” American Literature 66 (March 1994), 55–61. 53. Ann Douglas, Te Feminization of American Culture (1977; Rpt. New York: Macmillan, 1998). 54. George M. Fredrickson, Te Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 23. 55. On the rise of professionalism in the antebellum era, see Burton Bledstein, Te Culture of Professionalism: Te Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York: Knopf, 1976) and Magali  S.  Larson, Te Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). 56. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Elsie Venner; A Romance of Destiny (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), 9. All further references will be to this edition and will be cited parenthetically. 57. Criticism on the novel has largely focused on its medical elements, ranging from its interest in the deterministic elements of refex physiology to its relation to the new professionalization of medicine as an authoritative discourse in mid-­nineteenth-­century American life. For an example of the interest in refex physiology, see Charles Boewe, “Refex Action in the Novels of Oliver Wendell Holmes,” American Literature 26, no. 3 (1954), 303–19 and Randall Knoper, “American Literary Realism and Nervous ‘Refexion,’” American Literature 74, no. 4 (2002), 722–26. On the professionalization of medicine, see Joan Burbick, Healing the Republic: Te Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-­Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 241–61; ; Bryce Traister, “Sentimental Medicine: Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Construction of Masculinity,” Studies in American Fiction, 27, no. 2 (1999), 205–27; and Cynthia  J.  Davis, Bodily and Narrative Forms: Te Infuence of Medicine on American Literature, 1845–1915 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 13–48. 58. Sedgwick, A New-­England Tale, 34. 59. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Te Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (New York: Oxford University Press, 1909), 201. Other afectionately mocking references to “Daddy” Gilpin appear in Over the Teacups (1890) and One Hundred Days in Europe (1887). 60. Davis briefy mentions the racial signifcance of Elsie’s “Spanish” heritage and its connection to pre-­Civil War racial anxieties (34), as does Burbick, Healing the Republic (257). For another reading of the place of racial anxieties and the novel, see Maria DeGuzman, “Consolidating Anglo-­ American Imperial Identity around the SpanishAmerican War,” Race and the Production of Modern American Nationalism, ed. Reynolds J. Scott-­Childress (New York: Garland Press, 1999). 61. It is ironic that Holmes’s sobriquet has now become a stereotype or cliché of a New England character type, as it was intended to mark what he felt was a sign of the inevitable disappearance of a distinctive regional type and, with it, a connection to the Puritan history and character.

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62. See readings by Traister, “Sentimental Medicine”; Davis, Bodily and Narrative Forms; and Burbick, Healing the Republic. 63. Burbick, Healing the Republic, 257. 64. Cited in Charles E. Beveridge and Paul Rocheleau, Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing the American Landscape (New York: Rizzoli, 1995), 43. 65. Bonner’s model of well-­paid serialization created some of the most popular works of the period, especially by E. D. E. N. Southworth. David Dowling has discussed Bonner’s relationships with writers for the Ledger in Te Business of Literary Circles in NineteenthCentury America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 66. Wood, Te New England Village, 147. 67. Interest in the novel itself has been completely surpassed by the story of Beecher’s adulterous involvement with Elizabeth Tilton during the writing of Norwood and the sensational coverage of the trials in 1874 and 1875. See Robert Shaplen, Free Love and Heavenly Sinners: Te Great Henry Ward Beecher Scandal (New York: Knopf, 1954); Altina  L.  Waller, Reverend Beecher and Mrs. Tilton: Sex and Class in Victorian America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982); Laura Korobkin, Criminal Conversations: Sentimentality and Nineteenth-­Century Legal Stories of Adultery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); and Richard Wightman Fox, Trials of Intimacy: Love and Loss in the Beecher-­Tilton Scandal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 68. William  G.  McLoughlin, Te Meaning of Henry Ward Beecher: An Essay on the Shifing Values of Mid-­Victorian America, 1840–70 (New York: Knopf, 1970). 69. Douglas, Te Feminization of American Culture (1977; New York: Anchor Books, 1988), 240. 70. Henry Ward Beecher, Norwood; or Village Life in New England (1867; New York: Charles Scribner, 1868), 1. All further citations will be to this edition and will be cited parenthetically. 71. Douglas, Te Feminization of American Culture, 240. 72. For classic statements on the shif of reform from romantic perfectionism toward a professionalized bureaucratic system from the 1840s to the Civil War, see John L. Tomas, “Romantic Reform in America, 1815–1865,” in American Quarterly 17, no. 4 (1965), 656–81; Ronald  G.  Walters, American Reformers 1815–1860 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978). See Robert H. Bremner, Te Public Good: Philanthropy and Welfare in the Civil War Era (New York: Knopf, 1980). 73. Fredrickson, Te Inner Civil War, 99. 74. Cited in Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-­Century United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 154. 75. Lori Ginzberg describes the divide between the work of nurses in the Commission aiming to professionalize themselves and the popular rhetoric of “benevolent femininity” embodied by such fgures as Clara Barton that dominated the public understanding of women’s roles during the war (Women and the Work of Benevolence, 143–44). 76. Henry W. B. Cher, Gnaw-­wood, or New England Life in a Village (New York: National News Company, 1868) Accessed online via Wright American Fiction, March 16, 2018 http:// webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/TEIgeneral/view?docId=wright/VAC6035&brand=wright&doc. view=pagedImage&source=&image.id=VAC6035-­00000001&query=#docView. “Cher” was the pseudonym for Daniel Ottolengui, a Southerner who sought to satirize the Beechers

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and the northern narrative of the Civil War. For information on this parody, see Kirsten Twelbeck, Beyond the Civil War Hospital: Te Rhetoric of Healing and Democratization in Northern Reconstruction Writing, 1861–1882 (London: Transcript-­Verlag, 2017), 235. 77. Alan Liu, Wordsworth: Te Sense of History (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989) 95–96. 78. Cher, Gnaw-­Wood, 4. 79. Cher, Gnaw-­Wood, 4.

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Epilogue 1. Quoted in Sue Rainey, Creating Picturesque America: Monument to the Natural and Cultural Landscape (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1994), 83. 2. For an image of this advertisement, see Rainey, Creating Picturesque America, 79. 3. For information on Picturesque America’s sales and its standing, see Rainey, Creating Picturesque America, 274. 4. By that point, most of the work of creating the work had already been done by the original editor, Oliver Bell Bunce, but Bryant’s presence brought prestige to the project, refecting the publisher’s desires to link the project to the established literary authority. Bryant’s long career as a man of letters and American poet of nature may have bestowed authority on the project, but also associated it with an older generation. Hiring Bryant to edit a collection of descriptions and engravings of American landscape speaks to the conventionalism of Picturesque America. 5. William Cullen Bryant, “Preface,” Picturesque America (1874; Rpt: Secaucus.: Lyle Stuart, 1974), vii. All further citations will be to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text. 6. Rainey, Creating Picturesque America, 50–51. 7. See, for example, Christopher  N.  Phillips, Epic in American Culture: Settlement to Reconstruction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 288–89. 8. On Cooper’s engagement with the picturesque, see Blake Nevius, Cooper’s Landscapes: An Essay on the Picturesque Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). 9. In his infuential essay “Te Reading of Regions,” Richard Brodhead cites the publication of Woolson’s story alongside an account of a new vacation spot in Maine in the same issue of Harper’s as evidence of the “cooperation” of fction and nonfction in articulating the logic of regionalism. Richard Brodhead, Te Culture of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-­Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 133. Woolson’s story, however, is decidedly not a regionalist work in the sense of celebrating the distinctiveness of a region (in fact, it avoids specifying its location at all). Instead, it is regionalist in its critique of the archaic practice of picturesque tourism. 10. Constance Fenimore Woolson, “In Search of the Picturesque,” in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 45, No. 266 (July 1872), 161. Accessed Hathi Trust, June 24, 2018. All further references will be to this edition and will be cited parenthetically. 11. Richard Brodhead uses Woolson’s successful career as a regionalist author to highlight the ways in which the demand for regionalism ofered new opportunities to writers who might have been marginalized in an earlier era in “Te Reading of Regions,” Te Culture of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-­Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 138–39.

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12. On regionalism and its debt to anthropology, see Brodhead, Te Culture of Letters, 115–41; see also Bill Brown, A Sense of Tings: Te Object Matter in American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 85–92. 13. Brodhead, “Te Reading of Regions,” 121. 14. Amy Kaplan argues that regionalism served to unify its “urban middle-­ class readership,” creating “an imagined community by consuming images of rural ‘others’ as both a nostalgic point of origin and a measure of cosmopolitan development.” See Amy Kaplan, “Nation, Region, Empire,” in Te Columbia History of the American Novel, ed. Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 251. Although Kaplan and Brodhead largely envision regionalism as a white bourgeois appropriation of regional cultures, other scholars such as Marjorie Pryse and Judith Fetterley envision it more positively as an expression of authentic connection between the predominantly women regionalist authors and their regionalist subjects and as part of a project to encourage empathy for the subjects. See Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse, “‘Close’ Reading and Empathy,” Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 337–82. 15. On middle-­class analytic discourses as “valuable cultures,” see Alvin Gouldner, Te Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), 21. See the introduction of this work for its discussion of the picturesque as an analytic technique of middle-­class authority. 16. Bill Brown discusses the infuence of anthropological displays in museums and world’s fairs on regionalism in A Sense of Tings, 84–89. 17. Te American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) was founded in 1899, and among its founding members were the sons of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux  (Calvert Vaux’s son was named Downing Vaux). On date and founding members of  the ASLA, see www.asla.org/FAQAnswer.aspx?CategoryTitle=%20About%20the%20 American%20Society%20of%20Landscape%20Architects&Category=3146#DispID3118. Accessed June 27, 2018. 18. Te scholarship on middle-­class professionalization over the course of the nineteenth century is extensive. On  U.S.  middle-­class professionalization and higher education, see Burton Bledstein, Te Culture of Professionalism: Te Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York: Norton, 1976); on professionalization and social authority, see Samuel Haber, Te Quest for Authority and Honor in the American Professions, 1750–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) and Magali S. Larson, Te Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977) 19. Warren Burton, “Scenery-­ Showing,” Te District School As It Was (Boston: T. R. Marvin, 1852), 231.

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{ Index } For the beneft of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Astor Place Riots  78–81

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Beckert, Sven  75–6, 78 Beecher, Henry Ward  34–5 Norwood 196–207 Satire of Norwood 207–10 “Home Building”  134 “Uses of Disorder”  139–41, 143 Benjamin, Park  33–4 Berlant, Lauren  32, 107–8 Bermingham, Ann  26 Buell, Lawrence  27, 162–3, 165, 243n.4 Burton, Warren  31, 86, 218–19 Bushnell, Horace  166–7, 173 Bryant, William Cullen Central Park  106, 108–9 Picturesque America 211–15 Child, Lydia Maria Letters from New-York  69–70, 76–7, 83–7, 90–1, 96–8, 101–3 Central Park  105–6, 109, 111, 122–3, 128 Class Capitalist class  75–8 Middle class  5–7, 11–13, 75–6, 197–8 Mobility 37–8 Working class  78–84, 121–6 Confict  24–5, 122–4 Claude glass  54–5, 222n.9 Cole, Tomas  7–8, 29–31, 36–7, 39, 55, 57, 62–3 Cooper, Constance Fenimore  215–17 Cooper, Susan Fenimore  167 Domestic design Gender confict  118–20, 138–41

Libraries 138–9 Parlors  115–20, 138–9 Domesticity 116–17 Male domesticity  130–1, 133–6, 139–44, 161 Douglas, Ann  19–20, 186, 201–3 Downing, Andrew Jackson  8–10, 12–13, 175–6 Park writings  106, 109–11, 115–18, 122 Suburbs 134–6 Emerson, Ralph Waldo  12–13, 108–9, 114, 133, 147, 178–9 Epistolary  21, 152–60 Foster, George G.  69–71, 80–2 Frontier  24–5, 30–1, 46–9, 55–8, 90–1 Fuller, Margaret Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 42–52 City sketches  78, 82–3 Genre 13–14 Gilpin, William  4–5, 28, 34, 52–3, 190, 199 Gray, Barry (Robert Barry Cofn)  138–9, 161 Hale, Sarah J.  29 Harvey, David  3–4 Hawthorne, Nathaniel  32–42, 145, 168–9, 178–9, 246n.49 Holmes, Oliver Wendell  186–96 Immigration 35–8 Irving, Washington  25–6, 29–30, 43–4, 106 Janowitz, Anne  28, 31, 39 Judd, Sylvester Margaret 168–77

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Index

266 Judd, Sylvester (cont.) Richard Edney and the Governor’s Family  111–13, 118–21, 124–8 Lefebvre, Henri  3–4 Liu, Alan  6–7, 10–11, 207–8 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth  177–86 Lowell, James Russell  168–9, 178–9

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Mag0oon, E.L.  7–8 Mansfeld, Luther W.  150–1, 156–61 Masculinity Domestic  131, 133–4 And fear of efeminacy  157–8 And Homosocial Intimacy  148–59 Urban  114–15, 121–4 Suburban  131, 133–4, 146–7 Mathews, Cornelius  88–94 Melville, Herman “I and My Chimney”  141 Pierre 185–6 Middle Class  72–3 Professionalism  11–13, 135–6, 192–4, 218–19 Relation to Working class  78–87 And Bourgeois Capitalism  75–8, 91–3 Miller, Angela  8, 11–12 Mitchell, Donald Grant (Ik Marvel)  106, 129–31, 139–40 Mitchell, W.J.T.  3–4 Native Americans  48–51, 66–7, 88–91 New England  162–8, 173–4, 180–2, 184, 187–90, 195–6, 199–201, 203–7 Newman, Lance  48 Niagara Falls  32–3, 45–6, 178–9 Northern tour  25–6, 32–3, 37, 41–3 Olmsted, Frederick Law  105–6, 113–17, 121–4, 195, 204–5 Parks National Parks  65–8 Urban Parks  105–28 Pfau, Tomas  6–7

Picturesque 2–7 Design ethos  8–10 New England  163–8, 172–6, 180, 189–90, 199–200 Protocol of viewing  10–14, 192–5, 199–200 And Reconstruction  212–15 Ruins  28, 39–42, 60–4 Suburban 132–6 Urban picturesque  85–91 Poe, Edgar Allan  95–101 Popular Refnement  108–14 Reform  173–5, 179–80, 201–3 Bureaucratic 203–6 Visiting Societies  83 Regionalism  162, 217–19 Robinson, Solon  81 Rowlandson, Mary  55–6 Sedgwick, Catharine Maria  108–9, 163–4 Shamir, Millette  131, 148 Sketch 14–15 City sketch  72–85 Travel sketch  25–7, 33–4 Sublime  34, 61–2, 65, 189–90, 194–5, 200 Urban  94–5, 101–3 Suburbs 132–61 Toreau, Henry David  52–5 “Chesuncook” 65–7 Walden  142–4, 147–9 “A Walk to Wachusett”  55–8 A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers 58–65 Turner, Frederick Jackson  24–5, 41–2 Village  57–8, 147–8, 165–8 Village Novel  162–210 Whitman, Walt  79–80 Willis, Nathaniel Parker  114, 136–7, 146, 153–4 Zwarg, Christina  48–9

Evelev, John. Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874, Oxford University Press

Copyright © 2021. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved. Evelev, John. Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874, Oxford University Press

Copyright © 2021. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved. Evelev, John. Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874, Oxford University Press

Copyright © 2021. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved. Evelev, John. Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874, Oxford University Press

Copyright © 2021. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved. Evelev, John. Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874, Oxford University Press

Copyright © 2021. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved. Evelev, John. Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874, Oxford University Press

Copyright © 2021. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved. Evelev, John. Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874, Oxford University Press

Copyright © 2021. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved. Evelev, John. Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874, Oxford University Press

Copyright © 2021. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved. Evelev, John. Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874, Oxford University Press

Copyright © 2021. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved. Evelev, John. Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874, Oxford University Press

Copyright © 2021. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved. Evelev, John. Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874, Oxford University Press

Copyright © 2021. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved. Evelev, John. Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874, Oxford University Press

Copyright © 2021. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved. Evelev, John. Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874, Oxford University Press

Copyright © 2021. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved. Evelev, John. Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874, Oxford University Press

Copyright © 2021. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved. Evelev, John. Picturesque Literature and the Transformation of the American Landscape, 1835-1874, Oxford University Press