1704 In those days you weren’t spoilt for choice when it came to ways of moving about the American colonies. There were no roads to speak of, so no stage coaches. East-coast cities were best served by ship. That’s how Benjamin Franklin made his career-building move from Boston to Philadelphia 1725.
But 21 years before that, Sarah Kemble Knight, a Boston businesswoman, legal scrivener and schoolteacher who may have taught the young Ben, decided to risk the trip on horseback, possibly because her legal business required that she go by way of New Haven, Connecticut. She was gone for five months, arriving home on 3 March 1705.
She made her way along barely marked tracks, usually assisted by a local guide. Where rivers were shallow enough to ford, they rode across them. Where not, they might cross by canoe, the water almost up to the gunwales. Details like these she recorded in her journal, along with acute observations of the manners and mores of tobacco-chewing country ‘bumpkins’ (her word), native Americans little more than animals, and frontier settlers living in huts with bare dirt floors, with no
furniture but a Bedd wth a glass Bottle hanging at ye head on’t; an earthan cupp, a small pewter Bason, A Bord wth sticks to stand on, instead of a table, and a block or two in ye corner instead of chairs.
It was ‘the picture of poverty’, yet ‘both the Hutt and its Inhabitance were very clean and tydee: to the crossing the Old Proverb, that bare walls make giddy hows-wifes’.
In places this reads like Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), but Madame Knight wasn’t just Frances Trollope avant la lettre. What really distinguishes the journal from the travel book is the former’s sense of irony, its grip on reality. One night as they made their way along a dark, narrow track, ‘Going I knew not whither, and encompassed wth Terrifying darkness’, they breasted the top of a hill to suddenly see the full moon. Or as she put it, ‘the Kind Conductress of the night’.
My tho’ts on the sight of the moon were to this purpose:
Fair Cynthia, all the Homage that I may
Unto a Creature, unto thee I pay;
In Lonesome woods to meet so kind a guide,
To Mee’s more worth than all the world beside …
And the Tall and thick Trees at a distance, expecially wn the moon glar’d light through the branches, fill’d my Imagination wth the pleasant delusion of a Sumpteous citty, fill’d wth famous Buildings and churches, wth their spiring steeples, Balconies, Galleries and I know not what: Grandeurs wch I had heard of, and wch the stories of foreign countries had given me the Idea of.
Here stood a Lofty church – there a steeple,
And there the Grand Parade – O see the people!
That Famous Castle there, were I but nigh,
To see the mote and Bridg and walls so high –
They’re very fine! Sais my deluded eye.
What is it about the occasion that causes her to burst into poetry, the most formal manner of discourse? What prompts her rhetorically heightened references to the moon, like the elegant periphrasis ‘Kind conductress of the night’ and the classical allusion to the goddess Cynthia? Why do her most ‘pleasant delusions’ consist of famous buildings and churches got from stories of foreign countries’?
The obvious answer is that these elaborate forms were the author’s compensation, the fantasies of civilisation that came to her in the wilderness. True, but the point is, she knows it; she realises her ‘eye’ is ‘deluded’. And in case we miss that point, here is how she concludes the episode:
Being thus greatly entertain’d without a thou’t of any thing but thoughts themselves, I on a suden was Rous’d from these pleasing Imaginations, by the Post’s sounding his horn, which assured mee hee was arrived at the Stage, where we were to Lodg.
‘Without a thou’t of anything but thoughts themselves’? Can it be that an American first theorised deconstruction some two and a half centuries before the French?