Practically and conceptually, on both sides of the Atlantic, the fundamental building block of society was not the individual,
but the family
. In the transatlantic formulation of John Locke (who was engaged with America through his position with the Lords of Trade
and Plantations and through his master the Earl of Shaftesbury, and whose political philosophy underpinned both British and
American thinking about government and society), a family consisted of “the Master of a Family with all these subordinate
Relations of
Wife,
Children,
Servants and
Slaves united under the Domestick Rule of a Family.”
1 As the principal locus of rural and urban production as well as of reproduction on both sides of the Atlantic, the “household-family”
2 performed key economic, political, and socializing functions, many of which would later be taken over by the state: it educated
children and trained apprentices; it fed, clothed, housed, and supervised children, servants, apprentices, and, in the New
World, slaves; it also acted as society’s chief manufacturer, employer, support network, patronage peddler, and welfare system.
Family relations therefore often continued to link family members dispersed across the Atlantic world by commerce, schooling,
apprenticeships, domestic service or indentures, migrations, marriage, and naval, military, or government work.
3 In both Britain and America, masters of families in the propertied ranks also undertook significant local public administrative,
political, military, and policing duties, further extending their power over others. For all these reasons, both in Britain
and in the early Republic, the virtue, well-being, and good regulation of society as a whole were identified with the virtue,
well-being, and good regulation of the family. A great deal of fiction was therefore devoted to the conduct of the family,
much of it concerned with families in the employing and governing ranks.
Of the resulting domestic fiction, British and American scholars have focused most intensively on the seduction narrative
or courtship novel. This centered on “young women standing virtually on the doorstep of
definitive marital choices,” either to “dramatize the grounds on which the final crucial step was taken”
4 or to demonstrate how those who made the wrong choices fell out of family and “Society,” into poverty, pregnancy, or prostitution,
and miserable, lonely deaths. In America, this story has been credited with nation-building functions.
5 However, while courtship and seduction novels
had a great deal to say about relationships between parents and children, as well as about difficulties faced by daughters
and orphans, they generally ended with a marriage or death, and thus with success or failure in establishing a new family.
Other, now neglected, forms of domestic fiction on
both sides of the Atlantic addressed sexual, social, and economic threats to the long-term stability and viability of the household-family.
These might equally be credited with nation-building functions. These other – instructive, admonitory, regulatory, or reformist
– forms of domestic fiction become visible when we consider the British novels that American printers were reprinting between
c. 1785 and 1805.
6From among the mass of foreign books shipped over by the transatlantic book trade, early Republican printers generally chose
to reprint works that bore on contemporary American issues and that they thought would sell.
7 During these decades, they selected novels to reprint primarily from the Minerva Press, and from the presses of George Robinson
and George Kearsley, which already had wide popular readerships in Britain. American reprint selections thus draw our attention
to British presses, novels, and sub-genre
s of domestic fiction that British literary history has marginalized or ignored. At the same time, their focus on contemporary
American issues and objectives led patriotic printers to compile their publication lists from a combination of selected foreign
reprints and American-authored works. This means that American-authored novels too were often published “because they served
social objectives that the printer considered worthy of supporting with his enterprise” and thus that “the larger concerns
of the printers were crucial to the genesis of the American novel.”
8 For an American author, the reality of trying to get published often meant inserting his or her narrative not only among
imported books but, more importantly, among the foreign reprints that embodied a local American printer’s immediate objectives
or concerns. John Conrad, for instance, published Charles Brockden Brown’s novel
Jane Talbot in 1801 as part of a series of six novels on adultery and domestic abuse, five of which were British reprints, four of them
by best-selling authors of the Minerva Press, which in turn subsequently reprinted
Jane Talbot in England.
American printers’ coordination of reprinted and native-authored texts – like their efforts to replace reprints with American-authored
textbooks – no doubt helped to promote those thematic and generic continuities between American- and European-authored works
which have too readily been mistaken for servile imitation. In fact, thematic and generic continuities occurred, and were
inevitable, on both sides of the Atlantic, because British and American writers were taught to indite by selecting, appropriating,
renewing, varying, altering, modernizing, reapplying, and recombining narrative elements gleaned from earlier texts into novel
compositions of their own.
9 Considering the resulting continuities and differences together with American printers’ coordination of reprinted and native-authored
texts enables us to place American-authored fictions within larger early national printscapes, and to better understand how
particular British or American novels
, and particular genres or sub-genres, played on a transatlantic stage. That transatlantic publication was not a one-way street
becomes apparent when we turn our attention to the American novels that were reprinted in Britain and to the many novels by
Americans, or including American characters and episodes, which were only published in Britain.
I am going to look here at three little-studied sub-genres of eighteenth-century domestic fiction that were written and reprinted
on both sides of the Atlantic well into the nineteenth century: the novel of adultery, the manservant’s story, and a version
of the transatlantic tale. For the purposes of this rapid survey, I am including under “British” European novels translated
and published in Britain which became part of the British literary scene; and I am reluctantly forgoing distinctions between
literary marketplaces in different American cities or states that one would otherwise wish to make.
An unexpectedly large number of novels of adultery were reprinted in America – particularly in Philadelphia – between 1785
and c. 1805. They included Samuel Jackson Pratt’s
The Pupil of Pleasure (1776; 1782),
10 T. S. Surr’s
George Barnwell (1798; 1800),
The Precipitate Choice (1772; 1783), Frances Jacson’s
Plain Sense (1795; 1799), Mary Wollstonecraft’s
Maria or the Wrongs of Woman (1788; 1799), Elizabeth Inchbald’s
Simple Story (1791; 1793), Charlotte Smith’s
Emmeline (1788; 1802) and
Romance of Real Life (1787; 1799), Agnes Maria Bennett’s
De Valcourt (1800; 1801), Regina Maria Roche’s
Clermont (1798; 1800) and
Nocturnal Visit (1800; 1801), Elizabeth Villa-Real Gooch’s
The Contrast (1795; 1796), Louvet de Couvray’s
Emily de Varmont (1798; 1799), Isabelle de Montolieu’s
Caroline Lichfield (1787;
1798),
The Adulteress (1773; 1802), and Susanna Rowson’s
Fille de Chambre (1793; 1794). Unlike Goethe’s
Sorrows of Young Werther (1779; 1784) and Rousseau’s
La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761; 1796), these novels did not celebrate the exhilaration and pain of thwarted sexual passion. With few exceptions, they
presented adultery as an effect of wives’ unhappy situations within the family
, and fell into two broad types, both of which in their different ways represented marriage as a cruel trap for women rather
than as a reward.
The first type, which I have discussed more fully elsewhere,
11 portrayed purely sentimental seductions or “adulteries of the heart.” Persuaded or forced into a sterile marriage for the
family’s financial advantage by a parent or guardian, these wives were drawn to a man more congenial than their husband, who
was also more capable and willing than he to satisfy their need for love, companionship, and devotion. By leaving the adulterous
sexual act unconsummated, such novels highlighted the wife’s sentimental struggles to behave as she ought, the price she paid
for doing so, and – at a time when wives were officially the property of their husbands and told to have no will separate
from his – demonstrated that a wife made her own decisions and asserted her own moral will. By leaving the adulterous sexual
act unconsummated, these novels also highlighted the unreasonableness of husbandly jealousy and of the assumption that a man’s
legal possession of a woman’s body and fortune also entitled him to her mind and heart. This type of novel of adultery selectively
repeated and varied “narrative elements”
12 which can be traced back to Mme de Lafayette’s seventeenth-century novel,
La Princesse de Clèves: a husband who knows himself to be unloved; a garden location where the lovers meet; a strategic retirement; a tell-tale
letter; misleading appearances; suspected adultery; a confession; a determining relationship to a mother or adoptive mother;
a husband’s jealousy; death or punishment suffered or meted out in secret; and the question of whether the wife would marry
the man she loves after her unloved husband’s death. Duly varied and altered, many of these elements recur in American-authored
novels of adultery, such as Samuel Relf’s
Infidelity (1797) and Brown’s
Jane Talbot (1801), which displaced the story from the British or French upper ranks to America’s mercantile elite.
In the second type, where the adulterous sexual act was usually consummated, adultery was subordinated to, or excused by,
descriptions of domestic abuse. Such novels depicted the impact on wives of the unjust or excessive exercise of legal patriarchal
powers, such as a husband’s right to imprison his wife in a chamber of his house, on a remote country property, or in a lunatic
asylum; to deprive her of her children; to run through her fortune; to subject her to violence and irrational rage; to leave
her, homeless and unprovided for, to starve; and to spend his time and money on a mistress or bring her, humiliatingly, into
his household. These novels, which were “founded on fact” inasmuch as there were known cases in Britain of all of the above,
13 showed wives driven by their husband’s cruelty, or neglect of his marital duties, to seek the affection and protection of
another man. But in some novels, such as Frances Jacson’s
Plain Sense (1795; 1799), which mixed elements of the “adultery of the heart” novel with the novel of adultery and domestic abuse, the
heroine resisted the temptation presented by the other man, and demonstrated her virtues as a dutiful wife by religiously
observing the injunction to obey and submit to her husband despite his repeated, unjust, and excessive cruelties towards her.
The wife here is exemplary in her complaisance and submission; but as cruelty is piled upon cruelty, and suffering upon suffering,
questions arise both about the husband’s freedom to act as he pleases and about the doctrine of invariable wifely submission
itself. In America, this version of the story found particular favor with Sally Sayward Barrell Keating and with the later
Susanna Rowson; it also appeared in interpolated stories such as that of Mrs. Henderson in Sukey Vickery’s
Emily Hamilton (1803).
Adultery leading to desertion, separation of bed and board, or divorce was no less disruptive to the stability and reproduction
of the family than the seduction and fall of young women who might otherwise have become fertile wives. The range and specificity
of shared British–American terms for different constellations of the marital transgression itself testifies to the prominence
of this problem in eighteenth-century thinking about marriage – for instance, a married man’s affair with his sister-in-law
was incest, with an unrelated single woman, fornication and, if politely conducted with a woman of quality, gallantry.
14 But concern about adultery became acute on both sides of the Atlantic during the last decades of the eighteenth century.
In Britain, the wave of adultery trials which followed the notorious “crim con” trial of the Duke of Cumberland (the king’s
brother) for adultery with Lady Grosvenor in 1769 produced “hysteria” about the breakdown of the family, and a series of Parliamentary
Bills for the Punishment of Adultery between 1779 and 1800, which characteristically targeted wives.
15 Here woman-centered novels of adultery spoke up for women who had no voice elsewhere in the public sphere, to attribute infidelity
and marital breakdown to forced and loveless marriages, cruel or uncaring husbands, and unhappy domestic lives. In America,
the spread of new divorce legislation to most states after 1785 was accompanied by a notable increase in divorces, separations,
and desertions, and by growing concern about rising domestic violence. Here too adultery figured as
a threat to the stability and good order of the family
, and with it of the new nation.
16 Many of the novels about it are therefore fundamentally reformist: they challenge the conventional grounds for marital choices,
as well as conventional patriarchal marital prerogatives, in an effort to prevent wives from seeking protection or happiness
in extramarital affairs. But the circumstances in Britain and America were already not the same, and American
writers innovated in order to address peculiarly American concerns.
One way in which they did so was to mix narrative elements from different sub-genres of domestic fiction. This was particularly
well done in Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797), where the heroine commits adultery – has sexual relations and a baby – with a married man. William Hill Brown had
fictionalized the adulterous affair between local notable Perez Morton and his sister-in-law in The Power of Sympathy (1789); but no one knew who had seduced Elizabeth Whitman, the original of Foster’s heroine. By giving her heroine a married
lover, and joining elements of the courtship novel with elements of the novel of adultery, Foster rewrote the novel of adultery
as the story of the “other woman.” She showed what might drive a never-married woman of thirty-seven into the arms of a married
man. Foster spoke to/for the many unmarried women whom unfavorable male–female ratios after the Revolutionary War precluded
from finding suitable mates; indeed, among them, her title may have resonated as a wry echo of society’s over-facile judgments
of their vain quest for a congenial spouse. Sukey Vickery, “a young Lady of Worcester County,” used the same generic mix in
her charming novel, Emily Hamilton (1803), to fictionalize another adulterous “incident in real life.” But she used it to warn young American women who were disillusioned
with the men in their social circle against giving their heart to a stranger without first investigating exactly what and
who he was – Emily falls in love with a stranger who turns out to be a married man. The problem of mobile or migrating strangers
whose true situation and character were unknown to anyone in a woman’s social circle recurs in other early republican novels
(Female Quixotism, The Story of Margaretta, Wieland, Modern Chivalry), but not, to my knowledge, in British ones.
Bruce Robbins has argued that representations of servants in eighteenth-century British novels reflected a century-long social
and economic transition that many saw as problematical. Apprentices, journeymen, and
domestic servants were slowly being transformed from members of the household-family
, who lived under the governance of the master of a family like “children of a larger growth,” into independent wage earners,
as the mercantile system increasingly sought free, mobile, and disposable labor. According to Robbins, the expulsion of servants
from the domestic hearth produced “a lingering moral crisis” that was fictionally resolved in novels by Defoe, Fielding, and
Smollett through the discovery of the servant’s “high-born parents” and recovery of his original place within the patriarchal
family.
17 In America, when this transition from bound or indentured servitude within the household-family to free wage labor came to
a head during the late 1780s and 1790s, novels such as Fielding’s
Joseph Andrews which followed this pattern were reprinted. But the “servant problem” was primarily addressed by reprinting religiously inspired
works that touted what black servant Jupiter Hammon characterized as the doctrine that “Good Servants frequently make good
Masters.”
18 The most popular reprints –
The French Convert, Defoe’s
Family Instructor, and Hannah More’s
Cheap Repository Tracts – used this doctrine to preach a return from mercantile profiteering, which undermined and ultimately broke up the household-family,
to traditional family values.
Defoe’s
Family Instructor (1715), which was reprinted seven times in Philadelphia, New York, and Connecticut during the 1790s alone, was explicit about
the servant’s redemptive domestic role: “If those who call themselves Christians and Protestants will not instruct their children
and servants, they will find their children and servants instructing them, and reproving them too.”
19 This is illustrated by the ensuing story about a pious and virtuous apprentice, Tom, who is placed with a merchant who treats
his servants as free labor rather than as members of his family. Though an alderman and a magistrate, this master does not
care what his employees do, as long as they mind his business – he no longer views himself as responsible for their conduct
or for their moral and religious education. But Tom’s pious and virtuous actions have a rippling, transformative effect which
begins when he converts the wild and profligate apprentice of a neighboring clothier and uses religious instruction to turn
him into a sober, humble, loyal, and industrious worker. Tom’s arguments and example ultimately reform the alderman and his
entire family, to reintegrate servants into the family circle and subject them once again to their master’s good government
and religious and moral supervision.
The French Convert (1695) – which was reprinted on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the eighteenth century, and then reprinted almost annually
between 1791 and 1798 all over New England and New York – has been read primarily as an anti-French and
anti-Catholic tract;
20 but it was also the story of how a pious Protestant servant made good Protestant masters even from apparently unpromising
Catholic material. Bernard, a humble, Bible-reading servant who converts his mistress to Protestantism, protects her during
her husband’s absence from her corrupt and conniving Catholic chaplain and steward. He is “sold into slavery” as a convict
in the French West Indies by the steward for his pains. But Bernard is providentially redeemed in time to return and convert
his master, before demonstrating his loyalty and devotion by re-entering the family circle and going with this now entirely
Protestant and virtuous family into exile from France. In her
History of Charles Jones, The Footman, first reprinted in Philadelphia in 1800, Hannah More likewise insisted that “a Servant is to do what is right, let his master
do what he will.” She showed that by resisting his master’s bad example and not allowing himself to be jeered out of his virtue
by the other servants, Charles “ultimately triumphs” both by reforming the household and by advancing himself. Charles the
footman is rewarded for his virtue by promotion to butler, which enables him to save enough to go into trade for himself and
become the master of his own family.
21 In stories such as this, service was represented as what it had once been – a stage in a young person’s life when they worked
in the household of another prior to establishing their own household.
Some American-authored manservant tales took a similar line. In one story, published in Philadelphia in 1790, for instance,
John Ralling had “an honest servant instructing his Master in a lesson of the Greatest Weight and Importance”: that he should
“walk carefully in God’s good ways” and “Likewise example take by me / To serve thy God as I serve thee.” Ralling’s clever
(and ironic?) device was to make his exact and exacting, exemplary servant, a watch.
22 Likewise in Enos Hitchcock’s
The Farmer’s Friend (1793), young Charles Worthy is apprenticed to a mean and abusive master, Mr. Gruff, a miser caught up in the economic nexus
who wants to exploit Charles to enrich himself. But Charles serves him so faithfully and piously that “it softened his heart
and made him repent some of his ill-natured treatment of Charles”;
23 and, once free of his apprenticeship, Charles is rewarded for his domestic virtues by being enabled to carve out a new farm
for himself on the frontier. His industrious, pious, virtuous, and charitable conduct there also ensures that he exemplifies
an idyll of patriarchal government in the family he assembles on his increasingly prosperous property.
Other American-authored manservant tales demythologized this kind of story. For instance, mixing narrative elements from the
manservant’s tale
with narrative elements from Cervantes’s
Don Quixote in
Modern Chivalry (1792–93), Hugh Henry Brackenridge showed that Captain Farrago was reduced to desperate expedients just to keep his faithless
servant in his service, while he used that ignorant and illiterate servant, Teague, to mock the idea that the servant’s merit
and domestic virtue were
appropriately rewarded by advancement in America. Far from figuring as a reward for faithful service, Teague’s manifold opportunities for
advancement are precisely what obviate the need for him to remain in Farrago’s family. Here the possibilities for upward social
mobility in America are as subversive to traditional domestic service as the physical mobility of attractive strangers was
subversive to girls’ sounder (but duller) American marital choices. Charles Brockden Brown too characteristically innovated
by giving established stories a turn that put in question their underlying assumptions. In
Arthur Mervyn (1799), for instance, he portrayed a servant who had lost any secure or permanent place in the household-family, and interrogated
the assumption that good servants make good masters by exploring the possibility that a virtuous servant might be corrupted
by a vicious master instead. In the late Emory Elliott’s reading of this novel, Arthur, the innocent servant from the country,
is led astray by his master, Welbeck, who embodies the worst impulses of commercial society. Like his master and in his service,
Arthur steals, robs, and kills; but, like
Shamela, he knows how to make himself seem virtuous, and thereby imposes on those like Dr. Stevens or Achse who can help or advance
him.
24 This characterization differentiates Arthur interestingly from Godwin’s English novel
Caleb Williams (1794), where it is the aristocratic master, Falkland, not the still traditionally attached plebeian servant, who makes himself
seem virtuous in order to impose upon others. But Arthur’s real character is still being debated by critics. And perhaps that
is as it should be, for Brown showed in
Edgar Huntly (1799) just how many evils were unleashed precisely by Edgar’s refusal to accept the quiet and virtuous new identity that
a neighbor’s servant had created for himself, and by his insistence on digging relentlessly into Clithero’s concealed criminal
past. Was there no virtue, then, in permitting servants in America quietly to retain their virtuous demeanors, however newly
assumed, and thus to take advantage of their physical mobility to acquire a new character?
Literally hundreds of novels published only in Britain contained American characters, voyages, and scenes.
25 It is impossible to generalize here about
this wealth of material. But Julie Ellison has usefully characterized one type – transatlantic novels such as Charlotte Lennox’s
Euphemia (1790) and Gilbert Imlay’s
The Emigrants (1793) which were published in Britain by writers with transatlantic careers – as “there and back” novels.”
26 As the novels she discusses demonstrate, there were diverse possible emplotments for going there-and-back. That most frequently
appropriated in America is perhaps best exemplified by American double-agent Edward Bancroft’s
History of Charles Wentworth, Esq, published in London in 1770 and imported into America thereafter, which mixes narrative elements of the courtship novel
with a commercial-Atlantic adventure story.
27 Charles Wentworth lacks the fortune possessed by his rival for Sophia’s affections, whom Sophia’s family prefers. He therefore
resolves to “endeavour, in foreign climes, to repair that defect which now obstructs my hopes” by undertaking there “the most
dangerous and even laborious (if profitable) employments, as the only expedient by which I can overcome the difficulty in
question, and evince the disinterested purity of my passion.”
28 The novel goes on to give detailed, well-informed accounts of life in Barbados, Guiana, and Philadelphia, and of a slave
insurrection in the Dutch colony of Barbica, as it shows Charles progressively enriching himself as a plantation overseer,
privateer, and sugar planter, and demonstrating his constancy to Sophia by resisting the temptation to “procure me an advantageous
establishment” by marrying a Barbadian heiress (
II: 45). Having made his fortune by his own efforts, Charles’s “natural attachment to that spot in which he first received existence”
(
III: 97) takes him back to England, where he marries Sophia and buys a splendid country estate. Bancroft thus used the there-and-back
novel to educate British readers about the Americas and to show that a poor man could achieve the economic foundation he needed
for marriage, as well as upward social mobility in Britain (the Esquire in the title), by venturing into the dangerous Atlantic
world and making his fortune in the Americas in a few years. Charles’s desire to marry Sophia provides the impetus transforming
him from a dissipated idler into this productive, ambitious, and industrious man, to show “how effectual is the influence
of a virtuous woman in the reformation of a vicious lover” (
I: 213).
Several popular American-authored stories, most of them published in Boston during the 1790s, echoed this emplotment of there-and-back.
But they altered the story by recentering it on America and on the republican daughter, and by appropriating narrative elements
from reprinted British and European tales of constancy such as Kotzebue’s
The Constant Lovers (1799),
The Glebe House (1799),
Constantia de Valmont (the title given
in Philadelphia in 1799 to “The Frenchman’s Tale” from Harriet Lee’s
Canterbury Tales), and the ever-popular
Cynthia (1797). Most significantly perhaps, American authors merged constancy to the republican daughter with constancy to the new
nation
. In stories such as
Fidelity Rewarded or the History of Polly Grenville (1796) or Mrs. Patterson’s
The Unfortunate Lovers and Cruel Parents (1799), for instance, the republican daughter is confronted with a choice between her poor but worthy lover and the rich
merchant her father wishes her to marry. She makes the correct choice of character over wealth in the face of parental opposition;
but the poor American lover has to adventure abroad, to undertake dangerous commercial ventures or laborious employment in
foreign climes, to remedy the defect in his fortune before he can return to marry her. He also has to resist the temptation
to marry a wealthy English heiress or French countess, and establish himself abroad. Some stories downplayed the hero’s transatlantic
adventures to highlight the reasons for his departure and the reasons for his return. But no “natural attachment to the spot
where he first received existence” is attributed to the adventuring American lover. Only the republican daughter’s constancy
to America, and his constancy to her, bring about his return.
This is particularly clear in
The History of Constantius and Pulchera (1794)
, the most popular of them all, which gave the cross-dressing heroine the dangerous transatlantic adventures, and confronted
both hero and heroine with the choice between an American lover and a rich French aristocrat. Pulchera resists her father’s
attempts to marry her to La Motte, a wealthy French nobleman who would take her back to France and to the “pomp and show”
of aristocratic society, in favor of a prior commitment to Constantius, the son of a local Philadelphia merchant, to whom
she remains constant even when told that he is dead. By contrast, when he believes Pulchera to be dead, Constantius prepares
to marry La Motte’s sister and establish himself in France, arguing speciously: “It is true I have sought relief in the arms
of another, and soon, very soon, are the nuptials to be celebrated, but there is nothing that can erase that supreme indissoluble
affection which I have once for all placed in the inimitable Pulchera.”
29 Fortunately, Pulchera finds him before the knot is tied and, with the help of La Motte and his sister, persuades him that
his “constancy” to her overrides his commitment to the La Mottes and that he must again “cross the Atlantic” and establish
his family in Philadelphia with her.
Charles Brockden Brown also incorporated these narrative elements. He came closest to the conventional American story in
Jane Talbot: Jane refuses her brother’s offer to find her an aristocratic husband in France,
where he has married and established himself; and Henry, who has abandoned America for the East Indies, is returned to America
only by the prospect of marriage to her. But all Brown’s novels contain what I have called “adulterous triangles,” where a
character’s choice between two men, two women, or a woman and a man also embodies a choice between America and another country.
30 Brown interrogated the conventional patriotic story by demonstrating how many other combination
s and outcomes were possible. In
Ormond (1799), for instance, Constantia’s first lover leaves for a distant commercial voyage not to acquire the wealth to marry
her, but to extricate himself from the relationship once her father is declared bankrupt; and Constantia herself is led to
abandon America not by Ormond, the foreign lover, but by her female American friend who has already established herself in
England with her American husband.
American exceptionalist literary history has favored novels which seem to turn their backs on Europe; but transatlantic relations
were still important in America after its exodus from the British empire. Most obviously, during the 1790s, Federalists and
Republicans fought over alliance with Britain or France; merchants built American prosperity through commerce with Europe
and the colonized West or East Indies, the carrying trade and the sea; and many white Americans preserved familial, sentimental,
commercial, or cultural connections with the old country, whichever that happened to be. More critical, perhaps, was the fact
that British-Americans had been accustomed for two centuries to traveling back and forth on Bernard Bailyn’s “Atlantic highway”
in pursuit of education, wealth, or work. For many, mobility within “the Atlantic world system”
31 was still the standard or default position – the option on which one fell back when times were bad. When work or land was
scarce, one moved on, ignoring provincial, national, and imperial frontiers. Constancy to the new nation expressed in a determination
to plant one’s family
in the new Republic in good times and bad was as crucial to the viability of the new nation as to that of the American family;
but it had to be taught and learned – as it was in novels such as these.
As we have seen, a variety of sub-genres of domestic fiction were both written and reprinted in America – the novel of female
adultery, the manservant story, and the transatlantic courtship-and-adventure novel. Like the seduction novel, all addressed
seductive obstacles to the establishment, virtue, and stability of the household-family, the fundamental building block of
society. Early republican printers published both European reprints and American-authored narratives in these sub-genres,
creating a framework within which American writers distinguished themselves from British and European ones (as many of them
pointed out) by portraying properly American characters and “catching the manners of [their] native land.”
32 To this end, as we saw, they adapted, recombined, and interrogated narrative elements from European and reprinted books.
This was not servile imitation. Accomplished eighteenth-century novelists on both sides of the Atlantic wrote by citing, condensing,
or expanding, altering, answering, and rewriting each other’s characters, situations, and scenes; “modern writers” were all,
as Judith Sargent Murray said, “gleaners.” Having been taught that elements from different texts or genres should be “adopted
for use in the place that becomes them most,” novelists on both sides of the Atlantic also mixed and matched by selecting
and combining, as well as reworking, narrative elements.
33 This meant that narrative elements functioned as a language – as so many shared signifiers that took on different meanings
in different renditions, applications, and combination
s as they migrated from text to text. And if today we tend to look through the differences at the similarities, and dismiss
the writing as derivative or formulaic as a result, eighteenth-century reviewers and critics prized shared and recognizable
narrative elements for the differences they brought out.
This is clear from the reactions of reviewers to British reprints of American novels. British reviewers showed, for instance,
that they had recognized and enjoyed Royall Tyler’s variation on Roderick Random’s mother’s dream, and narrative elements
that
The Algerine Captive shared with
Gulliver’s Travels and Montesquieu’s
Persian Letters; but they admired his “American scenes” and his efforts to make “his countrymen perceive and feel the value of that independence
for which they fought and conquered.”
34 Similarly, British reviewers of Brown’s six reprinted novels identified narrative elements that Brown shared with Godwin
and recognized
Wieland as a “highwrought specimen of the Udolphic school”; but they praised him extravagantly for the “many distinctive traits [which]
sufficiently point out the country of the writer, and of the subject of his fictions,” with the result that Brown’s novels
were copiously reprinted in Britain as the work of an “American genius” throughout the nineteenth century.
35 One might therefore say that British readers could appreciate American novels, and American readers British ones – and that
they would continue to share their fictions transatlantically long after American independence – precisely because Britons
and Americans were linked, distinguished, and divided by a common literary language.