Chapter 16 Transatlantic historical fiction
I begin with the second of two chronological book-ends. In 1833, Rufus Choate delivered an address in Salem, Massachusetts
advocating “The Importance of Illustrating New-England History by a Series of Romances like the Waverley Novels.” Fiction
commemorating events and scenery in colonial history prior to 1783 would be valuable “as helps to history, as contributions to history, as real and authoritative documents of
history,” to embody and
fix deep in the mind and memory of the whole people a vast amount of positive information quite as authentic and valuable and curious as that which makes up the matter of professed history, but which the mere historian does not and cannot furnish. They would thus be not substitutes for history, but supplements to it.
Choate singled out “the Puritan character” as particularly worth the attention of an American Waverley romancer. At the same moment, just down the road in Salem, Nathaniel Hawthorne was publishing his first historical stories. “Provincial
Tales” and “Seven Tales of my Native Land” appeared individually in The Token, Salem Gazette, and Atlantic Souvenir. Dazzled by the contemporary colossus of Walter Scott, Choate was unable to see that alternative models for transatlantic
historical fiction already existed, and that they encompassed a geographical imagination much broader than New England.
Back in the 1680s an immigrant from the Netherlands settled in Albany County and anglicized his name to Knickerbacker. A century
later one of his descendants was named after George Washington; as a young writer he adopted his ancestor’s persona in A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty (1809). The stylistic antecedents of Washington Irving’s irascible Dutch antiquarian Diedrich Knickerbocker were Jonathan
Swift and Laurence Sterne, melded into a unique blend of whimsy and satire, political barbs tempered by indulgent digression.
This voice bespoke a whole attitude to the past in a land dedicated to the future. Knickerbocker’s annunciation of absence figured his country’s lack of antiquity (“Left his lodgings sometime since,
and has not since been heard of, a small elderly gentleman…”);1 his abandoned manuscript was America’s first transatlantic fictional history. The pedantic persona glances back at Puritan historian Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), which inscribed New England’s providential progress through the biographies of its governors and clergy. Knickerbocker’s
History is similarly patriotic, but with an explosive edge of skepticism about its own enterprise: a spoof founding narrative that
established “history” as a subset of fiction in American comic writing. Irving’s penchant for bilingual puns compounds Rabelaisian
bawdry and seventeenth-century Dutch colonial ways with nineteenth-century American progressivism. Knickerbocker’s epic ambitions
for his history culminate in a mock-Gibbonian penultimate chapter “Containing reflections on the decline and fall of empires,
with the final extinction of the Dutch Dynasty,” in which the historian’s melodramatic valediction precipitates global chaos:
the chain of effects stopped not here; the successful revolution in America produced the sanguinary revolution in France, which produced the puissant Buonaparte who produced the French Despotism, which has thrown the whole world in confusion! – Thus…have all the present convulsions, revolutions and disasters that overwhelm mankind, originated in the capture of little Fort Casimir, as recorded in this eventful history.
A piece of provincial hubris and authorial self-inflation, this is pure comedy. The subsequent sentence, though, sounds a
patriotic warning familiar in American writing in the first decade of the nineteenth century (a decade that culminated in
a second outright Anglo-American war): “Let then the potentates of Europe, beware how they meddle with our beloved country.”2
The invention of a history (and a pre-History) for independent America as a transatlantic enterprise was imperative for post-Revolutionary
writers. Commemorative novels, poems, and plays based on notable moments in the Republic’s past, such as William Dunlap’s
historical tragedy André (1798), appeared early, and helped to consolidate national feeling and separation from British values. But it took Scott,
as Choate recognized, to redeem the cultural status of historical fiction from its reputation as a debased and vulgarized
form of history. He was the major figure in transatlantic as well as European terms; his impact on both historical and national
fiction was unrivalled on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the nineteenth century. Until the 1980s scholarship on the
historical fiction of the early Republic regarded its transatlantic dimension largely as an exercise in documenting the reception and influence of Scott’s
novels, particularly in the American South. G. Harrison Orians’s “Romance Ferment after Waverley” and Rollin G. Osterweis’s
Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South (1949) set the tone; more recently Andrew Hook’s pioneering Scotland and America (1975) and subsequent essay collection From Goosecreek to Gandercleugh (1999), and the intellectual historian Michael O’Brien’s Re-Thinking the South (1988) and Intellectual Life and the American South (2010),3 have shown how Scott’s work offered American writers models to construct a “usable past” for their own national endeavor.
Good reason for this approach was widely available in letters and reviews, as indeed these scholars showed. When Harrison
Orians described Scott as the “master necromancer [who] set a whole generation of Englishmen and Americans dreaming and prating about the chivalries of a by-gone age,” his
terms were defined in advance by Mark Twain’s fulminations against the shams of the “Sir Walter disease” as a direct cause
of the American Civil War.4
In 1813, as he completed the first in the series of historical romances that would change the literary landscape of nineteenth-century
Europe and America, Scott was gratified to receive a copy of the “most excellently jocose” History of New York, recently revised by its author and reprinted in America in 1812.5 That the first transatlantic fictional history was burlesque says something significant about the effect of a transatlantic perspective on the emergent generic compound
that with the publication of Waverley (1814) would establish itself as a shaping force in nineteenth-century writing. I shall return to Scott. But it is important
to register that he was by no means the first European writer of historical fiction to achieve transatlantic resonance. In
seventeenth-century France, as Richard Maxwell has recently argued, Lafayette and the Abbé Prévost wrote fictional memoirs
set in historical contexts, or “secret histories” of lives and times.6 The colonial aristocrat William Byrd’s Secret History of the Dividing Line, a shadow and sometimes scurrilous account of the historical story told in his own History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina (1728), alludes to this genre. Maxwell describes these early historical novels as “transgressive” in nature, blurring boundaries between history and fiction.
In the transatlantic context where projection, expectation, and observation were so intimately interfused, we might expect
that a genre with such boundary-crossing possibilities, and a frisson of the forbidden, might seem peculiarly promising. Prévost’s
The English Philosopher or the History of Mr. Cleveland (1731–39) was the first influential transatlantic historical fiction. The supposed autobiography of a fictional son of Oliver Cromwell, it combines history, travel narrative, generational and religious conflict, and utopian idealist and picaresque modes in a trans-generic pot-pourri of episodes and locations. A sojourn in America connects Cleveland with the Stuart family in exile and represents an escape
from history, disclosing, as Maxwell puts it, “infinitely expandable fantasies about a World that is New in every sense, so
that established historical chronologies are…irrelevant.”7 Returning across the Atlantic he re-enters “History” proper in an account of the Rye House Plot against the English monarch
Charles II.
The Preface to Susanna Rowson’s Reuben and Rachel, or, Tales of Old Times. A Novel (published in Boston in 1798 and reprinted the following year in London) declared a “fervent wish,” to “awaken in the minds
of my young readers, a curiosity that might lead them to the attentive perusal of history in general, but more especially
the history of their native country.”8 Choate should have approved. The novel’s concerns are more complex, and more interesting, than this implies, however. Like
Knickerbocker’s History, Reuben and Rachel takes an epic sweep of transatlantic engagement from settlement to independence: Columbus’s grand-daughter Isabelle of Spain
retires to a castle in Wales with her only child Columbia (an allegorical prosopopoeia of America born of the fortunes of the Incas and the enterprise of Europe). Atlantic crossings structure the generational
successions in this family saga across three centuries. Repeating his ancestors’ transmigrations and returning to Pennsylvania
to claim his father’s inheritance in the 1770s, the eponymous Reuben is captured by Indians and captivated by a daughter of
the tribe. Romance resolution is achieved when he is reunited with his twin sister Rachel, both are united with their lovers,
and their sons (“true-born Americans” (II, p. 313)) become the inheritors of American land and future. But plot synopsis traduces a far from triumphalist story of
emancipation: on both sides of the Atlantic captivity and confinement oppress those gendered or racially typed as powerless who, as Christopher Castiglia has noted, are the novel’s
collective protagonists; the Revolution marks only a change in oppressors.9 Reuben and Rachel figures transatlantic history as repetition and doubling rather than as progress: names and locations are mutually refractive:
Isabella of Castile / Orabella of Peru; Orrabella / Arrabella / Oberea / Eumea – but its somber reprises of character, action,
and situation evoke a kind of historical claustrophobia tonally far removed from Irving’s mock-heroic burlesque. Epic and
domestic frames alike thwart autonomy, personal endeavor, and connected narrative: the historical chronicle of transatlantic
relations which the reader is left to piece together across the discordant contexts of these successive “Tales of Old Times”
is a story of uneasy compromise and mutual frustration. Rowson’s historicizing mix of British romance conventions of seduction and confinement with captivity narratives and moral allegory is both generically and racially adventurous;
it complicates the intriguing but problematic genealogy construed by Armstrong and Tennenhouse which regards the colonial
captivity narrative as the enabling formal innovation leading to the development of “the English novel.”10
In its subject, narrative form, and metaphoric doubling Reuben and Rachel characterized the disjunctions and continuities embodied in transatlantic relations over time. If we think of historical fiction as the imagined performance of events that constitute history, early transatlantic historical fiction both contributes to and deconstructs the idea of a national past. A full-length study
of transatlantic historical fiction remains to be written; its subject would be literature whose plot, theme, or style invokes
the transatlantic crossing. Future work (as I shall begin to suggest in this chapter) might profitably focus not on the importation
and development of “British” literary concerns in an “American” context, but – for example – on how transatlantic and historical
dimensions explicate or complicate one another; on generic instabilities, and the formal and stylistic manifestations of cultural
confrontation. Critical precedents for this approach are slight: historical fiction of the period has typically been treated
within national paradigms of Romantic nationhood. George Dekker, the most influential student of “American Historical Romance”
to date, asks “How did the genre rise, redomesticate itself in America, and retain an identity while also changing in response
to the changing circumstances of American social, political and intellectual life?”11 The question remains pertinent; but a transatlantic perspective requires a different approach.
William Robertson’s History of America (1777) instantiated transatlantic comparison as a new form of historiographical knowledge. Edmund Burke immediately recognized
the significance of Robertson’s deployment of the spatial as a means of understanding the temporal:
we possess at this time very great advantages towards the knowledge of human Nature. We need no longer go to History to trace it in all its stages and periods. History from its comparative youth is but a poor instructour. When the Ægyptians called the Greeks children in Antiquities, we may well call them Children; and so we may call all these nations, which were able to trace the progress of Society only within their own Limits. But now the Great Map of Mankind is unrolled at once; and there is no state or Gradation of barbarism, and no mode of refinement which we have not at the same time instant under our View…You have employd Philosophy to judge on Manners; and from manners you have drawn new resources for Philosophy.12
History, their contemporary David Hume agreed, “extends our experience to all past ages and to the most distant nations; making
them contribute as much to our improvement in wisdom as if they had actually lain under our observation.”13 Building his own conjecture on “probabilities,” Robertson enumerated “theories and speculations…[and] imagined conjectures”
about the origins of America’s native inhabitants. He asserted that “in every part of the earth the progress of man hath been
nearly the same, and we can trace him in his career from the rude simplicity of savage life, until he attains the industry,
the arts, and the elegance of polished society.” Attention shifts from the search for an “original” of American life to a comparison of similarities across time and space. Native American life is an iteration of all human life in its
“savage” or nomadic state, and therefore offers an incomparable source of information about the past. “In America, man appears
under the rudest form in which we can conceive him to subsist…That state of primaeval simplicity which was known in our continent
only by the fanciful description of poets, really existed in the other.”14 Note that this historiography combines a story of progress with a lateral structure of comparison that enables sympathetic
identification: as “they” are, so “we” once were. America’s history laid both sympathetic and exemplary claim on its readers’
attention.
What Robertson’s biographer Dugald Stewart would later call “philosophical” or “conjectural history” was systematically formulated
for the first time in America. Stewart’s term gestures towards the theoretical nature of this writing about the past. Robertson never visited America,
nor sought firsthand experience in other than written form. History was an act of imagination that created a narrative from
inevitably discontinuous observations. By looking elsewhere, at another society at a different stage, we could effectively
see into our own past. Equally, a society in (say) a hunter-gatherer phase was by a species of historical determinism destined
to evolve to agriculture and thence to a civil state, or to have civilization brought to it by conquest. Here the timing of
this landmark in historiography is important: the outbreak of the Revolutionary War of American Independence prevented Robertson
from continuing with a history predicated on colonial premises, in which “progress” was understood as a universal process
of refinement undergone by all human groups through a series of stages from “savage” to “civil society.” The published History of America is a ruptured version of its author’s intention to continue his narrative of progress to a present-day peace and plenty of
contented colonialism. As his Preface put it, “While they are engaged in civil war with Great Britain, inquiries and speculations
concerning their ancient forms of policy and laws, which exist no longer, cannot be interesting. The attention and expectation of mankind are now turned towards
their future condition. In whatever manner this unhappy contest may terminate, a new order of things must arise in North America,
and its affairs will assume another aspect.”15
Robertson’s exercise in imagining history transnationally predated the cultural nationalism that would construe history through a predominantly national lens for the following two centuries. The point here is not
to make a tired postmodern point about history “really” being fiction, but rather to suggest that it may be profitable to
consider the historical fiction that emerged between the Revolutionary War and the death of Robertson’s follower Walter Scott as a transatlantic
genre. To put it differently, fiction may be a way of thinking history, transatlantically and comparatively. Leonard Tennenhouse
has suggested that diaspora theory offers a literary history able to accommodate early Americans’ compound sense of the cultural “importance of feeling English” alongside a gathering sense of ideological and experiential
difference from the assumptions controlling British literature.16 To invoke another theoretical model, we might regard historical fiction as a literary “contact zone” in which the dynamics
of transatlantic literary relations were explored in the period.17 The most extensive exchanges in transatlantic historical fiction occur after 1830; studies have tended to focus later in
the nineteenth century, to take in Hawthorne – arguably Scott’s most important successor as a writer of historical fiction
– whose work is transatlantic in conception, form, and theme. Two advantages of considering the field up to 1830 are worth
noting. First, voices other than Scott’s and those of his avowed or unavowed imitators begin to be heard; second, the transatlantic
possibilities of Scott’s own historical fiction can be understood in new contexts, in particular, as forms of literary exchange
in which influence does not necessarily dominate and does not flow only in one direction across the Atlantic. Tilottama Rajan
claims that “literary and intellectual history are disciplines where history (as what really happened) is reconstituted by
being displaced into discourses whose notion of an event is more problematic.”18 Preeminent amongst these discourses, I argue, was historical fiction, which explored the relationship between continuity
and difference that preoccupied English-language writers in the transatlantic experience. A transatlantic perspective on historical
fiction from the 1770s offers a differently inflected version of Anglo-American Romanticism, in which national historical
fictions are generated in a matrix of spatial and temporal comparison. Historical fiction, that is, accomplished a particular
kind of transatlantic thinking.
As Irving’s History of New York appeared in print, the London Quarterly Review favorably reviewed Thomas Campbell’s historical poem Gertrude of Wyoming (1809):
according to the modern canons of criticism, the Reviewer is expected to shew his immense superiority to the Author reviewed, and at the same time to relieve the tediousness of narration by turning the epic, dramatic, moral story before him into quaint and lively burlesque. We had accordingly prepared material for caricaturing Gertrude of Wyoming, in which the irresistible Spanish pantaloons of her lover were not forgotten, Albert was regularly distinguished as Old Jonathan, the provincial troops were called Yankee-doodles, and the sombre character of the Oneyda chief was relieved by various sly allusions to “blankets, strouds, stinkbus, and wampum”…But however prepared we came to quizz what is no otherwise ridiculous than because serious and pathetic, our hearts recoiled from the disingenuousness of the task.19
The implication is that burlesque is a fitting British response to transatlantic historical themes, as it would not be – say
– for a work delineating violent tragedy in a French Revolutionary setting. Excessively voluminous Dutch pantaloons, Yankees, and wampum are part of the comic currency of Irving’s
History, but the Quarterly reviewer could not at this point have been acquainted with the voice of Diedrich Knickerbocker. It is unlikely that a single
common “source” could be found. The comment points rather to the ideological problems of “history” in post-Revolutionary America.
Perhaps what is going on is coincidental anticipation on both sides of the Atlantic of Karl Marx’s brilliant opening statement
in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon” (1852), that “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and
personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”20 One of the classic formulations of the philosophy of history, that is, was anticipated in the form of transatlantic historical
fiction. “The Eighteenth Brumaire” refers to a day in November 1799 when Napoleon took an irrevocable step towards the imperial
throne that would definitively separate France’s post-Revolutionary history from the radical events of the Revolution itself.
To the extent that post-Revolutionary transatlantic fiction historicized the American and French Revolutions as mutual reprises, farce or burlesque became an inevitable mode to evoke events and sequences as
mirrors of each other. History (as Derrida noted) ceases to refer to events in the world and becomes citation. This skeptical
instantiation of an infinitely replicable “past” would seem particularly appropriate to a culture ideologically committed
to newness and future possibility. If Robertson’s America established one version of the imagination’s contribution to History in the transposition of temporal and geographical situation, the Cockaigne of Irving’s New York offered another.
Its skepticism about the possibility of “history” as such notwithstanding, in 1809 A History of New York was the fullest historical account of the State’s Dutch past. The play between evocative “pastness” and “history” is amplified in later – indeed “posthumous”
– publications of Diedrich Knickerbocker. Irving’s Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–20) is a case study in transatlantic literary history. Dedicated to Scott, the book version collected a series of
short tales and sketches mainly composed by Irving during an extended stay in Britain, and mailed to America for serial publication.
Unauthorized reprinting of selected sketches in British journals led him to publish the first book version with John Murray
in England in 1820. Crayon’s selective impersonations of English literary genres, characters, and narrative forms effect a mutually refractive composite of estrangement and continuity
for Romantic transatlantic historical writing. History itself became fiction: reconstruction of events without an original
registered nostalgia and desperation in equal measure:
The games and ceremonials of old Christmas have entirely disappeared…There was a quaintness, too, mingled with all this revelry…it was suited to the time and place; and as the old manor house almost reeled with mirth and wassail, it seemed echoing back the jollity of long-departed years.21
Irving’s Sketch-Book addressed a contemporary view expressed with a combination of wistfulness and pride by American critics:
You look over the face of a fair country, and it tells you no tale of the days that are gone by…[y]ou have never peopled these woods and waters with imaginary beings; they are connected with no legendary tales of hoary antiquity; – but you cast your eye through the vista of two short centuries, and you see them as they are, and you see nothing beyond.22
His fiction created a picturesque version of the past – what (anachronistically) we might call “heritage” rather than “history.”
Another sketch, “Rip Van Winkle,” recovered from the posthumous writings of Knickerbocker, further destabilized any possibility
of separating history from fiction; it drew attention to print reconstruction of a national “folk” past from transnational
materials. Kaleidoscopic time frames refract between the Dutch past of Hendrick Hudson, a colonial “present” of the tale’s
initial setting, and a post-Revolutionary present of Rip’s return from the Kaatskill Mountains (“a dismembered branch of the
great Appalachian family”). Dis-location is manifest in the landscape, which becomes a figure for History; or for the moment aside from history. Much has changed when Rip returns to the village, but time also seems to be repeating itself: among the strange figures
Rip encounters is his own reflection reincarnated in his son. Transplanted from Europe, History becomes a kind of haunting
in America; the relation of past to present is displaced, mysterious, and unfathomable by a narrator mesmerized by material
that presents itself for re-enactment and rewriting while remaining impervious to reinterpretation. The passage of time (and
the interposition of the Revolution) is marked by the replacement of George III’s head on the village inn sign by that of
Washington: this allegory of the American Revolution is necessarily transatlantic in its reference. But the confected nature of the tale’s relation to Native American
and European folk tradition complicates straightforward equivalence. A “Note” and a “Postscript” suggest other contexts that
may or may not be origins of Knickerbocker’s story: “a little German superstition about the Emperor Frederick der Rothbart, and the Kypphaüser mountain,” and an Indian fable about the genesis of the Kaaters-kill waterfall. This past combined international,
cosmopolitan, and contemporary perspectives with the “recovery” of folk myth and local tale to evoke a land of what Irving
called “storied and poetical association.”23
Nina Baym claims that “historical novels of the Revolution were as much about contemporary relations with England as they
were about the Revolution itself.”24 Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House (1793) typifies displacement of political reactions to the French Revolution back a generation to the American Revolutionary War. The secret love affair of aristocratic Orlando and his social
inferior Monimia is played out against a period backdrop which allows Smith to express her radical opposition to slavery in an era of growing political censorship. Orlando leaves his British estate to go and fight in America; kidnapped and rescued
by Indians who cut off all his hair bar the Mohawk tuft, “he was distinguished from an Iroquois by nothing but his English
complexion.”25 Returning to Britain he finds himself supplanted and unrecognized. The question which drives the romance plot – of who shall inherit the estate – suggests that this is better regarded not as a historical novel but a chronologically
and politically transposed political allegory.
Radical and reactionary (anti-Jacobin) responses to events in France that seemed to unravel from a new dawn for humanity to
a Gothic vision of anarchy inform complex representations of Native Americans in transatlantic historical fiction. Indian
atrocities (frequently transposed to the Canadian or Revolutionary wars) manifested as a historicized transatlantic and racialized
displacement of the Terror; responsibility for their release was more obliquely related to European imperial ambition. Gertrude of Wyoming revisited some of Rowson’s historical concerns in Reuben and Rachel, as it also assessed the utopian aspirations of the English Romantics Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey: set in
1778, it describes a pastoral colonial English community in Wyoming, Pennsylvania, on the banks of the Susquehanna River.
This transatlantic refuge of “exiles met from ev’ry clime” was based on the historical episode of an Indian attack upon the
emigrants. Again, the ideological implications of transatlantic relationships are muddy. As one reviewer noted, Campbell’s
theme was not immediately apparent as “honourable to our national character”; the ambush had been funded by Britain.26 Tilar Mazzeo has argued that Gertrude “reinscribes the traditional colonial dichotomy, in which English national identity is either preserved entirely or is entirely
corrupted, to the extent that the transnational individual becomes something of a different class altogether – indigenous,
savage, and democrat.”27 Outalissi, the poem’s virtuous Oneyda warrior, is derived from James Macpherson’s eighteenth-century Scottish epic of the
doomed hero Ossian who combines martial valor, classical stoicism, and sensibility, naturalized in the American environment.
In terms of stadial history he is a metonym for his race’s vulnerability to the inevitable ceding of heroic savagism to the progress of civility.
The contrasting implications of the French Revolution were hard to compute; they had a direct bearing on two contrasting and apparently mutually contradictory paradigms
that operated within the space-time matrix governing representations of transatlantic history. The first, following Robertson’s
analysis, located “America” as an example of a society in its early stages, an imagined canvas which would clarify Europe’s
own past and the operation of historical forces of progress. The other, shaped by the political rhetoric of American youth,
newness, and possibility, located the corruption and “darkness” of the past in Europe. This second position referred itself
on the one hand to Puritan millenarianism and on the other to emerging eighteenth-century primitivism; the tutelary spirit
of the “noble savage” was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The presence of native peoples complicated the picture of historical progress.
With customary acumen and lack of tact John Neal described them as “the live wreck of a prodigious empire that has departed…within
the memory of man; the last of a people who have no history, and who but the other day were in possession of a quarter of the whole earth.”28 Noble rather than savage Indians were a reminder that the rise of one empire built on the ruins of another: history might
be cyclical rather than progressive. The effect was to dichotomize representations of Indians: bad savages whose extermination was the moral imperative of progress, and noble primitives whose
passing embodied the poignancy of history. A significant part of the cultural work performed by historical fiction was to
make these ideologically incompatible positions simultaneously available in emotional terms to transatlantic readers.
At this point we need to return to Scott, the towering figure of Romantic historiography in transatlantic as in European contexts.
Any study of historical fiction finds a watershed with the publication of Waverley, or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since, in 1814. On the eve of Waterloo, the novel’s double time frame juxtaposed current fears about French invasion of Britain
onto the 1745 Jacobite attempt to reinstate a Stuart monarch. Local and national events bear the impress of a broader sphere;
the twenty-six Waverley novels collectively offer an understanding of post-Napoleonic Europe.29 They established the modern form of the historical novel, evolving a plot structure and an idiom sufficiently capacious to
accommodate both commitment to the rightness and inevitability of stadial progress and a tragic sense of the losses (nobility,
freedom, poetry) it entailed. In 1820 – some half-dozen novels into the series – Scott’s by no means uncritical admirer Coleridge
indicated the transferable power of this paradigm when he described the novelist’s subject as the elemental struggle “between
the two great moving principles of social humanity; religious adherence to the past and the ancient, the desire and the admiration
of permanence, on the one hand; and the passion for the increase of knowledge, for truth, as the offspring of reason – in
short, the mighty instinct of progression and free agency, on the other.”30 This Coleridge saw as not specifically a Scottish, or even a European, but a human subject: a conflict that underlies all
social life, the drama in history. A Scott hero is a representative figure characteristically caught up in and tossed between
the opposing forces of historical conflict. A moderate amongst extremists, his establishment of a middle way offers resolution
of the fictional crisis and a progressive route out of factional stasis for the novel’s readers.
It had particular point in a transatlantic context. Scott’s contemporaries certainly believed so: he was frequently urged
(including by Irving) to write a historical novel with an American setting. This never materialized, but – educated by Robertson
– his fiction drew analogies between the early stages of society believed to be embodied in Scottish Highlanders or the tribes
of pre-feudal Europe, and the contemporary state of Native American society. Chronicles of the Canongate (1827), which (in an example of the circular currents of transatlantic influence) Scott felt might “be considerd [sic] as an imitation of Washington Irving,” contained “The Two Drovers,” a tale set in the late 1780s.31 A Highlander and an Englishman, companions as they drive their respective herds to market, come to blows over a misunderstanding;
bound by the code of honor that regulates his society, the Highlander kills the other, and is then found guilty and condemned
by an English judge. Two different systems of honor and justice come into fatal collision. Pronouncing the death sentence,
the judge’s peroration notes in mitigation the inevitability of the Highlander’s action:
The country which he inhabits was…inaccessible to the laws…founded upon the general principles of justice…[Revenge] must have been as familiar to their habits of society as to those of the Cherokees or Mohawks.32
In such a form the stark tragedy of cultural confrontation referred back to classical epic. Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok; A Tale of Early Times (1824) picked up the more conciliatory aspect of Scott’s historical romance to explore feminine desire and racial fears in a historical setting (Salem in 1629) which acts as a form of displacement
rather than of inquiry. Like Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, or, Early Times in the Massachusetts (1827) its temporal regression enabled expression of contemporary anxieties about racial mixing within a “Waverley” framework
of historical progress achieved through marriage of a hero and heroine from opposing factions (in this case, Puritan and Episcopalian).
Religion is a transatlantic descriptor in a plot that involves a plethora of tropes from murderous Indians and pirates to
religious bigotry, witchcraft, and rapid switches of setting from domestic interiors to frontier wilderness. Hobomok and Hope Leslie are tales set in the past rather than historical tales in Scott’s sense: neither seems particularly concerned to relate the
romance plot to process and change on a national or transnational scale. But Child and Sedgwick did advance the potential
of seventeenth-century witchcraft as a powerful historical fiction of American emergence. John Neal’s “unpublished preface”
to Rachel Dyer (1828), his novel about the Salem witchcraft trials, exhibited a more pugnacious Americanism, explicitly distancing its author
from what he denigrated as “imitations” of Goldsmith and Scott practiced by his countrymen Irving and James Fenimore Cooper.
Even here a transatlantic context determines the rhetoric: the preface was written for Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine and intended as the first in a series of “North-American Stories.” It explicitly invokes (and challenges) Sydney Smith, to
demand “another DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, in the great REPUBLIC OF LETTERS.”33
This had already occurred. Two years earlier Cooper (dubbed, much to his annoyance, “The American Scott”) published The Last of the Mohicans. If Scotland offered Ossian and noble Highlanders to American historical romance, both before and after Mohicans America reciprocated with Indians “infinitely more attractive than the worn-out and hackneyed subjects which form the staple
of almost every work of fiction of the present day,” as Scott’s admirer Daniel Winne wrote from America in 1826.34 Cooper’s Uncas, doomed son of Chingachgook, the last of the Mohicans, has eyes “beaming with a sympathy, that elevated him
far above the intelligence, and advanced him probably centuries before the practices of his nation.” Uncas’s opposite number,
Magua, is also no simple stereotype. Retaining the natural savagery of his tribe, he cunningly manipulates the emotions of
his people, so “artfully blend[ing] the natural sympathies with the religious superstition of his auditors, that their minds,
already prepared by custom to sacrifice a victim to the manes of their countrymen, lost every vestige of humanity in a wish
for revenge.” Cooper’s historicism – like Scott’s – was informed by Gothic, a “pre-historic” literary mode of passions not
bound by civility and rationality. It allowed violence to be located with and expressed by those whose predatory raids on
the frontiers of civil society it became the business of historical romance to contain:
they reached the naked rock above the caverns, where, after a shout of savage triumph, the air continued full of horrible cries and screams, such as man alone can utter, and he only when in a state of the fiercest barbarity.35
More soberly, this is also a European war over the territory and future of America; the savage Hurons are allied to the French,
the noble but doomed Mohicans to the British. The Mohicans are characteristically described as a “nation,” the Hurons in tribal
terms. In a striking example of how the historical novel might write history as well as reflecting it, Cooper’s versions of
the French and Indian wars of the 1750s had a material impact on racial views in the post-Revolutionary period, helping to
articulate the rationale for displacement and even extinction of America’s first nations, and simultaneously to voice the
unease or guilt that this evoked in the conquerors, within a tragic inevitability of Shakespearian proportions. Leatherstocking
expresses (and contains) the historical process for the reader: “It is true, that white cunning has managed to throw the tribes
into great confusion, as respects friends and enemies…thus throwing every thing into disorder, and destroying all the harmony
of warfare.”36
Cooper developed Scott’s form in significant respects: the peripheral characters of the folk who frequently served a comic
turn in the Waverley novels’ account of cultural change move to center stage and further marginalize the figures of the romance plot (typically English or English-derived settlers). Questions of inheritance and ownership take on different inflection
in the context of American settlement that affects how the marriage plot resolves itself, and the introduction of the disinherited
shifts the novel’s ethical center of gravity away from Scott’s sense of succession and continuity. In Natty Bumppo the Leatherstocking,
Cooper created a mythopoeic figure who straddles the stages of civilization, mediating between history (change, timebound
existence), and pre-history (nature, archetype, timelessness). His fictional history recapitulates Burke’s sense of Robertson’s
historical insights achieved through transposition of temporal and spatial coordinates: the geographical location of successive
Leatherstocking tales shifts according to the historical situation that drives the plot. “Westward the course of Empire takes
its way,” George Berkeley wrote in 1752, advocating colonial settlement; as settlement proceeds, Natty Bumppo flees before
it.37 Always at the frontier, inhabiting always the contact zone between stages of civilization, his geographical recession metaphorically
and mythically marks the historical progress of white American society across the landscape. In these novels, too, a visual
poetic encapsulates the temporal in what Andrew Newman has called a motif of “sublime translation” which makes the American landscape a protagonist in its own right.38 Newman’s use of the phrase is primarily linguistic: between Indians and white Americans or Gaelic Highlanders and English
speakers, but we might extend this cultural translation: that is, to the work accomplished by fiction crossing and re-crossing
the Atlantic in its inquiries about the meaning of human history.
NOTES
1 , A History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, 2 vols. (New York: Inskeep & Bradford, 1809), I: xii.
2 Knickerbocker, A History of New York, II: 248, 341.
3 , Scotland and America: A Study of Cultural Relations, 1750–1835 (Glasgow: Blackie, 1975) and From Goosecreek to Gandercleugh: Studies in Scottish-American Cultural History (East Lothian, Scotland: Tuckwell Press, 1999); , Rethinking the South: Essays in Intellectual History (1988; rpt. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993) and Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
4 , “Romance Ferment after Waverley,” American Literature 3:4 (January 1932), 408–31 (409); , Life on the Mississippi (1883; New York: Gabriel Wells, 1963), p. 375.
5 , The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. , 12 vols. (London: Constable, 1932–36), III: 259.
6 , The Historical Novel in Europe, 1650–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 2–3.
7 Maxwell, The Historical Novel, p. 33.
8 , Reuben and Rachel; or, Tales of Old Times, 2 vols. (Boston, 1798), I: iii.
9 , “Susanna Rowson’s Reuben and Rachel: Captivity, Colonization, and the Domestication of Columbus,” in Redefining the Political Novel: American Women Writers, 1797–1901, ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), pp. 23–42.
10 See and , The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
11 , The American Historical Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 8.
12 Edmund Burke to , June 9, 1777, in The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. et al., 10 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958–), III: (1961), ed. George H. Guttridge, p. 351.
13 , “Of the Study of History,” in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary (1889), rev. edn., ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985; 1987), pp. 563–68 (pp. 566–67).
14 , The History of America, ed. , 3 vols. (1777, reprint of 1792 edn.; London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1996), II: 27, 31, 51.
15 Ibid., I: iii.
16 , The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); see also , “The Impossibility of Being Anglo-American: The Rhetoric of Emigration and Transatlanticism in British Romantic Culture, 1791–1833,” European Romantic Review 16:1 (2005), 59–78.
17 , Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992; London: Routledge, 2008).
18 , “Introduction: Imagining History,” PMLA 18:3 (May 2003), 427–35 (431).
19 “Review: Gertrude of Wyoming,” Quarterly Review 1:2 (May 1809 [2009]), 254. See , Gertrude of Wyoming, A Pennsylvanian Tale, 3rd American edn. (New York: Longworth, 1809).
20 www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/. Accessed December 30, 2010.
21 , The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 165, 205.
22 North-American Review 15 (July 1822), 251.
23 Irving, The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, pp. 34, 48–49, 12.
24 , American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790–1860 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), p. 171.
25 , The Old Manor House, 4 vols. (London, 1793), III: 326. Cf., for example, Rowson’s The Fille de Chambre (1792) and , Saratoga: A Tale of the Revolution (1824).
27 , “The Impossibility of Being Anglo-American: The Rhetoric of Emigration and Transatlanticism in British Romantic Culture, 1791–1833,” European Romantic Review 16:1 (2005), 59–78 (69–70).
28 , Otter-Bag (1829), quoted in Orians, “Romance Ferment after Waverley,” p. 420.
29 For a fuller version of this argument, see , “Walter Scott,” in The Cambridge Companion to the European Novel, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
30 , “Letter to Thomas Alsop, April 8, 1820,” in Walter Scott: The Critical Heritage, ed. (1970; London: Routledge, 1995), p. 180.
31 , The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 173.
32 , “The Two Drovers,” in Chronicles of the Canongate, ed. Claire Lamont, vol. XX of The Waverley Novels (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 145.
33 , “Unpublished Preface,” to Rachel Dyer (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1964), p. xviii.
34 , The Private Letter-Books of Sir Walter Scott: Selections from the Abbotsford Manuscripts: with a letter to the reader from
Hugh Walpole (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1930), p. 301.
35 , The Last of the Mohicans (1826), with an introduction, historical essay, and notes by (1983; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 132, 284, 97.
36 Ibid., p. 223.
37 , “On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America,” in A miscellany, containing several tracts on various subjects (London: J. and R. Tonson and S. Draper, 1752), I: 187.
38 , “Sublime Translation in the Novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Walter Scott,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 59:1 (June 2004), 1–26.