Transatlantic literature and author love in the nineteenth century

Transatlantic Literature and Author
Love in the Nineteenth Century
Edited by

Paul Westover and Ann Wierda Rowland

Palgrave Studies in
Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
General Editor: Joseph Bristow


Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing
and Culture
Series Editor
Joseph Bristow
Department of English
University of California - Los Angeles
Los Angeles, California, USA


Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a new
monograph series that aims to represent the most innovative research on
literary works that were produced in the English-speaking world from the
time of the Napoleonic Wars to the fin de siécle. Attentive to the historical continuities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the series will feature
studies that help scholarship to reassess the meaning of these terms during
a century marked by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements.
The main aim of the series is to look at the increasing influence of types of
historicism on our understanding of literary forms and genres. It reflects
the shift from critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only
the period 1800-1900 but also every field within the discipline of English
literature. All titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical perspectives

and challenging readings of both canonical and non-canonical writings of
this era. Editorial Board: Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck College, University of
London, UK; Josephine McDonagh, Kings College, London, UK; Yopie
Prins, University of Michigan, USA; Lindsay Smith, University of Sussex,
UK; Margaret Stetz, University of Delaware, USA; Jenny Bourne Taylor,
University of Sussex, UK.

More information about this series at
/>

Paul Westover • Ann Wierda Rowland
Editors

Transatlantic
Literature and Author
Love in the
Nineteenth Century


Editors
Paul Westover
Brigham Young University
Spanish Fork, Utah, USA

Ann Wierda Rowland
The University of Kansas
Kansas City, Missouri, USA

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
ISBN 978-3-319-32819-5

ISBN 978-3-319-32820-1
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-32820-1

(eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016950463
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
Cover illustration: © Courtesy of the J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature
The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors received generous research and travel support from their
departments and colleges.
In particular, thanks to BYU’s Humanities Center and Romantic and

Victorian Study Group (RVSG) for facilitating Ann Rowland’s visit to
Utah—key for our collaboration—and for funding Ann Rigney’s germinal
visit to BYU campus in 2014.
Thanks to Anna Neill, Chair of the English Department at the
University of Kansas, for locating resources in the department to help
defray the expense of illustration permissions.
Thanks to the helpful people at Palgrave Macmillan, notably Benjamin
Doyle, Tomas René, and Joseph Bristow, our series editor. We are grateful
also to the press’s anonymous reader.
The Wasatch Romantic and Eighteenth-Century Studies Symposium
(WRECS, October 2014) provided an opportunity to workshop ideas
for this volume. Participants included Scott Black, Jeff Cowton, Mary
Eyring, Andy Franta, Evan Gottlieb, Billy Hall, Nicholas Mason, Michael
McGregor, Padma Rangarajan, Jon Sachs, and Matthew Wickman. Thanks
to all.
BYU’s Faculty Editing Service has been terrific. Meeting our ambitious
publication schedule, especially in light of other obligations, would have
been impossible without the assistance of Jennifer McDaniel and her staff.
Above all, we thank our contributors, who add their own acknowledgments in individual chapters.

v



CONTENTS

1

2

Introduction: Reading, Reception, and the Rise of 
Transatlantic ‘English’
Ann Wierda Rowland and Paul Westover
American Idiom: Sarah Hale’s Flora’s Interpreter
and the Figuration of National Identity
Kelli Towers Jasper

3

Bentley’s Standard Novelist: James Fenimore Cooper
Joseph Rezek

4

‘The American Tennyson’ and ‘The English Longfellow’:
Inverted Audiences and Popular Poetry
Sharon Estes

5

The Americans in the ‘English Men of Letters’
Ryan Stuart Lowe

6

‘The Author Makes the Reader Acquainted with 
His Abode’: Hawthorne as Transatlantic Tour Guide
in The Marble Faun and ‘The Old Manse’
Charles Baraw

1

19

49

75

99

121

vii


viii

CONTENTS

7 The Transatlantic Home Network: Discovering Sir
Walter Scott in American Authors’ Houses
Paul Westover

153

8 Wordsworthshire and Thoreau Country: Transatlantic
Landscapes of Genius
Scott Hess

175

9 Helen A. Clarke and Charlotte Endymion Porter:
Literary Criticism in Author Country a Century Ago
Alison Booth

203

10 Transatlantic Reception and Commemoration of the 
‘Poet of the Scotch’, Robert Burns
Christopher A. Whatley

237

11 Loving, Knowing, and Illustrating Keats: The 
Louis Arthur Holman Collection of Keats Iconography
Ann Wierda Rowland

267

12 ‘The Unofficial Force’: Irregular Author Love and 
the Higher Criticism
Charles J. Rzepka

293

Bibliography

321

Index

349


LIST

OF

CONTRIBUTORS

Charles Baraw has taught courses on nineteenth-century, twentieth-century, and
contemporary American literature at Yale, Wesleyan, and Southern  Connecticut
State University, where he is currently an Assistant Professor of English. He is
working on a book called Reading Encounters, a study on the mutual relations of
travel, reading, and literary form in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, William
Wells Brown, and other American writers. His article on Brown, ‘William Wells
Brown, Three Years in Europe, and Fugitive Tourism’, won the 2012 Darwin
T. Turner Award for the Year’s Best Essay in the African American Review.
Alison  Booth, Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of
Greatness Engendered: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf (Cornell, 1992) and How to
Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present
(Chicago, 2004). She is also the editor of Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender
and Narrative Closure (University of Virginia, 1993), the Longman Cultural
Edition of Wuthering Heights (2009), and The Norton Introduction to Literature
(8th–10th editions). Her articles on women writers, narrative, and film have
appeared in such journals as Victorian Studies, Narrative, and Kenyon
Review. Booth directs the Collective Biographies of Women project with support
of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, an ACLS Digital
Innovation Fellowship, and an NEH Level II Start-up Grant. Her study of Clarke
and Porter relates to themes in her forthcoming book, Homes and Haunts: Visiting

Writers’ Shrines and Countries (Oxford, 2016), on transatlantic literary tourism,
house museums, and topo-biography.
Sharon Estes received her PhD in English from the Ohio State University in 2013
and is associate professor of Language and Literature at Bucks County Community
College. The essay in this collection unites her research interests in transatlantic
reading, publishing, and circulation of texts with a current larger project that
ix


x

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

examines the American reception of transatlantic literary and theatrical representations of bigamous marriage.
Scott Hess is Professor of English and a member of the Environmental Studies faculty at Earlham College. His research fields include British Romantic poetry,
American nature writing, transatlantic print culture, and theories of authorship
and the self, as well as landscape art and photography. He has published the books
Authoring the Self: Self-Representation, Authorship, and the Print Market in British
Poetry from Pope through Wordsworth (Routledge, 2005) and William Wordsworth
and the Ecology of Authorship: the Roots of Environmentalism in Nineteenth-Century
Culture (University of Virginia, 2012). His essay here extends his discussion of
Wordsworth’s Lake District as a ‘landscape of genius’ to engage with author love
and the North American context.
Kelli  Towers  Jasper is a PhD candidate at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Her research focuses on the literature, culture, and book history of Britain and the
USA in the long nineteenth century, with an eye toward the transatlantic histories
of horticulture, botany, and landscape design. Her essay in this collection stems
from a larger project entitled Gathering Flowers: Romantic Botanico-Literary
Production and the Transatlantic Mediation of Culture.
Ryan  Stuart  Lowe is a Visiting Assistant Professor in English and American

Literature at Oklahoma State University. He received his PhD in English from
Washington University in St. Louis, a dissertation on the concept  of shyness in
Hawthorne and James. His interests include transatlantic literature, gender studies, media, and queer theory. His current research project explores the rise of the
‘tourist love story’ in American literature and film.
Joseph Rezek is Assistant Professor of English at Boston University and the author
of London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic
Book Trade, 1800–1850 (University of Pennsylvania, 2015). His work continues to
explore the relationship between the book trade and literary expression in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His essay ‘The Orations on the Abolition
of the Slave Trade and the Uses of Print in the Early Black Atlantic’ was awarded
the Richard Beale Davis Prize for the best article published in Early American
Literature in 2009–2010.
Ann Wierda Rowland, Associate Professor of English at the University of Kansas,
is the author of British Romanticism and Childhood (Cambridge, 2012) and
numerous chapters and articles on Romantic-era literature. Her current book project, provisionally titled ‘Keats in America’, examines the role Americans, the idea
of America, and the transnational exchange of money, manuscripts, artifacts and
other forms of cultural capital have played in the formation of Keats’s reputation
and reception.


LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

xi

Charles J. Rzepka is Professor of English at Boston University. He is the author of
The Self as Mind: Vision and Identity in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats (1986);
Sacramental Commodities: Gift, Text, and the Sublime in De Quincey’s Confessions
(1995); Detective Fiction (2005); Selected Essays in Romantic and American
Literature, History, and Culture: Inventions and Interventions (2010); and Being
Cool: Elmore Leonard and the Work of Writing (2013), in addition to numerous

award-winning essays on Romantic-period writing. An editor of Studies in
Romanticism, Rzepka received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the KeatsShelley Association in 2004.
Paul Westover is Associate Professor of English at Brigham Young University and
Book Review Editor for the Journal of British Studies. He is the author of
Necromanticism: Travelling to Meet the Dead, 1750–1860 (Palgrave Macmillan,
2012), co-editor of the Romantic Circles edition of Wordsworth’s Guide to the
Lakes (2015), and a historian of literary tourism in the context of Anglophone
canon-building, both national and transatlantic. His essays have appeared in such
journals as European Romantic Review and Studies in Romanticism and in edited
collections on tourism, literary reception, and the representation of place.
Christopher  A.  Whatley, OBE, is Professor of Scottish History at the University
of Dundee, Scotland and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He has
published extensively on Scottish history, work exemplified by his Scottish Society,
1707–1830: Beyond Jacobitism, Towards Industrialisation (Manchester, 2000). His
best-known recent work is the critically acclaimed and award-winning The Scots
and the Union (Edinburgh, 2006, 2007, 2014). He has long had an interest in the
social background and influence of Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns,
and has contributed chapters to books and journal articles on Burns since 1994,
most recently in the Journal of British Studies (2012), in Cultures of Radicalism in
Britain and Ireland (Kirk, Brown and Noble, eds., Pickering & Chatto, 2013),
and The Scottish Historical Review (April 2014), this last with Murray Pittock.
Whatley was co-investigator on the Pittock-led, AHRC-funded project, ‘Robert
Burns: Inventing Tradition and Securing Memory, 1796–1909’.



LIST

Fig. 2.1

Fig. 2.2

Fig. 2.3

Fig. 3.1
Fig. 7.1
Fig. 7.2
Fig. 7.3
Fig. 7.4

OF

FIGURES

Sample page with labeled components. Annotated page from
Flora’s Interpreter, or The American Book of Flowers and Sentiments,
2nd edn. (Boston: Marsh, Capen and Lyon, 1833), p. 25.
Rare Books & Manuscripts Library of the Ohio State
University Libraries
Sample page of index of interpretations. Reprinted from Flora’s
Interpreter, or The American Book of Flowers and Sentiments,
2nd edn. (Boston: Marsh, Capen and Lyon, 1833), p. 218.
Rare Books & Manuscripts Library of the Ohio State
University Libraries
Index of American authors. Reprinted from Flora’s
Interpreter, or The American Book of Flowers and Sentiments,
2nd edn. (Boston: Marsh, Capen and Lyon, 1833), p. 226.
Rare Books & Manuscripts Library of the Ohio State
University Libraries
List of Bentley’s Standard Novels

Abbotsford House in 2015. Photo by Katee Buckley Westover
Sunnyside in 2009. Photo by Paul Westover
Emerson’s ‘gaberlunzie’. Photo courtesy Ralph Waldo Emerson
Memorial Association
Ellen Emerson’s bedside cupboard with scenes from
Walter Scott’s ‘Lochinvar’ (Marmion) (by E. W. Emerson,
c.1865). Photo courtesy Ralph Waldo Emerson
Memorial Association

23

31

36
52
156
157
161

163

xiii


xiv

LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 7.5

Fig. 8.1

Fig. 8.2

Fig. 9.1

Fig. 9.2
Fig. 10.1
Fig. 10.2
Fig. 11.1
Fig. 11.2

Fig. 11.3
Fig. 12.1

Fig. 12.2

Sir Walter Scott and his Literary Friends at Abbotsford,
painted by Thomas Faed, engraved by James Faed,
published by James Keith in Edinburgh and William
Stevens & Williams in New York. Courtesy of the
National Park Service, Longfellow-House-Washington’s
Headquarters National Historic Site
Title page for Charles Mackay, The Scenery and Poetry of
the English Lakes: A Summer Ramble (London: Longman,
Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1846). Drawn on wood by
W. Harvey and engraved by Thomas Gilks. Courtesy L. Tom
Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham
Young University, Provo, Utah
N. C. Wyeth (1882–1945), Walden Pond Revisited, 1942,

tempera, possibly mixed with other media, on hardboard,
46¼ × 33¼″. Brandywine River Museum of Art, Bequest
of Carolyn Wyeth, 1996
‘The Chest-Nut Armchair. The Gift of the Children of
Cambridge’. Chair made of the tree mentioned in Longfellow’s
‘The Village Blacksmith’ and inscribed with a verse of that
poem. From Sloane Kennedy, Henry W. Longfellow:
Biography, Anecdote, Letters, Criticism (Cambridge:
Moses King, 1882), p. 119. Library of Congress
Sketch of Clarke and Porter’s summer house from
Lewiston Evening Journal Magazine Section, August 28, 1925
Sir John Steell’s statue of Robert Burns, installed 1880,
Central Park, New York. Photo by Patricia E. Whatley
George A. Lawson’s statue of Robert Burns, installed
1891, Ayr, Scotland. Photo by Katherine McBay
‘A Prize Fight of 1819’. Holman collection, Houghton Library,
Harvard University
Photograph of J. B. Speed Memorial Museum, Louisville,
Kentucky, with Louis Arthur Holman’s Keats collection on
display (1934). Holman Collection, Houghton Library,
Harvard University
‘Belmont Castle, or The Towers’. Holman collection,
Houghton Library, Harvard University
Sherlockian menu for the Baker Street Irregulars banquet of
December 7, 1934. MS Am 2717 (389), Houghton Library,
Harvard University
Certificate of investiture in the Baker Street Irregulars for
Edgar W. Smith. MS Am 2717 (381), Houghton Library,
Harvard University

166

180

182

221
224
238
239
281

282
286

299

301


CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Reading, Reception,
and the Rise of Transatlantic ‘English’
Ann Wierda Rowland and Paul Westover
In early November 1872, some 101 years since the birth of Sir Walter
Scott and forty years after his death, a group of prominent New Yorkers
and over 5,000 spectators gathered in Central Park to unveil a new monument. Its cornerstone had been laid the summer before, a timely keeping
of Scott’s centenary. On this afternoon, the dedication ceremony featured
bagpipes, immigrant Highlanders in military costume, and groups performing, in telling conjunction, both ‘God Save the Queen’ and ‘Hail

Columbia’.1 An account of this event, published in the New York Times
on November 2, preserves the opening remarks of the memorial committee chairman, who rejoices that Scott now joins Shakespeare, his best and
most fitting company, in Central Park’s outdoor answer to Poets’ Corner.
The Times also reproduces the day’s keynote address, delivered by the
aged William Cullen Bryant (a regular speaker at such commemorative
events), here lauded as a ‘kindred genius’ to Walter Scott. Bryant wears
‘a sprig of heather in the breast of his overcoat’ and reports himself espe-

A.W. Rowland ()
English Department, University of Kansas, Kansas City, MO, USA
P. Westover
English Department, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016
P. Westover, A.W. Rowland (eds.), Transatlantic
Literature and Author Love in the Nineteenth Century,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-32820-1_1

1


2

A.W. ROWLAND AND P. WESTOVER

cially pleased and enthusiastic at the city’s effort to add ‘human associations, historical [and] poetic’, to Central Park’s ‘shades, lawns, rocks, and
waters’. ‘Henceforth’, he prophesies, ‘the silent earth at this spot will be
eloquent of old traditions’, a sacred ground of memory and imagination.2
This moment of transatlantic cultural theater prompts various questions: Why all this to-do and excitement? Why so much effort to establish
a patch of ‘classic ground’ in Manhattan? And why, specifically, erect a

monument in America to a foreign (in this case, Scottish) writer? But
what may seem a slightly strange gesture to our twenty-first century sensibilities was, for the nineteenth century, not at all unusual. In fact, its
very conventionality is one reason why it now deserves attention. The
raising of this statue of Walter Scott in Central Park is best understood as
a typical episode in the larger commemoration movement that characterized British–American literary culture. What Philip Waller has called the
‘literary marmoreal movement’ and what, at the time, was described as
the ‘present rage for centenaries’3 reached a crescendo on both sides of
the Atlantic in the decades approaching the turn of the twentieth century, as statues, busts, commemorative plaques, and memorial ceremonies
honoring beloved authors became a customary mode of literary expression.4 That this was a transnational movement lent cross-cultural vitality to the phenomenon, as Americans raised memorials to British authors
(both at home and in Britain itself) and Britons in turn paid tribute to
American authors, in some cases crossing the Atlantic to do so. When,
for example, a group of Boston Keats devotees erected a memorial bust
of the poet in Hampstead Parish Church in 1894, Walter Besant enthusiastically accepted this American tribute on English ground and contemplated ways the English might reciprocate: ‘we might present a statue of
Hawthorne to the pretty little town of Concord. We might put up a bust
of Washington Irving in the City Hall of New York. We might give a statue
of Oliver Wendell Holmes to the great hall of Harvard.’5 Such gestures,
whether realized or merely notional, were characteristic of a literary culture in which the finest sensibilities were often proven and the highest
tributes paid in marble or bronze as well as in print.
We begin this volume with the anecdote of a Walter Scott statue in
Central Park because it offers a window into a nineteenth-century literary
culture that was decidedly transatlantic, author-loving, and in key respects
supra-textual—that is, capable of escaping the printed page and finding
expression in material culture and in the affective responses and activities of readers. The chapters of this volume share the general assumption


INTRODUCTION: READING, RECEPTION, AND THE RISE OF TRANSATLANTIC...

3

that ‘literature’ does not confine itself to books; rather, they explore what

has been called literature’s ‘social life’.6 Accordingly, they pose a number
of questions: By what various means did ‘English Literature’ come into
being? How did it find its way into the hearts and homes of its readers? What fascinations, diversions, cultural expressions, and social affiliations did it inspire? What collective values did it embody? And finally,
following David Harlan’s simple observation that ‘we are who we are,
at least in part, by virtue of the people and ideas we care about’,7 how
did a love of English Literature and its authors shape regional, national,
and transnational identities? In addressing such questions, the chapters
of the volume also make the specific case that what came to be called
and canonized as English Literature in the twentieth century was largely
a nineteenth-century Anglo-American invention, the product of a wide
range of inscriptional and material practices animated by the affective,
social, and identificatory experiences of readers.
By describing English Literature as a transatlantic invention, we mean
not only to emphasize the significant role nineteenth-century Americans
played in determining what came to count as canonical reading, but also
to uncover the degree to which ‘English’, as a category of identity and
affiliation, functioned transnationally. Throughout the nineteenth century, ‘English’ shifted between national, linguistic, ethnic, and racial connotations, and English-speaking people around the world, particularly in
the USA, played a significant role in shaping what ‘Englishness’ meant
at any given time. Indeed, many of the nineteenth-century terms associated with English identity, such as ‘Anglo-Saxon’, were originally used
predominantly in North America, contributing to the recasting of English
ethnicity as a transnational brotherhood united by language and cultural
memory.8 In the performance of English identity, even Britons at times
ceded the leading role to the Americans. Charles Wentworth Dilke’s influential book of 1868, Greater Britain, envisioned a ‘worldwide confederation of Anglo-Saxons’, but it was the English in America, he claimed,
who were most influentially spreading the values and language of English:
‘Through America, England is speaking to the world.’9 It is a short, if
paradoxical, step from such visions of the English-speaking world as a
‘greater England’—Prime Minister Gladstone’s community of ‘Englishspeaking peoples’—to an acknowledgment that Englishness has perhaps
its fullest expression not in England, but in America. ‘[T]here is not in
America a greater wonder than the Englishman himself’, Dilke writes, ‘for
it is to this continent that you must come to find him in full possession of

4

A.W. ROWLAND AND P. WESTOVER

his powers’.10 The growing sense that Englishness did not signify attachment to a particular place of origin as much as a portable set of imaginative identifications meant that Englishness was increasingly understood
as something ‘created for the diaspora—an ethnic identity designed for
those who were precisely not English, but rather of English descent’11—
or, if not ethnically English (because America was, after all, more racially
diverse than this discourse suggested), nonetheless eager to lay claim to
aspects of English heritage. England becomes something ‘best imagined
abroad, or imagined from abroad’, to adopt Robert Young’s phrase, and
it is precisely the element of distance suggested by the term ‘abroad’ that
becomes critical to the identity and experience of international Englishness
and Anglophilia in the final decades of the nineteenth century. As Young
concludes, ‘This dialectic of attachment to England, yet distance from it,
of continuity and rupture, similarity and difference, became the dominant
characteristic of Englishness itself.’12
The idea of Englishness as a diasporic identity, one created by and for
people living at a distance from England, must inform our understanding of the creation and consolidation of English Literature to a greater
extent than it has. So, too, must a greater allowance for the constructive role of reception, for English Literature was the product of readers
and reading as much as it was the product of writers and writing. The
principles underpinning our scholarly practice for the past two decades
have made us well able to describe how social and historical factors influence writers and texts; we are adept at situating a text in the particular
national, local, political, and social context surrounding its writing. We
also routinely analyze how the text, in turn, shaped its immediate world.
And yet, despite major strides in scholarship (especially in book history,
afterlives studies, collection history, and cultural memory studies), we are
generally less attuned to the long-term contexts of reading and reception, less able to see, describe, and analyze the material archive of readers’

engagement with literature, dispersed, as it is, both temporally and geographically. We agree with Rita Felski, who has argued that while we ‘cannot close our eyes to the historicity of artworks’, we nevertheless ‘sorely
need alternatives to seeing them as transcendentally timeless on the one
hand, and imprisoned in their moment of origin on the other’.13 Literary
history opens itself to new kinds of evidence when we emphasize texts’
extended consumption, transmission, celebration, and remediation histories. As Ann Rigney has modeled in her study of Walter Scott’s ‘afterlives’,
the best way to measure the impact of an author or book on literary cul-


INTRODUCTION: READING, RECEPTION, AND THE RISE OF TRANSATLANTIC...

5

ture may not lie in the scrutiny of print runs, sale numbers, or reviews at
the moment of publication, but instead in the investigation of a work’s
‘procreativity’, its ability to generate theatrical adaptations, visual illustrations, imitations, parodies, baby names, place names, merchandise, tourist
sites, monuments, and other cultural offspring.14 Catherine Robson notes
the extent to which reception history challenges the ‘hegemony within
academic literary studies of author-centered periodization’;15 we would
add that it shakes up the equally entrenched practice of nation-based categorization, insofar as we can consider Longfellow as an ‘English poet’
(memorialized in Westminster Abbey) who happens to hail from the USA,
or Scott and Dickens as America’s most popular novelists.
When we consider authors in terms of when and where they were most
read and beloved, and not strictly in terms of when and where they lived
and wrote, the figure of the author takes on new functions and dimensions. Shifting focus to the reader does not necessary imply the erasure or
‘death’ of the author in the Barthesian sense (though it does tend to make
the author ghostly, a friendly spirit or imagined presence to be encountered both in books and geographical ‘haunts’). On the contrary, as the
individual chapters of this volume will demonstrate, readers often insist
on keeping authors ‘alive’ and at the center of their reading and memorial
practices.16 What makes the transfer of interest and affection from text to
author possible—and indeed what encourages readers to move beyond

the text into prolonged, imaginative engagements with its author, characters, landscapes, and stories—is the extent to which literary culture functioned as a structure for personal and social feeling. Indeed, as important
new scholarship has made increasingly evident, the nineteenth century
saw the rise and consolidation of English Literature as an object of affective ties and relations, both in the sense that literature and books became
things to be loved in their own right, and that they became an important
currency in social and emotional relations more generally.17 Andrew Piper
and Deidre Lynch have each described the various ways in which literature
and literary culture underwent a process of ‘personalization’ in the late
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a process that involved concomitant
practices of personifying the artifacts, materials, and forms of the literary
world: the book, the page, the collected edition, the lyric poem.18 In ‘My
Books’, an essay that exemplifies the nineteenth-century habit of representing books and authors as beloved friends, Leigh Hunt remarks, ‘How
pleasant it is to reflect, that all these lovers of books [authors from the
past] have themselves become books.’19 Hunt transforms dead authors


6

A.W. ROWLAND AND P. WESTOVER

into fellow readers and then into book-objects, thus allowing books to
function, in Lynch’s words, as ‘surrogate selves’, objects of affection capable of standing in for the bodily presence of the author.20 As literary texts
came to be treated not merely as things to be used, but as persons to be
loved, so, too, were readers increasingly expected to have relationships
with authors and characters, and reading experiences both deeply felt and
personally enriching.21
Thus, in a culture where authors, books, and fictional characters were
routinely described as cherished companions (‘the company we keep’, as
Wayne Booth would later call them22), reading came to be understood as
an experience of communion, of intimate conversation, of mental, even
bodily contact, between reader and author, reader and character, reader

and book, or between like-minded readers. As the chapters of this volume
will demonstrate, readers on both sides of the Atlantic developed deeply
felt, insistently personal attachments to the books, texts, and authors of
English Literature, often seeking to ‘prolong their interaction with their
reading matter, generally well past the time of reading’.23 To some extent,
this impulse to move beyond the text and extend the time of reading
through extra-textual imaginative engagements of one sort or another is
a function of print culture and the very ways print works. The reproduction and reproducible quality of print encourages readers, in Leah Price’s
words, to ‘bracket sense-data’, to ignore the material form of the text in
order to experience the seemingly transcendent and nonmaterial aesthetic
experience it promises.24 Paradoxically, however, the transcendent, nonmaterial aesthetic experience promised by print persistently inspired material, corporeal, and local reading cultures and practices, as readers insisted
on placing authors and texts in particular landscapes or ‘author countries’,
erecting statues and memorials, repurposing texts for gifts and scrapbooks,
or forming social clubs and literary associations.25 Our focus in this volume on the variety of material practices readers pursued is thus part of the
‘wider cultural history of reading’ called for by Nicola Watson, the study
of ‘how literature is consumed, experienced and projected within the individual reader’s life, and within a readership more generally’.26
It is the overall contention of this volume that this wider cultural history of reading is needed to understand how transatlantic English took
shape in the nineteenth century. Illustrative prints, monuments, household decorations, and author shrines all gave material embodiment to an
emerging literary canon, evidence of the role readers played in deciding
which authors and texts became domesticated as English Literature and


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how that literature extended itself into the daily lives, rooms, meals, landscapes, and social relations of a culture. Ultimately, however, the volume
aims, if only by implication, to do more than point out historical curiosities and recover forgotten modes of literary experience. It aims to suggest
something about the power of literature to shape mentalities and bring
about social and political conditions that affect national and international

life.
Extending an olive branch after the Anglo-American War of 1812–1815,
Washington Irving speaks in 1819 of ‘the literature of the language’ as
a crucial medium of reconciliation and friendship. In that same essay,
‘English Writers on America’, he underscores literature’s unprecedented
ideological power on both sides of the Atlantic: ‘Every one knows the all
pervading influence of literature at the present day, and how much the
opinions of and passions of mankind are under its control.’27 In today’s
fragmented media environment it is easy to forget how central literature
was in the mental life of the nineteenth century. Mass culture was, to a
great extent, literary culture, so the invention of transnational English
left pronounced ideological and physical marks on both Britain and the
USA. It is no coincidence that literary diplomacy became a striking feature of nineteenth-century Anglo-American relations. Men of letters were
often assigned to diplomatic posts, and formal exchanges of literary devotions were often used to strengthen international ties.
Thus, in 1946, when Winston Churchill (the British Prime Minister
with an American mother) delivered his famous ‘Sinews of Peace’ speech
in Fulton, Missouri, he could call upon the deep-rooted commonplaces
of an Anglo-American cultural block: the broad understanding that the
UK and the USA had a ‘special relationship’ and a faith in the ‘fraternal
association of the English-speaking peoples’.28 Why were such ideas taken
for granted and how did they acquire the status of the commonplace? This
volume suggests that nineteenth-century literary culture was one important breeding ground for the conventionality of Churchill’s twentiethcentury statement. To a great extent, literature normalized the emotional
and memorial (not merely political, legal, and economic) connectedness
of the nations.
Of course, rhetorical claims of common culture and shared interests are
products of both consolidation and contestation, of what Elisa Tamarkin
has identified as the related impulses of defiance and deference that characterized Anglo-American relations in the nineteenth century, bringing
national traditions together even as they insisted upon drawing distinc-

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tions.29 The chapters in this volume present a transnational literary culture
neither smooth nor unified, one never fully achieved or organically original. Instead they attend to ad hoc and composite texts, to material practices
that imitate, reiterate, and remediate in what Kelli Jasper describes in her
chapter as a ‘constructive confusion’ of national literatures, origins, and
identities.30 In the literary culture that gave rise to transatlantic English,
there was plenty of rivalry and mutual criticism. Nonetheless, Americans
claimed beloved British authors and texts as part of their own history and
cultural identity, and British literary figures embraced American writers
and readers as ‘English women and Englishmen from over the seas’.31
(Our equivocation on ‘British’ and ‘English’ here and throughout is
intentional—a reflection of blurry usage from the time.) While there were
indeed voices agitating against such broad cultural annexations—Emerson
and Whitman, for instance, famously called for American literature to
break with European tradition—it seems clear that the American exceptionalist voices were, to some extent, exceptional.
Thus, for example (returning to the historical energies that ultimately
placed a statue of Walter Scott in Manhattan), a ‘Eulogium’ for Scott delivered to the Merchants’ Exchange in New York City less than a month after
his 1832 death answers the question ‘on what ground we, as Americans,
stand forth to testify our sympathy on this occasion’ with a strong (yet
conventional) claim of ‘equal inheritance’.32 The speaker, the Reverend
John McVickar, contends, ‘As it was our Shakespeare and our Milton in
whose footsteps Scott trode, so now is it our minstrel whose lyre is broken; our Scott whose name is now to be added to the list of the mighty
dead.’33 In this proprietary assertion of America’s claim on Shakespeare,
Milton, and Scott, McVickar locates the bards of Britain in a history that is
a catalogue of illustrious corpses, a history that is both America’s heritage
and, emphatically, an accomplishment of the past. To claim the illustrious
British dead for American history is thus also to locate England (the ‘old

country’) in the past and America (‘the new world’) in the present and
future. But just as this nationalist historical logic takes hold, McVickar
rejects it, proclaiming that over such gifted minds as those of Shakespeare
and Scott, ‘the petty distinctions of human origin have no power … no
nation can claim them as their own’.34 The rhetorical resources that allow
McVickar to blend national cultures in a happy homage to Britain, to
claim America’s equal inheritance, and even to imagine America’s future
preeminence also enable him to imagine a ‘great family of civilized man’,
a brotherhood of English speakers who know no national boundaries.35


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Such rhetorical gestures make and unmake, form and reform, the evershifting national identities, affects, and relations of transatlantic English.
In sum, transnational English was just one possible model for conceiving of literary tradition, but it seems to have captured the values and practices of most readers better than its competitors. Three main strands of
canon-making manifested themselves in nineteenth-century discussions:
what might be called the nationalist, the aggregative, and the cosmopolitan models. The models had variants on both sides of the Atlantic
basin, but they were perhaps easier to see in the USA (for instance, all
three animated McVickar’s eulogy). The nationalist mode tapped nativist patriotism so that, in America, some commentators called for cultural
independence to match America’s political independence. The aggregative
model, by contrast, assumed that American and English letters should be
regarded as part of a single tradition. This model, too, could have nationalist coloring: if Americans were extending the canon, not creating a new
one, they could lay claim to British writers as their own patrimony.36 That
was a happy thought for America’s cultural stature. (Tamarkin hints at
this aggregative logic when she observes that nationalism ‘works every bit
as seriously at bringing some aspects of the outside in, as it does at keeping others out’.37) The cosmopolitan model, meanwhile, sought to take a
more global, less Anglo-centric view, as when Americans claimed ownership in literature from all of Europe. In this line of thinking, great literature (the Western ‘supercanon’,38 in Nancy Glazener’s phrase) belonged
to any people capable of appreciating it. Great writers (and sensitive readers) were global citizens, superior to place or time, so that national distinctions did not matter. Even this view could have nationalist overtones,

for the cosmopolitan stance was one way for Americans to assert cultural
refinement and their place on the world stage. It was also perhaps a way
to compensate for their nagging sense, especially in the Early National
Period, that they had too little cultural heritage of their own.
In practice, finally, these models could coexist, hybridize, and lend
energy to one another. An enthusiastic adherent of the Young America
movement might still find himself reading beloved British novels while
nursing a cold. Emerson could call for American self-reliance while ruminating on Coleridge and Carlyle (and hanging pictures of them on his
walls). Longfellow could specialize in writing poems of American heritage
while cultivating literary contacts in Britain and leading the way in the
cults of Goethe and Dante. But what mattered most, apart from arguments among elites on the status of national literature, was what people


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A.W. ROWLAND AND P. WESTOVER

actually read—and that was why transnational English Literature was usually the practical victor in the canon debates. Due to longstanding habit,
the ‘culture of reprinting’ described by Meredith McGill,39 the price differentials created by asymmetrical copyright regimes, the affective imprint of
childhood reading, the emphases of school curricula, and many other factors, custom said that Americans cherished British books in addition to any
native productions they might embrace. For an American reader, British
books were simply part of one’s mental furniture, and loving the English
canon was (or at least could be) a way of loving one’s nation by making
its past as well as its current cultural attainments more firmly one’s own.
*

*

*

With a title promising treatment of something so capacious as the invention of transnational ‘English’, it seems best to acknowledge what this volume does not do, but which it might have done, and thus to point out lines
of inquiry for future scholarship that will enrich the story told here, which
by accident (for reasons of time, space, and the contingencies of collecting
contributions) has turned out overwhelmingly Anglo-American, not just
Anglophone in focus. For example, this collection does not attend to the
earlier history of international ‘English’, though eighteenth-century literary exchange between England and its neighbors—Scotland especially—
molded the discourse adapted for Anglo-American use in the 1800s.
Along a different but related track, this volume does not engage in a sustained way with the histories of school curricula and discipline formation,
but those brands of scholarship clearly complement what our contributors
have done. Further, the collection does not strongly address to what extent
and on what terms non-white Americans (especially African Americans
and Native Americans) could participate in the culture of author love and
transatlantic English. Nor does it explore what forms of resistance to the
dominant white literary culture might help us better see its functions, contours, and limits. Finally, this volume does not take up (except in passing) the history of ‘English’ elsewhere in the English-speaking world—for
instance, in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or Anglophone India. The
stories of those places intersect with ours and have many parallels. And of
course, the internationalization of English had a dark side that has been
explored by postcolonial scholarship. It must be said that ‘English’ had a
way of marginalizing literature in other languages, both in the transatlantic
world and elsewhere within the imperial footprint.