Transatlantic Stories and the History of Reading, 1720-1810: Migrant Fictions

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T r a ns at l a n t ic Stor i e s a n d t h e H is tory of R e a di ng, 1720–1810

Eve Tavor Bannet explores some of the remarkable stories about the Atlantic world that shaped Britons’ and Americans’ perceptions of that world. These stories about women, servants, the poor and the dispossessed were frequently rewritten or reframed by editors and printers in America and Britain for changing audiences, times and circumstances. Bannet shows how they were read by examining what contemporaries said about them and did with them; in doing so, she reveals the creatively dynamic and unstable character of transatlantic print culture. Stories include the “other” Robinson Crusoe and works by Penelope Aubin, Rowlandson, Chetwood, Tyler, Kimber, Richardson, Gronniosaw, Equiano, Cugoano, Marrant, Samson Occom, Mackenzie and Pratt. e v e t av or b a n n e t is George Lynn Cross Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. Her books include Empire of Letters:  Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence 1680– 1820 (Cambridge, 2005); The Domestic Revolution:  Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel (2000); and a four-volume edition of British and American Letter Manuals 1680–1810 (2008). She is currently ­co-editing (with Susan Manning) Transatlantic Literary Studies, a collection of essays by British, American and Canadian scholars for Cambridge.







T r a ns at l a n t ic Stor i e s a n d t h e H is tory of R e a di ng, 172 0 –1810 Migrant Fictions E v e Tavor B a n n e t

 c a mbr idge u ni v er sit y pr e ss Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107007468 © Eve Tavor Bannet 2011 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2011 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Bannet, Eve Tavor, 1947– Transatlantic stories and the history of reading, 1720–1810 : migrant fictions / Eve Tavor Bannet. p.  cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-00746-8 (hardback) 1. English literature–Appreciation–United States.  2. American literature– Appreciation–Great Britain.  3. Atlantic Ocean Region–In literature.  4. Comparative literature–English and American.  5. Comparative literature–American and English.  6.  Books and reading–History–18th century.  7. Liberty in literature.  8.  Publishers and publishing–History–18th century.  9. Adventure stories, English–History and criticism.  10. Atlantic Ocean Region–Description and travel–History. I.  Title. pr129.u5b36 2011 820.9′005–dc22 2011002468 isbn 978-1-107-00746-8 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of illustration Acknowledgments

page ix x

Introduction: Transatlantic stories and Transatlantic readers Transatlantic print culture Transatlantic readings Menu

1

6 11 15

Pa r t I  “P o or m a n’s c ou n t r y ”

21

1 Strange adventures

25

2 Captivity and antislavery

47

3 The parallel Atlantic economy

65

4 Fortune’s footballs

87

Introduction

On epitome or abridgement: the case of Defoe The other Robinson Crusoe Providence’s promise: Ashton’s Memorial Penelope Aubin’s Atlantic: Noble Slaves and Charlotta Dupont On generic shifts: the cases of Aubin and Mary Rowlandson Smugglers and free trade: Chetwood’s Captain Boyle White flight and The Hermit, Philip Quarll

The two faces of Ambrose Gwinett The Bampfylde-Moore Carew phenomenon “The sport of fortune”: Tyler’s Algerine Captive

Pa r t II T h e s e r va n t ’s ta l e  Introduction

vii

21

25 31 42

48 60

68 77 89 93 98

111 111

viii

Contents

5 The bonds of servitude

115

6 Bond and free: contemporary readings of Gronniosaw’s Life

139

7 Samson Occom’s itinerancies

158

Home on the plantation: Mr Anderson Runaways: Elizabeth Canning, Pamela and Moll Flanders in America On poverty and free blacks On negotiating slavery

Occom’s Lives Transatlantic commerce The Sermon on Moses Paul The Female American and missionary culture

Pa r t III Pr i n t s c a pe s  8 Robert Bell’s theaters of war: the war on politeness The Pupil of Pleasure, “Chesterfield” and Bell’s Miscellanies for Sentimentalists Coda: Mackenzie’s Man of the World

115 125

140 148 163 169 174 180

187 191 193 204

9 Robert Bell’s theaters of war: the war upon war

210

Afterword Notes Works cited Index

228 232 257 290

Reframing Emma Corbett Connecting The Man of Feeling

210 225

Illustration

Frontispiece: A Chart of the Atlantic Ocean Exhibiting the Seat of War both in Europe and in America According to the Latest Discoveries and Regulated by Astronomical Observations. Courtesy of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. D9. Maps 12.78.1.

ix

page ii

Acknowledgments

I am profoundly grateful to Joanna Brooks, Sharon Harris, Robert D. Hume, Susan Manning, Laura Stevens, Robert Warrior, Debbie Welham and Maxine Wheeler for so generously sharing their time and expertise and for their kind and much-needed encouragement. Special thanks are due to Rob Hume and Judith Milhous for a delicious and decisive lunch in New York, without which this book would not have been written. I thank my 2007 graduate seminar at the University of Oklahoma for circumnavigating the Atlantic with a variety of Robinsons and captivity narratives, and for teaching me, among other things, that I had my map, with Britain at the bottom, upside down; and Kristina Booker for her excellent work on Penelope Aubin’s doubles. This project would have been impossible without much institutional assistance from OU. I thank in particular David Mair for orchestrating the necessary time and working conditions; the staff at Bizzell Library, especially Molly Murphy and Anna Maia in Interlibrary Loan who miraculously found and obtained for me copies of rare and heretofore uncopied eighteenth-century texts, and David Corbly who kept me and the online eighteenth century connected. I am particularly fortunate in my readers for the press, Chris Loar and Leslie Howsam, who made suggestions which improved the manuscript and so perfectly understood what I was about. I thank Andrew Alexander, Deputy Head of the Map Department at the Cambridge University Library, for finding the frontispiece map, and Maartje Scheltens for her good work on the production of this book. I am again grateful to Linda Bree for her tact and good sense, and for sticking with manuscripts through thicker and thinner. This book is dedicated to Esther Bannet, an exceptional human being and exemplary mother-in-law who, for over thirty years, has given me only kindness, wisdom and understanding.

x

Introduction: Transatlantic stories and Transatlantic readers

This is a book about some of the forgotten, as well as some of the now more familiar, stories of the Atlantic world during the eighteenth century, and a study of how those stories became transatlantic – popular, meaningful to readers, or influential in shaping perceptions, on both sides of the Atlantic. Though written in a variety of genres, the stories that were reprinted and redeployed transatlantically were generally “founded on fact.” Broadly conceived by contemporaries as “fictional histories,” they fictionalized and personalized the history of the times. Designed to inform and instruct readers about how life was or might be conducted in the Atlantic world as much as to persuade and entertain them, they were at once fictional and “true.”1 Many of the British and American narratives that were later marginalized or forgotten were heavily weighted towards the experiences and perceptions of women, of the poor, and of the déclassé. They told about the transatlantic migrations, motives, and experiences of ordinary people  – stories of danger, conversion, captivity, community and amazing freedom in a multinational Atlantic; stories of servitude, of voluntary or forced migration, of flight and successive resettlements; stories about the ubiquitous violence and war; and stories rethinking conduct, the goal of return and the meaning of place. Their perspectives differ sharply from those of subsequent, traditional British or American national histories, which is one of the reasons they were ignored for so long. Narratives which in their own time were widely read on both sides of the Atlantic and for good reason, such as Penelope Aubin’s Nobles Slaves (1722), The Hermit (1727), The Narrative of the most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw (1785) or Samuel Jackson Pratt’s Emma Corbett (1780), fell out of favor less for aesthetic reasons, than because they fit so poorly into later nationalist master-narratives and reminded us of experiences that we preferred to forget. The stories in question do, however, often relate to what we are learning from the new Atlantic histories, while 1

2

Introduction

adding to such histories, vividness, immediacy, and contemporary subject positions, and testing events against a variety of generic forms.2 Literally hundreds of eighteenth-century British stories were largely or partly transatlantic in content – even the compendious lists painstakingly assembled by Robert Heilman and Benjamin Bissell during the 1920s and 1930s are incomplete.3 Eighteenth-century British readers were clearly as fascinated by the “Transatlantic,” as by the “Oriental,” tale. Both before and after the American Revolution, there were also literally hundreds of British stories shipped to American booksellers and libraries by the printers and publishers in Britain who participated in the profitable transatlantic book trade. Eighteenth-century American readers were clearly as desirous of keeping up with the best-sellers and steady sellers in London or Edinburgh as readers in London, Newcastle, Dublin or Edinburgh might be.4 Yet this was not the only way stories traveled; and far more two-way transatlantic literary interaction occurred than this well-researched picture suggests. A larger number of originally American stories than we tend to remember were reissued in London between the republication in 1682 of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative and the republication at the turn of the nineteenth century of Royall Tyler and Charles Brockden Brown. This is especially the case if we factor in the writings of transatlantic people who were adopted into the national literature of one nation and not the other. Like Benjamin Franklin, James Ralph, Increase and Cotton Mather or Thomas Atwood Digges in their respective genres, writers of transatlantic narratives such as Charlotte Lennox, Susannah Rowson, W. R. Chetwood, Edward Kimber, Edward Bancroft, Elizabeth Ashbridge, Peter Williamson, James Annesley, Samson Occom, James Albert Gronniosaw, John Marchant, Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, Tobias Smollett, Gilbert Imlay, John Davis, and quite possibly Penelope Aubin, lived and worked on both sides of the Atlantic. They drew on personal experience of North America or of the West Indies, of Britain and of the Atlantic world. Several also offered first-hand accounts of different parts of the Americas during the period, as well as acute transatlantic critiques. American stories that were “founded on fact” had more impact in Britain than we tend to suppose. At the same time, far fewer prose narratives first issued in Britain than we like to think were taken up by printer-publishers in America, though many of these were subsequently reprinted multiple times. It is important to remember that in America, there was a double economy of the book:  alongside the volumes carried over the water by the transatlantic

Introduction

3

book trade, there was, almost from the first introduction of printing to the new world, what Robert Bell  – the Scottish printer-publisher who migrated to Philadelphia in 1768 – called a “native fabrication” or “literary manufacture” of books.5 American production of such books as primers, sermons, psalm books and letter-manuals preceded by fifty years or more that of novels, which began to be taken up by American printers at the Revolution and came into their own only during the 1790s. But early and late, “native fabrication” and “literary manufacture” are more useful terms than “piracy” or “the reprint trade” because they highlight the fact that, during the eighteenth century, texts were often altered, reworded, epitomized, re-compiled, renamed, adapted, repositioned, reinterpreted, re-contextualized or reframed, in the course of reprinting and embodiment in different material books.6 “Native fabrication” and “literary manufacture” are what enabled American reprints to become what Richard Sher calls “acts of appropriation” and James Green “vigorous, even defiant statements of American independence,”7 rather than merely cheap reproductions of European texts. Native fabrication meant that many of the transatlantic stories that “lived on” for different readerships at different dates on both continents did so by virtue of being, to some degree, re-presented, re-told, re-interpreted, re-applied, re-cycled and reused. The word “story” in its everyday sense reminds us of this fact. We use “story” as the eighteenth century used the word “history,” for true, partly true and fictional accounts of someone’s experience, which change a little from retelling to retelling and are not bound to any particular form of words. The stories discussed in the chapters that follow were transatlantic both in the sense that they were about the transatlantic experiences of ordinary people and in the sense that they were reprinted on both sides of the Atlantic – preferably multiple times. These are some of the shared stories which helped shape Britons’ and Americans’ view of that world. A number of these stories were also transatlantic in the additional sense of being authored by transatlantic people, writers who had lived on both sides of the ocean. My criterion of selection throughout has been absence:  I have privileged stories which tell us something about experiences in the Atlantic world and/or about transatlantic literary relations that texts which we more usually read or teach do not, and transatlantic stories which have not, on the whole, been interpreted as such. But there is no rule without an exception. While reluctantly leaving out Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Scott and Susanna Rowson about whom I have written elsewhere,8 I have included one transatlantic story

4

Introduction

by a transatlantic person  – Edward Kimber  – which was not reprinted transatlantically, because it addressed important dimensions of British– American relations that were implicit elsewhere, and is now once again readily available in print.9 As James Raven has pointed out, Kimber was “one of the most popular novelists of his day.”10 Kimber’s History of the Life and Adventures of Mr Anderson, which was first published in London and Dublin in 1754, was based on the life history of an American colonist whom Kimber encountered while serving in America with the abolitionist founder of Georgia, General Oglethorpe. Kimber used Mr. Anderson to warn British readers of the danger of an alliance among the colonial poor – which for him meant indentured servants, African slaves, dependent white daughters and Indians  – against the violence and cruelty of their greedy white masters. The solidarity that Mr Anderson shows the poor enacting towards other poor and subordinated people was also quite regularly demonstrated in other transatlantic Lives that were founded on fact (regardless of how we now categorize them) – those of Ottobah Cugoano, Samson Occom, Updike Underhill, Bampfylde-Moore Carew, Ambrose Gwinett, John Ashton and Philip Quarll, for instance. The willingness of the poor to help others across national and ethnic boundaries was also treated thematically in epitomized Crusoes, in captivity narratives and in Aubin’s transatlantic novels. Together, these different transatlantic stories gesture towards the outlines of a transnational subaltern subculture in and between those rival Atlantic empires that were “Poor Man’s Country” for people who experienced and portrayed empire from below. At mid-century, Kimber also portrayed the desire of the subjected and the governed to escape from the empire, and from the rule of British or anglicized colonial men, into spaces as yet ungoverned by them. This too haunts many transatlantic texts, including The Algerine Captive. Considered in this light, San Domingo in Charlotta Dupont, the pirate refuges in History of Pyrates and Ambrose Gwinett, the “nativist” Indian movement of the 1760s and 1770s which Samson Occom joined, John Marrant’s Indians, Gronniosaw’s and Equiano’s “Africa,” the island world of The Hermit or of Paul and Virginia (adopted and appropriated from France by Britons and Americans in different translations), and in their way, women’s novels such as Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall, were disparate expressions of the same profound impulse to escape imperious, manly British rule. Utopian depictions of settlements in an American wilderness, such as what Jeffrey Richards calls “the fiction of America” in The Adventures of Emmera, or the British Pantisocratic Edens of the 1790s

Introduction

5

which Christopher Flynn characterizes as “English reforms in American settings,” have a problematical, and perhaps cooptative relation to acts, impulses and narrative exemplars that were potentially far more dangerous and disruptive to the politics and economics of Britain’s commercial empire.11 The same may be said of Rousseau’s innocent country retreats for propertied men. Representations of the lines of flight pursued by early American settlers who absconded from “civilization” to remain with their Indian captors, or by the poor who opted out of the empire by running away, by shipboard mutinies, or by slave insurrections, and who established pirate havens and hidden societies on deserted islands or in forests, mountains and swamps beyond the reach of imperial law, were far more disturbing to contemporary British and Anglo-American elites than Rousseau’s Clarens. Though not reprinted in America for perhaps obvious reasons, Mr. Anderson was both an early antislavery novel and a prescient reflection upon these and other pressing contemporary transatlantic concerns. For the rest, the transatlantic stories to be discussed here inhabited (at least) two different times, as well as continents, because once they began to reprint narratives at the Revolution, American printers reprinted older as well as newer European texts. This should not be interpreted as a sign of provincial lag; London publishers did the same after 1774 when perpetual copyright ceased and older books became available to all. However, the canon of early American narrative reprints from 1775 to 1800 does differ strikingly not only from New Critical and postmodern literary canons, but also from the canon of best-sellers in late eighteenth-century Britain compiled by James Raven on the basis of British reprints and sales.12 This is because, in compiling his (usually small) list of reprints by selecting among the great mass of foreign books, or in agreeing to co-publish an expensive edition, each early American printer-bookseller or publisher acted as a judge of what ought to be known, read, and made easily accessible to his neighbors. As Rosalind Remer has shown, during the first decades of the early Republic, “publishers were always looking for [European] books that, once edited by an American … would take on particular usefulness for American readers.” Here, “publishing could be an act of political self-definition.”13 In America, publishing became especially political during the American Revolution and after Jeffersonian Republicans broke away from the Federalists to form an opposition party in 1794. But British printers and booksellers had their politics too. For instance, John Almon, Joseph Johnson and the later George Robinson were identified with radical writings; the Dillys supported America and

6

Introduction

the Revolution; and John Newbery offered safe and moral “little books” for “children six feet tall.” Texts could therefore mean very differently at different temporal and geographical removes. The Noble Slaves and Captain Boyle, for instance, both dated from London in the 1720s, where they initially figured as responses to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and to contemporary British literary and political critiques of that text. Both novels were taken up in America during the 1790s, and by the “country printers” in New England who first published Royall Tyler’s novel, The Algerine Captive. Severed from their initial relation to Defoe and in the case of Noble Slaves, detached both from Aubin and from England, these narratives were paratextually reframed to underline Noble Slaves’ relevance to contemporary American concerns with Barbary captivity and Captain Boyle’s applicability to contemporary American disputes about free trade. As such, they migrated from country printers to printers in Boston and New York, and remained popular in America well into the second decade of the nineteenth century. At the same time, considered synchronically as works published more or less simultaneously in different parts of New England during the 1790s and early 1800s for their bearing on contemporary American events, these narratives formed part of the locally revitalized generic and thematic context of The Algerine Captive, as much as The Algerine Captive formed part of the locally viable context for them. Regarding the matter in this way allows us to recognize that Tyler’s novel was, among other things, a savage comment upon and reconfiguration of a particular kind of transatlantic story, and to understand why, when it was reprinted in London at the turn of the nineteenth century, The Algerine Captive was read by British reviewers as a far more politically radical novel than we are inclined to think it today. T r a ns at l a n t ic pr i n t c u lt u r e In what follows, the publishing history of books in the Atlantic world provides the material base for the study of the transatlantic migration of texts. But study of the variable contents of those books reveals a transatlantic print culture that was heavily invested in various forms of textual editing and paratextual rewriting. In the eighteenth-century literary market place, where eighty percent of narratives were published anonymously or pseudonymously and all power over the text remained in the hands of printers and publishers, authors were rarely the sole writers of texts.14 Narratives were co-authored, sometimes quite radically, by the editors,

Transatlantic print culture

7

printer-editors, compositors, or bookseller-editors who were also their initial readers. In editing a text – or in re-editing, reframing and reprinting it for a different audience, time or place – editors and printers not only figured as cultural brokers; they also acted as purveyors and translators of what they thought they had read, or in the case of epitomes and abridgements, of what they thought mattered about what they had read. As such, they left traces of their readings, and records of their re-applications of their readings, in the text or paratext.15 The number of eighteenth-century printers and booksellers who, despite their humble origins and often rudimentary education, were also writers themselves is quite remarkable. In Britain alone, a far from comprehensive list would include John Almon, William Bingley, Samuel Chandler, William Chetwood, Joseph Cottle, John Dunton, Robert Dodsley, Thomas Gent, Robert Goadby, Ralph Griffiths, James Lackington, Benjamin Motte, John Newbery, John Nichols, Samuel Richardson, William Smellie and George Walker.16 This bears witness to the extent to which, before the modern division of labor, practices of writing, editing and rewriting were imbedded in the “mechanic,” as well as in the commercial, heart of print. In his study of The English Novel in the Magazines, Robert Mayo described some of the writerly techniques regularly used by British editors to make novels widely available in a variety of different forms to the readers of such British magazines as The Universal, The Lady’s, The Novelist’s, The Hibernian and The Edinburgh, as well as to readers of such review-periodicals as The Monthly, The Critical and The British. The techniques favored included reframing, renaming, making extracts, detaching scenes, summarizing and connecting extracts, serializing, producing epitomes and long abridgements and further altering them. Among the stories offered in multiple versions, which differed according to editor and editorial technique, were Behn’s Oronooko, The General History of Pyrates, Robinson Crusoe, Rasselas, Telemachus, Gil Blas, The History of Marianne, Eliza Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless, History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy and Invisible Spy, Burney’s Cecilia, Mackenzie’s Man of the World, Henry Brooke’s Fool of Quality, Sarah Fielding’s Governess, Lennox’s Henrietta, Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield, Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udopho and Inchbald’s Simple Story.17 In her recent study of English provincial readers, Jan Fergus found that between 1770 and 1799, four times as many customers in the Midlands subscribed to periodicals such as The Lady’s Magazine, The Novelist’s Magazine, The Monthly Review and The Critical Review as bought or borrowed novels, and that such readers rarely purchased novels as separate books.18 They did not need to, for they got

8

Introduction

versions of a good cross-section of what we now consider the important eighteenth-century novels through the reviews and magazines. Nor were these necessarily less permanent than books. Stephen Colclough found that provincial readers, such as Joseph Hunter in Sheffield, collected these periodicals together in order to have them bound into volumes. Derek Roper discovered that urban readers such as William Hayley, Thomas Hollis, Warren Hastings and Robert Southey owned complete bound sets of one or more of the principal reviews. Eighteenth-century readers did not treat periodicals as ephemera as we do now.19 Royall Tyler’s Algerine Captive (for instance) therefore probably got wider circulation in Britain –and certainly in more durable form – from being serialized in The Lady’s Magazine (which sold 12,000 copies each week) and again in The Entertaining Magazine, than the novel would have done had its first English edition escaped the Robinson’s warehouse fire.20 The principal British magazines were also available in America, where the same editorial practices obtained. New American-authored narratives, such as Jeremy Belknap’s The Forresters, Ann Eliza Bleecker’s “History of Maria Kittle,” Charles Brockden Brown’s Memoirs of Stephen Calvert, or Judith Sargent Murray’s “Story of Margaretta,” first appeared in installments in American magazines from the early 1780s on, as did extracts from new American narratives: William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, Foster’s The Coquette, Brown’s Arthur Mervyn and Edgar Huntly, Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry, Crevecoeur’s Letters of an American Farmer, and Dr Hitchcock’s Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family among others.21 Many appeared several times in different American magazines over a ten or fifteen year period. Migrating British stories too were both serialized and extracted. As we will see, the same editorial practices of paratextual reframing (with new dedications, commentaries, prefaces or introductions), of renaming (often via new subtitles and descriptions of the contents on the title page), of reprinting extracts separately, and of producing and altering epitomes and abridgements, were prevalent in the print culture of the book trade too – and that on both sides of the Atlantic.22 Until the 1770s, English copyright law could not be enforced much outside London, and even then, translations, adaptations, compilations, abridgements and epitomes were regarded as new books and escaped copyright restrictions.23 A great many readers therefore got their stories in altered or shortened forms from printed books. Many now canonical novels were available both in full length and in abridged or epitomized book formats, including Clarissa, Sir Charles Grandison, The Female Quixote, Peregrine Pickle,

Transatlantic print culture

9

David Simple and Fanny Hill. In some cases, such as that of Robinson Crusoe, many more readers on both sides of the Atlantic knew the story through epitomes and abridgements than through Defoe’s original – as indeed they still do. Nor was serialization confined to the magazines. The different “books” of novels such as Robinson Crusoe, Tristram Shandy, Clarissa, Brooke’s Fool of Quality or Frances Sheridan’s Sidney Biddulph were initially published in London serially in separate volumes, often at intervals of a year or more; and established novels were marketed all over again as “part books” in 6d weekly installments. In Britain, as in America, some novels in printed books also began life serially in magazines, such as Smollett’s Launcelot Greaves, Charlotte Lennox’s Sophia or Frances Brooke’s The Old Maid. And when publishers did not serialize, alter or truncate narratives, readers often did. Fergus found that many of the readers she studied engaged in what she calls “desultory reading”: they read only parts of a full-length printed novel (books III and IV of five, all books but the last), thus producing their own extracts and abridgements of narratives in the very act of reading.24 One of the important implications of such readerly practices, and of the shifting about of versions between magazines, reviews, abridgements, books, part-books, and separately printed extracts of books, is that, both in America and in Britain, stories often had far greater exposure, and were far more widely read, in a wider variety of forms, than their book history alone would lead us to suppose. Whether “fictional” or “true”  – or as Hume said all stories were, mixtures of truth and fiction  – stories inhabited what David Brewer calls “a literary commons” for writers as well as for editors and printers. Eighteenth-century editors and writers felt free to provide characters in extant narratives with new episodes and adventures, to give their stories a different ending or to reorient the “argument,” as well as to write continuations to other authors’ tales.25 They also engaged in what Donald Reiman called “versioning,” the production of “differing versions” of the same story “that exhibit quite distinct ideologies, aesthetic perspectives or rhetorical strategies.”26 As we will see, versioning could be achieved by a variety of techniques, including by selecting and altering an extract from a story, and through the widespread practice of dialogically reworking and rewriting another writer’s scenes.27 Stories inhabited a “literary commons” in large part because narratives did not necessarily or normatively attach publicly even to great masters. James Raven found that between 1750 and 1770, new novels “were associated more with their bookseller-publishers than with their authors, even

10

Introduction

where authorship was announced.”28 Robert Griffin has shown that in Britain “Roxana circulated for nearly half a century without being linked publicly to Defoe’s name,” and in so many different versions that when the story did finally “acquire an author,” it was a puzzle even for a critic as acute as Charles Lamb to know which bits of which version were “his.”29 And considering nineteenth-century America, where the practices of reprinting and circulating multiple versions of the “same” story continued to prevail into the 1850s, Meredith McGill has argued that “critics [who] have rescued anonymous and pseudonymous texts from their disseminated condition and reissued them in standard, multi-volume authors’ editions, creat[e] composite figures and bodies of work that did not exist and could not have existed in the era in which these texts were written.”30 Here too, despite the copyright laws, print culture was neither primarily author-centered, nor ineluctably attached to a particular “correct” form of words. In Britain, of course, periodicals from The Spectator on did try to arouse in readers curiosity about authors; “by the author of” was used on imprints to connect anonymous texts, and authors’ Lives and Collected Works began to appear as early as the 1680s – often in the case of the latter, to raise money for a writer through a printed equivalent of the dramatist’s benefit night. Authors of stories often published in “semi-anonymity,” since their immediate social or literary circle often knew who they were, while the broader public, reliant on the title page, did not. But all this is as much as to say that for stories – as opposed to books of science, books of poetry, and classical texts, which were signed – the birth of the solitary, individualized, copyrighted, anchoring post-Romantic author was still “emergent” in Raymond Williams’ sense.31 Our post-romantic emphasis on originality has fostered denigration and exclusion from “literature proper” of works resulting from practices of imitation, extraction, compilation, versioning, abridgement and epitomization which were fundamental to all forms of eighteenth-century writing, as well as to the eighteenth-century book trade. Post-Romantic aesthetic values and modern copyright thinking – as well as twentiethcentury editorial practices which privileged originality, organic wholes and a single correct form of words – have tended to ratify “great masters,” to ignore or hide under modern editorial decisions the existence of diverse versions of the “same” story, and to dismiss with contempt the writing practices that produced them. Though we have begun to move beyond this, the underlying aesthetic assumptions and judgments still haunt us, and for some critics, still prevail – as do the scholarly reading practices from the New Criticism through Deconstruction which mastered

Transatlantic readings

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the great masters. We might denaturalize such aesthetic views by going back to Aristotle, who said that just hearing the plot of a tragedy should inspire the hearer with pity and fear, and by remembering that dramatic competitions in Greece were competitions between different renderings of the “same” story. The eighteenth century still distinguished between the “idea” or “argument” of a story, and its linguistic, rhetorical and generic “dress.” The “same” stories or arguments could be clothed in different rhetorical modes, different language and different genres, imitated and transformed, condensed or amplified, framed, repeated or combined in different ways and  – as we will frequently have occasion to see in the chapters below – constantly were. More important, such writing practices produced the mobile, unfixed, dynamic and migrant fictions which distinguish eighteenth-century print culture from our own. That the “same” story circulated in a variety of different printed versions; that stories were altered, reframed, reoriented and recycled for different audiences and different moments; that more than one version of a story might be present at the same time in the same towns or villages, or indeed be read or heard successively by the same person; that stories often overshadowed writers, and that eighteenth-century readers were far more comfortable with fragments, extracts and alternate print versions of stories than we appear to be, cannot be matters of indifference to the broader history of reading, to our understanding of the effect of ­eighteenth-century books, or indeed, to the study of how narratives migrated from British to American printers, and from American print to British reprint. As Roger Chartier has pointed out, therefore, “rather than trying, in one way or another, to cast off the immutable tension between the work as such and its multiple texts, what is important is to identify the way it was construed at each historical moment.”32 T r a ns at l a n t ic r e a di ng s Transatlantic print culture in this period thus offers particularly fertile ground for studying what Roger Chartier calls “the social history of the uses and understanding of texts” through the diverse and changing forms that the “same” stories were given in different contemporary books.33 As Gerard Genette has shown, paratexts – both in the form of matter in the book surrounding and presenting the text (title pages, prefaces, “letters to the reader”, typography, etc.) and in the form of matter outside the book about the texts (newspaper adverts, booksellers’ catalogues, reviews etc) – provide “commentary” on the text and influence

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Introduction

how it is read. As “thresholds of interpretation,” paratexts present ways in which a text has been read by the producers and publishers of the material books in which it figures, and guide readers’ readings of the text.34 The same must, of course, be said of revisions, excisions and additions made to the text itself in the course of successive reprinting. Rather than list the variants in different British and American editions, therefore, I have approached the changes made to texts and paratexts in different eighteenth-century books as records of past readings and as guides to reading for contemporary British or American readers which can, to some extent, be accessed again. In the chapters below, I offer accounts of transatlantic narratives which grow out of what historical readers in the book trade – editors, printers, booksellers, compositors, critics, reviewers and other writers  – said about them or did with them. I do not claim that these are infallibly accurate reproductions of past readings. Nor do I wish to argue that these were the only ways a text was read in the past. But reading transatlantic stories through past readings, paratextual reframings and rewritings of them will, I hope, help to make more intelligible eighteenth-century comments and reactions which seem strange, superficial or eccentric to us now. This will also, I hope, give us a better sense of why stories that we may be inclined to ignore mattered then, and might matter now. This approach leads to unfamiliar interpretations of even familiar texts. It becomes apparent, for instance, that editors and printers on both sides of the Atlantic read Captain Boyle, not as the rather lame copy of Robinson Crusoe that we consider it, but as an important narrative about what Atlantic historians now study as the “parallel Atlantic economy.” Contemporaries understood Chetwood to be championing practices that British authorities outlawed as smuggling and British and American merchants justified as free trade. Given the extraordinarily large number of people at all ranks who were engaged in smuggling on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as the recurrence of seventeenth-century free trade arguments at the end of the eighteenth century, the novel’s run-away success and long-lasting popularity make better sense. In some cases, working from contemporary readings and rewritings leads to double readings. In the case of James Gronniosaw’s and John Marrant’s narratives, for instance, we are fortunate to have both the conventional readings inscribed by their white editors, and the more radical readings and rewritings of their texts offered by other free blacks of the period, notably Cugoano and Equiano. The contrast is instructive.

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Similarly, both the historical reconstructions of recent scholars in Indian studies, and English texts published during Samson Occom’s two-year visit to Britain, such as Cry from the Wilderness: Or A Converted Indian’s Address to a Christian Congregation (1767) and The Female American (1767), suggest readings of Occom’s carefully opaque writings which differ markedly from more traditional scholarly interpretations based on the pronouncements of his American sponsor, Eleazar Wheelock, and on eighteenth-century missionary culture. Double-voiced texts thus offer a special form of fiction founded on fact:  they illustrate Hume’s dictum that all stories are mixtures of truth and fiction both by hiding truth in a more acceptable conventional fiction, and by passing off that conventional fiction as fact. The difficulty of re-establishing the “authentic” voices or texts of African, enslaved and Native American people who dictated their Lives or sentiments to white amanuensis-editors is notorious. However, the difficulty was not unique to them. The many illiterate or partly literate seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poor whites with captivity narratives, crime narratives or mariners’ tales to tell were likewise helped into print by amanuensis-editors. The editor figure which prefaced so many eighteenth-century British novels and alerted readers that their editorial intervention had altered the text, should not therefore be regarded merely as a “device” designed to increase readers’ credulity and foster belief. It should remind us that eighteenth-century lives and histories were often co-authored, ghosted, edited and/or “corrected” by more literate men or women who possessed the cultural capital, generic skills, moral commonplaces and decorum necessary to get a difficult story into print. The presence of an editor-figure indicates as much ground for suspicion, as for suspension of disbelief. One of the things that sophisticated eighteenth-century writers did best was to regularly remind readers that though in reading, “ideal presence supplies the want of real presence, so that in idea we perceive persons acting and suffering precisely as in an original survey,” readers were ill-advised to forget that, in reality, the narrative was only an artful, persuasive and unstable rhetorical artifice.35 Nor was the ubiquitous editor the only bar to the spontaneous overflow of free self-expression. For both in Britain and in America, censorship prevailed. Though pre-publication licensing ceased in England in 1695, and in America about forty years later, the same goal of preserving the stability of the standing order against its critics and potential subverters was subsequently pursued, post-publication, by invoking the laws

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Introduction

of seditious libel; by limiting the role of juries in libel cases; and by the arrest, seizure, fining and/or imprisonment of printers, print workers and writers  – when these could be identified and found.36 This in itself was good reason for authorial anonymity, as well as for fake imprints. Because it also gave rise to a variety of writerly techniques that were designed to elude or circumvent the authorities – from ambiguity and the introduction of subversive alternatives through apparently minor interpolations to full-fledged double-voiced discourse – the ubiquitous presence of censorship also has implications for the history of reading, to which we may be alerted by rewritings, by the line taken in contemporary reviews, or by indirections in paratexts. Though now often lumped together with “elite readers,” those in the book trade who left their marks on books – editors, printers, publishers, compositors, reviewers and other writers – were more like Jonathan Rose’s “common man” than we might expect. In terms of status, eighteenthcentury printers were “meer mechanics”  – “skilled workers” in Rose’s terms.37 As Leslie Chard pointed out, even at the end of the century, “the typical bookseller was the object of considerable condescension.”38 When not also printers themselves, booksellers were tradesmen who bought and sold books and shares of books, often along with patent medicines, stationery, hats and other goods. Some made huge fortunes, many went bankrupt. But they were rarely of the upper classes or offspring of the rich. In London, those who were not the sons or wives of printers and booksellers, often hailed from the provinces and/or from the lower artisanal or trading orders. For instance, William Lane, the enormously successful publisher of the Minerva Press, was the son of a London poulterer, and famously started his book business among the chickens in a corner of his father’s shop. Ralph Griffith, founder, publisher and writer of the influential Monthly Review, was a Shropshire man and an ex-watchmaker who had learned the book business by working for bookseller, George Robinson, the son of a Cumberland excise man. Joseph Johnson and John Newbery were farmers’ boys, from Everton, near Liverpool, and Berkshire respectively. Robert Dodsley, son of a dissenting schoolmaster in Nottinghamshire, had been apprenticed to a stocking weaver. Thomas Longman came from a family of Somerset soap makers.39 Writing too was still, as James Ralph pointed out, as much a trade as a profession.40 Most writers and editorial hacks, who traded on their literacy, were notably poor; and from 1749 when reviews started up, reviewers of books – including Charles Burney Sr and Jr, John Cleland, William Godwin, Oliver Goldsmith, Mary Hays, Thomas Holcroft, Samuel Johnson,

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Tobias Smollett and Mary Wollstonecraft – wrote reviews for bread. At a time when most literary reviews ran from two lines to two paragraphs, The Monthly Review paid two to four guineas per octavo sheet (about 16 pages), the others less.41 Post-Foucault, eighteenth-century criticism is frequently studied as a method of regulating readers and keeping the public in check. However, this view of the matter can be qualified by remembering that critics, periodicals and publishers did not all speak with one voice and that governments viewed writers, critics, editors, printers and booksellers as potentially dangerous groups which needed to be coopted and paid off, or punished and controlled. More than a few of them got into trouble with the authorities for what they printed, published or wrote, even before the repressive 1790s, when authorities both in Britain and America clamped down even more severely than before. Yet notwithstanding their vulnerability, they disseminated literature to the populace at large by offering stories to different readerships in different formats and at different prices, and got a considerable amount of social and political critique, as well as a large number of quite anti-establishment stories into print  – however indirect, moralized and carefully managed such publications sometimes had to be. Menu Part I, “Poor man’s country,” explores stories popular on both sides of the Atlantic which constituted major contemporary challenges to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Some of the most interesting stories in this section have been categorized as “imitations” of Defoe, as “imaginary voyages” or as “Robinsonades,” terms indicating their secondary, derivative character or their lack of realism. Such modern taxonomies have marginalized large numbers of transatlantic narratives by classing them as thirdrate works which have nothing significant to add aesthetically, generically or substantively, to what we already know from Defoe. This exclusionary maneuver has protected Defoe’s “realism.” For, as we will see, a common focus of all these excluded writings was their challenge to Defoe’s rendering of contemporary situations and events, and their often explicit contestation of the relevance, probability and realism of Defoe’s accounts of the Atlantic world. “Conversing” with Defoe’s books and with each other, these stories deployed a variety of different generic devices to explore dimensions of the Atlantic world that he had sanitized, papered over, or ignored. The fact that they were reprinted with greater frequency than his

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novels suggests that, for contemporaries at least, they resonated in highly meaningful ways. The chapters in this part work successively with individual stories, to explore what they have to teach us not only about transatlantic experiences, generic choices and contemporary propaganda, but also about methods used in the Atlantic crossing to qualify, alter or re-apply the meaning/s of their “strange adventures.” Different techniques are highlighted in relation to different stories and, when this seems useful, the techniques themselves are discussed or explained. The techniques used to transplant texts transatlantically included epitomizing, extracting, versioning, adding and rewriting, and use of diverse parts of the paratext to change a story’s generic affiliation, to alter its thematic focus, to indicate its local or contemporary relevance, to identify, conceal or alter its national origin, or to keep it safe from the censor. Eighteenth-century readers got much of what they knew about the Atlantic world through Lives and Histories of the narrator-characters who ventured into it, whether these narrator-characters were constructed as heroically successful or as what one contemporary American writer described as “fortune’s football.”42 Many of the stories in this book are therefore Lives or Lives containing Lives. But as Adrian Johns has shown, early modern readers who were not somehow in the know could not be certain that published lives and histories were what they claimed to be:  the true life and history of a real man or woman “Written by Himself” or Herself. As Kate Loveman has demonstrated, some contemporary writers also exploited this fact teasingly or maliciously for purposes of their own.43 The eighteenth-century reading public was thus confronted with an unstable mix of true, partly or largely untrue, and fictional narratives, all founded in fact. At the turn of the nineteenth century, George Walker was still offering as a truism Horace Walpole’s observation that “Romances are only Histories which we do not believe to be true, and Histories are Romances which we do believe to be true.”44 There is no reason for us to feel more confident that we can tell which works are history and which fiction than eighteenth-century readers could. We can find our own certainties about the authenticity of eighteenth-century Lives shaken too – as when, in a brilliant piece of research, Vincent Carretta found that Gustavus Vasa, aka Olaudah Equiano, whose Interesting Narrative we took to be true, was not in reality the kidnapped African of the first-person narrative, but a black man born in South Carolina.45 Mark Kamrath describes what must surely have been

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the attitude of eighteenth-century readers when, after investigating the authenticity of different transatlantic versions of a speech supposedly delivered by a Creek-Indian, which “probably had some historical base,” he concludes that “whether real or fictitious, it seemed real” and this “perception” was “sufficient.”46 Working with groups of texts, Part II, “The servant’s tale,” therefore brings together a variety of Lives that were “founded in fact” and “seemed real” from a variety of now distinct areas of research – estate or plantation fiction, the literature of the black Atlantic, Native American studies, women’s writing and the literature of the criminal Atlantic. These lives cohabited and interacted in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, as well as in the literary marketplace, in ways that are often obscured by our disciplinary divisions. In transatlantic print culture, the lines of exclusion did not necessarily fall where we now expect. African, Native American, criminal, servants’ and women’s lives, though unequally represented and often contained within now well-researched types such as the penitent criminal or the converted African, were not excluded from print. Brought together with an eye to paratexts, versions and contemporary readers’ readings, these Lives begin to escape such typologies to tell less conventional tales. They also make visible a commonality in the experiences and reactions of all those who were once described as “servants” and whose experiences of the Atlantic world were shaped by the various contemporary forms of servitude. Part III, “Printscapes,”47 considers how reprinted narratives were reused and re-understood from the other end, so to speak  – through the case history of a particular printer-publisher. The larger question here is how one culture appropriates materials from others to construct or reconstruct itself. Both British and American publishers appropriated foreign texts through reprints as well as translations; both also integrated them in one way or another with the new and old works by native-born writers that they were also publishing. But reprints could be selected for a variety of different purposes and used within a publisher’s overall output in different ways. Looking at how at least one printer-publisher selected, collected and deployed his reprints will, I hope, show the potential interest of an area where relatively little has been done. Robert Bell, who is said to have launched the American reprint trade and who has been described as America’s first literary publisher, is a particularly good subject here because he left so many indications in his

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Introduction

catalogues, public letters, compilations and printed books to demonstrate and explain what he was doing. He presented what he was doing to readers, and made it part of his interaction with them. Bell made it clear that he was not reprinting works singly, but topically in clusters, as elements of what might be described as concerted campaigns; and he left strong paratextual cues both about how each text was to be read and in what combinations each reader should read them. Bell was the first in America to reprint, alongside a version of “Chesterfield” and other books on courtly European manners, a series of English anti-Chesterfieldian novels, from Pratt’s The Pupil of Pleasure to Mackenzie’s Man of the World, which raised questions about the desire of American elites to “anglicize” by imitating the manners and mores of the British upper class. Bell was also the first in America to reprint Emma Corbett, a transatlantically popular novel which re-evaluated the transatlantic military code, as well as the British–American “family relationship” shattered by the war, alongside novels such as Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling, military works and heroic plays, both native and foreign. The chapters in this book can be read both temporally and spatially. Read in sequence, they move diachronically from the late seventeenth century to the revolutionary war, and juxtapose different issues, different social and political contexts, different places and different times. But considered spatially and synchronically, they deal with stories that were reprinted on both sides of the Atlantic, often decade after decade. With few exceptions, these are also stories which were issued again in New England and New York during the 1790s, whatever their original publication or reprint date, and which offered readers there a history of their present which memorialized the new Republic’s humble but feisty social origins and long-standing transatlantic links. To integrate these stories into current practices, I have deployed authorial names or personae whenever we know them, and have focused more on books than magazines. But I have not attempted to offer an encompassing master-narrative or to make each text demonstrate a single thesis. I have tried, instead, to explore shared British and American stories and genres through contemporary practices and through some of the different possible ways in which the excellent available scholarship in literary history, British and American history, the new Atlantic history, the history of the book and the history of reading can be used to shed light on the historical meanings and migrations of texts. I have had to leave out a great deal. This book is a first pass through a far richer field of transatlantically reprinted eighteenth-century narratives that has largely lain

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fallow as such, in order to take a look at least at some of what is there and – I hope – show why it may be of interest. What follows is a multiply interconnected series of transatlantic tableaux from which a variety of recurrent concerns emerge. Together, they tell their own story about women, the poor and the déclassé, and about the migration of stories in the Atlantic world.

PA R T I

“Poor man’s country”

I n troduc tion Several influential prose narratives first emerged in England between 1719 and 1727 as immediate critical responses to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Neglected or dismissed by modern critics, but exceptionally popular both in Britain and in America well into the nineteenth century, these narratives provided British, and later American, readers with important alternative representations of the Atlantic world. Unlike Defoe’s novel, Crusoe epitomes, Chetwood’s Captain Boyle, Aubin’s Noble Slaves, and Longueville’s The Hermit spoke to an England – and later to an America – which had not yet achieved its future strength either as a well-forged nation or as an imperial power. They told of mariners, merchants, servants and female travelers who had to venture out into a brutal Atlantic world still dominated by other nations, without adequate navies, protective convoys, or security of tenure in colonized lands. Rather than exemplify the “colonial mastery of the West,” their images of “extended subjugation and individualist triumph” as often as not involved their protagonists’ subjugation as white slaves, and survival, escape or gain against great odds.1 Written after the Peace of Utrecht, Britain’s first great victory over her imperial rivals, many of these stories tactfully presented themselves as historical: Crusoe epitomes, Captain Boyle, Noble Slaves and The Hermit placed the events they recounted before 1713. But in incorporating and addressing elements of Barbary and Indian captivity narratives as well as of mariner, pirate and corsair tales, they also intimated that for ordinary mariners, voyagers, sojourners and commercial adventurers, little had in reality yet changed. By beginning their voyages with, or centering them on a Barbary captivity, several of these stories presented the Barbary pirates who haunted the Straits of Gibraltar as a serious barrier to the Atlantic. They remind us, as Barbara Fuchs puts it, that both “Spain and England expanded 21

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into New World empires against a background of continuous European struggles against Islam.”2 But for some contemporary writers in Britain, North America and the West Indies, the juxtaposition of Barbary and African captivity, and of white and black slavery on the same Atlantic coast, inspired invidious comparison, and gave birth to an insistent late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century transatlantic antislavery discourse. Consistently in print in Britain throughout the eighteenth century, and copiously reprinted in America during the 1790s and early 1800s, these migrant fictions therefore link the transatlantic antislavery discourses, free-trade arguments and captivity narratives at the turn of the eighteenth century to those at the turn of the nineteenth. The novels first issued in what can be described as the first generation of reactions to Robinson Crusoe (1719–27), which are discussed in Chapters 1 through 3, highlighted historical dimensions of the Atlantic world that Defoe had marginalized, downplayed or entirely overlooked. Considered in terms of their first publication dates, they follow a linear trajectory. The epitomized Crusoes explored in Chapter 1 turned outwards to refocus Defoe’s story on Robinson’s encounters with Moors, Africans, Caribs, Spaniards and the Portuguese in a dangerous, multinational Atlantic, where everyone was enslaving and being enslaved. Ashton’s Memorial (like The Hermit, Charlotta Dupont, Captain Falconer, Pierre Viaud and others) portrayed even shipwrecked denizens of the Atlantic world as inhabitants of a known and populated, multinational sea, where irregular communities sprang up in the interstices of states and empires.3 These novels also indicated why Defoe’s “Reflections, as well Religious as Moral” were suspect, and therefore excised or dismissed, by those holding more mainstream Anglican or Puritan views. Pursuing this line while giving powerful expression to a late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century, transatlantic Christian antislavery discourse which Defoe had ignored, Penelope Aubin, discussed in Chapter 2, treated conversion or apostasy – rather than finding God within the terms of his own faith as Robinson did  – as the really pressing religious issue facing enslaved or captured Protestants in an Atlantic still dominated by Muslims and Roman Catholics. And where Chetwood, discussed in Chapter 3, corrected Defoe’s pacific homo solus idea of “economic individualism” by describing how mariners and merchants actually made their fortunes as smugglers through economic exchange in the Atlantic’s widespread, unofficial and often violent, trans-imperial economy, Longueville gave a far less idealized account than Defoe’s of what drove Britons to embark on Atlantic adventures and of what they sought from the New World.

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In this linear sequence, Aubin’s work could be described as representing the first of several generic challenges both to heroic Atlantic stories of masculine adventure and to contemporary criticism of Robinson Crusoe which opposed the “Historicall” to “Romance.” Recognizing that standard features of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century romances were already firmly grounded in the historical, and that they permitted her to highlight women’s heroism in the Atlantic world, Aubin used generic features of romance, combined with narrative elements borrowed from American woman-centered Indian captivity narratives and from the providence tale, to address contemporary historical events. Her formula proved so successful that, after the commercial failure of his purely “Historicall” and excessively factual critique of Defoe in Captain Falconer, Chetwood combined Romance (in the form of rewrites of Aubin’s scenes) with Adventures founded in fact, to produce his most popular and frequently reprinted story, Captain Boyle. Longueville too experimented with genre combinations, juxtaposing a travel story, a criminal biography and an utopian hermit tale in the original three-part version of The Hermit. But a different mode of generic challenge, that was equally traditional in its way, together with a different view of history, appeared in what figures here as the second generation of reactions to tales of heroic masculine adventure à la Crusoe.4 Three such narratives, all first issued during the second half of the eighteenth century, are discussed in Chapter 4. Using a variety of techniques, from anti-heroes to ironic, satirical or subversive rewrites of conventional generic topoi, Bickerstaff’s Ambrose Gwinett, Goadby’s Bampfylde-Moore Carew, and Tyler’s Algerine Captive punctured heroic representations of men achieving success and fabulous wealth through Atlantic adventures, and returning home to peace, prosperity and universal rejoicing in their father’s house. Their characterizations of the adventuring poor as hapless victims of larger Atlantic forces both at home and abroad, picked up on elements that were already present in a minor way in earlier stories. But by foregrounding these elements to turn the literature of adventure into a literature of misadventure, they revealed the propaganda embedded in literary convention and the wish-fulfillment passing for historical reality. However, this conventional linear trajectory based on the novels’ first publication date must be supplemented by the novels’ diverse afterlives, by the zig-zagging complexities of Atlantic history, by the many ways stories were reframed or altered by British and American editors and printers, and by each story’s multiple local and transatlantic temporalities. When reprinted in Philadelphia or Boston during the 1790s, for instance,

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without their original dates and often without their original attributions, these stories were, for all practical purposes, contemporary; they would also have been read in any order in which they happened to have been bought, borrowed or found. And a story reprinted in a different version, in a different literary market place, or decades after its first issue, figured in an entirely different literary, social and historical constellation from that in which it had figured on its first appearance. It also related to different literary and historical events – a point frequently underlined by local printers and booksellers in their texts or paratexts. The chapters that follow therefore pursue several dimensions, one of which – the linear chronological trajectory based on the novels’ first date of publication – serves only as a convenient string on which to hang the changing contexts, shifting temporalities, altered presentations, and crisscrossing Atlantic stories of these stories.

C h apt e r 1

Strange adventures

Crusoe epitomes were the earliest and most enduring of several transatlantic stories that challenged the realism and ideology of Robinson Crusoe, and rewrote it as a very different book. Crusoe epitomes are paired here with Ashton’s Memorial, a double-layered narrative which issued from Marblehead, Massachusetts in 1725 and was reprinted in London in 1726. These stories highlight contemporaries’ distrust of Defoe’s “Reflections, as well Religious as Moral,” and their insistence that Atlantic narratives be “Historicall” or “founded on fact.” In the process, they exhibit the strange adventures of a story, as well as of a hero. But to understand what was at stake in the story’s adventures, as well as the importance of abridgement in transatlantic print culture, it will be helpful to begin by briefly considering how epitome or abridgement (invariably treated as synonyms in eighteenth-century dictionaries) were viewed and used. I approach this question here through the contemporary controversy over the epitomizing of Defoe’s novel. On e pit om e or a bri d g e m e n t :  T h e c a s e of De f oe The often cited boast about Robinson Crusoe which Charles Gildon placed in the mouth of his character, Daniel Defoe – that “there is not an old woman that can go to the Price of it, but buys [the] Life and Adventures” – proved truer of epitomes and abridgements, than of Defoe’s original.1 There were at least 136 English abridgements of the novel during the eighteenth century – more than twice the number of reprints of the full length novel  – and this does not include the thirty-nine American abridgements published between 1774 and 1800, or serialization of the story in The London Post.2 More men and women on both sides of the Atlantic knew Crusoe through epitomes than through Defoe’s narrative. This is no small matter. For from the earliest abridgement, published in 1719 immediately after Defoe’s Life and Strange Surprising Adventures 25

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of Robinson Crusoe, epitomized Crusoes not only “strip[ped]” the novel of Defoe’s “Reflections, as well Religious as Moral.” They also decentered Robinson and added details to the adventures, to create a significantly different representation of the Atlantic world and of the Englishman’s place within it. Less what James Joyce called “the symbol of British conquest” and the “true prototype of the British colonist” than a representative of the often victimized British common man, this other Robinson Crusoe risked danger, capture and death for a livelihood, to see the world, or for a place to settle, in a multinational Atlantic world, where everyone was enslaving everyone and Britain’s dominion of the seas was not yet assured. The fact that, on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the century, all the major eighteenth-century English language abridgements of Robinson Crusoe for adult readers were versions of one another, only increased the impact of the matter-of-fact, opportunist and often subaltern, Atlantic adventurer who was their hero. Defoe’s printer and publisher, William Taylor, was therefore partly justified in complaining that in the “pretended Abridgement of this Book … the Author’s Sense throughout is wholly mistaken,”3 and in comparing this to “Robbing on the Highway.”4 The abridgement had hijacked the book as a saleable commodity by making it smaller, lighter and “more portable,” and by “lower[ing] its price to the Circumstances of most People.”5 Taylor, who owned the copyright to Defoe’s version of the story, therefore objected bitterly that abridgement was an “Injury Men do the Proprietor of [a] work” and “a Practice all honest Men abhor.”6 Twentiethcentury editors, bibliographers and critics, who prized originality, great masters and carefully reconstructed urtexts, agreed. As a result, Crusoe abridgements were marginalized as “juvenile literature,” and Gildon’s observation that Taylor’s objection to abridgement was “absurd” was dismissed. But Gildon was right both from a proprietary and from a writerly point of view. Taylor’s argument was an absurd one to make to “men of Trade,” given what he called their “Envy” and “that Regret which they have entertain’d at their having no share in it”;7 for men of trade could easily and legally do what they proceeded to do in 1722: publish a second abridgement of Defoe’s novel in the property of which several prominent publishers blatantly shared. It was an equally absurd argument to make to writers, who obtained no part of proprietor-publishers’ profits, for whom an epitome counted as a manuscript that could be sold for a lump sum just like any “original.” At this time, moreover, epitome or abridgement was regarded as a classical genre, and as “the Practice of all Ages and Nations.”8 Latin grammar schools taught pupils to write epitomes, along

On epitome or abridgement: the case of Defoe

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with themes, verse and translations; and there were therefore thousands of abridgements of “Books of real intrinsic Value” on the market, that were aimed at an adult readership.9 Indeed, several eighteenth-century authors (including Dr Johnson) published their own epitomes of their own larger works, to make them shorter, clearer, cheaper, and more accessible to a wider and less erudite public.10 As a rival “man of trade” pointed out, therefore, to present “the Abridging of a Work [as] scandalous and ridiculous,” as Taylor had tried to do, was to attack a branch of the trade on which a good deal of the trade was riding.11 Unlike some chapbook abridgements, longer or “loose” epitomes were more than just the poor, cheap skeleton of a given text. Most eighteenthcentury epitomizers insisted in their prefaces that epitome did not consist only of “stripping” a text of inessential language, reflections and scenes and of “divest[ing] it of every unnecessary embarrassment” in order to “clearly exhibit the whole substance of an author, without admitting anything superfluous.”12 Epitomizing or abridging included altering and/or adding to what their author had written – to amend him where he was mistaken, to update him by inserting later facts, developments or discoveries, and even to introduce the epitomizer’s own views and reflections. Crusoe abridgements addressed to an adult readership demanded to be read in these terms. The Preface to the “faithful” three volume abridgement of 1722 assured readers that “there are not only many Errors corrected, but several palpable and gross Contradictions rectified and emended.”13 The Preface to the multiple editions of The Wonderful Life and most Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1737), which was also sometimes reprinted in other epitomes, “acquaints the reader” that “in this new Epitome of The Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe … all possible care has been taken to preserve the history entire, to correct some mistakes in former impressions, and to add a considerable number of acts and material observations that have lately occurred, and were never published but in this edition.”14 Equally disconcerting to our post-copyright assumptions, epitomizers felt little or no obligation to use the same words that their author had used; they frequently rewrote. In its looser mode, then, epitome or abridgement was a form of collaborative writing, and a method of producing new texts from old. This can be illustrated both on the level of the paragraph and on the level of the episode even from an apparently minor incident, such as that in which Crusoe joins with the English Captain to recapture the latter’s ship from mutineers and get them both off the island. Here is the account of Crusoe’s initial sighting of the English ship, first as rendered by Defoe,

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and then as it appears in The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1722), the epitome which is usually closest to Defoe’s original: a) I was surpriz’d, when turning my Eyes to the Sea, I presently saw a Boat at about a League and Half’s Distance, standing in for the Shore, with a Shoulder of Mutton Sail, as they call it, and the Wind blowing pretty fair to bring them in; also I observ’d presently, that they did not come from that Side which the Shore lay on, but from the Southermost End of the Island. Upon this I call’d Friday in, and bid him lie close, for these were not the People we look’d for, and that we might not know yet whether they were Friends or Enemies. In the next Place, I went in to fetch my Perspective Glass, to see what I could make of them; and having taken the Ladder out, I climb’d up to the Top of the Hill, as I used to do when I was apprehensive of any thing, and to take my View the plainer without being discover’d. I had scarce set my Foot on the Hill, when my Eye Plainly discover’d a Ship lying at an Anchor, at about two Leagues and a half’s Distance from me South-south-east, but not above a League and a half from the Shore. By my Observation it appear’d plainly to be an English Ship, and the Boat appear’d to be an English Long-Boat. I cannot express the Confusion I was in, tho’ the Joy of seeing a Ship and one who I had Reason to believe was Mann’d by my own Countrymen, and consequently Friends, was such as I cannot Describe; but yet I had some secret Doubts hung about me, I cannot tell from whence they came, bidding me to keep upon my Guard. In the first Place, it occur’d to me to consider what Business an English Ship could have in that part of the World, since it was not the Way to or from any Part of the World, where the English had any Traffick; and I knew there had been no Storms to drive them in there, as in Distress; and that if they were English really, it was most probable that they were here upon no good Design; and that I had better continue as I was, than fall into the Hands of Thieves and Murderers. Let no Man despise the secret Hints and Notices of Danger, which sometimes are given him, when he may think there is no Possibility of its being real. That such Hints and Notices are given us, I believe few that have made any Observations of things can deny; that they are certain Discoveries of an invisible World, and a Converse of Spirits, we cannot doubt; and if the Tendency of them seems to be to warn us of Danger, why should we not suppose they are from some friendly Agent, whether supreme, or inferior, and subordinate, is not the Question; and that they are given for our Good? The present Question abundantly confirms me in the Justice of this Reasoning; for had I not been made cautious by this secret Admonition, come it from whence it will, I had been undone inevitably, and in worse Condition than before, as you will see presently.15

On epitome or abridgement: the case of Defoe

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b) … “looking towards the Sea, I perceiv’d a Boat about a League and a half distant, standing in for the Shore, with the Wind fair. I beheld they did not come from the Side where the Land lay on, but from the Southermost End of the Island: So these being none of the People we wanted, I order’d Friday to lie still, till such Time as I descended from the Mountain, which with my Ladder I now ascended, in order to discover more fully what they were: And now, with the Help of my Prospective Glass, I plainly perceived an English Ship, which I concluded it to be, by the Fashion of its Long Boat, which fill’d me with such uncommon Transports of Joy, that I cannot tell how to describe; and yet some secret Doubts hung about me, proceeding from I know not what Cause, as tho’ I had Reason to be on my Guard. And indeed I would have no Man contemn the secret Hints and Intimations of Danger, which very often are given, when he may imagine there is no Possibility of its being real: For had not I been warned by this silent Admonition, I had been in a worse Station than before, and perhaps inevitably ruin’d.16

The epitome clarifies the physical dynamics of Defoe’s setting by eliminating repetitions and streamlining physical movement – something it continues to do throughout the complex military maneuvers which follow. But it does a lot more too. It adds detail – for example, the detail of when and how Crusoe knew for certain that it was an English ship (i.e. from the “fashion of its long-boat” when he later sees the latter more clearly through his glass). It excises elements which contradict one another: for instance, if one wished to assert that people receive “secret Hints and Notices” of unsuspected dangers, it made no sense to the epitomizer to accompany this assertion with solidly rational and historical reasons for knowing that the men on the ship were liable to be dangerous, as Defoe had done. These reasons were better omitted. Proceeding by excisions, by paraphrase and by word substitutions, the epitomizer also subtly changed Defoe’s characterization of Robinson in this paragraph. In Defoe’s version, Crusoe’s fear (or paranoia) extends even to the realm of spirits. He is no surer of agents of the invisible world than of his own countrymen. Subsequent events prove him right, confirming that fear, a priori doubt and extreme caution are the safest ways to deal with approaching strangers, even when these are certainly English. In the epitomizer’s version, by contrast, Crusoe trusts his countrymen, and greets the recognition that this is an English ship with unmixed joy. It therefore takes a secret intimation of danger to warn him that he ought to be wary of Englishmen, of all people. Here subsequent events confirm the value of listening to apparently irrational “silent Admonition” of danger even when one “may imagine there is no Possibility of its being real.”

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The epitomizer continued to re-characterize Robinson in subtle ways throughout the episode. For Defoe, a key element, repeatedly illustrated and stressed, was Robinson’s insistence that the captain and everyone else recognize and obey his authority as the Governor of the island. Of all Defoe’s elaborations on this point, the epitomizer included only Robinson’s two conditions for helping the captain to recapture his ship from the mutineers:  that the latter recognize his authority as long as he remained on the island, and that the captain give him free passage home to England, should they successfully recapture his ship. For the rest, perhaps thinking that the conduct of Defoe’s Robinson smacked of the absolutism that the Glorious Revolution had disavowed, this epitomizer described only friendly cooperation between the captain and Robinson. He showed them working together to use the captured mutineers’ fear of being sent to England to be hanged and the offer of a free pardon, to persuade their captives to help them recapture the captain’s ship from the other mutineers. The Wonderful Life and Most Surprizing Adventures (1737) did not include any of this. This epitomizer gave a more instrumental account of the arrival of the English ship: Looking towards the sea, I perceived a Boat about a League and half’s Distance, standing directly in for the shore. I soon found, that these were none of the Company that I expected; for by the Help of my Glass I found that this Boat must belong to some Ship; which by casting my Eyes about, I plainly discovered lying at Anchor, at some Distance at Sea, which by the Fashion of her Long-Boat etc I concluded must be an English Vessel. Great were my Transports upon this unexpected Sight, which brought into my Mind fresh Notions of Deliverance: and yet I had some cautionary Thoughts which I confess were of use to me afterwards.17

Here Robinson spots the long-boat before the ship, indeed sight of the long-boat is what makes him look around for the ship. And Robinson’s joy at the realization that the ship is English is connected to the possibility of deliverance, rather than to the sight of his countrymen. This epitome omitted all questions of authority and governance, “shorten[ing] the relation as much as possible” (78) to go straight to the business of rescuing the captain from his captors, and the ship from the mutineers. Its focus was on Robinson “concerting measures” to seize the moment and make those “Notions of Deliverance” real. However, a later Philadelphia version of The Wonderful Life published in 1787, which mixed elements from The Wonderful Life with elements from The Life and Most Surprizing Adventures, filled this episode out by including a fragment that had been omitted from both these epitomes.

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Reframing the passage at the beginning and end with language of its own, it reintroduced a snippet from Defoe’s original description of the effect upon the mutineers of Robinson’s efforts to break them up into smaller and more easily vincible groups: We left Friday and the mate to pursue their business in decoying the fellows up into the woods, by shouting and hallooing, while we surprised the two they had left, one lying in the boat, the other asleep on the shore … Several hours after Friday came back and told me they had heartily tired the Men, by hallooing to them from different places; for he had heard them complain, they were so tired, they could not walk. At length we saw them all go to the boat, which was aground in the creek, the tide having ebbed out. When they saw the two men gone, they called to one another in the most lamentable manner saying they were got in an inchanted island, that was either inhabited and they should be murdered, or that there were devils in it and they should be devoured. They hallooed and called their comrades by their names, and then ran about wringing their hands like men in despair; I drew my ambuscade nearer, and ordered Friday and the captain to creep upon their hands and feet … 18

This epitome thus transferred belief in the evil agents of an invisible power from Robinson to the mutineers, to demonstrate that such beliefs were foolish and superstitious delusions. In the case of Crusoe abridgements, then, alteration was an ongoing process. As the epitomized Robinson Crusoes of 1719 and 1722 wandered or erred through their various London imprints and through diverse printings in Edinburgh, Birmingham, Dublin, Chester, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Worcester and elsewhere, they disseminated themselves into a plurality of versions which shared family resemblances, differed in detail from each other, and distanced themselves incrementally from Defoe’s original.19 The work of many hands on both sides of the ocean and existing only in its versions, epitomized Crusoes became a quintessentially transatlantic text. Nevertheless, since they necessarily preserved the “chief heads” of their original, it is possible to identify some general features that Crusoe epitomes shared. T h e o t h e r Robi ns on Crus oe All Crusoe abridgement for adults preserved the “chief heads” of Defoe’s narrative, while cutting, and altering or adding, to amend the faults that early critics found in it. As the Preface to Defoe’s Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe admitted in 1719, Defoe’s Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe had been “reproached with being a

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Romance” and with “errors in Geography,” as well as with “Inconsistency in the Relation and Contradiction in the Fact.”20 Epitomized Crusoes directly addressed the most damning of these criticisms for a narrative which had been published without Defoe’s name, as the genuine memoirs of one “Robinson Crusoe, mariner of York”: that the narrative was a “romance,” not the true history of a living person that it pretended to be, and that Crusoe’s adventures were both “invented” and “impossible.” The Prefaces to the two most reprinted and constantly altered of the longer epitomes, The Life and most Surprizing Adventures and The Wonderful Life and most Surprizing Adventures, dealt with the objection that “the Story is fictitious” as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe eventually did in its Preface to Part III, where Defoe described his narrative as “Allegorical” but “Historicall” too. But they granted Defoe his “metaphorical way of Writing” while refusing to follow him there. As The Wonderful Life pointed out in a severe new paragraph at the beginning of Crusoe’s narrative: “He that pretends to publish to the world an account of his own life and actions, is doubtless under the strongest obligations to confine himself within the strictest rules of modesty and truth, and this I humbly assure the publick I must [most] solemnly determine in the following narration.” Epitomes eliminated the “romance” in Defoe’s narrative by emphasizing and expanding the historically or culturally true elements in it, at the expense of the metaphorical and “immodestly” self-centered ones. Epitomized Crusoes decentered Robinson by sharply cutting down Defoe’s portrayal of “the solitary man on his island” as well as by cutting out most of his self-referential reflections. This virtually erased those aspects of the island experience and of the novel’s overall structure which have led us to view Defoe’s Crusoe as the prototype of economic individualism and as a practitioner of spiritual autobiography.21 As Martin Green and Richard Phillips have pointed out, nineteenth-century abridgements, which cut out most of what was before and after the island adventure, gave readers and critics “a quite static story of survival by means of work,” a “white, middle-class, Christian British” hero, and a “dialectical geography of home and away” in which everything Robinson does while “away” on his island is a “comment on his home.”22 This is still the Crusoe to which we are most accustomed. Eighteenth-century epitomes, by contrast, downplayed the island, expanded on what was before and after it, and turned Crusoe’s attention outward – to matters of sea-craft (he is, after all, a mariner) and to his exchanges with Moors, Africans, Portuguese, Caribs and Spaniards – to make his experiences among the diverse peoples of the Atlantic world the principal focus of his adventures.23

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Scraping away from Defoe’s narrative the giant shadow cast by Robinson’s psyche brought to the fore Defoe’s descriptions of Robinson’s experiences in ships on the ocean, in Barbary captivity, along the coast of Africa, and in Brazil. Cuts similarly reoriented Crusoe’s island experience outward to his encounters with the footstep and the cannibals, his relations with Friday, and his part in quelling a mutiny on the ship which ultimately returned him to Europe. To Defoe’s credit there was, indeed, a great deal of the “Historicall” already there, however perfunctorily rendered and easy to overlook. Epitomizers foregrounded this, and by means of careful alterations and the addition of telling details, introduced geographical and cultural information absent from Defoe’s account. In amending Defoe’s geography by ensuring that each adventure had a precise place on the map, eighteenth-century epitomes turned Robinson Crusoe into a circum-Atlantic novel. This is particularly marked in early American versions. The voyage of epitomized Crusoes around the Atlantic rim begins with Crusoe’s capture on a Guinea slaver near the Canary islands just beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, and with his Barbary captivity at Sallee, the only North African port on the Atlantic, just up the coast from those Straits. Crusoe’s escape from Sallee in a longboat with Xury takes them further along the coast, “beyond the dominion of the Moroccan King,” to West Africa, where African natives along the shore supply them with food and water. Crusoe and Xury are close to the Cape de Verde islands and heading to Gambia when a Portuguese ship rescues them from the longboat and carries Crusoe across to Brazil. When Brazilian merchants persuade Crusoe to go back to West Africa for slaves, the storm which drives Crusoe off course carries him up from Brazil into the Caribbean. Crusoe is shipwrecked after passing the British colony of Barbados. In some early American versions, he goes up a hill on his Caribbean island and thinks he can spot the American mainland. In one American version, Crusoe uses his knowledge of geography to conclude that he must be looking at South, not North America: “when it was a clear day, [I] could discover land, but could not tell whether it was an island or the continent; neither could I tell what place this might be; only thought it was America, and consequently that part of the country which lies between the Spanish territories and Brasils, which abound with cannibals who devour human kind.”24 In all versions, the ship which rescues Crusoe from his island “captivity” takes him back to England. But Crusoe almost immediately travels on from London to Lisbon, as much to complete the circle by returning to the Straits of Gibraltar as to settle his affairs.

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This geographical specificity helped to foreground the fluid identities of Englishmen in the Atlantic before Britannia ruled the waves, by making more visible Crusoe’s repeated transformations from slaver to slave and slave to slaver as he circumnavigates the ocean: slave trader on the captured Guinea ship and slave in Sallee; slave in Sallee and slave owner in Brazil; would-be slave trader in Brazil and “captive” on the island; captive on the island and slave owner again. Nor do Crusoe’s fluid identities stop here, for depending on the opportunities that present themselves in different parts of the Atlantic, he is also alternately mariner, merchant, fisherman and planter:  mariner when he goes to sea, merchant on the Guinea slaver, fisherman in Sallee, mariner on the longboat, planter in Brazil, merchant on the Brazilian voyage to Africa, planter on the island and mariner again. In epitomized Crusoes, the performative fluidity of Atlantic identities is not halted by recording the reflections of a confessional Protestant self whose singular identity is fashioned from inwardness, and fixed by memory and writing. Epitomizers downplayed those ordinary, and supposedly culturally neutral, everyday details in Defoe’s narrative which Ian Watt characterized as “formal realism” and Virginia Woolf as the realism of the “earthenware pot,” in favor of specific historical, cultural and professional details that evoked the knowledge and actual experiences of mariners, Barbary captives, and sojourners in the New World. Along with exactly how Crusoe-the-mariner was sailing and navigating his ship or boat during each voyage and adjusting his rigging during storms, they described the practices of Barbary Rovers who hoisted a friendly European flag to trick merchant ships into thinking that it was safe to allow them to approach, or who chased European ships with their faster and lighter vessels till they could catch up with them and swarm on board. Some versions expanded on Defoe’s description of the battle at sea between janissaries from the Barbary ship and vastly outnumbered European sailors desperately fighting for their liberty along with their vessel. At least one version introduced a speech by the merchant ship’s captain urging his sailors to fight courageously for their liberty, described Mussulman contempt for Christian “dogs,” and added an account of the chained sailors’ sufferings under hatches while the Barbary captain conducted them to Sallee – all common features of early English, and later of early American, Barbary captivity narratives. Once in Barbary, epitomes expanded on what Defoe only intimated:  that newly acquired slaves were always taken to the Emperor, who chose those he wanted for himself, before the rest were put on sale in a market place outside his castle. Or they described Crusoe as

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being confined to a cell or bagnio for European slaves in between labor assignments, as the memoirs of genuine Barbary captives often said they were. Historical and cultural details as well as dates were likewise inserted to represent Brazil as what it was during the later seventeenth century, when the action supposedly takes place – a flourishing Portuguese sugar economy and the place from which British planters on the Caribbean islands initially learned to grow and process sugar. Crusoe begins his plantation in Brazil, as new arrivals in the Caribbean had, by planting tobacco, since tobacco could be grown on comparatively small plots, with little capital, by a working planter who had only one or two indentured servants or family members to help him. When tobacco has made Crusoe rich enough to acquire sufficient land and think in terms of economies of scale, he turns to sugar, and finds, like other sugar planters, that he needs multiple slaves to grow and produce it.25 One early American version of The Life and Surprising Adventures highlighted the fact, already in Defoe, that Crusoe’s merchant-sponsored voyage from Brazil to West Africa to obtain slaves was a smuggling venture, by indicating that the Portuguese king reserved for himself a monopoly on the Brazilian slave trade, which merchants and planters had an obvious interest in breaking: After enjoining me to secrecy (it being an infringement on the powers of the Kings of Portugal and Spain), they [the Brazilian merchants] told me that they had in mind to fit out a ship to go to Guinea in order to stock the plantation with Negroes, which as they could not be publically sold, they would divide among them; and if I would go their supercargo in the Ship, to manage the trading part, I should have an equal share of the Negroes, without providing any Stock.26

This epitome thus drew attention to the prevalence of smuggling in the Americas and to the extent to which life on and around the ocean remained both opportunist and outside the law. This point recurs in epitomes’ accounts of the mutiny aboard the ship that ultimately rescues Crusoe from the island and in their description of the mutineers as pirates. Rather than merging his island with hazily distant and unexplored parts of the globe, epitomized Crusoes introduced cultural details both about the practices of native Caribs on the neighboring island where they lived, and about their occasional visits to “Crusoe’s” island. Historically, this use of islands corresponded to Carib and European practice: European settlement of the Caribbean had begun on those “uninhabited” islands, which

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Caribs living permanently on neighboring islands used only to grow specific plants, and to conduct specific ceremonies. Some American versions therefore show Crusoe finding traces of native agriculture on his island in the form of stalks of cotton or rice, as well as watching a cannibal feast. One went so far as to say that Crusoe found ready to hand on his island “the Catava Root, which the Indians make Bread of; also Plants of Aloes and Sugar Canes.”27 The Wonderful Life and Surprising Adventures completes this thought about occupying supposedly “empty” islands by continuing its narrative into Defoe’s Farther Adventures to describe Crusoe’s “colonization” of “his” island with Spanish, English and other peoples. Thanks to such changes, epitomized Crusoes came increasingly to resemble the life writings of genuine mariners and captives. Whether by Englishmen or Americans, and however otherwise altered by the editors or ghostwriters who wrote with or for their often illiterate or skimpily educated subjects, the memoirs of genuine captives and mariners are amazingly dispassionate. They stick to the sequence of events and focus on facts – on what happened, on the way it happened, and on the culture or environment in which it happened  – rather than on their own thoughts, feelings and experience of events. Especially but not exclusively before 1750, captivity memoirs were almost always what The Wonderful Life called “modest,” in the sense that their writers used the facts of the history, ethnology, a flat, matter-of-fact style, quotations from the Bible and/or third person narration, to hide their personal reactions from scrutiny: “Our feelings at this unwelcome sight are more easily imagined than described.” “I have not attempted a full description of the many hellish tortures and punishments those piratical sea rovers invent and inflict on the unfortunate Christians who may unhappily fall into their hands.” “My Afflictions are not to be set forth in Words to the Extent of them.”28 It is as if their subjects were so profoundly ashamed  – of having been humiliated by standing naked in a slave market, of having been made to suffer by the bastinado, torture, beatings, rape and starvation, of having been so abjected and deprived of personhood – that they were unable to fully ­re-envision it, or unwilling to portray themselves to the public as beings who had been so helpless, so violated, and so unmanned. In amending what contemporaries viewed as inconsistencies and contradictions in Defoe’s narrative, epitomized Crusoes also changed the meanings of key scenes and, with them, the ideology of the whole. Crusoe’s initial argument with his parents about going to sea was one such scene. Gildon indicated what was at stake here for an England where “our Navigation produces both our Safety and our Riches” and where

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the mariners needed to man the British navy and merchant fleets were frequently in short supply. In this environment, Gildon said, Defoe’s portrayal of the efforts of Crusoe’s father to “dissuade and deter” Robinson from going to sea, and his representation of Crusoe’s misadventures as punishment for disobeying his father’s wishes, were contrary to “the public good.” It was, moreover, absurd and contradictory to blame Robinson’s miseries on his disobedience of his father and then to make him “Fortunate in all [his] Adventures, even the most unlucky, and give him at last a plentiful Fortune and safe Retreat.” For the former inculcated obedience to parents, but the latter showed that the son had been right to disobey. Contrary to every principle of poetic justice, he was rewarded for his disobedience.29 Epitomes rewrote the initial scene between Crusoe and his father to obviate this contradiction. All eliminated Defoe’s encomium to middleclass British life, and many erased all reference to the middle class: there was no preaching of the benefits of remaining at home.30 To eliminate or downplay the unpatriotic paternal prohibition from going to sea, epitomes also softened parental objections to Crusoe’s choice of profession into expressions of prudence or natural feeling. In The Life and most Surprizing Adventures (1719), Crusoe’s parents object to his going to sea because they fear that he will be killed by Spaniards as his older brother had been, and because “the high tow’ring Thoughts of raising our Condition by wandering Abroad were surrounded with Misery and Danger, and often ended in Confusion and Disappointment” (2). Venturing on the seas was a perilous affair; not everyone who went succeeded in bettering himself; and a parent was bound to say so. Rather than curse his son by declaring that “if [he] did take this foolish Step, God would not bless [him],” as Defoe’s father had done, the father in this epitome concludes by telling Robinson, while “Floods of Tears ran down his aged Cheeks,” that “if you will go, my Prayers shall be offer’d for your Preservation.”31 The earliest American chapbook, The Life of Robinson Crusoe, Mariner (1757) put it more succinctly: “my father particularly lay[ed] before me the Danger of trusting to the Sea and the Hazard of meeting our enemy’s ships; also the ill Fortune which had attended my eldest Brother, who contrary to his inclination, purchased a Commission in the Army and was killed” (3).32 Along with the plain history of storms, captures and escapes in foreign lands, this adjustment profoundly altered the structure and ideology of Defoe’s narrative. Epitomized Crusoes showed how right Crusoe’s father was to caution him about the dangers and miseries he risked by Atlantic voyages. They exposed readers in imagination to the hazards that

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ordinary Englishmen might face in the Atlantic. But they also showed that these miseries and dangers were survivable. It was possible to escape from Barbary slavery, to find a ship to rescue one from a longboat on the open seas, to live through storms and shipwreck even if one were the only person left alive. It was possible to find friendly people in foreign nations who would lend a stranger a helping hand. And though perhaps not everyone succeeded, it was possible to be “Fortunate in all [one’s] Adventures, even the most unlucky,” and return home, at last, with “a plentiful Fortune” as Crusoe had. The ideological burden here becomes clear if we regard the regular and repeated publication in Britain of the narratives of genuine Barbary captives and of real shipwrecks during the seventeenth- and early eighteenth centuries as protest from below:  punctual reminders of the ordinary Englishmen who were paying with their lives, liberties and sufferings for the imperial aims and economic gains of governing elites, as well as for government failures to secure the seas. While English people were being tapped in Church every Sunday for funds to redeem Barbary captives; while “fathers and wives” were petitioning Parliament to rescue their sons and husbands from captivity; national weakness and government failures could remain no secret from the populace at large.33 The other Robinson Crusoe coopted such sights, memoirs and protests, and robbed them of their sting. It not only indicated that it was possible to escape captivity and shipwreck and return safe and whole, but also seduced readers with the possibility of achieving something better  – land and amazing wealth – if they were courageous enough to venture and clever enough to overcome. Epitomized Crusoes thus transformed the Lives and Sufferings of the captured, the abandoned and the shipwrecked into Lives and Surprizing Adventures. They participated in the process of replacing the older significance of the world “adventure” – accident, peril risk – with its modern meaning of daring, hazardous and therefore manly and exciting endeavor. To build an empire in the New World in the teeth of already well-established imperial rivals, Britain needed, not passive sufferers, but daring, flexible, and adventurous young men seeking to make or mend their fortunes in any way they could.34 The other Robinson Crusoe’s positive spin on danger and national weakness, and its resourceful subaltern hero, were also useful in America after the revolutionary war, when preserving the independence won on the battlefield depended on sustaining the new Republic’s Atlantic commerce. No longer under Britain’s protective imperial umbrella and without an American navy for convoys, the new Republic’s merchant ships regularly

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fell victim to the depredations of Barbary pirates and to the rivalries of the major European powers.35 The Wonderful Life was reprinted once in New York just before the Revolution. Reprints of Crusoe epitomes began to multiply in the Northern maritime states in the 1780s as it became clear that it was open season on the American carrying trade for Barbary pirates, Britain, France and Spain. Jay Fliegelman argued that, when read allegorically in relation to the mother country at the Revolution, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe “offered nothing less than a theologically and hence politically acceptable model of [filial] disobedience.”36 But the epitomized Crusoes that were actually reprinted in America, and with growing frequency after the revolution, ignored the issue of disobedience, and both modeled and rewarded the son who courageously made his independent fortune in the Atlantic against all odds. It is telling, therefore, that even during the 1790s, when they were regularly reprinting full-length European novels, early Republican printers invariably chose to republish Crusoe epitomes rather than Defoe’s original. Reconfiguration of Defoe’s scenes with native peoples was also crucial to epitomized Crusoes’ reconfiguration of Defoe’s ideological content. The inconsistency between Crusoe’s supposed friendship for Xury and his willingness to sell him, which has troubled modern critics, was not the only inconsistency addressed by eighteenth-century abridgers. They noticed that Defoe first described the Africans on the West African coast as “Savages” whom he equated with animals such as lions, tigers and the “Barking, Roaring and Howling … Wild Creatures,” and then showed them, unarmed, freely and peaceably offering Robinson the water and food he desperately needed, without expecting any return. They also noticed the contradiction between Defoe’s description of the Cannibals or Caribs as “nothing but Nature entirely abandon’d of Heaven, and acted by some hellish Degeneracy” (124) and his insistence later that they had “the same Reason, the same Affections, the same Sentiments of Kindness and Obligation, the same Passions and Resentment of Wrongs, the same Sense of Gratitude, Sincerity, Fidelity, and all the Capacities of doing Good and receiving Good, that He [God] had given to us [Europeans]” (151). Epitomes downplayed or eliminated this contradiction, by cutting or entirely erasing Defoe’s negative representations of Africans and Caribs. The Wonderful Life, for instance, represents the natives of the West African coast only through the scene in which they freely and generously give Robinson and Xury food and water. The Wonderful Life also models reciprocity in the form of a voluntary mutual exchange, in which Crusoe

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shoots a lion to repay the natives’ kindness by giving them its flesh for food. Although the European (realistically enough) makes a profit on the deal – he comes away with a skin he can later sell – the epitome makes it clear that Crusoe and Xury’s survival at this point depended on the generosity of the Africans, and that Crusoe’s initial impulse was to find something to give them in return, beyond mere thanks. Xury’s later “willingness” to be indentured for ten years to help Crusoe to find the funds he needs to establish himself in Brazil, is presented in a similar generous light. This aligns Xury and the helpful African natives with the kindly Portuguese captain and the helpful Portuguese son of English parents in Brazil who teaches Crusoe to plant. Together they suggest the outlines of a transnational Atlantic subculture in which people help people to survive regardless of national origin – as Crusoe later helps Spaniards as well as Englishmen to provide for themselves on the island, regardless of longstanding national enmity between England and Spain. At the same time, of course, on an international political and commercial level, Crusoe is embroiled in Barbary, African and Caribbean slavery. He both enslaves and is enslaved. Most epitomized Crusoes responded to slavery implicitly by taking what Moira Ferguson calls “an ameliorist approach” in the island section.37 They portrayed Crusoe’s relationship to Friday as an admirably benevolent one, in which Crusoe-the-master civilizes, converts and provides for his slave’s every need, and in which his slave is faithful, loyal and doubly profitable as a result. But an additional comment on Atlantic slavery is provided by a version of The Life and most Surprizing Adventures that was published in Philadelphia in 1789. This has Friday respond to Crusoe’s “notions about the Cruelty of the Savage” cannibals by explaining that “neither his nation, nor any other nation he knew of, ever eat their fellow creatures, but such whom the law of arms allowed to be devoured, and they were only those whose misfortune it was to be made prisoners of war.”38 Friday here explains the conduct of the cannibals by referring to the lex gentium or law of nations, which held that captives in war forfeited their lives to their captors, and could therefore be killed or enslaved. By putting Crusoe’s foot on his head “as a token that he intended to be my slave for ever,” Friday also models another way in which the lex gentium decreed that people could be legitimately enslaved:  they could voluntarily sell themselves into slavery in return for food and shelter or payment of debts.38 This epitomizer thus used the law of nations to put the cannibals on a par with all the other nations operating in the Atlantic. This made explicit what was already evident in epitomized Crusoes’ circum-Atlantic voyage:  “civilized” or “savage”, all

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obeyed the same law. Barbary Rovers captured and enslaved Europeans from enemy Christian nations; African sold to greedy Europeans captives from inter-tribal African wars; and Englishmen such as Crusoe were Guinea slavers, sold Moors (who were “willing”) to Portuguese slave traders, and happily acquired Caribs as voluntary slaves. Crusoe’s circular voyage around the Atlantic demonstrated that what goes around comes around. The lex gentium or law of nations was a law of omnium contra omnes; it created an Atlantic world where nation cannibalized nation and people of all nations were enslaved, exploited and consumed. Gildon had already struck an abolitionist note in his 1719 critique of Defoe’s novel, by reproaching him for not finding “any Check of Conscience in that infamous Trade of buying and selling Men for Slaves” and for failing to “attribute [Crusoe’s] Shipwreck to this very Cause” rather than to disobey of his father.39 His economy of expression indicates how familiar Gildon expected such antislavery sentiments to be – and with good reason. Antislavery arguments had already been made for nearly fifty years, and in a surprisingly large number of British, North American and West Indian texts, including:  Richard Baxter’s Christian Directory (1673), Richard Ligon’s History of Barbados (1657), Morgan Godwyn’s The Negro and Indian’s Advocate (1680), Thomas Tryon’s Friendly Advice to the Gentlemen Planters of the East and West Indies (1684), John Dunton’s essays in The Athenian Oracle (1704), John Dennis’s Liberty Asserted (1704), Samuel Sewell’s The Selling of Joseph (1700) and Jeremy Collier’s Essays upon Several Moral Subjects (1709). Gildon had no need to explain his remark. But for us to understand the full force of his objection, it is important to remember that many of these early antislavery writings appealed to the Christian’s conscience against one or more aspects of slavery, and described those who bought and sold men for slaves as only nominally Christian. Gildon’s objection therefore cut to the heart of Defoe’s portrayal of Crusoe’s spiritual autobiography. It put in question the Christianity of Crusoe’s conscience, his understanding of Providence, and the validity of a conversion that allowed him to keep and sell slaves. J. Paul Hunter has shown that Gildon’s critique of Robinson Crusoe also involved other attacks on Defoe’s “theological point of view, which seemed to him unsound and ultimately dangerous.”40 This is important because contemporary objections to Defoe’s religious and moral ideas justified – and help to explain – the excision in Crusoe epitomes of Defoe’s “Reflections, as well Religious as Moral.” For those who considered Defoe’s reflections morally or religiously tainted, they were better expunged.

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Strange adventures Prov i de nc e’s prom i s e :   A s h t on’s M e moria l

In 1725, John Barnard, a congregational minister in the fishing town of Marblehead in Massachusetts, joined his voice to contemporary critiques of Robinson Crusoe’s historical and religious validity, by “editing” the narratives of two fishermen from Marblehead who had been captured by pirates, one of whom had spent sixteen months on a deserted island in the Bay of Honduras. The resulting book, Ashton’s Memorial, printed for Samuel Gerrish in Boston in 1725 and reprinted in London the following year, was classified by twentieth-century critics as an “imaginary voyage” that was indebted to Robinson Crusoe.41 In fact, the case was more complex. Barnard’s narrative was “based on fact”: he had written down the stories that the two fishermen involved had recounted to him orally, piecing together what they had told him on several different occasions. But Barnard had also used what they told him for purposes of his own:  to demonstrate God and Providence in action and show where Crusoe’s religious meditations got Providence wrong. To this end, Barnard represented John Ashton, the fisherman who remained on the deserted island, as an exemplification of the proper religious attitudes, and capped the two fishermen’s narratives with a sermon of his own.42 Barnard’s idealized portrayal of Ashton may have seemed a bit over the top even to Samuel Chandler, the dissenting minister and publisher of dissenting theology who co-published Ashton’s Memorial in London. For the English publishers inserted an assurance in the Preface that the fishermen, at least, were speaking true: “I would only add, that I have too great an Opinion of the Vertue of both Persons mentioned (and so, I think have all that know them) to suppose that they would in least entertain the world with Fables instead of Realities.” The English publishers had noticed how often the fishermen’s stories and the construction that Revd. Barnard placed upon those stories diverged; and they guided readers towards discriminating between what the subtitle they added called “the authentic account” and what it called “the signal deliverances.”43 Barnard made it clear in an initial address “To the Reader” why he thought it essential to ensure that those who ventured on the ocean both understood Providence correctly, and “be fortified with the firm Belief of the Governing Providence of God and his Ability to do more than they can ask or think” to deliver them from all the dangers they would face, no matter how hopeless their situation might seem. Without this belief to bolster their courage and give them patience under suffering, he argued, mariners who “fell to the Sons of Violence” would “obtain

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Relief” in “Irregular Ways” – by throwing in their lot with their immoral and atheistic captors, by converting, or by committing suicide. Faith in God’s Providence was the stay of men who had to brave storms, hurricanes, shipwrecks, pirates, privateers, temptation, captivity, foreign prisons, Spaniards and the French in order to promote Atlantic trade in general, and Marblehead’s trade in fish with Jamaica and the West Indies in particular. Because Barnard was writing over the fishermen’s stories, the Memorial points in two somewhat different directions, which address Defoe’s Crusoe in different ways. As he makes clear in his sermon, the most important doctrinal point for Barnard was that “God is able to Deliver them that Serve Him from the Greatest of Enemies and Dangers” (47)44 – ‘those that Serve Him’ being the operative words. God would only “protect and deliver the Servants of God” (48). God’s enemies would feel his wrath. It was therefore necessary for Barnard to portray the fisherman, John Ashton, as a faithful servant of God from the moment he was first captured by pirates, and to show him demonstrating his faithfulness to God and grateful recognition of God’s many deliverances throughout his various ordeals. Barnard reproduced Ashton’s long account of the many efforts the pirates made to persuade him and his kinsman, Nicholas Merritt, to sign their articles and join them, and the men’s repeated staunch refusals to do so despite the pirates’ beatings, threats of death and promises of great wealth. Viewing these repeated refusals as exemplary resistance to the temptations of the Devil, Barnard emphasized Ashton’s horror at the company he was keeping: “in Danger of being poisoned in my morals, by Living among them, and of falling a Sacrifice to Justice, if ever I should be taken with them” (6). Barnard had no opinion of men who suddenly discovered God in extremis as Crusoe had, and stressed the desirable consequences of the fact that, unlike Crusoe, Ashton had been a good Christian all along. When contemplating his life in solitude on the island: It was no small Comfort to me that I was upon my lawful Employment when I was first taken; and that I had no Hand in bringing my Misery upon myself, but was forced away sorely against my will. It wonderfully alleviated my Sorrows to think that I had my Parents’ approbation and consent for my Going to Sea. I often fancied to myself, that if I had gone to sea against their Will and Pleasure, and had met with this Disaster … the very Reflection on it would so have aggravated my Misery, as soon to have put an End to my Days. I looked upon myself also as more in the way of Divine Blessing now, than when I was linked to a Crew of Pirates, where I could scarce hope for Protection and a Blessing. I plainly saw very signal Instances of the Power and Goodness of God to me, in

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the many Deliverances which I had experienced (the least of which I was utterly unworthy of) and this Encouraged me to put my Trust in Him; and tho I had none but God to go to for help, yet I knew that he was able to do more for me than I could ask or think; to him therefore I committed myself, purposing to wait hopefully upon the Lord till he should send Deliverance to me. (21–2)

Captivity and shipwreck were tests in a religious life, not occasions for convincing conversions; and by working for His servants against sinners, Providence gave men reason to fear and obey God, rather than vicious and temporarily powerful men. For Ashton, however, who kept returning to this point, the main problem was that “if he were taken [as a pirate], he would be hanged” (13). Indeed, this almost happened to his kinsman, Merritt, when, having escaped the pirates in a sloop, he put in at the French island of St. Michaels for water. Wishing to return to their families in Marblehead, the problem for both men was to convince the authorities that – though they had sailed with pirates, been members in good standing of pirate crews, and participated in taking any number of ships along the American coast, in the Gulf of Mexico and throughout the Caribbean (all of which is described) – they were not pirates. This was not a particularly easy case to make when fishing towns up and down the British seaboard colonies were regularly harboring and supplying pirate ships and trading in their goods,45 especially when there was no evidence, beyond the men’s assurances, that they had been unwilling participants in the pirates’ activities. For Ashton and Merritt, the Reverend Barnard, who was in effect vouching for them, was the signal deliverance. Assuming that Barnard knew what he was doing also puts an entirely different complexion on his part in this text. Ashton’s story describes him jumping ship, and deciding to be left behind on the island of Roatan where his ship had stopped to take water, as Alexander Selkirk, long supposed to be the original of Defoe’s Crusoe, chose to be left behind on an island rather than continue with his captain and ship. Ashton  – like Longueville in The Hermit, Chetwood in Captain Falconer, or Dubois-Fontenelle in Pierre Viaud – goes on to correct Defoe’s image of isolation in a deserted ocean by portraying a known and populated sea. The islands in the Atlantic, the Caribbean and the South Seas were known. The Gulf of Honduras too was full of islands that had been named. It was possible to be stuck on one of them for several months in solitude: it was not possible that no one else would know of the island, come to it, seek water on it or be shipwrecked on it. Ashton is stuck on a deserted island; but after some months, he is found by a

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kindly “North Briton,” who had lived among the Spaniards for twenty years, but was now seeking sanctuary among the islands from the threat of the Inquisition. The Scot saves his life before drowning. Months later, Ashton is found again, this time by a group of Englishmen from the Bay of Honduras who had heard that Spaniards were going to attack them by water while Natives descended upon them by land, and who had decided to hide out on the islands meanwhile. They help Ashton, and let him live among them. Then, logically enough, the pirate ship that Ashton jumped returns to the island to take on water again, and no one is safe. Ultimately, a Brigantine out of Salem, Massachusetts heading for Jamaica, stops to take water on the island too. This gives Ashton his passage home. The difficulty, then, was not unending solitude. There was a community of sorts among the displaced and victimized of the Atlantic world, where stranger helped stranger and strangers formed transitory, mutually enabling, communities. It was possible to survive the wilderness by staying among the kindlier outcasts of the Atlantic world who aided one another and made common cause. The difficulty was to escape the “malefactors” in which the ocean-going population abounded and to find one’s way home. And there, the problem was less to encounter an accommodating ship that would permit one to work one’s passage, than to discover a way of re-entering one’s society of origin to universal “rejoicing in [one’s] Father’s House,” without falling foul of suspicious authorities and of the law. Ashton’s Memorial is, among other things, a memorial to the difficulty of the adventurer’s return and to how, with the providential help of a man of stature and influence, it might be overcome. Where Crusoe epitomes excised Defoe’s religious and moral reflections, then, the Reverend Barnard replaced them with his own. But, albeit for different reasons (Britain’s shortage of mariners in the Navy and Merchant Marine; Marblehead’s dependence on the trade in fish), both took essentially the same position on young men and the sea: whatever the dangers, they needed to go. If anything, Reverend Barnard was the more radical in suggesting that men who were good Christians ought not to be punished if, thanks to Providence, they managed to return from whatever perilous Atlantic adventures had befallen them – whatever they had had to do. Neither followed Defoe in reimagining the Englishman as an isolated “island race” in the midst of an alternately hostile and deserted ocean. Instead, both expressed their sense of the “Historicall” through their narrative focus on material events, reported fact and telling detail, as well as by highlighting their protagonists’ inevitable encounters with the Atlantic’s diverse peoples. Penelope Aubin too highlighted

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the multinational character of the Atlantic and encounters among its diverse peoples, as we will see in the next chapter. But she did so while recalling to reality masculine writers of Atlantic adventures such as these who, (to borrow a phrase from Abigail Adams) had spectacularly failed to “Remember the Ladies”; and contrary both to their criticism of Defoe and to their practice, she demonstrated that there was no incompatibility between the Historicall and Romance.

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Captivity and antislavery

In Britain during the 1720s, Aubin’s choice of romance for her generic matrix was shrewd. In addition to their long-standing association with imperial expansion, romances had long since integrated adventure, travel to new and exotic locations, the terrors of voyages in ships at sea, abductions, pirates, shipwrecks, and captivity, into their tales of separated and star-crossed lovers.1 Romance enabled Aubin to introduce and foreground female protagonists, and to remind readers that women traveling in ships – whether as passengers, female tars, pirates, officers’ wives, or nurses and laundresses on hospital ships – were captured, drowned and shipwrecked too.2 The Atlantic was not exclusively male territory. Equally important, it allowed Aubin to deploy the romance formula which demanded that heroines be separated from their devoted chivalric lovers by endless obstacles to show how much females could do without the help of men, as well as to model ways for women to deal with captivity and interact with foreign cultures on their own. Aubin’s major transatlantic novel, The Noble Slaves (1722), was more popular and widely read than we tend to remember. It was a steady seller in Britain for much of the eighteenth century and a staple of Bell’s and Minerva’s circulating libraries. It was reprinted several times in London and in Dublin, twice posthumously “collected,” and included in catalogues of “the most esteemed and useful English books proper to form a select library” alongside Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa.3 In 1785, Clara Reeve still considered the novel notable enough for detraction in The Progress of Romance. The Noble Slaves also acquired a whole new lease of life in America, where there were five American editions between 1797 and 1814, and where the novel moved rapidly from local printers in Danbury, Connecticut, through New Haven to New York. However, British and American paratexts described Noble Slaves in different generic terms: the initial British editions characterized it as a “Life and Adventures” story in the manner of Robinson Crusoe, American editions 47

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as a Barbary captivity narrative and providence tale. I therefore begin by showing how these different generic characterizations were grounded in the text, and by discussing what Aubin did with the material she drew from the genres from which she borrowed. I conclude by comparing the different British and American paratexts provided for this novel with the different American and British paratexts provided for Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, in order to consider what printers’ generic characterizations can teach us about the meanings and migrations of texts. In what follows, I will also be drawing on Aubin’s other transatlantic novel, The Life of Charlotta Dupont, an English Lady Trepann’ d to Virginia, published in London the following year, where she rewrote, amplified and often illuminated sentiments, scenes and situations from Noble Slaves. Pe n e l ope Au bi n’s At l a n t ic:   Nobl e S l av e s and C h a r l o t ta Du P on t Perhaps because romance was, until recently, viewed exclusively as a woman’s genre, modern criticism of Aubin’s novels has tended to focus on such issues as “love, passion and (sometimes) marriage” and to interpret them in terms of Aubin’s piety, character as a “proper lady,” French Huguenot antecedents, and presumed Catholic sympathies. However, the pious and proper image of herself that Aubin constructed in her Prefaces has now been shaken by Sarah Prescott’s work on early eighteenth-century women writers’ use of virtuous self-representations as a marketing device; by Chris Mounsey’s argument that Aubin’s novels were more erotic than she pretended; and most recently, by Debbie Welham’s revolutionary biographical discoveries.4 Welham found that Aubin was “nearly related” to Sir Richard Temple and half-sister to Viscount Cobham of Stowe. Her husband, Abraham Aubin, whom she married clandestinely, was a captain, ship-owner, and transatlantic merchant, whose brother David, out in Barbados, was captured by pirates together with his ship and crew. What Welham calls “the family business” therefore explains the remarkable knowledge of the Atlantic world and of pirates’ ways that Aubin demonstrated in a deposition of 1709 earlier discovered by Joel Baer.5 It also puts her on a par with Defoe, whose knowledge of the Atlantic, of mariners and pirates, derived from his mercantile contacts, and whose representations of the Atlantic Aubin repeatedly contested. Consistent with her interest in the Atlantic, Aubin used romance techniques to address contemporary historical situations – a point that Aubin’s London printers indicated by characterizing Noble Slaves on their title

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page as a “Life and Adventures” story. When first published in England in 1722, The Noble Slaves bore on an immediately topical issue: “the great number of Christians at this time expected to return to Europe, redeemed from the Hands of those cruel Infidels [on the Barbary coast] amongst whom our Noble Slaves suffered so much.”6 The country had been watching with bated breath for well over a year as over 260 British slaves, some of whom had been in slavery for twenty years, were ceremonially handed over to the English Ambassador at Tetuan by the Emperor of Morocco and Fez, conducted to Mequinez, and from there carried by one Captain Stuart to Gibraltar and thence to England. When they finally arrived in London in December 1721, such “vast Multitudes of People crowded to see them” parade to St Paul’s in their “Moorish Habits,” that they had to be divided into groups and taken through the streets by different routes.7 By chance or by design, the first American edition of Noble Slaves in 1797 also coincided with the return of the first American mariners from Barbary slavery after over a decade of unsuccessful negotiation with their North African captors, as well as with the first edition of Royall Tyler’s Algerine Captive, whose hero and first-person narrator, Dr Updike Underhill, had likewise just returned from captivity.8 Aubin did not tell a circum-Atlantic story in her transatlantic novels as epitomized Crusoes did. Instead, she picked a spot – North Africa in The Noble Slaves, Virginia in Charlotta Dupont – where, after an initial journey out – from Mexico in Noble Slaves, England in Charlotta – different characters from different nations, with their different life histories and different voyages in and across the Atlantic, met by chance, to exchange stories and mutual help, before dispersing again.9 She thus deployed the seventeenth-century romance technique of having every new character introduce themselves by recounting their own life, to represent the Atlantic world as a plethora of intersecting national trajectories and analogical personal histories and to explore issues of infra-institutional transnational community. Aubin portrayed the Atlantic at the very beginning of the eighteenth century not only as looking overwhelmingly foreign from an English point of view, but also as overwhelmingly Spanish and Portuguese, where it was not dominated by “Mussulmen.” For her this meant that the Atlantic was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, except in the Muslim Barbary states. The religious problem presented by the Atlantic was not, therefore, conversion as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe understood it: recognition of sin, private repentance, spiritual awakening and return to the truth of one’s own religion. To travel in the Atlantic and to be captured by a foreign man or

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nation was inevitably to face pressure to convert to a foreign faith. This was not only a female issue for English or American Protestants. Horror of “Papism” was rampant; and British or colonial American renegades, who converted to Islam to escape slavery and prosper in the Barbary States, were as reviled in England, as by the Mathers in New England. The memoirs of genuine captives show that those who had “turned Turk” felt that they had to explain, excuse and show penitence for their defection in order to be readmitted to their home communities. Joseph Pitts, for instance, explained that he was offering insider information about Muslim religion and culture in order to “make some manner (at least) of restitution and reparation for my past defection.”10 The problem was even thornier for women, who also had to preserve their “virtue,” and avoid being “ruined,” if they wished to be permitted to once more “put on Habits suiting their Sex and Quality” (NS: 186) on their return home. To depict women’s conduct in captivity and in foreign cultures, and to distinguish what she considered exemplary conduct in captivity from its opposite, Aubin incorporated and addressed characteristic features of American woman-centered captivity narratives, several of which had been reprinted in England before 1722, as the Crusoe story incorporated and addressed features of the “Life and Sufferings” of genuine Barbary captives and castaways. For Aubin, it made good practical sense to borrow narrative elements from American woman-centered Indian captivity narratives for English novels about women in Barbary captivity that were to be “principally Founded on Facts,” because early English Barbary captivity narratives had little or nothing to say about female captives. Paul Baepler has suggested that early Indian captivity narratives were adapted from seventeenth-century English Barbary captivity narratives, while Nancy Armstrong and Lennard Tennenhouse have argued that eighteenth-century British novels, such as Samuel Richardson’s, “borrowed narrative elements” from American captivity narratives.11 Aubin’s transatlantic narratives support the view that Barbary and Indian captivity narratives and certain British novels were generically related in a twoway transatlantic flow. Indeed, they mediate between American captivity materials and Richardson, who reprinted Aubin’s works in 1739 and wrote his first “literary manifesto” by way of preface to them.12 Deploying romance conventions also permitted Aubin to seamlessly integrate into her narratives powerful elements of the Providence Tale.13 She used romance’s typical web of coincidence and chance meetings to affirm and demonstrate the workings of divine providence. Aubin began Noble Slaves by announcing that “the Providence of God which men so

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seldom confide in, is in this History highly vindicated” (2), and indicated throughout where providence was helping her protagonists. For instance, when most improbably united with her lover, Anna says: “Look upon this young gentleman and me, and learn to trust in Providence” (118–9). The very improbability of coincidences confirmed their supra-natural character. Unexpectedness and surprise were the proper signifiers of providential interventions, which also ensured success. The fundamental value which Aubin’s female characters carry with them into the Atlantic, however, is expressed by Teresa in Noble Slaves: “If we must perish on the sea or wander in strange lands, ‘tis better we should be married, and my honour secur’d, than be but friends” (39). There are therefore marriages at the beginning of the novel, when lovers first catch up with their trepann’d or abducted ladies, before they are separated again.14 But conventional sexual virtue is immediately radicalized for, in Aubin’s Atlantic, the principle that it is better to marry to secure one’s honor than to become any man’s mistress or concubine overrides considerations of rank, nationality, race or religion. In Noble Slaves, Maria, a Spanish Catholic in Barbary captivity, prefers to marry her Muslim master than be a concubine; however, she manages to make his conversion to Christianity a condition of the marriage. Captives in this novel are encouraged to convert Muslims whenever they can. The situation is different among Christians. In Charlotta, when the heroine, who is the Protestant English daughter of French Huguenots, is captured by a Spanish Catholic colonial Governor’s son from San Domingo and confronted with the choice of marriage or rape, she chooses marriage, despite the fact that she loves a man called Belanger, from whom she has been separated by romance complications. The reason for her choice is made clear by the terms of Don Antonio’s offer: “I’ll marry you and secure you from all fears of being abandon’d or ruin’d by me.”15 Belanger’s Virginian cousin justifies Charlotta’s decision to Belanger in the same terms: “She cannot be blamed, said he; she was left in your Rival’s power, and has wisely chose rather to marry than to be his Mistress by compulsion, and be ruin’d” (106). Survival with honor trumped love. After concealing her Protestantism from Don Antonio’s family in San Domingo for some time after their marriage, Charlotta converts to Roman Catholicism to transculturate into her husband’s family and society. And though “affection cannot be forced,” Charlotta is ultimately “pleas’d” to be Don Antonio’s wife in San Domingo. “For she had all that Mortal could wish, in a noble Fortune, lovely children, and a Husband who lov’d her beyond Expression, and deny’d her nothing” (99–100). In this novel, Aubin treats

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miscegenation in absolutely analogical terms when Isabinda, the white daughter of a Virginia planter, chooses to marry her father’s African slave, by whom she has had a mulatto child. Though before her abduction and seduction by Black Domingo, she was committed to another whom she loved, what matters after the event is that “he is a Christian and would be glad to marry me” (87). This literary argument, that it is more sensible to marry, even if you have to cross racial lines, convert and assimilate to a foreign culture, than to allow yourself to be ruined, explained and justified the many captured Englishwomen who never returned from captivity. As Aubin shows, prominent or wealthy men in Barbary captivity, like the Frenchman de Hautville and the Spaniard Don Lopez in Noble Slaves, were immediately confined separately from the women, and told to write home for their ransom. But the ransom demanded was so large, and it took so long to get an answer, that “there was little hopes of their living to receive it” (NS: 55). Many white men of all nations did die from the rigors of Barbary slavery before they could be redeemed. Many women may have died too. But like Linda Colley more recently, Aubin suggests that women did not return because they had rightly chosen to marry foreigners from Africa, North Africa or Spanish America, and to transculturate to foreign nations, rather than remain “helpless and alone” and “exposed to strangers” who would ruin them, abandon them, and leave them to the sexual use and abuse of other men (Ch.:60).16 Aubin’s interpolated narratives inexorably show that this was the fate of any female character who allowed herself to be seduced, raped or prostituted as a mistress or concubine.17 Indeed, these are the women in Aubin’s Atlantic who need to be redeemed  – and who are ultimately redeemed by the lords, captains or merchants who loved and lost them or who first ruined them. “If laws were just which puts a man to death for killing another,” the narrator of Charlotta insists, “a man who deceives and ruins a young girl deserves the same or worse” (14). In these novels, such a man or his surrogate redeems the masculine gender along with its victims: he erases the fall by attributing to the victim the virginal character she involuntarily lost and by marrying her. Starting from here, one might read Aubin’s transatlantic novels as critiques of society’s injustice in demanding female chastity regardless of circumstances, and in punishing with disgust, contempt or exclusion captured women who had not remained untouched. One might also read these Atlantic novels as demonstrating the fundamental incompatibility between the cultural imperative that captured women remain Protestant and the cultural imperative that they remain chaste.

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G. A. Starr and Paul Baepler have pointed out that captivity narratives are better viewed as “escape” or “survival” narratives, since only those who escaped were able to tell their tale, and by telling their tale affirm the possibility of escape.18 Aubin was before them here. Noble Slaves relentlessly imagines, explores and exemplifies ways of escaping slavery as well as ruin. Unlike her fallen women, Aubin’s women of “heroic Virtue” find ways of escaping captivity when marriage is not an option. They prime themselves by reminding themselves or each other of a long-standing Christian argument: that “I am a Slave by Heaven’s Permission; but my Soul is free”; or that “Slaves we are doubtless doomed to be, but our minds can’t be confined.” They tell themselves that, though suicide is forbidden, they “may resist all sinful Acts, till Life and Sense are lost” (NS: 28, 42). And trusting to Providence, they cast off the delicacy and helpless passivity incumbent on proper ladies and act – often violently. In Noble Slaves, when she is about to be ravished in a Barbary emperor’s seraglio, Teresa faints, cries, begs, and gains from the emperor pity – and a deferment of her violation. By contrast, when the emperor goes next door to try to violate Emilia, Emilia stabs the emperor with his own dagger and leaves him for dead. She also disguises herself in the emperor’s clothes and weapons – literally putting on the man. This not only facilitates her escape with Teresa (who, in a not too subtle comment on her conduct, Emilia disguises as a female slave); it also enables her to kill a renegade captain who would impede their escape. Emilia is not alone in her capacity for violence. Clarinda, who uses an Irish renegade to lead her clandestinely out of the Seraglio where she is confined, stabs him when he tries to rape her in a field. Maria in the same novel tears out her eyeballs and throws them at the Moorish governor who tries to force her. In Charlotta too (in a scene which anticipates Lennox’s transatlantic novel, Harriot Stuart), the heroine saves herself from a Jacobite pirate captain while she is his captive on his ship, by stabbing him with a bodkin from her hair, and watching him pass out. In each case, the body is the confined and confining body of a captured woman, but freedom and nobility of soul enable her to cloak herself in the supposedly masculine heroic virtues, and fight back. In this regard, Aubin’s women of “heroic virtue” conducted themselves very like the “American Amazons” or female “vanquishers” of that strain of Indian captivity narrative which began with Hannah Dustan (whose tale was published in England in 1702) and which proliferated in America during the last decades of the eighteenth century.19 Emilia’s stabbing of the emperor with his own dagger, or Clarinda’s bayoneting of the Irish renegade who tries to rape her, seem wildly improbable when read in

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terms of the courtly secret histories of a Manley, or the amatory intrigues of the early Haywood.20 They appear entirely possible when read in light of Hannah Dustan who, with the help of her friend, murdered and scalped ten of their Indian captors with their own hatchet, or the Panther Woman, who responded to an Indian who threatened rape by borrowing his hatchet while he was asleep and using it to cut him to pieces. This Indian captivity narrative context also casts Aubin’s main plot and the marriages with which Noble Slaves begins in a different light. Emilia and Teresa are wives when they are separated by captivity from husbands who are notable for their absence during their trials and for their inability to save or protect them; and Teresa, who is pregnant when they are captured, bears a dead child during the rigors of escape. American woman-centered Indian captivity narratives frequently portrayed the way captivity dislocated and destroyed the family unit by showing married women, pregnant or with newborns, separated from husbands who had gone away or were otherwise incapable of protecting them, losing their babies or watching them die on rigorous marches with their Indian captors, and having to deal with captivity on their own.21 Disguise in foreign dress and foreign habits is an important part of the resourcefulness of the women who escape slavery in Aubin’s transatlantic novels, but there is a right and wrong way of masquerading as a foreigner. In Noble Slaves, having escaped the harem, Emilia and Teresa occupy themselves until they can find their husbands by masquerading in “Turkish” dress for seven months, working as maid to a local Moorish seamstress, and embroidering Moorish girdles for her to sell. These disguises do more than demonstrate the advisability of hiding among the population if one is on the run. For in an analogical situation, Emilia and Teresa’s husbands, who disguise themselves in Greek costumes because they think their ability to speak Greek will protect them from detection, also succeed in hiding among the population. However, they fail three times to find and rescue their wives in part because, disguised as Greeks and foreigners, these lords can get local help only from another European slave. In the guise of Moors, by contrast, Spanish Teresa and French Emilia, with the constant help of Saraja, the Moorish seamstress and her circle of friends, succeed in escaping captivity (twice), in locating their husbands, and after the latter have departed, in getting themselves to Europe on their own. The women also all become lasting friends. For Aubin, then, the way to live in a foreign country  – whether for twenty years as a Spaniard’s wife like Charlotta, or for seven months as a Moor’s maid like Emilia and Teresa – is to transculturate by assuming

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that country’s habits, in both senses of that word. Cultural practices, like clothes, were habits that that could be put on and put off. When her Spanish husband dies and Charlotta is reunited with her Belanger, or when Emilia and Teresa return to Europe and their husbands, they have absolutely no difficulty in re-assuming the “Habits suiting their Sex and Quality” in their native lands. They now once again conduct themselves as proper European ladies and proper European wives. Nor has the masquerade which enabled them to survive in a foreign country and foreign culture involved any loss of identity or unforgivable disloyalty to “home.” Aubin’s position here was radically different from that of American Puritan ministers, who feared that their flock would transculturate among the Indians, or convert to Catholicism among the French Canadians, and who sought to conceal or downplay the “transgressive transculturations” in captivity narratives, as Michelle Burnham has shown.22 Aubin’s position was similar, rather, to that of those seventeenth-century American colonists Jim Egan describes, who insisted, in arguments with English officials in Britain, that living in America and adopting Indian woodland practices and Indian dress as convenient or necessary, in no way made them less English: “English subjects will remain English … because they are English by nature.”23 Aubin could be described as transforming the “scandalous” English practice of masquerading at balls as someone entirely other than oneself into an acceptable method of survival among foreign peoples. But there was also, arguably, a particularly acute reading here of captivity narratives such as that of Mary Rowlandson, whose tale was reprinted again in London in 1720, just before Noble Slaves. Critics are agreed that Rowlandson transculturated in captivity – she used her sewing to participate in the Indians’ exchange economy, she knew how to extract her pay from a recalcitrant Indian and how to introduce herself into everyone’s wigwam, she came to like Indian food. What is sometimes ignored is that though her bible was as visible to all as this outward conduct, the spiritual process of repentance, submission and purification she describes was not. Rowlandson drew the reader’s attention to the difference between what appeared and what did not through her account of her son, whom she found “lying on the ground” one day. When asked how he could sleep so, he told her: he was not asleep, but at Prayer; and lay so, that they [the Indians] might not observe what he was doing.” This contrast between the outward masquerade and the hidden inner life is important because it means that by describing her spiritual development and Indian captivity side by side throughout her narrative, Rowlandson was doing two

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things at once: she was “proving” that she remained an orthodox Puritan despite assuming Indian habits and customs to survive; and she was indicating how she disguised this from Indians who had proved hostile to her early attempts to preserve her English ways. Puritan women of heroic virtue remained Puritans even among the Indians, as Englishmen remained English even in America, because they could adopt Indian disguises and cultural practices as necessary or convenient, and then cast them off.24 In Aubin’s Atlantic, as in epitomized Crusoes and in Ashton’s Memorial, acts of kindness link men and women across nations, cultures and races: “Villainy and bad designs often unite Men for a time, but end generally in their Ruin and Hatred to one another; but when Religion and virtuous noble Designs are the Basis of Men’s Friendships, they are lasting and successful” (NS: 126). In these novels, shared misfortunes create understanding and lasting friendships among French, Spanish, English, African, Portuguese, Indian and Moorish men and women, and virtuous people join forces to help one another, regardless of race, religion or rank. Aubin’s Atlantic novels are structured to provide multiple opportunities for such transnational friendships and mutual aid to occur. Barbary captivity in Noble Slaves allows the lives of characters of different nations and different ranks to intersect in situations of shared misfortune. And Virginia in Charlotta figures as a country to which characters from different nations come for asylum from the ills they face elsewhere in the Atlantic world, as well as to seek and receive help. Aubin thus made central to her stories what had been marginal in Defoe and epitomized Crusoes: the transnational, infra-institutional actions of individuals helping individuals to survive regardless of national origin. Aubin’s novelistic representations of “little unforgotten acts of kindness and of love” between people of different and/or enemy nations were likewise borrowed from captivity narratives, and were utopian only in degree. The phenomenon was recorded in the memoirs of genuine captives in both Indian and Barbary captivity.25 For instance, in God’s Protecting Providence, published in Philadelphia in 1699 and repeatedly reprinted in London between 1700 and 1790, Jonathan Dickinson made a special point of the “Kindness of the Governor of Augusteen” towards himself and other captives of Indian “Cannibals.” The Spaniard had clothed, fed and conducted them to safety, though “a Man of another Nation, as well as of a different Religion; and what is more of such an one as doth not teach its Votaries so much Compassion to those they count Hereticks.”26 In Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, the narrator made it clear that she would not have survived without acts of kindness on the Indians’ part – though,

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as critics have pointed out, she was not initially able to see these as acts of humans rather than as acts of God. Later, Rowlandson repeatedly speaks of the “kindness” of those squaws and old Indian men who let her sleep by the fire in their wigwam and gave her food. Transnational acts of kindness were remembered in Barbary captivity narratives too. For instance, John Foss speaks of “an old Turk [who], with an air of kindness, gave me an old shirt without sleaves, blaming those who had taken mine” and remarks that “it was soothing to find a spark of humanity in my barbarous masters.” He also memorializes a French priest, who acted as the captives’ “kind benefactor” when they were being starved in the bagnio, by bringing them “two baskets full of white bread” and giving “each man a loaf weighing nearly a pound.” The soothing effect of the benefaction, and the whiteness and weight of the bread, so far outweigh the French priest’s Roman Catholicism, that Foss does not even consider it worth mentioning.27 Without obviating the harsh realities of slavery or suffering, such acts of kindness could make the difference between life and death. Kindness was also a lingua franca which required no interlingual dictionaries or ethnographic explanations to be understood. Again emphasizing what people of different nations shared, Aubin based her abolitionist arguments on an analogy between white and black slaves that was common to a variety of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century antislavery discourses.28 In 1680, for instance, Morgan Godwyn, who was widely read in America as well as in England, argued after seeing slavery in the West Indies, that Africans were not brutes but men with souls in the following terms: Suppose that one of this Island [Barbados] going for England, should chance to be snapt by an Algerine or Corsair of Barbary, and there to be set on Shore and Sold; Doth he thereupon become a Brute? If not, why should an African … suffer a greater alteration than one of us? If Slavery had that force or power so as to unsoul Men, it must needs follow that every great Conqueror might at his pleasure, make and unmake Souls.29

In New England, which had lost its share of mariners and travelers to Barbary captivity by 1700, Samuel Sewall applied the same analogy in his more economic and legal antislavery arguments: I am sure if some Gentlemen should go down to the Brewsters to take the Air, and Fish: and a Stronger Party from Hull should surprise them, and Sell them for Slaves to a Ship outward bound: they would think themselves unjustly dealt with; both by Sellers and Buyers. And yet it is to be feared, we have no other Title to our Nigers.30

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Sewell also had reprinted in Boston in 1705 an antislavery catechism that had appeared in John Dunton’s Athenian Oracle in London the previous year. The catechism summed up this particular antislavery argument in its first lines: I take it [“Trading for Negroes”] to be contrary to the great Law of Nature, of doing unto all Men as we would they should do unto us; and which as our Saviour tells us (Mat. 7:22) is the Sum of the Law and the Prophets.31

Aubin made “do unto others” based on white characters’ experience of the sufferings of slavery, the core of her antislavery arguments. In Charlotta, for instance, Charlotta and Don Antonio encounter Black Domingo on an island off the coast of Virginia where he fled for asylum from the horrors of slavery on a Virginia plantation, when they have themselves just escaped from Barbary slavery. Black Domingo has been the slave of barbarous white Christians, just as Charlotta and Don Antonio have been the white slaves of barbarous tawny Moors. Domingo has run away from his Christian master, just as Charlotta and Don Antonio have run away from their Muslim master. Thus, if it is admirable and heroic for the European characters to escape to regain their freedom, as the reader is encouraged to think, it is equally admirable and heroic for Domingo to do the same, and Charlotta and Don Antonio are right to help him get right away by taking him with them to San Domingo. This was a radical move for a time when, both in Britain and in America, runaway African slaves were advertised in the newspapers alongside lost horses or cattle, and brutally punished if recaptured for the material loss they had caused their owners. But it is backed by Charlotta’s own experience of slavery and justified by having Black Domingo echo Emilia’s and Maria’s speeches in Noble Slaves:  “My Soul is as Noble as your own … though chance made me a Slave and the barbarous Christians bought and sold me, yet my Mind they never can subdue” (Ch: 86). Noble souls are free whether their skin be black or white, and they prove their nobility by refusing to remain enslaved. Noble Slaves was more conservative than Charlotta inasmuch as it stopped short of miscegenation. But a clear argument for abolition was built into Aubin’s analogy between white and black slaves here too. Eleonor, a Venetian captive who has been the Muslim emperor’s favorite for eight years, persuades her master to free a black slave, Attabala, who had formerly belonged to her family and who had followed her into Barbary captivity. Aubin emphasizes that Eleonor begged for Attabala’s freedom precisely because she now knows what slavery is like. Thus where Defoe saw no problem in owning slaves, and Crusoe epitomes portrayed

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the Atlantic as a brutal space where people of all nations were enslaving and being enslaved, Aubin argued that people of every nation should realize they must not make slaves of others precisely because people of every nation were being enslaved. It is interesting to note that once British government treaties with the North African pirate states had finally succeeded in preserving Britons from Barbary captivity, this analogy between white slaves in Barbary captivity and African slaves in white captivity seems to have lost its force in Britain. At least, this is what novelist Elizabeth Griffith tells us in her 1777 preface to her re-edited version of Noble Slaves: Even within less than half a century, many stout hearts have been alarmed at the approach of an Algerine Corsair, as liberty is dearer than life to every True-born Briton. But as our seas are now no longer infested by pirates … the horrid apprehension of slavery is vanished from our minds; and we read, now, the accounts of our fellow creatures, who were formerly led into captivity, with the same sangfroid with which we listen to the story of the Israelites under Pharaoh.32

Other means of melting readers’ sangfroid had to be sought once slavery was no longer experienced by white readers as personal cause for alarm, and Britons could sing with confidence that “Britons never, never shall be slaves.” In the later eighteenth century, therefore, sentimental dramatizations of pain, emotional turmoil or despair and what Ian Haywood calls “spectacular violence” – the “bloody vignette” of a person’s extreme suffering at the hands of the powerful, cruel and violent, portrayed in a vividly visual and sensational manner33  – were used to awaken in readers the emotions of pity and horror that the stubborn understatement in remembered narratives and the conviction that “it couldn’t happen to me” tended to block. In America during the 1790s, by contrast, white settlers still faced both the renewed possibility of Barbary captivity and the real possibility of further Indian attacks. Here the older non-sentimental forms of captivity narrative retained their popularity and force, and were reprinted frequently and without apology alongside works in the newer sentimental style.34 Analogies between the white slaves of black masters and the black slaves of white masters which had flourished at the turn of the eighteenth century were revived. As Benilde Montgomery points out, “within two years of the first piracy [by Barbary rovers], comparisons between white slavery abroad and black slavery at home began to appear.” Indeed, the comparison was so widely used that it was understood that American writers were using white slavery in North Africa as a “mask” for critiques of African slavery in the United States, whether they

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said so or not.35 This suggests that when it was reprinted in America during the 1790s and early 1800s, Aubin’s Noble Slaves may have resonated with antislavery discourses, as well as with the many American-authored Barbary captivity plays, histories and novels, and with the many new and reprinted woman-centered Indian captivity narratives that were published during these years. On g e n e r ic

S hifts : T h e

c a s e s of Au bi n a n d M a r y Row l a n d s on

On one level, then, what appears to have happened is that American printers recognized and re-imported in Aubin’s novel narrative elements from captivity narratives which their forbears had earlier exported to Britain, as well as arguments from antislavery discourses which their forbears had shared with Britons, both of which had become topical again in America during the 1790s. American paratextual characterizations of Noble Slaves as a captivity narrative and providence tale can be described as recording this recognition and highlighting its topicality. But more can be learned by examining the novel’s British and American title pages more closely, and by comparing the ways in which Aubin’s story was “Americanized” with the ways in which Rowlandson’s story was “Anglicized.” The title pages of the first English editions placed Noble Slaves in the genre of “Life and Adventures” stories, and used their description of the contents to highlight the narrative’s similarities to Robinson Crusoe: The Noble Slaves: or, The Lives and Adventures of two Lords and two Ladies who were shipwreck’d and cast upon a desolate Island near the East Indies, in the year 1710. The manner of their Living there: The surprising Discoveries they made, and strange Deliverance thence. How in their return to Europe they were taken by two Algerine Pirates near the Straits of Gibraltar. Of the Slavery they endured in Barbary; and of their meeting with several persons of Quality, who were likewise Slaves. Of their escaping thence, and safe Arrival in their respective Countries, Venice, Spain and France, in the Year 1718. With many extraordinary Accidents that befell some of them afterwards.

The sequence is reversed – the island comes before the Barbary captivity – and there is a titillating variation in the starring role, but this description is designed to make readers think, as some modern critics did think, that Noble Slaves was merely following Defoe’s successful formula. Douglas and Nichols in Danbury, Connecticut, who otherwise published only discursive religious texts and established the title page that other American printers would copy, used their title page in 1797 to

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appropriate the novel to different purposes. To this end, they eliminated all reference to shipwreck on an island, thus cutting the cord to Robinson Crusoe, and ensured that there was nothing on their imprint to indicate that Noble Slaves was an English work.36 They excised Aubin’s name, which appeared on all English editions, and described the novel as “being an Entertaining History of the Surprising Adventures and Remarkable Deliverances from Algerine Slavery of several Spanish Noblemen and Ladies of Quality.” Characterizing the characters as Spanish during the 1790s when American printers were publishing French, German and Spanish novels in translation as well as English ones, further distanced the novel from its English origins. After years of national outrage about Congress’s failure to secure the release of several hundred American mariners who had been in Barbary captivity for upwards of ten years, Douglas and Nichols domesticated Noble Slaves in America as a captivity narrative which addressed this topical American concern, by printing the words “Algerine Slavery” on a separate line in extra large, extra bold black caps – a practice followed by subsequent American printers. Meanwhile, insertion of the phrase “Remarkable Deliverances” also allied Noble Slaves to the Christian Providence tale and seventeenth-century American captivity narrative tradition, not only to hearken back to early America and Puritan Connecticut, but also to appeal to Connecticut’s still dominant Congregationalist Standing Order. Something similar happened in reverse to Mary Rowlandson’s American captivity narrative when it was reprinted in England. Paul Baepler has commented upon the similarities in style and religious world view between Rowlandson’s narrative, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, and William Okeley’s early English Barbary narrative, Ebenezer, or a Monument of Great Mercy, published in London only seven years before Rowlandson’s work first appeared in Boston and London in 1682. The striking thing here, however, is that Rowlandson’s London publisher changed the American title of her narrative to play down these similarities and extract her from the neighborhood of Christian Providence tales.37 What was in Boston The Sovereignty and Goodness of God became in London A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. Wherein is set forth, the Cruel and Inhuman Treatment she underwent among the Heathens. Affirming the “Historicall” rather than the theological inserted Rowlandson among the English “Life and Sufferings” narratives of genuine captives, and transformed her testimony to God’s goodness into a testimony to Indian cruelty.38

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Without change to the texts themselves, the Anglicization of Rowlandson’s narrative and Americanization of Noble Slaves both involved alteration of the generic signals which guided readers’ readings and horizons of expectations. We might therefore say that such generic shifts were used, most obviously, to integrate a story into a different literary system, and to enable a new public of readers to identify what kind of story it was in terms more easily recognizable or more appealing to them. There were strong popular markets for “Life and Sufferings” and “Life and Adventures” stories in England at the turn of the eighteenth century, and for captivity narratives and accounts of Barbary slavery in 1790s America; tapping into them made commercial sense. The generic flipflopping of Aubin’s and Rowlandson’s narratives in their Atlantic crossing may also be said to indicate, in consequence, that genre was no more stable than social context or historical period in framing how a text might be read. Combining generic shifts with obfuscation of a story’s date and national origin, as on Noble Slaves’ American title pages, erased or further weakened the power of its original context or historical period over the reading of the text, and freed it for other constructions. We might also note that narratives which successfully mixed genres, as both Aubin’s and Rowlandson’s did, were easier to transplant in this manner, since publishers had only to indicate a different generic thread in the tissue of the narrative to appeal to a different readership at a different time or place. But this also means that, though “founded in fact,” paratextual characterizations of genre such as these were not full and accurate accounts of the product. Rowlandson’s narrative was only partly about “the cruel and inhuman treatment” she underwent; it was also about God. Noble Slaves was only like Robinson Crusoe in part; it was also in part like captivity narratives. However, market considerations were not the only determinants here. Paratextual generic characterizations might also not be fully accurate due to the often dangerous political environment for printers. They could prove more coded and less straightforwardly factual than we might expect, as becomes apparent when we factor in the circumstances surrounding these paratexts. In 1682, when Rowlandson’s captivity narrative was first published in Boston, Increase Mather and other Puritan leaders were debating Boston’s response to the Lords of Trade and Plantations who were demanding that they revise the Massachusetts Bay Charter to bring their laws into line with English law, and acknowledge their submission to the sovereignty of James II, the Catholic Stuart King.39 Teresa Toulouse has argued that

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Mather was using Rowlandson’s narrative to comment on “current royalist threats to colonial sovereignty” and to recommend “passivity and dependence in the face of God’s sovereign authority” as the proper response to this assault on Puritan freedom and autonomy in America. In Boston, as she points out, his Rowlandson-mediated commentary was directed at rival Puritan groups to “re-establish the covenantally sanctioned connection between a particular exemplary group within New England and their Sovereign God by demonstrating instances of His Providence to a woman of this group.”40 This also means that when Mather had Rowlandson’s captivity narrative published in London the same year, he was indirectly communicating to his friends and supporters in England the answer that the King could expect from those steadfast Puritans in New England, who acknowledged the sovereignty of God but not that of a human king, and whose indomitable faith assured them that “He shall deliver thee in six troubles, yea in seven there shall no evil touch thee.” In England, however, the readership could not be restricted to Mather’s coreligionists, English friends and supporters at Court. His English publisher therefore used his generic shift to both hide and hint at the historical and political import of the text. Inserting Rowlandson’s narrative into the historical “Life and Sufferings” tradition of genuine captives drew attention to the practical historical meanings of the text, without overtly raising the question of sovereignty. The possibility of perceiving defiant (read treasonable) political messages in the reprint nevertheless, would explain why Mather’s London printer took the additional precaution of concealing his identity on the imprint.41 The significance of Douglas and Nichols’ insertion of Aubin’s novel into the older captivity narrative and Ebenezer and Christian Providence Tale tradition is equally complex. It has been argued that reprints in late eighteenth-century America of early Indian captivity narratives in general and of Rowlandson’s narrative in particular “provide[d] a pattern for understanding the revolutionary war.”42 It could likewise be argued that American reprints of Noble Slaves in the 1790s and early 1800s offered a pattern for understanding and dealing with the new Barbary war. If, as June Namias has shown, American-authored fin-de-siècle Indian captivity narratives consistently “glorified white women’s use of violence” and “displayed [Amazonian] women as national heroic figures in the war against Indians,” then Noble Slaves could be read in America as an extension of the female heroism demonstrated in “the war against Indians” to the war against Barbary pirates.43 At the same time, reframing the novel as a

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Providence Tale on the title page highlighted and reinforced a point made by Aubin in a portion of the Preface that was carefully reproduced in American editions: “Let us proceed to reflect on the great Deliverances of these Noble Slaves: You will find that Chains could not hold them; Want, Sickness, Grief, nor the merciless Seas destroy them; because they trusted in God, and swerv’d not from their Duty.” (London edn.: xi; Danbury edn.:  iv) At a time when Americans were divided about the advisability of spending a huge proportion of the national income on redeeming American mariners from Barbary captivity, this might suggest to a still partly Puritan audience a critique of Congress’s disbursement and of slaves who had waited to be redeemed by human hands. If those captives had trusted in providence, and in the sovereignty and goodness of God, they would have tried to escape, as Aubin’s Noble Slaves had; and they too would have found that North African chains could not hold them. Generic shifts between British and American paratexts represent another way in which narratives migrated from place to place and from one temporal and historical context to another. They help us to understand how narratives were inserted into different literary systems and different literary markets, and how the same materials were re-presented to appeal to different readerly interests, tastes and expectations and/or to conceal that appeal from the authorities. Generic shifts demonstrate how differently the same text might be used in different social or historical contexts. But turned around and considered from another point of view, they can also reveal that texts such as Noble Slaves did incorporate multiple, otherwise unnoticed and unsuspected, transatlantic genres, as well as crisscrossing colonial and national intellectual or political movements which had already mutually fructified one another many times before. Aubin was thus not only answering Defoe, remembering the ladies, and correcting those who falsely imagined that only narratives focusing empirically on events, on reported facts and on telling details could adequately render the “Historicall.” She was also relocating the historical at the very juncture of genres, genders and transatlantic movements. This may help to explain why Chetwood’s contestation of Aubin’s heroic representation of women in the Atlantic world and return to the more conventional “Historicall” of masculine adventure tales involved dissolution of her tightly woven generic mix; and why both Chetwood and Longueville – to whom we now turn – replaced mixed generic forms with juxtapositions.

Ch apter 3

The parallel Atlantic economy

Much of Europe’s exploitation of Spain’s American empire rested on smuggling, on corruption, on fraud of all kinds, the magnitude of which … created in effect a parallel economy independent of the official system. (Bailyn, Atlantic History: 88)

Chetwood’s Captain Boyle (1726) and Longueville’s The Hermit (1727) both celebrated the happiness of denizens of the Atlantic world who lived outside the empire of British law. Both returned to the Historicall as epitomized Crusoes understood it: they presented themselves as stories based on “real Matter of Fact,” where “there are no Embellishments, nor one Step out of the Road of Truth.” The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Robert Boyle, in Several Parts of the World, Intermixed with the Story of Mrs Villars coopted Penelope Aubin’s earlier market success by “intermixing” romance elements and interpolated character histories with its historically and geographically grounded circum-Atlantic frame story à la epitomized Crusoe. But Chetwood used this generic combination to exclude his heroine from Adventure, the Atlantic, and all pretension to heroism, and to deny her the heady freedom and extra-legal successes he granted his roving, enterprising hero. As a result, the romance elements rapidly become separated from the “Voyages and Adventures,” to be confined exclusively to the characters’ interpolated histories of past events. Longueville entirely ignored the presence of women in the Atlantic as well as the generic possibilities of Romance. But, in juxtaposing three different genres in the three parts of his story, he altered the pattern of circum-Atlantic adventure narratives by devoting a full third of his text to describing and critiquing what had happened in Britain to compel his unwilling hero to leave home and try his fortunes in the Atlantic. His example in this regard would be followed, both in serious and in comic or ironic mode, by many transatlantic writers of the “second generation,” including Smollett in Roderick Random, Edward Kimber in Joe Thompson, 65

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Isaac Bickerstaff in Ambrose Gwinett, Goadby in Bampfylde-Moore Carew, and Royall Tyler in The Algerine Captive. Captain Boyle and The Hermit were both exceptionally popular. The Hermit or the Unparalleled Sufferings and Surprising Adventures of Mr.  Philip Quarll, an Englishman (1727), was admired from the first,1 but really took off after its acquisition by a conger consisting of J. Wren, S. Crowder, Henry Woodgate, J. Fuller and J. Warcus in 1759. Between 1759 and 1783, they appear to have published eleven editions. During the 1780s, other publishers also began to get into the act with “new editions” of their own, including William Lane of the Minerva Press who reprinted the narrative twice (in 1786 and 1794), Jeremy Belknap of the Apollo Press in Boston, and Isaiah Thomas of Worcester, Massachusetts, both of whom produced American editions in 1795. Recurrently serialized in the magazines and reproduced as a part book from its first publication, The Hermit was again serialized in England in The Novelist’s Magazine (1780–88; vol. xxi), another testimony to the story’s contemporary importance. By 1788, the narrative had begun to be altered, adapted and supplemented, the most interesting versions being the London abridgements of T. Sabine and John Marshall in 1788 and 1790 and the rewrite published by John Babcock in Hartford, Connecticut in 1799. There was also a version for children written for The Children’s Miscellany in 1788, which was reprinted in America in 1796. Though almost entirely ignored today, the story was popular in Britain until the 1870s, and remained familiar enough for both Lamb and Dickens to be able to allude to it without explanation.2 Captain Boyle was equally successful. There were at least twenty-nine London editions of the novel between 1726 and 1797, several regional English editions, a possible twenty-four Dublin editions before 1792, thirteen Edinburgh editions before 1785, seven New England editions between 1792 and 1799, and three more American editions in the early nineteenth century. The version of this novel that was reprinted in America during the 1790s and early nineteenth century was initially produced in England in 1759, by excising the story of Richard Castelman’s “Voyage, Shipwreck and miraculous Preservation” in Pennsylvania, which had been appended to the end of prior editions. Castelman’s encomium to the justice of British administration in Britain’s American colonies, and glowing description of the prosperity and good order it had created in Philadelphia, were eliminated in London when British troubles with America began. There was equally good reason for American printers to leave this out after Independence. But what is most significant

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about American editions of this novel is what they did not leave out. Contrary to their usual practice, American printers religiously reprinted Chetwood’s original dedication to Sir William Yonge  – an apparently say-nothing dedication, written seventy years earlier in what was now another country, to a man long dead. But, as we will see, they had a good reason for doing so. I therefore begin by reading the circum­Atlantic parts of this novel through the cues offered by this dedication, to suggest some reasons for Captain Boyle’s transatlantic importance and long-lasting popularity. The transatlantic publishing history of both novels demonstrates how stories were changed through what David Reiman called “versioning.” Versioning differed from epitomizing in that it did not “exhibit the whole substance of an author,” keep the chief elements of a story, or necessarily involve condensing and abridging. Instead, versioning disseminated a story in a variety of forms, with a variety of often quite different literary and ideological “arguments.” Versioning produced variants of a story which materially altered it aesthetically, ideologically or rhetorically by means of a variety of techniques. Taking an extract from a text and reworking it was one possibility. In America, as we will see, a version of “the story of Mrs. Villars” was produced in this way, by extracting an incomplete segment from Captain Boyle, adapting it, adding to it, and marketing it as a stand-alone seduction narrative. Another common method of versioning was to eliminate some episodes and introduce others and/or to rewrite extant episodes in such a way as to change the course or ending of the story. This happened to The Hermit several times, as well as to BampfyldeMoore Carew (see next chapter). Versioning is also a useful way of thinking about a more local practice of dialogical rewriting which many eighteenth-century novelists, including Chetwood, practiced. Eighteenthcentury novelists frequently rewrote scenes or situations from other novels to comment on their treatment, on their morality, or on the outcome they had been given in an earlier narrative, whether they went about it satirically like Fielding in Shamela or didactically, like Sarah Scott in Millenium Hall.3 Chetwood – best remembered today for his General History of the Stage (1749) but at this time still a publisher of popular fiction (including that of Defoe)4  – wrote novels almost entirely by amending scenes and adapting situations taken from other novels to make points of his own. In Captain Boyle, he reworked scenes from Defoe’s Captain Singleton and Colonel Jack as well as from Robinson Crusoe, while using his “intermixture” of romance, to rewrite scenes from Penelope Aubin’s transatlantic novels in repressive patriarchal mode.

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The parallel Atlantic economy S m ug g l e r s a n d f r e e t r a de :  C h e t wo od’s c a p ta i n b oy l e

Like epitomized Crusoes, Captain Boyle told a circum-Atlantic story about a hero who was not middle class. Robert Boyle is a poor young English apprentice, who has been trepanned onto a slaver and is being shipped to America to be sold as an indentured servant, when he is captured en route to America by a Barbary Rover and taken to Sallee. Like Crusoe, Boyle escapes, but with a fellow Italian captive and an enslaved Englishwoman, Mrs Villars, instead of a Xury. Boyle’s circum-Atlantic voyage resumes once Mrs Villars has been recaptured and given up for lost, and once the Italian has rewarded Boyle with a vessel for orchestrating his escape. Heading for America as a free man in his own ship, Captain Boyle sails from Naples in the Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar to the Canaries and Cape Verde Islands. From there, he too crosses to South America where, acting as his own supercargo or factor, he trades in Buenos Aires, Paraguay, Lima, Rio de Janeiro, Fort St. Anthony and Brazil before returning to Europe, via the Azores, St. Michael’s island and the Straits of Gibraltar, now a very rich man. The novel’s long title presented it as a “Life and Adventures” story with a bit of romantic interest thrown in. Both English and American title pages further described the story as containing an escape from Barbary captivity, and multinational interpolated life-stories. English editions to 1759, when the relevant segment was excised, also boasted a description of Philadelphia, and the story of a shipwreck. Only Chetwood’s short, fulsome and say-nothing dedication to Sir William Yonge suggested that the novel was also something more than this. It is significant, therefore, that American printers, beginning with John Folsom in Boston in 1792, invariably excised Chetwood’s Preface but took the unusual step of retaining this English dedication. Chetwood had dedicated the novel “without [his] leave” to Yonge, explicitly as “one of the Lords of the Treasury,” and implicitly as one of Walpole’s most loyal Parliamentary and ministerial lieutenants. In England in 1726, as in Boston in 1792, this indicated that Captain Boyle’s entertaining “Voyages and Adventures” also had a serious economic dimension. During the 1790s in America, when the capture and enslavement of American mariners by Barbary pirates was a prime public issue, preserving Chetwood’s dedication to this defunct English Lord of the Treasury signaled that the long account of Boyle’s Barbary captivity and escape at the beginning of the novel was not its only point of interest, or even perhaps the primary reason for its initial reprinting in Boston.

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Considered as a representation of economic man, Captain Boyle answered Robinson Crusoe by correcting the impression that Crusoes cruising around the Atlantic gained their wealth with nary a seaborne fight, as solitary individuals on deserted islands who lived without money in a commercial vacuum, or as mariners who became rich without effort while occupied elsewhere. Chetwood anchored his cruising hero’s economic individualism and achievement of wealth, instead, in his participation in the outlawed commercial networks which operated throughout the new world. His hero, Captain Boyle, was an “interloper”: a merchant, a smuggler and when necessary a pirate, who flourished in the infra-institutional Atlantic economy which ran beneath and sometimes in place of the legal and officially sanctioned channels of imperial trade. This alternative economy is described in some detail. When seeking to dispose of a ship in Panama, for instance, Boyle conceals his involvement as an Englishman by delegating a Spaniard, who was sailing with him, to go on shore in his place to sell the vessel to Panama’s Spanish Governor, and bring back water and provisions for his crew. At Buenos Aires, where he “drove a very good trade underhand with the Merchants,” Boyle depicts another clandestine method that merchants and captains used to circumvent the Spanish authorities. Boyle anchored his ship about two leagues out of port, and after an hour had canoes coming “incognito” to discover what he was selling. If his merchandise proved satisfactory, merchants returned under cover of night, with gold to make the trade and vessels to carry their goods to shore. Boyle too took his precautions: “As we [the English] had war with France and Spain, I had hoisted French colours, that we might have the Liberty to trade with more Safety.”5 There is more than a little irony about this doubly unlawful “liberty to trade.” For Boyle’s illicit commerce in South America fulfils every contemporary hope for commerce, by carrying food and commodities from one part of the world where they were plentiful to another where they were wanting; by obtaining bullion from foreign nations; and by creating wealth and harmony among people through commercial exchange. His stolen “liberty to trade” even permits close and lasting transnational friendships, as in San Salvador, where Boyle is befriended by a Portuguese merchant Don Jaques: “I see a Friendship may be contracted in a few Days, as well as Love, where there is harmony of Souls” (198). As Chetwood shows, these much touted benefits of trade were only impeded by restrictive imperial mercantile policies, such as the English Navigation Acts or Spanish and Portuguese state monopolies, which drove this transnational and trans-imperial trade underground, called

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it smuggling, and made it a criminal act. Mercantilist efforts to exclude foreigners and unauthorized persons or groups from closed imperial trading systems designed to enhance each mother country’s power and wealth, and state efforts to police trade and control its flow, not only stymied commerce; they made smugglers and interlopers the true champions of international trade.6 Though now generally identified with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), free trade and laissez-faire arguments against monopolies and mercantilist restrictions on trade were rife during the 1690s and first decades of the eighteenth century.7 Chetwood’s representation of Boyle took the part of merchants in England, the British West Indies, Boston, Philadelphia and New York who protested and petitioned against restrictive government legislation and against chartered joint-stock corporations, such as the Royal African Company, which monopolized new world commerce for a small minority of increasingly wealthy merchants in England. Speaking on behalf of excluded merchants and manufacturers, John Pollexfen – a member of the English Board of Trade and Plantations from 1696 to 1707 – was among those who pointed out that such monopolies were “exclusive to others, who have as much right to [trade] as they,” and that “endeavours to regulate Trade” prevented it from fulfilling its proper functions. “Leaving Trade to take its own course” was the way for “Trades carried on by Exportation of our Products and Manufactures” to create wealth for everyone.8 In practice, excluded merchants in the new world dealt with their exclusions as Captain Boyle did: by ignoring government regulations and restraints as far as possible, and by exercising their liberty to trade wherever profit offered. Illegal trade with the non-British West Indies, with South America and with Southern Europe was firmly built into local economies in the West Indies, New York, Philadelphia, Boston and other North American seaboard towns almost from the first, and was the basis of many American mercantile fortunes throughout the colonial period.9 The same may be said of smuggling foreign goods in and out of colonial ports to evade British customs and controls. Though dubbed smugglers or “interlopers and pirates” by the authorities, otherwise perfectly respectable merchants in Barbados, St Kitts, Jamaica, Boston, Philadelphia and New York, together with the captains of the ships transporting their goods, regularly circumvented imperial mercantilist prohibitions, to create a “mass of illegal trade that bypassed the formal nationalistic constraints” and “helped bind the widespread and intensely competitive Atlantic commercial world together.”10

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Boyle’s accounts of his commercial exchanges in South America defended this widespread practice, by inverting the “proper” hierarchy between merchants who traded legally and openly, and “smugglers” who did not. He showed that operating freely, albeit illegally, in Spanish and Portuguese America, as Boyle did, permitted an Englishman at once to connect people/s each to each across national and imperial boundaries, and to serve his own interests by enriching himself. Boyle further inverted the binary of legal and illegal trading by indicating that everywhere in the new world, Spanish and Portuguese governors were colluding with the network of illegal trade in exchange for bribes. At Fort St. Anthony, for instance, the Governor refuses to let Boyle trade with local merchants because “it was against the King of Portugal’s express Orders to suffer any trading with foreigners” (192–3) – until he sees Boyle’s “generosity.” Once satisfied, the Governor organizes the local merchants himself to secure his cut of the profits, acting as a veritable middleman. Boyle observes that, had he known better before, he could have done the same everywhere. Far from metropolitan capitals, therefore, where royal governors were the law, smuggling legitimized by bribes passed from the shadows into the open market. Indeed, in the new world, smuggling was the law. As modern historians have observed, this “pragmatic repudiation of mercantilism reflected the constraints of reality,” for Spanish, French and English metropolises consistently failed to supply sufficient ships with sufficient provisions and manufactures to meet their own colonies’ needs.11 Boyle’s conduct did, however, raise questions about those daring, opportunistic and adventurous young men supposedly needed to build an empire. Once England’s sons slipped the reins of indentures and subordination to fathers and masters, and set off to make their own fortunes independently in the Atlantic world, would they not, like Captain Boyle, also make their own law and escape metropolitan control?12 Chetwood defused this issue by representing Captain Boyle as a patriotic pirate as well as an entrepreneur. Penelope Aubin, who knew something about pirates,13 observed that “there was among the Pirates some that looked like Gentlemen, but they all talk’d and behav’d themselves like desperate Villains,” drinking, cursing, and talking like “Atheists and Libertines.”14 This is also the pirate of Charles Johnson’s History of Pyrates which has been a source text for modern views of eighteenth-century pirates. But Chetwood’s pirate is a merchant who passes as a gentleman wherever he goes, and whose patriotic actions at sea invert the proper hierarchy between privateers, who had a government commission to attack and capture enemy ships, and pirates who did not.15 As Boyle observes when

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he sets out from Naples: “We had no Commission and wanted none, for we resolv’d, like Englishmen, to fight only with the enemies of our country” (153). Representing Boyle as a patriot fighting the good fight for England after he had slipped the leash, not only helped to disarm criticism of the illegal freedoms he was taking; it also permanently fixed his identity as an Englishman. An Englishman was a man whose loyalty was to England, no matter where he lived or traveled, or how he stood with the British government. As John Richetti has shown, Defoe’s Captain Singleton was based on the famous pirate Captain Avery. But Chetwood modeled Boyle on the more patriotic, colonialist, and legally ambiguous figure of William Dampier, who was at various times a legal and illegal trader, an outlaw buccaneer, an authorized privateer, and an author (A New Voyage Round the World, 1697).16 Dampier pursued the same patriotic and imperialist goals whether officially commissioned to do so or not. He also used violence to achieve his ends, decimating native peoples and local Spanish or Portuguese colonists alike if they tried to impede his trade. Captain Boyle (who meets and dines with Dampier in the course of his adventures, and is invited to join him) resembles him in all these respects. Consequently, the Atlantic is also portrayed as a violent and dangerous place, where Boyle’s English ship has to trade against a backdrop of constant sea-battles with Spanish, French or Moorish vessels, with whom he engages both to enrich himself (by taking another ship and its cargo) and to prevent his own ship from being taken. Atlantic towns are likewise portrayed as having been conquered successively by the Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese, or as inhabited by hostile natives who resent the intrusion of foreigners. In this violent Atlantic world, innocently putting in at an island for water could subject Boyle’s crew to a surprise attack from natives, putting into port produce a dockside fight between crew members of different ships which put everyone in danger from the local authorities. To make his fortune in this violent and dangerous world nevertheless, Captain Boyle’s vessel was necessarily, like Britain’s growing commercial empire and ship of state, a “vessel of war and trade” (152), which traded despite international wars and warred to expand its trade.17 In Britain from 1726 to about 1770, this economic dimension of Captain Boyle can be described as ambiguously oppositional. Free trade arguments were not consistently taken up by government until the last decades of the eighteenth century,18 and for most of the century in Britain, smuggling was a popular anti-government cause. While an estimated 20,000 Britons of all ranks – from seamen and laborers to innkeepers, bribable

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customs and excise officers, country gentry, and local and London merchants – were making huge profits on contraband, popular feeling (and help) was usually forthcoming for smugglers against government efforts to arrest them, hang them and stop their activities. Government efforts to exercise more centralized mercantilist control over the economy, which began under Charles II and reached their apotheosis under Walpole, curtailed the people’s customary freedoms and criminalized long-standing practices; and this was not readily accepted. As John Taylor, Ordinary of Newgate, observed drily: “The common people of England in general fancy there is nothing in the crime of smuggling.”19 Many country gentlemen likewise saw interference with local smugglers as illegitimate state interference in their own local government. There was therefore more than one violent confrontation on the English coast between local smugglers and customs officers, and officers who could not be persuaded to turn a blind eye, were ostracized, abducted, beaten, tortured, murdered or robbed. Captain Boyle’s comfortable assurance that it was perfectly all right, indeed widely beneficial, for Englishmen to illicitly trade, smuggle, fight and rob on the seas played to such public feeling, represented it as victorious, heroic, patriotic and profitable, and gave it an economic, free trade rationale. But the novel could also be read as suggesting that it would be more profitable for enterprising smugglers to displace their activities to the new world, where they could enrich themselves by undermining the state monopolies of the Spanish and the Portuguese and by patriotically robbing rival empires of their bullion and revenue. The novel could thus be read as suggesting to Yonge that the confrontation in Britain could usefully be defused by exporting smugglers to the Americas, as Britain was already exporting convicts and the poor. In Boston in 1792, Captain Boyle may have resonated with readers in some of the same ways. For Boston too had a long history not only of smuggling and illegal trade, but also of defiance of British political and mercantile controls – beginning in the 1670s with Puritan struggles against Edward Randolph, the first English customs officer sent out by Charles II, who lost Massachusetts its original charter but failed to halt its illicit trade. American colonists remained “Englishmen” in their attitudes to smuggling even on the eve of the Revolution. As John Swift put it in 1771, customs officers in America had to “contend with the whole body of Merchants, many of whom think it no crime to cheat the King of his Duties … the hands of government are not strong enough to oppose the numerous body of people who wish well to the cause of smuggling.”20 American progressive era historians argued that Britain’s greater success in

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obstructing smugglers and in preventing evasion of British duties during the later 1760s and early 1770s played a key role in producing revolutionary movements in the North American colonies. And in his study of the political choices made by merchants and traders in Boston at the revolution, John Tyler too recently found that most of the principal Boston merchants were long-standing smugglers, and that these “smugglers served on many of the most important Patriot committees.” Their interest lay in shaking off, since they could not continue to evade, imperial mercantilist duties and controls. Much revolutionary rhetoric, by James Otis among others, therefore consisted of free trade arguments and of attacks on the British mercantile system.21 By 1792, however, when American printers began to reprint Captain Boyle, the subject had become a factional issue. The Federal government initially championed international free trade which had worked so successfully to enrich Americans on the Atlantic seaboard for so long. But it rapidly found that the new Republic could not afford to open her ports to all nations, while other nations, including Britain, insisted on retaining their mercantilist barriers and blocking American commerce. Jefferson and Madison wanted to retain free trade principles as most consistent with the principles of the Revolution. Hamilton – whose opponents saw him as another Walpole – preferred to follow the British model of centralized economic control, and to use customs and excise both to protect American domestic manufactures against foreign competition and to raise government revenue.22 In this context, Captain Boyle, with its dedication to Walpole’s henchman, could be read as ambiguously oppositional in a different way. Its championship of free trade might be understood as a critique of Hamilton’s Walpolean position; but it could also be read as rallying the troops. For once the new nation was on the wrong side of most other nations’ mercantilist barriers, doing business even with erstwhile trading partners such as the British West Indies, as the new Republic had to do to survive, made all American merchants and ships’ captains de facto smugglers and illicit traders, whether they wished to be or not. Chetwood was far less ambiguous about the proper place of women and slaves in the Atlantic world. In Captain Boyle’s world, European men and male European colonists in the Americas are linked across nations by friendships based on commerce and self-interest at the expense of Africans, Indians and women. When Boyle acquires slaves by capturing a Spanish galleon, for instance, self-interest supports ameliorism – Boyle converts his three Indian slaves and treats them well so that they will serve him well. But self-interest also permits him to trade in men considered as

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pure commodities when that proves more profitable – as soon as he is in port, Boyle sells the Africans he found on the Spanish ship, along with the ship’s other contents. The fact that in this novel, friendship between men of different nations is fundamentally instrumental, based on mutual advantage and the satisfaction of need, is underlined by incidents such as that in which Boyle makes drinking friends of his Moorish guards only to facilitate his escape and by the novel’s universal xenophobia  – the Spanish are “an unfaithful people” (170); the Moors, “but indifferent Soldiers and but seldom brave; they abominate the Christians” (121); the Jews, “mistrustful to the last Degree, false, jealous, and the very Picture of Ignorance” (120); and “the Portuguese lock up their Daughters as carefully as their money” (196). In his rewritings of scenes from Aubin’s novels, Chetwood cast a patriarchal damper on virtually all Aubin’s “vertuous noble Designes.” There is no female agency in this novel; no woman escapes from any captivity or cruelty  – Barbary, shipboard or domestic  – without male help, and no woman is permitted to act for herself in England or elsewhere in the world. Indeed, women are represented as untrustworthy and unfaithful, just like foreigners – “a woman once provok’d was the most dangerous Enemy a Man could have” (220). But women’s weapon of choice is intrigue, with the result that their characteristic attitude to danger is an unresourceful and helpless fear. As Mrs Villars says, from the first masculine challenge to her safety: “I was in such Terror that I did not well know whether I was really alive” (71). Nor can women look for help to other women, for there are no mutually supportive female friendships in this novel. Even maids constantly betray their mistress in exchange for bribes from the latter’s would-be lovers; and when maids do show loyalty, they are mistaken for their mistress and raped in her stead either by that would-be lover or by a band of roving men. It is as if Chetwood were ensuring that maidservants were punished for daring to even try to help, or rescue, their mistress, in order to emphasize that only an Englishman like Boyle is capable of protecting, rescuing or gaining an Englishwoman. The women in this novel are also unfaithful in the sense that they sleep with whomever they fancy – even Miss Villars tells Boyle coyly: “I am not displeaz’d I am in your Power, while you use that Power in Moderation” (104). Hamet, the Moorish/Irish renegade who initially captures both Boyle and Miss Villars, is the only man whose sexual advances are ever resisted  – as if to dispute Aubin’s representations of the possibility and desirability of transnational unions. Aubin’s use of disguise is radically reconfigured too. When Don Jaques’ daughter disguises herself as a man,

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it is merely to pursue a man for whom she has a hopeless passion. When Miss Villars is disguised as a man to facilitate her escape from Barbary captivity with Boyle, she only becomes more titillatingly attractive, both to Moors – “for it is as dangerous to be a handsome Man as a handsome Woman in Morocco, if the Brute of an Emperor should have a Fancy for them” (114)  – and to Boyle himself. He makes her a verbal promise of marriage in order to bed her while she is in male disguise (104). But this Atlantic marriage has no objective valence, and in no way protects either Mrs Villars’ virtue or her reputation – when she later returns to England, pregnant and alone, she is treated as a fallen woman. The fact that Miss Villars is recaptured by the Barbary pirates almost immediately after this “marriage,” and assumed to be dead thereafter, also keeps her conveniently out of the way while Captain Boyle enjoys his illicit American trading and pirating voyages. Together with the novel’s treatment of Africans and Indians, this ensures that Adventure and the Atlantic are reserved entirely for the self-interested and mutually profitable bonding of European and Euro-American men. Chetwood’s distinctly patriarchal representation of women’s character and place in the Atlantic world found favor with at least two American country printers. John Trumbull in Norwich, Connecticut and C. Sturtevant Jr in Keene, New Hampshire, captured the essence of Chetwood’s patriarchal position in a chapbook they published in 1793 and 1795 respectively. This chapbook consisted of an extract from Captain Boyle – a small part of the interpolated story of Miss Villars, – which was turned into a stand-alone story by the provision of a new ending. In Trumbull’s version, The Remarkable History of Miss Villars, Daughter of an Eminent Merchant of Bristol in Old England, the orphaned Miss Villars, who is “unfortunately a woman of business,” is abducted by a sea captain whom she has rejected as a suitor, and who is now determined to ruin her. Her maidservant, who tricked her into boarding the ship and now regrets her action, tries and fails to save her mistress from a fate worse than death. Once it is apparent that both women are incapable of helping themselves, and that Miss Villars’ father was a fool to leave her without male protection, Miss Villars is unexpectedly rescued from the captain by the first mate. Trumbull’s description of the contents – Containing an account of her miraculous escape from her seducer – shows that he sought to appeal to American readers by turning the extract into a seduction narrative, a genre notably popular in the early Republic. Sturtevant kept Trumbull’s description and most of his contents; but he added another descriptor to characterize the way

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he had changed Trumbull’s ending:  “With an account of her captivity by the Moors and her escape from them.” His last page has a somewhat incoherent account of Miss Villars’ helpless transfer from the hands of the lustful English captain to those of a lustful Moorish renegade and of her rescue from the latter by Captain Boyle. In Sturtevant’s hands, then, Trumbull’s seduction narrative also became a Barbary captivity tale. Both American printers thus used their extract from Boyle’s novel to highlight the dangers of the Atlantic world for women lacking a male protector, and to warn republican daughters both to eschew all pretention to physical or economic independence and to stay at home. One might say that they used narrative features of the seduction tale to subvert stories of Atlantic adventure, which depended on the protagonist’s willing  – or in the case of Captain Boyle and of Philip Quarll in the next section, initially unwilling – departure from home. W h i t e f l ig h t a n d t h e h e r m i t , Ph i l i p Qua r l l In 1727, The Hermit or the Unparalleled Sufferings and Surprizing Adventures of Mr. Philip Quarll, an Englishman consisted of three books in different genres. Book I, which serves as the frame story, is a travel narrative: it describes the sea voyages of Mr Dorrington, a Bristol merchant who is trading in South America and Mexico, “now called New Spain,” preparatory to heading to New England. Dorrington discovers the hermit, Philip Quarll, on an island off the coast of Mexico while on a fishing trip with a Mexican acquaintance. Book I is entitled “An Account of how Mr Quarll was found out, with a Description of his Dress, Habitation and Utensils; as also his Conversation with the Persons who first Discovered him.” But it goes on to describe how Dorrington “trafficked” for Cotton, Metal, Rosin and Gum, and the provisions available at each of the ports where his ship stops on its way back to London. These are almost all islands: Panama, the Gallapagoe Islands, Puna Isle off Peru, the Faulkland Islands, the Cape St Antonio in Paraguay, the Isle of Grande off the Coast of Brazil, the Cape Verde Islands, and the Canary islands, which were used as a “rendez vous by the Spanish Fleet.”23 Without explicitly raising issues of smuggling and free trade, Book I thus quietly confirmed Captain Boyle’s representation of illicit trans-imperial commerce, while giving it a normalcy and respectability Boyle’s lacked. There is apparently nothing out of the way about Dorrington trading in Spanish and Portuguese territory. In his Preface, the editor of The Hermit stresses that Dorrington is “an eminent Merchant … descended from a

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very ancient and honourable family in Staffordshire” and a person who “is allowed by all who know him, to be a Gentleman of unquestionable Veracity”24  – also that he is currently on another of his trafficking voyages to South America. Eminent and trustworthy Bristol merchants from ancient families traffic illegally all the time, and are not to be regarded as criminals for it. Book II is a criminal biography, which again challenged official notions of what was criminal and what was not. Based on “memorials” that Quarll gave Dorrington, and “digest[ed]” by the latter “in a more proper manner than I found them wrote in his manuscript,” Book II describes Quarll’s life in England from his birth, through Newgate, to his being cast away. Book III, which is likewise based on Quarll’s manuscript, describes Quarll’s life as a hermit on the island off the coast of Mexico or New Spain. This last book is responsible for the various modern classifications of the whole as a Robinsonade, an imaginary voyage, an island paradise narrative, or more recently as one of many popular British and American eighteenth-century hermit tales – classifications which, in one way or another, all tend to ignore Book II. Yet Book II gives force and direction to the critiques of England and of British imperialism in Books I and III, and relates directly to the announced audience for the story, which was offered as “an Encouragement to the Destitute and a Comfort to the Afflicted” (42). The importance of Book II for contemporary readers is indicated by the Sabine and Marshall abridgments of 1788 and 1790. Sabine eliminated Book III altogether, and replaced it with “An Account of the Robberies committed in City, Town and Country, by William Hawkins and Others,” to highlight the ways in which Quarll’s criminal biography critiqued the English justice system. And Marshall showed how incendiary Book II was, by downplaying it and turning the story into a survival narrative. Perhaps sharing a problem of Daniel Defoe’s characters, Colonel Jack and Moll Flanders, are obsessed with becoming genteel; broadly speaking, they use crime, prostitution and polygamy to obtain wealth and property, and to rise in the world.25 Philip Quarll’s criminal biography, by contrast, illustrates the frightening ease and rapidity with which respectable members of the English lower orders could fall into poverty, and the difficulty that even those willing to work might face in gaining a livelihood. Philip Quarll’s father was a master-builder who went bankrupt and had to eke out a slender living in the “mean” trade of brick maker. Philip himself was apprenticed to a locksmith by his now widowed mother, who had painstakingly saved the necessary £5 from her wages as a cleaning

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woman; but the locksmith had his effects seized and was thrown into a debtor’s prison because he had bound himself security for a relation, who failed. Loitering in the neighborhood streets waiting for the locksmith to be able take up his business again, Philip was befriended by a local housebreaker, who was arrested and hanged before he could introduce Philip to crime. But Philip’s reputation was ruined, and no one would give him work. “Thus seeing no Probability of amendment in the Station he was in, he resolv’d upon going to Sea, wanting for that Employment neither Character nor Recommendations” (77). Philip is ultimately sent to Newgate for bigamy, or rather polygamy – like Colonel Jack, he acquires multiple wives. But if the first part of his life shows how narrowly the respectable lower orders avoided falling foul of the law through debt or “evil company,” this second part takes up the issue of what J. A. Sharpe calls “social crime” – “practices which the statute book declared illegal [that] were considered legitimate at least in some circles.”26 Among the ordinary people of London in this story, there is a fundamental hostility to authority per se: when Philip joins the Horse Guards, because this is the only job he can get and, forgetting himself, returns to his lodgings in his uniform one day, his landlady and her neighbors are so indignant to find a guard amongst them that they assault him and his wife, tear the uniform off him and throw them out of his lodgings. But the plot most fundamentally highlights how customary ways of doing things are at odds with the law, when two of Philip’s wives simply desert him and set up house with someone else. When Philip’s fourth wife, the respectable landlady of a tavern, is confronted by one of these, her attitude demonstrates the distance between popular attitudes and the law: “Why do you disturb yourself about him? He has not deceived me unless it be in having a Wife before; but as you left him of your own Accord he had no more to do with you.” (138)

Since there was no possibility of divorce for the common people, desertion and setting up with someone else was a common way of terminating marriages. Philip is arrested for bigamy due to unjustified jealousy and spite – because the wife who had run out on him, “chusing that he should be hanged rather than her Rival should enjoy him,” took out a warrant against him (138). The editor makes it clear that he does not think that “Polygamy deserves such Misfortunes” (viii). Philip himself seems to have married repeatedly more to keep the favor of the upper class patrons on whom his living had come to depend,

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than for love or gain. A talented singer, he is taken up while in the Horse Guards by a group of officers who pay him handsomely for entertaining them, and arrange for him to become a singing master. Philip acquires one wife at the insistence of a lady whose daughters he taught, that he marry her favorite maid; he acquires another, the landlady of the tavern, at the insistence of the officers who patronize him. Patronage is also what saves him from the gallows when he lands in Newgate. In a scene unrivaled before Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art, Dorrington-Quarll unmasks the corruption of the legal system by describing the give and take of argument at a trial in which all but one of the judges planned to let him off as a favor to the Colonel who was Quarll’s principal patron. Though the judge “with whom no interest had been made” condemned him to death, the Colonel subsequently got Quarll a royal pardon through his friend, Lord Danby, “who had great influence at Court” (150), while a gift of silver plate to the recorder ensured that Quarll’s name was kept off the death warrant until the pardon could be processed. As Douglas Hay put it, “mercy was part of the currency of patronage”; and pardon-dealing, which “put the gallows directly in the hands of those who held power,” showed “extra judicial considerations at work.”27 After 1718, a royal pardon would normally mean commutation of a death sentence to transportation; but the story ensures that Quarll is set free, to make a critical point:  “I am fully resolv’d not to tarry long in England, which has brought upon me so many dire Mishaps” (149). Hardworking, universally liked and anxious to please, “a brisk, handsome, genteel young man” who had tried and tried again to make a living to no avail and narrowly escaped a hanging, Quarll spoke for those who left England because England had failed them. One might add that by the 1780s, when all those “new editions” came to be issued and Sabine and Marshall offered their abridgements, emigration had reached such proportions that there was widespread concern in Britain about “depopulation.”28 Quarll is shipwrecked on his way to Barbados, where he hopes to make a better life. But he discovers that Providence has done him a better turn by casting him up on an island whose “Blessing consists in its not being inhabited, being free of those Curses your populous and celebrated Cities regorge of” (27). This supports the underlying argument that the solution for “the destitute and the afflicted” in England is not another populous and monarchically governed island colony like Barbados, but getting away from government and centers of population altogether. When Quarll dreams that:

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the Fame of his Station, and happy State of Life was spread about the World, that it did prompt a vast Number of People from all Parts to come to it, which at last did enduce several Princes to claim a Right to it, which being decided by a bloody War, a Governor was sent, who laid Taxes, demanded Duties, rais’d Rents, and warned him to be gone (having fixed upon his Habitation for himself to dwell in). (209)

he cries out in his sleep. That is the nightmare. The great virtue of the New World was that it offered as yet remote and uninhabited places, where there was “plentiful Land, which produces both Fowls, Flesh and Fish, bees, excellent Greens and Roots, and affords the best Water, which by Nature was ordained for Man’s Drink” (181). The price to be paid might be loneliness, “Labour and Hard Living,” but, as Quarll points out, “I can take my Rest at my Need, and stand in no Dread of the severe Inspector and Taskmaster,” as he would as an indentured servant (172). And once he has learned to be content with his lot, he can perceive clearly how great were the follies of society and the errors of government in the old world – see in the waves beating on each other as they come ashore “a true Emblem of ambition, Men striving to outdo one another, are often undone” (215), and in a chest washed up by another shipwreck, an emblem of imperialism: How long will covetousness decoy Man to pursue Wealth at the Cost of their precious Life? Has not Nature provided every Nation and Country Sufficiency for its Inhabitants, that they must rove on this most dangerous and perilous Sea, which may be titled Death’s Dominions, many perish thereon, and not one on it is Safe.” (222–3)

He can also recognize in the fights among the island’s monkeys an image of “the frivolous and often unjust Quarrels that arise among Princes, which create such bloody wars, as prove the destruction of vast numbers of their subjects” (210). The point was not to reproduce monarchy and English society on his island as Defoe’s Crusoe did, but to escape them. For Quarll, as for Imlac in Johnson’s Rasselas many years later, “long journeys in search of truth are not required.” A family of lowly farmers on a remote Yorkshire farm in Book II enjoys the same happiness and recognizes the same truths when comparing their situation to that of a would-be woman of fashion from the city: How preferable is our Station to hers, how solid the pleasure we enjoy in this solitary Habitation … here no Debauches, Riotings, Fashions and luxurious Entertainments, no Envy of others’ Good Fortune, no Drunkenness, Swearing and Blaspheming the Mercies of the Almighty God ever take place as in flourishing Cities . . . Here all Nature praises God and gives Men her Bounty. How

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much more eligible is the Company of irrational Animals or even inanimate Things, than the Society of Men, who have divested themselves of all things but Shape, whereby to distinguish them from the most horrid Devils. (106–7)

Despite the story’s title, remaining alone is not required either. The “solitary” farm is inhabited by an entire family. Quarrl shares his island for ten years with a young French sailor who is later cast away upon it too, and he is perfectly willing for Dorrington to stay on with him. Solitude is not even required for Quarll’s religious life. When Dorrington points out that “you may, without slackening your Devotion, live in the World,” Quarll’s response is:  “No, was I to be made Emperor of the Universe, I would not be concern’d with the world again, nor would you require me, did you know the Happiness I enjoy out of it” (14–5). Quarll was Rousseau before Rousseau, and for a different social class. The island does, however, serve to explode some English political­cultural myths. Primary among these is the Lockean argument that “We are so formed by nature that no man in solitude without the aid of others and an intercourse of mutual Offices, can preserve himself in safety or even in life, not to speak of any pleasure or happiness.”29 The Hermit both insists and demonstrates that a man is perfectly capable of self-preservation, as well as of pleasure and happiness, when “remote from human Assistance,” even in old age (14). As the title page announces, Quarll lived on his uninhabited island “above fifty years, without any human Assistance, still continues to reside, and will not come away.” The story does confirm that man is exposed to the aggression of other men in the state of nature: while on his island, Quarll is robbed by two Indians who arrive in a canoe, and by Frenchmen, who plan to return to capture him and sell him as a slave. But a heavily underlined Providence preserves his safety and his life each time. Divine, not human assistance, is what is required to provide Quarll with the bounty of nature and to protect him from harm. The island is “a second Garden of Eden” not only because nature provides for all Quarll’s needs and because Quarll is living in rare harmony with the vegetable and animal kingdoms, but also because, like Adam before Eve, Quarll is protected and provided for entirely by God.30 This also explodes the myth of the social contract, Locke’s argument that men wisely and voluntarily entered into a social compact and subordinated themselves to a magistrate and to a fixed set of laws, for the preservation of their life, liberty and property. Quarll’s experience of the social contract in Book II was of a series of “Accidents” and “Misfortunes” which prevented him from acquiring property and from keeping his liberty, and which almost deprived him of his life. He refuses to return to

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be part of the social contract again because his life, liberty, property and happiness are far better preserved without one. Quarll shows his opinion of magistrates when he finds some “blank Indentures and Leases” in a chest washed up on the shore: “These, said he, are Instruments of the Law and often apply’d to Injustice; but I’ll alter their mischievous Properties and make them Records of Heaven’s Mercies and Providence’s wonderful Liberality” (183). His experiences on the island also belie both the political commonplace that mutual good offices are the “glue” of society, and the argument that Defoe made through Friday and in Colonel Jack that gratitude is the bond of societies large and small.31 Despite all the good offices Quarll performs for the young French sailor for ten whole years (including saving his life), the man shows his ingratitude by running off as soon as he spies a convenient ship, without bothering to say goodbye. The possibility dramatized by Quarll, that members of the lower orders, who suffered from poverty and got into trouble with laws that criminalized customary practices, might resort to flight from England’s dominions, was threatening enough to provoke symbolic and discursive reaction. In England, the symbolic dimension is perhaps most interesting. Topographically, Quarll’s island resembled the new English landscape garden that was slowly coming into fashion, in a reform of the older French geometrical garden which Horace Walpole attributed to the portrayal of Eden in Milton’s Paradise Lost and to Guardian # 173. The hermit’s island has a lake stocked with fish, copses of great trees, a forest with clearings and serpentine walks, grazing antelope, and a cascade of rocks with an echo, and it is bounded invisibly by rocks and the sea in a sort of natural Ha Ha. Joan Bassin has argued that “the real significance of the eighteenth-century landscape garden” was that in “creating a place which artfully re-enacted the scenery beyond its boundaries, the aristocracy was able to live in the midst of an imaginary world which captured the stability and harmony of its own fantasies.” And Jonathan Lamb has described the Patriot landscape garden exemplified at Stowe and at Hagley Park as “a setting of patriotic retirement” which was “sufficiently pliant to accommodate the novelties of [the] new world.”32 Both indicate that the English landscape garden was, among other things, a mode of appropriation – a way of acquiring, controlling and enclosing for the domestic pleasure of the English propertied and ruling classes, not only the classical fruits of the Grand Tour but also the flora, fauna and scenes of the new world. It is therefore interesting to note that when Queen Caroline reconfigured the royal estate at Richmond as an English landscape garden in the early 1730s, a few years after the publication of The Hermit, she built a

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hermitage in the midst of it and paid the working-class poet, Stephen Duck, to live in it under her patronage, as her tame hermit. This gesture was repeated so frequently, on so many English estates, that by the last decades of the century, Horace Walpole was dismissing the ubiquitous hermitage in the landscaped park as “the ornament whose merit soonest fades.”33 But I think we may see in this gesture a double cooptation and statement of intent. First, and most obviously, like nature itself after the Black Laws, the hermitage with its symbology of retreat, solitude and liberty was re-marked as an upper-class possession. Secondly, this gesture of enclosure of the hermit in the English country (e)state intimated that the flight of solitary Englishmen to places beyond the reach of their king and lawful governors was not to be permitted. However far the lower orders fled from centers of population, empire promised to extend its ineluctable embrace to bring them back, like Stephen Duck, into the fold. In the early Republic, as Eric Slauter has shown, political writers responded to a flood of both American-authored and imported hermit tales, which included Philip Quarll, discursively, with repeated and concerted attacks. They strenuously denied that someone reduced to solitude could possibly survive on his own, and portrayed life independent of society as both “unnatural” and unhappy. The independence of America from England was one thing; the independence of Americans from their new state and Federal governors  – a thing far easier to achieve on the vast new continent than in the British isles – was quite another. In 1790 and 1791, Federalist lawyer James Wilson also turned the hermit’s idyll of white flight on its head by arguing that “the most exquisite punishment, which human nature could suffer, would be, in total solitude, to languish out a lengthened life.” This, Slauter says “makes sense of the calls for solitary confinement of prisoners as a substitute for capital punishment, beginning to be made, by Benjamin Rush among others in the period.”34 Setting aside the question of whether it is more humane to imprison than to hang, here again, in the insistence on punitive solitary confinement, is the impulse of the ruling order to enclose and control those who would defy or escape it, and to turn an emblem of freedom from society into a mark of enclosure by, and subjection to, the dominion of other men. It is significant therefore to find, in John Babcock’s American rewrite of The Hermit in 1799 a reiteration of this Federalist position on solitude: Quarll’s solitary situation on the island, Babcock’s version insists, made him “very unhappy” and caused him to exclaim:

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Here am I cut off from all human society, and from every hope of again returning to my native country  – perhaps my poor mother, if yet living, is at this moment in tears, bewailing the hard fate of her only son. (47)

Critique of society, of government, and of law is silenced in this American version of the story.35 Instead of blank indentures and leases, Quarll finds “a roll of parchment, quite clean”(51) in the chest cast onto the rocks. And when Dorrington offers to take him back to England, he refuses only because “I have no friends now living to anticipate my return” (85). Like many an American, Quarll is settled in the new world, and has nothing and no one to go back to in Britain. Most significant of all, in this version, Quarll is no longer a convict. The whole story of polygamy and of Newgate is erased, and the first part of Quarrl’s life is changed to characterize him as a young man of “mean birth” with an exemplary mother:  “my mother’s poverty [and “hard labour”] did not prevent her from keeping me clean and tidy … all her leisure hours were employed in learning me to read, and in instilling into my tender mind the principles of religion and good manners” (33). This Quarll is also an exemplary young man who “had but little inclination to play with vulgar boys in the street” when the locksmith went to jail for his relation’s debt, but regretted instead becoming a burden to his mother. He is rescued from unemployment by a philanthropic ship’s captain, who takes a liking to him and persuades his mother to let him go to sea as a cabin boy; and he is cast away on a subsequent voyage in the honorable pursuit of his new profession. Once on the island, his early education immediately tells: “I returned thanks to God for my deliverance and resigned myself to his Providence” (43). Providence’s care, and the peace and plenty on the island, thus figure as his reward for conforming to the strictures of society and to the demands of religion. This version suppresses such social issues as the relationship of crime to poverty, need and dependence, which the original had forcibly raised. But then, by 1799, Jeffersonian Republicans had coopted the desire to escape government and population centers that Quarll represented, into their vision of a republic composed of small independent farms, where every man could live as happily on his own patch of land as Quarll did on his island. Federalist attacks on hermits in the early Republic took a line startlingly reminiscent of John Adams’s Puritan ancestors. Seventeenthcentury Puritan ministers too had done everything in their power to dissuade their congregants from wandering off to establish new farms at any distance from the Church, arguing that this would place laypeople dangerously beyond the reach of their ministerial supervision and good

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government. It seems that Jeffersonian Republicans better understood the impulse represented and imaginatively enjoyed in stories such as Captain Boyle and The Hermit  – the impulse of the governed to escape indentures, servitude, law, and the domination of governing English or AngloAmerican elites, by roaming the Atlantic and/or by acquiring a piece of land in some out of the way spot “which produces both Fowls, Flesh and Fish, bees, excellent Greens and Roots, and affords the best Water,” where they could live free and independent of masters and governors. This may be why Jeffersonians sought to persuade the small farmers of America that their free and independent way of life was compatible with republican government by speaking of the new republic as a collection of small, independent farms – and why the more firmly the new Republic established its grip on its wayward population, the more paeons to republican Liberty were sung. This impulse to escape to a “better countre” beyond the reach of government recurred in Tyler’s Algerine Captive, as we will see in the next chapter. But for the rest, the stories to which we now turn addressed questions of liberty and law in ways which challenged and complicated the relatively unproblematized celebrations in the novels discussed here of the free and happy life enjoyed by denizens of the Atlantic world who lived outside the law.

Ch apter 4

Fortune’s footballs

The two most popular transatlantic anti-heroes of the period were both beggars and convicts. Bampfylde-Moore Carew and Ambrose Gwinett’s narratives are therefore now classified as criminal biographies. They are, however, untypical of the genre.1 For one thing, these protagonists were not criminals; they were caught in the coils of the judiciary by happenstance. Gwinett is a poor attorney’s clerk traveling on foot to visit his sister when he is charged with a murder he did not commit and sentenced to be hanged, while Carew, though technically breaking the law by wandering about England begging, is never caught in, or charged with, this or any other crime. The first time he is transported to Maryland as a convict, it is on the whim of a judge who has a grudge against him; the second time, he is kidnapped by a captain working for a Bristol merchant while strolling on the sea shore. As we will see, both stories had literary antecedents and used literary techniques that ordinary criminal biographies lacked; and in their different ways, both used their anti-heroes to put in question the fundamental condition of the Lockean social contract: the idea that, in society, a person’s life and liberty were safeguarded by government and law. The third story, The Algerine Captive, is most frequently read now as a “bipartite” novel which contrasts North America with North Africa;2 and its American hero is construed, like its author Royall Tyler, as a “representative of the elite,” who was “a foolish malcontent,” a victim of “miseducation,” or the prey of unjustifiable “illusions,” for not being better pleased with America.3 But read here, like Bampfylde-Moore Carew, through contemporary British reviews, the novel does in fact offer a radical critique of established governments and laws. Like these two other stories too, it recapitulates and subverts the standard circum-Atlantic trajectory of imperial master-narratives and their set of goals. A recurrent generic feature of muscular Atlantic adventure novels which ultimately supported imperial goals, such as Robinson Crusoe, Captain Boyle, Noble Slaves, Edward Kimber’s Joe Thompson, or Smollett’s 87

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Roderick Random, was their markedly circular structure. Setting out from his native land, the adventurer’s voyage not only took him all around the Atlantic. Whatever captivities, shipwrecks or other impediments he met with, it also invariably brought him home, “fortunate in all [his] Adventures, even the most unlucky,” to “give him at last a plentiful Fortune and safe Retreat” in his native land. This circular story reenacted on the level of individuals that British imperial philosophy, which held that colonies and foreign conquests were designed to increase the wealth and power of the mother-country, and to benefit Englishmen at home. It not only promised that those who risked their all abroad and overcame every obstacle to make their fortune would return safely, to be rewarded with wife and estate, and to become respected propertied gentlemen in their native land. It also indicated that the proper thing to do was to bring one’s wealth back to England, rather than sink it into foreign soil and settle permanently in a distant land. Perhaps partly due to such stories, wealthy absentee West Indian planters, and more North American colonists of note than we like to remember, obeyed the call to return to England to live or die “at home.” As we saw, the possibility or desirability of return was put in question in stories such as Ashton’s Memorial and The Hermit. They are also put in question by the stories discussed below. But other story-devices were also used to challenge this imperial circular master-narrative. Primary among these was that encapsulated in the phrase Fortune’s Foot-ball, the felicitous title of a novel by Royall Tyler’s American contemporary, James Butler, about an man to whom everything disastrous happens that can possibly happen in the Atlantic world – pirate attacks, Barbary captivity, impressment into the British navy, enslavement in the Spanish galleys, hurricanes, shipwreck, penury, a tour of duty in a European army, sickness, wounds, heartbreak, loss of love, and loss of friends.4 Characters who were fortune’s footballs were characters who had, in one way or another, been driven out of their native land, and who were pushed from pillar to post in the Atlantic world, despite themselves, by forces and events beyond their control. Not themselves the dynamic or moral cause of the usually painful and unpleasant things that befell them, such characters served to illustrate the unfortunate effects on the poor and powerless of larger social or political forces. The lives of such anti-heroes wholly or partially (when given a happy ending) demythologized patriotic or propagandizing stories of enterprising Lives and Atlantic Adventures that produced wealth and success. And as a variant of what has been dubbed “the literature of misadventure,”5 they offered

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counter-narratives about the lives of the poor, the unsuccessful and the déclassé who became butts of the folly, violence and exploitation of the richer, better connected or more unscrupulous denizens of the Atlantic world. The stories that follow offer three very different variations on that demythologizing figure. T h e t wo fac e s of A m bro se G w i n e t t The Life and Adventures of Ambrose Gwinett (1770), which is attributed to Isaac Bickerstaff, was an eighteenth-century transatlantic retelling of the providential story of the hanged man miraculously saved, which dates from the hagiographical literature of the late Middle Ages and was pressed back into service by seventeenth-century Protestant divines.6 Gwinett was extremely popular both in Britain and in America. In Britain, there were thirteen editions before 1800, in America eight between 1784 and 1800, with three more issued during the early nineteenth century. But British and American paratexts highlighted different aspects of what was, with the exception of the final paragraph, word for word the same text. In Britain, Gwinett was presented paratextually as a familiar sight in London: he was that lame beggar “who in the year 1734, and a long Time after, swept the Way between the Mews Gate and Spring Gardens, Charing Cross,” and the reader was going to discover how he had come to that sorry pass. American printers, by contrast, described Gwinett on their title pages as an “Apprentice to an Attorney at Law, Who for a Murder he never Committed was tried, condemned, executed and hung in chains, in Old England; yet lived many years afterwards, and in his Travels found the Man in the West Indies actually alive, for the suppos’d Murder of Whom he had been really Executed.” Though indicating in their descriptions of the contents that Gwinett was tried, convicted and hanged for a crime he did not commit, British title-pages highlighted his Atlantic adventures. They described the story as containing : His Surprizing Recovery after Hanging in Chains; his Voyages to the West Indies, and being taken by the Spaniards, amongst whom he met with the supposed Murdered Mr. Collins: their Admiration in meeting each other and proposed return to England together. The Accident that threw Mr Gwinett in the Hands of Pirates; his extraordinary Adventures with them; his being taken again by the Spaniards and being sent to Old Spain, and there Condemned to the Gallies. His being taken by the Algerines, and carried into Slavery, and after many hardships returned to England etc.

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These misadventures covered pretty much all the long-standing international antagonisms to which Englishmen were exposed in the Atlantic, and encompassed all the “sufferings” to which ordinary Englishmen had been subject there, and reading about, for a hundred years or more; they were “strange” or “unparalleled” only by their accumulation in one character. This, in conjunction with the vision of the lame beggar at Charing Cross, prepared readers to encounter in Gwinett the sort of popular antihero who was the sport of fortune – driven out of England for a crime he did not commit, since he could not remain after escaping a hanging (he was cut down while unconscious but alive) without “exposing himself again to the terrors of the law”;7 and then, after being tossed from suffering to suffering in the Atlantic world, returning to England to find all his relations dead, by which time, “though not an old man, [he] was so enfeebled by hardships, that [he] was unable to work; and being without any manner of support, could think of no way of getting [his] living but by begging.” Because their title page was different, American printer-­editors drew their readers attention to the character of the hero in the short paragraph they added to the end of the text, which described Gwinett’s life as one “which seems to have been fore doomed to a share of distress, vicissitude and misfortune, that has rarely fallen to the lot of any individual of the human species,” or by observing that Gwinett was “a singular Instance of the Sport of Fortune”8 (my italics). It was all due to predestination; or for more secular readers, to being Fortune’s football. The main function of the juxtaposition on British title pages of the lame beggar at Charing Cross with the man hanged for a murder he had not committed and the olio of Atlantic adventures, was to direct the reader’s attention to the story line connecting the common British man to the Atlantic world. Cued by the paratext to follow this story line, the reader is unlikely to overlook the frightening ease and rapidity with which such innocent, respectable and potentially productive members of the lower orders as poor attorneys’ clerks could be tumbled out of their place in English society, cheated out of a promising future, and driven out the country by a misadventure with the law and by what Richard Collins, the man Gwinett is said to have killed, calls “injustices” – and through no fault of his own. The story’s ending, together with the vision on the title page of the lame beggar at Charing Cross, also indicates that there was nothing in England to return to, either for those who had been driven out or for the many maimed and destitute mariners returning from capture, shipwreck and the wars who were to be found begging all over Britain. This was reflecting on English government and English law with

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a vengeance. It was also strong and risky stuff to be publishing at a time when Britain was panicking about depopulation, since it was a comment both on why ordinary working people were leaving for the West Indies and the New World in droves, and on why they might not wish to return. English printers therefore pointed readers towards this thematics on their title pages by indirection. The text is peppered with prayers to God and allusions to providence, which were capitalized or italicized in some American editions. Its invocation of the traditional Protestant providential world view was evidently part of the text’s appeal in America. But the point that American editor-printers highlighted on their title pages, and wanted readers to take away from the story, was that it “DE MONS T R A BLY prov[ed] that Condemnations upon Circumstantial Evidence are injurious to Innocence, incompatible with Justice, and therefore ought always to be discountenanced, especially in Case of Life and Death.” This directed readers’ attention to the way the text cleverly offered three different stories about what happened on the night that Collins was “murdered”: Gwinett’s own story, that constructed from the “evidence” by his landlady and the neighbors, and that of the supposedly murdered man, Richard Collins. Gwinett explains such apparently damning facts as his possession of Collins’ knife and the blood in the garden latrine, but he is not believed. There are gaps in his story – he cannot explain, for instance, why there is blood in the bed he and Collins shared and or what had happened to the body, since Collins disappeared while he was in the latrine and he has no idea what became of him. The landlady and the neighbors find probable explanations for all these facts, including the absence of the body, to confirm their conviction that Gwinett has murdered Collins. These are the people who identify Gwinett as Collins’ murderer, who go to fetch him at his sister’s house, and who bring him to justice; and their talk amounts to a popular trial and judgment by jury antecedent to that in the court of law which sentences him to be hanged. Besides offering living proof that no murder was committed, Collins’ story fills in the gaps in Gwinett’s story to show up the neighbors’ story as a fabrication and to place Gwinett’s refusal to confess, despite the repeated efforts of divines and friends to make him do so, in an unaccustomed light. A convict’s refusal to observe the convention of confessing and acknowledging the justice of his sentence at his place of execution was thought to show his defiant or unregenerate state. The fact that no murder had been committed demonstrated that the assumption that Gwinett refused to confess because he was wickedly impenitent proceeded from the same presumption of guilt

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as the fabricated story. A convict might refuse to confess because he had not committed the crime and because, like Gwinett, he was an honest as well as an innocent man who did not wish to go to his Maker with a lie on his lips. Ignoring the convict’s claim that he was innocent, treating his story as a lie, dismissing a refusal to confess as defiance or lack of repentance, all proceeded from an assumption about the convict’s guilt that was, in turn, based on the popularly held and officially ratified story of the crime. Stories were therefore a serious matter – they could get a man hanged – and they were all the more treacherous because, as Gwinett’s Life dramatically demonstrated, multiple stories could hang or be hanged on the same circumstantial facts. As Alexander Walsh has shown, from mid-century, circumstantial evidence was given a new centrality in criminal trials. This was seen as problematical because, as presented by prosecutors or judges who were anxious crack down on crime, “circumstances typically told against the individual brought to trial.” In their directions to juries, judges justified relying on circumstantial evidence to establish the guilt of the accused by arguing that, being facts, “circumstances cannot lie,” as witnesses could, and that “it is not within the reach and compass of human abilities to invent a train of circumstances which shall be so connected together as to amount to proof of guilt, without affording opportunities of contradicting a great part, if not all those circumstances.”9 Gwinett disproved these arguments on the reader’s pulse, so to speak: it showed that people did have the ability to invent a train of mutually supporting circumstances proving someone guilty, which even an innocent attorney’s clerk could find it impossible to contradict or disprove. It showed that once narrativized, circumstances could lie in such a way that ordinary people and juries would believe what they were said to show. Gwinett also argued for giving more credence to the testimony of witnesses, by suggesting that the very incompleteness and disconnectedness of his testimony was evidence that Gwinett was telling the truth, since it meant that he was stating only the bits and pieces of the story that he happened to know for a fact. We might recall that at this time, Americans were busy revising and altering the penal code they had inherited from Britain, and that many were arguing for the abolition of capital punishment for a wide variety of crimes. By highlighting the problem of circumstantial evidence on their imprints and associating the injustices it occasioned at law with Old England (while printers Robert Bell in Philadelphia and John White in Boston both added a note stressing the “authenticity” of the tale), American printers were cleverly reusing the story to intervene in this

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American debate and refocuse it on contemporary American issues. By directing readers’ attention to Ambrose Gwinett as an object lesson in how rapidly people became fortune’s footballs when unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of English law, where their lives, liberties and fortunes became the sport of plausible, legally sanctioned but purely circumstantial fictions, they were making a case for change. T h e B a m pf y l de -Mo or e C a r e w ph e nom e non John Barrell finds the roots of the original story of Bampfylde-Moore Carew’s Life (1745) in Elizabethan rogue pamphlets.10 The rather different Apology for the life of Bampfylde-Moore Carew that was published at Sherborne in 1749 and that became the basis for the Bampfylde-Moore Carew phenomenon, began as a witty jest, that was almost immediately soured by a quarrel.11 This first edition of The Apology showed the wit of its author-editor (thought to be Goadby, one of its printers) as well as the tongue in cheek nature of its apology, by arguing in the Preface that this man who had been a vagabond, a beggar and a convict, was a hero comparable to Alexander, to Demosthenes, to Regulus and to Tom Jones. A gentleman and the son of a clergyman, Carew imposes in various disguises on the gentry and on his well-to-do friends, who invariably regard it as a famous joke. His ability to successfully dress up and impersonate people at all ranks and in all walks of life is deployed to bring out unexpected implications of Fielding’s argument about the universality of human nature: Thus great is the power of dress, that it transforms and metamorphoses the beggar into a gentleman, and the under wench into a fine lady; therefore let not the little-great (I mean those who have nothing to recommend them but their equipage) pride themselves as though they had something superior in them to the poor wretch they spurn from them with so much contempt; for … strip them of their gaudy plumes, and we shall not be able to distinguish them from the lowest orders or mumpers.12

But the adventures of this gentleman trickster are used primarily to enliven an extensive, well informed, and very positive, contemporary description both of the various settlements in America  – Maryland, Boston, Philadelphia, Rhode Island, New York and the Jerseys – and of Native American culture.13 This version of The Apology intervened in contemporary debates about crime only indirectly – by mischievously agreeing with those who argued that transportation to a country as settled, as civil and hospitable, and as prosperous as America now was, hardly

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constituted a terrible punishment for convicted felons; and by mockingly presenting a major problem at mid-century – the repeated and rapid return to England of transported convicts before their time – as evidence of the convict’s patriotism and love of their native land. However, the second, much expanded edition of 1750 abandoned this jesting, mock-heroic mode. Its new Preface described Fielding’s representation of himself as a moral and religious author as a deceptive impersonation far worse than Bampfylde’s, and attacked Fielding viciously for his authoritarianism and contempt for the “lower orders of society.” These traits may not be as obvious in Tom Jones as the author-editor of this Preface claims; but they would be amply demonstrated in Fielding’s Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers the following year (1751).14 While retaining the descriptions of America from the earlier ­version, this second edition was expanded into a pointed, populist and anti-Hanoverian, critique of English society, English government and English law. Neither the text nor the story of Bampfylde-Moore Carew’s life was ever any more stable than the stories about Gwinett, or indeed, than their wandering and erring hero. This was due to the fact that it was clear, as The Monthly Review put it, that though there “really [was] in being such a person as Bampfylde-Moore Carew, a noted beggar in the West of England,” his exploits in The Apology had a “colouring thrown on them” by his “ingenious biographer” which was not his own.15 Carew’s life and memoirs immediately became a site where different social and political positions were contested, and upon which different “colourings” were accordingly thrown. In 1750, for instance, The Monthly argued in the spirit of Fielding rather than of The Apology, that Carew’s “sharping tricks” and impositions on charitable people should “strengthen and confirm that common remark ‘that really, there is neither wisdom nor true charity in relieving idle vagrant beggars,’ a class of persons who are only kept up and maintained from one generation to another, by the mistaken benevolence of the unthinking and the irresolute, who cannot resist the pressing solicitations of artful adepts … ”16 And in 1753, Isaac Kimber’s London Magazine offered readers an abridgement of Carew’s Apology that was designed, in the same spirit, to “guard Persons against the Arts and Stratagems of such Wretches, who are the Pest of Society, and injurious to all honest Men.” In this version of the story, unlike the 1749 and 1750 editions, Carew’s crime is clear: he is “seized and confined as an idle vagrant,” and very properly tried and transported to Maryland.17 He is also presented as an incorrigible villain: “the evil habits [Carew] secretly

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longed to indulge and the unlicensed freedom he had enjoyed in the company of vagabonds, made him break through every Sense of Filial Piety, Affection and Gratitude” to his exemplary parents, who wished only to make him happy at home. From 1770, “new” editions of Goadby’s Apology, now retitled The Life and Adventures of Bampfylde-Moore Carew, dropped the attack on Fielding and most of the literary allusions in The Apology, and presented themselves on their title pages as “an impartial account of his [Carew’s] life.” These editions detached the story from the juridical controversies of the 1750s and, adding anecdotes from the 1745 edition and elsewhere, made Carew’s Life a radical text with broader political implications about tyranny and freedom. This was the version that was repeatedly reprinted for many of London’s most eminent publishers throughout the 1770s, 1780s and 1790s, and that dominated the British print market during and after the American Revolution and through the revolutionary decades. According to Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, the first of several American editions of Carew’s Life and Adventures was also published in Philadelphia by Robert Bell in 1773,18 but these editions have left no solid trace. The early nineteenth-century American editions, which survive owe more to the conservative backlash in British editions such as that printed by Robert Bassam in 1798, which omitted the peons to liberty and the pointed political reflections from the “impartial account” and reduced Carew’s life to anecdote and event.19 One American version went so far as to rehabilitate Carew and retire him to a country estate to live the life of gentility, prosperity and respectability to which it was his trademark to be most emphatically opposed.20 On the simplest level, the “impartial account” of The Life and Adventures of Bampfylde-Moore Carew (1770–1790s) was a celebration of vagabondage, mobility and freedom, in an era when strenuous efforts were being made by the authorities to keep the lower orders to their “duty” and fix them quietly in one place. The vagrancy laws and the poor laws returned the “wandring” poor bodily to their own parishes and sought to keep them there, whenever possible, by compelling them to work; and the militia was kept handy to deal with any motions of the mob or “mobility.”21 Because the poor generally had no means of subsistence while on the road but begging or stealing, begging and vagabondage were criminalized along with theft, on the assumption that beggars and vagabonds were, or would sooner or later become, robbers and thieves. Mobility was also the stratagem most frequently used by robbers, murderers, highwaymen and thieves to evade the authorities, since there was little effective official

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communication about criminals across precincts. On this level, Carew figured as a plebeian hero who valiantly resisted all efforts to stop him from wandering or compel him to work. He made begging an exercise in ingenuity rather than the last humbling recourse of necessity and despair, by demonstrating that it was an art which required all the skills of the most accomplished actor and a philosopher’s knowledge of the world, and which enabled the lowest of the low to get the better of their betters.22 When sent as a convict to Maryland, Carew’s showed his courage, ingenuity and determination by twice escaping from his seller before he could be sold, preferring the dangers of the wilderness and the risk of meeting hostile Indians to the rigors of hard labor and the discipline of the pot hook and the lash. There was, as The Gentleman’s Magazine said, something of the “marvellous” in that. But as a popular hero of the order of Robin Hood, Carew himself was the marvel:  a jack-in-the-box who demonstrated that, however poor an Englishman might be and however often cribb’d, confined and transported, he could not, without his consent, be governed, controlled, or kept down. In this context, the fact that the gentlemen who are tricked into giving Carew alms, treat his disguises as a good joke and invite him to stay to amuse them with his stories, underlines the distance between the customs and values of English people and the designs of English law. The wanderings of the poor were another of Sharpe’s “social crimes,” where custom and law diverged. On another level, which perhaps spoke more clearly to the concerns of professionals, tradesmen and patricians, Carew was a hero who rejected the polite and genteel society into which he had been born. A gentleman, the son of a gentleman, with a gentleman’s Latin education, Carew was a drop-out, who chose to live the life of a gypsy because “there is perhaps no people so completely happy as these are, or enjoy so great a share of liberty.”23 The “impartial account” offered two societies  – one internal, Gypsy, and one external, Indian  – as utopian counter-points to British society, to demonstrate what true liberty, social justice and government to the people’s good, could look like, and that Carew was willing to be governed by these societies’ rules. This made possible specific critiques and suggestions for reform: for instance by creating more or less explicit contrasts between the freedom and secrecy of the Gypsies’ election of their king and corrupt British election practices, or between the Indian king’s proximity to all his people, and knowledge of their needs and grievances, and King George’s isolation in his palace, and government through surrogates. It also made possible a larger argument about the lack of liberty in Georgian England:

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What is birthright, what is inheritance, when put in the scales against the choicest of blessings, public liberty? O liberty, thou enlivener of life, thou solace of our toils, thou patron of arts, thou encourager of industry, thou spring of opulence, thou something more than life … But where thou art not what place so sacred as to be secure? Or who can say, this is my own? … Oh my country! Alas, my country! Thou wast once the chosen seat of liberty … O thou whom my soul loveth, wherefore do I now seek thy footsteps in vain? … Alas, hast thou not seen them take the rod from [thy] beloved sister Justice, and give it to the sons of blood and rapine?24

From this point of view, Carew’s wandering life as a Gypsy both symbolized England’s loss of liberty and demonstrated the only way that liberty could still be enjoyed in Britain:  “We enjoy our Ease and Rest/To the Fields we are not press’d/And when the Taxes are Increas’d/We are not a penny cess’d/ … All of which happiness he brags/Is only owing to his rags” (61). In Britain, only beggars, who had dropped out of the economy and the labor system, who rejected the social and financial ambitions of commercial and genteel society, and who managed to stay beyond the reach of government and law, still had their liberty. Consequently, though his uncle offers to make him his heir and others are willing to help him back, Carew adamantly refuses to return to English society and to the tyranny of conventional British life. Comparison with the virtuous manners of American Indians makes a further point about the failings of conventional British and Anglo-American society: As he was now amongst a polished people, where knowledge has taught them to forget the ways of nature, and act everything in disguise; whose hearts and tongues are far distant asunder, as the North from the South Poles, and who daily over reach one another in the most common occurrences of life: we hope it will be no disgrace to our hero, if among such he appears as polished as the best, and puts on fresh disguise as often as it suits his conveniency. (109)

From this point of view, Carew’s tricking impersonations were merely a more outré expression of the mores and defects of polite British and Anglo-American society. In begging for his living in a variety of disguises, Carew was merely taking a leaf out of society’s book. On this level, Carew was a hero who challenged the polite and would-be well-bred to show how they differed from him, and to ask themselves by what right they condemned and convicted in a poor man, the idleness, the disguises, the trickery, the false self-representations, and the methods of overreaching others, which they practiced themselves. In the “impartial account,” the more honorable thing to do was to live as fortune’s football, wandering from pillar to post, forever between

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feast and fast, and accepting one’s fortunes, good and bad, with ingenuity and good humor. A man who was fortune’s football in this manner preserved his Liberty by rejecting the goals, ambitions and disciplines of Britain’s commercial empire, by evading the men of “blood and rapine” when he could, and by using his ingenuity to escape their slavery and lashes when he must. He deployed society’s hypocrisies against itself and demonstrated his preference for the free, egalitarian, materially impoverished but mutually supportive community of gypsies and Indians to the legal tyranny, corruption and snobbery of Georgian civilization. In the “impartial account,” then, beggars could be choosers. “T h e sp or t of f or t u n e”:  T y l e r’s A l g e r i n e C a p t i v e Like Ambrose Gwinett and Bampfylde-Moore Carew, The Algerine Captive uses the conventional circum-Atlantic adventure story for its frame. While displacing the point of origin and return from Old England to New England, Tyler sends his hero, Updike Underhill, up dikes and down hills “to seek … fame and fortune.”25 Underhill travels to the American South with the intention of returning to Massachusetts “after a few years of successful practice” as a physician, in order to “close a life of reputation and independence in [his] native state” (74). Unable to make it in the South and “reduced to his last dollar,” he becomes a ship’s surgeon. Embarking on a ship called “Freedom,” he travels to London, where he spends some time observing the natives, before joining the crew of a slaving ship which is bound for Africa, and then for Barbados and South Carolina. Underhill sails from London to Africa by the usual route, via the Madeira and Canary islands, and down past the Cape Verde islands to the Congo, and lands in Africa. When captured there by Algerine pirates, he is carried down to the Straits of Gibraltar and thence to Algiers just inside the Mediterranean. When released from slavery six years later by a Portuguese ship which “stood for the straits of Gibraltar” (224), he transfers to a British merchantman bound for Bristol, and thence to a brigantine going to Chesapeake Bay. Underhill too therefore circumnavigates the Atlantic, a point which Tyler emphasized by doubling the circularity of the voyage with the circularity of the narration: Underhill begins and ends his narrative “upon his return to his native country, after an absence of seven years”(5). Tyler demythologized the British Atlantic adventurer’s circular voyage by reproducing the structure of narratives such as The Hermit, Roderick Random and Ambrose Gwinett which demonstrated at some length the

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misfortunes that befell their heroes in their native country to force them to go to sea, and by having his hero return to America without the fortune he sought – and without any better prospect now of achieving his “primary object … a place of settlement, ” complete with wife and property, than he had when he first set out from his native state. Tyler also demythologized Atlantic Adventure narratives through the hero he created. This was noted by London’s Monthly Review in 1803,26 which described the narrative as a story of “misfortunes” and drew attention to the fact that, “like those of other notable worthies,” Underhill’s misfortunes were prefigured in his mother’s dream of Indians playing football with her son’s head. The allusion was to Smollett’s immensely popular seafaring doctor, Roderick Random, whose mother dreamed that her son was “a tennis ball which the devil-midwife struck with a racket so forcibly that it disappeared in an instant.”27 The Monthly’s allusion indicated with great economy that, like Random for two thirds of his novel, Underhill was what Tyler himself called him: “the sport of fortune” (23). Like Random, Underhill’s problem was that, though educated for it, he failed to become a member of the elite. His background and education were commensurable with the American elite of his time  – John Adams, Benjamin Rush, and Thomas Jefferson, for instance, also came from farming families, learned Latin and the classics, and acquired a profession (medicine or law) which they practiced before going on to greater things. Underhill’s career also in some respects corresponded to that of David Humphreys, to whom Tyler dedicated the novel. A Connecticut wit whose Latin education had been directed by his pastor father, and now the distinguished plenipotentiary negotiating the captives’ release in Algiers, Humphreys like Underhill had begun his career by teaching school. Underhill repeatedly indicates that this upwardly mobile trajectory was supposed to have been his path too. He juxtaposes with his mother’s prophetic dream of his future powerlessness, a synopsis of the life of William Phipps who began as a poor journeyman ships’ carpenter and became Governor of Massachusetts Bay. He records that the minister who urges Underhill’s father to let him study, tells him that he too had been poor as a boy, and that if Underhill went to Harvard College like him, he could follow him into the parish ministry and escape poverty as he had done. Underhill also illustrates his desire to “close a life of reputation and independence in [his] native state,” with the example of Benjamin Franklin, “a man who, from an humble printer’s boy, had elevated himself to be the desirable companion of the great ones of the earth” (75).

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But though it is “augured that [Underhill] should be a member of congress, and equal to the Adamses in oratory,” or “become a Witherspoon in divinity” (26), Underhill finds that once become a physician, he, like Roderick Random, lacks the patronage to enter the professional or the governing elite and thus the ability to settle himself in his native land. Despite the “celebrity of his [medical] preceptor,” the letters of introduction which Underhill very properly carries to Joseph Gardner (a physician and member of the Continental Congress), and to other gentlemen of the faculty in Boston, lead nowhere (59). They fail to produce a respectable job, or indeed any job at all. Sixty years earlier, like Alexander Hamilton, another impecunious physician who satirized the ordinary people he met on his Itinerarium, Underhill might perhaps have married into a wealthy and established American family, and found fortune and a place to settle that way. But for Underhill that possibility too is blocked: writing an ode to a young woman in New England leads absurdly to a narrowly averted duel with her suitor; and parents in the South “repel [his] every approach to their innocents” (83). With both avenues into the elite closed to him, then, Underhill finds himself in 1785, at the height of the post-war depression, an educated vagabond, traveling from town to town like “the strolling poor,”28 to seek settled work that is not to be found. Displays of his education are represented as ridiculous here by virtue of their incongruity in the non-elite environments into which Underhill has fallen and where he has to try to make his way. Indeed, this incongruity is the very mark of his fall. At the same time, Underhill’s satire and self-deprecating humor make light of his distresses in a manner which – while exposing Underhill the character to ridicule – re-marks Underhill the narrator as a man of wit, amusing conversation, and genteel education. Because Underhill the character “is a failure in America,” where he is subject to poverty and unemployment,29 he does not join a ship freely and voluntarily like Crusoe. He becomes a ship’s surgeon after the manner of Gulliver, to whom London’s Monthly Review compared him. As Swift repeatedly emphasized, Gulliver accepts the position of surgeon on a ship only because he can get no work as a physician at home. Like Gulliver, Underhill has just enough patronage to be “invited” to accept the berth by a captain who knows his “friends.” Tyler exposes the contrast between this brute reality and the standard puffing ideological representations by ironically contrasting Underhill’s penury and fear of a debtor’s prison with the seductive promise of Atlantic adventures à la Chetwood or Crusoe which his prospective employer holds out to him:

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I was encouraged by handsome wages, and a privilege in the ship, to carry an adventure … I was to be companion to the captain, and have a fine chance of seeing the world … To tempt the perilous ocean, and encounter the severities of the sea-faring life, the diseases of torrid climes, and perhaps a total separation from my friends and parents, was melancholy; but the desire to see the world, to acquire practical knowledge in my profession, to obtain property, added to the necessity of immediate subsistence, and the horrours of a jail, determined me … (83–4)

Underhill’s penury also links the first to the second book of the novel, which is set in Algiers. Underhill is sold into slavery there because his poverty excludes all possibility of ransom. The poor are those who are driven to go to sea, to risk tempests, disease and Barbary captivity for a subsistence and the hope of obtaining wealth. The poor are also those who, once captured, become Algiers’ “menial slaves.” Tyler stresses this point by again, and more explicitly, contrasting the reality with the ideological representation: I did not meet, among my fellow slaves, the rich and the noble, as the dramatist and the novelist had taught me to expect … I expected to find them [my fellow slaves] men of rank at least if not of learning. I fancied my master’s cook an English lord; his valet an Italian duke; his groom a knight of Malta; and even his foot boy some little lively French marquis … but the sober character of the historian compels me to assure my readers that … I never saw during my captivity, a man of any rank, family or fortune among the menial slaves … The menial slaves are generally composed of the dregs of those nations with whom they [the Algerines] are at war. (118, 119, 120)30

The American mariners captured and retained as slaves by Barbary pirates after 1785, and left there to rot for years like Underhill, were disproportionately poor and poorly connected men who could not raise a ransom and lacked the right American “friends.” Though dismissing the idea that there were any “noble slaves” in Barbary captivity, Tyler did reaffirm Aubin’s, Ashton’s and epitomized Crusoes’ representations of infra-institutional acts of kindness among people of different nations, as well as Aubin’s conviction about that “universal language of benevolence” (118) which transcends national tongues.31 But he was insistent that pity and mutual help were to be found only among the poor, the suffering and the enslaved: “Grandeur draws a circle around the great, and often excludes from them the finer feelings of the heart. The wretched are all of one family; and ever regard each other as brethren” (118). In Algiers, only Underhill’s fellow slaves of all nations show him a “tenderness bordering upon fraternal affection” by sharing

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their food, providing for his needs and covering for him when the physical labor demanded of him is beyond his strength. There is a single instance of “humanity” between captor and slaves in the novel – Underhill tries to ameliorate the conditions of the newly captured African slaves on board the Sympathy; and one of them later shows his sympathy and gratitude by doing the same for Underhill on the Barbary rover, when he in turn is confined to a dark hole between decks. But this shows only that ameliorist conduct on the part of those who enslave others is also in their best interests in an Atlantic world where enslavers might themselves at any moment find themselves enslaved.32 To move beyond such “humanity”and ameliorism and touch the well-springs of fraternal affection, Tyler suggests, it was necessary to have been among the wretched oneself – like the English apostate in Algiers who teaches Underhill how he might escape the miseries of starvation, killing labor and the lash by “turning Turk” as he has done, and like Underhill himself, who vows that if he is ever freed from slavery, he will devote his life to freeing others. Like Aubin, Tyler presented religious conversion as a primary issue for captives. But where Aubin treated religious and cultural conversion instrumentally, as habits one could put on and off at will, Tyler presented religious conversion both as a betrayal to be resisted and as a huge and perfectly understandable temptation nevertheless. “When a man is degraded to the most abject slavery, lost to his friends, neglected by his country and can anticipate no rest but in the grave” (126), who would not be profoundly tempted to cast off the yoke? What price the doctrine that “my body is in slavery, but my mind is free” (126) in a situation where those who run away are caught and so severely punished as to preclude all realistic possibility of escape? And how free is the mind which unquestioningly accepts the religion which the body was unwittingly born into (127)? Significantly, Underhill’s conversations on such topics are only with renegades and apostates. The renegade captain of the Algerine Rover and the English apostate from Birmingham who suggests that Underhill escape slavery by converting, exhibit the material rewards of conversion, and the temptation to be “free and happy” by throwing off the physical shackles of slavery. The Mollah, originally a Christian of the Greek Church in Antioch, tempts Underhill with freedom of the soul, by offering conversion to Islam as a means of throwing off his intellectual and spiritual shackles, and of finding joy in knowledge of the unity of God. Ironically, Underhill’s flight from the temptation of such freedom to the “safety” of slavery only teaches him that physical fatigue, fear of the whip, and the spectacle of the “insupportable agonies” of punished slaves, in

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time rob him of “the dignity of a free mind” altogether, and make him “indeed a slave” (144). Heroick virtue is not to be expected of those who are “indeed” slaves both in mind and in body, for “when men are once reduced to slavery, they can never resolve, much less achieve, any thing that is manly, virtuous or great” (145). In this situation, a man retains his religion, if at all, only as a symbol of home: “the religion of my country was all I had left of the many blessings I once enjoyed in common with my fellow citizens” (146). Underhill is rescued from this abjection by the Mollah’s patronage, which subjects him to the greatest temptation of all by enabling him to practice his profession, and gain the fame and reputation in Algiers which he had sought and failed to achieve in the new Republic. Ironically, in Algiers, his Latin proves useful and his education is highly valued – Underhill is called admiringly the “learned slave.” In Algiers too, Underhill has all the patronage he needs to advance. He can obtain wealth and banish poverty for ever if only he will convert: “if I had conformed to their faith, beyond a doubt, I might have acquired immense riches” (153). The history of Algiers and account of Algerian society, mores and religion which follows is therefore not only designed to satisfy the curiosity of American readers about Algiers, as has been argued. It describes the world that Underhill would be entering if he converted, and raises the questions that the analogies with Africa, England and North America are designed to explore: can one be free and independent in a tyrannical society, in a different religion? Where in the world can a man who values freedom find it? As Michele Crescenzo points out, “many scenes in the second book echo scenes in the first.”33 As an Algerine captive, Underhill undergoes the same abduction, confinement in the hold, humiliating physical examination, inability to understand what is going on about him, intimidating spectacle of violence against other slaves, physical abuse and despair in Volume ii as the Africans on the slaving ship in Volume i. Like the African slave of the unChristian minister in the South in Volume i, Underhill is beaten, cursed, and rendered docile by being “enslaved indeed” in Volume ii. Like the Africans on the ship in Volume i, Underhill prefers death to slavery in Volume ii. He even shares an enslaved African’s dream of freedom. Like the dying African on the slaver in Volume i who invites his wife and children to follow him into death and “slaken their thirst with him at the cool streams of the fountain of their Great Father, beyond the reach of the wild white beasts” (100), Underhill dreams in the Algerian stone quarry of “the spring under a rock upon [his] father’s farm … from which we used to

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supply our family with water” (124). Tyler’s analogies between white slavery in Algiers and black slavery under white British and American masters develop the “do unto others” theme. But Underhill’s vision is more thisworldly than the African’s. The cool, natural and free flowing spring of sweet water which quells the thirst of his father’s family on their independent farm is Underhill’s primary symbol, not only of American freedom, but also of “the rich blessings of our federal union” (124). Tyler’s analogies between England, America and Algiers show that from the first, America had been heir to a double legacy: Americans inherited from England forms of tyranny and unfreedom which eerily echo Algiers, as well as those “sentiments of independence, that love of liberty, which under God enabled us to obtain our own glorious freedom” (19). England is held responsible for all the different degrees of captivity and unfreedom in America and indeed in the Atlantic world. It is represented from the very beginning of the novel as an implicitly despotic country which punishes expressions of political and religious dissent, as well as all forms of lese majesty, with banishment or death. When it comes to insurrections or challenges to their rule, there are analogies between the panicked responses of the despotic Algerian Deys in Volume ii, who proceed on the principle that it is a matter of killing or being killed, and Underhill’s account of Queen Elizabeth and Charles II at the beginning of Volume i. Queen Elizabeth had Essex’s head for a “petty insurrection,” as Charles II had Hugh Peters’, the New England Puritan who returned “home” only to be “afterwards hung and quartered in England, for his adherence to Oliver Cromwell” (16). By showing that in New England, this same Hugh Peters was the primary persecutor and banisher of Underhill’s ancestor, Captain John Underhill, Underhill indicates that the Puritans in Massachusetts were the heirs of this English political and religious despotism. Like English monarchs, New England Puritans tolerated no challenge to their religious doctrines or to their political rule. They too subjected dissenters, such as Governor Winthrop, Ann Hutchinson, Roger Williams, William Blaxton and Captain Underhill to disenfranchisement or banishment, if they could not be brought by fines, imprisonment, halters and confiscation to recant (14). The Critical Review was sensitive to this analogy, but inclined to view English despotism and intolerance as a thing of the past. Comparing the Puritans’ treatment of Captain Underhill’s supposed adultery at the beginning of Tyler’s novel with “the late attempt in the house of lords, to cut up adultery by the roots,” the Critical Reviewer observed that the former made the latter “appear a mere bagatelle.”34

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Cathy Davidson has argued that in showing how “the rigid discipline of our fathers of that era often construed actions, expressions and sometimes thoughts into crimes,” Tyler was drawing a parallel between the repressive politics of the early Puritans and the repressive measures of the John Adams Federalists of 1797 who were framing the Alien and Sedition Acts. In 1797 too, she observes, American newspapers were filled with talk of new ways to require fines, imprisonments, disenfranchisement, confiscation and banishments for those criticizing Adams’ government or protesting against authority.35 One might add that Tyler places in the incongruous mouth of Thomas Paine in London the American Federalist party’s doctrine that only the minority should govern, since the ignorant majority of the people were necessarily “prone to errour” (89). The implication was that, like the suppression of dissent, the rule of the minority was a practice that properly belonged in England, and to the “manners, customs and habits of a strange country.” England is blamed too for the enslavement of American sailors in Algiers, and not only because, like other Americans at this time, Underhill believed that the British government was encouraging the Algerians to target American ships to punish America for her independence. Britain also figures prominently among those European nations which historically chose to make treaties with Barbary pirates for their own economic advantage, instead of working together to eliminate North African piracy for the common good. Underhill’s history of Algiers thus makes American slavery in Algiers the logical outcome of earlier European, and specifically English, competition, greed and corruption. London is represented as the capital of the African slave trade, and made to seem the only place from which slaving ships depart for Africa. Underhill also describes the economic and legal oppression which subject the English poor to forms of misery, servitude and unfreedom which fall short of slavery, but not always by much. He finds in London people “whose little smoky fire of coals was rendered cheerless by excise and their daily draft of beer embittered by taxes” while they “administer to the luxury of pensioners and place men.” He finds people “who are entangled by innumerable penal laws, to the breach of which, banishment and the gallows are almost universally annexed” and – in an allusion to Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World – he finds people “rotting in dungeons, languishing wretched lives in feotid jails, and boasting of the Glorious Freedom of Englishmen” (86). As Underhill describes it, then, English attitudes to the poor have also left their mark on America, and not only through those “school masters before the war” who “had been usually collected from

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unfortunate European youth of some learning” and “sold for their passage to America,” who had made “a school master and a negro … almost synonymous” (83). Underhill’s impoverished and unemployed situation in early Republican America, and his narrow avoidance of a fetid jail, resembles the situation in Britain which many Britons migrated to America to escape. And however satirically and light-heartedly, Underhill portrays an America which repeatedly imitates Britain’s practice of banishing all those who do not fit in – dissenters, political and religious dissidents, vagrants, convicts, the poor, the idle and the unemployed. Captain Underhill is banished both from England, and from Massachusetts Bay, despite his important military services during the Pequod War. Updike himself, who is physically banished from at least one town, is repeatedly starved out of other settlements which find him unacceptable as a man, a teacher or a doctor, because he does not conform. Lack of patronage and lack of acceptance almost land him in a debtor’s prison, before driving him out of America and back to England for work on a slaving ship. Nor is he alone. Underhill finds exiled in London a notable painter, the son of “a late patriotic American governor,” who has likewise been driven from America by “the imbecility of contemporary patronage” (88). Underhill intimates that “posterity” will “regret” America’s foolish loss of men with so much to contribute. What Underhill does not find in this England, which he identifies with virtually all forms of economic, legal, political and religious unfreedom, is understanding or admiration for “the independent farmer of America” (85). Underhill shows that the difference between Britain and America, which made the latter comparatively “the freest country in the universe” (at least for white men) was that citizens could always find “better countre” elsewhere on the continent (18). Like Roger Williams who escaped the tyranny of the Boston Puritans by going to settle Providence, RI (18); like Captain Underhill who went to fight with the Dutch in Albany before settling on Long Island; like Underhill’s father who, “in impoverished circumstances,” settled on a farm in New Hampshire; and indeed, like Tyler himself, who retired from Boston to a remote farm in Vermont; it was possible for people with “an ardent love of liberty, civil and religious” to live in America freely and independently of “the jurisdiction of Massachusetts,” in their own distant settlements, and on their own isolated farms (20). Their lives might be simple and frugal – Underhill speaks of his father living on bread as well as that sweet spring of water – but they were nobody’s real or metaphorical slaves. Underhill’s forbears therefore showed that it was impossible

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to be truly free and independent under government, whether in Algiers, in Old England, or in the New England of 1697 or 1797. It was possible to be free and independent only by moving beyond government’s reach. Despite the distant echo of Philip Quarll, this early version of “Go West, young man,” which Tyler practiced as well as preached, is represented as something thoroughly nativist. This was not something borrowed from England, which had only “contempt” for “the independent American farmer.” Underhill therefore concludes his narrative by calling on his readers to ensure that “foreigners … not be allowed” to dominate American policy. If Underhill also asks Americans “to unite our federal strength to enforce a due respect among other nations” and protect the freedom of American citizens, he does so in the spirit of the Federalists of 1787 who wanted a strong central government for purposes of union and defense, not, as has been assumed, in the spirit of the John Adams Federalists of 1797, who are represented as heirs to the more despotic and illiberal traits which their Puritan ancestors had brought from England to New England.36 Indeed, one might see in Tyler’s minimalist account of the federal union’s functions, a cautious but pointed comment on the expanded, managing and encroaching version of federalism instituted by the John Adams Federalists. It seems at first as if one disadvantage of living independently on a remote farm in Vermont and publishing with David Carlisle Jr in Walpole, New Hampshire, as Tyler did, was that his novel was not as widely read in America as it deserved to be. As G. Thomas Tanselle observed, Tyler’s friend, John Dennie, complained in 1797 that it was hard for Bostonians to get “a book that slumbers in a stall in Walpole, supposed, by the latest and most accurate advertisements, to be situated 400 miles north of their meridian,” and described it in 1804 as “a soothing triumph to the ingenious author to learn that his book is perused in the country of his ancestors,” though “neglected in his native land.”37 But perhaps Dennie was just trying to be kind. For Tyler’s printer in Walpole, New Hampshire, usually worked closely with Isaiah Thomas of Worcester, Massachusetts – Carlisle had printed with and for Thomas since 1794 – and Thomas had a bookstore in Boston as well as in Worcester. Here Thomas was, for instance, more than happy to sell the copies of Chetwood’s Captain Boyle that David Carlisle printed up for him. If Tyler’s novel was “neglected in his native land,” it was more likely because (as The Critical Review put it) Tyler had made “a good many pertinent remarks on the facts of the present day” and because, after his abortive courtship of John Adams’ daughter, he had been marginalized and cold shouldered by those descendants

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of the Puritans allied with John Adams, who described him to their friends as a loose cannon and an immoral man.38 The Algerine Captive ultimately reached Boston in 1804, after Adams’ fall, via imports of the London reprint.39 In London, by contrast, as Dennie said, G. and J. Robinson were insistent about reprinting the novel in 1802 and 1804, and about serializing it in The Lady’s Magazine, which sold approximately 12,000 copies each week.40 The Robinsons had been publishing radicals such as William Godwin, Thomas Holcroft, Emma Hays, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Helena Maria Williams, as well as Voltaire and Rousseau. This suggests that in promoting Tyler, the Robinsons may have been disseminating a writer whom they read as a radical. The Monthly Review of 1803 certainly read The Algerine Captive as a radical novel, temperate as its language is. For the reviewer characterized it approvingly as advocating civil and religious freedom, as affirming principles of the American Revolution which had faded in the minds of Tyler’s countrymen, as an abolitionist text, and as a critique of short-sighted European policies towards North Africa: the writer of this performance has wisely exhibited the miseries of captivity, in order that his countrymen may perceive and feel the value of that independence for which they fought and conquered. An able and warm advocate of civil and religious freedom, he nobly reprobates the narrow distracted views of European policy, and feelingly deplores the systematic oppression of the ignorant and unoffending Africans.41

Both the reviewers and the editor of The Lady’s Magazine made such radicalism safe in Britain by dismissing Tyler’s critiques of England (“the moral picture of London is darkened with shading not its own”) and by emphasizing the American-ness of the novel. The editor’s headnote in The Lady’s Magazine introduced it as “the first genuine American production of the kind that has been published in this country” and as “a narrative almost entirely founded on facts.”42 The Critical Review alerted readers to its provenance more skeptically in its first line by describing the novel as “the real or pretended history of an American physician,” while The Monthly spoke of the novel’s “transatlantic peculiarities” and offered seven pages of extracts exclusively from the American scenes. The Monthly also compared the novel’s critique of “the folly or vice of humankind” to Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, that sequence of discontinuous scenes and satirical insights produced by an outsider looking in. Though modern scholars have worried about American identity in The Algerine Captive,

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there was no doubt about its status as an American production in Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century. Its American-ness was marketed as its great appeal. This “outsider” status was only reinforced by British reviewers’ initial recognition that Tyler’s hero was another incarnation of that poor, friendless and exiled wanderer who so often became “fortune’s football” in the Atlantic world.

PA R T I I

The servant’s tale

I n troduc tion We make distinctions between chattel slavery, indentured servitude, convict servitude, and marriage which the transatlantic writers who follow often did not make. Our sense that the difference between lifelong slavery and temporally limited indentured servitude is a profoundly meaningful one, depends on implicitly modern assumptions about life expectancy which, for much of this period, servants and slaves in plantation colonies had little reason to share, given the appallingly high death rate of their fellow slaves and servants from seasoning, cruelty, punishment and disease within their first four years. English servants and African slaves often made common cause, running away together, drinking in dockside taverns together, breaking the law together, marrying together and risking death together. Both were in situations where subjection was a present reality and neither survival nor regaining one’s freedom seemed assured.1 Language did not draw clear lines among these groups either. Slaves who worked as domestics or in skilled trades were often described as “servants”; indeed, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, in North America, “servant was the usual designation for a slave.” Indentured servants called themselves slaves, and often lived and worked side by side with slaves under much the same conditions. Transported convicts were indentured like servants only for longer periods, and were often sold as servants. Wives were the property of their husbands, as were indentured servants, indentured convicts and slaves; they too were bound to obey their lords and masters, and could legally be beaten and abused. Wives were therefore regularly described by indignant women writers both as slaves and as “upper servants” to their husbands. For contemporaries, one obvious similitude among these groups lay in the fact that, for longer or for shorter periods, and in different measures depending on the personalities 111

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involved, all were the property of another, subject to the authority and dictation of another and, both in principle and in law, permitted no will of their own. There were other obvious similarities too. All these groups, including wives, represented important sources of bound or unfree labor that were placed by law at the disposal of the master of the family, at a time when the family household was still the fundamental economic unit of society. There were servants in families at most ranks on both sides of the Atlantic; and in most ranks, wives worked – laboring in the fields, selling eggs and the produce of their dairies, hawking print or milk or rum or old clothes, hiring themselves out as chars or washerwomen, running lodging houses and taverns, practicing a variety of trades, serving in their husbands’ shops, helping with artisanal work or managing the manifold tasks of a great household on a plantation or country estate. Another important similarity lay in the fact that physical violence was considered a normal and acceptable method of disciplining and “correcting” all subordinates, including wives and children. Debate about domestic violence turned only on what and how much physical abuse was excessive, and therefore cruel. The fact that this indeterminate and shadowy line was crossed only too often, in Britain as well as in America, is clear in Britain from the growing number of appeals from women for separation of bed and board on the grounds of cruelty, and from the series of Acts that were passed in 1747, 1767, 1792, 1793, and 1802 to endeavor to protect the poor children that parishes indentured as servants in England from early deaths at the hands of brutal masters or mistresses.2 Though a great deal has been written then and since about cruelty to servants and slaves on the plantations, as the stories below makes clear, physical violence and sometimes murderous abuse were shared transatlantic cultural characteristics, which representations of “humanity” and appeals to sentiment sought to alter, offset or correct. Slave owners increasingly used ideology and the law to create moral, social and racial differences between black slaves, white servants, convicts and wives, which they hoped would prevent their subordinates from making common cause against them. The ideologies they introduced, and their eventual success in dividing the population the better to rule it, have played a significant role in dictating the distinctions that we are now accustomed to make and the academic subject-divisions that have followed from them. These in turn have rendered almost invisible prose narratives which spoke to the similarities and interactions among indentured servants, convicts, slaves and women and to the once perceived affinities

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between poor whites, poor blacks, poor Indians, and female dependents in the household. The affinities among these groups begin to become visible again if we more closely approximate eighteenth-century linguistic usage by conceiving of transatlantic stories by and about all these groups as “servant tales” and look at them together and side by side. According to Jonathan Clark, more than fifty percent of the British population were servants of one kind or another.3 Servants also constituted over three-quarters of all immigrants to America – more when “servant” is understood to include slaves and convicts; more still if we recall that officials and clergy, who were likewise “under the obligation to render certain services, and obey the orders of” others, also described themselves as servants – “servants of State” and “servants of God” (OED). The servant’s tale was not a marginal story and “servant” not a simple  – or necessarily an embarrassing and humiliating  – word, even if our ideologies of individualism, independence or freedom subsequently construed them as such.4 The chapters in Part II explore a few of many transatlantic servant tales. They encompass narratives by writers who belonged to populations that were not yet writing novels – in the case of Samson Occom, I have therefore used letters and journals to reconstruct the transatlantic story which framed his transatlantically published work. They also inhabit that often undecidable space between fact and fiction discussed in the General Introduction, both by fictionalizing real lives and by playing to readers’ proclivity to mistake reassuring conventional fictions for fact. Where the stories in Part I stemmed from narratives about the multinational Atlantic that were first published in the 1720s, those in this section start at midcentury and bear on the dynamics of domestic life. These transatlantic Lives by and about servants, slaves, Native Americans, convicts, maids and wives demonstrate an obsessive recurrent concern with methods of escaping, if they cannot reform, the dominant patriarchal mode of domestic government. Contrary to the dominant ideology which preached passive obedience to subordinates in the household, the stories about servants in Chapter 5 represented running away from cruel, exploitative or sexually importunate masters as a virtue, and justified the many servants who took their freedom into their own hands by absconding. And contrary to a recent argument, the black and Indian servants in Chapters 6 and 7 did not need to be taught the value of freedom by imperial British political ideologues.5 Gronniosaw, Marrant, Equiano, Cugoano, and Samson Occom, all located liberty outside the English and Anglo-American world, in their own native societies prior to

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contact, or insofar as these had escaped contact. Far from admiring the liberties of Englishmen, they pointed to the deprivations imbricated in the freedom of the British poor, while negotiating spaces of freedom within unfreedom and rehearsing that solidarity among the subordinated, the exiled and the poor which transcends nations and ethnic groups, which we have seen before. Servants of God are represented here by Samson Occom, a penurious Native American Christian minister whose white patron expected him to serve him, and whose disillusionment with the British–American missionary establishment and with Anglo-American society as a whole, ultimately led to his withdrawal from both. His experience raised questions about the place of Indians in the white world, and about the role of Indian ministers in the imperial missionary establishment, which he addressed in his transatlantically reprinted Sermon to Moses Paul. These questions were also incisively and presciently examined in The Female American, published in Britain during Occom’s two-year visit, with which Part II concludes.

C h apt e r 5

The bonds of servitude

During the colonial period, most white labor in British America was bound and unfree.1 There was more than one way of pressing white Britons into involuntary servitude, whether in Britain or America, and the transatlantic stories examined in this chapter addressed some of them. They offer what is now a less familiar perspective on the lives of white people by showing why the word servitude, understood as “a state of degrading or burdensome subjection resembling slavery” was applied to “the condition of being a servant, especially in domestic service,” to indentures, and to “compulsory labor as a punishment for criminals” as well as to chattel slavery (OED). The hardships of servants on the plantations became notorious, and colonists feared that reports of them would keep white servants away. But the stories below represented cruelty and domestic violence as a transatlantic problem, and were didactic interventions which sought to correct and alter the domestic evils they described. They therefore end on upbeat notes. Hom e on t h e pl a n tation:   Mr A n de r s on Edward Kimber’s History of the Life and Adventures of Mr Anderson (1754), which is mostly set in America, was characterized by its earliest twentieth-century critic as “a narrative of considerable interest as a piece of Americana.” More recently, Melissa Homestead has cogently argued that it belongs to the prehistory of the early American novel.2 Otherwise, Mr Anderson has been denigrated or ignored, largely it seems because it has been understood to express “conventional anti-American bigotry” and to offer “negative images” of early America. Michal Rozbicki sheds light on this perception by classing Mr Anderson with novels by Defoe (Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack) which “cultivated in the imagination of English high society a stereotype of America as a land of exile for undesirables” and by dismissing Mr Barlow, one of Kimber’s brutal Southern 115

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s­ lave-owners, as a “stock character, representing only the typical ingredients of the popular image expected by readers.” Rozbicki argues instead that “true gentry was present in the colonies” as well as in the metropolis.3 No doubt. But this sort of objection not only identifies “America,” or at least what was worthy in early America, with wealth, gentility, and white men; it also overlooks the fact that Mr Anderson was an antislavery novel. Kimber offered very positive images of early American wives, daughters, indentured servants, yeoman farmers, African slaves and Indians, and reserved his animus for the vicious English captains of slaving ships, for French soldiers who broke their word to Indians, and for cruel and despotic Anglo-American slave owners. He also attacked the vicious and despotic features of English, French-Canadian and French societies. Kimber used types, positive and negative, to critique the major contemporary forms of bondage and servitude – marriage, indentures, slavery and captivity  – and to show why cruelty and bad faith necessarily led to misery, runaways, slave insurrections and Indian attacks. In his Itinerant Observations in America – which was based on his travels through Maryland, Virginia and New York during a two-year stay in America (1742–4) that was otherwise mostly spent in Georgia  – Kimber called slavery the “worst and greatest of Evils.”4 He defended “English Liberties” in The London Magazine, which he edited from 1755 on. And transferring an Old Whig argument into the domain of the Lockean family, with its master, mistress, children, servants and slaves, he argued in Mr Anderson that abuses of absolute domestic power, driven by greed for gain and lack of respect for the humanity of others, created suffering and oppression for everyone subject to the abuser, regardless of age, color or gender. He also warned his readers that people could not be expected to remain passively obedient under it, and showed how, by bonding together, the bound, subjected and enslaved might aid, comfort, and even liberate, one another. Kimber’s attitudes were formed by the Georgia plan and by his almost excessive admiration for General Oglethorpe, the idealistic trusteefounder and military defender of early Georgia, who was adamantly opposed to slavery, and under whom he had served. Indeed, the novel can be read as a defense of Oglethorpe’s plan for Georgia after it had been superseded and Oglethorpe had been discredited and recalled. The plan was for English philanthropists to actively help “poor familys reduced to the utmost necessity by inevitable misfortunes” and the “Idle poor” who were “so many Enemys to the public tranquility” in Britain, by transporting them gratis to Georgia, giving each implements, animals and 50 acres of land to work, and enabling them to become useful and productive

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members of society again.5 This not only involved a ban against keeping slaves in what was to be a society of free, hard-working yeomen on small family farms; it also meant that the poor brought over by the trustees’ philanthropy could settle the land without first having to bind themselves to four to seven year indentures to repay the cost of their passage, as they did elsewhere. In the event, many of the colonists complained of starving on the “pine-barren” plots they had been given and of being robbed by one Mr Jones who ran the general store corruptly for his own financial gain. Many fled Georgia.6 But the Georgia plan and its ideals were still in place in 1742, when Kimber joined Oglethorpe’s regiment at Frederica for an unsuccessful attack on St Augustine. And when Oglethorpe, whom Kimber described as a “God-like man,”7 left Georgia under a cloud, Kimber repeatedly defended his hero in print.8 He was not shy of indicating his loyalty to Oglethorpe’s principles – “Yet in our souls, his maxims dwell/Which teach to speak and act so well” – or of admitting “the desire” he had to “render myself worthy the Favour and Protection of so great a man as General Oglethorpe; to deserve which is to deserve all that’s good in Life.”9 Kimber was still ensuring that Oglethorpe was praised in The London Magazine in 1755,10 a year after the publication of Mr Anderson. Kimber published Mr Anderson just after the remaining Georgia trustees had given up on their philanthropic plan and turned the colony over to royal government, permitting slavery and other characteristics of plantation culture to flourish in Georgia as they did elsewhere. Kimber placed Mr Anderson’s plantation experiences in Maryland, where plantation culture was already fully developed, rather than in Georgia. But what W. Gordon Milne noticed about Kimber’s representations of palm trees and Indians in what he described as an otherwise geographically accurate novel, holds for Kimber’s representation of social and military issues too.11 As Kimber displaced palm trees from Georgia into Maryland where they did not grow, or moved Georgia’s Indian tribes to Virginia where they did not live, so he transposed into the Chesapeake issues that had been hotly divisive in Oglethorpe’s Georgia during the late 1730s and early 1740s:  slavery, the effects of slavery and alcohol on white culture, friendship between whites and Indians, attacks by the French and French Indians, and the use or abuse of patriarchal power. Kimber’s Maryland is also as isolated from the Atlantic and West India trade, and as free of convicts, as Georgia was during his sojourn there. The same phenomenon of displacement occurs on the level of the story. Kimber’s novel was “accurate” inasmuch as he based Mr Anderson on

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a true life story that he had heard in Maryland “from the very person himself who was chief in the story.”12 Kimber always used real lives and made it appear as if his protagonists had written their own histories (in rough draft if nothing else), because he believed that “Romances” were dismissed as “the product of mere Imagination,” and therefore made “no deep or lasting impression” on their readers. By contrast: In a real Life founded on Facts, like this, of a Person now in Being, where every Thing may be depended upon, and goes upon the standard of Truth; where it wears those indelible Marks of Fidelity that distinguish it from all Fiction and Invention; where one Fact or Circumstance naturally flows from another, and you see nothing either impossible or improbable in the Narration; real service is done to Mankind; and we can’t forbear comparing the Character of the Author with our own, and endeavouring to imitate the bright and shining Parts of his Conduct and Behaviour, and to eschew those Parts which appear to us absurd, immoral and ridiculous.13

As becomes apparent from comparing Kimber’s account of the story he was told with Mr Anderson, this meant, in practice, taking “facts” from different sources as needed, and representing them sentimentally in such a way as to register their moral valence. One illustration must suffice. The colonist in Maryland had told Kimber that he was about six years old when he was kidnapped from Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London by a ship’s captain from Bristol, who deluded him into thinking that he was taking him to find his father, abused him sexually on board his ship for the duration of a slaving voyage, and sold him to a wealthy planter upon their arrival in Maryland. These “facts” recur in Mr Anderson. But the colonist had not been able to discover who his parents were. Kimber supplied this lack by making his surrogate, little Tommy Anderson, the offspring of a well-dressed and well-to-do father, rather than, say, an orphan, a street-urchin, or a young pickpocket. This too was based on “facts.” For though it is sometimes said now that the “spirits” who spirited unwilling people away to the colonies disappeared before the end of the seventeenth-century, the kidnapping of children and young people to sell into indentures in America was still going on in Britain during the 1730s and ’40s, when it was definitely not restricted to the poor. One has only think of trepanned and abducted Elizabeth Ashbridge, whose childhood in a prosperous household made the hardships of American servitude all the more unbearable to her – or of Peter Williamson, whose “Discourse on Kidnapping” warned readers in 1759 that infants from six to fourteen, who were incapable of contracting for themselves, were being “sent off without the knowledge or consent of any one of their parents,” as he himself

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had been. There was also the notorious case of James Annesley, a young Irish nobleman who experienced “a thirteen-year slavery in America” as a bond-servant after being abducted from Britain with his uncle’s contrivance, and whose efforts to get justice at law upon his return during the 1740s made him a cause celebre.14 Tommy Anderson’s well-to-do social origin was thus also “founded on facts,” albeit not the facts of the original story. Like the palm trees, this was a fact displaced from elsewhere – and selected for literary and rhetorical effect. Smollett, who took the same line as Kimber on “Romance” in his Preface to Roderick Random (1748), explained that he had given his hero “the advantages of birth and education” because this would, “in the series of his misfortunes … engage the ingenious mind warmly in his behalf.”15 In other words, readers who assumed that hardship and misfortunes were in any case the lot of the poor, might withhold their pity from a hero who was not of “the better sort” and thus destined for better things. For the novel to have the desired effect, the hero had to be such as would engage their sympathies. Kimber gave little Tommy the advantages of birth, education and perhaps above all, whiteness, but went a step further, by modeling the proper reader response. Upon meeting little Tommy, for instance, Mrs Barlow (the slave-owner’s wife, but a “woman of sense and humanity”) “was surprised that there could be persons so hard-hearted to sell innocent and helpless infancy to perpetual servitude; when perhaps, as ills are common to all alike, and the most affluent may meet with reverses of fortune, their own children might be exposed to the merciless hands of strangers.”16 Here, Kimber both stressed that the better sort were personally concerned in this crime because their children could easily become its victims – little Tommy could be their son – and sentimentally evoked the proper moral readerly reaction. He thus turned “facts” into elements of “a System of Ethics and Morality, as much as … [of] an History or Series of Adventures.”17 In Maryland, Kimber’s “system of ethics and morality” opposed the culture of the great plantations – the culture of Mr Barlow with his thousands of acres and several hundred slaves and of the equally wealthy Carters – with that on the small family farm given to Ferguson on the expiration of his indentures. Ferguson and his wife, Molly, are precisely the sort of people that Oglethorpe designed for Georgia: “Tradesmen who have suffered losses, Artificers and Manufacturers of such branches of Trade as are decayed or overstocked, Fathers of numerous Familys by Sickness thrown behind hand so as they cannot retrieve it … ”18 Molly’s father was a bankrupted Bristol merchant who died in debtor’s prison, leaving his daughter to

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be indentured into domestic service by the parish. Ferguson was a Scottish physician, who found his profession “overstocked” in London, where “few are humane and charitable,” and where a man without suitable connections “may rot, starve and die as well as in the most wild parts of America” (62). Ferguson and Molly had both come to America as indentured servants, and been bought by Mr Barlow, who provided Ferguson with some land at the expiration of his time to retain his services as a physician. The Fergusons’ small family plantation  – which Ferguson cultivates himself without the aid of slaves, while supplementing his income by doctoring his neighbors and tutoring their children – is a rendition of Oglethorpe’s vision for Georgia. It is a model not only of frugal and industrious living, but also of affection, content and Christian kindness. Mr Ferguson’s farm serves as a refuge for Mrs. Barlow as well as for her daughter, Fanny; and together, they often manage to shield little Tommy from Mr Barlow’s cruelty. Under Ferguson’s old Whig auspices, moreover, both Fanny and Tom receive a polite, politically correct, and moral education. Life on the great plantations is portrayed as far more grandiose and unpleasant, as Carter Jr indicates when he describes what the unwilling Fanny Barlow could expect as his wife: “We’ll keep a coach, and I’m sure it will be the first kept at Worcester county. What a figure you’ll make at church and I at the gatehouse; for you must know I am commissioned for the peace as well as father and am a lieutenant in the militia also. Then I will soon be chosen a ’Sembly Man and maybe one of the Governor’s Council too, and then we’ll go to town and live as gay as the best of them – you shall have all the finery that can be brought from England and wear nothing but silks and sattins and jewels and gold and silver – egad, we’ll outdo all the county and buy out all the little folks about us.” (158–9)

Though slipped in apparently casually, the consequences of Carter’s calm assumption that he and those like him will engross all the colony’s governing institutions  – courts of law, militia, assembly, council  – are huge. They appear in the Carters’ efforts to aggrandize themselves at the expense of others – the Fergusons are clearly the sort of “little folks” that Carter Jr expects to buy out – and they appear in their style of domestic government. For the silks, the satins and the gaiety are the outward face of a culture dominated by the violence and brute force needed to realize the great planters’ determination that “my will shall be obeyed” (54). Kimber used analogies between the Carters, Mr Barlow and Williamson, the slaver’s captain who stole and abused little Tommy, to demonstrate the negative effect that the ability to impose their will on others had on their characters: heavy drinkers, they fall into a blind fury when crossed;

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they take pleasure in their cruelty as a mark of their absolute power over others; and each condones the injustices the other perpetrates to satisfy his greed. Kimber exemplified in these characters Jefferson’s later observation that: “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one hand, and degrading submission on the other … [Those] thus nursed, educated and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.”19 Kimber also showed how the conduct of such masters impacted their kin. Hard-drinking Mr Barlow’s treatment of his wife and daughter “border[s] upon ill-usage and brutality,” so that they look upon him “with fear and trembling whenever he [is] at home” (54). Barlow treats his daughter Fanny as property to be disposed of as he wishes, just like his bought servants and slaves. He insists, for instance, that she marry Carter’s brutal and ignorant son, regardless of her wishes, because he has made a good bargain with Carter Sr and “can do with her as he pleases” (70). Mrs Barlow, underlines the analogy between her daughter’s situation and her own when she observes: “I know too much the misery she must endure in such a match by my own experience” (67). To force her to the marriage, Barlow tears Fanny away from her mother (in another echo of slavery), and has her held “captive” in the Carters’ mansion. Here Carter Jr (who “lusts after her fortune”) means to force Fanny to marry him by slipping into her bedroom at night and raping her. In their violence and willingness to use force to impose their will on others, as in their material greed, Carter Jr and Mr Barlow are analogical figures. Little Tommy also rapidly learns to view Mr Barlow with fear and trembling when the latter demonstrates his brutality by taking a cowskin – “a twisted thong used to whip negroes” – to the eight–year-old child, because “he’s my slave for life” and Barlow is determined to ensure that “a good bargain he’ll be” (55). Later, when Tommy displeases him, Barlow aims the whip at his head, until he falls weltering in his blood, and continues beating Tommy on the ground until he almost kills him. This beating is analogous to the sadistic beating the Carters give a black slave for staving off a favorite dog which ran at him and bit him. For in the early part of the novel, when he is being kidnapped, abused on the slaving ship, sold and mistreated by his new owner, Barlow’s white “slave for life” functions in part as surrogate for the African slaves. Unlike the Africans, however, Tom receives in secret from Mr Ferguson the education which enables him to articulate the illegality of their analogical plight:

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I am sensible I am now in the condition of a slave; but how can that be, for I could never dispose of myself, and you have told me, no man is lord of another’s liberty, that we are all naturally born free … I am neither naturally nor legally obliged to serve any man on earth, unless he can prove that I voluntarily made myself his property by contract or indenture. (60)

Here the reader’s sympathy with little Tom is exploited to make a broader point about slavery which extends to the black slaves who help and befriend Fanny and Tom. Tom develops an argument about “manstealing” that antislavery discourses made against the slave trade when they charged slavers with kidnapping Africans or with buying kidnapped Africans, rather than prisoners of war. Man-stealing was in clear breach both of the lex gentium and of the Lockean foundations of modern contractual societies. For Kimber, the difference between servitude and “man-stealing” is fundamental and contractual. Kimber makes it clear that Ferguson and Molly had to see through their indentures to Barlow, however miserably they were treated, because they had legally contracted themselves to do so. But the same did not hold for those who had not, or were unable, to “dispose of themselves.” Tommy was being held “in the condition of a slave” illegally, as were kidnapped Africans. Abducted little Equianos and kidnapped little Tommies, who were born naturally free, also remained legally free despite their enslavement – at least in principle. Kimber overtly directed his efforts in this novel at “mollifying unfeeling, obdurate cruelty” (47) rather than at abolition. As Tom tells Mr Barlow and the Carters: “If you use your servants and dependents with kindness your work will be done cheerfully, and you will gain as many friends as you purchase; on the contrary, you will have as many enemies about you as there are men, who having no reason to the contrary, will take all opportunities to spoil and destroy you” (91). This is illustrated by Tom’s management of one of Mr Barlow’s “back plantations,” where his “kindness and clemency” gain the Africans’ good will and produce more work in two weeks than ever seen on the plantation (65). The effect of the contrary is demonstrated by the violent slave insurrection which the Carters’ “unheard of, wanton cruelty” provokes, during which the Carters are murdered. But while overtly taking an ameliorist stance, Kimber implicitly supported the slave insurrection. He invoked the older Christian tradition of antislavery discourse by alluding to the religious “do unto others” argument (75), and by comparing the slavery of Africans under the Carters to white slavery in Barbary captivity: “all the tortures we have read are practis’d in Barbary to Christian slaves … were outdone by these two monsters” (158). And having intimated that African slaves

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were legally free, he spoke of the “natural spirit of freedom” (170) which made the Gold Coast Africans on the Carter plantation rise up against their cruel bondage and described them as escaping to the Apalachian mountains where they could “defend their liberty against all comers” (171). Kimber confronted readers with the planters’ worst nightmare, an alliance of servants and slaves, by pointing out that during their insurrection, the slaves “found no opposition from the white servants and overseers” (170). He sought to gain the reader’s sympathy for both groups, by showing how the slave insurrection saves kind, virtuous and suffering Fanny from rape by Carter at the eleventh hour, and how the indentured servants help her get away. He represented the slaves as juster than their masters, by contrasting their killing of the murderous Carters with their sparing of Fanny and encouragement to the servants to carry her to safety. Kimber made it clear in his novel that abuse of power and cruelty to servants and dependents was as much a British problem as an American one  – Molly suffered in England so severely from the obdurate cruelty of her mistress as one of those poor children forcibly indentured by the parish, that she ultimately ran away. He also represented running away as an eminently rational, even exemplary, response to domestic cruelty – we are told that Tom too would have done it, had he not been so attached to Mrs Barlow and in love with Fanny. But there was a key difference between running away in England and in America:  Molly was able to escape her mistress and run away to America. When Fanny and the black slave, Squanto, run away from the Carters’ estate, by contrast, they are caught within five miles of their projected hideout, Squanto is murdered by Mr Barlow and the Carters, and Fanny is punished with an even harsher captivity. Moreover, though successful as far as it goes, the slave insurrection “raises the country” – about 200 armed men from all over the region gather to pursue the fleeing slaves; and though about sixty of them do reach the Appalachians, many more are killed. The consequence of the domination by rich white male planters of all the institutions of government and law, as well as of the militia and its weaponry, again becomes evident here. In these circumstances, Kimber suggested that the best that could be done in 1754 was to “mollify” (soften) slavery by inspiring readers and planters with Mr Barlow’s exemplary change of heart  – Barlow is so shocked by what happened to the Carters at the hands of their slaves that he remembers Tom’s warning, and reforms. Like many who condemned slavery at mid-century but saw no immediate prospect of abolishing the

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institution of slavery itself, Kimber thought it possible  – indeed, essential – to abolish slavery’s inhuman cruelties meanwhile. He therefore used the stick of fear, as well as the carrots of sentiment and self-interest, to this end. Mr Barlow is frightened into humanity by what happens to the Carters. By the same token, without overtly preaching revolution, Kimber held up before his readers the specter of a rebellion of poor servants of all kinds against the oligarchy of rich planters and the patriarchal rule of domestic tyrants; and he justified runaway servants, daughters and slaves. He extended Locke’s argument that subjects were entitled to overthrow governors who did not govern them “to their good,” which had been used to justify the Glorious Revolution of the governing elite in 1688, to the dependent and non-propertied ranks. He showed how cruelty and violence bred violence, and how servants, slaves and women – who together formed the majority of the population – might ally with one another to liberate themselves and each other from fathers and masters who did not govern them “to their good.” He thereby suggested that abolition coming from below might achieve its ends by abolishing the masters themselves. The novel pointedly places the ideal of liberty and social justice outside white colonial society among the Indians (with whom Oglethorpe’s relations were particularly good). Blaming distant British and French governments, who were at peace, for continuing their war sub rosa through colonial and Indian proxies on the American frontier (95–6), Kimber shows how “private decisions” could be used to subvert that goal. When Tom captures a French officer and his men, he says: “The two governments are not concerned in this affair – go, I give you your liberty … Let my generosity make you a friend to any English subject you may see a captive with your nation” (109). Tom also befriends the Creek Chief, Calcathouy, lives among his people, goes hunting and fishing with him, and describes the tribe’s history and customs in such a way as to make it clear that Creeks were perfectly happy in their own ways, on their own land, fighting their own wars, without the unwarranted intrusion of dishonorable, cruel and covetous Europeans. In modeling an enduring and idealized friendship between an English servant and an Indian, Mr Anderson also endorsed the attraction for Englishmen of escaping from the cruelty, bondage and constraints of the white colonial world into Indian society, and into the liberty of the American hills, streams and woods. As Betty Schellenberg observes, Kimber succeeded “in targeting that element of the fiction market focusing on the sufferings of the innocent.” But The Monthly Review tried to bury the novel by dismissing it in two lines as “the work of a professed adventure-maker,” which had

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“a multiplicity of strange stories” and “little to recommend it.”20 It is possible that Ralph Griffith, who was known for reviews “more or less marked by personal prejudice,” was swayed by the fact that his brother lived in South Carolina, a plantation state.21 But the most likely reason for The Monthly’s attempt to bury the novel was the fact that, in 1754, both Oglethorpe’s widely deplored defection from England to serve in a foreign army in the wake of his public humiliation over Georgia and the Georgia debacle itself, were still sore points. Kimber’s critique of the predominant non-Oglethorpian form of British colonialism in America was not welcome. One has only to add that the years between 1748 and 1754 saw an exceptionally large number of riots by the lower orders all over England, to see that the novel, with its positive portrayal of violent uprisings by the subordinate ranks, came at the wrong time. After three printings in London and Dublin in 1754, the novel was silenced. But it was taken up again in Berwick in 1782 at the end of the American Revolution, and twice more in England and Scotland in 1799 and c. 1800, when antislavery was a more widely popular cause and Mr Anderson could be read as a Jacobin novel. Ru n awa y s:   E l i z a be t h Ca n n i ng, Pa m e l a a n d M oll F landers i n A m e ric a White maidservant stories added the threat of forced or unwanted sex to the threat of excessive domestic violence. Servant stories often used the marriage plot to represent servants’ successful integration into society after servitude  – Mr Anderson too marries his Fanny and recovers the prosperous position in colonial and English society to which he had been born. But in two of the maidservant stories below, the marriage plot is also used as a convenient vehicle for representing or discussing the rehabilitation of vicious masters within the household. In America, though less than a third of indentured servants were female,22 reality and the marriage plot had initially converged. In young colonies where white women were scarce, they rapidly married, even when they had arrived as convicts. By the eighteenth century, though some convicts did marry in America, as did Elizabeth Canning below, it was no longer a given that they would. It is interesting therefore to find that by the end of the century, several American versions of Moll Flanders were giving her a happy ending in America that did not involve a spouse. Elizabeth Canning was a poor and illiterate maidservant who was transported to America as a convict in 1754, after two much-publicized

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and very controversial London trials, which produced a host of English pamphlets and newspaper reports. “The circumstantial narrative of her adventures, from her setting sail for Transportation to the present time” entitled Virtue Triumphant:  Or Elizabeth Canning in America, went the other way: first published in Boston, it was reprinted in London in 1757. Canning’s trials in England and every word written about her there have been studied and debated for more than two centuries. But Elizabeth Canning in America has been overlooked, in part, no doubt, because the Boston writer chose to answer an expository pamphlet war in England with an American story, in part perhaps because the pamphlet offered a critical American reading of the English Canning debate. The Boston narrator’s observation that Canning’s story “was already known to [Americans] thro’ the means of several pamphlets, brought over to America in the last ships from England” (12) is demonstrated in the very writing. The narrator shows how what happened to Canning in England is pieced together in America partly from ship-born pamphlets; partly from the English newspapers; partly from private letters that individuals received from correspondents in London; and partly from the stories told by persons coming over. The Bostonian also compiled his narrative from selected extracts of English pamphlet and newspaper materials, connecting them where necessary with prose of his own, and inserted them into American scenes, to show why Americans must judge the character of arriving convicts and servants for themselves. His tour de force demonstrated not only that the skills of an American editor were in no way inferior to those available in the metropolis, but also, as Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton have pointed out, that “crime was one of the links that bound the colonies to the mother country.”23 Virtue Triumphant; Or Elizabeth Canning in America is a narrative containing two interpolated narratives. The frame story tells of Canning’s shipboard journey to New England, complete with storm and shipwreck, and of her removal upon arrival as an indentured servant to the Wakefield plantation, where Mrs Wakefield treats her with compassion, and Mr Wakefield tries to seduce her. To avoid this fate, Elizabeth runs away, only to be captured by French Indians, who take her to a Roman Catholic priest in Quebec. Having failed to convert her, the priest too tries to seduce her, and when she resists, passes her on to another priest, who locks her up in a room and brutalizes her. Ultimately, Elizabeth is rescued by a repentant Mr Wakefield, now a widower, who marries her and takes her back to his plantation to be a mother to his children. The real Elizabeth Canning did marry soon after coming to America; she

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married John Treat, great nephew of an ex-governor of Connecticut, and had four children by him, one of whom fought in the Revolutionary war. But though “founded on fact” in this regard, this narrative is less a “true account” than a collection of narrative topoi – for instance, the capture by Indians who turn their captive over to French Catholics in Canada is by way of being a classical Boston captivity narrative theme. The reasons the Boston writer responded to discursive arguments in England with a story are laid out in the two interpolated narratives. The first occurs when Elizabeth has been taken from the ship to the Wakefields’ plantation and the whole family is having tea in a commodious summer house by the lake. Mrs Wakefield invites Elizabeth to “relate to them the history of her sufferings in England” (16). The story Elizabeth tells is culled almost verbatim from a pamphlet which Henry Fielding published in London in 1753, The Case of Elizabeth Canning as Stated by Mr Justice Fielding. It is merely translated from Fielding’s third person narrative into a first person narration which is put into Elizabeth’s mouth and inserted into the frame narrative as a flashback. This is the story in brief: Elizabeth had disappeared for a month, and then turned up at her mother’s house, barely clothed and more than half dead with cold and famine. She explained her absence by saying that she had been robbed by two men near Bethlehem gate in Moorfields, hit on the head, and abducted to the bawdy house of one Mother Wells in Middlesex. When she refused to “go their Way” (i.e. become a prostitute), she was deprived of her clothing by Mary Squires, a gypsy living in the house, and locked in a hay loft. There she was kept in solitary confinement for four weeks, with nothing but one jug of water, about 4 lb of bread and a small mince pie she had in her pocket, until she managed to escape through a window and return. Squires claimed that she had been at Abbotsville not at Mother Wells’ house at the time, but Canning’s story was confirmed by a maid called Virtue Hall. When the matter came up for trial at the old Bailey before Henry Fielding, ex-novelist and now JP for Middlesex, the jury found for Canning. Fielding sentenced Wells to prison and Squires to death by hanging; but his decision was overturned by Sir Crisp Gascoyne, Lord Mayor of London, who (in this version) suborned witnesses to give Squires an alibi at Abbotsville, bribed Virtue Hall to recant her story, and with the help of hack writers spread slanderous stories about Canning – for instance that she had gone to Mother Wells house to have an illegitimate child and was lying to cover that up and save her reputation. Gascoyne then initiated a second trial in which Canning was charged with perjury, convicted and sentenced to transportation. Elizabeth’s narrative is

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interrupted by some exchanges with the Wakefields, and brought up to the point of Elizabeth’s embarkation for America, where the frame narrative begins. Mrs Wakefield then reads aloud a letter sent to her by a gentleman in London who had visited Canning in Newgate after the trial, and her son reads to the assembled company extracts from English Newspapers. The Boston writer culled these from a pamphlet called A Full relation of everything that has happened to Elizabeth Canning since Sentence has been passed upon her about the Gypsy, published in London in 1754. As the narrator points out, in all this English material, the probability of Canning’s story was the site where Canning’s guilt or innocence was contested. Gascoyne and his supporters attacked the probability of Canning’s tale both by offering narratives of what might have occurred instead and by impugning her character. Character was an important and often mitigating feature in English criminal trials. Story and character were connected in law, because it was assumed a priori that the story of a person of bad character was not to be believed – convicted felons were not permitted to testify for that reason. Character and story were also conventionally connected in fictions because characters explained who they were by telling their histories. To suggest, as the painter Alan Ramsay did, that “there are such distempers as lyings in and miscarriages, to which young servant maids of 18 are very much subject; distempers that will hold them as long and reduce them as low as has been related of Elizabeth Canning” (20) was to impugn her character, and to portray her as something resembling the prostitute she said she had refused to become. Such speculative stories by Canning’s, or Fielding’s, opponents, had been her downfall – and could be the reader’s too – as the Boston narrator pointed out: If men … are in this manner to argue speculatively, and resolve not to admit the belief of facts merely because those facts seem to their narrow minds unaccountable; and if prosecutions are to be commenced by such dreams, and the tables turned in such a manner that the innocent sufferer shall find himself in the place of the criminal … who would not rather sit down contented with his first injury, than run the hazard of having calumny, imprisonment and all the rigour of the law heaped upon him, and added to his former sufferings? (34–5)

The Boston narrator used his second interpolated story to show how easily speculative stories could be made up out of whole cloth and believed, when bias or interest warped the judgment. Having conceived an “illicit passion” for Elizabeth, Mr Wakefield has an interest in finding that she is a “harlot” whom he can “bribe” to “have carnal intimacy” with him. Wakefield who has “seen pamphlets lately brought over, written on the other side” (47), therefore dismisses Elizabeth’s story as “the tale of a cock

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and bull” as Canning’s English antagonists did; and like them, he makes up a speculative story of his own. Building on a suggestion in an antiCanning pamphlet that she may have had a co-conspirator, Mr Wakefield invents a surgeon whom he supposes to have been Canning’s lover and the brains behind the lying in and cover up, and elaborately explains all the surgeon’s motives and methods for keeping his involvement secret. As the surgeon’s pawn, Elizabeth becomes a conveniently suggestible, obedient and above all, fallen girl. Having demonstrated how and why Wakefield devised his speculative story, the narrator punctures it. When put to the test by Mr Wakefield in the frame narrative, Elizabeth shows herself willing to subject herself to all the dangers of a wild and unknown land by running away, rather than be forced into carnal intimacy. This is, of course, pitting story against story, but that is exactly the point – that stories which could not be conclusively proved or disproved by argument, could only be effectively answered by a person’s actions, or by a story which unmasked incriminating stories as the speculative devices of self-interested men. The Boston narrator stresses the difference between stories denigrating Canning, and the judgment of those in America – like the captain and sailors on the transport ship or Mrs Wakefield – who judge her character by the resigned, pious and virtuous conduct they daily see. For the narrator, this discrepancy between judgment and judgment points to a larger, and arguably proto-revolutionary, issue. Prominent among the Bostonian’s selections from English pamphlets are extracts explaining the legal irregularities in Canning’s trials – for instance the judge’s dismissal in Canning’s perjury trial of the jury’s verdict that she was guilty but not of willful and corrupt perjury. The jury’s finding, that there may have been errors in Canning’s story but that these did not amount to perjury, was disallowed because the judge, backed by the authorities, wanted Canning transported. The Boston writer highlights such instances of legal corruption and injustice to remind New England readers that Canning’s case had troubling implications for Americans, who were also subject to the English system of justice: “If this be the case of English subjects, upon what ground do we stand?” he asks (33). Like the sailors on the transport ship who compare Elizabeth’s conduct with her sentence, the Boston narrator concludes that “Old England” has become a place where “bribery, corruption, venality, reign, having … usurped the place of honour, integrity and virtue.” One implication of the title, Virtue Triumphant, was that Elizabeth Canning’s life and conduct in America demonstrated that virtue, which could not triumph in England where bribery and corruption reigned, could triumph here.

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In America, the 1750s saw a marked change in attitudes to convict labor. Before this, convicts were generally assimilated to indentured servants. In the early years, they were also given the same rights as indentured servants and the same freedom dues. Convicts were viewed as a solution to the labor problems of the poorer planters and farmers, because they were far cheaper than slaves to buy: less than £13 for a male convict as compared to £35–55 for a male slave. Convicts also sometimes brought much needed trades or skills which they could teach to others. But during the late 1740s and 1750s, according to Roger Ekirch, concern with the moral basis of society and fear that convicts would make common cause with slaves and lead insurrections, led Americans to argue that convicts threatened “the Morals of Servants and the poorer People among whom they were mixed.”24 American colonies began to oppose convict transports, and to argue that “if it be prudence in England to banish rogues, it must certainly be prudence here to endeavor to keep them out.”25 Elizabeth Canning in America responded to this ideological environment not only by showing Elizabeth treated in the old way, as a servant and member of the family, but also by emphasizing the importance of American judgment. Given the corruption of English law, it was up to American plantation owners like the Wakefields to judge the character of transported convicts for themselves, and to subvert the intent of English courts to punish by giving convicts “good treatment” when they found their sentences to be unjust. As Elizabeth proved, convicts who were sent over were not necessarily the rogues and whores they were said to be. And those who were not – those who were victims of injustice, corruption and oppression in Old England – might, like Elizabeth Canning, fit into New England very well. In this context, the function of Elizabeth’s abduction by Indians to Canada is to demonstrate her pious and unwavering Protestantism, her constant virtue, and her ability to withstand the dangers and rigors of the new world. Indeed, there are parallels between Elizabeth’s mistreatment as a captive in Mother Wells’ house and her mistreatment as a captive in Catholic Quebec, which suggest that surviving the hardships of the one prepared her to survive the hardships of the other, and that refusing to prostitute herself in one way gave her the character to refuse to prostitute herself in another. For tough, virtuous and pious Protestant convicts such as this, Mrs Wakefield’s conduct is the proper model:  she tells Canning upon her arrival:  “Look on me, Betty Canning as your friend, and one who proposes making your life happier to you in this, than it has been in your own country” (14); and at

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her death, she insists that Wakefield make Elizabeth his second wife and mother to her children. Elizabeth Canning in America indicated that poor English servant girls such as Canning could do far better for themselves in America than they could ever hope to do in England. As the owner of several plantations, Wakefield is more than just well-to-do, and marrying him makes Elizabeth’s fortune. But in Virtue Triumphant, this is not presented as an easy or automatic consequence of coming to America under indentures. Elizabeth has to run away from her bad master and find a good master instead. Indentured servants did frequently run away from plantations, despite the appalling penalties for doing so. But running away was not usually justified as it was here. The Boston narrator makes it clear that, as his dependent and bond servant, Elizabeth had no way of resisting “the violent attacks” of her “lascivious” master, and that if she had stayed knowing this, she would have been “guilty of whatever act of violation may happen to [her]” (59). Since seeking Mrs Wakefield’s protection against her husband would create family discord, running away instead becomes the positively virtuous thing to do. The fault here was that of the master who drove her to it, not that of the runaway. The suggestion was that good treatment would eliminate the problem of runaways and also, from Canning’s establishment in America as Wakefield’s wife, that Virtue ultimately Triumphed in America only because the bond-maid had had the courage to run away. This point, that the conduct of masters needed reform more than servants, was addressed in America by reprinting stories which taught what black servant Jupiter Hammon characterized as the doctrine that “Good Servants frequently make good Masters.”26 Two of the most popular were The French Convert, first published in 1696 and prolifically reprinted on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the eighteenth century,27 and the servant story in Defoe’s Family Instructor, first printed in London in 1715, and reprinted seven times in Philadelphia, Connecticut and New York after 1792. As Defoe put it: “If those who call themselves Christians and Protestants will not instruct their children and servants, here they will find their children and servants instructing them, and reproving them too.”28 In such stories, male servants succeed in turning bad domestic situations into good ones by converting their masters to proper Christian values and instructing them in their duties as masters of families. This is was an element in Mr Anderson too, inasmuch as Tom’s instruction and example contribute to Mr. Barlow’s reform.

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The peculiar difficulties faced by female servants such as Canning – who was often compared to Pamela by contemporaries29  – when confronted with the violent importunities of a lascivious master, were addressed in the abridged version of Richardson’s Pamela (London, 1740) that was adopted by almost all American printers after Benjamin Franklin. The last quarter of the eighteenth century in America saw a troubling increase in domestic violence; the numbers of murders, beatings and rapes within the household soared. Indeed, in the capital, “violence occurred more frequently within the intimate bounds of the household than across the public boundaries of class.”30 Medical men and educators attributed this situation to an “excess of passion” and to peoples’ inability to keep their emotions in check. Arguing that failure to control one’s anger, fear or grief could result in physical illness or temporary madness, they joined together in recommending “emotional self-restraint as a means of achieving domestic harmony.”31 The version of Pamela that American printers appropriated addressed this issue head on. Only one American printer offered the story as “the entertaining history of a beautiful young damsel who rose almost from the lowest to the highest station in life” – and he fell into line with the others in his next edition.32 Following the example of Isaiah Thomas in 1794, American printers appropriated Francis Newbery’s 1779 abridgement of Samuel Richardson’s novel, which was a very different book. This was an informed and considered choice, which pre-empted a similar move in Britain during the early nineteenth century.33 As Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor have shown, there were “Pamelists and Anti-Pamelists” in Britain from the novel’s first publication and by the 1780s, the tide was turning in favor of those who objected to the indecency or immorality of Richardson’s text.34 Alongside now more familiar satirical parodies and attacks, such as Fielding’s Shamela or Eliza Haywood’s Anti-Pamela, there were anti-Pamelists, early and late, who gave expression to a serious religious and moral groundswell of feeling against Richardson’s novel. In London in 1754, for instance, the anonymous “lover of virtue” who published Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa and Pamela, Enquiring Whether they have a Tendency to corrupt or improve the Public Taste and Morals, described some of the moral objections to Pamela in an open letter to Richardson: If we look for a moral, we shall find the only one that can be extracted out of it to be very ridiculous, useless and impertinent; it appears to be this, that when a young gentleman of fortune cannot obtain his ends of a handsome servant girl, he ought to marry her; and the servant girl ought to resist him in the expectation of that event. (13–14)

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More troubling was the fact that the novel contained “nothing else but a minute and circumstantial detail of the most shocking vices and villainous contrivances, transacted in the most infamous of places, and by the most infamous characters, and all to satisfy the brutal and sensual appetite” (43). The novel was prurient, not to say pornographic. And “by giving so circumstantial an account of Booby’s fruitless operation,” it not only raised sexual passions in its male readers, but “pointed out to young gentlemen who may have the same designs, the quite contrary method by which they may assuredly promise themselves better success” (36). Francis Newbery’s abridgement answered such objections by bringing the novel into line “with the sentiments of virtue and religion” (Preface) and by concluding with an eight-page description of the moral and religious virtues that his version of the story imparted.35 Newbery answers the objections made in the Critical Remarks so exactly that he might have been their author. Newbery’s abridgement was published only once in England – British readers were more interested in “continues” of Pamela which showed her “in high life” or which turned her Booby suitor’s ineptitude into comedy.36 But American printers in Philadelphia, Boston and New York, followed at the turn of the century by a host of country printers, appropriated Newbery’s Pamela: there were at least ten American editions of it before 1800 and three more before 1819. Newbery’s Pamela was far more frequently reprinted in America than the abridged Clarissa. Newbery eliminated the “preposterous” marriage by making Pamela’s father, Mr Andrews, a man who “from being in pretty easy circumstances, was reduced to a day-labourer and to earn his bread by hedging and ditching.”37 Like Defoe’s Moll Flanders, twelve-year-old Pamela was adopted into the family of Lady B, who provided the genteel education which, together with her “increasing beauties, her innocence, her virtue, humility and sweetness of temper” (2), gave her all the characteristics of the genteel heroine she would have been had her father remained in easy circumstances. This also answered the objection of the “lover of virtue” that, because female chastity was “a political virtue” designed to ensure the proper succession of property, it was ubiquitous in the propertied ranks but entirely foreign to the lower-class culture of English serving maids. Pamela could credibly be virtuous in the manner of girls in the propertied classes because she was both born and educated into them. While bowdlerizing Pamela, Newbery turned the first part of the novel into a condemnatory study of sexual harassment, domestic violence and rape, which demonstrates the role of the passions in disrupting household peace. The emotions that Newbery initially puts in play between Pamela

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and Mr B are not attraction, love or lust, but anger, jealousy and fear. As he explains:  Mr B has “allowed himself the free indulgence of his passions” and, “supported in his daring attempts by an affluent fortune in possession,” he has “an imperious will” (160, 161). The result is that whenever Pamela denies or thwarts him in any way, Mr B (like Mr Barlow or Mr Carter) flies into a rage and becomes verbally abusive and physically violent. He also typically blames his victim for his unrestrained behavior: “’tis true I have demeaned myself by taking too much notice of her; but she bewitched me I think, and made me take greater freedoms than become me” (14). Pamela’s response to his repeated sexual assaults and to her increasingly insecure circumstances in his “family” is fear, which turns to terror when she is abducted and imprisoned in Mr B’s Lancashire house with the housekeeper Mrs Jewkes. Pamela tries to placate Mr B by showing her obedience where she can and appealing to his pity – “I have nothing to trust to but my virtue and my good name” (11). When this fails, fear and terror make her ill. Her rape is narrowly averted only because, when Mr B. is “proceeding to indecent liberties,” her “spirits became so exhausted with the violence of her struggling, added to her terror and indignation, [that] she fell into so violent a fit, that her features were distorted, her face was covered in a cold sweat, and she appeared as in the agonies of death” (76). Rather than linger endlessly on the details of their very unhealthy interaction, Newbery focused on the different conduct of the two housekeepers when confronted with their master’s abuses of domestic power, so that “the upper servants of great families may, from the odious character of Mrs Jewkes, and the amiable one of Mrs Jervis, learn what to avoid and what to chuse … ” (162). Mrs Jarvis sees it as her duty to protect the young maidservant from her master, even at the cost of losing her place. When Mr B. enters her bedroom to rape Pamela, she lays herself across the girl and puts herself physically between them. But Mrs Jewkes, who justifies her actions with “it is my business to obey” (33), makes light of Pamela’s plight. She acts as an extension of Mr B, not only by verbally abusing Pamela and physically restraining her, but also by going so far as to strike her; and when Mr B enters her bedroom to again try to rape Pamela, she eggs him on. Newbery’s point was that everyone in a household “family” (including Mr Williams, a clergyman who has apartments in Mr B’s house) was responsible for what transpired in it, and had a duty to protect the innocent against the lascivious, the weak against the strong, and an inferior against a superior, which superseded the duty to obey their master, even if doing so went against their own self-interest. A maidservant

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exposed to the violent attacks of a lascivious master should be able to look to others in the family for help; her plight should not be met with indifference or ignored. Should that fail, Newbery, like the author of Elizabeth Canning in America, insisted that the virtuous thing for a maidservant to do was to save herself by running away. This was a major ideological difference between Newbery’s Pamela and Richardson’s. As Kristina Straub has pointed out, in Richardson’s rendering, Pamela’s “desire to leave her place is … constrained by difficult travel, ambiguous claims to property and her own sexual vulnerability,” to show that “physical mobility for the female domestic is dangerous, even impossible.” Richardson was “following the lead of conduct literature” by “implicitly argu[ing] that mobility is at odds with the moral character of a good servant.”38 In Newbery’s version, the transition to Pamela’s love for Mr B and his “tenderness” for her is unmotivated, except through an allusion to an observation made in the lover of virtue’s Critical Remarks about the absurd ineptness of a hero who had no idea how to go about seducing a maid “without raising fears and terrors,” when any young gentleman who was not a booby would know that it was better to “melt, surprise or reason a woman out of her virtue” (37). Pamela overhears Mr B observe that “he had begun at the wrong end; and that he ought to have melted her by love, instead of freezing her by fears” (79). The second part of the abridgement confirms that Mr B’s “kindness” is far more effective in awakening Pamela’s affections, and in producing complaisance to the sexual “freedoms” he continues to take with her, than anger and violence had been. Mr B’s is now a reformed character who understands that “passions deform the noblest minds” (124). The last part of this abridgement can therefore be devoted to demonstrating how his new ability to restrain his anger, control his jealousy, and abstain from violent passions allows him to create domestic harmony even in a household containing the likes of Mrs Jewkes or of his enraged, raving and violent sister, Lady Davers. In this version of the story, Pamela’s virtues as a wife are only briefly described. Reform of patriarchal domestic government is what is demanded. And as in Mr Anderson and Elizabeth Canning in America, the argument is made that, failing this, far from being bound to remain in servitude and obey, it is a virtue in abused servants to free themselves from domestic tyrants who were likely to prove their death or ruin, by running away. The versions of Defoe’s Moll Flanders that were published in America at the turn of the nineteenth century bore less on the transportation of convicts from England, which had ceased a few years after the Revolution, than on contemporary American debates about the causes of rising crime

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rates in the new Republic. But they too, in their way, advised flight from bad domestic and social situations. American reformers of the penal code that America had inherited from Britain emphasized rehabilitation through environment, discipline and work, and American versions of Moll Flanders illustrated this point. The Boston, Leominster and Baltimore editions of Moll Flanders were based on different English abridgments – Boston’s Life, Death and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (c. 1773) was based on The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders (London, 1722); Leominster’s Life of Poll Flanders (1800) and Baltimore’s The Beauties of the renowned Moll Flanders (1802) on The Life and Actions of Moll Flanders (London, 1723).39 But the American editions were not just reprints: they edited, altered and supplemented their English copy texts, especially where Moll’s experiences in America were concerned. The London abridgement called The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders (1722) described transportation as putting a stop to Moll’s whoredom – “Moll having gone thro’ a variety of misfortunes in England, is at last got to America, where, instead of living by whoredom, marriage etc, there she is hoeing, weeding and picking tobacco” (7). It also made Moll the heir of her American mistress’s estate, and indicated that once provided for, Moll was able to “live an honest and pious life” and to “die a true penitent” (8). The English version thus argued that transporting convicts to America was a good thing because, besides ridding England of whores and thieves, it rehabilitated them. The Boston version of this text, The Life and Death and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (1773) took a different and more complex line. Hal Gladfelder has pointed out that “the cultural responses to criminality were various and conflicted, and even within a single text contradictory strains and motifs might jostle for dominance.”40 This American version of Moll used contradiction, and new passages of its own, to raise the question of whether crime was hereditary or societally caused. On the one hand, the American text explained Moll’s whoredom as an effect of “her descent from vicious parents of an ill character, for according to the old proverb, what is bred in the bone will ever come out in the flesh.” Whoredom was a consequence of hereditary human depravity, as the Puritans had argued. But on the other hand, it attributed Moll’s thefts to the circumstance of being “left so poor” by one of her husbands that she was “reduced to the greatest necessity.” Theft was a consequence of poverty and necessity, and thus of environment, as Enlighteners said. Newgate, with its underclass of turnkeys, bailiffs, hangmen, thief catchers, highwaymen and prisoners, was preeminently one of the environments

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populated by the British poor where crime and prostitution became a necessity of life. The Boston version also added a paragraph stressing the evils of transportation to Virginia: [Moll] is now put to hoe, the picking and cleaning of tobacco early and late; lies upon straw, goes in a manner naked, and afflicted with all other inconveniences which usually attend persons under her circumstances, which hardships of much work, hard lodging, bad clothing and slender diet, made her often wish with tears in her eyes that she was in Old England again; and said she would have been hanged before she came out of it if she had known before, as she did after, how hardly they were used, that were transported into the American plantations for theft. However, Moll was now forced to make the best of a bad market, as well as she could, did perform the servitude, which was a transportation of eight years, when being out of her time, and pretty much wean’d from now having any desire of seeing England again, she continued still in Virginia … (7–8)

Servitude in America in conditions resembling slavery was “a bad market.” But being able to get a paying job in a good family once out of her time, and being given responsibility “over all her [mistress’s] servants, both bound and free, white and black” gave Moll the opportunity to be “just, true, honest, faithful, painful in her business” and to earn her mistress’s financial bequest. This resolved the question of whether crime was caused by hereditary human depravity or by social circumstances, in favor of circumstance. Baltimore’s Beauties of the Renowned Moll Flanders made the same point in a different way. Here Moll’s mother, who was transported to Virginia after Moll’s birth in Newgate, explains to Moll what became of the English poor in America: Among the rest, she often told me that some of the inhabitants of the colony came thither in very indifferent circumstances from England; they were of two sorts: (1) such as were brought over by masters of ships to be sold as servants, or, (2) such as are transported from Newgate and other prisons after having been found guilty of a felony and other crimes punishable with death. Many a Newgate bird from the good usage they meet with here, becomes a great man, and we have several Justices of the Peace, Officers and Magistrates of the towns they live in that have been burnt in the hand.” (21)

Moll’s mother, who is herself branded in the hand, is evidence not only that “some of the best men in this country are branded in the hand,” but some of the best women too (21). Moll’s virtue and prosperity in Virginia, where “she luckily fell into a good family” and proved diligent, decently behaved, and capable of improving a plantation through her management, is then contrasted with what happens to her on her return to

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England: “Moll having left Virginia came to Bath, and being in a reduced state, went through such scenes of wickedness and misfortune as cannot afford either entertainment or instruction” (24).41 Once given the opportunity to live and work in decent families, to marry good men, and to live on rural plantations, virtue triumphed even in the servile classes and even among those, like Moll, who were criminal in other circumstances. It was thus to every young woman’s advantage to extricate herself from “scenes of wickedness and misfortune” and ensure that she “fell into a good family” by transporting herself from that “England” which created the conditions for crime to that “America” which created the conditions for virtue. David Waldstreicher has pointed out in relation to Benjamin Franklin – who began his illustrious career by committing the “real crime” of running away from his indentures because his brother and master repeatedly beat him – that “American freedom often depended on running away.”42 The number and frequency of advertisements in the newspapers for runaway servants and runaway slaves certainly testify to the ubiquity of this solution to the evils of servitude. In later years, according to Waldstreicher, Franklin conveniently ignored the implications of his origins as a runaway and lent his aid to those who endeavored to prevent others from doing what he had done. Like Richardson, he represented the interests of the masters. But Mr Anderson, Elizabeth Canning in America, Newbery’s Pamela, and the American Moll – like The Hermit and Bampfylde-Carew Moore in their different ways – spoke of, for, and perhaps to, those who acted on the principle that the triumph of virtue in America depended on freedom from the physical and/or sexual abuse of willful and vicious masters – whether that freedom was to be gained by reforming culpable masters or by running away.

Ch apter 6

Bond and free: contemporary readings of Gronniosaw’s Life

With the exception of Venture Smith, the major black, English-language, prose authors of this period had not been plantation slaves. Briton Hammon, James Gronniosaw, Ignatius Sancho, John Marrant, Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, and Boston King were or became mariners, preachers, musicians, soldiers and personal servants. That is to say, by chance or more often by design, they had moved into the principal upwardly, as well as geographically, mobile occupations open to enslaved Africans in Britain and America at this time. These were all occupations practiced by the free and the unfree, and by whites as well as blacks, which sometimes provided enterprising slaves with an opportunity to attain literacy and to obtain their freedom. With the exception of Briton Hammon, all these black authors published as free men. Consequently, while each depicted the evils of chattel slavery, and some openly pushed for abolition, they also offered strategies for negotiating servitude and raised the pressing issue of how, once free, black people could support themselves and their families. Where the stories about white servants in the last chapter struggled with the evils of bondage and looked out to freedom through the keyhole of running away, the narratives here look back at bondage from a perilous condition of freedom, where abject poverty and inability to find work as someone’s servant were not coincidentally allied. In an early essay, Henry Louis Gates characterized The Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, An African Prince (1770) as the beginning of a “chain” of “double-voiced” black writers, which included John Marrant, Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano, who revisited the tropes and topoi of shared black experience which Gronniosaw had first devised. By revising Gronniosaw’s tropes and topoi, he argued, these black writers “engaged in one form of direct political dialogue” with him and with each other.1 Their repetitions and revisions of each other showed, in other words, how 139

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these black contemporaries read and understood Gronniosaw’s seminal, sophisticated, and double-voiced discourse.2 Gates’ insight has not, on the whole, been pursued. Instead, the now famous trope of the “Talking Book” is treated as the only scene in Gronniosaw’s narrative that the others repeated or revised. Since Gates’ essay, moreover, the primacy has passed to Olaudah Equiano, the last published of the group3 and Gronniosaw has been marginalized as an assimilationist who abandoned Africa and was too fond of white culture.4 As we will see, this was how his white editor construed him, not how Marrant, Cugoano and Equiano read him.5 They show us instead where Gronniosaw used what Cugoano called “knowledge of Christianity and the laws of civilization” to distance himself from both, and how he sought to maximize the agency of black folk under slavery and to address the situation of free blacks. Like Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, Gronniosaw’s narrative carries the reader from Africa to servitude in America, and through the dubious freedom of a mariner’s life to England and marriage to a white Englishwoman. Gronniosaw’s Narrative, which was published almost as many times in Britain as Equiano’s, was also transatlantic in the sense that it was reprinted in America. But while Equiano’s Narrative was published only once in New York in 1791, Gronniosaw’s Narrative was reprinted multiple times: in Rhode Island in 1774 and 1781; in New York’s American Moral and Sentimental Magazine in 1797; in Salem, NY in 1809; and in the Catskills in 1810.6 Though not as familiar as Marrant’s Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant (1785), which has been described as one of the three most popular captivity narratives of the era, Gronniosaw’s narrative was certainly more widely available and widely read than either Equiano’s or Cugoano’s texts. Vincent Carretta has counted at least twelve editions of Gronniosaw’s narrative before 1800.7 On p ov e r t y a n d f r e e bl ac k s James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’s Narrative was initially published in Bath to “serve Albert and his distressed family” by raising money for them through sale of the book – as Sancho’s Letters would later be published in London to raise money for his family.8 To make his pitch in the last several pages of the book, Gronniosaw vividly described his poverty in England, and how it had come about. This is worth summarizing. When he and his white wife, who was a weaver, could no longer support themselves in London due to “a disturbance among the weavers,” Gronniosaw found work in Essex, and brought his wife there. But rural

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work was seasonal, and come winter, he was laid off. Both spouses were unemployed during that severe and snowy winter. Living in a damp and tumble-down cottage without a candle or wood for a fire, and ashamed to beg for help, “Albert,” his wife and their young children came close to starvation. They lived for several days on four carrots that someone had given them almost as an afterthought. After another merely temporary job, they were rescued from Essex and from the prospect of another such winter by the unexpected offer of a year-round job for Gronniosaw in Norwich, where his wife also hoped to get work. However, Gronniosaw’s master in Norwich was “very irregular” about paying his wages, their three children fell expensively ill, and one died. Again the family fell into penury, and was about to be turned out of their lodgings, when a charitable Quaker heard of their plight, paid their rent and bought Gronniosaw tools to set up in business chopping chaff, which no one else wanted to do. But seeing that chopping chaff paid Gronniosaw well, others became “envious” and undercut his prices to steal his customers and put him out of business. At the same time, the London weavers’ strike spread to the Norwich weavers, so that his wife could rarely get work either. Back to poverty and square one, the family had pawned or sold everything they had to get to Kidderminster and the prospect of a low paying job twisting silk, and were now destitute there. As Gronniosaw presented it, therefore, this free black man and his wife were members of the industrious and deserving poor. Though migrating from place to place in search of work as the British poor did, “James Albert” was a good Christian who wished both to work and to make some return for his readers’ “charitable regard” by edifying them with “this Narrative of my Life and of God’s wonderful Dealings with me” (33). Gronniosaw’s whiteface credentials were ratified not only by this self-representation, but also by the earliest white reader to describe how he read him. Reverend Shirley, cousin to the Duchess of Huntington, who authenticated the narrative and vouched for “Albert’s” character in the Preface, characterized it as a conversion narrative which offered Christians the edifying spectacle of an African’s Fortunate Fall. Shirley read Gronniosaw’s portrayal of Africa as demonstrating to white Christian readers “in what Manner will God deal with those benighted Parts of the World where the Gospel of Jesus Christ hath never reached” (32–3). Gronniosaw’s description of his departure from Africa, he thought, showed how God “most amazingly acts upon and influences their minds, and … brings them to the Means of spiritual Information” (33). And Gronniosaw’s subsequent “most pitiable Trials and Calamities”, first as a slave in New York and then in England

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as a poor black who saw “his wife and children perishing for Want before his Eyes,” was “a singular Honor” that God had done him, in order to lead him from darkness into light. The Reverend Shirley was certain that, though born to an exalted station in Africa, James Albert “would rather embrace the Dunghill, having Christ in his Heart, than give up his spiritual Possessions and Enjoyment, to fill the Throne of Princes” there (33).9 Gronniosaw’s experience of poverty in England was far more central to Cugoano’s reading. In his description of Gronniosaw’s life, Cugoano repeatedly emphasized it, allowing Gronniosaw’s poverty first to overshadow, and then to twist, what appears at first sight a mere repetition of Shirley’s remark about preferring to “embrace the Dunghill, having Christ in his Heart”: He was a long time in a state of great poverty and distress, and must have died at one time for want, if a good and charitable attorney had not supported him. He was long after in a very poor state, but he would not have given his faith in the Christian religion in exchange for all the kingdoms of Africa, if they could have been given to him, in place of his poverty, for it. (154)

“Great poverty and distress,” “want,” “need for charity,” “a very poor state,” “poverty,” and “for a long time” (twice) almost drown out Cugoano’s single acknowledgment of the importance of Christianity. Cugoano raises a doubt about Shirley’s smug certainty that Gronniosaw, “an African prince, who lived in England” would choose to give up “all the kingdoms of Africa” for what he had found in England  – and the syntax suggests that in any case, Gronniosaw lacked any such option (“if they [the kingdoms of Africa] could have been given to him, in place of his poverty, for it”). In juxtaposing poverty and the kingdoms of Africa in this way, Cugoano shifted Shirley’s contrast (being a Christian in England or a prince in Africa) to draw attention to the sharp antithesis that Gronniosaw had created between the plenty and independence he had known in “the kingdoms of Africa” at the beginning of his narrative and the poverty and dependence in England he described at the end of it, and between the contentment of his family of origin in Africa and the misery of his wife and children in England. There had certainly been a fall, but not perhaps that which the Reverend Shirley supposed. Gronniosaw began his double-voiced Narrative with a series of richly allusive African scenes, which could be read as initiating the Fortunate Fall scenario, but which also undermined it. Read in biblical terms (which is only one of its implied contexts), Gronniosaw portrays Guinea as a fruitful, Eden-like garden, where stately palm trees provide the natives with all

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they need in the way of food, drink, clothing, shade and spirituality,10 and where Gronniosaw is the favored grandson of the king and lacks nothing. Like the patriarch Abraham in Ur, a major center of moon-god worship in the ancient world, Gronniosaw lives among a people who are said to believe that “there was no power but the sun, moon and stars” (35) but realizes himself that “there must be some Superior Power” which created these things (34, 35). The way is prepared for the seduction of the snake by Gronniosaw’s restless desire for knowledge. This desire for knowledge, together with his unwillingness to remain content with “the customs of our country” and with his place in it, brings him into conflict with his father, who commands him to desist on pain of punishment. His siblings, and even his mother, pronounce him “foolish or insane,” and the servants treat him as the outsider he has made himself; but he cannot desist. The snake, when it comes, takes the form of a deceiving white man, a merchant who promises to show him strange and wonderful things abroad, to treat him as a companion to his sons, and to bring him back safe again, but who plans to make money from him by selling him into slavery. This African Eden is something of a Rorschach test: if the reader reads it, like Reverend Shirley, with the assumption that Christianity and white society are “better” (or that Gronniosaw thought so), s/he will see Gronniosaw’s willing departure from Africa as the first step from darkness into light, or from an African identity into an assimilated one, and his siblings as the ignorant or jealous villains. But if the reader understands, like Cugoano, that this African Eden was better materially and spiritually than anything Gronniosaw found in America and Europe as a slave or free man, s/he will agree with Gronniosaw’s siblings that Gronniosaw was “foolish or insane” to leave Africa, and notice the many comments the narrator inserts to indicate that, as a mature man in England, “Albert” thinks it was insane and foolish too. In this reading, the siblings figure as prophetic bearers of unwelcome truths that he had not wished to hear at the time. When he left Eden, Adam knew death. Similarly, after his mother, who accompanies her son and the merchant part of the way to the coast, has departed, Gronniosaw undergoes four near death experiences, which parallel the four times that “Albert” and his family almost die from starvation in England when he is a free man. The first time, the merchant’s partner puts Gronniosaw into a pit, as Joseph was put into a pit by his brothers who planned to kill him before selling him into Egyptian slavery instead. The second time, the partner wants to drown him in a river, as Pharaoh drowned the first born of his Egyptian slaves in the Nile. The third time, an African king on the coast wants to kill him as a spy, but

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condemns him to slavery instead. The fourth time, the merchant’s partner proposes to drown him if they cannot sell him to a ship’s captain as a slave. These near deaths in Africa on the road to slavery are connected to the near deaths to which poverty has reduced him in England as a free man by Albert-Gronniosaw’s repeated rejection of the materialistic values of Dutch and English merchants, and by white people’s repeated successes in robbing him of whatever money or gold he has. The most obvious critiques of European and American society here are produced by repeated and pointed contrasts between Albert-Gronniosaw’s lack of value for money (which is also meaningless in the Africa he describes), and the many white people who enslave, rob and defraud him, withhold his wages, or put him out of business, to gain money at his expense. This ensures that he remains poor, and becomes a charity case. Albert’s pious “I blessed God for my poverty, that I had no worldly riches or grandeur to draw my heart from Him” (42) is an ironic reminder that greed for money contradicts Christ’s teachings and that, by his poverty and persistent rejection of the merchant “snake,” Albert is more Christian than most Christians. But it is also a useful distraction from Gronniosaw’s repeated characterization of white society as a killer of black folk. Cugoano suggests that Gronniosaw’s rejection of the values of Western commercial societies may be more radical even than this, by describing Gronniosaw as “an African prince, who lived in England” and gained “some knowledge of Christianity” there (154). For the way Gronniosaw leaves Africa – in quest of knowledge, and with his family’s consent, his mother’s accompaniment part of the way, and the merchant’s promise that he would be treated as a companion to his sons and sent safely back – recalls the fact that West African kings frequently sent their sons and grandsons to England for an English education, and that they were usually converted and baptized there. This too was part of the British imperial commercial nexus, since it was thought that educating and baptizing African princes would bind them to England, and thus cement Britain’s commercial relations with West Africa. The fact that Gronniosaw was enslaved instead, recalls Behn’s Oronooko, but also a number of muchpublicized contemporary cases, including that of another African prince, Job Ben Solomon, who was captured when traveling in Africa and sold as a plantation slave in Maryland. James Oglethorpe arranged for Job’s repurchase, release and transportation to England, where red-faced British officials treated him as a celebrity and returned him to Africa in a specially commissioned ship.11 African princes with useful connections were not supposed to be enslaved. Nor, Gronniosaw implies, were African

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princes supposed to be insane or foolish enough to allow themselves to be seduced by their desire for knowledge into going to Europe and trusting their lives to a nation of merchants who would as soon sell them as trade with them. Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species addressed Gronniosaw’s issue of poverty head on.12 By 1787, when it was published, the free black community in London had been swollen by Loyalist ex-slaves from the American war. There were black beggars all over London; food banks had been set up; and black poverty had become a major social and political problem. Cugoano confirmed by openly stating what Gronniosaw’s narrative had quietly indicated that “Liberty and freedom, where people may starve for want, can do them but little good”; that “the industrious poor” should be able to find work and earn enough to buy food and shelter; and that it was necessary for black people to be taught a trade. Gronniosaw’s reiterated observation that his white wife was a weaver and descriptions of himself as a casual laborer had made this last point more subtly, by reminding readers that black people in London had been excluded from apprenticeships and from practicing trades in 1731 (174). Cugoano’s comparison of Britain to Africa also stated what Gronniosaw had indicated by juxtaposition: “in Africa … in many respects, we may boast of some more essential liberties than any of the civilized nations in Europe enjoy; for the poorest amongst us are never in distress for want” (174). Cugoano thus heard and accepted Gronniosaw’s identification of his sufferings from poverty, unemployment, seasonal work, and irregular wages as a free man in England with the sufferings of the British poor and the struggles of Britain’s dependent lower orders.13 This was not an African problem. Cugoano championed the British poor in his Thoughts and Sentiments, and made proposals that would help poor whites along with poor blacks. For he insisted that in “a well regulated society,” there ought to be neither “want” [poverty] nor “oppression” [slavery] (153). In a “free society,” everyone should have both freedom and food. Despite an African king who condemned him to slavery, Gronniosaw’s narrative attributed the slave trade primarily to rapacious white European merchants who deceived foolish Africans into going with them. Cugoano agreed that “the idol of cursed avarice” was responsible for the slave trade (151). But he revised Gronniosaw by eliminating any suggestion that Africans went voluntarily into slavery, and by giving African merchants a greater share of the blame for the commerce in men.14 To this end,

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Cugoano devoted most his own short autobiography to describing how other Africans had attacked his tribe, kidnapped him and his family, tortured his father to death to get at his wealth, and carried their captives to the coast to sell. Cugoano was willing to mitigate African culpability by admitting that Africans were being deceived by white merchants; but he argued that European merchants deceived African “slave-procurers” not the Africans they enslaved: “the artful Europeans have so deceived them [African merchants of slaves], that they are bought by their inventions of merchandize, and beguiled into it by their artifice” (155). Cugoano needed to show that Africans were being kidnapped to argue that men and women were being illegally enslaved who ought to be free. But he also needed to show that African merchants could be “bought” by European merchandise and “beguiled” by European commerce to make feasible his argument that, even without the slave trade, “there might be a very considerable and profitable trade carried on with the Africans” (172) by Britons who would have “the preference with them” as trading partners. If Europeans would as soon sell Africans as trade with them, the solution might be to seduce them into trading with Africans instead of selling them. Cugoano therefore suggested that if Africans were left peaceably in Africa to “improve their lands” in “imitation” of British (or erstwhile British) peoples, Africa would be able to supply Britain with those staples which North American planters and farmers had provided before the Revolutionary War (172). Cugoano was thus less interested in condemning the idol of avarice, than in using it to induce Europeans to stop buying Africans (“if there were no buyers there would be no sellers”) and to seduce African and European merchants into other forms of mutually advantageous trade. Cugoano’s friend and collaborator, Olaudah Equiano, supported this endeavor by rewriting Gronniosaw’s “Guinea” to show that commerce and trade were in no way foreign to Africans. Like Gronniosaw, Equiano portrayed Africa and his own exalted situation there as the Chief ’s son, as a paradise compared to life as a slave or as a free black in Britain or the West Indies. Equiano’s Guinea is not a Garden of Eden; but it is represented as a country of “bounty and fertility”15 where there is no lack of work, and “there are no beggars.” Here people drink palm wine, and no one “molests” the “serpents of different kinds, some of which are deemed ominous when they appear in our houses” (43). Commerce is not one of the serpents. Africans in this patriarchal society already trade in provisions  – bullocks, goats and poultry. They already grow Indian corn and “vast quantities of cotton and tobacco” (37); and they already

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have a population “habituated to labour from our earliest years” (37). In other words, Africa already grew staples that Britain had obtained from North America before the Revolutionary war, already traded in the sort of provisions that the British West Indies were no longer permitted to buy from the American states after the Revolution, and already had the seasoned labor to produce more of both. Not only was Africa already set up for the sort of mutually advantageous commerce with Britain which he, like Cugoano, proposed should replace the slave trade, but Africans were already competent planters and merchants. There was no reason why, outside Africa, they should not know the value of money, or how to profit from commerce. Outside Africa, Equiano whole-­heartedly embraced European commercial practices. His Interesting Narrative (1789) describes how, as an enslaved mariner in the West Indies and in North America, he traded on the side for himself, saved his money, and eventually managed to buy his freedom. As a free man in England, Equiano kept the copyright on his Narrative, had it reprinted several times “for the Author,” marketed it successfully through lecture tours, and died a rich man.16 Equiano showed that, like Gronniosaw, he had been repeatedly robbed by white men of money obtained through his own hard work, and that black people often had no recourse against whites. But he also demonstrated that it was possible to outsmart cruel or rapacious white people, if a black person, slave or free, learned to manipulate for his own benefit what Cugoano called “knowledge of Christianity and the laws of civilization” (171). Roxann Wheeler has rightly argued that, as it related to contemporary abolitionist debates, Cugoano’s emphasis on “the laws of civilization” was a response to white pro-slavery writers who used the four-stage theory of societal development to prove the cultural and intellectual inferiority of Africa and of African slaves by their supposed lack of religion, commerce and civility: black people could learn.17 But there was also another dimension to Cugoano’s argument: the suggestion that black people could learn to use Christianity and white people’s “civilization” to their own advantage. Obvious ways in which Gronniosaw, Cugoano, and Equiano all did this was by resorting to the “divide and rule” strategy of appealing to the kindness, pity and charity of “good” Christians against the rapacity and injustices of bad ones, and by using Christian principles against Christian practices. But they also modeled other ways in which black people could use their “knowledge of Christianity and the laws of civilization” to negotiate white society, assert agency, and better control their own fates.

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Gronniosaw was before Cugoano and Equiano here too. Gronniosaw had already demonstrated how a slave might use “knowledge of Christianity and the laws of civilization” to better his situation in slavery and pave his way to freedom, giving two noteworthy examples of how he had gone about it, which John Marrant and Equiano would later answer, correct and rewrite. As the slave of his first master in New York, the first English Gronniosaw learned consisted of swear words. He was warned by an old black servant who lived in the family that he must not swear, because “there was a wicked man call’d the Devil, that liv’d in hell, and would take all who said these words, and put them in the fire and burn them” (39). This terrified me greatly, and I was entirely broke of swearing. Soon after this, as I was placing the china for tea, my mistress came into the room just as the maid had been cleaning it; the girl had unfortunately sprinkled the wainscot with the mop; at which my mistress was very angry; the girl very foolishly answer’d her again, which made her worse, and she call’d upon God to damn her. I was vastly concern’d to hear this, as she was a fine young lady, and was very good to me, insomuch that I could not help speaking to her, “Madam, says I, you must not say so,” “Why”, says she? Because there is a black man call’d the Devil that lives in hell, and he will put you into the fire and burn you, and I shall be very sorry for that. “Who told you this?” replied my lady. “Old Ned,” says I. “Very well,” was all her answer; but she told my master of it, and he order’d that old Ned should be tyed up and whipp’d, and was never suffer’d to come into the kitchen with the rest of the servants afterwards. My mistress was not angry with me, but rather diverted with my simplicity, and by way of talk, She repeated what I had said, to many of her acquaintances that visited her, among the rest, Mr. Freelandhouse … ” (39)

In this complex passage, Gronniosaw preserves for his amanuensis and for the reader the appearance of “simplicity” which so “diverts” his mistress. He presents himself as an ignorant and credulous new slave, an innocent who repeats whatever he has been told, parrot-like, at the most inopportune moments. But by offering a series of contrasts, Gronniosaw also indicates that this “simplicity” was a mask that he was using for his own purposes. Gronniosaw contrasts old Ned’s concern for his soul and his own concern for his mistress’s soul, with their master and mistress’s lack of concern for the souls of their slaves – old Ned is beaten viciously for teaching Gronniosaw about hell, and telling him not to swear, and is banished from the kitchen to prevent him from proselytizing further. The character Gronniosaw gives his mistress as “a fine young lady” contrasts with her escalating anger at the maid, and with the tale-telling that leads

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her husband to inflict violence and physical pain on an old man, which she does nothing to stop. Gronniosaw’s choice of sin is a comment on these actions (to swear is to deny God) and so is Gronniosaw’s repetition with a single substitution (black for wicked) of what old Ned had told him about swearing. “There is a black man call’d the Devil that lives in hell” can be heard two ways: it can be taken to mean that the devil who lives in hell is black as white people said, or that the black man who is called a devil (by a swearing master or mistress) is living in hell. In this scene, moreover, Gronniosaw initially deployed the simplicity which so diverts his mistress to divert her from her anger with the maid, whose folly in answering back was going to get her a beating. But though he succeeded in saving the maid, his well-meant efforts got old Ned a vicious and undeserved beating instead. Gronniosaw makes it clear that he never made the same mistake again. He never again tried to meddle with other slaves, or to involve another slave in his performance. Instead, he used his simplicity and ability to divert his mistress and her acquaintances solely to ensure that his mistress was “always very good to me,” with the result that “the servants were all jealous, and envied me the regard and favour, shewn me by my master and mistress” (40). The other face of this scene, then, consisted of Gronniosaw’s demonstration that, to make slavery a little less like hell, a black man needed to gain the favor of his master and mistress – needed to get himself singled out for better treatment, from the slaves who got brutalized, burnt and beaten – and that he could do so by playing to white preconceptions about the “simplicity” and cultural ineptness of Africans, by allowing his master and mistress to believe in their own superiority, and by putting on a show of concern and good will. This gave a whole new dimension to Jupiter Hammon’s “Good servants frequently make good masters.” A black man needed to manipulate “civilization” and its myths from behind the mask of “good” black servant to make his master “good” to him. But there was a heavy price to pay for success – the hostility and envy of other African slaves, and isolation from one’s own people. In his second example, Gronniosaw showed that espousing Christianity, or appearing to, could be used the same way. On the obvious level of the narrative, repeating Christian doctrine pays off in immediately practical benefits. Mrs Vanhorn’s “funny” story about the slave preaching to her about hell attracts the interest of a Methodist minister, who sees Gronniosaw as a possible convert and buys him in order to instruct him further. Gronniosaw’s willingness to learn Christianity and to convert makes his new master “very fond of [him],” gets him sent to school,

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and ultimately gains him his freedom. But Gronniosaw intimates that being willing and teachable was at least partly about going along to get along, and that behind his mask of African “simplicity,” he believed of Christianity only what he chose to: He took me home with him, and made me kneel down, and put my two hands together, and pray’d for me, and every night and morning he did the same. – I could not make out what it was for, nor the meaning of it, nor what they spoke to when they talk’d – I thought it comical, but I lik’d it very well. (39)

Gronniosaw makes the Christian ritual of prayer strange and comical because he genuinely accepts of Christianity only what he had “always thought when I liv’d at home” in Africa, namely “that God was a Great and Good Spirit, that He created all the world, and every person and thing in it” (39). In listening to his master’s Christian instruction, he is “only glad that I had been told there was a God, because I had always thought so” (40). As someone who had always known that there was a God and that God was a spirit, Gronniosaw could hardly be serious about wondering “what they spoke to” in the passage above. Moreover, if, as has been suggested, palm trees were associated in several African religions with divination, and thus with contact between the physical world and the world of spirit, then the palm trees in Gronniosaw’s African Eden represented an African tree of knowledge; and only the ritual by means of which contact was made with the great and good Spirit (divination and contemplation versus kneeling and praying aloud) separated African from Christian faith.18 Gronniosaw mocks this ritual, even while he preserves under the mask of Christianity, the essence of his African faith. In his pretended simplicity and incomprehension, Gronniosaw was turning the incomprehension and ridicule with which Christians described African religious rituals back upon Christianity itself; but in his “I liked it very well” he was also suggesting the possibility of a syncretism which got along by adopting new outward forms for long-standing spiritual beliefs. Gronniosaw makes it clear that the major difference between his African faith and Christian doctrine lay in Christianity’s insistence on punishment – “I was never sensible in myself nor had anyone ever told me that He would punish the wicked” (40) – and in its infliction on believers of all the miseries of guilt. This distinguished Christianity as the religion of the wicked and fallen white world. That John Marrant read the implicit argument of both these scenes as I have described them is clear from the way he repeated and corrected them. Marrant revisited the first scene, when describing himself as working as a

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house-carpenter on a plantation near Charleston soon after his own conversion. Living as part of the plantation “family” there, he began teaching the slave children to say the Lord’s Prayer and some of the catechism. Like Gronniosaw’s mistress, the mistress of this plantation inquired who taught them, told tales to her husband, and repeatedly provoked him to violent beatings of the slaves to make them stop praying and learning Christianity. Like Gronniosaw, Marrant came off unharmed, in this case because he was a free man. Like Gronniosaw’s intervention to save the maid from a beating, Marrant’s intervention to save the slave children miscarried, and led only to suffering and grief. Like Gronniosaw too, therefore, Marrant left off and backed away. But Marrant learned that, after his departure and notwithstanding their savage floggings, the slaves continued to meet secretly in the woods to pray – “by which it appears that the work was of God, therefore neither the devil nor his servants could overthrow it” (124). It appears again, in other words, that slave-owners are denying God, and denying their slaves Christianity, that masters are in the camp of the devil and that their slaves are in hell. But Marrant revises and corrects Gronniosaw in one important regard: by insisting that the work of God, not man’s cunning, defeats the devil. Marrant also turned the scene of praying and being prayed over which Gronniosaw thought so comical into a scene of high comedy, when describing how the minister whom Mr Whitefield sent to his mother’s house to convert Marrant: fell upon his knees, and pulled me down also; after he had spent some time in prayer he rose up, and asked me how I did now; I answered much worse; he then said, “Come, we will have the old thing over again,” and so we kneeled down a second time, and after he had prayed earnestly we got up, and said again, “How do you do now?” I replied worse and worse, and asked him if he intended to kill me? “No, no,” said he, “you are worth a thousand dead men, let us try the old thing over again,” and so falling down upon our knees, he continued in prayer a considerable time, and near the close of his prayer, the Lord was pleased to set my soul at perfect liberty … The minister said, “How is it now?” I answered, all is well, all happy.” (114)

This scene could be read by Christians who believed that praying for the souls of the unconverted was an effective way of bringing them to God, as confirmation of their belief. But it could also be read as a reductio ad absurdum of this practice, since the minister keeps praying and asking if it is working, praying and asking if it is working, until young Marrant, who is acutely uncomfortable on his knees, realizes that the only way to stop him and make him go away is to tell him that it has worked and

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that all is well. Like Gronniosaw, Marrant was using ridicule to separate Christian prayer rituals from communion with God. As Cugoano pointed out, Marrant rejected such Christian rituals: “A. Marrant in America,” he observed, would “stroll away into a desart, and prefer the society of wild beasts to the absurd Christianity of his mother’s house” (154). God not the minister worked on Marrant’s soul, as God not Marrant worked on the souls of the plantation slaves. The Reverend Aldridge, who authenticated Marrant’s narrative in the Preface and vouched for his honesty, described it as an exemplary conversion narrative: “Were the power, grace and providence of God ever more eminently displayed than in the conversion, success and deliverances of John Marrant?” (110). For Cugoano on the other hand, the most important element in Marrant’s text, the element that he emphasized almost as much as Gronniosaw’s poverty, was Marrant’s close relationship to the Cherokees, and the “miraculous manner” in which he induced them to “embrace the Christian faith” (154). This was shrewd. Marrant’s account of his successful “conversion” of the Cherokee was proof of his usefulness to the Reverend Aldridge and to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, which was about to send him back out to Nova Scotia to minister to black and Indian people there. But Marrant’s account of his “conversion” of the Cherokee was also susceptible to another reading, which Cugoano indicates by drawing attention to its “miraculous manner.” As Philip Gould has pointed out, though Marrant’s sojourn among the Cherokee was long read as a captivity narrative, “this is not a conventional captivity narrative” either.19 Marrant again repeats and revises Gronniosaw in this part of his narrative. Like Gronniosaw, Marrant is viewed as “crazy and mad” by his siblings and his mother for his “views into the spiritual things of God” (114). Like Gronniosaw, he undergoes four near-death experiences:  the first when he is brought by an Indian hunter with whom he traveled in the wilderness to a Cherokee town, where he is made a captive and threatened with a particularly nasty death by burning. Marrant repeats Gronniosaw’s contrast between worshiping the sun, the moon and the stars, and worshiping the being who made them (119). He also appears to have thought that Gronniosaw’s topos of not knowing what was being addressed in prayer was an excellent device, because he repeated it four times, and raised doubts about it as Gronniosaw had done. The Indian hunter hears Marrant praising God and asks him whom he is talking to : “I told him I was talking to my Lord Jesus; he seemed surprised, and asked me where he was for he did not see him there. I told him he could not be seen with

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bodily eyes” (116). The executioner does the same twice, the second time just before he is about to drive wooden splinters into Marrant’s flesh and set them alight: “I asked the executioner to let me go to prayer; he asked me to whom? I answered to the Lord my God; he seemed surprised and asked me where he was? I told him he was present; upon which he gave me leave” (118). When Marrant is reprieved and taken to the Cherokee king, the latter again asks him if the Lord Jesus Christ “lived where I came from? I answered yes, and here also. He looked about the room, and said he did not see him; but I told him I felt him” (119). What is notable about these scenes is that the Cherokee hunter, executioner and king each accept Marrant and spare him from death only when they understand that what he is addressing and calling Christ or God is an invisible all-pervasive presence. From this point of view, if they “seem surprised” each time, it is to find that this black stranger too worships Manitou or the Great Spirit. Marrant teaches the Cherokee no Christian doctrine. Instead, he emphasizes again and again that he is able to achieve direct contact with this invisible presence, and to serve as its channel, as both African and Native American priests and healers were expected to do. He proves this to the Cherokee king, like a shaman or medicine man, by curing his daughter’s illness. This is what leads directly not only to their “conversion,” but more importantly to his complete acceptance and adoption by the tribe: “the poor condemned prisoner had perfect liberty, and was treated like a prince” (120). Gronniosaw had begun as a prince in Africa and fallen into a white civilization where liberty meant starving for want; but Marrant began as a free black in Charleston, South Carolina, and found his place – the only place in his narrative which ever recognizes and accepts him – among the Cherokee, who gave him “friendship,” “perfect liberty” and the status of a prince. One might say that living among the Cherokee was Marrant’s “Africa.” Marrant certainly implies that leaving Indian country was his equivalent to Gronniosaw’s fall, for like Gronniosaw’s mother, the King of the Cherokee is against his leaving, and then reluctantly consents and accompanies him part of the way. Implicit in Marrant’s description of his family’s inability to recognize him when he returns to them looking like an Indian was a critique of attitudes to Indians in the black community that were borrowed from whites, and that failed to acknowledge the family resemblances and deep spiritual affinities between Indians and black people. Marrant had demonstrated that a black person could be freer, happier and better respected among the Indians than elsewhere, and he had suggested the possibility of “friendship” and mutual help between black people and Indians.

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One might therefore say that Indians were for Marrant in the American South what Gronniosaw had made the British poor for poor blacks in England: fellow sufferers and potential allies. This is certainly how Equiano appears to have read it, judging by the ways in which he revised Marrant’s Indian scenes to reject all possibility of friendship, identification or alliance between black people and Indians. Equiano’s sojourn among the Indians is designed to mark his entire difference from them and his unwillingness to acculturate. His pious effort to convert a Musquito prince is a failure. The doctor in his revision of Marrant’s “cure” of the Cherokee king’s daughter is a white physician, not a shaman or medicine man, and Equiano dismisses the importance of the Indians’ friendship for him by observing that the Muskito Indians “were exceedingly fond of the Doctor, and they had good reason for it; for I believe that they never had such an useful man among them” (206). Equiano produces his own miracle, but “pointing up to heaven” and invoking God’s spiritual power to change the conduct of the Indians is devalued into a mere “stratagem.” Equiano’s description of this as “something like magic” suggests that he saw an affinity between Marrant’s repeated use of spiritual power to have immediate and remarkable effects upon people’s conduct, and white people’s views of African forms of spirituality such as Obeah and Voodoo (208). For the rest, Equiano describes the Muskito Indians as drunks, whose food and manners disgust him. He cannot wait to get away from them and return to England. If anything, he feels more kinship for the Muslims in Turkey. But Equiano’s actual friendships and alliances throughout his narrative are primarily with fellow mariners on the ships on which he sailed and with white people who could be of use to him. Like Gronniosaw, Equiano knew how to distinguish himself from other black men in order to ensure that his masters “did not … treat me as a common slave” (100). Only his methods of “making good masters” differed from Gronniosaw’s. Equiano’s method consisted of learning skills and excelling at them to make himself more “useful” than any other worker, bound or free, and of turning masters into “fathers” who would give him whatever protection and assistance they could. It also consisted of outsmarting them when he could. As we saw, Gronniosaw implied that his (African and Christian) disregard for money, and lack of understanding of its value, had contributed substantially to his poverty and victimization both in New York after his second master’s death and in England as a free man. He had also portrayed his manumission as the gift of a good white man: his good master in New York, the Methodist minister, had “left [him] by his will

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ten pounds, and [his] freedom.” Equiano revised both scenarios to suggest that the real error lay in false expectations and in a black man allowing himself to be taken in. He demonstrated repeatedly that the apparent goodness of even “good” white people was not something that a black man should rely upon. Equiano revised Gronniosaw’s scenario of manumission in his account of his own beloved master, the English naval officer, Pascal. Pascal too treated him exceptionally well as long as Equiano was his slave and allowed him to be educated – but he did not free him in the end, as Equiano and his mariner friends expected. Instead, when he no longer had need of him, Pascal sold Equiano again, condemning him without concern to the harshest West Indian slavery. Equiano agreed with Gronniosaw and Cugoano that “by the benevolence of some, a few may get their liberty” (53); but he made it clear that this was not something a slave could or should rely upon, for the benevolence of white masters could not be trusted in a matter where their “goodness” and their greed came into such immediate conflict (43). Equiano insisted that his success in buying his freedom from Mr Robert King, the Pennsylvania Quaker who had promised to permit him to do so, depended entirely on his a priori suspicion of white benevolence and on his understanding of how to use “the laws of civilization” to his advantage. “Fearing” that when it came to the point, this “good Quaker” was likely to change his mind, take his money, and leave him enslaved still and without recourse, Equiano countered this move ahead of time, by taking along a friendly white patron before whom his master was ashamed to defraud him. For an individual black man, then, it was not enough to throw sops to the “idol of avarice” by offering greedy men alternative means of gain, in this case money for freedom. To protect himself and get what he wanted, a black man also had to figure out how to use white “civilization” against itself. Joanne Pope Melish has made the interesting suggestion that “managing enslavement – by meeting white expectations while evading them; by being ‘good slaves’ while enacting freedom; by living two lives, one nested within the other” prepared slaves to be free.20 But Equiano went further. While directly appealing to Parliament to let his people go, Equiano’s narrative quietly modeled methods of self-help  – for slaves seeking to obtain as much freedom through mobility as possible within slavery (become a mariner, learn the French horn, learn to dress hair); for slaves seeking to buy or negotiate their freedom from slavery; and for free blacks seeking to retain their freedom against the constant danger of being recaptured and resold. As Paul Edwards and James Walvin

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have pointed out, before abolition, “black freedom, especially in London, was secured by self-help. Black slaves ran away from their masters and joined the growing band of free blacks in the capital who lived independently, though generally in abject poverty.”21 This might be described as the urban, British version of what happened in the plantations, when slaves helped themselves to freedom by running away to create maroon communities or to join Indian tribes. However, there were other options too. In Charleston from the 1750s and in Philadelphia, New York and New Jersey after Gradual Manumission Acts were passed, slaves who hired out as painters, pilots, carpenters or laborers, also helped themselves by saving what they could to buy their own freedom and sometimes that of their families (as Venture Smith would later do). In North America, self-help also took the form of negotiating with masters to exchange lifelong slavery for some form of temporary indenture, and that of building institutions for mutual support in free black communities.22 While raising the possibilities both of insurrection and escape, Equiano’s Narrative modeled black people’s extant repertoire of methods of self-help, to warn them to be wary, and use white “civilization” against itself to get what they wanted. Unlike Equiano, Cugoano accepted Marrant’s suggestion that Indians and black people could and should be “friends,” just as he had accepted Gronniosaw’s representation of black poverty in England as part of the overall problem of British poverty. Cugoano showed that he agreed that Africans and Indians could make common cause, as he had shown that he agreed that the white and black poor could make common cause, by speaking up for Indians as well as for the British poor: “None but men of the most brutish and depraved nature … could have treated the various Indian Nations, in the manner that the barbarous inhuman Europeans have done” (160). Africans and Indians were both, in his representation, victims of the same rapacious European colonialism, and of the same savage European commercial empires. By making explicit the affinities between Africans and Indians and between poor blacks and poor whites in Marrant and Gronniosaw’s subtexts, Cugoano also gave his own Thoughts and Sentiments a sub-text of its own. Beneath his arguments against the evil and wicked commerce in human beings and against the inferiority of blacks, and beneath his critique of rapacious and expansionist European commercial empires, Cugoano linked the sufferings and interests of Africans to those of Indians, slave and free, and the sufferings and interests of poor blacks to those of the white, British and American, poor. At the same time, he

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set the common interests of these groups against those of European and African “merchants” and against “ill-regulated societies” which exposed the many to oppression and want. By speaking for these others as well as for Africans, Cugoano modeled the possibility of a transatlantic, transethnic, trans-tribal, and transcontinental alliance between disenfranchised groups that together composed what Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker have called “the many-headed Hydra.”23 Read through the comments and rewritings of contemporary black writers, then, Gronniosaw’s double-voiced narrative initiated a tradition of Christian “conversion narratives” which turned on the conversion of servitude into freedom, and a tradition of “slave narratives” which used accepted typologies for black people to mask unacceptable ones. For these narratives proved to be about exercising agency within slavery and about self-help. They debated gaining freedom from servitude by “making good masters,” by making money and by purchasing manumission, as well as by relocating or by running away. They promoted alliances, which the masters’ laws increasingly proscribed, between black people and other disenfranchised populations, which the masters’ ideology increasingly distinguished. And they both represented and critiqued the poor’s dubious freedom to starve to death in “ill-regulated” European commercial societies which, unlike African and Indian tribes, systematically excluded and abandoned to want all those “masterless men” in the lower orders who were, and could become, nobody’s servants.

Ch apter 7

Samson Occom’s itinerancies

In 1766, while in Britain raising money for Revd Eleazar Wheelock’s Indian Charity School in Connecticut, the Revd Samson Occom wrote a letter to his wife which has been described as a rare example of his humor, and dismissed accordingly: My dear Mary and Esther, Perhaps you may Query whether I am well; I came from home well, was by the way well, I got over well, am received in London well, and am Treated extreemly well, yea I am Caress’d too Well, – And do you pray that I may be well; and that I may do well; and in time return Home well, – And I hope you are well, and wish you well, and as I think you begun well, So keep on well, that you may end well, and then all will be well: And so Farewell …1

Wheelock’s erstwhile Indian pupil was demonstrating his mastery of English epistolary conventions in a satirical performance that could easily be construed as confirming readings of Occom which saw him, through missionary texts and missionary eyes, as an “educated” and “civilized” Indian. Missionary-based accounts of Occom’s life have tended to agree with James Ronda that “the Indian who embraced Christianity was compelled in effect to commit cultural suicide.” As a result, they have represented Occom as an Indian who had whole-heartedly embraced European ways, or judged him in terms of how well he met the expectations and demands of his teacher and patron, Eleazar Wheelock.2 What could better demonstrate Occom’s status as an Indian who had successfully assimilated into British–American culture, than his parody of a standard form of letter of advice, the function of which was primarily polite and phatic – to maintain contact with a friend or family member at a distance by inquiring about their “health and welfare” and assuring them of one’s own? But matters were not so simple, even on the level of English epistolary convention. For though taught that they might also use letters of advice to let their family or friends know “what passes” in their affairs, English 158

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letter writers were warned that they must maintain “this Reserve of not writing inconsiderately any Thing that may give Offence, or may prejudice ourselves or our Friends, if it came to be known. In which we should be particularly on our Guard, in speaking of the Great and of State Affairs.”3 In Occom’s situation in Britain, the need “not to write inconsiderately” was not academic. Revd. Nathaniel Whitaker, who had accompanied Occom over, warned Eleazar Wheelock to watch what he wrote him because the London Trust, which took charge of the money they were raising, received and opened all their letters from America before they did. Ironically, this was how the members of the London Trust discovered, to their horror, that Whitaker and his white ministerial colleagues in Connecticut (including Wheelock himself) were trying to “get rich” from the money raised for the Indian school in Old England by using it to buy goods to ship to New England and sell at a profit there. There was more than one reason for Occom, who was not involved in the scam, to remain on his guard and keep his own counsel. Occom’s letter to his wife communicated the need for reserve by indirection: his parody held up for Mary to see the wall of silence that caution imposed, and made visible his unwillingness to write about “what passes.” The more remarkable thing about this “humorous” letter, however, was that Occom was sending it to a wife whom David M’Clure, one of Wheelock’s white disciples, described as an entirely traditional Indian who was, if anything, hostile to the white world:  “his Wife who was of the Montauk Tribe retained a fondness for her Indian customs. She declined evening and morning setting at table. Her dress was mostly Indian, and when he spake to her in English, she answered in her native language, although she could speak good English.”4 Clearly, if Occom expected her to get the point of his letter, Mary Occom knew a great deal more about Anglo-American culture than M’Clure supposed. Clearly too, while Occom’s “decent and proper behaviour … charmed most.. . who had the pleasure of conversing with [him]” in England,5 he was living a traditional Indian life at home. Following Robert Warrior’s call to “understand contemporary intellectual production in the context of over two centuries of a written Native intellectual tradition” which “reaches back at least to Samson Occom’s missionary writings,”6 scholars in Native American Studies such as Joanna Brooks, Hilary Wyss and Lisa Brooks, have begun to uncover the full extent of Occom’s political and social involvement with the Mohegan, Stockbridge and Montauk Indians and the traditional roles he played amongst them throughout his life. Their work shows that Occom’s Indian life at home was neither residual, nor

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peripheral to his career. On the contrary. While in Britain, Occom was doing in Rome as the Romans do and passing successfully as a “decent and proper” Englishman. But his biting reductio ad absurdum of polite English forms also signaled his distance, even alienation, from the code of manners to which he was adhering, and from the appearance of being well-pleased that he invariably showed. This played to Mary’s hostility to whites, in order to assure her that, despite celebrity and distance, he was still the Indian he had been at home. One might say that Occom’s epistolary parody was the equivalent of the formulaic phrase that he used in the missionary journal he kept in Britain to characterize his visits to important people:  “was very kindly receiv’d”; “was entertain’d with all kindness”; “was receiv’d with all kindness” (270). Here too a wall of silence was erected, and a shutter closed. Unlike other missionaries, Occom rarely used his journals to register his thoughts, describe his interactions with others, or examine his own spiritual or psychological state. He wrote his journals as “considerately” and cautiously as his letters, for his journals were no more private. Eleazar Wheelock always read them and included extracts or summaries of them in his reports to the British missionary societies that supported his Indian school. The difference was that Occom’s exaggerated repetition in his letter of the formulaic epistolary assurance that all was well also intimated that he knew perfectly well that all was not well, either with Mary or with himself. The letters he was receiving from Mary were “very melancholy.” Wheelock had spitefully informed him that his wife’s circumstances back in Mohegan were so “needy” that Mrs Whitaker, one Sarah Rogers, her sister, and his own daughter had all intervened with Wheelock on her behalf and Occom’s father-in-law had personally traveled to the school in Lebanon to fetch food for Mary and their children.7 Concern about his family’s poverty and hunger, which haunted Occom throughout his life, had followed him to Britain. And while being lionized by the “religious nobility” and the Great, and raising unheard of sums for the Indian school, Occom himself felt uncomfortably like “a Spectical and a gazing Stock” (Brooks: 175). The awkwardness of his position was captured, at the height of his British tour, in a satirical pamphlet that was published in Norwich in 1767, the same year as The Female American. A Cry from the Wilderness: or A Converted Indian’s Address to a Xn Congregation began as a parody of Occom’s 1765 autobiographical sketch:  “Till the Age of seventeen, I lived a poor blind Heathen, like the rest of my Countrymen, in a State of Darkness and Ignorance and Poverty. – H-ke – I had lived easy and

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contented in this wretched Condition, till about thirty Years ago it pleased the Lord to rouse me from this dangerous Security to a Sense of my lost and miserable Condition” (2). The pamphlet went on to ridicule the incongruity of simultaneously appealing to “Mr Mammon” and discoursing about salvation “thro’ the Mediation of our L. J. X, who is made Sin for us  – made a Sacrifice for our Sins” (5)  – the combination that, together with his necessary self-display as a converted Indian, composed his fund-raising sermons. Occom addressed these issues in his own parodic letter by giving his transatlantic itinerancy a carefully circular structure:  he had left home, traveled the roads, crossed the ocean, been received in London, was doing his business, and would, God willing, “in time” return home. Occom hoped to end where he had begun, at home with Mary at Mohegan, as he had done innumerable times before, when he set off to visit other Indian communities in New England or to get himself officially ordained. He and Mary had only to “keep on well” until he could return. As Occom reminded Mary in a subsequent letter: “it was the Call of god and nothing but the Call of god in his Devine Providence, Cou’d have Caused me to leave my Dear Family” (Brooks: 81). Samson Occom had initially been one of the many Indian youths who, almost from the beginning of contact in America, went or were sent to learn the invaders’ language, writing and culture in order to solidify alliances with the English, translate and interpret, negotiate about Indian lands, and tell sachems what was in the legally binding papers that white people wrote. Occom acted as a tribal counselor and native leader even at the height of his involvement with Anglo-American and missionary culture, when he had become a Christian minister himself. He traveled to Britain in 1765 to raise money to enable other Indians to receive the English education at Eleazar Wheelock’s Indian school in Connecticut which he had received, and which more and more coastal Indians needed by the 1760s to deal with the rapidly advancing white world. As a Native American who spent two and a half years traveling around Britain and interacting with Britons of all kinds, and as the first Indian to have a book published both in America and in Britain, Occom became a celebrated transatlantic figure. Yet upon his return from Britain, Occom turned his back upon his clan’s long-standing policy of alliance with the English, as well as upon the British–American world. He ultimately led neighbors and family members to a separatist Indian settlement called Brotherton deep in Oneida country, away from the British and American worlds. Occom’s break with Wheelock and turn to Indian separatism is usually placed in

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1770, when Wheelock moved his school to New Hampshire, and used the money that Occom had raised in Britain for an Indian school to found Dartmouth as a college for white students which excluded Indians. But as we will see in the first section below, the differences between the autobiographical sketch that Occom wrote in 1765 before his transatlantic voyage, and that which he wrote in 1768, immediately upon his return from Britain, while “Doctor Wheelock’s school prosper[ed] as heretofore” in Connecticut as an Indian school (Brooks: 84) shows that that Occom had already changed his view of Indians’ place in Anglo-American society. The radical reversal of Occom’s position had occurred in the interval, that is to say, while he was in Britain. Occom’s son-in-law, Joseph Johnson, explained the reasons for this turnabout to the Oneida Indians thus: Some says, that the Indians can see but little ways, and we believe that our fore fathers could not see but very little ways. Brethren, ye know that some of the English loves to take the advantage of poor, Ignorant, and blind Indians. Well so it was in the days of our forefathers in New England … Now we their Children just opening our Eyes . . and just reviving, or coming to our Senses like one that has been drunk – I say that now we begin to look around and Consider, and we perceive that we are striped indeed, having nothing to help ourselves, and thus our English Brethren leaves us, and laugh. So now Brethren, we leave the English those who have acted unjustly towards us in New England.8

The transatlantic story of betrayal that led to Occom’s withdrawal from the white world, which will be reconstructed in the second section below, informs and frames the new position Occom took on the place of Indians in white society in his Sermon on Moses Paul, a bestseller in America that was reprinted in Britain and is discussed in section three. This trajectory of cooperation and alliance followed by bitter disillusion and withdrawal to save what could be saved, recurred again and again in Indian contacts with settlers, missionaries and government officials during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.9 But Occom is unique in this period in having communicated what he wished to say about it in writing and in his own hand, rather than through the partial and unreliable mediation of reported speech. Occom’s style was guarded and oblique; he specialized in what Joseph Roach calls “arriving at direction through indirection.”10 This, together with his apparently conventional use of conventional genres, made his positions particularly vulnerable to distorting missionary interpretations. These began with Eleazar Wheelock’s narratives about his Indian school and mission to the Indians, and with the letters Wheelock wrote during and after Occom’s voyage to Britain, and have long affected how Occom

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has been read. But Occom did consistently represent what he thought through a key image:  his changing and shifting image of Indian itinerancy. As his writings show, itinerancy was  – like conversion and the mobility of the poor  – a site of contestation between masters and servants, governors and subjects, and the white and Indian worlds, as well as a point of division within missionary culture itself. This chapter concludes by reading aspects of The Female American as a commentary both on the situation of Indian “servants of God” like Occom within the transatlantic missionary world, and on the likelihood that Indians would really be permitted to escape from white colonization into separatist havens of their own. The novel was first published during Occom’s visit to Britain in 1767, when it was assumed by British reviewers to be the work of an American author; it was then twice reprinted in America at the turn of the nineteenth century. O ccom’s L i v e s Occom’s first autobiographical sketch of 1765, which initially took letter form, was designed to answer the Boston Commissioners for the New England Missionary Company (known in England as the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts), who were trying to undermine fund-raising efforts for the Indian school by spreading rumors that Occom was a fake. Occom, they said, was not evidence of Wheelock’s success in converting Indians, because Occom had been a Christian all his days and could no longer even “speak Indian.” (Brooks: 74) Occom answered these charges by emphasizing his Indian upbringing in a manner that was as implicitly provocative as it was overtly factual and polite: I was born a Heathen in Mmoyanheeunnuck alias Mohegan in New London North America, my Parents were altogether Heathens, and I was Educated by them in their Heathenish Notions, tho’ there was a Sermon Preach’d to our Mohegan Tribe Sometimes but our Indians regarded not the Christian Religion, they Woud persist in their Heathenish ways, and my Parents in perticular were very Strong in the Customs of their fore Fathers, and they led a wandering Life up and down in the Wilderness, for my Father was a great Hunter, thus I liv’d with them till I was Sixteen years old, and then there was a great Stir of Religion in these Parts of the World both amongst the Indians as Well as the English … (Brooks: 51–2)

Occom repeats in almost every clause white missionaries’ standard pejorative characterization of Indians as “heathens.” But he also highlights in the Mohegan way of life the feature that Anglo-American

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missionaries from John Eliot through the Boston Commissioners most abhorred: Indians’ traditional, wandering, “scattered and wild course of life.” This has been read as demonstrating Occom’s internalization of missionary values:  Anglo-American missionaries considered it essential to overcome what Wheelock called “the great Impediment of Indians continually rambling about”11 to subject them to “a civil, orderly, Christian way of living” on the British model through constant missionary criticism, discipline and oversight.12 But Occom’s repetition of the word “heathen,” combined with his manner of drawing attention away from himself to his “altogether heathen” parents, his heathen tribe, their “heathen notions,” their “heathenish ways,” their wandering life, and their utter disregard of the Christian religion, could also be read as indicating just how total the failure of the Boston commissioners’ missionary endeavors had been. Their preachers had not even begun to make a dent. The Great Awakening, George Whitefield, and by extension, Whitefield’s disciple, Eleazar Wheelock, had done for Indians what the New England Missionary Company had failed to do. This is certainly how the Boston commissioners understood Occom. They refuted this point in their subsequent letter to the SPG in England by insisting that they had contributed to Christianizing both Occom and the Mohegan Indians by keeping a school at Mohegan “for a long time,” and sending ministers there “upwards of twenty years ago” (Richardson, 137),13 and they showed that Occom’s charge continued to rankle even after they had retreated from their other “misrepresentations” of him. More significant in the autobiographical sketch of 1765 is what Occom did not say. His “true account” did not say that Occom had ever given up either his “heathenish Notions” or his father’s wandering ways. Indeed, the thirty-six entries he made in the missionary journal he was obliged to write for Wheelock while at the Indian school from December 1743 to November 1748, each recorded one or more of his departures from the school. Occom’s first entry is fairly typical in this regard: December the 6th, 1743 I went to the Revd Mr Wheelocks of Lebanon to Learn Something of the Latin Tongue, and was there about a Week, and was obliged to Come away from there again to Mohegan, and Stayd about Fortnight at mohgn and then I return’d up to Mr Whee. again and Some time towards Spring again I went home to Mohegan, and Stayed near three Weeks before I returned to Mr Wheelocks again, and August the 7th A.D. 1744 I went away from Lebanon to Mohegn and … (Brooks: 248)

One of Wheelock’s major justifications for his Indian boarding school was that the schoolmasters who were being sent to Indian towns to teach

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“can’t keep the Children in any Measure constant at School”14 because their parents took them “roving from Place to Place to get something to live upon.”15 By writing the school journal that Wheelock required entirely as a record of his “rambling ways” and “rovings from Place to Place,” Occom sardonically presented Wheelock, year by year, with a record of how little Wheelock himself had managed to keep his Indian pupil “constant at school.” Here, then, Occom was registering his distance from the norm to which he was conforming. At the same time, as Lisa Brooks has shown, this first journal of Occom’s repeatedly logged travels radiating from his “home” in the Indian community of Mohegan to any number of other Indian communities in Connecticut and New York, as well as his trips to and from Wheelock’s school. Placing his “home” in Mohegan, and travelling in a circle issuing from it completed by his return, demonstrated the scope of his friendships and connections among native peoples up and down the coast, marginalized Wheelock’s school as “just one site within Occom’s extensive network,” and centered Occom’s reality in a primarily “native space”:16 Sept the 7th AD 1745 I sot out from Lebn for Mohegan and got there Some time before Night And in the 10th of Sepr we Sot out from Mohegan for Nahantuck, and in the 12th of D Instant we turn’d again to Mohegan, and in the 13th of Sepr Many of us Sot out from Mohegan for Long Island and we got so far as New London that Night, and in the Morning we Sot Sail from there and we got to the place of our Desire in the Evening, and Some of us Lodg’d at [Queen’s] Wigwaum that Night, and there we were very kindly Entertained by all of ’em, We had Several Meetings together, and there was Some Stir among ’em –And in the 18th Sepr we all Return’d home again to Mohegan, and to Several Places where we belong’d … (Brooks: 249)

The “I” who sets out from Wheelock’s school in Lebanon here becomes “we” as soon as Occom reaches Mohegan and merges back into his community. “We” is then entirely absorbed in travel to “the place of our Desire” and in discretely undisclosed Indian affairs. Reserved and oblique, a wall of silence firmly in place, Occom was, as usual, being honest too. For even if he did not yet fully understand the larger implications, Wheelock could not fail to notice Occom’s immersion and continued involvement in the Indian world, or the fact that he had not succeeded in ensuring that Occom was “taken quite away from [his] Parents, and the pernicious Influence of Indian Examples.”17 The autobiographical essay of 1768 revisited these issues in distinctly different terms. Returning to the question of his education and

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conversion, Occom granted the Boston Commissioners that they had sent “a Minister from New London” to preach at Mohegan once a fortnight, and that “there was a Sort of a School kept” for a short while. He reiterated that both had been ineffectual, and that “the Extraordinary Ministers Preaching from Place to Place” during the Great Awakening had been the ones to introduce Christianity to Mohegan. He also insisted again that he had been “Brought up in Heathenism.” (Brooks: 52–3). The difference between the two versions lay in Occom’s representation of his education and relations to white people as purely instrumental and subservient to Indian-centered goals. Occom now explained that he had pitied his poor Indian Brethren for being unable to read and write, and had set out to acquire these skills in order to be “capable of instructing my poor Kindred. I used to think if I Coud once Learn to Read I would Instruct poor Children in reading” (54). To this end, Occom had gone to “my English Neighbours freequently for Assistance in Reading,” and then sent his mother to Mr Wheelock to see if he would teach him for “a week or a Fortnight.” Occom had used both his English neighbors and Wheelock’s school as the means of accomplishing his goal.18 After four years at Wheelock’s school, when he had acquired all the literacy and knowledge of the Christian bible that he desired, Occom claimed that he had “overstrained” his eyes and could no longer study, and followed his original plan by going off to find himself a schoolmaster’s post among the Indians at Montauk on Long Island.19 In the 1768 autobiography, then, Occom was no longer taking Wheelock’s part against the Boston Commissioners; he was inscribing his distance, indeed independence, from both. He had entered their orbit on his own initiative, in order to use them to teach him what he thought he and his fellow Indians needed to know and returned to the Mohegans and Montauks with his booty. In the Boston Newsletter where Occom’s 1765 autobiography had been published,20 Wheelock had appended it to an account of an important meeting with Indians at his house, to boast his own centrality in Indian relations. The 1768 autobiography showed that he had nothing to boast about. It is telling that Wheelock did not publish the 1768 autobiography, as Occom expected him to do. The 1768 autobiography also revisited the question of Indian itinerancy. This time, however, Occom ironically juxtaposed his itinerant “heathen” life as a child prior to the Great Awakening with his life as a Christian schoolmaster and minister at Montauk. As a child, he had “dwelt in a Wigwam,” because his “Parents Livd a wandering life, so as did all the Indians at Mohegan; they Chiefly Depended upon Hunting Fishing

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and Fowling for their Living and had no Connections with the English, excepting to [Traffic] with thim in Small Trifles.” (Brooks:  53) By the same token, as the schoolmaster and Christian minister at Montauk, I dwellt in a Wigwam, a Small Hutt fraimed with Small Poles and Coverd with Matts made of Flags, and I was oblig’d to move twice a Year, about 2 miles Distance, by reason of the Scarcity of wood, for in one Neck of Land they Planted their Corn and in another they had their wood … Some mornings and Evenings I woud be out with my Hook and Line to Catch fish, and in the Fall of year and in the Spring, I used my Gunn, for we lived very handy for Fowl, and I was very expert with a Gunn … at other times I Bound old Books for Easthampton People, made Wooden Spoons and Ladles, Stockd Guns, and workd on Cedar to make Pails Piggans and Churns etc. (Brooks: 57)

After being “civilized,” educated and anglicized, Occom was still living in a wigwam, still feeding his family by hunting, fishing, fowling and trafficking with the English in small trifles, and still “roving from Place to Place” seasonally each year. This time, however, as he made clear, the fault lay with Wheelock and the Missionary Societies, the very same people who condemned Indians for hunting, fishing and “continually rambling about.” For though they were more than willing for Occom to replace their erstwhile white missionary to the Montauk and Shenecock Indians on Long Island, and to act as the local schoolmaster besides, neither Wheelock nor the English or Scottish missionary societies was willing to pay him what they paid white missionaries for doing half the job. By leaving Occom and his growing family to the most abject poverty, Wheelock and the Missionary societies had driven him back to living in ways that they despised, to cultural practices that they considered the mark of savages, and to a form itinerancy that missionaries were supposed to suppress. At the same time, among Indians, itinerancy was the very signifier of masculinity; only women stayed at home to cultivate the ground. Occom’s insistence on his continued itinerancy after the Indian manner therefore also contained a quiet affirmation of the manhood which white missionaries insulted and denied by dismissing him as a “poor Indian.”21 Occom juxtaposed to this manly Indian itinerancy, the itinerancy of those Extraordinary New Light Ministers during the Great Awakening who went “Preaching from Place to Place” and who encouraged Indians to travel from Place to Place to attend their churches and meetings. There was more than a little irony here too, as Occom quietly highlighted the discrepancy in missionary thinking. For Wheelock and his ilk, there was a “good” missionary itinerancy, which Wheelock like Whitefield had practiced in his youth, and which he expected Occom to practice again upon

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his return from Britain – the itinerancy of evangelical New Lights ministers who went from settlement to settlement, from town to town, and from continent to continent, awakening people to their damnable state of sin and need for a saving conversion. And there was the “bad” itinerancy of Indians. In his 1768 autobiography, Occom highlighted his success at this “good” form of itinerancy too, describing the great increase in conversions he had achieved at Montauk after the departure of the white missionary, Mr. Horton, and his frequent 30-mile treks from Montauk to minister to the Indians at Shenecock at weekends. Occom’s success as an itinerant preacher all over Britain was already evident from the unprecedented sum of £11,000 that he had raised for the Indian school. Occom, who thought it his duty to minister both to Indians spiritual and temporal concerns, therefore presented himself in 1768 as doubly itinerant: he was itinerant after the Indian manner, and after the manner of English evangelical preachers. Unfortunately for Occom, there was also another view of this “good” evangelical itinerancy among British–American Christians. Old Lights condemned the itinerancy of New Lights preachers, because they failed to respect parish boundaries and intruded on the ministries of others.22 And white missionaries of all Lights condemned the itinerancy of Indian preachers, who intruded upon their missions to the Indians and upon what they saw as their prerogative, by succeeding among the Indians where they failed, and being followed as spiritual and civic leaders when they were ignored. Joseph Fish and David Jewett, for instance, both objected to Occom preaching on their patch, and Fish bitterly resented being overshadowed by native minister Samuel Niles besides.23 Occom appears to have been naive on this point. The autobiography of 1768 makes it clear that he believed that doing well deserved well: I was my own Interpreter. I was both a School master, and Minister to the Indians, yea I was their Ear, Eye and Hand as Well Mouth – I leave it with the World, as wicked as it is, to Judge, whether I ought not to have had half as much they gave a young Man Just mentiond which would have been but £50 a year (Brooks: 58)

Occom failed to understand that white ministers were competing for livings and status in New England, as well as for patronage and credit in Old England. The conversion of Indians might reflect well upon them; but the missionary successes of native preachers such as Occom or Niles awoke “jealousies,” especially when a native minister succeeded with the Indians where white ministers failed precisely “because he was a poor Indian” himself.

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T r a ns at l a n t ic com m e rc e What, then, happened between these two Lives to change Occom’s views? One important thing that happened was that Occom’s relationship with Wheelock deteriorated as rivalry kicked in to complicate what was, before 1766, a relationship of wary interdependence and mutual need. Wheelock recognized early on that Occom’s “Influence is great among the Indians” (Richardson: 29). He explained to British patrons that Occom’s successes proved that Indian missionaries were more effective among the Indians than white missionaries were: The Influence of their own Sons among them will likely be much greater than of any Englishman whatsoever. They will look upon such a one as one of them, his Interest the same as theirs; and will naturally esteem him as an Honour to their Nation, and be more likely to submit patiently to his Instructions and Reproofs than to any English Missionary. This is quite evident in the case of Mr Occom, whose Influence among the Indians, even of his own tribe, is much greater than any other Man’s.24

Wheelock boasted about this because Occom’s successes distinguished him from New England missionary societies, as the one missionary amongst them who succeeded in training and dispatching predominantly native school teachers and ministers to Indian tribes. Contrary to what he wished his patrons in Britain to believe, however, Wheelock was also entirely dependent on Occom’s cooperation and connections in the Indian world for the success of his Indian school. As Lisa Brooks has shown, all Wheelock’s Indian pupils were connections or relations of Occom’s; and when Occom withdrew his support from Wheelock, they came in waves to take their children home. It is quite possible that Wheelock made Dartmouth a college for white students to conceal his failure to recruit Indian students on his own. Until his turn to a separationist stance after 1768, Occom needed Wheelock too. Part of Occom’s influence among Indians who were pursuing what Dowd calls an “accommodationist” policy,25 derived from his ability to negotiate British–American society, from his continuing contacts in that society, and from his spiritual power as a Christian minister. It is also quite possible, therefore, that Occom’s turn to a separatist position after his break with Wheelock was necessitated by his loss of these advantages. Occom’s “influence among the Indians” which, as Wheelock well knew, extended far beyond religious matters, required and permitted him to act with more independence than Wheelock liked.26 During the years

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immediately prior to his departure for England, for instance, Occom was heavily involved in Mohegan efforts to unseat a sachem who was the Connecticut colonial government’s pawn, and to recover Mohegan lands that John Mason and the colony had illegitimately appropriated for English settlers. Occom’s efforts in this direction caused a furor in colonial government circles, in part because he managed to ensure that the Mohegan’s petition about their lands reached George III in London. Wheelock ensured that Occom was hauled before the Boston Commissioners to account for his actions, and that he signed a humiliating public apology for his “imprudent, rash and offensive Conduct.” But Wheelock privately informed George Whitefield that, behind closed doors, Occom had “made a bold and truly manly and Christian Defense in a Spirit of Meekness, and vindicated his Conduct to have been judicious, prudent and becoming to a Minister of the Gospel.” Occom had made it clear to Wheelock and the Commissioners that “his Nation … had long since chose him for their Counsellor, and depended upon him to see for them in all their civil affairs” and insisted that “the Indians have been much wronged in the affair for which they are Seeking Redress” (Richardson: 30–31). Occom had, therefore, in reality, neither apologized nor retracted. Though he lost the pension that Whitefield had arranged for him for his pains, Occom made it clear to everyone present where he thought his primary duty both as a minister and as a native counselor lay. When his position as a Christian minister was on the line, he gracefully bowed to the inequalities of power in colonial New England, and made a public show of knowing his place. But knowing too that Wheelock needed to send him to Britain “a begging” for the school, and could not afford to allow him to be dismissed, he ensured that Wheelock and the Boston Commissioners understood that he was not unequivocally “their” man. Occom excelled at this kind of brinksmanship. This meant (at least from Wheelock’s point of view) that Occom had a distressing tendency to do what he was told only when it suited him. For instance, when instructed by Wheelock to write to him more frequently from Britain to tell him what was going on, Occom who knew that Wheelock and Whitaker were corresponding behind his back, replied peaceably but immovably:  “Let it suffice you, to hear of me by Mr Whitaker’s Letters, there is no need of my writing often, since Mr  Whitaker writes so often” (Richardson:  222). Wheelock called this sort of conduct evidence of Occom’s “Indian distemper, pride,” and did all he could to “humble” him. This has been explained by giving Wheelock the character of a domestic patriarch who expected submission to his will

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of everyone around him. But Wheelock himself indicates that it was more a question of his own pride and fear of failure: “I am alone, a City upon a hill: the Lord uphold and direct me amidst thousands who are watching and wishing and waiting for my fall” (Richardson: 341). While Occom was in Britain, Wheelock saw himself falling as Occom rose. Wheelock initially sent Occom to Britain because George Whitefield insisted that the Indian who was sent over must be Occom. Once in England, and introduced into all the right circles by Whitefield and his followers, Occom supplemented the “esteem” and “great Influence” he enjoyed among the Indians, by obtaining the esteem of influential Englishmen. Here again Occom succeeded far better than Whitaker, whose correspondence made so much “trouble” for Wheelock. While the London Trust was reproaching Wheelock and Whitaker for “sporting with that which was given for sacred Purposes” by trying to use the money raised for the Indian school “in Trade” (Richardson: 235), enthusiastic divines in England were writing to Wheelock that: It was Right to send over Mr Occum, as a Specimen of the benefitt of ye School – As far as I hear he pleases in every Town and city – So much Simplicity appears in the man; So honest, guiless a Temper, with Seriousness in his public Service; So well he speaks in public, and So well he acts in private among his friends and mankind, that he engages their hearts[.] (Richardson: 227)

And while the London Trust was withholding the funds they held from Wheelock, and trying to tie it up legally so that he could not spend it without oversight, individual members of the Trust were writing to Wheelock to tell him to give Occom money to relieve his poverty, and offering to supply him with funds for Occom from their own pockets. Complaining that Occom’s success in Britain had gone to his head, Wheelock did his best to discredit Occom with his English friends. He also appears to have withheld the money they wished him to give Occom whenever he could. Poverty was humbling, and the money that Occom desperately needed to feed his family may have appeared to Wheelock to be his main, if not his only, hold over Occom. The other important thing that happened in Britain was that Occom realized how differently he was being treated “because he was a poor Indian” – and on a matter which went to the heart of his mission there. What happened in this regard can be gleaned from observations made at the time by members of the London Trust. The London Trust was headed by Lord Dartmouth, who was just stepping down as President of the Board of Trade and Plantations and was soon to become Secretary of State for America. The London Trust had a fundamentally different

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attitude to Occom from Wheelock’s, and not only because its members did not see him as a rival. During and after the Seven Years (or French and Indian) war, policy and attitudes towards Indians in England and New England differed widely. Colonists were inclined to blame the atrocities of enemy Indians allied with the French on all Indians, and to regard native peoples as dangerous impediments both to their appropriation of Indian lands and to their ability to “make or mend their fortunes” in America. They wished both this danger and this impediment gone. Wheelock was not alone in predicting that these would soon be removed when Indians conveniently vanished: “It looks to me more and more as though God designs to make short work with the Natives, that they will soon be Christianized or destroyed” (Richardson:  193). Whitefield (like Warrior)27 therefore feared that “the Pagans of America are Canaanites, to be cut off before God’s people” (Richardson: 21). The English, by contrast, regarded Indians at this time as important allies against the Spanish and the French, and made ineffectual efforts to stop British colonists from upsetting friendly Indian communities by further unfriendly land grabs. In 1763, for instance, George III forbade colonial expansion into Indian lands without his “especial Leave”; and when Occom’s petition reached him three years later, he supported the Mohegans against John Mason and the colonial government.28 English attitudes differed too because, as Alden Vaughan has shown, the British always made it a rule to ensure that visiting Indian “Kings” and emissaries from Indian nations were “Treated extreemly well, yea [and] Caress’d too Well” (as Occom put it), at least while they were in Britain.29 An Indian emissary on Occom’s business was a particular valuable guest. As we saw, the British had a long-standing policy of bringing African princes to England to be educated and converted to Christianity, in order to protect British commerce with Africa by strengthening their affective and political ties to England. Raising money for a school in New England to educate and convert the sons of sachems and future native leaders could be regarded as a similar investment to strengthen useful affective and political ties between Britain and Indian nations. Beyond their sincere desire to spread evangelical Christianity or serve George Whitefield, then, there were reasons for Lord Dartmouth, members of the London Trust, and George III (who contributed £100) to be supportive of Occom and concerned that he be treated well. Members of the Trust therefore made it clear when they did not think that Occom was being well treated. In 1767, for instance, Robert Keen, the Trust’s Secretary, noticed that, aside from being expected to

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preach all over Britain as instructed, Occom was being excluded and marginalized. He wrote a reproachful letter to Whitaker to that effect, “desiring he [Occom] may read the whole of this, as he ought to do all the Letters you receive from me or the Trust” (Richardson:  244). Keen wrote the same to Occom, adding that “it will give us more satisfaction to find Mr Whitaker and you consulting and adviseing with one another” and that Occom should “sometimes write yourself ” (Richardson: 245). At about the same time, Occom discovered from Whitaker that he had also been excluded from something that he undoubtedly cared more about: Whitaker and Wheelock had been conniving behind his back to obtain a large tract of land to which they proposed to move the Indian school. Occom’s response when finally told about this, was to suggest that they acquire “a large tract of land on Long Island” near Montauk, which had been offered to the Montauk Indians; it was “handy for fish oysters Clams etc” and there was plenty of salt and hay, so that Indian youth at the school could conveniently both live off the land and raise livestock there (Richardson: 219). Peaceable as it was, there was an implicit reproach in his suggestion: Wheelock and Whitaker had not been thinking either in terms of Indian places, or of the needs of Indian youth. When missionaries set up Indian schools for native students, they ordinarily consulted with the local sachem and obtained land and building materials for the school house from the tribe, if the tribe decided that they wanted a school; but Wheelock had ignored this practice too. Instead, he was taking advantage of the fact that Whitaker was in Britain to apply for land for the Indian school through Englishmen in London who had an “interest” with colonial proprietors in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire or New York, who were parceling out dubiously acquired Indian lands to white settlers. Occom may not have known at this time that Wheelock would ensure that the title to the land for the Indian school was granted to him and his heirs, rather than to Indians. But Occom cannot have failed to notice that he and Whitaker were being treated differently because he was “a poor Indian” or that Wheelock had already let Indians down on the crucial issues of land, sovereignty and what was to be done with the money raised for the Indian school.30 Occom dealt with this realization elegantly, and in such a way as to ensure that he did “return home well.” He developed a mysterious illness, and explained to the Trust, that this most unfortunately precluded him from undertaking any more fund­raising sermons and confined him entirely to his rooms. There was evidently nothing for it then but to send him home.

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Occom appears to have realized that he had made the same serious error that the Uncas (the Mohegan sachems of his clan) had made when they trusted one white settler, John Mason, with the title to their lands in the belief that these would be safer with an Anglo-American who was well known to them and a friend. Occom too had trusted one white settler, who was well known to him, to do what was necessary for Indian education and to act as his patron in the missionary world. Wheelock’s defection spelled the ruin of Occom’s plans to deliver his people, just as Mason’s defection spelled the beginning of the end of the Mohegans’ claim to their land – George III’s ruling in their favor was overturned in 1772. Occom despaired and turned to drink for a while. But he never made the same mistake again. He burned no more bridges – he was careful to keep up his relationship with his friends in the London Trust, who helped to support him by sending him money until the outbreak of the Revolutionary war; and he continued to correspond with Wheelock from time to time even after their break. But he trusted no more British–American allegiances, and built an alliance for the Mohegans and Montauks with the Oneida Indians instead.31 T h e se r mon on Mo se s Pau l As Joanna Brooks has pointed out, Occom’s exposure to the English, in what was his first full immersion in a whole Western culture, “left a lasting imprint” which was still evident “more than twenty years after his return from England.”32 This manifested itself in an interesting way. Occom made only a terse observation about the poverty he saw in the streets of London in the missionary journal he wrote at the time, describing: “Coaches and footmen passing and repassing, and the poor Begars Praying, Crying, and Beging upon their knees” (Brooks:  267). Twenty years later, in a sermon on the verse “Thou Shalt Love Thy Neighbour as Thyself” (Luke 10:26–7), he recalled that he had “Seen many in Great Britain that was poor” and roundly condemned “This sort of People, if they can get Riches to themselves they don’t car who is poor, if they can just have their Bellies ful, they don’t car who starves” (193). He used this sort of people to exemplify the sin of lacking love of neighbor and love of God (Brooks:  201, 205–6). Occom also made it clear that he understood this sin, and the poverty it condoned, to be a cultural characteristic of white Christian societies by contrasting it with what was customary “among the Indian Heathen in this great Continent”: “When there is a Scarsity of Food amongst them, they will yet Divide what little they have

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if there is but a mouth full a Piece, and When one kills any Creature, they will equally divide it amongst them all and when they have Plenty especially in what they got in Hunting and Fishing – and when anyone is destitude of a Blanket, he that has two, will freely give him one … ”33 (Brooks:  203–4). Poverty resulting from lack of love for one’s neighbor was no more an Indian than an African problem. What differentiates Occom’s surviving sermons before his British itinerancy from his surviving sermons after it  – beginning with the famous sermon at the execution of Moses Paul which was exported back to Britain in book form – is a new and powerful sense of the “wickedness” of the world, and of “Sin [as] the cause of all the miseries that attend poor sinful man” (Brooks: 182). Even more to the point, whenever Occom specified what he meant by Sin, he described facets of English and British–American culture: “tavern haunting, chambering and carousing, playing at dice and cards … cursing and swearing and prophaning the holy name of God, drunkenness, fighting, debauchery, lying and cheating” (Brooks: 184). Sin also took the form of commercial monopolies, of “inslav[ing] the poor Negroes in such Barbarous manner,” and of the hierarchical social system in which those above oppressed those below: “they got to be rich I mean the Nobles and the great, and they … keep the rest of their Brethren under their Feet, they makes Slaves of them, the great ones have got all the Land and the rest are poor Tenants” (Brooks:  59, 112). There are echoes of Cugoano here. There is fairly widespread agreement among scholars that Occom’s Christianity was syncretic. Occom tells us himself that he acted both as a spiritual guide and as a medicine man or healer, thus more in the manner of a traditional shaman or powwow than of a Western clergyman – we might recall here too John Marrant’s description of his conduct among the Indians. Occom also tells us that he acknowledged the spiritual power of shamans. In his account of Montauk culture, he explains that shamans “consult images to know the minds of their gods” and “say they get their art from dreams” – adding “I don’t see for my part, why it is not as true, as the English or other nation’s witchcraft, but is a great mystery of darkness” (Brooks:  49). As Daniel Richter observed, “Shamans and witches were two sides of the same coin, because spiritual power, like the beings who wielded it, was morally neutral.”34 Vine Deloria has argued that where native religions sought direct experiential contact with the spirit world, in Christianity “belief replaces experience.” Occom too insisted on the centrality of experiential immediacy. In his sermon at the execution of Moses Paul, he explained that “spiritual life … consists in

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union of the soul to God, and communion with God” and that “a true christian desires no other heaven but the enjoyment of God” (Brooks: 185, 186). In his later journals, he made it clear that he judged the success of his Christian prayer meetings by whether “we had the presence of God with us” (Brooks: 343), as well as by whether congregants manifested the proper evangelical tears and emotion. And Joanna Brooks has described how Occom “adapted hymns into the existing contexts [and indigenous musical traditions] of Native life.”35 But, as in the case of Gronniosaw, sin stands outside syncretism, which seems to assume some sort of analogy or homology or point of interface between religious traditions which enables them to incorporate or superimpose themselves upon one another. For the concept of sin was entirely alien to native religious thought and had no real analogues there. And sin was the focal point of Occom’s sermon at the public hanging of Moses Paul, the point upon which his double-voiced written discourse turned.36 Moses Paul was an Indian who had been found guilty of killing a white man while drunk, and who had asked for Occom to deliver the execution sermon at his public hanging. Occom took his text from Romans 6:23:  “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord,” a text frequently used for execution sermons in America. The sermon that was subsequently published and reprinted at least nineteen times in Connecticut, Boston and London between 1772 and 1789, is not the sermon that Occom actually delivered at New Haven to the condemned man and to the Indians, ministers, judges, slaves and settlers in the watching crowd. Occom stressed in his Preface that “about one half of it was not delivered as it was written, and now it is a little altered and enlarged in some places” (Brooks: 177). The printed sermon was a revised, expanded and rethought version of the oral sermon, which was itself different from his first written draft. In the version we have, Occom gave his discourse the structure of a conventional New Lights sermon, designed to awaken listeners to an awareness of their sin and need for a saving conversion;37 but he departed significantly from the norm. As Ava Chamberlain observes, Occom did not include, as was usual at this time, “either a scriptural or a legal defense of capital punishment. He considers both ‘temporal death’ and ‘spiritual death,’ but avoid judicial death.”38 Significantly too, Occom used his exposition of sin to dissolve all disparity between the criminal at the gallows in the public square and the decent, law-abiding citizens all around watching justice being done. He devoted a large part of his sermon to universalizing sin as “the

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woeful case of mankind of all nations, according to their appearance in these days.” After showing where and how sin was embedded in British– American cultural practices, he presented death as the existential situation of everyone contemplating Moses Paul: “we are all dying creatures”; “we are by nature as certainly under the sentence of death from God, as this miserable man is by the just determination of man” (Brooks: 179, 178, 191). Occom thus made Moses Paul, the Indian standing before the gallows at the moment of his execution, representative of all humankind – of every sinful, dying creature who, like him, deserved death as the wages of sin. Occom went so far as to represent Moses Paul as a literal sharer in the agony and death of Jesus Christ: “Shall he be crucified hard by your gallows, as it were, and will you regard him not?” (Brooks: 190). It will be remembered that Christ was crucified between two criminals, as a criminal himself. Occom also invited Moses Paul to reenact Jesus’s response to the “justice” they shared: O, poor Moses! Hear the dying prayer of a gracious Saviour on the accursed tree, – Father forgive them for they know not what they do, This was a prayer for his enemies and murderers; and it is for you, if you will now only repent and believe in him. (Brooks: 190)

Occom used this dimension of his sermon (and the contemplative exercise he was forcing on his readers), among other things, to appeal to ministers and “reverend Gentlemen” to regard ridding the world of sin as their principal mission: “attack this monster sin in all its shapes and windings … Call upon all orders ranks and degrees of people, to rise up against sin and satan” (Brooks: 191). A saving temporal conversion of white society must accompany the saving spiritual one. Occom went on to speak directly to Indians as one who knew what it was to be treated differently because he was a poor Indian, and by 1772, as part of a group of Indians who had nothing but “Jealousy [i.e. suspicion] and Distrust of ye Government, and also of any Dependence of them, Either for advice, protection, Regulation, Friendship, or even as much as to be treated as a Friend.”39 On this level, the message was rather different. “You are the bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh,” he told Moses Paul, “You are an Indian, a despised creature; but you have despised yourself; yea you have despised God more” (Brooks: 188). “We are despised in the world,” he told his poor Indian kindred, “for we despised ourselves more: and if we don’t regard ourselves, who will regard us?” (192). Occom represented Indian alcoholism as the effect of being despised by the white world, and as evidence that Indians had come to despise themselves as a

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result. He showed that for Indians, drunkenness represented pure loss. It not only led an Indian to “disfigure every part of him, both soul and body, which was made after the image of God” (192), but also made it possible for Indians to be “cheated over and over again” both of their substance and of their land (195). As Peter Mancall has pointed out, colonials and promoters of colonization repeatedly used alcohol, and encouraged Indians to trade furs, skins and land for it, as their most effective means of drawing Indians into the transatlantic network of imperial commerce.40 Drunkenness was thus the sin which best epitomized the situation of Indians who assimilated to colonial society. It was an effect of contact – of sinful “men who put their bottles to their neighbors mouth to make them drunk” (193). It was also an effect of immersion in BritishAmerican culture  – Moses Paul had “contracted many sinful habits in the [Provincial] Army, which before his Inlistment he was a Stranger to the practice of”; and subsequently, as a mariner in ships of war and in the Merchant service, “he got confirmed in those evil Habits which he too easily imbibed in the Army” (194). Moses’ sins – and the trajectory which led him to the fatal tree at New Haven that stormy day in September 1772  – issued directly from his contact with and immersion in English and colonial society. Moses was dying because of its sins. Drunkenness was a long-standing topic in New England execution sermons. Yet, in urging his fellow Indians to “fight against all sins,” and to “awake to righteousness” in a context where sin was repeatedly identified with English and colonial culture, Occom could also be understood by Indians to be making a more revolutionary point. For Occom’s Christian message eerily echoed that of the visionary shamans or powwows who were at that time being enthusiastically followed by non-Christian Indian Separatists. These powwows too were calling on native peoples to give up “all the Sins and Vices which the Indians have learned from the White People.” They were encouraging their followers to use “sacred power” to fight the colonists, and telling them that alcohol was “chief among ye vices which ye Indians have learned from ye White People.”41 Occom was joining his Christian Indian voice to theirs. Ironically, the larger causes of Occom’s disaffection were symbolized and recorded for posterity in the different ways in which this sermon was framed in American and English editions of the book. In American editions of Occom’s Sermon at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian, the sermon was prefaced with a justification for its publication, which alerted careful readers to look for ways in which the sermon’s “broken hints” and “common, plain everyday talk” addressed “poor Negroes” and “my poor

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kindred, the Indians.” American editions ended, conventionally enough, with an appendix giving a sketch of Moses Paul’s life and character from his own mouth. But they lacked another conventional feature:  Paul’s own confession and description of his crime/s. There was no admission of guilt. Instead, the appendix portrayed Paul as a literate Indian who had assimilated both to Christian and to British colonial culture and who had “contracted many sinful habits” in the Provincial army, where he had served under Colonel Putnam, and as a mariner on merchant ships and ships of war.42 Paul’s autobiographical sketch thus underlined the fundamental point that Ava Chamberlain shows Paul made in his appeal against his sentence: that he was not “of those fierce and barbarous Tribes of Northern Savages against whom the English are very justly prejudiced and incensed,” though he had been treated as such at his trial.43 He had been treated unjustly because he was “a poor Indian.” The English version of the sermon, which appeared in Bristol and London in 1788 and 1789, was edited by John Rippon, an English Baptist minister who was not only, like Occom, the editor of a book of hymns, but also heavily engaged in institutionalized British missionary work within the empire. Rippon reduced Occom’s preface to an apology for his lack of high flown language, lightly edited the sermon, and erased the appendix about Moses Paul. Even more to the point, he presented Occom’s sermon as an exotic specimen. Having described the Revd Samson Occom as an Indian who had visited England and recently preached at the Baptist Meeting house in New York, he observed in his “Advertisement” that “The following Sermon might, perhaps have been altered in a few places for the better, but it is presumed that good judges will overlook the defects of it, and wonder they are so few.” Rippon followed this up with an invented two-page dialogue supposedly between Occom and Moses Paul in the jail house prior to the execution, where Occom, acting as Ordinaries did in Newgate, sought and failed to obtain Paul’s confession, repentance and saving conversion. In place of the appendix, with its sketch of Moses Paul’s life, Rippon appended a paraphrase from the journal of a white missionary, Samuel Kirkland, testifying to Kirkland’s great successes in converting the Oneida Indians and describing an attempt by Indians on Kirkland’s life which had narrowly been averted. Indians were, after all, a murderous crew, however much one did for them; and Indian ministers were, of course, hopelessly ineffective at converting their fellows. Reliance must therefore be placed on white missionaries like Kirkland who were sent out by British church establishments run by people like Rippon. The missionary establishment had closed ranks.44

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It should not surprise us to find, therefore, that Occom’s turn to separatism was accompanied by a radical revision of his images of itinerancy. The revision first appears in the sermon on Moses Paul as a passing remark about “man being turned out of paradise by God himself, and become a vagabond in God’s world.” It was developed, most tellingly, in a sermon addressed “To all the Indians in this Boundless Continent” in 1784, the year Occom withdrew to Brotherton in Oneida country. Here Occom retold the story of Adam and Eve in the garden, and described the effects of their fall in the following terms: They have lost this World and all the fullness thereof, they have lost the garden that god made for them, Yea they are broke and become Bankrupts, and are fugitives and Vagabonds in the Earth, and are now liable to all manner of Miseries in this Life, liable to every Disease, Sicknesses and Accidents, and is now Danger and Fear on every Side, and is liable to Death Continually[.] (Brooks: 197)45

It is hard not to hear this as an allusion to the situation of Indians who, like Occom, were retreating before the shifting geographical itinerary of advancing whites. A vagabond was no longer an itinerant preacher ending, like Donne’s compasses, where he had begun. Nor was he any longer an Indian “rambling about” his tribal lands seasonally in the wake of his usual sources of fuel and food. A vagabond had no itinerary and no home. To be a vagabond was synonymous with being a vagrant and a beggar, “broke and Bankrupt” as Occom put it. To be a vagabond was to be a person outside British or American society and outside the law, a person against whom punitive laws were operative, and who enjoyed the protection of no human law. A vagabond therefore had good reason to fear danger, accident, and death at every hand, to flee contact like a fugitive, and to call on the Christian God for mercy and salvation. Perhaps Albert Gronniosaw had wider relevance than he knew, when he intimated that, for the man who had fallen from his African or American Eden into European hands, Christianity presented itself as the religion fit for an unfamiliarly sinful, suffering and fallen world.

T h e f e m a l e A m e r ic a n a n d m i s s ion a r y c u lt u r e The Female American was first published in London in 1767 at the height of Occom’s fund-raising tour; it was reprinted in Newburyport, Massachusetts in 1800 and again in Vermont in 1814. Though the novel has been loosely linked to Occom’s visit, critical interest to date has centered on the narrator-character’s gender and hybridity as the daughter of

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a white man and an Indian princess, and on her rewriting of scenes from Robinson Crusoe, Philip Quarll and the story of Pocahontas. But as Laura Stevens has pointed out, the novel took as its focus questions of “missionary work and British acculturation” and claimed American Indian authorship.46 Unca Eliza Winkfield’s name not only made her the “fictional granddaughter” of Edward Maria Wingfield, the first President of the Virginia Colony;47 it also linked her to Ben Uncas I, II and III, the Mohegan sachems of Occom’s clan, who from the seventeenth century had pursued an “accommodationist” policy with the British, and Christianized. As both The Critical and The Monthly Reviews pointed out in their different ways, The Female American described what was viewed in England by 1767 as a distinctively colonial American religious view of the world: the novel was “full of wonders; and well calculated to make one sort of reader stare.”48 In Georgian England, providential interpretations of such wonders and portents as earthquakes, comets, eclipses, visions, dreams and monster births had been discredited by the learned and abandoned by divines. Sensational accounts of wonders and illustrious providences, which readers of all ranks in England and New England had once shared, were now ridiculed in Britain as superstitious tales that were only fit for the ignorant lower orders or for pagans.49 Wonders could certainly still make such readers “stare”; but they were beneath the notice of rational, enlightened Englishmen. This is why The Critical Review observed with heavily sarcastic gallantry that “We could have wished, as well for her sake as our own, that this lady [Unca Eliza Winkfield] had published her adventures at the Fall of Niagara, or upon the Banks of Lake Superior, as she would then, probably have received the most judicious and sincere applause from her enlightened countrymen and princely relations, and have saved us six hours very disagreeable employment.”50 Unca’s memoirs were fit only for “wild,” and therefore presumably pagan, Indians. These eighteenth-century British reviewers are useful in enabling us to see that, both in her exemplification of the “uses of literacy” and in her representations of wonders as “remarkable providences,” Unca illustrates the popular religious culture of seventeenth and eighteenth-century New England that David Hall has described.51 When Unca is shipwrecked on an apparently deserted island, her reading matter is restricted to familiar early colonial texts: besides the manuscript left by a hermit who had once lived there, she only has a bible and an almanac. Though capable of different styles of reading, including the selectively instrumental, Unca stresses the primacy of intense, reverent and devotional re-reading of her

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bible and of the meditation upon it, which had been fundamental to her religious education. Her clergyman uncle was “a great recommender of meditation” as a means of convincing the understanding, moving the emotions and determining the will:  “We should be often inculcating upon our minds the truths we know, and they will become fixed” (69). Unca constantly practices meditation as he taught her to do: in part by remembering his sermons and transforming them back into living speech by speaking them aloud to herself; in part by reflecting devotionally upon such prodigies and wonders as the hurricane, the earthquake, and the monstrous animal who eats 300 mice; and in part by using moments of fear and terror as occasions for self-scrutiny, repentance, renewal of trust and faith in God and appropriate action. While acknowledging that the hurricane, the earthquake, unusual animals and the events that befell her were natural phenomena with natural causes as natural philosophers argued, Unca insists that nature demonstrates God’s providential design and that belief in special providences is not “superstition”: “He who would divide the belief of a particular providence from religion, destroys that which he should retain. He takes from man that hope which only can support him under the vicissitudes and cares of this life” (84). When it occurs to her that she can use the great hollow golden idol on the island to convert the Indians to Christianity, Unca awaits a sign from God to know whether to proceed, and prepares herself by prayer and meditation to preach to them spontaneously, without a written text or notes. For Unca, then, “the providence of God was “wonder-working,” making manifest “the reach of His sovereignty”; and acts of “special providence” represented God’s explicit “intervention into the affairs of men.”52 Highlighting in order to dismiss this “wonder-working” dimension of the novel enabled The Critical and The Monthly to suppress Unca’s sophisticated and embarrassing analysis of the uncomfortable place that Indian missionaries such as Occom occupied in Anglo-American religious culture. Unca was modeled after Occom in several respects. The beneficiary of both an English clerical education and an Indian one, and more fluent in Indian languages than in English, Unca was unusually successful in converting Indians to Christianity thanks to her syncretism (symbolized by teaching Christianity through the mouth of the Indians’ golden idol and by dressing her missionary self in the robes of a priest of the sun) and thanks to her understanding of Indian ways: “I was well acquainted with the manners of the Indians. I adapted my discourse to their own way of reasoning, and avoided all such terms and modes of speech, as are intelligible only to Europeans” (107). She not only taught

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the Indians Christianity through a series of catechisms which employed what Occom called “common plain every day talk” (Sermon, Pref) but also like Occom, composed hymns, and made the singing of hymns a key part of the Indians’ Christian devotions. When she went to live with them in their Indian village, Unca successfully negotiated with the entrenched local religious power elite and turned the priests of the sun into her supporters and helpers. While they taught Christian doctrine to the children, she instructed the people at large by regularly reading aloud from the bible and explaining her translations of it to them. Unca based her authority and success as a missionary both on her ability to serve as a channel for God’s word and on her unthreatening physical and cultural likeness to those she was converting. As she tells the Indian priests, she is “a person … like yourselves, and that you may be the less fearful or suspicious, … a woman, who shall live among you as you do” (111). For an author who knew that hunting, fishing and warring itinerancies were signifiers of Indian masculinity, the figure of an Indian in a clerical gown being carried from place to place in a coach as a “spectacle” for Britons, may well have appeared feminized. Unca’s physical likeness to the Indians serves her less well in England. Though living there for several years and acculturated by education, she never passes as English:  “My tawny complexion, and the oddity of my dress, attracted everyone’s attention” (49). She was treated as a “spectacle and gazing stock.” And though “kindly entertained” by her uncle, though “invited by all the neighboring gentry, who treated [her] in a degree little inferior to that of a princess,” and though surrounded by people who “pretended” to be her “admirers” (50), she too distrusted the sincerity of the English people by whom she was “caressed.” “Tawny as [she] was, with [her] lank hair” and Indian bow and arrow, she did not feel she belonged. Like Occom, Unca longed to return to her native land. And once living among Indians, she was so “very happy among these plain, illiterate and honest people” that she determined never to leave them again. Her only fear was that, through her contacts with the English, “their country might be discovered, and probably invaded, and numbers of the people be carried away into slavery, and other injuries committed” (121). In the event, invasion comes in the form of a white missionary, Unca’s cousin Winkfield, who brings with him from England all the institutional authority of the English church and all the greed of commercial and religious imperialism. Winkfield not only appropriates the Indians’ gold to buy European commodities for himself. He also appropriates Unca’s converts as the basis for his own missionary success: “I will … end my days

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carrying on the great work you have so wonderfully begun amongst them; for never shall I be able so successfully to fulfil the duties of my function, as among a plain, uncorrupted, honest people as these. What a glorious harvest do I see!” (135). As a white man and a stranger, Winkfield needs Unca to gain acceptance among the Indians, to act as his interpreter and to teach him the Indian language. He therefore needs “to tread, with her, the path that leads to glory and happiness by well doing” (139). But since, unlike Unca, cousin Winkfield is fully qualified through holy orders to baptize and marry, to hold divine services every Lord’s day and to admit converts to the Lord’s Supper, she is soon downgraded to the helper who teaches the little children their catechisms. This is not a peaceful accommodation; it is a take-over. The problem is that there is no gainsaying the Englishman’s ambition. No resistance, no attempt to preserve her independence, serves. Winkfield is determined on this “marriage” to Unca. Though “however so often as he mentioned it, [she] most strongly opposed,” he forces the unwilling Unca to accept his invasion of her life and her world: “he said he should now live with me whether I would or not” (138). Felicity Nussbaum has pointed out that many English women writers “recognized powerful similarities between a tyranny based on colour and one based on sex.”53 Both come into play in this “marriage” which subordinates the Indian missionary to the white minister, and the woman to the man, and forces Unca  – as American Indian, Indian missionary, and wife all rolled into one – into obedience to her English lord and master. Though the old English hermit on Unca’s island had managed to live for forty years withdrawn from the world, without seeing another white man, as Philip Quarll had done, “voluntarily quitting the advantages of society, to avoid the temptations of it” (70) was not going to be a long-term option either for Unca or for Indians. Written in 1767 before Occom’s open break with Wheelock and withdrawal with other Stockbridge Indians to Brotherton (where a white English missionary did indeed insert himself), this emplotment of the probable outcome of the less than ideal dynamic between British and Indian missionaries was prescient, to say the least. But beyond this, The Female American raised questions about “missionary work and British acculturation” that are also raised by Occom’s story, and not so clearly answered. Were English missionaries to the Indians supposed to be on “the path to glory?” Was forcing oneself on Indians, “harvesting” souls, and taking Indian gold “well doing?” Was an Indian such as Occom wise to have any connection with white missionaries, to try to acculturate to British society, or indeed, to bring Christianity to his “uncorrupted” and

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honest people? Were Indian “pagans” more “superstitious” and “deluded” for accepting the truth that God made the sun from the mouth of a sun idol, than English seamen were who imagined from Unca’s appearance that she was a she-devil or a witch and claimed to have seen her “fly into the air?” (133). And when cousin Winkfield describes his discovery of Unca, her converts and the prospect of making a career for himself among the Indians as “a series of amazing providences” (135), are we to conclude that the wonders characterized as providences in this novel are acts of God – or the comforting and self-promoting constructions of blinkered men?

PA R T I I I

Printscapes

Together with the frequent anonymity and apparent fixity of printed texts, the mobility of printed matter across provincial boundaries and national frontiers has undergirded the argument that print created an impersonal public sphere. However, this seemingly impersonal public sphere was also an effect produced by members of the trade who understood the power of print and not infrequently put it to use to support causes in which they were personally invested. This was exemplarily, but not uniquely, the case during the American Revolution. Exploring patterns of publication constructed by individual printers through their selection of reprints can shed light on how particular printers used the power of print, as well as on their appropriation and deployment of reprints. I call such larger patterns printscapes. In America as in Britain, reprints of foreign works (when necessary, in translation), were susceptible to very various fates. In Britain, some fell stillborn from the press; some were appropriated, imitated, answered or adapted by British authors; and some  – like Schiller’s Die Räuber and other “German Gothic” texts – became integral to an entire genre, cooperating with British-authored texts, and helping to shape the imaginary of generations of British readers. In America, given the predominance of reprints in the early years, the conjunction of carefully selected British, French, German and Spanish reprints with American-authored texts produced a literary scene in Philadelphia, Boston or New York that differed substantially from that in London, Dublin or Edinburgh during the same years. This is not to say that some of the same fashionable books were not available as imports, but to suggest that imports should not be permitted to overshadow the individual, local and national printscapes produced by printers on the spot. Part III offers a small, exploratory sample of literary printscapes from Robert Bell’s publications during the crucial years between 1776 and 1783. Bell, a Scottish printer who migrated to Philadelphia from Ireland 187

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shortly before the Revolution, has been described as an American patriot, as America’s first literary publisher, and as the founder of the American reprint and book auctioning trades.1 Bell, who also established a circulating library of 2,000 volumes in Philadelphia’s Third Street, made it his business to encourage readers to read, buy and trade books. Describing himself as “a Person well acquainted with Books,”2 Bell relentlessly educated the American public both about the importance of reading, and about the value or interest of particular books. In 1778, for instance, he prefaced a list of reprints he proposed to auction with multiple quotations from Cicero and others on the pleasures of reading and uses of books. In his Sale Catalogue for 1773, he guided readers and potential buyers of his new and used imported books by means of informative annotations – Sarah Scott’s Sir George Ellison was “a character of great Virtue within the reach of every Gentleman’s Imitation”; Hervey’s Meditations “hath been read with much Satisfaction by Persons of all Religions, and even by Persons of no Religion at all”; Davenant’s work on Grants, Resumptions and Ministers Impeached for procuring Grants of the Crown Revenue was “absolutely necessary for all real Patriots.”3 Bell also informed and guided readers by including advertisements at the beginning of his reprints which “placed” the writer in his literary, philosophical, and social context, and explained the work’s contemporary importance. Bell provided more paratextual cues to reading in his books, catalogues and advertisements, than almost anyone else, and he made it clear to readers which books he wished them to read in conjunction with one another. Bell almost invariably selected and clustered his reprints topically. That is to say, he both proceeded thematically, by pursuing a particular topic through a number of different reprinted books, and selecting the topics he pursued for their contemporary relevance and utility. This is evident not only from a close examination of his reprint list or from the way Bell linked books internally by references to one another within the texts, but also from his advertisements and methods of marketing. When the revolutionary war broke out in 1776, for instance, Bell advertised together on a separate page “the following Military Works, Some of them very Valuable and Seldom to be met with” which he had reprinted: Le Blond’s Military Engineer, Chebron’s Nouvelle Fortification, Ozenam’s Ancient and Modern Methods of Fortification, Marlborough’s Battles and Sieges, Simes’ Military Guide for Officers, A New System of Military Discipline, founded on Principle, Stevenson’s Military Instructions, Hoste and Webster’s Mechanics, Fortification, Artillery or Gunnery, adapted to the use of Gentlemen of the Army and Navy.4 He also combined some of them into a

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miscellany entitled The Art of War (1776). This was useful because officers in the Continental army had little or no military training, and General Washington made it known that he wished military texts to circulate amongst them.5 Elsewhere, Bell advertised together, and offered to sell together in a single binding, the various medical works he had reprinted “for the use of Military and Naval Surgeons”: Swieten’s Diseases Incident to Armies, Ranby’s Nature and Treatment of Gunshot Wounds, Northcote’s Directions to be Observed by Sea Surgeons and Preservatives of the Scurvy at Sea, Lind’s Rules for Preserving Health in Warm and Cold Climates. As he pointed out, “whatever contributeth to promote the health and happiness of such valuable lives, as those of A M E R IC A N SOL DI E R S A N D S A I L OR S , should meet with a generous reception” from what he called Sentimentalists  – readers who understood that bringing reason and knowledge to bear on winning the war was both a necessary and a patriotic act.6 Under the title The Politics of the Year 1776, Bell likewise clustered together both in an advertisement and by offering for sale in a single binding a variety of topical political tracts that he had published separately:  Common Sense, with large Additions; Plain Truth, with Additions; Observations against Reconciliation, Strictures on the Pamphlet intitled Common Sense and Tucker’s True Interests of Great Britain, set forth in regard to the Colonies.7 Bell also produced a cluster of reprints on religious toleration, some of which he collected in The Palladium of Conscience, and a cluster on questions of liberty. While obviously a method of endeavoring to increase his sales of works that had not perhaps shifted fast enough, such advertisements and collections drew readers’ attention to the common topical character of particular books and to the advantage of reading them together. The two chapters which follow show how Bell’s reprints of transatlantic novels by Samuel Jackson Pratt, aka Courtney Melmoth, and by Henry Mackenzie were embedded in such clusters and paratextually reframed both to indicate their topical applications and to construct, via a series of texts and paratexts, what might be described as “the ­printer’s argument.”

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Robert Bell’s theaters of war: the war on politeness

Bell produced a particularly interesting topical cluster in 1778, the year the British abandoned Philadelphia after a season of gallantry, balls and assemblies in which many prominent Philadelphians had eagerly joined with the occupying army. Under the title Miscellanies for Sentimentalists, Bell assembled a variety of works, which he also published singly, that reflected upon polite English manners and upon European political conduct from the vantage point of the skeptical Enlightenment: The Life of David Hume, Written by Himself; Principles of Politeness and Knowledge of the World by the late Lord Chesterfield; Political Maxims of the Cardinal de Retz; Rochefoucault’s Maxims and Moral Reflections and James Murray’s Travels of the Imagination. As if to remind readers of what they should be about, Bell concluded this compilation with American Philip Freneau’s poem, American Independence, an Everlasting Deliverance, and with The Humble Confession, Declaration, Recantation and Apology of Benjamin Towne, Scottish-American John Witherspoon’s satirical piece about a printer who had changed sides with changes in the political climate. As we will see, in an era when compilation was still considered and read as a form of writing, this was more than a random collection of mismatched texts.1 As we will see too, Bell’s reprints of Pratt’s The Pupil of Pleasure (1778) and of Mackenzie’s Man of the World (1782) were among the literary reprints that belonged to Bell’s skeptical reexamination of polite European manners. “Courtney Melmoth,” who will figure largely in this chapter and the next, needs more introduction than Henry Mackenzie, who has long figured as a major eighteenth-century Scottish writer. Courtney Melmoth was the nom de plume of Samuel Jackson Pratt, whose personal failures as an Anglican minister, actor, friend and husband did not prevent “Melmoth” from becoming one of the most admired (as well as voluminous) writers of the 1770s and 1780s. Though Byron, Lamb and twentiethcentury critics who valued their opinion later spoke of Pratt with disdain, 191

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during these decades Pratt’s poems were appreciated and reprinted, and his topical novels widely and favorably reviewed.2 The London Review of English and Foreign Literature compared The Pupil of Pleasure (1776), Pratt’s response to Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son (1774), to Fielding’s response to Richardson’s Pamela in “the celebrated Joseph Andrews.”3 Town and Country Magazine described it as “a masterly ironical satire” and The Westminster Magazine “promise[d] … Readers, that they will receive advantage and entertainment from the perusal of these volumes.”4 The London Magazine described Pratt as an “ingenious and admired writer” whose other novels, Shenstone Green and The Tutor of Truth, it had already recommended, before it proceeded to “strenuously recommend” Emma Corbett; or the Miseries of Civil War (1780), Pratt’s “much admired historical novel” about a family torn by loyalties and interests which bound its members both to Britain and America and led its sons to fight on opposite sides during the revolutionary war.5 This novel, which met with “general approbation and applause,” went through nine London editions before 1789 – three of them during 1783, the year the peace was signed – and warranted a frontispiece by Angelica Kauffman. In America too, where several works by Pratt were made available to American readers, the imported London edition of The Pupil of Pleasure was advertised in New York and Philadelphia as “a Novel much admired and universally read, having passed through several editions in a very short time”; and imported editions of Emma Corbett were regularly offered for sale in Philadelphia, New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut between 1782 and 1799, beside Frances Burney’s Evalina and Cecilia or, after 1789, beside William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy.6 Summing up Pratt’s literary career at the beginning of the nineteenth century and using his real name, Britain’s Lady’s Monthly Museum observed that “this admired and justly celebrated writer may be justly classed among the most superior novelists of the day.”7 As James Green has observed, Bell introduced sentimental fiction to the revolutionary generation. Like Mackenzie or Sterne, whose Sentimental Journey Bell had reprinted in 1770, Pratt was a sentimental writer, whose novels were said to move their readers to tears.8 But when Bell described his reprints as “Provisions for Sentimentalists,” he was using the word sentiment in its other contemporary sense of thought, opinion and idea. He was providing “Food for the Mind,” “Reasoning for Rationalists,” and “Mental Luminators” for “any Gentleman who believeth that lining for the head is useful, necessary or advantageous … on terms as moderate as what he pays for the covering of his Feet.”9 Bell’s

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bent was evident, since he chose most of his reprints from what he called “the Liberal Fountains of Literary Knowledge,” and prompted readers to “dare to think for themselves.”10 But though a champion and provider of Enlightenment thinking in its various Scottish, English and French forms, Bell evidently saw no more contradiction between sentiment and sentimentalism, than did Pratt, who used sentimentalism in The Pupil of Pleasure to drive home to his readers the “aggravated evils in society arising from the practice of such perniciously pleasing precepts” as Lord Chesterfield’s.11 Sentimentalism too could be conducive to thought:  as Bell’s epigraph had it, “This work of Sentiment Refin’d / To Knowledge leads the willing Mind”; or as William Annesley put it in Mackenzie’s The Man of the World: “the heart must feel, as well as the judgment be convinced, before the principles we mean to teach can be of habitual service.”12 This means that sentimental novels, or at least those that Bell reprinted, need to be read for their appeal to the judgment too. Much of the recent scholarship on politeness has stressed the extent to which Americans who wished to display their wealth and elite status  – or who, like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams wished to succeed in the international military or political arenas – emulated British manners, and sought to “anglicize.”13 During the revolutionary era, however, Bell took a different line:  he deployed his reprints in 1778 and 1782–3 to warn his readers against the deceptive allure of aristocratic European manners and to promote simplicity, the integrity of the family and “the politeness of the heart.”

T h e Pu pi l of Pl e a s u r e , “C h e s t e r f i e l d,” a n d Be l l’s M i s c e l l a n i e s f or Se n tim e n ta l i s t s Pratt was linked to Bell’s Miscellanies for Sentimentalists  – which Bell advertised with a full detail of its contents at the end of The Pupil of Pleasure – in a number of circuitous ways. This is therefore a story that can only be told by detours. The first point of interest is that Pratt’s Preface to The Pupil of Pleasure (1776) responded directly to the Preface of The Life of the late Earl of Chesterfield, or, The Man of the World (London, 1774), which John Sparhawk had reprinted in Philadelphia in 1775 and was selling at the London bookshop, by offering to answer an example with an example. The Life of the late Earl had used narrative and copious quotations from Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son to “exemplify” in Chesterfield “the complete man of the world,” on the grounds that “the influence of example

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is universally allowed to be superior to that of precept,” and that few examples were so suitable for imitation as that of Lord Chesterfield.14 Pratt put Chesterfield’s book into the hands of a putative son and pupil who imitated his example, and used a story told in letters containing quotations from Chesterfield’s Letters, to offer a counter-example: that of a man who “puts into practice very ingenious precept laid down by the noble earl,” wreaks destruction on women, on families and on himself as a result, and demonstrates that Chesterfield’s example is one to be eschewed. Pratt’s “biographical commentary on the text of Chesterfield” was informed by the charges of licentiousness and immorality that had been directed at Chesterfield’s Letters in Britain in 1775 and 1776, all of which his Preface made it clear he had read. But Pratt highlighted two charges in particular: the dissimulation and hypocrisy that Chesterfield recommended, and the fact, shocking to many, that he had advised his son to seduce married women and keep his adulteries secret rather than risk his health and reputation with poxy whores. As Pratt’s Chesterfieldian pupil, Philip Sedley (who shares the Christian name of Chesterfield’s son) points out, beside Chesterfield, “Richardson’s a child … Lovelace a bungler” (9). Under “a smiling aspect, plausible exterior, fair seeming sentiments and a complacent flexibility” and while toying with several women at once, Sedley does not merely ruin one Clarissa. He destroys the family of a learned country clergyman, Mr Homespun, by seducing his wife and causing the death of both; he also almost destroys the family of Sir Henry Delmore by raping his consumptive and dying, married daughter and attracting his unmarried one. Admired and well liked to the end, his destructive course is only halted when Delmore’s son-in-law kills him in a duel. In Britain, militant attacks on Chesterfield’s licentiousness and immorality began, as Sidney Gulick has shown, only with the issuance of cheaper editions of Chesterfield’s Letters which made them accessible to a broader public.15 An Apology for Mrs Eugenia Stanhope, for instance, blamed Chesterfield’s daughter-in-law for “exposing to the general view” a work so “pernicious to morals.” This criticism was consistent with the fact that (as Free and Impartial Remarks on Lord Chesterfield’s Letters pointed out) Chesterfield’s system was designed to teach his son to function successfully as a minister and negotiator of British interests at foreign courts, where intrigue, dissimulation, flattery, the art of pleasing, and the real or figurative seduction of great ladies with influence where it counted, was precisely how what Chesterfield called “business” was done.16 Chesterfield was teaching his son to be a politically astute and effective courtier. On another level, too, as Town and Country Magazine

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observed, “Lord Chesterfield did but speak out what the greatest part of mankind, and I am sure, all of polite society, think. His crime was that he boldly confessed that which others practice, in silence.”17 Polite society knew that hypocrisy and dissimulation were inseparable from politeness, which required one to pretend to be pleased when one was not, and to conceal – among other things – disagreement, boredom, impatience, resentment, contempt, hostility, dislike or distaste and the need to laugh, cough, sneeze, scratch or slouch.18 There was reason for concern, however, once those in the lower orders, who might misunderstand, were offered an unvarnished exposé of the hypocrisy of the elite and a how-to book that was, as Horace Walpole said, “adapted to the meanest capacities.” In England, debate about Chesterfield’s moral effect upon the public quickly dissipated after 1778 because adaptations had swiftly been provided to keep the public safe.19 In Britain, these bowdlerized, moralized and “systematized” adaptations of the Letters were reprinted almost three times as frequently as Chesterfield’s Letters themselves. This was still a fresh move in 1778, when Bell chose to reprint one of the systematized English adaptations, Principles of Politeness and Knowledge of the World by the Revd Dr John Trusler and to include it in his Miscellanies for Sentimentalists. Working from the Letters, Trusler had “diligently selected every observation and remark that can possibly improve or inform the mind, within the rules of morality,” in order to convey “every Instruction necessary to complete the Gentleman and the Man of Fashion, to teach him the Knowledge of Life, and make him well received in all Companies.” His “additions” had inserted the missing morality: “where there seemed a deficiency in any part of the system … he endeavoured to supply it.”20 Bell’s response to Sparhawk’s reprint of the eulogistic Life of the Late Lord Chesterfield, was thus to offer Philadelphians the first American reprint of Principles of Politeness. This bowdlerized and moralized version of the Earl’s system of education became dominant in the American reprint trade, and helped make “Chesterfield” a core part of genteel masculine education in America for the rest of the century. Like Pratt in The Pupil of Pleasure, then, Bell offered a safer example. In Britain, The Pupil of Pleasure could be compared to Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and described as a “masterly ironical satire upon Lord Chesterfield’s Letters” because English reviewers noticed that Pratt had responded to publicly expressed concern about the effects of broader public access to the Earl’s Letters by showing how ridiculous, as well as dangerous, his precepts could become in non-elite hands. The hero of The Pupil of Pleasure, Philip Sedley, is not only a mister rather than a lord. He

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is the son of a London alderman who made his money dealing in hops, and can introduce himself to the notice of such as Sir Henry Delmore only by frequenting the fashionable spas, where all ranks of people promiscuously mixed. Sedley is dangerous because he can be mistaken for a gentleman, not only by a naive country pastor like Mr Homespun or by Sir Henry Delmore himself, but also by Delmore’s unmarried daughter, who knows him only as an acquaintance of her father’s and assumes from his manners, that he is “a man of birth, rank and character” (i: 138). Sedley is dangerous too because, while enabling him to pass as a gentleman, his practice of Chesterfield’s precepts enables him to blind, disarm and circumvent the very husbands and fathers who would normally block his efforts to seduce their wives and daughters. The mock-heroic note is supplied by the fact that Mrs Homespun, the first victim of Sedley’s elaborate Chesterfieldian stratagems, is a farmer’s daughter, and by Sedley’s footman, Thomas, who reads his master’s copy of Chesterfield’s Letters on the sly. Thomas uses Lord Chesterfield’s precepts to seduce the wholesome “water-dipper” who supplies visitors to the spa with glasses of medicinal water, and resolves to imitate his mentor by himself writing Letters filled with “observations on men and manners” and containing a “Treatise on Toothpicking” to “show the precise method of holding, handling, drawing and re-placing the dentical instruments” (ii: 135). In Philadelphia, however, Bell turned this upside down by describing The Pupil of Pleasure on his title page as “Exhibiting the Adventures of a Man of Birth, Rank, Figure, Fortune and Character, ardent in the Pursuit of Pleasure, much delighted with, attracted by, and formed upon the Chesterfieldian System.”21 Bell presented Sedley paratextually, not as a parvenu, but as the very type of the polite, and intrinsically untrustworthy, wealthy English aristocrat, who pursued his pleasures regardless of the cost to anyone else and honed his manipulative skills by studying Chesterfield. The option certainly existed of taking a more classless and republican line, as The Pennsylvania Magazine showed in 1775 when, in response to The Life, it declared itself “bound to bear our testimony against a system of education in which crimes that every man should shrink from with horror, are recommended as necessary to an accomplished citizen.” Here all citizens are at risk from “the licentious freedom with which the noble Author strikes at the laws of morality,” and in danger of becoming vicious by seeking to figure as accomplished gentlemen.22 This line would be taken up again in America, by Mercy Ottis Warren.23 But Bell’s representation of the man of pleasure as a man of birth, rank and fortune, and thus as a European, connected Pratt’s novel more usefully to

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Trusler’s “Chesterfield” and to what Bell was conveying in compiling his Miscellanies for Sentimentalists. As Trusler’s title intimated, his adaptation of Chesterfield pursued two somewhat incompatible goals: to articulate “Principles of Politeness” within the rules of morality for would-be gentlemen, and to impart the “Knowledge of the World” and “acquaintance with the principles and manners of mankind” (66) that they would need to make their way in it. This meant that, on the one hand, Trusler described good breeding as “a result of good sense and good nature,” characterized lying as a mean and ridiculous vice that would recoil upon the liar, and advised his readers to avoid the genteel and fashionable vices, and not be “men of pleasure”: Some young men are apt to think, that they cannot be compleat gentlemen, without being men of pleasure; and the rake they often mistake for the man of pleasure. A rake is made up of the meanest and most disgraceful vices … A man of pleasure, at best, is but a dissipated being, and what the rational part of mankind must abhor. (34)

But it meant, on the other hand, that Trusler reproduced Chesterfield’s cynical view of men, as beings governed by vanity, prejudice, deceit, selfinterest and self-love, as well as Chesterfield’s warnings against trusting anyone, his recommendations of secrecy, impassivity and reserve, and his advice on how a man might exploit the weaknesses of others to gain his own ends:  “Rather flatter a person’s vanity than otherwise”; “when angling for praise, modesty is the surest bait”; “find out if possible, their foible, their governing passion or their particular merit; take them on their weak side, and you will generally succeed”; “We must like the chameleon put on the hue of the persons we wish to be well with.” Bell reinforced this “knowledge of the world” part of Trusler’s message by framing it with an “Account of the Life of the Late Earl of Chesterfield” which characterized Chesterfield as a patriot for being bold and incorruptible in the service of his country, and which detailed his many political successes. Lest anyone miss the point, Bell added an extract from The Monthly Review which praised Chesterfield for his “perfect knowledge of mankind.” Bell followed this up by including in his Miscellanies, alongside Trusler, two of the texts that Trusler/Chesterfield had recommended for further acquaintance with the world: The Political Maxims of the Cardinal de Retz, and Rochefoucault’s Maxims and Moral Reflections (30). The Cardinal was entirely cynical and pragmatic about politics and human conduct, the Duc de la Rochefoucault little less so:  “The great actions … represented by politicians as an effect of deep designs … are

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commonly the effects of caprice and passion”; “whatever we may pretend, interest and vanity are the usual sources of our afflictions”; “we judge so superficially of things, that common words and actions, spoke and done in an agreeable manner with some knowledge of what passes in the world, often succeed beyond the greatest ability.” Bell followed the Cardinal’s political maxims with an extract from Chesterfield, pointing out that the Cardinal had described “how great business is really carried on,” and that this was “very different from what people who have never been concerned in it, imagine” (69). He also framed Rochefoucault’s maxims with an advertisement from the translator, Lockyer Davis, quoting and confirming Chesterfield’s judgment that these maxims were “I fear, too like and too exact a picture of human nature” (11), and with an advertisement for Zimmerman’s Strictures on National Pride, which Bell had reprinted, but not included in the Miscellanies. Zimmerman ran true to form by describing vanity and self love as “the general weakness” both of men and of nations, and by showing how they manifested themselves in acts, customs and beliefs: “Among the English, a contempt for all other nations under the sun is, as it were, hereditary” (47); “to pride oneself absolutely in a title and coat of arms, or even on the services of ancestors, so as to neglect personal merit, is a ridicule not to be too severely exposed” (67); “the bulk of mankind are infinitely better pleased with those who from a false complaisance or want of sense, applaud our errors, than with those who might give us to understand that we are in error” (37). In 1778, therefore, Bell was offering his readers a crash course in what lay behind the seductive graces of polite manners and the deceptive complaisance of courtly politics. He was doing this immediately after the city’s occupation by the British, when many prominent Philadelphians had been seduced by their attractions and succumbed, and in a year when the British sent over three well-bred commissioners to negotiate a political reconciliation, and the French joined the war on the American side. Without dismissing good manners, Bell was thus also quietly warning patriots who, like Philip Freneau, saw independence as an everlasting deliverance, and preparing them for what they would be up against in their political and social dealings with polite, clever and dissembling Europeans. In Philadelphia in 1778, in the midst of the revolutionary war, when Britain was the enemy and the French had just joined the fight on the American side for reasons of their own, unvarnished exposés of the pride, self-love, dissembling manners and cynical political practices of British and French elites, were weapons in the war.

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Bell’s characterization of The Pupil of Pleasure as the adventures of a man of birth, rank, figure and fortune invited readers to read Sedley as an illustration of these doctrines and of their effects, and to use the novel to advance their own knowledge of the world. Pratt deployed Richardson’s epistolary technique of having his villain communicate his designs in confidence in letters to a friend, while his victims communicated their impressions of him in letters to their particular friends, to unmask Sedley’s Chesterfieldian stratagems for the reader, and to demonstrate in detail both how they could be applied and how they fooled the unwary. For instance, Sedley practices Chesterfield’s dicta that one should flatter a person’s vanity, take them on their weak side, and like a chameleon take on the hue of the person one wants to please, on the Reverend and Mrs Homespun. In a letter to his friend, Homespun  – who prides himself on his learning and dislikes fashionable society at the spa – expresses his pleasure at having found someone at the spa who, while “perfectly well mannered,” is not frivolous and foppish, but “willing to discuss divinity and ethics even here.” Observing that his wife says that Sedley also understands dress, he naively concludes that “with the arts of a scholar he has, it seems, the invention and taste of the courtier, without anything of courtly insincerity” (45). Meanwhile, Sedley’s letters to his friend, James Thornton, explain just how subtle a polite gentleman’s flattery of a person’s vanity can be  – one method he uses on Harriet Homespun is to differ from her a little on her favorite subject of dress, and then to allow himself to be won over to her view, in order to “throw triumph on her side and make her happy in an ideal superiority” (35). Sedley’s letter shows that “accommodating himself” like a chameleon both to “the grubber of books” and to “the grubber of fashions” is only the first step: “If I can once bring her to be discontented with her situation … the day is my own!” (35). We learn how he has done this from Homespun’s complaints to his correspondent that Harriet has unaccountably begun to criticize his manners, and from Harriet’s confidences to her friend: I have been several days in a place of politeness, where Horace [her husband] is the most awkward of the circle. My eyes are now opened to his imperfections – I see them, I feel them, I detest them. He is a lump of learning, without ductility, without softness, without – what Mr Sedley calls the Graces. (70)

Harriet rapidly discovers that the two men’s kisses differ accordingly, and she is lost. One of the things that Pratt does particularly well is demonstrate the seductiveness of polite manners and of the pleasures of life in “a place of

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politeness.” For the pupil of pleasure himself, the attraction is more political than sexual. Sedley is not your outré, dissipated and self-indulgent Restoration rake.24 He takes far more pleasure in his own skillful deployment of politeness, in devising and concealing his stratagems, in proving that he is “a match for all of them,” and in the power he is exercising over others, than in the “voluptuousness” of his little Harriet: “mark my policy, to which I have even at the age of thirty, sacrificed my passion– passion which is equally destructive of pleasure and business” (143); “I will surely sacrifice the possession of her person to the unblemished security of my character” (150). Sedley’s mastery of polite manners and “improvement” of Chesterfield’s precepts feeds his vanity and self-love, and is their expression. He is thus himself an exemplification of the idea upon which he practices, that vanity, interest and self-love govern human action. Sedley prides himself on being able to get the better of anyone, and proving himself their better gives him pleasure. For his victims, on the other hand, the seductiveness of aristocratic manners and of life in “a place of politeness” lies in the fact that everything there is subject to “the art of pleasing” and designed to please. Even before meeting Sedley, Harriet becomes addicted to the pleasures available at the spa: she is “so happy in doing as others do,” and “finds such real felicity” in the leisure and entertainments of “the Ton,” that she “doubts she will wish even after a fortnight to return home to peace, privacy and the parsonage house” in the small rural village where the Homespuns live (24). It is important therefore that Sedley is also a pupil of pleasure in the further sense that he studies to give pleasure: “the great point in my system is, to make people who are to give me happiness, happy in themselves” (57). Sedley’s manners and “the manner with which he adapts himself to the person he addresses” (i: 81) give such pleasure to the Reverend Homespun and Sir Henry Delvile, and to Harriet and Delmore’s daughters, that neither the men nor the women willingly deprive themselves of his presence, and all are insensibly drawn in. As Delia Delmore says: “he has pleased me … I admire his manner even more than his person. His words, his looks, his motions, are truly irresistible” (82). Surrounded by such as Homespun, who slurps his tea loudly from his saucer, or by the man dining at a tavern who, “uniting the uncouthness of the elephant to the ill manners of a bear, scatters his offal around” and splatters his neighbors, even Sedley’s table manners must please. A second link between Pratt and Bell’s Miscellanies for Sentimentalists runs through pleasure and through Hume, whose autobiography Bell also reprinted in the Miscellanies. Pratt, who said he knew Hume personally,

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had published An Apology for the Life and Writings of David Hume the year before, in which he contrasted Hume’s “rational spirit of morality” with the egregious hypocrisy both of Chesterfield and of Christian ministers and moralists. Observing that “it is one of the very worst circumstances against the cause of Christianity, that very few of its professors were ever either so moral, so humane or could so philosophically govern their passions, as the skeptical David Hume,” Pratt had reaffirmed Hume’s Shaftesburyean argument about the representation of virtue: Christianity had made God demonic, and virtue harsh and unattractive, instead of portraying God as compassionate, and virtue “as the most lovely, amiable and estimable of all objects,” in order to “attract and entertain, rather than frighten and disgust.”25 As Susan Manning has pointed out, “Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, published in 1739–40, was the work which did more than any other to advance the idea that moral duty was the product of pleasure.”26 Accordingly, The Pupil of Pleasure countered both the pleasures of the “place of politeness” and the pleasure given by the man of pleasure, by touting the far greater pleasure given and experienced through the performance of virtuous acts. Pratt made virtue “amiable” by showing – and using sentimental discourse to make his readers feel  – how pleasurable and satisfying it was. Even Sedley’s correspondent, Thornton, who has practiced the Chesterfieldian system, comes to acknowledge that the “system borrowed from the Scriptures brings greater pleasure – it is do as you would be done by” (ii: 31). Witnessing the marital happiness of Lieutenant Vernon and Sophia, he cannot help seeing that “the passion betwixt these two was more exquisite than if it were divided betwixt two and twenty” (i: 121–2). Thus “if to be happy is the ultimatum of all earthly pursuits” and if “that conduct is most rational by which the greatest share of felicity is procured,” it is more rational, as well as more pleasurable, to seek “the real, undissimulated love of a Sophia, than command the keys of the seraglio” (i: 118, 122). Delia Delmore describes with admiration the pleasures of living in a family governed by a “sincere, Christian” patriarch such as Sir Henry, who has made his family “the seat of integrity, unanimity and mutual confidence” (i: 68), and created a little society where simplicity, fidelity, virtue, benevolence, sobriety and tenderness reign and the vices of the world are eschewed – a point made by having him symbolically move his family away from the spa to an Eden-like country estate. And Sedley himself fictionally “proves” that the pleasure produced by a moral act is involuntary, and more “natural” than the sophisticated and adventitious pleasures of the man of the world, by finding that he is unaccountably

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“moved” by the plight of the water dipper whom Thomas has ruined, and that having forced Thomas to marry her, he is “more happy in putting these two persons together, than all the joys I have ever tasted with the exquisite and yielding Harriet” (i: 45). But Pratt’s novel also ultimately condemns life conceived as the pursuit of pleasure. The proper model of masculinity for such as Sedley and Thornton, who are neither old men nor men of rank like Sir Henry, is Lieutenant Vernon – whose letters were not coincidentally extracted and published in 1778 in New York’s Royal Gazette.27 When he volunteers to fight in the American war, Vernon writes to his wife that “business will engage me from pleasure,” and to Thornton, that “dalliance” even with his beloved Sophia is an “effeminating” indulgence which he cannot allow himself at a time when “my country requires me in the way of my profession” (i: 36, 37). He also refuses to let Sophia accompany him to the theater of war in America, because her presence would make him “less attentive” to his duties as a soldier. Vernon is not lacking in sensibility: his gentleness, his concern for Sophia’s feelings, and the emotion with which they read the account of Andromache’s suffering in Pope’s Homer together, make this plain. But pleasure is of man’s life a thing apart, and a man must control his passions to keep it so. Men “behave like men” (ii: 74) when they get on with “business” and do what is owing to their “character” by pursuing honor and glory in the service of their country. If there was anything in aristocratic culture worthy of imitation by men in the lower orders, then, it was “having a soul that pants to be ranked among the Roman Caesars” (ii: 39). Sophia, who is compared to the Spartan and Roman matrons, shows that she too knows her duty, by demonstrating that women “can be tender, without being weak,” and that rather give way to fear and distress, she expects her husband to “sustain the duties of his station” (ii: 57–8). The inextricable link between the private family and the political order is explicit here; it was also implicit throughout, given the frequency with which the “little society of the family,” the fundamental unit of the Hanoverian State, was represented as a microcosm of the kingdom in eighteenth-century novels. In this regard, one function of Travels of the Imagination by James Murray and of Philip Freneau’s poem, which Bell included in the Miscellanies, was to make readers think more about the destructive consequences for the larger society of the polite manners and cynical European political practices whose principles Chesterfield, Retz and Rochefoucault revealed, and whose destructive impact on the family Pratt had demonstrated in his novel. Murray, a Scottish minister of

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radical views who supported the American revolution, portrayed his physical Travels from Newcastle to London as a journey from the freedom of nature where beings pursue “the chaste pleasures which fill the soul with unmixed joy” (14) into an England which becomes more oppressive and vicious as London is approached. After symbolically crossing the Tyne, the traveler is gradually initiated into a society where “instead of cherishing their own flesh, [men] imitate the vilest of animals, in drinking stolen waters to gratify their lusts” (15); where “swarms of priests … devour very extensive livings” and “want to make a monopoly of divine favor”; where the militia is used to “enslave the nation” and shoot at mobs who “will not live without food, which they have no right to taste, unless they are able to pay for it, according to the price that monopolizers and ingrossers set upon it” (45); and where “those who have most money have least mercy” (85). Lest anyone miss the point, Bell appended to this, a satirical account of “The Trade and Mystery of Kingly Government within the Island of Great Britain from the Accession of James I until the fatal Year 1776” which portrayed British monarchs as blundering tradesmen who had so mismanaged their shop that the “thirteen rich Colonies … set up for themselves under a banner of Independence, with a determination never to permit the Trade and Mystery of Kingly Government to be set up with the United States of America” (111). The British model of social and political conduct whose principles Bell was publishing to give his readers knowledge of the world, was a model for America to distrust and eschew. Philip Freneau’s poem, “American Independence,” which followed, reinforced this point by portraying Britain as a “tyrant … crown’d with pride” whose Selden-like “lust for power” and for getting the better of everyone was wreaking destruction on families in America. In 1778, Bell also published several works which, like The Pupil of Pleasure, indicated that retreat or escape from manipulative, licentious and destructive “Ton” dominated societies, and return to a simpler and more “natural” rural life, was the right way to go. This idea was present in Zimmerman’s Strictures on National Pride and in Murray’s Travels of the Imagination as well as in Freneau, who represented it not only through those who “at last on Jersey plains distrest / … swore to seek the mountains of the West” and “there a free empire for our seed obtain,” but also through his images of the land of America itself – those “lands now wet with human gore,” the “bleeding soil” and “dear-bought fields,” which remained, beneath it all, a “paradise” that was not in Britain’s “command.” The same year, Bell also published a Miscellany of stories by Voltaire, another writer whom Chesterfield admired, which included

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The Pupil of Nature, Voltaire’s tale about a Huron who has learned in America to freely say what he thinks and do what he pleases, and who is introduced both into Anglo-Irish and into French society to demonstrate the hypocrisy, intrigues, dissembling manners, and political injustice there. A number of plays that Bell reprinted made the same points: The Political Duenna, a vicious satire on the use of Chesterfieldian principles in the British court (1778); Robert Dodsley’s The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green (1777), an exposé of the English gentry’s licentiousness and abuse of power, which shows that virtue has to conceal itself among the poor and déclassé; and Garrick’s The Lying Valet (1778), which places intrigue at the heart of English social intercourse. Bell was thus a “literary publisher” who used even his literary reprints to make a transatlantic argument, and to repeat like a mantra an antiaristocratic, anti-European, condemnation of the polite. Gordon Wood has shown that after 1776, patriot political writers in America regularly contrasted English vice and “corruption” with republican simplicity and virtue, pointing out that corruption had been the rallying cry of the British opposition and evoked the British Commonwealthsman tradition. But as Ann Little has demonstrated, this contrast was also a paradigm that Americans had been using against a variety of enemies – the Indians, French Catholics in Canada during the Seven Years War – since Puritan ministers began invoking it in the seventeenth century.28 Through his selection, compilation and clustering of reprints and through the paratextual materials with which he surrounded them, Bell was thus invoking and reinforcing a familiar, long-standing American paradigm which opposed the vice and corruption of the Other to American virtue and simplicity. He was also using his selection of reprints to give the vices and corruption of the enemy contemporary specificity by clothing them in contemporary aristocratic British and European cultural practices, and rendering the hidden dangers they represented visible and vividly immediate. One therefore might say, as Abbé Raynal said of the principles of the American Revolution in another of Bell’s reprints, that when these texts “which were indebted for their birth to Europe, and particularly to England, had been transplanted to America … the discoveries of the mother country were turned against herself.”29 C oda :  M ac k e n z i e’s M a n of t h e Wor l d In 1782, when the war had been won and American representatives were negotiating the peace at Paris, Bell resumed publication by returning

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to the Chesterfieldian fray in reprints such as Lord Lyttelton’s Familiar Letters (1782), and by reprinting Mackenzie’s Man of the World, which could be regarded as a coda to this line of argument. In Britain, Mackenzie had published The Man of the World (1773) before the publication of Chesterfield’s Letters (1774), but Chesterfield’s Letters had not invented the type. Indeed, The Man of the World might be said to belong to a veritable subset of the eighteenth-century British novel that portrayed innocence unwittingly betrayed by deceptively attractive, seemingly virtuous, polite and powerful genteel or aristocratic males, whose outward attractions hid a vicious nature and whose self-interested actions proved destructive to both individuals and families. Going back to Fielding’s Jonathan Wild (1754) and Amelia (1752) as much as to Richardson’s Lovelace, this subset included, besides The Pupil of Pleasure, such novels as Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Henry Brooke’s Fool of Quality (1766), Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) and Inchbald’s Nature and Art (1796), all of which were reprinted in America (Brooke and Goldsmith, copiously). Early American novels such as The Power of Sympathy, The Coquette and Wieland can be read as incorporating elements of this tradition, whose traces can still be detected in Henry James’ transatlantic stories of American innocents betrayed by subtle and deceptive, aristocratic Europeans. In Britain in 1773, after Fielding, Richardson, Goldsmith and Brooke, Mackenzie’s novel did not elicit surprise. The Monthly pronounced its aristocratic villain, Sindall, “almost as wicked as Lovelace,” The Westminster Magazine said that its “sentiments are not new,” and everyone complained about the immorality of the ending, since, like Sedley, Sindall does not repent.30 The Critical Review, however, reprinted a long extract from the novel taken from William Annesley’s advice to his children just before his son’s “entrance into the world,” which went to the heart of what The Man of the World was trying to show. Warning his son against gentlemen whose “surfaces are showy, without intrinsic value” and against being drawn in by men of pleasure, Annesley tells him that “the roar of riot or the shout of the bacchanal” are no “measure of the degree of pleasure which [a man] feels”; for “pleasure is in truth subservient to virtue” and the debauched are “incapable of that delight which the finer sensations produce, which thrill in the bosom of delicacy and virtue.” Warning his daughter that libertines are in reality motivated only by “the pride of conquest,” he tells her to “think respectfully of yourself” and to “look upon those men, even in their gayest and most alluring garb, as creatures dangerous to the peace, and destructive to the welfare of society.” Secure in his own virtuous rural retirement from “the world,” Revd Annesley

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thinks it unnecessary to be distrustful of everyone, for “there is a wide distinction between the confidence which becomes a man, and the simplicity that disgraces a simpleton”; and “he who never trusts is a niggard of his soul, who starves himself, and by whom no other is enriched.”31 But in the novel, this last proves the Annesleys’ undoing. For The Man of the World demonstrates what Sir Henry Delmore in The Pupil of Pleasure ruefully tells his children in Pratt’s rewrite of Mackenzie’s scene: that “what is most to be dreaded” in “a well bred, high polished, elegant deceiver” is that “no eye can see him; no understanding detect him; no policy escape him” (ii: 68). While Sir Thomas Sindall undermines Richard Annesley’s principles, leads him imperceptibly into scenes of riot and debauchery, and brings him to such a point of desperation that he robs a coach to keep his mistress, lands in Newgate and is transported to America as a convict, all the Annesleys continue to regard Sindall, gratefully, as the sincere, devoted, honorable and generous friend he pretends to be. Annesley’s “confidence” in Sindall thus proves to be the simplicity of a simpleton, after all; and of everyone else too. For Sindall’s responsibility for Richard’s ruin, Harriet’s seduction and death, and Annesley’s demise from a broken heart, do not preclude him from living a prosperous life on his estates thereafter, as a respected and respectable squire. The difference between The Man of the World and the works that Bell published in 1778 was that where the latter advanced the possibility of withdrawing from the sophisticated manners and vices of societies epitomized by the man of world, to the simpler and more natural pleasures of virtuous and innocent rural family retreats, Mackenzie’s novel showed that retreat was not an option, and innocent virtue no solution. Long before the birth of his children, William Annesley had withdrawn from London and from the mercantile society in which his father ruled triumphant to set up as a country parson in a small village. Mackenzie makes it clear that retreat to the peace, virtue and felicity of an idyllic rural domestic life is no long-term solution by making the man of the world the local squire and Annesley’s country neighbor, and by comparing him to the “enemy” of mankind, the snake in the Garden: “a beautiful serpent, whose mischief we may not forget while we admire the beauties of its skin.” There is no security in a cloistered virtue for, like Milton’s Satan, the man of the world shows that he can leap the wall and penetrate Eden’s defenses. Sindall and all he represents can only be conquered once Richard Annesley, who is transported to America as a convict, has survived every possible hardship and brutality in the Atlantic world and returned a changed man. In this twenty year interval, Annesley has fought

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as a soldier in the West Indies and on the American mainland; has been captured by Indians, by a privateer and by the French; been cheated of his beaver skins and deceived by a hypocritical merchant in Williamsburg; has suffered hunger, poverty, injustice, the lash, torture and jail; and as a mariner working his passage home, been shipwrecked and attacked by wreckers on the English coast. This has armed him against all evil by teaching him fortitude, valor, and independence, and by making him fully aware of the “fraud, hypocrisy and sordid baseness” of “civilization” and of the men of its world. Though the Indians among whom Annesley lives for many years in America are still characterized idyllically by “the perfect freedom subsisting in a crude and simple state of society” (iii: 44), their virtues are eulogized through the dying speech of the Indian who has been Annesley’s surrogate father. Like Annesley’s virtuous, innocent and happy family in its country retreat, then, this idyllic Indian retreat from civilization is marked with death. Richard Annesley can no more live there in felicity for ever with his surrogate Indian father, than he had been able to live in felicity forever in his father Annesley’s annihilated and now vanished country retreat. Rather than withdrawing from the world, then, a man needed the fortitude, independence and skepticism to engage it, in all its transatlantic cruelty, deceptiveness, danger and complexity. For those who were not subject to Richard Annesley’s trials, Mackenzie offered another solution in the chapter that follows the section of Annesley’s advice to his son which The Critical Review reprinted. Here William Annesley distinguishes the “false politeness” of men of the world from “a politeness of the heart, which is confined to no rank, and dependent upon no education” and which “seldom fails of pleasing, though [its] style may differ from modern refinement” (i:  21). The politeness of the heart is the expression of that “desire of obliging” which proceeds from the social affections, and of that “liberal construction of the rules of morality” which derives from “conscience considered as the representation of God.” It manifests itself in gentle manners, a winning deportment, in good humor guided by delicacy, and above all in a sensibility and “genuine overflowing kindliness” which is “the sister of philanthropy.” The problem with society from this point of view was that the “shallow” ceremonies of polite falsity “covered the coldness of indifference.” Polite manners had “repressed” genuine kindness and “rusted” the social affections, with the result that “the social feelings grow callous from disuse” (i:  21). One function of sentimental discourse, understood as an appeal to the feelings, was therefore to awaken and exercise readers’ sensibility and social affections, in order to make them value that “politeness of the

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heart” which is confined to no rank. Another was to draw a distinguishing line between politeness as the genteel manners of the elite, and politeness as the moral and altruistic conduct of people at all ranks. Bell’s reprints of novels of sensibility for the revolutionary generation thus formed part of an anti-aristocratic, anti-European patriot agenda, that was designed, more broadly, to awaken in American readers the social affections and politeness of the heart that might serve as foundations for a different and better social order. But his repeated castigation of aristocratic European manners and choice of sentimental literary reprints also offered American writers a distinctive legacy and characteristic twist on the seduction plot. Vivian Jones has argued that in England, “the seduction plot in which vulnerable femininity is betrayed into ruin by socially superior masculinity, is a founding bourgeois myth” because “upward social mobility is thus motivated and legitimated through female sexual fantasy.”32 Though one might wish to qualify this by suggesting that this seduction plot warned women of the risks of imprudently aspiring to upward mobility where it was in reality unattainable, in England the connection to questions of upward social mobility holds in many cases. But the sentimental English seduction plots Bell chose to reprint in Philadelphia during the Revolutionary war raised an entirely different set of issues, especially as he had contextualized them. For though Pratt and Mackenzie were “feminist” enough to portray some strong, virtuous, intelligent, and even “Spartan” females, and both showed that a truly virtuous woman could only be conquered by trickery and violence, the seduced woman nevertheless figured structurally in their seduction plots as the family’s weakest link. Both Sindall and Sedley had “taken them on their weak side” by practicing on fathers and husbands to blind them to the danger and get them out of the way, so that they could seduce and, when necessary, physically overpower and rape their helpless wives and daughters. Ruining wives and daughters in turn spelled the destruction of the family and of its future, symbolized in the cases of Harriet Homespun and Harriet Annesley by the death of the seduced woman and of the child she carried. While valorizing the soldier who could eliminate the danger by force of arms, whether in a duel or in the field, this version of the seduction plot drove home the idea that, through his wife and real or potential offspring, the domestic security and progeny of more virtuous and well-intentioned Christian men were under threat from the man of the world. Alluring as they were to men and women alike, polite manners which represented the exquisite pinnacle of ancien regime European sophistication and breeding,

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were a menace to the peace, harmony and reproduction of decent families at all ranks, and thus to society as a whole. Through his choice of reprints and aggressive anti-aristocratic campaign, then, Bell contributed significantly to popularizing the idea that the seductive, polite, aristocratic and libertine European man of the world posed a serious threat to women and to the family, and must be treated with suspicion and resisted at all costs. The connection to be made between this and building the new nation, which was implicit in Bell’s selection and combination of Chesterfieldian reprints, was later elaborated in Royall Tyler’s play, The Contrast (1787). Tyler Americanized many of the same characters  – the Chesterfieldian pupil, the servant aping his master, the father blind to the character of the seducer, the pleasure seeking and frivolous young woman, the manly soldier – and placed them in American scenes, to condemn the anglicized American man of pleasure and valorize the American soldier as the manly man of valor and principle. Leonard Tennenhouse has described one line of descent that led to and through The Power of Sympathy, via a series of reprinted and Americanauthored magazine stories which made the point that “seduction is first and foremost a disruption of established relations between men” and that “the unregulated desires of the libertine poses a threat to patrilineage in the new United States.”33 There was, I suggest, another line of descent too. For in the American-authored seduction novels of the 1790s, resisting the man of the world and the allure of the pleasures of his world, became a task that republican women alone were expected to take on.34 Their task was made all the harder because American men, now educated to gentility on the more than usually ambiguous “Chesterfieldian” principles of the adaptations, had succumbed to the lure of politeness and of figuring as men of the world. This meant that the same signifiers of American good breeding now concealed both the man of virtuous and the man of vicious pleasures in the same national body under the same genteel social code.

Ch apter 9

Robert Bell’s theaters of war: the war upon war

As we saw in the last chapter, “the printer’s argument” in Bell’s cluster of publications on politeness warned Americans to be on their guard against seductive but duplicitous aristocratic European manners, and stood against what has been described as “the refinement of America” in favor of a new society governed by simplicity, philanthropy, and the politeness of the heart. The printer’s argument to which we now turn looked backwards and forwards too. Bell’s reprints of Pratt’s Emma Corbet [sic] (1782, 1783) and of Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling (1782) belonged to a cluster of literary as well as discursive publications that bore on questions of conduct in war. Bell used these reprints of wholly or partly transatlantic stories not only to tout the “manly” and patriotic character of the soldier during the Revolutionary war as a man of valor, sensibility and principle, but also to model the “new man” and “new woman” who would be needed for the peace. R e f r a m i ng E m m a C or be t t In Britain, in 1780, a glance at Pratt’s title – Emma Corbett; or, the Miseries of Civil War; founded on some recent Circumstances which happened in America  – would have told prospective readers that this was a pro­A merican novel. Loyal addresses to George III, which supported coercing the colonies into proper submission, spoke of the conflict as an “unnatural rebellion”; opponents of government policy, who petitioned for conciliation and peace, described it as an “unnatural civil war.”1 Almost without exception, reviewers in Britain billed Emma Corbett enthusiastically as an anti-war novel. All emphasized that “The History of Emma Corbett is built upon real and recent circumstances”  – Emma’s experiences in America were based on those of a certain “unfortunate Miss Ross”; “the various pictures of wretchedness and bloodshed” were nothing but “the faithful portrait of unexaggerated T RU T H ”; and the sufferings of 210

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the Corbett family encapsulated “the disunion of many families, besides those alluded to in these volumes.”2 Charles Corbett was “a gentleman of family and property in England and a widower,” who described himself as “American”  – thus ambiguously as an expat from America who had settled in England, and in the parlance of the time, as an Englishman who took the part of the Americans in the war. His son, Edward, had gone over to fight under General Washington, to defend land that he had inherited in America from the depredations of the British army. But Corbett’s ward, and soon to be son-in-law, Henry, took the British side and went to America to fight under King George. The young men had been brought up together, shared a common education, memories and culture, and wished to marry each other’s sisters. The American war as a fight between brothers on opposite sides tore the family apart and thus, according to one reviewer, demonstrated the fatal “consequences to private families of party rage, and of that unnatural, cruel and impolitick civil war, which for upwards of four years has been carried on with circumstances of barbarous resentment, disgraceful to the arms and to the policy of civilized countries.” In a review that was reprinted in The Edinburgh Magazine, The London Magazine went on to hope that “the sympathetic sensations which this tale necessarily excites” would move those in power to “study the means of reconciliation with unremitting ardour, and to prevent, before it is too late, the ruins of a dismantled empire.”3 Reviewers also showed, through the extracts they selected and the comments they made, that they understood that Pratt had also gone further, to force a re-examination of the legitimacy and morality of war itself: “we read of the general ravages of war; considered merely as an affair of state, with little or no emotion. If we are indeed to feel, and to be made sensible of our dangers or our distresses, they must both be brought HOM E to us: they must be displayed, with all their horrors, as they tear up the tendernesses, and dismember the comforts and supports of private life.”4 I will come back to this point. Suffice it to say for now, that London reviewers read the novel in 1780 against the “military transactions,” “politics” and divisions over the American war, with which everyone in Britain was “glutted.” Robert Bell described the novel in very different terms when he advertised his reprint in The Pennsylvania Evening Post in 1782: Emma Corbet [sic] was a love story “exhibiting Henry and Emma, the faithful modern lovers, as delineated by themselves in their original letters.” It was also a love story that bore on the war now concluded, as this had transpired in Philadelphia a few years before:

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In this work the very great vicissitudes of human life, and the miseries of civil war, are feelingly depicted; founded upon incidents which occurred at and near Philadelphia, in the royal winter of 1777, when the British gentry imagined they had taken an eternal lease of the great Congressional city.5

Bell’s advertisement linked Henry and Emma’s love story to his reprint of The Pupil of Pleasure – which made sense, since it was a more complex and conflicted rendering of the love story of Lieutenant Vernon and Sophia in that novel – and to a long poem, re-titled “The Sentimental Sailor,” which Bell had added to Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling, also reprinted in 1782. Bell also connected the two novels by advertising Emma Corbett on p. iv of The Man of Feeling, at the end of Mackenzie’s Introduction, in the same terms as in the newspaper, and by advertising The Man of Feeling in Emma Corbett in a parallel manner, as “exhibiting the History of Mr Harley, Miss Walton and Edwards, the Volunteer Soldier.”6 Bell’s focus, then, was not on the family relationship between England and her colonies that English reviewers highlighted and Jay Fliegelman has so eloquently explored, though this element is certainly present in Pratt’s novel.7 His focus was on the conduct of individual characters in wartime, or on what one reviewer of Emma Corbett described as “the struggles of the patriot and the parent, the lover and the hero” as they “alternately plead before us.”8 This focus linked Emma Corbett in particular to the heroic drama that Bell had published in 1777 and 1778, when the novel supposedly took place, and highlighted the ways in which, after the war, Emma Corbett, like The Man of Feeling, invited reconsideration of the heroic and soldierly virtues earlier prescribed for American patriots. Bell had been interested in soldiers from his earliest reprints – in 1769, for instance, he attached “The Adventures of Tom Dreadnought, who served as a soldier and sailor in the late war” to his reprint of Goldsmith’s poem, The Traveller, and in 1770 he reprinted Marmontel’s Belisarius. During the revolutionary war, he intensively published both Americanauthored and imported heroic drama  – Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Battle of Bunkers Hill (1776) and The Death of General Montgomery (1777), Francis Dobbs’ The Irish Chief or Patriot King (1777); Douglas Home’s Alonzo and Ormisinda (1777) and Henry Brooke’s Gustavus Vasa, the Deliverer of his Country (1778) among others. Gustavus Vasa and The Irish Chief – in which Pratt had acted the principal role in Dublin, as Bell made sure his readers knew – fed into Bell’s “Chesterfieldian” concerns by showing how noble military heroes had been deceived by subtle and ambitious princes who pretended to be making peace, almost destroying themselves and their countries as a result. But whatever their plots, all these plays

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represented their military heroes as heroic by eulogizing the same – relatively new – ideal of soldierly conduct. Brackenridge’s plays have been dismissed as wartime propaganda, which of course they were. But they were also a great deal more. They quite breathtakingly made sense of Greek and Roman practice by elevating ordinary men whom people personally knew or knew of – Joseph Warren and John Montgomery – to legendary heroic and exemplary status, even as they turned two potentially demoralizing early defeats into magnificent moral victories, and touchstones of American valor and determination. Even more importantly perhaps, they served as conduct books for soldiering in the war. Generically, they were designed to produce in their readers “admiration” and “wonder” and in the words of Eugene Waith, “to appeal to what was noble in the audience, and create an audience of heroes.”9 Given the practice in both British and Continental armies of having officers enact plays, and given that the two armies chose what Jeffrey Richards has described as opposite kinds of theater, the heroic dramas that Bell reprinted had also been weapons in the war.10 The ideal of soldierly conduct eulogized in all these plays is conveniently summarized in the following lines from The Irish Chief or Patriot King: When in the field we meet opposing foes; When steel to steel is clos’d in deadly strife, Let Rage inspire, and fury stalk at large: But when the fortune of the day is cast, When in the vanquish’d we no longer meet Contending arms – let Mercy walk abroad, The conquer’d soothe and mitigate their pain, The dying comfort, and the wounded heal. Success indeed our admiration draws But ’tis Humanity deserves applause.11

Soldiers, and more especially officers and gentlemen, must follow a code of honor, which prescribed duty, bravery and self-sacrifice. They must fight like lions and be prepared to die in the service of their country. But they must also demonstrate the sensibility which alone marked officers as gentlemen. This sensibility manifested itself in the humane treatment of prisoners, of surrendering troops, and of the bodies of enemy wounded and dead, and in the mercy shown to the helpless populations that armies overran. This sensibility also expressed itself in feelings of pity for the suffering, the dying and the dead, which legitimately took the form of manly tears. As a “Gentleman of the Army” put it in an epilogue he wrote for

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Bunkers Hill which was spoken by Lieutenant Colonel Webb, aide-decamp to General Putnam, in 1776: Why steals a tear, soft trickling from the eye? Is Freedom master’d by our late defeat, Or Honour wounded by a brave retreat? ’Tis Nature’s dictates; and in Pride’s despite, I mourn my brethren slaughter’d in the fight.12

Likewise, in the play itself, before heroically defending Bunkers Hill and dying patriotically for freedom, Warren and his fellow officers “mix [their] tears” with the “Salt tears of Grief by many parents Shed / For Sons detain’d and tender innocents / … famishing for bread” in Boston.13 As Sarah Knott has shown, these values were shared by both sides during the revolutionary war.14 In practice, of course, neither side honored them consistently. Ethan Allen made it clear in the narrative of his captivity by the British that Bell published in 1779, that British conduct varied according to whether a particular officer in the British service viewed Americans as soldiers or as “damned American rebels,” and thus as criminals who would, or should, be hanged for treason. The division in British society about the American war was reflected in Britain’s armed forces. But the fact that the same military code of conduct was shared on both sides of the Atlantic meant that Brackenridge could roundly condemn Generals Gage at Bunkers Hill and Carlton at Quebec for breaking their promises of fair and humane treatment for American soldiers in terms meaningful to both sides, which simultaneously asserted the status of Americans as soldiers and prisoners of war that these British generals denied them: “When men far off, in civilized states / Shall know the perfidy and breach of faith / … they shall execrate / The earth disgracing name of Englishman.”15 In times of war, this intertwined code of honor and sensibility served a number of very useful purposes. One of its more important functions was to motivate men to fight, and to fight in specific ways. According to Armstrong Starkey, new methods of open order combat or petite guerre, which released troops from the old line-order battle formations and had them fighting more autonomously in smaller units, required new forms of motivation. “What would induce a soldier to fight and not desert under looser control? How could an officer earn implicit obedience on scouting, ambushing and foraging missions?” According to Starkey, much emphasis was placed on “the example of the officer whose bravery, professionalism and humanity would inspire obedience.”16 The officer’s code

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of conduct raised and channeled his emotions to produce these qualities. The code of honor, which required him to display bravery, played heavily on the officer’s fear of shame and ambition to be honored by others  – something that Brackenridge’s heroic dramas shamelessly exploited: “All things are mortal, but the warrior’s fame; This lives eternal in the mouths of men.”17 The code of sensibility, meanwhile, roused and developed those feelings of pity which were the precondition for his merciful treatment of vanquished enemy soldiers and helpless enemy populations, as well as for his humanity towards his own men in an era otherwise characterized by brutal military punishments. It was not yet obvious that the lash and the halter did not inspire loyalty in the troops; that an officer should not permit his men to rape, pillage, kill, burn, torture or dismember anyone who could not defend themselves, much less do so himself; or that capture and surrender were not just convenient opportunities for revenge. The intertwined code of honor and sensibility – and plays such as those that Bell published – helped to make it so. A second function of this code, and another good reason for its dissemination, was to assimilate the new men from non-aristocratic backgrounds into the traditionally aristocratic officer corps, by using their aspirations to gentility to craft “a corporate culture” based on courtesy and politeness (what else!) and involving moderation, restraint and selfcontrol. This was an important step towards the professionalization of modern armies. In America, General Washington in particular was anxious to ensure that his officers were gentlemen because he considered the officer’s gentlemanly code of honor and sensibility essential to the order and military discipline of the Continental army. In practice, things did not always work out the way they were supposed to:  officers quarreled and fought duels on points of honor, resigned their commissions over questions of status, or demonstrated their gentility through haughtiness, idleness and ostentation rather than through duty and self-control. But according to one historian, Washington’s policy did get some junior officers reading Trusler’s Principles of Politeness in camp. And where it was practiced, the code of honor and sensibility did limit the damage caused by war. Contemporaries claimed, and modern historians have confirmed, that wars were fought more “humanely” during the period when this ethos was in the ascendancy, than either before or after it. This code also made it possible to feel positively virtuous about going to war and killing other people. As Nathaniel Whitaker explained: “Every soldier should enter the field with benevolent, tender, compassionate sentiments, which is the temper of Jesus Christ … These are no more inconsistent in a soldier

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engaging in battle and doing his best to kill his enemies, than they are in a judge and executioner, who takes away a murderer from the earth.”18 In Emma Corbett, American soldiers are represented as heroes, and General Washington is shown displaying all the requisite soldierly and gentlemanly sensibility. Told that Emma has traveled to America disguised as a man in a desperate effort to find her Henry, and been wounded and captured when the British ship in which she sailed was taken, “the soldier’s cheek was not without the graceful dignity of a tear. He wept. Sacred, said he, be the rights of hospitality. I am not at war with the affections … I feel them all.”19 Though surrounded by “the shrieks of widows and daughters and fatherless children,” by families burying the dead, and by “the bells of death toll[ing] out in every street,” Washington humanely helps Emma to cross into British lines to search for Henry, and demonstrates that the Americans are “a generous enemy” in “compassion to private woe” (iii: 17). On the British side, Henry is the model of honor and sensibility: he is “going into the paths of duty”– a “duty not to be laid aside without dishonor” – by answering his country’s call to arms in what he takes to be a just cause; and he demonstrates throughout Volume i that he has all the proper sensibility  – he shows Emma every “sympathetic tenderness,” expresses his emotions in poetry, and upon receiving a letter from Emma on board the transport ship that is carrying British soldiers to America, he cries: “Soldier that I am, I do not blush to tell you that I have wept over its contents” (i: 21). But Pratt used the love story of Henry and Emma that Bell emphasized in his advertisements to demythologize this military code. He put the transatlantically shared soldierly ideal under such pressure that it cracked apart to reveal conflicts between honor and humanity, duty and sensibility, reason and loyalty, ideology and reality, that its proponents papered over. Emma highlights this thematics at the beginning of Volume ii, when she writes to Caroline Arnold, a soldier’s wife and daughter: “Henry is gone, you know, to defend his country, to signalize his bravery, and to serve his king. I admit the propriety of the enterprise according to the laws of honour, but I weep at the extremity of its horror, when tried by the laws of feeling and humanity” (ii: 3). By “horror,” she means not only Henry’s possible death in battle, but war as “that wanton and insatiable power, which scatters desolation o’er the land” and “delights to hear the wail of the wounded and the groans of the expiring” (ii: 3). Contrary to what the officer’s military code pretended, therefore, she finds that the laws of honor and those of sensibility do not, and cannot be made to, accord. Older and more cynical, Caroline points out that military officers

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are not sensible of this contradiction because they compartmentalize. “In the interval of peace,” she observes, “few men of any order have a more elegant humanity than the English officers”; but when “military fame” calls, so does “a different duty”: Sometimes it is true, the tears of a wife excite the manly drop in the eye of a husband; but it tarries not. The voice of public fame is, on these occasions, louder than that of private affection … One hero inflames another: the sparks of glory pass like an electric power:  the necessity of a brave example becomes apparent: the profession soon grows into a darling passion … home connections are forgotten: the scene of action terminates the prospect: the warrior can see no farther … tenderness would assist the efforts of his foe … He gives himself up therefore nobly and absolutely to the battle, and death itself is, in that moment, less terrible than defeat. (ii: 7)

Officers’ manly tears were no more to be trusted than the many brief eighteenth-century intervals of peace. For though honor was in reality only ambition, and bravery the contagion of one fiery “hero” by another, men at war became so obsessed and blinkered by them, that they wantonly cast aside home, humanity, sensibility, even life itself. The novel also begins with this question of the disjunction between sensibility, feeling or humanity and “going into the path of duty,” for the quarrel between Charles Corbett and Henry with which the novel opens turns precisely upon these points. Corbett’s support for America in the war is laden with sensibility and with wounded feelings of humanity: Oh, thou hapless land! … thou art equally the object of my love, and more of my pity. The rapacious Henry is gone to plunge another poignard in thy bosom – the bosom of my country – the tomb of Emma’s brother, and the vault of every generous affection. Nature herself lies bleeding on thy shore, and there the inhuman mother has plunged the dagger, with her own barbarous hand, into the bowels of her child. (i: 39)

Corbett breaks with Henry when Henry goes to fight on the British side, in terms which again intimate the incompatibility in a soldier of sensibility and honor:  “Whom I thought tender, him I find bloody” (i:  4). A soldier’s apparent humanity is deceptive, for his duty is precisely to plunge bayonets into people upon command. Henry’s response underlines the disconnect between reason and emotion in Corbett’s position, and suggests that reason offers better ground for accommodation:  “It is sufficient for a soldier that he believes his quarrel to be just. You arraign my humanity. Wherefore? … May we not consider a public contest in different points of view and yet be friends?” (i:  5).

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If Corbett were relying on reason rather than emotion, Henry suggests, they could respect each other’s political differences, and remain friends. But Henry’s subsequent career shows that any hope of moderating sensibility by the use of reason is likely to prove temporary and unstable. When he first goes off to war, Henry is able to tell Emma that she must “check the extreme of sensibility,” show fortitude, and refrain from “debilitating [his] mind” (i: 15, 19). But once in America, after he has been wounded in battle and after they have been married for several months, when Emma becomes sick unto death, Henry’s feelings overcome him; and consonant with psychosomatic eighteenth-century theories of illness, he dies of an extreme of sensibility. In retrospect, one can only conclude that hapless America awoke less powerful emotions in his breast, than his hapless wife. At the same time, the “path of Duty” is shown to be both less reasonable and less honorable than it seems. Emma observes that both her brother and her lover insist that they are “going on the path of duty” but are fighting on opposite sides. The point is not only that there are patriots willing to die for their country on both sides; it is that duty as such is non self-explanatory. Like saying a gun must shoot, but not whether, when, where, how or at what it is right to shoot, the soldier’s duty is an indeterminate concept which can point or be pointed in any direction. The quarrel between Corbett and Henry reveals, moreover, that noble talk of honor and duty hides practical, far less heroic, calculations about gaining or losing property. Edward went over to America to take possession of his property there, and then found that he had to fight to protect and keep it. Henry, who has no “patrimony,” looks to “the arts of war, rather than those of peace” to rectify his fortunes, because manly pride forbids him to marry Emma, who already has a fortune, “without the effort to deserve them.” Ethan Allen too made a great deal of this point:  British soldiers, he said, had been promised lands in America from among those that would be confiscated from the rebels, while Americans desperately fought to defend their livelihoods on the land they stood to lose. Corbett observes that “the times are greatly changing and require great innovation of conduct,” since “new modes of duty spring from new circumstances” (ii: 6). But he himself is incapable of doing what is necessary “to accommodate ourselves to incidents, which render improper today, what might yesterday be right” (ii: 6). The characters who do know how to accommodate themselves to changing circumstances are Emma, whose own sense of honor leads her to abandon the conduct expected of proper

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ladies for the duration of the war; and Raymond, who serves as the model for the kind of man who will be needed after the war. Pratt called this novel Emma Corbett, not Henry Hammond or Edward Corbett. He also had Raymond describe Emma explicitly at the end of Book II as a character whose “fidelity, heroism and resolution … claim admiration … whatever be their issue” (iii: 6). He thus signaled the move he was making:  he was putting Emma in the place of a Henry or an Edward, or indeed a Warren or Montgomery, as the hero whose actions in wartime are supposed to command the reader’s wonder and admiration. Emma deserves the admiration which would normally be reserved for military heroes, because she demonstrates through her actions that only the heroism of healers can properly conjoin the bravery, professionalism and humanity vainly demanded of officers by the military code. Pratt was also offering Emma Corbett as a tribute to the roles women played in war. Eighteenth-century women regularly went to war both with the British and American armies. A famous few dressed as soldiers or sailors, pretended to be men, and fought alongside the men as regular troops, sometimes for years before being discovered. Many went to war in the wake of armies, staying with the wagons during actual battles, but performing all kinds of essential tasks for the army when it halted, from cooking and laundry to sewing and nursing. Some were soldiers’ wives following their husbands, some provided sexual services. Officers’ wives could accompany their husbands too, though rather than stay with the wagons, they would often be put up at a house or inn in a neighboring town until some sort of stable accommodation for the officers had been built.20 Many women also stayed behind to look after family property or family members. Joan Gundersen has shown that, far from being merely passive victims of the Revolution, both rebel and loyalist women actively made their own choices among these various options, with the result that women acted upon, and reacted to, the same wartime situations in very different ways.21 Pratt made the same point by using twists and turns of the plot, that were much admired in the eighteenth century but may seem improbable to us now, to give the same few correspondents the opportunity to demonstrate different choices that women might make in wartime, different roles they might play, and different situations in which they might find themselves as a result. Louisa, Henry’s sister, for instance, has agreed to remain safely at home when her lover, Edward, goes to war, but after he is gone, she finds that she is pregnant and hears that

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he has been killed. In the subject-position of the deserted sweetheart, Louisa withdraws from society to a remote country cottage to hide her shame, have her baby and mourn Edward and her ruined life. We later learn that there has been a secret marriage, which Edward has made her promise to ­conceal, and that Edward is in fact alive. Louisa now assumes the role of the wife left behind at home – she informs Corbett, her father in law, of the marriage and moves in with him to comfort him in Edward’s absence with the promise of the child. When Edward is then really killed, she becomes the grieving war widow, who is very properly supported by her husband’s family, and who shares with them both their mourning for their lost son and brother, and the hope represented by Edward’s child  – and so on. Many women readers would be likely to recognize their own situations and the emotions Louisa expresses in one or other of these subject positions. Emma takes on a different group of possible subject-positions. She begins as the daughter, whose first challenge is to determine where her duty lies, between the absent soldier-lover to whom she is committed and the father who has changed his mind and now wants her to marry someone else, who is both richer and more conveniently at hand. Corbett then temporarily loses his money, to put her in the position of the daughter who has to choose whether to betray her lover in order to “save” her papa by marrying for money, or work to earn their daily bread. Having demonstrated both her fidelity to Henry and her independence of mind, Emma takes on the various roles of the woman who chose not to stay behind when men went to war. Her disguise as a man, the battle on the ship and her capture place her in the subject-position of women like Deborah Sampson who disguised themselves as male soldiers or sailors and fought alongside the men. The roles Emma takes on when she finally does find Henry and the British army, are the more traditional roles of the many women who went to war in the wake of eighteenth-century armies to nurse, feed and launder for the troops and stay with their men. In between, Emma, demonstrates even greater bravery and heroism, by going out alone into the vast American hinterlands in search of Henry. When she finds him lying in the middle of a deserted forest with a poisoned arrow in his chest, she uses the medical knowledge she has acquired from Raymond to suck out the poison and keep him alive for several days, until a provisioning wagon train for the army passes by, and she can get them both rescued. After nursing Henry back to health and marrying him, Emma becomes the officer’s wife and pregnant mother struggling to preserve domestic life in the midst of war torn

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Philadelphia; and then a widow who, while slowly dying from the poisoned arrow which is a metonymy for war, lives long enough to return to England and have her child. In many ways, Emma and Raymond are analogical characters. Both are demonstrably capable of self-sacrificing love. Raymond has served as a ship’s surgeon in wartime, and capably teaches Emma how to deal with wounds. Both are therefore healers. Raymond also follows Emma to America, to help, protect and physic her in the midst of the fighting; both therefore have the same courage. Moreover, rather than remain blinkered by ideas of honor and glory, as Caroline says all male participants in wartime are, Raymond’s experience as a surgeon has made him stingingly aware of war’s cruelty:  “I caught [my] opinions from experience – from the wounds of my fellow creatures … I had so much business on my hands, that it was almost too much for my heart.” Raymond’s experience of war has led him to reject the officer’s code: to “deplore the passion for honourable death”; to regret “the abuse of power, and madness of ambition” which made men cut each others’ throats and lop each others’ limbs “for subsistence, for glory, for pride or for pique”; to distrust the rationales of those in power for going to war – “in point of propriety, there is seldom a pin to choose on either side” – and to view partisanship like Corbett’s as a dangerous form of “enthusiasm.” Raymond has “travelled [him]self out of enthusiasm.” Travel has taught him that men have fought wars in all countries since the beginning of time, but that “the causes of war are so wretchedly inadequate to the horrible effects, that [he was] often melted into tears.” A good-natured man can only “detest war” and “sincerely wish well to every human creature.” The corollary is that jubilation even at the warmest moment of victory is inhumane and immoral: for “if all the milk of human kindness were not drained out of the hero’s bosom,” he would consider “what heaps of his countrymen as well as that of the enemy” have been cut to pieces, and realize that “there is as much cause for him to sorrow as rejoice” (ii:  41). Emma shares Raymond’s antiwar position, and condemns military heroes in the same terms as he: “Heroism laughs at the apostrophe of pity: but I who want refinement to extinguish the simplicity of my sensations, shall yet persist in calling even victory a calamity” (ii:  30). She too can see beyond political “sides” and rationales for military interventions to the human beings and suffering involved in war. Both characters thus give voice to a broader pacifist and antiwar position, which is repeated throughout the novel.

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Though historians have argued that pacifism began in Britain only after 1793,22 clergy from a variety of denominations in England, Scotland and Ireland were already using their sermons on the Day of Thanksgiving for victory against France and Spain in 1749 to express pacifist positions very like those expressed here.23 In Britain in 1780, Pratt, an unorthodox clergyman himself, was writing within this unorthodox clerical antiwar tradition and using sentimental popular fiction to disseminate it. Bell, for his part, was reprinting Emma Corbett in Philadelphia, an historically Quaker city where the Quakers had been pacifists since the seventeenth century. Though Quakers had joined in the boycott of English goods, sent food to besieged Boston and extended philanthropy to refugees from the fighting, pacifism had got them into trouble during the revolutionary war, for their rejection of violence and attempted neutrality marked them for many as Tories and traitors to the Patriot cause. One of the “incidents which occurred at or near Philadelphia” just before “the Royal Winter of 1777” was that leading Philadelphia Quakers were arrested as traitors and deported to Winchester, Virginia, without trial. Bell had printed and disseminated the several protests and petitions that these Quakers wrote from their Philadelphia prison prior to deportation; he also began publishing a cluster on liberty about this time. It is possible that he chose to reprint Emma Corbett after the war, among other things, because, as healers, Emma and Raymond offered Quakers models for conduct in war that were consistent with their pacifist principles.24 In future wars or attacks on the frontier, might Quaker men and women not demonstrate both their patriotism and their pacifism as healers, by rescuing the wounded and nursing the sick? The difference between Emma and Raymond as models lies in the fact that, unlike Emma, Raymond never permits his sensibility to overwhelm his reason, much less his realistic assessment of the situation in which he finds himself. At the beginning of the novel, Raymond uses self-deprecating humor to keep his sense of proportion. In the process, he also demythologizes the love story of Henry and Emma, which replays a plot familiar from innumerable eighteenth-century fictions. What hope, he asks, can a dark complexioned, round, middle-aged man like himself, with a wig, gout, small-pox pits and an estate of £50,000 have of winning “a woman of sentiment, an AT TAC H E D woman of sentiment, the mistress of a young soldier, who loves a man of poverty – a man of poetry – and to crown all, who loves a man that is not the present choice of her father?” (I. 34). There can be no romantic appeal in “plain affection in a snuff-colored coat with money bags, and a path to marriage

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unobstructed.” But later, one of Raymond’s important functions in the novel is to show what a struggle it can be to master one’s feelings – when Emma actually marries Henry, he finds it so hard to contain his emotions, that he withdraws from Philadelphia to a village some distance away, to fight it out on his own. Since the balance of reason and sensibility is always necessarily temporary and unstable, the battle to conquer excessive sensibility must be ruthlessly fought again and again. The fact that, despite his torment, he repeatedly wins the battle to restrain his sensibility and conduct himself as he should means that – unlike Henry, Emma, his own sister and Edward, whose excessive sensibility ultimately overwhelms them – Raymond survives the war and remains capable not merely of acting as wartime exigencies require, but also of doing the hard, unromantic and demanding things that are needed in the aftermath of the fighting, when peace has been declared. Raymond’s key function, which is reinforced by the fact that he resembles her in all but gender, is to supply Emma’s place. That Emma is killed off at the end of the war and as a result of it suggests that, for all his admiration of her heroism, Pratt did not view her as the model of female conduct that was going to be desirable or appropriate once peace was restored. At the end of the novel, Raymond, not Emma, is the one literally left holding the babies  – Emma’s baby with Henry, and Louisa’s baby with Edward  – while all the parents and grandparents are killed off. Though not at all the stuff of which romantic heroes and conventional plots were made, Raymond holds the future in his hands. Raymond, the man of healing and peace, can be viewed as a reincarnation and update of Locke’s “nursing Fathers.” These took various forms in the course of the century, including that of the good-natured man whose benevolence and humanity protected, nurtured and educated, but also firmly governed children, dependents and tenants “to their good.” Emma Corbett therefore concludes with a reaffirmation and re-institution of patriarchy. Although Pratt here presents patriarchy in its least violent and most sympathetic paternalistic form, this is a reaffirmation of patriarchy in which there is no mother, because (as in Locke’s image) the father has taken over the mother’s role. In 1782 and 1783, at the end of the War of Independence, Bell appears to have agreed with Pratt that Emma was not a model of feminine conduct that was going to be desirable or appropriate for the new republic after the war, and that patriarchy must be firmly restored. But he evidently did not think that Pratt had gone far enough in making this clear. One might notice in this connection that Henry who appeared nowhere on Pratt’s title page, always appeared on Bell’s imprints and

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advertisements  – and always before Emma, as “Henry and Emma” rather than as “Emma and Henry.” Though he could not change the title without losing sales, Bell played Emma’s centrality down as far as he could. Bell also filled the last pages of Volumes ii and iii of Emma Corbett  – which he reprinted separately from Volume i at intervals of two and four weeks respectively  – with a barrage of corrective patriarchal criticism and advice to women. Methods of folding paper to make a book may have left him with some vacant pages; but what he printed on them was up to him. To Volume ii of his Emma Corbett, Bell added two short pieces: “Momus or the Laughing Philosopher,” the story of a ridiculously henpecked husband whose shrewish wife spends money they do not have on show; and “An Extraordinary Love Letter from Mr. Peter Plainman to Miss Priscilla Prudish,” in which Peter castigates Miss Priscilla’s “false ideas” of pleasure and luxury, and informs her that they could be happy together only “if you complied with my terms” (ii: 48). To Volume iii, Bell added “A Speech on the Probability of a Happy Marriage by a Father to his Daughter,” supposedly based on Rousseau. This father gives his daughter a measure of liberty in choosing her marital partner (at least “while reason dominates”) which was perhaps more characteristic of America than of Europe. He also advises her “not [to] aspire to what you cannot attain to,” and to “take a poor man, whose person you like, and whose temper is suitable to you,” who will work with his hands to support his family, and ennoble his lowly rank with his virtue (iii: 48). There was no question of female heroism and resolution here – no mention of the many American women who had capably managed farms and plantations during the revolutionary war and successfully protected them from both armies, no allusion even to the many women in Philadelphia and elsewhere who were still successfully running shops, taverns, boarding houses and businesses in 1782. There was to be no remembering of the ladies, and no female independence, after the war. A marriage, in which she lived “happily in poverty” by having the correct state of mind and complying with her husband’s terms, was the future that Bell was presenting post-war to American women in the new nation. The epigraph which he attached to his edition of Emma Corbett, taken from the monument on her tomb, said it all: Ah, pass not yet. If thou didst ever know The tenderest touches of impassioned woe! Pass not, if truth, and fortitude, and love Can stay thy footsteps, or thy Spirits move!25

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Emma was buried; she represented the past that sentimentalists needed to mourn. Crying with Emma acknowledged women’s love, fortitude and woe during the war. It might even offer some kind of personal or collective catharsis. But though staying for a while to remember and be moved, those footsteps must and would move on. C on n e c t i ng T h e M a n of F e e l i ng The Man of Feeling, which Bell linked to Emma Corbett in his advertisements, echoed several of Pratt’s themes, most particularly the critique of honor and the critique of war. Among the fragments of Harley’s papers, for instance, there is a misanthrope’s attack on honor and friendship as the world understood them. There is an encounter with a soldier who has both the honor and the sensibility required by the military code, and who has served his country faithfully for over forty years, but who never made it above the rank of captain, precisely “owing to those rigid principles of honor, which it was his boast to possess.”26 There is Harley’s discovery that an Italian gentleman who speaks nobly of honor and sensibility has reduced an entire family to starvation in a debtor’s prison, because the husband refused to act as his wife’s pimp. And there is a fragment about British militarism in India, in which Harley, like Emma and Raymond, “cannot throw off the man so much as to rejoice in our conquests” because he knows of no conqueror “giving peace and happiness to the conquered.” Harley also points out that for English officers abroad, ambition for the “fame of conquest” came a poor second to ambition for immense wealth (54). Read in the context that Bell was creating, and against his addenda to Emma Corbett, however, “exhibiting the History of Mr Harley, Miss Walton and Edwards, the Volunteer Soldier” added two other important elements to what has gone before. The history of Mr. Harley and Miss Walton reinforced the lesson of the “Speech on the Probability of a Happy Marriage by a Father to his Daughter” that Bell appended to Volume iii of Emma Corbett, which told the daughter to marry a poor man who would ennoble a lowly rank with his virtue, rather than to seek wealth and social status in a husband. Indeed, it constituted a “negative example” for that advice. For though Harley and Miss Walton love each other throughout their lives, neither declares their love until Harley is on the point of death. The reason for this lies beyond Harley’s bashfulness or the decorum precluding a proper lady from offering herself, in the

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paralyzing social stricture that neither his wealth nor his station in life permit Harley to aspire to Miss Walton’s hand. The result is a lifelong amatory non-event. Two people who could have been happy together, live lonely sterile lives, because it is not socially acceptable to marry a poor man. Edwards, the honest and honorable volunteer soldier who is given 200 lashes and drummed out of the army for showing humanity to an Indian, adds a more practical and populist note to what was involved in rebuilding after war. For Edwards returns home from the army not only to find his family shattered, but also to find their livelihood as tenant-farmers destroyed and poverty staring him in the face. Whatever difficulties they encountered from greedy squires and unfair rents before he self-sacrificingly went to war, the family had somehow managed to hold together, farm the land and feed themselves. During Edwards’ absence, however, bad harvests and bad debts had bankrupted his son, killed the parents, and left his orphaned grandchildren destitute and on the parish. Like Raymond, therefore, Edwards is left to raise two children on his own. The key difference is that Raymond is the wealthy owner of an estate, and Edwards is an elderly, poor and landless soldier, with a gamey arm. The importance of being “happy in poverty” was reemphasized here. The post-war 1780s in America were years of economic depression, and picking up the pieces while striving to be “happy in poverty” was a challenge that many would face. Mackenzie’s proffered solution was the philanthropy of the rich or richer for the poor. Harley may be represented as unfit for society and for the world; but his short, supposedly undistinguished life is distinguished by three notable acts of philanthropy which save three families from starvation, despair and death: the family of the honorable captain, the family ruined by the Italian libertine, and the family of Edwards, the volunteer soldier. Harley makes it possible for Edwards to raise his orphaned grandchildren by supplying him with a piece of land and a small hut, by physically helping him to plant a kitchen garden, and by giving him the seed he needs. His philanthropy contributes to the rebuilding of society after war by enabling a demobilized soldier, who would normally become one of the many beggars roaming the land, to earn a subsistence and contribute to society, in his turn, by taking in and raising children orphaned during war. The families thus reconstituted were irregular – Raymond raises children in no way related to him, Edwards is not a father but a grandfather – and these families both notably lacked a mother or a mother figure. But

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Mackenzie, like Pratt, was mobilizing sensibility as a prompt to masculine action, and suggesting that a benevolent, sentimentally motivated philanthropy which moved “nursing fathers” to reconstitute families and raise the next generation to moral and productive adulthood, was the form of patriotic sacrifice of self to society that, in times of hardship after the ravages of war, would best serve the public good.

Afterword

There is no single, all-encompassing meta-narrative here; nor do I think there should be until much more work has been done. But some intriguing reflections do emerge from these popular, plurally and diversely reused, stories of the Atlantic world. The transatlantically reprinted, transatlantic stories explored above were about poor folk who achieved wealth and success in the Atlantic world, and more often, about poor folk who did not. They told of those who lost rank and caste in the Atlantic world, and those who voluntarily stepped away from them. They displayed characters defying gendered norms of conduct as dictated by British and politely anglicized American society, and characters evading conventional typologies for convicts, heathen converts, Indians and slaves. There were few proper ladies in these popular imaginary transatlantic spaces that were “founded on fact,” far fewer admirably civilized gentlemen or heroic action figures than one might expect, and no vicious convicts, ignorant Indians, or grateful, kneeling slaves. For readers in the new Republic during the 1780s and 1790s, such American reprints must have conveyed some reassuringly traditional values:  they were heavily weighted towards Christian or providential renderings of experience, towards ethical concerns, and towards questions of law. They made present the people’s multifarious hardships, their humble, can-do social origins, and their transatlantic links. Considered from the British side, these prints and reprints were also heavily weighted towards American tales of violence  – to stories of peril, captivity, slavery, servitude, suffering, transgression, shipwreck and war in North America and in the multinational Atlantic. And one has to wonder as a result whether, for British readers of such stories, “empire” yet had the stable, orderly and majestic connotations  – or “America” the clear outline – that each would acquire in the ­nineteenth century. 228

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Many of these popular, transatlantically shared, stories delineated or championed transnational community and mutual help among the poor of different nations, races and peoples, notwithstanding xenophobic national policies, mercantilist barriers, and divisive imperial wars. Many of them also celebrated, idealized and/or modeled the possibility of recapturing one’s freedom from violence, servitude and government, despite the odds, and held out the hope of making  – or moving to  – a “better countre.” In a British–American Atlantic, too, that prided itself on two Glorious Revolutions (1688, 1776), each of which re-established government on the basis of what Hume called “the government of laws not men,” narratives portraying the bloody injustices of British law and the elite and racial biases of American law cut to the heart of both national Enlightenment projects. These stories exhibited some of the many and variegated ways in which movement in the Atlantic world was conceived and described  – from adventure, strolling and vagabondage, to missionary or Indian itinerancies; from catching a working ride on a passing ship and commercial venturing, to voluntary withdrawal and running away; from violent uprooting and successive involuntary transplanting, to the multiply problematized circular circuits of return; from “there and back,” to back and forth, again and again and again; from going to plant oneself in a better country beyond the jurisdiction of British or American governors, to the ceaseless substitution of migrant for migrant across the Atlantic highway. This is intriguing in an era when governments on both sides of the Atlantic sought to stabilize their populations by criminalizing the strolling poor and halting the wandering Indians, in order to fix the people in their proper settlements, create loyalty to place or country, and multiply the wealth-producing population by preventing depopulation. Such refined explorations of so many strikingly diverse forms of movement as we have found in these stories suggest that well-developed transatlantic counter-cultures, with their own notions and practices of freedom, were being addressed, preserved or reaffirmed. They certainly indicate that there were then more varied and complex ideas and figurations of movement than are encompassed even by such modern critical categories as “travel,” “conquest,” “contact” and “tourism.” It also appears that these stories “founded on fact” worked differently from the nineteenth-century realist novels to which eighteenth-century fictions have been compared. For one thing, while nineteenth-century “documentary” realism was a genre that deployed specific and now well understood writerly techniques (including reflection of a “reality”

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holistically conceived and understood from the point of view of the end, development of character, enigma and suspense), eighteenth-century stories “founded on fact” could be given a variety of generic forms. The same historical facts could, for instance, be rendered in a “Life and Sufferings” story, in a “Life and Adventures” story, in a Romance, in a Providence Tale, in a Captivity Narrative, in a mixture of genres, as a major focus of the story or in a subordinate interpolated history of one of the characters. Indeed, an author’s choice of genre or genres itself constituted a comment on the historical facts, as did their positioning within the story’s episodic flow, and the different, partial, paratextual generic descriptors imposed upon them by different printers. Nor were eighteenth-century stories “founded on fact” bound to the probable (the “realistic”) as nineteenthcentury realist novels understood it. If anything, they explored “the endless bounds of possibility” emerging from historical situations, from their potential implications, or from their conjunctions. When not imagining what might occur in given historical situations, they imagined how these might be better handled, addressed, or managed to achieve more moral or desirable outcomes, and rewrote or recast one another’s scenes accordingly. Lacking the nineteenth century’s evolutionary, teleological and often deterministic sense of how the future would unfold, they favored analogies and juxtapositions over development, and the delightful variety of episodes, attitudes and subject-positions over apparently inexorable fates. Eighteenth-century stories “founded on fact” show us writers (and characters) struggling to deal with historical facts, reflecting very variously upon them, measuring them against diverse genres and subjectpositions, and repeatedly demonstrating for the ignorant or unwary how many different stories could be hung on the same facts. In reading these migrant fictions through what contemporaries in the book trade on both sides of the Atlantic said about them or did with them, different contemporary ways of saying and doing things with stories were highlighted for different tales. This made it possible to look successively at and through a variety of different kinds of window. Reading stories through what contemporaries said about them involved decoding what contemporary reviewers, authors or critics tell us about how they read particular stories, and what editors, printers and publishers show us by the ways in which they used, transformed or replaced paratextual materials to reorient readers’ horizons of expectations for particular tales. We read stories through changes of title or subtitle, shifting descriptions of contents, dedications, letters to the reader, prefatory “advertisements,” prefaces, print fonts, the addition of prefatory scenes, guiding paragraphs

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tacked on to the beginning or end of texts, publishers’ advertisements inserted in books or newspapers, and comments in reviews, critical pamphlets, and other writers’ affiliated texts. Reading stories through what contemporaries can tell us about their readings by what they did with stories involved examining processes of epitomizing, extraction and versioning, rewritings or reorientations of the same story, and the selection and privileging of forgotten versions of now canonical texts. It led us to consider what editors and printers conveyed through compilation, which contemporaries still understood as a manner of writing, whether this took the form of assembling diverse materials within a single volume and surrounding them with a variety of signifying connective materials, of juxtaposing a text with foreign textual materials, or of clustering reprints which, for all their generic and substantive variety, centered on particular topical concerns. This also led us to touch on some ways in which reprints might be used by printers and publishers in conjunction with original writings to produce “a printer’s argument,” and more indirectly, a distinctive local and topical literary scene. In all this, whatever their intentions, authors have not been the sole, or even the determining, source of textual meanings. These migrant fictions lived on, often for more than a century, because they were reframed, re-imagined, re-written, re-cycled and reused – as perhaps they have been here again.

Notes

I n t roduc t ion 1. There is a massive literature on the relation of fact and fiction, but see especially. Davis, Factual Fictions, and Terdiman, Body and Story. 2. Bailyn, Atlantic History; Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History” and Greater Britain; Kathleen Wilson (ed.), New Imperial History. For relations between transatlantic literary and historical studies, Slauter, “history”; Aravamundan, “Fiction/Translation/Transnation”; Manning and Cogliano (eds.), Atlantic Enlightenment; Manning, Cogliano and Tailor (eds.), Transatlantic Studies Reader. 3. Heilman, America in English Fiction; Bissell, American Indian. Also Simmons, “Americana in English Books”; Fulford, Romantic Indians. 4. Some of the classics here are Barber, “Books from the Old World”; Botein, “Anglo-American Book Trade” and Raven, London Booksellers. See also Amory and Hall, Colonial Book. 5. “To the American World,” prefixed to Bell’s reprint of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1771); Bell’s Proposals Addressed to Those who Possess a Public Spirit (1771). 6. William St. Clair observes that “movable type encouraged instability between editions,” that “publishers encouraged amendments and additions as a means of maintaining and renewing interest,” and that “printers often made changes without the author’s consent.” “Publishing, Authorship and Reading”: 26, 25. 7. Sher, Enlightenment and the Book: 506; James Green, “English Books and Printing.” 8. Bannet, “Theater of Politeness”; Bannet, “Immigrant Fictions”; Bannet, “Sarah Scott and America.” 9. Eds. Matthew Mason and Nicholas Mason, Broadview, 2009. 10. Raven, British Fiction: 19. 11. Richards, “Adventures of Emmera”; Flynn, Americans in British Literature, chap. 2. 12. Raven, English Novel:  35ff; For the argument that books were important in the founding of early America precisely “because they were local,” see Loughran, Republic of Print. 232

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13. Remer, Printers and Men of Capital: 88, 29. 14. Raven, Business of Books; R. Griffin (ed.), Faces of Anonymity. 15. Genette, Paratexts; Derrida, Parages; Hall, Ways of Writing. 16. For what they wrote, see Brecken and Silver (eds.), British Literary Book Trade. 17. Mayo, The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740–1815. 18. Fergus, Provincial Readers: 236–7 and chap. 5. Magazines or reviews sold for pennies; novels, which were usually printed in octavo or duodecimo, sold at 2/6d or 3 shillings a volume; upmarket editions. of novels were more expensive still. 19. Colclough, Consuming Texts: 99ff; Roper, Reviewing before the Edinburgh: 24. Popular periodicals were also reissued as bound volumes by printers and booksellers. 20. For The Entertaining Magazine, see Pitcher, Discoveries in Periodicals, a supplement to Mayo’s bibliography of novels in the magazines. 21. Pitcher, Fiction in American Magazines; Chielens (ed.), American Literary Magazines; Sharon Harris, “The New York Magazine”. 22. For transatlantic changes to non-fictional texts, see Bannet, Empire of Letters and Sher, Enlightenment and the Book. 23. Feather, Publishing, Piracy and Politics and “The Publishers and the Pirates”; Saunders, Authorship and Copyright; Loewenstein, The Author’s Due; Johns, Nature of the Book; Rose, Authors and Owners. 24. Fergus, Provincial Readers: 109. 25. Brewer, Afterlife of Character; Keymer and Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace, chap. 2. 26. Reiman, Romantic Texts and Contexts: 169. 27. Bannet, “Quixotes.” 28. Raven, British Fiction: 2. 29. R. Griffin, “The Text in Motion”: 398, 400. 30. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting; for Britain, St. Clair, Reading Nation. 31. For books of poetry, Feldman, “Women Poets and Anonymity”; for science and the classics, Chartier, Order of Books; for the argument that single-authored work is a critical myth, Stillinger, Multiple Authorship; for the status of authors, D. Griffin, “Rise of the Professional Author.” 32. Chartier, “Crossing Borders”:  44. Also Raven, “New Reading Histories” and Price, “Reading.” 33. Chartier, Forms and Meanings: 92. Also Chartier, Inscription and Erasure. 34. Genette, Paratexts: 8, 11, title. 35. Kames, Elements of Criticism: 70. 36. For England, Hanson, Government and the Press; Siebert, Freedom of the Press. For America, James Morton Smith, Freedom’s Fetters. 37. Rose, Intellectual Life: 2. 38. Chard, “Bookseller to Publisher”: 152.

234

Notes to pages 14–26

39. See Brecken and Silver (ed.), The British Literary Book Trade; Curwen, History of Booksellers; Townsend, John Newbery and His Books. 40. Ralph, The Case of Authors by Profession or Trade (London, 1758). 41. Anthonia Foster “Review Journals”; Roper, “Smollett’s ‘Four Gentlemen’ ”; Donoghue, Fame Machine; Morrissey, Constitution of Literature. 42. James Butler, Fortune’s Foot-ball; or the Adventures of Mercutio. Founded on Matters of Fact (1797). 43. Johns, Nature of the Book; also Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars; Loveman, Reading Fictions. 4 4. Walker, The Vagabond: 53. 45. Carretta, Equiano the African. 46. Kamrath, “American Indian Oration”: 161. 47. I have borrowed this marvelous word from Scott Black, Of Essays and Reading: 1. I n t roduc t ion to Pa rt I 1. Snader, “Oriental Captivity Narrative”: 273, 272. 2. Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: 2. Also MacLean, Looking East. 3. Novels often pointed out that it was virtually impossible, given the regular pattern of currents, storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic and ships’ habitual use of the same shipping lanes, for only one vessel to visit, or be wrecked on, an island. 4. Aubin was certainly not the first writer to mix genres, and satirical or subversive rewrites of popular mariners’ and pirates’ tales also accompanied the first generation of responses to Defoe. But other than Gulliver’s Travels, these earlier stories were not copiously reprinted in America. 1.   S t r a nge a dv e n t u r es 1. Gildon, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr. D- de F-…(London, 1719): ix–x. For Gildon and this text, see Dottin’s “Introduction” to Robinson Crusoe Examin’ d and Criticiz’ d. 2. Hotham’s London Post, fall and winter 1719–20. For the quantitative information, ESTC and Evans. This is a conservative estimate, which may relate more to the copies that survive than to the number of edns. and print runs originally published. 3. “Just Published, the 4th Edition,” Advertisement just after the Preface in Defoe, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London:  printed by W. Taylor, 1719). 4. Preface, The Farther Adventures: 4. 5. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner (London: Printed for T. Cox, 1719): Preface. Cox denied he had published this, and claimed that, having quarreled with Taylor, Defoe wrote the first long abridgement of 1719 himself to undermine Taylor’s sales. The second long abridgement of 1722, The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson

Notes to pages 26–31

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Crusoe, of York, Mariner…The Whole Three Volumes faithfully Abridg’ d, initially published by E.  Midwinter for A.  Bettesworth, J.  Brotherton, W. Meadows and M. Hotham, was claimed by Thomas Gent. For the full story, see Hutchins, Robinson Crusoe and its Printing. 6. Preface, The Farther Adventures: 4. 7. “The Publisher’s Introduction” to Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London:  printed for W. Taylor, 1720). 8. Gildon, Life and Strange Surprising Adventures: 34. 9. Ibid: 34, 35. For epitome in education, see Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster (1570) and Henry Bright, The Praxis … for the Use of Youth in the Lesser Schools (Oxford, 1783). 10. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language … Abstracted from the Folio Edition by the Author (London 1756). An epitome by someone else called Johnson’s Dictionary in Miniature likewise went through several editions Epitomes were made in virtually all fields  – law, medicine, history, navigation, philosophy and poetry. John Hook’s The Orlando of Ariosto, reduced to XXIV Books; the narrative connected and the stories disposed in a regular series (2 vols., London 1791) is notable because Hook had already published a full-length translation of the original. 11. The Life and Most Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner … The Whole three Volumes faithfully abridg’ d (London: printed by E. Midwinter, 1722): Preface, p. 2. 12. [John Collard,] An Epitome of Logic; in 4 Parts. By N.  Dralloc (London, 1795):  xii. The Philosophical Works of the Hon Robert Boyle, Esq; Abridg’ d, Methodiz’ d and Dispos’ d under General Heads (London, 1725):  ii. An epitome had to be shorter, but not short. The Philosophical Works abridged were 770 pages. 13. The Life and most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner (London: E. Midwinter, 1722): Preface p. 2. 14. The Wonderful Life and Most Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner … Faithfully Epitomized from the Three Volumes (London: printed for A. Bettesworth and C. Hitch, R. Ware and J. Hodges, 1737). 15. Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (3rd edn; London: Printed for W. Taylor, 1722): 296–7. 16. The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1722): 168–9. 17. The Wonderful Life and Most Surprizing Adventures (London, 1737): 75–6. 18. The Wonderful and Surprising Adventures of the renowned hero, Robinson Crusoe (Philadelphia:  Printed for Charles Cist, 1787):  123–4. The Life and Most Surprising Adventures only has: “By this time it was pretty late, when returning to their Boat, which they found a-ground in the Creek, the Tide out, and the Men gone, they ran about wringing their Hands, crying it was an enchanted Island, and they should all be Murder’d by Spirits or Devils. My men would willingly have fallen upon them, but I would not agree to hazard any of our own Party” (174).

236

Notes to pages 31–38

19. The earliest London abridgement, The Life and most Surprising Adventures, which worked primarily with cuts and paraphrase, remained closest to Defoe. The Wonderful Life and Surprising Adventures, which appeared in London twenty years later, was a different version of the earlier epitome, which included additions and alterations. Each of these epitomes was reprinted multiple times. Later there were “new editions” of each which made revisions, as well as versions which mixed elements of both epitomes together. Both epitome series were altered more dramatically when they made the Atlantic crossing. In America during the early Republic, titles were also sometimes reversed, with The Life and Most Surprizing Adventures containing a version of the text of The Wonderful Life or vice versa. Most chapbooks also appear to have been abridgements of one or other of these epitomes, rather than of Defoe’s original; and some chapbooks, especially. in America, introduced their own changes and additions. 20. Preface, Farther Adventures. For Defoe, see Richetti, Life of Daniel Defoe; Novak, Daniel Defoe; Backscheider, Daniel Defoe. 21. For instance, Novak, Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe; Hunter, Reluctant Pilgrim; Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography; Seidel, Robinson Crusoe. 22. Green, Seven Types of Adventure Tale:  51; Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire: 29. 23. For Defoe’s treatment of the different peoples of the Atlantic, see Wheeler, Complexion of Race, chap. 1 and Richetti, Life of Daniel Defoe: 187. 24. The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Philadelphia: printed for Peter Stewart, 1789): 51. 25. See Curtin’s very useful Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex. For Defoe’s treatment of Caribs, Boucher, Cannibal Encounters; Schmidgen, EighteenthCentury Fiction and the Law of Property, chap. 2; Gautier, “Slavery and the Fashioning of Race”; and Hulme, Colonial Encounters. 26. The Life and Most Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Philade­ lphia: printed by Peter Stewart, 1789): 24. See also same title Boston: Isaiah Thomas and E. T. Andrews, 1794; and that printed and sold in Wilmington by Peter Brynberg in 1796 which appear to be indebted to it. 27. The Life of Robinson Crusoe, Mariner (Boston, 1757): 9. 28. “A Journal of the Captivity and Sufferings of John Foss,” in Baepler (ed.), White Slaves: 75, 73; “God’s Mercy Surmounting Man’s Cruelty,” in Derounian-Stodola (ed.), Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives: 72. 29. Gildon, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures: xiv, 3. 30. However, one American chapbook, Travels of Robinson Crusoe. Written by Himself  (1786) replaces Defoe’s encomium on the middle class with an encomium on the early Republic (p. 6). 31. In Robinson Crusoe, (ed.) Shinagel: 6. Subsequent references to Defoe’s version will be to this edition and in the text. 32. Initial London versions of The Wonderful Life (1737) dealt with the parental prohibition by not explaining parental objections (“My father and my mother used a thousand arguments to dissuade me”) and by representing

Notes to pages 38–47

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Crusoe’s going to sea uncritically as a matter of personal preference (“my inclinations were bent another way, and nothing would serve my turn, but at all hazards I must go to sea” (8). Hugh Gaine’s New York version of The Wonderful Life (1774) attributed the parental objection to “the extreme uneasiness my father and mother showed at the thoughts of my leaving them” and turned their unstated cautions into a form of foreshadowing: “As if bent on my own destruction, I hardened my self against the prudent and kind advice of the most indulgent parents.” The chapbook series called Travels of Robinson Crusoe was more critical of his “roving” disposition. See, for instance, that issued by Isaiah Thomas in Worcester Mass in 1786. However, Thomas was targeting children and concluded with the following: “Note: If you learn this Book well and are good, you can buy a larger and more complete History of Mr. Crusoe, at your friend the Bookseller’s, in Worcester, near the Court House” (24). 33. Colley, Captives. For petitions, see, for instance, To the Right Honourable Commons of England in Parliament Assembled. The Humble petition of disconsolate Fathers and Wives, on Behalf of their distressed Children and Husbands, which are now Slaves and Captives in Algiers (London, 1681). 34. See Frohock, Heroes of Empire. 35. Lambert, Barbary Wars; Allison, The Crescent Obscured. 36. Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: 67. 37. Ferguson, Subject to Others. 38. The Life and most Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner (Philadelphia: printed by Peter Stewart, 1789): 78–9, 73. 39. Gildon, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures: 14. 40. Hunter, Reluctant Pilgrim: 21. See also chap. 3. 41. Following Gove, Imaginary Voyage: Catalogue. 42. For Barnard’s evangelical theology, see Daniel Williams, “Of Providence and Pirates.” 43. Ashton’s Memorial or an Authentick Account of the Strange Adventures and Signal Deliverances of Mr. Philip Ashton (London: printed for Richard Ford and Samuel Chandler, 1726). The American edition was subtitled “An History of the Strange Adventures” not “an Authentick Account.” 4 4. Page references in the text are to the American edition. 45. Heyman, Commerce and Culture; Dow and Edmonds, Pirates of the New England Coast; Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. 2. Cap t i v i t y a n d a n t islav e ry 1. Fuchs, Romance; Quint, Epic and Empire; Greene, Unrequited Conquests; de Armas Wilson, Cervantes, the Novel and the New World. 2. Stark, Female Tars; Druett, Hen Frigates; and Charles Johnston’s History of Pyrates (1724). 3. John Whiston and Benjamin White’s catalogue of 1758. Their 1760 catalogue classed Aubin’s novels among “the most esteemed modern books that have been published in fifty years past.”

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Notes to pages 48–53

4. Warner, “Elevation of the Novel”:  580; Richetti, Popular Fiction, chap. 6; Prescott, Women, Authorship and Literary Culture:  47, 51 and Prescott, “Penelope Aubin”; Mounsey, “‘bring her naked from her bed … ”; Welham, “The Particular Case of Penelope Aubin.” 5. Baer,“Penelope Aubin and the Pirates of Madagascar.” 6. Penelope Aubin, The Noble Slaves: or the Lives and Adventures of Two Lords and Two Ladies (London, 1722): 201. Subsequent page references will be in the text. 7. The London Journal: 83, Sat. Sept. 25, 1720 (p. 4); 110, Sat. Sept. 2, 1721 (p. 4); 116, Sat. Oct. 14, 1721 (p. 2); 124, Sat. Dec. 9, 1921 (p. 3). 8. American captives were released from slavery in July 1796, but it took some, like John Foss, another year to get home. Baepler, White Slaves: 71–2. 9. If anything, this gave her more geographical range and flexibility. In Charlotta, for instance, characters travel to and from Virginia, Barbados, San Domingo, Carolina, Newfoundland, Canada and Mexico in the Americas; Morocco, Tunis and Algiers in North Africa; Ireland, England, France, Spain and Italy in Europe; and the area around the Oronooko River in West Africa. 10. Joseph Pitts, “A True and Faithful Account of the Religion and Manners of the Mohammetans, with an Account of the Author’s being taken Captive” (1704) in Matar (ed.), Piracy, Slavery and Redemption: 221. 11. Armstrong, “Captivity and Cultural Capital”:  373; Armstrong and Tennenhouse, The Imaginary Puritan; Baepler, “The Barbary Captivity Narrative”; Snader, “The Oriental Captivity Narrative”; Derounian-Stodola, Introduction, Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives; Colley, Captives. 12. Zach, “Mrs Aubin and Richardson’s Earliest Literary Manifesto.” 13. Hartman, Providence Tales and “Providence Tales and Indian Captivity Narrative”; Richetti, Popular Fiction. 14. Even these marriages are ambiguously moral in contemporary terms, for the ladies have been trepann’d, abducted or sent away by a parent or guardian in order to prevent them from marrying the suitors they now marry. Along with filial duty and rank, parental objections to a love match due to disparities of rank or fortune and family ambitions, are left behind when Aubin’s heroines enter the Atlantic. 15. Penelope Aubin, The Life of Charlotta Dupont, an English Lady (London, 1723): 60. Subsequent page references will be in the text. 16. Linda Colley observes that many captive British and European women “disappeared into households that never gave them up for ransom,” and that if they had children by their owners, they might not have wished to be redeemed. “Narrative of Elizabeth Marsh”: 141. 17. Dorinda, Miranda, Louise, Lucy and Catherine in Charlotta, Anna’s mother and Eleanor in Noble Slaves. 18. Starr, “Escape from Barbary”; Baepler, Introduction, White Slaves: 33. 19. Namias, White Captives; Derounian-Stodola and Levernie, The Indian Captivity Narrative.

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20. The nobility of Aubin’s slaves is significant here, for female violence was associated in England with the criminal lower orders. See Kilday, “Women and Crime” and Laura Brown’s “Amazons and Africans” in Ends of Empire. 21. Emilia and Teresa are able to reconstitute their families and slip back into their erstwhile roles on their return from captivity, as captured American frontiers’ women often could not. Readjustment to white society was often more difficult than Aubin supposed. 22. Burnham, Captivity and Sentiment.: 130. 23. Egan, Authorizing Experience: 57. 24. The corollary was that Rowlandson did not believe that “Praying Indians” were genuine converts; they too must be putting on the enemy’s “habits” as necessary or convenient. 25. See, for instance, Derounian-Stodola and Levernie, The Indian Captivity Narrative: 76ff. 26. Jonathan Dickinson, God’s Protecting Providence (3rd edn., London, 1720): Preface, 7. 27. In Baepler (ed.), White Slaves: 75, 79. 28. For early transatlantic antislavery discourses, Bruns (ed.), Am I not a Man and a Brother; Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings; Gilbert, “God Preserve … New England: Richard Baxter and his American Friends”; Rosenberg, “Thomas Tryon”; David Brion Davis in Bender (ed.), The Anti-Slavery Debate; Gould, Barbaric Traffic. 29. Morgan Godwyn, The Negro’s and Indian’s Advocate (London, 1680): 28–9. 30. Samuel Sewall, The Selling of Joseph, a Memorial (Boston, 1700):  2, 3. For Sewall’s position, see David Brion Davis, Problem of Slavery:  341ff; Von Frank, “John Saffin”; Peterson, “Bostonians, Antislavery and the Protestant International.” 31. The Athenian Oracle, the Second Edition, printed at London, 1704 (Boston, 1705): 1. 32. A Collection of Novels, selected and revised by Mrs. Griffith (London, 1777): 51–2. 33. Haywood, Spectacular Violence: 2, 4. 34. See Castiglia, Bound and Determined, and Sharon Harris, Executing Race. 35. Montgomery, “White Captives, African Slaves”: 615, 622. 36. Their edition says “reprinted by” but not from where; subsequent editions, which appear to be reprints of this, only say “printed by” or “printed and sold by.” 37. For the relation of providence tales to captivity tales, see Hartman, Providence Tales. 38. This move was repeated when Rowlandson was reprinted in America during the 1770s. The Boston edition of 1773 is entitled: A Narrative of the Captivity, Sufferings and Removes of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. 39. For relations between Puritans in England and New England:  Foster, The Long Argument; Bremer, Congregational Communion and “Increase Mather’s Friends”; M.  G.  Hall, The Last American Puritan. For the argument with James II, Lewis, “Royal Government”; Sosin, English America

240

Notes to pages 62–67

and the Restoration Monarchy; Bliss, Revolution and Empire; Middlekauf, The Mathers. 40. Toulouse, “The Sovereignty and Goodness of God in 1682”: 934, 939. Gary Ebersole observes that the Boston title emphasized theology, the English title the veracity of the account (Captured by Texts:  19); Tara Fitzpatrick argues that Rowlandson must be distinguished from the male ministers who used her narrative for their own ends (“The Figure of the Captive”). 41. Katherine Zabelle Derounian-Stodola observes that in the London advert for Rowlandson’s narrative, the printer was Thomas Parkhurst, a Presbyterian who regularly published the New England clergy, but on the actual London imprint the publisher is Joseph Poole, whose only known publication this is. Derounian-Stodola, “Publication, Promotion and Distribution of Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative”:  239 ff. In fact, the imprint is silent about the printer and publisher, and says only “sold by Joseph Poole, at the Blue Bowl in the Long Walk by Christ Church Hospital.” London printers concealed their identity when they judged that the material they were publishing was politically incorrect and likely to get them into trouble with the authorities. 42. Sieminski, “The Puritan Captivity Narrative”; Sekora, “Red, White and Black” in Shuffleton (ed.), A Mixed Race. 43. Namias, White Captives: 36. 3. The pa r allel At la n t ic e c onomy 1. Two versions of the story were published in 1727, one signed by Peter Longueville, who complains in his Preface that the other version, printed by J. Cluer and A. Campbell who had purchased his copy, “made one Mr. Dorington, a Pretended Bristol Merchant on whom he Fathers a Journal at the End of my first Book to be the Author of the present History.” Following Arundel Esdaile (“Author and Publisher in 1727”), Longueville is therefore supposed to be the narrative’s author. However, the version that was subsequently reprinted and altered was Cluer and Campbell’s; its differences from the Longueville version include a different Preface and a more polished, grammatically correct style. 2. Harkins, “From Robinson Crusoe to Philip Quarll”: 68. 3. For other techniques, see Bannet, “Quixotes, Imitations and Transatlantic Genres.” 4. As a publisher, Chetwood’s imprints included Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess (1719), which rivaled Robinson Crusoe’s sales, Haywood’s British Recluse (1722) and Idalia (1723), Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) and Colonel Jack (1724), Mme. Aulnoy’s novels (1721), and The Arabian Nights (1721–2). William Burling points out that his detailed knowledge of different parts of the world suggests that Chetwood may have traveled extensively in his youth. (Burling, “Chetwood, William Rufus.”) For Chetwood’s mix of fact and fiction, see Freeman, “The Beginnings of Shakespearean (and Jonsonian) Forgery.”

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5. The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Robert Boyle (London:  printed for John Watts, 1726): 170. Subsequent page references to this edition are in the text. This is a rewrite of a scene at the end of Defoe’s Colonel Jack. 6. For Defoe’s position, see Novak, “Colonel Jack’s Thieving-Roguing Trade.” 7. For early free trade arguments in England, Irwin, Against the Tide; E.  A.  J.  Johnson, Predecessors of Adam Smith; Finkelstein, Harmony and Balance, and Cherry, “The Development of the English Free Trade Movement.” For America, Jensen, Maritime Commerce; Barrow, Trade and Empire, and Matson, Merchants and Empire. 8. Pollexfen, A Discourse on Trade, Coyne and Paper Credit (London, 1697): 125, iii, 151. 9. Doerflinger, Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise; Matson, Merchants and Empire. 10. Baylin, Atlantic History: 88 and Liss, Atlantic Empires. 11. Grahn, “Carthagena and its Hinterland” in Knight and Liss, (ed.) Atlantic Port Cities: 178. For “smuggling” of this sort throughout Spanish America see the other essays in that book. 12. For the issues here, see Netzloff, England’s Internal Colonies. 13. Beer, “Penelope Aubin and the Pirates of Madagascar.” 14. Aubin, Charlotta Dupont: 77. 15. Rediker, “Under the Banner of the King’s Death.” 16. Richetti, Popular Fiction: 84ff. According to the ESTC, Captain Singleton ran to only five editions and only in Britain. Chetwood’s view of Dampier corresponds with that in the latest DNB. For a different view of him, see Edwards, Story of the Voyage. 17. Chetwood’s novel suggested an incompatibility between patriotic piratical wars and free and open transnational and trans-imperial trade, for whenever patriotic rivalries intrude upon trade, violence and disharmony follow. 18. Semmel, Rise of Free Trade Imperialism. 19. Winslow, “Sussex Smugglers” in Albion’s Fatal Tree:  148; McLynn, Crime and Punishment, chap. 10; Hancock, “Rethinking the Economy of British America,” in Matson (ed.), Economy of Early America. 20. Quoted in Jensen, Maritime Commerce: 145, 152. 21. Tyler, Smugglers and Patriots; Schlesinger, Colonial Merchants; McClellan, Smuggling in the American Colonies; Jensen, Maritime Commerce; and Joshua Smith, Borderland Smuggling. 22. Banning, “Political Economy and the Creation of the Federal Republic,” in Konig, Devising Liberty; Lambert, The Barbary Wars; Bourgin, The Great Challenge; Coatsworth, “American Trade with European Colonies.” 23. I am not sure that it was possible to go around the Atlantic in this direction. 24. The Hermit (Westminster:  printed by J. Cluer and A. Campbell, for T. Warner and B. Creake, 1727): v–vi, vi, vii. Subsequent references will be in the text. 25. For Defoe, Hanson, “Criminal Conversations”; McBurney, “Colonel Jacques”; Faller, Crime and Defoe; and O’Brien, “Union Jack.”

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Notes to pages 79–90

26. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England: 124 27. Hay, “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law” in Hay, Albion’s Fatal Tree: 45, 48 28. Bailyn, Voyagers to the West. 29. Frances Hutcheson, Collected Works: 4: 279. This is a version of John Locke’s “God having made Man such a Creature, that, in his own Judgement it was not good for him to be alone, put him under strong Obligations of Necessity, Convenience and Inclination to drive him into Society…” Two Treatises on Government, (ed.) Peter Laslett: 2: #77. 30. For islands as Edens and ecologies, Grove, Green Imperialism and Gillis, Islands of the Mind. 31. Novak, Defoe and the Nature of Man; for a critique of gratitude, Boulukos, “Daniel Defoe’s Colonel Jack.” 32. Bassin, “English Landscape Garden”: 32; Lamb, Preserving the Self: 207. 33. “On Modern Gardening,” in The Works of Horace Walpole (London 1798): ii: 541. Bassin also argues that Caroline’s garden was viewed as “a kind of earthly paradise” and that Stephen Duck, “the natural man, the unlearned, unschooled poet,” was being coopted to natural religion and science (“Kent’s Hermitage for Queen Caroline”: 190, 188). See also, Manning, “Hermits and Monks”; Hudson, “The Hermit and Divine Providence”; and Hunt, “Emblem and Expression in the Eighteenth-Century Landscape Garden.” 34. Slauter, “Being Alone in the Age of the Social Contract”: 11. 35. It appears to be loosely based on John Marshall’s London abridgement of 1790, but is substantially different, both in the order of events and in the comments about them. 4.  Fort u n e ’ s fo o t balls 1. For characteristics of the genre, see Faller, Turned to Account; Ian Bell, Literature and Crime; Gladfelder, Criminality and Narrative; and Cohen, Pillars of Salt. 2. This bipartite reading stems from Cathy N.  and Arnold E. Davidson, “Royall Tyler’s Algerine Captive”: 53, and Tanselle, Royall Tyler. 3. Gardner, Master Plots: 50; Margulis, “Spies, Pirates and White Slaves”: 18; Dennis, “Legitimizing the Novel”:  74; Spengemann, Adventurous Muse: 122. 4. James Butler, Fortune’s Foot-ball: or, the Adventures of Mercutio. Founded on Matters of Fact. A Novel in two volumes (Harrisburg, PA: printed by John Wyeth, 1797; vol. ii: 1798). 5. Thompson, Suffering Traveller: 15. 6. Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England: 80. For Bickerstaff, Tasch, Dramatic Cobbler. 7. The Life and Adventures of Ambrose Gwinett, well known to the Public as the Lame Beggar Man (London: printed by John Lever, 1770): 12.

Notes to pages 90–95

243

8. The Life and Adventures of Ambrose Gwinett, Apprentice to an Attorney at Law (Norwich, Conn. printed and sold by John Trumbull, 1784): 22; The Life and Strange Unparallel’ d and Unheard of Voyages and Adventures of Ambrose Gwinett (US: printed for the Travelling Booksellers, 1798): 23. 9. Walsh, Strong Representations: 15, 28, 16. 10. Barrell, “Afterword” in Maclean et al., The Country and the City: 235. 11. As far as I can tell, this quarrel arose from the fact that W. Owen, co-publisher of the Sherborne edition, was taken up and prosecuted as a Jacobin during the interval between the two versions. Fielding appears to have been involved. 12. An Apology for the Life of Bampfylde-Moore Carew (Sherborne:  printed by R.  Goadby and sold by W. Owen, London, 1749):  87–8. For a critical view of literary beggars such as Bampfylde became in Goadby’s hands, see Hitchcock, “Literary Beggars” in Wall (ed.), Concise Companion to the Restoration and Eighteenth Century; for contemporary attitudes to beggars and itinerants, Hansen, “Criminal Conversations.” 13. For the sources of these descriptions, Wilkinson (ed.), King of the Beggars and Berson, “The Memoirs of Bampfylde-Moore Carew.” 14. Fielding argued that with few exceptions, the poor were poor because they were idle, or because they drank, gambled, and spent too much time and money on diversions. He demanded strong, authoritarian measures to control and punish the poor, including implementation of laws from less “enlightened” ages which had been allowed to fall into desuetude; he also approved laws punishing “conspiracies” for raising wages or limiting hours of work among artificers, working men and laborers, describing this as “treason.” 15. The Monthly Review (1749 October): 457. 16. Ibid. Fielding wrote: “Mankind are so forward to relieve the Distresses of their Fellow Creatures that every Beggar, who can but moderately well personate Misery, is sure to find Relief and Encouragement, and this, though the Giver of the Gift must have great Reason to doubt the Reality of Distress, and when he can scarce be ignorant that his Bounty is Illegal, and that he is encouraging a Nuisance.” Enquiry (Dublin, 1751): 36. 17. The London Magazine, or Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer 22 (1753 April): 183, 184. See also The Lady’s Magazine which serialized a similar but not identical abridgement in 1750 (October and Nov.), nos. 25 and 26. 18. Morgan and Rushton, Eighteenth Century Criminal Transportation: 80–4. 19. The Life of Bampfylde-Moore Carew, Sometime King of the Beggars (Philadelphia: William M’Carty, Ann Cochran, printer,1813). 20. The Life, Voyages and Adventures of Bampfylde-Moore Carew … Collected and Amended from his known Writings by Thomas Price of Poole, in Devon (London:  printed for J.  Barker, Mr. Brown, Bristol and Mr Fish, Exeter, c. 1785). 21. Marshall, The English Poor.

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Notes to pages 96–111

22. For an interesting perspective on the assurance that it was possible to so thoroughly disguise oneself as to be unrecognizable even to one’s friends, see Morgan and Rushton, “Visible Bodies.” 23. The Life and Adventures of Bampfylde-Moore Carew, commonly called King of the Beggars, Being an Impartial Account of his Life (London: sold by T. Foster, R. Armstrong, J. Digby and W. Locke, 1779): 10. Page numbers in the text for the “ Impartial account” are to this edition. 24. Ibid.: 57. 25. The Algerine Captive, (ed.) Caleb Crain (New York:  Modern Library, 2002):  62. This reproduces the 1797 Carlyle edition References will be to this edition and in the text. 26. Quoted in Tanselle, Royall Tyler, p.147. 27. Reprinted innumerable times throughout the century in Britain, Roderick Random was also reprinted in America in 1794, and then again four times in the early nineteenth century. 28. Jones, “The Strolling Poor”: p. 28. 29. Margulis, “Spies”: 17, 21. 30. For the Quixotic note in this and other passages, see Wood, Quixotic Fictions of the USA. 31. For a reading of this part of the novel in relation to American Indian captivity narratives, see Gardner, Master Plots: chap. 2. 32. The point is reaffirmed at the end of the novel, when Underhill’s cruel Tunisian master is captured by the Portuguese ship. Underhill has to physically prevent another of the Tunisian’s slaves, now freed by the Portuguese, from doing him violence. 33. Crescenzo, “Ernestlie Lookinge for a Better Countre”: 23. 34. The Critical Review 35 (1802 May): 113. 35. Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986): 201. 36. See also Gardner, Master Plots: 37ff. 37. Quoted in Tanselle: 141, 147. 38. See Gelles, “Gossip.” 39. Amory, “The North East Book Trade” in The Colonial Book: 337. 40. For the very minor changes in the text of the English edition, see Tanselle, “Early American Fiction in England.” 41. The Monthly Review 42 (1803, Sept): p. 93. 42. Quoted in Tanselle, Royall Tyler: 146. I n t roduc t ion to Pa rt I I 1. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom; Lancaster, “Almost Chattel”; Jordan, White over Black; Berlin, Many Thousands Gone; Linebaugh and Rediker, Many Headed Hydra, David Brion Davis, Problem of Slavery; Eltis, Rise of African Slavery.

Notes to pages 112–119

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2. Bridget Hill, Women’s Work and Servants; Boydston, “The Woman Who Wasn’t There”; Waldstreicher, Runaway America; George, London Life; Foyster, Marital Violence; Dolan, Dangerous Familiars; Daniels and Kennedy (eds.), Over the Threshold, and Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe. 3. Clark, English Society: 83. 4. For the complex positionalities of servants, Robbins, The Servant’s Hand. 5. Doyle, Freedom’s Empire. 5. The b on ds of se rv i t u de 1. Salinger, “To Serve Well and Faithfully”; Abbot Emerson Smith, Colonists in Bondage; Van der Zee, Bound Over; Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery; Kenneth Morgan, Slavery and Servitude; and Menard (ed.), Migrants, Servants and Slaves. 2. Frank Gees Black, “Edward Kimber”; Homestead, “Beginnings of the American Novel,” in Hayes, Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature.  Matthew Mason and Nicholas Mason, editors of the recent Broadview reprint, describe it as “a highly readable, still entertaining primer on transatlantic history and culture” (p. 11) but endorse the criticism below. 3. Rozbicki, Complete Colonial Gentleman: 95, 102. In error, Rozbicki gives Mr Anderson’s publication date as 1782. 4. Hayes, “Introduction” to Kimber, Itinerant Observations. Hayes’ introduction and notes are by far the best resource available on Kimber. 5. Oglethorpe, Some Account of the Design of the Trustees for establishing Colonys in America: 11, 13. 6. Lane (ed.), General Oglethorpe’s Georgia: Colonial Letters, 1713–43. 7. Kimber uses this phrase in “On Oglethorpe,” in Hayes, Itinerant Observations: 80, and again in “Parallel between the late Earl of Peterborough and General Oglethorpe,” London Magazine 13 (Nov. 1744): 544. 8. Edward Kimber, A Relation or Journal of a late Expedition to the Gates of St. Augustine, on Florida, Conducted by the Hon. General James Oglethorpe (London, 1744); “Present Danger of our North American Colonies,” London Magazine 13 (Sept. 1744): 444–6; “Parallel between the late Earl of Peterborough,” London Magazine 13 (Nov. 1744):  544. See also Spalding, Oglethorpe in America . 9. In Hayes, Itinerant Observations, p. 80; A Relation or Journal: 35. 10. London Magazine (June 1755): note, p. 287. 11. Milne, “A Glimpse of Colonial America.” 12. Heyes, Itinerant Observations: 50–1. 13. Preface to The Life and Adventures of Joe Thompson (Dublin, 1750): xiii. 14. Williamson, “A Curious Discourse on Kidnapping,” in French and Indian Cruelty (London, 1759):  102; Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman, return’ d from a thirteen year slavery in America, (Pts. I and II, London, 1743; Pt. III, London, 1747). Elizabeth Ashbridge’s case falls into the category of

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Notes to pages 119–133

those Williamson describes as being deluded about the work and the plantations, in order to catch them on their own, and confine them until their ship left for the colonies. Though Some Account of the Early Part of the Life of Elizabeth Ashbridge was published much later (Philadelphia, 1807), her abduction occurred during the 1730s. 15. Smollett, Roderick Random (Oxford, 1979): xlv. 16. In the Broadview edition, p. 53. All further references will be to this edition, and in the text. 17. Preface to Joe Thompson, vii. 18. Oglethorpe, Some Account of the Design of the Trustees, p. 11. 19. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia; quoted in Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: 375. 20. Schellenberg, The Professionalization of Women Writers: 130; Monthly Review 10 (Feb 1754): 147. 21. Kent, Goldsmith and His Booksellers:  29. Later the Monthly not only took great pleasure in hunting out inaccuracies in Kimber’s three books on the Peerage, The Peerage of England, Ireland and Scotland, but repeated the exercise for Kimber’s corrected second edition Monthly Review 35 (Oct 1766): 312; 37 (Aug 1767); 146; 38 (May 1768): 402; 40 (Feb 1769): 174. 22. Morgan, Slavery and Servitude; Salinger, To Serve Well and Faithfully; Bailyn, Journey to the West. 23. Morgan and Rushton, Eighteenth Century Criminal Transportation: 4. 24. Ekirch, Bound for America: 137. 25. Quoted in Ekirch, Bound for America: 138. 26. Jupiter Hammon, An Address to the Negroes in the State of New York (New York: Daniel Humphreys, 1787): 5. 27. For this story’s anti-French, anti-Catholic slant, Kidd, “Recovering the French Convert.” 28. The Family Instructor (Philadelphia:  printed and sold by Stewart and Cochran, 1792): 6. 29. See Moore, Appearance of Truth for the parallels. 30. Rowe and Marietta, “Personal Violence” in Over the Threshold:  29; Also Snyder, Brabbling Women; Brown, Good Wives. 31. Miller, “Governing the Passions” in Over The Threshold: 50, 58. Also Okin, Crime and the Nation; Meranza, Laboratories of Virtue, and Marietta and Rowe, Troubled Experiment. 32. The Pleasing history of Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded. Being the entertaining history of a beautiful young damsel who rose almost from the lowest to the highest station of life (Boston: printed and sold by Samuel Hall, c. 1793). Hall’s 1797 edition is Newbery’s. 33. Sabor, “Cooke-Everyman edition of Pamela.” 34. Keymer and Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace. 35. Only Isaiah Thomas’s Worcester edition, Kirk’s New York edition, and Samuel Hall’s second Boston edition of 1797 included Newbery’s concluding explanations. 36. See Keymer and Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace.

Notes to pages 133–142

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37. The History of Pamela:  or Virtue Rewarded, Abridged from the Works of Samuel Richardson, Esq. (London:  printed for Francis Newbery, 1779):  1. Page references in the text will be to this edn. 38. Straub, Domestic Affairs: 50, 52 39. For The Life and Actions of Moll Flanders, and its origin in a newspaper abridgement, Shaw, “Serialization of Moll Flanders.” 40. Gladfelder, Criminality and Narrative: 84–5. 41. Leominster’s Life of Poll Flanders (1800) has much the same passage and contrast, but it emphasizes the point by returning Moll to England, where she cannot help falling back into vice, before bringing her back to America to enjoy peace, piety, virtue and prosperity with her good Lancashire husband on their Virginia estate. 42. Waldstreicher, Runaway America: 6. 6.  B on d a n d f r ee : c on t emp or a ry r ea di ngs of Gron n io saw ’ s L ife 1. Gates, “Gronniosaw and the Trope of the Talking Book”: 259, 257. 2. Since Gates, E. B. Dubois and Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, the notion that different or contradictory messages are transmitted by black-authored texts has been explored under a variety of theoretical rubrics. See for instance, Sekora, “Black Message/White Envelope”; Zafar, We Wear the Mask; and Barrio-Vilar, “Narrating the African Self.” 3. This began in Gates’ The Signifying Monkey. 4. See, for instance, Littlefield, “Almost an Englishman”; Woodward, AfricanBritish Writings; Constanzo, Surprising Narrative; and Gates’ The Signifying Monkey. 5. As Gates has shown, “shared modes of figuration result only when writers read each other’s texts and seize upon topoi and tropes to revise in their own texts.” “Gronniosaw,” 254. 6. I am relying here on Potkay and Burr, Black Atlantic Writers. 7. Carretta (ed.), Unchained Voices: n. 1, p. 54. All page numbers to Gronniosaw, Marrant, and Cugoano in this chapter will be from this edition, and in the text. 8. Because Unchained Voices abridges Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, quotes from that are taken from Olauda Equiano, the Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, (ed.) Vincent Carretta. Page numbers also in the text. 9. Gronniosaw’s narrative also obviously passed muster with his amanuensis, a “young lady from Leadminster,” subsequently identified in America as Hannah More. It has been suggested that her hand may appear in some of the text’s more unctuous and ill-fitting pieties. One or two American editions left out the Preface, but kept the epigraph from Isaiah 43:16, which made Shirley’s overall point: “I will bring the Blind by a Way they know not … I will make darkness light before them, and crooked things straight, These things I will do unto them and not forsake them.” The Salem, NY, edition of 1809, which was retitled The Black Prince, omitted the epigraph

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Notes to pages 142–150

and curtailed the preface to a paragraph describing how it had come into print. It changed the wording of the original to describe the text as “worthy the notice of every humane mind,” and cut out the last two sentences of the text which appealed to God, to leave the reader on Gronniosaw’s appeal for support. There were also additions at the end, to shape the reading in various directions. The Leeds edition c. 1790 concluded with “A few Providential Deliverances in America,” where the first person narrator, who is presumably Gronniosaw, describes being miraculously saved by God from an alligator, a poisonous snake bite and a bear in America. The Catskill, NY, edition of 1810, added a story about “a pious Negro woman” in the Caribbean who worshiped an invisible God through sacrifices and prayers of thanks, while knowing nothing of Jesus or of Christianity. Besides “proving” that it was possible for Gronniosaw to reach a knowledge of God without the Bible or the Christian church, this was supposed to settle the debate about whether “God does ever extend salvation to the Heathen, to whom … a Redeemer has not been revealed.” (90). 10. For the palm tree in African religion, see Gates, Signifying Monkey: 15–17 and Parrinder, West African Religion. 11. For Job, see Thomas Bluett, Memoirs of the Life of Job, the Son of Solomon the High Priest of Bonda in Africa (London, 1734); Edwards and Walvin, Black Personalities; and Grant, The Fortunate Slave. For other cases, Shyllon, Black People in Britain: chaps. 4 and 5. 12. Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments overtly supported the abolitionist James Ramsay’s Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the Sugar Colonies (1784) against James Tobin’s Cursory Remarks (1785) which attacked Ramsay. But in the process he both used and answered a number of other texts, many of which he did not name. These included Gronniosaw’s and Marrant’s Narratives. 13. For the “class solidarity” between white and black people, see Myers, Reconstructing the Black Past:  120ff. Roxann Wheeler argues that in the 1780s, “Britons treated blacks in Britain often in the same way that they treated Catholics, Jews, Scots and the French” (Complexion of Race: 259). 14. Cugoano argued that “Africa has been robbed of its inhabitants; its free born sons and daughters have been stole, and kid-napped, and violently taken away, and carried into captivity and cruel bondage” (166) and that “African villains” who traveled into the interior parts of the country to steal and kidnap men or who went to war with other Africans only to get slaves, were a major part of the problem (154). 15. Walvin, An African’s Life: 7. 16. Carretta, “Property of the Author” in Carretta and Gould, Genius in Bondage. 17. Wheeler,“ ‘Betrayed by Someone of My Own Complexion’,” in Genius in Bondage. 18. For the proximity of Christian conversion and West African religious traditions of ecstatic soul possession, for “synchretic Christianity,” and for work

Notes to pages 150–165

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that has been done on these topics, Potkay and Burr, “Introduction,” Black Atlantic Writers; Echervo, “Theologizing underneath the Tree”, and note 35 in the next chapter. 19. Gould, “Remarkable Liberty” in Genius in Bondage, p.122. 20. Melish, Disowning Slavery: 49. 21. Edwards and Walvin, Black Personalities: 24. For black poverty, Fyer, Staying Power and Shyllon, Black People in Britain. 22. Philip D. Morgan, “Black Life in Eighteenth-Century Charleston”; White, “We dwell in safety and pursue our honest callings”; Newman, “A Chosen Generation”; and Joanna Brooks, “The Early American Public Sphere.” Ira Berlin argues that slaves were already buying their freedom in New England and New York in the seventeenth century (Many Thousands Gone). 23. Linebaugh and Rediker, Many Headed Hydra. 7.  S ams on O c c om ’ s i t i n e r a nc ies 1. The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, (ed.) Joanna Brooks: 78. Henceforth Brooks and in the text. 2. Ronda, “‘We are Well as We Are’ ” :  67. As Laura Stevens has shown (The Poor Indians), missionary texts were generally ethnocentric, selfserving and designed to provide sentimental Christian readers with “poor Indians” who could elicit their pity and their pounds. For recent examples of the missionary-­c entered approach, see Elord, “I did not make myself so’ and Weinstein, “Samson Occom”  in Weinstein, Enduring Traditions. 3. A Gentleman of Fortune, The New Art of Letter Writing (London, 1763): 20. 4. Quoted in Love, Samson Occom: 153. 5. Letter from Dr Andrew Gifford to Occom on his return to America in 1768, quoted in Love, p. 148. 6. Warrior, Tribal Secrets: 2, 3. 7. An Indian Preacher in England, ed. Leon Burr Richardson: 118. Henceforth Richardson and in the text. 8. Murray (ed.), To Do Good to My Indian Brethren: 206–7. 9. Strong, The Montaukett Indians of Eastern Long Island; Richter, Facing East from Indian Country; Axtell, The Invasion Within. 10. Roach, Cities of the Dead: 24. 11. Quoted in Peyer, Tutor’ d Mind: 61. 12. Axtell, Invasion Within, esp. chap. 2; and Wyss, Writing Indians: esp. chap. 1. 13. Writing for the Boston Commissioners, Andrew Oliver insisted: “We think it highly improbable that he should have lived in a State of Heathenism, while Lecturers and school masters were then supported among them [by us]” (Richardson, 294). 14. Wheelock, A Plain and Faithful Narrative of the Original Design, Rise, Progress and Present State of the Indian Charity School at Lebanon in Connecticut (Boston, 1763): 20.

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Notes to pages 165–173

15. Wheelock, A Brief Narrative of the Indian Charity School in Lebanon in Connecticut (London, 1766):  38. This is Samuel Kirkland’s explanation of the same problem, of keeping Indian children in school. 16. Lisa Brooks, “The Common Pot,” n. 63, p. 102. 17. Wheelock, Plain and Faithful Narrative, p. 25. 18. This goal was more important to Occom and to his nation than he made it seem, for as Sandra Gustafson has pointed out:  “Both Europeans and Native Americans identified textuality, particularly the use of Scriptures, as a crucial difference” between Christianity and native religions, and “English reliance on written deeds made literacy a crucial secular as well as sacred skill for natives involved in land transfers.” Gustafson, Eloquence is Power: 39, 35.One might add that Christianity was the hegemonic ideology in eighteenth-century Connecticut, which was still dominated politically and religiously by the old Puritan Standing Order, and that textuality and Christianity were imbibed together – the Bible, being readily available, also served as a reading textbook. 19. It was not always easy to get away from Wheelock’s school. Wheelock sent home an Indian student who was (or appeared) extremely sick, and was told by his family that the young man subsequently died; Lisa Brooks shows that this student did not die – he was removed from the school because he was needed to act as an interpreter at an important treaty negotiation, and continued to serve his people as an interpreter for many years thereafter. Since there is nothing in Occom’s surviving writings to suggest that he subsequently had any trouble with his eyes, this too may have been a means of leaving the school rather than a statement of fact. 20. The Boston Newsletter and New England Chronicle, (March 13, 1766): 3. 21. I am indebted to Joanna Brooks for this point. 22. Hall, Contested Boundaries; Lambert, Inventing the Great Awakening. 23. Working among the Stonington Pequots, Fish resented “their great Fondness for the Indian Teachers” and the fact that Indians stopped coming to listen to his sermons when the native minister, Revd. Samuel Niles, withdrew his support. Simmons and Simmons (eds.), Old Light on Separate Ways. David Jewett complained about Occom’s “interference” in his domain to the Boston Commissioners. 24. A Plain and Faithful Narrative, p. 17. 25. Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: xxi and passim. 26. For Wheelock’s difficulties with the independence of his Indian students and for the latters’ “elaborate combination of deference and defiance”, see Murray, “Pray Sir, Consider a Little.” 27. Warrior, “Canaanites, Cowboys and Indians” in Treat (ed.), Native and Christian. 28. Bickham, Savages Within the Empire: 88ff; Merritt, At the Crossroads: 263ff. 29. Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters. 30. David M’Clure, Memoirs of the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock (Newburyport, 1811): 47. According to M’Clure, Occom would have known this much by

Notes to pages 173–176

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1768. John Thornton, treasurer of the London Trust, later made it clear that he and his colleagues also thought that Occom had been “hardly treated” financially, and had “suffered” unfairly by his transatlantic itinerancy. Though “Occom was the Instrument (under God) that was the means of collecting all the money,” Thornton pointed out, Whitaker not Occom “benefitted” (Richardson: 359). Despite being regarded in England as “a double minded artful Man” who could “by no means help [the] cause” (ibid.: 357), Whitaker received a sizable lump sum from the London Trust before sailing back to America; his wife was adequately provided for during his absence; and he received a comfortable ministerial living on his return. But Occom returned to America in 1768 as poor as ever. His wife was not adequately supported by Wheelock during his absence, and debts that Wheelock had promised to pay for Occom had not been paid. Nor was there any ministry awaiting him. 31. While Occom was separating his Indian followers from their erstwhile British–American allies, Wheelock was separating his American school from its erstwhile British patrons. Wheelock schemed to extract the money that Occom had raised in Britain from the keeping of the London Trust, and ultimately managed to dissolve it in favor of an American board of advisors made up of his own acquiescent friends. As the American Revolution approached, therefore, each man was pursuing his own separatist path. 32. Brooks, American Lazarus: 60. 33. Occom was equally shocked in Britain to find “there were Some at Churches Singing and Preaching, in the Streets some Cursing, Swaring and Damning one another”(Brooks: 267), and later observed that Indians were fortunate in their languages, since these made it impossible to curse or take God’s name in vain. 34. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: 84. 35. Fawcett, Medicine Trail; Wyss, Writing Indians: 73ff; also Thomas, Manitou and God. Deloria, God is Red: 80; Warrior, Tribal Secrets; Brooks, American Lazarus:  65. For syncretism, Calloway, New World for All; Bellin, The Demon of the Continent; Bross, Dry Bones and Indian Sermons; and Pointer, Encounters of the Spirit. The last argues that syncretism affected Europeans as well as Indians. 36. For much of the eighteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic, hangings were public events that were preceded by a sermon and – when this could be obtained – by an admission on the part of the person about to be hanged of the justice of the judgment that had condemned him or her to death. 37. For the sermon as an example of evangelical theology, see Ruoff, “Introduction to Samson Occom’s Sermon”; Bosco, “Lectures from the Pillory”; and Minnick, “The New England Execution Sermon”. For a different reading of the double voiced character of this sermon, see Murray, Forked tongues. 38. Chamberlain, “The Execution of Moses Paul”: 447.

252

Notes to pages 177–188

39. William Stillhouse to the Government and Council of Connecticut. Quoted in Szasz (ed.), Between Indian and White Worlds: 72. 40. Mancall, Deadly Medicine. 41. Dowd, Spirited Resistance, quoted pp.  33, 20; also Merritt, At the Crossroads. Occom’s remarks are usually related to some notable New England sermons on drunkenness by Puritan and other ministers; one doesn’t preclude the other. 42. A Sermon, Read at the Execution of Moses Paul, An Indian, 3rd edn. (New London: printed and sold by T. Green, 1772): 2, 24. Only one American edition lacks the appendix: A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian (New Haven: printed and sold by T. and S. Green, 1773?). 43. Quoted in Chamberlain, “Execution”: 439. 4 4. A Sermon at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian. … To which is added A short Account of the Late Spread of the Gospel among the Indians. Also Observations on the Language of the Muhhekeaneew Indinas by Jonathan Edwards D.D. (London: Reprinted 1788). Occom’s brief sermon was not given a starring spot:  it was overwhelmed by all these other framing and supplementary materials. 45. Occom returns to this in a sermon of uncertain date called “Stand fast therefore in Liberty,” when he describes man, once “turn’d out of paradise” as “broak … become a Bankrupt, a vacaband, is become poor, extreamly poor to Nakedness, nakedness indeed with a Witness for he is Stript of all …” (Brooks: 224). 46. Stevens, “Reading the Hermit’s Manuscript” in Approaches to teaching Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe : 142. 47. Burnham, “Introduction,” The Female American (Broadview Press, 2001): 24. Page numbers in the text are to this edn. 48. The Monthly Review 36 (Mar 1767): 238. 49. Burns, An Age of Wonders. 50. The Critical Review 23 (March 1767): 217. 51. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment and the chapters on “The Politics of Reading and Writing in Eighteenth Century America” and “Readers and Reading in America” in Hall, Cultures of Print. 52. Hall, Worlds of Wonder: 71. 53. Nussbaum, “Women and Race” in Jones Women and Literature: 78. I n t roduc t ion to Pa rt I I I 1. Green, “English Books” in Amory and Hall, The Colonial Book; Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book; Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution: chap. 1; Landis, “Robert Bell; Printer.” 2. Bell, Philadelphia January 17, 1774, Memorandum: 1. 3. Bell, Sale Catalogue of a Collection of New and All Books (Philadelphia, July 15, 1773): 29, 36, 12, 49, 44. 4. Josiah Tucker, The True Interests of Britain set forth in regard to the Colonies” (Philadelphia: Robert Bell, 1776): last page.

Notes to pages 189–194

253

5. Cox, A Proper Sense of Honor: 43–4. 6. Philadelphia, May 6th, 1776, “Just Printed, Published and Now Selling” by Robert Bell. 7. Tucker, True Interests of Britain, page before last. 8. Robe rt Bell’ s t heat e r s of wa r :  t he wa r on p oli t e n ess 1. Bannet, Empire of Letters: chap. 2. 2. Grieder, “Amiable Writer or Wretch?”; Cerny, “Pratt, Samuel Jackson”, DNB; April London, “Samuel Jackson Pratt” in Battestin (ed.), British Novelists. 3. The London Review of English and Foreign Literature 4 (Nov. 1776): 324–5. 4. Town and Country magazine; or Universal Repository of Knowledge, Instruction and Entertainment 9 (Feb 1777): 97; Westminster Magazine (Mar 1777): 143. 5. London Magazine, or Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer 40 (May 1780); 228 and 50 (Mar 1781): 143. 6. For The Pupil of Pleasure, The Royal Gazette, Mar. 7, 1778, p. 1 and Mar. 14, 1778, p. 1, and The Pennsylvania Ledger, April 29, 1778, p. 3. Extracts of the novel also appeared in The Royal Gazette on these dates. For Emma Corbett, see, for instance, William Prichard’s advertisement in several papers, including The Pennsylvania Packet, May 24, 1783; Isaac Beers’ advertisement in several Connecticut papers, including The Connecticut Journal, Feb 9, 1785, p. 2; and Thomas Allen and Thomas Green’s advertisements in The Daily Advertiser, Sept. 29, 1789 and The Connecticut Gazette, Nov. 19, 1790, respectively. Also familiar in America were Melmoth’s novel Liberal Opinions, his The Beautiful and Sublime in Scripture, and a number of his popular poems including “Sympathy” and “The Triumph of Benevolence.” 7. The Lady’s Monthly Museum: 4 (June 1808): 306. 8. For sentimentalism, see esp. Barker-Benfield, “Origins of Anglo-American Sensibility”; Barnes, States of Sympathy; Bell, Sentimentalism; Boudreau, Sympathy in American Literature; Burstein, Sentimental Democracy; Carey, British Abolitionism; Stern, Plight of Feeling; Todd, Sensibility. 9. “Robert Bell, Bookseller, Provedore to the Sentimentalists and Professor of Book Auctioning in America is just arrived from Philadelphia …” (1778). 10. Robert Bell, Philadelphia, January 17, 1774, Memorandum: 1, 2. 11. Courtney Melmoth, The Pupil of Pleasure (Philadelphia: Robert Bell, 1778): Preface, p. 6. Page numbers in the text will be taken from this edition. 12. Henry Mackenzie, The Man of the World (Philadelphia:  printed and sold by Robert Bell, 1782): Titlepage epigraph, and p.  16. The epigraph on the English edition is Virginibus Puerisque Canto – Hor. Page numbers in the text will be taken from this edition. 13. Bushman, Refinement of America; Shields, Civil Tongues; Hemphill, Bowing to Necessities; Chaves, “Polite Mentors.”

254

Notes to pages 194–209

14. The Life of the late Earl of Chesterfield, or The Man of the World, 2 vols. (London: printed for J. Bew, 1774): v, vii. 15. Gulick, “The Publication and Reception of Lord Chesterfield’s Letters …” This is confirmed by Nelson, “The Reputation of Lord Chesterfield in Great Britain and America.” See also Gulick’s “A Chesterfield Bibliography to 1800.” 16. Apology for Mrs Eugene Stanhope, London, 1775; Man of the World, Free and Impartial Remarks on Lord Chesterfield’s Letters (London: 1774). 17. Town and Country Magazine 8 (June 1776): 283–4. 18. For contemporary thinking on this subject more broadly, Davidson, Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness. 19. As Gulick points out, “Chesterfield was considered to have a very high reputation as an educator, one matter excepted which did not imperil the whole. That one fault could be remedied. It is evident that the various adaptations had proceeded on this principle.” “Publication and Reception,” p. 123. 20. Miscellanies for Sentimentalists (Philadelphia: Robert Bell, 1778): 66 and title page. References will be in the text and to this edition. 21. The English title page read:  The Pupil of Pleasure or the New System Illustrated, Inscribed to Mrs Eugenia Stanhope, editor of Lord Chesterfield’s Letters. 22. The Pennsylvania Magazine (Jan 1775): 40. Quoted in Gulick, pp. 93–4. 23. Hayes, “Mercy Ottis Warren versus Lord Chesterfield.” 24. For the contrast between aristocratic “retenu” and the Restoration rake, Weed, “Sexual Positions.” 25. Courtney Melmoth, An Apology for the Life and Writings of David Hume, with a Parallel between him and the Late Lord Chesterfield (2nd edn., London, 1777):  12, 74–5, 26. For readers’ reception of Hume in Scotland, Towsey, “Patron of Infidelity.” 26. Manning, “Whatever Happened to Pleasure?”: 215. For the genealogy of this concept in Tillotson and Shaftesbury and its applications, Williams, “The Luxury of Doing Good” in Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century. 27. Royal Gazette, March 7, 1778, p 1 and March 14, 1778, p. 1. 28. Little, Abraham in Arms. 29. Abbé Raynal, The Revolution of America (2nd edn., Philadelphia: Robert Bell, 1782): 20. 30. The Monthly Review 48 (April 1773); 268; The Westminster Magazine (March 1773): 211. See also Town and Country Magazine 5 (May 1773): 266. 31. The Critical Review 35 (April 1773): 273, 274, 272. 32. Jones, “The Seductions of Conduct” in Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century: 117, 118. 33. Tennenhouse, “Libertine America”: 10, 11. See also his Importance of Feeling English. 34. For instance, Korobdin, “Can your volatile Daughter ever acquire Your Wisdom?”; Zagarri, “Morals, Manners and the Republican Mother”; Jan

Notes to pages 209–216

255

Lewis, “The Republican Wife”; Ruth Bloch, “ Gendered Meanings of Virtue”; Kerber, Women of the Republic. 9.  Robe rt Bell’ s t heat e r s of wa r :  t he wa r u p on wa r 1. Bradley, “The British Public and the American Revolution” in Dickinson (ed.), Britain and the American Revolution: 139. 2. London Review of English and Foreign Literatures 9 (April 1780): 265; London Magazine or Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer 49 (May 1780): 228. 3. The Edinburgh Magazine or Literary Amusement 49 (July 1780): 12. 4. London Review of English and Foreign Literatures 9 (April 1780):  265. See also the extracts in 11 (May 1780): 302 and 377 which are described as “on a subject in which every lover of his country, and his kind, is concerned.” See also the Letter to the Editor of the Town and Country Magazine 12 (May 1780): 228, and the “Address to the Politicians and Partizans” in the Weekly Miscellany or Instructive Entertainer 14 (May 1780): 151. 5. Pennsylvania Evening Post and Public Advertiser 8:  878 (November 25, 1782): 173. 6. End of vol. i: 1783. 7. Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims. 8. London Review of English and Foreign Literature 9 (April 1780): 266. 9. Waith, Ideas of Greatness: 207, 23. 10. Richards, Theater Enough. 11. Francis Dobbs, The Irish Chief of Patriot King. A New Tragedy (Philadelphia: Robert Bell, 1777): 58. 12. [Hugh Henry Brackenridge] The Battle of Bunkers Hill … By a Gentleman of Maryland (Philadelphia: Robert Bell, 1776): 37. 13. Ibid.: 5. 14. Knott, “Sensibility and the American War of Independence”; also her Sensibility and the American Revolution. 15. [H.  H.  Brackenridge], The Death of General Montgomery, in Storming the City of Quebec (Philadelphia: Robert Bell, 1777): 53. 16. Starkey, War in the Age of enlightenment: 61. 17. Death of General Montgomery: 15. 18. Quoted in Royster, A Revolutionary People at War:  22. In addition to Royster, Starkey and Knott, these paragraphs are indebted to: Cox, A Proper Sense of Honor; Gould, “Fears of War, Fantasies of Peace” in Gould and Onuf (eds.), Empire and Nation; Resch and Sargent (eds.), War and Society in the American Revolution; and Conway, The British Isles and the War of American Independence. 19. Emma Corbet (Philadelphia: Robert Bell, 1782): iii: 10, 16. Page references in the text will be to this edition.

256

Notes to pages 219–225

20. Mayer, Belonging to the Army; Hagist, “Women of the British Army during the American Revolution”; Hiltner, “Example of our Heroine Deborah Sampson”; Stark, Female Tars; and DePauw, “Women in Combat.” 21. Gundersen, “We bear the Yoke with Patience” in Resch and Sargent, War and Society; also Van Buskirk, Generous Enemies and Gundersen, To be Useful to the World. 22. For instance, Caedel, Origins of War Prevention; Cookson, Friends of Peace; Langford, Polite and Commercial People. 23. For instance, Nathaniel Bell, “The Evil Effects of War and the Blessings of Peace,” Sermon Preached at Chelmsford, April 25, 1749; Philip Bennet, “The Harmony between Justice and Peace, and the means of enjoying Perpetual Peace,” sermons preached before the University Of Cambridge, 1749; John Bisset, “A Sermon Preached in the Church of Aberdeen upon 25 April, 1749; John Conybeere, “True Patriotism,” Sermon preached before the Hon. House of Commons at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, Apr. 25, 1749; Thomas Fothergill, “The Desirableness of Peace and the Duty of a Nation upon Recovery of it,” Sermon Preach’d before the University of Oxford at St. Mary’s, April 25, 1749. 24. See Brock, Pacifism in the United States and A Brief History of Pacifism; Lowe, Imagining Peace; Weddle, Walking the Way of Peace. 25. The first English editions of Emma Corbett in 1780, which were co-published in Bath and London, had two epigraphs, both different from this. But there were no epigraphs on the later editions published only in London after 1781. Thus depending on which English edition. Bell used as his copy text, he was changing the epigraphs, or introducing one where there had been none. 26. The Man of Feeling (Philadelphia: Robert Bell, 1782): 27. Page numbers in the text are to this edition.

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Pr i m a ry Wor k s For the principal works discussed, I have given all the versions I have consulted, and where applicable the more accessible modern edition from which I have quoted. For other works, I have given only the original place and date of publication and, where applicable, the first American or British reprint. A Cry from the Wilderness: Or a Converted Indian’s Address to A Xn Congregation. Norwich, 1767. Affecting Story of the Dreadful Distresses of Frederick Mannheim’s Family … with the Extraordinary Bravery of a Woman. Exeter, NH, 1793. Allen, Ethan. A Narrative of Col. Ethan Allen’s Captivity, from the time of his being taken by the British, near Montreal 26 Sept, 1775 … Philadelphia: Robert Bell, 1779. An Address to the Inhabitants of Philadelphia by those Freemen of the City of Philadelphia who are now Confined in the Mason’s Lodge by virtue of a General Warrant. Philadelphia: Robert Bell, 1777. An Apology for Mrs Eugenia Stanhope. London:  printed for T. Cadell and T. Evans, 1775. An Authentick Narrative of the Whole Affair between Elizabeth Canning and Mary Squires. London, 1754. Annesley, James. Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman, return’ d from a thirteen year slavery in America, Pts. I and II, London, 1743; Pt. III, London, 1747. Argument on both Sides of the Question in the Intricate Affair of Elizabeth Canning. London: printed in the Year 1753. Ashbridge, Elizabeth. Some Account of the Early Part of the Life of Elizabeth Ashbridge, Philadelphia, 1807. Aubin, Penelope. The Noble Slaves, London:  printed for E. Bell, J. Darby, A. Bettesworth et al., 1722; Dublin:  printed for James Dalton, 1736; Dublin:  printed for John Dempsey, 1736; Dublin:  printed for James Dalton, 1736; in A Collection of Entertaining Histories and Novels, 3 vols., 1739; Belfast:  printed and sold by the booksellers, 1775; in A Collection of Novels, selected and revised by Mrs Griffith, London, 1777; Danbury, Conn.  printed by Douglas and Nichols, 1797; New Haven:  printed by 257

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Index

Adams, John, 85, 99, 105, 107–8, 193 adventure tales, 22–3, 25, 33, 38, 46, 65, 77, 87–90, 98, 100, 119, 229 Africa, 4, 13, 33–4, 52, 98, 103, 105, 141–3, 145, 153 Africans, 39–41, 74–5, 111, 116, 121–3, 139, 141–2, 144–7 Guinea, 142, 146 Ambrose Gwinett, 4, 23, 66, 87, 89–93, 98 America, 2, 22, 78, 113–14, 116, 118, 120–3 Boston, 6, 23, 31, 42, 58, 62, 66, 68, 70, 93, 100, 107, 126–7, 137, 163, 187 colonial, 117–18, 120, 124–6, 163, 170, 172, 178 Georgia, 116–17, 119–20, 125 Georgia Plan, 116–17 Marblehead, MA, 25, 42, 45 Maryland, 93–4, 116–19 New York, 6, 31, 39, 70, 93, 116, 187 Philadelphia, 23, 31, 68, 70, 93, 187–8, 191, 198, 211, 222 plantations, 117, 119–21, 123, 126, 139, 151, 224 Revolutionary War, 2, 5, 18, 38, 74, 95, 108, 145–7, 174, 187–8, 191–2, 198, 202, 210, 214, 223–4 Virginia, 48, 56, 58, 116–17, 137 Worcester, 31, 66, 107 Annesley, James, 2, 119 Ashbridge, Elizabeth, 2, 118, 245 Ashton, John, 4, 42, 101 Ashton’s Memorial, 22, 42–5, 88 Atlantic Circum-Atlantic stories, 33–4, 40, 65–6, 68, 87–9, 98 histories, 1, 18, 23 multinational, 22, 26, 46, 228 world, 1–3, 6, 17, 21–2, 32, 38, 41, 45, 72, 74, 77, 88–90, 102, 117, 206, 228–9 Aubin, Penelope, 22, 47–8, 65, 71, 75, 101, 103 Charlotta Dupont, 4, 22, 51–3, 56, 58 Noble Slaves, 1–2, 4, 21, 48–64, 87, 101

Bampfylde-Moore Carew, 4, 23, 66–7, 87, 93–8, 138 Barnard, Revd John, 45–46 Bell, Robert, 3, 17–18, 187, 191–3, 195, 197–9, 202–4, 206, 208–13, 222–5 Miscellanies for Sentimentalists, 191, 195, 197–8, 200, 202 book history, 6, 9, 18 Brackenridge, H. H., 213–15 Britain, 2, 21, 78–81, 83–4, 91, 104, 115–16, 118, 158, 162, 174 Britons, 115, 123, 138 London, 2, 4–6, 9, 14, 25, 31, 33, 42, 48, 55–6, 58, 61, 63, 66, 73, 77, 79, 89, 95, 98–100, 105–6, 108, 118, 126, 140, 145, 158, 170, 173–4 London Trust, 159, 171–4 Canada, 55, 116, 127, 130, 204 Canning, Elizabeth, 125–32, 135 Virtue Triumphant, 126, 129, 131 captivity narratives, 1, 4, 13, 50, 56–60, 75, 103–4, 116, 123, 127, 130, 134, 140 Barbary captivity, 21, 33–4, 38, 48, 50, 52, 57, 68, 76–7, 101, 103, 122 Indian captivity, 21, 23, 50, 53–4, 126, 152 Caribbean, 33, 35–6, 44 Caribs, 39 Chesterfield, Earl of, 18, 193–5, 199, 201 Letters to his son, 192–5, 199 The Life of the Late Earl of Chesterfield, 193 Trusler’s Principles of Politeness, 195, 197, 215 Chetwood, W. R., 2, 7, 12, 64, 67 Captain Boyle, 6, 12, 21, 23, 65, 67–77, 87, 107 Captain Falconer, 22–3, 44 community, 1, 22, 45, 49, 56, 98, 157, 229 compilation, 8, 10, 126, 128, 191, 204, 224, 231

290

Index conversion, 1, 22, 42–4, 49–52, 102–3, 126, 141, 144, 149, 151–3, 157, 163, 166, 168, 172, 177, 182–3 Great Awakening, 164, 166–7 convicts, 85, 87, 91, 93–4, 96, 106, 111–13, 117, 125, 130, 135, 206, 228 copyright, 10 crime, 13, 78, 85, 90, 92–3, 95, 119, 126, 135–7, 177 “man-stealing” (kidnapping/abduction), 118–19, 122, 134 “social crime”, 79, 96 criminal biography, 23, 78, 87 Cugoano, Ottabah, 2, 4, 12, 113, 139–40, 142–4, 147, 152, 175 Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic, 145–6, 156–7 Defoe, Daniel, 10, 15, 22–3, 25, 31, 49, 60 Captain Singleton, 72 Colonel Jack, 78–9, 83, 115 Moll Flanders, 115, 125, 133, 135–8 Robinson Crusoe, 6, 9, 12, 15, 21, 25–6, 28–43, 49–50, 60, 68, 87, 181 The Family Instructor, 131 Dickinson, Jonathan, 56 Dustan, Hannah, 53–4 epitome (or abridgement), 3, 7, 9–10, 16, 25–31, 66, 78, 80, 132, 231, 242 epitomized Crusoes, 4, 9, 22, 25–7, 30–41, 101 epitomized Moll Flanders, 136–8 epitomized Pamela, 132–5 Equiano, Olaudah, 2, 4, 12, 16, 113, 139–40, 148 Interesting Narrative, 146–7, 156 escape (runaways), 163 from government, 84, 86, 90 from servitude, 86, 96, 113, 116, 123–4, 126, 131, 135, 138 from slavery, 53, 75, 102, 116, 123, 156 gradual manumission, 156 to a “better countre”, 86, 106, 229 extracts, 7–11, 16, 67, 76–7, 231 Fielding, Henry, 93–5, 127, 192, 195, 205 Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, 94 The Case of Elizabeth Canning, 127 flight, 1, 5, 77, 83–4, 123, 136, 161, 163, 229 Foss, John, 57 Franklin, Benjamin, 2, 99, 132, 138, 193 freedom (or liberty), 84, 86, 95–8, 102–7, 113–14, 116–17, 122–4, 135, 138–9, 145, 147–8, 150, 153, 155–6, 229

291

genre, 1, 11, 16 fact & fiction, 1, 16–17, 23, 32, 42, 113, 118–19, 127, 229–30 history and romance, 23, 31, 46, 48, 65, 117–19 mixed, 23, 65, 67, 234 realism, 15, 34, 125, 229–30 Gildon, Charles, 25–6, 37, 41 Godwyn, Morgan, 57 Griffith, Elizabeth, 59 Gronniosaw, Albert, 113, 139–40 Narrative of—, 1–2, 12, 139–45, 148–50 imitation, 10–11, 15 Indian school, 158, 160, 162, 173 Indians (Native Americans), 4–5, 13, 17, 74, 82, 93, 96–7, 113–14, 116–17, 124, 153–4, 156, 174, 177–8, 181, 229 Cherokee, 152–3 Creeks, 124 Mohegan, 159–61, 163, 165–6 Montauk, 159, 166–8, 173 Muskito, 154 Oneida, 161–2, 174, 180 Stockbridge, 159 Uncas, 174, 181 insurrections, 116, 122–3, 125, 130 islands, 4, 33–34, 36, 44, 77, 80–3, 85, 182, 184, 234 Kimber, Edward, 2, 4–5, 115–16 History of Mr Anderson, 4, 115–25, 135 Itinerant Observations in America, 116 Joe Thompson, 65, 87 The London Magazine, 116–17 law, 41, 45, 53, 71, 79, 83, 85, 90, 92, 94, 96, 105, 112, 120, 122–3, 140 legal system, 78, 80, 127–9, 136 circumstantial evidence, 91–2, 128 hanging/gallows, 80, 84, 89, 91–2, 127, 176 Newgate, 73, 78–80, 85, 128, 136–7 outlaw, 35 transportation, 80, 93, 96, 126, 130, 136–7, 206 Lennox, Charlotte, 2–3, 7, 9 letters, 158–9, 161, 163, 170–1, 173, 199 Lives, 4, 13, 16–17 Life and Adventures, 38, 47, 49, 60, 62 Life and Histories, 1, 16, 119 Life and Sufferings, 38, 50, 61–2 Spiritual Autobiography, 32, 41 Locke, John, 82, 87, 116, 122, 124, 223

292

Index

Mackenzie, Henry, 189, 192, 208 Man of the World, 191 The Man of Feeling, 18, 210, 212, 225–7 The Man of the World, 7, 18, 193, 205–8 mariners’ tales, 13, 34, 35, 207 Marrant, John, 2, 12, 113, 139–40, 148, 150, 152 Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with …, 140, 150–4, 156 mask, 148–50, 157 disguise, 75–6, 93, 96–7 masquerade, 54–5, 59 Mather, Cotton, 2, 50 Mather, Increase, 50, 62–3 migration, 1 of texts, 48 missionaries, 114, 158–64, 167–9, 173, 179, 182–5, 229 North Africa, 33, 49, 52, 59 Occom, Samson, 2, 4, 13, 113–14, 158, 180, 182 Autobiographies, 163–8 Mary Occom, 159–61, 183–4 Missionary Journals, 160, 163–5, 174 Sermon on Moses Paul, 162, 174–9 Oglethorpe, General James, 4, 116–17, 119–20, 124–5, 144 Okeley, William, 61 paratext, 6, 8, 11–12, 16–17, 24, 89, 178–9, 189, 223–5, 230–1, 256 content descriptions, 8, 47, 76, 89, 196, 224 dedications, 8, 67–8 generic shifts, 47, 60–4 introductions, 8, 212 letters to the reader, 11, 42 prefaces, 3, 8, 11, 42, 48, 141, 152, 176, 194, 247 reprints, 248 subtitles, 11 title pages, 7, 11, 49, 64, 89–91, 95, 196, 223 Pierre Viaud, 22, 44 pirates, 3, 35, 43–5, 48, 69–71, 89, 98 Barbary pirates, 21, 34, 39, 41, 98, 105 poverty, 23, 78, 83, 85, 100–1, 136, 140–2, 144–5, 156, 160, 167, 171, 174–5, 207, 226, 228 beggars, 87, 89–90, 93–8, 145, 174, 226 poor laws, 95 the poor, 1, 4–5, 13–14, 78, 80, 88, 95, 100–1, 106, 113–14, 116–19, 123, 130, 136–7, 141, 145, 156, 168, 222, 224, 226, 228–9 Pratt, Samuel Jackson (aka Courtney Melmoth), 189, 191–2, 194, 199–200, 208, 222 An Apology for the Life and Writings of David Hume, 201

Emma Corbett, 1, 18, 192, 210, 212, 216–23, 225 The Pupil of Pleasure, 18, 191–3, 195–7, 200–2, 205–6, 212 print culture, 13–15, 17, 25, 187 anonymity, 6, 9–10 censorship, 13–16, 139 copyright, 5, 8, 26–7 editors, 6, 12–15, 23, 42, 79, 93, 126, 136, 230 printers and publishers, 2, 6, 12–15, 17, 23–4, 230 American, 5–6, 39, 42, 47, 60–1, 63, 66, 74, 76, 89–92, 95, 107–8, 132–3, 136, 178–9 British, 5, 26–7, 42, 48, 63, 78, 80, 89, 91, 93, 95, 133, 179, 240 printscapes, 17 reprints, 3, 6, 10, 12, 15, 17, 22–3, 39, 42, 47, 59–64, 108, 126, 131–3, 136, 140, 163, 176, 178, 187–9, 195, 204–5, 208–10, 212–13, 228, 231, 236 privateers, 43 Providence, 42–3, 45, 85, 91, 161, 181, 185, 228 Providence tales, 23, 48, 50, 61, 89, 181–2 Ralph, James, 2 readers, 2, 5, 7–13, 18, 141–2, 152, 166, 208, 228 reading, 141–2, 181–2, 188–9 double reading, 12–13 history of, 10–12, 14, 18 Reeve, Clara, 47 religion, 25 African, 150, 154 Anglican, 22 Christianity, 22, 42, 49–52, 114, 122, 131, 140–4, 147–8, 150–4, 158, 164, 174, 201, 208, 228 Indian shamans, 153–7, 176, 178 Muslim (Mussulman), 22, 34, 51, 103 Protestant, 22, 34, 50, 89, 130 Puritan, 22, 55, 61, 63, 85, 104, 136, 204 Quaker, 141, 155, 222 Roman Catholic, 22, 48–50, 55, 57 syncretism, 150, 175–6, 182 reviews, 6, 8, 11, 87, 94, 99–100, 108–9, 181–2, 192, 195–7, 205, 207, 210–11, 230 rewriting, 6–7, 9, 16, 67, 84, 231 Richardson, Samuel, 7, 50, 194, 199, 205 Clarissa, 8–9, 47, 133, 194 Pamela, 47, 132–5, 192 Sir Charles Grandison, 8 Rousseau, 5, 108 Rowlandson, Mary, 2, 48, 55–6, 60–2 Rowson, Susannah, 2–3 Rush, Benjamin, 84, 99

Index Scott, Sarah, 3–4, 67, 188 seduction plots, 196, 208–10 sentimentalism, 193, 208, 222, 227 serialization, 7–9, 25, 66 sermons, 42–3, 114, 161, 173–6, 180 servitude, 1, 111–16, 122, 131, 137, 228–9 antislavery, 5, 22, 40–41, 57–60, 116, 122–5, 140, 145–6, 155 indentured, 81, 96, 111, 116, 118–20, 122–3, 156 servants, 4, 111–13, 123, 149 servants of God, 43, 113–14, 163 slaveowners and masters, 112, 116, 125, 131–2, 134, 138, 141, 148–9, 151, 154–5 slaves, 4–5, 21, 34, 40–1, 49–50, 53, 74, 89, 98, 101–5, 111–13, 116–17, 121–3, 137, 148–51, 175, 183, 228 Sewall, Samuel, 57 Smollett, Tobias, 2, 15 Launcelot Greaves, 9 Peregrine Pickle, 8 Roderick Random, 65, 88, 98–100, 119 smuggling, 12, 22, 35, 68–74, 77 South America, 52, 68, 70–1, 77 Brazil, 33–5, 40, 68 The Female American, 114, 163, 180 The French Convert, 131 The Hermit, Philip Quarll, 1, 4, 21–3, 65–7, 77–85, 88, 98, 107, 138, 181, 184 trade economic individualism, 32, 69 free trade, 6, 12, 22, 68–74, 77, 241 in fish, 43, 45 mercantilism, 70–1, 73 parallel Atlantic economy, 12 slave trade, 116, 118–22, 145–6 sugar trade, 35

293

transatlantic book trade, 2–3, 10–12, 14, 126 people, 3 stories, 2–5, 205, 210, 228–9 subculture, 40 travel narratives, 23, 77 Tyler, Royall, 2, 87 The Algerine Captive, 4, 6, 8, 49, 66, 86–7, 98–109 The Contrast, 209 vagabonds, 95, 100, 180, 229 vagrants, 94–5, 106 versions, 7, 9–11, 17, 26, 31, 34, 76, 85, 94–5, 132, 136–7, 166, 176, 195, 231, 236, 240 versioning, 9–10, 16, 67, 231 violence, 1, 4, 21, 42, 72, 112, 120–1, 124, 228–9, 241 domestic, 123, 125, 131–5 Walker, George, 7, 16 war, 72, 90, 124, 189, 198, 210, 214–16, 219, 222, 224–5, 228 soldiers, 116, 124, 189, 202, 207–10, 212–14, 216, 218, 225–6 West Indies, 2, 22, 70, 74, 88–9, 91 Wheelock, Eleazar, 13, 158–61, 164–6, 169–73, 184 Whitefield, George, 151, 164, 167, 170–2 Williamson, Peter, 2 women, 47, 50 captive, 50, 52, 116, 123 convicts, 127 daughters, 121, 208 heroic, 23, 53, 64, 209, 219–21, 223–4 maidservants, 113, 125–38 marriage, 111, 116, 121, 125, 132, 184, 223–4 wives, 111–13, 116, 119, 208