Abstract:
Using archival and genealogical sources, this study corrects the long-standing misattribution of the American novels Monima; or, The Beggar Girl (1802) and Margaretta; or, The Intricacies of the Heart (1807) to Martha Meredith Read. Their true author, Mary Endress Ralston (1772–1850), is introduced as a bilingual Pennsylvania German Lutheran literary pioneer.
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In many ways, S. Scott Rohrer claims, British loyalism in the colonies during the eighteenth century remains an untold story. Despite canonical studies by scholars including Robert M. Calhoon, Catherine S. Crary, and Mary Beth Norton, as well as more recent studies by Maya Jasanoff and Phillip Gould, Rohrer finds an unexplored, and important, story of loyalism in the figure of Thomas Bradbury Chandler, the Anglican minister at St. John's in Elizabeth Town, New Jersey. Rohrer makes a convincing case throughout The Folly of Revolution: Thomas Bradbury Chandler and the Loyalist Mind in a Democratic Age. He situates Chandler as a major theological and political node in a network of colonial Anglican ministers, explaining Chandler's education, ideological formation, mission to further Anglicanism in the colonies, and resistance to American independence. For Rohrer, Chandler's life and worldview constitute an "alternative vision" that "has receded from historical memory" (3). Indeed, even as The Folly of Revolution provides a finely detailed biographical study of Chandler's life, it simultaneously tracks the broader intellectual milieu, with particular attention to the eighteenth-century debates surrounding Anglicanism and evangelicalism, as well as republicanism and monarchism. In many ways, for Chandler, the problems of evangelism and republicanism were one and the same. Rohrer's study does an admirable job of examining a range of intellectual traditions through the lens of Chandler's life and learning.
The Folly of Revolution begins by unfolding a central question for Chandler throughout much of his career: "How could social and political order [End Page 481] survive when subjects had the right to challenge authority?" (4). Beginning with his schooling at Yale, where Chandler rejected the Congregationalism of his youth, Rohrer takes us through the minister's meticulously monarchical positions, the most vital of which was his goal of establishing an Anglican bishop in America. He became friends early in his life with Samuel Johnson, one of the chief Anglican ministers in the colonies, a man who fought fiercely for the creation of a colonial episcopate. Chandler took up this cause when Johnson no longer could. In support of his position, Chandler "did not look to the ancient world for guidance," unlike many other American intellectuals, instead opting to exam
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When was the last time James Fenimore Cooper had a moment? The answer might be 1992, when Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans gave us Daniel Day-Lewis as a smoldering young version of Cooper's wonderfully crusty character Natty Bumppo. If that's the case, it has been too long. Today even Cooper's most influential novels—The Spy (1821), The Pioneers (1823), The Red Rover (1827)—are more gestured at than rigorously read, while the lesser lights seldom attract even a passing glance. The Bravo, his 1831 novel about political corruption in eighteenth-century Venice, is among the unnoticed. It is also among the latest of Cooper's works to benefit from the SUNY Press treatment, as that publisher works to deliver "sound scholarly editions of Cooper's major works, based wherever possible on authorial manuscripts" (wjfc.org).
Granting that all of Cooper's works might merit a certain kind of interest just by being his, it seems reasonable to ask what specifically we gain by livening up The Bravo's afterlife with a new edition. Certainly, this novel marks a sea change in Cooper's career, as the first of only three novels that he set in Europe. Cooper had left the United States in 1826, and, like innumerable tourists before and since, he found in Italy's culture and history tinder for the imagination. The result is a novel that centers on Jacopo Frontoni, a young man pressed into serving the Venetian government that has unjustly imprisoned his father. In his search for liberty, Frontoni must navigate a power structure as fluid and murky as the canals' waters. His suffering serves as an indictment of the demagogue-infected republic whose bottoming out, the narrator assures us every so often, will come [End Page 513] not too many decades hence. In fact, the independent Venice of this novel would succumb to Napoleon in 1797 and to Austria in 1815.
For some people, the boon of travel is a clearer perspective on life back home. Getting out of the United States set Cooper's mind only more firmly on his country's problems, even as it widened his perspective on how some of those problems persist across both epochs and oceans. In his send-up of the Venetian government and its failure to represent the best interests of the citizenry, we observe a trenchant critique of Jacksonian democracy. But the novel also represents more deep-seated political concerns. First published in 1831, The Bravo can be situated in a swirl of US cultural productions from the 1830s that were grappling with the subject of the country's long-term prospec
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