Sullen Fires Across the Atlantic:
Essays in Transatlantic Romanticism

Notes

Many thanks to Joel Pace for feedback on earlier drafts and my Stanford reading group, especially Mark Feldman, Naomi Greyser, and Chris Phillips, for their constructive comments.

¹ Cheap, pirated editions fueled the reading market in America. For example, cheap editions of Macaulay's History of England (1848) sold at highest $4 (16s.6d.) and at lowest 50 cents (2s.) Zincke finds the accessibility of literature to be the prime proponent of America's high literacy. Gohdes, in American Literature in Nineteenth-Century England points to evidence that English booksellers might also be literary pirates, although this practice lessened by the second half of the century (25).
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² For a reading of Sydney Smith’s article and its periodical context (Edinburgh Review) see chapter 3 in Richard Gravil, Romantic Dialogues: Anglo-American Continuities 1776-1862 (New York: St. Martin Press, 2000).
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³ David S. Shields, "British-American Belles Lettres" in The Cambridge History of American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 309-343. Shields’s "British American society" refers to the colonial reading community of British Americans before the Revolution.
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⁴ James Raven, "The Export of Books to Colonial North America," Publishing History 42 (1997): 21-49.
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⁵ William Ellery Channing, "Remarks on National Literature." Oration delivered before the Philadelphia Society at the University of Philadelphia, 18 October 1823. From The Works of William Ellery Channing, D. D. (Glasgow: Richard Green and Co., 1885): 83-95.
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⁶ In the same way, Channing was horrified by the proliferation of "cent papers" that were dangerously "adapted to the most uncultivated minds" to exploit the imagination and purse of the people. See "An Address on Self Culture," in The Works of William Ellery Channing, D. D. (Glasgow: Richard Green and Co., 1885): 243-263, 258.
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⁷ Whitman published short stories as "W.W." and "Walter Whitman." See "Death in the School-Room—A Fact," Democratic Review 9 (August 1841): 177-181; "Wild Frank’s Return," Democratic Review 9 (November 1841): 476-481; "Bervance; or Father and Son," Democratic Review 9 (December 1841): 560-567; "The Tomb-Blossoms," Democratic Review 10 (January 1842): 62-68; "The Last of the Sacred Army," Democratic Review 10 (March 1842): 259-263; "The Child-Ghost; A Story of the Last Loyalist," Democratic Review 10 (May 1842): 451-459; and "Angel of Tears," Democratic Review 11 (September 1842): 282-283.
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⁸ Historians have noted, of course, the magazine’s connection with the Young America nationalist movement in the mid-1840s. Edward L. Widmer’s Young America (1999) claims that the Democratic Review was a vehicle of "Young America," a circle of New York writers promoting literary nationalism. "Young America" founder Evert Duyckinck did not begin to write in the Democratic Review until a year after the magazine moved its printing office to New York in November of 1840. "Young America" contributors included William Gilmore Simms, Cornelius Mathews, and William A. Jones. Moreover, while noting the Locofoco tenor of the magazine, Widmer does not distinguish O’Sullivan’s Locofocoism from the goals of Young America. O’Sullivan’s and Duyckinck’s politics, for instance, were sometimes at odds. Duckinck seemed to have little patience for Locofoco-type radicalism and O’Sullivan’s magazine editorials indicate that it did not support Young America’s petition for the International Copyright Act.
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⁹ See John Louis O’Sullivan, "The Texas Question," Democratic Review 14 (April 1844): 423-430. Also, Sohui Lee, "Manifest Empire: Anglo-American Rivalry and the Shaping of U.S. Manifest Destiny." Manuscript. In Romantic Border Crossings, eds. Jeffrey Cass and Larry Peer. Forthcoming.
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¹⁰ "Causes of Poverty," Democratic Review 5 (May 1839): 448-466, 457.
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¹¹ Hume’s writing seemed to gain more attention from American reviewers during the 1840s. See "Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments," North American Review 8 (March 1819): 371-396; "The History and Moral Relations of Political Economy," Democratic Review 8 (October 1840): 291-311; "Hume, Voltaire, and Rousseau," New Englander and Yale Review 1 (April 1843): 169-184; "Life and Correspondence of David Hume," The Living Age 10 (August 1846): 249-265.
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¹² For a historian’s argument on Republican motherhood in America see Joan R. Gunderson, To Be Useful to the World: Women in Revolutionary America, 1740-1790 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996). In addition to Smith’s notion of moral sentiments, texts in the Democratic Review also channeled arguments on domesticity that connected domestic roles of women with the development of political consciousness and national loyalty. Poems in the Democratic Review like the anonymously published "Psyche" suffused woman’s world with republican duty and significance. For the poet of "Psyche," the moral and political worth of woman’s world is grounded in the fact that man’s "[p]atriotism [. . .] grew" in "home’s sweet scenes." "Psyche, a Poem," Democratic Review 2 (April 1838): 17-31, 27 and 25.
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¹³ Recent works on the politics of sympathy include Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). In addition to Glenn Hendler’s Public Sentiments (2001), see also Kristin Boudreau, Sympathy in American Literature: American Sentiments from Jefferson to the Jameses (Gainesville, Fl.: University Press of Florida, 2002).
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¹⁴ For an extended argument about Hawthorne’s connection with O’Sullivan’s magazine and his political rhetoric please refer to Lee, "Hawthorne’s Politics of Story Telling: Two ‘Province-House’ Tales and Anglomania in the Democratic Review."
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¹⁵ William Gilmore Simms, "The Epochs and Events of American History, as Suited to the Purposes of Art in Fiction," 53.
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¹⁶ [John L. O’Sullivan] "Wordsworth’s Sonnets on the Punishment of Death" Democratic Review 10 (March 1842): 272-288. The abolition of capital punishment was one of O’Sullivan’s pet political projects and the Wordsworth article should be considered in light of the publication of O’Sullivan’s tract on capital punishment a month earlier. A month earlier, the Democratic Review notified its readers: "Mr. O’Sullivan’s ‘Report on the Abolition of Capital Punishment’ has also attracted considerable attention. We hope that this important subject, which is now again before the Legislature of this and several other States, will awaken that interest which it so well deserves." Democratic Review 10 (February 1842), 201.
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