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  • Dodge and Motley:History in Hans Brinker
  • Susan R. Gannon (bio) and Ruth Anne Thompson (bio)

Nineteenth-century America found the Dutch fascinating. Washington Irving's whimsical Diedrich Knickerbocker's A History of New York (1809) so caught the public fancy that it shaped the popular view of many Americans about their own past, and his other folklore-like stories about the American Dutch were widely admired. Influential members of the New York Historical Society and Irving's own St. Nicholas Society kept interest in New York's Dutch heritage very much alive. Even Santa Claus—in the nineteenth century still noticeably Dutch and often depicted puffing on a clay pipe—was an effective ambassador for his homeland (Gannon and Thompson). Popular histories of Spain and England by William H. Prescott and Thomas Babington Macaulay focused attention on the Dutch, who figured prominently in them. And by mid-century "forgotten links heightened the discovery of identification with the Dutch: Dutch alliance with the Americans against Britain, with the British against Napoleon" (Edwards 187). The scene was set for the extraordinary public response to two remarkable—and related—best-sellers: historian John Lothrop Motley's three-volume The Rise of the Dutch Republic (1856) and Mary Mapes Dodge's Hans Brinker; or, The Silver Skates (1865).1

We will suggest here that in Hans Brinker Dodge interpreted Motley for young America. She approached her audience, of course, in ways appropriate to its special needs, and modified the materials she borrowed as necessary. And she had her own cultural program in mind for America's youth. But Hans Brinker owes much to The Rise of the Dutch Republic. Motley's conception of Dutch history and character as exemplary for nineteenth-century Americans is a central premise of Dodge's novel, which is, to a degree, a work of speculative fiction in the utopian mode. Motley's ideal of heroism and his stress on communal responsibility are central preoccupations of Hans Brinker. And the novel's theme, the heroism required of ordinary young people as they struggle toward their own independence, echoes the central theme of The Rise of the Dutch Republic. [End Page 43]

John Lothrop Motley (1814-1877) was one of America's most prominent historians in the mid-nineteenth century. The Rise of the Dutch Republic was begun in 1846, in Boston. He worked on it for five years, and then went to Europe, where he found so much additional archival material that he had to rewrite the whole manuscript. But any historical narrative is of course a kind of fiction, selectively ordered according to the author's notions of cause and effect, and "the book had had its firm contours settled, its scheme of development established, its basic historical thesis firmly grounded, before Motley visited the Netherlands" (Edwards 182). He believed that "there are certain 'true principles' in human history which will triumph despite the actions of individuals, though some great men . . . may forward their advance. These 'true principles' are the great liberal ideas of freedom and democracy" (Maloney 137)—as Motley interpreted them.

Motley saw the history of all the Western nations as related, and tended to equate Western history with the history of humanity. "So close," he said, is the relationship between the whole human family, that it is impossible for a nation, even while struggling for itself, not to acquire something for all mankind" (1: iv). He saw the creation of the United States as a direct result of the rise of the Dutch republic:

The maintenance of the right by the little province of Holland and Zealand in the sixteenth and by the United States of America in the eighteenth centuries, forms but a single chapter in the great volume of human fate; for the so-called revolutions of Holland, England, and America, are all links of one chain.

(1: iv)

A basic reason for the popularity of Motley in his own time was certainly the story he chose to tell—which foregrounded an analogy between American and Dutch history and offered readers a story with a positive message. He felt it would be "a consolation to those who have hope in humanity to watch...

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