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  • The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Anderson
  • George Boulukos (bio)
Edward Kimber. The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Anderson, ed. Matthew Mason and Nicholas Mason. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2009. 242pp. CAN$19.95. ISBN 978-1-55111-703-4.

Edward Kimber’s History of The Life and Adventures of Mr. Anderson is at once an unexceptional and a fascinating eighteenth-century novel. Its first readers appear to have found it unremarkable; as Matthew and Nicholas Mason explain in the introduction to their admirable edition, many readers accessed the book through circulating libraries, but it received only one review, and that dismissive.

The subject matter, rather than the execution, makes this novel notable today. Mr. Anderson is an excellent example of the “transatlantic” novel, representing characters who move between London and Paris and the American colonies. The characters not only report on the management of slave plantations and the use of Indian allies in proxy wars between England and France, but they also actively participate in both. Furthermore, the hero—a white Englishman—is sold into lifetime slavery as a boy, making Mr. Anderson one of a very few extended literary treatments of what we now call indentured servitude. The account of Tom’s kidnapping and rough Atlantic crossing at the outset of the novel briefly gives it the feeling, and gritty realism, of a Daniel Defoe novel or an early slave narrative. The novel’s credentials as a key document of the British Atlantic world are heightened by Kimber’s actual travels in the colonies, which he documented in a series of newspaper articles (preceding Mr. Anderson). Those newspaper articles have recently been edited and printed as Itinerant Observations in America.

The novel’s initial gritty realism also introduces subject matter even more surprising in an eighteenth-century novel than slave plantations and indentured servitude: the sexual abuse of a child. Tom is kidnapped by an evil slave-ship captain who plans not to sell him but instead to “make him the subject of the worst, most shocking, and most unnatural lust” (50). The captain sells Tom only when he is seemingly at death’s door. Although the tone of the novel changes drastically after the opening, Kimber does not simply drop the issue of Tom’s sexual victimization. The scandal of Captain Williamson’s mistreatment of the hero reappears throughout the novel, ending only when Tom is able to confront his molester on a captured pirate ship.

The novel, while not notable for its artistry, is nonetheless useful as an example of circulating library fare. Its first readers were no doubt aware that Kimber’s narrative technique was not as vivid or as original as Defoe’s, Eliza Haywood’s, or Samuel Richardson’s. To the reader familiar with the canon of the eighteenth-century novel, Kimber’s style registers as a pastiche. In the realistic opening, the narrator offers [End Page 396] attention to the psychology of the characters. Tom’s childish emotional malleability is laid out in a few deft strokes. On the day of his kidnapping, “the poor innocent cry’d most piercingly till weariness closed his eyes,” but by the next day, “he was brought up to the port pleased and contented, and still buoy’d up with the promise of seeing his papa, whom he now and then faintly enquired after” (49). The unfortunate parents are left to their “killing anguish” (49) as attention quickly shifts to the lad’s fate on shipboard. There are tears and emotions, to be sure, but the moments of potentially heavy-handed sentimentality are quickly left aside in the rush of developing events. Later, however, every coincidental re-encounter with an acquaintance involves exclamations (“thank God! that has made me thus the instrument of preserving a dear and valued friend” [132]), embraces, and, of course, more tears. More striking than this overt machinery of sentimentality, however, is the gradually increasing employment of the narrative style of romance and early-century secret history, including several interpolated tales. And while Tom is attractive throughout the novel, only at the beginning does this beauty have negative effects; later, the trend towards Romantic characterization...

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