English Westerns

JAMES K. FOLSOM Yale University English Westems One of the more remarkable —some might say disappointing — developments of nineteenth century literary history was the start­ ling, and by and large unexpected, influence of James Fenimore Cooper on European literature. A Spanish critic who wrote in 1853 that El ultimo de los Mohicanos was “a masterpiece which has become a classic in every language of Europe” probably stated no more than the simple truth. In Germany the immediate and lasting popularity of the Lederstrumpferzdhlungen attests to Cooper’s over­ whelming importance in that country, as does the presence of nu­ merous imitators, of whom only Karl May is at all widely remem­ bered today. And in France Cooper’s work was incorporated at once as a welcome graft to an already venerable primitivistic tradi­ tion.1 Even today the anomaly of French and German Western films attests at once to Cooper’s continuing popularity and, more significantly, to a perennial European fascination with the Amer­ ican West. In England fascination with the American West was also great, though it took a different form from that which developed on the Continent. In Great Britain there was little direct imitation of Cooper, though his works were widely read; but without much question his influence is to be traced to the immense number of later English books about the American frontier. Two significant differences are immediately apparent between English and Continental treatments of the American West. First of all, on the Continent the American West ossified with the frontier 1See Clarence Gohdes, “The Reception of Some Nineteenth-Century American Au­ thors in Europe,” in The American Writer and the European Traditon, ed. Margaret Denny and W. H. Gilman (Minneapolis, 1950), especially pp. 112-113; and, more generally, Hoxie Neale Fairchild, The Noble Savage, A Study in Ro­ mantic Naturalism (New York, 1928). of the early Leatherstocking Tales. Few European writers in the Western tradition follow the American West across the Mississippi, and as a result they ignore what have become the staples of later American Western writing: cowboys, wagon trains, cavalry patrols, and indeed the whole physical and moral geography of the Great Plains are almost totally missing from Continental western fiction. English Westerns, in contrast, are almost ostentatiously up-to-date; they chronicle the events of the California gold rush, of cowboy life on the Great Plains and of trapper life in the Rockies, and even, on occasion, of very particular historical events such as the Mormon migration to the Great Salt Lake.2 Indeed, three of the most prolific writers of English Westerns knew America more than casually at first hand, and consciously wrote to give the impression that they were conveying incontrovertible, eyewitness information about the Western frontier.3 The second difference is that English Westerns were confessedly written as juvenile fiction, in contrast to Continental western fiction which, however much it may have been read by juveniles was like Cooper’s fiction ostensibly written for adults. This juvenile bias of English Westerns is probably their most obvious single distinguishing characteristic, and it serves to separate them on the one hand from the usual Continental and on the other from the ordinary American method of writing Westerns. Since it may serve as well to isolate English attitudes toward the American West and indirectly to throw into bolder relief some of our own habitual attitudes toward our Western experience, a more careful analysis of these heretofore ignored works of juvenile fiction may prove of value both to the historian of taste and, hopefully, to the student of more serious literature. The juvenile bias of English Westerns is perhaps most easily seen in their omnipresent moralizing. It is probably fair to say that all juvenile fiction —or at least an overwhelming majority of it —is written with some kind of overtly conceived moral purpose. On the 2The plot of Captain Mayne Reid’s The Wild Huntress (London, 1861), for in­ stance, depends upon the allegation — often made at the time because of the Mormon custom of polygamy —that the Latter-day Saints were engaged more or less openly in the White Slave trade. 3R. M. Ballantyne (1825-1894) was a clerk for the...