West Virginia: A History

Chapter 22: Literary Endeavors

22 Literary Endeavors TheCMIWar Era. The birth of West Virginia during the tragedy of civil war provided a setting for a great literature, but the conflict left little time for literary pursuits. The most important West Virginia novel set in a wartime context was David Gaunt (1862) by Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910). In it Mrs. Davis, the mother of the noted writer Richard Harding Davis, portrayed the attitudes of Wheeling area farmers toward the war. She found nothing romantic in war, "for the shadow of death has fallen on us; it chills the very heaven." She added, "Men had forgotten to hope, forgotten to pray; only in the bitterness of endurance they say in the morning, 'Would God it were evening!' and in the evening "Would God it were morning!'"' Mrs. Davis was also attracted to the effects of industrialism on Wheeling and its vicinity. "Life in the Iron Mills," published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1861 is said to have been the first work in American fiction to deal with the problems of labor. Margaret Howth (1865) contrasted the wretchedness of life in the mills with the beauties of the countryside. Although ''crude and amateurish in workmanship," the novels of Mrs. Davis have been seen as "Russian-like in their grim and sordid realism" in an era given to excessive sentimentality and as a "distinct landmark in the evolution of American fi~tion."~ The Civil War also gave rise to valuable personal narratives. They included Nine Months in the Quartermaster's Department (1862) by Charles Lieb; Four Years A Soldier (1867) by David E. Johnston, a sergeant major in the Confederate Army; and The Flying Gray-Haired Yank (1868) by Michael Egan, a Union soldier from Parkersburg who was confined to a Confederate prison. Poetry, much of it of no enduring value, was the most popular literary form during the Civil War. The best poetry of the era came from the pen of Daniel Bedinger Lucas (1836-1909) of Charles Town, a member of the staff of General Henry A. Wise and later of the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals. The title poem of TheLand Where We WereDreaming (1865) perhaps caught better 'Quoted in Mary Meek Atkeson, "West Virginia Literature and Literary Writers," in James Morton Callahan,A History of West Virginia,Old and New, 3 vols. (Chicago: American Historical Society, 1923). vol. 1, 684. *FredLewis Pattee, "Rebecca Blaine Harding Davis," in Dictionary of American Biography, ed. Allan Johnson, Dumas Malone, and others, 26 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1928-1980),VOI.5, 143. 256 West Mrginia:A History than any other the spirit of the ~ o s t Cause, which provided themes for other works of Lucas, including The Wreathof Eglantine (1869).The romantic poetry of Beuhring H. Jones (1823-1872), a native of Pratt and longtime resident of Lewisburg, was written in a "quiet pensive vein, recalling loved ones at home, and pathetic scenes in battle and camp" while Jones was in a federal prison at Johnson's Island. His best work was published as The Sunny Land; or Prison Prose and Poetry (1868). late Nineteenth Century Prose and P o * . No great literary flowering accompanied the achievement of statehood in West Virginia, the triumph of western political and economic ideas, or the arrival of the new industrial age. The literary climate of the state in the late nineteenth century, however, was by no means arid. William Leighton (1833-19111, a resident of Wheeling, combined literary pursuits with a manufacturing business. TheSons of Godwin (1877) and At the Court of King Edwin (1878) were written in expressive and beautiful English in Shakespearian form, and three other works, A Sketch of Shakespeare , Shakespeare's Poems, and The Subjection of Hamlet, published between 1879and 1882,established Leighton as a leading Shakespearian scholar. His most ambitious work, Change: The Whisper of the Sphinx (18791, was a poem of great power in which he saw "The works of man sink crumbling back to dust, From which, with painful toil, his hand hath raised them."" Frank R. Stockton (1834-1902) lived at "Claymont," Jefferson county, the last three years of his life. His most important literary works, including Rudder Grange (1879), The Casting Away of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshire (1876), and his most famous story, The Lady or the Tiger (1882), were behind him. In the last, he left readers arguing whether a barbaric princess sacrificed her lover to a lady bound to many him or to...