The Peculiar Birthright of Every American: George Watterston's The Lawyer
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Notes
1. David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989), p. 59.
2. Emory Elliott, Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic, 1725-1810 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), p. 31. Elliott calls this republican mode of cultural authority "associationism." In The Republic of Letters: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990), Michael Warner elaborates what he calls "the republican paradigm" of authorship as the presumably altruistic attempt to convey information in a way that would contribute to an homogenous national identity (p. 168). Robert A. Ferguson has similarly described a literature of "consensus" (p. 12) in "'We Hold These Truths': Strategies of Control in the Literature of the Founders," in Reconstructing American Literary History, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 1-28.
3. Robert A. Ferguson's Law and Letters in American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984) provides a comprehensive discussion of the dominant role played by lawyers in the literature of the early republic. He contends that lawyers were inclined by training to adhere to "universally applicable forms" (p. 33).
4. Cathy N. Davidson's Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986) extensively documents the role of didactic novels in the early republic.
5. Stephen Burroughs, Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs (1797; repr. Albany, B. D. Packard, 1811). See Philip F. Gura's introduction to the 1988 edition of the Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1988) for a more complete publication history.
6. See Jay Fliegelman's Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982) for a broader discussion of this subject.
7. George S. Watterston, The Lawyer: or Man as He Ought Not to Be (Pittsburgh, 1808). A limited number of copies of The Lawyer are currently in existence. In writing this essay, I have consulted the one owned by the Lilly Library in Bloomington, Indiana.
8. Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word, p. 236; Henri Petter, The Early American Novel (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1971), p. 324.
9. Julia E. Kennedy, George Watterston: Novelist, "Metropolitan Author," and Critic (Washington: Catholic University Press, 1933), p. vii. Kennedy cites Lillie Deeming Loshe's The Early American Novel 1789-1830 (1907; repr. New York: Ungar, 1966), p. 55.
10. Reynolds, p. 193. Reynolds places The Lawyer in a "Romantic Adventure" tradition and overlooks the didactic pretensions of Morcell, which clearly allude to the didactic tradition rather than the discourse of adventure, and so suggest that The Lawyer's generic assignment be reconsidered.
11. George S. Watterston, The Child of Feeling (Washington, 1809), p. 94.
12. Quoted in Kennedy, p. 46.
13. Kennedy and Loshe both connect this subtitle to English didacticist Robert Bage's Man As He Is (London: W. Lane, 1792) and Man As He Is Not, or Hermsprong (London: W. Lane, 1796). While the allusion is clear, Watterston's replacement of "is" with "ought" complicates the subtitle's irony.
14. The most recent analysis of the spread of "moral" texts in the early republic is Richard D. Brown's Knowledge is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 65-81.
15. Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, 20 vols. and index (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1928-1937), Vol. 2, p. 214.
16. See, particularly, Sussanna Haswell Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1792) and Enos Hitchcock's Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family (1796).
17. See Fliegelman, pp. 245-47.
18. See Davidson, p. 236.
19. See Davidson, pp. 236-38.
20. In the prefaces to nearly all of Brown's novels, "C. B. B." instructs his reader on the interpretations he has in mind. While "C. B. B." may be Brown's own ironic nod to convention, he signals some form of authorial presence that must be acknowledged by the reader.
21. Kennedy, p. 20.
22. Sacvan Bercovitch, "The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History," CritI, 12...
