Margaret Fuller, Wandering Pilgrim

Acknowledgments

xi I wish first to express my gratitude to my thesis advisors many years ago at Cornell, Cushing Strout and Meyer Abrams. I am grateful as well to my former Cornell professor, Jonathan Bishop. Professors Bishop and Strout instilled in me a love of the American Transcendentalists, especially of Margaret Fuller. To Professor Abrams I owe most of what I know about the Romantics. To him I owe as well the underlying theme of this book, as I explain in the prologue. Another scholar to whom I am profoundly indebted is Joel Myerson. This book would not now exist had he not long ago expressed an interest in my scholarship on Fuller. Myerson, who had read my 1972 Cornell dissertation on Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft , through the years sent me offprints of his articles on Fuller and other Transcendentalists and early on encouraged me to develop and publish my own research on Fuller. I am now doing that, thanks to the outstanding scholarship on Fuller not only of Myerson but also of Robert Hudspeth, Charles Capper, Joan von Mehren, Larry Reynolds, Bell Gale Chevigny, Jeffrey Steele, Paula Blanchard, and others. I am especially grateful to Joan von Mehren, who has been supportive and generous, even sending me the proofs of her latest publication so I could integrate her recent findings into my manuscript before my book went to press. Although I could not incorporate major information from Charles Capper’s volume 2 of his Fuller biography into my book since it appeared while I was correcting my proofs, I do want to thank him for his gracious and prompt responses to my questions prior to his book’s publication. I also want to thank friends and fellow faculty at Mississippi State University. I am grateful first to history professor Pete Grill, whose spring 1996 lecture to my graduate seminar on the 1848 European Revolutions helped me to understand the complexities of those revolutions. Thanks as well to Jeff Mitchell, a visiting philosophy professor whose lecture on Plato’s mysticism and theory of the Forms to my graduate students in another of my seminars made clear to me the powerful influence of Plato’s idealism on Fuller. Thanks to MSU faculty Robert Wolverton and Richard Patteson. Dr. Wolverton offered valuable information about Greek and Roman mythology, and Professor Patteson alerted me to the meticulously researched and original scholarship of Victorian scholar James Kincaid. Not to be forgotten are the English Department graduate students who assisted me and offered insights that enriched my understanding of Fuller. These include Suzanne Acknowledgments Baga, Todd Bunnell, Tracy Carr, Lee Durrett, Andy Lowery, Staci McCormick, Amanda Myers, Bonnie Novak, Jennifer Southall, and Ann Taylor. I wish to give special thanks to my former MSU graduate student Sylwia Martin, who appeared in my 1996 seminar on the 1848 European Revolutions fresh from Poland. Sylwia proved a gold mine of information on Adam Mickiewicz and put me in touch with Grazyny Grochowiakowa at the Muzeum Literatury im. Adama Mickiewicza in Warsaw. Thanks to the museum and to Sylwia’s serving as interpreter, I have been able to include in my book the 1898 drawing of Adam Mickiewicz by Kazimierz Mordasewicz after an 1839 daguerreotype by an unknown artist. A special note of thanks to William McClung, who went to Mt. Auburn cemetery in Cambridge and took especially for this book the marvelous photograph of Timothy Fuller’s tomb covered with snow. Thanks also to Jim Cawthorne of Camera 1 in Columbus, Georgia, who, along with Harvard’s Imaging Services in Widener Library, reproduced quality images for me. I am grateful, as well, to Willard P. Fuller Jr., who has generously given me permission to reproduce Fuller family photographs. Many thanks, also, to Constance Fuller Threinen for allowing me to reproduce a black-and-white image of Hicks’s portrait of Fuller in Rome, which she owns. To all the librarians at the various libraries who have aided me in my research I am indebted. Foremost among these are the many helpful librarians in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. The late Carolyn Jakeman of the Houghton was helpful to me in the early 1970s when I began my research on Fuller there. Librarians in the Houghton who in recent years have been helpful include Betty Falsey, Susan Halpert, Tom Ford, Emily Walhout, Jennie Rathbun, Peter Accardo, and Leslie Morris. I wish as well to thank librarians at the Boston Public Library, the University of Georgia Library (one...