Transatlantic Traffic and (Mis)Translations

5. The Toast of Heroes and Fair Albion’s Son: Jonathan Mitchell Sewell’s Ossianic Versifications

113 chapte r fi ve The Toast of Heroes and Fair Albion’s Son Jonathan Mitchell Sewall’s Ossianic Versifications Dafydd Moore M J ames Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian (1760–63) are today widely recognized (again) as one of the publishing sensations of the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Jerome MacGann considers that “Ossian’s influence on the literary scene of the late eighteenth century eclipsed all others .” Robert Crawford believes that Macpherson “initiated and brought to fruition a tonal shift in Western writing” and if John Kerrigan’s confidence that “anyone seriously interested in English Romanticism reads Ossian” seems a touch optimistic yet, most at least would consider the poems a significant part of early British Romantic culture one way or another.1 Much of the recent work on Ossian has stressed the cultural, political, national and philosophical contexts for the poems, and has been less interested in the shaping impact of Ossian on other writers.2 This is in part because of a suspicion about the overall logic of the “influence” argument, which can work to reinforce the secondary position of Scottish literature by implying its value relies on identifying an influence on figures established as primary via pre-existing Anglocentric literary histories. Accordingly, most considerations of influence recently have tended to concentrate less on establishing Macpherson’s importance via his influence than on the ways in which that influence was retrospectively written out of accounts of both the period and the (often personal) histories of individual writers.3 Versifications and adaptations of Ossian are a little-considered dimension to these reception studies. Imitations (and particularly parodies) are often noted in passing as evidence of the poems’ status as literary general knowl- 114 dafydd moore edge upon which authors felt confident to trade, but there has been little consideration of “straight” adaptations, and less effort to think about what the presence of these texts tells us about the reception of Ossian either in cultural or aesthetic terms. It has not helped that most versifications are not evidence of towering poetic genius on the part of authors who are mostly (probably rightly) now lost to literary history. This is a shame because these efforts can provide vivid insights into the way Ossian was read, understood, and entered the cultural bloodstream in ways that unsettle some current assumptions about how the poems were read and understood. These insights can be identified with all the more precision for coming from writers whose modest talent does not necessarily stretch to a confidence in subtext, and are arguably all the more valid in coming from writers who, like the vast majority of Ossian’s readers, were not themselves poetic geniuses. In other words, attention to this body of rather ordinary verse can allow for consideration of the undoubted phenomenon of Ossian’s wide readership “on the ground” and, as it happens, sidestep the anxiety that considering that readership only via recognized figures is only confirming Macpherson’s ultimately subaltern status. Consideration of Ossian’s impact in the United States has followed the familiar pattern. That is to say, it has tended to focus on the regard in which the poems were held by recognized figures, in this case most notably Thomas Jefferson, James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville.4 Of these, Jefferson’s interest is considered the most intriguing (Napoleon being the other political figure with a considerable interest in Ossian), and is certainly the most studied. Versifications and adaptations are mentioned in passing as evidence of what Carpenter termed the “vogue” for Ossian, but have received little attention. In this chapter I want to suggest that some examples written in New England at the end of the eighteenth century not only contribute to general understandings of the phenomenon of Ossianic versification, but also offer some specifically enlightening contexts for such activity, and offer an insight into relations between Britain and New England at the end of the eighteenth century. Although there were a number of writers responsible for such work, my main focus will be Jonathan Mitchell Sewall, and the eight Ossianic versifications included in his collection of Miscellaneous Poems published in Portsmouth, New Hampshire in 1801.5 Toast of Heroes & Fair Albion’s Son 115 Sewall was born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1748 and may by some accounts have studied at Harvard before entering legal practice in Portsmouth and becoming prominent in civic life and a...