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A Textbook of the Genteel Tradition: Henry Ward Beecher's Norwood

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Henry Nash Smith
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Extract

By the outbreak of the Civil War, the kind of highbrow psychological romance that Hawthorne and Melville had brought to a brilliant consummation in the 1850s had clearly lost favor both with critics and with the reading public. At the same time, middlebrow domestic fiction with a religious emphasis in the manner of Susan B. Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850), and the “sensation novel” of physical adventure aimed at an even less literate audience, were gaining more and more readers. During the 1860s the field of American fiction was dominated by weekly story papers serializing this popular fiction, and the closely related series of dime novels published by the firm of Beadle & Adams and its competitors. Such material was ground out according to formulas in an essentially industrial process; it had little bearing on the development of serious literature.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 3 , October 1978 , pp. 135 - 153
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

NOTES

1. Felheim, Marvin, “Two Views of the Stage; or, The Theory and Practice of Henry Ward Beecher,” New England Quarterly, 25 (09 1952), 314–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Rourke, Constance, Trumpets of Jubilee. Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lyman Beecher, Horace Greeley, P. T. Barnum (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927), p. 187.Google Scholar

3. McLoughlin, William G., The Meaning of Henry Ward Beecher. An Essay on the Shifting Values of Mid-Victorian America, 1840–1870 (New York: Knopf, 1970), p. 252.Google Scholar

4. Shaplen, Robert, Free Love and Heavenly Sinners. The Story of the Great Henry Ward Beecher Scandal (New York: Knopf, 1954), pp. 18–20.Google Scholar

5. Whittier, John Greenleaf, Letters, ed. Pickard, John B. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975), II, p. 477Google Scholar (to Edna Dean Proctor, Amesbury, Mass., 10 Nov. 1860).

6. Clemens, Samuel L., The Love Letters of Mark Twain, ed. Wecter, Dixon (New York: Harper, 1949), pp. 53–55.Google Scholar

7. McLoughlin, , Meaning of Henry Ward Beecher, pp. 10, 27, 57, 63Google Scholar; Shaplen, , Free Love and Heavenly Sinners, pp. 18–20.Google Scholar

8. Unsigned review of Norwood in Catholic World, 10 (12 1869), 394Google Scholar. A few months later the young Henry James declared in an unsigned review of Beecher's Lecture-Room Talks in Atlantic Monthly, 26 (07 1870), 118–19Google Scholar, that the minister's religion “claims merely natural sanctions.” “His disciple need intermit no business avocation,” continued James, “… nor waste any time in puerile ascetic practices; but, on the contrary, keep every sail bent that now carries him onward to fortune or to fame, and yet find himself in the end just as complete as needs be in all the armor of righteousness …”

9. Review of Parton, James, Famous Americans of Recent Times in Atlantic, 19 (05 1867), 637Google Scholar. In the review cited above, James calls Beecher “a true symbol for the time” (Atlantic, 26 [07 1870], 119).Google Scholar

10. Whittier, , Letters, III, p. 215Google Scholar (to William Allinson, Amesbury, Mass., before February 19, 1870): III, p. 229 (to Celia Thaxter, Amesbury, Mass., July 24, 1870).

11. Ibid., III, p. 322 (to Lydia Maria Child, Amesbury, Mass., September 20, 1874).

12. Rourke, , Trumpets of Jubilee, pp. 234–37.Google Scholar

13. Beecher, Henry Ward, Norwood; or, Village Life in New England (New York: 1868), p. vGoogle Scholar. (Subsequent references to this edition will be included in the text.)

14. Review of Norwood in Atlantic, 21 (06 1868), 761.Google Scholar

15. New Englander, 27 (04 1868), 411–12.Google Scholar

16. Nation, 6 (04 2, 1868), 274–75.Google Scholar

17. Bushnell, Horace, Christian Nurture (1847, 1861)Google Scholar, especially the Introduction by Luther A. Weigle in his edition (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1947).

18. Nation, 6, p. 275.Google Scholar

19. Atlantic, 21, p. 761Google Scholar. The reviewer for the New Englander (27, p. 412) also said that Beecher preaches too much, “though the preaching is much of it very good, and quite to our mind.”

20. Putnam's Magazine, 1 (06 1868), 769–70.Google Scholar

21. Harper's Monthly, 36 (05 1868), 816.Google Scholar

22. Elizabeth Wetherell [pseudonym of Susan B. Warner], The Wide, Wide World, 2 vols. (New York: 1851), II, p. 228.Google Scholar

23. Unsigned review of Norwood in Catholic World 10 (12 1869), 394Google Scholar: unsigned article, “Beecherism and Its Tendencies,” Catholic World, 12 (01 1871), 448.Google Scholar

24. McLoughlin, , Meaning of Henry Ward Beecher, pp. 255–56.Google Scholar

25. Robert Shaplen presents a detailed account of these events in Free Loue and Heavenly Sinners.

26. Santayana, George, “The Moral Background” (1920)Google Scholar, in The Genteel Tradition. Nine Essays by George Santayana, ed., Wilson, Douglas L. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), p. 85.Google Scholar

27. McLoughlin, , Meaning of Henry Ward Beecher, pp. 64, 132.Google Scholar

28. Entry for May 15, 1873, in Norton, Sara and De Wolfe, M. A., eds., Letters of Charles Eliot Norton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), I, pp. 506–507.Google Scholar

29. Whicher, Stephen, Freedom and Fate. An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1953; Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1957), p. 109CrossRefGoogle Scholar: “Although Emerson refused to conceive of life as tragedy, there is a sense in which his view of life can properly be called tragic, in so far as his recognition of the limits of mortal condition [sic] meant a defeat of his first romance of self-union and greatness.”

30. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “Fate” (1860)Google Scholar, in Selections, ed., Whicher, Stephen E., Riverside edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), pp. 332, 338.Google Scholar

31. Rose Wentworth summarizes the view of her father, who is Beecher's mouthpiece: “one part of the truth Nature expresses to the senses, and another, the far higher, through the senses she expresses to the soul” (Norwood, p. 205Google Scholar).

32. Emerson, , “Nature” (1836)Google Scholar, in Whicher, , Selections, pp. 35, 31.Google Scholar

33. “Realism” appears in this country in discussions of painting as early as the mid-1850s (Stein, Roger B., John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840–1900 [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967], pp. 115–16)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, but was not applied to literature before the mid-1860s. The earliest use of the term in American literary criticism that I know of, which occurs in a review by Henry James in the Nation. 1 (09 14, 1865), 77Google Scholar, suggests the link be tween painting and fiction: “For an exhibition of the true realistic chic we would … [compare] that body of artists who are represented in France by MM. Flaubert and Gerome to that class of works which in our literature are represented by [Charlotte Yonge's] ‘Daisy Chain’ and ‘The Wide, Wide World.’” (James evidently has in mind Aunt Fortune and Mr. Van Brunt.) But as late as 1869 the term “realism” had still not come into general use. Two different reviewers of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Old Town Folks referred to her portrayal of nongenteel characters as, respectively, “the truth of Pre-Raphaelitism” (Harper's Monthly, 39 [08 1869], 454Google Scholar) and “a pre-Raphaelite picture” (Galaxy, 8 [07 1869], 142).Google Scholar

34. The moralistic tone of the terms “conscience” and “humility” anticipates Howells' attitude toward realism in literature.

35. Emerson, , “Nature,” p. 26.Google Scholar

36. Auerbach, Eric, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans., Trask, Willard (Princeton, N.J.: 1953), pp. 40–46.Google Scholar

37. Atlantic, 21, p. 761.Google Scholar

38. Nation, 6, p. 275.Google Scholar

39. Harper's Monthly, 36, p. 816.Google Scholar

40. Atlantic, 21, p. 763Google Scholar. Beecher himself loved fast horses. Whittier wrote to a friend concerning a visit to New York in 1859: “Henry Ward Beecher gave me a break-neck sort of drive over the city with his spirited team of horses …” (to Hannah J. Newhall, Amesbury, Mass., May 17, in Letters, II, p. 407Google Scholar).

41. For example, New York Tribune, 12 27, 1850, p. 6.Google Scholar

42. Literary World, 12 28, 1850, p. 524.Google Scholar

43. See note 33.

44. Atlantic, 10 (07 1862), 126–27.Google Scholar

45. “The serious treatment of everyday reality, the rise of more extensive and socially inferior human groups to the position of subject-matter for problematic-existential representation …” (Auerbach, , Mimesis, p. 491).Google Scholar

46. Aaron, Daniel, The Unwritten War. American Writers and the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 1973).Google Scholar

47. Concord, September 26, 1864, in Slater, Joseph, ed., Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1964), p. 542.Google Scholar

48. Review of Braddon, M. E., Aurora FloydGoogle Scholar, in Nation, 1 (11 9, 1865), 593–94Google Scholar: rpt. in Pierre de Chaignon la Rose, ed., Notes and Reviews by Henry James (Cambridge, Mass.: Dunster House, 1921), 108 ff.Google Scholar

49. In an unpublished fragment called “The Start,” written shortly after 1900, quoted in Smith, Henry N., Mark Twain's Fable of Progress (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1964), p. 93.Google Scholar

50. Brumm, Ursula, American Thought and Religious Typology (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1970), p. 217.Google Scholar

51. Ibid., p. 220.