ISSN:
0021-8758
Source:
Cambridge Journals Digital Archives
Topics:
English, American Studies
,
History
,
Political Science
,
Sociology
,
Economics
Notes:
In the London Quarterly Review for January 1814 appeared a long and brilliantly written review of an anonymous American pamphlet entitled Inchiquin the Jesuit's Letters, which had been published in New York some four years earlier. The pamphlet, indeed, was only of passing interest to the Quarterly. The real issue was the moral condition of the United States, an enemy which had to be dealt with during the coming year first militarily then diplomatically. The British reader was to be assured that the Americans should be handled no less severely than the French. To this end, the essayist revealed the distressing truth: through Gallic influence the Yankees had become imperialists, and the mania pervaded every aspect of life in the States. It followed that such a people should be chastised without scruple — whatever their English affinities. American magazines called the review a “collected mass of calumny and falsehood against a whole nation,” a “nefarious tissue of calumnies on the American character,” a copy of “all the effusions of malevolence, misrepresentation, and ignorance” which the Quarterly could find against “American taste, customs, morality, and literature.” Even a few notable Britons were embarrassed: the venerated Wilberforce called on John Quincy Adams in London to explain that the Quarterly's opinions of the United States were not those of the British people, and Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate and a major contributor to the magazine, told young George Ticknor in Paris after the war (a conflict that the Tory Southey had supported enthusiastically) that nothing in his literary career had caused him more mortification than “being thought” the author of the piece.
Type of Medium:
Electronic Resource
URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0021875800009476
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