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/vo I 11,-7 ERICAN LOCAL COLOR IN THE BRITISH ISLES Lawson, Jr. Committee swvn en<b> 525633 -YW . 12/1 il ABSTRACT The reception In various foreign countries of the work of major American writers like Emerson, Whitman, and Twain has been the subject of scholarly inquiry. The present stu­ dy is an extension of this approach to some minor American authors whose work, even among critics, is assumed to be in­ digenous and national. The investigation both makes clear a foreign image of America and helps us to understand what, in their time, the local color writers were. Both the na­ ture of the British reception of these writers and the rea­ sons for it are treated. The approach here has been to examine the contemporary reputations in the British Isles of American local color writers from four broad geographical areas—the Far West, the Midwest, the South, and New England. The particular writers studied include Joaquin Miller, Helen Hunt Jackson, Mary Hallock Foote, Edward Eggleston, John Hay, James Whit­ comb Riley, Will Carleton, Alice French, George Washington Cable, Mary Murfree, Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Har­ ris, Mary E. Wilkins, and Sarah Orne Jewett. Bret Harte, the subject of this sort of inquiry elsewhere, is also re­ ferred to at times, and reviews of his work appear in the annotated bibliography with which the work concludes. Mostly from English periodicals, the more than three- hundred annotated reviews and articles appearing in the bib­ liography were taken as the indicators of taste for a signi­ ficant segment of the British public. This bibliography is not only the basis for the present study, but might also be considered an independent work. It collects sources hither­ to not brought together and examined. Among the conclusions of this study was that frequent­ ly the section of America treated by a local color writer affected his fame abroad. For example, Joaquin Miller, the Far Western writer, was often praised more for his subject matter than for his treatment of it. Writers about unfamil­ iar regions were apt to attract British reviewers. On the other hand, writers from long-settled areas of America were generally less well-received} the reviewers tended to write less about the section and more about the work itself. De­ spite these variations in approach, British reviewers gen­ erally appreciated all the American local color writers, and the study demonstrates that these writers had English repu­ tations not previously suspected. 111 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................. 1 THE APPEAL OF THE EXOTICi FAR WESTERN AMERICAN LOCAL COLOR.......................................... ........................... 8 Joaquin Millen "The Buffalo Bill of Poesy"..................................................9 Helen Hunt Jackson and Mary Hallock Foote, Indians and Miners........................................................................2? THE LIMITS OF NOVELTY: THE RECEPTION OF MIDWESTERN LOCAL COLOR WRITERS..............................................37 Edward Eggleston« Backwards Society ............................................. •••.•«33 John Hay« The Pike County .41 James Whitcomb Riley and Will Carleton, Down Home .................................... « • • . ...........................45 Alice French, Setting and Dialect .49 THE ROMANCE OF THE TRADITIONAL, SOUTHERN LOCAL COLOR .... ................................ ..... .54 George Washington Cable, Dialects and "Races". ......... .................. .55 Mary N. Murfree, The Folk of the Mountains ............ .60 Thomas Nelson Page, Partisan Regionalist. ....................... ........ .63 Joel Chandler Harris, The Negro and the Plantation. ...........65 iv CHRONICLES OF SMALL BEER: NEW ENGLAND .........................................74 Mary E. Wilkins» The Dally Round ,»••,•»••••••••••• »75 Sarah Orne Jewett: True Artistry and "Decaying Villages" ....... .80 CONCLUSION .......................... .87 ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY . .......................................................................90 OTHER WORKS CONSULTED ....................................................... 133 INTRODUCTION Among the American books read by the people of the British Isles—years after Sydney Smith questioned whether anyone did—were those by the so-called "local color" writers. Both the verse and the fiction of this American "school" found a ready audience in the British Isles. Not only were these writers known to the English, Irish, and Scotch, they also became the subjects of much critical discussion. That the critical treatments of the fiction and verse were so universally favorable attests both to the difference between the critical stances of England and America and to the difference a hundred years makes in a reading public’s attitude. Several local color writers were very popular in the British Isles when they were not in the United States; reputations in some cases persisted there long after they had waned in this country. Examining the reasons for these attitudes not only defines the bases of criticism, but fixes, in an historical context, the nature of the subjects of criticism. The case of the reception of American local color writers in the British Isles is especially interesting because their sort of regional writing was supposedly an indigenous 2 production of their sections of the nation. How could regional American prose and verse, replete with local character types and dialect, be interesting to, or even communicate to, an English readership of which at least one member spoke of the difficulty of understanding regional English writing?^ What salient aspects of American local color appealed to the British, and what were the reasons for this appeal, are two questions that must be answered in explaining this circumstance. Although much more time can be spent speculating on the second of these interrelated questions, most of the following pages are concerned with these queries. As a preliminary to this investigation, a definition of what is here meant by American "local color" should be proposed. Following the usual delimitations of the term, local color is taken to include one type of writing in America which sprang into importance in the years immediately following the Civil War. It first became influential and popular in 1870, with the rise to fame of Bret Harte. The turn of the century is a convenient but necessarily very approximate date for the decline in the prominence of local color. By this time, the popularity of the genre had markedly dwindled and its place was increasingly being taken by other kinds of writing. 3 The great bulk of local color was in the form of the short story. This fact is partly attributable to the impetus and encouragement given those who wrote shorter pieces by contemporary American magaZines. Novels and a poetry which was almost always in a humorous vein were nevertheless by no means unknown. Local color was, in addition, one type of postwar realism, "if realism be 2 defined as a graphic delineation of actual life." Besides the sometimes surface aspects of local color like florid description of scenery and the reproduction of a regional dialect, there was ideally also a deep-seated concern for one’s area. This facet of local color is aptly summariZed by a modern American critic of Mary E. Wilkins: "it can be understood to denote not merely surface aspects of a story but also an impulse, a sensi­ bility, an attitude toward a particular moment in the 3 development of a traditional culture." The approach in this study will be to examine, under four regional headings, the British conceptions of American local color writers and writing: the Far West, the Midwest, the South, and New England. This organiZation presents some problems. The English did not usually consider, for example, all Southern regional writers to be necessarily part of a "school," nor, indeed, to have more to do with each other than any of them had to do with, say, a Western 4 writer. In addition, local color was not always the product of a part of the country as broad as the "South." Thus Joel Chandler Harris was a writer of middle Georgia and George Washington Cable of Louisiana, or even of Creole life in New Orleans. Yet these writers’ broader regional settings were pertinent to / most English reviewers. The order in which the four sections are arranged reflects a general progression which existed for contemporary foreign readers, from those areas of America least known about to those most known about. This order is notably apropos since to many of the critics the setting of a story was at least as striking as the author’s treatment of it. On this level, the stranger lands seemed to them to be much the more exciting and, therefore, noteworthy. With the Inescapable oversimplification, then, and with the above qualifications and others which will become evident in the following pages, these are the general outlines of this investigation. The specific writers discussed here were chosen for several reasons. First of all, they came from all parts of the country. English reviews of their work were either significant enough or numerous enough to warrant discussion Although there were many other local color writers, these are taken as representative. One difficulty with examining the reviews of the writers who were selected was that, 5 in addition to their regional writings, they also wrote other sorts of books. John Hay, for one example, wrote a book about Spain. The reviews

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