My Own Personal "'Hamlet' Back-&-Forth"

 “What kind of boat is she?”

 

An embarrassing question; for it was suddenly apparent that this small craft could not be classified. She was neither sailor nor steamer; she was not a trader, still less a yacht. A roof, the width of the beam, had been raised over a black, flat-bottomed hull; small square-paned windows had been cut in, and a short mast raised above. Space had been left in the bow for anchor and ropes; in the stern a tiny deck gave just enough room for the sweep of the tiller.

 

“She’s a—well—she’s a painter’s boat.” 

 

The San Luca, by Cilette Ofaire, book’s title taken from the name of the boat in the travel narrative, was on a bookshelf I was looking through at home. I wondered why it hadn’t been on the shelf with the houseboat books, where I would have found it months ago when moving those books from living room to office. Although the “painter’s boat” was not exactly a houseboat, they did live aboard for years, the husband and wife, both of them painters. (It should really have been called a “painters’ boat,” with the apostrophe indicated plural artists.) In any case, the subject matter moved me to set aside a novel I’d planned to read at bedtime in favor of traveling aboard the ‘San Luca.’ 

 

They begin in Germany, with the plan of giving up cheap apartment hunting and the dreariness of even cheaper hotel rooms in the years following World War I, to take to Europe’s canals, living and working in their waterborne vessel. 

 

Charles had found her in a partly drained canal in the dreary marshes bordering the Elbe between Hamburg and the sea. She made us think of a peddler’s booth abandoned after a fair, or a broken-down circus wagon left by the roadside. On her prow she had carried the carved wooden head of a dragon, set off by daubs of green and yellow, and along the sides of the hull had been painted wings which ended in a sort of tail vanishing into the rudder. We could not help smiling at her absurd, helpless air.

 

Charles and Cilette did not have Harlan and Anna Hubbard’s drifting voyage down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Sometimes they had an opportunity to moor in some lovely pastoral backwater, but just as often they were towed from one city to another in a long “train” of barges, a tugboat the motive engine of the train, past factories and cranes and sad little remnants of pathetic, bare-limbed trees. And in fact, being towed by some other vessel seemed their primary way of moving, from Germany to Czechoslovakia to Holland and beyond, in a world of customs officials, police, required permissions, and rules.

Intermission in Northport

I left my reading at the end of Part I to begin another day, first outdoors with dog and then indoors at bookshop. Part I of the story had ended sadly, with the suspicious disappearance of their little dog in Amsterdam, suspicious because neighbors on hand had complained about the boat being moored on “their” canal, and one had falsely claimed to the police that the quiet, sleeping dog “barked all night.” 

 

After a couple of early customers, the shop settled down to a dead quiet until, one by one, friends trickled in. Even before being introduced to one another (those not already acquainted), lively conversation ensued. Books were purchased and ordered, recommendations made, questions asked, until the talk ranged far and wide from Waukazoo Street, ceasing only a few minutes after closing time. It was a good day in Northport. And the next day, Saturday, would be Independent Bookstore Day! 

 

But first, back home to Sunny. In the rain. A short walk under an umbrella, dinner preparations, and then an hour of relaxation, the momma with her book, Sunny with her bone. 

 

Back to the Boat

What a surprise awaited me at the beginning of Part II. Charles and Cilette sell their boat! Right in the middle of the book! The new owner, a friend of theirs, gives it a new name, and C&C purchase another boat and christen it ‘San Luca’ to continue their voyaging, now through Belgium and on to France. 

Early in the story, we were told that Charles “knew how to create an atmosphere of intimacy out of the barest of materials” and thus transformed the droll, abandoned, dragon-headed boat into a waterborne home and studio to two wandering artists. Charles’s ingenuity is exercised once again on the new boat, a “lamentable figure” when first they see her, “streaked with rust” and further disfigured with “ugly red paint.” As soon as they found her,

 

…Charles began to draw up plans: taking her to pieces, putting her together again, modifying her to fit all our needs and our wishes. 

 

“The entry here,” he said aloud, “will become the living-room.” He shut his eyes and Cilette knew that he was building the wall over in his dream.

 

The Artist's houseboat in Leland, Michigan!

Oh, what memories such passages evoke for me! The Artist whose life I shared was a boat dreamer, also, and could not see an old hull anywhere on land or a smart vessel in harbor without making elaborate mental changes, sometimes even committing plans and sketches to paper, and so whenever we would read aloud to each from books such as this one, he could not bear to rush through descriptions of renovations and would often say, if I were the one with the book in hand, “Wait. Read that last part again. I didn’t quite picture it.” 

 

Daydream material

Sketching a remodel....

Then Back in the Bookstore

On Saturday, April 26, the sun came out in Northport for Independent Bookstore Day!!! More importantly, probably, from a traditional Northport point of view, it was the day of the annual Scott Brow Fishing Derby for families of young children up at the millpond. Some people came for both books and fish, though, and that worked fine.

 

Discussing movies and TV series with a customer-friend from Cedar, I needed to check on the date of the 19^th-century establishment of the town that became the ghost town where the Artist and I spent several contented winters. Imagine my horror, in looking up my own blog post from 2015, to discover that I had mistyped the date for the first Dos Cabezas post office! It was, of course, 1879, not 1979! All this time, and of all the people who had read that post (a popular one because of its subject matter), no one had corrected me! It’s kind of a hassle to make a correction to a post that far back in time, but I persisted until victory was mine.

 

Two dogs visited the bookshop on Saturday, Charlie and, later, another little dog about the same size but held in the owner’s arms. Friend Lucia also stopped by (though she had bought books only the day before) to wish me a Happy Indie Bookstore Day! 

Always good to see Lucia!

My bedtime book on Saturday was, once again, Ellen Airgood’s South of Superior, my go-to comfort book, the one that soothes my soul in troubled times and strengthens my resolve.

 

An excerpt from one of my favorite books

 

…It was hard to say who the “real” people were. She didn’t have anything against most of the new people, not the retirees or the summer people or tourists or even the snowmobilers, not on a case-by-case basis, except that they tended to expect too much, to assume too much. But they paid their taxes and kept their lawns mowed and volunteered at the school and spent money in the local stores and had as much right to be here as Gladys did, she realized that. And McAllaster had always been a tourist town, a resort town; her own parents had made a living off that fact. 

 

But things were changing fast now. Too fast. Half a dozen new summer places got built on the beach every year, and no one was content with a regular house, everyone had to have a mansion. At this rate she wouldn’t be able to afford the taxes on the house she’d lived in for more than fifty years….

 

-      Ellen Airgood, South of Superior

  

On the road!

 

Last time I went anywhere farther from home than Benzie or Grand Traverse County? Last fall I ventured all the way to Cadillac, and in late spring of 2024 I made it up to the U.P. once. 

 

My spring road trip 2025 took me to Reed City, the halfway point a friend from Kalamazoo and I had chosen for this season’s rendez-vous. 

Always good to see Laurie!

We did no sight-seeing, and so I have no album of photographs to share, but I did stop to hover a few moments at a little farm village called Chase, where I mailed a postcard to a friend in the U.P. and used my phone to capture a couple of old buildings, the first because it must have been very important at one time in local history, the second because it made me think of how often I have meditated on hiding out in some out-of-the-way place where no one would ever find me. Why such an idea? Don’t you have occasional fantasies of leaving everything behind?

Faded glory

No one would look for me here.

Now, in closing, another excerpt

A somewhat strange book came into my hands. The title is King Noanett, the subtitle A Story of Old Virginia and the Masssachusetts Bay, the author’s name on the title page given as F. J. Stimson, but in parentheses below that J.S. of Dale. The main character is a young man of Devon, who meets a lass and falls in love – an old story, so far. This particular story, however, is set in the time of great conflict in England, and as the young man’s grandfather is a Parliamentarian and the young woman’s grandfather a royalist, the lovers are star-crossed. And here I must reveal that the young man’s unusual name is Bamfyde Moore Carew.

 

Let me here skip ahead in the story. Carew is convicted of giving aid to the royalists and sentenced to “transportation” (i.e., deportation to the colonies) and several years’ servitude (I forget how many), but eventually he and an Irishman who had shared the same transport vessel escape their masters and join an army. Horrors of slaughter and dissipation drive them from that life, also, and they carry away with them a girl whom neither of them wishes to marry (because the Irishman, like the Devon man, is in love with another) but whom they cannot leave to the life of the camp. 

 

Enough of background. Of this convoluted story, I only want to leave you today with a speech the Irishman makes to his friend:

 

“Beauty is given man, the good kind of beauty to enjoy, the bad kind to tempt him and teach him strength. In this way even pleasure hath its place—and a Puritan is but a suicide that thrusts him, like a blubbering child, away from the fires that are to try him! Let monks renounce—a man is here to live, and touch and try the lives of others; to feel his life and use it to the full, and then to give it away—to the first cause, maybe? Men to be brave and true, maids to be brave and gentle—and both their highest duty to be kind.” 

 

“Their highest duty to be kind.” Isn’t that a noble thought for the day? 

Quietly spectacular hellebore

“You May Quote Me”

No peepers peeping yet on Tuesday....

The American spring is by no means so agreeable as the American autumn; both move with faultering step, and slow; but this lingering pace, which is delicious in autumn, is most tormenting in the spring. In the one case you are about to part with a friend, who is becoming more gentle and agreeable at every step, and such steps can hardly be made too slowly; but in the other you have been shut up with black frost and biting blasts, and where your best consolation was being smoke-dried.

 

-      Fanny Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans

 

Ah, spring, you are such a tease!

The sun shone in Leelanau on Easter! All day long! We couldn’t call it a warm day, but it was lovely. Even though the daffodils hadn’t opened yet, the little blue squills were cheery in the sunlight.

Monday was a day of rain. Shrug! “April showers”— you know the rest. On that rainy day I drove south of Traverse City on an errand that had been postponed long enough but on the way stopped at a thrift shop to look through music CDs for something to combat the dreariness of the day and give me voices in the car that were not battering me with current events. What I found was the original cast recording of “The Phantom of the Opera.” It more than fulfilled my requirements: I was in another world all afternoon! The mood of the rain … memories along every mile of road … images of the Paris Opera … the lyrics and the music!!! “Wishing I could hear your voice again….” Oh, yes! And, of course, "The Music of the Night"! I was ecstatic and miserable and floating on air and drowned in sorrow. When I got home, I told Sunny, “I’ve been breaking my heart in Paris. It will take me a while to come back to you.”

From the previous century's bulbs 

Tuesday the sun returned, and the “wild” daffodils at my place began to open (the ones that I planted not quite ready but getting close), and with another day of sun in the forecast, I hung towels out on the line. Sunny and I played in the yard, I worked at outdoor tasks, and we made it to the dog park and met with friends there. 

No more snow!!! Airborne puppy!

Mrs. Trollope said it first.

The passage quoted at the beginning of today’s post is the first paragraph of Chapter XIV in Mrs. Trollope’s book (I call her “Mrs. Trollope” because that’s how she was referred to at the time her book made such a sensation), and I used it today because it captures so well the feelings of most of my fellow northern Michigan residents. But naturally, most of the book is given over to subjects other than climate and weather. It was after reading both the Rev. Isaac Fidler’s and James Stuart, Esquire’s accounts of visiting the young United States, comparing them, and musing over the difference in the two gentlemen’s impressions, that I decided the time had come for me to read the famous account, read by both Fidler and Stuart, of American life written by Englishwoman Frances Trollope, whose visit began in the last days of 1828 and extended into 1832. 

 

Look again at those dates above. Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave Beaumont made their nine-month visit to “America” (i.e., the United States of) in 1831-32, so their time here would have overlapped with that of Mrs. Trollope, but I can find no evidence that the three ever met. The latter expressly says in the preface to her book (speaking of herself in the first person in the preface but in the first person in the main text):

 

She leaves to abler pens the more ambitious task of commenting on the democratic form of the American government; while, by describing, faithfully, the daily aspect of ordinary life, she has endeavored to shew how greatly the advantage is on the side of those who are governed by the few, instead of the many.

 

In other words, she isn’t going to get into politics, but it’s obvious to her, after over three years in the U.S. that England, with its monarch and aristocracy and established national Church, has the better form of government for all concerned. That, of course, is her opinion. Her observations and the conversations she committed to paper as quickly as possible so as not to lose either the words or the tone—those cannot be as easily dismissed as her opinions, if one does not share or appreciate them. 

 

Fidler and Stuart, men, along with Monsieur de Tocqueville, focusing on politics, had little to say of the life of American women, and Fanny Trollope gives detailed observations on that topic. 

 

In general, she sees the two sexes mixing very rarely. In public gatherings (mostly religious but occasionally a lecture), the norm is for men and women to sit separately. Men do their drinking at night, away from home, in places where women are not welcome (probably not allowed), and even in the home, the midday dinner meal lasts only about ten minutes, with husband and wife separating as soon as they leave the table, while at breakfast the husband reads his newspaper until he leaves for his office or shop. Boarding house meals are similarly silent and rushed.

 

As dancing and theatre-going are mostly out of bounds for 1830s Americans, young people meet at preachings or are introduced in the homes of friends. “Refined” young American ladies in this time period would never dream of allowing so much as an elbow to come into contact with any part of the body of a man or boy at a dinner table or on a staircase! When Fanny proposed a “pic-nic,” she was advised by a very proper young lady that it would be very improper for men and women to sit together on the ground. In cities, there are occasional balls. When refreshments are offered, men and women go to separate rooms. (How, though, I wonder, did they dance without touching?)

 

Mrs. Trollope gives it as her opinion that American manners would be much improved if there were more mixing of ladies and gentlemen. For one thing, she suspects the men would do much less chewing of tobacco and spitting on the floor, which was one of her constant complaints. This spitting occurred even in the House of Representatives, although the Senate, she allowed, was more dignified: its members sat up straight, rather than lounging and putting up their feet, and there was very little spitting. From the gallery, she was unable to hear much of the discussion on the floor.

 

Everywhere in the country, however, she found conversation among men almost exclusively political, while the women, in their limited sphere, gossiped among themselves and spoke of dress. Mrs. Trollope was frequently bored to tears and wondered how the women could stand the tedium of their lives. She hoped to find literary conversation in her American travels, but this hope was dashed again and again. Americans of the merchant class were not conversant even with Shakespeare and could hardly imagine they were missing anything. Their ambition was all financial, getting ahead the focus and aim of their lives.

 

Despite fierce denials met with in the United States, and despite James Stuart’s suspicion that Mrs. Trollope exaggerated or invented much of what she reported, I found her observations quite believable and calmly expressed. As to the narrow American focus on getting ahead financially, this is confirmed in de Tocqueville’s writings. Mrs. Trollope finds confirmation of her impression given by an Englishman she met.

I heard an Englishman … declare that in following, in meeting, or in overtaking in the street, on the road, or in the field, at the theatre, the coffeehouse, or at home, he had never heard Americans conversing [this would be American men] without the word DOLLAR being pronounced between them. Such unity of purpose, such sympathy of feeling, can, I believe, be found nowhere else, except, perhaps, in an ants’ nest.

I have read elsewhere (perhaps in Dickens?) about the constant spitting of chewing tobacco and the haste with which Americans rapidly gulped down meals in silence. Could Mrs. Trollope return today, she would find Americans enjoying more leisurely meals but snacking and sipping and gulping throughout the day, too. She would find conversation of men and women to include lively discussion of professional sports, books, films, and more, along with politics and financial matters. 

 

Our own pictures of American life in that period, whether in the North or the South, in cities or plantations or on the frontier, is generally oversimplified to the point of falsehood. Seeing our country not through history textbooks or hagiographies of famous men but through the eyes of visitors from overseas, making contemporary observations firsthand, makes for eye-opening reading. And if those observers sometimes disagree on specifics, don’t we do the same now, in the present? It’s a reason not to read only one account and think you have gotten a complete picture.

 

***

 

Well! After writing the paragraph above, I picked up the book again to continue my reading, and what did I come upon?

 

While reading and transcribing my notes, I underwent a strict self-examination. I passed in review all I had seen, all I had felt, and scrupulously challenged every expression of disapprobation; the result was, that I omitted in transcription much that I had written, as containing unnecessary details of things which had displeased me; yet, as I did so, I felt strongly that there was no exaggeration in them; but such details, though true, might be ill-natured, and I retained no more than were necessary to convey the general impressions I received.

 

Further along, near the end of her book, she devotes an entire chapter to the American reception of another English visitor’s writings following his visit to the U.S. Travels in North America, by Captain Basil Hall, was met with exactly the kind of angry denial that was to greet Mrs. Trollope’s own work, although when she finally procured her own copy of his Travels, she found that this visitor of goodwill ”earnestly sought out things to admire and commend” in America.

When he praises, it is with evident pleasure, and when he finds fault, it is with evident reluctance and restraint….

Both Captain Hall and Mrs. Trollope (and the captain had traveled all over the world) found it more difficult to be understood by Americans than by men and women of any other nation, which Mrs. T imputed to the exceedingly thin skin of Americans, who wanted to hear nothing but praise. I do think we have improved in this regard since the 1830s and realize that our way of life is not perfect.

The subject was metaphor, the teacher said.

 

Here is one of those silly, unimportant little issues that turn me unreasonably peevish. I was reading a book review online, and the writer of the review, a teacher of writing, praised the book author’s use of metaphor, proceeding to give half a dozen examples—all of which were similes, not metaphors! This would probably not matter to me at all, except that I wrote my doctoral dissertation on theories of metaphor, and metaphor is a puzzle for those who wrestle with literal meaning. Simile is no problem. Something is like something else. Fill in ‘something’ and ‘something’ with two different things, and you’ve got a simile. A metaphor, on the other hand, says that the first something is the second something. 

 

“My love is like a red, red rose.” Fine.

 

“Juliet is the sun.” A different kettle of fish!

 

Simile, I’m thinking, is a pretty easy case to make, because, at least for a philosopher, any two things are alike in some way or other, however remote. Persuading someone of identity, merely by stating it, requires a skillful writer and a reader who trusts that writer. 

 

At least, so seems to me. Your thoughts?

Blue sky over blue water

REMINDER --

Second Thoughts

Leelanau Twp., 4/15/25

Is spring having second thoughts about getting underway?

 

You would have thought so if you were in Leelanau on tax day, Tuesday, April 15. We got out of bed in the morning to fresh snow on the ground and a biting wind! But besides being tax day, it was also “Alyssa’s Day of Kindness,” a day to put a smile on the faces of friends and/or strangers by treating them to ice cream or coffee (two of Alyssa’s favorite things) or flowers or anything else—or simply doing a kind deed for another person—in memory of a 21-year-old who died by suicide. Alyssa’s family came up with this wonderful memorial idea, which was kicked off three years ago. Those of us who participate take photos to share, and it is a lovely way to remember this beautiful girl I’m sorry I never met—though I can’t help wishing we didn’t need this memorial and that Alyssa were still here to enjoy another spring in her young life….

 

Beautiful Alyssa!

Note: Please see the number in the flier above. If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, please call or text 988 for help!

 

Biting My Tongue

 

Some people think we should always blurt out whatever comes into our minds, right there on the spot, and they call anything else “self-censorship,” meaning something bad. I disagree. Why say something I’ll be sorry I said, when there’s usually no reason not to pause and reconsider? By taking time, I may revise my expression, tempering or strengthening it, as the situation seems to require. Sometimes I’ll decide to say nothing. Not speaking right then doesn’t mean I won’t say something later.

 

And yes, once in a while I do blurt out my first reaction! Am I always sorry? Not always! You would love to have an example of that, too, I know, but those unscripted moments are not for a public showcase! Mine is not a blurting blog.

 

Life happens moment by moment, though, and it doesn’t happen in a vacuum but always at a specific time, in a specific place, under specific circumstances, and it’s a harsh rule that admits of no exceptions.

 

 

Changing My Mind

 

Related to the idea of exceptional blurting is another notion of second thoughts. One recent day I had stopped by my bookshop to drop off a few books and pick up others to take home on loan. I sat down at my desk for a minute, and a woman walked in the door I hadn’t locked. “I’m not really open,” I told her. She looked disappointed but then admitted she was only looking for a restroom. I suggested the gas station next door, but then, as she was getting back in the passenger seat of a car out front, I had second thoughts and went out to invite her back in. Why not? She was very appreciative and thanked me repeatedly.

 

When I locked up shop a few minutes later and went over to the gas station myself to pick up a few items, I met a woman I’d known in Kalamazoo decades ago. She had gone out to her car and found her sister missing and been alarmed. “She has dementia!” I told her I’d let her sister use the restroom in my place and that she was now safely back in the passenger seat of the car. Everything had worked out fine.

 

Even if I hadn’t met the driving sister, though, I had already felt better about my second thought and decision. The woman’s dementia was not obvious to me, but that she had some sort of illness was, and each and every single one of us knows how much it can mean to find a restroom when we need it! As characters in Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov, said more than once in that book, it was only a little onion. Such a little onion I gave!

Throwing Out the Script

 

The foregoing is introduction to my telling you that this post on having second thoughts is not the post I planned to publish on my blog today. The discarded post began with the statement “I can’t do it” and went on to detail my heartbreak over the ongoing events in our nation over the past—how many days and weeks has it been?? It isn’t that I would have wanted to “take back” anything from that post, had I put it up. No, but I had two reasons for starting over: first, I have no hope of changing a single mind (you can't make people care if they don't); and besides that, I know that at least a couple of my regular readers come here for something other than politics and current events. News they can get elsewhere. News is hard to avoid! What they want from me is strength and courage and dog and landscape photos, a smile, news from my little corner of the world, and (some of them) gentle meanderings about books. 

 

And why not?

 

 

Back to My Little Corner

 

Well, today was a sunny day in my one and only precious life. Song sparrows sing again in the mornings now, and redwing blackbirds make their creaking calls from the top of the barn, sounding like the old swings of my childhood school playground, swings with heavy wooden seats hung by heavy steel chains. (At least, I presume that metal was steel. Joliet, Illinois, was a steel-making town, after all, our township high school team known as the Steelmen—though also, confusingly, as the Iron Avalanche, unbeaten until they were beaten.) Robins cry out in self-admiration, "Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty!" 

Barefoot child with grandfather c.1951

Canada geese fly overhead these days in honking Vs, and every once in a while I hear the clatter of a sandhill crane’s voice and stop whatever I’m doing outdoors to search the sky, hoping for a sight, while mallards and herring gulls find refuge in temporary ponds that have formed in fields of corn stubble. It's good to see them, too.

All of which is to say that life goes on. (Or as I have come to say in recent years, “Life goes on ... until it doesn’t.” None of us is going to live forever.) The earth rotates and orbits the sun, day alternates with night, and the cycle of seasons repeats and repeats. Our blue-and-green planet, brimming with life, has not always been in existence and will probably not exist forever, but here we are, right now, and here it is, and there is comfort in knowing and seeing that we haven’t yet killed our home.

Toe of my boot illustrates how tiny these daffodils are.

Now that the yard is free from snow (again!), Sunny and I have resumed her work on the weave poles, which she finds the most challenging of all the agility equipment. She loves jumping the hurdles so much that it’s hard for her to understanding that weaving does not require that she jump. Do we all need a challenge? “Weave!” will be Sunny Juliet’s challenge this spring and summer.  

Sunny with challenges!

Also, let’s not forget that April is National Poetry Month! Poetry! There’s a reason to celebrate! 

 

My poet of the year 2025 is Fleda Brown, and Fleda will be here on the Friday before Memorial Day, May 23, to read from her new chapbook of prose poems, Doctor to the World. There will be chairs in a circle in the Artist’s gallery next to the bookstore (I’ll have it cleaned up before the event, I promise), and we will convene at noon, so I’m inviting attendees to bring sack lunches for an informal and intimate gathering. 

Poet Fleda Brown on a previous visit to Northport

 

Finally, in closing –

 

Life! It’s what we’ve got, so take it easy, my friends, or take it hard, but take it, and don’t take it lying down! Also, don’t forget, if you can manage it, to brighten the corner where you are.

 

¡Nunca te rindas!

 

Also,

 

HOORAY FOR HARVARD!!!

Once There Came Two Englishmen

First, The Lo-o-o-ong Birthday!

 

Before beginning with the Englishmen, I want to note that the birthday I was so reluctant to welcome stretched out to about two weeks, from the first early package in the mail to the last birthday dinner, at which my hostess provided me with my very first experience of the famous Sanders Bumpy Cake from Detroit! I had heard of it but had never seen, let alone tasted, one before. What a treat!

The beautiful cyclamen above, my favorite hothouse plant of early spring, had better be my last birthday gift this year, but could anything be lovelier?

 

And Now, Two Englishmen in Pre-Civil War America

 

Observations on Professions, Literature, Manners, and Emigration, in the United States and Canada, Made During a Residence There in 1832, by the Rev. Isaac Fidler (NY: J. & J. Harper, 1833)

 

Three Years in North America, Vol. II (from the second London edition), by James Stuart, Esq. (NY: J. & Harper, 1833)

 

Arriving in New York in December of 1831, after seven weeks at sea, Rev. Isaac Fidler reports that he found lodging for himself, his wife, two children, and a servant lodgings in a boarding house for $21 a week, water and three meals a day included. They subsequently moved into an unfurnished apartment, dismayed at the cost (more than a furnished flat at home, the author tells us), as an entire house, which would have been their preference, was far beyond their means, even after the servant left them for better wages with an American family.

Like so many others, Rev. Fidler’s reasons came to America with the hope of improving his situation in life. 

 

Educated for the church, but destitute of interest or patronage, I remained a mere teacher at home, with little to encourage my ambition….

 

He had hopes of finding employment in an Episcopal church in the United States. When disappointed here, as he had been in England, Fidler tried his luck in Canada, but Mrs. Fidler did not care for that country, and so back to England the family went, having spent altogether less than a year in North America.

 

James Stuart, on the other hand, as indicated in his book’s title, was here for three years, his travels were much more extensive, and, as a man of apparently independent means, he was at leisure to look more carefully into the regions through which he traveled. (Stuart, actually a Scot, was married but childless; if his wife accompanied him to America, she makes no appearance in his book.) Despite a background in law, Stuart had been embroiled in more than one controversy in England that led to duels. He seems, however, to have passed his visit to our shores peaceably. 

Both Fidler and Stuart note American shrewdness and fixation with finances. Both also read Mrs. Trollope’s popular book, Domestic Manners of the Americans, before undertaking their stateside visits. Fidler, who also read Stuart’s book before publishing his own, was convinced of the absolute truth of Mrs. Trollope’s negative stories and hoped Americans would take her lessons to heart and improve themselves. Americans, for their part, denied the Trollope stories, and some American booksellers refused to carry her book—which only persuaded Fidler that the stories must be true, “as they always denounce as false whatever truth offends them.” (Thus claims of either “Guilty” and “Not Guilty” indicate guilt, as Fidler sees it here. Interesting.)

 

Stuart’s opinion, happily, was otherwise. He spent much longer in North America, traveled to every part of the country, and spoke with Americans from all walks of life, while Fidler concentrated on those who had been born in England and had emigrated as adults. Stuart also visited every denomination of church and attended at least one camp meeting (it was apparently a single camp meeting that Mrs. Trollope had painted in lurid terms), and he saw no such excesses of lewd behavior as she had reported. 

 

(Frances Milton Trollope was the mother of the English novelist, Anthony Trollope. When the latter traveled to the States himself—the northern states, at least, during the Civil War—he was grateful to be received hospitably, given his mother’s harsh published views.)

 

Stuart reported favorably on American cuisine (e.g., judging American canvasback duck as tasty as Scotch grouse) and gave fascinating details of the period’s modes of travel.

 

…The river was hard frozen, and we expected to cross on the ice; but the passage of the mails on the ice is, it seems, prohibited by the rules of the post-office of this country; and persons are employed to keep an open course for the small rowing boats, in which the mails are transported. We embarked and were pushed forward by three men, who propelled the boat by long poles shod with iron….

 

Fidler’s American travels seem to have been restricted to New York (city and state), New Jersey, and Boston, Massachusetts. He noted that Americans were “prejudiced” against British aristocracy, and he considered most American writing to “exhibit a curious medley of prejudice, ignorance, and bombast.” All of North America, in fact, struck him as crude and unrefined.

 

Fidler, not having traveled in the South, did not give an opinion on slavery but did note:

 

In New-York no white person will sit down to eat at the same table with a coloured person, nor associate in same company. … I talked with several coloured people [in Canada], and always found them, in conversation, rational and sensible.

 

He spoke apparently at length with one “coloured” woman while briefly attached to a church in Canada.

 

I encouraged her to join our Sunday school, which she did a few times; but had not acquired ability to read, before she left the neighborhood. Her husband had been a slave in the States, and had made a premature [sic] liberation of himself by crossing the boundary line. Yet he could not gain a living by his skill and labor. He was a helpless and dependent creature. I perceived the necessity of conveying useful instruction to people inured to slavery, before emancipation and the rights of freedom are bestowed. Liberty to the captive is assuredly no blessing, where this had not been previously provided. 

 

(Liberty no blessing? That, of course, was the English clergyman’s view, not an opinion given by the formerly enslaved man, whose “premature liberation” of himself would seem to indicate that he preferred freedom, despite its difficulties.) 

 

Fidler spent much more of his North American time in Canada than in the U.S. As a Church of England clergyman, he found Canada’s Anglican religious observances congenial and would have been happy to settle there permanently, had his wife been so inclined. As for religion in America, he considered Methodist to be “bigots” and expected that in time the Episcopal church would become the national church of the United States, but he had not attended the meeting of Congress that Stuart did, or he might not have made such a prediction. [See my discussion in this post, under the section “Reading the Past,” for that background.]

 

Stuart traveled extensively in the antebellum South, as well as west to St. Louis, and thus had more to say about America’s “peculiar institution” (slavery) than Fidler. In Charleston, for example, he noted his landlady 

 

… give a young man, a servant, such a blow behind the ear as made him reel, and I afterward found that it was her daily and hourly practice to beat her servants, male and female, either with her fist, or with a thong made of cowhide.

 

He quotes another writer telling a story a serving girl in the same landlady’s establishment, punished by “twenty-six lashes inflicted … with a cow-hide” while another “young negro slave who waited in the house” had to stand by and count the lashes. Nor was this the end of the girl’s punishment, as the Frenchman she had defended herself against complained to the police, had her arrested, and she was then whipped again “in his presence.”

 

“I regret that I did not take a note of this miscreant’s name, in order that I might give his disgraceful conduct its merited publicity.”

 

Note that the unnamed “miscreant,” quite rightly, is the Frenchman, not the punished serving girl.

 

Both men frequently note prices, Stuart going far beyond Fidler in that regard, paying attention to commodity markets and the resources of different regions, as well as personal finances. At one point he makes the acquaintance of a fellow Scot in Illinois, who had first settled in New York but then been tempted further west by newspaper stories describing prairie land in Illinois.

 

He therefore came directly here from New-York, and procured 500 acres of the very best land in the state, as he thinks, of rich soil from three to four feet deep. It produces from thirty to forty-five bushels of wheat, and excellent corn and oats in rotation. It would do it injury to give it manure. The land is so easily ploughed, that a two-horse plough ploughs two and a half acres per day. There is never any want of a market. Everything is bought by the merchants for New-Orleans, or for Galena, where a vast number of workmen are congregated, who are employed in the lead mines on the north-western parts of the state. There is also a considerable demand for cattle for new settlers. Cattle are allowed to run out on the prairie during the whole winter….

 

Returning to the parson: Except for his lack of satisfaction and gratitude, Fidler’s style of writing reminds me of Mr. Collins (a fictional reverend) in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, as he exhibits the same overly conscious sense of social hierarchy as did the clergyman in the novel and similarly preens himself on his own judgment. Noting in his book’s preface that he has done all he could to avoid repeating anything Mrs. Trollope “had already said in a very popular and attractive style” and anything in Mr. Stuart’s book (the style and content of which he passed over in silence), Fidler writes of his own authorship in the third person: 

 

He flatters himself, therefore … that those who have read the above works may yet peruse his with some advantage.

 

Oh, yes, the advantageous perusal! 

 

Ah, but now, my own confession! It is impossible for me to read Fidler objectively, since the 19^th-century reader who once possessed the copy now mine added extensive marginalia, in soft pencil, from beginning to end of the narrative. At one point early on, that reader noted “True” in the margin, but more often, as he got deeper into the book, he was writing the word “Lie” “You lie!” or even, once, “Big Lie.” 

Here the long-ago reader remarked to the author, "You old Sponge."

I found the entertainment value increasing with longer marginal notions. Here are a few samples:

 

      “Old sour Crout”

      “Fiddler Diddaler”

      “Charitable Parson Fiddler”

      “Fiddle it off, Parson”

      “You lie, Parson”

      “Quarrelling Parson Fiddler”

      “Fidgetty Old Mrs. Fiddler” [She was never satisfied, according to her husband.]

      “Oh you old humbug”

 

The anonymous reader with his pencil even takes leave of the author on the last page of the book with “the hopes of the Reader that you will never return here” and makes reference to the writer’s “amiable spouse” and the writer’s own “amiable, candid disposition” with obvious sarcasm. I must say, it was fun sharing my reading with Anonymous from almost 200 years ago! Fidler alone would have been far too solemn!

Back to the Present?

 

One reason I have shared these two books today, other than having made extensive notes on them months ago, is to avoid discussion of current events. My head is not in the sand, never fear (though as often as possible I put my mind “somewhere else” at bedtime), but on Sundays now I am staying resolutely offline and away from the news, taking the day to restore my spirit. And although planting anything outdoors this early would be premature—no wild leeks poking up in the woods yet, no peepers peeping in the ponds—it feels good to rake the yard and to spend time at the dog park with Sunny and her friends. Small beginnings of the young season, too, are to be found, for those with searching eyes. Whatever transpires in the summer to come, right now I am grateful to be granted another spring.