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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
A dramatic incident in the literary warfare between England and America during the first quarter of the nineteenth century was Tom Moore's indictment of the American character in Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (1806), inspired by a tour through the United States in the summer of 1804. Four Juvenalian “epistles” developed the contrast in America between man's humanitarian dreams and his actual moral and political performance. Because of the poet's popularity, his diatribe, which included slanderous portraits of Jefferson and Washington, was widely discussed and deeply resented even by Moore's American friends. The most substantial rebuttals came in a lengthy critique of Moore's work offered as prefatory material to an American edition of Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (Philadelphia, 1806); in a serial review by William Coleman in the New-York Evening Post (October-November 1806); and in an anonymous poem entitled An Attempt to Vindicate the American Character (Philadelphia, 1806). So violent was the reaction that not until the publication of Lalla Rookh in 1817 did “Anacreon” Moore regain favor among Columbian readers, and by that time he had come to regret what he called his “crude and boyish tirades against the Americans.”
1 Americans were particularly incensed by Weld's Travels Through the States of North America and the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, during the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797 (London, 1799) and Parkinson's A Tour in America in 1798, 1799, and 1800, 2 vols. (London, 1805). Allen Nevins, A merica Through British Eyes (New York, 1948), pp. 9–23, discusses the utilitarian purposes of such travelers and their reactions to America. See also Jane Louise Mesick, The English Traveller in America, 1785–1835 (New York, 1922), Chapter x, which offers an interesting review of the literary warfare inspired by travel books. These studies generally ignore Moore's attack on America, and neither treats the violent response to Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems.
2 Odes of Anacreon, Translated into English Verse by Thomas Moore, published by Maxwell, Philadelphia, 1804, and by Longworth, New York, 1805; The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little, brought out by Longworth in New York, 1804, and by Maxwell in Philadelphia the same year. Joseph Dennie's Philadelphia Port Folio, the most influential American literary magazine of the decade, began reprinting pieces from Anacreon and the Works of Little in 1802, and, by the time the Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems made its appearance, had reproduced about one half of the contents of Anacreon and a good third of the Little poems. Editors of other periodicals as well as newspapers followed Dennie's lead, either reprinting directly from the two published works or from selections in the Port Folio. All in all, the evidence is conclusive that in America, during the period 1802 to 1806, Moore was by far the most extensively reprinted contemporary English poet.
3 The standard account of Moore's American visit is Howard Mumford Jones, The Harp That Once — (New York, 1937), Ch. iv. See also B. J. Lossing, “Tom Moore in America,” Harper's New Magazine, Lv (Sept. 1877), 537–541. Moore's letters offer an important record of his experiences in the New World. See The Letters of Thomas Moore, ed. Wilfred S. Dowden, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1964), Vol. I.
4 To John E. Hall, 12 July 1818, ibid., p. 458.
5 For a contrary opinion, see Howard O. Brogan, “Thomas Moore, Irish Satirist and Keeper of the English Conscience,” PQ, xxiv (July 1945), 255–257, 275.
6 Jones, The Harp That Once —, p. 91.
7 Howard Mumford Jones, 0 Strange New World: A merican Culture, The Formative Years (New York, 1964), pp. 304–311, uses Moore's contrast between dream and fact as a means of classifying the basic attitudes of nineteenth-century travelers in America.
8 Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (London, 1806), p. 20, n. All citations from Epistles are from this edition. Jones, The Harp That Once —, p. 79, reprints the major portion of this note from Moore's commonplace book with the comment that it was not included in Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems. It appears, with a few additional sentences and inconsequential changes in wording, in the first London edition, as well as in all three American editions published in Philadelphia in 1806.
9 This note was deleted from the three American editions of 1806—one guesses through the influence of the Dennie circle. In addition, Moore wrote John E. Hall in 1816 that he himself eliminated the note from all editions after the first. Letters, ed. Dowden, I, 397. The fact that this libel of Washington appeared only in the first London edition has caused some confusion in Moore scholarship. Wilfred Dowden in a footnote to the 1816 letter to Hall surmises that Moore's comment about deletion must have been an allusion to the material on Jefferson “since the attack was on him,” not Washington (the verses satirizing Jefferson were never deleted). Howard Brogan, “Thomas Moore, Irish Satirist and Keeper of the English Conscience,” p. 256, incorporates the error into his argument for Moore's “independence of judgment”—for example: “Though Moore revered the memory of that stately Whig aristocrat, Washington, he rightly [sic] looked upon Jefferson as carrying leveling to ridiculous extremes.” Neither Howard Mumford Jones nor B. J. Lossing mentions the Washington note, nor does L. A. G. Strong in The Minstrel Boy (London, 1937). As we shall see, one significance of Moore's treatment of Washington is that it is a factor in the violent American reaction to the Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems.
10 See William Coleman, “English Tourists,” New-York Evening Post, 10 Nov. 1806.
11 On the occasion of the Merry's first dinner at the White House (2 Dec. 1803), the President, deciding to insist on the customs of a democratic society, offered his arm to Mrs. Madison and swept into the dining room, leaving the rest of his guests to seat themselves pellmell. Mrs. Merry ended below the Spanish Minister, while a mere Congressman elbowed Merry himself out of a place of honor on Jefferson's left. The insult became an international incident. See Henry Adams, History of the United States of America During the First Administration of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1889), i, Ch. xvi.
12 Augustus John Foster, Jeffersonian America: Notes on the United States of America, ed. Richard Beale Davis (San Marino, Calif., 1954), pp. 10–11. Foster was Secretary of Legation under Merry and later Minister to the United States himself.
13 The Schuylkill saints were equally gracious. The Port Folio printed four little poetic compliments to the minstrel or his poetry during the September after his visit and three more in the year and a half following (not counting two British tributes that Moore himself sent Dennie from Halifax before he left for England). Howard Mumford Jones, The Harp Thai Once —, p. 84, reprints one of them. Here is another (it was printed as a fictional song):
Moore, the minstrel of the plains,
Sweet melodious, softly sings
All the joys that Bacchus brings.
All the notes Anacreon sung
Once more warble from his tongue;
Twine, ye nine, a wreath of roses
Where the urchin Love reposes;
Crown him minstrel of the plain,
While my lyre resounds its strain.
(The Port Folio, v, 12 Jan. 1805, 8)
As editor of the magazine, Dennie offered periodic commendations of Moore following the visit in June 1804, comparing him at various times to Parnell, Goldsmith, Waller, Addison, Prior, La Fontaine, and Burns, and defending his love poetry against “faded gossips and bridling prudes.” After the publication of Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems, however, the friendly voice fell silent.
14 One other piece that stirred American resentment was “Fragments of a Journal,” a good-humored bit of doggerel that, with its notes, included ridicule of New York, which offended New Yorkers, of the College of William and Mary, which offended Virginians, and of a pretty Quakeress, which offended Yankee chivalry.
15 Most of these mention, in general terms, Moore's great popularity as a poet, the unflattering epistles on America, and the warmth and wit of the new songs and amatory verse.
16 This piece was reprinted at least three times: The Literary Magazine and American Register, VI (Sept. 1806), 220–222; the Richmond Enquirer, 16 Sept. 1806; and the New-York Evening Post, 7 Nov. 1806. I have quoted from The Literary Magazine and American Register, pp. 220–221.
17 “Anacreon Moore versus America,” The Literary Magazine and American Register, vi (Sept. 1806), 220. The skill and style of this review suggest that Brown himself was the author. The Literary Magazine reprinted only one or two of Moore's songs during the period under study, though Brown was the first to publish (Jan. 1805) Moore's verses to Mrs. Joseph Hopkinson, “Alone by the Schuylkill a wanderer rov'd,” later included in Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems. In Jan. 1807 the Literary Magazine reprinted, with an approving comment by the editor, the whole of the Edinburgh Review attack by Francis Jeffrey.
18 The first was published (by Watts) late in August. At about the same time this “second” edition appeared, Bartholomew Graves, also of Philadelphia, brought out a “dwarfish imilation, in the puny shape of a lank duodecimo,” as the Port Folio called it in an editorial charging that this competing edition was composed from sheets stolen from Watts. “Surreptitious Edition of Mr. Moore's New Work,” The Port Folio, N. S. n (20 Sept. 1806), 173–174.
19 Since Moore's visit, Dennie had been tried for “inflammatory and seditious libel” and declared not guilty. The statement at issue, a paragraph which had originally appeared in the Port Folio in April 1803, began, “A Democracy is scarcely tolerable at any period of national history” and ended, “The institution of a scheme of polity, so radically contemptible and vicious, is a memorable example of what the villiany [sic] of some men can devise, the folly of others receive, and both establish, in despite of Reason, Reflection, and Sensation.” See “Miscellaneous Paragraphs,” The Port Folio, v (7 Dec. 1805), 382–383.
20 “Art.xviii. Epistles, Odes, and other Poems.By Thomas Moore, Esq.” Edinburgh Review, viii (July 1806), 456–465. Jeffrey called Moore “the most licentious of modern versifiers,” a poet whose aim is “to impose corruption upon his readers, by concealing it under the mask of refinement,” whose raptures are “the unhallowed fruits of cheap and vulgar prostitution, the inspiration of casual amours, and the chorus of habitual debauchery.” Moore called the reviewer to the field of honor, where the police intervened and, during the confusion of the next few hours, claimed to have discovered that there was no bullet in Jeffrey's pistol. See Jones, The Harp That Once —, pp. 93–99.
As for the date of arrival of the Jeffrey review, it would have taken the fastest packet about forty-five days to make the Atlantic crossing from Liverpool (the usual port of embarkation) to Philadelphia—let alone the time involved for the Edinburgh Review to get to Liverpool or some other port. Thus it is improbable that the Jeffrey attack could have been in the hands of the author of the “Notice” while he was drawing up his case against Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems some time in August or early September, though the arguments of the two critics are similar. It was William Charvat, in The Origins of American Critical Thought, IS10–1835 (Philadelphia, 1936), who first made the point that if American and British critics of the time often sounded alike, it was not necessarily because the former were plagiarizing the latter, but because they had come out of the same intellectual and literary environment.
21 Jeffrey's Edinburgh Review article took no stand whatever on Moore's indictment of America.
22 On 20 Sept., the Port Folio printed an anonymous review of Epistles, Odes, and Oilier Poems (Watts's second edition), written in a style so pedestrian that it was surely not Dennie's work. It is laudatory, but conspicuously makes no mention of the offensive American epistles or of the attack on the nation.
23 On 21 Oct. 1806 the paper also offered a brief excerpt from the Edinburgh Review article and noted the Moore-Jeffrey “duel.”
24 It also had the distinction of being called the “privy of Pennsylvania” by its archenemy, Joseph Dennie. The Port Folio, iii (25 June 1803), 207.
25 Aurora, 1 Oct. 1806.
26 “Moore's Poems,” The Polyanthos, iii (Nov. 1806), 252.
27 Ibid., p. 254.
28 Monthly A nlhology and Boston Review, iv (Jan. 1807), 41.
29 One local wit addressed Moore as follows:
Bewitching Bard suspend thy Lyrel
So fraught the strains with attic fire,
We would—but dare not scout them.
Yet hadst thou kept one string in store,
To virtue's as to Fancy's lore,
The world had gain'd a moral more,
Nor Moore been quite without them.
(New-York Evening Post, 1 Nov.)
30 30 and 31 Oct., 3, 5, 7, and 10 Nov.
31 Strong, The Minstrel Boy, p. 303, offers brief excerpts.
32 The pamphlet itself, however, ends in something like a roar. In a postscript, the author, with his poem already in the press, discovers the New-York Evening Post reprint of the libelous footnote on Washington, and his outrage flows into capital letters and invective. An Attempt to Vindicate the American Character, pp. 41–42.
33 On 7 Mar. 1807, Pindar Cockloft made hudibrastic mention of “A little pest, hight TOMMY MOOEE, / Who hopp'd and skipp'd our country o'er / … And when his brain, of cobweb, fine, / Was fuddled with five drops of wine, / Would all his puny loves rehearse, / And many a maid debauch—in verse.”
34 In six monthly installments beginning in February and ending in July 1807. The general tone and approach are exemplified by a passage in the June installment in which the author, addressing Moore on the causes of his lack of understanding of the United States, blames the company he kept while here: “—men, who labour, both by their precept and example, to annihilate all order, and decency, to trample upon all virtue and honour, to destroy all civilized society, and to degrade the human race, in its every appetite, pursuit, and propensity, below the level of the brutes, that perish;—that such beings, Sir, never gain admittance into the company of real gentlemen,—of men of honour, and integrity, of wisdom, and of justice, of liberality and of courage;—and that never,— no never, are such beings permitted to disgrace the presence of women of pure and unsullied virtue.” Monthly Register, Magazine and Review of the United States, m (June 1807), 27.
35 However, the bookseller David Longworth continued to reprint Moore's poetry: The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little (New York, 1807 and 1816), Little and Moore's Poems (New York, 1808), and Moore's Works (New York, 1808).
36 See Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes (New York, 1947), pp. 104–105. In an apparent attempt to combat the new wave of popularity, the Philadelphia Magazine, or Weekly Repository of Polite Literature in its issue of 1 Aug. 1818 reprinted the review of Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems from Charles Brockden Brown's Literary Magazine and American Register of Sept. 1806.
37 To John Elihu Hall, June 1816, Letters, ed. Dowden, I, 397.
