Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature

By Claudia Stokes

An aesthetic of unoriginality shaped literary style and reader taste for decades of the nineteenth century. While critics in the twentieth century and beyond have upheld originality and innovation as essential characteristics of literary achievement, they were not features particularly prized by earlier American audiences, Claudia Stokes contends. On the contrary, readers were taught to value familiarity, traditionalism, and regularity. Literary originality was often seen as a mark of vulgar sensationalism and poor quality.

In Old Style Stokes offers the first dedicated study of a forgotten nineteenth-century aesthetic, explicating the forms, practices, conventions, and uses of unoriginality. She focuses in particular on the second quarter of the century, when improvements in printing and distribution caused literary markets to become flooded with new material, and longstanding reading practices came under threat. As readers began to prefer novelty to traditional forms, advocates openly extolled unoriginality in an effort to preserve the old literary ways. Old Style examines this era of significant literary change, during which a once-dominant aesthetic started to give way to modern preferences.

If writing in the old style came to be associated with elite conservatism—a linkage that contributed to its decline in the twentieth century—it also, paradoxically provided marginalized writers—people of color, white women, and members of the working class—the literary credentials they needed to enter print. Writing in the old style could affirm an aspiring author's training, command of convention, and respectability. In dismissing unoriginality as the literary purview of the untalented or unambitious, Stokes cautions, we risk overlooking something of vital importance to generations of American writers and readers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Dec 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9780812298161

Claudia Stokes

Claudia Stokes is associate professor of English at Trinity University in San Antonio. She is coeditor of American Literary Studies: A Methodological Reader.

Book preview

Old Style

Old Style

Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature

Claudia Stokes

PENN

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2022 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved.

Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stokes, Claudia, author.

Title: Old style : unoriginality and its uses in nineteenth-century U.S. literature / Claudia Stokes.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021005728 | ISBN 9780812253535 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: American literature—19th century—History and criticism. | Originality in literature. | Imitation in literature. | Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.) | Conservatism in literature. | Conservatism and literature—United States—History—19th century.

Classification: LCC PS201 .S76 2021 | DDC 810.9/003—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005728

For Eleanor and Simon

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I. UNORIGINALITY ON THE MARGINS

Chapter 1. The Poetics of Unoriginality: The Case of Lucretia Davidson

Chapter 2. Novel Commonplaces: Quotation, Epigraphs, and Literary Authority

Chapter 3. A Few Good Books: Rereading and the Virtues of Familiarity

PART II. ELITIST CONSERVATISM AND THE DEFENSE OF TRADITION

Chapter 4. Old Friends in New Dress: James Fenimore Cooper and the Politics of the Sequel

Chapter 5. Longfellow’s Antiquarianism

Chapter 6. Thomas Bailey Aldrich and the End of Tradition

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book examines the culture of literary influence that underlay so much of American literature in the nineteenth century, and it is with sincere gratitude that I thank the many people who influenced me and provided so much helpful guidance during my time working on this book. At my home institution of Trinity University, I received ample support to conduct research, travel to archives, and attend conferences and research seminars. Deneese Jones, vice president of Academic Affairs, worked to create an institutional climate that encourages chairs and administrators to continue their work as researchers, and, in support of that culture, Mark Brodl, Fred Loxsom, and David Ribble always ensured that I had the resources I needed. Peggy Sundermeyer, Trinity’s director of Sponsored Programs, likewise provided invaluable assistance and encouragement with numerous grant applications. Within the English Department, Ruby Contreras, Casey Fuller, and Stephanie Velasquez daily helped with administrative tasks, and they alleviated some of the burdens of my day job as department chair so that I could work on this book. I am grateful to be able to work with all these people.

This project has richly benefited from several other institutions, which provided additional instruction and resources. In the summer of 2016, I attended a summer seminar of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and I wish to extend my thanks to the organizers, Laura Gardner and Laura Rinaldi Dufresne, as well as fellow participants Jillian Hess, Will Nash, Amanda Watson, and Laura Zebuhr, who generously provided recommendations and insights that enriched my understanding of commonplacing. This book also benefited from an extraordinary seminar on the history of the antebellum American book, offered at Rare Book School by the insuperable Michael Winship; I can’t thank Michael enough for his wisdom and instruction. I offer special thanks to Todd Pattinson, who generously provided many additional resources, helped me find cover images, and permitted me to use his photograph for the book’s cover. I also offer warm thanks to fellow seminar participants Faith Barrett, Steffi Dippold, Kadin Henningsen, and Janiece Johnson. A portion of my chapter on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow benefited from a seminar on nineteenth-century American poetry organized by Virginia Jackson and Michael Cohen for the biannual conference of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. I am grateful for the comments and recommendations of the seminar organizers and fellow participants. I also offer my thanks to the staff at the Massachusetts Historical Society, who graciously provided assistance during my research there, and I also thank MHS for permission to quote from their collection of commonplace books. Thanks are due, too, to Harvard University’s Houghton Library for permission to quote from their commonplace book collection.

This book has also benefited from the attention and insights of many colleagues and friends, who kindly read drafts, offered wisdom, and recommended sources. I first devised this project in conversation with Jennifer Putzi and Alexandra Socarides, and their enthusiasm first led me to think that this project might have some substance. Along the way, I consulted many people, who offered invaluable advice and generously shared resources. I offer my sincere and abundant thanks to Dale Bauer, Renée Bergland, Russ Castronovo, Tess Chakkalakal, Travis Foster, Barbara Hochman, Sarah Beth Kaufman, Laura Korobkin, Christopher Lukasik, Elizabeth Renker, Bryan Sinche, Betsy Tontiplaphol, and Priscilla Wald. I offer my special thanks to Faye Halpern and Gillian Silverman, whose incisive, careful readings and advice have helped me more than they may realize. Thanks are due, too, to Tess Chakkalakal, Elizabeth Fenton, Meredith McGill, and Sarah Salter for inviting me to deliver portions of this project at their respective institutions; I thank attendees at Bowdoin College, University of Vermont, Rutgers University, and Texas A&M–Corpus Christi for their helpful comments and suggestions. While working on this book, I had the good fortune to collaborate with Elizabeth Duquette on another project, and I thank Betsy for her editorial wisdom, patience, and friendship.

I also wish to thank the several editors whose remarkable editorial guidance helped give this project shape and focus. This book is all the better because of the careful attention of Theresa Strouth Gaul, Gordon Hutner, and Jennifer Tuttle. I am grateful to American Literary History and Legacy for permission to reprint the portions of this book that were originally published there. I offer my special thanks to Jerome Singerman, senior editor at University of Pennsylvania Press, who supported this project from the very beginning and provided indispensable advice throughout the process. Over the years, Jerry has become a valued friend, and I am so grateful to know him. At Penn Press, I also wish to thank managing editor Lily Palladino and copy editor Karen Carroll for all their careful, detailed work.

Finally, I would like to thank the people in my immediate circle whose companionship enrich my life beyond measure. I thank Debra Morrow and Dwight Downing, Heather Sullivan, Betsy Tontiplaphol, Shannon Mariotti and David Rando, and Jennifer Bartlett for their friendship and support. I offer my boundless thanks to my husband, David Liss, for his partnership and for his enthusiastic support of my work. I researched and wrote this book during a professionally demanding period of my life, and David helped me balance these many responsibilities, carve out additional time when necessary, and talk through some thorny problems. Our children, Eleanor and Simon, continue to bring purpose and joy to my life, and this book is dedicated to them with love.

Old Style

INTRODUCTION

It seems that, for as long as we can remember, literary achievement has been defined by one essential quality: originality. The job of the writer, as Ezra Pound neatly put it, is to make it new, and critics for generations have appraised texts for the skill with which they diverge from convention and stake out new ground. We celebrate originality in part because it confirms a writer’s creativity and individualism, and modern depictions often herald the original artist as a maverick who ushers in paradigm shifts and field-altering change. Over the last half century, originality has become a pervasive aspirational goal embraced not just by writers and artists but by Americans more broadly. Its status as a national ethic likely derives from its celebration of independence and rebellion, qualities that ostensibly reflect the United States’ own early history. T-shirts and commercial slogans urge Americans to be original, in the words of the Sharp Corporation’s current motto, and schoolchildren today learn to value creativity and admire iconoclasts who pursued original ideas, among them Albert Einstein, Frida Kahlo, and Martin Luther King Jr.

Originality may seem like a timeless literary virtue, but it acquired prominence only fairly recently, in the years following World War I. Raymond Williams notes that the word originality seldom appears before the eighteenth century, but it became so central to the twentieth century that he designated it a signature tenet of modernity: it denotes the new and became a common term of praise of art and literature because it characterized "a kind of work distinguished by genius … taking its material from itself and not from others" (emphasis in original).¹ In the nineteenth century, however, originality was by no means an intrinsic literary virtue but was instead perceived with suspicion: originality often connoted irregularity, sensationalism, and vulgarity, and its execution could impugn an author’s taste and education. Williams references Romantic notions of artistic genius, which extolled the artist as a brave loner willing to break with familiar convention, but this view took decades to cross the Atlantic and enter mainstream American literary culture, and even then it encountered more resistance than we have perhaps remembered.² The vexed reception history of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), dubbed by one reviewer a primitive formation of profanity, conveys that nineteenth-century readers and critics did not particularly prize originality per se but often regarded it with skepticism and distaste.³ Nineteenth-century American readers and critics more commonly favored literary traditionalism and conventionality, finding value in texts derived from others, to quote Williams. These qualities today might render a book trite or clichéd, but unoriginality in the nineteenth century did not present an intrinsic aesthetic liability and was for generations a legitimate aesthetic mode that, if executed well and devoid of any signs of outright plagiarism, could confer prestige and affirm respectability. Novelty became a cardinal aesthetic virtue of the twentieth century, but in the nineteenth century the old and the familiar were valued for their history, durability, and wholesomeness.

Old Style recovers the forgotten nineteenth-century aesthetic of unoriginality, which for generations enabled writers to showcase their taste, education, and propriety. In this undertaking, it joins the important recent work of such critics as Jennifer Putzi, Eliza Richards, Alexandra Socarides, Ezra Tawil, and Leonard Tennenhouse in adumbrating the significance of precedent and established convention in nineteenth-century American literature. William Huntting Howell recently argued that begging, borrowing, and stealing proved essential to building a life and a country in the early national period of the United States, and Old Style extends this inquiry by examining the literary sector in particular, where allusive familiarity was respectable and even at times requisite.⁴ Raymond Williams observed that the word originality derives from the word origin, and until the eighteenth century it connoted an awareness of the history underlying contemporary life. It is this quality of originality—the recognition of continuity between the past and the present—that chiefly shaped literary aesthetics for much of the nineteenth century: literariness was distinguished not by innovation but by conservationism and historicity, by deft, knowledgeable allusiveness. Over the last century, scholars have attended primarily to the singular, the atypical, and the new, and we have forgotten that, in the nineteenth century, the borrowed, the familiar, and the traditional provided trusted markers of quality and discernment.

To be sure, literary borrowings had long been central to the American book trade, which in the nineteenth century was positively overrun by reprints of British books that allowed American publishers to profit from the labors of British writers without having to compensate them for it.⁵ Such pirated transatlantic borrowings aside, American writers could respectably express their literary traditionalism using any number of accepted techniques, among them the enlistment of time-honored topics and narratives handed down through the generations; the deliberate invocation of signature styles and forms; quotation and allusion; and even the overt reconstruction of familiar texts or earlier literary periods. In his magisterial study of nineteenth-century aesthetics, M. H. Abrams asserted that writers could seek inspiration by looking inward or to the natural world, but this formulation overlooks the fact that writers were also directed to look to each other and to their predecessors for source material.⁶ For early nineteenth-century American writers, the literary past was not something to be cast off or outgrown, but something to embrace, align oneself with, and use strategically.

English critic William Hazlitt openly expressed this preference, asserting, I hate to read new books. There are twenty or thirty volumes that I have read over and over again, and these are the only ones that I have any desire ever to read at all.⁷ In 1822 Washington Irving likewise noted a widespread preference for the traditional and familiar, commenting, I know it is the humour, not to say cant of the day, to run riot about old times, old books, old customs, and old buildings.⁸ This antiquarian enthusiasm no doubt attests to the retrospective inclinations of Romanticism, but Irving also observed that this preference typified a new nation predisposed to revere historicity. Irving’s remarks remind us that in the early national period novelty and originality offered discomfiting reminders of the nation’s own youth and uncertainty, and in this context history and tradition provided reassurances of stability, continuity, and heritage.

Washington Irving’s own early career bears ample witness to the advantages of unoriginality, for at the age of twenty-one he began publishing under the suggestive pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle, penning letters openly modeled after Joseph Addison’s essays in the Spectator. Irving might have sought to leverage his youth as well as that of the nation itself by writing in the spirit of hopeful anticipation, but he instead established his literary bona fides by announcing his allegiance to the old style and assuming the gruff persona of an elderly skeptic intent on preserving the customs of the past. In such works as A History of New York (1809) and The Sketch Book (1819–20), Irving built an international reputation by presenting himself as a faithful warden of history and adopting a literary voice marked by the evocation of familiar writers and styles.⁹ In The Art of Book Making, included in The Sketch Book, Irving even satirized the common practice of repurposing older literary material, depicting a room in the British Museum where writers literally devour the books of prior authors in an attempt to gather material for their own writings. Irving’s example illustrates that the skillful reproduction of recognizable literary texts could launch fledgling writers, but, as I will show, it could also prove advantageous to white women writers and writers of color, who often cannily used unoriginality to affirm their respect for tradition and suitability for a public audience. Modern criticism often characterizes unoriginality as an impediment to change or as evidence of lesser literary skill, but unoriginality could nonetheless prove remarkably effective in opening doors for marginalized writers and transforming the demographics of American literature.

It bears stressing that our modern veneration for originality constitutes a significant break with established custom, for unoriginal traditionalism reigned for quite literally millennia as a grand literary style and a fixture of educational curricula. Since antiquity, pupils studied the precepts of Imitatio and Traditio, and mastered the conventions of rhetoric through the careful study, memorization, and emulation of model texts. Cicero, for instance, encouraged aspiring Roman orators to copy prior Athenian models, and in his Institutio Oratoria (95 CE) Quintilian promoted emulation as a reliable route to eloquence.¹⁰ In The Courtier (1528) Castiglione similarly asserted that a man cannot write well without copying his forebears, and in The Defense of Poesy (1595) Sir Philip Sidney concurred that skilled poets most properly do imitate.¹¹ In his treatise on aesthetics, Edmund Burke in 1757 pronounced unoriginality the foundation of learning and civil society: he wrote, It is by imitation far more than any precept that we learn every thing.… This forms our manners, our opinions, our lives. It is one of the strongest links of society; it is a species of mutual compliance which all men yield to each other.¹² In Critique of Judgment (1790) Immanuel Kant summarily declared, Learning is nothing but imitation.¹³ Historians note that, well into the nineteenth century, studied unoriginality was widely deemed a legitimate skill necessary for the conservation of traditional practice and the transmission of knowledge, essential, for instance, in the training of apprentices and trade novices, who often learned skills through replication and imitation.¹⁴ Alexander Mazzaferro has also shown that in the early modern period such terms as innovation denoted not laudable creativity but insurrection and even sedition, a designation that characterized some forms of originality as disruptive to the very social order.¹⁵ In sharp contrast with modern notions of the artist as an innovator who bravely stakes out new territory, the writer was instead more commonly regarded as a craftsman who had mastered the conventions of rhetoric and prosody preserved over the generations. As a result, the use of familiar tropes and styles did not undermine a writer’s reputation but instead evidenced skill and command of tradition.¹⁶

Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, American schools have relaxed long-standing practice and begun to encourage creativity and self-expression, but literacy education for most of American history entailed exercises of rewriting and imitation, which characterized literary skill as the mastery of inherited textual practice and tradition. Copying figured centrally in American literacy instruction, supported by copybooks that provided examples of various genres—oratory, verse, prose—for students to mimic.¹⁷ Similarly, Americans learned the protocols of letter writing by studying epistolary manuals, which offered instruction in the form’s conventions and included examples for readers to imitate. In his autobiography Benjamin Franklin vouched for the merits of such imitative practice and described his own early efforts to develop writing skill by copying Joseph Addison, devising a series of imitative exercises that helped him refine his style, organization, and vocabulary. As William Huntting Howell observed, Franklin presented himself as an exemplary model fit to be imitated and as a result implicitly invited the reader to copy him and embark on similar writing exercises, perhaps even replicating Franklin’s own style.¹⁸ Franklin’s example confirmed that studied literary unoriginality could enable social mobility and success, allowing Americans from modest origins to achieve international renown.

Unoriginality also redounded to readers, whose ability to recognize a writer’s sources attested to their own literary education and skill. As Eve Taylor Bannet notes, this recognition augmented the pleasures of letter reading, as recipients delighted in discerning the conventions and models used by their correspondents.¹⁹ Nineteenth-century readers possessed a broad bibliographic imagination, to use Andrew Piper’s term, which found value in a text’s familiarity and secondariness.²⁰ One particularly noteworthy outlier to this norm is Edgar Allan Poe, whose many accusations of plagiarism confirm his tendency to read with an eye toward textual familiarity, as was common practice.²¹ Such detections typically provided enjoyment and authentication for readers, but Poe adopted a paranoid attitude toward such findings and used them as a weapon against his perceived rivals. That Poe discerned misconduct in unoriginality should not be taken as evidence of a general public attitude, for the sheer bewilderment that met Poe’s accusations confirms that American readers and critics did not share his contempt for textual familiarity. Following World War I and the ascent of modernism, however, the association of imitation with childhood education contributed to the decline of this enduring tradition, for it imputed a sense of immaturity to imitative practice, suggesting the copyist’s failure to reach adult independence through originality.

Old Style examines the utility of this venerable literary mode, which could meet the varied needs of writers across a wide spectrum—women and men, Black and white, adults and children, wealthy and poor. For these different constituencies, recognizable literary precedent and well-executed convention could affirm the writer’s credentials and skill, and these textual traits likewise provided readers with trusted evaluative principles. Though adaptable and long lived, this revered literary mode began to lose influence in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, when a number of developments sparked unprecedented changes in literary standards and taste. Following the nation’s economic recovery from the Panic of 1819, the American book trade became revitalized in part because of such major technological inventions as the Fourdrinier papermaking machine, the Bruce typecasting machine, the Adams power press, and the Hoe rotary cylinder press, as well as the invention of stereotyped and electrotyped printing plates, which made repeated typesetting unnecessary and enabled the ready printing of pre-prepared text. In New York State alone, the number of printers increased exponentially during the first half of the century, growing from merely 4 in 1790 to 94 in 1840.²² These changes caused a sharp increase in efficiency and production as well as the growth of cheap print forms, with newspapers nearly quadrupling in number in this period, growing from 365 in 1810 to 1,403 in 1840.²³ Additional cheap forms proliferated, among them chapbooks, comic almanacs, and songsters, all of which could be purchased inexpensively at periodical depots and newsstands rather than through booksellers. New story papers emerged—Brother Jonathan, the New World, and Waldie’s Select Circulating Library—which allowed Americans to read reprinted British novels for a fraction of the price of more costly bound volumes: Adam Waldie boasted that a year’s subscription to his story paper allowed readers to acquire at a dramatically reduced rate the equivalent of fifty books. Major improvements in national infrastructure—such as the completion of the Erie Canal, the rise of express companies, and the expansion of railways—enabled print to achieve wider circulation, and cheap postal rates likewise contributed to the creation and reach of new periodicals. As Michael Winship has shown, the era also saw new industry coordination with the establishment of wholesale commerce within the book trade.²⁴ First organized in the 1820s by Henry C. Carey, these industry sales enabled booksellers around the country to obtain a greater variety of stock and allowed books to achieve wider geographical circulation through exchange within the trade.²⁵

These numerous changes caused the literary market to become inundated with new print material, which attracted readers with the promise of excitement and novelty. Robert A. Gross has shown that American presses during this period issued more than two thousand titles annually, a rate of productivity that doubled and even quadrupled the output of the years before and immediately following the American Revolution, respectively.²⁶ Washington Irving marveled at the increased supply of print, quipping, The stream of literature has swoln [sic] into a torrent—augmented into a river—expanded into a sea.²⁷ In his biography of Irving decades later, Charles Dudley Warner recycled Irving’s metaphor in describing the changes wrought by these developments: The attention of young and old readers has been so occupied and distracted by the flood of new books, written with the single purpose of satisfying the wants of the day, produced and distributed with remarkable cheapness and facility, that the standard works of approved literature remain for the most part unread upon the shelves.²⁸ Canonical texts—dubbed by book historians steady sellers because of their evergreen longevity in the book market—and traditional reading habits seemed poised to disappear forever as readers increasingly gravitated to new, untested books of questionable quality. As books jostled for attention in a crowded market, writers used sensation and novelty to attract readers, and originality gradually acquired status and legitimacy. Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language omitted the word originality as well as its cognates, but by 1828 these terms appeared in Noah Webster’s Dictionary, a shift that confirms the decisive entrance of novelty and innovation into American public discourse during the intervening seventy-five years.

These developments endangered long-standing traditions of textual composition and appraisal, and they consequently prompted lively debates about the importance of continuity amid the allures of novelty. In depicting the varied uses of unoriginality for generations of American writers, Old Style also chronicles several impassioned efforts to preserve this distinguished literary mode, despite the many changes overtaking the nineteenth-century literary marketplace. At the center of this study are numerous writers—among them Lucretia Davidson, James Fenimore Cooper, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—who sought to forestall these changes and positioned themselves as faithful stewards of literary tradition. These efforts may have bolstered their careers during their lifetimes, but their fidelity to traditionalism often impaired their long-term literary status, for later critics often dismissed these writers as inconsequential figures who did little to advance the larger maturation of American literature and would characterize their unoriginality as a hindrance to that development. As a result, these writers were often omitted from the canonical literary tradition they strove to protect.

Literary traditionalism also came under fire from the era’s robust literary nationalism, which urged Americans to sever ties with traditional literary influences and produce texts grounded in local American culture. This movement, which we term the American Renaissance, characterized unorig-inality as an impediment to the full development of a homegrown American literature and rejected the inclusion of the United States within the British literary tradition, insisting instead on the full literary independence of the United States.²⁹ It was in response to the lasting influence of literary traditionalism that Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1837 famously called for its conclusion, announcing, Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close.³⁰ In using the term apprenticeship, Emerson acknowledged that imitation had long served as an essential feature of artisanal training, but he insisted that the United States was finally ready to leave that subordinate position and strike out on its own. Old Style demonstrates that these debates were significantly more complex than we have perhaps remembered: writers such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow countered these separatist literary arguments by promoting traditionalism as a boon to American literature, claiming that it provided fertile ground from which an authentically American literature could organically grow. Un-originality, Longfellow objected, is intrinsic to both American literary history and the nation’s literary future: a nation cannot develop a literature sui generis, he asserted, and the United States must work with the varied literary materials that make up its heritage. By recovering these long-forgotten debates, Old Style demonstrates that the nationalism of the American Renaissance met with some resistance from a few prominent critics, who countered that literary separatism was dishonest about the fundamentally transnational nature of American literature and worried that this movement would cause the loss of national memory and history. In these respects, critics’ fears doubtless proved correct.³¹

In depicting nineteenth-century efforts to preserve a venerable but weakening literary style, Old Style examines how this literary mode became associated with elitist conservatism, a linkage that contributed to its fall from grace in the twentieth-century academy. Peter Mack has observed that literary tradition is often invoked at times of change to justify conservatism, with the preservation of the literary past often believed to exert a suspicious coercive power.³² For the last century, scholars have often interpreted a writer’s faithful replication of convention as indicating an uncritical contentment with the status quo and an unwillingness to enact change, whether literary or social; more than one critic, for instance, has dubbed Washington Irving a conservative because of his commitment to literary and social tradition.³³ The rhetoric of inheritance often used to defend unoriginality likely contributed to this association, for it presented literary tradition as an intergenerational bequest that concentrated resources among a select few and sought to limit wider access. For generations, traditionalist unoriginality enabled social mobility, but in the nineteenth century it became the cause célèbre of several prominent advocates who sought to preserve not only old books and old ways of reading but also a social hierarchy governed by elites. The final three chapters of Old Style consider several such figures—such as James Fenimore Cooper and Thomas Bailey Aldrich—whose advocacy of traditionalism was visibly grounded in elitist sympathies and an aversion to populism in both literature and politics. Their controversial public efforts to preserve the literary and economic status quo helped fortify the growing association of unoriginality with elitist conservatism, and their efforts only hastened the decline of the literary mode they so valued.

This association of unoriginality with elitist conservatism also helped buttress twentieth-century critical judgments, for it positioned the modern esteem for originality as an engine of social progress. Rita Felski has recently examined how modern literary scholars often portray themselves as political intercessors who thwart the text’s efforts to indoctrinate the reader, but the rhetoric of political intervention pervaded literary criticism well before the advent of post-structuralist critique.³⁴ According to Theodor Adorno, the modern veneration for originality rose amid early twentieth-century political upheaval, a context that colored this new literary value with the patina of populist insurgency.³⁵ Over the ensuing century, critics have consequently depicted originality as an act of rebellion designed to cast off the yoke of despotism, with literary tradition standing in for the elite rule that favored it. Within this formulation, the original writer—and, by extension, the critic who champions such work—is a kind of freedom fighter who enables the liberation from constraint, even if merely the constraint of literary convention. This assessment, to be sure, overlooks the utility of unoriginal traditionalism to aspiring writers from the social periphery—writers of color, white women, working-class writers—who enlisted this literary mode to achieve access to print, but this notion also contributed to the portrayal of nineteenth-century traditionalists as reluctant democrats who had not yet learned to embrace independence but continued to cherish the vestiges of a repressive British past. This formulation implicitly conflates literary originality with literary nationalism, though these two literary modes are by no means synonymous. As numerous scholars have shown, many patriotic writers sought to bring glory to the United States by expressly imitating familiar British literary models, thereby implicitly positioning the new nation as Britain’s equal in literary sophistication and skill.³⁶ These ambitions rarely figure in twentieth-century appraisals, which more often characterize traditionalist writers as submissive and docile, in thrall to the colonial influences of literary tradition and their work mere detours in the development of American literature.

George Santayana, for instance, articulated this view in 1915, just as twentieth-century aesthetic standards began to take hold. Santayana hailed Walt Whitman as the revolutionary liberator of American poetry whose unorthodoxy finally broke the restraints of hidebound convention. Before Whitman, American poetry had merely "modulated in obvious ways the honorable conventions of the society in which it arose. It was a simple, sweet, humane Protestant literature, grandmotherly in that sedate spectacled wonder with which it gazed at this terrible world and said how beautiful and how interesting it all was.… To be a really great poet[,]