They say not to judge a book by its cover, but I would argue that judging a book by its title is a whole different thing. Trust me, I’m not one to resist a title like Edward Everett Hale’s Practical Christianity Applied to the Manufacture of Woolens. It was, in fact, the first book I chose to read from the Byrdcliffe collection – and my fascination with the title was only slightly diminished when I discovered it is actually a subtitle. The main title is How They Lived in Hampton – hence the (dare I hope witty?) title of this blog.
Surprisingly, despite the documentary nature of the title, a quick perusal of the introduction makes it clear that this seemingly practical manual is in fact a fiction:
Unfortunately for me, I was not trained to the woolen manufacture, and could not take, therefore, the difficult part which Mr. Spinner takes in this book… I was therefore obliged to decline the three proposals. But in this book, as the reader will see, I have supposed Mr. Spinner accepted one. (Hampton iv)
Perhaps the fictional nature of the text would have been more obvious had I more immediately connected Edward Everett Hale with his most famous short story, “The Man Without a Country,” which was published as pro-Union propaganda in The Atlantic Monthly in 1863. It is the story of a U.S. Army Lieutenant sentenced to perpetual imprisonment on the high seas in complete comfort as befits his rank, as a punishment for repudiating the United States at his trial for treasonous collaboration with Aaron Burr in 1807 with the words, “I wish I may never hear of the United States again!” The judge grants him his wish: Nolan is to spend the rest of his life in exile aboard Navy warships, with explicit orders that no one shall ever mention his country to him again.
The story is pure fiction, and yet Hales’ 1897 edition includes an introduction in which he describes the inspiration for his tale:
The publisher of this edition of THE MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY asks me to give some account of the circumstances and incidents of its Publication. I do this with a certain reluctance, lest it should seem that I think they are more important than they are. It is true, however, that a series of curious coincidences accompanied the history of the story. Persons who are interested in the Curiosities of Literature, then, may read this preface.
His introduction goes on to include a description of the “real Philip Nolan,” (1771 – 1801) , a horse-trader and freebooter in Natchez, who was implicated in Aaron Burr’s Mississippi River intrigues and treason trial.
It is perhaps this insistence on documentation and factuality that explains why I was introduced to the story as fact in my eighth grade American History class. And my history teacher was not alone. So convincing was Hale’s story, that a monument “in memory of” Nolan and bearing his self-written epitaph was erected on July 4, 1975, by the Altrusa Club of Andalusia, Alabama. It is a singular choice in and of itself – but even more so for an international women’s service organization modeled along the lines of Kiwanis. Perhaps the Club’s stated purpose of “promoting literacy” explains their decision to honor a completely fictional character. Do you have a better explanation?
Although it is fiction, the “plot” of Practical Christianity is by in large an exhaustive documentary of the organizational details involved in creating a cooperative community that fairly divided both labor and profits, in the spirit of the most famous of the turn of the century socialist utopias, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. Hale’s exhaustive documentation of the composition of boards, the distribution of compensation, and the running of the company store makes the narrator’s interview with the town’s schoolteacher and librarian on the subject of her methods of education almost frivolous in comparison:
Indeed, Mr. Freeman, the difficult point with a public library is at the beginning. The old proverb is certainly true there. Somehow it happens that the first five hundred books you buy are infallibly stupid books. They are the ‘books which no gentleman’s library should be without,’ but which might as well be manufactured out of wood and leather, and nailed up permanently on the shelves. It is not until you have done with the ‘standard books,’ and begin to supply people with the every-day literature of the time, that they begin to understand that it is worth while to go to the library… Here I make them bring me everything. I make the man who comes up on the trail bring me the New York Herald or Tribune of that day… (Hampton 130)
The Whitehead’s library had no shortage of those first five hundred books, including the collection of Dryden with Byrdcliffe bookplates that first got me interested in reconstructing the library. But conventional as these choices are, they open a whole new avenue of investigation. For the Dryden set has a copyright date of 1821, over thirty years before Ralph Whitehead was born in 1854. So how did such a set make it into the Byrdcliffe library? Inheritance? An antiquarian book store? More on this puzzle next time.
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