THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL NOVEL
(ON AMERICAN THEMES)
BEFORE 1860
THE EARLY NOVELS OF
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
(1821–1831)

BY

ERNEST ERWIN LEISY
A.B., University of Kansas, 1913
A.M., University of Chicago, 1919

AN ABSTRACT OF A THESIS

SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN
ENGLISH IN THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, 1923

URBANA, ILLINOIS

THE EARLY NOVELS OF
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER (1821–1831)

James Fenimore Cooper—so the popular legend runs—was a man who wrote stories about idealized Indians and the wilderness, now read mainly by boys; who created Leatherstocking, the man without a cross; and who spent an irascible old age winning petty lawsuits. Further reflection may call to mind that he was enamored of the sea as well as of the wilderness, and that one of his stories had something to do with a spy. All this, of course, is true; but that Cooper did much more than this, has been discovered comparatively recently. The explanation is to be found, in part, in the fact that after Cooper’s death in 1851, the vogue of his type of romance having passed also, his popularity suffered a decline reaching its lowest ebb between 1870 and 1880. Another reason is that the novelist’s dying injunction that no biography be authorized was carried out so literally by his oldest daughter and literary executrix that many family papers of value were destroyed. She afterwards published in the Atlantic Monthly for 1887 two reminiscent articles about her father, but these are rambling and uninformative in character. In 1883—thirty years after the death of the novelist—Professor Lounsbury succeeded surprisingly well in piecing together the outward facts of Cooper’s life.[1] The “Correspondence of Cooper,” just published,[2] reveals little about the workmanship or about the personality of the novelist, except by way of emphasizing the fact that his social and political ideas meant more to him than his art. Cooper’s own introductions, added to his works in 1849, the articles by his daughter, and the results of Lounsbury must suffice for the external evidence on Cooper’s work; whatever conclusions are reached on internal evidence may be modified when materials still in the possession of the Cooper family are given up to the public.

Of the critical writings concerning Cooper the best is an essay by W. C. Brownell in American Prose Masters (1909), in which he applies the canons of criticism to the works of Cooper in toto under the captions: Form and Substance, Defective Art, Romantic Realism, Indians, Characters, Women, and Patriotism. John Erskine in Leading American Novelists (1910), pp. 51–130, has taken up in greater detail the leading works, using the critical-historical method. Carl Van Doren in The Cambridge History of American Literature, I, 293–306, and The American Novel (1921), Chapter 2, follows somewhat the same method as Erskine. W. L. Cross in The Development of the English Novel (1899) has a brief but pointed six pages on Cooper and his relation to Scott and his successors. These critics think highly of Cooper’s work but have been interested primarily in Cooper’s results rather than in the history of how Cooper produced his results. Only Brownell and Erskine incidentally, and Cross briefly, touch upon Cooper as an historical novelist. Leaving Cooper’s other historical work out of account, they concentrate upon The Spy, declaring it an historical novel of adventure, as Cooper had not the background for genuine historical work and did not test his fictitious characters in great historical crises such as in Kenilworth or The Abbot. This seems a too arbitrary restriction of the term “historical,” for which Brownell makes some amends when he declares that the alliance of romance with reality in Cooper’s tales, “his general and personal interest in the life he depicted makes his account of it solider art, gives his romance even more substance and meaning than Scott’s historiography.”[3] How extensively and well Cooper portrayed the setting of a past time, how he related his work to his public, what connection it had with the work of his predecessors and contemporaries, the consequent originality of his contribution, and the nature and extent of his influence on the historical novel have received insufficient attention.