Reviewing America: Francis Jeffrey, the Edinburgh Review and the United States
The result, however, was not internment or even minor harassment, but rather invitations to meet the President and the Secretary of State, James Madison and James Monroe, both in private and at a state dinner. [...]as Jeffrey noted rather bemusedly in his journal, both men debated British policy wit...
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| Published in: | Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature 2012, Vol.18, p.53 |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | The result, however, was not internment or even minor harassment, but rather invitations to meet the President and the Secretary of State, James Madison and James Monroe, both in private and at a state dinner. [...]as Jeffrey noted rather bemusedly in his journal, both men debated British policy with him, evidently considering the views of the editor of The Edinburgh Review a matter of real interest in the American political world. According to the Blackwood's reviewer, Franklin is the only American "philosopher whose discoveries have been of much importance to mankind; and if the whole stock of their literature were set on fire to morrow, no scholar would feel the loss" ("Means of Education" 1819: 646). According to Breck, Jeffrey began the interview with a haughty proclamation of his unshakeable support for British measures "in all that relates to their disputes with you". Jeffrey's private emotional responses, private political discussions, thus never became part of the public discourse of America in The Edinburgh Review, a point that perhaps emphasises more strongly than anything else how his lived experience of American life and politics remained secondary to the lively and divisive literary construction of America that appeared in the Edinburgh periodicals. 1 References quote the pencilled page numbers on the original manuscript and, in brackets, the page of the (unpaginated) typescript also held by the NLS. 2 This joke has had a curious afterlife in popular science. |
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| ISSN: | 1571-0734 |