American Claimants: The Transatlantic Romance, c. 1820–1920, by Sarah Meer

Abstract

Reviewed by: American Claimants: The Transatlantic Romance, c. 1820–1920 by Sarah Meer Kristen Renzi (bio) American Claimants: The Transatlantic Romance, c. 1820–1920, by Sarah Meer; pp. x + 265. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2020, $85.00. Sarah Meer's wide-ranging study American Claimants: The Transatlantic Romance, c. 1820–1920 makes a compelling case for the need to conceptualize claimants across national boundaries, whether as plot devices, as authorial claims to authenticity/inheritance, or as modes of articulating a work's lineage. Indeed, Meer argues upfront that the internationality of the claimant has obscured its visibility as an influential trope within existing critical traditions: "Claimant texts do not fit critical traditions organized by nation," she writes, and "the American claimant appears more influential" when seen through international prisms that imagine an "encounter, or cultural conflict, or social exchange" (3). In the book's eight chapters and epilogue, Meer repeatedly signals the transatlantic conversations at work between Victorian Britain and nineteenth-century America, while also extending her analysis to claimants within African history and literature. In so doing, she gives an account of the period that is sensitive to colonial contexts while using the claimant as a unifying thread across disparate sources, texts, authors, and history. Meer successfully argues that the claimant is an understudied narrative trope worthy of critical attention. Her American claimant is, at its most concrete, a feature within a lost-heir narrative in which an American, separated from British familial ties, stakes a claim to a British estate or title. Though this plot is no nineteenth-century invention, she argues for its particular relevance within the Victorian era as it indexes other key period concerns: questions of social identity (particularly involving class and race); mass migration and travel; social mobility; and historical lineage and tradition. Fictional claimant narratives also drew on their real-life counterparts for both source material and popularity—most notably, the famous nineteenth-century Tichborne case. In American and British claimant narratives, Meer finds these ideas most likely to engage questions of [End Page 135] national caricature (the Yankee yokel or savage, the British dandy or snob), racial and class mobility (as demarcated by servant or slave status), and the contested category of the gentleman; she also notes their relation to, yet distinction from, the American period staple of the confidence man. Due in part to the theatrical representation of the claimant on the nineteenth-century stage, and also in part to the performative, aesthetic dimensions of staking an identity claim, Meer also charts sartorial signals throughout the text as another means of marking, and finding, claimant connections. In the book's early chapters, Meer focuses most explicitly on plot-centric studies. These are the book's most persuasive chapters, as they demonstrate in detail the means by which claimant narratives engage the above topics alongside the significance of this engagement. For instance, in her discussions of Tom Taylor's play Our American Cousin (1858) (chapter 2) and Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel Little Lord Fauntleroy (1885) (chapter 3), Meer articulates the ways in which these two texts narrate the trope to render claimants—and the cross-cultural clashes regarding class and race that they highlight—benign. And in chapters 4 and 5, perhaps the strongest chapters in the book, Meer's attention to transatlantic periodical cultural exchange leads to a fascinating look at the import of connections (both explicit and implicit) between the interest paid to claimants and their narratives by Frederick Douglass and Charles Dickens. Meer's opening question in chapter 5 is simple: "Why did Douglass [without authorization] reprint Bleak House?" in the periodical he edited, printed, and published in Rochester, New York from 1851–60, Frederick Douglass' Paper (99). From this question, Meer generates a complicated, nuanced answer that uses a blend of imaginative close readings, literary historicization, and Douglass's political publishing and writing to demonstrate how "context can unearth hidden claimants" (98). The concrete and abstract ways of figuring claimants are most successfully merged and realized in these pages, and the transatlantic claimant's significance is clear here. In this instance, the claimant provides a way to reaffiliate, through print culture, Douglass's Black...