Colonial Revivals: The Nineteenth-Century Lives of Early American Books by Lindsay DiCuirci

Abstract

Reviewed by: Colonial Revivals: The Nineteenth-Century Lives of Early American Books by Lindsay DiCuirci Kathryn Snyder Colonial Revivals: The Nineteenth-Century Lives of Early American Books. By Lindsay DiCuirci. Philadelphia, PA.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. 288 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $69.95, eBook $66.45. Lindsay DiCuirci's book Colonial Revivals seeks to join the "history-as-process" and the "constructed archive" genres so popular in recent American historiography. Her topic is the "documania" of nineteenth-century American antiquarians and their "near pathological obsession with manuscripts and documents related to colonial history in particular." (18) While some men, like author Washington Irving, wrote of their fear of navigating a chaos of overproduction—of too much being in print and of thus losing authorial possession—most of the nineteenth-century emphasis was on preservation. Had the ancient Egyptians spent more time finding ways to immortalize their words in print, by producing copies of their hieroglyphs, instead of building in marble and stone, or embalming bodies that would all desiccate to nothing in the end, their civilization might have been truly eternal. This was the "fantasy of print's permanence and society's permanence," and the thing that would save Irving's own nineteenth-century civilization from going the way of Ozymandias. (15) And for the new Republic of the United States, nothing seemed more important than collecting the material evidence of the colonial past with its "patina of age" (especially from the more remote seventeenth century) in order to "[build] a case for the young nation's legitimacy and permanence." (18) Collecting and reprinting such material was a process that reflected this national exuberance—but also anxiety that records could be (and were often) lost to fires and misplacement. Far from producing a single national story, DiCuirci argues, documania for colonial manuscripts often resulted in "bastions of localism," and she explores these themes in five chapters: 1) the New England custom-house as both a physical archive and a more Gothic and "imagined space of uncanny encounters with the dead"; 2) the re-invention of colonial New England figures John Winthrop and Cotton Mather through reprints of their seminal books; 3) the southern sectionalism (re)constructed by Virginia antiquarians during the antebellum period; 4) the myth of William Penn and the Lenape Indians through collected testimonies, which encouraged a sense of moral Pennsylvania regionalism; and 5) her final chapter about the global implications of colonialism through Washington Irving's 1828 archival biography, The Life and Voyages of Christopher [End Page 127] Columbus. (32) Preservation in nineteenth-century Pennsylvania often meant being a member of the local historical society which promulgated the narrative of the mythical tree where William Penn negotiated his land treaty with the native Lenape people. The Tree has since become a sort of relic, that of "treaty fragments"—its bark gifted and its seeds planted all over the colony as if it were a blessing on the land and its people to fill it with more of their progeny. (144) Unlike the "tyrannical" Puritans of Massachusetts, Penn and his followers were supposed to have been fair-minded and peaceful in their dealings with one another and with the native peoples. Preservation also meant that one might have taken sides in the growing divisions between "orthodox" and "radical" Quaker sects, divisions whose adherents began to take a renewed interest in printing the writings of "primitive" Friends, like George Fox. This kind of material history and "documania" was thus at the praxis of three (often interrelated) nineteenth-century groups: antiquarians who sought to distinguish their histories from that of New England; social activists resisting Jacksonian Indian Removal; and the Society of Friends "clashing over the future of their faith." (146) In this chapter, DiCuirci wisely points to the Quaker emphasis on "the spirit over the letter," an emphasis that makes this chapter in particular a productive exploration of the question that haunts us now as much as it did the Friends and documaniacs of nineteenth-century America: can "the work of reprinting," of exploring these archives, "reconcile the tension between dead letters and living communities?" (33) DiCuirci's book is at once local and global...