Abstract
The first history of American literature by a British author, John Nichol's American Literature, An Historical Sketch, 1620–1880, was published in Edinburgh in 1882. In several ways the publication was an unlikely event. By 1882 few American scholars had devoted themselves to the study of American literary history. For a British one to do so at that date must have struck most of his contemporaries as scarcely comprehensible. In 1866 Henry Yates Thompson of Liverpool had offered to endow a lectureship at Cambridge in the ‘History, Literature, and Institutions of the United States’—the lecturer to be appointed by the President and Fellows of Harvard. But for a combination of ecclesiastical, political, and academic reasons the offer was rejected as a dangerous novelty. Nothing had happened to make the ‘dangerous novelty’ of 1866 a respectable subject of academic concern in 1882.
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