Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s Manuscript Books: Curating a Legacy?

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹ In 1878 the papers were placed in the newly erected Ridgway Library, which had been built with the bequest of James Rush to house the contents of the Library and the papers he had inherited from his father. James had received the papers from his older brother Richard when the latter had died in 1859. (Fried 500; Anonymous 6).

² Annis Boudinot Stockton, Rush’s mother in law, was one of Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s oldest friends. Stockton, a poet herself, and Fergusson remained close friends all of their lives. (Ousterhout 121–122; Mulford 1–17; Fried 129).

³ In this eulogy published eight years after Fergusson’s death, Rush remembers Fergusson’s life as one centered around her intellectual and social life. A great part of the essay is dedicated to highlighting Fergusson’s engagement with Philadelphia’s literary culture and her committed to promote it through the evening gatherings held at Fergusson’s house in Philadelphia and at her country estate in Horsham, PA.

⁴ Until the very end of the last century, the dismissive attitude reflected in James Rush’s reading seems to have been the prevalent one among readers. Fergusson’s name did not disappear from history, yet it was left in the shadow, most of her work remained unstudied and unpublished, and her literary contributions were dormant in the archives with the rest of the surviving manuscript work which eventually joined Volume 40 of the Rush family papers. Fergusson’s name appeared in volumes about colonial literary history throughout the nineteenth century. Her literary production gained some more attention after the publication of Anne H. Wharton’s late nineteenth-century volume about colonial and early republican literary salons where she described Fergusson as “the most learned woman in America” (Wharton 13).

⁵ Eliza Stedman to Mrs. Senior, April 6, 1801.

⁶ I have discussed Fergusson’s use of the manuscript commonplace book as a way to reconstruct the cultural and literary environment of the pre-Revolutionary period (Cillerai 114–26).

⁷ During her lifetime, Fergusson had some of her poems published in local magazines such as the Universal Asylum and Columbia Magazine. The first publication of some of Fergusson’s poems and letters was in two issues of The Pennsylvania Magazine History and Biography edited by the collector-historian Simon Gratz in 1915.

⁸ Fergusson transcribed and annotated the two volumes of the psalms again in the early 1790s. The red leather-bound volumes of the later transcription are owned by the Library Company and temporarily housed at the Pennsylvania Historical Society. The two volumes of the Telemachus, which Fergusson completed and had bound together in the second half of the 1760s, are at the Library Company.

⁹ Fergusson had met Evans on her return trip from England in 1765. The two developed a close friendship, and, after Evans died in 1767, Smith asked Fergusson to help him prepare the collection and find subscribers to support the book’s publication. Although Fergusson actively participated in editingthe book, Smith did not mention her collaboration in the Preface he wrote. Anne Ousterhout, Fergusson’s biographer, speculates that this might have been the first time that any of her poems were published. (Ousterhout 114)

¹⁰ Fergusson’s friend Milcah Martha Moore copied a portion of a journal that Fergusson kept while in England and some of her poems in her commonplace book showing evidence of Fergusson’s literary wit and of her literary interactions (Moore 200–216).

¹¹ Ousterhout cites manuscript notes by historian William Buck reporting that cartloads full of her papers were burnt after she died in 1801 (Ousterhout XIV).

¹² Although the name “commonplace book” is frequently used to refer to these books, the hybridity of the books’ content makes them closer to the miscellany and copy book. I here refer to the books as commonplace books following David Allan’s suggestion in Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England that the term commonplace is appropriate to use for a large variety of hybrid compositions that includes hybrid forms like Fergusson’s books.

¹³ Susan Stabile provides a concise summary of the content of these books in the introduction to Anne Ousterhout’s biography of Fergusson (Ousterhout 22). While Stabile’s description of the books is mostly correct, the book that she describes as composed for either Elias Boudinot or Benjamin Rush, which is the one I refer here as “Laura to a Friend” based on the words printed on the book’s spine, does not have any direct reference to either man. The Willing Family book at Graeme Park is composed around two long odes entitled “Ode to the Litchfield Willow” and “Ode the Second, A Tribute to American Genius and Friendship.” As the titles reflect, the poetic theme of these compositions is translatio studii and the cultural westward progress of the arts.

¹⁴ Both David Shields (119–130) and Margaret Ezell (21–44) have examined the intersection between the literary salon and eighteenth-century manuscript publication such as Fergusson’s commonplace books.

¹⁵ The books’ epistolary function shares what literary scholars have described as the transformative nature of epistolarity. In the letter exchange, connections and representations are re-mediated and thus both may be altered as the correspondence continues. Caroline Wigginton, for example, discusses Fergusson’s use of the epistolary form as a medium to redirect and reconfigure the “dynamics and uneven bonds of early America” in the particularity of her relationships to other authors (Wigginton 6).

¹⁶ Fergusson’s methods of producing the books, including her composition, revision, copying, arrangement, and presentation to specific audiences reveal the multiple technical operations that are involved in the production of her work. Fergusson’s books show how the materiality of the text and the textuality of the material form are bound together. I refer specifically to what Roger Chartier and Peter Stallybrass write in their essay “What is a Book?” where they see this interdependence as a necessary element of a book’s history as well as of its cultural and historical value.

¹⁷ The letter to Ann Ridgeley (neé Moore), September 14, 1797 is printed in the collection that Simon Gratz edited and published in Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography in 1915.

¹⁸ There is no evidence that, if it was composed, the manuscript Fergusson refers to in her letter remains.

¹⁹ This is also reflected in the common practice of copying each other’s work in commonplace books. As I mentioned earlier in this essay, Milcah Martha Moore, a member of Fergusson’s literary circle, transcribed a section of the diary that Fergusson kept while in England along with several of her poems. Annis Boudinot Stockton transcribed many of Fergusson’s poems as well. Karin A. Wulf provides a useful analysis of the networking practices among early American women writers as well as a discussion of the commonplace book tradition among this group in her introduction to Milcah Martha Moore’s commonplace book (Moore 1–57).

²⁰ I have argued elsewhere that Fergusson’s notions of friendship and sociability are rooted in the eighteenth-century cosmopolitan ideal. The idea of universal friendship and communication permeates Fergusson’s poetry and her representations of identity in the socio-political context of late colonial and early republican America (Cillerai 114–19).

²¹ Ivy Schweitzer has described this type of friendship as formative of personhood and created through relation and affinity and argued that the early American notion of friendship was a cultural practice rooted in the classical tradition via early Christianity and early modernity. Aristotle’s notion of friendship as a “state” based in choice rather than an “emotion” shapes this notion (Schweitzer 9). In reshaping the understanding of friendship in socio-cultural terms, Schweitzer claims that non-elites, people of color, and women appropriated a previously masculine notion of friendship in order to claim “admission to an exclusive discourse of affiliation, perpetuating but also, in turn, substantially and radically altering it” (Schweitzer 12).

²² The poems are titled “Epistle from Emilia to Laura,” “Laura in Answer,” and “Emilia in Answer.” The first one is numbered 31 and the second and third paired together as number 32 in the table of contents. In the body of the book they are marked as 41 and 42. Following the last poem is a short poem that Fergusson added in 1782 entitled “Lifes Emblem” The fragrant blooming blushing Rose/ A few short Suns remains;/ Not long it doth its Sweets disclose/ But Droops upon the Plains:/ Not so the rugged prickly Thorn;/ Which doth the Stallk suround:/ From of the Bush is never torn/ But Constant lives to Wound.” This later addition is another example of how the added gloss accompanies and interprets the poems in light of the passing of time and the knowledge of incumbent end that maturity brings about.

²³ The attitude that these expressions reveal speaks to eighteenth-century complex interconnections between emotions, perceptions of the self, and social relationships and norms that historian Nicole Eustace has recently examined. Eustace has referred to examples from Fergusson’s correspondence to discuss the way emotions affect her understanding of the self, social norms and interpersonal relationships and expose this foundational aspect of eighteenth-century culture. Eustace analyzes the conflict that emerged in late colonial North American society between the understanding of feeling in relation to faith, which required self-transcendence in search for communion with God, and the understanding of feeling in relation to contemporary philosophical beliefs, which interpreted feelings as a mechanism to advance social benevolence. While the former view promoted the removal of one’s feelings, the latter placed feeling at the foundation of one’s social life. Eustace concludes that “ultimately, these two cultural currents flowed into the same surging stream” (Eustace 237–38).

²⁴ The Sorrows of Young Werther had been first published in 1774. A French translation had been published in 1777 and the first English translation dates 1779. In 1787, Goethe reissued the novel with significant changes to the original version. Fergusson was probably familiar with the novel and might have read either the French or English translation.

²⁵ A longer version of this poem is copied in the commonplace book entitled Laura to a Friend, which Fergusson composed two years later. The final line of the copy in the Stockton’s book is not in the one in Laura to a Friend where the poem has a different title as well: “Lines on reading a popular Novel ‘The Sorrows of Werter’.” The later version consists of ten lines and there is no mention of friendship. The introductory poem to Laura to a Friend entitled “Introduction to Laura’s Efusions of Friendship. Composed in Solitude at her paternal Seat” shows that friendship is a central theme in that commonplace book as well. However, friendship in Laura to a Friend remains at the theoretical level. The later book treats friendship as a literary concept rather than the real-life friendship that clearly emerged as is the case in the book for Annis Stockton. Here is the text of the later version of the poem:

Mistaken youth thy Love to Frenzy wrought

Spurnd Calm Reflection and each Sober thought!

A little Time had showd can Charlots Charms

Had Died and faded in a Werters Arms!

For Guilt and meanness ne’er with Thee could dwell

Thy Heart was formd for Genuine Honors Call

Thus had you triumphd oer the fair ones Fall

Still your own hand had aimd the fatal Ball

Mercy itself had scarce your Crime forgiven

While now we Hope you, yet may enter Heaven!

²⁶ In Book VIII:7, Aristotle writes: “But there is another kind of friendship, viz. that which involves an inequality between the parties, e.g. that of father to son and in general of older to younger, that of man to wife and in general that of ruler and subject. And these friendships differ also from each other; for it is not the same that exists between parents and children and between rulers and subjects, nor is even that of father and son the same as that of son and father, nor that of husband to wife the same as that of wife to husband. … In all friendships implying inequality the love also should be proportional, i.e. the better should be more loved than he loves, and so should the more useful, and similarly in each of the parties, then in a sense arises equality, which is certainly held to be characteristic of friendship.” (Aristotle 220) Schweitzer provides an extended overview and bibliography to understand the ancient context of friendship doctrine and its mutations during the early following centuries (Schweitzer 27–72). A distinction between my point here and Schweitzer’s argument is that the scholar is discussing the issue of egalitarian friendship among women and as a form of female empowerment in early American female to female friendship. In proposing the replacement of a sentimental relationship between a man and a woman with one of friendship, Fergusson implies a preexisting equality between men and women that would allow it to function better than love.