Text: C. F. Briggs (?), Literary, Broadway Journal (New York), June 7, 1845, vol. 1, no. 23, p. 361-363

[page 361:]

REVIEWS.

 

FLEETWOOD, OR THE STAIN OF BIRTH. A Novel of American Life. By the Author of Philip in Search of a Wife, &c., &c. New York. Burgess, Stringer & Co. 1843.

A novel of American life is one of the greatest novelties in literature; and we took up “Fleetwood,” therefore, with peculiar pleasure, anticipating, from its winning title, an unusual treat. Novels of Irish life, Scotch life, Cockney life, French life, and even of Swedish and Russian life, are as plenty as blackberries, in our booksellers’ shops. But hitherto, nobody but Mr. Dickens and Mrs. Trollope, has made an attempt at American life. It certainly speaks little for the imagination of our twenty millions, that not one among them has been found capable of giving a sketch of their characters. We have not produced a single book which can be pointed to as containing an insight into the peculiarities of the national character. Mrs. Clavers has made the most successful attempt, but her sketches are confined to a very limited circle of characters. Very perfect, they are, as far as they reach; but our American novelist is yet in embryo, and in embryo must remain, until an international copy-right law shall enable the genius of the nation to develope itself. The author of the book before us, says in his preface, which he calls an “overture,” that twenty thousand copies of his last work were sold; a much greater number we fear, than were read, for we do not remember to have heard it named or to have seen it alluded to, by any of our critics or reviews. Twenty thousand copies are a monstrous edition for a novel, much larger than any of Walter Scott's ever reached, and probably four times greater than either of Bulwer's or James’ novels has ever amounted to in their best days. Cheap reading, we mistrust, produces cheap readers. A great majority of the books published at the present day, novels in particular, are pure luxuries, and a luxury to be held in any esteem must not come too cheap. If novels and truffles were given away, we doubt whether half the quantity of either would be devoured, that .there is at present. Authors and booksellers made a terrible mistake when they introduced the cheap system. Nothing has saved the present race of English novelists from utter oblivion, but publishing in three volumes at a guinea and a half. A book needs the endorsement of a review to give it a circulating value, but whc will waste time in reviewing a work which is shabbily printed and sold for a shilling? Mr. Cooper has lost half his popularity at home, since he reduced the price of his novels; but abroad where the old price is adhered to, he meets with the same dignified reception that he ever did. Whether such a book as Fleetwood would meet with a more profitable sale if the prices were greater we have doubts, but if the uniform price of novels were greater, we should have no Fleetwoods at all, but in their place works of a much higher order of merit.

The sub-titles of Fleetwood are both misnomers; first there is no character in it to whom the stain of birth is fixed, and secondly it contains no American life, nor any other life indeed, although it contains several American names. The first chapter of the work affords a fair specimen of the author's style, which is stiff and pompous, — inflated without being light, and dreadfully hard without any force; — it begins in this abrupt and grandiloquent style:

“Midnight brought with it no abatement of the violence of the gale. During the day it had swept in eddying gusts through the broad avenues and narrow cross streets of the city, carrying desolation and dismay — prostrating chimneys — scattering the slates from the roofs, and making sad havoc with the wooden signs which adorned the districts devoted to traffic. One man, as he was passing up Broadway, had been knocked on the head by the shaft of a canvass awning, and instantly [column 2:] killed. Others had been severely bruised by the flying fragments, strewn at random by the blast. The dwellers on the North River had been appalled by the lurid aspect and the rapid swelling of that majestic stream. Its tortured waters would writhe and convolve into large ridges of foam, as if a new ocean were struggling for birth beneath its laboring surface, &c., &c.” Much more of similar description follows, which the reader will naturally suppose has something to do with the story, but it hasn’t. The man knocked on the head by the shaft of a canvass awning and instantly killed, as he was going up Broadway, is a touch of “American life,” and should be a caution to our citizens to get into an omnibus when wooden signs, slates and chimneys are “strewn at random by the blast.” “The dwellers on the North River “and the “shaft of a canvass awning,” are objects of which we have no very clear idea, although we are tolerably familiar with the river and with awnings.

In the midst of this tremendous storm, the door of a house opens, “a young man might have been seen,” — he must have been seen, or the fact could not have been chronicled — “to issue forth unattended.” Though young women do not often issue forth unattended in stormy nights, it is a very common occurrence with young men; and we do not, therefore, see the necessity of noticing the fact. The young man after he has issued forth, holds this remarkable conversation with somebody who had lighted him to the door:

“You had better stay, Challoner. It is a dreadful night. Gome back.”

“No, I thank you, Winton. I shall get along very well. Good night.”

What does the reader suppose that this young man, who had issued forth unattended at midnight, did in the midst of a pelting snow storm, when chimneys were flying about at random, and the waters of the North River wore convolving themselves into lurid aspects and so forth l We will let the author answer. “No sooner had the door closed upon him than he threw his cloak over his arm, took off his hat, tore open his vest, and stood with his face to the blast, as if its snow-laden currents were hardly strong and chilly enough to cool the fever of his brain. His person bared to the storm, lie walked slowly on like one immersed in thought.” Now to our thinking he acted much more like one immersed in liquor than thought.

This gentleman had just left a gambling house, where he had lost all his money, and having a young wife at home whose destitution he commiserates, he coolly stops at the door of a courtesan and requests the trifling loan of a hundred dollars of the bawd who keeps the house. His request is politely complied with, but before he reaches his own house, “as he was turning the corner of a well known street, (there are several in New York) a chimney was hurled into fragments by the blast. The scattered debris struck him violently on the head and felled him to the earth.” Debris is, we suppose, a new name for bricks, we know of no other material of which chimneys are composed. “The storm howled on, and spread its flaky winding sheet over his body; and there he was found under the incarnadined snow, a ghastly spectacle, by the early morning light.”

This is the last of the chapter and the last of the unfortunate gentleman; we hear of him no more until the book is closing. The next chapter begins with a conversation between “two young men equipped for a shooting excursion,” seventeen years after the “tragical event which we have narrated.” The scene is in Connecticut near the Sound; the two young men are the heroes of the novel, very intimate friends, who appear afterwards to have had not the slightest regard for each other. As they stand conversing after the manner of American [page 362:] high life, they see a young female on the brow of a small sandy acclivity in the act of falling from a spirited horse. Fleetwood, the man-angel of the story, “darted to her relief and caught her in his arms, while her horse in his fright, was twisting round like — “Like what? We would bet a trifle that no reader, though ever so familiar with horses, could ever guess, — “like water as it leaves a tunnel.” This young lady is the woman-angel of course, with “chiselled loveliness of features,” not to be described; and “long eye-lashes that curtained dark blue balls.” He and she fall in love without the slightest hesitation, as a matter of course; the merest tyro in novel-reading could tell that. But we regret for “American life,” that Mr. Fleetwood was guilty of an act which not only proves him to be either an ass or a villain, but also lets us into the secret of the author's estimation of a gentleman and of his experience of “American life.” While the young lady rests in a fainting condition in his arms, he has the meanness, which no butcher's boy would be guilty of, to kiss her lips and her cheek; and when Glenham, his companion, interrupts him, he requests that American gentleman to run and call a physician, to which Mr. Glenham replies, “using a school boy's colloquial vulgarism,” as the author elegantly expresses it, “in what part of my eye do you see anything green?”

Fleetwood is a young gentleman of very large fortune without a relative in the world, although he is a descendant of the royal families of England and France, all his relations having been blown up in steamboats or lost at sea. His father had enjoined upon him never to marry a woman of inferior birth to himself; but Adelaide, the heroine, proves to be the offspring of a left-handed connexion; in fact her mother was the keeper of the very brothel from whom the unfortunate gentleman, who was killed by the debris of a chimney, borrowed a hundred dollars in the first chapter. What of that Love is not only blind, but an unprincipled vagabond, and Fleetwood, under his directions, pays not the slightest regard to his father's injunctions, but proposes to marry Adelaide, who agrees to marry him, after fifteen minutes’ acquaintance. The young lady's mother, however, puts a stop to the match by taking her daughter hack to New York, with an intention of putting her upon the stage; her extremely modest and shrinking manners rendering her a capital subject for the display of the theatre. Augusta, the mother of the young lady, who still keeps up her establishment, in a “well-known street,” forms a league with Mr. Gordon, a rich merchant, Glenham, Fleetwood's friend, and Count La Salle, a French gentleman, to prevent Fleetwood from marrying Adelaide, and to carry their purpose, they resort to practices which we trust no three individuals could be found in the world base enough to undertake. But quite as a matter of course they don’t succeed. Adelaide turns out to be the lawful daughter of the debris-killed gentleman and the heiress of a large fortune, which she bequeaths to Fleetwood and dies; he gives the money to the greatest rogue in the book and goes a travelling, and the book is at an end. But a letter from Mrs. Davenant in Paris to her friend in New York, intimates that there is probability of a match being made between Fanny Ellsler the younger, a Park Theatre figurante, whom Adelaide took under her protection before she died, and Fleetwood, who has been travelling in the East.

“Fleetwood “is probably quite as good a book as many of those that issue from our press and are eagerly read by the young and thoughtless, doing them no more harm than any other merely idle employment, and we should not have selected it from a mass of flimsy things for an extended notice, had not the presumption of the author, in putting “a Novel of American life “in the title page, arrested our attention. American life is human life, and the author who aims to represent American men and women, must bear in mind the importance of making them appear like human beings, if he would have them pass current with the rest of the world.