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James Fenimore Cooper
LIONEL LINCOLN; or, THE LEAGUER OF BOSTON (1825) Rockville, Maryland. Wildside Press. 2008. 448 pages. • ISBN-10: 1434474208 ISBN-13: 9781434474209 reviewed by Patrick Killough I. for biblio.com August 31, 2009 Reviewer's rating of LIONEL LINCOLN: * * * * * RECOMMENDED FOR READING Between THE PILOT and THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, James Fenimore Cooper issued his fifth novel, LIONEL LINCOLN (1825). Its deliberately evocative, antiquarian subtitle: THE LEAGUER OF BOSTON (leaguer means siege) locates this historical novel's period in time: April 1775 - March 1776. After 4,000 British troops were repulsed from Lexington and Concord during a search for colonialsts' weapon, the survivors fell back on Boston and the protecting guns of the Royal Navy. Month after month for nearly a year the rebel noose tightened. Despite a costly victory at Bunker Hill, the British, first under General Gage, then under General Howe, remained generally passive as the new Continental Army under George Washington cut off supplies and the Redcoats began to suffer hunger and smallpox. Into this pre-revolutionary cauldron sails a 25 year old British major to join his regiment -- Lionel Lincoln, Oxford educated, member of Parliament. He will end his life an Earl in ancestral England. But he had been born in Boston to a cadet branch of a noble English family and will view both the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord and the ensuing siege of Boston from competing English and American viewpoints. With the rest of the British land and naval forces, he is evacuated from Boston in March 1776. In the meanwhile Lionel Lincoln is given no important command by the generals but is told to spend his time making useful friends for the Crown among the colonials: both loyalists and rebels. Major Lincoln reconnects with Mrs. Priscilla Lechmere, the young officer's great-aunt, resident in Boston, and almost immediately falls in love with her beautiful teen age granddaughter Cecil Dynevor. A close military friend of Lionel's from boyhood and days at Oxford, Captain Peter Polwarth, is already in love with Agnes Danforth, a great-niece of Mrs Lechmere living under her roof. Polwarth is a dedicated epicure and fills the tale with humor relating to keeping his ample belly well supplied with first-rate food. By novel's end he has lost a leg in combat and has proposed marriage 50 times to ardent rebel, Agnes Danforth. The novel soon gains a distinctly Gothic feeling with the introduction of an apparently ancient man (he turns out to be 30 years younger than he makes out) known simply as Ralph with whom Lionel Lincoln had become acquainted on the voyage from England to Boston. Ralph is passionately against British tyranny and for colonial rights. Both Lionel and Ralph are in the frequent company of Job Pray, a childlike man of 27 whose mind youthful illness had greatly weakened. Lionel Lincoln shows himself to be rashly impulsive and to fear that a hereditary tendency toward madness (his baronet father languishes in an insane asylum in England) may someday touch even himself. This is a true historical novel on the model of Sir Walter Scott's trend-setting WAVERLEY: people large and small are caught up in a turning point in history as the process begins of expelling Britain from 13 of its North American colonies. A commercial flop, LIONEL LINCOLN is nonetheless appreciated as opening an important new creative stage in the author's growth -- being the fifth of 32 novels Cooper wrote. The author was experimenting, evolving. He did serious on the ground inspection of Boston and imagined his characters back into an earlier period. The streets and buildings themselves of that city are made important players in the siege and the romances. Cooper also created memorable scenes of battle, bombardments, siege, hunger and illness. Why and how men change their political allegiances is the overriding theme. The tacked on Gothic dimension of LIONEL LINCOLN is generally held to have been a mistake. Lincoln and his relatives and a couple of Boston acquaintances are slowly revealed to have previously unknown family ties among themselves. Working out those ties moves several characters to do strange things. Madness, a chilling wedding scene, graveyards, omens, frightening shadows cast on a chapel ceiling: all this and more is pure Gothic fiction. But Gothic writing was still in its hey day, wildly demanded by readers, and in the early 1820s Cooper desperately needed to make money. Mighty Britain and its quarrels with Scotland, Ireland and North America were themes being explored in contemporary literature by Walter Scott, Fenimore Cooper and others. Cooper was busily creating America's first serious fiction to find readers world wide. LIONEL LINCOLN, for all its faults, is a fascinating read and has many aspects of a good detective yarn. -OOO- http://www.biblio.com/books/209375529.html =-=--=-=- II. bn title of this review: "certain features of mind ... are transmitted through families" reviewer's rating of LIONEL LINCOLN: * * * * Posted 8/31/2009: In April 1775, when his ship sailed into Boston harbor from England, the future was bright for 25 year old Major Lionel Lincoln. He was returning after nearly two decades to the city of his birth after growing up in England, studying at Oxford and being elected to the House of Commons from one of two seats controlled by his wealthy aristocratic family. Young Lionel comes to join his regiment days before General Gage sends out a detachment of redcoats to Lexington and Concord to seize a rebel arsenal. Although not yet given a command, Lincoln will be among them as a volunteer to hear "the shot heard round the world" that launched the American Revolution. Fenimore Cooper's fifth novel, LIONEL LINCOLN (1825), marks a new stage in the 35 year old author's rapidly evolving career. It is his first novel with an American urban setting (Boston and environs). It is also an experiment in tacking on dark Gothic elements to the personal dimension of an historical novel of national loyalties modeled on Sir Walter Scott's 1814 genre-creating WAVERLEY. The Gothic dimension proved a dead-end but was well calculated to keep America's first novelist to live by his pen before American and European readers eager for the bizarre, the noir, the mad, the supernatural and the ghastly. The world historical turning point of LIONEL LINCOLN is fascinating enough. Its core is the beginning of British expulsion from 13 North American colonies launched by the battles of Lexington, Concord, Bunker Hill and other skirmishes graphically sketched by Cooper. From April 1775 to March 1776 American forces soon led by Congress-appointed George Washington of Virginia, pen eight thousand or more crack British troops in Boston. Only the massive guns of the Royal Navy prevent the redcoats being overrun. In the end, hungry, suffering from smallpox and other ailments, General Howe evacuates most of his troops to Nova Scotia to take up arms against the rebels in New York and elsewhere. Boston remains free of British rule from that day to this. The second component of LIONEL LINCOLN, the Gothic, appeals to me personally independently of the sheer historical truth of the novel. Young Lionel Lincoln's father has languished in an English madhouse for a decade. Only slowly do we find out why. Meanwhile Lionel fears that his hot temper and bursts of impetuosity may be signs of incipient madness in himself. His father was not the first of his line to go mad and "certain features of mind ... are transmitted through families," Lionel believes. Meanwhile he renews acquaintance with an ancient great-aunt and falls in love with her beautiful granddaughter Cecil Dynevor. Both these women and others in Boston know something appalling about Lionel's insane father and deceased mother. So does ancient Ralph, a mysterious shipmate of Lionel on the Boston voyage. So do 27 year old Job Pray and his mother, she having been present at Lionel's birth. What is this dark personal mystery far better known to several people in Boston than to Major Lincoln? Ere long he impetuously resolves that nothing, not even his eerie marriage celebrated in an almost totally dark chapel will keep him from the truth. Not even defection to the despised Yankee rebels, should it come to that. Experience wartime Boston when it was still held for King George III. Suffer with its ever hungrier, sicker inhabitants. Follow two couples in their unusually challenged young loves. -OOO- http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Lionel-Lincoln/James-Fenimore-Cooper/ e/9781434474209/?itm=4&usri=1 http://my.barnesandnoble.com/communityportal/ review.aspx?reviewid=1203606 ==-=-=-=-=-= III. epinions TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: April 1775 - March 1776: George Washington squeezes Redcoats out of Boston by aohcapablanca, Sep 08 '09 A couple of decades ago my wife and I were led by excellent U. S. Park Service guides around Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts. Of Minutemen and Ralph Waldo Emerson's "shot heard round the world" we heard more than a little. And I remember how the stunned British regulars then scampered for cover back to Boston. But If I ever knew that mighty British armed forces in Boston, first under General Gage, then under General Howe, had next been continually besieged and starved 1775 - 1776 for nearly a year, I had forgotten it. Then I recently read for the first time James Fenimore Cooper's fifth novel, LIONEL LINCOLN, or THE LEAGUER OF BOSTON and was made to taste, see, feel hunger and disease as the British lost round one of the American Revolutionary War. I also looked up "leaguer" and learned that it was an old word meaning "siege." "Beleaguered" is cognate. As he began writing his fiction, the thorough New Yorker James Fenimore Cooper drew upon the style and themes of equally thoroughly Scottish Sir Walter Scott. In WAVERLEY (1814) Scott had created a new genre: the historical novel, in which little people intermingle with the great ones of the earth and together change the course of world events. Scott also probed over and again a second theme -- loyalty: why people become and remain true to a religious faith, to a political constitution to a family, to an hereditary ruler. But temptations arise for people to change loyalties. Some abandon one faith for another. Why? How? What are the mechanics of loyalty shifts? All this Scott probes novel after novel. So, in imitation, does James Fenimore Cooper. The world-historical shift beginning to take shape in Fenimore Cooper's LIONEL LINCOLN is the expulsion by 13 of its North American colonies of Great Britain's overlordship. From April 1775 till March 1776 colonials (after a few months led by General George Washington of Virginia) beleaguered Generals Gage and Howe in Boston and finally drove them to sail away to fight on other North American battlefields. They never returned to Boston. This was a colossal victory for the increasingly united Americans. Those 13 colonies were still four months from declaring independence and the UK might yet have salvaged a good post-colonial relationship without years of additional fighting and suffering. One of the determining factors of the North American secession was loyalty. By some accounts 25% of the colonials were and remained passionately anti-British, 25% were passionately loyal to the Crown and 50% in the 13 colonies wished the whole mess would blow over. In Cooper's novel of 1825, the loyalty issue is incorporated in one man, his friends and relatives. Lionel Lincoln is an aristocrat, major of grenadiers, member of Parliament, wealthy, a native Bostonian who had been raised from early youth in England. In early April 1775 Lionel returns to his birthplace to join his regiment -- just before General Gage sends a couple of thousand men to seize weapons from colonials at Lexington. For moderately implausible reasons, successive British commanding generals give Major Lincoln lots of time off, with no command and a vague brief to make friends useful to the Crown among his colonial kin. Lionel Lincoln and a humorous, epicurean military colleague, Captain Peter Polwarth, friend from boyhood, fellow student at Oxford, fall in love with two gorgeous young colonials living in the home of Lincoln's aristocratic great-aunt Mrs Priscilla Lechmere. One girl is intensely for colonial rights; the other adheres to the crown. Major Lincoln volunteers to join Gage's troops repelled from Lexington and Concord, watches from a hill the battle at Bunker Hill, fights in more than one skirmish and experiences the siege of Boston from various points of view. He sees soldiers and civilians alike weakened by hunger and smallpox and morale sink in both Royal navy and the land forces. That is the general thrust of the plot. The novel's descriptions of battles are justly famous. It would spoil the tale if I told you whether Major Lincoln remained loyal to his regiment and the King or went over to George Washington and the independent Massachusetts of his birth. It's a grand tale. Read it and love it. For better or worse, however, there is another, a Gothic, dimension to LIONEL LINCOLN. This was Fenimore Cooper's fifth novel and sixth published work of fiction. He was young. He was experimenting. He intended to make a living from writing (something he would become the first American to do). So he studied his readership markets closely -- in America, Britain, France and elsewhere. A year after LIONEL LINCOLN, Cooper would rocket to global fame with THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS (1826). But in 1825 he badly needed new readers. And the best-paying hard core readers of fictional narratives were young women raised on Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron. Gothic (starting with Hugh Walpole's 1764 THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO) was all the rage. Writers in England, Scotland and Ireland were pouring out tales of ghosts, goblins, dark houses, madness, wicked priests, nymphomaniac nuns, groans, apparitions, clanking chains, etc. So, to gain readers for a still rare novel of the American Revolution, Fenimore Cooper tacked on a subplot revolving around Lionel Lincoln's bloodline. His father had long since been driven insane (or close to it) by vicious relatives in Boston and England. Thanks to them he had now been languishing the past ten years in an English madhouse. His son, Major Lincoln, had not seen him in a decade. Lionel senses that he himself often reacts impulsively to events, and without balance. This makes him fear that his blood line is tainted. And some of his Boston kin have the same worry. What is Major Lincoln's mysterious attraction to an ancient man, an ardently anti-British stranger named Ralph who had made the 1775 sea journey with him to Boston? Why do Lionel, the stranger and a mentally challenged young Boston man of 27 (and his mother) keep crossing paths in war and peace in and around Boston? There are some well written, very eerie scenes sketched in this sub-plot. One thinks of the hasty wedding in a dimly lit Anglican chapel. There are unaccounted for voices and the shadow of arms projected on the church ceiling. But this fascinating tale might better have been told outside the framework of a novel focusing on George Washington versus King George. The Gothic sub-plot strains not just the reader's credulity but the novel's internal unity as well. I end by returning to the novel's theme of loyalties -- to King, to family, to birthplace, to ideals of order and liberty. Cooper's next book, THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, would look back almost two decades in time to the French and Indian War and to the great British disaster at Fort William Henry on Lake George. What would go so sour in the next twenty years between Britain and her New World? There had been little or nothing in the 1750s to foretell the problems of the 1770s with the Stamp Act, the Boston Tea Party, "the shot heard round the world," the American siege of and British retreat from Boston -- to which the Redcoats would never return. What spawned that 25% of colonials who had come actively to despise Britain by July 4, 1776? Read LIONEL LINCOLN and find out. -OOO- Pros: Hear again the shots heard round the world at Lexington and Concord. Boston under siege. Cons: A tacked on Gothic subplot of hereditary madness and/or the fear thereof. The Bottom Line: Lose yourself in Cooper's early novel (fifth of 32), with its Minutemen and Washington's first big victory over the British 1775-1776. Learn from Cooper's youthful experiment with the Gothic. Overall Product Rating: * * * * ABOVE AVERAGE. http://www.epinions.com/review/James_Fenimore_Cooper_Lionel_Lincoln _or_the_Leaguer_of_Boston_epi/content_484201959044 =-=-==-=-=-=- IV. amazon.com TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: How the editors established the best text of Cooper's 1825 novel REVIEWER'S RATING of LIONEL LINCOLN: * * * * * If you are not picky about typos or how accurate is the reproduction you are reading of a classic American historical novel such as Cooper's 1825 LIONEL LINCOLN, then any old text or recent uncritical reprint will do. Not long ago I read for the first time LIONEL LINCOLN in such a weathered old edition. It had been printed in New York, was undated and I had to cut its pages open myself. My book had the merit of being cheaply purchased. And it served its elementary purpose. The print was legible and the tale proved unsuspectedly good. Over eleven months after the April 1775 skirmishes at Lexington and Concord, the British army and navy were squeezed by rebellious colonials into cramped defensive positions in and around Boston. In March 1776 George Washington and his Continentals, along with the local Minutemen did the unthinkable: they compelled General Howe and the Royal fleet to sail off to Nova Scotia to plot new attacks against the American rebels. British armed forces never returned to Boston. This was the beginning of a turning point in world history (like a Walter Scott historical novel): the removal of British sovereignty from 13 North American colonies. Into this revolutionary cauldron just before the failed Red Coats march to gather rebel arms at Concord, comes the tale's "wavering hero," 25-year old Major of Grenadiers Lionel Lincoln. He had been born in Boston but went to England in boyhood where he was educated at Oxford and is in 1775 a member of Parliament from a safe family borough. Lionel's baronet father was placed ten years earlier in an English insane asylum. Lionel worries that madness is hereditary in his family and he senses incipient insanity may explain that he reacts too passionately and spontaneously to various provocations. He falls in love, nonetheless, with a local beauty, when he is not busy fighting rebels and watching the battle for Bunker Hill. Several subplots involving a mysterious old stranger from England, a 27-year old simpleminded man named Job Pray and a dark marriage scene in a Boston chapel are drenched in elements of highly popular Gothic conventions. A solid, accurate historical novel. Defensible experimentation by Cooper with the Gothic. All this I derived from my very ordinary weathered text of LIONEL LINCOLN. But I also felt the need to study a more scholarly edition with good introduction and notes. And I found that in this 1984 State University of New York edition. The Historical Introduction and Notes by Donald A Ringe and Lucy B. Ringe are first rate. Most fascinating to me was their effort to establish the best possible text of this, Cooper's fifth novel. No easy task. For no Cooper MS exists. In 1832 Cooper revised for an English publisher several of his novels and wrote a fresh preface for LIONEL LINCOLN. Yet certain handwritten remains which we have for revisions of other novels (and which we know he did for LIONEL LINCOLN) have been lost for this 1832 review. In a nutshell, the two editors tried to preserve as much of the faulty first New York edition as possible, including American colloquialisms later edited out in England. This New York State University critical edition also presents 16 contemporary illustrations (including four from the first French edition of the novel). This edition also discusses at length critical reactions in several countries to what proved a publishing flop. An education in itself, beyond Cooper's gripping yarn. In his 1832 Preface, James Fenimore Cooper rationalized his marketplace failure as deriving from the impossibility of combining very detailed, well researched war research with fantastic imagined Gothic elements. Cooper never attempted quite that feat ever again in the remaining 26 novels he would write. -OOO- Your Tags: james fenimore cooper, 1775-1776 siege of boston, critical edition, major lionel lincoln http://www.amazon.com/Lionel-Lincoln-Leaguer-Writings-Fenimore/ dp/0873954165/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252703040&sr=1-1 =-==-=-=-= http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/cooper_lincoln.html |