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James
Fenimore Cooper
PRECAUTION (1820) Reviewed by Patrick Killough for epinions.com TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: "Marriage was marriage, a husband a husband" REVIEWER'S RATING of James Fenimore Cooper's PRECAUTION * * * * Mar 31 '09 I had a hellish time working my way through the first 12 chapters (of 49) of PRECAUTION. Critics had warned that it was lame and rarely read any more. Moreover it was an imitative, derivative novel of English manners. I therefore opened its pages with foreboding: from a sense of duty, piety and homage to its author, James Fenimore Cooper. He was, after all, America's first man of letters who made a good living from writing. PRECAUTION was also Cooper's very first novel, paving the way for over 30 often better ones stlll to come. Within pages I was asea trying to make sense of the interactions between three familes of friends. To help me through a maze of characters I gnashed my teeth while preliminarily pigeonholing them and later characters as follows "DRAMATIS PERSONAE
I. MOSELEYS -- Clara Moseley. -- John Moseley, brother of Clara. -- Sir Edward Moseley, father of Clara. His property is 100 miles from London . -- Jane Moseley. younger sister of Clara. -- Emily Moseley. younger sister of Clara and John; age 18. One of three marriageable daughters. -- Lady Anne Moseley, Sir Edward's wife. -- Mrs Wilson nee Moseley. Sister of Sir Edward. Widow of a General. II. THE RECTORY III. DENBIGHS IV. COLONEL EGERTON V. HAUGHTONS VI. JARVISES." Cooper's 1820 novel, by all accounts written with an admiring eye on Jane Austin's PRIDE AND PREJUDICE (published 1813), mixes up all the above characters and pigeonholes -- and a few more -- into a study of mating patterns among English aristocrats and higher gentry. It is the time of the Napoleonic wars. Three rising families: Jarvises, Moseleys and Chattertons have young adult sons and/or daughters that need marrying off. (NOTE: The Chattertons did not even make it into my first rough and bemused pigeonholing above! Ah, that may be simply because they do not appear before Chapter Seven.) All these lives soon intersect with aristocratic Denbighs. Two Denbighs in particular contribute enormous confusion to the plot. Both are named George. They are cousins. Like all male Denbighs their voices share a distinct ancestral similarity. Hear one Denbigh and you might be listening to a grandfather or a cousin. A certain George Denbigh -- we learn very, very slowly -- has claims to be both a Duke and an Earl. For reasons never clear to me, this George Denbigh, Esquire decides to mask his high nobility during encounters with Moseleys and Jarvises (but not with Chattertons -- for whatever reason he does not have to). Perhaps one or two close to the Moseleys know 25 year old Denbigh's real identity. But the novel's heroine, young Emily Moseley, never notices a clue for over 400 pages. Predictably, Emily Moseley and George Denbigh, Esquire fall madly in love. But Emily's father (don't ask me why) has given her over to the moral charge of his widowed sister, Mrs Wilson. Mrs Wilson, perhaps the most memorable character in PRECAUTION, sees it as her mission to guide Emily to the choice of as good a husband as Emily can possibly land. He must be of suitable rank, a thorough Christian and yet Emily must never love husband nearly as much as she loves God! Meanwhile Emily's mother, Lady Anne, is so happily married that she gives the problem of her daughters' finding suitable mates nary a thought. To Lady Anne Moseley, one man is much like another. Most marriages are happy. So why worry? "... marriage was a marriage, a husband was a husband" (Ch. 13) Cooper, in his capacity as God's eye narrator, has a more exalted view: " ... every union gives existence to
a long line of immortal beings, whose future welfare depends greatly on
the force of early examples, or the strength of early impressions"
(Ch. 13)
Mrs Wilson finds it extraordinarily difficult to get a fix on George Denbigh, Duke/Earl incognito. But somehow all turns out well in the end for the young lovers. As novels go, PRECAUTION is twice as long as it ought to be. It has too many characters. It is also extremely unlikely that George Denbigh, holding back his claims to be both Duke and Earl, with gigantic estates not all that far from the Moseleys and the other families, could remain so long unknown. And yet. And yet ... this is a novel that improves as it rattles along. It is funny. The characters grow into three dimensions as they hunt grouse, play with their hounds, give or attend a first sermon, enjoy teas, breakfasts, balls and rides through the countryside. George Denbigh emerges as almost a saint in disguise, in self-imposed secrecy disbursing hard love to poor people in need, weaning drunken fathers of families away from alcohol and the like. He deliberately takes a clumsily aimed bullet (meant for a bird) that would otherwise have struck Emily. Denbigh also befriends a young woman whose British Protestant mother had married into a noble Spanish family. It is fun to see Denbigh speaking Spanish with the young widow's uncle, a Spanish general with an Irish name, as uncle tries to persuade favorite niece to come back to the Conde, her father in Spain and act like a good Catholic. Fenimore Cooper's novelist daughter Susan tells us that her father wrote PRECAUTION on a dare by his wife. For he had just finished scanning an unnamed English woman's novel (written after the manner of Mrs Amelia Opie, Fenimore later said) and swore that he could do better. The result was PRECAUTION. Cooper was American, admittedly well married into New York "aristocracy." But he had in 1820 no first hand experience of English gentry or high nobility. But then English novels of manner were all the rage in North America. And America was thought not to have enough history to generate commercially succesful novels -- something Cooper would soon remedy with his second novel THE SPY about, tangentially, George Washington. Nonetheless, using books alone, James Fenimore Cooper created in PRECAUTION a believable little literary world and a cast of characters with whom he thoroughly empathized, albeit critically. This growing empathy would later make it possible for America's first commercially successful novelist to think his way sympathetically into the mind of such thoroughly American but diverse characters as THE SPY, THE PILOT, THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS and THE DEERSLAYER. I find an instructive parallel between Cooper's 1820 first novel, PRECAUTION, and Cardinal John Henry Newman's first (of only two novels), LOSS AND GAIN, published in 1848. I know of no evidence that Cooper read Newman or vice versa. But each produced his first novel because he judged that he could improve on a recent novel by an English woman. In Newman's case, the offending work was called FROM OXFORD TO ROME. It was published anonymously in 1847 by Elizabeth Harris and told the story of a soul's journey from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism. Newman had undergone a much more profoundly theological, agonizing but superficially similar conversion himself and was in 1848 studying in Rome to become a Catholic priest. He thought Harris's concept of conversion an absurdly unrealistic description of the process and set out to correct it. Among their contemporaries both John Henry Newman and James Fenimore won huge reputations as writers. Cooper wrote novels, a history of the U. S. Navy and much else. Newman wrote only two novels but much philosophy, theology and religious controversy. But both men initially made themselves novelists in order to improve on recently read provocative novels by unnamed or anonymously published English women. I recommend that you delay reading Cooper's PRECAUTION until you have first read and enjoyed all or some of the five masterly LEATHERSTOCKING tales or a couple of his sea adventure yarns (THE RED ROVER, HOMEWARD BOUND). You may well grow to like Fenimore well enough to overlook his often convoluted sentences, political jeremiads and sermonettes -- because you admire his probings of character and morals and the rapid pace of his tales of danger, captivity, rescue and warfare. If so, then and only then, take a look at his first novel, PRECAUTION. I also recommend for your study of Cooper that you consult the many aids available on the web site of the James Fenimore Cooper Society, based in Cooperstown, New York (a town founded on Lake Otsego by James's father, the Quaker, Judge William Cooper). Unfortunately for me, I discovered that web site's lengthy presentation of the plot and characters of PRECAUTION only after worrying over the first few chapters for hours and after gnashing my teeth working up quasi-genealogical charts of my own as to who was who in the novel. So do yourself a favor and look at http://external.oneonta.edu/cooper/writings/plots/walker-precaution.html Then make up your mind whether to read Cooper's flawed but not unrewarding first novel. -OOO- Pros: The first novel of America's first financially successful man of letters. Moral. Witty. Graphic. Three-dimensional. Cons: Far too long. Too many characters. Sententious. Sometimes convoluted sentences. Based on readings, not experience. The Bottom Line: Cooper's PRECAUTION launched the career of America's then best known novelist. It makes you laugh and cry. A leisurely novel of English manners. A far cry from THE DEERSLAYER. Above Average Recommended: Yes http://www.epinions.com/reviews/Precaution_by_James_Fenimore_Cooper ====-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= for alibris.com TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: Cooper's First Novel Taught Him to Empathize, Mar 30, 2009 By abuatticus, black mountain, NC Reviewer's rating of PRECAUTION * * * * FOUR STARS James Fenimore Cooper's writer daughter Susan tells us that her father wrote his first (1820) novel PRECAUTION on a dare from his wife. James F. had just said, as he tossed aside an English woman's novel, that even he could write a better novel than what he had just read. We are not sure whom he had read, and perhaps he did in fact improve upon his model. But PRECAUTION, it strikes me, has notable weaknesses. At over 400 pages long in the edition I have, it is at least twice as lengthy as its plot requires. It is also fiendishly intricate and abounds in asides, aphorisms, pieties and wry observations of the surface of human or at least English nature. To thread your way through this social labyrinth and elaborate cast of people marrying, giving in marriage and dodging marriage, keep your eye on young goody-goody heroine Emily Moseley and her father's widowed sister Mrs Wilson. If Mrs Wilson is the novel's incarnation of "PRECAUTION" (for doing all she can to nudge her niece year after year into a good, prudent, emotions-under-control Christian marriage with a suitable socially equal English male), then who might be Emily? "ONE TEMPTED TO GO ASTRAY"? Yes, but not stray very far or ever be in serious need of her aunt's playing mother hen to her chick. There are three interconnected families who strive to marry off their youngsters suitably: Chattertons, Moseleys and Jarvises. All are seen through the eyes of and weighed on the moral scales of Mrs Wilson. Characters paraded across the pages include Divines, Dukes, Earls, Ladies, army officers, women with little on their minds but how to marry, a Spanish general with an Irish name and various men and women caught up in Napoleon's Peninsular Campaign on the Iberian peninsula. We see PRECAUTION's characters hunting foxes or birds, moving from country to town, attending church, hosting or attending parties, surviving being shot by accident, etc. In the end, after manifold difficulties, marriages do happen, some better than others. And young Emily sails into safe harbor with a fabulously wealthy, handsome English aristocrat whose true identity emerges implausibly slowly, given the small world of English higher nobility. To me, the importance of Cooper's first novel lies in watching him empathize with the personally unfamiliar denizens of a genteel English world that he had yet to experience except in books, especially novels. Cooper empathizes very well and will do so again and again in his later American Wilderness and Sea Adventure novels. Who among contemporary American writers (before, during and after the Indian Removals and the Trail of Tears) has a juster appreciation of the strengths of American Indians? Who better grasps the impulses that drove his greatest hero, the marginalized American, Natty Bumppo, through the stages of alienation leading him through DEERSLAYER, PATHFINDER, past THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS and finally out to the western PRAIRIE in the days of Lewis and Clark? PRECAUTION first made Europe and America take serious note of this fresh voice, soon to be dubbed "the American Scott" -- Sir Walter Scott, that is. -OOO-" =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= for amazon.com TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: How easily could a combined earl and duke remain incognito in eary 19th century england?, March 30, 2009 By T. Patrick Killough (Black Mountain, NC United States) PRECAUTION was James Fenimore Cooper's first novel. It is not much read today because it is a vintage Cooper tale neither of the American Wilderness (like THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS) nor of Sea Adventure (like the RED ROVER). PRECAUTION was drawn from books, not the author's lived-through experiences. Cooper knew, for instance, Lake Otsego in central New York because he had grown up there in Cooperstown, founded by Judge Cooper, his own father. And he could push farther back in time speaking with older men and women who had been there before him. And you can feel those living memories in THE PIONEERS and other wilderness novels. Cooper had also been a professional seaman and drew on personal recollections for THE PILOT and his sea yarns. But around 1812 and later the novels people read both in Europe and in North America were largely set in England, Ireland and Scotland. If Cooper wanted to become a professional writer, he had, therefore, to write books that would sell in the mother country. So he read his Jane Austen and other novelists, dramatists and poets and wrote as their readers liked to be written for. All that conceded,PRECAUTION, nonetheless, can be very heavy reading. Its cast of characters is so large and their interconnections so tight that I had to draw semi-genealogical charts to make sense of them. There are twice as many pages as the story merits. There is too much moralizing and sermonizing. If you decide to read the novel for its significance as Cooper's first novel, here are a few tips: --Keep your eye on young Emily Moseley. Getting her married off to an apppropriate Christian Englishman is the life task of her widowed aunt, Mrs Wilson. It is Mrs Wilson's "precaution," or prudence, for better for worse, more frequently conventional than original, that functions like a Greek chorus throughout, though PRECAUTION is not a tragedy. -- See if you can figure out which of two cousins with the same name and similar voices is which: George Denbighs they both are. -- Ask if it is credible that one major character who is both a Duke and an Earl can hide his identity while flitting among the gentry from parlor to ballroom to village strolls for well over 300 pages. How many Dukes and Earls were in England during the Napoleonic Wars? And if you were in the lower nobility or upper gentry yourself and had daughters to marry off, how likely that you would be fooled by such a masquerade? I give you PRECAUTION. It offers you a good base point from which to watch America's first successful man of letters, James Fenimore Cooper, grow novel after novel both as supply-side substantive writer and canny deliverer of what readers were demanding. -OOO- Your Tags: james fenimore cooper, first novels, novel of manners, english nobility, george denbigh, emily moseley http://www.amazon.com/Precaution-James-Fenimore-Cooper/product-reviews/ 1606640194/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1 file: cooper_precaution |