Literature

What is true of art and architecture is often as true of literature. There is, of course, much fiction and poetry that is place-specific Perhaps an effort can be made to identify some of that, but we will leave that for another time, or better still, to specialists in the field.

There are a few essays that attempt to assess Connecticut writers as a group. Perhaps the best of these is “The Literature of Connecticut,” by Stanley T. Williams, in Norris Galpin Osborn’s History of Connecticut in Monographic Form, vol. II: 483-537. Williams was a scholar and Yale professor who did not unduly praise the literary quality or importance of Connecticut writers. Nevertheless, this is a very convenient; compact survey of the subject, running from the works of Thomas Hooker and the poetry of Roger Wolcott to “the gentle retrospective musings” of Ik Marvel and the “tranquil presence of Charles Dudley Warner” in the late nineteenth century. The essay was written in the mid-1920s, but Williams revised it for publication as Tercentenary pamphlet LI (1936) under the same title. “Any attempt to limit the literature of Connecticut to an entity with special characteristics must fail,” says Williams. Since the turn of the nineteenth century, he maintains, Connecticut had lost its peculiar flavor and “dissolved...into the larger whole. Hence the only pictures of the essential Connecticut of the eighteenth century occur in the writings of the Wits.... But recent Connecticut writers have dealt with a civilized and urbanized community or with subjects not peculiar to the state.” (p.21) There is also a very short summary, “Literature;” in the WPA Guide. Alice C. Jenning’s “Connecticut in Literature;” Connecticut Magazine 9 (1905) 3:477-88, is a short; eclectic survey focusing on the nineteenth century. She attempts to discuss Connecticut writers who wrote about Connecticut, and includes the Wits, the Beechers, and Mark Twain.

There are two eras, one of which Williams alludes to, in which Connecticut figured importantly in the world of American letters, and students of Connecticut history should be familiar with them. The first was the Federal era, when the so-called Hartford, or Connecticut, Wits attracted a good deal of attention. Leon Howard’s The Connecticut Wits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942) is the standard, scholarly treatment and, of course, it includes an excellent bibliography, which should be consulted by serious students. Howard supersedes Annie Russell Marble’s Heralds of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1907), which she summarizes in Tercentenary pamphlet LIX (1936), The Hartford Wits. Henry A. Beers, another Yale Professor, wrote about the Wits in The Connecticut Wits and Other Essays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920). Vernon Louis Parrington edited a volume of the Wits’ work, The Connecticut Wits (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927), which includes a fairly long introduction. Winnifred B. King’s “First American Satirists: The Hartford Wits....” Connecticut Magazine 10 (1906) 3:403-11 is useful only for its portraits of Barlow, Humphries, Hopkins, and Trumbull. R.W. Wright, in “The Poetry and Poets of Connecticut,” Papers of the NHCHS 7 (1877) :93-116, treats many poets, but focuses on the Wits.

The most recent work on the Wits collectively is a doctoral dissertation by Thomas Anthony Kevlin, “Some Aspects of the Political and Social Thought of the Connecticut and Hartford Wits” (University of South Carolina, 1975). Kevlin’s thesis is that the Wits subscribed to a “definite creed of social order, best exemplified in Timothy Dwight’s poem, ‘Greenfield Hill.’ This social order was one of village centered agrarianism, local democracy guided by the naturally gifted, and close social control of each citizen’s moral behavior.” For various reasons the Wits’ political thought lost its coherence after 1790, Kevlin believes. The Wits are discussed, of course, in many general histories of American literature, and anthologized in some of them. Always the best way to understand them is to read what they wrote.

See also:

Baily, Marcia Edgerton. “A Lesser Hartford Wit: Dr. Elihu Hubbard Smith.” The Maine Bulletin 2 (1930) 11. This monograph of about 150 pages is a University of Maine master’s thesis about Smith, who moved to New York in 1793 and died five years later at the age of twenty-seven. He is best known--if known at all--as the editor of an anthology of his fellow Wits’ work.

Harrington, Karl P. Richard Alsop, “A Hartford Wit.” Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1969. This is another short work about a lesser Wit. The author was professor of English at Wesleyan.

Parsons, Francis. “Brainard--A Poet of Hartford’s Early Literati.” Connecticut Magazine 7 (1902) :371-80. A two-part piece that sets John G.C. Brainard (Yale, 1815) in the Hartford literary context.

For studies of the major Wits, see the “Biographies” section under Joel Barlow, Timothy Dwight, David Humphreys, and John Trumbull. Other minor Wits were Theodore Dwight and Lemuel Hopkins.

A couple of items relating to the post-Wits years are James Lingsley Blake’s “‘The Microscope’ and James Gates Percival,” Papers of the NHCHS 8 (1914) :215-37; and volume II of Samuel G. Goodrich’s Recollections, cited elsewhere, which includes much material on publishing, bookselling, and the Connecticut literary scene of the first half of the nineteenth century written by a participant and close observer. Another early-nineteenth-century figure is Lydia Sigourney, whose three-score volumes are characterized in the WPA Guide as “lachrymose verbosity...[which] are now literary curiosities that serve as an excellent index to the taste of a generation to which a cloying sentimentality was endearing and which reveled in polite periphrases.” (p. 108) She is covered in the “Biographies” section below.

John DeForest is another Connecticut writer of importance in the period between the Wits and the Nook Farmers. DeForest, who wrote the still-standard history of Connecticut Indians (1851), was older than the Nook Farmers and anticipated many American writers in some ways. He was a realist before the term had been coined, and he was a local colorist before the local colorists. His fiction is so authentic that one can rely on it to give an accurate picture of upper class New Haven and Connecticut just before and after the Civil War. See his biographical entry below.

The second era of Connecticut literary prominence was after the Civil War, when a group of extraordinary intellectuals came together at Nook Farm, just west of the Hartford bounds. This community of writers has been chronicled and analyzed in Kenneth R. Andrews’ Mark Twain’s Hartford Circle (Cambridge, 1950; reissued by Washington Paperbacks, 1969). As with the Wits, the best way to understand these writers is by reading their works, which Andrews has conveniently listed for us in the back of his book. Henry A. Beers’ essay “Hartford in Literature,” in Memorial History of Hartford County, edited by James H. Trumbull (Boston, 1888), covers much more than Hartford in the 1 880s, when Clemens and others were in flower. In “Literary Lawn,” Connecticut Magazine 7 (1901) 1:45-48, Florence Peltier Perry describes the area around Forest Street, where Clemens, Charles Dudley Warner, and Harriet Beecher Stowe lived, as it appeared in 1901. There are lots of photographs. Other Nook Farmers and their friends, such as Horace Bushnell and Isabella Beecher Hooker, are listed in the “Biographies” section below.

There are also a few anthologies of writings by Connecticut authors. A study of the works contained in some of them, might reveal characteristics common to Connecticut writers distinctive from those of people from other places. But it might not. One example of this type of work is Charles W. Everest, ed., The Poets of Connecticut with Biographic Sketches (Hartford: Case, Tiffany and Burnham, 1843). The forty-four biographies could tell a good deal about the Connecticut literary scene. But Lucia Trent and Ralph Cheyney, eds., Connecticut Poets: An Anthology of 88 Contemporaries (New York: Henry Harrison, 1932), without biographies, will take some deep analysis, we suspect, to reveal much about Connecticut in the early twentieth century. Another, more useful anthology is Alice DeLima and Cynthia Reik, eds., On Common Ground: A Selection of Hartford Writers (Hartford: the Stowe-Day Foundation, 1975). Authors from the Wits to the modern black writer Lucy Cooper Summers are included. The organizing principle is simply their location in Hartford.

Among some miscellaneous literary items that have come to our attention is Rollin G. Osterweis, “The Susquicentennial History of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences.” This is in volume 38 of the Academy’s Transactions (New Haven, 1952). Osterweis writes:

Two main functions attracted the attention of the Academy from the beginning: the arrangement of meaningful meetings and the sponsorship of significant publications. While the former plotted an undulating curve down through the years, the latter has enjoyed a remarkably sustained succession of peaks. (p. 107)

In the nineteenth century, the academy attempted, with some success, to be the center of intellectual activity in the state. It rested in the shadow of Yale College and was dominated by Yale professors. It still functions--and often flourishes. Appended to Osterweis’s article there is a list of publications showing an almost exclusive concern with scientific subjects.

Three other items belong here only because they don’t fit anywhere else.

Bates, Albert C. “Connecticut Almanacs of the Last Century.” Connecticut Quarterly 4 (1898) 4:408-16. Includes many illustrations of sample pages taken from the collections of the CHS.

Kerr, Chester. “Book Publishing in New Haven,” Journal of the NHCHS 15 (March, 1966) 1:10-23. A sideline of printers till 1909, book publishing in New Haven came of age with the founding of Yale University Press, says the then Director of that Press. This is an interesting, detailed survey, principally of the years before 1909.

Robinson, Henry Pynchon. “Samuel Johnson, Jr. of Guilford and his Dictionaries.” Connecticut Magazine 5 (1899) 10:526-31. This tells the story of a man who composed and published a little dictionary in 1800, six years before Webster. In 1899, only two copies were known to exist, one in the British Museum and one in Guilford.