Literature and the Monthly Anthology

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Literature and the Monthly Anthology

Background. The periodicals that began to materialize during the early years of the republic served as important vehicles for literary criticism, publishing reviews and essays on literary topics. One of the most important such periodicals was the Monthly Anthology, founded in Boston in 1803. Its first editor, David Phineas Adams, was unable to make the journal a financially viable enterprise and abandoned it after publishing six issues. In 1804 William Emerson, the father of poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, took over as editor, and the following year a group of leading Boston intellectuals—including Joseph Buckminster, William Tudor, and Joseph Tuckerman—joined Emerson. To give the enterprise a firmer institutional basis they formed the Anthology Society. In that year the subscribers to the Anthology numbered 440, but their efforts extended the life of the Anthology only temporarily, and it folded in 1811.

The Impact of the Anthology. Although short-lived, the Anthology made a significant contribution to American literary development, offering original essays and extensive literary reviews that were pieces of literature in their own right. Helping to set the standards for literary achievement in America, these writings reflected the sectional and class biases of the Anthology editors. The Anthology therefore played a role in establishing the cultural dominance of New England over the rest of the nation, a tendency that would become even more pronounced in succeeding decades.

Patrician Authors. Reflecting their own privileged backgrounds, the members of the Anthology Society articulated a literary ideal that disdained commercial motives as incompatible with good literature. They themselves did not earn a living from their writings and received no pay for their contributions to the Anthology. They saw literature as a patrician enterprise, written by gentlemen amateurs who sought not wealth or fame but only the public good. They blamed the widespread concern with popularity and profit for the failure of Americans to develop literature and culture. Anthology contributor Winthrop Sargent lamented in 1805 that the “national maxim” was “‘get money.’ ” His fellow contributor, Theodore Dehon, expressed a similar concern: “the passion for wealth, and the ardour of political contention, which are, perhaps, the predominant traits in the character of our countrymen, have retarded the ascendancy of genius, and obstructed the progress of letters.” For Dehon literary critics needed to combat this tendency, for “Ignorance, or corruption, in the very important tribunals of criticism, would unquestionably impede the progress and diminish the reputation of American literature.” He believed that publications such as the Anthology could help the United States to achieve the potential to “vie with any nation upon the earth in the pursuit of literary distinction.”

Washington Irving and Salmagundi. Periodicals were objects of ridicule in Salmagundi, a series of humorous essays that New York writers Washington Irving, William Irving, and James Kirke Paulding began publishing in 1807. Although Salmagundi, which appeared serially as twenty small pamphlets between 24 January 1807 and 25 January 1808, satirized periodicals like the Monthly-Anthology, the New Yorkers’ work also shared the patrician outlook of that magazine. Like the founders of the Anthology, Washington Irving disparaged the desire for profit and popularity in literature. Yet at the same time Irving was deeply ambivalent on this subject. While he disdained commercial motives in literature, he was also one of the first American writers to make a successful living from authorship, helping to inaugurate a trend he found disturbing.