Jefferson Abroad (Modern Library) - Hardcover

Jefferson, Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679603190 ISBN 13: 9780679603191

Publisher: Modern Library, 1999

Synopsis

In July 1784, Thomas Jefferson, recently appointed to represent the American Congress in Paris, sailed from Boston with his daughter Martha, bound for France. Jefferson was eventually  installed in a house on the Champs-Elysées, where he set about enjoying the special attractions of Paris. He went to galleries and concerts and entertained widely; he made note of the urban engineering and the beauty of Parisian architecture; and he browsed assiduously in local bookstores. Jefferson also made trips around the country and across western Europe, all the while taking notes on what he saw: the soil, crops, livestock, buildings, wine,
and local politics and customs.
        Fortunately, Jefferson, who was to become
the third president of the United States in 1801, recorded his impressions in his voluminous correspondence and journals. He wrote to Abigail and John Adams, James Madison, George Washington, and also to a number of women friends and his children, so a variety of styles and levels of intimacy adds to the fascination of these accounts.
        This volume has been selected from Jeffer-
son's letters by Douglas L. Wilson and Lucia  Stanton, scholars of the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, who have provided a Preface and Notes. In the opinion of the editors, the five years that Jefferson spent in France were arguably the most memorable of his life. "By the time he returned to America in 1789," they write, "Paris--with its music, its architecture, its savants and salons, its leanings and enlightenments, not to mention its elegant social life and distinctive sexual mores--had worked its enchantments on this rigidly self-controlled Virginia gentleman, and had stimulated him to say and do and write remarkable things."

About this title

Review:

The man who penned the sweeping words of America's Declaration of Independence was nonetheless a natural pragmatist who preferred details to grandiose statements. That is one of the enjoyable revelations contained in this collection of Thomas Jefferson's writings during the years 1784 to 1789, when he served in France as the representative of the American Congress. "Of political correspondents I can find enough," Jefferson writes to his friend James Currie. "But I can persuade nobody to believe that the small facts which they see passing daily under their eyes are precious to me." Though his own correspondence does not lack for pungent generalizations ("I like a little rebellion now and then," he tells Abigail Adams. "It is like a storm in the Atmosphere"), Jefferson's personality emerges most colorfully in his informal comments. "Hampton Court. Old fashioned. Clipt yews grown wild," reads a note on his tour of English gardens. Flirtatious letters to various women highlight his charm, trenchant comments on the deteriorating situation in France reveal his hatred for economic and social injustice, and exchanges with James Madison and other confidants at home limn his ongoing concern for events in the United States. Useful annotations by two scholars from the International Center for Jefferson Studies add to this book's value for Jefferson fans and students of American history. --Wendy Smith

From the Back Cover:

"I am constantly roving about, to see what I have never seen before and shall never see again. In the great cities, I go to see what travellers think alone worthy of being seen; but I make a job of it, and generally gulp it all down in a day. On the other hand, I am never satiated with rambling through the fields and farms, examining the culture and cultivators, with a degree of curiosity which makes some take me to be a fool, and others to be much wiser than I am."
--Thomas Jefferson to the Marquis de Lafayette, Nice, April 11, 1787

"We have now need of something to make us laugh, for the topics of the times are sad and eventful. The gay and thoughtless Paris is now become a furnace of Politics. All the world is run Politically mad. Men, women, children talk nothing else; and you know they talk much, loud and warm."
--Jefferson to Anne Willing Bingham,
Paris, May 11, 1788

About this edition

• Publisher: Modern Library
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0679603190
• ISBN 13: 9780679603191
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 672