Synopsis
A contemporaneous reviewer called James Fenimore Cooper's England "unquestionably the most searching and thoughtful, not TO say philosophical of any" of the books "published by an American on England." Another cited with approval the "potent causticity" with which a fellow reviewer "develope[d] the gangrene of the author's mind in its most foul and diseased state."
Such were the extremes of response elicited by publication in 1837 of the fourth and most controversial book in Cooper's travel series, Gleanings in Europe. Partly because of his ambivalence for most things British, England is perhaps the most fascinating of the travel volumes to the modern reader. Probably no American of his time was received more hospitably by the British upper classes, nor did any reciprocate with shrewder or more scalding criticism.
Cooper himself thought well of his book, taking some delight in the stir it made in London and expecting it to do much good at home. The modern reader will be delighted by his novelist's eye for the revealing scene or detail and by the multidimensional perspective he provides on British-American cultural conflicts of the 1820s and 1830s.
About the Author
James Fenimore Cooper was born in 1789 in New Jersey, the son of a wealthy land agent who founded Cooperstown in New York State. Cooper attended Yale, but was expelled in 1805 and spent five years at sea on merchant then naval ships. He married in 1811, and eventually settled in New York. Precaution, Cooper's first novel, was written in 1820 as a study of English manners; its successors, The Spy and The Pilot, written within the next three years, were more characteristic of the vein of military or seagoing romance that was to become typical of him. In 1823 he began the Leatherstocking Tales series of novels, centred on a shared Native American character at different periods of his life, for which he is chiefly remembered. Cooper's reputation as one of America's leading authors was quickly established, and spread to Europe by a long stay there from 1826, making him one of the first American writers popular beyond that country. After his return to America in 1832, however, conservative political essays and novels dramatising similar views, as well as critiques of American society and abuses of democracy, led to a decline in his popularity. James Fenimore Cooper died in 1851.
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