By JAMES HURT

Illinois: the first look

This fourth series of humanities essays is made possible in part by a grant from the Illinois Humanities Council, in cooperation with the Illinois General Assembly and the Illinois Department of Conservation. This is the first in Illinois Issues' current series of essays designed to explore literary, historical and cultural issues of interest to people in the state. The authors are bound by no restrictions regarding form, style or perspective, and they are encouraged to use any of a number of approaches, including exposition, analysis, satire and parody.

This drawing of Morris Birkbeck, who wrote about Illinois in his Notes on a Journey in America published in 1817, is from the frontispiece of George Flower's History of the English Settlement in Edwards County, Illinois (1882). Line print reproduction from the Chicago Historical Society.

THE LINE of the frontier moved steadily westward across America throughout the 18th and 19th centuries as inexorably, it seemed, as the path of the sun itself, and in the first quarter of the 19th century it marched slowly across the prairies of Illinois. Thousands of settlers either turned their wagons straight west from Pennsylvania or poled their flatboats down the Ohio to swarm into the new land. To the Indians on the other side of the moving frontier, of course, the new land was an old land; to them, it was not a frontier gradually opening the boundaries of freedom but a steadily encroaching line of defeat and displacement. To the white settlers, the first look at the Illinois prairies was full of wonder. Many of them left records of their reactions in which we can still sense, behind the attempts to describe the new land to those who stayed behind, the motives and values that had led them to Illinois.

One way of getting at those motives and values is to look at a moment when history, not quite coincidentally, juxtaposed Illinois and John Keats. Among the books reviewed in April 1818 by the influential conservative London journal, the Quarterly Review, were Keats' Endymion and Morris Birkbeck's Notes on a Journey in America. The Quarterly Review hated both of them. The reviewer of Endymion, unidentified but now known to be John Wilson Croker (what a name!), sneered at Keats as a "Cockney poet" who expressed "the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language." Keats was an imitator of the older poet Leigh Hunt, the reviewer thought, but "more unintelligible, almost as rugged, twice as diffuse, and ten times more tiresome and absurd than his prototype."

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Croker took four pages to slap down the upstart Keats; another anonymous reviewer took 24 to attack Morris Birkbeck just as savagely. Birkbeck, a prosperous Surrey sheep farmer, had emigrated to America and with his friend George Flower had established an English settlement in Southern Illinois near present-day Albion. The reviewer used the same sort of "Tory" critical style on Birkbeck — personal abuse, coarse sarcasm and willful misunderstanding — that his colleague had used on Keats. Birkbeck had been a Quaker, and so the reviewer sarcastically called him "Friend Morris" throughout the review. Birkbeck was frank about the disadvantages of frontier life, and so the reviewer hooted, "Certainly these are pleasant proofs of the inferiority of England to America!" The reviewer was explicit in saying that he "detested most cordially" all Birkbeck's moral and political principles and concluded that "Whatever 'New America' may have gained by the name of Birkbeck having ceased to be found in the list of the citizens of Old England, the latter has no reason to regret the loss. Many more of the same stamp may well be spared to wage war with the bears and red Indians of the 'back-woods' of America."

Keats no doubt read Croker's painful review of Endymion repeatedly (as the victims of bad reviews are likely to do), but he probably read the review of Birkbeck's book with almost as keen an interest. His 20-year-old brother George had sailed for America only a few months before, equipped with a new bride and a copy of Birkbeck's Notes, and determined to make his way to Illinois to join Birkbeck's settlement. John, worried about George's prospects on the Illinois frontier, studied Birkbeck's books himself. As it turned out, George Keats never made it to Birkbeck's Illinois settlement. He stopped off in Kentucky, first in Henderson and then in Louisville, where after some lean years he became a wealthy and influential businessman, long outliving his famous brother, who died of tuberculosis in 1821 at the age of 25.

The Quarterly Review's parallel attacks on Endymion and Birkbeck's Notes were not coincidental but were consistent expressions of the atmosphere of reaction and repression that gripped England in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The jeering at Keats as a Cockney upstart was rooted in a deep fear of democratic revolution. For Croker, even Keats' violation of the rules of neoclassic verse threatened to open the floodgates of social upheaval: "There is hardly a complete couplet enclosing a complete idea in the whole book," charged the shocked Croker, as if only Alexander Pope's principles stood between the Quarterly Review and revolution.

This cartoon may have been one of the first "travel posters" selling Illinois. It was reproduced in Charles Boewe's Prairie Albion (Southern Illinois Press, 1962). Cartoon courtesy the Library of Congress.

The attack on Birkbeck's book had the same background. For the reviewer one of Birkbeck's worst offenses was that he had a good word to say for France, where the revolution had, in the reviewer's eyes, "plundered the rich." He lampooned Birkbeck's motives for leaving England — the postwar agricultural depression and the fact that as a Quaker he could not vote or own land — and thought that Illinois would soon secede from the United States if Birkbeck's radical view that "every little society of men ought to govern itself" prevailed.

The Quarterly Review's juxtaposition of Keats and Birkbeck and its hysterical rejection of them both remind us that the settlement of Illinois was a part of the Romantic Movement. Impatience with traditional authority and the hope of a new order more hospitable to individual freedom and aspiration were being felt throughout Europe and eastern America in 1818, and they sent settlers pouring over the mountains to the frontier, located for the moment in Illinois. And the books they wrote about their experiences were not only full of Romantic principles but were essentially Romantic in their form and structure.

The basic impression that these books leave on a modern reader is of a great feeling of exhilaration at the prospects of new beginnings, a Wordsworthian feeling that "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!" The persistent Edenic imagery that marked accounts of American discovery and the movement west, hackneyed as it became, represented a genuine emotional truth. Illinois, far from European political and economic tyranny, was the setting for a new, free humanity. Birkbeck's optimism at the prospects for building in Illinois "a flourishing public-spirited, energetic community, where the insolence of wealth and the servility of pauperism, between which in England there is scarcely an interval remaining, are alike unknown" may be discounted as the hopefulness of a proselytizer. But George Flower, looking back on the mood of the English settlers from a half-century later, in his History of the English Settlement (1860) remembers their Romantic individualism and love of freedom, though he is more ironically conscious than his former partner of the occasional gap between the promise and the reality of American freedom. Referring to an agricultural theorist in England who wrote a book on raising pigs without ever having raised any himself, he says that America's democratic principles sometimes are only "pigs upon paper. ''

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One of the early authors of Illinois is George Flower, who wrote his History of the English Settlement in Edwards County, Illinois in 1860, published in 1882. These are details of oil portraits of George and his wife Eliza. Photos of the oil paintings from the Chicago Historical Society.

Birkbeck and Flower were well educated, prosperous men who might be expected to theorize on their experience. But their conception of Illinois as a blank book where a new and better chapter of human history might be written was shared by immigrants very unlike themsleves. Rebecca Burlend, for example, in her harrowing account of frontier hardships, A True Picture of Emigration (1848), concludes that the hardships were worth it. Spurred to go to Illinois from their native Yorkshire by economic and political conditions similar to those that motivated Birkbeck and Flower, though on a much smaller scale, she and her husband endured grinding poverty, isolation and illness for several years. Although, after 14 years, their house and farm were no better than those they left in Yorkshire, she emphasizes that here they own them instead of being held to ruinous leases.

. . . building in Illinois 'a flourishing public-spirited,
energetic community, where the insolence of wealth and the
servility of pauperism . . . are alike unknown'

These early visitors and settlers in Illinois were of their age not only in their Romantic individualism but also in their view of nature. The Illinois landscape was not merely a tabula rasa to be inscribed with the record of a reborn humanity, it was the home of a rich and varied nature in whose presence the individual self could expand and flourish. George Flower speaks for all of them, if more eloquently than most. The pioneer, he says, "sees what none who come after him and fall into the routine of civilized life can ever see; nature in the plentitude of its perfection; its varied beauties, undisturbed and undistorted by art; the forest in its native grandeur, unscathed by the axe; the prairie, with its verdure and acres of brilliant flowers; the beauties of the prospect varying at every step, and limited in extent only by his power of vision. . . . Refreshed, strengthened, and purified, he feels, for a time at least, superior to the irritations and annoyances of an imperfect civilization; for there is in the changeful heart of man a deep response to the ever-changing aspects of nature."

"Nature," for these travelers, means overwhelmingly the prairie, and the struggle to describe what a prairie is like to readers who have never seen one is a recurring theme. At first the prairie is assimilated to the familiar; it is described in terms of European or eastern American landscapes. Here, for example, is Flower's description of his first view of Boltenhouse Prairie, the site of their future settlement: "A few steps more, and a beautiful prairie suddenly opened to our view. At first, we only received the impressions of its general beauty. With longer gaze, all its distinctive features were revealed, lying in profound repose under the warm light of an afternoon's summer sun. Its indented and irregular outline of wood, its varied surface interspersed with clumps of oaks of centuries' growth, its tall grass, with seed stalks from six to ten feet high, like tall and slender reeds waving in a gentle breeze, the whole presenting a magnificence of park-scenery, complete from the hand of Nature, and unrivalled by the same sort of scenery by European art. For once, reality came up to the picture of imagination."

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Similar passages occur so frequently in these books that they form a motif that might be called The First View of the Prairie. And most of them, like Flower's, draw upon conventions of European landscape. Despite his assertion that the scene is "unrivalled by the same sort of scenery by European art, "Flower presents it as a version of "park-scenery" and describes it in Romantic terms, recording not so much its objective appearance as his own act of perception, first the general impression and then the "distinctive details." all compared to his own "picture of imagination."

'conceptions of beauty and grouping
of trees, formed in the artificial school of Britain, are
inapplicable to the magnificent scale on which nature
hath adorned the country between Chicago and Springfield'

Later descriptions of the landscape, often by the same writers, try to capture the strangeness and grandeur of the prairie rather than trying to assimilate it to conventional notions of "parks" and "prospects." The prairie is an instance of the Romantic Sublime. Patrick Shirreff, for example, in his Tour Through North America (1835), in trying to describe the "beauty and sublimity" of the prairies, thinks that "conceptions of beauty and grouping of trees, formed in the artificial school of Britain, are inapplicable to the magnificent scale on which nature hath adorned the country between Chicago and Springfield." The prairie is more like a sea than like a park, he thinks, with groves of trees "like islands in the ocean." and he rather disappointingly records that it inspired "ideas which I had not then the means of recording, and which cannot be recalled."

The evocation of the sea is an almost obligatory motif in these descriptions of the Prairie Sublime, as are a few other motifs, such as the Prairie Storm and the Prairie Fire. Even the comparatively literal-minded William Oliver (Eight Months in Illinois, 1843) cannot resist describing a prairie fire (combining it with the sea motif): "Few sights can be grander than that of a prairie on fire during the night; the huge body of flame spread far and wide, leaping and plunging like the waves of the sea in a gale against a rocky coast, and emitting a continued roar like that of a heavy surf when heard from a short distance." By 1852 the conventions of the Prairie Sublime had become so well established that the witty and ironic John Regan could include a vivid and hair-raising description of a prairie storm in his Emigrant's Guide to the Western States of America (1852) and label it "A Touch of the Sublime."

These books are Romantic, too, not only in their expressions of Romantic individualism and reverence for nature but also in their very form. The early 19th century was, like our own age, a period of the collapse of traditional literary forms. The Romantics sought, rather than the strict and traditional forms of their predecessors, fluid, "organic" forms able to follow the erratic progress of the individual mind that formed their chief subject. A similar intention seems to lie behind the Illinois travelers' pragmatic choices of open, indeterminate literary forms for their work: "notes," "letters," "a journey." Many of them might be described the way James Hall described his Letters from the West (1828) in his subtitle: "sketches of scenery, manners, and customs." They are Romantic "miscellanies," fragments and short sketches held together only by the presence of the author's continuing sensibility. The many collections of letters, either real or imaginary, suggest the openness, immediacy and intimacy of a real conversation. And the best of the books shaped around the journey to Illinois, like Birkbeck's Notes and John Woods' Two Years' Residence on the English Prairie of Illinois (1822), take on the quality of quests, inner as well as outer journeys. Birkbeck's journey in Notes, for example, is a progress through a series of exemplary communities — the slave society of Maryland, the commercial environment of Pittsburgh, the Utopian societies of Busro and Harmonie — which Birkbeck measures against his own idea of the "good society."

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Rebecca Burlend wrote of her hardships in settling in Illinois and concluded after 14 years that it was worth it. Photo courtesy Lakeside Press.

At least two of these books introduce so many complexities into their ostensibly simple forms that they transform them into new forms. Eliza Farnham's Life in Prairie Land (1846) at first seems to be a factual account of a five-year residence in Illinois. But Farnham employs novelistic scene construction, characterization, invented or recreated dialogue and a carefully managed point of view so freely that the result can only be called a novel. Even more important is the way that Farnham shapes her experience in Illinois into a coherent pattern of personal crisis and recovery. The first half of the book traces the exhilaration of arrival in the new land, the warmth of reunion with Farnham's sister Mary and the deep happiness of love, marriage and motherhood. But it ends in a severe testing: the deaths of Mary and of Farnham's young child, which trigger a spiritual and psychological crisis in Farnham. The second half traces her recovery, presented, significantly, in terms of the healing power of nature. Even the title is given additional resonance by Farnham's crisis and recovery; the "prairie land" is the scene of her restoration and maturation, the place where she encounters birth and death, love and loss, and where she finds strength by finding her place in the natural world.

Like Farnham, Regan, in his Emigrant's Guide, takes a simple, utilitarian form and transforms it into a complex work of fiction, though a very different one from Life in Prairie Land. The book is actually a comic, picaresque novel in which the author, a young Scottish immigrant to the Spoon River country, pours a wealth of high-spirited comic anecdotes and eccentric characterizations into the conventional frame of a settler's account of his experiences. The book's comically split nature is acknowledged in its two titles. Regan gave it one utilitarian, didactic title — The Emigrant's Guide — and a novelists' subtitle — Backwoods and Prairie. This charming book, which was rediscovered in 1984 by the scholar John Hallwas of Western Illinois University, thoroughly deserves a modern printing.

These high claims for these early Illinois writers would probably have surprised their contemporaries. James Hall, an indefatigable worker on behalf of a frontier literature, lamented in Letters from the West the difficulty of assimilating the rawness and newness of Illinois to poetry. "The day will surely arrive," he wrote, "when the poet and the novelist will traverse these regions in quest of legendary lore, will listen with eagerness to the tales of hoary-headed sires, and laboriously glean the frail and mutilated memorial of the daring of other days." But that day was not yet, and so Hall had to labor to cast an aura of romance over the recalcitrant reality of the present. Frances Trollope, in Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), similarly lamented the absence of a visible human past in the West. "Were there occasionally a ruined abbey or a feudal castle, to mix the romance of real life with that of nature, the Ohio would be perfect," she wrote.

The notion than an Illinois prairie might be improved by having a ruined abbey set down in the middle of it reveals some of the confusion about the relation between the New World and the Old that troubled those who tried to describe the prairie. Trollope and Hall missed the external trappings of Romanticism (or more properly Gothicism) in the West. They did not consider that a vital frontier Romantic literature might look as little like its English or European couterpart as a prairie looked like an English park. And so they missed it when it appeared, unexpectedly, in the guise of modest, subliterary, utilitarian writing. But the love of freedom, the reverence for nature, and the willingness to find new forms to express new experiences of the early Illinois travelers not only produced a fascinating body of literature but entered permanently into the intellectual and cultural history of Illinois.

Books referred to

Morris Birkbeck, Notes on a Journey in America (1817)

_____, Letters from lllinois (1818)

Henry Bradshaw Fearon, Sketches of America (1818)

William Cobbett, A Year's Residence in the United States of America (1819)

John Woods, Two Years' Residence on the English Prairie of Illinois (1822)

William Faux, Memorable Days in America (1823)

James Hall, Letters from the West (1828)

Charles F. Hoffman, A Winter in the West (1835)

Patrick Shirreff, A Tour Through North America (1835)

Harriet Martineau, Society in America (1837)

Edmund Flagg, The Far West (1838)

Fliza R. Steele, A Summer Journey in the West (1841)

Charles Dickens, American Notes (1842)

William Oliver, Eight Months in Illinois (1843)

Sarah Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes in 1843 (1844)

Eliza Farnham, Life in Prairie Land (1846)

Rebecca Burlend, A True Picture of Emigration (1848)

John Regan, The Emigrant's Guide to the Western States of America (1852)

Juliette Kinzie. Wau-Bun, the "Early Day" in the North-West (1856)

George Flower, History of the English Settlement in Edwards County Illinois, Founded in 1817 and 1818, by Morris Birkbeck and George Flower (written 180, published 1882)

(Excerpts from many of these books, and many others, are reprinted in Paul Angle's useful Prairie State: Impressions of Illinois, 1673-1967, By Travelers and Other Observers, 1968.)

James Hurt is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A specialist in modern British literature, he has also written frequently in the past 10 years on Illinois literature and history in such periodicals as American Literature, Illinois Times and the Chicago Reader. His play about Vachel Lindsay, Cad Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters, Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight, has been produced each summer since 1980 in New Salem State Park near Springfield.

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