The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground

Abstract

James Fenimore Cooper’s (1789–1851) first literary success celebrates its two hundredth anniversary at a moment when textual editing is becoming a topic of renewed interest in many circles of American literary studies. This scholarly edition puts issues of literary revision, textual authority, and the mediations of publishing and the book trade front and center. The book is a monumental achievement based on decades of meticulous bibliographical work and collation.With The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821), Cooper did not just establish himself as a writer invested in the historical novel and the romance of American history; he set himself on a path of revision that continued for nearly three decades. The immediate and lasting popularity of The Spy resulted in a series of American and British editions as well as a substantial number of European piracies. Printers and publishers were crucial for making and remaking the novel, sometimes in ways that were at odds with authorial intention. Each edition required a new setting of type, a process that, at times, corrupted Cooper’s language due to lapses in proofreading and typesetting. Because of the errata, Cooper felt embarrassed by The Spy despite its resounding success, an anxiety he partly blamed on having written the novel too hastily. By 1831, he lamented the novel as a “decayed edifice” whose convoluted textual history necessitated a severe pen to get it exactly right (16). The labor of revision was both extensive and intensive. Over the course of a decade, Cooper made several thousand verbal changes to The Spy, from its initial New York edition to its 1831 publication by the London firm Colburn and Bentley. Six separate American editions issued between 1821 and 1827 had subtle differences in wording and punctuation, sometimes with hilarious infelicities such as the “segar box” (instead of a lone cigar) stuffed into the mouth of one character.The first commercially successful novel by an American author—because of these differences across the various American and European editions—is shot through with an unstable textuality that impacted every aspect of the book’s narration and characterization. There were, to put it bluntly, many Spies in circulation in the first half of the nineteenth century. And which version of the text are we using in our own research or in classrooms today? The answer to this question implicitly shapes the reading experience. For instance, the 1997 Penguin edition of The Spy, edited by Wayne Franklin, follows the 1859 edition illustrated by Frank Octavius Carr Darley, a text with numerous divergences from versions circulating in the 1820s and 1830s. Students, teachers, and scholars will therefore benefit from a scholarly edition that synthesizes all the substantive verbal differences into a version close to what Cooper intended.This edition of The Spy carefully reconstructs the novel using a rigorous method of scholarly editing in the tradition of W. W. Greg, Fredson Bowers, and G. Thomas Tanselle. It has the seal of approval of the Committee for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association and is the eighteenth volume in The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper (henceforth abbreviated as the Cooper Edition), a distinguished series begun by James Franklin Beard. The book is an incredible feat in light of the thousands of verbal alterations, substitutions, and deletions that the editors considered to establish their authoritative text. Examining eight different iterations of The Spy between 1821 and 1849, the editors supply a hefty textual apparatus giving the rationale for a copy-text, the principle of accepting or rejecting divergences from the original 1821 version, and a long list of emendations and ejected readings. Also useful is the overview of the most important editions of the novel from Cooper’s lifetime, as well as a “stemma” of textual transmission that identifies the Anglophone sources for a number of European piracies. The careful reader of the Cooper Edition can use this apparatus to track Cooper’s revisions and reconstruct the making and remaking of a groundbreaking nineteenth-century bestseller.The Cooper Edition opens with a “Historical Introduction” by James P. Elliott that explains the genesis of The Spy and outlines the novel’s relationship to themes of historical memory, civic virtue, and literary nationalism. We learn from this introductory essay how the amateur author of Precaution (1820) became a surprise literary success, and Elliott enlivens this story with correspondence from Cooper and his publishers along with early reviews of The Spy. Elliott’s introduction works quite well for readers new to the novel, but it could also have delved into popular reception in the 1820s by noting contributions such as the New York theatrical adaptation by Charles Clinch (1822), the attempt at a “tell-all” story of the real Harvey Birch in H. L. Barnum’s The Spy Unmasked (1828), and various reimaginations of the novel’s scenes in paintings and engravings. (Some of these images are reproduced in the Cooper Edition’s introductory pages, but without editorial comment or historical contextualization.) More background might also have been included about the novel’s loyalist theme, best known through The Spy’s allusions to the death of Major John André. André, after all, was a key figure in earlier literary efforts by William Dunlap (André: A Tragedy in Five Acts, 1789) and Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1819–20). For Elliott, minor characters in The Spy such as Isabella Singleton and Colonel Wellmere are doomed to fade away according to the narrative’s “schematic necessity,” but these residual elements of the narrative, like the specter of André, never truly disappear (xxi). A number of recent scholars have contended that post-independence American literature condenses a host of emotional investments that amount to a nostalgia for all things British and imperial, not national or American. Such nostalgia for older patterns of deference associated with British America include a racialized component in the case of Cooper. In The Spy this appears in the character Caesar Thompson, who is enslaved by the loyalist Wharton family. A discussion of Cooper’s treatment of race and slavery would have strengthened the introductory essay of the Cooper Edition, since the novel’s plotline hinges on a white character donning a black disguise in a kind of proto-blackface moment, one of many scenes that seek to extract humor and excitement from the novel’s prominent Black character.Cooper wrote different prefaces and introductions between 1821 and 1849, all of which are included in this volume. Again, to highlight the utility of the Cooper Edition, note that the mass-market Penguin edition includes only the author’s introduction from 1849. This later pronouncement casts a retrospective glance upon a novel written nearly three decades earlier. In 1849, Cooper was at the end of his career, and at this point he reframed The Spy’s nationalist message into a vision of US empire linked to Winfield Scott’s invasion of Mexico City that concluded the US-Mexico War (1846–48). But the prefaces and introductions from the 1820s and 1830s show a different side, one less confident and more anxious about literary reputation. Indeed, the preface to the 1821 edition exposes the polar opposite of the self-assured author of 1849, since in the beginning Cooper merely hopes that The Spy will have a “small chance of being noticed abroad” (2).We now see Cooper as a giant of nineteenth-century letters, but his success depended upon The Spy and not solely on the better-known novels featuring Natty Bumpo. However, far less critical attention has been paid to The Spy in comparison to the Leatherstocking Tales. It may be the case that this landmark novel will be the subject of renewed critical scrutiny. This volume published by the SUNY Press contains a wealth of information for future studies. The Cooper Edition is an essential reference for anyone studying James Fenimore Cooper’s formative role in the emergence of US literature.