Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature

New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History

by Bryan Waterman

In the 1790s, a single conversational circle―the Friendly Club―united New York City's most ambitious young writers, and in Republic of Intellect , Bryan Waterman uses an innovative blend of literary criticism and historical narrative to re-create the club's intellectual culture. The story of the Friendly Club reveals the mutually informing conditions of authorship, literary association, print culture, and production of knowledge in a specific time and place―the tumultuous, tenuous world of post-revolutionary New York City. More than any similar group in the early American republic, the Friendly Club occupied a crossroads―geographical, professional, and otherwise―of American literary and intellectual culture. Waterman argues that the relationships among club members' novels, plays, poetry, diaries, legal writing, and medical essays lead to important first examples of a distinctively American literature and also illuminate the local, national, and transatlantic circuits of influence and information that club members called "the republic of intellect." He addresses topics ranging from political conspiracy in the gothic novels of Charles Brockden Brown to the opening of William Dunlap's Park Theatre, from early American debates on gendered conversation to the publication of the first American medical journal. Voluntary association and print culture helped these young New Yorkers, Waterman concludes, to produce a broader and more diverse post-revolutionary public sphere than scholars have yet recognized.

344 pages, Hardcover

First published February 21, 2007

Reviews

[Christopher Sutch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although this is an interesting and informative book for someone like me, whose specializations do not include early American literature, from what I can tell Waterman's argument is made mostly by synthesizing various sources rather than on original research (though there is some of this: he does quote some archival material, and some sources that are long forgotten and have remained unpublished since the 19th century). Further, his argument only makes a very small contribution to the scholarship, and mainly by 1) framing his work by close readings of Elihu Hubbard Smith's diary (which only gives information through the man's death in 1798); and 2) more closely contextualizing Charles Brockden Brown's writings in order to demonstrate that most critics have misread the author's works. Even Waterman can't say whether "the Friendly Club" even existed beyond Smith's death, so writing an entire book about its members and their influences on each other and on their efforts to disseminate information is a little dubious (not to mention arcane). Waterman also makes no bones about essentially ignoring race almost entirely, and dealing with class and gender only slightly more (he is after all dealing with a group of white, privileged males). I'd be more interested to learn about groups of African American freedmen (or slaves) and/or women who formed similar groups for similar reasons (and surely, as Waterman's quoting of the research on Bayard Smith's letters demonstrates) some such thing was going on. In other words, this is akin to the mania for scholarship on "celebrities" rather than on ordinary people and their lives, and thus has a more reactionary political outlook than I usually care for in the scholarship I consume. I did enjoy the chapter on the Illuminati scare and the possible infidelity of Smith with his married friend Susan Tracey, however (showing my own guilty pleasure in conspiracy theories and gossip).

[Mark Smith]

Written by my Brother-in-law, he's been writing this for years and is definitely excited to be finished with it. I'll read it when he sends me a copy (hint, hint).