Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
Builders is in form biographical, beginning with the protagonist's education
at Winchester School and the Temple, his misfortunes in England and
Scotland, and his voyage to Charleston, South Carolina, and then to Georgia.
"Mr. Oglethorpe, with his Mirmidons," and Whitefield and "his crews"
and the Orphan House are among the things or people attacked as the
narrative progresses. Much of Georgia history is here, including gardens
and planting. In the second edition an appendix discusses reviews of the
first edition and attempts to answer them.218
Thomas Atwood Digges (1741-1821), a Catholic and a native of
Maryland, was the author of The Adventures of Alonso (London, 1775 ),
frequently called the first American novel. Though it is dated a decade
after the period of this study, it is still by a colonial southern colonist of a
notable Chesapeake planter family which had branches in both Virginia
and Maryland. Only recently has the authorship been established. Digges
was a descendant of the Edward Digges mentioned earlier and had gone
to Lisbon in Portugal for business reasons some time before 1775, and
Portugal is mentioned in the subtitle of the book. Up to a certain point the
novel is political and economic propaganda, but it is distinctly narrative
fiction in form. The story begins in London, goes on to Brazil and Panama
and the West Indies and back to Portugal. The title page ascription, "By
a Native of Maryland, for some years resident in Lisbon," seems to suggest
possible American as well as Iberian setting or theme. In any event, the
novel belongs to the pre-Revolutionary South. It lies outside its author's
considerable patriotic or political activity.219
One lively narrative has recently been printed from the original manuscript
in the Maryland archives, "The Recantation and Confession of William
Marshall alias Johnson, before his Excellency and the Council." It
describes a common man's life of wandering and his capture by Indians
and what the red men required him to do. There are suggestions in the
colonial records that several such autobiographical narratives were recited
to officials or judges in the various southern provinces, though only a few
have so far been printed.220
These varied tales, together with the book advertisements in the provincial
gazettes and the inventories noted in Chapter IV, show that southern
colonials read a variety of fiction and of autobiographical narrative and
wrote a little of it themselves. One recalls that only a few southern Indian
captivity narratives were printed in a period when in the Northeast especially
they were favorite reading for all sorts of reasons. During and after
the Revolution the southern provincial read more and more fiction, but it
was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that he wrote many
novels or recorded many actual captivities.