Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic '
fications, extravagantly extended figures of speech, word coinages, and the
usual tricks of exaggeration and understatement. The New Englander
appears for the first time as a distinct type, here usually with scatological
allusion, as he was to appear many times later in southern humorous
writing. Adamites, Ranters, Fifth-Monarchy men are not tolerated even
in "liberal" Maryland, though Quakers are prominent.
The paragraph on female indentured servants, replete with open ob­
scenities and leering innuendos, must have brought many a smile or
snigger to the face of a contemporary reader. Then after much rambling
and many satiric thrusts at men and occupations, Alsop stops in mid­
sentence with "But stop (good Muse ) lest I should, like the Parson of
Pancras, run so far from my Text in half an hour, that a two hours trot
back would hardly fetch it up." His extended description of the Indians
is on the whole accurate, but the tone is mock-heroic, and he concludes
the chapter on them with a Latin quotation regarding urinating and the
peculiar manner of this natural act by the men in turn outdone by the
females, who "stand bolt upright with their arms akimbo, performing
the same action, in so confident and obscene a posture, as if they had taken
their Degrees of Entrance at Venice, and commenced Bawds of Art at
Legorne."
The letters of the appendix are in the same language and tone, though
apparently written over a number of years, including such comments as
"Herds of Deer are numerous in this province of Mary-Land, as Cuckolds
can be in London, only their horns are not so well drest and tipt with
silver as theirs are." Perhaps the most effective irony and bitter satire of
the whole work lies in the poem on the velvet cap recently received, prob­
ably from his brother Peter Alsop. It is a devastating comment on Crom­
well, the Roman Catholic Church, and Edinburgh Presbyterians, along with
related institutions or matters. Elsewhere he describes the inexperienced
factor or merchant-agent who comes into the colony as does the later
persona of Cook's Sot-Weed Factor.
Thus in A Character is God's plenty in forms and examples of humor
and satire at the same time that the work is a first-rate promotion pamphlet.
The persona of Alsop's account may be called our first major comic
figure, in this instance a learned Stuart madcap who makes his case for
the colony in the genuine woolen costume of sober fact overlaid with cap
and bells, motley, and bawdy.65 He anticipates to some extent the later
southern backwoods humorist, who is a sophisticated and educated man
manipulating the voice and manners and language and exaggerated ac­
tion of his principal persona. But Alsop is too close to his narrator, too
much a part of him, to have the relative detachment culminating in the
creations of A.B. Longstreet or G.W. Harris or Mark Twain or William
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