The improbable course of Thomas Cooper's life (1805–1892) – from shoemaker and autodidact, to school teacher, to Methodist circuit rider, to Chartist activist, to prison poet, and finally to working-class lecturer and editor – encapsulates the tensions and contradictions of Victorian self-help. Fiercely devoted to projects of self-education and improvement, as an apprentice craftsman in Lincolnshire, Cooper memorized Hamlet and significant portions of Paradise Lost, and taught himself Latin, French, and some Hebrew. The publication of The Purgatory of the Suicides, the epic poem for which he is best known, made Cooper a minor celebrity in the world of middle-class literary reformers, who praised his artistic and educational accomplishments. The novelist and Christian socialist Charles Kingsley discerned in his heroic commitment to “the pursuit of knowledge under difficulties” an alternative to political militancy and loosely based Alton Locke, the story of a disillusioned Chartist hero's spiritual redemption, on Cooper's own life (Collins 3–4). Samuel Smiles, the Scottish reformer and author of Self-Help, celebrated Cooper's writing as part of a national culture which could help heal the country's social and economic divisions, arguing that his literary achievements placed him in “the same class as Burns, Ebenezer Elliot, Fox, the Norwich weaver-boy, to say nothing of the Arkwrights, Smeatons, Brindleys, Chantrys, and the like, all rising out of the labour-class into the class of the thinkers and builders-up of English greatness” (Smiles 244).

But Cooper's tenure in the early 1840s as the self-styled “general” of the “Shakesperean Chartists” of Leicester – at the climax of his Chartist activities – also discloses how mutual improvement was often imbued with both a utopian ethos and politically radical aims.Footnote ¹ Cooper orchestrated an impressive array of cultural activities for Leicester's depressed stockingers, endeavors which contributed to Chartism's phenomenal growth in the town, because they tapped a persistent desire for literacy, education, and art – the exclusion from which was felt alongside other political and economic grievances. A musical society, a weekly teetotal meeting, a reading and discussion group, frequent lectures by Cooper himself on literature, the history of England, geology, and phrenology, and even a production of Hamlet (which cast Cooper in the title role) comprised the local movement's cultural front, joining the agitation for democracy with the longing for intellectual improvement.Footnote ² The connection between education and political struggle was perhaps most clearly indicated by a weekly Sunday school (open to men, women, and children), which named class sections for history's great radicals, from Luther and Milton to William Cobbett and Feargus O'Connor, a typological gesture suggesting that study would nurture the next generation of democratic leaders.

In 1843, Cooper was sentenced to two-years imprisonment in Stafford Gaol for polemical speeches made during the “Plug Plot” riots of the previous year, a national strike wave which involved nearly 500,000 workers and had diverse connections to the Chartist movement. In prison, Cooper completed two major works: The Purgatory of the Suicides and a two-volume collection of short stories, Wise Saws and Modern Instances, both of which Jeremiah How published in 1845 upon Cooper's release.Footnote ³ Taken together, these works explore the contradictory nature of education in a politicized context, alternately considering it a vehicle for individual mobility and a necessary tool for social change. They reflect on the irony that Cooper's own tenacious commitment to personal, communal, and national self-help seemed to lead inexorably to confrontation with the British state, to defeat, and to imprisonment.

Of Cooper's prison compositions, The Purgatory of the Suicides has received significantly more attention from scholars and critics than the short stories, a trend established in Cooper's own time by Smiles writing in Howitt's Journal, as well as reviews in other journals, including the radical paper the Northern Star. In the past decade, chapter-length studies have analyzed Cooper's manipulation of the epic form (Kuduk; Kuduk Weiner 66–96) and his role as “Labour's Laureate” in shifting Chartist aesthetics from a demotic, oral tradition to a more ornate literary style (Janowitz 159–94).Footnote ⁴ As Stephanie Kuduk Weiner demonstrates, The Purgatory of the Suicides recasts the conventions of the epic to make Chartism a culminating episode in the history of the nation (Kuduk 166). The poem alternates between a series of visions in which the shades of Greek, Roman, and Christian figures debate the progress of democracy and other philosophic questions and exordia which return to the setting of Cooper's cell to offer more immediate reflections by the poet. Although certain critics have faulted the poem's erudition as self-conscious and heavily worn and its Spenserian stanza structure as overwrought, Cooper's classicism highlights the disjunction between an all-encompassing imaginative vision and his perception of the impossibility of liberty in contemporary England. The poem's attempt to lay claim to a classical cultural heritage is also consistent with the faith it articulates in the emancipatory power of learning. The final book forecasts that an enlightened people will one day emerge as their own liberators:

The quotidian activity of the autodidact – his homely sacrifice in studying late into the night, his reflection at “frame or loom” – becomes in the poem part of a millennial contest between despotism and freedom, a precipitant and augury of the collective transformation that Chartism promises.

However, Cooper's prose work is the formal and thematic negation of his epic. Eschewing the latter work's highly literary style, “Simple Stories of the Midlands and Elsewhere,” Cooper's preferred title for the collection – which was rejected by the publisher – describes an untransformed world in which the individual is stranded outside history, able to perceive, but not to shape, the conditions which define his life. If scenes of education also feature in Cooper's short fiction, any solution that learning and enlightenment offers appears provisional and incomplete. The final stories in the second volume began as chapters in a discarded autobiographical novel, which Cooper attempted before joining the Chartist movement. Poverty frustrated the effort, a circumstance to which “London ’Venture; or the Old Story Over Again” alludes. However, biographical elements resurface throughout the series, and Cooper's stories manipulate the expectations of their earlier form. Repeated accounts of childhood reading, of migration by young adults from the countryside to the city, and of struggles in the metropolis, fill the work. Wise Saws and Modern Instances, in other words, utilizes the constituent plot elements of a Bildungsroman. But the segmentation implicit in a series of loosely linked narratives profoundly troubles the conventions of that genre. Certain stories elaborate the interior lives of their characters; others obscure even the protagonist's thoughts and emotions, focusing instead on material circumstances and narrative events. These divisions create unsettling effects, suggesting that an individual's activities, choices, and endeavors in one portion of his life cycle might be only tenuously related to his ultimate trajectory. From this perspective, Wise Saws and Modern Instances revises middle-class narratives of education and self-formation, which, in Franco Moretti's account of the “classical Bildungsroman” define a life as meaningful via a double movement by which the protagonist recognizes “the internal interconnections of individual temporality” while coming to understand his or her experience in an “ever wider and thicker network of external relationships” (Moretti 18). Cooper's stories, on the other hand, go to pains to highlight disjunctions and fractures in the process of development while describing moments of alienation that do not form part of a progression towards integration. The present study selects four stories from Cooper's collection which taken together might comprehend a life, but in which childhood learning, adolescent apprenticeship, adult labor, and the experiences of old age seem fragments of an existence that cannot cohere into a single narrative.

The technical inventiveness of the stories in Wise Saws and Modern Instances makes the collection a significant, if underappreciated, landmark in Victorian literary history. By refashioning the Bildungsroman as a set of discrete tales, Cooper effectively splinters narrative perspective and embraces a dialogic structure. However, Wise Saws and Modern Instances offers more than a simple experiment in form. Rather, the collection gives expression to a working-class revision of the classical Bildungsroman, in which the passage to adulthood is defined in terms of independence and self-sufficiency obtained through career success and marriage to an appropriate love object. In Cooper's vision, individuation is not self-realization, but loss. Freedom is negative, the separation from a community, rather than a vista of possibility, where economic activity is no longer typified as the discovery of a vocation which expresses an inner subjectivity, but rather appears as an anonymous struggle against blind market forces. The poignancy and power of the collection derives from a lingering sadness about the unavailability of the promise of autonomy; the frustration of the hope that an individual can transform his own life and the world through faithful study and diligent application. But alongside this sense of regret about the limits of individual agency appears a forceful critique of those aspirations in the first place, a critique grounded in Cooper's political radicalism and his participation in the mass politics of the Chartist movement.

Rewriting Spiritual Memoir

The second-to-last story in the collection is a spiritual biography of a child raised by a female cordwainer, or shoemaker, in rural Lincolnshire. The title of the story, “Dame Deborah Thrumpkinson, and her Orphan Apprentice Joe,” signals how the narrative turns away from the idea of self-making, giving pride of place not to the protagonist, but to his adoptive parent, who closely resembles Cooper's own mother as depicted in his 1872 autobiography. Deborah is a charismatic and kindly woman, who smokes, supports herself as a master artisan in charge of her deceased husband's business, and exhibits a strong practical intelligence. In the story's first scene, focalized from the widow's perspective, a menacing chimney sweep encourages Joe's mother to apprentice her son to him, an invocation of the atomistic world of the beginning of Oliver Twist, in which the sweep Gamfield similarly tries to profit from child labor. But the muscular intervention of Deborah (who threatens to shake the liver from the villain's body) rescues the child and suggests that in Cooper's setting, unlike Dickens's, self-interest has not entirely displaced communitarian values. When the boy's mother dies, Deborah takes him in, becoming his “godmother and protectress” (Cooper, “Dame” 2: 159). Cooper thus re-interprets the motif of the orphan, the quintessential Victorian figure for the dissolution of traditional social ties. By Bruce Robbins's definition, orphanhood mitigates ambivalence about the success of an upwardly mobile protagonist by “removing the tenderness or early attachment that would guarantee a later conflict of loyalties” (Robbins 57). In this light, orphanhood appears “the disguised vestige of an earlier murder. For it shoves out of sight in the past a murderous rejection that was a logical necessity in order for upward mobility to happen” (Robbins 58). Making the eponymous orphan hardly an orphan at all – emphasizing instead his status as a beloved foster child – Cooper keeps his protagonist's debts in full view; Joe's development will depend on nurturing relationships, rather than a murderous self-invention.

Detailed accounts of reading structure the narrative, tracing Joe's intellectual and spiritual trajectory from orthodox Christianity, to Methodism, to free thought. These scenes afford Cooper the opportunity to scrutinize various kinds of writing, and they embed Joe's education in material circumstances and community practices, underlining how reading is at root a social, not solitary, activity. Dame Deborah commences the protagonist's scholastic career by teaching him the alphabet:

Next, Toby Lackpenny, the village tailor and radical, introduces the boy to Robinson Crusoe and The Pilgrim's Progress, both seminal texts of working-class dissent.Footnote ⁵ When the village parson informs Deborah that her young charge is reading “secular” writing, Joe learns a lesson about the political nature of literature. Chafing at the subsequent restrictions Deborah places on his study, and suffering a “restlessness and disquietude of . . . mind,” our hero converts to Methodism (Cooper, “Dame” 2: 165). Although the narrator describes this event in mostly emotional terms, he also acknowledges the learned aspects of the religion. What attracts Joe is the intellectual acumen of a revival preacher, who interprets and applies the boy's first primer, Holy Scripture. Finally, it is literature that effects the last conversion of the story, Joe's loss of faith.

The climax of “Dame Deborah” transpires when the hero – by this time a teenager – visits the market town of Gainsborough and discovers two texts in a book stall. As he thumbs a treatise by an unnamed French philosopher, an event at the market seems to endorse the author's religious skepticism, providing a “running commentary on what [Joe] had hastily read” (Cooper, “Dame” 2: 180). A hawker attracts a crowd by describing a pious tract, in which a jilted young woman returns from the dead to warn her rakish lover of his imminent demise – the lover repents, attains a state of grace, and passes to his eternal reward. Though the peddler swears the story occurred in Cornwall within the last month, Joe has just put down a dusty volume which included the same tale. The gullibility of the crowd in accepting the recycled narrative sets Joe on the path towards freethinking, the supernatural story acting as a proxy for religious orthodoxy, against which Cooper will launch no direct assault. But if the protagonist of “Dame Deborah” has become a perceptive reader, intimating the ideological work the regurgitated ghost story performs, an irony persists: the very genre Joe scrutinizes – a conversion narrative – is the one in which he finds himself.

Joe's secular conversion encapsulates several crucial aspects of the story as a whole. First, it emphasizes the way contingent events influence his destiny. The narrator describes the rationalist dissertation as:

If hazard mocks the idea of Joe as the significant agent in his own life, the narrator is reluctant to specify what larger forces shape his story:

Christian's mystical journey sits over Cooper's text, suggesting a model for the child's spiritual maturation. “The ‘Pilgrim,’” Joe is assured by his tutor, Toby Lackpenny, has “a hidden and all-important meaning, which he must endeavour to discover, and apply to his own spiritual state as he went along” (Cooper, “Dame” 2: 161). But the narrative of “Dame Deborah” traces Joe's disappointing realization that his actions lack universal meaning, and the refusal to ascribe allegorical significance to the events at the market turns from the example set by Bunyan. As a new Methodist, the protagonist oscillates between paroxysms of doubt and ecstatic faith, but ultimately he fails to understand his life as a battleground where opposed cosmic forces meet, to interpolate himself into the world of Apollyon and Doubting-Castle, Hopeful and the City of gold.

In addition to lacking transcendent meaning, Joe's spiritual biography is destabilized by his multiple conversions. Instead of encountering a single transformation which justifies the telling of the tale and provides the interpretive frame illuminating the protagonist's life, the reader witnesses a series of changes: Joe's discovery of the Bible; his conversion to Methodism; his incipient atheism; and his eventual disillusionment with free thought, as his “self-gratulation” at “thinking diversely from the mass of his fellows” mellows into a melancholy loneliness (Cooper, “Dame” 2: 187). In the second passage quoted in the preceding paragraph, the narrator appears briefly impatient with his own interpretive project – “without entering into the labyrinth of his progressive trains of thought, or solving the question of the validity of any of his conclusions, suffice it to say. . . . ” This diffident posture towards Joe's development anticipates the story's finale, in which the protagonist as a young adult, reflecting on his travels, wearies of the question of belief:

The wrenching sadness of this ending lies in part in its inability to quit the themes of the preceding story even as it turns outward to the kinds of questions which animated Cooper as a political activist and Chartist lecturer. If the narrator comes to regard the subjective crises which structured the biography mere scruples, a frame insufficient to the broad, external “world of misery,” social suffering continues to be described only by the reflection it casts in Joe's conscience. Nineteenth-century working-class autobiography frequently secularized the tradition of spiritual memoir inherited from the Civil War period, maintaining the improving ethos of religious literature but transferring the belief in the moral significance of an unprivileged life to worldly subject matter (Vincent 14–18). “Dame Deborah Thrumpkinson and her Orphan Apprentice Joe,” on the other hand, leaves intact the spiritual content of Protestant biography but nevertheless turns against the form of its inherited genre, suggesting that neither religious belief nor a generalized meditative sensibility are sufficient to make sense of an individual's history.

From Country to City

The meaning of “Dame Deborah” is informed by the story's position as the penultimate piece in Cooper's collection. By the time Joe sets forth to study the “great book” of man, the reader has already encountered four stories about youths who seek their fortunes by leaving rural communities (Coope, “Dame” 2: 194). As these pieces each end in at least partial failure, Cooper creates a devastating dramatic irony: the reader is more aware than both protagonist and narrator that Joe's painstaking preparations for his adult endeavors might be wasted effort. The possibility of future calamity shadows the child's first steps.

“London ’Venture; or the Old Story Over Again,” as its title implies, reflects on the conventions of narratives about emigration to urban centers, the literary rite of passage in which adulthood is defined as the ability to navigate the social space of the metropolis. The story is a striking counterpart to “Dame Deborah.” Whereas the account of Joe's emotional and spiritual development gives meticulous attention to the contradictory influences that shape his inner life, “London ’Venture” provides little interiority and only the barest of back stories for its protagonist, Ingram Wilson, a young man “who had forsaken an engagement on a thriving newspaper in an opulent agricultural district, and had ‘come up to London’ . . . chiefly through a vivid persuasion, that London was the only true starting point for ‘a man of genius’” (Cooper, “London” 2: 42). Offering a rapid but detailed account of Wilson's failure to find employment, the expenditure of his savings, and his decline into poverty, the story glides over the writer's education and world view. In fact, economic contingency reduces the hero's intellectual accomplishments to so many irrelevancies; detritus both figurative and literal. By the end of the third paragraph the aspiring littérateur has sold his library:

Thus stripped of the paraphernalia of intellectual biography, Wilson reflects on scenes at the margin of London's economy: “He was driven to moralise, almost by necessity, as he wandered about from street to street; and he had many a notch in his mind about costermongers riding in front of their dog-carts” (Cooper, “London” 2: 44). A variation of Baudelaire's flâneur, but lacking the latter's freedom, Wilson suffers not existential but material deprivation. The narrator juxtaposes the hero's education, the evidence for which emerges as useless and fragmentary quotations recalled desultorily, with the degraded circumstances of his present; to complete the above passage, Wilson compares the suffering of Tantalus with that of a costermonger's dog. An ironic and bleak portrait of a “poverty-stricken philosopher,” the protagonist is a parodic reflection of Cooper's own celebrated feats of learning, his hard-won classical education so proudly on display in The Purgatory of the Suicides.Footnote ⁶

At times “London ’Venture” reads as a structural outline of a Bildungsroman. The mentor whom Wilson befriends, a retired half-pay naval officer, can only warn him of the fate of the thousands who come to London:

Wilson ignores his friend's recommendation to seek employment as a copyist in the British Museum, anxiously insisting on the originality of his intellectual project. But the youth from the provinces is, to speak precisely, a cliché, and Cooper treats him as such, describing his protagonist in tired, stereotyped language. The phrases that pervade the literary marketplace bleed into the narrator's idiom. When Wilson finds work, it is with “a small publisher, who had commenced a small periodical, and wanted a young man of genius, and all that, to edit it” (Cooper, “London” 2: 55). This development is described in a perfunctory, even dismissive, manner:

Rendering moot the emotional significance of the protagonist's failed opportunity, the narrator makes clear that no matter Wilson's particular efforts, the paper is doomed by an overcrowded publishing market. In other words, the very typicality of Wilson's story, the fact that hundreds of young writers produce “similar ephemera,” is what insures failure. Trapped in an individualism he does not recognize as structured in advance, Wilson sinks into the atomized crowds the narrator repeatedly evokes (“[H]e began to feel himself in a desart, even amidst thousands.” Cooper, “London” 2: 43).

Cooper's vivid representation of Wilson's imitative desire run amuck calls to mind René Girard's treatment of the paradigmatic relationship between the protagonist, his mentor, and a shared object of attraction (Girard 1–52). The hero's ambitions originate neither within himself nor in an object per se so much as from an unspecified body of literature about feats of genius in the metropolis. This corpus is bitterly criticized by the failure of Wilson's plans: the hero sells his library to sustain a poor facsimile of the life the volumes describe. Wilson also fails to discover an embodied model for the career he wants to pursue. The elderly officer who tries to rescue the protagonist takes on the structural function of a deus ex machina, but he cannot adequately fill the role. Having himself abandoned the ambitions of his youth, the old soldier embarrasses his finances by sharing a nightly dinner with the protagonist, who eventually declines to accept even this support when he learns of the pinched circumstances of his friend. When a “literary M.P.” from Wilson's home district refuses the writer assistance, the Balzacian project of social mapping is left stillborn, the doors to polite society closed (Cooper, “London” 2: 55). The youth from the hinterlands can find no route to maturity in the city, and Cooper's genre outline remains a hollow contour.

A Dialogic Bildungsroman

Of Cooper's formal experiments, the most dramatic and successful occur in “‘Merrie England’ – No More!” This story revisits a central tableau of the novel of development, the moment a youth departs the stultifying existence of his village or town. Widely used set pieces in continental and British fiction, such scenes typify the “transcendental homelessness” Lukács ascribes to the nineteenth-century novel, “the inadequacy that is due to the soul's being wider and larger than the destinies which life has to offer it” (Lukács 112). Cooper's innovation is profound: from a chronicle of this event, he omits the central character, recounting the attempted departure of a young man from Leicester, but from the perspective of the community he seeks to leave behind, which is instantiated in a confusing welter of voices. “‘Merrie England’ – No More!” is a Bildungsroman without a protagonist.

Relentlessly dialogic, the story relies on direct discourse, often barely attributed, to advance its action (Kuduk 174). It begins with “a group of five or six destitute-looking men” conversing around a Roman milestone marker. The unemployed laborers discuss the prospects of Tom, a youth who has gone missing over the last day. One member of the group tries to reassure the boy's father, John, about his son's fate:

Though others chime in to defend Tom's right to “mend his luck,” dismissing John's worries that he might become a thief or be transported, the substantive action of the group will be to frustrate Tom's effort to leave. For the youth has decided to enlist in the army, a decision all recognize will not only endanger himself but will also threaten to harm the community, making him at once a “sold slave” and active agent of oppression (Cooper, “Merrie “ 1: 206).

The climax of the story occurs when someone spies the “pale, tall stripling” with a recruiting sergeant, whom a crowd surrounds and heckles:

What follows is a near riot against military recruitment, the only representation in Wise Saws and Modern Instances of a direct confrontation between “the people” and state authority. Though the threat of violence is implicit in the crowd's actions, the group also articulates a coherent position. The soldier speaks the language of individual constancy. The crowd invokes communal responsibility and derides the sergeant's claims, reminding Tom that soldiers lack personal freedom. As Tom has not accepted payment, the mob eventually forces the recruiting officer to release him. The discussion that follows analyzes Tom's actions in terms of their political implication. One member of the chorus is proud that “the bloody rascals have not had two Leicester recruits these two years” (Cooper, “Merrie” 1: 208). Another wonders if the refusal of “all workingmen . . . to go for soldiers” would be a viable option to win political rights, a strategy that was actually advocated by certain Chartists under the slogan “No Vote, no Musket!” A third doubts the efficacy of such a plan because of the “Johnny Raws ready to list in the farming districts” (Cooper, “Merrie” 1:208). Though the commotion is about Tom, the story remains significantly de-centered. Indeed, the youth's only contribution to the dialogue – and his only speech in the story as a whole – is to explain how the recruiter had “been at me this three months; but I never yielded till this morning, when I felt almost pined to death and he made me have some breakfast with him, – but he'll not get hold of me again!” (Cooper, “Merrie” 1: 207–08).

Although “‘Merrie England’ – No More!” is one of the most explicitly political stories in Wise Saws and Modern Instances and was, perhaps for this reason, reprinted in the Chartist organ the Northern Star, the narrator's refusal to arbitrate between the competing perspectives in the debate over military recruitment measures the distance between Cooper's volume and more didactic fiction. The story itself points up this difference in an angry discussion between John's family and another destitute couple about a tract left by “a piety-monger” at the couple's home (Cooper, “Merrie” 1: 214). Cooper's characters object to the way the tract promotes the acceptance of poverty, but they equally resent its condescending tone and simplistic arguments. The narrator warns Christian missionaries that they “must expect to find the deepest subjects of theology, and government, and political economy, taken up [by the urban poor] with a subtlety that would often puzzle a graduate of Oxford or Cambridge” (Cooper, “Merrie” 1: 216). This polemical claim has already been demonstrated by the conversation about Tom's prospects, which ranged lazily over sophisticated topics, including the underlying similarity between environmental determinism in Owenite socialism and the role of providence in Calvinist theology. But unlike the secular sermons in didactic fiction, such as Harriet Martineau's Illustrations of Political Economy, the dialogue in “‘Merrie England’ – No More!” remains casual, idiomatic, and liable to break off at a moment's notice, even as it encompasses erudite references to controversial themes.

Although the crowd's victory over the recruiting sergeant demonstrates the potential power of collective activity, “‘Merrie England’ – No More!” retains the critical, pessimistic outlook of the rest of Cooper's short story collection, which anatomize present economic, social, and political crises, rather than imagining their resolution. After all, the effect of the crowd is only to cancel Tom's action and return him to a barely sustainable existence in depressed Leicester. But “‘Merrie England’ – No More!” also negates a narrative structure which articulates freedom and self-realization in terms of an individual's escape from community life. The story's surprising and evocative close makes explicit the violence Cooper does to received form:

If fiction is the realm of complacent cliché, “tales” of “merrie England,” then this distant and alienated overview, in which the characters merge back into an unnamed mass, is meant to jar the reader's sensibility by denying any easy moral lesson. The jagged phrases which degenerate into a rote list epitomize the collapse of a formal logic which finds in individual biography self-sustaining narrative momentum. The disjointed, repetitive cycle of lives ruled by economic contingency and political repression can only be broken, if at all, by the active engagement of the reader addressed in the final sentence.Footnote ⁷

The Impossibility of Nostalgia

In addition to stories about childhood and young adulthood, Cooper's collection also features several narratives in which elderly characters play prominent parts. These figures are often portrayed as remnants of an earlier time, castaways whose habits and attitudes modern society renders incomprehensible. “Last Days of an Old Sailor, or, ‘Butter your Shirt; Sing Tantara-Bobus, Make Shift!’” is explicitly about nostalgia, but its setting, the same desiccated landscape of “‘Merrie England’ – No More!” transposed to a more rural locale, swallows the best efforts of the titular character to conjure the experiences of youth or recover a bygone spirit of open-ended possibility. The central episode of “Last Days” is a reunion between the retired sailor Matthew Hardcastle and his former shipmate Paul Perkins. Meeting accidentally on a street in Gainsborough, they retire to Matthew's cramped quarters, which are decorated with portraits of the “gallant faces” of Nelson and other admirals as well as curios from the South Seas, “odd fragments of a sailor's fondness” (Cooper, “Last Days” 1: 165). The comrades share glasses of grog, recollect old stories, and honor “the bravery and virtues of the dead” (Cooper, “Last Days” 1: 166). Late at night the conversation turns serious when Paul expostulates with his friend about politics. Asserting that wars have saddled the nation with exorbitant taxes, he links militarism with the country's endemic poverty and implicitly with his and his friend's own straitened circumstances. He describes, moreover, “this setting of poor Englishmen on to fight poor foreigners” as “only a deep scheme, on the part of the rich abroad and the rich at home, to keep the poor down” (Cooper, “Last Days” 1: 171). But even as “Last Days” delivers this straightforward message, the sailors’ dialogue reflects on the limits of didacticism as a formal strategy for politically-engaged literature. The argument breaks down “with a hearty laugh on both sides” when Matthew wearies of serious talk and exclaims, “Blow me! . . . if I can see the use of all your palaver” (Cooper, “Last Days” 1: 174).

But the story is political in another sense. In staging the alcohol-soaked retelling of the aging sailors’ hijinks, Cooper takes aim at a triumphalist vision of the national past promoted by the “naval novelists” Frederick Marryat and Frederick Chamier and the many hack writers who imitated their tales of adventure at sea. Marryat's novels, some of the most widely read fiction of the 1830s (Parascandola 10), synthesized anti-radical politics with gripping anecdotes about the exploits of junior naval officers during the Napoleonic Wars. Mr Midshipman Easy, for example, describes a young Briton sympathetic to Jacobin principles who joins the navy because he believes that “although the whole earth has been so nefariously divided among the few . . . the waters at least are the property of all,” only to be cured of this mad philosophy by naval discipline and life experience (Marryat 38). Of all Cooper's re-interpretations of motifs from popular genres, “Last Days” is the most easily traceable, for it slips in and out of Marryat's own idiom in order to analyze the affective response elicited by adventure stories and to identify the pitfalls of conscripting individual heroism into a project of nation making.

The second half of the story's title, “‘Butter your Shirt; Sing Tantara-Bobus, Make Shift!’,” refers to a pet phrase Matthew frequently invokes as a kind of charm to ward off ill fortune. The reader learns its origin when Paul tells a waitress from the local public house a humorous anecdote, which is also a send-up of naval fiction:

In this escapade and its condensation into a talismanic saying, Cooper captures essential components of Marryat's prose. First there is a comedy made up of seemingly cataclysmic circumstances, a lightheartedness authorized by the hero's ability to land always on his feet. The narrator of Mr Midshipman Easy exclaims, “There certainly is a peculiar providence in favour of midshipmen compared with the rest of mankind; they have more lives than a cat – always in the greatest danger, but always escaping from it” (Marryat 142). Next, Matthew's increasingly frustrating reiteration of his formula (which he uses to counter Paul's exposition about the troubled state of the country) recalls the diminished range of emotion in Marryat's happy-go-lucky characters and the repetitive sameness at the heart of a potentially infinite series of picaresque adventures.

Finally, “Last Days” drastically re-interprets Marryat's valuation of personal bravery. In Patrick Brantlinger's innovative description, the characters in Marryat's novels exhibit “a spirit of ‘altruistic suicide’” (Brantlinger 54). While praising individual endeavor, the novels lose sight of individuality in an onrushing staccato of action: “the hero is he who can swim with the tide of events, which threatens at every moment to overwhelm mere selfhood” (Brantlinger 50). The selfhood of Cooper's characters is similarly cast into doubt. Yet instead of becoming transcendent figures subsumed into heroic activity, they are reduced to passive objects, social atoms at the mercy of unseen political and economic forces. Matthew is shocked to learn that a sailor who served with him at Trafalgar recently died in a poor house, though “he used to rush into a gun-boat like a ravenous wolf!” (Cooper, “Last Days” 1: 173). Nor can he anticipate that a similar fate awaits himself: “In proportion to Matthew becoming helpless, people were wearied with waiting upon him; and, disgraceful to relate! the old warrior-seaman was, at length, neglected till his aged body swarmed with filth” (Cooper, “Last Days” 1: 175). The story's irony extends beyond the discrepancy between Matthew's providentially touched life in the navy and his experiences on shore, for the old sailor has unwittingly helped author his own fate, albeit in a circuitous fashion he fails to recognize. His poverty, Cooper suggests, stems from the burdens placed on the civilian economy by the wars he fought in, while his neglect by the community is a result of the diffusion of an individualistic ideology which can only advise the downtrodden to “butter your shirt; sing tantara-bobus, make shift!”