US historians once paid little attention to the cultural connections that existed between Great Britain and the early American republic. As Jennifer Clark explains in her introduction to The American Idea of England, this may be attributed in large part to the exceptionalist tone that dominated American historiography in the twentieth century. This air of superiority was reinforced by the Cold War, a period in which the United States regarded itself as the protector of a war-weary Western Europe. Thus Americans may have agreed with Winston Churchill in 1946 that the two countries enjoyed a “special relationship,” but the hubris of empire led them to assume that this was a relationship in which Great Britain had always occupied a subordinate role.
The recent interest in Atlantic world studies, of course, has changed all that, prompting a much-needed and long overdue reappraisal of the connections that existed between the two countries. Clark's study takes its place in a growing body of scholarship that argues that John Bull loomed large over the early republic as the United States sought to establish itself in the years after independence. Political separation had been achieved, but the transatlantic relationship continued to shape virtually every aspect of American life. Whether they liked it or not, citizens of the American republic were still bound to Great Britain by “a tie,” in the words of Richard Rush, that was “light as air, and unseen, but stronger than links of iron” (1).
Like other recent works on the subject, The American Idea of England is particularly interested in John Bull's role in the early development of an American national identity. As earnest republicans, Americans may have wanted to distance themselves from monarchical Britain, but their attachments to the imperial parent remained too strong for them to effectively do so. Notwithstanding the tensions that continued to plague the transatlantic relationship after independence, Clark finds an undercurrent of Anglophilia among American political and cultural elites, who continued to regard Great Britain as a model worthy of emulation.
To be sure, overt expressions of Anglo-mania among American political leaders may have been muted by republican orthodoxy; nonetheless, Clark argues, citizens of the United States harbored a deep affection for Great Britain that endured despite two wars for independence. In framing their own nationalist discourse during the War of 1812, for example, Americans borrowed from British rhetorical traditions. Far from engendering a visceral hatred of Great Britain, the second war for American independence actually revealed how strong the centripetal pull of Britain's cultural orbit remained. Similarly, the invective hurled at the young republic by British journals in the years that followed – the so-called Paper War – also failed to ignite American anger. While they may have taken umbrage at British condescension, American intellectuals were too accustomed to view the imperial parent in favorable, familial terms to respond in kind.
This infatuation with Great Britain was no less pronounced in the belletristic sphere. Clark examines a wide range of literary genres which Americans used to negotiate their newfound independence. Much as they wanted to create a truly “national” literature, American writers seemed incapable of doing so, regarding the British literary canon as the acme of belletristic achievement. While Clark's use of source materials is necessarily selective, she nonetheless builds a convincing case that many American writers remained hidebound to British literary forms and traditions. At the same time, not surprisingly, they were prisoners of their own unreasonable expectations. Thus England remained a quaint, bucolic idyll for Washington Irving, whose fictional traveler Geoffrey Crayon saw only the “Olde England” of stately manors that Irving wanted him to see. Such fawning Anglophilia would recede as the United States grew in geopolitical stature. Some three decades later, Herman Melville's Redburn would travel to England with similar preconceived notions, only to find a foreign land in which he felt completely out of place.
At no time during this period did Americans believe they needed to wholly renounce their Britishness. Rather, Clark argues, they regarded the imperial parent as intimately connected with the growth of their republic, continuing to draw from British norms in order to fashion a hybrid identity on their own terms. Clark does not view Americans as idolaters who sought only to mimic Great Britain, nor does she view them as knee-jerk Anglophobes who reflexively sought to craft a new republic in purely oppositional terms. In this nuanced study, the “idea” of England served as a device which allowed Americans to arrive at a better understanding of themselves as a people, and of the nation they would become.
