ABSTRACT
Here Patmore reviews the American writer John Neal’s elephantine 1825 novel Brother Jonathan: or; The New Englanders in the style of Francis Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review. Though the imitation ultimately fails to match the level of perception evident in Patmore’s adoption of Hazlitt and Wilson’s critical manner, it has its moments of interest, not least in the imagined collision between patrician critic and American innovator. The 1820s saw a vogue for American literature never previously evident amongst the British reading public. Led by the enormously successful figure of ‘Geoffrey Crayon’, i.e. Washington Irving, whose Sketch Book went through many editions in the 1820s and who was a friend of both Jeffrey and Walter Scott (both of whom thought highly of the work), the likes of James Fenimore Cooper and John Neal saw their work taken up by British publishers. Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1820), Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823) and Neal’s Brother Jonathan led this benign invasion, which in the cases of Irving and Neal was literal as well as metaphorical, given that both men spent significant periods in Britain. Neal (1793–1876) lived in England from 1823 to 1827 and William Blackwood published Brother Jonathan. 1 He also contributed to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine; hence the decision by ‘F. J.’ to reject his review from the Edinburgh, the great and bitter rival of Maga.
