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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Biglow Papers," James Russell Lowell employs an innovative blend of dialect poetry and satirical verse to confront the pressing social and political issues of the 19th century. Written in the voice of the fictional character Hosea Biglow, the work critiques contemporary themes such as American expansionism and the moral implications of the Mexican-American War. Through its sharp wit and humor, Lowell's writing reveals the tensions within a society grappling with questions of identity and national purpose, making it a pivotal contribution to the American literary tradition of social critique. James Russell Lowell, a prominent figure of the American Romantic movement and a key member of the Fireside Poets, was deeply influenced by the prevailing issues of his time, including abolitionism and education reform. His erudition and experiences as a journalist and critic endowed him with a unique perspective on the socio-political landscape, which undoubtedly shaped his decision to adopt the voice of a rustic New England farmer in order to connect with a broad audience and present his ideals. Readers seeking both entertainment and insight into the historical and political climate of the era will find "The Biglow Papers" an essential and engaging read. With its rich tapestry of humor and pointed commentary, this work invites reflection on the enduring questions of morality in governance and the complexities of American identity. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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The Biglow Papers
Table of Contents
Introduction
At its core, The Biglow Papers stages a contest between plainspoken conscience and high-flown authority, as a shrewd New England farmer’s vernacular exposes the evasions of war-friendly politics, the inflation of patriotic rhetoric, and the uneasy bargain between individual responsibility and public policy, using humor as leverage, dialect as evidence, and verse as a civic instrument that invites readers to weigh the costs of national action against the claims of moral judgment in a society that prizes both liberty of speech and the consolations of expedience.
James Russell Lowell’s work is a collection of satirical verse framed by mock-editorial prose, rooted in mid-nineteenth-century America. The earliest pieces appeared as newspaper installments during the Mexican–American War (1846–1848) and were gathered soon after as a first series; a later series, issued during the Civil War era, returned to the format to address new urgencies. Set largely in New England but trained on national debate, the book occupies the tradition of political satire and American dialect writing, blending topical argument with literary play in a manner that situates it within the period’s public conversation.
The premise is both simple and artful: Lowell channels the voice of Hosea Biglow, a rural Yankee observer, whose letters and verses are presented by an ostentatiously learned minister, Parson Homer Wilbur, A.M., with copious editorial apparatus. This framing device generates a layered performance in which confident common sense meets scholastic pedantry, each illuminating the other. Intermittent dispatches from the world of recruitment and soldiering extend the satire’s reach. The reading experience alternates between boisterous humor and sober reflection, shifting across lively meters and mock-scholarly prose to create a hybrid that feels like a public forum conducted in verse.
The book’s themes circle the ethics of national policy, the pressures of patriotic spectacle, and the obligations of citizenship. It interrogates expansionist ambitions, the costs of war to ordinary people, and the ways party allegiance can deform moral judgment. Its satire also engages the era’s arguments over slavery and the balance between federal power and local conscience. By staging political speech alongside vernacular counter-speech, it asks who gets to define national purpose and what happens when policy demands silence from those it most affects. The result is a critique of rhetoric as much as of events.
Language and form are central to its effect. Lowell constructs a distinctive Yankee dialect that is playful yet precise, treating pronunciation, spelling, and idiom as instruments of perspective rather than mere caricature. The editorial notes, etymologies, and learned digressions parody scholarly authority while offering genuine context, creating a double-voiced texture in which competing registers contest the truth. Varied stanza patterns and familiar song rhythms lend momentum and memorability, inviting public recitation. Together, these devices turn style into argument: the dialect insists on democratic intelligibility, while the apparatus exposes the pretensions and evasions of official discourse.
Readers today will find in its pages a study of how political language works—how slogans travel, how newspapers amplify, how sentiment can be mustered to justify action. The book invites skepticism toward easy appeals to unity, asking whether consent is informed or coerced. It also models a use of humor that does not trivialize moral stakes: laughter becomes a way to pry open certainty and make room for conscience. In an age wary of spin and spectacle, its attention to media, messaging, and the ethics of persuasion remains timely without requiring specialized historical knowledge to follow the thrust of its satire.
Approached as a conversation rather than a puzzle, The Biglow Papers rewards patience with dialect and curiosity about its editorial frame. The voice of Hosea Biglow offers immediacy and moral candor; the interruptions of Parson Wilbur supply context and provoke second thoughts. Together, they stage a civic rehearsal that encourages readers to test arguments, examine motives, and distinguish authority from wisdom. The collection’s blend of accessible cadence and intellectual pressure makes it a durable introduction to American political satire, promising an experience that is spirited, argumentative, and deeply engaged with the responsibilities of speaking—honestly and audibly—within a noisy republic.
Synopsis (Selection)
The Biglow Papers is a collection of satirical verse and prose pieces by James Russell Lowell, originally appearing as newspaper contributions and later gathered into two series. Using invented New England voices, the work comments on United States politics from the Mexican-American War through the Civil War era. Its central speaker, the rustic poet Hosea Biglow, writes in Yankee dialect about contemporary events, while the scholarly Parson Homer Wilbur supplies prefaces, annotations, and a mock-editorial frame. Through this apparatus, the book presents political debate, public sentiment, and local scenes in a form that imitates popular communication of the time, blending humor, reportage, and literary pastiche.
The framing conceit is crucial to the narrative flow. Letters and poems allegedly from Hosea are addressed to editors or acquaintances and then introduced, footnoted, and sometimes corrected by Parson Wilbur. The contrast between Wilbur’s Latin-tinged erudition and Biglow’s homespun idiom structures the reading experience, juxtaposing official rhetoric with vernacular judgment. A recurring correspondent, Birdofredum Sawin, offers another perspective: a shrewd, self-serving common man who enlists as a soldier and reports his fortunes with brash candor. Together these voices create a chorus through which news items, speeches, and political platforms are echoed, answered, and reshaped into a serial narrative of public life.
The First Series, published around 1848, centers on the Mexican-American War and the domestic controversies it provoked. Hosea Biglow’s early contributions challenge the rationale for the conflict and question the motives behind territorial expansion. He records town meetings, recruiting appeals, and editorial arguments, translating them into dialect verse that recasts grand policy in everyday terms. Parson Wilbur, intervening with gravely amused commentary, cites authorities and offers historical parallels, amplifying the material without overruling it. The pieces unfold as a running conversation in which neighbors weigh duty, conscience, and party loyalty while newspapers amplify and distort events in familiar nineteenth-century fashion.
Birdofredum Sawin’s enlistment provides a thread that carries readers from the village green to the army camp. His letters relay the promises of bounties, the realities of discipline, and the shifting calculations of a soldier navigating opportunity and risk. Through his bragging reports, the work depicts recruitment practices, rumors, and changing morale without focusing on battlefield specifics. Interspersed, Hosea’s own verses scrutinize stump speeches and editorial catchphrases, exposing how patriotic formulas and party slogans travel. A frequently cited figure of local politics serves as a foil for opportunism, allowing the series to register the distance between public principle and private advantage.
Alongside political skirmishes, the First Series includes domestic scenes and courtship episodes that anchor its satire in ordinary life. These interludes set chores, seasons, and neighborly talk against the larger drumbeat of national controversy, underscoring what policy decisions mean for households and towns. The serial momentum builds toward an election year, with attention to platforms, conventions, and third-party stirrings that reorganize alliances. Without naming winners or charting outcomes, the sequence suggests the pressure of conscience on voting choices, especially regarding slavery’s expansion. The first series closes having mapped how a provincial community processes distant war through language and song.
The Second Series, issued during and after the Civil War, resumes the format with altered stakes. Secession, emancipation, and national survival dominate the agenda, and Hosea’s voice, still lively, carries a graver undercurrent. The dialect poems consider enlistment and drafts, home-front economies, and the tests placed upon civic patience. Birdofredum reappears in episodes that trace opportunistic adjustments to wartime conditions, emblematic of wider social churn. Parson Wilbur expands his editor’s role, situating each number within a moral and historical frame that binds local observation to national purpose. The correspondence now tracks not just politics but the experience of rupture and mobilization.
Several Second Series pieces focus on the meaning of freedom, the conduct of leaders, and the obligations of citizens under strain. They mark moments such as early reverses, decisive shifts in policy, and the broadening of war aims without narrating campaigns. Satirical portraits of peace advocates, foreign commentators, and party managers recur, counterposed with sketches of farmers, mechanics, and soldiers. The editor’s footnotes, sometimes longer than the poems, stage debates about language, taste, and authority, making the book itself a forum for competing claims. As before, the materials appear as occasional writings tied to identifiable news cycles.
Later installments address questions of reconstruction, national character, and the uses of memory. The sequence considers how defeated regions, veterans, and political institutions might be reintegrated, while cautioning against complacency and opportunism in the aftermath. Experiments in parody continue, including imitations of well-known poetic styles, as the series measures American subjects against British literary models. The apparatus keeps attention on sources, misquotations, and editorial interventions, so readers witness how texts are made and remade in public life. By extending its vernacular method into a period of rebuilding, the work sustains its interest in how opinion hardens into policy.
Taken together, The Biglow Papers presents a chronicle of mid-nineteenth-century American politics filtered through invented correspondents and a mock-scholarly frame. It combines dialect poetry, letters, and editorial notes to trace debates over war, slavery, citizenship, and governance from local vantage points. The collection’s structure mirrors the flow of newspapers and meetings rather than a single plot, emphasizing how language shapes events. Its overall message is that public judgment emerges where learning and common speech meet, and that national choices are argued into being. By organizing varied voices, the book preserves a record of argument as it was spoken and sung.
Historical Context
James Russell Lowell’s The Biglow Papers are set against the public life of the United States from the mid-1840s through the Civil War, with a distinctly New England vantage. Their local stage is the Yankee village—modeled on rural Massachusetts parishes—where town meetings, pulpits, and newspapers mediate national events. The fictional Parson Homer Wilbur, A.M., and farmer Hosea Biglow speak from this milieu, whose rhythms of farm work, meetinghouses, and common schools intersect with rapid change: railroads, the electric telegraph (1844), and industrializing cities such as Lowell and Boston. The time frame spans the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) and the Union crisis (1861–1865), when partisan journalism and mass mobilization fused politics and everyday life.
The Mexican-American War (1846–1848) began after the United States annexed Texas in 1845 and President James K. Polk ordered troops to the disputed Nueces–Rio Grande strip. Fighting opened at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma in May 1846; U.S. forces captured Veracruz (March 1847) and entered Mexico City on September 14, 1847. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (February 2, 1848) transferred over 500,000 square miles (the Mexican Cession) to the United States. Lowell’s first series (1846–1848), appearing in New England newspapers, satirizes recruitment bounties, war rhetoric, and “Slave Power” expansion; Birdofredum Sawin’s letters lampoon the volunteer’s experience, while Biglow’s dialect exposes the moral cost of conquest.
The slavery expansion crisis intensified with the Wilmot Proviso (1846), which sought to bar slavery in territory won from Mexico; it passed the House but failed in the Senate. In 1848, anti-slavery Democrats (“Barnburners”) and Conscience Whigs formed the Free Soil Party at Buffalo (August 9–10), nominating Martin Van Buren with Charles Francis Adams for vice president; they drew roughly 10 percent of the popular vote. The Biglow Papers echo Free Soil principles—“Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men”—by attacking the linkage between territorial aggrandizement and slaveholder power, and by portraying Northern rural conscience as a counterweight to party expediency.
The Compromise of 1850, engineered by Henry Clay, admitted California as a free state and strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act (September 18, 1850), obliging officials and citizens nationwide to aid in the capture of escapees. Enforcement convulsed Boston: Shadrach Minkins was rescued from custody (February 15, 1851); Thomas Sims was returned under guard (April 12, 1851); and Anthony Burns’s rendition (June 2, 1854) provoked mass protest. Though the first Biglow series predates these cases, its moral logic anticipates New England resistance to federal complicity in slavery. The Biglow persona later reappears to condemn legalistic inhumanity and the perversion of civic institutions to enforce bondage.
The Kansas–Nebraska Act (May 30, 1854) repealed the Missouri Compromise line (36°30′) and instituted “popular sovereignty,” triggering “Bleeding Kansas.” Pro-slavery “Border Ruffians” invaded polling places; free-state settlers established a rival government. Violence escalated with the Sack of Lawrence (May 21, 1856) and John Brown’s Pottawatomie killings (May 24–25, 1856). In Congress, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was caned by Representative Preston Brooks (May 22, 1856). These conflicts crystallized Northern outrage and birthed the Republican coalition. The Biglow Papers’ recurring attacks on doughfaces and party maneuvering mirror this radicalization, presenting Yankee common sense as a republican ethic resisting mob violence and legislative betrayal.
Secession began with South Carolina (December 20, 1860); by February 1861 seven Deep South states formed the Confederate States of America. War opened at Fort Sumter (April 12, 1861). Pivotal Union moments included Antietam (September 17, 1862), after which Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation (September 22, 1862), and the final Proclamation (January 1, 1863), redefining the conflict as a war for Union and freedom. Lowell’s Second Series (1862) directly addresses these crises, denouncing Copperhead peace agitation and urging perseverance to emancipation. Through Parson Wilbur’s editorial voice and Biglow’s vernacular, the work endorses national resolve, lampoons timid leadership, and frames emancipation as a constitutional and moral necessity.
Home-front strife crested with the Enrollment (Conscription) Act (March 3, 1863), which allowed a $300 commutation fee, sparking accusations of class privilege. The New York City Draft Riots (July 13–16, 1863) killed more than 100 people, with brutal attacks on Black residents. Meanwhile, Black enlistment advanced, notably the 54th Massachusetts Infantry under Robert Gould Shaw, whose assault on Fort Wagner (July 18, 1863) symbolized Black citizenship claims. The Biglow Papers satirize anti-war demagogues such as Fernando Wood and Clement L. Vallandigham, exposing racial panic and class resentments. Biglow’s plain-spoken republicanism champions citizen duty and equal sacrifice, aligning popular conscience with the Union’s widening war aims.
The book functions as a sustained civic critique of mid-nineteenth-century America. By filtering public controversies through a New England parish and a farmer’s idiom, it indicts imperial war-making, the entanglement of party patronage with policy, and the subordination of law to slaveholding interests. Its Civil War writings expose class inequities in conscription and the politics of racial fear, while demanding that constitutional fidelity include emancipation. The work mocks euphemism, newspaper cant, and legislative evasions, insisting on accountability to local moral sense. In doing so, it portrays republican virtue as residing in informed common citizens resisting demagoguery, sectional aggrandizement, and the commodification of both labor and life.
