A photographic reproduction, produced by Richard D. Hathaway
Copyright 2006 by Richard D. Hathaway
Permission is hereby granted to an individual to make a single copy for personal use.Richard Hathaway (141 Fulton Ave. #112, Poughkeepsie, NY 12603) would like to hear from those who are looking at this reproduction of Margaret, particularly so that he can judge whether there is enough interest to justify making Parts II and III available and perhaps even enough interest to justify turning it into a searchable etext.
This, the original 1845 version of Sylvester Judd's Margaret, has never before been reprinted. Margaret is the preeminent novel of the Transcendentalist movement. The only other one, Lydia Maria Child's Philothea, set in ancient Athens, lacks the Emersonian combination of lyrical idealism and downrightness, the "smack of the soil" that James Russell Lowell particularly prized. He called Margaret "the most emphatically American book ever written," a note picked up by Nathaniel Hawthorne's labeling it "intensely American." Even such a leader of the Realist movement as William Dean Howells placed Margaret second only to the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne among New England romances, saying, surprisingly, that it was "vastly better. . .than the best new novel of our generation." And this was in January 1871, just as Howells was about to publish Henry James's first novel, Watch and Ward, in The Atlantic Monthly.
Making the first edition of Margaret once again available is significant for the following reason. The language of Judd's revision was smoothed down. Occasionally an improvement, this was in other ways a bowdlerization, a response to the genteel critics who had attacked the novel's uncouth, vulgar language--the grittiness that might have attracted readers a hundred years later had they been able to see the novel's original version. Here are a few examples: on page 30 Brown Moll says to her husband, "Panguts!...what do you do? Lazying about here like a mud-turtle nine days after it's killed." When Pluck tries to mollify her with "Dearest Maria," she replies "Don't deary me with your dish-cloth tongue." In the revised version Judd changed "Panguts!" to "Trencher worm!" and removed "with your dish-cloth tongue." Genteel novels did not speak of "guts," and women had only "limbs." Initially using the word "bellygut" to describe a way of a child's flopping on a sled, Judd discreetly omitted the word from the revision. Again: on page 40 Margaret arrives home after dark with the rum she had been sent to buy for her foster-father, Pluck. In the second edition Judd omitted the succeeding scene, with its drunken delirium and improprieties of imagery: "Bite, will ye? spit fire, ram lightning down a babe's throat." Before Pluck even gets going with the rum, his wife comments, "You are a real coon that would suck the biggest cock dry." On page 41 Judd uses a dash for the word "damned," but on page 67 he is not so squeamish, at least not in the first edition. His initial mask of anonymity gone as his novel won him celebrity, Judd had to be a bit more discreet. He was after all a Unitarian minister and married to the daughter of a U. S. Senator, the richest man in Augusta, Maine.
Part I, "Childhood," presented here, is the section that has been most admired for its earthiness and local color, though Part II, "Youth," is also worth attention for its Transcendentalist elements. Part III, "Womanhood," leaves earthiness (and most readers) behind, but is of interest as an example of the romantic utopianism that Hawthorne and others were reacting against.
Chapters not to be missed: 2, 6, 13, 15, and especially 14 and 17.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page and Part I, Chapter 1 - PHANTASMAGORICAL - INTRODUCTORY
Chapter 2 - WORK AND BEAUTY. - AN IMPRESSION OF THE REAL.
Chapter 3 - LOCALITIES DESCRIBED. THE FAMILY MORE PARTICULARLY ENUMERATED. - OBED INTRODUCED.
Chapter 4 - THE WIDOW WRIGHT.
Chapter 5 - THE BEE HUNT. - MARGARET GOES FARTHER INTO NATURE. - SHE SINS AND REPENTS. - THE MASTER.
Chapter 6 - WHY MARGARET WAS SORROWFUL. - DREAMS. - LIVINGSTON. - A GLIMPSE AT "THE WORLD." - ISABEL. - NIGHT AND OTHER SHADOWS.
Chapter 7 - RETROSPECTIVE AND EXPLANATORY.
Chapter 8 - MARGARET'S OLDEST BROTHER, NIMROD, COMES HOME. - HE PROPOSES A VARIETY OF DIVERSIONS [the camp meeting]
Chapter 9 - MARGARET SUCCESSFUL IN A NOVEL ADVENTURE [ dowsing for water]
Chapter 10 - THANKSGIVING, OR NEW ENGLAND'S HOLIDAY. - MARGARET HAS HER DIVERSION.
Chapters 11 and 12 - 11. A REVISED ACCOUNT OF NIMROD AND HIS DOINGS. - 12. THE STORY OF GOTTFRIED BRÜCKMANN AND JANE GIRARDEAU
Chapter 13 - RETURNS TO MARGARET, WHO ADVANCES IN CHILDHOOD AND KNOWLEDGE OF THE WORLD. [Training Day]
Chapter 14 - THE SABBATH. - MARGARET GOES TO MEETING FOR THE FIRST TIME. - HER DREAM OF JESUS.
Chapter 15 - . MARGARET PASSES A NIGHT AT THE STILL, AND SOLOMON SMITH MAKES HER USEFUL.
Chapter 16 - MARGARET ENQUIRES AFTER THE INFINITE; AND CANNOT MAKE HER WAY OUT OF THE FINITE. - SHE UNWITTINGLY CREATES A GREAT SENSATION IN THE TOWN OF LIVINGSTON. [lost in the woods, nurtured by a mother bear]
Chapter 17 - WINTER, These .pdf files are image-only, not searchable.