Washington’s Napkin

This chapter traces the origins of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun to his abandoned claimant novel (‘The Ancestral Footstep’), and argues that the novel transfers the inheritance theme to its depiction of American artists in Rome. It suggests an undercurrent of competition in Hawthorne’s depiction of the sculptors, and conflicted feelings about Hiram Powers and William Wetmore Story, particularly their self-chosen exile: conflict expressed in terms of the Yankee type. In Rome, the transatlantic difference that is so often signalled in clothes settles on nudity in statuary, a particular anxiety for Hawthorne. Transatlantic relationships also become triangular, British and American writers bonding in Rome; William Wetmore Story aspires to address American slavery by portraying African figures in classical terms.

Eleazer’s Cross

This chapter argues that claimants became fodder for mid-century periodicals, and they provided an imagery for anti-slavery rhetoric. It examines Frederick Douglass’s use of illegitimacy in his speech on the Fourth of July, and his deployment of ‘Yankee’ tropes to protest against segregation. It links them to his efforts to cultivate a transatlantic community through Frederick Douglass’ Paper, work involving personal and political bonds with British colleagues—William and Mary Howitt, and Julia Griffiths. The paper was both local and national in its reach, as was its fascination with claimants like Eleazer Williams and Monsieur Ben, two candidates for the ‘Lost Dauphin’. Monsieur Ben was the subject of a long-lost column by James McCune Smith, in the series ‘Heads of the Colored People’.

Dundreary’s Whiskers

This chapter introduces precursors to the claimant—the theatrical Yankee and his vehicle the trip play, in which Britons travelled to the United States, or Americans to Britain. The trip plays cast light on Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans, and on Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit and American Notes. In Tom Taylor’s Our American Cousin, a trip play involves a claimant, inaugurating patterns evident in the structure and characterization of subsequent claimant texts. The chapter relates mid-century transatlantic tensions to the creation and staging of Our American Cousin, as reflected in Great Exhibition dramas and the newsprint duels of The Times and the New York Herald. It also suggests that the play drew on a pedagogical relationship between Tom Taylor and an American student at Cambridge, Charles Astor Bristed.

The American Claimant

The introduction outlines the idea of the American claimant, an American heir to a British estate, and traces it back to medieval lost-heir romances such as Havelok. In lost-heir romances, a hero is stolen or banished before he or she can inherit riches or power. She or he is thought to be dead, but by good fortune is saved. Often, she then works as a servant; certainly, her life is humble and obscure. But she thrives, and eventually returns, to be restored to her rightful position. The introduction also discusses real cases—James Annesley, the Tichborne Claimant, and those Nathaniel Hawthorne records in Our Old Home. It suggests a relationship with the figure of the confidence man, and discusses underlying preoccupations, including gentlemen and servants, and dress and undress.

Capped and Gowned

Chapter 8 notes that education has been a major arena for transatlantic contact, and that it has also had political implications: seeking educations abroad offered some students a way to challenge racism and segregation. It takes three cases of such transatlantic educations—Alexander Crummell, Yolande Du Bois, and John Dube—and suggests ways in which their experiences show educational theories crossing and converging in Britain and South Africa. Dube’s example itself led to claimant fictions, by John Buchan and George Heaton Nicholls: the chapter shows how these drew on the imperial romances of H. Rider Haggard, reimagined in these novels with the conventions of claimant fiction.

Fauntleroy’s Suit

This chapter explores claimants in a variety of fiction, especially the multiple claimants created by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and notes that a recurring feature is a recognition scene in a picture gallery. It argues that in Little Lord Fauntleroy Burnett is inverting the convention of the Yankee claimant, creating a conciliatory version of a form predicated on culture clash and the possibility of revolution. It suggests an analogue in Emily Dickinson’s ‘No matter—now—Sweet’, a possible influence in Captain Marryat’s The Children of the New Forest, and multiple heirs, including novels by Nancy Mitford, and The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Epilogue

I have been arguing that the American claimant, in nineteenth-century British and American culture, embodied a tension between innovation and tradition. Moreover, to focus on such claimants, relatives who are also strangers, exposes unexpected kinships amongst texts. Filaments once ran between—of imagery, and associations, and ideas—but not all of them survive: they become visible only when scatterlings assemble, as some have done in this book. Claimants invoke the restitutive teleology of romance; they can confirm identity, assert authority, demand justice, or narrate a process of transmission. Over a very long period, the idea has helped writers, editors, artists, and students choose an inheritance and decide on a legacy, defining who they are and who they wish to be....

Hank’s Night Shirt

Claimants were not only a lifelong preoccupation for Mark Twain, they represent a powerful impulse in his writing; he sought on multiple occasions to write himself into a historical literary tradition that stretched back to the English middle ages. Twain’s irony and ambivalence have obscured his fascination with tradition, but the figure of the claimant captures his characteristic tension between distance and identification. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is a prime example of this impulse; the chapter suggests that it also harks back to the claimant’s origins in Yankee drama, as it is structured like a trip play.

Amelia’s Bloomers

This chapter draws on the discussions in chapter 4 (illegitimacy, links with British editors, Julia Griffiths’s role), to read the reprinting of Bleak House in Frederick Douglass’ Paper. This brings out the novel’s proximity to claimant themes, and it ties the reprinting to dialogues with other periodicals, particularly Dickens’s Household Words. It suggests how Bleak House might read differently in Douglass’s paper, linking crossing sweepers with race, but sitting uncomfortably with its radical readership, particularly in matters of women’s rights and reform. It examines J. R. Johnson’s Uncle William’s Pulpit, an homage to Dickens published by Douglass.