Cooper’s Europe and His Quarrel with America

Abstract Gleanings in Europe, the massive five-volume project completed in 1838 by James Fenimore Cooper, marks the most ambitious effort by an antebellum American author to scrutinize the new nation from a critical, transnational perspective. Cooper’s ostensible subject, the curiosities of western Europe, facilitates a comparative analysis of his own country and its emerging national character. Having contemplated early American experience in such narratives as The Spy, The Pioneers, Lionel Lincoln, and The Last of the Mohicans, Cooper went abroad in 1826 to ensure that his daughters learned foreign languages, to arrange European publishing agreements, to seek relief from physical ailments, and to acquire a cosmopolitan understanding of cultural differences. Through DeWitt Clinton and Henry Clay he secured a nominal appointment as U.S. consul to Lyon, France, to “avoid the appearance of going over to the enemy” as an expatriate.1 His only prior glimpse of Europe had come two decades earlier during a youthful tour of duty with the U.S. Navy. When he returned as a celebrated novelist, Cooper made the grand tour, studied the human scene, and socialized as a literary lion, meeting the great and near great, all the while drawing inferences about manners, beliefs, politics, and national traits in the countries he visited.