George Alsop

George Alsop (born probably June 19, 1636 in Westminster ; died probably around 1673 ) was an English writer who spent four years as a debt servant in the North American colony of Maryland . His work A Character of the Province of Maryland , published in 1666, is an important testimony to American colonial society and one of the earliest comic works in American literature.

Life

Portrait of George Alsop in the first edition of A Character of the Province of Maryland (1666)

Little is known for certain about his life, so that the literary scholar JA Leo Lemay at times considered that Alsop could have been a fictional author, a kind of straw man who was invented on behalf of Lord Baltimore to promote the colony of Maryland. After evaluating church records, however, Lemay came to the conclusion that Alsop could probably be identified with a tailor's son named George Alsop, who was born on June 19, 1636 in Westminster. Under the portrait Alsop in the first edition of A Character of the Province of Maryland , published in 1666, his age is given as 28 years; the assignment is therefore problematic.

Alsop's work contains some references to his biography: He was an Anglican and in the Interregnum after the English Civil War a supporter of the royalists. Although he did not enjoy any academic training, he was probably able to speak both Latin and French and was well-read, as evidenced by references to the poetry of John Donne . In London he began an apprenticeship as a craftsman (handicraft) , but decided to emigrate to the American colony of Maryland out of disgust for Oliver Cromwell's Puritan regime . In December 1658 or January 1659 he landed in Maryland. In order to cover the cost of the crossing across the Atlantic, he leased his labor for four years to a certain Thomas Stockett on January 17, 1659. Stockett was also a royalist, quite wealthy, himself only emigrated to Maryland in 1658 and had acquired at least three tobacco plantations there within a short time. In a deed of sale from June 1661, Alsop vouched for the business as a witness. It is therefore believed that he served Stockett as a secretary and accountant. In 1661 Stockett was named captain of the Baltimore County Militia and one of two negotiators for relations with the Susquehanna Indians. One of Stockett's related tasks was to issue passports to the Indians if they wanted to move on "English" soil; therefore it is likely that Alsop came into frequent contact with Indians.

Probably during his indenture (debt bondage), which ended on December 11, 1662 at the latest, Alsop became seriously ill and returned to England around 1663/64, where the Puritan rule had ended and the monarchy was restored. He had apparently settled in London and wrote in the plague year 1665 his book A Character of the Province of Maryland , which in 1666 appeared in print.

After returning to England, Alsop was in the service of various Anglican clergy and was finally rector of Chipping Ongar , a hamlet in Essex , in 1670 . This year his name also appears in connection with an episode that occurred in the summer of 1670: the Bishop of London, Humphrey Henchman, had a pastor march into a Quaker prayer house under the protection of an armed guard every Sunday for weeks. to celebrate a mass there according to the Anglican rite. On at least one of these Sundays, this task fell to Alsop. Despite the presence of the Guard, the Quakers attacked him physically. He was injured in his knees and chest and stripped of his robe, but was ultimately able to escape. On May 7, 1673, Alsop was replaced as rector by Chipping Ongar; it is believed that he died around this time.

Two other writings have survived from the restoration period , the author of which is George Alsop, but there is disagreement among researchers as to whether they can be attributed to the author of Character of the Province of Maryland or a namesake or even two different other individuals of that name . On the one hand, it is a copy of a sermon given on November 24, 1678, as the author Leo Lemay excludes the Maryland Alsop, since the preacher has an MA in the title. The other pamphlet in question is a sixty-eight-page pamphlet entitled An Orthodox Plea , the author of which Lemay believes to be George Alsop, who entered church service as early as 1645, is recorded in the register of Cambridge University in 1647/48, and possibly also with the author is identical to the aforementioned sermon. According to a more recent assessment by Simon Dixon, however, it is at least due to stylistic similarities, but also based on thematic considerations, that the author of An Orthodox Plea is identical to that of Character of the Province of Maryland . An Orthodox Plea is a polemic against non-conformist sects - the Quakers are not named by name, but are primarily meant - and a defense of the Anglican Church, its constitution, doctrine and liturgy. Alsop particularly emphasizes the importance of consecrated churches as places of worship and thus opposes the practice of the Quakers of using secular spaces such as private houses for devotion. The building of a church therefore appears as a physical manifestation of God on earth, as an actual house of God .

plant

Maryland Colony Map from A Character of the Province of Maryland (1666)

Alsop wrote his pamphlet A Character of the Province of Maryland only after returning to England. It is one of the most comprehensive contemporary descriptions of the English colonies of southern New England. Strictly speaking, the work can be assigned to English literature, but has been and is primarily studied in American literature and history. For historians, his report is a valuable, if undoubtedly nicely colored, source on the economic and social history of the colonial era. In literary histories, Alsop's work is often counted among the earliest comic works in American literature , alongside Nathaniel Ward's The Simple Cobbler of Agawam (1647) and Ebenezer Cook's The Sot-Weed Factor (1708) .

The font is to be assigned to the intention of the promotion literature , so the "advertising literature" with which the English should be convinced of the attractiveness of emigrating to the American colonies. Possibly the script was written on behalf of Lord Baltimore, who, as the owner of Maryland, had an interest in people willing to emigrate to choose his colony and not Virginia or New England.

Alsop's pamphlet stands out from the large number of such writings because of its liveliness and stylistic peculiarity. In terms of form and content, it is an extremely versatile font that combines prose passages, poetry and letters, in the words of Moses Coit Tyler a "heterogeneous mixture of fact and fiction, of description and speculation, of wild joke and bare nonsense" . Alsop's style is shaped by the mannered baroque prose of the time, but also often breaks through its conventions in a highly idiosyncratic manner, which may be attributed to Alsop's pronounced half-education. He indulges in puns, paradoxes, metaphors rolled out into the ridiculous, alternating between stilted poetic diction and crude nonsense; References to classical mythology can be found alongside daring allusions to the London demi-world.

The introduction begins with a dedication to Lord Baltimore, another dedication to the brave merchants of the colony of Maryland and the captains of the ships who dare to make the crossing there. This is followed by an address to the reader (Preface to the Reader) and a humorous poem by the author to his work, apostrophized as a child, whom he is now releasing into the world where there is a risk of being panned by the critics:

Farewell, poor brat! thou in a monstrous world,	Farewell, you poor brat, the one in the world
In swaddling clothes, thus up and down art hurled;	on your own in wet diapers!
There to receive what destiny doth contrive,	Now it has to show whether you are going under
Either to perish or be saved alive.	or maybe survive alive.
Good Fate protect thee from a critic's power;	May God spare your delicate throat
For If he comes, thou'rt gone in half an hour,	from critics and bad reviews.

This is followed by an engraving with a portrait of Alsop, including a poem dedicated to him by an unspecified HW , another poem by Will. Barber and a third (To my Friend Mr. George Alsop, on his Character of MARY-LAND.) From the pen of a certain William Bogherst , who is probably the pharmacist William Boghurst , who died in the plague year 1665 through his healing skills Fame had come.

The first of the six chapters is a catalog-like representation of the geography, flora and fauna of Maryland, as found in many promotion tracts . Alsop tries repeatedly to make analogies with the biblical Garden of Eden ; his statement that the natural treasures of the colony are a symbol of an "Adamite or primitive situation" is an early evidence of the "Adam's motif", which the literary scholar RWB Lewis described as a defining motif of American literary history. In the second chapter, Alsop describes the inhabitants and the customs and laws of the colonists. Here, too, he praises Maryland in the highest tones: the settlers are so righteous that the lawyers and judges hardly have work and prisons are dispensable, and the children are more polite than in England. Protestants and Catholics live peacefully and without quarrels side by side, there are no radical sectarians apart from a few Quakers. The third chapter deals with the legal conditions of debt bondage and the living conditions of servants. Even this institution, which in reality often borders on slavery, knows how to defend eloquently and in particular brings up his own experiences as a debt servant. He urged trained but impoverished English to move to America, as they could prosper there in a short time after their contract expired. He combines this request with a broad side on the critics of the American colonies. In the fourth chapter he then describes the flourishing trade in and among the American colonies, in particular the importance of tobacco growing as the most important industry in Maryland. The fifth chapter (A small Treatise on the Wild and Naked Indians (or Susquehanokes) of Mary-Land, their Customs, Manners, Absurdities, & Religion) is a description of the Susquehanna Indians. Alsop describes it very benevolently and thinks of it repeatedly with adjectives like “noble” and “heroic”, but also describes with great pleasure the alleged cruelty of the Indians, who enjoyed cannibalism and sacrificed children to the devil. The sixth and final chapter contains letters which Alsop wrote to his friends and relatives in England during his time in Maryland and which, as non-fictional "original documents", are intended to prove all the more clearly how pleasant life on the other side of the Atlantic is.

literature

Editions of A Character of the Province of Maryland

• A Character of the Province of Mary-Land, wherein is Described in four distinct Parts, (Viz.) I The Scituation, and plenty of the Province. II The Laws, Customs, and natural Demeanor of the Inhabitant. III The worst and best Usage of a Mary-Land Servant, opened in view. IV The Traffique and Vendable Commodities of the Countrey. Also a small Treatise on the wilde and naked Indians (or Susquehanokes) of Mary-Land, their Customs, Manners, Absurdities, & Religion. Together with a Collection of Historical Letters. London 1666.
• John Gilmary Shea (Ed.): A Character of the Province of Maryland . William Gowens, New York 1869.
• Newton D. Mereness (Ed.): A Character of the Province of Maryland . The Burrows Brothers Company, Cleveland 1902.
• Clayton Colman Hall (Ed.): Narratives of Early Maryland, 1633–1684 . Charles Scribner's Sons: New York 1910.
• Alsop's Maryland: A Character of the Province of Maryland . Heritage Books 2001. ISBN 0788419714

Secondary literature

• Simon Dixon: The Priest, The Quakers and the Second Conventicle Act: the Battle for Gracechurch Street Meeting House, 1670 In: Sarah Hamilton, Andrew Spicer (eds.): Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe . Ashgate: Aldershot 2005.
• Jim Egan: To Bring Mary-land into England: English Identities in American Colonial Writing. In: Carla Mulford, David S. Shields (eds.): Finding Colonial Americas: Essays Honoring JA Leo Lemay. University of Delaware Press: Newark 2001.
• In E. Fields: George Alsop's Indentured Servant in A Character of the Province of Maryland . Maryland Historical Magazine 85, 1990. pp. 221-35.
• Harry Hanson Kunesch, Jr: George Alsop's 'A Character of the Province of Maryland': A Critical Edition. Unpublished dissertation, Pennsylvania State University 1970.
• JA Leo Lemay: Men of Letters in Colonial Maryland. University of Tennessee Press: Knoxville 1972.
• Ted-Larry Pebworth: The 'character' of George Alsop's 'Mary-Land'. In: Seventeenth-Century News 34, 1976. pp. 64-66.
• Moses Coit Tyler : A History of American Literature during the Colonial Time, 1607-1765 . GP Putnam's Sons, New York and London 1878.

swell

1. ↑ Lemay, p. 345
2. ↑ Lemay, p. 344
3. ↑ Lemay, p. 68
4. ↑ A Sermon Preached at Sea Before the Honorable Sir Robert Robinson, Knight, Principal Commander of His Majestie's Squadron of Ships, now Riding at Spitt-Head, November the 24th, 1678… By George Alsop, MA Chaplain to Sir Robert Robinson. London 1679.
5. ↑ Full title An Orthodox Plea for the Sanctuary of God, Common Service, White Robe of the House, Being writ for the good of all. London 1669.
6. ↑ Dixon, p. 310 ff.
7. ↑ a heterogeneous mixture of fact and fiction, of description and speculation, of wild fun and wild nonsense. Tyler, p. 66.
8. ↑ This author had in some way acquired a quantity of ill-assorted information, and also an extensive vocabulary, but was without sufficient education to make proper use of either. His style is therefore extravagant, inflated and grandiloquent. It is also coarse and vulgar, even for the seventeenth century. Hall, p. 337
9. ↑ Lemay, p. 53
10. ^ "Emblems or Hieroglyphics of our Adamitical or Primitive situations"

This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on February 24, 2007 .