Robert Beverley

Robert Beverley (born between 1673 and 1678 in Middlesex County , Virginia , died on 26. August 1726 in Westover , Virginia) was a planter and historian in the English colony Virginia.

Life and work

He was the son of the plantation owner Robert Beverley, Sr. and his second wife Mary. Little is known about his early years; apparently he was sent to England for schooling. In 1696, back in Virginia, he married Ursula Byrd, the sister of William Byrd I , one of the wealthiest landowners in the colony. From 1696 he was the clerk of the House of Burgesses , the House of Representatives of the Virginia Colony, and in 1699 was himself sent to this chamber of law as a member of the Jamestown settlement . After 1705 he lost political influence after intrigues against the royal governor Francis Nicholson .

In 1703 he went to London to appeal to the Privy Council on a legal matter. Perhaps on the crossing to England he began to work on a work on the history of Virginia. The result appeared anonymously in 1705 (or allegedly written by "an Indian" ( by an Indian )) under the title The History and Present State of Virginia in London. In the second, heavily revised English edition of 1722, he stated in the foreword that he had tackled his work to correct the numerous errors in the manuscript of John Oldmixon's British Colonies in America (published 1708) and to address the numerous prejudices circulating in England about the American colonies to refute. The first of the four “books” or better chapter of the history describes the settlement history of Virginia from the “lost colony” on Roanoke Island to the founding of Jamestown by John Smith , whose flirtation with the chief's daughter Pocahontas up to the Bacon's rebellion . The second book deals with Virginia's natural resources, the third with the Indians, and the fourth with the "current state" of the colony.

Beverley's work was particularly popular in France; a first translation appeared in 1707, three further French editions followed until 1718. In the USA the work was almost forgotten and only moved back into the focus of historians and literary scholars in 1947 with a new edition arranged by LB Wright. Today, along with the History of the Dividing Line Run in the year 1728 by his brother-in-law William Byrd II, it is considered the most important work of American colonial historiography outside of New England . The specifically American qualities of history have been pointed out on various occasions , such as the fact that Beverley compares and rejects English and French historiography in the preface; He described his style model as oriented towards the Indian way of thinking. Beverley also sharply criticized the English colonial administration.

literature

History editions

• The History and Present State of Virginia. London 1705.
• Histoire de la Virginie . Thomas Lombrail, Amsterdam 1707.
• LB Wright (Ed.): The History and Present State of Virginia. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1947.

Secondary literature

• Robert D. Arner: The Quest for Freedom: Style and "Meaning" in Robert Beverley's "History and Present State of Virginia". In: Southern Literary Journal 8: 2, 1976.
• Leo Marx: The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Oxford University Press, New York 1967.
• Judy Small: Robert Beverley and the New World Garden. In: American Literature 55, 1983.