Robert Lawson-Peebles, who contributed the chapter “From British Outpost to American Metropolis” to the Cambridge Companion, taught at Oxford, Princeton, and Aberdeen, before moving to Exeter University, where he held the post of Senior Lecturer in English at the School of English. Bob is currently Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow and Honorary University Fellow at Exeter. He holds a D.Phil. from Oxford University and received the bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Sussex University.
Bob’s scholarship deals with transatlantic cultural relations from the Viking settlement to the present day. He is the author of Landscape and Written Expression in Revolutionary America: The World Turned Upside Downa (Cambridge UP, 1988, reprinted 2008); ; Modern American Landscapes (1995); and American Literature Before 1880 (Longman, 2003). He has also edited the volumes Views of American Landscapes (with Mike Gidley, Cambridge, 1989, reprinted 2008) and Approaches To The American Musical, which appeared from Exeter in 1996. Current work in progress includes a biography of Benjamin Franklin and a book on the impact of jazz in Britain.
Bob’s contribution to the Cambridge Companion uses gastronomical motifs as a prism through which to view British American writing about New York. “The epic that is New York was founded in conquest,” he writes, and is “then transformed into the capacious corporeality that would be celebrated by Whitman.” Here is an excerpt from Bob’s discussion of Travels in North America, which was published in 1829 by Basil Hall, a retired Royal Navy officer:
Basil Hall was no ordinary seaman. He had traveled extensively in Europe and further abroad, sailed round the Cape of Good Hope to the East Indies and to China, and round Cape Horn to Northern Mexico. He had made excellent use of his experiences, undertaking scientific experiments and publishing the journals of his travels. He had already, at the age of twenty-seven, been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. But the opening hyperbole, followed by a delay of two pages, suggests that the “glorious breakfast” presented a challenge even to Hall’s sophisticated analytical powers. He responded by shaping his description into two related if roughhewn parts. Hall begins with the language of excess, then tries and fails to contain it with the language of politeness. …
A civilized nation is characterized by a civilized dining room. Basil Hall’s description of the dining room at the American Hotel therefore does more than simply reflect his pleasure on landing after twenty-eight days in ship’s quarters. His brief but detailed account of the environment emphasizes its comfort and refinement – and his own comforting, refined ability to describe it. …
Basil Hall’s breakfast … shows that New York could offer its own challenges to politeness. Hall’s description of his food is in a different register from his description of the dining room. Although the language of politeness made room for sensuality, it was held in check by refinement. But refinement is unable to restrain the language of excess. “A great steaming, juicy beefsteak” are the words of a hungry sailor, home from the sea, rather than those of a second son of a baronet and Fellow of the Royal Society. After this lubricious outburst, the profusion of the food challenges Hall’s repertoire of images, and pushes him beyond pleasure, further into a hedonism confirmed by the quotation from John Donne’s “Elegy XIX: To his Mistress Going to Bed.” For Donne, “Mahomet’s paradise” was merely a way-stage in disrobing en route to sexual afflux, celebrated by the cry “O my America, my new found land.” Hall reassigns Donne’s reference to the Koran from the sexual to the gustatory organ and – naval discipline reasserting itself – does not overindulge it. Although Hall knows that the culinary is less carnal than concupiscence, he realizes that he has still exceeded the bounds of politeness. Protesting that he is no “gourmand, or epicure,” Hall declares that he has “made upon this occasion a most enormous breakfast,” and is too embarrassed to ask for more. So, with reluctance, he “rose at last with the hungry edge taken off, [if] not entirely blunted.”
Next: Martha Jane Nadell.
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