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Reviews of Books
| Gilbert Imlay: Citizen of the World. By Wil Verhoeven. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008. 313 pages. $99.00 (cloth).
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Reviewed by Wayne Bodle, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
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Gilbert Imlay was, literary critic E. F. Wyatt wrote on the eve of the Great Depression, "a man of enlightenment beyond his age." That ambiguous tribute was the best thing Wyatt could say about Imlay in a cascade of descriptors that included "unscrupulous," "a dodger of debts," and "a greedy and treacherous land booster." Wil Verhoeven acknowledges that "Imlay was all of these [things] and more" (1). That Verhoeven's tenacious effort to recover Imlay's mostly obscure but briefly incandescent life—while separating it from its intersection with that of Mary Wollstonecraft, which gave Imlay his fifteen minutes of American fame—coincides with a market failure that some economists are comparing with the Depression is relevant and ironic. Imlay's immersion in a frontier land rush after the American Revolution was both a training ground and a point of entrée to the more complex currents of profiteering and fraud swirling around in revolutionary France. Where Wollstonecraft discerned in Imlay's florid visage "tender looks [that give] lustre to your eye," the real animating spirit lying beneath was probably more a perpetual and barely contained "irrational exuberance" than amour.1 Ultimately, Verhoeven provides a well-documented and reasonably nuanced interpretation of Imlay's character and experience. |
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Even with gaps in the chronological record of Imlay's peripatetic life and a few rough-edged transitions, this book will enlighten readers. Verhoeven, a professor of American Studies in the Netherlands, is as adept an archival researcher as he is a practitioner of cultural analysis. With a keen eye for detail, he paints Imlay as a native of proprietary New Jersey who practiced "reverse transatlantic emigration" (5) before dying on the Channel Island (Jersey) that gave the American colony its curious Latinate name; as a clueless provincial adventurer who skunked the cunning Daniel Boone on a Kentucky land deal; as a committed libertarian who cruelly invested in an Atlantic slaving voyage; and as an unschooled rustic who published successively a best-selling geographic guide to the American frontier and a widely read "Jacobin" novel. |
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It would be unfair to call this work less a biography than a book of essays, but Imlay's fractured life compels Verhoeven to adapt different scholarly tools to its various parts. The first chapter is an exercise in genealogy and cultural geography. The Imlays were part of a wave of seventeenth-century Scottish migrants to coastal New Jersey who leavened the Dutch cultural character of the Hudson River plateau and the English Quaker cast of the Delaware Valley. By the time Imlay was born in 1754, his father, Peter, was engaging in modest land speculations. In 1772 Peter married the widowed daughter-in-law of a member of the colony's provincial council, but Gilbert enjoyed few stabilizing advantages from such upward mobility. He grew up in a colony that was buffeted in the 1750s by the Seven Years' War, then shattered socially and politically when it became the cockpit of the American Revolution. Gilbert Imlay's closest relatives mostly sided with the rebels. He served briefly in the Continental army as a paymaster, undoubtedly learning about "paper" economies. As the active campaign moved south in 1778–79, Verhoeven concludes, Imlay was "drawn into the maelstrom of wartime racketeering and rogue trading" (30) left in its wake. |
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