| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century. By David A. Gerber. (New York: New York University Press, 2006. x, 422 pp. $55.00, ISBN 0-8147-3171-6.)

When Charlotte Erickson published Invisible Immigrants: The Adaptation of English and Scottish Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century America (1972), she created a new model and set a very high standard for the study of immigrant letters. So thorough and insightful is that classic work that one may wonder why there should be another book on letters written by nineteenth-century British immigrants in America. David A. Gerber shows us why in this excellent study. First of all, Gerber had access to letters that Erickson did not, and he returned to the unedited versions of Erickson's published letters to mine more information (for a total of seventy-one collections of letters). He also includes as his subjects some Scots-Irish along with the English and Scots. But more important, he asks different questions about the immigrants and migration in general. Instead of focusing on their social and economic backgrounds and adaptation, Gerber looks at them as individuals and explores how their letter writing shaped them, helped them adjust and preserve continuity in their lives, and enabled them to achieve self determination, dignity, and their "quest for meanings" (p. 262).

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