James Lawrence Dusenbery's journal is more than just a chronicle of daily activities; it offers us a fascinating view into the literary life of an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina in the middle of the nineteenth century. Dusenbery labeled his text "Liber Carminum et Fragmentorum" (a book of verses and fragments), and devoted the first sixty-seven pages of it to copied-out poems and excerpts from longer verse works from some of the most well-known authors of the early nineteenth century. In the following section of the journal—which chronicles his senior year at the University—he frequently mentions the books he is reading for school, as well as the books he is reading in his spare time. Looking at Dusenbery's reading material helps us understand literary culture in the South in the middle of the nineteenth century, and also sheds light on the ideas that shaped his character.

At first glance, one of the most striking aspects of Dusenbery's reading list for a modern American reader is the lack of what we usually consider the "classic" American works of literature. In fact, many of those works were published after Dusenbery graduated from the University. In 1841 (Dusenbery's senior year), Melville was still on the whaling voyage that would later inspire Moby Dick (1851), and Nathaniel Hawthorne had only just produced his first short story collection, Twice-Told Tales. It is more likely that Dusenbery would have been familiar with two other famous authors of early American literature: James Fenimore Cooper and Edgar Allan Poe, both of whom had published significant works by 1841. However, if Dusenbery read them, he did not record that fact. His surviving library circulation records show that he borrowed some early American fiction, like George Balcombe by Beverley Tucker and Horse-Shoe Robinson by John Pendleton Kennedy. [1] However, Dusenbery seemed to prefer the fiction and poetry of British authors like Sir Walter Scott—a preference that reflects the American literary climate in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The period of American literature following the Revolutionary War was plagued with cultural anxiety as authors made an effort to build a national literature separate from and equal to the literary productions of Britain. This anxiety is apparent in Dusenbery's junior year essay topic, assigned to him by the professor of rhetoric, William Mercer Green: "Can the highest order of poetic excellence be attained in this country?" Dusenbery begins his essay with the brief statement "I think so." He goes on to argue that America's commitment to public education combined with its great natural beauty produced the conditions necessary for poetic genius to flourish. However, he is hesitant to credit the American authors he names (Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Joel Barlow, William Cullen Bryant, Fitz-Greene Halleck, and Nathaniel Parker Willis) with the highest level of poetic excellence. In fact, though he writes of great American poets, his own quotations and literary allusions in the essay are drawn from the Bible and the poem "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by British author Thomas Gray.

As Dusenbery's essay shows us, the American literary culture of the 1840s was still very much British, but this was due as much to economic reasons as the reasons of quality cited by Dusenbery. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, there was no international copyright law, which meant that publishers could freely reprint contemporary British works and keep the profits. Of course, British authors protested this loss of revenue. The protestors included some of Dusenbery's favorite authors, among them Charles Dickens who spoke passionately during his 1842 American tour against the pirating (as he saw it) of his work (McGill 76-77). Thomas Moore, another author frequently quoted by Dusenbery, was the first signer of a petition to the United States Congress in 1837 in which British authors requested the American rights to their books. That petition invoked another of Dusenbery's favorite authors, Sir Walter Scott (who had died in 1832), arguing that "while the works of this author, dear alike to your country and to ours, were read from Maine to Georgia, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, he received no remuneration from the American public for his labors; that an equitable remuneration might have saved his life, and would, at least, have relieved its closing years from the burden of debts and destructive toils." [2] In addition to Moore's signature, the petition contains the signatures of poets Thomas Campbell and Samuel Rogers, and novelist G. P. R. James, all of whom are mentioned or quoted in Dusenbery's journal. Their concern about the lack of international copyright suggests that they were all quite popular authors in America, and shows that Dusenbery's consumption of British literature was not unusual for his time. In fact, of the fifty-four texts mentioned in Dusenbery's journal, only four can be definitively identified as American works.

Although we can use Dusenbery's journal to compile a list of prose and poetry that he read, we can only guess at the format in which he encountered those works. Not only were British texts cheaply reprinted by American publishers in book form, but excerpts from those works were frequently reprinted in the many newspapers and magazines that flourished during Dusenbery's early life. Anthologies and miscellanies were also popular formats which Dusenbery would have had access to at the University, if not during his earlier schooling. Much like anthologies today, eighteenth and nineteenth century anthologies were intended to collect and disseminate works that, according to the editor or publisher, were the most important for moral and educational improvement (Benedict 182-183). Publications like Elegant Extracts: or, Useful and Entertaining Pieces of Poetry, Selected for the Improvement of Young Persons by Vicesimus Knox brought together excerpts from "publically known" and "universally celebrated" poems, such as Milton's "L'Allegro," to be used by young scholars "either in recitation, transcription, the exercise of the memory, or in imitation (Knox vi-vii)." [3] Dusenbery's ability to quote snippets of poems (like "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" or "L'Allegro") in his school papers and in his private journal is most likely due to reading an anthology like the Elegant Extracts, rather than reading independent volumes of Gray's or Milton's works.

While at the University, Dusenbery had at least two ways to access books. One was through the University's library and school curriculum. Another was through the more extensive libraries maintained by the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies. Although the libraries could be a point of competition between the societies (many books found in one are duplicated in the other), student members were allowed to check out books from either society. In 1843, the year after Dusenbery graduated, the Dialectic Society library committee reported a total of "3478 plus" volumes with subjects including biography, natural history, poetry, politics and law, drama, geography, theology, and novels. Their collection included 27 periodicals, both English ones like Blackwood's and the Edinburgh Review and American ones like the North American Review and the Southern Review. [4] Judging from his journal and circulation records, Dusenbery preferred lighter works of poetry and fiction to weighty historical or scientific works. His serious reading was mostly associated with his classes, although there were exceptions, such as Dante's Divina Commedia, which he describes in his journal as "a theological poem & entirely too deep for my comprehension" (August 14, 1841).

Music is another avenue through which Dusenbery may have encountered his favorite works. In his entry for January 8^th, 1842, Dusenbery mentions that "Miss Elizabeth [Elizabeth Allen Holt] played 'come to the sunset' for me on the piano." The song was most likely "Come to the Sunset Tree," a musical version of Felicia Hemans's poem "Tyrolese Evening Hymn." Indeed, many of the poems found in Dusenbery's journal either originated as songs, or were later set to music. Based on this example, it is possible that at least some of the poems that Dusenbery copied into the beginning of his journal were familiar to him as songs rather than stand-alone texts. [5]

Dusenbery references fifty-four individual works in his journal. Three of those works (Abercrombie's Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers , Euripides' Medea , and Kent's Commentaries on American Law ) are books he studied for classes. The rest are works he either quotes from or mentions reading. Most authors appear only once or twice in the journal, but there are three exceptions to that rule: Felicia Hemans, Sir Walter Scott, and Thomas Moore. Because of their frequent appearance in the journal, it seems safe to say that these were three of Dusenbery's favorite authors during his undergraduate years.

Felicia Dorothea Browne Hemans (1793–1835) is one of the authors who appears most frequently in Dusenbery's journal (he copied out eight of her poems, and mentions another), and the only female author to appear by name. Hemans was a British poet who never set foot in America. Nevertheless, as Susan Wolfson writes, "In the United States and Britain, she was one of the best-selling poets of her century" (Wolfson xiii). Hemans's poetry ranged from short lyrics on domestic or religious subjects to long works on historical or political events, but the poems copied out by Dusenbery into his journal do not reflect this variety: they are all tales of heroism, chivalry, and death. Among these poems is one of Hemans's most famous works: "Casabianca." This poem, otherwise known as "The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck," tells the tragic story of a boy sailor during the Napoleonic Wars who burned to death because he would not desert his post without the permission of his father, who was lying dead below the deck. As Hemans scholar Nanora Sweet writes, "Casabianca" was "so widely known in Britain and its colonies and Anglophone America as to be obligatory learning for schoolchildren." We cannot know whether Dusenbery was assigned to memorize and recite this poem as a school task or if he came to it on his own. We do know that Dusenbery transcribed seven other poems by Hemans into his journal, all dealing with conflict, heroism, and death in dramatic historic settings ranging from Scotland to Greece.

Dusenbery's preference for chivalric historical tales also led him to the works of Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), perhaps the most famous and most prolific author of the British Romantic period. Scott is best-known for his poetry and novels set in Scotland, which brought to life the highlands and lowlands of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. We know from the circulation records of the Dialectic Society library that Dusenbery checked out Scott's Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, and the collections Waverly Novels and Tales of My Landlord. He was also apparently fond of Scott's poetry because he includes in his journal Scott's poem "Lochinvar" and excerpts from his long work Lady of the Lake, both of which describe two (or more) men battling for the love of a fair lady. While we do not know how much Dusenbery was influenced by the martial heroism portrayed in the poems of Hemans, we do know that Scott's portrayal of the chivalric relationship between men and women influenced Dusenbery's perception of himself and his attitudes towards the women who shared his social class. In the September 12^th entry of his journal, which describes his reception of the news that his sister, Laura, and her friend were accused of cheating at school, Dusenbery casts the girls as "fair & injured damosels" and himself as "the good & gallant knight, Sir James" who "would shortly appear & do his devoir in their behalf." Dusenbery further states that if any accuser is brave enough "he will meet him in the lists, in sight of all the chivalry & fair ladies of the land, hurl the false-hood in his teeth & engage with him in deadly combat; till one or both shall fall" (September 12, 1841). Although used for a comic effect in this entry, Dusenbery's fascination with the world of medieval chivalry fueled by his reading of Scott was symptomatic of a larger Southern obsession with the idealized medievalism portrayed in Scott's works. This obsession emerged in concrete events, such as tournaments where "knights" would compete for favors to give their ladies, and in more abstract analogies that equated Southern plantations with feudal manors and slaves with medieval serfs (Osterweis 16-17, 98-99). Various authors mocked the South's medieval fixation throughout the nineteenth century, notably John Pendleton Kennedy in his 1832 fiction of plantation life Swallow Barn and Charles Chesnutt in his end-of-the-century novel of the color line, The House Behind the Cedars. The most scathing response to the effect Scott had on the South came from Mark Twain in his 1883 book Life on the Mississippi, who blamed the Civil War in part on the feudal ideology popularized through Scott's tales. [6] Twain wrote of the South:

There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization and so you have practical, common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive work, mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried. But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner—or Southron, according to Sir Walter's starchier way of phrasing it—would be wholly modern, in place of modern and mediæval mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is (468-469).

Although Twain's accusations toward Sir Walter Scott are exaggerated for satirical effect, Dusenbery's preference for Scott and his adoption of chivalric attitudes—especially in his interactions with women of his own class—suggest the importance Scott's works had in shaping the identity and perceptions of young men in the South before the Civil War.

Thomas Moore, the third author whose work appears frequently in Dusenbery's journal (he is referenced eight times), is far less well-known in the twenty-first century than either Felicia Hemans or Sir Walter Scott. However, Moore's popularity in the early nineteenth century was equal to or greater than that of Hemans, Scott, or his now-famous friend Lord Byron (whom Dusenbery cites only twice). Born and raised in Ireland, Moore was best known for his ten volumes of Irish Melodies, collections of traditional Irish tunes arranged by various composers with lyrics written by Moore. Although Moore wrote the songs as patriotic and affectionate tributes to his homeland, they soon reached America, and according to Charles Hamm were "the most popular, widely sung, best-loved, and most durable songs in the English language of the entire nineteenth century" (Hamm 44). Some of the songs were martial in tone, like "The Minstrel Boy." However, Moore's reputation rested as much upon his romantic poetry as it did upon his patriotic lyrics, and it is his romantic side that Dusenbery seems to have favored. If the works of Hemans and Scott show Dusenbery's interest in military heroism, history, and chivalry, Moore's poetry suggests the power that love and lust had over Dusenbery's imagination during his youth.

In the first entry of his senior year journal, Dusenbery writes that "I have never yet seen a woman who resembles my ideal model of female perfection" (July 17, 1841). Although Dusenbery never describes his ideal of female perfection in detail, he does write about his interactions with women of various social classes. The most intriguing woman he mentions is Mary. On July 31^st he writes that she is "a very pretty little country girl, whom I met with in my rambles last vacation & though I do not really love her, yet there's none I would rather be kissing than Mary." His equivocal feelings towards Mary fall short of the chivalric attitude he adopts towards the young ladies within his regular social circle (like the Holt girls), yet he clearly accords her more respect than the prostitutes he visits throughout his senior year. In October he contemplates "committing the unpardonable sin against love & gallantry" (having sex with her) during his next visit, which he excuses by doubting her virtue ("if indeed she has any") and arguing that his "passions" are too strong to be resisted (October 24, 1841). This back-and-forth debate Dusenbery has with himself over the status of Mary is echoed in several of Moore's poems mentioned in the journal, which feature women who are respectable (not prostitutes), yet open to seduction. One such poem is "Fanny of Timmol: A Mail-Coach Adventure," which Dusenbery alludes to within his first mention of Mary:

Yet I swore not that I was in love with you. Fanny, —

Oh, no! for I felt it could never be true;

I but said—what I've said very often to many—

There's few I would rather be kissing than you.

(Moore 285)

The coy flirtation Moore describes in that poem, which blurs the line between refusal and consent, clearly resonated with Dusenbery as much as did the idealized chivalry in Scott's poetry.

Like much else in Dusenbery's life, what we know about his reading habits is fragmented and biased towards his early years. Nevertheless, we can learn from these fragments how Dusenbery's youthful attitudes about masculine behavior, feminine perfection, and the relationships between the sexes were shaped by, and articulated through, the novels and poems that he read. In this section of this site, we have provided links to the full texts of the works Dusenbery mentions in his journal. Wherever possible, we have linked to the same edition that Dusenbery would have had access to at school, as nearly as we can tell from the University and debating society library catalogs. We encourage you to explore the links and experience for yourself the books that shaped Dusenbery's world.