Genius Fan

Let me direct you to a book illustration that transports me back in time to the Eighteenth century in a way few others do. Go to Bernard Bailyn’s 1986 book Voyagers to the West: Emigration from Britain to America on the Eve of the Revolution, find p.352, flip four pages further on in this un-numbered section of sketches, past full length portraits of runaway servants John Cass, John Watts, Catharine Moserin and Jan Peterson, until you reach the centre spread. The scene shows the deck of a ship, anchored off the American coast, and the sale of “…indentured servants and convicts – wary and sickly from two or three months aboard small, pitching, overcrowded vessels, many of them despondent and in rags… They are lined up on the deck for inspection and are being interrogated by potential purchasers.” I can hear everything, smell everything and feel everything, thanks to illustrator Richard Schlecht.

In his preface Bailyn described the “engrossing” work researching migrants in an emigration register at the Public Record Office in London, listing every person officially known to have left Britain for America from December 1773 to March 1776. “I wanted to trace every one of them, find out everything about them, probe their origins, the great transition in their lives, and their ultimate destinies.” Together, Bailyn and Shlecht have succeeded in portraying real scenes and some emotion running through this work on emigration. (Bailyn won a Pulitzer Prize for this work.) And it was a pleasure to read US historian Richard Dunn’s 1990 review of the work, in which he revealed the enthusiasm of other reviewers (eg. “…an enthralling book, a work which the reader must enter totally and live within,” and “A work of great imaginative power and panoramic sweep.”) I’m a non-academic fan of the Eighteenth century and I tell you this book is brilliant.

Bernard Bailyn: 9 Sep 1922 – 7 Aug 2020

Notes
Bernard Bailyn won his second Pulitzer Prize in 1987, for Voyagers to the West.
Voyagers to the West: Emigration from Britain to America on the Eve of the Revolution, Bernard Bailyn (1986)
Review, by Richard S Dunn, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography Vol. 114, No. 1 (Jan., 1990)