Ohio History Journal

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HOWELLS' "BLISTERING AND CAUTERIZING"

HOWELLS' "BLISTERING AND CAUTERIZING"

 

by Louis J. BUDD

Assistant Professor of English, Duke University

 

As a sexagenarian describing his early manhood, William Dean

Howells reminisced, "If there was any one who had his being more

wholly in literature than I had in 1860, I am sure I should not have

known where to find him."1 Such testimony cannot be ignored. Yet

it has encouraged our accepting too hastily the trite picture of still

another introverted lad who quietly matured his literary urgings.

Although we will best remember Howells as a novelist and essayist,

to understand him we must recall the citizen who tried always to

shoulder his part of the democratic burden. Although we cannot

controvert his word concerning his adolescent dreams, we can,

through the record preserved in Ohio newspapers, rediscover a youth

who sweated printer's ink and floundered in the main American

current. Howells' coming biographers will profit from reading his

early political commentary. They will enjoy it too.

In his own family, young Howells found several exemplars of

political enthusiasm. His paternal grandfather had felt abolitionist

enough to stand as an elector in 1844 on the Liberty party ticket.

His maternal uncles, the Dean brothers, had remained antislavery

Whigs despite threats of mobbing. His father, most active of all,

expended his life in partisan journalism and earned minor diplo-

matic posts during a busy career closely repeated by Will's brother,

Joseph. Briefly a member of Ohio's first abolition society,2 William

Cooper Howells had become a constitutional antislavery man; he

breathed an intransigent humanitarianism into the newspapers he

edited. Although a fervid Swedenborgian, for him political urg-

encies overrode theological problems, and the "question of salvation

was far below that of the annexation of Texas, or the ensuing war

against Mexico, in his regard."3 In time, he led his family to Ohio's

1 Literary Friends and Acquaintance (New York, 1902), 1.

2 Annetta C. Walsh, "Three Anti-Slavery Newspapers," Ohio State Archaeological

and Historical Quarterly, XXXI (1922), 172.

3 W. D. Howells, Years of My Youth (New York, 1916) 22.

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