Aguecheek

Republished as My Unknown Chum

The anonymous, relentlessly first-person author is a Bostonian who lived and traveled from early to mid-nineteenth century.  He’s so conservative he’s a monarchist.

I will mostly have complaints about the author’s reactionary political principles, so I will state now that the book, despite the fact that it has no plot, little action, and only occasional characters, is quite entertainingly written.  Mostly on foreign travel, I would love to compare the description of the cities of Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century with a visit to them today.  Also, some glimpses of U.S. life given in the essays show the longstandingness of our culture and problems— “the legislative power is enthroned, not in the Senate, nor in the House of Representatitives, but in the Lobby,” he wrote in the last essay.

The book was published as My Unknown Chum with the subtitle “Aguecheek,” which the foreward by Henry Garrity says is the original title, in 1919; the copyright, by the publisher, the Devin-Adair Company, is 1912; but in the foreward Garrity says the pet possession of a new friend he met in 1878 “was an old book long out of print— ‘Aguecheek.’”  In the text the author mentions that in 1856 he was at “a way station on the Worcester Railroad” (which could well have been my hometown of Natick).

Never in the book, which could not have been written too long before the Civil War, does the author mention the enslavement of blacks.  His last chapter, mind you, is on cant (insincere or hypocritical talk), including the cant of liberty by Americans.  Yet he doesn’t condemn slavery; he implies the superiority of “the thousand-years-old monarchies of Europe” over “our governmental experiment.”  If democracy, as opposed to dictatorship, had taken root in Europe then, we would probably have avoided a couple of world wars.

it comes out that Louis Napoleon III is a dictator who dissolved the elected parliament and imprisoned his political rivals for elections that culminated in his election to emperor-for-life.

a statesman may be rightly known by examining the character of his opponents.  And who are the opponents of Napoleon II.?  [. . .] radical demagogues, who delight to mislead the fickle multitude with the words “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,” on their lips, but the designs of anarchy and bloodshed in ther hearts.  Their ranks are swelled by [. . .] a large number of newspaper scribblers deprived of their occupation by Napoleon’s salutary laws against abuse of the liberty of the press, and lacking ambition to earn an honest livelihood.  [Page 159, emphasis added.]

European history is one of the huge gaps still in my knowledge of the past, but the dictionary says that Napoleon III’s reign did have prosperity but ended in disaster in 1870 (probably a decade after the book was written) as his military ambitions overreached military ability, first in Mexico and then against Germany.

He repeatedly eulogizes the dark ages, including the art thereof (pages 58 and 59); I might be more open to his more general challenge of conventional wisdom if I didn’t happen to dislike pre-Renaissance European art.

It isn’t much of a surprise to find the author sympathetic to the Tory side of the American Revolution.

One comparison is certainly sharp.  It comes when he is more or less defending the Crusades, and could be put to easier and better use condemning all sides of his comparison:

It was certainly as respectable an undertaking as any of the crusades of modern times,—as that of the Spaniards in America, the English in India, or the United States in Mexico,—with this exception, that it was not so profitable.  I am afraid that some of our modern satirists are lacking in the spirit of their profession, and allow themselves to be made the mouthpieces of that world wisdom which it is their office to rebuke.  [He’s referring to what one could call the profit motive with that last sentence.  Page 186.]

Place to visit in Boston: “the old building at the corner of Washington and Schoool Streets was built in 1713, and is therefore older by seventeen years than the Old South Church.”  (Page 238.)  “In the fullness of time, a tall, handsome stone or iron building will rise on that revered site, and we lovers of the past shall try to invest it with something of the unpretending dignity and genial associations of the present venerable pile, which will then be cherished amoung our most precious memories.”  (Page 247.)  I hope he is as wrong with this prediction as he was about European monarchy standing the test of time.

My Unknown Chum (“Aguecheek)”.  (Circa 1860.)  Devin-Adair Company, 1912.

This book is in the Maurice Institute Library collection.

Book read 2002 December to 2003 January.

Review written from 2003 January 14th to 15th.