Afterword: ‘A tear to Nature’s tawny sons is due’: Alexander Wilson’s The Foresters and Romantic Period Uprootings

Summary

In 1804, Alexander Wilson set off with two companions to make a journey through what is now Pennsylvania and New York to visit Niagara Falls. The expedition is described in his extended 2,219-line loco-descriptive poem, The Foresters. It was not a strictly touristic excursion. His purpose was professional: to seek new species of birds to describe, draw and add to the inventory that would bring him renown as the ‘Father of American Ornithology’. Earlier that year, in June, Wilson had become a citizen of the recently established nation of the United States of America. He had emigrated to the young country from Scotland in 1794. In his native town of Paisley, Scotland, Wilson had been apprenticed as a weaver at the age of thirteen. However, like so many of the inhabitants of that region, he was also a poet. Upon the publication of his first volume in 1790, he abandoned his work as a weaver to become a peddler and chapman, wandering the Scottish countryside selling his wares and observing the Scottish landscape. Wilson is one of the few labouring-class poets of the era who dared publish work containing explicit political protest. Briefly imprisoned and fined for these works, he sought to evade further prosecution by emigrating to America. In America, Wilson reinvented himself, became a protégé of the founding American naturalist, William Bartram, and pursued his interests as a natural historian and editor, eventually publishing his nine-volume American Ornithology (1808–14).

Wilson's biography is exemplary of many other narratives of early American self-invention (or reinvention) popularised by near contemporaries like Benjamin Franklin. Such narratives continue to lure immigrants to the United States even today. However, just as with many of the works and artists explored by the preceding chapters in this collection, Wilson's life and art illustrate the complications and compromises of colonial mobility. Further demonstrating a point that is made in different ways, forms, times and places by the essays included in this volume, an analysis of Wilson's poem underscores the inter-sectionalities of environment, race, class and gender in the Romantic period. As the essays all suggest, by reading texts through these lenses we are able to call out larger ideological trends while emphasising the unique improvisations of individual artists within (and sometimes against) those trends.