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"John Bartram was the pre-eminent figure in eighteenth-century American botany, appointed botanist by royal appointment to George III in 1765. ‘John Bertram’ is the figure who inhabits the pages of letter eleven of Hector de Crèvecœur’s Letters from an American Farmer. What is happening in the tantalizing alteration of the single vowel? Although it is unlikely to reveal repressed memories of colonial violence, as the ‘Bedloe – Oldeb – Bedlo’ configuration does in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’, I would argue that far from being mere ‘typographical error’, it self-consciously highlights the move from biographical mimesis into the precincts of fiction. In so doing, it advertises a traditional Quaker problem: the imperfect transmission of the self and its spiritual ideas through the debased language of man." |
