Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [28]
And there were those in the Bay Colony who counted themselves fortunate to be America-born, free of the taint of Old World strictures, who believed with a kind of reckless arrogance that America had not only purified but also enlarged and redeemed the human soul. The idea of England as a soiled and fallen world, as opposed to merely a savage one, was part of their catechism. They were proud of their backwardness; they mocked the dandies as they disembarked; they reveled in using and broadening their own American accent, which had already ironed out the multifarious wrinkles of British regionalism.
Hannah, though aware of both tendencies among her countrymen, found herself easily embarrassed by their expression. Nothing in colonial society had demonstrated its unalienable claim on her affection. Nothing in English society, or among recently arrived Englishmen, excited her contempt. The English, like her husband, seemed vastly more exciting and knowledgeable and appreciative than the men of Salem; on the other hand, their scrutiny extended to realms of social rank that seemed to her false measures of value.
And England itself, though it might be an exhausted force, as colonists liked to think, still compelled a fascinated study. Like all things fallen, it held a certain attraction. The moral superiority that grew out of the contest with savagery was but one category of excellence. There was wealth and trade and culture, history and the great common pulse of humanity, that surged from the streets of London. That, too, counted.
Always dutiful, she kept a diary (London Sketches by an Anonymous Colonial Daughter [University Presses of New England, 1967]) intended—or at least contrived—as epistles to a distant mother, for sharing with Susannah back in Salem. Three were published in Boston papers (heretofore unidentified as to authorship), with some twelve holograph pages having been preserved in the Colonial Archives Wing of the British Museum. They offer as vigorous an assessment of English life in the Dutch King William Ill’s years as any on record. She didn’t travel often into the city, saw no plays, had few friends. Her husband was often gone to sea. She was, in other words, an ideal correspondent, the perfect reporter. Seeing no one, going nowhere, doing nothing, she learned to cultivate her own garden.
There were those she had known in Salem who dreamed of a “return” to England, who viewed their years in the colony as a fiduciary sentencing preferable only to imprisonment, an abbreviated means of establishing property and a name for themselves uncontended by a thousand others immediately more qualified than they were. In her letters, she addressed those friends, calling them (in the manner of “Firsters”) Desponders.
Her letters are addresses from England to Expatriates and Nativists.
Consider my old friend, Dr. Aubrey. Thinking himself a superior Specimen of Training & Dedication, most especially to Colleagues (how he grinds his Teeth at the Thought, the Impudence of implied Equality!) trained in the Colonies, he deigns to serve in poxy Boston-town expecting no less than Knighthood for passing two winters apart from the subtle shadings of social Nuance held dear in his native Yorkshire.… For Colonial Indifference to protocol, which we might translate as perceiv’d Insults to his imperial Self, our medical Servant closes down his Office and grants Interviews to all and sundry, assuring that his Leavetaking shall be no less attended than his Arrival.
Unremark’d in our obedient and worshipful Press is the fact he had charged his Patients at three times the Tariff of Physicians trained in unsavoury local Colleges