Transatlantic Republic of Letters
Historians have long understood that the English and French periodicals had a strong influence on colonial American letters. During this period, the variety of institutions used for transmitting ideas did not exist in America. Aside from the largely arbitrarily assembled booksellers' stocks, an occasional overseas correspondence, and the publisher's or printer's advertisements to be found in the back of the books, the only way colonial intellectuals could keep alive their philosophical interests was through the reporting in periodical literature.
Examples include Benjamin Franklin, who cultivated his perspicuous style in imitation of the Spectator. Jonathan Edwards's manuscript Catalogue of reading reveals that he not only knew the Spectator before 1720 but was so enamored of Richard Steele that he tried to get his hands on everything: the Guardian, the Englishman, the Reader, and more. At Harvard College in 1721 a weekly periodical entitled the Telltale was inaugurated by a group of students, including Ebenezer Pemberton, Charles Chauncy, and Isaac Greenwood. As the Telltale's subtitle - "Criticisms on the Conversation and Behaviours of Scholars to promote right reasoning and good manners" - made explicit, it was a direct imitation of the English genteel periodical.
One of the best examples of a transatlantic Republic of Letters began about 1690, when John Dunton launched a series of journalistic ventures, nearly all of them under the aegis of a forward-looking "club" called the Athenian Society, an English predecessor of Harvard's Telltale Club, Franklin's Junto, and other such associations dedicated to mental and moral improvement. The Athenian society took it as one of their particular goals to spread learning in the vernacular. One of the plans of this group in 1691 was the publication of translations from the Acta Eruditorum, the Journal des Sçavans,the Bibliothèque Universelle, and the Giornale de Letterati. The outcome was the formation of The Young Students Library, containing Extracts and Abridgements of the Most Valuable Books Printed in England and in the Foreign Journals from the year Sixty-Five to the Present Time. The Young Students Library, like the Universal Historical Bibliothèque of 1687, was made up almost entirely of translated pieces, in this case mostly from the Journal des Sçavans, Bayle's Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, and Le Clerc's and La Crose's Bibliothèque Universelle et Historique.
The Young Students Library of 1692 was exemplary of the kind of material to be found in later forms of the learned periodical in England. Expressly lamenting the absence in England of periodicals, the Young Students Library was designed to fill the need in America for periodical literature.
For Americans it served, according to David D.Hall, as:
| “ | An expansive vision of learnedness, articulated especially during the Revolutionary period, as a means of advancing 'liberty' and thereby fulfilling the promise of a republican America. It drew together political radicals and religious dissenters on both sides of the Atlantic, who drew from their shared struggles against a corrupted Parliament and the Church of England a common agenda of constitutional reform. | ” |
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