Lionel Lincoln, or The Leaguer of Boston

Between THE PILOT and THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, James Fenimore Cooper issued his fifth novel, LIONEL LINCOLN (1825). Its deliberately evocative, antiquarian subtitle: THE LEAGUER OF BOSTON (leaguer means siege) locates this historical novel's period in time: April 1775 - March 1776. After 4,000 British troops were repulsed from Lexington and Concord during a search for colonialsts' weapon, the survivors fell back on Boston and the protecting guns of the Royal Navy. Month after month for nearly a year the rebel noose tightened. Despite a costly victory at Bunker Hill, the British, first under General Gage, then under General Howe, remained generally passive as the new Continental Army under George Washington cut off supplies and the Redcoats began to suffer hunger and smallpox. ***

Into this pre-revolutionary cauldron sails a 25 year old British major to join his regiment -- Lionel Lincoln, Oxford educated, member of Parliament. He will end his life an Earl in ancestral England. But he had been born in Boston to a cadet branch of a noble English family and will view both the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord and the ensuing siege of Boston from competing English and American viewpoints. With the rest of the British land and naval forces, he is evacuated from Boston in March 1776. In the meanwhile Lionel Lincoln is given no important command by the generals but is told to spend his time making useful friends for the Crown among the colonials: both loyalists and rebels. ***

Major Lincoln reconnects with Mrs. Priscilla Lechmere, the young officer's great-aunt, resident in Boston, and almost immediately falls in love with her beautiful teen age granddaughter Cecil Dynevor. A close military friend of Lionel's from boyhood and days at Oxford, Captain Peter Polwarth, is already in love with Agnes Danforth, a great-niece of Mrs Lechmere living under her roof. Polwarth is a dedicated epicure and fills the tale with humor relating to keeping his ample belly well supplied with first-rate food. By novel's end he has lost a leg in combat and hass proposed marriage 50 times to ardent rebel, Agnes Danforth. ***

The novel soon gains a distinctly Gothic feeling with the introduction of an apparently ancient man (he turns out to be 30 years younger than he makes out) known simply as Ralph with whom Lionel Lincoln had become acquainted on the voyage from England to Boston. Ralph is passionately against British tyranny and for colonial rights. Both Lionel and Ralph are in the frequent company of Job Pray, a childlike man of 27 whose mind youthful illness had greatly weakened. Lionel Lincoln shows himself to be rashly impulsive and to fear that a hereditary tendency toward madness (his baronet father languishes in an insane asylum in England) may someday touch even himself. ***

This is a true historical novel on the model of Sir Walter Scott's trend-setting WAVERLEY: people large and small are caught up in a turning point in history as the process begins of expelling Britain from 13 of its North American colonies. A commercial flop, LIONEL LINCOLN is nonetheless appreciated as opening an important new creative stage in the author's growth -- being the fifth of 32 novels Cooper wrote. The author was experimenting, evolving. He did serious on the ground inspection of Boston and imagined his characters back into an earlier period. The streets and buildings themselves of that city are made important players in the siege and the romances. ***

Cooper also created memorable scenes of battle, bombardments, siege, hunger and illness. Why and how men change their political allegiances is the overriding theme. The tacked on Gothic dimension of LIONEL LINCOLN is generally held to have been a mistake. Lincoln and his relatives and a couple of Boston acquaintances are slowly revealed to have previously unknown family ties among themselves. Working out those ties moves several characters to do strange things. Madness, a chilling wedding scene, graveyards, omens, frightening shadows cast on a chapel ceiling: all this and more is pure Gothic fiction. But Gothic writing was still in its hey day, wildly demanded by readers, and in the early 1820s Cooper desperately needed to make money. ***

Mighty Britain and its quarrels with Scotland, Ireland and North America were themes being explored in contemporary literature by Walter Scott, Fenimore Cooper and others. Cooper was busily creating America's first serious fiction to find readers world wide. LIONEL LINCOLN, for all its faults, is a fascinating read and has many aspects of a good detective yarn. -OOO-