Precaution - A Novel is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original edition of 1870. Hansebooks is editor of the literature on different topic areas such as research and science, travel and expeditions, cooking and nutrition, medicine, and other genres. As a publisher we focus on the preservation of historical literature. Many works of historical writers and scientists are available today as antiques only. Hansebooks newly publishes these books and contributes to the preservation of literature which has become rare ...
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Precaution - A Novel is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original edition of 1870. Hansebooks is editor of the literature on different topic areas such as research and science, travel and expeditions, cooking and nutrition, medicine, and other genres. As a publisher we focus on the preservation of historical literature. Many works of historical writers and scientists are available today as antiques only. Hansebooks newly publishes these books and contributes to the preservation of literature which has become rare and historical knowledge for the future.
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Seller's Description:
PLEASE NOTE, WE DO NOT SHIP TO DENMARK. New Book. Shipped from UK in 4 to 14 days. Established seller since 2000. Please note we cannot offer an expedited shipping service from the UK.
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
PLEASE NOTE, WE DO NOT SHIP TO DENMARK. New Book. Shipped from UK in 4 to 14 days. Established seller since 2000. Please note we cannot offer an expedited shipping service from the UK.
James Fenimore Cooper's writer daughter Susan tells us that her father wrote his first (1820) novel PRECAUTION on a dare from his wife. James F. had just said, as he tossed aside an English woman's novel, that even he could write a better novel than what he had just read. We are not sure whom he had read, and perhaps he did in fact improve upon his model. But PRECAUTION, it strikes me, has notable weaknesses. At over 400 pages long in the edition I have, it is at least twice as lengthy as its plot requires. It is also fiendishly intricate and abounds in asides, aphorisms, pieties and wry observations of the surface of human or at least English nature.
To thread your way through this social labyrinth and elaborate cast of people marrying, giving in marriage and dodging marriage, keep your eye on young goody-goody heroine Emily Moseley and her father's widowed sister Mrs Wilson. If Mrs Wilson is the novel's incarnation of "PRECAUTION" (for doing all she can to nudge her niece year after year into a good, prudent, emotions-under-control Christian marriage with a suitable socially equal English male), then who might be Emily? "ONE TEMPTED TO GO ASTRAY"? Yes, but not stray very far or ever be in serious need of her aunt's playing mother hen to her chick.
There are three interconnected families who strive to marry off their youngsters suitably: Chattertons, Moseleys and Jarvises. All are seen through the eyes of and weighed on the moral scales of Mrs Wilson. Characters paraded across the pages include Divines, Dukes, Earls, Ladies, army officers, women with little on their minds but how to marry, a Spanish general with an Irish name and various men and women caught up in Napoleon's Peninsular Campaign on the Iberian peninsula.
We see PRECAUTION's characters hunting foxes or birds, moving from country to town, attending church, hosting or attending parties, surviving being shot by accident, etc. In the end, after manifold difficulties, marriages do happen, some better than others. And young Emily sails into safe harbor with a fabulously wealthy, handsome English aristocrat whose true identity emerges implausibly slowly, given the small world of English higher nobility.
To me, the importance of Cooper's first novel lies in watching him empathize with the personally unfamiliar denizens of a genteel English world that he had yet to experience except in books, especially novels.
Cooper empathizes very well and will do so again and again in his later American Wilderness and Sea Adventure novels.
Who among contemporary American writers (before, during and after the Indian Removals and the Trail of Tears) has a juster appreciation of the strengths of American Indians? Who better grasps the impulses that drove his greatest hero, the marginalized American, Natty Bumppo, through the stages of alienation leading him through DEERSLAYER, PATHFINDER, past THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS and finally out to the western PRAIRIE in the days of Lewis and Clark?
PRECAUTION first made Europe and America take serious note of this fresh voice, soon to be dubbed "the American (Sir Walter) Scott."
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