The Comic Genius of Dr. Alexander Hamilton

Mississippi Quarterly, The, Spring, 1993 by David B.. Parker

The three volumes under review offer several different views of Southern humor. The first is a study of a Maryland colonist whose reputation as a comic writer began only two centuries after his death; the second is a collection of essays on Southern humor (and Southern literature in general) from a major scholar; the third is another collection, this one of essays on the topic of humor gathered from the most important journal in the field of American literature.

Much has appeared lately on Dr. Alexander Hamilton (1712-1756), a Scottish-born physician (no relation to George Washington's secretary of the treasury) who spent most of his adult life in Annapolis. As a medical student at Edinburgh, Hamilton had joined several local clubs. Clubs such as these, providing food, drink, and fellowship, were popular in eighteenth-century British society. When Hamilton crossed the Atlantic in 1738 to pursue a medical career in the colonies, he found he missed the social life he had left behind. In 1745 Hamilton formed a club in Annapolis similar to those he had enjoyed in Edinburgh: the Tuesday Club, which included among its members almost all the leading lights of Annapolis society and among its guests virtually everyone of importance who visited the area. Meetings of the Tuesday Club were given to conundrums, songs, mock trials, and so forth; serious discussions, and any mention of Maryland politics, were not allowed. The club met every other Tuesday for eleven years; upon the death of Hamilton, its founder and secretary, the club immediately disbanded.

Despite the demands of a successful medical practice and his social responsibilities - which undoubtedly increased after 1747, when he married into the prominent Dulany family - Hamilton spent a good bit of time writing. Except for a Masonic address and a pamphlet defending a fellow physician in a medical controversy, however, nothing Hamilton wrote was published under his own name during his lifetime. But scholars have recently begun to describe and publish a veritable trove of Hamiltoniana, much of it relating to the Tuesday Club. One of those scholars, Robert Micklus, has used these previously neglected (or in a few cases unattributed) materials to write a fine new study of Hamilton and his "comic genius."

In the summer of 1744, in an effort to shake the consumption that had afflicted him since his arrival in Maryland, Hamilton set off on a tour of the northern colonies. The detailed travel diary he kept during that trip shows him to have been a perceptive observer and witty commentator on colonial life and manners. Although the Itinerarium, as it was known, was a polished piece of work - Hamilton rewrote and revised it after his trip - it remained unpublished until the twentieth century. Carl Bridenbaugh's edition of the Itinerarium, published in 1948 as Gentleman's Progress, gave Hamilton what he had not had until then: the beginning of a literary reputation. But it was just the beginning. Jay B. Hubbell, in his classic The South in American Literature, 1607-1900 (1954), said of Hamilton that "his claim to a place in literary history rests upon his Itinerarium" (p. 67). Thanks to Micklus and others, that is no longer true.

In the late 1740s Hamilton wrote a handful of comic essays for the Maryland Gazette: a parody of Masonic ceremonies; an article on misspelling (which was itself full of misspellings and incorrect punctuations); a cure for those afflicted with "fits of Rhiming"; and so on. But these appeared under various pseudonyms, and it would be over two centuries before J. A. Leo Lemay and Robert Micklus identified them as coming from Hamilton's pen.

Hamilton's greatest writing projects concerned the Tuesday Club. As secretary, Hamilton recorded the club's minutes, including the nonsense that passed for the club's business. (Hamilton's minutes were published in 1988 as The Records of the Tuesday Club of Annapolis, 1745-56, edited by Elaine G. Breslaw.) Then, during the last four years of his life, Hamilton began rewriting the minutes, adding a narrator, a series of introductory essays, a weak plot (the rise and fall of the "Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club"), and countless digressions (letters, speeches, commentaries, and so forth) to create what amounts to a comic novel. Hamilton, of course, would never have called his "History" a novel, for the same reason that Henry Fielding would not have called his History of Tom Jones a novel: in the eighteenth century, "novel" meant "romance," and both terms were used pejoratively. When Hamilton died in 1756, his "History," which already filled some 1,900 manuscript pages, remained unfinished, an ongoing project that Hamilton apparently intended for publication but that remained unpublished until 1990 (when a three-volume set edited by Micklus was published). Micklus suggests that if Hamilton had published his "History" in the 1750s, his name would now be as prominent as those of Fielding and Laurence Sterne in the history of the early development of the modern novel.