SOURCE: Introduction to The Story of Kennett, by Bayard Taylor, College & University Press, 1973, pp. 7-21.

[In the following introduction to Taylor's The Story of Kennett, La Salle offers an overview of Taylor's career and provides background for the novel.]

One hundred years ago, few serious readers in America would have thought it possible that Bayard Taylor would someday be an almost forgotten author, for he was one of the better-known writers of his period. Taylor's fate serves to remind us that two very different literatures were being written in the 1850's and 1860's. Among Taylor's contemporaries were Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman; but from another angle, the literary life was dominated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and John Greenleaf Whittier. The general devaluation of the “Genteel writers” of New England has consigned to obscurity such members of that tradition as Taylor, Thomas B. Aldrich, R. H. Stoddard, and George Henry Boker. Only by recalling the work of a writer such as Taylor, however, can the modern reader acquire a complete picture of American literature of the mid-nineteenth century.

I

Taylor's America was a country in flux. “Manifest destiny” was a popular doctrine, and the geography of America was being radically altered during Taylor's young manhood. While he was on his first voyage to Europe, the annexation of Texas took place. Within the next decade, that state's territory was substantially expanded, the territories of California and New Mexico were acquired, the border of Oregon was fixed along the forty-ninth parallel, and the Gadsden purchase was accomplished. This expansion accelerated the western drift of the population in the United States, and the census of 1850 revealed that fully forty-five per cent of the population resided west of the Alleghenies. More than most of his contemporaries, Taylor must have been conscious of this vast “other” America, for he made a trip to California in 1849 for Horace Greeley's newspaper, the New-York Tribune. The new literary market was one which Taylor would try repeatedly to tap on the lecture circuit tours of his middle years, although without complete success. This enlarged America would ultimately subscribe to values different from those associated with the New England literary establishment and with its heirs.

The other major historical event of Taylor's lifetime was, of course, the Civil War. For whatever reasons, Taylor himself did not go to war; but he secured a commission for his brother, gave speeches supporting the Northern cause, and was for a time a war correspondent for the Tribune. At the was's end, America was a country at once politically one and yet simultaneously ever more conscious of its cultural multiplicity. This heightened awareness of sectional peculiarities found expression in the “local color” movement in literature.

These historical occurrences encouraged the growth of a realistic, empirical American literature (as opposed to an idealistic one). And because of his involvement in these events, one could have expected Taylor to be a part of that development. Officially, he was not. It would remain for the next generation of American fiction writers—Bret Harte, Edward Eggleston, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells—to reflect the new modes of life to be seen in this enlarged America, and the ways in which the values of the new territories would conflict with those of the more traditional East. Only Whitman, at the time of Bayard Taylor's literary successes, was dealing with the expanded America as subject matter.

Despite Taylor's apprenticeship in journalism, much of his literature did not reflect his observations of the world about him; instead, it illustrated his commitment to the Genteel Tradition—the literary Establishment of his day. The Literary History of the United States (1948) phrases the problem tersely, as it identifies the choice which Taylor and his cohorts made: “The securities of Concord and Cambridge were gone, even though Longfellow and Lowell, Holmes and Emerson lived on. … The issue was sharply drawn: if one wishes to write, one must choose to defend the old order or to throw in one's lot with the new. There was no easy blending of ideality with reality in these uncertain times. … resentful of the claims of the realists, [Boker, Stoddard, Taylor, Aldrich, and Stedman] self-consciously proclaimed themselves the champions of Ideality in literature” (809).

What were the intellectual values of this tradition to which Taylor had bound himself? Its assumptions can be briefly summarized: that there was an “ideal” order which it was the writer's duty to express; that moral codes were of higher importance than, say, esthetic ones; that man was capable of virtually endless self-improvement in the ethical and cultural spheres; and that it was the social responsibility of literature to encourage this perfectibility. To be a useful, moral document, art should present a very disciplined experience, and call the reader's attention to the ideal, universal aspects of a present, specific situation.

V. L. Parrington in Volume II of his Main Currents in American Thought (1927-30) observes: “The essence of the Genteel Tradition was a refined ethicism, that professed to discover the highest virtue in shutting one's eyes to disagreeable fact, and the highest law in the law of convention. … The first of literary commandments was the commandment of reticence. … Any venture into realism was likely to prove libidinous, and sure to be common” (436). To take one specific example, the Genteel writers usually represented the “common man” in an idealized fashion, often in a semi-pastoral setting. For such a figure, contentment with one's social lot was a highly regarded virtue, although a certain measure of material ambition was acceptable. Sustained vernacular expression, physicality, and controversial ideas were avoided. Plot, in the mechanical sense, was an important element. The ideas which that plot projected were designed to flatter the social and moral preconceptions of the largest number of readers.

Ultimately, it is not surprising that the writers of the Genteel Tradition devoted an inordinate amount of attention to such minor literary forms as the more impressionistic kind of “local color” story, the historical romance, travel writing, and children's literature. It is of particular significance, however, that the tradition produced no major novelists, perhaps because the novel, more than other genres, has historically had social change as one of its basic subjects. The Genteel writers, in declining to have their work reflect the turmoils of their world, were really turning away from the major line of development of narrative fiction. Thus the writers of the Genteel tradition are usually remembered as poets or essayists rather than as novelists. Actually, they produced an appreciable amount of work more or less in that genre: Longfellow wrote two volumes of narrative fiction, Whittier one, Holmes three, Aldrich three, Taylor four. But—as Taylor undoubtedly noticed—most of the Genteel writers never achieved the popular success in the novel that they had enjoyed in other forms.

Such novelists of the period as Susan Warner, Maria Cummins, and Augusta Jane Evans Wilson were reaping financial rewards with a somewhat different kind of book. Alexander Cowie in The Rise of the American Novel (1948) comments that “When Holmes published Elsie Venner in 1861, the vogue of the historical romance and the Gothic tale was largely over or in abeyance, and the novel of domestic life was in ascendancy” (495). He defines the latter as “an extended prose tale composed chiefly of commonplace household incidents and episodes casually worked into a trite plot which involves the fortunes of characters who exist less as individuals than as carriers of moral or religious sentiment. The thesis of such a book is that true happiness comes from submission of suffering” (413). Virtually none of the practitioners of the “domestic novel” were considered serious writers by Taylor and his contemporaries, and he was certainly trying to go beyond the obvious limitations of such writing. Yet The Story of Kennett seems related to the “domestic novel” as it is defined by Cowley.

Kennett serves to remind us that the tradition of Melville and Hawthorne was not so dominant in the latter half of the nineteenth century as it is today. The decade of the 1850's had seen the publication of Melville's monumental Moby Dick and of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and The Blithedale Romance. Hawthorne's The Marble Faun inaugurated the next decade in fiction, but no works in what might be called the Symbolist tradition followed it. To consider the American novel at its best in the 1860's is to be concerned with such Genteel items as Oliver Wendell Holmes's Elsie Venner and The Guardian Angel, Sidney Lanier's Tiger Lilies, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women—and the novels of Bayard Taylor.

The directions taken by the novel in the twentieth century allow us to forget the existence of Genteel narrative fiction. The modern American novel, as well as the tradition of American Realism in general, descended at least in part from the symbolic and allegorical interpretations of America written by Melville and Hawthorne; but it owes relatively little to the idealized depictions of the Genteel writers. The consequence is that Genteel novels have almost disappeared from the histories of American literature. Nevertheless, they are a part of America's literary history, and the present reprinting of a novel by Bayard Taylor will permit the examination of this sub-genre by a new generation of readers.

II

Richmond Croom Beatty's definitive Bayard Taylor, Laureate of the Gilded Age (1936) portrays the writer as one who embraced social and cultural values which led him to substitute activity for substantial achievement. Taylor was born in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, in 1825. His formal education ended in his sixteenth year; an apprenticeship with a printer and newspaper publisher provided his introduction to writing as a profession. His first poem was published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1841, and his first volume of poetry, Ximena, appeared in February, 1844, under the name of “James Bayard Taylor.” Shortly thereafter, he departed for a walking tour of Europe which lasted almost two years. His travel letters, originally sent back to Philadelphia magazines, were to published as Views Afoot (1846). The activities which were to claim the largest part of Taylor's attention—newspaper work, poetry, travel writing—were begun, therefore, by the age of twenty-two.

Taylor recommenced newspaper work upon his return from Europe, first in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, and later in New York. Out of the already mentioned trip to the California gold fields came more travel letters (for the New-York Tribune), and an impressionistic book called Eldorado in 1850. Although Taylor had married that same year, his wife's death a few months later led him to embark on additional travels. He sailed for Africa in 1851, shortly before his first major volume of poetry, A Book of Romances, Lyrics, and Songs, was published. The trip through Egypt, Ethiopia, Turkey, and Palestine was extended, at Greeley's order, by a trek through India en route to Hong Kong, where Taylor joined Commodore Perry's expedition. Thus Taylor also visited Japan before returning to America at the end of 1853. His adventures were then recounted for an eager public in a series of travel books: A Journey to Central Africa (1854); The Lands of The Saracen (1854); A Visit to India, China and Japan in the year 1853 (1855). Poems of the Orient, with “exotic” themes, was published in 1854.

In that same year, and in addition to performing miscellaneous editorial chores and preparing another volume of poems, Taylor entered the Lyceum circuit. He returned to Europe in 1865, and by the end of the year had made an extensive tour of Scandinavia; the resulting book was Northern Travel (1857). He remarried while abroad, and his growing responsibilities encouraged even more furious activity. Two books of miscellaneous essays, At Home and Abroad, were published in 1859 and 1862. The Poet's Journal appeared in 1862, and a collected edition of his poems in 1864. By this time, he had embarked on a new career in novel writing.

Taylor began his first novel, Hannah Thurston, while acting first as secretary, then as chargé d’affaires at the United States Embassy in St. Petersburg. This book, which dealt with his birthplace under the thin disguise of “Ptolemy, New York,” and sold fifteen thousand copies within a few months of its publication in 1863, was soon issued in London, and later was translated into German and Russian. Its success led Taylor to work immediately on a second novel, John Godfrey's Fortunes, which appeared in England and in America in 1864. A first-person narrative, it is a satire on the literary life in New York City. The Story of Kennett, usually considered Taylor's most successful novel, was published in 1866.

III

Taylor's correspondence during the composition of this third novel (as quoted in Marie Hansen-Taylor and Howard E. Scudder's Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor [1884]) is interesting for what it reveals about the author's attitude toward the novel as a form. In a letter of January 6, 1866, to a Kennett Square friend, Taylor called the book his “pet novel,” and described it as “totally different from the others—altogether objective in subject and treatment—” (451). By April, Taylor was anticipating good fortune: “My new novel … promises to be a marked success, so far as present indications go. Although the publishing business is as flat as possible, more than six thousand copies have been ordered in advance of publication, and the few who have read the book are unanimous as to its interest. … I … am entirely satisfied … with the experiment of writing three novels and am now sure that I can write a good and characteristic American Novel” (453). The two interesting implications in this letter are, first, that Taylor's measure of his novel's achievement was clearly a commercial one; secondly, in his view, the “characteristic American novel” would be something on the order of Kennett—an idealized romance with a historical background and some Genteelly treated “local color” material.

Another letter, from the same volume, shows Taylor's concern with character psychology. When he replied to a protest about the impropriety of the funeral scene—a scene that is one of the best in the novel—he justified Mary Potter's actions in terms of logical character projection, not ideality or historical accuracy: “What you say of the order of the funeral in Kennett is quite true. Such an incident as I have described probably never occurred, but that makes no difference whatever. It is natural for Mary to do it; there could be no other culmination to her history. I was a year studying out the plot before I began to write, and the idea of the denouement at the funeral came to me like an inspiration” (456). He was not consistent, however. In too many other instances he imposed authorial values on his figures, rather than dramatizing those of the characters themselves.

Taylor's pleasure in the public acceptance of the book was expressed in a letter to Thomas Bailey Aldrich on April 16, 1866: “I had bestowed much preliminary thought upon the book, and I worked out the idea with the most conscientious care, hoping to make a stride in advance. It is a great joy and a great encouragement to be so unanimously assured that I have not failed in my aim. The moral is that labor pays, in a literary sense” (458).

Clearly, Taylor had high ambitions for The Story of Kennett; however, he also wanted a popular success. Thus he attempted in a single work to blend together several things: the material, settings, and melodramatic action associated with the historical romance; the theme of “patient suffering” and the housewifery of the domestic novel; and the didactic morality of the Genteel tradition.

The reader of Kennett is kept aware of the historical framework by a series of references to the Tories and their suspected sympathizers, one of whom is Old Man Barton. When Gilbert is being given advice on reporting his robbery to the proper authorities, one suggestion is that he write to General Washington demanding protection, “‘and say the Tory farmers’ houses ought to be searched’” (Chapter XXI). There are references to such local places and events as “Chadd's Ford,” “the Hessian Burying Ground,” and the “‘Lammas flood o’ ’68’” (Chapter XXI). Gilbert's problem in borrowing money to pay off his farm's mortgage is explained in terms of the historical period: “In ordinary times he would have had no difficulty; but, as Mr. Trainer had written, the speculation in western lands had seized upon capitalists, and the amount of money for permanent investment was already greatly diminished” (Chapter XXVI). Finally, Taylor provides for us that standard figure of the historical melodrama, “Sandy Flash”—a flamboyant highwayman with overtones of Robin Hood.

A counterpart to the above is the love story of Gilbert and Martha, designed to attract the feminine audience. The tale is a conventional one: the young man of uncertain birth is inspired by his fair maid to triumph over his difficulties. A good deal of attention is devoted to various domestic arrangements and, in particular, to descriptions of the clothes worn by the female characters. This detail occurs throughout, but is particularly obvious in the descriptions of the wedding party in Chapter XXXIV. And Mary Potter, it should be noticed, is the perfect exemplification of the “domestic novel” heroine, as defined above.

But the book also exhibits the stylistic and intellectual characteristics of the Genteel literary tradition. Gilbert Potter, the “common man” protagonist, is heavily idealized—in his character and actions, as well as in his grammar. The heroine, Martha Deane, is without a single humanizing flaw. The plot is tightly constructed in a very mechanical way, and the suspense is situational rather than psychological. There is a clear implication that life in the past must have somehow been more pleasant, more meaningful than it was in Taylor's present. Vice and virtue are rather rigidly separated. The moral of The Story of Kennett, heavily underlined, is that the virtuous will always triumph—with patience—over their adversaries.

Taylor's novel is interesting, therefore, partly because it provides a sort of summary of trends current in American writing during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Yet Kennett seems also to go beyond some of the contemporary Genteel literature; surprisingly, the movement is in the direction of greater realism and a more critical view of the society. For one thing, the reader is often given the sense of a dense cultural fabric such as one expects to find in the “novel of manners.” The differences between the architectural styles of the Deane, Barton, and Potter homes are carefully rendered, for example; and the domicile is suggestive of the character within. The set-piece descriptions of fox hunt, barn raising, Quaker meeting, and country wedding correspond to the traditional “social gathering” scenes of that sub-genre. Even more striking is Taylor's attempt to render the intellectual, as well as the physical, landscape.

In his Prologue, the author calls attention to the fact that “the conservative influence of the Quakers was so powerful that it continued to shape the habits even of communities whose religious sentiment it failed to reach.” Among the major characters, the only practicing Quaker is Dr. Deane, and his portrait is far from flattering. Taylor sees him as a humorous rather than a wicked villain, but the hypocrisy of his “plainness” is insisted upon. A similar irony is suggested by Taylor's rather rich vocabulary in his description of the Quaker meeting in Chapter VII. Again and again—through the figure of Martha Deane, for example—Taylor ironically ascribes the virtues associated with Quakerism to non-members of the sect.

The Quaker physician serves to introduce the question of “public opinion.” Dr. Deane's concern for his reputation among the members of his sect also allows one to observe the extent to which the society is class-conscious. Gilbert Potter is constantly made aware of the gradations of a system which is prepared to make distinctions between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” human beings. For Gilbert, a great passion is the only excuse for his presumption in courting Martha Deane: “It might seen like looking too high, Mother, but I couldn’t help it’” (Chapter XII). Viewed from this angle, Gilbert's real problem is with the caste system of his culture.

A third element is that, as rendered by Taylor, much of the society of rural Pennyslvania in the eighteenth century is money-fixated. Dr. Deane's criterion for a future son-in-law is largely financial, Alfred Barton's relationship with his father is totally governed by his anticipation of future inheritance, and Mary Potter confesses that it was Barton's prospects that led her to agree to their secret marriage. Even Gilbert Potter reacts to the symbolic value which money has taken on in his culture: “When Gilbert had delivered the last barrels at Newport and slowly cheered homewards his weary team, he was nearly two hundred dollars richer than when he started, and—if we must confess a universal if somewhat humiliating truth—so much the more a man in courage and determination” (Chapter IX).

Hypocrisy, snobbery, materialism—these are the values which Taylor seems to be ascribing to rural Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century. They are not the qualities which we immediately associate with that time and place; but they are exactly those that a writer like Mark Twain has taught us to associate with his—and Taylor's—nineteenth-century America.

It becomes important to realize that Taylor's knowledge of his own century did, in fact, surreptitiously enter the narrative. Albert H. Smyth in his biography (Bayard Taylor [1896]) assures us that the author based several of his eighteenth-century characters on people of his own day, some of whom he had known personally. Sandy Flash was based on an actual nineteenth-century highwayman; Gilbert Potter, Deb. Smith, Martha Deane, the farmer Fairthorne, and the boys Joe and Jake are modeled on people from Taylor's own period (167-73). Knowing this raises the possibility that Taylor was using his historical setting as a screen for critical comments about a culture which he knew at first hand.

But Taylor could not bring himself—or his protagonist, Gilbert Potter—to deal directly with the issues that he had raised. Both Gilbert and his friends plainly prefer to accept their society's values rather than question them. Only once in the narrative does Taylor have Gilbert come close to a critical look at the way in which his society operates—when the protagonist senses the analogy between his position and that of Deb. Smith:

… her words hinted at an inward experience in some respects so surprisingly like his own, that Gilbert was startled. He knew the reputation of the woman, though he would have found it difficult to tell whereupon it was based. Everybody said she was bad, and nobody knew particularly why. … The world, he had recently learned, was wrong in his case; might it not also be doing her injustice? Her pride, in its coarse way, was his also, and his life, perhaps, had only unfolded into honorable success through a mother's ever-watchful care and never-wearied toil (Chapter VI).

Gilbert could have turned at this point to questioning the moral and social bases of his society—as Huckleberry Finn would do a few years later. From this possibility, Taylor felt it necessary to retreat. And the Genteel Tradition provided him with an easy escape route, through the sentimentality of the last sentence in the paragraph quoted above.

Perhaps because he sensed that prose fiction was a dangerous tool, Taylor wrote only one other novel: Joseph and His Friend (1870), his least interesting work in that genre. Taylor's real love was poetry, and he perhaps viewed his novels as distractions from what he considered his more serious work; indeed, he had stopped in the middle of writing Kennett to compose a long poem which he believed to be his masterpiece: The Picture of St. John, a narrative poem running to thirty-two hundred lines that appeared in 1866. His next major work was his translation of Faust, published in two parts in 1870 and 1871. Taylor's great feat was to render the poem in its original meter, and his translation is still admired. Various poems, stories, essays, editions, and travel books followed. Another long poem—Lars: A Pastoral of Norway—and two plays—The Prophet and Prince Deukalion—appeared between 1873 and 1878.

Public honors rewarded such prodigious activity. Taylor was invited to write and deliver the “Ode” at the Centennial Celebration in Philadelphia in 1876, and in 1878 he was named United States Minister to Germany. His death came less than a year after accepting that post. In the next two years, two collections of his work were published, and by the end of the century, three biographical studies had appeared: the previously cited Hansen-Taylor and Scudder volume, Smythe's work, and Russell H. Conwell's The Life, Travels, and Literary Career of Bayard Taylor (1884). To his large public, Bayard Taylor's literary reputation must have seemed firmly established.

IV

Taylor's letters and the magazine reviews show that The Story of Kennett was, in general, well received. Taylor summarized some of the praise in a letter to E. C. Stedman on April 15, 1866: “Whittier is enthusiastic about Kennett, ditto Howells. The former says it contains ‘as good things as there are in the English language;’ the latter, ‘it is the best historical (historical in the sense of retrospective) novel ever written in America.’ [George W.] Curtis said very nearly the same thing to me at our dinner. So, you see, my hope and your prophecy are in a way to be fulfilled. The people in this country are buying it like mad” (Hansen-Taylor and Scudder, 457).

In the literary journals, none of the anonymous reviewers found the plot of the book its most engaging aspect, nor the attempts at humor very telling. Most praised the portrayal of individual incidents and the characterizations to be found in Taylor's work. All seemed to accept the book as Taylor's attempt to depict the Quaker character within the framework of a regional portrait. The Nation (April 19, 1866) offered an unfavorable comparison to J. T. Trowbridge's New England novel, Lucy Arlyn (1866). The reviewer, who complained that Taylor's was not really a historical novel since it merely dressed contemporary events in the clothing of 1796, was particularly offended by the presentation of the Quakers: “We do not see real Friends. Perhaps we do see Quakers. Quakers are the sect beheld from the outside; but the Society of Friends can be known only by the most delicate interior affiliation, by spiritual rapport, or by the highest refinement of appreciation.”

The reviewer concluded that the novelist simply did not comprehend the “inner life” of the Quakers—not allowing for the possibility that Taylor consciously might have chosen to concentrate on the sect's public aspect. A letter which Taylor wrote to Aldrich suggests that personal animus may have been involved: “Both the ‘Round Table’ and the ‘Nation’ seem to have a spite at me, altho’ the managers of both papers want me to write for them” (Richard Cary, The Genteel Circle: Bayard Taylor and His Friends [1952], 33).

Interestingly, the reviewer for The Athenaeum of London (May 12, 1866) praises those elements which had offended the Nation: “Much of the population of Kennett is Quaker; and we can vouch for the fidelity of Mr. Bayard Taylor's portraits of Quakers at meeting or in their own houses.”

A much more perceptive review was the unsigned one by William Dean Howells which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly (June, 1866). Significantly, the critic praised Taylor for the specificity of his material: “There is such a shyness among American novelists … in regard to dates, names, and localities, that we are glad to have a book in which there is great courage in this respect.” The reviewer grasped the point that what other commentators had seen as a lapse of taste on Taylor's part in the funeral scene was actually a bit of psychological verisimilitude: “Considering her [Mary Potter's] character and history, it is natural that she should seek to make her justification as signal and public as possible.”

Howells also held that the actions of Dr. Deane and Martha were intended by Taylor to represent opposite sides of the single coin of Quakerism: “In the sweet and unselfish spirit of Martha, the theories of individual action under special inspiration have created self-reliance, and calm fearless humility, sustaining her even in her struggle against the will of her father, and even against the sect to whose teachings she owes them. … [Dr. Deane] is the most odious character in the book, what is bad in him being separated by such fine differences from what is very good in others.”

This point is a valid one. Whether Taylor's presentation of the religious sect is historically accurate, or even fair, is one question; whether or not the author has created believable psychological relations between his characters is quite another. What is worth noting is that the opposing characters of Dr. Deane and his daughter Martha are so created as to have additional meaning because of their contrast.

More recent critics have given Taylor's work in general, and his novels in particular, only passing reference. The Literary History of the United States comments tersely that he wrote “three creditable novels on social themes” (810). Arthur Hobson Quinn says in The Literature of the American People (1951) that “in The Story of Kennett (1866) … Taylor created a masterpiece.” This surely overgenerous evaluation was made on the basis that Taylor wrote with affection of an era he knew well, that several characters were based on “real people,” and that the novel has become a part of the “local life” (357).

Carl Van Doren in The American Novel, 1789-1939 (1940) regards Taylor's work as an example of those sentimental narratives of the mid-nineteenth century which also reflected the rising interest in realistic literature: “During the sixties realism hovered in the air without definitely alighting. Oliver Wendell Holmes, for instance, in Elsie Venner (1861) worked his romantic problem of heredity upon a ground of shrewd realistic observation; Bayard Taylor employed a similar composition of elements” (177).

But only Alexander Cowie in The Rise of the American Novel (1948) attempts to define fully Taylor's place in the history of fiction in the United States. He describes Taylor's four novels as “useful links in any study of the evolution of fiction before the dawn of Howellsian realism” (475). Although he doubts that The Story of Kennett can accurately be called a “historical novel,” the author's use of factual material “makes for authenticity in atmosphere and episode. … There are many homely illustrations of the quiet (Quaker) life of Kennett Square—social, religious, industrial—that ring true and that seem to be integral parts of the story …” Taylor was “on the whole … on the side of realism in fiction” and “anticipates Howells in protesting against the morbid tone of many novels of the 1850s and 1860s, but it remained for Howells to inaugurate a new regime in novel-writing” (481-86).

While Taylor's verse today seems irrelevant to the development of American poetry, The Story of Kennett appears to have been part of a growing realism in the American novel. In this novel about his birthplace, Taylor seems to be part of a tradition in the American novel of manners—one with James Fenimore Cooper for an ancestor, and George Washington Cable for a descendant. If Taylor sometimes relied on plot contrivances, idealized love stories, and melodramatic adventures, he differed from both his predecessors and some of his followers more in degree than in kind.

Much more than he seems to have done in his poetry, Taylor in The Story of Kennett was dealing with material which he knew in depth (even if he chose sometimes to concentrate on its superficial aspects). And he goes somewhat beyond a mere surface realism. The Quaker beliefs as a social force, the importance of money to one's status in the emerging American community, the tyranny of public opinion—all of these things are described and sorted out with the care, if not always the emphases, of the social historian.

Beatty comments “In his fiction, as in his other prose, he [Taylor] remained fundamentally a reporter” (238). The reporter and the romancer have an uneasy coexistence in The Story of Kennett. What one misses is the insistence on the inter-relationships within the social fabric which one gets on occasion from the novels of Cooper, and more certainly from a work like Cable's The Grandissimes. Some of the most interesting aspects of Taylor's novel for the modern reader are things which are only hinted at by the author—for example, the connections among the economic, social, and religious life in this small, culturally unified community. Why, one wonders, did he stop with these veiled suggestions? The answer lies in Taylor's relationship to the values of his own culture. Both in its achievements and in its limitations, The Story of Kennett is a document which implicitly defines the Genteel Tradition.