William Bartram, The Search for Nature's Design

This is a beautiful book, lovingly produced for readers who adore William Bartram (1739-1823) as an artist, Romantic, naturalist, and gardener and painstakingly assembled by scholars who approach him from a variety of perspectives.

Because the volume’s inclusion of correspondence, botanical materials, philosophical tracts, draft documents, and illustrations provides a richly multidimensional representation of Bartram’s experiences and achievements, William Bartram: The Search for Nature’s Design comes closer than any previous work on Bartram to showing us not only the whole career but also the whole person: the failed businessman, insecure son, devout Quaker, wilderness traveler, assiduous gardener, loyal friend, advisor and mentor, and tireless student of a natural world that he felt offered a continuing revelation of divinity. It is an ambitious book, impressive in both execution and presentation.

In this marvelous, indispensable edition, editors Hallock and Hoffmann, assisted by an interdisciplinary team of coeditors, successfully challenges the stereotype of William Bartram the solitary wanderer and one-book author of Travels who spent the last decades of his life pottering around in his father’s botanical garden. They replace it with a more complex and more provocative image: that of a sophisticated artist and scientist fully in touch with his time, a tireless mentor to an international circle of young naturalists and firm believer in the rights of humans as well as animals. Driven by a compassion for all manner of living things, Bartram’s pliable prose and supple drawings redefine what we know about early American culture.

* author of The Poetics of Natural History and editor of John James Audubon: Writings and Drawings *

Here is a highly valuable collection of previously unpublished manuscript materials from the hand of William Bartram, one of a very small group of internationally prominent naturalists in the United States at its time of inception. For anyone interested in the history of gardens, botany, early ecological thinking, nature illustration, ethnography (especially of southeastern Indians), antislavery treatises, Quaker figures, travel literature, climate studies, pharmacology, or American history and culture more generally, this collection of Bartram’s writings and artwork is a treasure trove. For scholars who only know Bartram as the writer of Travels, and as the American who influenced British Romanticism, here is copious new material (with lucid critical introductions) that shows Bartram’s involvement in all the key cultural and intellectual debates of his time.

* author of American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World *

Hallock and Hoffmann have set out to consider ‘the full range and broader contexts of Bartram’s work’ and to provide a framework for future scholarship—in which they have succeeded admirably.

* Journal of Southern History *

This volume is important for anyone interested in Bartram’s Travels or in the cultures of natural history more generally. The materials collected here illustrate Bartram’s biography and the production of Travels and present his participation in a range of contexts: literary natural history, visual arts, moral philosophy, antislavery, ethnography, commerce, medicine, gardening, field botany, Linnaean taxonomy, and so on. Expert introductions provide excellent guides to these contexts. The documents are presented in a highly readable clear-text style that preserves the flavor of the original manuscripts. I’ve used some of these materials successfully to open Travels for study in the undergraduate classroom.

* author of American Georgics: Economy and Environment in Early American Literature *

William Bartram, the Search for Nature's Design provides, for the first time, a primary text survey of the full career of one of the most important North American naturalists of the eighteenth century, a man whose travels, collections, gardens, writing, and expertise placed him at the center of an emergent global network of natural history correspondents. This remarkably ambitious book comes closer than any previous work on Bartram to showing us not only the whole career but also the whole person: the failed businessman, insecure son, devout Quaker, wilderness traveler, assiduous gardener, loyal friend, advisor and mentor, and tireless student of the natural world. This book provides the richest, most engaging, and most detailed picture to date of one of the most remarkable of eighteenth-century Americans. It will be a wonderful addition to knowledge in a number of cognate fields.

* editor of Reading the Roots: American Nature Writing before Walden *

Buy and enjoy this book! . . . .The two coeditors and nine other contributors as well as the publishers, the designers, and the donors who must have provided subventions, all deserve our gratitude. If all you do is gaze at the pictures it is still a bargain as a coffee table book.

* Early American Literature