Talk:Rowland Robinson

"Differences between Northern and Southern states"?

I don't have all of Robinson's works, but I have a pretty good chunk of them, and I don't remember anything at all about Southern states in them, except indirectly in Sam Lovel's Boy when the Civil War comes and Sam Lovel and Sam Jr. enlist. It doesn't say anything about their war experiences at all. I also contest the description "including attitudes towards Native Americans, African Americans, and foreigners" as it seems to suggest these are the primary purpose of the books, to draw a connection with his work as an abolitionist. At least in the books I have, the primary purpose is to make a written "portrait" of the dying regional culture of the Vermont Yankee, and to write about Vermont history in the Lake Champlain region. He says so explicitly in the foreword of the Danvis books. His subject is old time Vermonters and their culture and ethos, as well as a very detailed and accurate rendering of their unique regional accent and way of speaking, figures of speech, etc. If there is any major theme regarding "others" in the book, it's Vermont's antipathy towards "Yorkers" from New York, mostly as an excuse to talk about the exploits of Ethan Allen and Co. While there are a few pointed mentions of blacks and slavery, and the author goes out of his way to depict Sam Lovel meeting and befriending a group of Abenakis a few chapters after he said "he wished all the red men were dead, the way they carry on out West in the papers!", these are totally minor and subsidiary points of the books. In A Danvis Pioneer he has the hero meet a black slave (belonging to a Yorker, of course), who then runs away and proves himself a stout and noble fellow. His wife is then confiscated and emancipated by Capt. Ebeneezer Allen after the Battle of Bennington, because the owner made the mistake of trying to remain neutral in the war. But he mostly includes these characters as an excuse to describe how Allen was the first man to confiscate and free a slave as "spoils of war", which became common practice in the Civil War. He even included his emancipatory note, verbatim, "the first such" as he describes it. He touches on the relations between French-Canadians in the relations between Antoine and his Yankee townsfolks, but that tells more about Robinson's OWN prejudices against them than him writing about OTHER'S prejudices. In any case, the introduction seems to suggest that he spent his time writing novels and stories about race and race relations, with some details about Vermonters thrown in. While that may make him sound much more fashionable in 2020, I don't think it's really true. Robinson loved Vermont and their unique culture, and was troubled by seeing them melting away into uniformity with all the rest of the world. He was mostly concerned with trying to record the Vermont he had seen and heard when he was younger, and I think he does an incredibly good job. It's amazing that (as far as I can find) there have not been any recent re-printings of his novels. The newest ones I can find are from the 1937 "new" printing.

Idumea47b (talk) 02:57, 12 May 2020 (UTC)