JEREMY BELKNAP'S The Foresters: A THRICE TOLD TALE
Jeremy Belknap's The Foresters,1 once a favorite story at New England firesides,2 remains an inadequately (and to some extent, inac curately) reported work of the literature of the early Republic. For our present reassessment of our literary origins we should have on record a fuller account of what Belknap called his "Bulliad,"3 especially of its hitherto only briefly described, if not ignored, second edition of 1796. The Foresters is a satirical allegory of the settlement of the New World, of the American Revolution, and (in the extended second edi tion) of Washington's administration and the "Citizen Genet affair," among other events. It is a story ofJohn Bull (the Kingdom of England) his wife (Parliament) his mother (the Church of England) and his neighbors, including Old Lewis (France) Nic Frog (Holland) and Lord Strut (Spain) At its center is an account of Bull's "lawsuits" (the Revolution) with the Foresters, who are (at the beginning) the separate American colonies represented, for example, by John Codline (Massachusetts) Roger Carrier (Rhode Island) and William Broadbrim (Pennsylvania) In all of this Belknap has what one commentator, George E. Hastings, calls "deepest obligations" to John Arbuthnot from whose History ofJohn Bull the work in part derived.4 The debt is acknowledged indirectly in Belknap's subtitle, which borrows from Ar buthnot when it identifies John Bull as "the Clothier" and again in the early description of Bull as "in the main an honest, plain dealing fellow, yet choleric and inconstant, and very apt to quarrel with his best friends, "6 which is almost an exact quotation from Arbuthnot.7 If The Foresters is noted at all in the historical accounts of our fic