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The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America, by Ann Fabian
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The practice of selling one's tale of woe to make a buck has long been a part of American culture. The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America is a powerful cultural history of how ordinary Americans crafted and sold their stories of hardship and calamity during the nineteenth century. Ann Fabian examines the tales of beggars, convicts, ex-slaves, prisoners of the Confederacy, and others to explore cultural authority, truth-telling, and the nature of print media as the country was shifting to a market economy. This well-crafted book describes the fascinating controversies surrounding these little-read tales and returns them to the social worlds where they were produced.
Drawing on an enormous number of personal narratives—accounts of mostly poor, suffering, and often uneducated Americans—The Unvarnished Truth analyzes a long-ignored tradition in popular literature. Historians have treated the spread of literacy and the growth of print culture as a chapter in the democratization of refinement, but these tales suggest that this was not always the case. Producing stories that purported to be the plain, unvarnished truth, poor men and women edged their way onto the cultural stage, using storytelling strategies far older than those relying on a Renaissance sense of refinement and polish. This book introduces a unique collection of tales to explore the nature of truth, authenticity, and representation.
- Sales Rank: #2320360 in Books
- Published on: 2002-01-07
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .75" w x 6.00" l, .81 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 268 pages
Review
"Occupying untracked ground, Fabian's book offers cameo turns of captives, beggars, sailors, murderers, runaway slaves, Union soldiers taken prisoner during the Civil War."--M. Cantor, "Choice
About the Author
Ann Fabian is Associate Professor of American Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth Century America (1990).
Most helpful customer reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Abuse of sources to support false premises. Knowing misrepresentation and distortion of primarily honest works.
By Allie Jones
The unvarnished truth about Ann Fabian's work is that it's a flagrantly, unconscionably false representation of the narratives she "studied" and, worse, that it's a work whose sources have been twisted by Fabian to advance her own preconceived notions -- ones that are almost totally unsupported by the personal narratives about which she supposedly reveals the "unvarnished truth."
Her premise is that "[t]he practice of selling one's tale of woe to make a buck has long been a part of American culture. The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America is a powerful cultural history of how ordinary Americans crafted and sold their stories of hardship and calamity during the nineteenth century."
This is patently, provably untrue. Fabian writes like a biographer who despises and scorns his subject, and, not content to present any facts or items in a bad light, manufactures worse things from his own imagination using chance references and speculations.
Fabian's title gives the reader not so much a warning regarding a revelation of "truths" that the narratives' authors would prefer to keep hidden if they could -- which is what the title implies -- as it is a foreshadowing that the book reveals truths about Fabian as an historian and author that she would prefer remain hidden herself. The serious reader doesn't have to dig very deeply to strip away Fabian's varnish of erudition to find a work that is an example of scholarly writing AT ITS WORST. But the truth will out, as they say.
The reader has only to study Fabian's sources for himself (to use the word in its grammatically correct neutral generic form). One source that she uses to make sweeping statements about ALL narratives that don't even apply to this one, is Captain David Perry's autobiography Recollections of an Old Soldier: The Life of Captain David Perry, A Soldier of the French and Revolutionary Wars, etc....Written by himself. This source is online at The Captain David Perry Web Site. Perry's Recollections was printed free of charge by a generous young printer (Simeon Ide) in Windsor, Vermont, 1822, strictly on the merits of its worth.
There was NO monetary motivation for the recording of his life by David Perry, as Fabian maintains, nor was Perry sought out by the printer, as Fabian declares. Perry's Recollections is a unique work, written for his posterity at the age of 79, and neither he nor the publisher received any remuneration, nor did they seek any. Beyond the printer's effort to cover the cost of printing Perry's 55-page book, any proceeds were reserved for the publication of the accounts of any other Revolutionary War veterans who should come forward. (None did.) And yet, Fabian lumps Capt. Perry into a group she calls "beggar storytellers" and uses his printed work to support conclusions she has reached BEFORE she ever did the research, or else she simply ignored the truth when she read it.
Clearly, she did not read in any depth the narratives about which her book's purpose is ostensibly to lay bare the truth. Like a scientist whose mind is made up regardless of the facts, she picks pieces here and there that can be blended into a work wholly devoid of the substance of the truth.
The only truth she succeeds in revealing is that her work is one of slander in the guise of scholarly writing. If you must read Fabian's work, take an open mind into your own study of the narratives she uses or cites. They are not hard to track down (although Fabian disguised the title of Capt. David Perry's book by placing "Recollections of an Old Soldier" in the middle of his title, and if she did this once, she may have done so for other sources). Many are held in university libraries' microfiche or microfilm collections, the Library of American Civilization [LAC] series, for example, and some narratives are online at Archive.org.
Don't believe a word Fabian says, but use her work as a starting point to do your own careful reading of the narratives she used and abused. She didn't even do the long-dead writers the courtesy to take their narratives at face value. I have studied history for 40 years, primarily in researching the life and times of Captain David Perry. In the process, I have studied a number of the sources she cited, so can speak with some authority.
I'd like to add to this review other specific examples of her falsehoods. That such a work as hers might be taken as actually revelatory of truths is egregiously shortsighted, but the main fault lies with Fabian herself. For an excellent example of using personal narratives in a honest, insightful, truly scholarly way, see Dr. Fred Anderson's A People's Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years' War, originally published by the Institute of Early American History and Culture, The University of North Carolina Press, (1996). I found only one error -- the name of Perry's captain at one point (he'd joined a decimated ranger company at Quebec by that time and so was no longer serving under his original captain, whom he didn't rejoin until the end of the 1759 campaign) -- but Anderson's reading of Capt. David Perry's Recollections was refreshingly accurate considering the vast number of such records Anderson used, and his use of his sources bespeak an integrity in scholarly writing using personal narratives in a way that is totally lacking in Ann Fabian's (infamous) The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America.
Her work, conclusions, discussion of narratives and their authors, etc, should be taken with less worth than a grain of salt. More examples to come. My full review is over three pages long and needs paring. Honestly, I'd have to write a book about the untruths and downright lies contained in Fabian's work. She doesn't even cite her sources properly. I can only imagine that, having perpetrated a fraud, she'd prefer her readers NOT find and study her sources for themselves. This is irony in the extreme, since she goes to far as to accuse the narratives' authors of fraud themselves.
I only wish I'd written this review three years ago when I first bought the book. Seldom have I been so incensed at an author (and publisher) for foisting on the unsuspecting public, or the unsuspecting professors, college students, and students of history in general, a work so replete in the worst way with "scholarly" mendacity.
If you read this book, read it as an example how NOT to use sources; you'll find no honest portrayal of them here. Fabian has twisted them to suit her own purposes: the acclaim of her peers? Of critics? to spark controversy? Or more likely, as she accuses the narratives' authors of doing, to simply make a buck.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Misleading and false representation of America's history
By A. MURDOCK
The author of this book seems to want to put our nations early historical writers in a 21st century created box. Unfortunately, the assumption that people who were miserable, through poverty, or circumstances; sold their stories as published works, to gain a dollar, isn't at all always the case. This author included my ancestor, Captain David Perry, in this discussion, as part of the proof of her theory. What the author failed to do was RESEARCH. An embarrassing mistake INDEED! Captain David Perry's book Recollection of an Old Soldier, was published FREE of charge. The customary expectation at that time was that people PAID to have books published. As a historian myself, I have noted numerous instances, where entire farms were mortgaged to print books in our early history as a nation. (That hardly screams they were looking for a dollar. It just wasn't so.) Their motivation was in their cause for FREEDOM, and a lasting FREEDOM for their posterity to come. Captain David Perry's motivation to publish his life history is spelled out very directly in his last words to his posterity. As a man who fought hard for the foundation of this beautiful country; he gave us all this word of warning for FREE, dying as a pauper: "When we reflect back to our Revolutionary war, and see how much blood and treasure were spent to gain our independence, shall we, after so long an experience of the advantages arising from so good a government, be any more deceived by internal or foreign enemies? Shall we contrast the mildness of our government, and the civil and religious liberty that we enjoy under it, with the bigotry and tyranny which prevails under the monarchies of Europe, and say we are willing to exchange the former for the latter? I dare say not. Then let me conjure my posterity to stand by this government of our choice, and never be deceived by political or ecclesiastical demagogues. Let the people keep the right and power of election; always in their own hands, and at their annual freemen's meetings be sure to choose men into office, who are true friends of a Republican Government. Let them encourage all the arts and sciences that are necessary in a Republic, and none others, -- and in this way they may perpetuate their liberties. -- But if they are ambitious to ape the follies, extravagance, and luxury of European countries, their freedom can have but a short duration. But, above all, let us as a nation dedicate ourselves to God, and pray that he would have us in his holy keeping, and so direct the councils of our nation, as may tend to preserve its free institutions, to the latest period of time; which is the ardent prayer of David Perry, Chelsea, Vt., 1819." It is unfortunate and embarrassing to think that of all the works this author wanted to make example of, in suggesting motivation, it was this one, by Captain Perry. His clear motivation is a warning for our time. And this author has proven him CORRECT. Clearly the warning is needed.
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