An historical novel, set during the American Revolutionary War. Preceding Cooper’s classic, The Last of the Mohicans, Lionel Lincoln has been criticised for being too historically accurate. Cooper had planned for it to be the first in a series of novels portraying the part each of the colonies played in the Revolution. However, the novel was a flop, and he would later reflect in the preface to the 1837 edition :
“Perhaps there is no other country, whose history is so little adapted to poetical illustration as that of the United States of America. The art of printing has been in general use since the earliest settlement and the policy of both the Provinces and the States has been to encourage the dissemination of accurate knowledge. There is consequently neither a dark, not even an obscure, period in the American annals: all is not only known, but so well and generally known, that nothing is left for the imagination to embellish.”
“The novel abounds in documentary data: battles are charted, and sieges described with a tactician’s care; the geography of colonial Boston is painstakingly rendered; costumes are drawn precisely; even the weather is accurately recalled. Under the weight of such regard for historical veracity and detail Cooper’s fiction simply collapsed.” (Steinbrink).
Engraved bookplates of Roderick Terry to front pastedowns of both volumes. Occasional browning throughout both volumes, some light wear to extremities of bindings, otherwise a very good set.
BAL, 3832. James Fenimore Cooper, Lionel Lincoln or the Leaguer of Boston, 1837. Jeffrey Steinbrink, “James Fenimore Cooper and the Limits of History” in Historical Reflections.
