The colonial revival.(Books about antiques)(Re-creating the American Past: Essays on the Colonial Revival)(Book review)

Richard Guy Wilson, introducing this book of essays about the colonial revival movement in the United States, writes: "What does Colonial Revival mean? Although to some the apparent obtuseness of such a question may render it redundant, any attempt to define the Colonial Revival can become so complex that the response begins to resemble the later manner of Henry James with multiple layers, qualifications, asides, and repetitions." The book bears out this assessment, as some two dozen essayists expand on the many forms of colonial revivalism, from deft additions to existing buildings to construction from the ground up. It is even pointed out that the colonial revival was itself reviving a revival, since the early colonists were reviving the sorts of things they had left behind in Europe.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's house on Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, represents one of the more piecemeal applications of the colonial revival in Sarah M. Heald's essay. His house was a Georgian mansion where George Washington stayed for nine months during the American Revolution. Three of Longfellow's poems set the stage for the revival: "To a Child," remembering the presence of Washington; "The Courtship of Miles Standish" (1858) celebrating the diligence of young spinner at her wheel; and "The Old Clock on the Stairs" (1845). Artifacts eventually caught up with the poetic themes. There were a number of pictures of Washington as husband and warrior in various rooms, and in 1844 Longfellow added a plaster copy of Houdon's bust of Washington. This was placed on the stair landing, although the poem of the following year had a tall-clock in this position. A spinning wheel was not part of the household until at least a decade after the relevant poem. It was added to the bedroom of the two youngest children, Edith and Annie, at their request, but as a decoration, not a hobby. A tall-case clock did not replace the bust of Washington on the stair landing until Longfellow bought a Dutch example in 1877, more than thirty years after he wrote the poem.

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By this time the house positively vibrated with the past, and as one of his daughters wrote to a cousin in 1875, "I hardly want to return to the present day, especially as this house is such a fine chance to keep up with the delusion." Longfellow's children created a trust to preserve the house. The essay ends: "The Longfellows were not unique in their romantic impulses nor furnishings, yet their roles as prominent players in the creation of these historical myths reveal deep ironies which can provide lessons of caution to all keepers and consumers of our past."

The next gradation of colonial revivalism was remodeling houses into colonials. This was made easier at the turn of the twentieth century by the ...