I’m delighted that my article about the artists and writers who invented LIttle Compton as a summer destination has been published in Rhode Island History!
“So near, yet, oh, how far” is a line from a 1869 Providence Journal article by Sara Helen Whitman describing her summer vacation in Little Compton. Whitman was a poet, translator, literary critic, one of America’s foremost theorists of Romanticism, and a founding member of the artsy circle in Little Compton—people like George Burleigh and his son Sydney, and feminist speaker Charlotte Beebe Wilbour and her spouse Egyptologist and translator Charles Edwin Wilbour. Burleigh spoke for them when she described Little Compton as having “that charm of remoteness”—even while acknowledging that it wasn’t far away.
My article explores the way that Whitman describes the town by calling on a remarkable range of Romantic literary references, including Goethe, Dante, Thoreau, Samuel Johnson, Cervantes, and Tennyson. (The Providence Journal doesn’t have article like this anymore!) Whitman and her circle imagined the summer Little Compton into existence as an artists’ colony by imagining it as remote—even though, in fact, the town was not far from Providence or nearly so disconnected from the rest of the world as they liked to pretend. The article ends by considering what might be called “peninsular thinking” has shaped the town ever since then.
Recent issues of Rhode Island History are not online. Check out the article at your local library or at the Rhode Island Historical Society or the Little Compton Historical Society.
