Margaret Fuller’s Reading Worlds

Author

Julius Caesar(100 BCE–44 BCE)

Julius Caesar is documented in Fuller’s letters and books (1821–1843). One work is named, most often in Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, and the most intensive engagement recorded is “read”.

Engagement
ReadMentioned
Present in
Letters · Books
Documented
1821–1843
Totals count documented engagements, once at the earliest witness. How we count →

Reprints, Memoirs passages, and repeat notes within a single manuscript are shown but never counted twice. Evidence for this author is selective, not exhaustive. Methodology →

Confirmed reading

Passages where the evidence goes beyond allusion to indicate that Fuller had Julius Caesar’s work in hand — an explicit statement of reading, sustained excerpting or translation, or a specific reading episode recorded by those who knew her.

  • Dated
  • 1821CommentariesAttested

    “I have persuaded mamma to ask Mr Stiles Ganet to come here twice in a week in order to hear me recite in Caesars Commentaries and the Greek Grammar.”

    Letters of Margaret Fuller ed. Hudspeth · Cambridge 15th Jan 1821

    Describes arranging tutoring specifically to recite Caesar's Commentaries, a concrete, dated study/reading activity.

In Fuller’s words

“I have persuaded mamma to ask Mr Stiles Ganet to come here twice in a week in order to hear me recite in Caesars Commentaries and the Greek Grammar.”
Commentarii de Bello Gallico [The Gallic Wars] · Letter to Timothy Fuller · 1821

When Fuller engaged with Julius Caesar

I. Childhood
II. Adolescence1record
III. Self-Directed
IV. Transcendentalist
V. New York1record
VI. Europe
✦. Memoirs (1852)
1810
1820
1832
1836
1844
1846
1850

This page brings together documented engagements currently identified within the Fuller Reading Worlds catalog.

Caesar in Fuller’s reading world

Documentary evidence

Selected passages from Fuller’s own writings, in chronological order.

1821—

Letter to Timothy Fuller

p109
read
“I have persuaded mamma to ask Mr Stiles Ganet to come here twice in a week in order to hear me recite in Caesars Commentaries and the Greek Grammar.”

Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. I. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.

Inferred Fuller explicitly names "Caesars Commentaries" as a text she recites from regularly with her tutor Ezra Stiles Gannett (identified by Hudspeth as a Harvard Divinity School student), engaging with Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, a standard Latin school text of the period.

1843—

Summer on the Lakes, in 1843

read
“Literature should not be left to the mere literati--eloquence to the mere orator. Every Caesar should be able to write his own commentary.”

Fuller, Margaret. Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1844.

Inferred Fuller names Caesar explicitly and invokes his Commentarii as the paradigm of the military-political man who records his own experience. 'Caesar' is used both as a proper name and as a generic title (any great active man). Fuller's argument ? that active men like her steamship captain should develop their powers of literary expression ? uses Caesar as the supreme example.