Margaret Fuller’s Reading Worlds

Author

Alexander Kinmont(1799–1838)

Alexander Kinmont is documented in Fuller’s books, published essays, reading notebooks, and manuscripts (1843–1845). One work is named, most often in Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, and the most intensive engagement recorded is “excerpted”.

Engagement
ExcerptedAnalyzedQuotedReadMentioned
Present in
Books · Essays · Notebooks · Manuscripts
Documented
1843–1845
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 →

In Fuller’s words

“Two wise and candid thinkers,–the Scotchman, Kinment, prematurely lost to this country, of which he was so faithful and generous a student, and the late Dr. Channing,—both thought that the African Race had in them a peculiar element, which, if it could be assimilated with those imported among us from Europe, would give to genius a development, and to the energies of character a balance and harmony beyond what has been seen heretofore in the history of the world.”
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass . . . · 1845

When Fuller engaged with Alexander Kinmont

I. Childhood
II. Adolescence
III. Self-Directed
IV. Transcendentalist
V. New York3records
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.

Kinmont in Fuller’s reading world

Documentary evidence

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

1843—

Summer on the Lakes, in 1843

analyzed · read
“Kinmont says, that limits are sacred; that the Greeks were in the right to worship a god of limits.”

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

Inferred Fuller names 'Kinmont' explicitly and paraphrases his argument that 'limits are sacred' and 'the Greeks were in the right to worship a god of limits.' Kinmont was a Scottish-born Swedenborgian philosopher and lecturer who settled in Cincinnati, Ohio. His Twelve Lectures on the Natural History of Man was published posthumously in 1839 (Cincinnati: U. James), based on lectures he delivered in Cincinnati in 1837-38.

1845—

Woman in the Nineteenth Century

p101
analyzed · read
“Two younger thinkers, men both, have uttered noble prophecies, auspicious for woman.”

Fuller, Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Greeley & McElrath, 1845.

Inferred Named explicitly as 'Kinmont, all whose thoughts tended towards the establishment of the reign of love and peace'; Twelve Lectures is his major work. Alexander Kinmont, Cincinnati philosopher, author of Twelve Lectures on the Natural History of Man (1839).

1845—

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass . . .

“Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass . . .”
mentioned
“Two wise and candid thinkers,–the Scotchman, Kinment, prematurely lost to this country, of which he was so faithful and generous a student, and the late Dr.”

Fuller, Margaret. "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass . . ." New-York Daily Tribune, 10 June 1845. · 10 June 1845

Undated

Pieces with no legible date. They are part of the record but cannot be placed on the lifeline.

n.d.—

Notebook 1842

p45
excerpted · analyzed · quoted · readManuscript page
“From Kinmont's lectures on the natural / history of man and the rise and / progress of philosophy.”

Fuller, Margaret. "Notebook 1842." Houghton Library, Harvard University; bMS Am 1086 (90); Box 6.

n.d.—

Notes on Rhine Ballads and Catlin

p1
quoted · readManuscript page
“Kinmont says / "I never could trust that man nor woman either, and never will, that can be insensible to the simple ballads and songs of rude times.”

Fuller, Margaret. "Notes on Rhine Ballads and Catlin." Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Inferred The opening quotes Kinmont, expressing the view that insensibility to simple ballads reveals a fundamental flaw of character, and introducing 'this notice of two good books'.