Margaret Fuller’s Reading Worlds

Author

James Walker(1794–1874)

James Walker is documented in Fuller’s manuscripts (1835). One work is named, all in Poems, Others, and the most intensive engagement recorded is “excerpted”.

Engagement
ExcerptedAnalyzedQuotedReadMentioned
Present in
Manuscripts
Documented
1835
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 James Walker’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
  • 1835On the Exclusive SystemDemonstrated

    “Nobody denies that Christianity, considered is a system of religious instruction, has its essential and fundamental doctrines..." Walker on the exclusive system.”

    Manuscripts (Houghton Library, Margaret Fuller Family Papers) · 1835 Nov-

    Manuscript notebook entry copying a substantial multi-clause passage from Walker's essay.

In Fuller’s words

“Nobody denies that Christianity, considered is a system of religious instruction, has its essential and fundamental doctrines ... Thus one sect after another has arisen, each denying to all the rest an authority, which, however, in the same breath it has had the inconsistency and effrontery to arrogate to itself.' Walker on the exclusive system.”
"The Exclusive System" · Poems, Others · 1835

When Fuller engaged with James Walker

I. Childhood
II. Adolescence
III. Self-Directed1record
IV. Transcendentalist
V. New York
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.

Walker in Fuller’s reading world

Documentary evidence

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

1835—

Poems, Others

pp27–28
excerpted · analyzed · quoted · readManuscript page
“Nobody denies that Christianity, considered is a system of religious instruction, has its essential and fundamental doctrines ...”

Fuller, Margaret. "Poems, Others." Houghton Library, Harvard University; bMS Am 1086.

Fuller copies a substantial passage and attributes it explicitly: 'Walker on the exclusive system.' The passage discusses competing Christian denominations — Catholics (Council of Trent), Lutherans (Confession of Augsburg), Calvinists (Synod of Dort, Westminster Assembly), and the Church of England (Thirty-Nine Articles) — each claiming exclusive authority to define essential doctrines.