Thing-Finder

Alexis de Tocqueville is famous for his Democracy in America published in 1835. While primarily intended as a comparison of democracies versus aristocracies, it is also an anthropological study as well as a travelogue. I came across this snippet in which de Tocqueville describes a specific frontier cabin in which he stopped for the night but offers it as a representative example of the cabins in which he stayed as he travelled about. I was struck by his description of the reading conditions and supplies for a typical frontiersman.

We entered the log house: the inside is quite unlike that of the cottages of the peasantry of Europe: it contains more than is superfluous, less than is necessary. A single window with a muslin blind; on a hearth of trodden clay an immense fire, which lights the whole structure; above the hearth a good rifle, a deer's skin, and plumes of eagles' feathers; on the right hand of the chimney a map of the United States, raised and shaken by the wind through the crannies in the wall; near the map, upon a shelf formed of a roughly hewn plank, a few volumes of books--a Bible, the six first books of Milton, and two of Shakespeare's plays; along the wall, trunks instead of closets; in the centre of the room a rude table, with legs of green wood, and with the bark still upon them, looking as if they grew out of the ground on which they stood; but on this table a tea-pot of British ware, silver spoons, cracked tea-cups, and some newspapers.

The literary conditions of frontiersmen and women in the 1830's is something of a reproof to our current homes which are so often bereft of books at all much less Milton and Shakespeare.