Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness Britain and the American dream

In this monograph, Moore (Univ. of Oxford, UK) examines the Atlantic origins of the ideals powerfully expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence as "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Eschewing a grand narrative, Moore instead provides an exquisitely articulated entangled history of the lives of six "often underplayed" figures from the era of the American Revolution who "thought just as long and hard about life, liberty, and happiness as Thomas Jefferson did" (p. 11). However, most of these figures--John Wilkes, Catharine Macaulay, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Franklin--are hardly unfamiliar to students of the period. Further, why their specific experiences were selected as especially emblematic of those ideals is never explained. Consequently, beyond their having had chance encounters with one another, their association here feels rather arbitrary. The presentation of how their lives embodied these concepts is the highlight of this piece. Ultimately, this is an exceptional narrative history that eruditely synthesizes and presents the last half-century of scholarship on the transatlantic origins of Jefferson's phraseology in the Declaration. While not innovative in content, its accessibility will nonetheless make it valuable to a general audience. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers. --Matthew Reardon, West Texas A&M University

Historian Moore (Endeavour) offers a rich and immersive intellectual history of the American Revolution focused on its roots in Enlightenment era Britain. At the center are six interconnected figures who embodied the "complex" relationship between England and its colonies in North America and whose ideas influenced the famous phrase "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" in the Declaration of Independence: founding father Benjamin Franklin, who spent much of the period in London, where he felt it was "his particular, peculiar destiny to be making America's case alone"; journalist Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense "advocated for independence and nothing else"; lexicographer Samuel Johnson, a skeptic of "modern, progressive, Whiggish society" who argued that the colonists "wanted Britain to have dominion without authority, and for them to be subjects without subordination"; radical politician John Wilkes, whose slogan in the 1760s was "Wilkes and Liberty!"; republican sympathizer Catharine Macaulay, whose History of England would be more celebrated in America than Britain; and London printer William Strahan, whose friendship with Franklin was sorely tested by their differences of opinion over the proper relationship between the colonies and the Crown. The portrait of Franklin and Strahan's relationship is especially well done, and Moore's fluid prose is infused with the "boisterous" excitement of the era, when "people knew they were living at a loaded moment in history." This is a pleasure. (June)

A nation rises out of the Enlightenment. Like Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men and Leo Damrosch's The Club, Moore's vibrant group biography brings to life the intellectual and political currents, in Britain and Colonial America, that gave rise to the phrase "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," words that "were destined one day to become an evergreen mantra for politicians, and a shorthand for that ideal we call the American Dream." Moore's central figures are Philadelphian printer, scientist, and politician Benjamin Franklin, aspiring to "gentlemanly credentials"; Scottish-born printer and publisher William Strahan; the irascible Samuel Johnson; "political agitator" John Wilkes; historian Catharine Macaulay, whose romantic liaisons inspired salacious gossip; and outspoken British émigré Thomas Paine. In tracing their lives and interconnections in the decades leading up to 1776, Moore depicts a British nation increasingly focused on commerce and geopolitics, with a new generation of Britons "beginning to see themselves as masters of their own destiny," talking of liberty "as a rare and fragile thing." As the author writes, "liberty meant freedom from tyranny. More distinctly, people thought of it as the right to live with some independence, within a legal system that protected them from the malignant reach of arbitrary power, in a property of their own possession that was safe from intruders." To Britain's colonies, liberty meant independence from a king who was quashing free speech, imprisoning opponents, and extorting money from its possessions through taxation. They would not be enslaved by Britain, although they did not include their own slaves in their cry for freedom. "How is it," Johnson remarked acerbically, "that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" It was Paine who urged his fellow colonists to send a "manifesto" to Britain outlining their intentions to break with the motherland, in effect providing a prototype for the committee that met to draft that declaration, and it was Jefferson who summarized the yearnings of the age in a simple phrase. An energetic and meticulously researched history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.