SOURCE: "A Reading History: 'Hobomok' and Its Audience," in Cultural Transformations: Lydia Maria Child and the Literature of Reform, The University of Georgia Press, 1994, pp. 11-29.

In the following essay, Mills focuses on Hobomok, exploring the tensions in the novel over race relations and colonialism in America.

When Lydia Maria Child produced her first novel Hobomok in 1824, she was especially conscious of the prevailing literary tastes and social views held by men who stood prominently behind the pulpits, podiums, and desks of such key religious, academic, and literary institutions as the Unitarian church, Harvard College, the North American Review, and the Boston Athenaeum.¹ The novel and its reception provide a case study in how a social ideology, uniquely concentrated in identifiable civic associations and eloquently set forth by community spokesmen, shaped the creation and interpretation of an early American novel. Tracing the relationship between Child and these institutions...