Percival Lowell: The Culture and Science of a Boston Brahmin

Abstract

Known today for crankily insisting that Mars had canals, which implied an advanced civilization, Percival Lowell, as David Strauss makes clear, was a man of many and formidable parts: compelling writer, early student of Japan, gifted astronomer, all rolled together in a figure who was both product of and rebel against his Boston Brahmin background. Lowell benefited from the wealth, connections, and matchless educational opportunities of his class; his brother was president of Harvard University. But he strongly resisted its expectations of community solidarity and family loyalty. This tension between class and individual furnishes Strauss's interpretive framework. After graduating from Harvard in the 1870s, Lowell and his friends became “Bohemian bachelors” of an almost European type, avoiding marriage and business careers or, indeed, jobs of any kind for several years. Lowell then went to Europe and eventually Japan because it was easier for him to feel free as a foreign traveler than it was at home. Once in Japan, he became a serious travel writer, describing and interpreting exotic customs almost anthropologically, though in florid prose. Although Lowell was perhaps the best American writer on Japan until Lafcadio Hearn some years later, his inquiries were marred, says Strauss, by his insistence that the Japanese, admirable in religion and art, lacked the individualism that was indispensable to a truly advanced civilization such as those in the West.

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