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The nineteenth-century church music controversy: a possible referent for Cooper's "manifestly impossible" (1) singing-master in The Last of the Mohicans.(James Fenimore Cooper )(Critical essay)

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From: ANQ
Date: 20060101
Author:Sloan, Karen S.

In The Last of the Mohicans, a Puritan singing-master, David Gamut, wanders into a besieged British fort during the French and Indian War. He has no weapon stronger than his pitch pipe and no apparent survival skills other than an overweening confidence in the providential power of psalmody. What prompts the psalmodist's two-hundred-mile trek from New Haven, Connecticut, to Lake George, New York, at the height of an intercontinental war is unclear--an observation that may have prompted one of Cooper's contemporaries to call Gamut "one of the strangest conceits that ever entered ...