Burr at Elsinore
How Aaron Burr, Laurence Sterne, Hamlet, and Tristram Shandy were shaped by their uncles.
The hill and terrace in the rear, something higher than the top of the palace, extends a considerable length, perhaps half a mile, and affords a magnificent and varied view of the town, the castle, the ocean, the Baltic, the Swedish coast, and the town of Helsingborg. Paused at the tomb of Hamlet. It is on this terrace; a square pillar about four feet high, and without inscription; the only monument. I would willingly have passed an hour alone on this terrace.
-The Private Journal of Aaron Burr. Elsinore, October 21st, 1809.
Aaron Burr was born in New Jersey, but it’s no great surprise that he spent some time in Denmark. Fleeing overseas was his go-to move, starting in early childhood. When Burr was two, his father died of overwork, and his mother and grandmother followed soon after. He was sent to live with his uncle, a harsh disciplinarian who beat him for any infraction. Burr tried, always unsuccessfully, to escape punishment by running away and signing on as a cabin boy on a ship.
Now, in his early fifties, he was in trouble again. A co-conspirator had ratted him out about his plan to seize land from Spain in his own name. He was probably hoping to become King of Mexico, Texas included. He’d been arrested four times by various people trying to figure out how to charge him with treason for this, and the last time had been an especially narrow escape. Also, people were occasionally trying to charge him with the murder of Alexander Hamilton. Hence, Denmark.
Elsinore (Danish Helsingør), the city where Hamlet takes place, is a natural waypoint for fugitives. You can see the Swedish city of Helsingborg from there, and make the voyage in under an hour, so the “flee overseas to a new country” option was conveniently available on short notice. In World War II, while Denmark was occupied by the Nazis, Sweden remained neutral but relaxed its immigration policies. Elsinore was the gateway to safety for about seven hundred Jews, smuggled out to Sweden by an organization codenamed the Elsinore Sewing Club.
Burr had pragmatic reasons to be there, but he was still a tourist. He’d given his commencement oration, at Princeton, on “castle-building,”1 and he rarely passed up an opportunity to visit one. On this tour, it’s easy to imagine why he might’ve been transfixed by Hamlet’s putative grave. Burr and Hamlet were linked by a particular fatal flaw, one that had propelled each into a disastrous duel.
Ulysses and Hercules
In his first scene, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is publicly humiliated for failing at adulting. His uncle, the new king, chides him for still visibly mourning his father. It’s been almost two months, longer than the period required by “filial obligation.” Continuing to mourn shows a sweet nature, the king says, but such “unmanly grief” makes him seem like a petulant child, pointlessly angry at the natural and inevitable.
It’s time to grow up. To learn fortitude and patience. And no going back to studying abroad, either—“Be as ourself in Denmark.”
Be like the King, Prince Hamlet, and you will be King yourself some day. While the king’s name is never spoken in the play, we certainly learn a lot about what kind of a role model he is. Hamlet’s uncle is so calm and restrained as to render him unreadable. His plans are manipulative and intricate; he’d rather talk somebody else into murder than do the deed himself. He is indeed the sort of person who might serve a king he hates for decades, waiting for his moment.
But that’s not Hamlet’s only option. Hamlet Senior was a very different kind of king. The first thing we learn about him is that King Fortinbras of Norway once challenged him to a duel to the death, winner takes some of the loser’s lands. He accepted, out of pride, and won. “Valiant,” they called him. Maybe Hamlet could be like him.
Even before he knows that one murdered the other, Hamlet strongly prefers his father to his uncle. (His mother, whose revealed preferences seem to be the reverse, is therefore also ruled out as a role model.) There’s just one tiny problem—he really does have a sweet nature. Valiance, to Hamlet, means killing people for emotional reasons, and his emotions don’t push him in that direction.
As soon as he’s alone, Hamlet soliloquizes about it:
My father's brother, but no more like my father than I to Hercules.
Hercules’s fatal flaw is that he murders people on impulse. Starting as a young boy, when he killed his music teacher, a harsh disciplinarian who beat him. Later, his entire family. Fatal flaws in someone strong are mainly fatal for other people.
Hamlet feels like he’s on the opposite end of that spectrum. Which means…ugh. He has to be his uncle?
Then a spirit, claiming to be his father, shows up and tells him to avenge his death by killing his uncle. Hamlet doesn’t have it in him to just run off and stab the guy, who’s currently drunk at a party. This could all be a trick! And what of the consequences?
You know who’d be great at this sort of thing, in Greco-Roman myth? Not Hercules, but Ulysses. Ulysses, the brains behind the Trojan Horse and the hero of The Odyssey, is both valiant and cunning. He’d take a few days to get his ducks in a row, figure out who to trust, make sure he’s going to have better weapons and the element of surprise. Then he’d valiantly slay the villain, and take his throne.
Ulysses is name-checked in other Shakespeare plays and plays a prominent role in Troilus and Cressida. In Hamlet, though, he’s glaringly absent. Hamlet, in his constant patter of classical references, never mentions him, even after going through a very Odyssey-like adventure offstage. And that is, more or less, his fatal flaw. The only people he respects, real or fictional, are men prone to reckless violence. In order to respect himself he must become like them, contrary to his nature and aptitude.
Throughout the play, Hamlet soliloquizes about how to become a badass. Is it more badass to stoically suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to decisively commit suicide? And, finally, he gets to his answer.
Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour's at the stake.
But if you’re going to kill and die for a straw, someone could get hurt! So he embraces fatalism, just like his uncle said to. People are gonna die. Whatever. He’s never going to reconcile with his mother. Whatever.
Let Hercules himself do what he may,
The cat will mew and dog will have his day.
So when challenged to a duel, he accepts, against advice of counsel. Neither party survives.
Uncle Toby and Jonathan Edwards
Burr’s political ambitions died with Hamilton, but Burr lived on, longer than all the Founding Fathers. It was just enough time for him to realize where he’d gone wrong. The story goes, anyway, that in his eightieth and final year, he decided that Laurence Sterne was his favorite author, and that he should’ve been reading him all along. “If I had read Sterne more and Voltaire less,” he said, “I should have known that the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me.” That phrasing alludes, specifically, to this lovely passage from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy:
My uncle Toby was a man patient of injuries;—not from want of courage,—I have told you in a former chapter, “that he was a man of courage:”—And will add here, that where just occasions presented, or called it forth,—I know no man under whose arm I would have sooner taken shelter;——nor did this arise from any insensibility or obtuseness of his intellectual parts;—for he felt this insult of my father’s as feelingly as a man could do;—but he was of a peaceful, placid nature,—no jarring element in it,—all was mixed up so kindly within him; my uncle Toby had scarce a heart to retaliate upon a fly.
—Go—says he, one day at dinner, to an over-grown one which had buzzed about his nose, and tormented him cruelly all dinner-time,—and which after infinite attempts, he had caught at last, as it flew by him;—I’ll not hurt thee, says my uncle Toby, rising from his chair, and going across the room, with the fly in his hand,——I’ll not hurt a hair of thy head:—Go, says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he spoke, to let it escape;—go, poor devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee?——This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.
I was but ten years old when this happened: but whether it was, that the action itself was more in unison to my nerves at that age of pity, which instantly set my whole frame into one vibration of most pleasurable sensation;—or how far the manner and expression of it might go towards it;—or in what degree, or by what secret magick,—a tone of voice and harmony of movement, attuned by mercy, might find a passage to my heart, I know not;—this I know, that the lesson of universal good-will then taught and imprinted by my uncle Toby, has never since been worn out of my mind: And tho’ I would not depreciate what the study of the Literæ humaniores, at the university, have done for me in that respect, or discredit the other helps of an expensive education bestowed upon me, both at home and abroad since;—yet I often think that I owe one half of my philanthropy to that one accidental impression.
At the same age, ten, Burr had made his last attempt to escape. He actually made it onto a ship this time. With the ship still docked he saw his uncle coming aboard, and, in desperation, climbed up into the rigging and refused to come down. That uncle was his mother’s brother Timothy Edwards, son of the Reverend Jonathan Edwards at the center of the First Great Awakening. In his most famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Edwards Senior had used this analogy:
The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.
That was Burr’s grandfather—the sort of person who would hold an insect over a fire and feel like God. Even at age eleven, he was capturing and experimenting on spiders. Unlike future preachers of fire and brimstone, he spoke these terrible words softly and calmly. He dismissed the idea that he might be traumatizing children. Children are more hateful in God’s sight than a young viper, he wrote, and need much to awaken them from their natural senselessness and stupidity. He recommended dealing unsparingly with them, and “never knew any ill consequence of it.”
His son, Timothy, is often described as a reverend himself2, but I don’t think he was. I think he was a judge who acted like a reverend, and was sometimes conflated with his grandfather and namesake, who actually was one. General opinion seems to have been that he was a naturally kindly person who beat his children out of duty. He certainly didn’t spare the rod. Burr said later that if he called you into his study to pray, you could tell how bad a beating was coming by how long the prayer was. When he was eight, he hid in a tree and threw cherries at a guest. That warranted a very long prayer.
Tristram’s uncle wouldn’t hurt a fly, except to protect someone else. What could it have felt like, reading Sterne at eighty, having spent your life being undone, over and over, by your own duplicity and brutality? Wondering who you could have been, if you’d had that one moment of secret magic, instead of a childhood suspended over a fire by an angry God?
Roger and Jaques Sterne
So let’s talk a bit about Laurence Sterne, who had the same family background as Hamlet and Burr, just adapted into farce. His father, Roger, was a soldier who died when Laurence was young, partly because of a duel. A duel over a goose, apparently. The duel was fought with swords, and ended in Roger being backed up against a wall and run through. He yielded, then noted that the sword had gone through him into the wall, and asked that the victor clean the wall bits off the sword before pulling it out of his body, for hygiene purposes. His opponent did so, and Roger was well on his way to recovering when he was deployed to Jamaica and died of malaria. Laurence was ten years old the last time he saw his father.
He went to live with his uncle Richard, who while probably not the inspiration for uncle Toby seems to have been nice enough. He might have lived a quiet life as a vicar in Yorkshire, had it not been for another uncle, Jaques. Jaques was not so nice. An archdeacon and powerful man in the church, he informed his nephew that he had been pulling strings on his behalf, and, in exchange, he wanted Laurence to write on his. Specifically, he wanted Laurence to write propaganda supporting his political party, the Whigs. Laurence tried to oblige, but he was a sensitive soul, and didn’t like enraging the Tories. When he eventually stopped, his furious uncle became his enemy.
His career in the Church of England being thoroughly thwarted by his nemesis, Sterne fell back on his newly-discovered ability to write, which worked out pretty well for him. He loved being famous. And he loved what he wrote: bawdy, satirical stories of people being basically kind and well-intentioned, with results ranging from touching to absurd to deadly.
The Ant and the Butterfly
Burr’s fatal flaw, most of his contemporaries thought, was that he was too purely selfish. He had no goals, and no ideology, beyond pure self-interest, which put him out of step with the idealistic revolutionaries. Only a handful of people saw further.
That handful includes his old friend Hamilton. When Hamilton wrote about why even Jefferson’s ideological opponents should prefer him to Burr, Miranda’s musical summarizes him as saying “Jefferson has beliefs. Burr has none.” But that’s not quite what Hamilton thought. Burr did have one consistent ideology throughout his life, one that wasn’t politically advantageous and therefore rarely put in writing. Hamilton called it “perfect Godwinism.”
But that’s Hamilton being characteristically sexist. Burr didn’t have a portrait of William Godwin, the political philosopher, hanging above his mantle. It was a portrait of Godwin’s first wife, feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft.
Burr had one crucial trait in common with Sterne—he saw everybody as equally human, equally capable of greatness and worthy of compassion. Burr would knife you in the back for a dollar, but he wouldn’t dehumanize or belittle you to justify it to himself. In his time, that made him a radical. He believed in full equality, regardless of race or gender. In the New York State Assembly, he tried, unsuccessfully, to abolish slavery and give women the vote.
When he found himself a single father, he raised his daughter the way Wollstonecraft said to, fostering her intellect, the same way she said to raise a son. Burr seems to have been very compassionate towards children in general, although many of the kids he helped were, secretly, his. By the time Burr made it to Europe, sadly, his heroine was dead. But he was eager to meet her two young daughters, now being raised by William Godwin and his wife, Mary Jane.
In Denmark, Burr had Wollstonecraft’s memoirs of her own trip to Scandinavia as a travel guide. After Elsinore, Burr made his way to London. He showed up at the Godwins’ with some well-chosen gifts, his journal records: “two newspapers for Mrs. Godwin” and “three leetle books for the three Godwins.” I think the three Godwins are the three girls living there: Wollstonecraft’s daughter Fanny, 16, her daughter with William, the future Mary Shelley, 13, and the new Mrs. Godwin’s daughter Claire, age 12. (Burr knew them from a quick visit pre-Denmark).
He seems to have left the men of the house, William Godwin and William Godwin Junior, age 7, out of the gift-giving. But no offense taken. Burr soon became a close friend of the entire family. William trusted Burr with secrets that Burr didn’t even trust his journal with. One entry reads
To Godwin's, where remained till ten. He related many curious particulars respecting himself.
This may be controversial, but I think stopping there is Burr’s worst crime of all.
William Godwin’s diary records some ninety meals shared with Burr. Burr’s journal cryptically alludes to some unknown clandestine work for the Godwins, possibly related to their ongoing scheme of selling juvenile radical propaganda, disguised as more mainstream children’s books, under a fake name. Parents and teachers would leaf through Fables Ancient and Modern. Adapted for the use of children, by Edward Baldwin, Esq. and just see the classics—the ant and the grasshopper, the boy who cried wolf, and so on. They tended to miss what their children didn’t—every one was rewritten with a sense of compassion for all the characters, even the ones making mistakes. The narrator still frowns on the grasshopper for not saving food for the winter, but the ants don’t just let him starve like in the original. They give him what food they can spare, apologize that they can’t give more, and give some helpful advice for finding more ants to beg from. After all, they’re not monsters.
Another fable adapted by the fictitious Edward Baldwin was “The Fly in the Mail-Coach.” In the original, a fly perches on a racing chariot, feeling proud of himself for how much dust he thinks he’s kicking up, while the narrator and reader snicker. The End. In this version, the fly sees the coach kick dust into the faces of some boys and girls who were good students and are now on their way to get cake as a reward. The fly isn’t proud—he’s guilty. He says aloud that it’s a shame he had to get dust in the kids’ faces, it’s just that he was in such a hurry to get to see London for the first time. A butterfly hears him and says, no, don’t worry, we’re both completely irrelevant to what the coach does. The fly, abashed, hides for the rest of the trip, but then cheers up and flies off to explore London.
Burr had fallen in with a clan of writers who cared enough to give even a fly a happily ever after. “This family truly loves me,” he wrote, two years later.
Lodore and Derham
Burr is possibly the only friend of the Godwins’ to sincerely like and respect both halves of the couple. Most people didn’t understand what William saw in Mary Jane, and thought he’d remarried too hastily so his children would have a mother. But she was Burr’s favorite Godwin. He found her charming and sensible, and saw her marriage for the equal partnership that it was. Once, when he was sick, he wrote Mary Jane a letter, and they both came to visit. He wrote in his journal that Mary Jane thought it was too cold, but William thought it was too hot, and that this conflict was resolved by Mary Jane moving to sit by the fire and William to the opposite side of the room.
He saw virtues in their children, too. When he was struggling with insomnia, Fanny was the only one in the family he trusted to make him tea. William the Younger would give weekly lectures to his family and guests. Burr recorded that the nine-year-old spoke on “The influence of governments on the character of a people” with gravity and decorum. He also wrote that he was pretty sure his sister Mary had written the lecture for him. And, it seems likely, young Mary saw him. Pieces of Burr show up in multiple characters in Mary Shelley’s second-to-last novel, Lodore. Lord Lodore, who flees overseas to avoid one duel, only to be shot dead in another one outside New York, gets this mixed review from the narration:
[He lacked] the enthusiasm for a party or a cause, which is necessary for one who would make a figure as a statesman. His sensitive disposition, his pride, which, when excited, verged into arrogance; his uncompromising integrity, his disdain of most of his associates, his incapacity of yielding obedience, rendered his short political career one of struggle and mortification.
His old friend Derham raises his own daughter, Fanny, the same way Burr raised Theodosia—a non-gendered education meant to elevate her soul and help her learn to seek happiness. This works, reports her friend Ethel, Lodore’s daughter and one of the novel’s protagonists.
Fanny zealously guarded her individuality, and would have scorned herself could she have been brought to place the treasures of her soul at the disposal of any power, except those moral laws which it was her earnest endeavour never to transgress. Religion, reason, and justice—these were the landmarks of her life. She was kind-hearted, generous, and true—so also was Ethel; but the one was guided by the tenderness of her heart, while the other consulted her understanding, and would have died rather than have acted contrary to its dictates.
Burr, Hamlet, and Sterne
I think Burr spent his whole life running away from his uncle, just like Hamlet and Sterne. His tragedy is that he took too long to find someone to run to.
He grew up believing that religion, ideology, and even most things called “morality” were really just cruelty in a frock. How could he not, with the family he had? Burr wasn’t cruel, and didn’t want to be. So he didn’t allow himself to believe in anything, even Godwinism. “I wish I could persuade you,” Godwin wrote to him once. When he took a friend to an art fair, the young woman stopped and stared at a gruesome painting of the crucifixion. Don’t worry, Burr told her. That never happened. It’s okay.
Burr did more damage than a fly can do, and would’ve done much worse if he’d been more successful. Amorality, in someone so strong, is deadly. And it was ultimately self-defeating. If he hadn’t betrayed Jefferson, he could easily have ended up succeeding him as President. His final plot, in a Hamlet-like twist, was foiled by Alexander Hamilton Junior, the son of the man he’d killed. If he’d had better models, real or fictional, he might’ve been much better off, and the world with him.
Sterne did better—I’d say his one fatal flaw was chronic tuberculosis—but not all of the ingredients missing from Burr’s life were present in his. When Ignatius Sancho wrote him a letter, asking him to return to political writing to advocate for the abolition of slavery, Sterne only wrote a letter back. He’d just finished writing a scene in his novel, he told Sancho, sympathetic to the plight of his people. Racism is absurd, he wrote, but that’s just how people are. They find some reason to oppress each other. Sancho used that letter itself as propaganda, quite effectively. But it still seems unfortunate that Sterne had retreated into such fatalism. Running from his uncle, the progressive politician and bully. Sterne inserted himself into Tristram Shandy as Parson Yorick, a clown and descendant of clowns, and later wrote under that name. If you think your only two options are absurdity and cruelty, well, better to play the fool. Alas.
Sterne’s lack of courage, Burr’s heartless betrayals, and Hamlet’s brainless killing all came from, it seems to me, an unreflective belief that everybody has to have at least one of those flaws. Because, when they were young, every adult they knew had one, so that’s what growing up meant.
It gives me hope for that old chestnut that we just need more positive role models. Just be courageous and kind and public-minded, or write a good character who is, and you’ll become some kid’s core memory. They’ll know, really know, that they don’t have to just pick one or two of those virtues. And then they’ll grow up and be better than us.
Of course, even if this is the only article of mine you’ve read, you know I don’t believe in only writing about role models. We need our villains, flawed heroes, and cautionary tales, too. But let’s write about them with compassion. All of them were once ten years old, watching their uncles, learning what it meant to be strong.
This was probably a metaphor, as in “building castles in the air,” but only the title has survived.
Including in Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, for example. It’s complicated, because in this time period Reverend was considered an honorific, not a job title or a noun. But I think contemporaries referred to him as The Honorable Timothy Edwards, the honorific for a judge, and that’s what his tombstone reads. Calling him The Reverend Timothy Edwards is probably technically correct, though, since he does appear in a list of deacons. It’s been a little annoying wading through all the contradictory information about Uncle Tim. An article on PBS.org calls him Timothy Edward Burr, which would put him on the other side of the family. This genealogy book has a welcome trove of information on Timothy that agrees with the few primary sources I’ve found, but hurts its credibility by including a blatantly fake story about Aaron Burr visiting his childhood home in 1809, which would’ve been quite a feat. My current best guess is that he had a lot of jobs, including sometimes local deacon. Probably.
"Burr didn’t have a portrait of William Godwin, the political philosopher, hanging above his mantle. It was a portrait of Godwin’s first wife, feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft." Um. Wow.