Bennett, Bridget. “The Damnation of Theron Ware or Illumination (1896).” The Damnation of Harold Frederic: His Lives and Works. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1997. 174-97.

Carter, Everett. Introduction. The Damnation of Theron Ware. By Harold Frederic. 1896. Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1960. vii-xxiv.

Carter, Everett. “Naturalism and Introspection.” Howells and the Age of Realism. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1966. 239-45.

Donaldson, Scott. Introduction. The Damnation of Theron Ware. By Harold Frederic. 1896. New York: Penguin, 1986. vii-xxx.

Garner, Stanton. “The Other Harold Frederic.” Upstate Literature: Essays in Memory of Thomas F. O’Donnell. Ed. Frank Bergmann. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1985. 129-41.

Hirsh, John C. “The Frederic Papers, The McGlynn Affair, and The Damnation of Theron Ware.” American Literary Realism 17.1 (1984): 12-23.

Lackey, Lionel. “Redemption and The Damnation of Theron Ware.” South Atlantic Review 55 (1990): 81-91.

Myers, Robert M. “Antimodern Protest in The Damnation of Theron Ware.” American Literary Realism 26.3 (1994): 52-64.

Myers, Robert M. “Author of The Damnation of Theron Ware.” Reluctant Expatriate: The Life of Harold Frederic. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1995. 115-34.

O’Donnell, Thomas F. “The Baxter Marginalia: Theron Ware a Clef.” Frederic Herald 1.3 (1967): 5.

O’Donnell, Thomas F, and Hoyt C. Franchere. “The Damnation of Theron Ware.” Harold Frederic. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1961. 108-17.

Rees, John. “‘Dead Men’s Bones, Dead Men’s Beliefs’: Ideas of Antiquity in Upstate New York and Theron Ware.” American Studies 16.2 (1975): 77-87.

Watson, Douglas. “Folk Speech, Custom, and Belief in Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware and Stories of York State.” New York Folklore 3 (1977): 83-99.

Wilson, Edmund. “Two Neglected American Novelists: II—Harold Frederic, the Expanding Upstarter.” The New Yorker (6 June 1970): 112-34.

Wilson, Edmund. “Two Neglected American Novelists: Harold Frederic, the Expanding Upstater.” The Devils and Canon Barham: Ten Essays on Poets, Novelists and Monsters. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973. 48-76.

Woodward, Robert H. “Some Sources for Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware.” American Literature 33.1 (1961): 46-51.

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Bennett, Bridget. “The Damnation of Theron Ware or Illumination (1896).” The Damnation of Harold Frederic: His Lives and Works. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1997. 174-97.

Bennett approaches her analysis of Frederic’s novel from a biographical and cultural perspective. In Chapter 5, she claims the novel “is an embodiment of its own message—the difference between appearance and reality”—because both Theron Ware and the reader are misled with respect to his “illumination” (174). Bennett hypothesizes that Frederic expresses empathy for his main character, the “badly treated” Reverend Ware, probably because he too felt victimized by life’s circumstance (175). According to the Harold Frederic Papers in the Library of Congress, the author originally intended to kill off the title character by having him jump off the Brooklyn Bridge (built in 1883); however, Bennett contends that suicide might have made Ware appear to be a decadent hero. Death by alcohol would have been conventional and melodramatic. Thus the unexpected ending Frederic chose for Ware reflects the author’s pessimism regarding the Gilded Age and ironically perpetuates the themes of illumination and damnation. Bennett observes, “Theron is less illumined, as he believes, than literally blinded by the people and ideas that he encounters. It is in this debilitated state of hysterical blindness that he seems most like a moth helplessly circling a source of light that he believes to be the catalyst of his illumination, singeing himself every time he gets too close to it, and inevitably foundering into it” (178). This analysis reflects Frederic’s disillusionment with the Edenic myth of America and the corruption and falseness of its political and religious leaders—beliefs that are revealed through the characters in the novel. According to Bennett, “Theron’s anxiety about how others perceived him, his eagerness to please and naive belief in his own intellectual and social advances captured a painfully familiar aspect of American national character” (186). Bennett notes that similar themes may be found in the writing of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James.

Carter, Everett. Introduction. The Damnation of Theron Ware. By Harold Frederic. 1896. Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1960. vii-xxiv.

Carter’s oft-cited introduction opens with a biographical survey of Frederic’s life before it moves on to a cultural and a moral examination of the trio of Father Forbes, Dr. Ledsmar, and Celia Madden as “seducers of innocence” (xxi). Carter claims that Theron Ware falls from innocence into knowledge, “a fall into the religious and scientific knowledge” and “the dark knowledge of the flesh” (xxi). Father Forbes is responsible for Ware’s religious crisis, while Dr. Ledsmar—a Darwinian atheist—introduces Ware to the writings of Renan. According to Carter, Celia Madden’s role in Theron Ware’s damnation is “evil” (x). The critic’s bibliography is a good source for contemporaneous reception of the novel: most of the citations are reviews or articles from the 1890s.

Carter, Everett. “Naturalism and Introspection.” Howells and the Age of Realism. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1966. 239-45.

Carter combines biographical and genre criticism in his chapter that examines Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware. According to Carter, Frederic “thought of himself as a realist,” a disciple of William Dean Howells. Howells preached “a fidelity to the life one knew, an immersion in one’s own experience, an unswerving loyalty to the truth and a hatred of the false and sentimental.” Like Howells, Frederic looked to his own life and region for inspiration. Unlike Howells, however, Frederic “found his interest going from the social to the individual, from the inequities in relations between men to the tormenting self-divisions within man, from an analysis of the normal and commonplace to a concern with those hidden recesses of the individual soul where cower lust and fear and primitive ignorance” (240). Frederic observed “a society in turmoil” due to social, economic, and scientific advances, which prompted a “struggle within the individual [. . .] attended by possibilities of evil as well as possibilities of good” (241). Theron Ware’s illumination results in his fall rather than his salvation. Because the characters of Ware, Father Forbes, and Celia Madden, as well as the scenes of New York State life, are “drawn from life,” Carter identifies The Damnation of Theron Ware as a work of “realism” (244-45). However, because Frederic also sought to explore a “psychological rather than a social truth” in his portrayal of Father Forbes, Celia Madden, Dr. Ledsmar, and the Soulsbys, he transforms the characters into archetypes (245).

Donaldson, Scott. Introduction. The Damnation of Theron Ware. By Harold Frederic. 1896. New York: Penguin, 1986. vii-xxx.

Donaldson’s introduction to The Damnation of Theron Ware combines biographical and genre criticism with a brief character study. Part I is a biography of Harold Frederic: journalist, novelist, bon vivant, and polygamist. Part II opens with Donaldson’s acknowledgment that Frederic’s literary reputation generally rests upon a single novel, The Damnation of Theron Ware, a situation he regrets as unfortunate because Seth’s Brother’s Wife (1890), In the Valley (1890), and The Market-Place (1899) “represent major achievements” as well (xii). Donaldson states that Frederic’s novels “resist pigeonholing as works of realism, naturalism, or romance” and further asserts that Damnation “reveals traces of all three approaches” (xvi). Parts III, IV, and V explore the character development of Theron Ware, as well as of Father Forbes, Dr. Ledsmar, Celia Madden, and Sister Soulsby. The novel is described as a “subtle study of moral disintegration” (xviii), in which Ware “abandons his faith and seems at the end to have learned almost nothing from his ordeal” (xix).

Garner, Stanton. “The Other Harold Frederic.” Upstate Literature: Essays in Memory of Thomas F. O’Donnell. Ed. Frank Bergmann. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1985. 129-41.

Garner’s chapter is a biographical sketch of Frederic that acknowledges his achievements as an editor and a journalist, but concentrates upon Frederic’s literary contributions as a writer of fiction. Joseph Conrad characterized Frederic as “a notable journalist (who had written some novels).” Garner contends that Conrad’s comment is an example of how Frederic’s fiction has been, and continues to be, misunderstood and underappreciated (130). In Garner’s opinion, Frederic is a “fine stylist” who, “in the ease and fluency of his language [. . .], belongs in the camp of Mark Twain” (133). Garner examines genre in The Damnation of Theron Ware, Gloria Mundi, and The Market-Place to show Frederic’s growth as an author. Frederic’s early works set in upstate New York establish him as a regionalist; however, most of Frederic’s later works are set abroad and are a “fusion of types,” borrowing elements of regionalism, realism, and romance (135). For example, elements of realism and romance flavor The Damnation of Theron Ware, one of Frederic’s later novels (although set in New York), with provocative social and moral issues. The setting of Gloria Mundi and The Market-Place, Frederic’s last two novels, moves beyond the Mohawk Valley to “the ancient European cradle out of which [. . . Frederic’s regional American] culture had risen” and on to “the future of the West and of mankind” in the character of Joel Thorpe. Garner concludes “that in addition to the regionalist we know there was another Harold Frederic whose vision grew much broader” (140).

Hirsh, John C. “The Frederic Papers, The McGlynn Affair, and The Damnation of Theron Ware.” American Literary Realism 17.1 (1984): 12-23.

Hirsh combines textual and biographical approaches in his examination of the Frederic Papers, preserved in the Library of Congress, “to help illuminate some of the more important structural and thematic concerns of the novel, particularly those affecting Fr. Forbes and the Catholics” (12). In his article, Hirsh produces excerpts from the author’s early notes that indicate some of the relationships that Frederic intended to develop, among them Theron Ware, Father Forbes and Dr. Ledsmar; Celia Madden and Father Forbes; Father Forbes and his Bishop. Hirsh cites Paul Haines’ 1945 unpublished dissertation that identifies Father Edward Terry, a priest whom Frederic knew in Utica, as a possible source for the development of Father Forbes. However, Hirsh suggests that a more influential source may have been Father Edward McGlynn, an Irish-Catholic priest in New York who made newspaper headlines in the 1880s for his political activism and American ideal of Catholicism (he was excommunicated in 1887 and reconciled with the church in 1893). The character of Father Forbes, as it emerged in The Damnation of Theron Ware, is forceful, powerful, and sophisticated. Elements of the role that were in Frederic’s working notes but eliminated from the novel include public condemnation of the priest for a scandalous relationship with Celia Madden and serious political activism.

Lackey, Lionel. “Redemption and The Damnation of Theron Ware.” South Atlantic Review 55 (1990): 81-91.

Lackey’s biographical and psychological study examines Frederic’s portrayal, and possible redemption, of Theron Ware. Lackey’s article is a sympathetic reading of Ware is influenced by his opinion that Frederic never achieved total honesty in his own life; thus “the author neither expected nor achieved total honesty in his characters” (81). Frederic’s practices regarding money, friendships, and extra-marital relationships, for example, are reflected in Ware’s desire for financial freedom, cultured friends, and a liaison with Celia Madden. Because Ware lacks “the financial access to culturally enlightened circles that would have afforded him the expertise and discretion to enter into moral ambiguities gracefully and knowingly—on Forbes’ and Celia’s own level,” they judge him a bore (85). Sister Soulsby consoles Theron Ware after his rejection by Celia Madden and Father Forbes. Some critics see this consolation as “a prelude to renewed vanity, delusion, and failure” (86), but Lackey prefers to believe “there is ground for hope that Theron may after all have learned something valuable from his mistakes [. . .]. Having lost his life, Theron may yet save it” (87). Lackey speculates that Frederic may have intended the ending to be ambiguous in order to pave the way for another book, perhaps “The Redemption of Theron Ware.” In any case, Lackey chooses “to place the best construction on the various ambivalences Frederic positions in the concluding chapters” (88).

Myers, Robert M. “Antimodern Protest in The Damnation of Theron Ware.” American Literary Realism 26.3 (1994): 52-64.

Myers combines biographical and cultural criticism in his article to examine Frederic’s portrayal of nineteenth-century America, particularly the country’s attitude toward religion. According to Myers, many earlier critics of Frederic’s works “tended to see Frederic as an objective critic standing outside of his culture”; he, however, detects in The Damnation of Theron Ware the author’s concern for the effect of “overcivilization and fragmentation of modernism” on American cultural institutions (52). Frederic undertook extensive research on Methodism, Catholicism, and higher Biblical criticism in order to be as accurate as possible in his portrayal of a minister and a priest. Myers notes that Frederic’s sources on comparative religion “map a decline in traditional faith” resulting in “a profound ambivalence about the psychological and social effects of faithlessness.” Frederic’s own views on religion “altered between contempt for religious superstition and a recognition of the social value of religion”(54). In the 1890s, tensions between liberal Methodists, who “adopted the modern optimistic belief in the inevitability of progress,” and conservative Methodists, who protested the “modernizing trends of the liberals,” were dividing the church. Reverend Ware’s attempt to bring “modern ideas” to the Methodists of Octavius is thwarted by “a strong conservative faction” (56). Partly in reaction to his frustration with primitive Methodism, Ware embraces Celia Madden’s aesthetic paganism. He is also exposed to Father Forbes’ Catholicism, described by Myers as “a useful social institution” (59), and Sister Soulsby’s pragmatism, “based on social utility rather than theology.” Myers observes, “Father Forbes, Doctor Ledsmar, Celia, and Sister Soulsby all contribute to Theron’s destruction by consistently overestimating his ability to assimilate a modern view of religion.” Catholicism can tolerate a Father Forbes in its midst because the “corporate ethic of the Catholic Church de-emphasizes the significance of the individual priest” (60). Reverend Ware does not have that luxury in Methodism: “if the minister be corrupt his ministry will be corrupt also.” Myers concludes, “Forbes’ vision of a national church, focused on the needs of the consumers rather than doctrinal disputes with other religions, parallels simultaneous developments in American business. [. . .] The pragmatic approach to religion that emerges from Theron Ware points to a church strikingly similar to the modern corporation, an institution that took shape in the late nineteenth century” (61).

Myers, Robert M. “Author of The Damnation of Theron Ware.” Reluctant Expatriate: The Life of Harold Frederic. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1995. 115-34.

Myers’ biographical essay examines the influence of events in Harold Frederic’s life on the writing of The Damnation of Theron Ware. In this chapter, Myers notes that Frederic’s attempts to keep the circumstances of his unconventional life private—specifically, the maintenance of two households—may have “contributed to his conception of the difficulties Theron Ware faced as he began to separate his public from his private self” (116). A decade of expatriation may also have afforded Frederic an outsider’s perspective with regard to American culture; he was particularly concerned that “America had become overcivilized and that the homogenous American spirit was being torn apart by such factors as the growing class unrest and the increasing conflict between the sexes” (119). According to Myers, these concerns are reflected in Frederic’s novel. Having perused Frederic’s notes on “extensive readings in science, comparative religion, and the history of Methodism,” collected in The Frederic Papers in the Library of Congress, Myers also theorizes that Frederic may have used the characters of Father Forbes, Dr. Ledsmar, and Celia Madden to express his own views on religion, philosophy, and American culture (120).

O’Donnell, Thomas F. “The Baxter Marginalia: Theron Ware a Clef.” Frederic Herald 1.3 (1967): 5.

O’Donnell’s note relates some of the brief marginalia contained in a copy of The Damnation of Theron Ware (Herbert S. Stone, 1899) acquired by O’Donnell and believed to have belonged to one of Harold Frederic’s close friends and first cousin, John Baxter. The marginalia are generally biographical in nature, referring to events, people, buildings, streets, or places that appear in Frederic’s novel and are also familiar to Baxter. For example, next to the text that reads, “[. . .] my very particular friend, Dr. Ledsmar,” the margin note reads, “My mother’s name and of course his mother’s as well spelled backwards” (underlined in original). Frederic’s and Baxter’s mothers’ maiden names were Ramsdell. Opposite the name “Father Forbes” on one page, Baxter wrote “Father Terry,” and next to “Octavius,” he wrote “Utica.” In two places, Baxter seems to identify elements in the book directly with Frederic: opposite the text that reads, “[. . .] and a copy of ‘Josephus’ which had belonged to his grandmother,” Baxter penned the words, “My grandmother’s book. Here he makes himself Theron”; opposite the text that reads, “[. . .] it did have a curious effect upon Theron Ware,” Baxter wrote, “Harry,” the name by which friends and family members knew Harold Frederic. O’Donnell states that the marginalia “demonstrate the extent to which F[rederic] relied on his memories of Utica as he wrote the novel” (5).

O’Donnell, Thomas F, and Hoyt C. Franchere. “The Damnation of Theron Ware.” Harold Frederic. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1961. 108-17.

O’Donnell and Franchere’s chapter on The Damnation of Theron Ware combines biographical and cultural criticism in an examination of the writing and reception of the novel. The essay opens with a survey of the novel’s contemporaneous reviews in both England and the United States, then moves on to speculate upon the genesis of the work, which took Frederic “five years of conscious, careful, and silent planning” to write. O’Donnell and Franchere believe the idea for the novel may have occurred to Frederic “as far back as his Utica days when his long conversations with Father Terry, the brilliant and candid priest, had so stimulated him” (110). They point out that Frederic observed the growth of religious skepticism in the 1870s and 1880s—fueled by Darwin’s theories, higher Biblical criticism, aestheticism, and intellectual epicureanism—and incorporated these influences in the characters of Dr. Ledsmar, Father Forbes, and Celia Madden, with disastrous results for his title character. Unable to reconcile “currents of thought that are disturbing the very universe of his time [, . . .] Theron brings about his own damnation,” conclude O’Donnell and Franchere (116).

Rees, John. “‘Dead Men’s Bones, Dead Men’s Beliefs’: Ideas of Antiquity in Upstate New York and Theron Ware.” American Studies 16.2 (1975): 77-87.

Rees’ biographical and psychological approach to the last of Frederic’s New York State novels leads him to speculate in this article that a “special regional consciousness” in areas like “religion, history, [. . . and] legend” contributes to the “psychological interest” of The Damnation of Theron Ware (78). Father Forbes claims that the “idea that humanity progresses” is “utterly baseless and empty.” Theron Ware confesses to Sister Soulsby, “It oppresses me, and yet it fascinates me—this idea that the dead men have known more than we know, done more than we do; that there is nothing new anywhere” (79). Rees contends that Frederic believed the past is constantly imposing itself on the present and that “beneath the rising American republic lay an empire of the dead” (83). Beliefs, for example, about pre-Columbian America—including the theory that “the Indians were descended from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel” and the Mound-builders were a “physically and mentally superior race”—promoted a sense of “religious antiquarianism” in residents of upstate New York, the regional consciousness that permeates Frederic’s novel (82-85).

Watson, Douglas. “Folk Speech, Custom, and Belief in Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware and Stories of York State.” New York Folklore 3 (1977): 83-99.

Watson’s linguistic and biographical study of The Damnation of Theron Ware and Stories of York State examines the materials and processes of folklore—specifically speech, customs, and beliefs. Watson reasons in his article, “Frederic’s life provided him with both a natural and a practiced awareness of the ‘folk,’ and his fiction became a medium for recording the particulars of that awareness.” Folk speech is “used for the purposes of characterization and establishment of setting.” It portrays Brother Pierce’s upstate New York fundamentalism: “We are a plain sort o’ folk up in these parts. [. . .] We ain’t gone traipsin’ after strange gods [. . .]. No new-fangled notions can go down here” (84). Sister Soulsby’s figurative expressions and use of proverbial sayings—“You’ve got to take folks as you find them,” and “you’ve got to find them the best way you can”—“express her understanding of human nature and her attitude toward overcoming its limitations” (86). Watson notes three distinct dialect patterns in Stories of York State: the upstate New York dialect (similar to Pierce’s in The Damnation of Theron Ware), the Irish immigrant dialect, and the German immigrant dialect. In addition to using folk speech patterns to create realistic characters, Frederic also used folk beliefs and customs, such as the rustics’ opposition to intellectualism and the Methodists’ suspicions of the Irish and the Italians. Folk customs in The Damnation of Theron Ware include the camp meeting, the lovefeast, donation parties, and the rental of pews. According to Watson, Frederic attended a Methodist camp meeting in 1875 and wrote an essay attacking “the hypocrisies of the barely religious event” (96). “Frederic’s use of the folklore of his native Mohawk Valley,” asserts Watson, “appears to be not only extensive, but basically accurate as well” (97).

Wilson, Edmund. “Two Neglected American Novelists: II—Harold Frederic, the Expanding Upstarter.” The New Yorker (6 June 1970): 112-34.

Wilson’s biographical criticism of The Damnation of Theron Ware likens the title character to his creator, Harold Frederic. Wilson dedicates a large portion of his article to Frederic’s biography and a chronological review of Frederic’s literary works. Drawing parallels between events in Frederic’s life and events in his novels, Wilson states that Frederic “violates the genteel conventions by allowing sex often to figure in its rawest, least romantic form” (114). To support his point, Wilson cites Frederic’s public defense of prostitution in London and his maintenance of two households—one with his legally-married wife and children, the other with his common-law wife and children. The Damnation of Theron Ware is described as “amusing, absorbing, rather shocking” (124). Wilson identifies the “three tempters” (Father Forbes, Dr. Ledsmar, and Celia Madden) as the agents of Ware’s damnation and Sister Soulsby as the only “redeeming element among Theron’s mischief-making friends” (125-26). Ware’s “illumination” is a feeble version of the “intellectual and imaginative expansion” Frederic himself experienced. Furthermore, Frederic and Ware shared a “kind of disregard of consequences”; Wilson cites the serious debt both faced as an example (126). Wilson concludes that “Theron Ware was an unself-flattering version of Harold Frederic as a young provincial eager to widen his social, aesthetic, and intellectual scope and to make for himself a career” (133).

Wilson, Edmund. “Two Neglected American Novelists: Harold Frederic, the Expanding Upstater.” The Devils and Canon Barham: Ten Essays on Poets, Novelists and Monsters. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973. 48-76.

Wilson’s chapter was first published as an article in The New Yorker (6 June 1970): 112-34.

Woodward, Robert H. “Some Sources for Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware.” American Literature 33.1 (1961): 46-51.

Woodward combines textual, biographical, and cultural criticism in his examination of Frederic’s writing methods and sources. The article opens with a statement Frederic made in an interview published in Literary Digest in which he describes his research: “‘I seek to know my people through and through. [. . .] I set myself the task of knowing everything they knew. [. . .] I have got up masses of stuff.’” Among the background works Frederic studied, Woodward cites Samuel Laing’s Human Origins (1892) as the source for Father Forbes’ Abraham speech and Zénaïde A. Ragozin’s The Story of Chaldea from the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria (1886) for Forbes’ discussion of eponyms. In the case of Dr. Ledsmar’s conversation with Theron Ware, all the German and French historians he refers to are among those listed in Mme. Ragozin’s book. The books Dr. Ledsmar loans to Reverend Ware, with the exception of the one written by Ernest Renan, are also on the list. According to Woodward, Celia Madden’s classification of people as Greeks or Jews comes from Renan’s Recollections of My Youth (1883). Frederic relied upon his readings in the Northern Christian Advocate, a Methodist journal, for “‘all the details of a Methodist minister’s work, obligation, and daily routine, and all the machinery of his church’” (46). Sister Soulsby’s woodchuck story is quoted almost verbatim from an 1893 issue of that journal. Woodward concludes that Frederic’s characters “had to reveal themselves—their intellectual selves as well as their personalities—through their conversation,” and that Frederic, “to make his characters speak convincingly, had to know what they would know” (50-51).