Thomas Green Fessenden

Thomas Green Fessenden (April 22, 1771 – November 11, 1837) was an American author and editor who worked in England and the United States.

Early life and education

Born and raised on the family farm in Walpole, New Hampshire as oldest of nine children, Fessenden graduated from Dartmouth College in 1796. During his college term he wrote a ballad titled "Jonathan's Courtship", which was reprinted in England. He studied law in Vermont with Nathaniel Chipman, occupying his leisure in writing humorous poems and other papers for the Farmer's Weekly Museum of Walpole, of which Joseph Dennie was then editor.

Career

He went to London in 1801 as agent for a new hydraulic machine. The enterprise proved a failure and involved him in pecuniary difficulties. While in London, he became interested in the construction of a patent mill on the River Thames, and in this enterprise also he was completely ruined. At this time, he formed the acquaintance of Benjamin Douglas Perkins, patentee of the metallic tractors (see Elisha Perkins) which Fessenden advertised in a poem in Hudibrastic verse. The poem, "Terrible Tractoration", was anonymously published in 1803 and satirized the members of the medical profession who opposed the use of the instruments. Nathaniel Hawthorne characterized the poem as "a work of strange, grotesque ideas, aptly expressed". The poem was enlarged and republished in New York in 1806 as "The Minute Philosopher".

Politically aligned with the Federalists, Fessenden was suspicious of democracy and wrote an extended poem criticizing the Democratic-Republican Party.