Richard Alsop was born on January 23, 1761 in Middletown, Connecticut, United States. He was the oldest son of Richard and Mary (Wright) Alsop. From his father, a prominent merchant of Middletown, Connecticut, he inherited a taste for business, an affectionate disposition, and a shaping force in his life--a passionate love of books.
Alsop acquired his education at home and from tutors. Later he entered Yale College and received the degree of Master of Arts in 1798.
Alsop's acquaintance with classical literature was apparent even in boyhood; stories survive of his dramatic impersonations of the Iliad. His absorption in books, however, begot in him less learning than a rich culture which found expression in skill with modern languages and in poetry based on old legends.
Alsop translated from French, Spanish, and from the Scandinavian, the last-named study influencing his epic, "The Conquest of Scandinavia. " All his writings attributed to this early period and unpublished (a Greek poem on the Trojan War; translations from Silius Italicus and from the French of Florian and the Italian of Monti) proclaim him a poet deeply in debt to European culture. This remains true, despite his interest in field sports, natural history, taxidermy, and shrewd trading on the Connecticut River.
As part of his talent for literature Alsop adapted himself readily to the prevalent mode in writing satire. Like Freneau and Odell, he won fame by jests at the foibles of his time, but, unlike these, his pen was more playful than caustic. He had no part in the Revolution, but his letters are full of his concern with contemporary events; full also of good-humored derision at fools and Jacobins, --he thought them identical.
Alsop wrote frequently in collaboration with David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, and Dr. Lemuel Hopkins, but he probably had no part in composing the mock-heroic poem "The Anarchiad. " Wittier and more distinctive was "The Echo, " which appeared in twenty numbers of the American Mercury, between 1791 and 1805. The origins of "The Echo, " and thus indirectly of a later burlesque, "The Political Greenhouse, " recreate perfectly the temper of Alsop in this mild flagellation of John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and Judge Hugh Brackenridge.
In an office at Hartford he read, with Theodore Dwight and Mason Cogswell, a flamboyant newspaper account of a thunderstorm in Boston, and, amid laughter, volunteered a satire. His gibes struck home; there were fresh couplets; and the group, with others, was soon known as "The Hartford Wits. " This edge in Alsop sharpens a literary output which sometimes appears hopelessly bookish. The American Poems published at Litchfield in 1793 seem mere relicts of scholarship.
Not less conventional is A Poem: Sacred to the Memory of George Washington (1800), in which Alsop, though stirred by the President's death, is an extremely orthodox mourner. Such writing (including inoffensive works like The Enchanted Lake of the Fairy Morgana, from the Italian of Boiardo, The Geographical, Natural, and Civil History of Chili, from the Italian of Molina, and even The Charms of Fancy, so reminiscent of Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination), simply reiterates Alsop's ideal of following intently the acknowledged masters. Fortunately he occasionally strays off the beaten path. Though formal, the "Hymn to Peace" and the "Inscription for a Family Tomb" betray real emotion.
The true Alsop, kindly, social, brilliant, comes out also in the remaining years of his life. These (1800-1815) he spent in Middletown; in Hartford, where he is said to have conducted a bookstore; and in New York, where he frequently visited Isaac Riley, the bookseller, his brother-in-law. He wrote for Charles Brockden Brown's periodical, the Monthly Magazine and American Review, and the tale persists that Alsop, the "Hartford Wit, " mingled with the New York coterie, Brown, William Dunlap, S. L. Mitchill, and Philip Freneau.
He was now famous; he admitted modestly that "The Political Greenhouse" had awakened "considerable curiosity in this country. " It had indeed; it was quoted in Congress to demonstrate that Connecticut was entangling the United States in a war with France.
Alsop died suddenly at Flatbush, Long Island (where his ancestors had first settled). In the very year of his death he edited a curious volume, the Narrative of the Adventures and Sufferings of John R. Jewitt, Only Survivor of the Ship Boston, During a Captivity of Nearly Three Years Among the Savages of Nootka Sound. Though unlike his standard writings, this book, an imitation of Defoe, reminds us again of Alsop's love of remote lore, his respect for proven literary models, and what his contemporaries called his "ingenious fancy. "
Alsop married Maria Wyllys Pomeroy in 1786. They had three children.
