A Free Classroom Resource

Alexander Gordon’s The Humourist essays were published pseudonymously in the South-Carolina Gazette in 1753–1754 and remained unavailable as a complete series for more than 270 years.

My 2025 book, Unmasking The Humourist: Alexander Gordon’s Lost Essays of Colonial Charleston, South Carolina, identifies Gordon as their previously unknown author and presents the definitive edition of the essays.

Having taught American literature at the college level for twenty-three years, I want to see Gordon where I believe he belongs:

In the classroom.

That has been one of my goals from the beginning. Recovering Gordon and establishing his authorship mattered enormously to me, but recovery alone is not enough. A writer returns to the literary conversation only when people begin reading, discussing, questioning, and teaching what he wrote.

So I decided not to wait.

Why Teach Gordon?

Gordon brings a distinctive Southern voice into the mid-eighteenth-century American literary conversation. His periodical writing belongs to the transatlantic tradition of Addison and Steele, but Gordon gives that tradition a colonial setting and a voice of its own: his world is Charleston rather than London—or Philadelphia.

Just as importantly, Gordon enters readily into conversations with writers already central to the early American literature classroom.

His wonderfully acerbic essay on literary critics, for example, pairs naturally with Anne Bradstreet’s “The Prologue.” Together, the two texts open questions about authorship, literary judgment, modesty, reputation, and the writer’s relationship with critics and readers.

Elsewhere, Gordon turns from literary criticism to the broader social world, examining slander, reputation, hypocrisy, and the obligations of genuine social virtue. Like Benjamin Franklin in the Silence Dogood essays, Gordon writes through a pseudonymous periodical persona, using wit and satire to scrutinize the morals and manners of colonial society. Read together, the two writers invite students to consider how satire can expose social failings—and who has the authority to judge them.

And Gordon is, in one sense, the newest voice in colonial American literature: a substantial body of writing more than 270 years old has only recently been recovered, attributed, and made accessible to modern readers. His recovery gives students an unusual opportunity to encounter the early American canon not as something fixed and finished, but as literary history still being made through research and scholarship.

The Free Classroom Packet

I have prepared a short teaching packet designed to make it easy to introduce Gordon into an existing early American literature course.

It includes two complete essays from The Humourist:

1. Gordon on Literary Critics
A complete essay from The Humourist, published in the South-Carolina Gazette, No. 1026, February 12, 1754, that pairs especially well with Anne Bradstreet’s “The Prologue.”

2. Gordon on Slander, Reputation, and Social Virtue
A complete essay from The Humourist, published in the South-Carolina Gazette, No. 1027, February 19, 1754, that pairs especially well with Benjamin Franklin’s Silence Dogood essays, particularly No. 9.

The packet provides brief historical and literary context, suggested pairings, discussion questions, assignment possibilities, essays reproduced from the definitive edition, explanatory notes, and complete citation information.

The essays are short enough to add to an existing syllabus without redesigning a unit.

Use them tomorrow.

Free for classroom use. Copyright retained. Citation required.

Instructors may reproduce and distribute the complete packet to students enrolled in their courses, either in print or through password-protected course-management systems, provided that the packet is reproduced without alteration and that all copyright notices and required citations remain intact.

All other rights are reserved.

About the Edition

Unmasking The Humourist: Alexander Gordon’s Lost Essays of Colonial Charleston, South Carolina (Luminare Press, 2025) is the first publication of the complete series since its original newspaper appearances in 1753–1754 and the definitive edition of the essays.

Based on extensive archival, textual, and biographical research, I identify the previously unknown author behind “The Humourist” as Alexander Gordon (c. 1692–1754), a Scottish antiquarian, Egyptologist, playwright, artist, scholar, and colonial administrator who spent the final twelve years of his life in Charleston, where he served as Clerk of His Majesty’s Council.

The original eighteenth-century texts are in the public domain. My transcriptions, editorial content, scholarly annotations, introduction, analysis, and teaching materials remain copyrighted.

Are You Teaching Gordon?

If you use The Humourist in a course, I would be delighted to hear from you—where you are teaching Gordon, which essay you used, what you paired it with, and how your students responded.

Brent L. Kendrick, Ph.D.
brentlkendrick@gmail.com