In mid-September 1838, a Harvard Greek tutor announced that the Second Coming of Christ had occurred in him. He told his students to “flee to the mountains, for the end of all things is at hand!” The administration was not amused. Harvard’s president, Josiah Quincy, canned the visionary tutor and packed him off home to Salem. He was Jones Very, a twenty-five-year-old Harvard alumnus and divinity student who, for roughly the next two years, declared himself the spokesman and scribe of God. During this period, Very wrote hundreds of sonnets, many articulating his spiritual program, and he preached his religion to anyone who would listen: by annihilating our will, we can allow God to direct our every thought, word, and even the movements of our bodies. Clark Davis’s biography God’s Scrivener tells the story of this strange New England religious figure who caught the attention—and affection—of Transcendentalists such as Emerson, Elizabeth Peabody, and Bronson Alcott. Davis works to correct previous accounts of Very as merely “a Salem eccentric more amusing than important” and seeks to understand him “as a significant figure in the literary and intellectual history of the American nineteenth century.”
Jones Very got off to a rocky start, born in 1813 to the first cousins Jones and Lydia Very only six months after they wed. Their marriage certificate disappeared, and scholars long believed them unmarried, an error Davis puts to rest. Very’s father, a merchant captain, took the boy with him to see New Orleans, Denmark,