In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Nineteenth-Century British Travelers in the New World ed. by Christine DeVine
  • Michèle Mendelssohn
Christine DeVine , ed. Nineteenth-Century British Travelers in the New World. Farnham : Ashgate , 2013 . xiv + 319 pp. $98.96 (hardback).

Reading Nineteenth-Century British Travelers in the New World is like traveling on a transatlantic steamer in the company of some of the most interesting writers of the Victorian age. The ship’s compartments are occupied by the great and the good, who, taken together, set afloat a rich variety of thoughts about the United [End Page E-22] States. Among the passengers there are also the romantic and the hopeful (such as the utopian-minded Frances Wright and the student of democracy John Stuart Mill, who are curious about the political possibilities America affords). But there is also, for better or worse, less agreeable company on board, such as the notorious Fanny Trollope and the self-righteous Capt. Basil Hall, whose indignant 1829 account of American slavery turned a blind eye to the persistence of slavery in the British Empire until 1834.

The editor-cum-captain of the vessel is Christine DeVine, who musters an effective crew of contributors. Though this is not “the first book to examine attitudes of British visitors to the New World throughout the nineteenth century” (19), we are nevertheless in good hands throughout the voyage. The book’s purpose, DeVine tells us, is to map out “how the Britain of this period viewed itself as part of the transatlantic world” (3). The book’s journey divides into three sections, the first of which addresses British ideas of the New World. The second and third parts deal with politics and the American South. The central question propelling the intellectual voyage is “what happens when ideology bumps up against reality” (13) in nineteenth-century British travel writing about the United States? This is a good question and one that the book answers in a variety of interesting ways, most notably by suggesting that nineteenth-century British travel writing reinforced “nineteenth-century England’s own sense of national identity” (13) because British writers saw the New World through their own homely (largely middle-class) ideological lens. So, for instance, British travel writers might assume a genteel voice that seemed to emanate from a slightly higher place on the social scale than the one they really belonged to. At other times, they would accentuate concerns over lax class boundaries in America. Dickens, for one, did not enjoy the friendliness that permeated American public life. “Everybody talks to you, or to anybody else who hits his fancy,” he grumbled (qtd. in DeVine 10). On the other hand, the social reformer Frances Wright noted “the good nature of the [American] public” and the inaccuracy of the opinions proffered by “our [British] grumbletonians” (Wright 18, 16).

One of the most emphatic complainers was Fanny Trollope. She ended her 1832 Domestic Manners of the Americans by saying that she found “the population generally” unappealing (Trollope 367). “I do not like their principles, I do not like their manners, I do not like their opinions,” she writes. “Both as a woman, and as a stranger, it might be unseemly for me to say,” she apologizes, acknowledging the social and literary conventions within which she is writing. But she has already violated them. Her acknowledgement cannot undo that.

What methods did women travel writers use to circumvent or address the contemporary prejudice against them and against women “performing” in public or in print? Traveling alone on horseback through Colorado, Isabella Bird’s 1878 account bears the telling title A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, a label that underscores what DeVine calls her “ongoing negotiation between fearless adventurer and demure English woman” (9). Despite the prejudice against certain forms of women’s writing, being a woman could also be an advantage, as Harriet Martineau’s experience shows. Martineau had full access the private worlds of American women, so, unlike Dickens, she was privy to a wider range of experiences, as Deborah Anna Logan notes in her essay. “I know nothing in Humanity so beautiful as the domestic classes of America,” Martineau declared in a letter chiding...

pdf

Share