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2. Hail Britannia African Americans Abroad in Victorian England For nineteenth-century British travelers, the United States of America was a brave new world, and for African Americans, England was the land situated somewhere near the second star to the right. This perception of England and of Europe as a kind of Neverland, a cherished place to which travel was an extraordinary venture, is evident as late as 1899 when educator, race leader, and accommodationist Booker T. Washington questioned about whether he had ever considered a trip to Europe, exclaimed that “it was something entirely beyond me.” In his autobiography, Up From Slavery, Washington goes on to express his feeling that travel to Europe was a white entitlement; such travel was one of the “luxuries [that] had always seemed to me to be something meant for white people, not for my race” (271, 272–73). Washington confesses to having “always regarded Europe, and London, and Paris, much as I regard heaven” (Up from Slavery 273). By the time Washington made his second trip to Europe in 1910 to study the condition of the poor and working Europeans who were emigrating in increasing numbers to America and competing as it were with blacks, he would not be as in awe of London and Paris as he had been ten years earlier when he believed European cities such as London to be transcendental spaces.1 This glorification of London and Europe must have proved even more of a tendency among African Americans during the first part of the century when most blacks in the United States, enslaved and illiterate, could not and did not travel abroad. Thus while Queen Victoria’s subjects journeyed in appreciable numbers to America, very few African Americans were in a position to travel to Britain. Still, some blacks managed the trek across the Atlantic, though they traveled on terms very different from that of the Brit- ish. On the one hand, the crossing of white Britons to American no matter how physically perilous and financially taxing was made in the assurance of both a welcome predicated upon shared whiteness and Europeanness and a return to a homeland where he or she was free. On the other hand, the earlier crossings of black Americans was an affair informed not only by the physical and economic difficulties of sea transit but also by all the anxieties attendant upon being racial pariahs often in flight from the homeland. Getting to the British Isles would generally prove a formidable task for African Americans and being there a taste of paradise. Getting There: The Sociohistorical Politics of Black Travel to Europe During the first half of the nineteenth century, most of the African Americans who crossed the Atlantic to Great Britain did so under very different circumstances from British travelers and with different sociocultural imperatives. Antebellum blacks, whether slave, fugitive, or free, often traveled overseas as freedom fighters or seekers. Whether officially abolitionists or not, African Americans traveling abroad were leaving behind a country that enslaved blacks and discriminated against them for a country where they could find respite and reprieve. This is to say that, unlike the British or the white Americans who crossed the ocean in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, black Americans found their passage troubled in more ways than one. Thus, those nineteenth-century blacks whose celebrity status approximated that of British visitors to the United States, such as the Marryats and Martineaus, tended not be travelers with “ample time” and “substantial income” (Rapson 25). Forced to “seek a refuge from republican slavery in monarchical England,” Frederick Douglass, for example, depended on the financial backing of his antislavery activist friends during his “twenty-one Months in Great Britain” (My Bondage and My Freedom 223). Ultimately enabled to go “roaming in freedom over . . . the most interesting spots on the earth’s surface,” Douglass declared, “I shall never be done [thanking] the abolitionists for their agency” (Douglass Papers). Later in the century, Ida B. Wells, who traveled twice to England, would visit Great Britain: first, at the behest of Scottish patron Isabelle Fyvie Mayo (a.k.a. author Edward Garrett) and, later, at the invitation of the Society for the Furtherance of the Brotherhood of Men, which had been formed during the occasion of Well’s first two-month visit to Great Britain. Both the patron and the society extended invitations to Wells assuring her of their willingness to, in Isabelle Mayo’s words, “find the money for [Well...

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