Observing America: The Commentary of British Visitors to the United States, 1890–1950

Notes

Notes Preface 1. To consult a study of a wide range of such travel books, see Richard Rapson, Britons View America: Travel Commentary, 1860–1935 (Seattle, 1971). For an anthology of British travel writing about the United States, see Allan Nevins, ed., America through British Eyes (New York, 1948). 2. For scholarly examinations of travel writing, see Christopher Mulvey, Anglo-American Landscapes: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Travel Literature (Cambridge, England, 1983); Christopher Mulvey, Transatlantic Manners: Social Patterns in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Travel Literature (Cambridge, England , 1990); Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars (New York, 1980); Paul Fussell, ed., The Norton Book of Travel (New York, 1987); and Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge, England, 2002). 3. Comparative histories involving the United States include Robert Kelley , The Transatlantic Persuasion: The Liberal-Democratic Mind in the Age of Gladstone (New York, 1969); George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York, 1981); Patrice Higgonet, Sister Republics : The Origins of French and American Republicanism (Cambridge, Mass., 1988); and Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass., 1987). The value of viewing American history in an international context is stressed in Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, Calif., 2002). 4. A prime example of a scholar’s embracing the theory of American exceptionalism is Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York, 1996). Michael Kammen discusses the mixed view of the concept among academics in an essay, “The Problem of American Exceptionalism : A Reconsideration,” in his book In The Past Lane: Historical Perspectives on American Culture (New York, 1997), 169–98. 5. See James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York, 1986); and Daniel T. 251 Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). For scholarship specifically on Anglo-American reform connections during the early twentieth century, see chapter 3 of this volume. Introduction 1. Nevins, America through British Eyes, 79–102. 2. See Henry Pelling, America and the British Left: From Bright to Bevan (London , 1956). 3. Two notable contemporaries of Trollope who viewed the United States in a similar vein were the retired naval officers Captain Basil Hall, author of Travels in North America (1829), and Captain Frederick Marryat, who wrote A Diary in America, with Remarks on Its Institutions (1839). 4. The edition used here is Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans , ed. Donald Smalley (New York, 1949). 5. For an account of Trollope’s life and her stay in America, see Donald Smalley’s introduction to Domestic Manners, vii–lxxvi. 6. The edition used here is Harriet Martineau, Society in America, ed. and abr. Seymour Martin Lipset (New Brunswick, 1981 [1962]). In 1838 Martineau also came out with Retrospect of Western Travel, a more accessible and conventional , but less important, account of her journey. 7. Martineau did not follow in the footsteps of the Scottish-born radical Frances Wright, who, after her first trip across the Atlantic, published an effusively laudatory book about the United States, Views of Society and Manners in America (1821). 8. For an account of Martineau’s life and American trip, see Seymour Martin Lipset’s introduction to Martineau, Society in America, 5–41; also, R. K. Webb, Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian (New York, 1960), particularly 134–74. 9. Kemble was a member of a celebrated theatrical family and in 1832 traveled to America to perform on stage. Her journal of that highly successful tour was published in 1835. While in America, she met and married Pierce Butler , and they eventually went to live on the large Georgia plantation he had inherited . Repelled by the institution of slavery, she recorded her observations in the well-known Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839, which did not appear until 1863. 10. Webb, Martineau, 157. 11. For an account of Dickens’s American experiences, see Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, rev. and abr. ed. (New York, 1977), 197– 246; Fred Kaplan, Dickens: A Biography (New York, 1988), 122–44. 12. The edition used here is Charles Dickens, American Notes and Pictures from Italy (Oxford, England, 1978 [1957]). 252 Notes to pages 3–7 • 13. Dickens’s friend and biographer, John Forster...