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The Incoming Tide No other genre of American literature enjoyed a greater popularity or a more enduring prominence in the nineteenth century than travel writing. Essentially, it had been intertwined with the development of America’s literary identity from its beginnings, as the ¤rst European explorers recorded their experiences for readers back home. By the mid–nineteenth century, the passion for traveling as both tourist and reader touched most sectors of American life. Published by canonical and minor writers, travel books provided crucial income for many of the century’s authors. At one point or another in their careers, almost all of the era’s prominent literary ¤gures availed themselves of the freedoms and bene¤ts of travel writing. Often, as in Mark Twain’s case, that decision proved highly pro¤table. Although most modern readers have ignored this vibrant genre of American literature and its vital connection to the century’s ¤nest authors, the numerous and now-forgotten career travel writers who de¤ned its development and pushed its popularity were among the more prominent literary personalities of their time.1 Midway in the century, the interest in both tourism and travel literature had evolved into an outright phenomenon. In the May 1844 issue of United States Magazine and Democratic Review, for example, Henry Tuckerman notes:“Our times might not inaptly be designated as the age of travelling.Its records form no insigni¤cant branch of the literature of the day”(527).2 The American curiosity for faraway lands combined with the increasing availability of quicker and cheaper transportation to create a boom in foreign travel. Physically and eco2 Tourism and Travel Writing in the Nineteenth Century nomically, more Americans were able to travel abroad, and as the number of commercial and passenger ships sailing the Atlantic Ocean multiplied, so did the number of tourists who could afford to make the trip to the Old World. Christof Wegelin notes that the steadily increasing numbers from 1820 to 1849 exploded by 1860. The number of U.S. citizens returning yearly to Atlantic and Gulf ports, according to Wegelin, “rose from 1,926 to 2,659” in the three decades following 1820, but in 1860 the returning tourists in the four largest Atlantic ports alone numbered 19,387 (307).3 With the dramatic technical advances in steam-powered ships, voyages between the continents became commonplace. “Steam is annihilating space,” Tuckerman continues. “The ocean, once a formidable barrier, not to be traversed without long preparation and from urgent necessity, now seems to inspire no more consideration than a goodly lake, admirably adapted to a summer excursion”(527).By the post–Civil War era,the travel contagion had become a full-®edged social upheaval. “If the social history of the world is ever written,” observed Putnam’s Magazine in May 1868, “the era in which we live will be called the nomadic period. With the advent of ocean steam navigation and the railway system, began a travelling mania which has gradually increased until half of the earth’s inhabitants, or at least of its civilized portion, are on the move” (“Going Abroad” 530–31). Indeed, Americans were “on the move” in unprecedented numbers, and as an inevitable result,supply-and-demand economics gradually took hold as the industry and ancillary business ventures matched public interest. For the ¤rst time in history, tourism was beginning to become the norm for a signi¤cantly broader segment of the population, and traveling became associated more often with economic forces than with aesthetic ones.4 The corresponding interest in travel literature swelled as well,both for readers who planned to make their own journeys and for those who simply wanted to gain the experience vicariously. For every actual tourist, there were hundreds more who were fascinated by the experience offered by reading travel books—virtual reality for the nineteenth century. In Trubner’s Bibliographic Guide to American Literature (1859), Benjamin Moran writes: “This would seem to be the age of travel literature, judging from the many narratives now published, and the general excellence of such works. No nation has given more good books of this class to the world since 1820 than the United Tourism and Travel Writing 17 States, considered with regard to styles or information” (lvi). Sales¤gures encouraged writers and publishers to ¤ll the seemingly insatiable demand aggressively,and the result was a plethora of travel texts with a wide array of points of interests and narrative styles. Harold Smith, whose American Travellers Abroad...

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