Crossing the Atlantic: Travel and Travel Writing in Modern Times

Travel, Gender, and Identity: George and Anna Ticknor’s Travel Journals from Their 1835–36 Journey to Dresden

189 Travel, Gender, and Identity George and Anna Ticknor’s Travel Journals from Their 1835–36 Journey to Dresden Thomas Adam G eorge and Anna Ticknor were the embodiment of old Boston. Both came from old Brahmin families with long family trees that stretched back to the early days of English colonization. And although both came from well-off families, George Ticknor was born into one of modest means. He graduated from Dartmouth College and passed the bar exam in 1813, but quickly became bored at the prospect of a career as a lawyer. In 1814, he decided to pursue academic studies at the famous University of Göttingen (Germany). He left Boston for Europe in midApril 1815—at a time when Europe was in uproar again because of Napoleon Bonaparte’s return to power in France (his famous 100 days). Ticknor spent the next two years in Göttingen. Already in November 1816, the president of Harvard University, John T. Kirkland (1770–1840), offered him a teaching position in modern languages and literatures upon his return. After Ticknor returned from Europe in June of 1819 (he had continued traveling in Europe, including France, Spain, and Portugal, from the end of his stay in Göttingen until then), he was formally introduced at Harvard as the Abiel Smith Professor of the French and Spanish Languages and Literatures and Professor of Belles Lettres on August 10, 1819.1 In 1821, Ticknor married Anna Eliot. Nine years younger than Ticknor , she was the daughter of the wealthy Boston merchant Samuel Eliot (1739–1820), founder of the Eliot Professorship of Greek at Harvard.2 Anna was “an intelligent woman who fully shared her husband’s taste for letters and society. Beneath a conventional façade, she was an independent and witty spirit, with a pungent style of writing and conversation and ready Thomas Adam 190 affection.”3 And although George Ticknor’s father was not poor, it was this marriage to Anna Eliot that provided for a comfortable life. Her significant inheritance of about $85,000 and the very modest legacy left to George by his father allowed the couple to live in comfort.4 They “bought a house on fashionable Park Street, where they held court for many years to fashionable and literary Boston.”5 The couple had four children, two of whom died in early childhood. During his sixteen years of teaching at Harvard, Ticknor restlessly attempted to reform the college, inspired by what he had encountered in various German high schools and universities.6 Resistance to change deeply frustrated him and seemed to have contributed to his resignation in 1835. Freed from professional duties, Ticknor planned a second extensive European journey with his wife and two children.7 And it is this second journey Map of George and Anna Ticknor’s travel route, 1835–1836. Based on William C. Woodbridge’s map of central Europe of 1837. Courtesy of the David Rumsey Map Collection (www.davidrumsey.com). Travel, Gender, and Identity 191 that is at the center of the following discussion. On June 25, 1835, after a three-week voyage, George and Anna Ticknor arrived with their two daughters , twelve-year-old Anna Eliot (Nannie) and two-year-old Eliza Sullivan (Lizzy) in Liverpool. After a few weeks of traveling in England, Wales, Ireland , and Scotland (June 25 to October 25), the Ticknors headed via Calais and Brussels to Dresden. They stayed in Dresden for most of the time in the period from November 20, 1835, to May 11, 1836. During this time, both Anna and George Ticknor wrote extensive travel journals about their encounters with Dresden society and the cityscape.8 They thus provide us with two parallel narratives that allow for a comparison of male and female perception of an alien culture and society and the reflection of these (possibly different and possibly gendered) perceptions in their travel writing. The Ticknor’s parallel writing gives us a unique opportunity to test assumptions about the distinct ways in which women and men perceived an alien environment experienced while traveling and the distinct and gendered ways in which they produced travel narratives. Gender in Travel Writing Mary Wollstonecraft contended in 1792 that “[a] man, when he undertakes a journey, has, in general, the end in view; a woman thinks more of the incidental occurrences, the strange things that may possibly occur on the road; the impression...