Romantic Readers and Transatlantic Travel: Expeditions and Tours in North America, 1760–1840 by Robin Jarvis (review)

This is the first book-length study of the reading of travel literature in any period and deserves praise for that fact alone. This genre, “factual accounts of real travels” (1), was the most popular after novels, and consequently its reception is in urgent need of analysis. What makes travel literature particularly interesting is its cross-gender appeal, even in the eyes of contemporaries, who expected women to read light, imaginative literature and men to read more difficult epic works, satire, classic literature, history, and science. Within this broad field Jarvis focuses on the reading of literature about North America, including the newly independent United States, British North America (Canada), and the Arctic regions of the continent. The book adds to our understanding of transatlantic romanticism during a turbulent period in Anglo-American relations encompassing independence in 1776 and the War of 1812 between the two countries. Its focus on readers who, largely, never visited the places about which they were reading also increases the importance of their reading in forming an imagined America.

Jarvis restricts his study to the reading of books; his exclusion of newspapers and magazines, among other reading matter, is not explained. It may have simply made the project more manageable, as he is aware that magazines were more widely read than books (newspapers were even more common). Both these serial forms of print reviewed and excerpted American travel books, for example, the full column of extracts from Ross’s Voyage of Discovery (1819) in the North Wales Chronicle or the short extract from Franklin’s Narrative of a Journey … (1823) in the Hull Packet. Indeed, the stages of remediation involved in a journalist in Hull choosing excerpts from a periodical review of a book he has never read about a place he has never visited could reveal a great deal about reception. Evidence of reading these reviews is not hard to find; a quick search on the Reading Experience Database returned Thomas Carlyle’s reading of “a most delectable account” of Lewis and Clark’s travels up the Missouri in the Quarterly Review, Southey’s review of the same book in the Edinburgh Review, and Sydney Smith’s praise for an article about Ross’s voyage to Baffin’s Bay in the Edinburgh Review. It is not clear why such sources were not used.

Jarvis’s book comprises four chapters. The first, probably the most successful, uses private journals, correspondence, commonplace books, and marginalia to recover the experiences of “private” readers, including differences in gender and class. The dominant response is one of pleasure in imaginary travels. The second chapter focuses on the United States, using reviews (some retrospectively attributed, others anonymous) in London and Edinburgh periodicals of books as “evidence of contemporary reception” (8). Jarvis argues convincingly for the worth of reviews in magazines such as the Edinburgh Review, Quarterly Review, Blackwood’s, and the Critical Review, finding personal responses distinct from the editorial line of each publication. Jarvis’s approach to his sources is nuanced and balanced throughout. Despite giving short shrift to reader-response theory and the implied reader, he finds that such readers inferred from the text in some periodical reviews are surprisingly close to some “historical” readers.

The third chapter uses similar material, this time reviewing books on British North America, including Arctic exploration. The final chapter looks at the ways in which six well-known writers—Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, Thomas Cooper, Thomas Moore, and Felicia Hemans—reworked North American travel literature in their prose and poetry. This chapter is the least successful, its close readings adding little to the scholarship on which it builds and requiring much speculation about influence, without fully exploring the extra layer of creative use of reading material that Jarvis has introduced. Perhaps Coleridge’s adaptation of the idea of the Indian shaman to his study of superstition in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner tells us what...