Nineteenth-Century British Travelers in the New World by Christine DeVine, and: Victorian Yankees at Queen Victoria’s Court: American Encounters with Victoria and Albert by Stanley Weintraub (review)

Christine DeVine’s collection is a welcome addition to the well-established but stillgrowing fields of transatlantic studies and the study of travel writing, as it offers sustained attention to nonfiction travel narratives about North America in that crucial mid-nineteenth-century period when political reform was taking root in England and the United States was expanding through war and negotiation. Several strong essays in Nineteenth-Century British Travelers in the New World explore how British travelers textually shaped their experiences in ways that enabled them to influence burgeoning British dialogues on democracy, rights, and the relationship between the public and private spheres. Two essays in particular, Elizabeth J. Deis and Lowell T. Frye’s excellent “British Travelers and the ‘Condition-of-America Question’: Defining America in the 1830s” and Nathalie Vanfasse’s essay on Basil Hall’s Travels in North America (1829) and Charles Dickens’s American Notes (1842), investigate travelogues as key locations for debate about what a democratic future might look like for a country poised to integrate new voices into governance after the Reform Bill of 1832. In addition, Lindsay Mayo Fincher, in “‘Lodestar to Isabella’s Wanderings’: Bird’s West and Her British Audience,” provides insight on the politics of home and away by suggesting that while Isabella Bird explicitly deplored cultural restrictions on British women’s mobility, she also expressed a longing for what she perceived as the civilized behaviors of home when she traveled in the American West.

Two other engaging essays center on the way that “Old World” concepts and experiences influenced the perspectives and rhetorical choices of visitors to the “New World.” The collection’s opening essay by Matthew Kaiser looks at the interaction of play, death, and joy in the California-related texts of two Scots, John Muir and Robert Louis Stevenson. Kaiser skillfully examines the ways in which Muir and Stevenson fashioned the landscapes they encountered through nostalgic memories of their boyhoods in Scotland and positioned Western wildernesses as places permanently divorced from the demands of capitalism. Additionally, Susan P. Casteras, in a rich essay on U.S. slavery in British artwork, discusses the ways that paintings, drawings, and engravings “project[ed] British anxieties [and] aggrandiz[ed] its national assertion of moral ‘supremacy’ on the issue” of chattel slavery (223). Casteras not only provides good close readings of several little-known pieces but also untangles complexities in reception history so as to illuminate further the ideological work of the genre.

The crafting of the volume, unfortunately, is not as strong as many of the individual essays. They are grouped into three rather broadly conceived sections. The first two sections—“Imagining a New World” and “Politics and Its Discontents”—overlap significantly in both subject matter and the critical approaches employed, suggesting that alternate groupings (perhaps historical or spatial/geographical) may have communicated more clearly how this volume advances particular facets of transatlantic studies. There is a third section, “Heading South: The Slave States,” and the introduction mentions a fourth section, “America as the Modern World,” that seems to have disappeared somewhere in the editing process. Its lone remaining representative, Keiko Nitta’s essay on Henry James’s The American Scene (1907), is now the final essay in the third section. While the studies in the unit on the South (with the prominent exception of Nitta’s essay) are compelling, DeVine’s preview of that section in the introduction is problematic. One does not, of course, expect DeVine, whose own work focuses on Victorian novels and questions of class, to be an expert on nineteenth-century discourse on U.S. slavery. However, the introduction reveals a troubling tone-deafness when it comes...