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32 The figure of the alienated American colonist in London on the eve of independence has become a historian’s stereotype. Whether the subject is political radicals immersed in the unreal hothouse of City politics,southern planters who felt socially discounted, or pretty much any colonist scandalized by the swirling cauldron of political and cultural corruption that was the empire’s capital, the analytical framework of “alienated provincial” is a well-established one. Even Benjamin Franklin, whose love of London is well known,admittedly remained at the margins of its society,unable to gain acceptance in its best circles. From our vantage point, it is natural that such a stereotype should emerge. Since we know that national independence was right around the corner for Americans, it makes sense to characterize colonists visiting their ancestral capital as having a shared reaction to the place,albeit a rather negative one. Casting them all in the role of alienated provincial is, in effect, a simple matter of rolling back the “innocents abroad”motif of the nineteenth century to the late colonial period, and it lends historical continuity to an image of Americans abroad that is familiar to us today. The stereotype is also a necessary corollary to a large body of scholarship that depicts the mainland American colonies in the eighteenth century as sharing a love-hate mentality toward their mother country that was the seedbed of American national identity. Drawing on core-periphery theory to model the relationship between Britain and her Atlantic provinces and pointing to the century-long cultural process of Anglicization that made the colonies both more like one another and more alike in their view of England, scholars have shown that the colonists were deeply conflicted over their desire to aspire to metropolitan standards versus their desire to conserve local norms. This conflicted reaction toward the metropolis was an important catalyst to the growing rift with Britain in the late colonial Decadents Abroad Reconstructing the Typical Colonial American in London in the Late Colonial Period julie flavell s Decadents Abroad 33 period. Where the cultural hegemony of the metropolis gave rise to a colonial sense of inferiority, compensatory images emerged of the colonies as refuges of traditional English virtue and simplicity,with the metropolis cast in the role of the corrupt and decadent Old Country. The adaptive responses of colonists who visited the metropolis ought to be a significant test case for the thesis. But although provincial Americans venturing to London are presumed to have been culturally or socially alienated in many scholarly works, with alienation usually expressed through an extreme sensitivity to corrupt metropolitan lifestyles, no in-depth study of their acculturative encounters there has ever been undertaken. In this essay I offer a preliminary revision of the stereotype of the alienated provincial in London. It starts by considering the characteristics of the total American presence in London in the 1760s and 1770s and then focuses on one type of colonial visitor in particular,wealthy planters and merchants, whose numbers there were on the rise in the period just before the American Revolution.These colonial visitors, mainly from the colonies south of New England, were the forerunners of the elite American tourists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Together with their retinue of enslaved black Americans, they were an important presence in London during the late colonial period, and an important corrective to the impression of social alienation.They were part of a growing trend of wealthy provincials moving around the English Atlantic, an integrative trend that was merely interrupted , not stopped, by the American War of Independence. In the eyes of their English contemporaries, these wealthy visitors came closest to embodying the “typical American” in London, far closer, indeed, than Franklin and his better-remembered circle. In fact, if colonial Americans who ventured to London had been summed up by eighteenthcentury Londoners themselves—if contemporary Londoners had generated their own stereotype of visiting colonists—the unflattering soubriquet to emerge would probably have been something like “decadents abroad.”This is because American colonists in London on the eve of independence were associated with the decadent lifestyles of Britain’s exploitation settlements in America. Benjamin Franklin may have been the most famous colonist to walk London’s streets in the late colonial period, but with his white,Yankee persona he was not the most typical. There is a bias toward a white northern experience in our knowledge of colonials in London...

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