Nineteenth-Century British Travelers in the New World

With cheaper publishing costs and the explosion of periodical publishing, the influence of New World travel narratives was greater during the nineteenth century than ever before, as they offered an understanding not only of America through British eyes, but also a lens though which nineteenth-century Britain could view itself. Despite the differences in purpose and method, the writers and artists discussed in Nineteenth-Century British Travelers in the New World-from Fanny Wright arriving in America in 1818 to the return of Henry James in 1904, and including Charles Dickens, Frances Trollope, Isabella Bird, Fanny Kemble, Harriet Martineau, and Robert Louis Stevenson among others, as well as artists such as Eyre Crowe-all contributed to the continued building of America as a construct for audiences at home. These travelers' stories and images thus presented an idea of America over which Britons could crow about their own supposed sophistication, and a democratic model through which to posit their own future, all of which suggests the importance of transatlantic travel writing and the 'idea of America' to nineteenth-century Britain.

Christine DeVine is Mary E. Dichmann/BORSF Endowed Professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, USA.

Introduction Seeing America; I: Imagining a New World; 1: A Joy on the Precipice of Death: John Muir and Robert Louis Stevenson in California; 2: Utopian Ideals in Transatlantic Context: Frances Wright's American Vision; 3: The Failure of Dickens's Transatlantic Dream in American Notes; 4: National Adolescence and Imaginative Freedom: The Traveling Desires of Martineau and Bird; 5: "Lodestar to Isabella's Wanderings": Bird's West and her British Audience; II: Politics and its Discontents; 6: British Travelers and the "Condition-of-America Question": Defining America in the 1830s; 7: "Inexpressibly Engaging": Fanny Trollope Visits Charles Bird King's Portraits of Indian Chiefs; 8: Intertextuality in Charles Dickens's American Notes and Basil Hall's Travels in North America; III: British Travelers and the "Condition-of-America Ques; 9: "Condemned of Nature": British Travelers on the Landscape of the Antebellum American South; 10: "My dearly-beloved Americans": Harriet Martineau's Transatlantic Abolitionism 1; 11: "Too abhorrent to Englishmen to render a representation of it ... acceptable": Slavery as Seen by British Artists Traveling in America; 12: Telling "a still more dismal story": Cultural Role-Playing and Surrogate Narration in Kemble's Georgian Journal; 13: The Closing of an American Vision: Alien National Narrative in Henry James's The American Scene