The Transatlantic Invention of “English” Literary Heritage

Abstract

One of this book’s themes is the establishment of “literature” as Britain’s key heritage concept—a process abetted by the growth of literary tourism. In previous chapters, I have focused mainly on homegrown British tourists, but now I turn to other travelers drawn to Britain’s literary shrines. Few scholars have considered the role foreign visitors, especially Americans, played in constructing Britain as the home of great dead poets.¹ Yet surveying the nineteenth century’s travel literature, one finds the most ardent necromanticism in books on Britain by tourists from the United States; further, one discovers, increasingly as the century goes on, managers of British attractions going out of their way to court American customers, Americans outnumbering other visitors to literary shrines, and even British guidebooks quoting American writers. Accordingly, in tracing the invention of literary, tourist Britain, it is crucial to speak not only of the Englishman’s England (to borrow Ian Ousby’s book title), but also of the American’s. Americans helped to solidify Britain’s literary itinerary, confirming to Britons the heritage that mattered most.

Show me the birthplace of those bards of old, / Whose music moved me, as a mighty wind / Doth bow the reed. Show me their marble tombs, / Whose varied wisdom taught the awe-struck world, — / Those giants of old time. Show me thy domes / And castellated towers, with ivy crowned, / The proud memorials of a buried race; / Pour on my ear thy rich cathedral hymn, / England, our mother, and to my far home, / In the green West, I will rejoicing turn, / Wearing thine image on my grateful heart.

Lydia Sigourney, “Approach to England”