Romancing Post-Napoleonic Britain

Abstract

During the landmark year of 1812, while Napoleon’s army waged a bloody war against his native Spain, Joseph (José) Blanco White set aside the labor of single-handedly writing, translating, and editing the content for his London-based journal El Espa n ol to write one of his first major articles in English. 1 His review of The Present State of the Spanish Colonies; including a Particular Report of Hispaniola, or the Spanish part of Santo Domingo…(1812) by William Walton, “British Agent” who resided in Hispaniola between 1802 and 1809, appeared in The Quarterly Review .² Walton’s book, like Robert Semple’s Sketch of the Present State of Caracas (1812), followed in the wake of Alexander von Humboldt’s more scientific and highly influential Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (1810).³ The frugality of editions like Walton’s and Semple’s in both length and price helped to further popularize a region that had been of interest to Britain since Francisco de Miranda had first initiated negotiations with William Pitt in the 1790s.⁴ Misinformation spread with popularity, however, and Blanco set himself the task of rectifying for British readers the perceptions of South America that travel books propounded.⁵