Abstract
If imperial travel to London had as its objective the promotion of sentimental ties to inform and resolve local and regional issues, American travel was much more practical and utilitarian. Far from being uncertain about the increasing prominence of technological, industrial, or commercial expansion, Americans were instead caught up in the swell of development after 1865. In the immediate post-Civil War decades, the entire American political economy transformed itself to become a ‘more alert, hardworking, less hidebound, more efficient competitor’,1 on the world stage, and to set in motion the United States’ ascent to eventual Great Power status — a trajectory which, ironically, saw ‘the British Empire [as] the available model for her unaccustomed role’.2 As Henry James observed during his self-imposed exile there, ‘the sense of life is greatest there, it is a sense of the life of people of our consecrated English speech … London must ever have a great illustrative and suggestive value, and indeed a kind of sanctity’,3 while Ralph Waldo Emerson saw the process commencing already by mid-century:
A wise traveller will naturally choose to visit the best of actual nations; and an American has more reasons than another to draw him to Britain. In all that is done or begun by Americans towards right thinking or practice, we are met by a civilization already settled and overpowering.
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Notes
A. Zwerdling, Improvised Europeans: American Literary Expatriates and the Siege of London (Basic Books, New York, 1998), p. 16.
H. James, English Hours (Houghton-Mifflin, Boston, 1905), pp. 13–14.
R.W. Emerson, English Traits (Phillips, Sampson & Co., Boston, 1856), p. 41.
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M. Phillips, Abroad and At Home: Practical Hints for Tourists (Brentano’s, New York, 1891), p. 24.
‘Enterprise and Prosperity’, The New York Times, 7 June 1865; and see B.C. Stephenson (ed.), The American Visitor, 1 (1884), 9–11, which lists 321 ‘Americans’ (possibly meaning North Americans) present in London in a single (unstated) month.
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R. Kirk, America’s British Culture (Transaction, New Brunswick, NJ, 1993), pp. 13–28 and 69–82.
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D. Gilbert, ‘London in all its glory — or how to enjoy London: Guidebook Representations of Imperial London’, Journal of Historical Geography, 25, 3 (1999), 279–97.
A.C. Coxe, Impressions of England, or, Sketches of English Scenery and Society (Dana, New York, 1856), p. 28.
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A.D. King, Global Cities: Post-Imperialism and the Internationalization of London (Routledge, New York, 1990); as well as
J. Eade, Placing London: From Imperial Capital to Global City (Berghahn Books, New York, 2000).
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A. Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right (Hill and Wang, New York, 1995), pp. 29–32 and 65–111; Stephanson hits the core of the relationship by noting that ‘Within Anglophone civilization, it was clear too that God had commissioned the United States, the westward empire, as the future leader. It had already achieved the lead in material wealth and population, as well as the highest degree of Anglo-Saxonism and true Christianity. Since there were no more Western continents remaining, it seemed that God had been “training the Anglo-Saxon race” for the historical climax’ (p. 80);
E.M. Burns, The American Idea of Mission: Concepts of National Purpose and Destiny (Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 1957), pp. 44–5;
T. Hietala, Manifest Design: American Exceptionalism and Empire (Cornell, Ithaca, 2003), pp. 178–214; and
M.T. Carroll, Popular Modernity in America: Experience, Technology, Mythohistory (SUNY Press, Albany, 2000), pp. 8–13. These authors position the frontier as an ideological force in American national consciousness, the physical embodiment of a struggle for success against difficult conditions (tied to the revolutionary myth). Indeed, the frontier continued to play an important cultural and national role in American history throughout the twentieth century, most notably in its achievements in space.
E. Champney, Three Vassar Girls in England: A Holiday Excursion of Three College Girls through the Mother Country (Estes & Lauriat, Boston, 1884), p. 166.
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M. Berger, The British Traveller in America, 1836–1860 (Columbia University, New York, 1943), ‘In this attitude, America reminded foreign observers of an adolescent boy who felt he was not quite a man, but desired everyone else to think so. An American would hear no disparagement; he would admit no inequality’ (p. 62).
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D. Boorstin, America and the Image of Europe: Reflections on American Thought (Meridian Books, New York, 1960), p. 11; and see Mulvey, Transatlantic Manners, pp. 4–6.
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© 2014 Joseph De Sapio
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De Sapio, J. (2014). ‘How Differently We Go Ahead in America!’: American Constructions of British Modernity. In: Modernity and Meaning in Victorian London. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137407221_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137407221_3
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