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AMERICANS ABROAD

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The best-known and most influential works of American travel literature appeared after 1869, when Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad appeared to critical and popular acclaim. The Nation first published Henry James's writings on the European scene in 1870; his first published volume, Transatlantic Sketches, did not appear until five years later. But between 1820 and 1870, travel writings were among the most popular forms of literature read by Americans. The most avidly read works and the largest body of published material concerned the European Continent. Americans had deeply conflicted attitudes about the Old World. It was the source of their civilization, the home of much they wished to emulate. Europe also represented much that Americans despised. As a result of this tension, they produced and consumed a large amount of judgmental literature about Europe. Writers were aware of this and struggled to find a distinctive voice. Twain sought in Innocents Abroad to communicate to his readers a sense of travel as if they were experiencing it themselves. Given the sheer volume of published works, it was a challenging task.

Works on other parts of the world were not nearly as popular as European accounts. Fewer Americans traveled to regions like Asia, Africa, and South America. Also there simply was less demand for these works. Americans needed Europe in a way they did not utilize other parts of the world. Europe never represented exclusively the "other" to American audiences. Americans, engaged in a process of self-definition in the early nineteenth century, rejected much of European culture and constructed their own sense of self against it. But they never entirely separated themselves from Western civilization; to be an American was, in part, to be a European. This ambivalence is particularly notable among travelers to Great Britain but is present in those to the Continent as well. Accounts of Asia, other parts of the Americas, and Africa seldom possess this dual quality. They were more completely the "other," so they had less to offer readers as they considered what it meant to be an American. Even so, books and articles about non-European travel were published and read in the 1820–1870 period.

Scanning the travel books and articles penned by Americans over this fifty-year period, one might be led to believe that everyone who boarded a boat published an account of his or her experiences. In fact, only a small fraction did so. These literary representations are an important source of information about Europe and Americans, but they have their limitations. Published writings could not be as candid as private writings. Sexual behavior, gossip, and other titillating matters could not be discussed openly. These taboos explain much of the banality of travel literature. Wary of candor, authors retreated to safe topics: the dimensions of Saint Peter's, the history of Holyrood Castle, contrasts between English and French national character. Nevertheless, the differences between published narratives and "authentic" private jottings can be exaggerated. Letters and diaries were likely to be distributed among friends and family. And books and articles were hardly bereft of opinion: they reveal many of the issues that preoccupied Americans during this period, such as anti-Catholicism, cultural nationalism, and the significance of European revolutions.

WHO, WHAT, WHERE, AND WHY

Records from consular visits, port records, and notices of ships' arrivals and departures indicate that tens of thousands of Americans traveled abroad from 1820 to 1870. Their reasons for doing so were accordingly diverse. Some relocated there entirely, such as the South Carolinian John Izard Middleton, who married the daughter of a Swiss banker and lived in Paris. Expatriates were a tiny fraction of the community abroad, however. The vast majority of travelers returned home at some point, although their reasons for leaving it varied widely. Physicians prescribed salt air and a change of scenery for consumptives and the seriously ill. Business travel propelled thousands of men overseas. The trade-show movement, which culminated in the 1851 Great Exhibition in London that featured the Crystal Palace, signified the growing importance of business travel, although these shows also attracted many tourists.

Many other Americans traveled abroad in pursuit of education. Artists, of course, congregated in Paris, Rome, and Florence to learn painting and sculpture. During the nineteenth century the centers of medical education shifted away from Edinburgh and London to Paris and later on to Germany. Other American visitors studied law, but most simply sought a more advanced education than could be obtained in the United States. In the mid-nineteenth century, this desire spurred an especially intense student emigration to Göttingen and other German universities. Reform-minded Americans sailed overseas to participate in the numerous meetings and conventions that bound together the transatlantic benevolent empire. Missions drew others abroad, and this cohort represented a disproportionate share of travelers to non-European destinations. Tourism, finally, propelled others overseas. Some engaged in a full-fledged grand tour of several months or even years, traveling from city to city and exploiting letters of recommendation to penetrate high society. Others enjoyed a more modest regimen of a few weeks, rushing from capital to capital via diligence, carriage, or rail, their noses never far from their guidebooks.

This last form of travel, perhaps better labeled tourism, became especially popular in the post-1840 period, when the growth of the middle class and the maturation of transoceanic steamships vastly increased the number and diversity of American travelers. The wars of the French Revolution and Napoleonic era had discouraged overseas travel among Americans and Britons. The coming of peace in 1815 inaugurated a rush of travel abroad. Even so, as the rationales for travel listed above suggest, the vast majority of discretionary travelers in the early nineteenth century were men of means. Sailors in the navy and merchant marine constituted the only significant group of working-class travelers in this period. Overseas travel was an expensive endeavor, out of the reach of all but the well-to-do until the middle of the nineteenth century.

As the social class profile of Americans abroad diversified after 1840, so did its gender distribution. More and more women joined their husbands and fathers on their business and leisure excursions. By the 1860s thousands of women and men were sailing and steaming overseas every year. The Civil War interrupted this trend, but Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant had hardly parted company at Appomattox when rates of travel began to approach antebellum levels; it soon far exceeded them. But the post-1870 differences were also qualitative. Americans encountered the world in different ways than they had before. They evidenced more interest in areas outside Europe, but they increasingly did so through imperial eyes. Their views of Europe were different as well. Postwar travelers, representatives of a confident, muscular America, believed they had less to learn from Europe than had their predecessors. A voyage there became more a token of gentility, a tourist practice, than a genuine encounter.

Most Americans traveling abroad in 1820–1870 visited Europe. But they distributed their favors unequally. Early in the century travelers tended to follow the route of the conventional British grand tour, with the significant addition of Britain itself. Great Britain was the single most popular destination. Most travelers seem to have ignored the pleas of literary nationalists, who urged Americans to match political independence from Britain with cultural autonomy. What is more, republican Americans displayed an unseemly interest in the trappings of monarchy and aristocracy. There was acute competition to be presented at court. Americans also visited Scotland with great frequency and to a lesser extent Ireland. When Americans visited Ireland after 1840, the experience usually served to confirm anti-Irish and anti-Catholic prejudices.

Beyond Britain, Americans could be found in large numbers in France and Italy north of Naples—again the conventional route of the grand tour. Many travelers also sailed the Rhine and toured parts of Germany. Other corners of Europe were more poorly represented on travelers' itineraries. Spain, the subject of one of the antebellum era's most interesting travel accounts, James Johnston Pettigrew's (1828–1863) Notes on Spain and the Spaniards (1861), seems to have been less popular than Germany. Less visited still were eastern Europe, Turkey, and Russia, although a few intrepid folk made their way there every year. The Holy Land and Egypt, which were not significant destinations in the early decades of the century, became popular toward the middle of the century, when accounts such as John Lloyd Stephens's (1805–1852) Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land (1837) made these regions seem accessible.

PREPARATION

Women and men had at their disposal a variety of sources designed to help them prepare for their travels. There was the genre of travel literature itself, of course; books purchased and borrowed from libraries as well as the innumerable shorter accounts in newspapers and magazines were invaluable sources of information on transportation, lodging, and sightseeing. So pervasive was this literature, in fact, that it was often hard for travelers to experience a journey abroad as a process of discovery, as travelogues were not shy about telling their readers what they ought to see and what they ought to think about it. For this reason European travel constituted one of the most constructed and ritual-laden practices in nineteenth-century American culture.

Most of the reading material consulted by Americans preparing to travel overseas during the mid-nineteenth century was not domestic but British. Few travelers employed American-authored guidebooks. Americans in Paris favored the guides to the city published annually by Galignani's, the English bookstore. Beginning in the 1830s the most popular travelogues employed by Americans were published by the London house of John Murray (1808–1892). They were comprehensive and accurate (Murray encouraged his readers to write in with corrections). Murray's handbooks stressed practical information, such as stage schedules and rates, notes on passports and currency, hours of operation for museums, palaces, and other attractions, and locations of hotels. But Murray as well as his main rival Baedeker, went beyond the practical. They shaped travelers' experiences by offering interpretations of artworks, comments on national and regional character, and judgments of religion and culture. That all this was offered from a British perspective (in Murray's case) does not seem to have bothered American travelers, whose loyalty to these guides persisted despite the increased availability of American-published books, such as George Palmer Putnam's (1814–1872) The Tourist in Europe (1838).

Imaginative literature was a second genre that influenced how Americans confronted the outside world. British works remained more popular than domestic productions during the mid-century period. Shakespeare was the most important touchstone for travelers to England. Nearly as many Americans visited Scotland as England; the main literary lights here were Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott. Travelers were more likely to take a pilgrimage to Melrose than to Stratford-on-Avon. George Gordon, Lord Byron, was the favored cicerone to Italy; his description of the Vatican appears to have been particularly vivid to judge by how often travelers to the Holy See cited it. Germaine de Staël's (1766–1817) Corinne (1807) shaped perspectives toward Italy in a more general way, by offering a morally tinged contrast between North and South. Her De l'Allemagne (1810) was less influential if only because Germany was a less-common destination than Italy.

European writing about the United States also shaped travelers' approaches to foreign experiences. Americans raged over the slights of Frances Trollope (1780–1863) and Basil Hall (1788–1844) regarding their fast-eating, tobacco juice–spitting, money-grubbing ways. Travelers were keenly sensitive about this literature. Their fixation upon mumbling orators in the House of Lords, hordes of beggars in Naples, and Parisian infidelity represented, in part, payback to European critics of the United States. But they also took this literature seriously for its admonitory lessons. They monitored their own behavior closely. Americans abroad strove to be models of republican gentility, possessed of all the qualities of true refinement shorn of European vices. They tried to be sophisticated, believing that even the most obliging European secretly thought they were barely civilized. They also monitored each other against aristocratic envy, which might be interpreted by Europeans as a sign of national weakness. This responsiveness to Old World opinion was powerful testimony in favor of a central charge of critics like Trollope—that of American cultural insecurity vis-à-vis the Old World.

PORTRAYALS BY AND OF AMERICANS ABROAD

These attitudes guaranteed that literary representations of Americans abroad would be unusually complex. Although American journals regularly reviewed European travelogues, the British less often returned the favor. The English tended to dismiss accounts by Americans abroad as crudely patriotic—as, in fact, many of them were. Although the volume of travel writing defies simple distinctions, in general one's portrayal of Americans abroad depended on where the author came down on the question of national exceptionalism. The heirs of John Winthrop tended to represent Americans abroad as virtuous pilgrims in lands of vice, ignorance, poverty, and despotism. Those who endorsed cultural engagement with the Old World were less Manichaean (with a dual worldview, seeing things as either good or evil), although not many were so daring as to grant Europe moral equivalence with the United States. A few writers did tip the moral scales squarely in favor of Europe. William Wells Brown's (1815–1894) American Fugitive in Europe (1855) was exceptional in foreshadowing the expatriate literature of the next century, where the sensitive American is at home only away from his or her own shores. Such a view was very much the exception; only a few figures could muster a strong enough sense of alienation to portray it compellingly. Even Frederick Douglass's fugitive writings possess a core of patriotism that makes even such an alienated American a stranger abroad.

Most Americans abroad fell within the poles of expatriate and hyper-patriot. A significant number of travelers found themselves too overawed by what they saw to maintain a pretense of sophistication or hostility. Such is the disarming quality of the best-selling author Bayard Taylor (1825–1878), whose Views A-foot (1847) portrays the American as a kind of parched cultural consumer. Other works took this self-consciousness as their point of departure. James Fenimore Cooper's (1789–1851) Home as Found (1838) finds Americans returning from Europe lauded as hajji—participants in a pilgrimage, possessed of special qualities by virtue of their contact with the divine. Cooper's portrayal is unusually complicated because, while he sought to make fun of this phenomenon, he clearly believed that a certain class of Americans who had traveled abroad really was more worthy than regular folks. In Augusta Jane Evans's (1835–1909) Beulah (1859) there is little sense of travelers returning with a halo; young men fresh from the Continent marry badly, fall into drink, and fritter away their fortunes. Cooper and Evans each applied a jaundiced eye to both aspects of the American abroad. Their American was neither the eager consumer of refinement portrayed by Taylor nor the embittered realist as written by William Wells Brown. "Abroad" was likewise a more complex category, more morally ambivalent than most of their fellow Americans were, in this middle point in the nineteenth century, prepared to admit. Yet both pointed dumbly toward the future, away from the romantic nationalism that inspired many travelers to find in foreign climes the roots of American greatness and uniqueness, toward the uncertain, calculating modernism of James, Twain, and Henry Adams.

See also Education; English Literature; Leisure; Travel Writing; Tourism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Brown, William Wells. The American Fugitive in Europe: Sketches of Places and People Abroad. Boston: John P. Jewett, 1855.

Cooper, James Fenimore. Home as Found. 1838. Introduction by Lewis Leary. New York: Capricorn Books, 1961.

Evans, Augusta Jane. Beulah. 1859. Edited with an introduction by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

James, Henry, Jr. Transatlantic Sketches. Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1875.

Pettigrew, James Johnston. Notes on Spain and the Spaniards, in the Summer of 1859, with a Glance at Sardinia. Charleston, S.C.: Evans and Cogswell, 1861.

Putnam, George Palmer. The Tourist in Europe; or, A Concise Summary of the Various Routes, Objects of Interest, &c. in Great Britain, France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Belgium, and Holland. New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1838.

Staël, Germaine Anne-Louise de. De l'Allemagne. 1810. Paris: Charpentier, 1869.

Staël, Madame de. Corinne; or, Italy. 1807. Translated and edited by Sylvia Raphael, introduction by John Isbell. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Stevens, John Lloyd. Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1837.

Taylor, Bayard. Views A-foot; or, Europe Seen with a Knapsack and Staff. Boston: J. Knight, 1848.

Twain, Mark. The Innocents Abroad. 1869. Introduction by Mordecai Richler, afterword by David E. E. Sloane. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Secondary Works

Buzard, James. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Kilbride, Daniel. "Travel, Ritual, and National Identity: Planters on the European Tour, 1820–1860." Journal of Southern History 69 (2003): 549–584.

Stowe, William W. Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Vance, William L. America's Rome. 2 vols. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989.

Ziff, Larzer. Return Passages: Great American Travel Writing, 1780–1910. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000.

Daniel Kilbride