When the famed British writer Charles Dickens came to America on a reading tour in 1842, he was instantly repelled by a habit unknown on his side of the water: spitting. "I would be content," he recalled, "even to live in an atmosphere of spit, if they would but spit clean. But when every man ejects from his mouth that odious, most disgusting compound of saliva and tobacco, I vow my stomach revolts, and I cannot endure it."
Dickens found much to admire in the early 19th-century American way of life, but its rougher edges made him glad to return to England. The wild and woolly aspects of America gave other British travelers pause too, as James Simmons demonstrates in this set of anecdotal sketches on British travelers to the United States. Simmons doesn't offer much of a thesis, except to note that different visitors responded differently to the unfamiliar surroundings of America: George Ruxton, for instance, reveled in the trying conditions of the Rocky Mountains, where Indian attacks and psychotic trappers were commonplace, while Oscar Wilde was moved to ecstasy at the sight of both the actress Sarah Bernhardt and the porcelain teacups of San Francisco's Chinatown. Other travelers, for their part, found less to like in the New World, complaining bitterly about drunken stagecoach drivers, perilous fauna, and other colorful inconveniences. But whatever their reaction, Simmons writes in this entertaining exercise in cultural history, all these travelers "returned to England profoundly changed by their exposure to the American people, institutions, and landscapes." --Gregory McNamee
From Publishers Weekly
During the 19th century, the English loved traveling in America almost as much as elite Americans loved making the tour in Europe. Travel journalist Simmons (Americans: The View from Abroad, etc.) leads readers on a lively and engrossing romp across the continent, as seen by eight British travelers (who, happily, all kept detailed logs of their stay in America). Frances Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans became a bestseller in England, but was reviled in the U.S.--Trollope was none too sympathetic to the Yankees, who in her eyes were little more than uncivilized boors. (She was especially repulsed by Americans' lack of table manners.) Fanny Kemble, an English actress who married a Georgia planter, published her journal of the two years she spent as plantation mistress (the marriage ended in disaster, and Kemble returned to England as an outspoken abolitionist). In American Notes, Charles Dickens made many negative observations about America--its penal system was too harsh, journalists were unscrupulous--but he admired American men's gallant and gentlemanly treatment of women. Richard Burton wrote a detailed account of his stay with Mormons in Utah, and was tolerant of polygamy. Simmons's final chapter--on Oscar Wilde--does not live up to the rest of the book; Simmons is more interested in showing how Americans responded to Wilde than the other way around. On the whole, though, this is an entertaining, if occasionally superficial, look at America through travelers' eyes. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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