Abstract
By the mid nineteenth century a steady stream (later to become a torrent) of Americans was crossing the Atlantic to visit the Old World a trip which had often been dreamt of and planned long before. Continental Europe had its powerful attractions, especially in Italy, but it was the ‘homeland’ — England and Scotland in the main — that exerted the greatest pull. This was the land of forefathers, the progenitor of the new, democratic nation now emerging in the United States. It was, as importantly, also a land already familiarised and sanctified by literary associations and culturally generated preconception. These associations in large part determined the American tourist’s itinerary: Stratford for Shakespeare, the Lakes for Wordsworth and Scotland for Burns and Scott.
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Notes
Washington Irving, The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1848) (Tarrytown, New York: Sleepy Hollow Press, 1981), 105.
Grace Greenwood, Haps and Mishaps of a Tour in Europe (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1854), 132.
Henry James, English Hours (1905) (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1981), 122.
Sophia Hawthorne, Notes in England and Italy (London: s.n., 1869), 181.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (1854), 2 vols (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Company, 1856), I, 202.
Denise Kohn, Sarah Meer and Emily B. Todd eds., Transatlantic Stowe: Harriet Beecher Stowe and European Culture (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006).
Catherine Sedgwick, Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (1841), 2 vols (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1855), I, 13.
James Fenimore Cooper, Gleanings in Europe (1837), Robert E. Spiller ed., 2 vols (New York: Oxford University Press, 1928; Kraus reprint, New York, 1970), I, 30.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Our Old Home (1863), 2 vols (London: Chatto and Windus, 1890), I, 158, 159.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, English Notebooks, Thomas Woodson and Bill Ellis, eds, The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Vols. XXI, XXII (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997), I, 203.
Mark Twain, Notebooks and Journals, eds Frederick Anderson, Michael B. Frank, Kenneth M. Sanderson, Vol. I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 5 63–4.
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© 2009 Shirley Foster
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Foster, S. (2009). Americans and Anti-Tourism. In: Watson, N.J. (eds) Literary Tourism and Nineteenth- Century Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234109_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230234109_16
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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