Louis Simond (1767-1831) earned a permanent place in the footnotes of the literary history of England when he was entertained while touring the Lake Country by De Quincey, who characterized him as a "thorough, knowing man of the world, keen, sharp as a razor, and valuing nothing but the tangible and the ponderable." By birth a Frenchman, Simond emigrated before the Revolution in his native land to the United States, where he became a successful New York merchant. In 1810-11 he made a tour of Great Britain, where he encountered De Quincey, Wordsworth, and others, recording his impressions in a journal written originally in English and published anonymously by a "French traveler" in 1815. After Waterloo a French translation appeared, a second edition of which finally identified the author by name.
The Journal of a Tour and Residence in Great Britain, as it is known in its English version, is marked by a highly critical observation of English society and politics virtually uninformed by and uncompared with Simond's twenty-year experience as a prosperous exile in a new democracy. Instead, English manners and institutions are contrasted negatively with the French--but of a France of the "ancien regime." The fact that the French translation of the Journal was presented to the restored king Louis XVIII suggests that a motive in addition to the assumed gentlemanly one of enlightening the world by recording one's travel impressions, Simond consciously or unconsciously may have been trying to reassert his European--or, more properly--Continental identity--after having spent a twenty-year sojourn in a world spared the social upheaval of the Revolution, the Terror, and the Napoleonic aftermath.
While Christopher Hibbert resurrected Simond's British journal in 1968 as "An American in Regency England," and despite the fact that Simond passed his young manhood in the New World, there is very little American in that book, and that little relates generally to the natural world rather than to social, political, or economic affairs, his major concerns. Through a survey of the Journal, and, to a lesser extent, Simond's two other travel books on Italy (1828) and Switzerland (1822), I propose to advance the hypothesis that Simond's journals, characterized as they are by impatience, fastidiousness, and intolerance, are informed as well by a search for a personal homeland, a place of peace where he may rest after years of exile.
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