Travel accidents were stock subjects for sensation and social investigation in the late nineteenth-century American (post 1850) literary marketplace. Harper's Weekly regularly published reports of particular railroad accidents with full-page illustrations of the crash scene and personal reports from witnesses and victims. With front-page stories, reports of court proceedings, and editorials, newspapers offered readers a range of ways of thinking about railroad accidents. Out of the cultural weight of travel accidents, travel and fiction writers generated narrative. This essay explores three writers who invoked accidents to write about the ethical traveling self and its relation to marginalized social groups. Davis, Howells, and Wister used the trope of travel accident to reflect on one central tension of travel in the age of imperialism and nation making: while individual travelers journeyed for a range of reasons and with a range of effects, travel as an institution strengthened white, national authority and subjectivity. These three writers' responses to the tension between "innocence" and imperialism were in dialogue with each other, and I use them to sketch a range of white, nationally identified middle- and upper-class responses to this paradox.
In Rebecca Harding Davis' "By-Paths in the Mountains," (serialized in Harper's Monthly, 1880), a group led by a Philadelphia doctor unexpectedly stays with an Appalachian man and learns of the law's unfair harassment of him and his family. This text presents itself as a travel guide for hardworking middle-class travelers looking for a unique and ethical alternative to fashionable travel. Davis uses unexpected events and interactions to test her characters' tolerance for poverty and physical hardship, thus positing faith in a particular kind of ethical bourgeois travel.
William Dean Howells' early novel Undiscovered Country (1880) begins with a similar premise, in which Bostonian travelers unexpectedly seek hospitality from a Massachusetts Shaker community, and critiques the position that Davis' travel guide represents. The travelers make enemies with a local tavern keeper, and the Shakers do not reciprocate the travelers' curiosity about the Shaker religion and community. Howells' novel throws into relief the paucity of traveler sympathy and suggests that travelers fulfill their psychic needs through some other means. But his critique of sentimental travel offers nothing in its place.
Owen Wister's novel The Virginian (1902) hinges on a scene in which Eastern tourists, ranch hands, and local residents mill around while waiting for railroad workers to repair the track. Like descriptions of warm, local hospitality, train accidents and delays were common scenes in travel narratives. As in Davis and Howells' texts, the delay fosters atemporarily free space in which characters interact across social boundaries. But bourgeois readers are not encouraged to reflect on their relation to other social groups. Wister's novel fills the free space with the charismatic leadership of his cowboy hero, the Virginian, who works to secure the West for a new generation of the elite.
Many scholars have traced the thick rhetorical and institutional connections between genteel literature, individual travel accounts, and prescriptive travel guides in the nineteenth-century literary marketplace. I chose to focus on more prescriptive literature because these texts shape and impute meaning to the representations of accident commonly found in travel narratives. Although remembered primarily for their fiction, Howells and Wister were highly influential in the development of travel and writing: Howells edited the journal, Harper's Monthly, where much material on leisured travel in America appeared, and Wister was a key developer of the symbolic appeal of Western travel. The experiential possibility and rhetorical use of accident prompted these authors to write about traveling-class individual agency and social responsibility, important questions for their age and ours.
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