Since American independence in 1782, with only a brief pause during the War of 1812, British travelers had been crossing the Atlantic and penning their observations of the new society being created in the United States. American democracy became all the more intriguing to the British in the 1830s as the rising tide of pressure for political reform in Britain crested. British travel writing of the 1830s was as much a debate about democracy as it was an effort to report accurately the people and society of the United States.
My presentation focuses on the British discussion of American manners as the precondition for successful self-governance. When British travel writers struggled to represent the American frontier, the most recently settled zone of the country and the place where America seemed the most different from England, their efforts to confront the implications of American democracy became even more intense. Were Americans coarse or refined? To British travelers, the answer to this question determined whether the American experiment in democracy would fail or succeed. Republican democracy depended on a virtuous people for its strength; vulgar, greedy, violent people could only have license, not liberty. Influenced by the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment, British travelers perceived politeness as a sign of advanced civilization. The United States was a test case of whether civilization could exist without the guidance of a court and aristocracy.
My presentation examines the work of five of the most well-known, even controversial, travel writers of the time. Frances Wright, Basil Hall, Frances Trollope, Frederick Marryat, and Harriet Martineau all debated the issue of American manners. My analysis reveals the assumptions underlying their writing, and the consequences of those assumptions, by reading it as within the tradition of British political theory's version of historical anthropology. My intent is to stimulate discussion about the intellectual and historical context of these texts, and by extension, of travel writing in general.
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