A traveller's appreciation for a particular place or country is partially determined by what was expected before arriving--this is true today, and it was true in the nineteenth century. Isabella Bird was able to love and enjoy the Rocky Mountains because of what her particular idea of a utopia was as well as her preconceptions of the place. By examining her view of America and comparing it to Fanny Trollope's and Charles Dickens's views of America, this paper attempts to give insight into why Miss Bird was able to feel the way she did about America. By contrasting the reasons why these three individuals came to America, we will be able to understand Bird's openness to the American Rockies.
Charles Dickens's expectations for America were very different from what he actually found in the New World. His disappointment, however, was not because he found a lack of democracy that he wanted, but because he was considered such a huge celebrity. He attended formal dinners and galas in his honor and was hounded everywhere he went when he had come to America to escape those things. Although he expected to find the perfect democracy, the reality Dickens found was quite different.
Francis Trollope also traveled to America expecting to find a utopia. She came as a companion to her friend, Mrs. Wright, who had established a community at Nashoba where she was attempting to eradicate slavery by educating former slaves. The community was a failure, so Trollope went to Cincinnati where she attempted a Bazaar, but ended up losing everything and becoming destitute.
Isabella Bird, however, found more than she hoped for in America. She was planning on simply crossing the continent in order to get back to her home in Britain, but she ended up staying in the Rockies for several months. A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains begins with "I have found a dream of beauty at which one might look all one's life and sigh." The entire account is full of utopian descriptions such as this. Utopia does not mean the same thing for Isabella Bird as it does for Dickens and Trollope, however. Bird enjoys the wilderness more than civilization: in The Golden Cheronese and the Way Thither, she describes how she found peace in the depths of the jungle where the animals were her only companions (except for a few servants that a Victorian lady couldn't really do without).
This paper compares these three travellers only in order to understand how America represented a utopia in their eyes. It concentrates on Isabella Bird and A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains because she was one of the few who found a utopia in America, because of her influence on travel writing in general, and also because of her impact on the way women travellers were viewed in the Victorian Age.
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