Though interest in England's transatlantic "cousins" had motivated travel to and writings about America since the revolution and before, travel narratives written and published at the end of the nineteenth century are of particular interest for the way in which they participate in the New Imperialism and an allied Anglo-Saxonist discourse informed by racial Darwinism and theories of eugenics. "Seeking the Anglo-Saxon" explores how English travel writers contributed to--and challenged--colonialist constructions of the United States evident in other periodical genres (particularly fiction) during the last twenty years of the century, constructions which re-colonize the transatlantic cousin ideologically if not politically. This paper focuses on the diversity of travel narratives published in four prominent Victorian monthlies: Blackwood's, the Cornhill, Macmillan's, and the Nineteenth Century. Many of these narratives are by English "gentlemen"--among them George Curzon, J. P. Maud, Laurence Oliphant, Archibald Geikie, and Lord Dunraven--seeking adventure and sport on the American frontier. Some are by "lady" travellers like Constance F. Gordon Cumming, Beatrice Harraden, Alma Strettell, and Henrietta Grey Egerton, interested in recording local color and social customs. Though their style and focus varies, narratives by both men and women frequently participate in a social commentary and critique that builds, like Matthew Arnold's 1882 essay "A Word about America" (a work written and published in the Nineteenth Century before his own trip to the United States), on the assumption that all Americans are merely "the English on the other side of the Atlantic."
This assumption, adopted by politicians and ideologues interested in promoting an Anglo-American alliance and U.S. participation in an Imperial Federation, emerges on several levels in the travel narratives, illustrating David Spurr's point in The Rhetoric of Empire that colonizers generate authority by insisting on both "their radical difference from the colonized" and "on the colonized people's essential identity with them." The otherness of Americans and American life, emphasized by many travel writers, does not preclude a rhetorical insistence on the essential Anglo-Saxonism of the United States. Like the western local color stories so popular in literary monthlies, travel narratives set on the frontier, many of them recording events two or three decades old, emphasize the "colonial" primitivism of American life and culture while hailing the Anglo-Saxon initiative that "civilizes" the West and tests racial virility. A few articles hint at a racial degeneration threatening Anglo-Americans not unlike that believed to endanger Anglos on colonial frontiers in Asia and Africa, a degeneration traceable to climate, social conditions, and/or intermarriage with "lesser breeds." Indeed, whether American or British, Anglo-Saxons are presented as united against the "degenerate" races, and even travel narratives which deplore the U.S. government treatment of Native Americans and the discrimination suffered by African Americans tend to reinforce by racial stereotyping the inferiority of "darker" peoples.
The primitivism of nostalgic, frontier narratives is challenged by travellers' descriptions of more "civilized" U. S. metropolitan centers--those historically popular with English travellers: New York, Washington D.C., Boston, New Orleans, and Chicago. Sometimes these distinct narrative types jostle each other in the same issue, underscoring the tension between a lingering British desire to identify the United States as merely another colonial outpost, and a grudging recognition that by the end of Queen Victoria's reign the United States was becoming a cosmopolitan national power in her own right. Indeed, this recognition spurred English travellers to look for points of comparison with home: favorable comparisons are interpreted as signs of racial and cultural kinship, less favorable as signs of degenerative influences (such as the influx of Irish emigrants). Indeed, given the immigrant diversity of the American population by the 1880s and 90s--a diversity that some travel writers celebrate but many look on with suspicion--it is perhaps not surprising to find that New England and Virginia, home of "pure" English descendents, provide popular subjects for travellers intent on promoting transatlantic connections.
The need in travel narratives to reinforce by various strategies the essential Anglo-Saxonism of a nation that was, after all, not Anglo-Saxon, not a British colony, and sometimes not even an ally (quite the converse, in fact, during the 1895 Venezuela Boundary dispute) illustrates the potential instability, not to mention the rationalizations, of imperial discourse. Generally, English travellers want to look upon American industrial progress and agricultural power as indicators of Anglo-Saxon initiative, as success in which they and the mother country can share. In this respect late-Victorian travel narratives, like many political writings in British magazines, attempt to co-opt American successes in a rhetorical act of colonization. This process, however, turns the pages of English periodicals less into scenes of imperial conquest than into a stage for imperial contest.
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