Christopher Mulvey has entered the world of travellers writing about their journeys abroad – Americans in their travels through England, and the English in their forays to the United States – during the eighty years following the end of the 1812–15 War. The writings of travellers from one country about the other dispel the myth that good manners were a universal value, and any variations were to be explained in terms of moral or political corruptions of one or the other nation. The impact of different yet somehow familiar cultures is highlighted in chapters which explore the contemporary issues of the nineteenth-century American woman, slavery, and the English poor. Mulvey also examines the American traveller's view of such English institutions as those of the gentleman, the aristocracy, and the servant and, in comparison, the English opinion of American merchant society, planter society and the American West.
Christopher Mulvey has entered the world of travellers writing about their journeys abroad – Americans in their travels through England, and the English in their forays to the United States – during the eighty years following the end of the 1812–15 War. The writings of travellers from one country about the other dispel the myth that good manners were a universal value, and any variations were to be explained in terms of moral or political corruptions of one or the other nation. The impact of different yet somehow familiar cultures is highlighted in chapters which explore the contemporary issues of the nineteenth-century American woman, slavery, and the English poor. Mulvey also examines the American traveller's view of such English institutions as those of the gentleman, the aristocracy, and the servant and, in comparison, the English opinion of American merchant society, planter society and the American West.
During the nineteenth century some hundreds of Englishmen and Americans visited each other's country and then published account of their journeys in the form of travel books. In his examination of the aesthetic values inherent in such books and the national prejudices and preconceptions betrayed by their authors, Christopher Mulvey has written a fascinating and entertaining chapter in nineteenth-century cultural history. The apprehensive Englishmen went to America as to a laboratory in which democracy was under investigation - as if to an England of the future. The sentimental American went to England above all to savour the past: to return to his roots. Their successes and failures in these aims, the extent to which reality matched preconception and the extent to which preconception shaped reality are the subject of this study. In all, the books, letters and journals of some ninety travellers are examined in Anglo-American Landscapes.
A joyous ride through time, where readers can criss-cross the British Isles and the world at large to land in 100 contrasting places and light on 100 wonderful topics that bring the extraordinary stor
