3 Review(s)

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.