Star-Spangled Eden: 19th Century America Through the Eyes of Dickens, Wilde, Frances Trollope, Frank Harris, and Other British Travelers

When the famed British writer Charles Dickens came to America on a reading tour in 1842, he was instantly repelled by a habit unknown on his side of the water: spitting. "I would be content," he recalled, "even to live in an atmosphere of spit, if they would but spit clean. But when every man ejects from his mouth that odious, most disgusting compound of saliva and tobacco, I vow my stomach revolts, and I cannot endure it."

Dickens found much to admire in the early 19th-century American way of life, but its rougher edges made him glad to return to England. The wild and woolly aspects of America gave other British travelers pause too, as James Simmons demonstrates in this set of anecdotal sketches on British travelers to the United States. Simmons doesn't offer much of a thesis, except to note that different visitors responded differently to the unfamiliar surroundings of America: George Ruxton, for instance, reveled in the trying conditions of the Rocky Mountains, where Indian attacks and psychotic trappers were commonplace, while Oscar Wilde was moved to ecstasy at the sight of both the actress Sarah Bernhardt and the porcelain teacups of San Francisco's Chinatown. Other travelers, for their part, found less to like in the New World, complaining bitterly about drunken stagecoach drivers, perilous fauna, and other colorful inconveniences. But whatever their reaction, Simmons writes in this entertaining exercise in cultural history, all these travelers "returned to England profoundly changed by their exposure to the American people, institutions, and landscapes." --Gregory McNamee