In the closing months of 1819 and into the winter of 1820 readers throughout the United States eagerly awaited installments of a provocative travel narrative by one of America's rising literary stars, Washington Irving (1783–1859). His whimsical and thoughtful mix of travel sketches and short fiction would become the first formidable salvo in a battle for an indigenous literature in the young nation. It was no accident that The Sketch Book, at its core a travel book, would become such a popular and critically acclaimed work of American literature. It tapped into the essential nature of the country, a culture defined by movement. Irving effectively captivated an audience eager both to celebrate its sense of self and to venture out into the broader world.

Americans would be unable to inundate the rest of the world until technological advances meshed with an increasing economic vitality, which allowed a much broader range of Americans to travel in the second half of the nineteenth century. The tourists and travel writers in the two generations following The Sketch Book would nonetheless shape the aesthetic purpose that has since informed American tourism. In the years between 1820 and the Civil War, American tourists, representatives for the most part of the nation's economic and social elite, established the first American identity on the world stage. These tourists were keen to be acknowledged and respected as members of the great hope for a civilized future. If Irving seized on a growing mood of Americans to define themselves as both a part of and apart from the Old World, the growing developments in travel infrastructure began to make such forays possible. Early limitations on travel would be erased at a remarkable rate as steam navigation both on land and sea steadily chipped away at the time, danger, and expense of travel. Until the 1840s, when steam-powered ships began to make regular trips across the Atlantic Ocean in two weeks, the journey to the Old World for Americans demanded at least six weeks in sailing packets. With the advent of steam navigation, the world opened to Americans on a substantially larger scale. No longer wholly subservient to the vagaries of the winds, ocean travel became relatively dependable, and Americans were ready to exploit the new opportunities.

The result of such technological advance was inevitable. By the 1840s the interest in both tourism and travel literature had evolved into an outright phenomenon. In the May 1844 issue of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, for example, Henry Tuckerman notes, "our times might not inaptly be designated as the age of travelling. Its records form no insignificant branch of the literature of the day" (p. 527). The American curiosity about faraway lands combined with the increasing availability of quicker and cheaper transportation, creating a boom in foreign travel. More Americans were physically and economically able to travel abroad, and as the number of commercial and passenger ships sailing the Atlantic Ocean multiplied, so did the number of tourists who could afford to make the trip to the Old World. Christof Wegelin notes that the steadily increasing numbers from 1820 to 1849 exploded by 1860. U.S. citizens returning yearly to Atlantic and Gulf ports, according to Wegelin, fluctuated between just under 2,000 to just over 8,000 in the three decades following 1820, but in 1860 the returning tourists in the four largest Atlantic ports numbered 19,387 (p. 307). With the dramatic technical advances in steam-powered ships, voyages between the continents became commonplace. Tuckerman continues, "steam is annihilating space. . . . The ocean, once a formidable barrier, not to be traversed without long preparation and from urgent necessity, now seems to inspire no more consideration than a goodly lake, admirably adapted to summer excursions" (p. 527). These new tourists not only wanted to test themselves in a foreign context but they also traveled to learn.

In an age of a democratization of knowledge that glorified self-improvement, the burgeoning, literate middle class clamored toward anything perceived as educational. This social quest was intricately intertwined with tourism. The Unitarian clergyman William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) effectively captured the growing mood in his "Self Culture," a lecture first given in Boston in 1838. Channing defined "self culture" as "the care which every man owes to himself, to the unfolding and perfecting of his nature" (p. 354). He insisted that the goal of the American people should be "to fasten on this culture as our Great End, to determine deliberately and solemnly, that we will make the most and best of the powers which God has given us" (p. 371). The time-honored and socially respected art of traveling, in and of itself connoted self-improvement, whether or not tourists actually changed substantially or learned anything. Tourists could always say—once back at home—that they had been there, wherever "there" was, and no matter the nature of the experience, that fact alone could hold sway in any salon discussion or social occasion. Traveling to learn, at least ostensibly, therefore established itself as a valuable part of touristic performance.

TOURING THE OLD WORLD

Europe offered the strongest lure for American tourists, who sought to understand where they came from in order to know where they were going. The United States had successfully separated itself politically from England, but it had yet to sever the undeniable emotional and intellectual ties to European cultures and institutions. The European travel experience helped these tourists, who were overwhelmingly of European descent, reconcile opposing impulses: to reject the past by concentrating only on an American future or to embrace that legacy and the rich associational identity it fostered. By traveling to Europe, Americans could wander among the accomplishments of their ancestors and celebrate them, all the while affirming their belief through direct comparison that America was a land of the future and Europe of the past.

Washington Irving is the first significant writer to give a resonant voice to this impulse. In the "Author's Account of Himself," the introduction for The Sketch Book, Irving wistfully captures a prevailing and enduring sentiment through the voice of his fictional narrator, Geoffrey Crayon:

But Europe held forth the charms of storied and poetical association. There were to be seen the masterpiece[s] of art, the refinements of highly-cultivated society, the quaint peculiarities of ancient and local custom. My native country was full of youthful promise: Europe was rich in the accumulated treasures of age. Her very ruins told the history of times gone by, and every mouldering stone was a chronicle. I longed to wander over the scenes of renowned achievement—to tread, as it were, in the footsteps of antiquity—to loiter about the ruined castle—to meditate on the falling tower—to escape, in short, from the common-place realities of the present, and lose myself among the shadowy grandeurs of the past. (Pp. 14–15)

Irving makes calculated word choices as he describes the attractions of Europe: "ruins," "times gone by," "mouldering stone," "ruined castle," "falling tower," and "shadowy grandeurs of the past." Taken together, these not-so-subtle associations encouraged readers to view Europe as a culture long past its prime. Irving's tone is that of a romantic dreamer touring a cemetery that is aesthetically charming, perhaps, but marked by death nonetheless. Irving was by no means alone, and subsequent generations of tourists would likewise lose themselves among "shadowy grandeurs," and many would whistle along the way as they echoed his enthusiasm and "youthful promise."

TOURING THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE

As he had with the American perspective to European charms, Irving reflects a common attitude of nineteenth-century American tourists in relation to the American natural landscape. He writes that "on no country have the charms of nature been more prodigally lavished" and goes on to expound the virtues of those "charms":

Her mighty lakes, like oceans of liquid silver; her mountains, with their bright aerial tints; her valleys, teeming with wild fertility; her tremendous cataracts, thundering in their solitudes; her boundless plains, waving with spontaneous verdure; her broad deep rivers, rolling in solemn silence to the ocean; her trackless forests, where vegetation puts forth all its magnificence; her skies, kindling with the magic of summer clouds and glorious sunshine;—no, never need an American look beyond his own country for the sublime and beautiful of natural scenery. (P. 10)

The energy of this passage serves as a striking contrast with the "shadowy grandeurs of the past" that dominate his romantic musings of Europe. In his description of the natural beauty of America, he highlights the vitality of life—"teeming with wild fertility" and "spontaneous verdure." If American tourists went out into the rest of the world, especially Europe, with insecurities about their cultural and intellectual status, they could at least be highly confident in the potential of the land itself, a continual source of national pride.

Whereas travel writers and readers looked eastward to the past of the Old World, they looked to the interior of North America and westward to their supposed future. If Europe represented the "treasures of age," then the West promised an "image of perpetual juvenescence" (p. 15), according to James Jackson Jarves, author of Scenes and Scenery in the Sandwich Islands (1843). The promise of the New World was embodied most dramatically in the beauty of its natural landscape, which stood in stark opposition to the ruins of the Old World. It was a new Eden of possibilities. One of the most popular travel writers of the century, Bayard Taylor, named the narrative of his journey to the West Coast Eldorado; or, Adventures in the Path of Empire (1850). Tourists could take part in this cultural production with a confident imperialistic tone. The American quest for cultural stability influenced the popularization of travel books on the whole. The slow but steady American conquest of the West, moreover, gave epic significance to any journey through the region. The number of travelers who ventured west, as compared to the number of those who visited Europe, was small, however. The infrastructure for travel to the West was virtually nonexistent in the first half of the nineteenth century, and travel beyond the Mississippi River was reserved for comparatively few. Between 1820 and 1840 most continental tourism focused on travel within the original thirteen colonies. Toward the midpoint of the century, of course, many more tourists embarked on tours farther westward, but travel remained dominated by emigrants and entrepreneurs. The message from these early tourists resonated to readers still hugging the eastern shore.

AMERICAN TOURISM AND CULTURAL ASCENDANCY

Americans of the nineteenth century had a powerful need to define their place and identity in relation to, or, more frequently, in opposition to the rest of the world. Many Americans felt a contradiction between wanting to respect the accomplishments of Old World cultures and wanting to debunk them. As is made evident by the quantity of travel books published during the era, American tourists often became obsessed with Europe's past as an object lesson for the idyllic future inherent in the United States. In looking toward the other horizon, tourists to the New World and, by extension, the South Seas, most often sought to define themselves by dismissing the accomplishments and integrity of native cultures, or, in a more benign condescension, viewing them as simplistic and romantically alluring as residents of a new Eden. As self-appointed messengers of a new world order, nineteenth-century American tourists typically patronized the peoples they encountered. As representatives of what they saw as a beneficent civilization on the rise, they provided a strong cultural framework for aggressive late-nineteenth-century political imperialism.

The tourists of the mid-nineteenth century established the dominant cultural perspectives that would continue to define American tourism for generations to come. Although their impact was significant, by 1870 the world of tourism was on the verge of an upheaval that would be driven by the more far-reaching forces of economic and political power weight gained by sheer numbers of tourists. The publication of Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad in 1869 signaled the impending shift to mass tourism and imminent American muscularity. In the concluding pages of his narrative of a highly publicized five-month tour of the Old World, America's first pleasure cruise, Twain noted that he and his fellow tourists "always took care to make it understood that [they] were Americans—Americans!" (p. 645). If the earlier generations of American tourists endeavored to define a young nation, subsequent tourists were increasingly capable of redefining the world.

See also Americans Abroad; Exploration and Discovery; The Innocents Abroad; Nature; Travel Writing

Jeffrey Alan Melton