1. Royce, Josiah, “The Mechanical, the Historical, and the Statistical,” The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce, ed. McDermott, John J. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), vol. 2, p. 711.Google Scholar

2. Belasco, Warren James, Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910–1945 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), p. 25.Google Scholar

3. See Lears, T. J. Jackson, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer, 1880–1930,” in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History 1880–1980, eds. Fox, Richard Wightman and Lears, (New York: Pantheon, 1983), pp. 3–38.Google Scholar

4. Plesur, Milton, America's Outward Thrust: Approaches to Foreign Affairs, 1865–1890 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971), p. 125.Google Scholar

5. I adopt this list from Higman, John in Writing American History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), p. 128.Google Scholar “The story,” Higham continues, “begins with the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804; it ends with the retirement in 1894 of John Wesley Powell as Director of the U. S. Geological Survey.”

6. Metwalli, Ahmed M., “Americans Abroad: The Popular Art of Travel Writing in the Nineteenth Century” in America: Exploration and Travel, ed. Kagle, Steven (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1979), pp. 68–69.Google Scholar

7. Interesting work could be done on the inscription of travel in Dickinson especially. For example, one might consider the following lines: “The soul has moments of Escape–/When bursting all the doors– /She dances like a bomb, abroad …,” and then wonder whether Dickinson could have written them if she had ever gone abroad, or if she could have written them because she had no desire to go abroad. I would see such lines myself within the thematic of American travel writing (for which I take Thoreau to be central) I discuss in an earlier article, cited below.

8. James, Henry, The Art of Travel, ed. Zabel, Morton Dauwen (New York: Doubleday, 1962).Google Scholar John Carlos Rowe offers an especially acute, epistemological reading of James' travel writing in “James's Rhetoric of the Eye: Re-Marking the Impression,” Criticism 24 (Summer 1982): 233–60.Google Scholar For Howells, see Dean, James, Howells' Travels Toward Art (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1970).Google Scholar Dean's very title, incidentally, provides an interesting example of how travel writing gets aesthetically situated: The implication is that as Howells got better as a travel writer, he reached the goal of his travels, which was to write about them better. One of the purposes of my discussion is to offer an account of why travel writing got situated in an aesthetic category.

9. On Irving, see, e.g., the opening chapter of Christ of Wegelin, , The Image of Europe in Henry James (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1958).Google Scholar On Taylor, see Beatty, Richard, Bayard Taylor, Laureate of the Gilded Age (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1936).Google Scholar On Adams, see Brown, Margaret, “Henry Adams: His Passage to Asia,” in Critical Essays on Henry Adams, ed. Harbert, Earl N. (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), pp. 43–57.Google Scholar

10. Spiller, Robert, The American in England, During the First Half Century of Independence (New York: H. Holt, 1926), chs. 2–7, 10.Google Scholar

11. Ibid. (The many articles that were not incorporated into books could easily merit a study in themselves, and it would not consist only in pieces published in major journals such as Harper's or The North American Review; Spiller, e.g., notes that letters or series of letters began to appear very early in the American writing about England in such periodicals as the Rural Magazine and Christian Spectator.)

12. Metwalli, , “Americans Abroad,” p. 70.Google Scholar On Melville as a travel writer, see Jubak, James, “The Influence of the Travel Narrative on Melville's Mardi,” Genre 9 (1976): 121–33.Google Scholar

13. James, , The Art of Travel, p. 323.Google Scholar

14. Jarves, James Jackson, Italian Sights and Papal Principles (New York, 1856), pp. 34–135.Google Scholar Compare his later, more anecdotal, and far better written Italian Rambles (New York, 1883).Google Scholar By this time Jarves is more interested in a more direct American appropriation of Florence, and so he says, e.g., the following sort of thing: “If we are to build up on American soil cities like Florence, worldrenowned for art and science even more than for commerce and luxury, we must breed merchant princes cultured like Rucellai, and deeply imbued with his maxim, that it is pleasanter and more honorable to spend money for wise purposes than to make it…. Rucellai is not the highest type of man and citizen, but there is in him a public spirit which may be studied to advantage by many of our merchant princes whose fortunes are as far superior to his self-made one as America is a land of greater diversity of gifts and promise than ever was in Italy” (pp. 379–80).

15. Thorpe, Willard, “Pilgrims' Return,” in The Literary History of the United States, ed. Spiller, Robert et al. (New York: Macmillan), 4th ed., p. 829.Google Scholar

16. Hillard, George Stillman, Six Months in Italy, (London, 1853), vol. 1., pp. 82–83.Google Scholar

17. Frazar, M. D., Practical European Guide: Preparation, Cost, Routes, and Sightseeing (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1908), p. 188.Google Scholar

18. James, , The Art of Travel, p. 322Google Scholar; Jarves, , Italian Sights, ch. 6, pp. 136–57.Google Scholar

19. See especially Plesur, , Outward Thrust, pp. 104–05Google Scholar, and Dulles, Foster Rhea, Americans Abroad, Two Centuries of European Travel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964), pp. 102–09.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20. Quoted in Dulles, , p. 109.Google Scholar But Dulles provides many other examples, merely by the way, of the same spirited mockery – e.g., Henry Adams: “Bored, patient, helpless, indulgent to an extreme; mostly a modest, decent, valuable citizen, the American was to be met at every railway station in Europe carefully explaining to every listener that the happiest day of his life would be the day he should land on the pier in New York” (p. 112).

21. Pitman, Marie (Margery Deane), European Breezes (Boston, 1882), pp. 11–12.Google Scholar

22. Fussell, Paul, Abroad: British Literacy Traveling Between the Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 203.Google Scholar

23. Thorpe, , “Pilgrims' Return,”Google Scholar gives this formula: “The author must begin with the excitements of the ocean voyage itself and devote at least a portion of the chapter to the thrill, so long anticipated, of setting foot on foreign soil. From this point on he should mix architecture and scenery with comment on philanthrophies, skillfully work in a little history cribbed from Murray's guides, taking care to add a touch of sentiment or eloquence when the occasion permitted. If the essay or book required a little padding, it was always possible to retell an old legend or slip in an account of dangers surmounted in crossing the Alps” (p. 831). I would only add that, of course, such formulas only develop from real intimacy with audience expectations, which the formulas both solidify and confirm.

24. This is an exact pattern for Pitman's text, with the sole difference that the return (from which I will subsequently quote) is given in the preface (pp. 10–11).

25. According to Thorpe, , “Pilgrims' Return” (p. 832)Google Scholar, the Crawford text “possesses a distinction which almost makes it great.” I would venture the opinion that such distinction is purchased by the fact that Crawford is so completely there, in Rome, from the start, that Ave Roma Immortalis hardly qualifies as a travel text at all, a fact which Thorpe concedes by mentioning it under “books unlocking the secret charms of a particular region” which “constitute a subdivision of travel literature.” This, however, hardly solves the problem of what is a subdivision of what. My argument is that for most of the 19th Century no one bothered with this problem.

26. This is the basic reason why it remains so difficult to say who wrote the first books of travels in American writing which treated another country as if it were a foreign land. In The American in England, Spiller gives Silliman, Benjamin, A Journal of Travels in England, Holland, and Scotland, 3 vols. (New Haven, 1820)Google Scholar, first published in 1810 (p. 346). In Anglo-American Landscapes, a Study of nineteenth century Anglo-American travel literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983)Google Scholar, Christopher Mulvey, however, accepts William Austin, and quotes from a letter Austin wrote during 1802–03 that was subsequently incorporated into his book, Letters from London (Boston, 1804), p. 34.Google Scholar There seems to be no way to give a definition, short of giving an equally definitive account of what a “book” is, as distinct from a book that consists of a series of letters. Similarly, it is difficult to say with absolute certainty who the first American was who traveled abroad for the sole purpose of writing a book about it. The usual solution, I think, to this question is to say Washington Irving and to be done with it. Compare a New York journalist, Nathaniel Parker Willis, sent as a correspondent abroad in 1831. Portions of his newpaper columns were, according to Spiller, issued in book form almost immediately. In 1831 he wrote from Italy, “I love my country, but the ornamental is my vocation, and of this she has none” (quoted in Spiller, , p. 366).Google Scholar

27. See The Profession of Authorship in America, ed. Bruccoli, Matthew J. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968)Google Scholar, especially the chapter, “James T. Fields and the Beginning of Book Promotion.”

28. MacCannell, Dean, The Tourist, A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken, 1976), p. 158.Google Scholar

29. On this last point, for example, Nuhn, Ferner in The Wind Blew from the East: A Study of the Orientation of American Culture (New York: Harper and Bros., 1942)Google Scholar: “Space has been our time” (p. 4).Google Scholar

30. Mulvey, , Landscapes, p. xiii.Google Scholar

31. Metwalli, , “Americans Abroad,” p. 80.Google Scholar

32. Irving, Washington, The Sketch Book (1820; rpt. New York: New American Library, 1961), p. 62.Google Scholar

33. Mulvey, , Landscapes, p. 16.Google Scholar

34. Quoted in ibid., p. 120. Compare Adams, Henry: “The English when bored kill something” (p. 129).Google Scholar

35. Sontag, Susan, “Model Destinations,” Times Literary Supplement, 06 22, 1984, p. 699.Google Scholar

36. Quoted in Spiller, , American in England, pp. 175–76.Google Scholar

37. See Mulvey, , LandscapesGoogle Scholar, ch. 5. It might be noted in passing that it was in the common medium of the “literary” that America made its first memorable appropriation from abroad. As Spiller notes of Irving: “it was a strange twist of fate which put into the hands of a visitor from the hustling, industrious young country across the water the task of crystallizing a spirit which was mellow because it was breathing its last deep draughts of old English air. Addison and Steele – even Lamb and Dickens – were unable to appreciate it with the same kindly detachment” (p. 296).

38. Spiller, , American in England, pp. 347–48.Google Scholar

39. Fussell, , Abroad, p. 203.Google Scholar

40. Hillard, , Six Months in Italy, p. 5.Google Scholar

41. Quoted in Mulvey, , Landscapes, p. 112.Google Scholar

42. Twain, Mark, The Innocents Abroad (1869; rep rpt. New York: Bantam, 1964), p. 1.Google Scholar

43. It is tempting to detail this list even more. Twain's pages on the Holy Land are continually threatened by the authenticity of the one great text: the Bible. At a kind of other extreme, Twain often gives extracts from his own diaries and journals – in effect quoting himself. The words that are his and the expectations and assumptions of his readers are composing the book, or else the very economic setting in which the words are being produced. I shall have more to say subsequently about the inscription of the economic in American travel writing. Here let me give an example:

Toward nightfall, the next morning, we steamed into the great harbor of this noble city of Marseilles, and saw the dying sunlight guild its clustered spires and ramparts, and flood its leagues of environing verdue with a mellow radiance that touched with added charm the white villas that flecked the landscape far and near. [Copyright secured according to law.]

The problem is, whose law? The energy by which Twain has to keep declaring that the law is his own, while fending off the right to ownership of other texts or other forces, is the very life of the book.

44. Metwalli, , “Americans Abroad,” p. 72, esp. p. 77.Google Scholar

45. MacCannell, , The Tourist, p. 13.Google Scholar

46. In The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982)Google Scholar, Alan Trachtenberg invokes the same totality this way: “By ‘the incorporation of America’ I mean, then, the emergence of a changed, more tightly structured society with new hierarchies of control, and also changed conceptions of that society, of America itself” (pp. 3–4). “More tightly” does not quite address the hyposticised, totalized modern idea MacCannell writes about – and quite properly, in my own view, because I have been so far presenting a view of American travel and travel writing from beneath ideology. Trachtenberg has nothing to say about travel. I will have nothing to say about whose interest the Representative Figure of the American serves because I find it impossible to line up this Figure with a coherent determination of any interest.

47. Ibid. p. 150.

48. Riis, Jacob, How the Other Half Lives (1890; rpt. New York: Dover, 1971), pp. 27, 38.Google Scholar

49. See Fuller, Margaret, At Home and Abroad; or, Things and Thoughts in America and Europe, ed. Fuller, Arthur B. (Boston, 1874).Google Scholar

50. “One of Them,” in Americans in Europe (New York, 1893).Google Scholar

51. Quoted in Spender, Stephen, Love-Hate Relations: English and American Sensibilities (New York: Vintage, 1975), p. 7.Google Scholar

52. “One of Them,” in Americans in Europe, pp. 240–41.Google Scholar

53. James, , The Art of Travel, p. 363.Google Scholar

54. The Education of Henry Adams, ed. Sammuels, Ernest (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), p. 92.Google Scholar

55. Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, From Ponkapog to Pesth (Boston, 1883), pp. 264–67.Google Scholar Of course, it is an open question, so late in the day of the “formula” given above by Thorpe for this sort of gesture, how much Aldrich may have been influenced, in turn, by the fact that aliens from other countries were already beginning to settle in America in unprecedented numbers.

56. Pitman, , European Breezes, pp. 10–11.Google Scholar

57. Quoted in Sanford, Charles, The Quest for Paradise: Europe and the American Moral Imagination (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), pp. 138–39.Google Scholar

58. Quoted in Nash, Roderick, Wilderness and the American Mind (1967; rpt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 73–74.Google Scholar This was of course while nature was both wholly American and wholly sufficient. Nash's last chapter has an especially nice statement of the development to the present, much of it the consequence of the tourism I will be discussing in my next section: “Thinking of wild nature as an actively traded commodity in an international market clarifies appreciation and largely explains the world nature protection movement. The export – import relationship underscores the irony inherent in the fact that the civilizing process which imperils wild nature is precisely that which creates the need for it” (p. 343).

59. Curtis, George, Lotus Eating: A Summer Book (New York, 1854), pp. 9, 91–92.Google Scholar

60. Quoted in Spiller, , American in England, p. 29.Google Scholar

61. Quoted in Dulles, , Americans Abroad, p. 146.Google Scholar

62. Ibid., p. 144.

63. Belasco, , Americans on the Road, esp. chs. 1 and 2.Google Scholar

64. Caesar, Terry, “‘The Other Way Around’: the Question of Travel in American Travel Writing,” Alif 3 (Spring 1982): 23–37.Google Scholar

65. Quoted in Higham, Writing American History, pp. 101–02.Google Scholar

66. Dulles, , Americans AbroadGoogle Scholar, estimates that “in that fateful August 1914” there were “anywhere from 150,000 to 200,000 Americans” abroad (p. 150).Google Scholar Earlier, he gives over 100,000 transatlantic travelers by 1900 (p. 102).

67. Wharton, Edith, Italian Backgrounds (New York: Scribner's, 1908), p. 5.Google Scholar

68. See Dulles, , Americans Abroad, ch. 6.Google Scholar

69. I will have much more to say about this in subsequent pages. I owe this point in particular (and much else in general) to Walter Benn Michaels, who directed the National Endowment for the Humanities Institute on American Realism at the University of California, Berkeley, 1985, without which the production of this paper would not have been possible.

70. Frazar, , Practical Guide, p. 1.Google Scholar

71. Greenblatt, Stephen, “Improvisation and Power,” in Literature and Society: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1978 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 57–58.Google Scholar

72. Allen, Grant, The European Tour (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1908), pp. 5–6, 12.Google Scholar

73. Sayre, Henry M., “Surveying the Vast Profound: The Panoramic Landscape in American Consciousness,” Massachusetts Review 24, No. 4 (Winter 1983): 736.Google Scholar Sayre argues (to summarize too briefly) that visual panoramas-first constructed in London – led to a widespread popularity for, and creation of, heroic, epic vistas concurrently produced by American painting and history during the last half of the 19th Century. As he puts it, “the collective, anonymous, and sovereign gaze permeates American culture throughout the last half of the nineteenth century,” a point of view that Sayre concludingly characterizes as furthermore “imperial.”

74. Mulvey, , Anglo-American Landscapes, p. 24.Google Scholar

75. As always, of course, travel within the United States was figured differently to the extent (which I have not tried to assess) that it had its own separate development from travel abroad. For example, in Theodore Roosevelt's famous speech of 1899, “The Strenuous Life,” he urged his hearers to “boldly face the law of strife … for it is only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness” (quoted in Higham, , Writing American History, p. 78).Google Scholar Although travel abroad was certainly implicated in “national greatness,” travel at home was clearly more suitable to strenuousness, as Belasco's pages on the do-it-yourself, roughing-it appeal of early automobile travel made apparent. Or, to take another example, by 1913 ten different railroad lines advertised in one issue of the Literary Digest (noted in Schmitt, Peter, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America, New York: Oxford University Press, 1969, p. 148).Google Scholar Again, such advertising may have had European travel as its model, but the relationship is not easily disentangled, nor perhaps even very profitably. By 1914, “travel” functioned as a kind of reversible term, feeding disparate energies both outside and inside the country.

76. MacCannell, , The Tourists, p. 3.Google Scholar

77. The career of Frederick Law Olmsted provides virtually a case study in the convergence of each of these two projects. He visited England in 1850, wrote of his travels in Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England, 2 vols. (New York, 1852)Google Scholar, and eventually made use of his experience in order to design many of America's urban parks, beginning with Central Park. In The Incorporation of America, Trachtenberg has some acute pages on Olmsted, pp. 107–12. In effect, what Olmsted's designs accomplished was a transformation of the foreign for domestic purposes that preserved the pastoralizing sign of the foreign.

78. Twain, , Innocents, p. 56.Google Scholar

79. MacCannell, , The Tourist, p. 120.Google Scholar

80. Along with Lears, cited earlier, see Presbrey, Frank, The History and Development of Advertising (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1929)Google Scholar, who at one point quotes Calvin Coolidge on how adverstising, “righfully applied, is the method by which the desire is created for better things” (p. 622).Google Scholar Travel was the name for one of these better things and the source of imagery by which the desire for still better things was produced. This dynamic was inseparable from the beginning of both travel abroad and advertising.

81. Foucault, Michel, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8 (Summer 1982): 782.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

82. Seltzer, Mark in his Henry James & the Art of Power (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984)Google Scholar puts the more abstract point of a “double discourse” especially well: “The double discourse of power thus requires a strategic opposition and difference – an aporetic moment; it requires a power of separation and a separation of powers in order to operate” (p. 183).

83. James, The Art of Travel, p. 281.Google Scholar

84. Ibid., p. 341.

85. Another way to present this is in Seltzer, , Henry James:Google Scholar “Put simply, the novel makes power acceptable in the form of the aesthetic respresentation itself” (p. 149). For further studies of what might be called the disciplinary dialectics of Jamesian representation, see the opposing views of James's practice in Agnew, Jean-Christophe, “The Consuming Vision of Henry James”Google Scholar in Lears, and Fox, , The Culture of ConsumptionGoogle Scholar, and in Culver, Stuart, “Representing the Author: Henry James, Intellectual Property, and the Work of Writing” in Henry James: Fiction as History, ed. Bell, Ian F. A. (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1985).Google Scholar

86. Riis, , How the Other Half Lives, p. 124.Google Scholar

87. Warner, Charles Dudley, Saunderings, in The Complete Writings of Charles Dudley Warner, ed. Lounsbury, Thomas R. (Hartford: American, 1904), vol. 1, p. 11.Google Scholar

88. On the origins of travel writing see Adams, Percy G., Travels and Liars, 1660–1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962).Google Scholar

89. Taylor, Bayard, ed. Cylopedia of Modern Travel (Cincinnati, 1856), p. vii.Google Scholar

90. Wharton, , Italian Backgrounds, p. 85.Google Scholar

91. Frazar, , Practical Guide, p. 1.Google Scholar

92. Allen, , European Tour, p. 6.Google Scholar

93. Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1979), part 3, ch. 3, “Panopticism.”Google Scholar

94. Allen, , European Tour, p. 284.Google Scholar

95. Foucault, , Discipline and Punish, p. 202.Google Scholar

96. James, , The Art of Travel, p. 171.Google Scholar

97. Frazer, , Practical Guide, p. 82.Google Scholar

98. Foucault, , Discipline and Punish, p. 187.Google Scholar Compare the later, more striking, maxim: “Visibility is a trap” (p. 200).Google Scholar

99. Studies on the relationship between photography and tourism are many. I would cite only Sontag, Susan, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977)Google Scholar for its polemical force and ch. 14, “Nature and the Camera,” in Schmitt, , Back to NatureGoogle Scholar, for its brief, densely factual tracing of how the camera pastoralized nature at home for Americans. Eastman Kodak was marketed in the United States as soon as it was invented in 1880. I have been unable to discover when the first travel book was published in the United States that was illustrated with photographs. In Anglo-American Landscapes, Mulvey mentions that illustrations became more numerous in travel books toward the end of the century, and that James was distressed by the illustrations that accompanied a new edition of English Hours, which came out in 1905 (p. xii).

100. Take the matter of guides and guidebooks. Guides were not guidebooks. The difference between then could merit a study in itself, although it would only reveal, I think, that the difference is only one of not easily determinable degree before it shades into a difference of kind; what in fact dictates the contrast between Murray's guides for American travelers abroad, issued before the Civil War, the annual Handbook for Travelers in Europe and the East published by Harper beginning in the 1860s, or Cook, 's ExcursionistGoogle Scholar is ultimately less of textual difference than one of disciplinary formation. There simply was no tourism of the nature and scale before the last decade of the 19th Century as represented by the guidebooks from which I have been quoting. The point I would make is that what I have termed an economy of use was indigenous to American travel and travel writing from its earliest decades (growing out of the periodical travelogues made up into books) and that this economy sustained a practical relay of possible real presence for readers at home who dreamed of traveling. Abroad, furthermore, could not have been so greedily and pervasively appropriated by Americans had they merely felt displaced – although of course one could further argue that such appropriation rather inexorably became one basis upon which they eventually (and modernistically) came to feel displaced anyway. But this is not quite to say the same thing as MacCannell; the modern world cannot have the same structure of a tourist attraction before the tourist attraction is given as a model for the world.

101. MacCannell, , The Tourist, pp. 13, 15.Google Scholar

102. Lears, T. J. Jackson, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981), p. 25.Google Scholar

103. On this last point, see Plesur, , America's Outward Thrust, pp. 67–68.Google Scholar

104. Allen, , European Tour, pp. 9–10.Google Scholar

105. Buxbaum, Edwin, Collector's Guide to the National Geographic Magazine (Wilmington, Del.: n.d.), p. 28.Google Scholar

107. Allen, , European Tour, pp. 14–15, 10.Google Scholar

108. Ibid., p. 167.

109. Ibid., p. 10.

110. The Education of Henry Adams, p. 95.Google Scholar

111. Twain, , Innocents, p. 362.Google Scholar

112. Royce, , “The Mechanical, the Historical, and the Statistical,” p. 730.Google Scholar

113. Ibid.