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HISTORICIZING AMERICAN TRAVEL, AT HOME AND ABROAD
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 March 2011
Extract
In the winter of 1859, the Boston poet Julia Ward Howe sailed for Cuba; and in the winter of 1860, Ticknor and Fields published an account of her travel. A Trip to Cuba appeared only months after the same firm had published Richard Henry Dana's story of his “vacation voyage,” To Cuba and Back. These two narratives responded to a burgeoning American interest in the Caribbean island that promised recuperation to American invalids and adventure for military “filibusters.” Howe's narrative demonstrated a self-conscious familiarity with antebellum travel writing more broadly, however, as she playfully resisted yet ultimately upheld various conventions of a genre that had become a staple of the American literary marketplace. “I do not know why all celebrated people who write books of travel begin by describing their days of seasickness,” she noted, before discussing her own shipboard illness. She followed similar cues as she blended elements of autobiography, the social sketch, nature writing, and political and social commentary. Across 250 “sprightly” pages, readers were offered a familiar melange of humorous portraits, detailed descriptions of “foreign” institutions, and extensive commentary on local customs and social mores.
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References
1 Howe, Julia Ward, A Trip to Cuba (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860), 3Google Scholar. Dana, Richard Henry, To Cuba and Beyond: A Vacation Voyage (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1859), 245Google Scholar. Two separate reviews of A Trip to Cuba described it as “sprightly.” For a list of books of foreign travel, see Smith, Harold F., American Travellers Abroad: A Bibliography of Accounts Published before 1900, 2nd edn (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1999)Google Scholar.
2 Howe, A Trip to Cuba, 12–13. Howe here was characterizing the free blacks she encountered in Nassau, where her ship stopped on the way to Havana. But she made similar comments about black Cubans in later chapters of the volume.
3 For emancipation as a test of British economic predictions see Drescher, Seymour, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; and Holt, Thomas C., The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1928 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)Google Scholar. On the way British emancipation figured specifically into slavery debates in the United States see Rugemer, Edward Bartlett, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, LA, 2009)Google Scholar.
4 Dana, To Cuba and Beyond, 245. Dana's narrative is also interesting for the way it grappled with the epistemological questions that dogged all travelers into slave societies: first, how to balance an account of the laws regarding slavery with a description of actual practice, and second, how to sort one's way through the contrasting anecdotes that bombarded the traveler, of “injustice, cruelty, and licentiousness,” on the one side, and of “justice, kindness, and mutual attachment” on the other; 257.
5 The Dial (April 1860), 263; Godey's Lady's Book and Magazine (May 1860), 469.
6 Domosh, Mona, American Commodities in a Global Age (New York: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar; Hoganson, Kristin L., Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007)Google Scholar. For another study of late nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism, see Hansen, Jonathan M., The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 See, for example, Christopher Endy's effort to include the examination of travel as a relevant aspect of diplomatic history in Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).