"Latent Preparedness": Allusions in American Travel Literature on Britain Benjamin Goluboff In 1857, his consular duties in Liverpool at an end, Nathaniel Hawthorne took his family on a tour through the Scottish Highlands. All of the Hawthorne family were devoted readers of Walter Scott, and in her Notes on England and Italy (1869), Sophia Hawthorne described their arrival at Loch Katrine, and her son Julian's delight at finding himself in the land of the Last Minstrel. Mrs. Hawthorne recalled that: Julian ran on before us, and just as we were coming opposite an enormous cliff, we heard him shouting aloft—"And like a sheet of burnished gold/ Loch Katrine lies before me rolled." How little he supposed he should repeat those lines in the very place Fitz-James himself stood, perhaps, when he first heard them read in Leamington.1 Julian, eleven years old at the time, was enacting a central convention of American travel writing on Britain at midcentury: frequent allusion to the literature of the land. Certainly literary allusion is a general feature of all travel writing—witness Boswell's reciting Macbeth on his way to the Hebrides, or Paul Theroux's references to the novels of Hudson and Traven on the Patagonian Express—but given the peculiar qualities of American travel to Britain, allusion in the records of such travel invites special examination. The American experience of travel in Britain was attended by an enchant ment of the familiar. American travelers arrived there prepared to see sights and hear voices already well known to them. It is a familiar irony that people travel 0026-3079/90/3001-065$1.50/0 65 to confirm their expectations of the foreign. But in no other avenue of travel were those expectations so vivid as for the nineteenth-century American en route to Britain. "The Old Home" might thrill Americans but it could rarely surprise, rarely defy their expectations. The narrator of James's "A Passionate Pilgrim" despaired of understanding the source of these expectations: The latent preparedness of the American mind for even the most delectable features of English life is a fact which I never fairly probed to its depths. The roots if it are so deeply buried in the virgin soil of our primary culture, that, without some great upheaval of experience, it would be hard to say exactly when and where and how it begins.2 Actually, this "latent preparedness" was not such a mystery. American travelers to the Continent or the Holy Land might have had a fair idea of what to expect there—as would, say, a literate Spaniard traveling to Britain—but Americans had been preparing themselves for Britain literally since they learned to read. As Richard Harding Davis wrote near the end of the century, "The Englishman takes nothing to America but himself. The American takes to England . .. the accumulated reading of a lifetime."3 Americans, of whatever political stamp, knew what to expect in Britain and how to tailor the reality of the nation to their own preconceptions of it. Through the allusions by which these preconceptions were voiced and confirmed we may assess the different ways in which "latent preparedness" conditioned the American experience of travel in Britain. The principal texts for this assessment will be travel narratives published around midcentury, during what might be called the second phase of American travel to Britain. Up till around 1840 most of the Americans who came to Britain did so for reasons other than pure tourism. Benjamin Silliman, for example, came in 1805 to procure books and laboratory equipment for Yale College; Washington Irving arrived in 1815 on an errand for his family's New York hardware concern. After 1840 (the year in which Samuel Cunard's shipping line was established) American tourism in Britain increased dramatically. Encouraged by the rela tively cheap and rapid steam ship passages, and attracted by the London Exhibition of 1851, Americans annually went to the Old Home in thousands. For the most part, this second wave of Americans came purely to see the sights, many to write about them. It was these tourists who were responsible for the great proliferation of British travel accounts at midcentury, and who participated wholeheartedly in the conventions of literary allusion that characterize those accounts.4 The functions of allusion in these travel accounts were several. Allusions acted, first of all, to counteract the cultural insecurity that American travelers experienced in Britain. After all, what made Britain as encountered so hauntingly familiar to Americans was the prestige, indeed the cultural hegemony, of its literature. Many Americans appear to have felt that travel in Britain constituted 66 a sort of examination in cultural literacy. Behind the literary references in their books there was a nervous desire to display conversancy with the canon of British literature. These allusions also operated in such a way as to emphasize the presence of the alluder on the landscape. (Remember the shape of Julian's reference to Scott: the Lochwlikeasheetof burnished gold, anditdoesliebeforemerolled.") Tallying the familiar landscape against the literature that made it so, American travelers located themselves on British terrain through literary reference. Granted, this rhetorical placement of the speaker is a common activity for literate travelers, but given the "latent preparedness" of the American mind for Britain, it was an activity revealed to perfection in these travel books. Finally, the literary references of American travelers in Britain had the effect of keeping a familiar landscape familiar. American expectations of Britain were often at variance with the realities of the nation at midcentury. Travelers came expecting to see rural cots, wimpling burns and quaint Dickensian characters. And they got what they came for. Americans reinforced through allusion the image of a placid rural England—the England, in short, of Irving' s Sketch Book. Through the allusions they made—allusions which, as we shall see, actually shaped their itineraries in Britain—Americans shielded themselves from the contemporary realities of nineteenth-century Britain. An illustration in Irving's sketch, "Rural Life in England," from the 1880 edition of The Sketch Book. Robert Weisbuch's recendy proposed model for American "cultural time" provides a useful vocabulary for discussing the escape from contemporaneity that American travelers enacted through allusion. Weisbuch defines "cultural time" as "the collective metaphor that expresses an age's view of itself in relation to all 67 of history."5 The cultural time of midcentury America was, Weisbuch suggests, paradoxically plural. Emerson's contemporaries saw themselves simultaneously as belated and early—belated in the general course of Western civilization, early in the development of American history and culture.6 As metaphors for cultural development, both lateness and earliness carry mixed messages. Implicit in the metaphor of lateness are connotations of rich cultural maturity as well as of exhaustion and decadence. Earliness suggests both the crudely inchoate quality of American culture that James complained of in his biography of Hawthorne, and the promise of innocent liberty implicit in the myth of the American Adam.7 Weisbuch argues that the genius of American Rennaissance literature consists in the creative use of the plural times available to the American writer.8 Through what Weisbuch calls American "actualism,"Emerson's contemporaries exploited the simultaneous metaphors of earliness and lateness by "inventing histories out of the self or by making the self tantamount to history."9 Weisbuch's model of cultural time allows us to identify the attitude to history that character ized American travelers to Britain. What is revealed in their books—specifically through the habits of allusion in those books—is a powerful sense of belatedness, of enervating distance from cultural origins. This sense of belatedness runs counter both to the Emersonian program of self reliance and to the Berkeleyan motif of westering empire, but it is nevertheless vividly apparent in midcentury American travel books. British travel was for these Americans a return to origins, a chance to reclaim earliness; above all, it was a flight from the contemporary. The bulk of allusions in American travel books was to British literature of a vintage comfortably remote from contemporary concerns. Invocations of Shakespeare, Milton, Addison, Pope and Scott were much more frequent than were nods to the Victorians. It is also interesting to note that the literary references made by these Americans rarely performed the traditional documentary function of allusion in British or Continental books of travel. The allusions in Hippolyte Taine's Notes on England (1872), for example, acted as corroborating data for a series of observations about contemporary society and culture. Taine wrote of the cartoons in Punch—as he did of the novels of George Eliot and Thomas Hughes—as interpretive tools by which "one can perceive the fact as it actually exists."10 "The fact" for Taine was contemporary social reality in Britain, and his references to current literature were meant to document that fact. American travelers, on the other hand, were hardly concerned at all with documenting contemporary Britain through allusions to contemporary British literature. They sought to evoke the storied Britain of Falstaff and Sir Roger De Coverley—the England of their reading—not the Britain of midcentury that concerned Taine. Many American travelers used allusion simply to identify themselves as readers of the British canon, and thus to compensate for their sense of belatedness as Americans. For example William Wells Brown, fugitive slave and abolition lecturer, filled his American Fugitive inEurope (1855) with a battery of allusions that can only be described as apologetic in intent. Here Brown described himself 68 during his visit to London in 1849, weary after a day of self-improvement at the British Museum: It was eight o' clock before I reached my lodgings. Although fatigued by the day's exertions, I again resumed the reading of Roscoe's "Leo X.", and had nearly finished seventy-three pages, when the clock on St. Martin's church apprised me that it was two. He who escapes from slavery at the age of twenty William Wells Brown, from the frontispiece of his Sketches of Places and People Abroad (1855) 69 years, without any education, as did the writer of this, must read when others are asleep, if he would catch up with the rest of the world. 'To be wise," says Pope, C6is but to know how little can be known."11 More than ten years after Emerson had advised his countrymen to close their ears to the courtly muses of Europe, Brown was apologizing for being a belated American—one who must struggle to catch up with what all the world has read before. Brown's insecurity was obviously compounded by his being a black man. But in his use of allusion to compensate for belatedness, and to reveal himself as a conscientious student of British literature, Brown behaved exactly as many white American travelers did. More than thirty years earlier, the allusions in Washington Irving' s The Sketch Book were arrayed to reveal the Geoffrey Crayon persona as an adherent to standards of literary taste no more current than those of the British Augustan period. The epigraphs to the sketches, drawn from Burton, Cowper, andLyly, and the allusions throughout the work to Addison and Goldsmith were designed to show that Irving was not to be taken as a new-fangled "Cockney" writer. It was no accident that Irving invoked, through this series of allusions, the specific prose models which The Sketch Book's British reviewers used to praise his style.12 If allusion in these books was motivated by the travelers' desire to declare their literacy and to dissemble their condition as cultural arrivistes, frequent gaffes and incongruities arose as a result. Such was the case in Andrew Carnegie's An American Four-in-Hand in Britain, the sentimental account of the Carnegie family's coach trip through rural England in 1881. Early in their excursion the family heard the news of Garfield's assassination. Carnegie, who had been a friend of the President, paused in his narrative to eulogize him: One might almost be willing to die if, as in Garfield's case, there should flash from his grave, at the touch of a mutual sorrow, to both divisions of the great English speaking race, the knowledge that they are brothers . . . "Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it." Garfield's life was not in vain. . . . Let other nations ask themselves where are our Lincolns and Garfields.13 The reference to Macbeth (I. iv. 7.) could notbe more inappropriate. Clearly Carnegie did not bother to look into the context of this quotation, or he would have perceived in Malcolm's speech about the traitorous Thane of Cawdor an unfor tunate connotation to this eulogy of Garfield. Carnegie blundered in seeking to establish his credentials in British literature. When Sydney Smith declared in 1820 that no one in the four corners of the world reads an American book, he was accusing American culture, to use Weisbuch's model, of a crude and unpolished earliness. The Emersonian 70 Andrew Carnegie and his traveling party atop the "Four-in-Hand" (1883). Carnegie is seated on the left in front, holding the whip. program of American literary nationalism was to seize upon that sense of earliness as the basis for fresh and unimpeded creation. But these narratives of British travel show how many Americans in the age of Emerson perceived themselves as culturally belated, and how many of them sought to counteract that sense of belatedness through displays of assimilated reading. All of the allusions discussed so far were made in such a way as to foreground the travelers themselves—in these cases, to advertise the speakers' literacy in British classics. This self-promoting quality also marked the allusions by which travelers ordered their experience of British landscape. A traveler's reading determined the sites he or she visited, and these sites generated references to the literature that had put them on the itinerary. But it was only a secondary function of such allusions to actually describe a particular site. Mainly, American travelers emphasized their own presence in a landscape by reference to the works associated with it, thus rhetorically locating themselves in British territory. When Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect, arrived at Liverpool in 1851, a figure familiar from his reading stood before him: "At the head of the gang-plank stood a policeman, easily recognized and familiar, thanks to Punch, who politely helped us to land. . ."14 Here Olmsted not only expressed pleasure in seeing his reading corroborated by the concrete particulars of Liverpool, he also demonstrated the fact of his new location. Olmsted was able to verify Punch because he was now participating in the reality from which its caricatures were drawn. Describing his first day in London in 1852, Henry Tuckerman, a minor luminary of the Duyckincks' New York literary circle, similarly underscored his 71 presence on British soil. On his way to look at Nelson's column, Tuckerman's attention was taken by "the names on the glistening panels of each omnibus that dashed by the square." He listed these names in a compound allusion to the works and careers of London writers: "Hampstead" made me think of poor Keats and his walks when the daisies bloomed along the lanes of that suburban retreat, and of Cunningham, Sydney Smith, and Hood, who lie in its churchyard; "Kensington" raised the image of good Mrs. Inchbald in her retirement there; "Turnham Green" revived Goldsmith's joke; "Highgate" suggested Coleridge, and "Sydenham" Campbell. . . .15 Clearly, the references served to orient the traveler upon the landscape. But as he took his bearings through allusion, Tuckerman was also putting himself on the map. The passage makes vivid the fact that the traveler had arrived where the books come from. This process of travelers locating themselves through allusion resembles the "sight/marker" relationship described in Dean MacCannell's study of modern tourism. MacCannell explains that a tourist attraction or "sight" becomes such through its association with a "marker," some piece of information about the place either attached to it or carried in the tourist's mind. Recognition occurs in the instant when the sight and marker are brought together.16 Those lines from "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," then, served Julian as a marker for Loch Katrine. His recitation of them at the pertinent place announced the moment of recogni tion. But while MacCannell's scheme reveals allusion as the signal of sight/ marker recognition, it does not account for the way in which these travelers' references acted to foreground the travelers themselves. Why did the allusions made by Olmsted, Tuckerman and so many other American travelers tend as much to emphasize the speaker's location as to announce the simple correspon dence of sight and marker, place and text? The reason for this foregrounding lies, to great degree, in the extent of the Americans ' "latent preparedness" for Britain. The narrator of James's "Four Meetings," described that moment of recognition that so many travelers to Europe recorded through allusion: We're like travellers in the desert—deprived of water and subject to the terrible mirage, the torment of illusion, of the thirst-fever. They hear the plash of fountains, they see green gardens and orchards that are hundreds of miles away. So we with our thirst—except that with us it's more wonderful: we have before us the beautiful old things we've never seen at all, and when we do at last see them—if we're lucky!—we simply 72 recognise them. What experience does is merely to confirm and consecrate our confident dream.17 Americans had seen the beautiful old absent things of Britain—seen them in the British literature with which they were so eager to display their conversancy, and in the writings of previous travelers. So familiar was the British scene for them that American travelers found in Britain only the slightest disparity between their expectations and the encountered reality of the nation. Encountered Britain could be quaint or grand or picturesque, but it almost always corresponded with its advance publicity. With so small a gap, then, between sight and marker, the habit of allusion became more a device for confirming one's arrival than for taking stock of a landscape not really foreign to the American imagination. By foregrounding themselves through allusion, American travelers showed how generously their confident dream had been fulfilled. If this foregrounding derived from the Americans' "latent preparedness" for Britain, it also contributed to the historical sleight of hand that characterized American travel in the Old Home. Through allusion, American travelers located themselves in an early Britain distinctly remote from contemporary landmarks. In this sense, the enterprise recorded in these books was not so much travel as escape—escape to a fictive Old England whose landscape had already been navigated through reading. Such an escape occurs in Margaret Fuller ' s At Home and Abroad ( 1853) as the traveler transferred herself through allusion from a local and contemporary landscape to one imaginary and early. Fuller recounted how while touring the Highlands, she became separated from her guide on the slopes of Ben Lomond and was lost as darkness fell. Eventually she was forced to spend the night alone in a mountain pasture. Fuller's allusive habit of mind turned the pasture into a scene from the indigenous literature, and herself into a leading character: For about two hours I saw the stars, and very cheery and companionable they looked; but when the mist fell, I saw nothing more except such apparitions as visited Ossian upon the hillside when he went out by night and struck the bosky shield and called to him the spirits of the heroes and the white- armed maids with their blue eyes of grief. To me, too, came these visionary shapes; floating slowly and gracefully, their white robes would unfurl from the great body of mist in which they were engaged, and come upon me with a kiss as perva sively cold as that of death.18 Lost on Ben Lomond, Fuller was nevertheless able to place herself imaginatively. She could not find the inn or her guide, but she successfully located herself in the Celtic twilight, thereby confirming her location in the early Britain she knew from books. 73 Through "latent preparedness," literature informed landscape in these pas sages. The citation of a familiar text illuminated an only slightly less familiar place, and the correspondence between the two verified the traveler's presence at the sight. Frequently, the travelers' allusions worked the other way around, demonstrating how an encountered landscape might lend new meaning to a familiar text. Here again, the emphasis was upon neither place nor text—the familiar confirms the familiar—but upon the location of the traveler in "literary" Britain and upon the privileged reading of British texts that that location enabled. Harriet Beecher Stowe described this experience of heightened literacy early in her Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (1854): There are many phrases and expressions with which we have been familiar from childhood, and which, we suppose, in akind of indefinite way, we understand, which, after all, when we come on English ground, start into a new significance. . . .19 The particular expression Stowe had in mind here was the "hedge-row elms" of Milton's "L'Allegro," adozen lines of which she duly quoted. Having arrived in Lancashire, and with an actual specimen of the British hedgerow before her, Stowe looked back to her Milton with new understanding. Even so sober a commentator on the English landscape as Hawthorne took pleasure in showing how his presence in that landscape enhanced his reading. He wrote in his English Notebooks for 1853: An American would never understand the passage in Bunyan about Christian and Hopeful going astray by a by-path into the grounds of Giant Despair—from there being no styles [sic] and footpaths in our country.20 By demonstrating the privileged literacy that British travel granted them, these travelers advertised their progress into a region of which their American audience will have only read. And in confirming their location this way these travelers were, of course, falsifying their moment in history. As Stowe revealed herself in Milton's, and Hawthorne in Bunyan's landscape, both travelers belied their condition as belated Americans. The anachronistic quality of American travel books on Britain accounts in great part for the homogeneity of the content of these books, and for the near- uniformity of American tourist itineraries in Britain. Significantly, those Ameri cans who came to Britain in the 1850s appear to have traveled without guide books. English-language guidebooks on Britain were largely unavailable to American travelers at midcentury, and references to them are correspondingly scarce in American accounts of British travel before the 1870s.21 Without guidebooks to direct their steps, most travelers in the 1850s allowed British 74