Frances Trollope, Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens and Their Perspective on the Mississippi River and the Niagara Falls
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European Joint Master’s Degree – Second Cycle (D.M. 270/2004) in English and American Studies Final Thesis A British Glance over the American Landscape: Frances Trollope, Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens and their perspective on the Mississippi River and the Niagara Falls Supervisor Ch.ma Prof.ssa Emma Sdegno Ch.mo Prof. Christoph Houswitschka University of Bamberg Graduand Eleonora Arduini Matriculation Number 848553 Academic Year 2014 / 2015 Table of Contents Introduction.................................................................................................................................3 1. Leaving England.....................................................................................................................6 1. 1 Point of view.................................................................................................................6 1.1.1 Travel Books as Narratives..................................................................................8 1.1.2 The Narrator..........................................................................................................9 1. 2 Travel writers................................................................................................................15 1.2.1 The Rise of Women Travel Writing.....................................................................15 1. 3 British Travel Writing: its Development in 19th century England ..............................21 1.3.1 Why Leaving England?.......................................................................................23 1.3.2 Imagined Americas..............................................................................................25 1.4 Harriet Martineau..........................................................................................................29 1.4.1 Why Travel to America?......................................................................................31 1.4.2 The Journey: a General Overview.......................................................................34 1.4.3 Her Deafness: an Obstacle to see America..........................................................36 1.4.4 How to Approach America..................................................................................39 1.5 Frances Trollope ...........................................................................................................42 1.5.1 Why Travel to America?......................................................................................42 1.5.2 The Journey: a General Overview ......................................................................45 1.5.3 Manners as a Subject for her Travelogue............................................................47 1.5.4 How to Approach America..................................................................................48 1.6 Charles Dickens.............................................................................................................50 1.6.1 Why Travel to America?......................................................................................52 1.6.2 The Journey: a General Overview.......................................................................53 1.6.3 How to Approach America..................................................................................55 2. The Mississippi River...........................................................................................................57 2.1 The Mississippi River: a General Overview.................................................................58 2.2 New Modes of Travel: the Journey on board the Steamboat .......................................63 2.2.1 The Influence of Steamboat travel on the point of view of Frances Trollope, 1 Charles Dickens and Harriet Martineau on the Mississippi River................................67 2.3 Edmund Burke and the Beautiful..................................................................................75 2.3.1 The Mississippi landscape of Frances Trollope and Charles Dickens ...............79 2.3.2 Harriet Martineau: the Mississippi Landscape and the Sociological Interpretation.................................................................................................................88 3. The Falls of Niagara..............................................................................................................94 3.1 Niagara Falls: a General Overview...............................................................................95 3.2 The Concept of the British Sublime and its Evolution................................................101 3.2.1 Frances Trollope: the terrifying nature of the Falls...........................................110 3.2.2 Charles Dickens, Harriet Martineau: the Falls, the Self and Society................118 Conclusion..............................................................................................................................131 List of Illustrations..................................................................................................................137 Bibliography............................................................................................................................138 2 Introduction This dissertation focuses on travel during the nineteenth century in the United States. Many prominent Victorian writers wrote travel accounts, among these Frances Trollope, Harriet Martineau and Charles Dickens who wrote respectively Domestic Manners of the Americans, Retrospect of Western Travel and American Notes for General Circulation. My focus is on these British authors' points of view when approaching America, on the ways they confronted the "New world" dealing with cultural and personal preconceptions. I have chosen these three authors due to the historical period they share, the first half of the nineteenth century, and their different backgrounds. Frances Trollope was a middle-class English woman who lived with her husband and their children in a huge mansion in the British countryside, Harriet Martineau a sociologist and writer who was very well-known both in England and America for her hugely successful work Illustrations of Political Economy while Charles Dickens was at the apex of his popularity when he left for the United States. Dickens was one of the most famous English novelists known for his focus on social issues and social injustices in Victorian England. My choice to include two female writers is due to the change of role that women were experiencing towards the beginning of the nineteenth century in the public sphere. By assuming that travel writing is a form of narrative, this dissertation argues that each traveller approached America from his/her own point of view and that it affected how they saw this country and how they related their opinions and ideas regarding the New World in their travelogues. I concentrate on point of view in travel and travel writing in the United States of these British authors whose travelogues were all written within the decade 1832- 1842. These dates mark respectively the publication of Frances Trollope's Domestic Manners and Charles Dickens's American Notes. Point of view is the central focus of my argument. More specifically, in the main body of this thesis I explore two major landscape subjects for travel writers in the United States: the Mississippi River and the Niagara Falls. These landscapes are significant in terms of point of view since they seem problematic for the travellers to describe. With this in mind, I argue that several factors have influenced the travellers' perspectives on these two landscapes. Those taken into account in this dissertation are technology, aesthetic theories of beauty in nature and the personal interests of the travellers. Besides, this thesis hinges upon the premise that point of view is both a visual and a 3 narrative concept. Travellers, in fact, had the possibility to see the landscape directly, this enabled them to see through their visual point of view. Later, they usually turned their impressions into written travel books in order to share their experience. The visual point of view was thus transformed into a narrative point of view. These perspectives may coincide, or be separate by time and space. In fact, travellers could see before writing or writing before seeing. However, all the writers examined visited these landscapes before writing about them and sometimes their visual point of view recorded in letters and diaries did not agree with their narrative point of view in their published travelogues. Chapter one introduces British travel writing in the nineteenth century. Also presented in this chapter are the primary authors and texts of this dissertation. The chapter can thus be divided into two parts. The first part aims to discuss the function of point of view in the genre of the travelogue as well as the role of the narrator. It then moves to delineate the main characteristics of British travel writing. In the second part, the chapter focuses on the authors taken into consideration in this dissertation, namely Frances Trollope, Harriet Martineau and Charles Dickens. It outlines the reasons which encouraged them to depart from England to the New World, then it sketches a general overview of their travels and it ends by examining specific methodologies employed in order to study and depict America and the Americans in their travelogues. The second chapter focuses on the Mississippi River and the factors which apparently impacted their points of