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Emerson's English Traits and the Paradox of Empire Emerson’s English Traits and the Paradox of Empire susan l. roberson ALPH WALDO EMERSON begins English Traits (1856) R by recalling his earlier voyage to the island: “I have been twice to England. In 1833, on my return from a short tour of Sicily, Italy, and France, I crossed from Boulogne and landed 1 in London at the Tower stairs.” “I find nothing in my memo- randa of visits to places,” he reports of his first sojourn. “But I have copied the few notes I made of visits to persons” (p. 502), of Wordsworth’s “green goggles,” of Carlyle “full of lively anec- dote,” and of the talk of books he shares with them (pp. 509, 507). These appealing vignettes describe “the meeting between an intelligent young American . and the literary lights of the day,” including as well Horatio Greenough, Walter Savage Lan- 2 dor, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In the second chapter of English Traits, concerning his second visit to England in 1847, Emerson details in fairly conventional terms the hazards of a sea voyage, “one of the severest tests to try a man.” Noting that the English are a “seafaring people, who for hundreds of years claimed the strict sovereignty of the sea,” he remarks succinctly 3 that “the sea is bounded by his majesty’s empire” (p. 517). By 1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits, in Selected Writings of Emerson, ed. Donald McQuade (New York: Modern Library, 1981), p. 501. Hereafter cited in the text. 2 Susan Castillo, “‘The Best of Nations’? Race and Imperial Destinies in Emerson’s English Traits,” Yearbook of English Studies 34 (2004): 103. 3 As Curtis Fukuchi has observed, the strength and dangers of the sea in En- glish Traits are, metaphorically, “the sources of English power” (“ ‘The Only Firma- ment’: ‘Sea-Room’ in Emerson’s English Traits,” American Transcendental Quarterly 1.3 (September 1987): 197. The New England Quarterly,vol.84,no.2 (June 2011). C 2011 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. 265 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00089 by guest on 26 September 2021 266 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY referring not only to his own journey but to England’s mar- itime superiority, Emerson announces that, even though later essays take up a number of diverse subjects, English Traits should be viewed as a travel book, a book about travel and transportation. The structure of English Traits has, as a whole, puzzled read- ers, in part because a number of its essays contemplate matters such as race, character, and manners. In his review for Putnam’s Monthly, Parke Godwin called English Traits “a miscellany of 4 remarks on one topic.” Yet the book does meet certain con- temporary expectations of travel writing. Visiting Stonehenge with Thomas Carlyle, Emerson situates himself as a tourist who takes measure of the monument for readers back home: “Stonehenge is a circular colonnade with a diameter a hundred feet, and enclosing a second and a third colonnade within” (p. 648). Sophia Hawthorne was similarly precise when she gauged the width along the “west front” of an English cathedral at “174 feet” and described the “sacred place” as “great spoil for Henry 5 the Eighth.” Attention to details of landscape, architecture, and history was typical for the period, as was a factual, linear rendition of the journey (“On leaving Wilton House, we took the coach for Salisbury” [p. 653]). As their still relatively young nation struggled to find its place in the world, Americans took vicarious satisfaction from reports that their upper- and middle-class elites were proving ade- quate to European sophistications and expectations. And so in “Personal,” Emerson assures his countrymen that “My journeys were cheered by so much kindness from new friends, that my impression of the island is bright with agreeable memories” (p. 656), just as Harriet Beecher Stowe, who also toured England as an invited speaker, commented in Sunny Memories of For- eign Lands (1854), “A circle of family relatives could not have 6 received us with more warmth and kindness.” Although the 4 Parke Godwin, quoted in Castillo, “The Best of Nations,” p. 100. 5 Sophia Hawthorne, Notes in England and Italy (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1869), p. 37. 6 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, vol. 1 (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Company, 1854), p. 22. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00089 by guest on 26 September 2021 EMERSON AND EMPIRE 267 passage of time has blunted the significance of such remarks for twenty-first-century readers, we need only consider our own society’s penchant for celebrity gossip to understand how they might have been understood in the antebellum United States. Emerson was a famous man, and his contemporaries wanted to know about his comings and goings as well as his opin- ions about what he saw and whom he met. Evidently Emer- son did not disappoint, for English Traits was, in fact, “the most eagerly anticipated and one of the most successful of his 7 publications.” In addition to presenting Emerson as a privileged and yet quintessential American tourist, English Traits exemplifies the ways in which overseas travel writing moves him to ponder his home country and national identity. When Alfred Bendixen re- flects on English Traits as travel writing, he notes that “it is also quite characteristic of the American travel writer who is torn between admiring foreign achievements and defending Amer- 8 ican values.” And as Terry Caesar argues, “Americans write of travel abroad, for better or worse, in order to be responsi- 9 ble to their national identities.” Just so, Emerson celebrates the “great sloven continent” of America, which has “long since driven away the trim hedge-rows and over-cultivated garden of England,” national differences to which he has become “quite too sensible” during his sojourn (p. 655). Thus, at the same time that Emerson is contemplating what makes “England, England” (p. 518), he is also thinking about what makes America, Amer- ica. Emerson’s use of such traditions of nineteenth-century travel writing, then, asks us to consider English Traits as a travel book, albeit an unconventional one. But what also rec- ommends English Traits as an example of travel writing—and recommends it especially to our present age—is its insistent 7 Robert E. Burkholder, “The Contemporary Reception of English Traits,”inEmer- son Centenary Essays, ed. Joel Myerson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), p. 156. 8 Alfred Bendixen, “American Travel Books about Europe before the Civil War,” in The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing, ed. Bendixen and Judith Hamera (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2009), p. 122. 9 Terry Caesar, Forgiving the Boundaries: Home as Abroad in American Travel Writing (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), p. 5. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00089 by guest on 26 September 2021 268 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY concern with transportation and the flow of goods, institutions, and peoples around the globe. Most of the nineteen essays that form English Traits contain some reference to England as a seafaring nation or as the cen- ter of global commerce, if not as a colonial empire. England’s history as an island that was originally colonized by various continental forces and subsequently extended its own energy outward to the rest of the world is, for Emerson, what sets it apart as a nation. In his essay on “Race,” he claims that “The English derive their pedigree from such a range of nationalities that there needs sea-room and land-room to unfold the varieties of talent and character” (p. 527); in “Ability,” he comments on England’s “commercial relations to the world,” by means of which they “have made the island a thorough fare, and London a shop” (p. 549); in “Character,” he comments on the colonizing activities of the English, how “[t]hey subsidize other nations” and administer their codes around the world (p. 573); in “Cock- ayne,” he calls the founding saints of England and America, St. George and Amerigo Vespucci, traveling rogues and thieves; in “Wealth,” he examines London’s role in the global econ- omy; and in “Result,” he critiques England’s foreign policy and alludes to the paradox of empire: that the English have an “in- stinct for liberty and law” as well as an instinct for “conquest” (p. 663). As he repeatedly attempts to understand “why En- gland is England” (p. 518), Emerson returns again and again to England’s position as a seafaring, commercial nation that trans- ports its goods and institutions “into every nook and corner of the earth” (p. 571). Exerting an astounding influence, the em- pire, by Emerson’s estimate, accounts for “perhaps a fifth of the population of the globe” (p. 523). Stressing the point that migration involves more than people alone, twentieth-century critic Arjun Appadurai refers to these various emigrating influ- ences as ethnoscapes, finanscapes, and ideascapes, an approach to critiquing globalization and empire that Emerson anticipates 10 in his 1856 travel book. 10 Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Public Culture 2.2 (Spring 1990): 7. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00089 by guest on 26 September 2021 EMERSON AND EMPIRE 269 In his 2002 economic history, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, Niall Ferguson asks two questions that not only relate to our early-twenty-first-century understanding of global power but that resonate throughout Emerson’s book: “Why should Amer- icans care about the history of the British Empire?” and “Was 11 the British Empire a good or bad thing?” As for its negative aspects, Ferguson faults the British Empire for its “involve- ment in the Atlantic slave trade and slavery itself” (pp.
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