Transatlantic Manners: Social Patterns in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Travel Literature

Christopher Mulvey has entered the world of travelers writing about their journeys abroad--Americans in their travels through England, and the English in their forays to the United States--during the eighty years following the War of 1812. The writings of travelers from one country about the other dispel the myth that good manners were a universal value and that variations were to be explained in terms of moral or political corruptions of either nation. The impact of such different yet somehow familiar cultures is highlighted in chapters that explore the contemporary issues of the nineteenth-century American woman, slavery, and the English poor. Mulvey's text draws on the writings, letters, and reports of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Adams, Matthew Arnold, and Fanny Trollope among others.