The paper that I will be presenting is based on the travel diary of Richard Cobden, who, as a 21-year-old calico manufacturer from Manchester, England, made a tour of the United States by coach, rail, and steamship in 1835. Cobden is better known for his later role as an MP who obtained the repeal of the Corn Laws and gave his name to the “Cobden Club,” which promoted free trade. From an early age, however, he loved the U.S. Before he even set foot on American soil, he wrote a pamphlet, England, Ireland, and America, which celebrated our system of universal education, our ingenuity, and our policies on trade and nonintervention.
I became interested in Cobden’s diary in the context of my research on the cultural influences of early, 1830s, railroads. The project developed in a seminar with Prof. Maurice Lee at Boston University, “Information Revolutions and 19th-century Transatlantic Literature,” but it has also given me the opportunity to engage ideas of Romanticism and modernity that I explored in a seminar with Prof. Charles Capper.
I visualize Cobden’s personal growth in three-dimensions. He physically moves through the American landscape along one axis, through time and space. Simultaneously, he is growing along a second axis as a Romantic and a modern individual. At the same time, he is being pulled into a third dimension by transatlantic influences. I am working with the trope of what Laura Stevens calls the “cracked mirror.” In this manner, both “American and British authors experience the uncanny as they read each other, seeing a culture that resembles but reconfigures their own, and their writing is often a meditation on the distorted reflection they see.”
The central problem that I am now trying to address has to do with whether or not I am trying to do too much in this paper. Perhaps my narrative would be more effective if I followed only one thread: travel, or the tension between the Romantic and the modern, or Transatlanticism. Yet in Cobden’s story these themes appear to be inextricably connected. I remain hopeful that there is a way of telling the story that can articulate these mutual influences in a lucid and elegant fashion.
I look forward to your thoughts on the paper. At the very least, I look forward to leading you in Cobden’s footsteps from the warehouses of Manchester, to New York Harbor in 1835, to the timeless thunder and mists of Niagara Falls. It is an amazing journey.
Kate Viens
Boston University and the Massachusetts Historical Society
Thanks for getting us started, Kate! This is a really rich and compelling topic, and my take is that you should certainly address all three dimensions--even if you can only scratch the surface of each in a conference talk, it seems to me that your ideas about all three (individually but esp. in relationship and combination) are particularly significant and convincing.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to me to think about Cobden's travels in relationship to (for example) de Tocqueville's, from roughly the same moment. AdT of course traveled with the intent of studying and writing about his experiences, perhaps more so than Cobden--but perhaps not, and in any case it'd be interesting to think about the America that each man saw and described.
Ben