'A banishment' - Gloria Deak describes the visits of celebrated Victorians to America

No, they decidedly did not like us — this is true at least for the majority of the nineteenth-century British travelers to the New World. They came out of a sense of wonder, somewhat akin to the reaction of Thomas More who declared in his sixteenth-century Utopia that ‘nowadays countries are always being discovered that were never in the old geography books.’ Over the next few centuries, perhaps no emerging country west of the Atlantic would excite as much curiosity as the vast expanse of territory that would become known as the United States.

It soon became manifest that, in expanding her geographical borders, the United States had staked out a new social order. Was it not likely that this developing country, with its brash ideas, would find herself a pariah among the very nations she sought to rival? Would she be able — indeed, how did she dare — impose her new concepts on countries with longer histories? And when would she be mature enough to make significant contributions to global advancements in the sciences and the arts?