Reflections on a Frontier Landscape
: British Writings on the American West, c. 1870-1914

Student thesis: Doctoral ThesisDoctor of Philosophy

Abstract

This thesis examines British portrayals of the American West and its landscape between the mid-Victorian period and 1914. Focusing on published texts, it considers these portrayals in a diverse range of cultural contexts. These include children’s literature, hunting accounts, travel narratives, and the writings of public intellectuals. The thesis engages with themes such as empire and imperialism, democracy, the idea of the ‘frontier’, and British (or English) national identities.

The dissertation addresses a significant shortcoming in the existing scholarship. Numerous works have dissected the perceptions by Americans of the British in the American West or detailed how British commentary portrayed Americans. Other works have examined the activities of these same British men and women. But there has been a dearth of analysis that focuses on what is revealed about the British themselves by their portrayals of this specific geographic region. With its focus on the (self-)reflective quality of much of British writing on the American West, this thesis reduces that lacuna in the scholarship.

Chapter One examines the children’s literature from British authors that utilised the landscape of the American West. This chapter investigates the broader context for the messaging in a wide selection of children’s literature and ties the imagined world of juvenile books into the larger national and imperial realms, both of which had become areas of increasing interest during this age of growing literacy.

Chapter Two and Chapter Three shift from children to adults, and from travels in the imagination to journeys in the vast lands 100° W. The second chapter tracks British hunters through published hunting accounts and the third chapter draws upon scores of travel narratives. From these narratives, the thesis turns the many strong written sentiments and some of the more subtle textual signs back upon the authors and searches for the connections within histories of modernity, urbanisation, environmentalism, and empire.

Chapter Four takes up again several of the themes discussed in the previous three chapters, but limits the analysis to four public intellectuals. Using the published writings of James Bryce, Lord Curzon, Sir Charles Dilke, and J.A. Froude about the American West, this chapter shows the purchase of the Western frontier landscape on the intellectual development and public discourses of these men, which, this thesis asserts, also give a good indication of changes in the public understandings of the Empire and the evolving meaning of ‘England.’

The subject as cast by this thesis is original; as conceived, it has not previously been undertaken before, or at any rate analysis in this vein has been fleeting at best. This thesis advances ideas about how the American West functioned as a cultural presence (beyond the familiar spectacles of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show) in the lives of many British over a span of five decades. There is little doubt that the Western frontier featured heavily in a not insignificant portion of the published works of British writers; the story of this thesis is how a jarring and unfamiliar landscape sparked many revelations in the social and intellectual lives of the British — and how this scholarly approach offers to historians another line of enquiry into the cultural history of the period.










Date of Award1 Apr 2023
Original languageEnglish
Awarding Institution
  • King's College London
SupervisorPaul Readman (Supervisor) & Daniel Matlin (Supervisor)

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