An Emigrant and a Gentleman: Imperial Masculinity, British Magazines, and the Colony That Got Away Author(s): Anne

M. Windholz Source: Victorian Studies, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Jul. 1, 1999), pp. 631-658 Published by: Indiana University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3829990 . Accessed: 04/04/2011 17:27
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An Emigrantand a Gentleman: BritishMagazines,and the ImperialMasculinity, ColonyThat Got Away

ANNE M. WINDHOLZ

I As many scholars have recently noted, young men who came of age in England at the end of the nineteenth century did so as the very nature of masculinity was being contested in social, economic, and sexual arenas. The ideals of British masculinity with which many of these youths grew up, traceable to the "muscular Christianity" of Thomas Arnold and Charles Kingsley decades before, were tested and challenged, redefined or reinforced, against backdrops at least superficially disparate: against the cultural boundaries being extended in a continental bohemia by the Aesthetes and Decadents, and against the imperial boundaries being defined and defended across the globe by the soldiers and adventurers of Victoria's Empire, whose manly civilizing mission was celebrated (and occasionally satirized) in the writings of G. A. Henty, H. Rider Haggard, and RudyardKipling. While the Decadent movement challenged entrenched gender norms and sexual prejudices in the realm of high culture, the literature of empire more fully permeated fin-de-siecle popular culture, not least as an antidote to the degeneracy perceived as threatening British manhood and, by extension, nationhood. Imperial masculinity captured the imagination of the public and was promulgated in the rhetoric of politics, literature, and even science. British manhood would bring civilization to the hinterlands of the world; in turn, the hinterlands of the world would save British manhood from civilization. As late as 1907, George Nathaniel Curzon, world traveler,would contend before an Oxford audience that "[o]utside of the English Universities no school of character exists to compare with the Frontier"and, further, that "on the outskirts of Empire [...] is to be found an ennobling and invigorating stimulus for our youth saving them alike from the corroding ease and morbid excitements of western civilization" (56-57).

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The frontier Curzon lauded as a crucible of British manhood significantly extended beyond the colonies to include the western United States. Despite the fact that, for many Victorians at the end of the century, patriotic allegiance to Britain and Empire in some measure constituted manliness, America was at this time attracting a larger number of young British males than any of Britain's colonies. By the 1890s, as many as sixty percent of the British migrants went to America (Musgrove 19), and the United States remained the preferred destination well into the first decade of the twentieth century (Erickson, Leaving10).1 Reaction in Britain to such emigration was ambivalence, even alarm. To be sure, the pull of America was an old fear: Britain's desire to plant emigrants in its own colonies and its perception of the United States as a dangerous lure to British manhood dates back to the earlynineteenth century (see Fender). But at the fin-de-siecle this threat was exacerbated since the United States, along with Germany and Russia, was emerging as an industrial and military threat to Britain's world dominance. More striking yet was the actual composition of these emigrant groups. F. Musgrove observes that "[b]y the last decade of the [nineteenth] century the educated, white-collar, and professional middle classes were over-represented among emigrants. In the 1850's they were 7.9 per cent. of all male emigrants from the United Kingdom, by the 1870's they were 15.2 per cent., but in the 1890's they were 26.5 per cent." (19). While Erickson questions Musgrove's contention that England's elite were pouring out of Britain and into the United States, arguing that many "professional" emigrants were actually gentlemen travelers who had no intention of staying in the US (Leaving 114), the fact remains that fears about the loss of emigrant sons to America were widespread. Used to considering themselves gentlemen, many young men from the middle and upper class found that economic conditions in Britain made it difficult to support the lifestyle associated with gentlemanly status. In the United States, on the other hand, the masculine myth of frontier adventure seemed to coincide with a matchless promise of financial renewal (Athearn 120), and America accordingly proved an efficient siphon of British manhood at a time when activist intellectuals were arguing that the salvation of Victoria's Empire depended on the propagation of Britain's masculine elite at home. Matthew Arnold might believe that Americans were merely "the English on the other side of the Atlantic" (681), but others continued to look at the United

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States as a rebel republic. Theodore Roosevelt's 1888 boast that on the American frontier the sons of Britain (and, indeed, all Europe) become "completely Americanized" could only reinforce British anxieties, notwithstanding his assertion that "on the whole it would be difficult to gather a finer body of men" (6). Fin-de-siecle anxieties over America, British masculinity, and empire are foregrounded in the periodical debate over gentleman emthe Macmillan's, igrants staged in monthlies such as Blackwood's, Cornhill, and the NineteenthCentury, magazines of established repute, some intellectual and literary pretension, and a substantial, largely middle-class readership.2 Concern over gentleman emigrants turned the pages of literary magazines into a keenly contested cultural site, where romantic Western fiction a la Bret Harte and exciting travel narratives by the likes of Curzon clashed with the essays and stories of emigrant writers A. G. Bradley, A. H. Paterson, and others who presented the United States as a proving ground that tests, even threatens, emigrant manhood. These authors warn their readers that, to succeed in America, British gentlemen must not only be prepared to face physical danger, cultural famine, and moral corruption, but they must also be ready to accept menial labor, domestic tasks, and the advice of "inferiors"-ready, in fact, to redefine their conception of masculinity. The fear that emigrant failure in America might signify the degeneration of British masculinity and imperial prowess competes in this discourse with an anxiety that the emigrant who succeeds and validates his manhood might in the process forfeit his status as a gentleman -that central norm of British masculinity-and become what William Morton Fullerton, in the age of the New Woman, the New Fiction, and the New Review,fittingly calls the "New Englishman" (737): an American, a rebel son, a masculine power allied to the colony that got away. The resolution of these fears depended on a discursive strategy that incorporated the United States into Britain's imperial fold. This rhetoric manifests itself in severalwaysin the magazines: by representing the United States, and particularlythe American West, as an exotic, uncivilized, colonial hinterland; by explicitly linking it with Britain's other "white"colonies (New Zealand, Australia, and Canada); by assuming racial and cultural kinship, most notably in references to Americans as "cousins"and Britain as the "mother"country; and by insisting on its essential Anglo-Saxonism in spite of the evident diversity of its immigrant population. Such rhetoric annexes American successes as signs of the

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Anglo-Saxon initiative that made Britain into an empire. Where this rhetoric came to prevail, Anglo-Saxon manhood stood united against not only Native American, African, and Asian, but also Spaniard, Boer, and Hun on the frontiers of twentieth-century imperialism. II During the greater part of the nineteenth century the evolving identity of the English gentleman both challenged and defined British social ideals. Coming out of what James Eli Adams calls an "[e]galitarian [...] resistance to aristocratic hegemony," it created a new "norm, that could be realised by deliberate moral striving" (152); as Robin Gilmour explains, the gentlemanly ideal "provided a time-honoured and not too exacting route to social prestige for new social groups [... .] a station which aspiring members of the middle classes could hope to penetrate and, to some extent, make over in their own image" (5). Conservative fears about advancing democracy found voice in attendant anxieties over the increasing numbers of would-be gentlemen, dandies, and, later, "gents,"who appropriated (often in exaggerated forms) the trappings of the gentleman without either attaining or exhibiting the moral stature and sensibility which constituted the ideal. If, as Gilmour suggests, by the 1850s the ideal of the gentleman became institutionalized in British society (13), by the 1870s the status and title of gentleman could be purchased for the price of a public school education regardless of"the father's origin or occupation" (8). Thus, by 1888, Bradley offers a broad, inclusive definition of the gentleman: "the son of a peer, or a parson, of a soldier, a merchant, or a lawyer" ("Gentlemen" 30). The expanded body of men who not only aspired to but also claimed the title of gentleman by the end of the century indicates the pervasive success of this particular gender ideology and the extent to which British maleness became identified with it. Yetjust as the title of "gentleman" became increasingly accessible to aspirants, economic depression made the prosperity that it seemed to promise difficult to realize. Gentlemanly status might theoretically be defined by a moral sensibility that democratized the ideal, but it ultimately remained dependent on financial standing. Further, its very accessibility threatened to cheapen its value, to make the gentleman superfluous. If, by the time the New Imperialism began to infuse national discourse in the 1870s, the gentleman became "arallying-point for older values threatened by

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the establishment of modern industrial society" (Gilmour 13), it was largely a reflection of his increasing social and economic insecurity. This insecurity was pervasive enough that emigration began to be seen as a solution to what might be termed "redundant gentlemen," much as it had earlier been seen as a solution to redundant women, troublesome Irishmen, and the urban poor. Emigration schemes for the latter groups proliferated at the end of the century, perhaps most notably inJ. R. Seeley's 1883 TheExEngland and the pansion of England and William Booth's 1890 In Darkest WayOut (Wagner 162-64). Magazines were a particularly popular forum for promoting this remedy, and the United States plays a significant "colonial" role in proposals for dealing with the traditionally marginalized. In 1882, philanthropistJ. H. Tuke argued in the ContemporaryReviewthat the British government should give aid to Irish emigrants so they could seek better homes on the "fertile prairies of the New World" (Minnesota and Iowa receive special mention) and thereby rid the Union of a poor, unhappy, and socially contentious population (708-09). That same year, suffragette Adelaide Ross urged Macmillan's readers to support female emigration to the "colonies" (including Tennessee, Virginia, Iowa, and "the Western States") as a remedy for the social evils attendant upon having "amillion morewomenthan men"in the kingdom (313-14). That by the 1880s the British gentleman should have joined the Celt, pauper, and odd woman in their hopes for a better life in the New World confirms the extent to which the traditionally privileged man of gentle breeding and education felt under siege in late-Victorian Britain. While unemployment rates did not rise between 1873 and 1896, neither did the status of gentleman any longer ensure employment, particularly for Britain's younger sons. For some kinds of work, it could be a positive liability: Cornhillessayist and fiction writer Charles Edwardes writes in one short story that young British gentlemen are "'handicapped [...] by their gentility [.. .] a most unmarketable quality"' ("Florida Girl" 165). Unemployment, as Michael Roper and John Tosh point out, threatened "not only [men's] income but their masculinity" (18). Emigration to the United States, "thatwonderful and virile democracy" (Curzon 55), was increasingly a solution for the gentleman facing economic emasculation and hence social impotence at home. If economic conditions in the mother country did not allow him to fulfill his masculine identity, then, as George Jacob Holyoake argues in "Emi-

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grant Education" (1898), the gentleman must leave the country to whom he "owes [..] honour and service" and go where conditions are more favorable (435).3 To be sure, the marginalization of the gentleman implied by the magazine discourse on emigration is undoubtedly exaggerated, given the advantages men of the middle and upper classes continued to enjoy compared to women and the otherwise disenfranchised. Still, it was an ironic position for the most potent icon of Victorian hegemony, one that exposes fin-de-siecle fears about British masculinity and the allied state of the Empire. As Graham Dawson demonstrates, a "dominant conception of masculine identity-the true 'Englishman'-was both required and underpinned by the dominant version of British national identity in such a way that each reinforced the other" (2). Emigres' preference for the US can in part be explained by the post-CivilWar economic boom, which added a financial component to the already attractive mythology about life on the American frontier. The West offered the Briton an unparalleled opportunity for winning the wealth due his status as a gentleman while at the same time promising romance, adventure, and (not least) unadulterated masculine society. It was a myth appealing to young men raised for the most part in public schools, where, having been "torn at a tender age from mother and home," they lived in a distinctly homosocial, sometimes brutal, world which was in itself a testing ground for their developing manliness (Gilmore 17); where along with Latin and Greek they learned to embrace an imperial conception of masculinity based on "neo-Spartan virility as exemplified by stoicism, hardiness and endurance" (Mangan 1); and where they often amused themselves by reading works such as Captain Mayne Reid's exciting wild west novels for boys. Reid's various books--The Scalp Hunters: or; Romantic Adventuresin NorthernMexico in (1851), TheBoyHunters:or Adventures Searchof a WhiteBuffalo (1853), TheQuadroon; A Lover's Adventures Louisiana (1856), and TheHeadin or, less Horseman:A StrangeTale of Texas (1866) -used an American backdrop to valorize "[y]outh and age, guileless, noble, self-reliant, killing to survive and to spread civilisation, illustrating at every turn the mastery that was wrought of technical advance, environmental knowledge and moral worth" (MacKenzie 190-91) -illustrating, indeed, imperial masculinity. When it came to attracting adult readers, British magazine editors were no less eager than American land speculators to exploit this myth about life in America. Travel narratives, short stories, and his-

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torical essays all contributed to a discourse that entertained, and sometimes reassured, Britons by its tendency to represent the United States as a primitive, colonial hinterland where the gentleman could take his pleasure, spread a bit of British enlightenment (and not a little British condescension), bolster his pocketbook, and in the process reassert his manhood.4 The fiction of Harte and his many imitators-among them, G. L. Stevens, EdwardJames Cattell, and T. H. Stevens-contributed to romantic, idealized visions of western life in the magazines, and although women play a significant role in a few of these works, the perspective tends to be emphatically, if not exclusively, masculine. As Tosh observes about imperial fiction by Kipling and Henty, British fiction set on the North American frontier "beckoned young men in reaction against domesticity,"offering "an imaginative space where male comradeship and male hierarchies found their full scope, free from feminine ties" (6768). Canadian G. W. Heaton, in the 1887 Macmillan'sstory, "AnAdventure in Cariboo," offers what is perhaps the most explicit example of this appeal: "'There was, as a matter of course in these womanless lands, an efficient and beautiful manliness in the atmosphere"' (185). Such manliness was undoubtedly appealing to young Anglo-Saxon males beset back in Britain by the New Woman, who was challenging their sexual prerogative, their monopoly on professional careers, and even those bastions of gentlemanly privilege, Oxford and Cambridge. These fictions ignore the fact that during the 1880s and 90s women in the United States were winning promising political rights (including, in Wyoming, suffrage), and although nonfiction by women travel writers like Constance F. Gordon Cumming, Alma Strettell, Edith A. Bailey, Edith M. [Nicholl] Bowyer, and Henrietta Grey Egerton testify to the vital presence of British women on the American frontier, female characters and authors representing the West in these magazines are relatively few and marginalized. Certainly a preponderance of the fiction suggests that confrontations between men are less complicated and more easily resolved than encounters with women: one merely has to shoot one's antagonist, an unequivocal way of affirming masculinity in response to fin-de-siecle "anxiety about waning virility" (Showalter 10). As late as 1900, a woman writer felt compelled to set the record straight for Cornhillreaders, asserting that in the southwestern states "[we] neither [.. .] go about with revolvers perennially in our hip pockets [n]or shoot our man once a week or so" (Bowyer 253). Not surprisingly, much western

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fiction of the fin-de-siecle is set twenty, thirty, or even forty years earlier: a time when the United States was not a serious challenge to Britain's industrial, political, or military sovereignty in the world and when women were not a serious threat to the prerogative of the British gentleman either on the colonial frontier or at home. Constrained by their actual experience of America, magazine travel writers do not offer unequivocally primitivist representations of the United States. Literary monthlies were as likely to publish contemporary travel narratives celebrating electric lights in Chicago or the cultural amenities of US coastal cities as they were to include elegiac narratives about Britons trekking through the wilds of western America. And even trekking through the West was not what it had been where civilization was being spread by the railroad. Such acknowledgements notwithstanding, Laurence Oliphant's "WesternWanderings: The Newest American Railroad" (1882) and G. F. Byron's "The Overland Emigrant" (1892) do, nonetheless, hearken back to more stereotyped views of the West in their emphasis on violence (potential or actual), physical discomfort, and a collection of exotic characters that would do justice to a dime western. On a single trip from San Francisco to New Orleans, Byron records meeting a drunken dwarf peddler, a gambler, a one-eyed cattleman, a lunatic Chinaman, an American tramp, a French nobleman, and a collection of vicious Mexicans and Apaches. Frontier adventure at the fin-de-siecle might not be what it had been in the 1840s or 50s, but, for these English gentlemen, it was adventure nonetheless. Perhaps the most potent lure America offered young Britons was the literature about hunting in the West, where the bagging of an elk, a buffalo, or a bear served as a badge of manliness (Woods 39). The Earl of Dunraven acknowledged that he himself was drawn to western America by the romances of Mayne Reid ('"Wapiti" 597), but that his life there-and not least his life as a hunter-was "asa dream of schoolboy days [.. .] at length fulfilled" ("Colorado"454). He celebrates both the "veryexact science" of hunting and the manliness of the hunters, particularly his American guides Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack, "fine specimens" of Anglo-Saxon masculinity with "honest hearts and stalwart frames and handsome features" ("Wapiti"596). As such colonial hunting narrativesshow, the Britishgentleman's love of the hunt, his "sporting instinct," defined his masculinity as much as anything else. Wyoming emigrant rancher Moreton Frewen, who later returned to England and served in Parliament, insisted that this love went "a great deal beyond

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killing"to embrace the "love of new and wild experiences, the artist soul, [and] the love of untutored nature" (qtd. in Woods 39). Such romanticism frustrated magazine writers who sought to warn prospective emigrants about harsher realities; Bradley, otherwise a proponent of emigration, repeatedly attacks the romantic "manias" motivating young men-and sometimes old-to leave the motherland ("Gentlemen" 31, 40).5 Blackwood'swriterJohnG. A. Hope contends in his 1884 article "A Glimpse of the West" that British parents and offspring are deluded by "prettyfiction[s]" of "good shooting, beautiful climate, and rolling prairies" (762), while in 1889J. W.Jeudwine points out "almost the only readable books on colonial life and farming in the United States are written by moneyed men travelling for amusement, in search of game, pleasure, or the picturesque" (404).6 But even while writers cautioned against a romanticized view of the certain Blackwood's the magazine itself published many narratives supporting just this West, view (see Haggard; Shand; Wood-Seys). In 1887, a peak year for English emigration to the United States (Erickson, Leaving100),J. P. Maud's "A Fall Hunt in the Rockies" was published, promoting camp life in the Rocky Mountain West, and guaranteeing "a 'way up' good time" in this "sportsman'sparadise" (272,264). The dour advice of writers like Hope or Jeudwine, who admitted he was a "disappointed" emigrant (404), could hardly hope to compete.7 Even travel narratives which suggested that Britons were often ill-prepared for the hardships awaiting them tended to celebrate the masculine sporting instinct. In "Lost in the Rockies" (1892), W. H. Grenfell relates his misadventures when, shod only in a pair of gentlemanly "lawn-tennisshoes" (844), he loses his way hunting for breakfast. His ability to survive increasingly uncertain as the days pass, Grenfell laments, "Whydid I go out alone to die here like a rat in a trap when I feel so strong and well? Why did I come out at all to die three thousand miles away from home with impotent rage at my heart?" (846). While Grenfell is ultimately rescued and lives to prove his manhood another day, he records that "withina week of my return to camp we were hunting for my companion as he had been hunting for me [...] searching for that which [...] when we did find it, was all that remained of one of the truest and bravest Englishmen who have ever been taken by the love of adventure to the far-off Rocky Mountains" (849). The pathos of this conclusion is less a warning against a quixotic love of adventure than a canonization of this "truest and bravest [of] Englishmen." Death on

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such terms becomes heroic, and narratives built on such premises, no matter how grim their content, could not be counted on to deter Britons' younger sons from seeking their fortune in America. Laura Chrisman describes how the "colonial settler ideology of self-rejuvenation"contributed to imperial ideology, producing the paradoxical belief that colonial life allowed colonizers both to arrest their decline and to save "the native population from its own degeneration" (48). The ironies of this ideology emerged starklyin the United States. First, the American natives most Britons believed they were rescuing were not the indigenous peoples but the white population, themselves colonizers, who even in the 1880s and 90s were still sometimes presented in British magazines as cultural savages. Second, the frontier conditions that contributed to this cultural savagery were the very ones that were expected to rejuvenate British masculinity. While the decadent culture inevitably adhering to the gentleman emigrant provided a tonic of civilization for the sorely deprived (and hence degenerate) American, the relative lack of culture in US colonial life cured the British male from an enervating overdose of it at home. Even thejadedJeudwine acknowledges that "ifhe has pluck and sense, and a love for an outdoor life, [the young emigrant] may enjoy life to the full, and learn the lesson he would very likely never have learnt at home-to be a man" (420). The frontier teaches masculine "[s]elf reliance -the true foundation of national greatness" (420). Baumann concurs, assuring Cornhill readers that the "cow-boy'slife, with its hardships, isolation, and dangers, develops all the sterner manly qualities in a high degree" (301). Of course realizing this masculine ideal in the United Statesthe colony, after all, that got away-was more problematic for a Briton than realizing it in one of Britain's holdings. On the one hand, failure in the United States brought British masculinity and British power into question. Anxiety over such failure emerges in warnings against ignorance and pleas for an appropriate education. Holyoake warns that "emigrants from Albion have mostly a perilous unfitness, which should be remedied in their interest, and for the credit of the country from which they proceed" (427), while Godsall dismisses public school education as "totallyvalueless" (973). Similarly,Arthur Montefiore tells British parents, "Youhave doubtless spent hundreds of pounds on giving [your sons] what is called, with good reason, the education of a gentleman," but "[t]hat nurture which is not controlled by sense is often more cruel than neglect. There is many a lad struggling on in squalor in the colonies who,

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if he had but been taught some simple lessons in common things would be living in comfort and wholesomeness" ("Our Boys"38). Montefiore ridicules the gentleman emigrant who would depend upon a fancy letter of introduction for success in the United States rather than upon a plain knowledge of "common things"; throughout "Our Boys in Florida"his mantra is "before emigration, education" (216). His proposed curriculum for aspiring emigrantswhich includes first aid, "cookery,"and basic sewing-indicates the extent to which the gentleman emigrant had to be prepared to sacrifice notjust the distinction of class but also the prerogatives of gender in order to better his chances for success. Any emigrant who left Britain hoping to flee domesticity and female incursions into traditionally male educational and professional provinces had, ironically, to assume domestic duties usually reserved for servants and women. He must be willing both to perform menialjobs and to take advice from social inferiors (and magazine articles often relegate the majority of Americans to this category) who would show no deference to the gently born and bred Briton. In "An American Broncho," Paterson, who presumes to judge the character of a wild horse after only having "been out West four weeks" (299), not only earns contempt from a ranch hand who dismisses all Brits as fools, but is also forced to face his shortcomings as a cowboy when compared to a desperado horsebreaker who, far from a gentleman, is "the hero and god of lawless men" (300). Montefiore, at least, considered the sacrifice of gentlemanly privilege minimal, contending that rather than the pinnacle of civilized manhood the British gentleman was in fact "often the foulest-mouthed and wildest drinker of all the loafers in the saloons" ("Education"214). Acknowledging this tendency ("Gentlemen" 37), Bradley nonetheless insists that as "a production peculiar to Great Britain" the gentleman emigrant must be a source of pride since, as a group, "the gently nurtured of this nation cheerfully undertake and show a fair measure of success in a career which would appal [sic] the equivalent class in any other country in the world" ("Farm" 193). British gentlemen distinguish themselves, that is to say, by their willingness to shake off gentlemanly privilege and take up "yeoman's service in the cause of civilization" (197). Montefiore's emphasis on "common things" and Bradley'sstress on "yeomen's service" prefigure Kipling's description of the realities of imperial manhood-and nationhood-in his 1899 poem "The White

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Man's Burden,"written on the occasion of the United States' takeover of the Phillipine Islands. 'Take up the White Man's burden-," Kipling writes, "No tawdry rule of kings, / But toil of serf and sweeper- / The tale of common things" (261). As Kipling knew, sacrificing the privileges of class and gender that came with being a gentleman in order to do the work of colonization was not, in practice, a romantic proposition. After all, as Robert Benson writes in his otherwise enthusiastic 1881 Macmillan's report on the English colony founded in Iowa by Cambridge alumnus W. B. Close, "not every one [... .] can endure with equanimity the complete absence of good servants unless imported from England, or not to have his boots blacked [...] or to get nothing but tea and coffee to drink, and that none of the best, and only salt pork badly cooked to eat" (67). Further, for some essayists,gentility often seemed to be built on nothing more substantial than external trappings. In "Sheep Hunting in the Mountains" (1881), the Earl of Dunraven, recounting how he and his gentlemen friends were mistaken for a "disreputablegang" (691), wryly notes:
After all, it is the clothes that makes the man. [..] If you want to destroy an aristocracy,cut off their collars, not their heads. [...] [T]here are some individuals among all those classes that lead rough, wild, out-of-door lives, such as hunters, trappers, miners, cattle men, lumber men, &c., who look more refined and neater than their fellows, and these men, being to the manner born, will look a great deal more like gentlemen than any gentleman who has taken to the wild life for a while. A few weeks in the wilderness will transform the most high-bred looking man, and give him the appearance of an atrocious villain of the deepest dye. (691-92)

Dunraven's commentary suggests a literal refashioning of British masculinity even as it challenges Victorian assumptions that the true gentleman might be distinguished by "innate physiological sensibility" (Adams 152). Paterson, in "Camp Life on the Prairies" (1884), describes a "forlorn" shepherd, facing the threat of mountain lions and warring Indians, who "[t]wo years before, when at home in England, [. . .] was accustomed to call himself a 'gentleman"' but is now become "only a sunburnt face very much begrimed with dust and perspiration, and a lean bent figure, clad in a faded blue flannel shirt, coarse brown canvas trousers-so stained and discoloured by grease and dirt as to be almost black-clumsy, ill-fitting shoes [...] and an old felt hat" (171). The potential damage to an emigrant's social status, symbolized by the loss of gentlemanly luxuries, is decried by more than one es-

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sayist, particularly in the defensively nationalistic Blackwood's. George Forbes, for instance, urges that "[a]n Englishman in America should always try to retain his Englishness-otherwise in a year or two he will be reduced to the level of an average American" (441), whom he dismisses summarily as "aptto be a most awful 'bounder'" (435). Maintaining his distinction as both an Englishman and a gentleman could be difficult, however, since America presented a threat not only to the emigrant's social status, but also to his faith in the supremacy of British civilization. Arnold, in "AWord about America" (1882), contended:
Acting by itself, and untrammeled, our English class of gentlemen has eminent merits; our rule in India, of which we may well be proud, is in great measure its work. But in the presence of a great force of Philistinism [like that presented by the United States], our class of gentlemen, as we know, has not much faith and ardour, is somewhat bounded and ineffective, is not much of a civilised force for the nation at large [...]. (694)

Arnold in fact warns that the English gentleman, that class of man he sees as "unique"to Britain (694), frequently becomes impotent in the face of American society, unable to deliver the seeds of civilization. "uncivilized" There is, after all, no guarantee that by sacrificing gentility and living the life of a yeoman, a gentleman emigrant will be able to serve civilization at all. And if he cannot do that, he becomes, for Britons, as ideologically superfluous in the United States as he was economically redundant in Britain, merely another bounder doing time in America. Fears for the gentleman emigrant-his health, his manliness, his morality, and his dedication to mother country-are represented with no less urgency in the fiction of literary monthlies. Edwardes's Lord Duncombe, in the Cornhillshort story "A Florida Girl" (1893), worries about his son facing "[f]evers, brawls, the unaccustomed climate, [and] snakes," and perhaps rightly so (167). The young aristocrat's American patron observes, "There's a graveyard in Portlock, by the Gulf, with only fifteen heaps in it, and twelve of them's over British bones. It don't suit their constitution I reckon" (164). The protagonist of Edwardes's short story survives America, but the hard work, harsh climate, and inevitable setbacks crush characters with weaker constitutions. Beatrice Harraden chronicles the brutal challenge to British manhood in her serial "Hilda Stafford: A Californian Story" (1896) where she explodes romanticized notions of the western experience. Robert Stafford emigrates to California when his health fails in Eng-

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land: he works hard to succeed, but dies defeated by floods, demanding labor, and his wife's discontent. Fellow emigrant Ben writes a bitter eulogy back to his friend's father: "I thought it sheer madness for a frail young fellow like that to come out to a life of physical toil. Ranching is not child's play [...] I wish this could be better understood in the old country" (662). Ben's allusion to a misguided child echoes terms used to describe Stafford's earlier homesickness, in which "his heart and whole being were leaping towards the blessed land which had nurtured him: even as tiny children cry out for their mother" (497-98). The support and approval of a mother is in fact what Stafford seeks from his wife. But Hilda, who epitomizes British life and culture, denies him this. Instead she proves the point that Godsall makes in his essay on gentleman emigrants: that a wife, particularly one suitable for a gentleman, compels the emigrant to "[realize] the incongruity of his position" (969). Harraden's heroine goes even further, suggesting that by emigrating, Stafford has compromised his manhood as well as his status as a gentleman. Hilda's last words to her husband are a direct challenge: "[]f I werea man,"she cries out, "Iwould rather starve at home in my old career than cut myself off from the throb and pulsation of a fuller life" (658, emphasis added).8 When confronted with the handsome and unequivocally masculine Ben, however, who exhibits all the "stern manly qualities" of imperial masculinity while also, significantly, adopting the domestic "common" duties that allow him to make Stafford's bleak house into a home,9 Hilda develops a passion strong enough to make her consider staying in California. Her passion reaffirms British masculinity after Stafford's defeat and death bring it into question, but the story further supports the idea that there is no place for a cultured Englishwoman in the homosocial frontier environment. As Ben says, "[I]t's a land and a life for men" (503). Ben feels compelled to repulse Hilda's advances out of loyalty to Stafford and the masculine bond uniting all the gentleman emigrants. Though called upon to reject the advances of a modern Englishwoman rather than a "savage"colonial subject, Ben's denial of his own passion reenacts the ideal of manly renunciation which Kingsley had promoted at mid-century and which played an important role in the British ideology of empire (Adams, ch. 3). By sacrificing Hilda, Ben retains both his integrity as a gentleman and his potency as a representative of British manhood, yet paradoxically loosens his link with the motherland. Seen within the context of the nationalist gender par-

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adigm identified by Anne McClintock-where women represent "nationalism's conservative principle of continuity" and men "represent the progressive agent of national modernity [.. .] embodying nationalism's progressive, or revolutionary principle of discontinuity" (359) any other relationship between Hilda and Ben wouldjeopardize British imperial enterprise on the American frontier. The widow must return to London, leaving behind young Englishmen who, forever loyal to Britannia but (they seem to believe) forever in exile, request that she kiss the ground for them and send them "an illustrated paper sometimes" (Harraden, "Hilda"667). If in "Hilda Stafford"British masculinity proves resistant to the attractions of English womanhood and the life in the motherland she represents, it elsewhere proves significantly less impervious to the threat that femininity in general, and American femininity in particular, posed to the homosocial frontier ideal. The American girl's popularity in the pages of literary magazines suggests that British gentlemen found her as seductive as the myth of the American West-and that those back in Britain found her just as frustrating and dangerous. Although in actuality many British emigrants were wary about taking an American wife (Erickson, Invisible72), problematic romances between young Britons and American girls are common in periodical fiction. Strong-willed, strong-minded, and sexually alluring, the stereotypic American girl threatens to dominate the love-struck gentleman; often poorly or inappropriately educated, however, she also demeans his social standing and jeopardizes his future. In W. E. Norris's "Mrs.Van Steen" (1880), an English colonel meets and falls in love with an American, but worries that his beloved's brother will "wear a dirty flannel shirt, carry a bowie-knife in his waistband, and squirt tobacco-juice out Amerof the corner of his mouth" (694) -in other words, be a "typical" ican male and hence an unsuitable acquaintance, let alone relation, for a gentleman. Emigrant Charles Duncombe is able to save his ancestral mansion by marrying pretty heiress Mercy Tunks in "A Florida Girl," but the fact remains that his Florida "orange blossom" intimidates him with a gun, spends her days smoking and reading cheap romances, talks "like a British kitchenmaid" and, as the narrator decorously concludes, has "manners inconvenient for polite life" (Edwardes 162). Mercy Tunks is, in fact, an exaggerated representation of the social degeneracy often associated with marriage to an American woman. HenryJames explores this threat in TheSiegeof London,an 1883

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Cornhillserial in which an American widow with a disreputable western past seeks to marry a young English baronet. Like the western states from which she comes, Mrs. Headway is presented as attractive, exotic, crude, and dangerously capable of seducing a young Englishman away from his mama-and his mother country. That she is able to become Lady Demesne in the midst of all the protections London society can offer underscores the vulnerability of unprotected British youths across the Atlantic where, according to C. de Thierry in "American Women, from a Colonial Point of View" (1896), American women are spoiled by an extravagant esteem too "Oriental [. . .] to be altogether pleasing," (517), a "half-oriental attitude [...] which is one of the most disquieting features in American social life" (526). The racial undertones of de Thierry's rhetoric highlight a colonialist attitude toward the United States which is underscored by her contention that although British emigrants initially flourish in the United States, they are doomed to degenerate after the first generation because of the climate and, by implication, the deficiencies of American women as mothers (525).1? This perspective not only attacks the American girl's influence by suggesting that the natives regard their women with exaggerated, undeserved, even uncivilized respect; it also diminishes her femininity by implying that, like any other colonial subject, she would be a less than fit mother for a Briton's children. In magazine fiction, the dubious respectability of a Mrs. Headway or a Mercy Tunks presents the American wife as a social liability, but in nonfiction works like de Thierry's, American women embody far more insidious and deep-rooted threats to British manhood: fears of emasculation, degeneration, and loss to the motherland. Exaggerated, even absurd as such fears seem, they nonetheless illuminate imperial insecurities. Even in the relatively lighthearted Blackwood's travel essay "YankeeHomes and Buffalo Haunts," Andrew documents conversations with English emigrants who confess Haggard that "[t]hey have married out here an American wife, and can never go back," and, further, that they "wish they had gone to Australia" (17677). Haggard accordingly takes pains to emphasize the superiority of Canadian girls to those of the United States, stressing that while he meets "manyreal beauties" in San Francisco (175), it is the "veryhandsome and friendly" women of Vancouver Island, "gem of the British crown," containing "the most thoroughly English of all our American colonists," whom he looks forward to visiting again (191). The implica-

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tion? Emigrate within Victoria's domain, marry from among her daughters, and secure for the Empire what an early-twentieth-century doctor would call "mothers of a stronger and more virile race, able to keep Britain in its present proud position among the nations of the world" (qtd. in Davin 20). In accord with suspicions of the American girl, some writerspresented the United States not as an arena for masculine renewal, but as a site of miscegenation and degeneration. The climatic danger referred to in de Thierry's work figures in numerous articles hinting at a threat of racial degeneration to Anglo-Americans not unlike that believed to endanger Anglo-Indians in Asia, traceable to climate, social conditions, and/or intermarriage with "lesserbreeds."It took only a short visit to convince the author of "SomeAmerican Notes" (1885) that the United States "hasan omnivorous appetite for fresh colonists, and a digestion which absorbs and assimilates them all. It takes an Irishman or a German landed in the States perhaps a shorter time, an Englishman or Scotchman perhaps a longer time, to become an American; but they are all transformed at last" (43). Not only is the gentleman emigrant lost to the motherland in such a process, but the transformation is clearly a degeneration: "Physically there is deterioration. The climate withers all. [ . .] There is no greater mistake than to imagine that the typicalAmerican is an energetic being, vivid and versatile in mind, restlesslyeager in the active realisation of his ideas; for in truth he is the slowest, most lethargic of men" (43-44). This is a far cry from the masculinity celebrated by Roosevelt and Curzon. Similar fears were propagated in magazine articles such as J. S. Fortescue's 'The Influence of Climate on Race" (1893), and books like Charles A Pearson's 1893 bestseller NationalLifeand Character: Forecast. Acceleratdeing anxiety about physical degeneration may account for Blackwood's cision to publish a rather bizarre, sensational article in 1897 entitled "Faces and Places" by physician Louis Robinson. Among other things, Robinson argues that British descendants in America, particularlyin remote areas, have deteriorated over time into a Yankee "type" bearing the features of the American Indian (231-32). For racist and paranoid Britons, the possibility was appalling. The gentleman emigrant might successfully prove his manhood in the United States at the price of physical degeneration in his sons and his sons' sons. To appropriate McClintock's observation, "Woebetide the race that [e] migrated from its place" (49). These were the nightmares of empire.

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Nor were the nightmares limited to physical degradation, degeneration, and decline. There was also the risk of moral decline, perhaps the most serious threat of all to the conception of the gentleman. In one of the most virulent magazine attacks on American life, "Civilization, Social Order, and Corruption in the United States of America," in published in Blackwood's 1892, D.J. Bannatyne argues that American republicanism has caused a moral and social degeneration manifested in everything from incivility to the sexual abuse of children and murder. He justifies his criticism by arguing that the "streamof population which flows from the European States into the Western Republic, gives us a direct interest in the administration of the laws and the maintenance of liberty in the land where these emigrants make for themselves a home either temporarily or permanently" (617). This kind of disgust with US political corruption combined in the monthlies with exaggerated ideas about the immorality of the Old West to construct America as a threat to the British gentleman's character as well as to his constitution." A noteworthy example of this is Horace Vachell's "The Man Who Died," published in the Cornhillin 1900, in which a Dorset parson's ne'er-do-well son, living an indolent, debauched life in California, decides to pretend he is dead when his father cuts off his allowance. Having used the funeral funds to open a saloon, the son is exposed when the parson unexpectedly inherits a fortune and travels to California to visit his grave. Heartbroken and enraged, the old man demands that his son "askhimself if he is fit to return with me to England, to live with those gentlewomen his sisters, to inherit the duties and responsibilities that even such wealth as mine bring in their train. He knows that he is not fit" (652-53). The influences of rowdy frontier life posed a constant menace to the honor not only of the emigrant, but also of the Empire his manhood represented, and in this context Vachell's title is significant: the parson's son not only forfeits his right to call himself a gentleman, but also proves himself unmanly, a failed representative of imperial masculinity, a dead man. Unfit to govern an English country house, he is even less fit to represent the British Empire. Though US social corruption, usually manifested in political scandal, remained a concern even for essayists less virulent than Bannatyne, the United States' emerging global and military status at the end of the century-a sign of healthy masculinity that British imperialists felt compelled to respect-largely quashed the idea that AngloAmericans were degenerate or that the gentleman who made his home

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in that country was doomed to deteriorate.l2 More prominent than the fear of failure was the fear of success: the fear that British sons would discover, in the words ofJames's Henrietta Stackpole, that "Englandwas not everything" (Portrait321); that the best of Britain's sons would succeed in the United States; that they would free themselves from the stigma of redundancy, realize imperial masculinity, and become truly American, rebel sons depriving imperial Britain of the flower of her manhood at a time when eugenicist Francis Galton was arguing, with some success, that British supremacy depended upon the breeding of her best and brightest at home. In an 1882 NineteenthCenturyarticle, W. M. Torrens calls upon England to gather "our colonial children together" against "the evil day of foreign envy,jealousy and revenge" so that "wemay feel assurance that the seed of our loins will not be wanting for our help and stay"(539). He goes on to excoriate the United States, significantly designated one of those 'jealous rivals in manufacture and trade" for "absorb[ing] seventy-two per cent" of English emigrants while England's "sister realms beyond [the] sea" are "stinted and starved" of "men of our own race" (546). And, while Bradley advocates emigration, he is adamant that it should be a solution only for the superfluous younger sons, those gentlemen who are not likely to succeed in Britain because of intellectual or other deficiencies: "those who have no alternative but emigration, and no choice but physical labor" as opposed to "men who might have risen to be Queen's Counsel, or Headmasters, or Canons" ("Gentlemen" 40). Edwardes clearly endorses this view in "A Florida Girl."Duncombe is, as his father admits, a gentleman of much brawn and little brain, but he works hard in the United States and succeeds in spite of his stupidity (or perhaps because of it), returning triumphantly to England with his pretty, if socially problematic, American heiress on his arm and her completely unproblematic money in his pocket. Indeed, Duncombe's success allows him to save the family estate and preserve a British gentleman's life with all its attendant privileges for his father, himself, and his sons. Though irony is its dominant tone, Edwardes'sshort story nonetheless presents "aversion of the [British, masculine] self that can be lived with in relative psychic comfort" (Dawson 23), one where the gentleman emigrant, once redundant, succeeds in America and comes back to England a full man, capable of service to the mother country. A number of the essays and short stories talk about gentlemen emigrants returning to Britain, but few offer such "psychic comfort."

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For example, Paterson relates thatJack Halliday, the "forlorn"emigrant shepherd he describes in "Camp Life on the Prairies," eventually returns to England, but Paterson is ambiguous about whether the impact of life in America has been good or not, merely commenting that "the impression stamped on his character by the experiences I have here described is too deep ever to be quite effaced" (181). The return is certainly less than triumphant for the protagonist-narrator of Flamborough's short story "The West-Bound Express" (1890). In this emigration nightmare, narrator Philip Sinton and his partner William, failures at British law and medicine, fail again on "a wretched sterile track" in "the booming state of Dakota" (267). William leaves on the Westbound Express for the mining camp of Silverbow, where he intends to explore other prospects. After two months of silence and a series of ominous dreams, Sinton, concerned and depressed, follows him on the same train only to discover that William and eight other passengers have, over the course of several weeks, been thrown to their deaths from a high mountain trestle by a Yankee conductor, a "homicidal maniac" (275). His motive? "'He talks that one of his great-greatgrandfathers was shot by the Britishers, and he hates all Johnny Bulls for that"' (271). Sinton goes back to England a shattered man, physically broken and mentally emasculated, having realized all the worst fears of an uneasy Britain sending its younger sons to America: that their sons will be needlessly stripped of their gentlemanly status, that they will be destroyed as men, and, in the case of the narrator's partner, that they will never return from the rebel republic, from the colony that was, despite racial and cultural rationalizations to the contrary, not a colony, and had not been for over a century. III In a magazine discourse dominated by colonialist constructions of America, it is perhaps not surprising to find a subtext suggesting to British readers that somewhere deep in the American psyche, out on the frontier, the Revolution continues, threatening the lives of gentleman emigrants and thereby challenging the political sovereignty of Britain itself. The magazine response to the threat that the United States posed during the last decades of the century as a sovereign nation, a siphon of British manhood, and a competitor on the world stage was a species of ideological colonization - indeed, recolonization - that

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gradually came to depend less on anachronistic representations of the United States as a primitive colonial outpost for unemployed English gentlemen and more on a kinship rhetoric that stressed, in spite of its evident emigrant diversity, the essential Anglo-Saxonism of the United use States. In fact, Torrens's NineteenthCentury of the imperial rhetoric of race and family in a way that excludes America is relatively unique in periodical debates of the 1880s and 90s.13Kinship rhetoric was fairly common throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and while the use of the word "cousins"to refer to Yankees could carry uncomplimentary connotations, by the Victorian fin-de-siecle those connotations seem generally neutralized, if not abandoned. Family rhetoric in the magazines becomes employed in the service of the New Imperialist ideology and punctuates texts written by outspoken proponents of Imperial Federation and an Anglo-American Alliance as well as by travel and fiction writers. "Cousin"becomes a term of family endearment, a means of promoting and preserving not just Anglo-American unity but also Anglo-Saxon racial bonds and thereby the British Empire.'4 For example, Henry Truman Wood, in "Chicago and its Exhibition" (1892), urges Britain to "take the foremost place" at the exhibition because to do otherwise would "implysome lack of friendly feeling between ourselves and our great kindred across the sea" (565). As Christine Bolt notes, Britons "could not fail to see that they might have to share" their "'advantageous position in History"' with the United States (73), and such sharing was obviously more palatable if they could convince themselves that Americans were in fact cultural and racial "kin"reflecting glory back upon the mother country, and that gentleman emigrants who did not return were nonetheless participants in British imperial enterprise. The limitations of such a strategy did not escape the magazine writers who employed it. There was no lack of animosity between the old Empire and the emerging one. As late as 1895 England and the United States were threatening war over Venezuela, prompting Henry Stanley, explorer and exemplar of British imperial masculinity, to present statistics on the number of people of British birth or British descent living in the United States as a means of illustrating what a "monstrous"crime battle between "kinsmen"would be (5). In the same where Stanley makes this arJanuary 1896 issue of the Nineteenth Century Edward Dicey expresses cynicism about such appeals: gument,

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Personally, I think the blood being thicker than water theory may easily be carried too far. The relations between England and America always remind me of certain families I have known [ . .] whose members are alwaysbickering with one another and speaking ill of each other, and yet, in spite of all prefer each other's company to that of strangers. [...] But a preference for each other's society does not hinder the members from going to law in defiance of common sense. Nor do I think that the ties of a common descent, a common language, and a common history will compel Englishmen and Americans in the future [...] to abstain from killing each other's soldiers, sinking each other's ships, and bombarding each other's towns. (8)

But what Anglo-Saxon family rhetoric could do was preserve for Britain the illusion that her emigrant sons were not lost to her. Lord Meath acknowledges US status as an independent nation in his "ABritisher's Impressions of America and Australasia" (1892), but concludes by subordinating it to a race patriotism that links England with "those great and distant countries which have been colonised by men and women of the British race, and which are destined to play so important a part in the future history of the world" (514). Under the kinship model not only is nationalism ultimately subordinated to race patriotism, but parochial conceptions of manliness like that of the British gentleman are subordinated to a transnational ideal of masculinity that unites the Anglo-Saxon, whether Briton or American, emigrant or native, on the frontiers of twentieth-century imperialism. By century's end the masculine proving ground was shifting away from the frontier. The great Klondike gold rush, which saw both Britons and Americans living out the adventure of the Wild West one last time, was in many ways a nostalgic venture, while the veldt of South Africa and the hills of Cuba provided modern battlegrounds on which to test the masculinity of the imperial Anglo-Saxon.15 In Stephen Crane's grim short story "GodRest Ye, Merry Gentlemen," published by the Cornhillin May 1899, the homosocial camaraderie once shared by hunters and cowboys on the American frontier has been transferred to war correspondents in Cuba recording the United States' own march toward imperial might. In a scene pregnant with symbolism, a British correspondent offers to share his blanket with an American journalist who has lost his coat; it is an invitation to a shared masculinity, even a subliminal sexual invitation, that emphasizes the extent to which the Briton and the American are united in a common fight against the elements, the enemy, and a mutual fear and distrust that might divide them in imperial endeavor. The American accepts a portion of the blan-

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ket; the imperial mantle is not passed, but shared; and the alliance is made. Politically the Anglo-American Alliance and Imperial Federation promoted by propagandists such as J. R. Seeley and James Anthony Froude and statesmen such as George Campbell and Joseph Chamberlain proved no less impracticable than Cecil Rhodes's grandiose scheme to achieve "the recovery of the United States, for the making of the Anglo-Saxon race into an empire" (qtd. in Arnstein 173). Nonetheless, by Victoria's death in 1901, Roosevelt's rough-riding heroism had helped inaugurate a new era of Anglo-American cooperation-what G. S. Clarke called in 1898 a "natural rapprochement' (193)--founded upon a transatlantic, Anglo-Saxon masculine ideal, one conceived on the American frontier and realized on the imperial battlefield. Evolving in no small measure out of the discursive strategies and counter-strategies that comprised magazine debates over the fate of the gentleman emigrant in the United States, it was an ideal destined to shape, for better or worse, twentieth-century imperialism and to undergird AngloAmerican relations far into the next century. Augustana College

NOTES Part of the research for this article was funded by Roanoke College and by the 1996 NEH Summer Seminar, 'The New Woman and the New Man of the 1890s,"held at the University of Michigan and directed by Martha Vicinus. Early portions of this article were presented before the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (1996) and at the International Conference on American and British Travel Writersand Writing at the University of Minnesota (1997). I gratefully acknowledge the research assistance of former student Susan K. Johnson and the generous advice of Mark Van Wienen, James Eli AdStudies. ams, and the readers at Victorian 'Charlotte Erickson's conclusion contradicts Patrick Dunae's contention that Canada was the preferred destination for English emigrants (Dunae 7-8). I have found that the magazine discourse tends to validate Erickson. While articles published during the 1880s and 90s show that Canada was an important and, because part of the Empire, often more desirable North American locale from the British point of view, those articles that compare the US and Canada are almost alwayscompelled to observe (and sometimes bewail) the fact that most emigrants went to the United States. was 2Politically,Blackwood's rigidly Tory. Macmillan'sembraced the Philosophic Radicalism of John Morley in the early eighties before turning its focus from politics to literature (Sullivan 217-18). The Cornhill,once the most popular magazine among educated Victorians (Houghton 554), became increasingly nationalistic and jingoistic in the late 1890s (Houghton 323). The most intellectual, influential, and, where treatments of Anglo-American relations are concerned, least partisan of these magazines was the "gen-

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erally dispassionate and fairminded" NineteenthCentury(Sullivan 269). 3Magazine essayist B. M. Godsall explains that many young British males were squeezed out not only as a result of economic pressures, but also as a consequence of the institution of the exam system, which newly governed the entrance to many professions at the end of the century (964). For an excellent survey of the challenges facing the English gentleman and driving him to emigrate, see Dunae, ch. 3. 4Itake issue with Robert Athearn's premise that Britons writing about the United States were "[u]nhampered by bonds of national patriotism" and therefore best suited to offer objective assessments of the American West (164). In fact, Britons' own "national patriotism" and imperial agenda permeated their discourse on America. 5In this essay Bradley charts the history of emigration manias not only to the American West, but also to Canada and Florida. Bradley, who according to Dunae operated a "farm-pupil"emigration service in London (175), was himself an emigrant to the American South and is Britain's most prolific writer on that region in the monthlies I have surveyed. Though without the frontier connotations that dominate discourse on the and West, his depictions of the American South in Blackwood's Macmillan'sare also primiand often explicitly colonial (see "Mar'se";"Old";"Poor";"Social";"Some tivist, exotic, Plantation"). For more on Britons and the American South, see Conan Doyle; Edwardes, "Florida Girl," "Florida in Winter," "Scene";Lang; Montefiore, "Our Boys."The writings of these men suggest that stereotyping of the South was as common as stereotyping of the West in the discourse on America: in both cases the English popular imagination was fed by nostalgic visions of America as it had been decades before. 6While the average Briton most frequently encountered the romance of the American West vicariously through reading, some were seduced by their own experience as tourists. Such was the case of John Baumann, who explains in his 1886 Cornhillarticle 'The Cow-Boy at Home" that as a youngster briefly visiting the western United States he "sawonly the picturesque side of frontier life, and was fascinated by its dangers, its freedom, its unconventionality" (294). Hoping as an adult to live out the promise of his boyhood visit, Baumann emigrated to Texas where he discovered "that the cow-boy's life is not all beer and skittles, and that the vision of sport and adventure which attracts many a young Englishman also give way to a very hard and not very agreeable reality" (308). 7Jeudwine was among those failed emigrants who carried on the tradition of Frances Trollope and, according to Stephen Fender, "could alwaysentertain the hope of redeeming lost ideals, energy, capital and face by writing up their American adventures for the London literary market" (220). For more on Britons who returned to the homeland, see Shepperson. 8Hilda Stafford's reaction to life in America is in line with what Erickson observed in her study of the letters of British immigrants in the United States: that "[m]iddle-class women, unaccustomed to manual labor and conscious of status, did not make good migrants" and that 'women of all classes were more likely to express their unhappiness as migrants" (Invisible65-66). In February of 1897, Harraden followed up "Hilda Stafford" with a nonfiction essay entitled "Some Impressions of Southern California." While this essay celebrates California's beauties and softens the harsh portrait painted by her fiction, it is nonetheless directed as a warning toward women "gently nurtured" for whom Harraden suggests emigrant life will prove that "there is a starvation of the souljust as possible as the starvation of the body" (177-78).

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'The ability to join domestic talents to more traditional masculine roles that I find being valorized in the British periodical literature on gentleman emigrants was actually "incorporated into the concept of manliness" for suburban American men by the beginning of the twentieth century (Marsh 122). "'Foran in-depth study of the British attitude toward American wives, particularly the aristocracy,see Montgomery. among "Though generally no admirer of American politics or morals, Bradley did consider the United States of the 1880s and 90s a less threatening place for emigrants, in part because he thought the fin-de-siecle generation of sons contained fewer "ready-made black sheep" ("Gentlemen" 33). Late-Victorian magazine fiction rarely reflects this view of the United States, perhaps in part because so much of it is set earlier in the century. '2In 1899, however, Bradley derided the United States' takeover of the Philippines maintaining that, considering corruption in American government, American politicians (as opposed to the American people as a whole) are "abreed less fitted to rule an uncivilised race than any other within the pale of the Anglo-Saxon fold" ("America's" 240). '3McClintockpoints out, however, that the trope of the family in nineteenth-cenBritain often proved "indispensable for legitimizing exclusion and hierarchy within tury nonfamilial social forms such as nationalism, liberal individualism, and imperialism" (45). 14Itis worth noting, however, that in 1888, seeking to "tracethe results of English blood and English tradition transplanted into a new country," Emily Acland is careful to designate Canadians as "brothers"and Americans as "cousins,"underscoring for magazine readers the degree of kinship that might be accorded an actual member of Victoria's domain and that due to the colony that got away (413). 5'I am indebted to Richard Slotkin's work for illuminating the relationship between nostalgia, the frontier experience, and imperialism.

WORKS CITED 23 Acland, Emily. "ALady's American Notes." NineteenthCentury (Mar. 1888): 403-13. Adams, James Eli. Dandies and DesertSaints: Stylesof Victorian Masculinity Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. Arnold, Matthew. "AWord about America."NineteenthCentury11 (May 1882): 680-96. and Arnstein, Walter. Britain Yesterday Today,1830-Present.6th ed. Toronto: Heath, 1992. Robert G. Westward Briton.New York:Scribner's, 1953. the Athearn, Bannatyne, D.J. "Civilisation,Social Order, and Moralityin the United States of America." Blackwood's (May 1892): 617-37. 151 Baumann, John. 'The Cow-Boyat Home." Cornhill54 (Sept. 1886): 294-308. Benson, Robert. 'The English Community in Iowa."Macmillan's44 (May 1881): 65-69. Attitudesto Race.London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971. Bolt, Christine. Victorian Corner." Cornhill82 (Aug. 1900): 251-57. Bowyer, Edith M. Nicholl. "AFar-Away Bradley, A. G. "America'sProblem." Macmillan's79 (Jan. 1899): 232-39. "Farm-Pupilsin the Colonies." Macmillan's62 (July 1890): 193-98. "Gentlemen Emigrants."Macmillan's58 (May 1888): 30-40.

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