ABSTRACT
Travellers' accounts have long been recognised as insightful documents in efforts to understand the cultural and intellectual transatlantic world. Christopher Mulvey particularly captured the transnational nature of travel literature by looking both at American commentary on England, and the English, as well as the reciprocal ideas of English travellers in America in a comparative context. The Revolution and the French wars caused a pause in the east-bound traffic, but independence did alter the perspective of Americans in England. The terms of maritime travel in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries ensured that those able or willing to go to England were still relatively few in number. Men and women looked on travel in England as a genteel experience. They had the financial support and the important connections that gave them immediate entree into desirable English society. For Americans, colonial, newly independent or nationally self-confident, the trip to England, and the inevitable comparative analysis, was always important.
