ABSTRACT
The subject of America as seen from Britain during the nineteenth century is, of course, vast and complex, not least because no settled image prevails. What I hope to do, however, is to touch briefly on how various tropes about America were worked and reworked, to suggest how 'America' was put into discourse, offering often elusive points for debate and anxiety about Britain's own future as a modern polity and society. At one level, Jean Baudrillard's portrayal of Europe as forever chasing the shadow of America's radical otherness makes. good sense.1 But America's 'otherness' is always in question; the anxiety is often expressed not that America is something else·, a space against which Europe is defined, but rather that it is a: privileged site where. Europe's future, for better or worse, is constantly being previewed. Whether Britain and America are comparable sites of civilization is a matter for debate. Moreover, I use the term 'imagination' in my title not to imply a 'real' Amer,ica over an imagined space, but rather to suggest that it is precisely how America is to be imagined that is most crucially in question: what does America represent and for whom? Certainly many travelled to America from Britain, not least importantly the hundreds of thousands of working people seeking a brighter future, and found their images radically at odds with their actual experience of the New World. But people, particularly writers, travefted to America to see and prepared to see certain things, to test certain imaginative constructions. And, as Malcolm Bradbury notes, it was hardly necessary to go to America in order to construct such an imagined space.2 No less of a champion of all things American tha:n John Bright never visited its republican shores. America wa:s a place to be imagined, debated and theorized - a 'true fictional space'. 3
Above all, perhaps, America: rep:resents the site of 'the modem'. But the terms 'modern', 'modernism' and 'modernity' are notoriously difficult to pin down.4 Certainly 'the modern' entails a desacraJ\ilzation of tradition, an assertion of openness and freedom unbounded by the past or history, a restless desire to move within the horizon of an always imminent present. This also implies a national and individual doctrine
of self-referentiality. Thus Thomas Paine believed that Americans must be taught 'the manly doctrine of reverencing themselves'. In the first instance, radicals envisaged America as a modern space characterized by the positive virtues of youth, simplicity, rusticity and innocence.5 For Major John Cartwright, America stood like 'naked Eve - "when unadorned, adorned the most" - the Americans, when stripped of political garb of civil rule, appeared with the greater lustre, enrobed in political wisdom and virtue'. 6 Nakedness here stands for the unconditioned self: the enlightenment desire to strip away the trappings of past civilization; full development is premised on its own conditions of existence. Such visions of America as 'natural' space subject to the pure designs of natural reason and thus available for new beginnings ran up against the development of this space, its realization as modern space? America still offered a utopian space of naturalness; the back country was the perennial site of utopian experimentation, whether pantisocratic, Owenite or Icarian. America rarely failed the romantic quest for the natural sublime, although monumental landscape succumbed to development: Niagara Falls becoming a site of commercial tourism. 8 Throughout the nineteenth century, the shifting western frontier loomed as a space of Nature and of freedom, a receding place just beyond culture and social order, of homesteads and farms, but also of wildness, untamed meanings and loss.
