ABSTRACT
The scenes of improvement signaled travelers that land, labor, and comfort had undergone complex revaluation; travel writers determined to render exact assessments of life in interior to their international audiences of potential emigrants laid out revaluations concisely. Many travelers operated on the general assumptions that a house should be a comfortable refuge from surprising weather and that closing out the climate and the landscape constituted a step forward to comfort. In the 1830s, the objects travelers associated with comfort were failing to appear. Travelers who immersed themselves in the life of the interior to degree not attempted by the wary and defensive travelers of the 1820s had their imported notions of comfort deranged by the experience of life without domestic furniture. Numerous travel books enumerated the details of Morris Birkbeck's and George Flower's efforts to transplant English country life to Illinois: flower gardens, hedges, fences, porter's lodge, roast beef, mutton, plum pudding, mince pie, pianos, books, upholstery, and cricket matches.
