ABSTRACT
By 1824, the build-up of American travels, boosted most recently by Timothy Dwight's Travels in New England, and New York, was such that the Eclectic Review contemplated with awe a veritable 'continent of information'. Andrew Franta has shown how the growth of the periodical press affected the practice and theory of poetry, while Karen Fang has mapped subtle connections between late Romantic authors, periodicals, and imperialism. The reception of Ashe's Travels, hardly a work of towering genius militates against assumptions of a pervasive anti-Americanism in the British periodical press at this time. In the thousands of pages devoted to North American travels in the periodical press in the Romantic period, there was one other important theme that reviewers could not help but address: in addition to new geographical or anthropological knowledge, they returned time and again to questions of national destiny and the future of Anglo-American relations.
