In July 1860, Queen Victoria's son Albert Edward arrived in the United States for a ceremonial tour, the first member of the royal family to visit the republic. At every stage of his unprecedented journey, the eighteen-year-old Prince of Wales enjoyed a rapturous response: feted by civic institutions, honored by street parades, and made the subject of countless fawning newspaper reports. Even for a nation preoccupied with its inexorable descent into sectional conflict, it seemed the mysteries and pageantry of Old World royalty retained a compelling allure for popular and elite audiences alike. The tour remains an unfamiliar and peculiar cultural episode. However, in her innovative study, Elisa Tamarkin demonstrates that such transatlantic adulation was merely one expression of a broad cultural phenomenon.
Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion and Antebellum America uncovers an often startling willingness among Victorian Americans to reinvest in English culture and Englishness. This pathbreaking work of cultural and social history offers a reconsideration of ways in which Old World symbols and practices were used to shape a post-Revolutionary democratic culture. The book argues that a fascination with and fondness for England constituted a range of “pervasive networks of affects and attachments … a popular devotion across class, region, and even race” (xxvi). This fondness is shown to be a “pattern of belief” that articulated “an imaginary geopolitics—a desire by Americans to claim a transatlantic affiliation” (xxxiii). The study pursues this frequently counterintuitive tradition in a variety of cultural forms, from visual arts to historiography. Promising familiar “historical terrain” covered “in an unfamiliar fashion” (2), Tamarkin offers a succession of intricate arguments that revise assumptions about nineteenth-century Anglo-American relations. Four extensive case studies isolate principal themes: obsession with monarchy, nostalgia for the British Empire, abolitionist Anglophilia, and English influence on the American academy.
In her section on monarchy, Tamarkin examines responses to Albert Edward's tour and Victoria's coronation in 1838, tracing the construction of the queen as an idealized American symbol of idealized middle-class domesticity and the triumph of moral influence over political power. She suggests that Americans who loved Victoria found new ways to love America and that “simply put, some of the period's urgent questions were addressed by confusing America with what it manifestly was not: the monarchy of Britain.” Tamarkin finds at the heart of this fascination with monarchy the theme of deference as a model of viable democratic politics. A central thesis emerges that a “profound reinvestment in the symbolic authority of England” (xxiv) provided a model of deference advantageous in the formation of a national style of politics.
Moving from cultural to social history, Tamarkin wryly explores the importance of English models in the development of the American academy. The extent to which intellectual and university culture in the United States historically assumed Old World pretensions is, of course, a familiar theme. Tamarkin clarifies this to reveal the British roots of an entire shaping philosophy of American intellectualism: not just pedagogic practices but collegiate societies and rituals and entire styles of reading, writing, and thinking.
Perhaps most arresting is the exploration of pro-English sentiment among African American abolitionists. Examining the writings of William Wells Brown, Alexander Crummell, and Frederick Douglass, Tamarkin asks how and why such figures came to fashion themselves as Englishmen, expressing such enthusiasm for an ostensibly conservative idiom of class. She uncovers a vibrant tradition of Anglophilic regard, an attitude that at its most pronounced involved an appropriation of Anglo-Saxon racial heritage.
These case studies present a predominately, but not solely, American story. To Tamarkin, the significance of Anglophilia “resides largely within those aspects of American life we see illuminated in the image of England it brings forth” (xxiv). Accordingly, the emphasis of the study rests largely on a correction of tendencies within American studies, challenging long-standing historiographical narratives regarding nativism and cultural nationalism. But the study consciously adds to the flourishing wave of scholarship that aims to synthesize the too often discrete realms of British and American social history. Her analysis is thoroughly versed in the recent theory and historiography of Englishness, and she addresses a number of wider theoretical questions of relevance to British studies. Several of her insights suggest rich avenues for further research, in particular on the legacy and complexity of English imperial attachments and the emergence of an international psychology of aspiring Englishness.
There are limitations to this relevance. In particular, the author is candid about her inattentiveness to internal British political and cultural distinctions, eliding the American salience of intertwined idioms of Englishness and Scottishness. Moreover, although Tamarkin surveys her novel terrain with considerable erudition and command, Anglophilia often proves an arduous experience, its original insights ill-served by ironic flourishes and frenetic theoretical allusiveness. Nonetheless, this is an impressive and substantial contribution to nineteenth-century transatlantic studies, posing promising fresh questions in its emphasis on how “nationalism, as a form of feeling, an ideology and set of practices, works every bit as seriously at bringing some aspects of the outside in, as it does in keeping others out” (xxvi).
