Kenneth D. Rose calls the thirty-five years between 1865 and 1900 “the golden age for European travel in the United States” (1). Issue might be taken with that. The thirty-five years from 1825 to 1860 could lay an equal claim, with Frances Trollope, Basil Hall, Harriet Martineau, Fanny Kemble, Frederick Marryat, Alexis de Tocqueville, Charles Dickens and Alexander Mackay the very best among a troop of travel writers. Indeed, the five years of the Civil War need not be excluded. Europeans did not stop going to America and writing well about it just because there was a war on. Nonetheless, Rose's period was certainly the golden age of the American railroad, and the travel literature of the period was rich, as he demonstrates in Unspeakable Awfulness: America through the Eyes of European Travelers, 1865–1900. The book's mean font and narrow margins are off-putting, but Rose writes in an easygoing, literate fashion that makes for amusing reading.

Titles like “Character, Class, Dress, Money, and Advertising” suggest the casual assortment of topics that characterizes a number of chapters. Though Rose includes good summaries of texts and journeys along with valid points about life in America for both inhabitants and travellers, there is too little analysis and too cheerful a tone. The North is taken as the norm, and the many different opinions that accumulate around innumerable subjects result in bland escape clauses such as: “Life in the United States was clearly befuddling to many Europeans, and some retreated to the posture of condemning everything that was American” (55). Southern violence, racism and unfriendliness are not included in Rose's generalizations about American character and culture, and the result is Sunday-magazine discourse.

Travel literature is a tricky entity. There is a wealth of texts in the European accounts of nineteenth-century America that are rich, entertaining, filled with sound perception, spiced with wicked prejudice, rich in self-revelation, provocative in their misunderstandings, startling in their curiosities. Two or three hundred of them make wonderful reading, with their powerful formula of the leaving, the arriving, the first impression, the itinerary, the mishaps, the outcomes, the reflections, the departure. Travellers always have something to say and therein lies some of the problem with travel literature. Book by book enthrals, but their aggregation palls. It is difficult not to add and subtract massed general impressions until nothing can be determined at all. The wonderful sharpness of the individual report is replaced by a gravelly aggregate.

Rose takes up the issue of the fact versus fiction in travel literature. This is undoubtedly an important question, but it needs a deeper, more pointed scrutiny. Traditionally, travellers have been thought of as great liars, and travel literature a form of wonder literature, but the men and women writing about the United States were not by and large liars. They were often misinformed, prejudiced, narrow-minded, and limited, but they reported what they saw as they saw it.

Unspeakable Awfulness is good on the Civil War and very good on the Civil War dead because the travellers are reduced to a pretext. Rose then writes well about something he knows well. That makes for interesting and informative reading, but it is fair to say that it is not at that point a book about travel literature; it has become, briefly, a book about the Civil War. Swerving from the Civil War, Rose switches to politics, politicians, and patriotism. “By necessity,” he says, “patriotism played a different role in America from that in Europe because Americans had to forge a nation out of many different elements” (215). That overlooks the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire, the United Kingdom, all nineteenth-century nations attempting to forge a national identity out of “many different elements.” Graham Robb has argued that that was the case even for France, and it was evidently the case for the collections of kingdoms and principalities that became Germany and Italy.

Rose needs to think more fully about the nations that his travellers came from, as well as about the one they went to. Generating patriotism for the modern, ethnically diverse, industrializing nation-state was the great task of the nineteenth century, usually accomplished by manufacturing notions of exceptionalism, destiny and race. That was sufficiently successfully achieved in most cases for the great nation-states of the twentieth century to murder each other's citizens in hundreds of millions. As an exceptionalist state, the United States was no exception, though Rose tends to think it was.