In the 1800s, Americans took to traveling in Europe in huge numbers. Newspapers across the nation were filled with travel accounts, and many of America's most prominent writers, starting with and including Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, recorded their impressions of the European people and places that they encountered. Henry James not only traveled but lived abroad for much of his life, attending school in Switzerland (like the young man Winterboume in Daisy Miller) from the age of thirteen. He later used this experience to write stories that pitted American innocence against European sophistication in the context of changing social codes, both in the United States and abroad.
Americans abroad. Why was there a rush to travel to Europe in the 1800s? Historians propose several reasons. First, by the late nineteenth century, Americans who had previously concerned themselves with getting established and procuring food, housing, and employment for themselves, finally had the time and the money to travel. The economic power base shifted from agrarian production to capitalist economics in the late 1870s, creating a new class of Americans able to concentrate on self-improvement and amusement.
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