Selling the Sights by Will B. Mackintosh

Author:Will B. Mackintosh [Mackintosh, Will B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS036040 History / United States / 19th Century
Publisher: New York University Press

The hyperbolically foolish and banal tourists conjured by the satirists of the 1820s and 1830s shared another feature in common, even though it was one that went unremarked upon at the time. Their misadventures were increasingly consumer misadventures, brought about by their failure to properly navigate the market for commodified travel. Their slapstick mishaps increasingly involved stagecoaches, steamboats, and railway carriages rather than pedestrianism and the antics of old mares like Dr. Syntax’s Grizzle. They missed connections, boarded boats headed in the wrong direction, and were whirled along at improbable speeds by primitive rail cars. While embedded within these new forms of transport, their novel and intimate interpersonal contexts provided ripe settings for satirical treatments of social interactions. They frequently misunderstood the commodified knowledge they purchased in books, and demonstrated endless gullibility in the face of anonymous human informants. They may have shared Jeremy Cockloft’s silly superficiality and Dr. Syntax’s penchant for physical and cultural pratfalls, but drivers of their ignorance and the causes of their mishaps were increasingly the things they bought: books, tickets, and even entire experiences of politically motivated guzzling of spring water.

None of the authors writing in the 1820s or 1830s drew this connection explicitly. The entrepreneurial innovations that produced commodified experiences of summer leisure were still developing, and their cultural effects were as yet still too unformed, to be a convenient subject of popular satire. By the 1840s, however, the marketplace for commodified experience brought forth a new generation of tourist satires that increasingly revealed an explicit link between consumer practices and tourist archetypes. Their caricatures of tourists built on existing satirical practice, but they heightened their emphasis on those features of commodified experience that skeptics were already noticing: its predictability and interchangeability from one tourist to the next, its preoccupation with existing patterns of travel rather than exploration and discovery, and the growing suspicion that experiences purchased in the marketplace might be meaningless. Midcentury satirical tourists were fundamentally frivolous consumers of commodified experience, and all of their negative characteristics were derived from this relationship to the marketplace for leisure travel.

These midcentury satires also began to lose the intimate connection to their British forebears and to the transatlantic concerns that had characterized their predecessors before 1840. Instead, the ambitious, superficial, gullible, disengaged tourist became an increasingly integrated stock figure within the main currents of American humor. Beginning in the late 1830s, tall talk, an indigenous American form of oral humor, started to appear in print.43 These tall tales were built around an artful performance of exaggeration and fantasy built on solid base of plausible reality. The humor and pleasure of the tall tale, according to Henry Wonham, came when the audience was “suspended between knowledge of the tale’s falsehood and appreciation for the teller’s dexterity in stretching the limits of plausibility.”44 Tall talk had thrived as an oral form, particularly on the geographical margins of American life, since the eighteenth century, and in the nineteenth century American authors began to experiment with ways to import the form into literature.

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