Kirkus Reviews QR Code
DIARY IN AMERICA by Jules- Ed. Zanger

DIARY IN AMERICA

By

Publisher: Indiana Univ. Press

First published in 1839, this is the once famous Captain Marryat's unflattering account of his North American travels, and it is now reprinted for the first time and copiously annotated. ""Of all literary lions the most tactless and blundering"", Marryat coached New York in the middle of the panic of 1837, seven years after another disilluoned English visitor, Mrs. Trollope, had infuriated the country with her Domestic nners of the Americans. Marryat, far less discreet, dropped bricks as he visited cities and backwoods settlements in this country and Canada, as he went down the Mississippi to St. Louis, up the Ohio to Cincinnati, keeping his journal and scattering insults. Out ged citizens burned his books and nicknamed him ""smellfungus"". Supplementing the Domestic Manners but lacking Mrs. Trollope's distinctive reporter's touch, this disconnect- Manners but entertaining record of a bigoted Englishman in America will appeal to students and collectors of Americana of the period, although historians will deplore Marryat's lack of accuracy.