Made of the Mist: Nineteenth‐Century British and American Views of Niagara II

Abstract

Writing within the conventions of the European sublime was often problematic for 19th-century travel writers who found Niagara had no Old World precedent. Frances and Anthony Trollope, Dickens, Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Twain, and Henry James all made important contributions to the literary development of the Fall's treatment in the 19th century, when they first became widely written upon, painted, and commodified after the 1825 completion of the Erie Canal. This article explores the importance of these authors' points of view of the cataract in relation to silence, guidebook empiricism, guidebook Romanticism, irreverence, and the problematic prospect of coming to terms with the Falls as a commercial and tourist destination.