Abstract
In 1813 the celebrated founding editor of the Edinburgh Review, Francis Jeffrey, travelled to New York and Washington while Britain was at war with the United States and there is a surviving journal of that journey. The trip was for a romantic purpose (Jeffrey was to marry and bring back to Britain his second wife) but the timing meant that he was an enemy abroad while on US soil. As such, the journal unsettles our expectations about national identifications and this article examines Jeffrey’s interactions in the White House, his reactions to encounters with African Americans and his Romantic responses to the American landscape in order to investigate his transnational politics.
Highlights
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What of Jeffrey as a transnational figure? His American journal is a reminder of complex transatlantic connections, political, literary and natural, which transcended or mapped across the fixed boundaries of nations and the official discourse of sovereign enmity
It complicates the historical narrative of international hostility between Britain and America, but shows that any promise for intercultural dialogue ends at race. His use of the Edinburgh Review as a bargaining tool to help him to escape internment testifies to the resilience of literary ideas in the face of political division and aggression
Summary
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