What to See and How to See It: Tourism and the Mythical Past in a World Without a Renaissance

In the summer of 1858 the wealthy Bostonians Robert, Anna, and their teenage daughter Helen Waterston neared the end of their Grand Tour of Europe. The family had traveled throughout Great Britain, France, and Germany, and in mid-1858 they arrived in Naples. As was then too common, seventeen-year-old Helen died prematurely soon after their arrival, probably of tuberculosis. Despite her early death Helen has left copious documentation about the last years of her life. For example, no less than Edmonia Lewis sculpted her likeness, a recently identified bust now housed in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In addition, for almost two years Helen wrote hundreds of pages of daily diary entries about her visits to historical monuments and museums. Helen wrote about the things she saw, the things that she liked, the things she liked less, and at times the reasons behind her preferences. Collectively and individually these entries reveal how a young American woman conceptualized and made links between an older European past and the story of the United States decades before the story of Western Civilization became popular in the twentieth century. In addition, the survival of two large volumes of letters written by her mother and over a hundred travel sketches from her father during the same time provide comparative insights into how Americans created a mythical past that joined the United States to older European stories. That mythical past shaped which sites Americans needed to see, what they saw when they arrived, and even how Americans and their hosts took advantage of each other in a nineteenth-century tourist economy.