halfcactus

Like The Empire Must Die, Sara Jeannette Duncan’s An American Girl in London is another book that I almost certainly read but didn’t actually mark as read on my Kindle, which is perhaps fortunate as this gave me the very great pleasure of rereading it.

The book was published in 1891, catching the zeitgeist of stories about the culture clash occasioned by Americans descending on England, sometimes as tourists and sometimes on the hunt for aristocratic husbands. (Edith Wharton’s The Buccaneers is a late entry to this genre, but probably the most famous.)

In An American Girl in London, our heroine Mamie is the heiress to a baking powder fortune out of Chicago, who decides to travel to London on her own after her parents are unavoidably detained by political business in America. (Poppa is a senator, you see.) Indomitable and archly funny, she visits Madame Tussaud’s, goes to Ascot, and is presented at Court:

I liked going to Court better than any other thing I did in England, not excepting Madame Tussaud’s, or the Beefeaters in the Tower, or even “Our Flat” at the Strand. It did a great deal to reconcile me, practically, with monarchical institutions, although, chiefly on poppa’s account, I should like it to be understood that my democratic theories are still quite unshaken in every respect.

(The concern that contact with monarchical European institutions would corrupt American democratic principles is a recurrent one in 19th century American books, possibly because at that point American democracy was politically speaking a weird outlier in a monarchical world. At another point, Duncan assures us that “My democratic principles are just the same as ever, though – a person needn’t always approve what she likes.” You can enjoy the pomp of someone else’s monarchy without wanting to bring it home!)

Aside from being deliciously funny, the book is full of fascinating tidbits about the differences between American and British English in the 1890s, like Mamie’s shipboard exchange with a woman who inquires, “Have you been bad?” Mamie, after some hesitation, replies that she doesn’t think so, but after all the prayer book says that we’re all miserable sinners… The lady, startled, informs her that she was asking if Mamie had been seasick.

Or the bit where a man accuses Mamie of “pulling his leg,” an expression that was clearly not current in America at the time.

Or the entire subplot where Mr. Mafferton decides that he should like to marry Mamie, but neglects to inform her of this fact by so much as a single bouquet or box of chocolates, so that Mamie remains completely in the dark until she’s actually having dinner with his family and discovers that they think she will be joining the family on a permanent basis very shortly. Awkwardly, Mamie is already engaged to a fellow back in America.

Honestly just the perfect combination of business and pleasure. Some of the most delicious research material I’ve ever had the joy of experiencing. I’m now overcome by the desire to reread the sequel, A Voyage of Consolation, in which Mamie takes Europe.