With the exception of Herman Melville, nineteenth-century American writers are better known for staying home than for venturing to exotic locales. Henry David Thoreau boasted that he had “travelled a good deal in Concord.” A move around the corner in Amherst, a distance of half a mile, left Emily Dickinson with “a kind of gone-to-Kansas feeling, and if I sat in a long wagon, with my family tied behind, I should suppose without doubt I was a party of emigrants!” Poe’s imaginary expeditions—to the South Pole and the Moon—confirmed Dickinson’s quip that “to shut our eyes is Travel.”
No one was more insistent on the virtues of staying home than Ralph Waldo Emerson, who dismissed travel as “a fool’s paradise” in his essay “Self-Reliance.” “It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans,” he wrote. “They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were.” Unimpressed by a passage in Emerson’s essay “Prudence” in which he argues that external circumstances should have no effect on one’s inner life, Melville scrawled in the margin, “To one who has weathered Cape Horn as a common sailor what stuff this is.”
And yet, as Brian C. Wilson notes in The California Days of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a vivid and painstakingly researched account of Emerson’s late-in-life, seven-week trek across the North American continent in 1871, for all his anti-travel vitriol Emerson “seemed to relish being on the road.” Before he turned thirty, he resigned from a secure position as pastor of the Second Church in Boston, when he felt he could no longer in good conscience administer communion. Moving to Concord, he adopted instead the riskier profession of itinerant lecturer, traveling light, as Wilson notes, with his “bright purple satchel…stuffed with books and papers.” Decrying the materialism of modern life in his widely read essays, Emerson was surprisingly bullish on trains, which he found “highly poetic” and to which he accorded an almost mystical power. “Railroad iron is a magician’s rod,” he wrote in his 1844 lecture “The Young American,” “in its power to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water.”