While rocking chairs had been around America since the early eighteenth century, they did not fully enter the European consciousness until the 1830s, when travelers to the United States began commenting on their ubiquity. “In America”, wrote James Frewin for The Architectural Magazine and Journal in 1838, “it is considered a compliment to give the stranger the rocking-chair as a seat; and when there is more than one kind in the house, the stranger is always presented with the best.” Not everyone appreciated the gesture.
That same year, in her Retrospect of Western Travel, the British social theorist Harriet Martineau stops off at a small inn between Stockbridge and Albany, New York. She describes “the disagreeable practice” of rocking in chairs and finds “ladies who are vibrating in different directions, and at various velocities, so as to try the head of a stranger almost as severely as the tobacco chewer his stomach.”38 A similar description later appeared in the Michigan Farmer and other magazines, echoing both the rocker’s nicotinic effects and asynchronicity; the author calls rocking chairs a woman’s “nervine, a narcotic, a stimulant”, and describes “a woman photographer [who] would sit in a rocker with a camera in her lap and placidly photograph a group of rocking women in rockers of various gaits”.39
Once Martineau gets going, she has trouble stopping. “How this lazy and ungraceful indulgence ever became general, I cannot imagine”, she laments, before painting America as the Land of the Rocker:
When American ladies come to live in Europe, they sometimes send home for a rocking-chair. A common wedding present is a rocking-chair. A beloved pastor has every room in his house furnished with a rocking-chair by his grateful and devoted people. It is well that the gentlemen can be satisfied to sit still, or the world might be treated with the spectacle of the sublime American Senate in a new position; its fifty-two senators see-sawing in full deliberation, like the wise birds of a rookery in a breeze.40
Charles Dickens made a parallel observation in his American Notes, finding a rocking chair aboard a steamship on the Connecticut river: “But even in this chamber there was a rocking-chair. It would be impossible to get on anywhere, in America, without a rocking-chair.”41 (Note the symmetry here: Dickens in a travelogue finds a rocker on a steamer; Tubb reads in his rocker to approximate the pitch and roll of steamboat journeys.) The novelist seems to appreciate his seesawing surroundings, but it is tough to tell what exactly gets Martineau’s goat. The fact that the parlor women are vibrating?
While we often associate springs with energetic release (trampolines and Tigger’s tail, Pogo sticks and prank nut cans stuffed with a tubular snake) they can also dampen motion (shock absorbers) or cancel it altogether. In the mid-nineteenth century, upholstery springs were introduced into train seating to absorb the jolts of rail transit on passengers’ nervous systems: a public health concern, connected to both sexual and physical disturbances. “A compulsive link of this kind between railway-travel and sexuality is clearly derived from the pleasurable character of the sensations of movement”, wrote Sigmund Freud in his essay on infantile sexuality.42 Adults and adolescents “will react to rocking or swinging with a feeling of nausea, will be terribly exhausted by a railway journey, or will be subject to attacks of anxiety”. And, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch chronicled, The Lancet released a pamphlet on The Influence of Railway Travelling on Public Health in 1862, describing an ergonomic antidote to wobbling train cars. . . namely, more rocking:
The springs of railway carriages, the horse-hair seats (and the elastic floor of cork supplied to the new royal carriage), are recognitions of the principle, which the habitual traveler may wisely extend for himself by many expedients, if he keeps in view what he has to attain—elasticity.