A Diary in America, with Remarks on Its Institutions was published by Longman in 1839, based on Marryat’s extensive American travels of 1837–1838. Like Frances Trollope and Dickens, Marryat visited America as an already-famous writer and published his observations for a British audience hungry for information about the new democracy. Unlike Trollope’s Domestic Manners, Marryat’s book is relatively sympathetic — he admired much about American energy and enterprise — though he shares her distaste for slavery and for the rawer manifestations of democratic culture.
Marryat traveled widely: from the eastern seaboard to the Mississippi frontier, from Canada to the Deep South. His observations are those of a naval officer — practical, detailed, interested in technology and commerce — rather than those of a literary intellectual. He describes steamboat travel on the Mississippi, the mechanics of a slave auction, the frontier settlements of Wisconsin, Niagara Falls, the Philadelphia waterworks, and the social life of New York and Washington with equal attention and curiosity.
The book was less sensational than Trollope’s or Dickens’s American accounts and consequently less commercially successful, but it provides a more balanced view of antebellum America than either. Marryat’s professional background — he was used to judging systems by their practical effectiveness rather than their theoretical elegance — gives his observations a pragmatic quality that complements the more literary accounts of his contemporaries.
Collecting A Diary in America
First edition (Longman, London, 1839): Three volumes with a subsequent three-volume “second series.”
Market values:
- First edition (3 vols, first series): $200–$500
- Complete with second series (6 vols): $400–$1000
- Later reprints: $30–$75