In 1844 a nineteen-year-old farmer's son, printer's apprentice, and aspiring poet – Bayard Taylor – sailed for Liverpool with two friends and with commissions for travel essays from the Saturday Evening Post and the United States Gazette. Taylor grew up in a society that linked European travel with cultural aspirations; as he says, “An enthusiastic desire of visiting the Old World haunted me from early childhood.” However, his limited means led him to design “a more humble method of seeing the world [that] would place within the power of almost every one what has hitherto been deemed the privilege of the wealthy few” (15). And so, drawing on the precedent of German journeymen and university students, Taylor became perhaps the first young American tourist to backpack through Europe. His two-year travels on foot through Britain, Germany, France, and Italy resulted in periodical essays, which he collected in his first and quite popular travel book: Views A-Foot; or, Europe seen with Knapsack and Staff (1846). They also resulted in a career as a professional travel writer, newspaper correspondent, lecturer, poet, novelist, translator, and finally ambassador to Prussia.

This trajectory – from his father's substantial Pennsylvania farm through travel and travel writing to the U.S. embassy in Berlin – maps out one route toward class and gender formation in the antebellum United States. The conjunction of travel and print culture offered the possibility of gaining and demonstrating cultural authority, and Taylor's democratic extension of the means of travel ensured that this possibility was available to “almost every one,” that is, most literate citizens in the post-Jacksonian era of universal white male adult suffrage. One crucial demonstration of cultural authority in these travel writings was the caliber of affective and aesthetic responses to the scenes of tourism. Although Views A-Foot also engages other implications of European tourism, my interest is in the role of aesthetic responses in the tourist's performance of a culturally elite subjectivity. As was the case with most Americans, Taylor experienced and composed particularly heightened responses to landscapes in Italy.