The English visitor, returning from America, seems rarely to have found much to praise. Dickens, Trollope, Kipling—to mention only the Victorian big guns—cast a dyspeptic glance on the continent and found it wanting. ‘Hell with the lid off’, was Dickens’ judgment on Pittsburgh, and Kipling found little sign of gracious living in New York.

Travellers, it is true, can always find some evidence to confirm their own prejudices, and the Americans—in this, as in all else, a generous people—are liberal in providing it. Thus, innumerable films have prepared one for the usual Mid West town, but it is still a surprise to see it articulated, to realize that the image is not a Hollywood set inspired by a reading of Sinclair Lewis. A sort of Slough extending to infinity: it can underline the story of the man arriving at an American airport late at night, who, having booked in at the universal convention hotel, had to telephone room service in the morning to discover where he was. But generalizations of this sort are singularly unfaithful to the essential American fact. The Main Street snapshot, with its drive-in cinema and its ten-cent store, is as misleading as the British Tourist Board’s advertisements suggesting that England is all cottages with roses round the door.