American Scenery, Vol. 1

American Scenery, Volume 1 is the first volume of a famous illustrated book by Nathaniel Parker Willis, published in two volumes in 1840. The book combined Willis’s descriptive prose with steel engravings of American landscape views drawn by the English topographical artist William Henry Bartlett, and was one of the most successful illustrated books published about America in the early Victorian period.

Willis (1806-1867) was one of the most successful American magazine writers of the early and mid nineteenth century. He had built a career as a travel writer, magazine editor, and society columnist whose work appeared widely in American and British periodicals. His prose was light, observant, and pitched at the educated middle-class audience that the new mass-circulation magazines were developing across the period.

The American Scenery project began when Bartlett toured the United States in 1836 to produce drawings for what was conceived as a topographical celebration of American landscape. The engravings cover the major scenic locations that Victorian taste considered most worth illustrating. The Hudson River valley and the Catskills feature prominently. Niagara Falls receives extended treatment across several engravings. Various New England scenes appear, along with views from the Southern states and from the rapidly developing Western country.

Willis wrote the accompanying text in his characteristic light and informed style. The prose combines straightforward topographical description with historical background, with anecdotes about the various places and the people associated with them, and with the kind of cultivated observation that Willis brought to all his travel writing. The whole production was aimed at the British middle-class audience that wanted to know more about America and at the substantial American audience that liked to see its own country presented with European production standards.

The book remains one of the most important visual records of pre-Civil War American landscape. Many of the scenes Bartlett drew have since been transformed by industrial development and urban expansion, and the engravings preserve a now-vanished American countryside. For readers interested in early Victorian American travel literature or in the visual history of nineteenth-century America, the book is essential.