American Scenery (Volume II)

American Scenery, Volume II is the second volume of the famous illustrated book by Nathaniel Parker Willis, published in 1840. The second volume continues the topographical and descriptive treatment that the first volume began, with additional steel engravings by William Henry Bartlett of American scenic locations and additional descriptive prose by Willis.

The second volume extends the geographical coverage. The first volume had concentrated heavily on the Hudson River valley, the Catskills, Niagara Falls, and the major scenic locations of the Northeast that the Victorian taste considered most important. The second volume reaches further into New England, into the developing settled regions of the Old Northwest around the Great Lakes, and into selected Southern locations including Virginia and the Carolinas.

Bartlett’s engravings remain the visual heart of the book. He was working in the classical topographical tradition that English engravers had developed across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with substantial attention to picturesque composition and atmospheric handling of light, weather, and seasonal change. The American landscapes were new material for the established tradition, and Bartlett’s engravings showed European readers what the major American scenic regions actually looked like in a way that earlier verbal descriptions could not match.

Willis’s prose continues in the same light informed mode as the first volume. He combines straightforward topographical description with historical background on the various locations, anecdotes about local figures and incidents, and the cultivated observation that distinguished his magazine work. The whole production aims at the educated middle-class audience on both sides of the Atlantic that the early Victorian illustrated book market was reaching.

The two-volume set was one of the most successful illustrated books on American subjects of the early Victorian period and went through many editions across the following decades. Original copies are now valuable to collectors of early American illustrated books. For readers interested in early Victorian American travel literature or in the visual history of pre-Civil War America, the work remains essential. It pairs with Bartlett’s other illustrated travel books including Canadian Scenery and various European volumes.