Prescott’s Visit to England, 1850
In the mid-nineteenth century, writes Roger Howell, the eminent historian of Spain, Mexico and Peru paid a most successful visit to the British Isles.
In a well-known prophecy, Horace Walpole predicted in 1774 that the next Augustan age would dawn on American shores and that there might well emerge a Thucydides at Boston. In the years immediately after American independence, there seemed little chance that this would be so.
American historical writing of the post-Revolutionary period may have had its merits, but it did not elicit much interest among English and European critics. Then, within a generation, the picture was radically altered. American historians began to treat broader—indeed, in the case of Parkman and Prescott, imperial—themes and to treat them with a combination of literary skill and scholarly concern that soon drew the attention of the English reviews.
And as Prescott himself confessed, it was the approbation of the English critical quarterlies that he most desired. Though firmly and solidly a product of New England, Prescott was anxious for international recognition of his work, and the recognition he had come to value most highly was that of the English and Scottish reviewers.
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