An American in London
In 1844, US businessman Elizur Wright recorded the highs and lows of a visit to Victorian Britain. Richard Sugg reveals what he found
In 1844, the Connecticut businessman Elizur Wright penned a series of letters describing a six-month visit he made to Britain. The result, writes is a remarkable, unvarnished outsider’s account of the world’s first industrial nation in all its grime and glory
Elizur Wright is one of the most remarkable Americans of whom you have probably never heard. Born into a fiercely pious family in Connecticut in 1804, Wright (pictured left) came close to studying for the priesthood, yet spent his final years as an atheist, campaigning against his country’s puritanical obscenity laws. In between, he taught mathematics, practised engineering, risked his personal safety fighting for the abolition of slavery, reformed American life insurance and developed a vigorous interest in the social and political problems afflicting Great Britain.
That latter passion was sharpened by a trip Wright made to Britain in 1844. This was nominally a personal business venture, designed to boost his family fortunes. But Wright also used the trip to engage in walks, tours and political campaigns in locations as varied as London, Essex, Suffolk, Yorkshire, Newcastle and Scotland. As such, the trip offered him an immersive experience of Britain in the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign.
Wright was a man with a hungry eye for all the details of social life, landscape, architecture and industry, and when that eye alighted on a detail that commanded his attention – the beauty of a Lake District mountain, the privilege of Etonian aristocrats, the desperation of London’s poor – he felt moved to record what he saw.
These observations would burst forth, in a wealth of vibrant colour, from a series of letters he wrote between April and September 1844 chronicling his experiences. As the following examples prove, his correspondence painted a portrait of Britain that was scathing, admiring, appalled, awestruck – and never short of fascinating.