Audiobook · read by volunteers
Young Americans Abroad
John Overton Choules (1801–1856)
Read by Sibella Denton · 56 chapters · 8 h 15
About the book
It is 1851, and the Crystal Palace Exhibition has drawn visitors from around the world to London. The Reverend Dr. Choules sets out from Newport, Rhode Island, with three teenage students, who must leave the fourth member of their well-born quartet at home. All four have promised to write letters about the journey, and this book is the result: a lively series of accounts of ships, cities, castles, museums, English customs and the sights of the Exhibition itself. Written in the form of letters from young Americans to their friends, it combines instruction and amusement in the manner of the time. One LibriVox volunteer reads the introduction and 55 letters, in about eight hours. The letters are lively, informative and often amusing. The result is part travel guide, part family album and part window on mid-century manners.
Introduction
John Overton Choules lived from 1801 to 1856. He was an English-born Baptist minister who spent much of his career in the United States, serving congregations in Rhode Island and New York, and who wrote a number of books, including travel narratives for young readers. Young Americans Abroad, published in 1852, belongs to this last group, and it grew out of a European tour that he made with several young men in 1851.
The year is of special interest. The Great Exhibition, held in the Crystal Palace in London’s Hyde Park, opened in May 1851 and was a showcase of industry and invention from many countries. The American visitors saw it and travelled on to other places, and the book follows their movements with the kind of detail that readers of the time expected: descriptions of landscapes, historic buildings, famous people, hotels and journeys, with moral reflections never far away. It was meant to inform and to amuse young people who might never have the chance to see such places.
The format of the book is a series of letters, from Letter 00, the introduction, to the numbered letters that follow. This gives it a fresh and informal tone, and many of the letters are short enough to be heard in a few minutes. For a modern listener, the interest lies partly in the places described and partly in the attitudes revealed by the writer, those of a cultured American of the mid-nineteenth century looking at Europe.
The recording has 56 parts and lasts about eight and a quarter hours. It is read by a single LibriVox volunteer. The letters can be heard in any order, a few at a time, and give the pleasant sense of travelling with companions who keep a good-natured diary.
Public domain
John Overton Choules died in 1856: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text