CHAPTER VII
ENGLAND AND AFTER

1850–1852

After Two Years of farming on Staten Island, Olmsted began to move toward the career of traveling and writing that would absorb much of his energy in the next ten years. His first opportunity came in the spring of 1850, when John Hull Olmsted and Charles Loring Brace were planning a walking tour of England and the Continent. Olmsted pleaded with his father for permission to leave the farm for most of the growing season and join his friends in their travels. His father agreed, but even his brother thought his decision to leave the farm for so long would confirm the widely held view that he was changeable and lacked fixed purpose. “Won’t it add to the preconceived notions people have of his stability,” John wrote Frederick Kingsbury, “—the stability of change!”

The two surviving letters that Olmsted wrote during the trip are included in this chapter. One is an account he wrote for the Hartford Daily Courant of a long debate in the House of Commons that was Sir Robert Peel’s last appearance there. The other tells of his visit to Olmsted Hall, the ancestral dwelling of the family in Cambridgeshire. It also recounts some of the activities of Olmsted and his friends in London, where, as John said, they saw “the best pictures, best buildings, even the best gardens and parks, and not only these things but the best men”.

When Olmsted returned to America in October 1850 after an absence of six months, he was depressed by what he found. In place of the exciting procession of earnest thinkers and reformers he had encountered on his trip, there were his frivolous and materialistic countrymen. He decided that some good should come of what he had learned on his trip and began to seek a way to exert “increased influence. . . over others.” He urged Charles Loring Brace, who was still in Europe, to prepare to join in this effort, and his brother John echoed his thoughts. “We want ten thousand such apostles [337]of ideas as you to come and work, and work against the material tendency that is swamping us,” John wrote his friend. “That will be your exact post when you return. . . .“

Olmsted chose to influence his countrymen by writing on important social issues. During the voyage back from England, he wrote an article about the life of merchant seamen in which he proposed new educational and recreational facilities to improve their lot. He published it anonymously the following year in the American Whig Review as “A Voice from the Sea.” Meanwhile he wrote a glowing description of “The People’s Park at Birkenhead, Near Liverpool,” which appeared in the May 1851 Horticulturist. He then went on to write a two-volume account of his English walking tour entitled Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England. The first volume was published in February of 1852 and the second in October. At the same time he began to search out American subjects to investigate and describe.

In the summer of 1852 he visited the North American Phalanx, a Fourierist community at Red Bank, New Jersey. He described it in the letter to Charles Loring Brace included in this chapter, and in an article published in the New York Daily Tribune on July 29, 1852. His concern, as in his book on England, was to find social practices and innovations that might improve American society. These writings of 1852 were the prelude to Olmsted’s major literary enterprise, his travels in the South from 1852 to 1854 and the three major books of description and analysis of the region that he wrote during the following five years.