The Grand Tour

In 1881, fifteen-year-old Amy returned to Germany to “finish her education.” A charming San Francisco woman, Mrs. Amelia Burrage, took the heiress and five other hardy and swashbuckling California girls with money to a beautifully furnished house in Dresden, originally constructed around 1730 for Augustus, elector of Saxony. It was as sumptuous as an apartment in Versailles. There, the “young, prankish and romantic little imps,” were expected to improve their equestrian skills, perfect their table manners and elocution, and learn how to play the part of, if not a perfectly plumed and perfumed princess, a fetching facsimile.

Amy Isabella Crocker as a teenager

According to Amy, the girls learned nothing at all of any practical value or educational merit but rather became proficient in a number of things that would make their dear old Victorian mothers reach for their prayer-books:

(It was) one of those curious schools which Europe creates especially for American girls where you learn…to act like a duchess, to flirt outrageously, to wear the clothes of a society woman ten years older than your age, to smoke, to drink and to carry on with the handsome, heel-clicking young officers of the court in their musical comedy uniforms…

The girls were schooled in the art of pleasing the young German noblemen. It was in Dresden that amorous Amy had her first experience being swept away by a dashing man. He was a certain German prince who had the handsomest uniform in the world, the most romantic saber-scars and a terrible reputation. They became engaged. It was very formal, but very short-lived lasting only a month.

The climax of Amy’s Dresden education was being presented at court to the King and Queen of Saxony. It was her graduation from childhood. With the assistance of a Paris couturier, coiffeurs and specialists in “maquillage,” Amy was made to look like “something between a wax doll and Catherine of Russia in full array.”

Mrs. Burrage was a fine woman, of good social standing in San Francisco. She took the job as duenna to the young women of the Wild West because her fortune at home needed some padding. She became bedazzled by the luxuries of the Old World and spent the wealthy California parents’ money recklessly. Like a magician’s assistant, one day she disappeared in a puff of smoke absconding with a sizeable chunk of fun money. Amelia Burrage left the six teenage girls alone at the Dresden mansion. They remained there for two months unchaperoned until their mothers got the news, arranged their affairs, and came to collect them.

Amy, all the more uninhibited without supervision, followed up her brief adolescent engagement, with a briefer adolescent affair. This time with a Spaniard:

The gentleman in question was a toreador. Perhaps not really a great matador (I seem to remember that he was the apprentice or perhaps the servant of one) but to me his greatness was simply enormous.

Most American girls of today will be left cold, as they say, at the idea of a toreador. They have known their Valentinos and their Novarros (whether on the silver screen or in front of the local drug-store), but for a fifteen-year-old tomboy, removed from early Sacramento ranches only by a boat-ride and several yards of silk court-dress, a real live toreador (in the Eighties, too) complete with be-buttoned and beribboned and be-caped costume, was something to take away the breath.

This one took mine.

His name was Miguel. As nearly as I can remember him now he was handsome in that classical, long-eyed, swarthy, swaggering way that Spaniards are supposed to have and all affect. He was brutal, conceited, haughty, passionate, direct, childish and completely irresponsible. He was accustomed to getting… or taking… whatever he wanted. He wanted me…

Mother Margaret learned of the abandonment of the girls, but knew nothing of their capricious hijinks and flirtations with unsuitable young paramours. She sped to Europe to personally extricate her daughter fearing the worst. A week after they left the glorious German city, young Miguel was killed in a corrida according to Amy’s 1936 memoirs.

Amy first told the story of her free-for-all finishing school experience and her engagement and romance to the Fort Worth Star Telegram in 1912. She then named her distinguished German nobleman as Prince Alexander of Saxe Weimar. The practical side of Amy toppled out of love with him when she learned that he paid $100 for a pair of boots. In the 1912 report, Amy recollected that the rebound romance after the German prince was not with Miguel the doomed toreador, but with a famous Spanish artist that she would not name. A little poetic license from a committed story teller. Amy claimed that this artist arranged “superb entertainments” that was her introduction to Bohemia, “a place where I’ve lived ever since.”

The Travel Agents

Amy was the only one of the five Crocker sisters who would be sent off to a finishing school. Mrs. Crocker, now in her late fifties, had high hopes that the decidedly boy crazy young coquette would become a bit more decorous and demure. The original plan was a full three-year stay. Amy’s education in Dresden was in fact cut short in a little over a year. In London the Crockers, Margaret, Amy and adolescent brother Elwood, were persuaded to go on a Grand Tour of Europe by travel agents Charles and Henry Gillig at the American Exchange on the Strand just across from the Charing Cross Railway station.

Charles Alvin Gillig

Billed as the headquarters for Americans in Europe, London’s American Exchange offered currency exchange, mail delivery, tourist information, hotel reservations and steamship and railroad tickets. They issued travelers’ circular notes, letters of credit and money orders. They sent telegrams and they held 600 mostly American newspapers in their reading room. They promoted European travel to the United States, and through the United States to Japan, China and Australia. The president of the Exchange was two term Congressman, four term U.S. Senator and Governor of Connecticut Joseph R. Hawley. The vice-president and general manager was Henry F. Gillig. Charles Alvin Gillig, Henry’s teen-aged brother, caught Amy’s eye.

The affairs of mother and daughter in Europe were managed by the American Exchange. The affair of Charles and Amy would be managed by Mother Margaret. Charles came from an accomplished and honorable self-made family. Not unlike the Crockers. Margaret approved of the pairing. Though she was not aware of unfinished Amy’s two entanglements with swaggering foreigners, Margaret Crocker had foresight and was wise enough to know that she needed to take a commanding role in her youngest daughter’s love life. By maternal suasion and a rare show of daughterly obedience an engagement was made. They were a lovely couple. Charles enjoyed showing off his bride to be.

Amy and Charles were singled out by noted actress and theater critic Olive Logan at the new play Queen and Cardinal by Walter Raleigh at the newly rebuilt Theatre Royal Haymarket at London’s West End. Amy wore, “a most lovely-pale blue and olive green toilet of richest satins, trimmed with gorgeous passementerie, [which] caused many a head to peer forward to catch a glimpse of her own with its crown of golden curls.” Olive continued, “Her much enamored fiancé, Charles Gillig, sat by her side, as happy as a king.”

Charles would get the notices a few weeks later, “Young Mr. Gillig is just at manhood’s threshold, full of life and spirits, well-educated, gentlemanly, and—I do not mind telling you in confidence—he is handsome as they make them, if not more so, nowadays…Charles Gillig has push, energy, good financial training, and is already second in charge of an establishment unique of its kind in the world.” They looked like a couple of lovers in Dresden china, with their rosy cheeks, their bright eyes, and their affectionate canoodling.

Henry Franz Gillig

Mr. Henry Franz Gillig was an internationally known personality. He believed firmly in giving generous hospitality to celebrities and notorieties as a means of pushing business. Henry was a brash American from Buffalo who had the audacity to throw a yearly Fourth of July party celebrating American independence in the heart of Great Britain. When Gillig hoisted an American flag for his first event in 1879, a London mob of ruffians trampled the offending stars and stripes under foot, then threatened to tear down the building and put a bullet in Gillig’s head. His charisma eventually won over the offended Londeners.

On Independence Day, 1887, Mr. Gillig gave a festival at the Grosvenor Gallery for 2,000 guests including painter James Whistler, actor Sir Henry Irving and comedian Marshall Wilder. Publisher and love interest Mrs. Frank Leslie assisted in received the guests and Colonel William F. Cody “Buffalo Bill” and his Wild West Show was hired to entertain his distinguished crowd.

Henry received press for his fantastic banquets–for preacher Henry Ward Beecher, Speaker of the House James Blaine, Augusta Bartholdi, who designed the statue of Liberty, and the Lord Mayor of London himself Robert Nichols Fowler. At the Blaine banquet there were no less than 27 prima donnas present including the great Adelina Patti…

Gillig became known as the new Columbus, who has rediscovered Europe for America. He crossed the Atlantic Ocean one hundred and twelve times. Henry acted as an intermediary between the statesmen of America and the statesmen and royalty of Europe. He managed the tours abroad of the late President Grant and many other noted Americans. He became friends with King Edward, Prince Bismarck, Andrew Carnegie, the Duke of Leck, the Duke of Cambridge, Lord Wolesley, the Duke of Cannaught, the Duke of Saxe Gotha, the great African explorer Henry M. Stanley and writer Bram Stoker. At the height of his popularity Henry Gillig was written into a three-part novel by William Fraser Rae, Miss Bayle’s Romance.

Henry proposed that on the day of the marriage of Charles and Amy, he would make his 19-year-old brother president of the American Exchange in Paris, which he was about to establish. Amy wanted to take her young stud home to the states with her. Henry F. Gillig was deeply displeased at the idea of his brother deserting him and after a kerfuffle with Mrs. Crocker, all of the funds Henry held for the Crockers were then withdrawn. Amy assured Charles that she had abundant means for both of them and wanted her husband to be absolutely independent. Charles saw a brighter future with the Crocker clan and decided to go traveling through Europe with his new fiancée.

Bildungsreisen

In truth Amelia Burrage did not break the bank in Dresden then skip town, abandoning her California ingénues like Amy’s memoirs reported. She actually escorted Amy to London to meet Margaret. Amelia was a queenly, distinguished and respectable woman with a crown of gray hair that glowed like a halo. She joined Amy and Margaret on the Ireland-Scotland leg of their Grand European tour.

From the Enlightenment into the mid-19th century, Grand Tours through Europe, known in Germany as Bildungsreisen were undertaken by the upper classes. The Grand Tour was a predominantly British aristocratic tradition, a sort of male finishing school or male rite of passage designed to rediscover the origins of European civilization and to experience what the British considered the greatest aspects and achievements of the past. Alongside instilling knowledge, the Grand Tour was a years long expedition used to form men’s virtues, character, identities and their emotional capacity. During the tour, these gentlemen of the gentry visited royal courts and aristocratic estates to teach them appropriate etiquette and social graces through practice. “They spent time at balls, at university, on hunts, in art galleries and pleasure gardens, among classical ruins, in cabinets of curiosities, churches and taverns,” according to Grand Tour scholar Sarah Goldsmith. She continues:

Tourists were expected to, and did, present a range of elite masculinities which included the polite, refined man of taste and the hardy, stoic man, and extended to the sensitive man of feeling, the enlightened man of science, the patriotic military leader, the convivial man of homosocial cheer, the libertine and others…

The successful tourist developed a flexible temper that could assimilate itself to every tone of society, “from the court to the cottage.” Men typically embarked on the Grand Tour around the age of 17 before marriage. Key destinations included the cities, courts and environs of France, the Low Countries of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, the German principalities, Austria, Switzerland and Italy, with occasional excursions further afield.

The aristocrats’ political, social and professional concerns determined their destinations. Each city had its allure for the classical education of the young noblemen. Rome and Florence were most important – the former as the home of classical civilization and the latter as the home and the source of the greatest examples of Renaissance artistic and architectural genius. The young aristocrats traveled with a band of merry men — tutors and mentors, an equerry to care for the horses, coachmen and domestics and other attendants, and a gaggle of protégés.

During this important stage in the development of tourism, travel remained confined to a minority of wealthy landed nobles and educated professionals. For them, traveling was a demonstration of power and an expression of their social status.

Margaret may not have sent her youngest daughter to Europe to tame her but instead may have seen in Amy, the striking social butterfly, the makings of a European princess, which she would become some 45 years later.

Bayard Taylor

James Bayard Taylor (1825–1878). Amy’s future father-in-law was Bayard’s foster brother.

The post-Napoleonic era marked the advent of American participation in the European Tour, whether for pleasure, personal interest, or educational/cultural purposes. Some Americans endowed The Grand Tour with the character of a high-minded literary expedition. An advance guard of prominent authors, among them Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, was followed to Europe by a procession of their faithful readers in search of all things venerable and exalted.

The chief American literary promoter of European travel at the tail end of the Grand Tour stage of the history of tourism was journalist and poet James Bayard Taylor of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. Bayard set sail for Liverpool in July 1844 with a cousin and a friend. Unlike his European counterparts, he made his first tour as the poor son of a farmer turned county sheriif. With some recognition locally as poet with some talent, Bayard persuaded personnel at the Saturday Evening Post, the United States Gazette, Graham’s Magazine and later Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune to fund his adventure in exchange for written accounts of his travels.

By combining thrift, winning charm, and his magazine labors, Taylor spent the next two years touring Europe, mostly on foot, supported himself during the whole time by his literary correspondence. The remuneration he received was in all only $1500. He returned to New York in 1846 and soon published a collection of popular travel pieces, Views Afoot, or Europe Seen with Knapsack and Staff. The New York Herald gave it a favorable review:

It is true, he did not travel en seigneur (a man of rank), but he derived more information than if he had: for there is no royal road to any kind of useful knowledge. It would expand very much the mind, and enlarge the heart of many a rich or titled man, if he occasionally should adopt the same system of traveling: and see mankind, as it were, incognito.

Taylor spent almost sixteen years traveling abroad – to Europe from Lapland to Greece and from the British Isles to the Russian Empire, to Egypt and central Africa, to Palestine, Syria, and Istanbul, and to India, China, and Japan – between 1844 and his death in 1878, primarily as a news correspondent. His Grand Tour highlighted the American egalitarian spirit by demonstrating that travel was not the exclusive preserve of the wealthy and aristocratic – any able-bodied, ambitious, determined American male could experience it. He became a national folk hero.

“Off the Rialto,” from Picturesque Europe edited by Bayard Taylor Publisher: D. Appleton & Co. (New York, NY)

Bayard Taylor was an American Grand Tourist in Europe while it was still an arduous and challenging adventure. In the 1840s, crossing the ocean and touring Europe was not necessarily a common or easy task. Slow and uncomfortable means of transportation were deemed too arduous and inhospitable for women. The tour involved hardships and physical risks exemplified by the necessary engagement with the natural phenomena of the Alps and Vesuvius.

Phase Two

Thomas Cook, a brilliant entrepreneur from England, is seen as the pioneer of commercialized mass tourism that in time superseded the exclusive and elitist Grand Tour. Transportation innovations and advancements like steam powered locomotives and ocean liners as well as new rail lines like the Vitznau-Rigi railway, Switzerland Europe’s first mountain railway built in 1871, opened up new possibilities for the middle classes and those with less physical stamina. Cook organized group holidays offering an all-inclusive price that reduced the travelers’ costs.

When the tourists of the Crocker party got to Rome, the pinnacle of their journey, Amy Crocker was stricken with fever and was for weeks devotedly nursed by her affianced husband. Charles had to carry her in his arms to the railway station when they left for Spain. Amy’s Grand Tour of Europe was anything but typical.

On their way back to America, in the spring of 1882, Amy accepted attentions from another young gent. Charles objected so seriously that he broke the engagement when the party reached New York. Margaret stepped in and managed to have the youngsters kiss and make up. The party then started for Sacramento, and, much to Gillig’s astonishment and indignation, the same guy who had been too gallant on the steamer reappeared on the train and renewed his attentions to Amy.

The romance of Amy and Charles was rocky.

In October of 1882 the young couple celebrated the anniversary of their engagement at a dinner party at London’s Westminster Palace Hotel. The San Francisco Examiner reported that Amy broke off the engagement that same month. In less than two months, Amy would elope with Richard Porter Ashe, a law clerk from San Francisco. A month later The Standard of London would announce the marriage of Charles Alvin Gillig to another Amy, Amy Passingham, at the parish church in Milton Cambridgeshire. Charles kept in contact with Margaret, visiting her in California in 1883. He named his daughter Margaret Amy. Perhaps it was the overzealous approval of Amy’s mother that doomed the relationship.

Beyond her Dresden dalliances, Amy offered nothing of her education in Europe, her Grand Tour, in her 1936 memoirs. Charles Gillig would receive no mention at all. At first glance it would seem to have been merely a leisurely vacation rather than a journey through the origins of Western civilization and a study of the history of Western art and architecture. Amy certainly received all of the benefits of exposure to the rugged and the picturesque landscapes, the cultures, the museums, the ruins. There were undoubtedly a series of potent life lessons. Amy’s Grand Tour was first a sexual awakening journey. It was a christening. A coming of age. A tectonic shift. Amy would begin her discovery of her boundless sexual powers. She would also learn practical lessons in conducting unbridled affairs in foreign lands, a practice that she perfected and engaged in countless times in the years to come.

Her affair with Miguel the doomed bull fighter as reported in her memoirs reads like a romance novel:

He had seen admiration in my eyes. He flashed his teeth at me and flourished a be-jeweled sombrero and waited for me to come to him. These are not quite the facts of the case but it amounted to that. My vanity prefers to leave the intimate details out of the story.

I came, all right. I made secret dates with him. I heard him through my ears, my eyes, my flesh, my pores…saying phrases that sent maggots into my brain, poured brimstone into my blood. In the same instant he could be my master or at my feet. His touch left scars on my soul. And when he kissed me, his breath proclaimed the fire that was to follow its vapor and bathed my body and heart in its madness while his hands gave off their electricity.

Unbridled Amy would have a ten year love affair with the great hedonist, Tantric master and ceremonial magician Aleister Crowley, “The Wickedest Man is the World.” He found her lovemaking skills “astonishing.” Amy later found herself in the arms of legendary Latin lover Rudolph Valentino, then 30 years her junior. Her sexual prowess and powers increased exponentially over the decades.

The New Grand Tour

The time of the Grand Tour had passed. After the opening of the Transcontinental Railroad and the Port Said-Suez Canal in 1869 the goal posts were moved. Adventurous aristocrats in the second half of the 19th century wanted to circle the globe. In 1872, Thomas Cook organized and led the world’s first round-the-world tour. Henry Gillig opened up shop the following year. Also in 1873, Jules Verne would publish the immensely popular Around the World in 80 Days. Thomas Cook’s first journey circumnavigating the globe took 222 days and covered more than 29,000 miles. His group took in America, Japan, China, India and ended up in Egypt. The advertising cost for that trip was £300. Cook and Gillig advertised in each other’s publications and sometimes ran ads together.

In the fall of 1883, Hattie Crocker, Amy’s first cousin, would embark on her trip around the world with Lord Mayor of London Sir Sydney Waterlow. It would be eleven years before Amy would realize her Grand World Tour dream. Following Bayard Taylor’s example, Amy would write a travel book offering great poetic detail about her life changing, saturnalian odyssey. Crocker returned with a deep and meaningful appreciation for the cultures of Eastern Civilization that eclipsed her love of Europe and the U.S. Amy’s literary, journalistic and anthropological focus would be on Hawaii, Japan, China, Borneo and India.

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Aftermath

Henry F. Gillig never married but was linked romantically to Mrs. Frank Leslie and singer Miss Emma Thursby. It was reported that he took a special trip to California in 1887 to put the make on his brother’s former fiancée, Amy Crocker, only a few weeks after she succeeded in procuring a divorce from first husband Porter Ashe. Strangely Amy would marry another Henry Gillig, no relation, two years later.

The American Exchange went bankrupt with an estimated liability of 4 million dollars in London on April 13, 1888. It’s fall was attributable to Gillig’s vain-glorious desire to make the exchange the grandest thing on earth. Exchange cash was spread out all over the globe, apportioned off to something like 2,800 correspondents. The collapse left hundreds of touring Americans stranded in all parts of the globe. Investors got alarmed when dividends had been passed two years in a row in order to extend the arms of the exchange in European and Asiatic cities and in order to make some needed improvements in the London office. A furious Mark Twain who lost $10,000 (300K today), put the blame solely on Gillig, “…it is good riddance to bad rubbish if he has quit the country,” Twain remarked in a very non humorist mood.

American Exchange money signed by Henry Gillig. The firm went bankrupt in 1888 leaving travelers stranded all over the world.

Gillig slide didn’t end there. He lost law suits against his former love interest Mrs. Frank Leslie and the legendary actor Edwin Booth (brother of the Lincoln assassin). Henry was charged in a civil action instituted by Raymond W. Kenney, a furrier, to recover $2,600. He was locked up in Ludlow Street jail briefly when he couldn’t make bail. He made news when he punched the left jaw of fellow financier Henry S. Ives with his left duke. He then smashed him with an umbrella. Both parties claimed to be the custodian of railroad bonds held by Miss Christine Nilsson, the actress.

Henry F. Gillig became a promoter of various financial schemes. In 1891, Henry F. moved to Bronxville and became the proprietor of the drug store at 197 Bedford street in Brooklyn. Henry held an interest in the Excelsior Fur and Glove Sewing Machine Company, the Reynolds Card Manufacturing Company and the American Fur Company. Money matters caused a blood vessel to burst in his head in April of 1897, when those companies fell on hard times.

Henry financially backed the the theatrical management partnership of Abbey, Schoeffel and Grau, who were the first to bring grand opera to America at the old Metropolitan Opera House. This first season was a critical success but a financial flop loosing 300K. The theater performers represented by the firm didn’t fair any better. Among all the long list of great and lesser actors and actresses that the firm managed and Gillig financed, Sir Henry Irving and Sarah Bernhardt were almost the only ones who brought a profits to the partners. The Lillian Russell Company lost the firm a whopping $200,000. In spite of the calamitous first season at the Metropolitan, Henry is credited, along with impresario Henry E. Abbey, with establishing grand opera as a permanent institution in New York City.

Another positive in the tumultuous career of Henry Gillig occurred when he assisted hundreds of German vine growers looking to emigrate to the U.S. in 1904. He went on an expedition to California combing the countryside from the north to the south looking for fertile lands. The vineyards along the Rhine had been deteriorating for several years. Gillig thought that the Rhine people could have as much success producing wine in California as the German brewers who made millions in New York and Milwaukee. For this the prescient Henry also deserves some acclaim.

Part of the reason for the collapse of the American Exchange was competition right in his London neighborhood by a new agency, the United States Exchange which opened up shop in 1884 at 9 Strand, Charing Cross, two doors from the Grand Hotel. The president of this firm was Charles Alvin Gillig his brother.

Charles became a successful rival. He went on to become the editor and publisher of several books of value to American and English tourists. Among them were Tours and Excursions in Great Britain, New Guide to the United States, London Guide, published by Rand McNally which had at least 16 editions and the Tape Map of London, the most comprehensive map available to any point in the English Metropolis. He became a godfather to traveling Americans. By 1896, 10,000 people registered on the books at his Exchange every twelve months.

At the turn of the century Charles became an American general passenger agent of the Great Eastern railway and proprietor of a new agency — the American Rendezvous at Trafalgar Square. The Gillig brothers reconciled in the mid 90s.

Charles was divorced twice. His marriage to the second Amy ended with charges that his wife committed adultery with a London clergyman. The affidavit alleged that Mrs. Gillig began a life of shame as “the mistress of her own mother’s paramour.” Charles lost custody of his two kids. His second marriage to Carrie Alta Osgood lasted nine years.

With World War I, the tourism industry screeched to a halt. In the spring of 1915, his life in disarray, Charles Alvin Gillig walked up the steps of Westminster hospital, drew a revolver and shot and killed himself. A coroner’s jury rendered a verdict that Mr. Gillig took his life while temporarily insane. He had been suffering from insomnia and depression and had been very much worried over the falling off of his business because of the war.

Charles Gillig’s will asked that his body be cremated and the ashes thrown to the winds. He had written on an envelope: “Love to Harry and all friends. Keep this envelope as a remembrance.”

Stavanger, Norway by Bayard Taylor, c. 1856

A year after returning from his Grand Tour Bayard Taylor would meet his new foster brother, the recently orphaned George Gouraud, Amy Crocker’s future father-in-law. Gouraud worshiped his brother as an adventurer and a creative genius. He would name his second son after him.

Bayard Taylor, the farmer’s son, lacked a formal education or substantial wealth, but, more so than any other nineteenth-century American traveler, preserved the essential spirit of the early Grand Tour; he went not just to roam about but to improve himself by learning as much as he could of the people and cultures he encountered. Bayard ushered in a new era of tourism that began to cater to the middle classes.

Taylor enjoyed a classic American success: up from poverty to affluence, from obscurity to fame, from crudity to elegance. When he returned to the United States, his descriptions of foreign lands generated demand for appearances on the lecture circuit. With his book sales and his lectures he made a small fortune. As his career progressed, he formed friendly relations with some of the most prominent American literary and scholarly figures of the mid-nineteenth century, including Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Bancroft, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, and Herman Melville. Taylor was chosen over Walt Whitman to deliver a poem at the nation’s Centennial Celebration in Philadelphia in 1876. He later served as a diplomat in both Russia and Germany.

Most of Taylor’s 60+ volumes are forgotten today. Some highlights include El Dorado or Adventures in the Path of Empire (1850) about the California Gold Rush; Joseph and His Friend: A Story of Pennsylvania (1870), which is today called America’s first gay novel; The Prophet: A Tragedy (1874), which is about Joseph Smith and Brigham Young; Echo Club and Other Literary Diversions (1876), which lambasts Walt Whitman, Bret Harte, and Joaquin Miller and Lands of the Saracen, (1859) which is credited with introducing America to hashish. Bayard is best remembered for his poetic and excellent translation of Goethe’s Faust (2 vols, Boston, 1870-71) in the original metres.

 

Coming soon–More Bayard Taylor

 

Selective Bibliography

“Views Afoot,” New York Tribune, Dec 16, 1846, p 1.

“Hauling Down the Flag,” Greenwood County Republican, Dec 12, 1879, p 3.

Olive Logan, “Reappearance of Mrs. Scott-Siddons: Interesting People,” Cincinnati Enquirer Nov 13, 1881, p 9.

“A Marriage with Money,” Topeka Daily Capital, Nov 8, 1881.

“The Paper Carnival,” San Francisco Newsletter, Oct 21, 1882, p 8.

“News of the Week: The Gilligs,” Chicago Tribune, Dec 30, 1883, p 12.

“Our Fourth of July Celebrations,” The Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times (London, England), July 09, 1887; p 29.

“England—Ball Given at the Grosvenor Gallery,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, Aug 6, 1887, p 402.

“Gillig Engaged,” The Evening News, Sep 28, 1887.

“Up the Flume: Gillig’s American Exchange in London Fails for Four Millions,” The Record Union, Apr 14, 1888.

“The Wrecked Exchange,” The Times (Philadelphia), May 12, 1888, p1.

“Stayner Too Scientific to Allow Gillig to Break his Jaw,” Boston Globe, Dec 6, 1888, p5.

“Booth and Barrett,” Inter Ocean, Feb 20, 1889, p 3.

“Gotham Gossip,” The Times, Picayune, Mar 20, 1892, p 12.

“Lillian Proved a Costly Star,” SF Examiner, May 24, 1896, p 1.

“Where Rich Americans Go,” The Kansas City Star, Jun 7, 1896, p 7.

“Promoter in Ludlow Street Jail,” The Courier News, May 8, 1897, p 1.

“Buffalo Man’s Success in London,” Buffalo Evening News, Feb 22, 1898, p 1.

“Famous Giver of Dinners,” Buffalo Evening News, Jun 9, 1900, p7

“Henry F. Gillig Here,” Evening Star, Feb 24, 1904, p 11.

“Large Colony Anticipated,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 14, 1904, p 13.

“He talks of Santa Cruz: Henry F. Gillig, Traveler, Journalist, Diplomat, Gives his Opinion of Santa Cruz and California,” Evening Sentinel (Santa Cruz), May 20, 1904, p1

“War Drove Him to Suicide,” Barre Daily Times, Mar 22, 1915, p6

Ueli Gyr, The History of Tourism: Structures on the Path to Modernity, (Institut für Europäische Geschichte, 2010).

John Stephan Kemp, “Bayard Taylor and his Transatlantic Representations of Germany: A Nineteenth-Century American Encounter.” Dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy of History, (The University Of New Mexico, May, 2014).

Sarah Goldsmith, Masculinity and Danger on the Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour, (University of London Press, 2020).

Howard Hope, The Remarkable Life of George Gouraud, (UK: Book Printing, Remus House, 2021).