London

London is the first major European setting of Amy Curtis March’s foreign journey, and its decisive significance lies in the way the city turns travel into a performance of observation. From a front window of the Bath Hotel on Piccadilly, Amy records London in notebook-like fragments, moving between personal excitement, comic misunderstanding, fashionable consumption, aristocratic display, and encounters with historic and theatrical culture.

Arrival and First Impressions

Amy arrives in London after a sea voyage during which she sends one unhappy message from Halifax but then travels delightfully, seldom ill and spending much of the time on deck. She reaches the city with Aunt Mary and Uncle, who chooses the Bath Hotel on Piccadilly because he stayed there years earlier and refuses to go elsewhere. The hotel is not fashionable, and the family does not intend to remain long, yet its front window gives Amy a privileged place from which to begin reading the city.

Her first London experience is damp and obscured rather than immediately picturesque. Rain leaves little to see except fog and umbrellas, so the party rests, unpacks, and shops between showers. This subdued arrival quickly gives way to the pleasures of preparation: Aunt Mary supplies Amy with a white hat and blue feather, a matching muslin dress, and a mantle, while Amy buys ribbons in Regent Street and plans to obtain gloves in Paris. Clothing makes the journey visible and helps Amy imagine herself as an elegant, affluent traveler, even as her delighted tone preserves the freshness of someone still learning the conventions of foreign society.

Comic Travel and Cultural Misreading

London’s unfamiliar systems produce one of Amy’s most revealing comic episodes. For amusement, Amy and Flo order a hansom cab while Aunt Mary and Uncle are away and set out alone, only to discover afterward that this is not considered proper for young ladies. Once enclosed by the cab’s wooden apron, they find themselves unable to reach the driver, who sits above and behind them. He drives so quickly around corners that Flo becomes frightened, while Amy calls, waves her parasol, and discovers that neither gesture can control the vehicle.

The cab becomes an object that first promises independence and then exposes the travelers’ helplessness. Amy finally finds a small door in the roof, through which a red eye appears and the driver asks, "Now, then, mum?" She gives an order, and his exaggeratedly solemn response makes the horse walk as if going to a funeral. When she requests greater speed, he returns to his former helter-skelter pace, leaving the girls to resign themselves to their fate. The episode transforms fashionable mobility into a miniature adventure: Amy wants the freedom of the city, but the city’s mechanisms operate according to rules she does not yet understand.

The journey also sharpens Amy’s habit of interpreting what she sees through mistaken or playful analogies. On the way to London, she and Flo misidentify a brewery as a gray place among the trees, a colliery as a gallows, and geese as a flock of lambs. Uncle’s corrections puncture their romantic impressions without extinguishing their pleasure. London therefore begins before the hotel, in the comic distance between what the young travelers imagine and what the experienced observer recognizes.

Hyde Park and the Social Spectacle

On a fair day, Amy visits Hyde Park, which lies close to the hotel, and presents the excursion as proof that she and her companions are more aristocratic than they appear. The surrounding geography is marked by elite presence: the Duke of Devonshire lives nearby, his footmen lounge at the back gate, and the Duke of Wellington’s house is not far away. London appears here as a visible hierarchy, where houses, servants, vehicles, clothing, and leisure all announce social position.

Hyde Park offers Amy an almost theatrical panorama. Fat dowagers move about in red and yellow coaches, richly dressed servants ride behind them, powdered coachmen sit in front, and smart maids accompany rosy children. Handsome girls appear half asleep; dandies lounge in unusual English hats and lavender gloves; tall soldiers wear short red jackets and caps tilted to one side. Amy longs to sketch these figures because the park supplies a succession of carefully arranged types, each distinguished by costume, posture, occupation, or rank.

Rotten Row intensifies the contrast between spectacle and cultural difference. Amy explains the name as "Route de Roi," or the king’s way, but finds the avenue more like a riding school. The horses are splendid and the men, especially the grooms, ride well, while the women seem stiff and bounce in ways that violate Amy’s own standards of horsemanship. She compares their appearance to the women in a toy Noah’s Ark and imagines showing them an energetic American gallop. The park is thus both an attraction and a field of comparison: Amy admires London’s scale and ceremony while measuring its manners against American ideas of movement and style.

The social life of Rotten Row is not limited to riding. Old men, stout ladies, and little children all participate, while young people flirt openly. Amy notices a pair exchanging rosebuds, since wearing one in the buttonhole is fashionable, and judges the custom a pleasant idea. Her account turns a public promenade into a coded social world in which gestures, flowers, clothing, and modes of riding communicate belonging.

Historic and Theatrical London

Amy’s London culminates in a visit to Westminster Abbey, which she refuses to describe in detail because description seems inadequate to its effect. She calls the experience sublime, allowing a single evaluative word to stand where an inventory of architectural or historical particulars would fail. The Abbey interrupts the comic and fashionable surfaces of the earlier scenes with a sense of monumental significance.

The same day ends with a theatrical performance by Fechter. Amy calls it an appropriate conclusion to the happiest day of her life, linking London’s historic grandeur to its modern entertainment. The city’s power lies in this succession of registers: fog and umbrellas, Regent Street ribbons, a runaway hansom cab, aristocratic coaches, public flirtation, Westminster Abbey, and the stage. London is not presented as a single stable image but as a sequence of experiences that Amy collects, sketches, and records.

Narrative Function and Significance

London is filtered through Amy’s first-person notebook correspondence rather than through impersonal description. Her selective method—giving only "bits" from the notebook because she has done nothing but sketch and scribble—makes the city feel immediate while also revealing the limits of her understanding. The reader receives London as she receives it: in vivid fragments, interrupted by weather, clothing, jokes, errors, and sudden impressions of grandeur.

The setting also dramatizes Amy’s developing cosmopolitan identity. She is eager to master foreign conventions, shops for the wardrobe of a traveler, observes aristocratic society, distinguishes proper and improper conduct, and compares English riding with American movement. Yet her most memorable experiences are not those in which she appears fully in command. The hansom cab leaves her helpless, the park invites amused criticism, and Westminster Abbey exceeds her descriptive powers. London therefore enlarges Amy by confronting her with a world that cannot be reduced to her prior expectations; its pleasures depend on the continuing tension between confident self-presentation and delighted discovery.