Majestic Nature of the North

"Thomas Kelah Wharton's travel diaries provide an intimate glimpse into the society of early nineteenth-century America. As a young immigrant from England, the eldest son of a wealthy merchant who fell on hard times, Wharton (1814-1862) navigates the complex world of New York and the Hudson River Valley in the early 1830s and his diaries reveal a vibrant cultural and social scene. Encounters with the Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole; author Washington Irving; Sylvanus Thayer, superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point; the Greek Revival architect Martin Thompson, and many others enliven the story. Wharton was a gifted pen-and-ink artist, and his faithful drawings provide rare and wonderful views of an America just beginning to industrialize. Wharton's journals skip two decades, and pick up in 1853 when Wharton--now an established professional living in New Orleans--brought his young family from New Orleans to Boston. The trip to Boston, richly illustrated with Wharton's fine drawings, illuminates the joys and hazards of travelling aboard steamboats and trains, and touches on the tensions growing between North and South. The journals show an inquisitive, observant mind at work, one with strong artistic opinions and religious views and a bent to Romanticism"--