The Amateur Emigrant

Description

In the late 19th-century, Stevenson journeyed in America to study an involvement course in the loss and misery of emigrant steam and rail travel. It was a reprehension to the author’s romantic view of the New World. He explains in The Amateur Emigrant, “For many years, America was to me a sort of promised land.” Furthermore, America had the added supplication of freedom from constraint and convention: “The war of life was still conducted in the open and on free barbaric terms.” He contemplates that the emigrants, however, were entirely life’s failures because they were not brave seekers of the golden land of democracy and equality. Stevenson writes, “The more I saw of my fellow passengers, the less I was tempted to the lyric note.”

Not only was his personal observation were affected but also his writing, this caused in a strict prose style. The chapter on “Despised Races”, illustrates racial discrimination between the Native American, “over whose own hereditary continent we had been steaming all these days”, and the Chinese, captive to their own rail car on the train and, same with the Native Americans often disparaged by fellow travelers. His odd experience yielded into something pleasurable as the train goes along California. He hopes for the breaking of the dawn, “The day was breaking . . . everything was waiting, breathless, for the sun . . . and suddenly . . . the city of San Francisco, and the bay of gold and corn, were lit from end to end with summer daylight.”

Stevenson is a travel writer, who writes about the nature and personal observations. He also writes about the local people he meets and their culture. The Amateur Emigrant looks forward to positivity and high regard to democracy.
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