The Amateur Emigrant, by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Amateur Emigrant, an autobiographical account of Stevenson's voyage from Scotland to California in 1879, is a rich and provocative work of late-Victorian travel writing and cultural criticism. It describes vividly how Stevenson mixed with 'steerage' passengers aboard an Atlantic steamship and experienced the indignities of a transcontinental emigrant train. The Amateur Emigrant engages critically with Victorian ideas about class, race, and gender, and makes an important...
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The Amateur Emigrant, an autobiographical account of Stevenson's voyage from Scotland to California in 1879, is a rich and provocative work of late-Victorian travel writing and cultural criticism. It describes vividly how Stevenson mixed with 'steerage' passengers aboard an Atlantic steamship and experienced the indignities of a transcontinental emigrant train. The Amateur Emigrant engages critically with Victorian ideas about class, race, and gender, and makes an important contribution to the literature of emigration. Stevenson's middle-class family and friends found the work so transgressive that it was withdrawn from publication at proof stage. It was published in bowdlerized form in 1895 and since then has rarely been available in the form in which Stevenson composed it.