The ‘Most-Talked-Of Creature in the World’: The ‘American Girl’ in Victorian Print Culture

Abstract

As a celebrated and vilified figure in the British press, the American girl constituted yet another prominent form of contested femininity in Victorian Britain, one which Bob Nicholson suggests was reflective of a growing fetishisation of America in British print culture, as well as of a broader cultural anxiety about the effects of the same. If Eliza Lynn Linton’s ‘Girl of the Period’ constituted a threat to the moral health of the nation from within, then the American girl was seen by many as an invasive threat to femininity from beyond Britain’s borders. Nicholson’s essay demonstrates the potency of the girl as a symbolic force in Victorian Britain, as well as the crucial role of the periodical in shaping the various, often competing cultural forms that she assumed.