I think of
other Niagara Falls connections …
Frances
“Fanny” Wright, recall, was the social reformer who met with and tried to
convince Mary Shelley to join her at Nashoba, her settlement near Nashville, Tennessee,
the settlement where she’d hoped to purchase slaves, train and educate them,
release them, prepared for an occupation. Mary declined—though, as we’ve
seen—Frances Trollope joined her for a while, then quickly escaped to
Cincinnati, where she became a merchant before returning to England to become a
popular novelist—though not so popular as her son Anthony would one day become.
But Francis
Wright was in America more than once and during her travels visited Niagara
Falls. An account of her 1819 visit (fourteen years prior to Trelawny’s) appears
in her book Views of Society and Manners
in America (1821).[1]
She and her party stayed in rooms in a tavern about a half-dozen miles away,
and on the first night she told of hearing the rumbling of the Falls in the distance. The next day(s) they
approached and explored, and here’s a bit of what she said:
… we saw, on lifting our eyes, a corner of
the summit of this graceful division of the cataract hanging above the projecting
mass of trees, as it were in mid-air, like the snowy top of a mountain. Above,
the dazzling white of the shivered water was thrown into contrast with the deep
blue of the unspotted heavens. … From this spot (beneath the Table Rock) you feel, more than from any other, the height of
the cataract and the weight of its waters. It seems a tumbling ocean, and you
yourself a helpless atom amid these vast and eternal workings of gigantic
nature! … Never surely did nature throw together so fantastically so much
beauty with such terrific grandeur. … The shivering mortal stands on the brink ….
And yet
another visitor—who was there at the same time as Trelawny—was Fanny Kemble, a
member of the celebrated acting family, the Kembles, who lit the London stages
for decades.
(Pictures from my 1999 visit.)
(Pictures from my 1999 visit.)
[1] (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
UP, 1963). Her account of her time at the Falls appears on pp. 23–28.
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