This chapter introduces precursors to the claimant—the theatrical Yankee and his vehicle the trip play, in which Britons travelled to the United States, or Americans to Britain. The trip plays cast light on Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans, and on Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit and American Notes. In Tom Taylor’s Our American Cousin, a trip play involves a claimant, inaugurating patterns evident in the structure and characterization of subsequent claimant texts. The chapter relates mid-century transatlantic tensions to the creation and staging of Our American Cousin, as reflected in Great Exhibition dramas and the newsprint duels of The Times and the New York Herald. It also suggests that the play drew on a pedagogical relationship between Tom Taylor and an American student at Cambridge, Charles Astor Bristed.
Role of Emotional Entropy and Ethnocentric Paradigms in International Service-Learning