Homeward the Course of Empire: The Popularization of the American West in Great Britain, 1850-1913

Images of the American West in Britain became prevalent in British popular culture during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. This popularity arose out of the shared ethic of the Anglo myth. This myth was based upon the confidence gained from a growing industrial complex and the application of the Christian Genesis to the new Edens, the American West and the British Empire. The Anglo myth could be found in British adventure novels set in both the West and empire. Buffalo Bill Cody used it in his Wild West, and Samuel Franklin Cody utilized it in his frontier melodramas as well as in creating his own flamboyant self-image. The continued existence of romantic, western imagery raises questions concerning myth and reality in the formation of thought about both the American frontier and the British Empire