Thomas Prince’s Travels and the Invention of Britain

From 1709 to 1711, Thomas Prince (1687–1758), recent Harvard graduate and future minister of Boston’s Old South Church, traveled between Boston, Barbados, and London. His travel journal (now in the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society) excerpted passages from English poetry and popular song from the previous five decades. By transcribing the works of a politically and religiously diverse range of authors (Whig and Tory, Nonconformist and Anglican), Prince made the case for a tolerant, patriotic, and cosmopolitan Britishness. In late February and early March 1710, while Prince was in London, Anglican minister Henry Sacheverell was impeached by Parliament for preaching a sermon questioning Nonconformists’ loyalty. During his trial, antiDissenter rioting broke out in London and spread across England and Wales. As Prince transcribed poems for and against Sacheverell, he bemoaned the factional contention that was undermining British unity. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Chandler Robbins Gilman and Chandler Robbins, both greatgrandnephews of Prince, incorporated brief excerpts from his travel journal in fictional tales and sketches. Gilman and Robbins used these fragments to symbolize the cultural continuity between England, New England, and the United States, overlooking the contingency and fragility of British identity in Prince’s account.