Yes, Herman Melville sold a lot of books before he died, but it was his Typee, an account of “life among the savages,” that captured the popular imagination, not the unloved and disregarded Moby-Dick. Perhaps the most depressing part of seriously studying English literature is realizing just how little of it was actually read at any point in history by anyone. The printing presses of the Western world before the 20th century were kept humming not by Hawthorne or the Brontë sisters but instead by hastily written and only accidentally factual travelogues meant to shock and titillate the respectable middle class in an era when it was always difficult, frequently dangerous, and occasionally fatal to leave one’s home country. 

In 2024, rich people no longer fear international travel. They adore it. They’re addicted to it, at a level that would give Ozzy Osbourne pause. Instead, they’re terrified of “flyover country,” those nonplaces bereft of Starbucks and Apple stores but infested with toothless Deliverance caricatures who, in the words of Thomas Schaller and Paul Waldman, have created “what may be the most dangerous moment for American democracy since the Civil War.”