Summary
Wilde begins by admitting he cannot picture America as an Elysium and knows nothing of its politics or trade. His first impressions are of a people comfortably dressed, always hurrying for a train, which is bad for romance, and living in the noisiest country on earth, woken by the steam whistle rather than the nightingale. American cities lack the beauty of Oxford or Winchester, and where Americans have tried to create beauty they have failed. But they apply science to life and honour inventors, and Wilde finds their machinery lovely: the water-works at Chicago are the most beautifully rhythmic thing he has seen. The inordinate size of everything, though, seems meant to bully the visitor.
Niagara disappoints him, as it must disappoint every bride taken there, and seeing it properly means wearing a yellow oil-skin. The six-day rail journey west is made worse by boys selling cheap pirated editions of his poems. He is never called 'Stranger', but Captain, Colonel or General, and he notes that many Americanisms, such as 'I guess', are old English kept alive in the colonies, as is Puritanism around Boston.
San Francisco's China Town is the most artistic town he knows: poor labourers drink from delicate china cups, while his hotel gives him a cup an inch and a half thick. In Salt Lake City the Tabernacle is shaped like a soup-kettle. At Leadville, the richest and roughest city in the world, he lectures the miners on the Ethics of Art and reads them Benvenuto Cellini, and they ask who shot him. They take him to a dancing saloon whose notice over the piano reads 'PLEASE DO NOT SHOOT THE PIANIST. HE IS DOING HIS BEST.', then down a mine in a bucket, and to supper of whisky in three courses.
A Southern gentleman dates even the moon by the war; a Western patron sues a railway because his cast of the Venus of Milo arrived without its arms. Wilde praises Spanish and French place names and refuses to lecture in Grigsville. American girls are 'little oases of pretty unreasonableness', the men practical, and he draws a lesson for education: handicraft should come before books. He ends by saying America has no pageants, only the Fire Brigade and the Police, but has the best politically educated people in the world and teaches the beauty of FREEDOM.