A beloved pastor has every room in his house furnished with a rocking-chair by his grateful and devoted people. A common wedding present is a rocking-chair. “How this lazy and ungraceful indulgence ever became general, I cannot imagine”, she laments, before painting America as the Land of the Rocker: When American ladies come to live in Europe, they sometimes send home for a rocking-chair. Once Martineau gets going, she has trouble stopping. She describes “the disagreeable practice” of rocking in chairs and finds “ladies who are vibrating in different directions, and at various velocities, so as to try the head of a stranger almost as severely as the tobacco chewer his stomach.” 38 A similar description later appeared in the Michigan Farmer and other magazines, echoing both the rocker’s nicotinic effects and asynchronicity the author calls rocking chairs a woman’s “nervine, a narcotic, a stimulant”, and describes “a woman photographer would sit in a rocker with a camera in her lap and placidly photograph a group of rocking women in rockers of various gaits”. That same year, in her Retrospect of Western Travel, the British social theorist Harriet Martineau stops off at a small inn between Stockbridge and Albany, New York. “In America”, wrote James Frewin for The Architectural Magazine and Journal in 1838, “it is considered a compliment to give the stranger the rocking-chair as a seat and when there is more than one kind in the house, the stranger is always presented with the best.” Not everyone appreciated the gesture. While rocking chairs had been around America since the early eighteenth century, they did not fully enter the European consciousness until the 1830s, when travelers to the United States began commenting on their ubiquity.
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