There is no doubt that we are a bookish family, and never more so than at Christmas. If I had been present at the first Christmas, presumably in the role of one of the three wise men, I would have forsaken frankincense and myrrh, if not gold, and presented the infant Jesus with a copy of the works of Shakespeare, or, failing that, with Boswell's Life of Johnson. Books comprise at least half of our intra-family presents; Boxing Day is partly occupied by reading books we have given to each other.

Most years, there prove to be some books that have been chosen as presents by more than one member of the family. This year there were two; I gave a copy of Niall Ferguson's Money to Modwenna, our daughter-in-law, herself a national authority on micro-finance. I received the same book from Annunziata, our daughter. I have had the pleasure of reading the copy that I gave before Christmas, and the copy that I received after Christmas. It is one of those rare books that combine enjoyment with enlightenment. Everyone ought to read it.

The other book on which we doubled up was The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, Kate Summerscale's account of the murder at Road Hill House. Craig Brown has described it as “a masterpiece” and that seems a fair judgment. It has, for us, the added interest of being a Somerset murder.

We have the advantage of living quite close to the big book barn at Hallatrow. The building is huge for a book shop; I can remember it being built during the Second World War. We were told that it was intended to store margarine, but I now think it probably stored explosives for D-Day. Our elder son, Thomas, is a book barn aficionado, and so are his elder children. I get the benefit of receiving presents of books that I did not even know existed.

One of these out-of-the-way books was given me, and I have been reading it since Christmas; it is English Traits by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson, an essayist and lecturer, is one of those idealist American authors whom the English respect but do not often read. He was born in 1803; his father was the Minister of the First Church in Boston. His family has been described as “a home of plain living and high thinking”. His role as a poor scholar at Harvard was rather like that of Samuel Johnson at Oxford, about a hundred years earlier.

Emerson's first visit to England was made in 1833; his second visit was in 1847. He used the experience gained in both these visits to compose essays on various aspects of mid-19th century England. English Traits was eventually published in 1856. He is writing about the England that existed just before the great exhibition of 1851 and shortly before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859.

He made a good impression on most of the literary figures he had most wanted to meet. They included Landor, Coleridge, Carlysle and Wordsworth. He had little rapport with Coleridge: “The visit was rather a spectacle than a conversation, of no use beyond the satisfaction of my curiosity. He was too old and preoccupied, and could not bend to a new companion and think with him.”

He had a much more satisfactory meeting with Carlysle. “He was tall and gaunt, with a cliff-like brow, self-possessed and holding his extraordinary powers of conversation in easy command; clinging to his Northern accent with evident relish; full of lively anecdote, and with a streaming humour, which floated everything he looked upon.”

Carlysle was equally impressed. Of Emerson he wrote: “He seemed to be one of the most lovable creatures in himself we had ever looked on. He stayed till the next day with us and talked and heard talk to his heart's content, and left us really sad to part with him.”

To an English reader, Emerson is surprisingly Anglophile, even if the England of which he writes is becoming increasingly remote. “The English,” he wrote, “are free, forcible men... they give the bias to the current age; and that, not by chance or by mass, but by their character, and by the number of individuals among them of personal ability... men of vast intellect have been born on their soil... they have sound bodies and supreme endurance in war and in labour.”

Emerson saw that British power might have reached its peak: “It is in its solstice, or already declining.” The mid-19th century probably was the high point of the British Empire, and of the cultural influence of the English. The question Emerson raised then about England is now being raised about the power of the United States.

Nevertheless, Emerson admired the English and saw The Times as “the living index of the colossal British power”. He wrote: “The English like it for its complete information... they like its independence; they do not know, when they take it up, what the paper is going to say: but, above all, for the nationality and confidence of its tone. It thinks for them all; it is their understanding and day's ideal daguerreotyped. When I see them reading its columns, they seem to me becoming every moment more British. It has the national courage, not rash and petulant, but considerate and determined.”

That is a considerable compliment from a leading American writer to an English newspaper. Emerson made generous-minded criticisms of England and indeed of The Times. He would have liked The Times to be more radical and less representative, which he thought might “give England a new millennium of beneficent power”. That was beyond the capacity even of the 19th-century Thunderer.

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