My professor brought up that Mark Twain would make fun of that cultural trend occasionally. Twain probably thought the same, that racists were using a cartoon version of Europe as an aesthetic. Like the steamboat that crashes is the Walter Scott, a prominent medieval romance author who Twain really hated. The entirety of Twain's book "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" is a guy from 1889 ends up in feudal England and basically clowns on the concept of monarchy and chivalry so hard he makes England into a republic. Then the Catholic church tries to kill him.

Honestly typing that out I forgot just how cool Mark Twain actually was. American mythology has tried to smooth over how vocally anti-racist he was too. He even called himself an anti-imperialist one time