American Notes for General Circulation

American Notes for General Circulation, published in two volumes, is a travelogue detailing the author’s first journey to North America from January to June 1841, partially to give speeches in favor of stricter international copyright agreements, and also to conduct research for his next novel, Martin Chuzzlewit.

The passage from Liverpool to Boston took eighteen days, and it was a successful voyage in that it only ran around once (while in Canada). In his typical verbose manner, Dickens complains about everything: the small cabin, the flimsy furniture, uncomfortable beds and thin, rough-spun bedding, the rough seas and inclement weather, the poor quality of the food, and the incompetence of the ship’s officers and crew.

Once in America, the complaints continue to pile up. Dickens had many problems with American society, slavery first and foremost, of which he stated, “the presence filled me with a sense of shame and self-reproach.” He also deplored the lies and fearmongering that was so prevalent in the American press. Regrettably, he had little to say about the genocide of the indigenous Americans who originally peopled the land.

He complained incessantly about the heat. The weather was too hot for an Englishman, even in the depths of winter, and people in America preferred their indoor spaces on the warmer side, with stoves and fireplaces generating more heat than he was accustomed to. He was puzzled by the popularity of rocking chairs, which never caught on in Europe. His most frequent complaint was the constant public spitting and the failure to use spittoons, which he excoriated in no uncertain terms.

He frequently compares incidents from his travels to the allegorical tales in the Arabian Nights. He also alludes to Jonathan Swift and/or Gulliver’s Travels on numerous occasions. Other authors mentioned include Daniel Defoe, Sir Walter Scott, John Bunyan, Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Washington Irving, the English poets Lord Byron and George Crabbe, William Shakespeare, George Colman the Younger, James Fenimore Cooper, and Alain-René Lesage.

His means of transport included trains, horse-drawn coaches and a multitude of steamboats, sailboats, and river barges in various states of disrepair. His whirlwind tour included the cities of Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Baltimore, Richmond, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville, Columbus, Sandusky, Cleveland, Buffalo, among other places. The furthest west he traveled was the prairie near Lebanon, Ohio. Towards the end of this trip, he spent a few weeks in the Canadian cities of Toronto, Montreal and Quebec.

Fascinated by the penal system both home and abroad, Dickens inspected dozens of prisons, penitentiaries, insane asylums, reform schools, and almshouses while in America. He also visited cathedrals, churches and convents, colleges and universities, hospitals, homes for the blind and deaf, public libraries, post offices, and manufactories. He walked the grounds of Cambridge University (before it was renamed Harvard) and Yale College in New Haven, CT.

In Boston, he attended a mass at the Seamen’s Bethel church and listened to a sermon by Methodist preacher Edward Thompson Taylor, a former sailor who peppered his sermons with seafaring language and nautical metaphors. Father Mapple in Melville’s Moby Dick is said to be based on Taylor.

In New York City, which he deemed dirtier than Boston, he visited Wall Street, the city penitentiary on Blackwell’s Island, the Manhattan House of Detention for Men, aka “The Tombs,” and a tavern named Almack’s, which changed its name to Dickens Place after his visit. In the slums of the Five Points neighborhood of lower Manhattan, he inspected the interior of a few filthy tenements, walking knee-deep in biohazardous waste and interacting with free black people huddled by the dozens in single rooms.

Dickens labeled Washington D.C., as “the head-quarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva.” He also wrote that “the prevalence of those two odious practices of chewing and expectorating began about this time to be anything but agreeable, and soon became most offensive and sickening.”

He spent a full week in the capital city, during which time he visited both houses of Congress nearly every day. His eyewitness report is not flattering: “I saw in them, the wheels that move the meanest perversion of virtuous Political Machinery that the worst tools ever wrought. Despicable trickery at elections, under-handed tamperings with public officers; cowards attacks upon opponents, with scurrilous newspapers for shields, and hired pens for daggers; shameful trucklings to mercenary knaves…aidings and abettings of every bad inclination in the popular mind, and artful suppressions of all its good influences.”

Perhaps the most humorous episode of his travels occurred while in transit from Baltimore to Harrisburg via stagecoach: “We took up at a rural bar-room, after we had gone a few miles, an intoxicated gentleman, who climbed upon the roof among the luggage, and subsequently slipping off without hurting himself, was seen in the distant perspective reeling back to the grog-shop where we had found him.”

While stopping for sustenance at a riverside hostelry in Columbus, Ohio, Dickens offered his opinion of the temperance movement in America: “…I ask for a brandy; but it is a Temperance Hotel, and spirits are not to be had for love or money. This preposterous forcing of unpleasant drinks down the reluctant throats of travellers is not at all uncommon in America, but I never discovered that the scruples of such wincing landlords induced them to preserve any unusually nice balance between the quality of their fare, and the scale of charges: on the contrary, I rather suspected them of diminishing the one and exalting the other, by way of recompense for the loss of their profit on the sale of spiritous liquors. After all, perhaps, the plainest course for persons of such tender consciences, would be, a total abstinence from tavern-keeping.”

Roughly two decades later, Dickens made a second pilgrimage to America (1867-68). In a postscript added to a reprinting of American Notes published two years before his death, he reported on the altered state of the nation: “…how astounded I have been by the amazing changes I have seen around me on every side—changes moral, changes physical, changes in the amount of land subdued and peopled, changes in the rise of vast new cities, changes in the growth of older cities almost out of recognition, changes in the graces and amenities of life, changes in the Press, without whose advancement no advancement can take place anywhere.”

In 1842, Charles Dickens alighted on our shores to explore America. He came over on a voyage that can best be described as "painful" and was happy to be on dry land once his ship pulled into Boston Harbor. Over the next few months, he traveled across the United States, mostly in the Northeast and what would become the Midwest, making astute observations about life in America as he went.

"American Notes for General Circulation" is the product of that journey, and as a travelogue it's pretty good, fine, if not especially amazing. Dickens nails a lot of things about Americans in the mid-nineteenth century, and accurately predicts that slavery will lead to a general conflict among the states. He spends a lot of time visiting the poor and seeing asylums for the mentally ill and those who lack sense of sight or hearing, and he provides a master class in how to write about the uncomfortable accommodations that travelers had to endure. But the book just doesn't sing the way that his fiction does, and while Dickens is entertaining and insightful, he doesn't really come across as masterfully as he does in most of the fiction that I've read by him. I think this has been a down year for me and Dickens; after finishing "Our Mutual Friend" in January and loving it, this and "Hard Times" have been the only Dickens books that I've read since, and each has let me down. I have "Bleak House" sitting on my shelf, waiting to be picked up. Dare I proceed with it before the calendar turns to 2023?

"American Notes," for all my gripes, is an essential read if you're into Dickens or just enjoy travel writing where the subject is more about the traveler's unease with his or her surroundings. For that, it's enjoyable. But definitely lower-tier Dickens, "American Notes" is.

An account of the (relatively young) Dickens' family pre-civil war excursion to the US and, briefly, Canada, describing the mechanics of travel and his impressions of what he saw and the people he met. There are enough descriptive passages to let you know it's definitely Dickens and it puts him in historical context a bit if you aren't a student: his fiction is rarely contemporary, so he can feel older than he really is. As you night guess, he's strongly opposed to slavery and his brief first hand experience changes his itinerary. There is a lengthy section dealing with the issue. In it, and some other criticisms he makes about other aspects of the country, he doesn't hold back and there's a section clarifying it slightly added after his subsequent trip 25 years later, after the war.

I took my time with this delightful travelogue of Charles Dickens’s visit to America in the late nineteenth century. In each city, he visited hospitals, schools, asylums, etc. The descriptions were such a history lesson. The font itself is intimidating, but it is actually very easy and entertaining to read. I learned a lot and thoroughly enjoyed the trip.

I read this book because Dickens refers to St. Louis and Belleville and Lebanon, IL, all places I know. His view of us, even in 1850, probably still has much truth to it. I was particularly interested in his comments about slavery and his decision not to travel South so he would not encounter it.

By all accounts a scathing indictment of America; though, Dickens does avoid the actual experiences of seeing for himself slavery in the Deep South. I do think much of his criticisms are valid—such as the deep American approval of the “self-made” aka wealthy man no matter the means (most often immoral) and the frontier habits of the times.

But there are some interesting observations and tidbits of life at that time. And Dickens does include what he does best—observations of unique characters. People watching and the recording thereof is really his greatest and, at least for me, delightful strength.

Notable mostly for its insightful discussion of the torture inherent in solitary confinement. (Dickens visited numerous prisons and asylums, presumably as part of the purpose of the voyage.) Uneven in the quality of its descriptive passages, some small number of which sing with wit and vivid depiction but others of which drag. The description of the workings of Washington, D.C. is not to be missed, particularly by those patriots who tend to forget that the country was forged by tobacco-chewing knuckle-heads.

Devo ammettere che non sapevo quanto fosse divertente Dickens quando scriveva dei suoi viaggi. In questo fatto in America è anche straordinariamente incisivo e diretto. Libro adorato e introduzione puntuale e interessante. Imperdibile!