Amusing humane travelogue. Focuses on journeys and public institutions. Denounces slavery.

Read for Victorian Transatlanticism

Creo que en este libro se puede ver claramente el prototipo de inglés pedante que viaja a otro país mirando cada detalle con aire de condescendencia. De hecho el libro es totalmente prescindible excepto por la conclusión final, donde si creo que Dickens disecciona acertadamente, también con cierta condescendencia, a la sociedad americana. Es incluso gracioso ver como ya critica el sistema de salud americano y la costumbre de comer tanta carne y en tanta cantidad.

I'm not a fan of adventure diaries (be they travel or otherwise) but as this author is guilty of being a genius I can take two incredible memories away from this. The first being the amazing and inspiring true story of Laura Bridgeman (who was the first deaf, dumb and blind American). The second is the horrific insight in to the dark world of slavery (which is discribed in all it's awful detail)

Dickens is not afraid of offending any one by the writing of this travel diary, nor does he find any reason to be anything other than honest, open and frank. Readers interested by this period of American history will be more than justly rewarded.

Meh, disappointing. I will stick with his novels

I was excited for this book. Here was one of my favorite 19th-century English authors visiting the United States in the early 1840s and giving his unvarnished impressions of it. I wasn’t disappointed.

I have to admit, it took a little getting used to at first. I don’t know why I was expecting Charles to write any other way than he does in his novels. I suppose because this was nonfiction. I thought it might be a little less flowery. Of course, nonfiction from that era probably is generally a lot more florid than it is today. Those were the times.

Anyway, I eventually got used to it though, come on Charles, are you being paid by the word for this too? I suppose. Once I got into it, the book just flowed along.

I loved so many of the observations that made me realize things that American writers from the period never mentioned in their books, such as just how prevalent and ubiquitous chewing tobacco and spitting was. I’ve never heard anywhere else how much they soiled the floors of even government buildings with their foul brown saliva. Their teeth must’ve been such that they had no business making fun of the British on that score. Also, just how unfinished, and half-built Washington DC was at that time and how sprawling and empty. Not to mention the popularity of rocking chairs never fizzed on me before. You get a sense also of how empty the country was from the point of view of someone from England. An outsider looking in gives a very useful perspective.

I appreciate how candid Charles was. He wasn’t afraid to tell it like it was. I found this chapter near the end of the book on slavery to be particularly powerful. That can’t have made him a lot of friends in Dixieland. His description of those horrors and pointing out that public opinion does not give anyone the right to do anything they want to their fellow human beings, giving a list of examples of how slaves were treated, drove home the point beautifully.

Also, I thought it was particularly interesting when he wrote of “…those owners, breeders, users, buyers and sellers of slaves, who will, until the bloody chapter has a bloody end, own, breed, use, buy, and sell them at all hazards: who doggedly deny the horrors of the system in the teeth of such a mass of evidence as never was brought to bear on any other subject, and to which the experience of every day contributes its immense amount; who would at this or any other moment, gladly involve America in a war, civil or foreign, provided that it had for its sole end and object the assertion of their right to perpetuate slavery…”

Go Charles! You tell ‘em! Years ago, a Mormon told me that one of their prophets had predicted the Civil War. All I could think at the time was who wasn’t predicting a Civil War back then? Not Charles Dickens. Maybe he was a prophet. Or maybe everyone was talking about it.

I understand that one of the reasons Charles might’ve been so hard on the Americans in this book was because he had a bit of a chip on his shoulder over copyright. Here he was a best-selling author in one of the biggest markets for books in the world and he was getting no royalties. Printers were profiting from his work and paying him nothing. I’d be upset too.

It was fun to travel with one of my favorite authors. This was an unenjoyable read.

Star rating? Star rating??! How dare I give a star rating to Dickens?

Seriously: (1) I have been a Dickens fan from the age of ten, but have not reread this book in decades, and (2) I disliked it (and Martin Chuzzlewit) pretty intensely as a kid. Also, on rereading, it's a little uneven. He's very harsh toward the Shakers, for example, and he skims over some parts of the journey he takes while going into exhaustive detail in other places--for example, blow-by-blow descriptions of a couple of stagecoach rides. These are still funny, to this day, but perhaps not quite as funny as Dickens intended.

That said, this book is still almost scarily relevant. It isn't just the lovely and enthusiastic writing in places. (His description of Laura Bridgman and her education, and of his visit to Niagara Falls, are both very moving. so is his extended interview with a proud, intelligent, and literate Choctaw chief.) No, it's his astute analysis of America's "peculiar institution" and its effect on our character. If you read nothing else, read the chapter "Slavery" and ask yourself where we are today, and how we got here. It isn't just the extreme, sickening cruelty, though that's very hard to read. It's his tying it to two very American ills. Those are greedy carelessness of the environment, and gun violence. Let's look at these in order.

Dickens points out, rightly, that in places where slavery is legal, public properties are typically shoddy and run-down. The slaves have no incentive to do one second of work more than is already forced from them, and the slave-owners outright refuse to do anything for themselves they can have their slaves do for them. Thus (and Booker T. Washington also pointed this out), the institution has a very bad effect on the "work ethic" of Blacks and whites alike. Modern analysts who trace the American capitalist system, with all its ills, back to slavery, have a supporter in Dickens.

More than this, though, slavery encourages cruelty and violence to all human beings. How, Dickens asks, can humans who've been allowed to treat their fellow human beings as property--to brand them, beat them, rape and humiliate them, torture them, and even kill them at will--be other than cruel and violent to each other? Clearly, they can't. Juxtaposed with a horrible catalog of ads for runaway slaves, Dickens lists articles from newspapers about gun murders and duels--including one duel between two small boys. He points out that violence like this is endemic in America, but that the worst cases are almost invariably to be found in the slave states. Thus, just like the modern Black Lives Matter movement, Dickens traces gun violence back to slavery and its debasing effects.

This is powerful stuff, and, as I said, scarily relevant.

So I do recommend this book. I got a lot more out of it as an adult than I had as a child. I might go so far as to say every U.S. citizen should read it. You might be bored at times, want to argue with Dickens at others, and even be infuriated at still others. That is the power of Dickens's words, and of this book.

Amazing, and screamingly funny sometimes, especially the part about hogs touring Broadway, and tobacco chewing in Washington, D.C. Very touching, too. His portrait of the enlightened Perkins Institute for the Blind is fascinating, especially the part about Laura Bridgman, one of the first deaf-blind students, who was about 13 at the time he visited. He contrasts this with the institutions for paupers in New York, which were at least as squalid and cruel as those in England. His exposure of the inhumane system at the Eastern State Penitentiary eventually led to fundamental changes at that prison.

I've been enjoying Dickens a lot this summer, and it's occurred to me that he and similar writers deserve a lot of credit for changes in social conditions over the last two centuries. They did not do the essential legwork, but in an age without photography, they exposed the results of inhumanity, cruelty, and indifference. Dickens wrote about the English Poor Laws that imprisoned debtors without trial, food, clothing, or hope (Little Dorrit); religious and secular charity that punished and used orphans (Oliver Twist); and society that subjugated and humilated women and children for the benefit of wealthy men (Nicholas Nickleby). Harriet Beecher Stowe flouted polite society and exposed the brutal reality of American slavery--in fact, she toned down the reality, but what she showed was bad enough to galvanize the sleepy emancipation movement. Upton Sinclair pulled no punches in his portrait of the abuses of meat plant workers, and his work led Americans to demand massive reforms.

Dickens viajó a Estados Unidos a mediados del siglo XIX. Recorrió prácticamente toda la zona de Nueva Inglaterra, llegó hasta el Medio Oeste, subió a las cataratas del Niágara y después se marchó. La parte en la que narra sus visitas a hospitales, orfanatos y cárceles es la menos brillante, pero el resto es muy divertido. En especial sus descripciones de los medios de transporte: barco, barco de vapor, barca, diligencia, coche de caballos, barcaza y muchos, muchos más.
La nota más seria es su alegato contra la esclavitud y la relación curiosa que establece entre los estados esclavistas y el número de crímenes absurdos.

Well now, how does one describe this book? Is it a travelogue written by the greatest British author of the 19C? Is is a thinly disguised complaint of the weaknesses, hypocrisy, and ill-manners of much of the American public? Could it be a cautionary tale of what republic is like? Is it a soft compliment to Canada, a country which shares a border with the United States?

What it is for sure is a detailed look at the various jails in the United States, a focussed commentary on the steamships that moved both people and goods around the country and a very candid look at individual American personalities Dickens encountered during 1842 in North America.

It is not anything like a Rick Steve’s episode on PBS or a Cook’s tour guide. Personally, I found it very insightful and refreshing. Dickens captured and described his personal impressions. Like his insights or not, the text is worth reading.

I have finished the complete works of Charles Dickens. I have commented on various novels but have not listed the various short works in the collection, except that I found the travelogue of his 9 month or so visit to the USA and Canada very interesting. He got as far west as St Louis by various travel means - canal boat, stage couch, rail. He ends with a long list of extracts from newspapers of advertisements for runaway slaves. This is the nature of Wanted: Female X missing toes on left foot, male Y no right ear, and so on and so on. Then a chapter listing stupid disputes among whites: disputes ending in two people shooting each other, stabbing, etc. He connects the two, suggesting that the culture of violence and mutilation of slaves translates to violence in all conflicts, black and white.

Booooooooooooooooooo.