What a fascinating read and a great introduction to Charles Dickens. Reading about the lunatic asylums and prisons was interesting and also heartbreaking. I found it intriguing that whilst visiting another country he bothered to visit and record about these institutions. Not your regular tourist traps. Then to finish off with slavery. One can see the influence of this trip in his other novels.

Amusing how little has changed in some aspects of the American character that Dickens encountered in 1841, as summarized in the final chapter. He used his impressions in writing Martin Chuzzlewit and later on apologized for that on his second visit.

Dickens was very interested in our prisons and schools for the disadvantaged,.

It's difficult to believe that Dickens actually admired the United States in 1842, because he wrote forcefully against slavery, solitary confinement in Eastern Penitentiary, the treatment of Native tribes, corrupt politicians, the press, deplorable personal hygiene, the filthy Mississippi River, and tobacco-chewing men spitting indiscriminately in public and private. Then again, he observed and wrote movingly about advances in education for deaf and blind children in special schools; beneficial care for mentally ill adults in hospitals; and favorable working conditions for young women in factories. To me, though, on a grand scale, his criticisms outweigh his praise, and rightly so.

On the lighter side of this six-month recap, Dickens reserved his funniest writing for the hazards of various modes of transportation upon river, sea, and land, and also for his fellow passengers' dining habits. He made keen observations about Americans' speech patterns, turns of phrase, and temperaments, too. There are some abrupt transitions among and within the chapters, however, and occasional descriptions of landscapes that aren't especially distinct, which is odd, given Dickens' descriptive powers. And yet: his celebrated passage about encountering Niagara Falls is magnificent, because it's only partly nature writing, and more so a spiritual rush of words about the wonders of creation. Here and elsewhere, Dickens tapped into a source of American energy that later spurred Whitman and Kerouac to write so well about their young and deeply flawed nation.

There are notes on brief visits to Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec City, but primarily this is a book about the United States, one I'd recommend to those into Dickens and/or travel writing.

No obvious beginning comes to mind, so I’ll start with me laughing out loud. I’m always tempted, in reading anything by Dickens, to start a list of quotes, but it’s becoming equally irresistible to compile the truly cathartic moments. There were passages in American Notes that set me laughing and kept me going. Here’s one in reference to sleeping arrangements on a canal-boat:

“I found it [the bunk], on after-measurement, just the width of an ordinary sheet of Bath post letter-paper; and I was at first in some uncertainty as to the best means of getting into it. But the shelf being a bottom one, I finally determined on lying upon the floor, rolling gently in, stopping immediately I touched the mattress, and remaining for the night with that side uppermost, whatever it might be. Luckily, I came upon my back at exactly the right moment. I was much alarmed on looking upward, to see, by the shape of his half-yard of sacking (which his weight had bent into an exceedingly tight bag), that there was a very heavy gentleman above me, whom the slender cords seemed quite incapable of holding; and I could not help reflecting upon the grief of my wife and family in the event of his coming down in the night. But as I could not have got up again without a severe bodily struggle, which might have alarmed the ladies; and as I had nowhere to go to, even if I had; I shut my eyes upon the danger, and remained there.”

Dickens’s comic talent is one of the sheer pleasures of literature. Where irony is involved, he has no match... Which brings me to America. American Notes is unrelenting in its satire of the American political, cultural, and literal landscape – right down to the double entendre in its full title. Not surprisingly, the book was poorly received in the States (as well as in Britain, actually), and readers still complain that Dickens was unfair. Yet Dickens was prejudiced for America in making his long-anticipated Atlantic crossing. He risked sounding ungrateful for an enthusiastic welcome, furthermore, in sacrificing his international persona for an objective voice. Dickens was disillusioned by a country he had rather idolized for its sociopolitical ideals. Besides, what about Dickens’s America might one defend? The prevalence of chewing tobacco over personal hygiene? The overweening sense of righteousness, still true of democracy today? The political partisanship, now expressed through backhanded rather than overt aggression? Dickens was far from a bigot arrived to assert British supremacy; he spoke highly of the northern states and sometimes praised their institutions above England’s own. Literally enough, his trip took a downturn past New York, owing largely to the influence of slavery.

I have to deviate from my perspective thus far and admit that Dickens’s arrogance did flare up on occasion. Call it youth, inexperience, comic excess – I think together they rendered him foolish in some of his judgments. There isn’t a Dickensian novel that doesn’t treat of hypocrisy and selfishness, so America isn’t exclusively blameworthy in that regard. It is due to Dickens, however, to note his much revised “press release” of 1867, the year he returned to the States for an American reading tour. He asked that his updated impressions, published in an 1868 postscript to American Notes, appear in every future edition of that work and Martin Chuzzlewit (both as they involve American scenes).

I ultimately give American Notes three stars in view of certain liberties Dickens took with genre and narrative. As interested as he was in public institutions – and as much as he believed in literature for social change – his level of attention to, namely, slavery and disabled care was inappropriate for a travelogue. Both topics figured in disproportionate sections of the narrative and contributed to its sometimes off-kilter pacing. Dickens also quoted at length in chapters three (Volume I) and nine (Volume II), which abstracted the content a little and made for piecemeal narration. Otherwise – four stars to Dickens’s confessions for being boisterous, funny, and even contemporary.

So here's my beef with Dickens: he can be amusing, but I'm far too impatient for the payoff. I struggled mightily through the first 25 pages of this:
"About midnight we shipped a sea, which forced its way through the skylights, burst open the doors above, and came raging and roaring down into the ladies' cabin, to the unspeakable consternation of my wife and a little Scotch lady - who, by the way, had previously sent a message to the captain by the stewardess, requesting him, with her compliments, to have a steel conductor immediately attached to the top of every mast, and to the chimney, in order that the ship might not be struck by lightning." (p. 22)

That is one single sentence! The crux of which I can't even tell you. By the time I've typed the last word, I've forgotten the point. For nights descriptions such as this put me archly to sleep. And then I had a brilliant idea: skip ahead, skip ahead. Surely the story would be improved once Mr. Dickens arrived in America.

I skip ahead to find him safely arrived in Boston, his ship sea-ed or sea shipped or whatever other nautical means of arrival there may have been:

"In all of them, the unfortunate or degenerate citizens of the State are carefully instructed in their duties both to God and man; are surrounded by all reasonable means of comfort and happiness that their condition will admit of; are appealed to, as members of the great human family, however afflicted, indigent, or fallen; are ruled by the strong Heart, and not by the strong (though immeasurably weaker) Hand." (p. 63)

The sentences before and after are no clearer to me. I am remembering now as I read this, why the Wreck of the Golden Mary was such a revelation: I think it's the only Dickens I enjoyed enough to read more than once. Still, I'm nothing if not a glutton for punishment, so I decide to seek out the chapters that find Dickens in the South, where he was, if my memory served me, most appalled.

"Then, in order as the eye descends towards the water, are the sides, and doors, and windows of the state-rooms, jumbled as oddly together as though they formed a small street, built by the varying tastes of a dozen men: the whole is supported on beams and pillars resting on a dirty barge, but a few inches above the water's edge: and in the narrow space between this upper structure and this barge's deck, are the furnace fires and machinery, open at the sides to every wind that blows, and every storm of rain it drives along its path."

Uncle, uncle, uncle! Isn't there a rule against using more than one colon in a sentence? And sweet mother of God, the sentence that follows the above monstrosity is even longer:

"Passing one of these boats at night, and seeing the great body of fire, exposed as I have just described, that rages and roars beneath the frail pile of painted wood: the machinery, not warded off or guarded in any way, but doing its work in the midst of the crowd of idlers and emigrants and children, who throng the lower deck; under the management, too, of reckless men whose acquaintance with its mysteries may have been of six months' standing: one feels directly that the wonder is, not that there should be so many fatal accidents, but that the journey should be safely made." (p. 175)

I could go on. The passages on 188 and 189 are even longer - once I gave up on following the story and focused instead on the sentence structure, I found my interest waxed, though I couldn't tell you what I was reading...and then I remember: life's too short to read lousy books.

In conclusion, if this is your bedtime reading, you're a better student of literature than I.

This months-long travelogue wasn't initially intended for an American audience, but the America of 170 years ago was so vastly different than what it is today that it doesn't at all feel as redundant as reading a Lonely Planet or Frommer's guide for your own hometown. There are some genuinely interesting parts to this book--such as the description of a pre-Mall Washington, D.C., as it was still being built. And some borderline hilarious moments as well, such as his disgust with the amount of tobacco spitting at the time and his catty response to the Shakers when they wouldn't let him into their place of worship. But unfortunately a large part of vacation also involved sitting inside carriages and boats as he traveled to the various destinations, and unfortunately he often opted to devote more detail to that than to the sites themselves. It makes for some brain numbing tedium between the good parts.

In American Notes for General Circulation, Charles Dickens travels the northeastern seaboard, the Midwest and Canada. Dickens was interested in American institutions and apparently the most interesting item a city might possess is a prison and an insane asylum. I am not sure why this would be the case. Perhaps since America was still young and our cultural development was still in its infancy the most notable public building housed the criminal and crazy.

Dickens seems impressed with the decently of the average American but also regarded us as a rather grubby lot. In particular he was startled that every man, woman, child and the child’s dog chewed tobacco. On would think that his entire trip occurred under a continual rain of spittle.

I have never read any of Dickens’ non-fiction. Though Dickens continues to throw in a barrel of adjectives and adverbs when the sentence was perfectly healthy and happy without the additional baggage, this work is cleaner and more the to point than some of his fiction. Well done Charles.

Kniha Americké poznámky od Charlesa Dickensa by sa mohla nazvať cestopisom. Autor v nej opisuje svoju návštevu rôznych amerických miest a tiež časti Kanady. Každé navštívené mesto opisuje, aby si ho čitateľ vedel predstaviť - čo bolo dosť zaujímavé, poznať dobový pohľad na dnes už obrovské metropoly - vtedy však boli novými mestečkami. Kopec charakteristík venuje aj inštitúciám v danom meste, dosť podrobne sa zameral najmä na väzenia, súdy či ústavy pre choromyseľných a chudobince. Miestami ma kniha nebavila, najmä čo sa týkalo opisov cesty, podrobné útrapy pri ceste na parníku, dostavníku, železnici. Nájdeme aj krátke príbehy osôb, ktoré Dickens stretol. Tiež sa kriticky, resp. subjektívne vyjadruje k životu a celkovému fungovaniu v Amerike.

Excellent travel diary from Dickens’ 1842 trip to Halifax, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Cincinnati, down the Mississippi (which he hated) and up to Niagra Falls (which he loved). Interesting to read Dickens speaking in his own voice. Also, while it is aggravating when contemporary readers apply our moral codes to the past, I can’t help but be pleased with Dickens’ strongly worded opinions on slavery and the treatment of Native Americans. His alienation on taking a train from Philadelphia to Baltimore and entering the slave-owning South is visceral in impact. Considering that this was two decades before the Civil War, and that many other Englishmen supported the South and their practices so much later, it is all the more striking.

Charles Dickens’s account of his 1842 tour of America is, as I expected, a lively travelog. It is also, as I hoped, an insightful commentary that offers enlightening, if dispiriting, links between the country’s early days and its present.

Dickens spent six months in America, and American Notes covers a lot of ground, recording where he goes, how he gets there, what he sees, and what he thinks of it all. He admires Boston, laments the squalor in New York, scorns the politicians in Washington, enjoys the west—especially Cincinnati—and finds tranquility and joy in the beauty of Niagara Falls.

Travel by coach, railway, and steamboat was strenuous, but he makes good fun of the discomforts—the bad food, the atrocious sleeping accommodations. He cannot find humor, though, in the filth, especially the omnipresent tobacco spitting, which disgusted him. I would have liked to hear from Mrs. Dickens about these ordeals, but though she accompanied him, she remains voiceless throughout.

This is very much a Dickensian tour: he visits public institutions—prisons, insane asylums, the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind (which he cannot praise highly enough)—and comments always on the poor, the needy, and the obligations of government to assist them. And Dickens being Dickens, he finds stories everywhere—recording in detail the story of Laura Bridgman, a girl left blind and deaf and even without a sense of smell by childhood fever, who is educated at the Perkins School, or imagining the thoughts of the prisoners in Philadelphia’s punishing system of Solitary Confinement. His remarks are wide-ranging and frank: he mocks the Shakers, loathes the Mississippi River, admires a Choctaw Chief.

Initially Dickens had planned to travel further south but decided against it, partly because of time and the heat, but largely because of his aversion to slavery. The ugliness of slavery is a theme running through the book, and through his eyes we see its centrality to any view of American life. Indeed, he devotes a chapter to “that most hideous blot and foul disgrace,” delivering a powerful polemic that includes a list of newspaper ads for runaway slaves, which identify them by their irons and mutilations. The descriptions are repellent, so painful they are almost unreadable, and the chapter is deeply affecting.

Although Dickens saves his generalizations about the American character for a concluding chapter, he has of course shaped his stories and commentary throughout to express his praise or criticism. The targets of praise are very much what you would expect—Americans’ frankness, their enthusiasm, the institutions that are trying to do good work.

But it is Dickens’s criticism of what he found in 1842 that seems to me extremely pertinent today. Most notably, he sees a system that deters the best men from running for public office; an acceptance of violence that permits people to shoot each other without punishment; an abject and licentious press; and a “love of ‘smart dealing,’” an admiration that “enables many a knave to hold his head up with the best, who well deserves a halter.” The art of the deal was apparently worshipped in America a long time ago.

In a postscript, Dickens writes of his later visit to America in 1868, and the great advancement he found everywhere. But reading his earlier remarks, I find myself reflecting on the character of our country and whether we will ever successfully uproot our weakness for violence, craven politicians, and vendors selling snake oil as balm.

This is a great slice of history, to read Dicken's thoughts about America as he traveled here before slavery was ended. I couldn't put this book down, the stages and riverboats he rode on, his thoughts about tobacco and slavery. He visited prisons and asylums, which I doubt today many travelers would consider doing. He visited schools and even, despite his revulsion by slavery visited a slave-holding state. His views about who Americans were are all quite interesting.

Reread I reread this in anticipation of an upcoming reread of Martin Chuzzlewit.

Dickens was a young man when he visited the U.S.A. the first time and much of American Notes is written in the spirit of a crusading journalist, which he was. He came to the U.S. loving the idea of it and ready to be wowed, but instead he couldn’t stomach the signs of slavery he saw, starting in Baltimore, and turned around before he even made it to the Deep South. But he’d seen enough to excoriate the U.S., including the “public opinion” he was told would ameliorate the harsh treatment of the slaves: He quotes from newspaper accounts to show there's no evidence of that.

The above leads to another topic still relevant in the U.S.: the use of gun (and knife) violence to settle even petty differences between angry men. He sets out several newspaper accounts he acquired during the time he was in America: a tip of an iceberg. Reading these today is sobering because one sees how prevalent and ingrained gun culture was, and thus is, in the U.S.

But what comes before his accounts of these more major issues are ongoing complaints, everywhere he goes, rendered sarcastically and causing me to laugh aloud, of the spitting of tobacco, the ignoring of omnipresent spittoons, as if the men can’t be bothered to use them even as the floor grows filthier. From my reading of Dickens’s biographies, I seem to remember Americans were more upset over this depiction than they were of the above issues.

After his second visit to America, some twenty-five years later, Dickens mellowed, saying there’d been changes in the country since his first visit, as well as in himself, enough to warrant a postscript in future editions saying so. He needn’t have done so. Party politics still rule over (mental) health facilities. Legal disputes still stop (educational) progress. Young white criminals are still treated differently than their black counterparts. Native Americans are still treated dishonestly. The rich are still considered more “virtuous” than the poor. Immigrants are still exploited. Racists still threaten the white-allies of blacks with violence and death, same as slave owners did to abolitionists.

Americans are notoriously thin-skinned when criticized by outsiders (or even insiders) and it’s likely, in his "old age," Dickens wanted to keep his American friends and ensure his books would still sell in the U.S. I don’t think Dickens walked back his comments about spitting, as he shouldn't have. Spitting in public still exists here. Don’t get me started on the young man I saw at a Houston brewery a few years ago and what he was doing with his chewing tobacco. I wasn't laughing.