Reading Dickens can be tedious at times and this has its moments, but overall I found it interesting to read the nineteenth century author's impressions of his trip to America.

His experience of the long voyage across the Atlantic and the differences in culture when he lands in America are known to have contributed to his background knowledge for writing his novel, Martin Chuzzelwitt, which describes shipboard life and the discovery of American culture in similar terms.

One of the observations that stands out is his experience of train travel in America and the way that women are treated politely when traveling alone, even having women only coaches. He contrasts the clean dress and polite mannerisms of poorer women in America with the grottier poorer classes at home, perceiving a vast difference.

Not all of his observations of America are complimentary though. His commentaries about slavery and chewing tobacco paint Americans as little more than savages in a civilized world and his reaction to what he found in those early, inhumane prisons was scandalous. Towards the end, he quotes some newspaper ads for help in capturing runaway slaves that highlight just how badly these slaves had been treated.

The contrast between American culture and Dickens' British experience is interesting in view of the fact that it had only been an independent country for a little over 50 years at the time, yet some of what he described sounds like a Western novel.

This is not the most riveting read, but it's interesting in a historical context.

American Notes, by the wonderful Charles Dickens, is one of the best books I ever read. Top 10? No. Top 20? Definitely! In 1842, the 30 year-old Dickens spent a few months in the United States, and even visited President Tyler in the White House. Dickens’ very honest opinions on what he saw and experienced were a bit too much for some Americans , who didn’t like Dickens’ views on slavery, which he rightfully could not compromise with. Dickens visited Boston, New Haven, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, even St Louis, and he traveled to Canada. His descriptions of his travels via steamboat, railroad, stagecoach, and horseback are a pleasure to read, as his humor and sarcasm adds spice to the mix. His description of Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia is a gem, not to mention an eye opener. Considering the fact that I read not for pleasure, but for learning, I will forevermore refer to this book when I think of the development of American culture, in all its glory and absurdity.

American Notes for General Circulation is a travelogue by Charles Dickens detailing his trip to North America from January to June 1842. While there he acted as a critical observer of North American society, almost as if returning a status report on their progress. Having arrived in Boston, he visited Lowell, New York, and Philadelphia, and travelled as far south as Richmond, as far west as St. Louis and as far north as Quebec. The American city he liked best was Boston – "the air was so clear, the houses were so bright and gay. [...] The city is a beautiful one, and cannot fail, I should imagine, to impress all strangers very favourably." Further, it was close to the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind where Dickens encountered Laura Bridgman, who impressed him greatly. I don't have much to say about this short book except that he was right. Some of the things that drove him crazy drive me crazy yet. He was mobbed everywhere he went. Dickens wasn't used to having people watching and waiting for him at all hours of the day, he hated it, so would I. He wrote to John Forster:

I can do nothing that I want to do, go nowhere where I want to go, and see nothing that I want to see. If I turn into the street, I am followed by a multitude.

It would be horrible. I don't know how the people famous enough to be followed around by people with all those cameras can stand it. They can't leave their homes without people taking their pictures. I wonder what Dickens would have thought of that. Dickens visited Perkins School for the Blind near Boston, where he met Laura Bridgman, who is considered the first deaf-blind person to receive a significant education in English. His account of this meeting in American Notes would inspire Helen Keller's parents to seek an education for their daughter. I never knew that before I read the introduction to this book.

He was particularly critical of the American press - those guys who were following him around all the time, and the sanitary conditions of American cities. He also wrote merciless parodies of the manners of the locals, including, but not limited to, their rural conversations and practice of spitting tobacco in public. One of the things I hate most of all is chewing tobacco. I can get nightmares from thinking of it:

As Washington may be called the headquarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva, the time is come when I must confess, without any disguise, 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.

But before he can travel in our lovely country and find the things that he either loves or hates about it, he has to get here:

I say nothing of what may be called the domestic noises of the ship: such as the breaking of glass and crockery, the tumbling down of stewards, the gambols, overhead, of loose casks and truant dozens of bottled porter, and the very remarkable and far from exhilarating sounds raised in their various state-rooms by the seventy passengers who were too ill to get up to breakfast. I say nothing of them: for although I lay listening to this concert for three or four days, I don’t think I heard it for more than a quarter of a minute, at the expiration of which term, I lay down again, excessively sea-sick.

Not sea-sick, be it understood, in the ordinary acceptation of the term: I wish I had been: but in a form which I have never seen or heard described, though I have no doubt it is very common. I lay there, all the day long, quite coolly and contentedly; with no sense of weariness, with no desire to get up, or get better, or take the air; with no curiosity, or care, or regret, of any sort or degree, saving that I think I can remember, in this universal indifference, having a kind of lazy joy—of fiendish delight, if anything so lethargic can be dignified with the title—in the fact of my wife being too ill to talk to me. If I may be allowed to illustrate my state of mind by such an example, I should say that I was exactly in the condition of the elder Mr. Willet, after the incursion of the rioters into his bar at Chigwell. Nothing would have surprised me. If, in the momentary illumination of any ray of intelligence that may have come upon me in the way of thoughts of Home, a goblin postman, with a scarlet coat and bell, had come into that little kennel before me, broad awake in broad day, and, apologising for being damp through walking in the sea, had handed me a letter directed to myself, in familiar characters, I am certain I should not have felt one atom of astonishment: I should have been perfectly satisfied. If Neptune himself had walked in, with a toasted shark on his trident, I should have looked upon the event as one of the very commonest everyday occurrences.

No, he's not at America yet, he has some way to go yet, hopefully he'll make it:

Once—once—I found myself on deck. I don’t know how I got there, or what possessed me to go there, but there I was; and completely dressed too, with a huge pea-coat on, and a pair of boots such as no weak man in his senses could ever have got into. I found myself standing, when a gleam of consciousness came upon me, holding on to something. I don’t know what. I think it was the boatswain: or it may have been the pump: or possibly the cow. I can’t say how long I had been there; whether a day or a minute. I recollect trying to think about something (about anything in the whole wide world, I was not particular) without the smallest effect. I could not even make out which was the sea, and which the sky, for the horizon seemed drunk, and was flying wildly about in all directions. Even in that incapable state, however, I recognised the lazy gentleman standing before me: nautically clad in a suit of shaggy blue, with an oilskin hat. But I was too imbecile, although I knew it to be he, to separate him from his dress; and tried to call him, I remember, Pilot. After another interval of total unconsciousness, I found he had gone, and recognised another figure in its place. It seemed to wave and fluctuate before me as though I saw it reflected in an unsteady looking-glass; but I knew it for the captain; and such was the cheerful influence of his face, that I tried to smile: yes, even then I tried to smile. I saw by his gestures that he addressed me; but it was a long time before I could make out that he remonstrated against my standing up to my knees in water—as I was; of course I don’t know why. I tried to thank him, but couldn’t. I could only point to my boots—or wherever I supposed my boots to be—and say in a plaintive voice, ‘Cork soles:’ at the same time endeavouring, I am told, to sit down in the pool. Finding that I was quite insensible, and for the time a maniac, he humanely conducted me below.

I'm not sure how, once he was finally to America and on the actual ground how he ever worked up the nerve to get back on a ship to go all the way back to England, if that's what happens when he spends too much time on a ship. But finally he makes it to America, makes it it to his hotel, and tries to order dinner:

‘Dinner, if you please,’ said I to the waiter.

‘When?’ said the waiter.

‘As quick as possible,’ said I.

‘Right away?’ said the waiter.

After a moment’s hesitation, I answered ‘No,’ at hazard.

‘Not right away?’ cried the waiter, with an amount of surprise that made me start.

I looked at him doubtfully, and returned, ‘No; I would rather have it in this private room. I like it very much.’

At this, I really thought the waiter must have gone out of his mind: as I believe he would have done, but for the interposition of another man, who whispered in his ear, ‘Directly.’

‘Well! and that’s a fact!’ said the waiter, looking helplessly at me: ‘Right away.’

I saw now that ‘Right away’ and ‘Directly’ were one and the same thing. So I reversed my previous answer, and sat down to dinner in ten minutes afterwards; and a capital dinner it was.

Well we finally made it to America, Boston for that matter, and since they are off the ship and on the land I think I will leave them there and go find my next book.

After enjoying the scrumptious meal of a Dickens novel, I rise from the table sighing with content, full to the brim and happy. However, I go on to other things and seem to forget in the meantime, how wonderful that meal was.

So it is with American Notes. I had forgotten how superb Dickens' writing is, how lush the prose, how subtle the hints, how witty the criticisms. Now I remember.

In 1842 Dickens spent 6 months touring the United States. This was not a reading tour, just a visit to see the country. He saw the great cities of the East, refused to go any further south than Richmond, Virginia and travelled as far west as St. Louis. He spent time in Canada as well, circling back to New York City to embark back to England.

He didn't like what he saw. The only time he comes right out and rants is on the subject of slavery. He devotes an entire chapter to it, and, as I said, refused to go any further south than Richmond.

He didn't like all the spitting American men did, either, but it didn't raise his hackles; it aroused his sarcastic humor.

And he was very disturbed by a penitentiary in Pennsylvania that kept all of its prisoners in solitary confinement for their entire sentences. They learned a trade such as weaving, sewing or shoe making, but saw no other human than the one that brought them their meals. Dickens talked with some of these prisoners and was especially interested in those who were nearly ready to leave. His view was that they were NOT ready to leave and would not be able to join in productive society. The depth of this view can be seen in Dr. Manette in Tale of Two Cities. Upon being released from prisoner, where he has been in solitary confinement continuously, he has to be taken back to a small hovel at the top of an "apartment" building, left alone in the dark, pursuing his "profession" of making shoes. This portrait is not something Dickens made up - it came straight out of the prisons of America.

Dickens never straightforwardly criticized America; he simply wrote cunningly funny stories about his adventures. And they are delightful! It's hard not to know what he feels. For instance, here is what he says about the American trait of Universal Distrust:

Any man who attains a high place among you, from the President
downwards, may date his downfall from that moment; for any
printed lie that any notorious villain pens, although it
militate directly against the character and conduct of a life,
appeals at once to your distrust and is believed. You will
strain at a gnat in the way of trustfulness and confidence,
however fairly won and well deserved; but you will swallow a
whole caravan of camels if they be laden with unworthy doubts
and mean suspicion.

Sounds a lot like today......

If you love Dickens or if you enjoy reading travelogues, pick this one up soon.

Cuando lo empeze a leer no sabia con que me iba a encontrar y a medida que avanzaba la lectura me fui encantando con este diario/scanner social escrito por Dickens acerca su viaje a America

In this book, we see nineteenth-century Washington congressmen hocking tobacco-juice loogies all over the Congressional carpets. This book is awesome.

American Notes for General Circulation is a portrait of 1842 America and Americans unlike any I’d ever encountered. Probably because, as it turns out, Americans liked Dickens's social commentary about stuff like Oliver Twist not getting a little more, but didn’t so much want to hear critiques about themselves. Typical. And so the book hasn’t come down in the classic US canon for the ages.

I think that maybe it should have. I’m still haunted by Dickens's image of traveling west, pre-railroad, through a soggy brown wasteland of gigantic stumps and tiny shacks – Little House on the Prairie it ain’t. And the discomfort, difficulty and danger (seems like those newfangled steam ships had a tendency to explode) of Dickens’s journey is riveting in itself, down to the descriptions of the shipboard accommodations, particularly the cuisine (look for it!).

But it’s not all jolly in travelogue land. Dickens found the institution of slavery so repugnant that a well-deserved excoriation of the US for tolerating it is a major focus of the book. Yay, Dickens! But did anyone else notice that in the midst of his knight errantry on behalf of the enslaved and impoverished, his treatment of women was rather problematic? I mean, he spends a not-insignificant portion of the book checking out hot Yankee babes (in kind of a creepy way), making scathing remarks about those Cambridge, MA bluestockings, and presenting his wife in a less-than-flattering light. Boo, Dickens! Now writing three-dimensional women was not exactly Dickens’s strong suit, but I’ve always cut him some Victorian male slack on that one. But as he served up yet another ogle, something gave, and I haven’t been able to cut him quite the same length of slack since.

My issues with Dickens and women didn’t scuttle the book, though, which is hilarious, insightful and feels awfully familiar. The more things change…

[Note:  This book was provided free of charge by Net Gallery/Dover Publications.  All thoughts and opinions are my own.]

I must admit that I did not come to this book without some sort of expectation.  I have heard before that Charles Dickens [1] had written a fierce and harsh travel book about his time in the United States, but I did not find this book to deserve its fierce reputation.  To be sure, the author had some criticisms to make about the United States, especially concerning the horrors of slavery, the immense seriousness of our national character, and the low state of our press, and much of these remain problems to the present day, as race, our seriousness in partisan conflict and the sorry state of our press are still major issues in our republic.  The author, though, strikes me as a clear eyed observer whose thoughts on his travels are not too far from my own, and being a critical person myself I feel that it would be wrong to view someone whose approach to traveling and commenting on what he sees is so similar to my own approach [2].  Would I be less generous to the author if I was not a witty and experienced world traveler myself?  Probably, but this is the sort of book I would have written in his shoes, and I liked it a lot, unsurprisingly.

This volume of about 250 pages consists of the author's exploration of the United States and Canada during the 1840's.  His writing about his trip from the United Kingdom to the Halifax and then Boston sounds like it could have been written by a late-period Evelyn Waugh for its comic description of an ill person trying to pretend that they are not ill while on a boat.  His visit to Boston and Lowell expresses a lot of what interests him--discussions about religion, class (he is especially approving of the accomplishments of the young women of the Lowell factories), the care of prisoners and the disabled, as well as politics and the people he happens to meet.  His visits to Hartford, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Richmond and Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, Kingston, Montreal, and Quebec are of the same note.  Throughout these pages we see the author make some trenchant comments against slavery, point out the horrible sameness of so many of the people he met, and comment on the poverty of the arts of conversation in what he witnessed.  He also had some critical things to say about the love of Americans even in the 19th century for long prison sentences that tended to prevent former criminals from ever coming to grips with society on the outside, something that remains no less relevant nowadays.

While the author did not find in America what he hoped or expected to see, he wrote as an honest and witty and observant traveler, and this book remains worthwhile because it still has something to say to Americans about ourselves, even if we may not be inclined to want to hear its message.  Far from dismissing this book as a libelous and abusive attack on the United States from someone who didn't know what they were talking about, this is a book from someone who was insightful as well as critical.  He was a friend of what was then considered liberal sentiment, with a desire that ordinary working people would acquire high culture, a longing for an honest press that rose above the libelous--which sadly has not yet happened here--and a keen observation of the hypocrisies of slave owners and others who professed the right sentiments but had the wrong sort of behavior.  Above all Dickens, who himself had some experiences of the workhouse and of growing up in poverty, had a strong allergy to cant and to the bromides that he witnessed around him so much, the excuses that people make for not valuing the more noble arts of humanity or the better angels of our nature, and it is entirely understandable if his book on America was less positive than he or his readers hoped.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2012...

[2] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

It has some consistency problems but the observations are still very relevant. Dickens worried about American violence, distrust of politicians, uncivil political discourse, boom and bust financial schemes, devotion to money making over ethics... Sound familiar? which is both depressing and as well as comforting. We've been slogging along with these boat anchors around our neck for a long time and we still seem to make substantial forward progress. His observation of small details is delightful. He has problems when he can't seem to make up his mind whether he admires the US or is sorely disappointed because it didn't live up to his expectations. Still a very worthwhile read and I had forgotten how delightful his writing is.

Charles Dickens, in my opinion, is a severely overrated, rather self-important and self-righteous bore. So I don't like most of this books.

This time, though, while he's still a self-important and self-righteous bore whose sense of humour essentially is based entirely on the assumption that the rest of the world is stupid (which, admittedly, is a fair assumption to make), he actually manages to turn these traits to his advantage. It's not very nice being all the aforementioned while writing fiction, but extremely entertaining to the reader in a travel memoir - just ask Twain. After all, Innocents Abroad is the quintessence of these traits.

Dickens' account of America is entertaining, too, because it's rather fascinating to see how the world changed since he was there. Sometimes in rather spectacular ways. Let's take an example - the amazed soliloquies about the moral enlightenment and advanced tactic inherent in the "silent discipline" prison system. Where, you guessed it, no prisoners are allowed to talk to each other, ever. Shudder though you might it's an excellent demonstration of both how people thought then about moral issues and character, and how bad London prisons must have been.

Entertaining, too, are his predictions concerning America's future. For example "Washington [D.C.] is half-empty, and likely to remain so, because nobody who doesn't have to would ever come here." It's also rather amusing to discover that Americans got into the habit of chewing stuff (tobacco rather than gum) already as far back as the 1800s, and that even at that point in time they ate meat three times a day.

It's not as insightful as Tocqueville's travelogue (which actually becomes philosophy and political science), but it is entertaining, and though Dickens' representation of America seems a little detached from the reality of even the America of the time - not to mention of today - it's certainly a glimpse.

P.S.: On a personal note, as an Old-Worlder who lived for a period in that extremely organized and planned country, I was terribly amused by Dickens' comment, describing either Pittsburgh or Philadelphia - I can't recall which - as "too organized and laid out." and saying that "after a while [he was] willing to give an eye for the sight of a curved street."

Amen to that, Dickens.

In 1842, Charles Dickens and his wife, Catherine, voyaged to the United States. The weather was stormy and cold so it was dangerous crossing the Atlantic Ocean, and most of the passengers were very seasick. He arrived in Boston and toured some of the New England and Mid-Atlantic states. The descriptions are unusual for a travel book because he spent a great deal of time looking at prisons, schools, mental hospitals, and mills. He wrote detailed, mostly positive descriptions about those institutions. Although we know from his letters that he was greeted in each city with welcoming dinners and tours since he was a world-famous author, very little mention is made of their hospitality. He seemed exhausted after all the uncomfortable traveling, especially when he went to see the prairie in the frontier of Ohio.

Dickens was used to the older country of England with established institutions and housing, and the British class system. It seemed surprising to him to find so many people living on the edge because they were new immigrants, or were homesteading in the forests or the prairies with no real support.

The highlight of his trip was Niagara Falls. He visited several cities in Canada, and the travel was easier by boat through the Great Lakes. Dickens also directed and acted in three short plays for charity while he stayed in Montreal. He seemed happier and more relaxed in Canada which was part of the British Empire at that time. Dickens and his wife had calmer seas for the return trip back to England.

The book has a section about slavery at the end. Dickens never went any further south than Virginia because slavery sickened him. He thought that tolerating slavery corrupted the character of a nation. He also held negative views of the press, and was disgusted by the habit of spitting chewing tobacco.

Dickens was not happy--with good reason--that the United States did not have an international copyright law. His books were pirated by anyone who wanted to print them. He had hoped to influence the government, but had little success.

The observant Dickens noticed little details, and some of his observations added humor to the account. It was interesting to see America through the eyes of someone who was traveling almost two centuries ago. Dickens, a social activist, was probably one of the few travelers who asked to see the prisons when he arrived in a city!

I’m not convinced I’m going back to read the whole thing, but I greatly enjoyed the chapter Dickens wrote about traveling through my neck of the woods!

Un libro casi “desconocido “ en la gran producción de el autor.