Dickens Does America

U.S. wall map from 1845, just three years after Dickens' journey, Click here for the full rez version.

When Charles Dickens set sail for North America from Liverpool on January 3, 1842, the nation he visited was a work in progress, and one hundred seventy one years later, it remains so. It's infrastructure was scrappy, its people a little rough around the edges, and its geographical obstacles daunting, but the pluck of its citizens and its vast natural resources made its potential seem limitless. In many respects, the United States was what we would now consider a third world country, or at most a developing nation. Dickens was both charmed and appalled by what he saw there, and his criticisms did not go over well with the American public upon publication. At the time, Dickens was the biggest literary star of his day with a huge readership in the former colonies and around the world. so its understandable that his missive stung a bit.

American Notes for General Circulation (1842; this edition: 1913) by Charles Dickens

Americans can be a little touchy about criticism from their former imperial rulers, and patronizing lectures in stern English accents tend to make us cringe. It's in our DNA. But, to use an American phrase, "he called 'em the way he saw 'em", and while his tone can be a little paternal in places, his motivation was not to flout his cultural superiority but to write an accurate record of what he experienced. Between the lines, one gets the feeling that Dickens really wants the young nation to succeed and to live up to its own constitutionally prescribed standards regarding human rights. He also presents vivid portraits of cities, towns, the wilderness and the people he met on his journey with that singular Dickensian eye for detail and ear for dialect. This is Charles Dickens, after all, so you can expect beautiful writing and short jabs of dark, poignant humor. I won't spoil it for you, but here are a few highlights of the journey:

He made land on the continent near Halifax after a rough journey with choppy seas and the dismal echoes of aggrieved stomachs churning across the Atlantic. On the first leg of his journey, he headed for Boston, stopping at Lowell and Worcester, Massachusetts, down through Hartford and New Haven, Connecticut via the Connecticut River, then via the Long Island Sound to New York and on to Philadelphia. 

Dickens was not the typical holiday maker. In all of the major cities he visited, he made a point of visiting the local prisons, insane asylums, poor houses and rehabilitative facilities for the disabled, making American Notes a sort of twisted Zagat's guide for the disenfranchised. Boston had the best of facilities, New York and Philadelphia the worst. One of the most engrossing passages in the book concerns meeting Laura Bridgman, a young deaf and blind girl in Boston who learned special sign language fifty years before Hellen Keller. Dickens was much encouraged by the orderliness and cleanliness of the city and its facilities and was sufficiently moved by Bridgman's story to include a very detailed description of her education, making her world famous. By contrast, his description of New York's darker corners and of a prison in Philadelphia in which all the inmates are in perpetual solitary confinement conveys the essence of human despair and the depths of the author's compassion.

Laura Bridgman

From Philadelphia, Dickens travelled to Washington D.C. where he watched Congress in session and was unimpressed by showy political posturing and rhetoric, but positively appalled by the preponderance of tobacco chewing and the poor marksmanship of perpetually masticating Yanks when aiming for the spittoon, even in the White House. Of American cities in general and of Washington, D.C. in particular, he notes that America seems to be in a perpetual state of construction as many public buildings and public works projects stood unfinished, often awaiting funding for completion. When traveling between cities, the roads were muddy and perilous and wagons often cramped and uncomfortable. Locomotives were brand new and could only carry him along a few routes. An American road trip was not for the faint of heart in the 1840s.

Crossing into Richmond, Virginia and Baltimore, Dickens experienced his first glimpses of the grim reality of slavery. The picturesque vistas of Richmond were spoiled by a painful awareness of the inhumane treatment of African Americans. In fact, at the end of the book, he devotes and entire chapter to denouncing slavery in the bluntest terms, including several unsettling excerpts from newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves, complete with graphic details of distinguishing wounds and disfigurements from various physical abuses that would identify them. He also cites stories concerning duels, murders and assassinations to illustrate the young nation's tendency for gun violence and vigilante justice. Sobering and prescient stuff, to say the least.

He then left Dixie for Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and Louisville en route to St. Louis (where your humble blogger resides). It was a tough journey by boat, and Dickens describes the transition from the Ohio River to the Mississippi in dramatic terms as the pristine beauty and relative tranquility of the Ohio gives way to the muddy clutter and the ferocious current of the Mississippi. At the time, Missouri was the western most state in the Union--the last stop before reaching the wild, lawless Indian territories. From St. Louis, he made a visit to the Illinois prairie, back to St. Louis and back through Ohio up to Lake Erie and on to Canada, passing through Niagara Falls and completing his six month journey at West Point.

In many ways, his reportage of America mirrors the view of many outside observers at virtually any point in its history (Alexis de Tocqueville's Journey to America, written a decade earlier, comes to mind). Dickens sees a world of contradictions: beauty and brutality, industry and soul-chilling poverty, equality and oppression. In fact, as Dickens tells it, my forefathers were friendly, earnest men with great spirit and gumption, who spat great wads of tobacco juice on the floor, kept their heating stoves on high, had a few bugs to work out of their conception of human rights, embraced an informal, egalitarian attitude in court proceedings and legislatures, swore allegiance to lofty ideals that they struggled to live up to in practice, and used quaint and colorful colloquialisms. Except for the constant spitting part, these words could be aptly applied to the present day, and as an American, I really don't have a problem with that assessment. One hundred seventy one years later, American Notes is both a valuable historical document of what the U.S. once was and a still-relevant, farsighted commentary on what it has become.

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