American Notes for General Circulation

Charles Dickens was the most famous of many travelers of his time who journeyed to America, curious about the revolutionary new civilization that had captured the English imagination. His frank, often humorous descriptions in his 1842 account cover everything from his uncomfortable sea voyage to an ecstatic narrative of his visit to Niagara Falls. Yet Dickens is also critical of American society, its preoccupation with money, and reliance on slavery, as well as the rude, unsavory manners of Americans and their corrupt press. Above all, American Notes is a lively chronicle of what was for Dickens an illuminating encounter with the New World.

Charles Dickens entered the world of travel writing with his 1850 work, American Notes for General Circulation. Dickens' travels were part of the trend of European writers, such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Harriet Martineau, who came to America to comment on her successes and failures in the experiment of democracy. His work, reflecting his 5-month trip to America in 1842, proves to be a testing ground for his own democratic and radical ideals. Traveling mainly along the East Coast and Great Lakes regions, his writing style was that of critical observer or reporter, rather than that of a tourist. Dickens visited prisons and mental asylums and parodied local manners, including tobacco spitting and rural dialects. Slavery proved to be abhorrent to Dickens, and the continuation of the institution in America, as well as the free availability of bootlegged copies of his work, colored his more positive observations of American society. His commentary about Wall Street, the press, and the prison system, while often satiric and funny, have a thoroughly modern appeal. While originally revered and given a hero's welcome, Dickens' interactions with the American press, especially in relation to his views on America's lack of copyright law, tarnished his impressions of America and America's impressions of him. Though his travels, Dickens became sensitized to the differences between the ideals of democracy and equality and the application of those ideals in American society. It is these differences that came to be elucidated in the development of the darker, more cynical world-view of his later novels.

Charles Dickens is probably the greatest novelist England ever produced. His innate comic genius and shrewd depictions of Victorian life -- along with his memorable characters -- have made him beloved by readers the world over. In Dickens' books live some of the most repugnant villains in literature, as well as some of the most likeable (and unlikely) heroes.