American Notes For General Circulation
Charles DickensOverview
So wrote an exuberant Dickens shortly before his voyage to America in 1842. He was the most famous of many travellers of his time who journeyed to the New World, curious to find out about the revolutionary new civilization which had captured the English imagination. His frank, often humorous descriptions cover everything from his comically uncomfortable sea voyage to his wonder at the Niagara Falls. In general Dickens is critical of what he saw as a society ruled by money and partly built on slavery, with unsavoury manners and a corrupt press. His unfavourable account provoked a hostile response in America and Britain, although he was to change his opinion later.American Notes can be read as a journey in the long-established tradition of Chaucer, Bunyan or Swift -- as a progress to knowledge through varied experiences. Above all, it is a fascinating account of what was for Dickens an illuminating encounter with the New World.
Synopsis
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.