This week’s History Thread keeps with our recent literary focus. We’ll look at Charles Dickens and his journey to the United States, chronicled in his 1842 book American Notes (for General Circulation), which can be found online here. The title is a punning reference to the recent disputes over the Bank of the United States, showing Dickens was well-versed in American political controversies.

At thirty years old, Dickens was already a literary celebrity; his early books The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickelby were well-received on both sides of the Atlantic. What inspired Dickens to travel to the United States, beyond curiosity, isn’t entirely clear, though it’s been suggested that his friendship with Washington Irving (the famed American writer, then serving as Minister to Spain) persuaded him to take the plunge. And Europeans recounting their to the United States was a mini-genre of its own in the 1840s: Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is merely the best-remembered (and easily the most insightful) of the lot.

Regardless, in January 1842 Dickens, his wife Catherine and a maid Anne Brown sailed for the United States. They arrived in Boston and were overwhelmed by the experience. Dickens wrote glowingly of Boston’s physical beauty and the “intellectual refinement and superiority” of its leading citizens. He was favorably received and treated to ovations everywhere he traveled, becoming somewhat vexed and annoyed: “If I turn into the street,” he complained to a friend, “I am followed by a multitude.”

When not being feted by Boston’s leading citizens, Dickens spent much time visiting its philanthropic institutions: mental hospitals, asylums for the blind and mentally handicapped and orphanages. Dickens’ reformist zeal was impressed by the humanity on display, which he compared favorably to what he’d witnessed in London. And in the most affecting passages of American Notes, he recounts his meeting Laura Bridgman, a deaf and blind girl at the Perkins School of the Blind, whose struggles to overcome her handicap inspired Helen Keller:

She had, until now, been quite unconscious of the presence of visitors; but, having her hand placed in that of the gentleman who accompanied me, she immediately expressed his name upon her teacher’s palm.  Indeed her sense of touch is now so exquisite, that having been acquainted with a person once, she can recognise him or her after almost any interval.  This gentleman had been in her company, I believe, but very seldom, and certainly had not seen her for many months.  My hand she rejected at once, as she does that of any man who is a stranger to her.  But she retained my wife’s with evident pleasure, kissed her, and examined her dress with a girl’s curiosity and interest.

She was merry and cheerful, and showed much innocent playfulness in her intercourse with her teacher.  Her delight on recognising a favourite playfellow and companion—herself a blind girl—who silently, and with an equal enjoyment of the coming surprise, took a seat beside her, was beautiful to witness.  It elicited from her at first, as other slight circumstances did twice or thrice during my visit, an uncouth noise which was rather painful to hear.  But of her teacher touching her lips, she immediately desisted, and embraced her laughingly and affectionately.

Dickens remained in touch with Bridgman and her teacher, Samuel Gridley Howe. Years later, during his second visit to the United States, Howe asked permission to print Braille versions of Dickens’ novels. Dickens, decidedly cash-strapped at that point in his life, not only assented but gifted Howe $1,700 out of his own pocket to create and distribute a Braille edition of The Old Curiosity Shop.

Surprisingly, Dickens made little effort to meet American literary figures during his sojourn. He managed a brief meeting with Ralph Waldo Emerson following a lecture in Boston; though the two men were mutual admirers (“If I were a Bostonian,” Dickens wrote, “I think I would be a Transcendentalist”), they left little trace of what was said and mostly confined their relationship to written correspondence. He also struck up a relationship with poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose work similarly impressed him. Of the up-and-coming generation of new American writers – Hawthorne, Melville, etc. – Dickens had nothing to say.

Impressed though Dickens had been by Boston, his enthusiasm for America waned as he traveled farther south. He was appalled by New York, finding little to enjoy among the bustling crowds of Manhattan, the conniving traders of Wall Street and the street gangs and beggars of the Five Points. More appalling still were the cities’ packs of wild hogs: “Just as evening is closing in, you will see them roaming towards bed by scores, eating their way to the last.” And, when he visited the notorious prison at the Tombs, he was further disgusted by the harsh treatment of prisoners there, which far exceeded what he’d experienced in England.

After brief visits to Philadelphia (where Dickens was disturbed by a penitentiary that practiced solitary confinement) and Baltimore (where he had his first, distasteful brush with slavery), Dickens arrived in Washington, DC. If Dickens retained any awe towards the United States, at this point it vanished completely. He remarked scathingly on the city’s humid climate, its ramshackle architecture and the ubiquity of tobacco spitting, which deeply disgusted him. And, of course, being constantly reminded of slavery in the capital of a nation dedicated to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Take the worst parts of the City Road and Pentonville, or the straggling outskirts of Paris, where the houses are smallest, preserving all their oddities, but especially the small shops and dwellings, occupied in Pentonville (but not in Washington) by furniture-brokers, keepers of poor eating-houses, and fanciers of birds.  Burn the whole down; build it up again in wood and plaster; widen it a little; throw in part of St. John’s Wood; put green blinds outside all the private houses, with a red curtain and a white one in every window; plough up all the roads; plant a great deal of coarse turf in every place where it ought not to be; erect three handsome buildings in stone and marble, anywhere, but the more entirely out of everybody’s way the better; call one the Post Office; one the Patent Office, and one the Treasury; make it scorching hot in the morning, and freezing cold in the afternoon, with an occasional tornado of wind and dust; leave a brick-field without the bricks, in all central places where a street may naturally be expected: and that’s Washington.

Dickens’ experience in Washington wasn’t all negative. He dined with President John Tyler, responding positively to his Virginian courtliness (“in his whole carriage and demeanour, he became his station singularly well”), and met a variety of other political notables. He was most impressed with John Quincy Adams, the former President-turned-Congressman who hosted Dickens at a dinner and invited him to a session of the House of Representatives. Dickens witnessed Adams attempting to combat the notorious “gag rule” outlawing discussion of slavery, and was appalled to see Southern senators attacking Adams. “It is the Inalienable Right of some among them, to take the field after their Happiness equipped with cat and cartwhip, stocks, and iron collar, and to shout their view halloa! (always in praise of Liberty) to the music of clanking chains and bloody stripes.”

A short stop in Richmond, Virginia (where Dickens witnessed a slave auction) convinced him not to continue further south. He instead traveled west along the Ohio and Mississippi, making visits to Pittsburgh (“it certainly has a great quantity of smoke hanging about it”), Cincinnati (“a beautiful city; cheerful, thriving, and animated”), Louisville (“no objects of sufficient interest to detain us”) and St. Louis (“it is very hot, lies among great rivers, and has vast tracts of undrained swampy land around it, I leave the reader to form his own opinion”). He encountered a species of boisterous frontiersmen which he referred to as “the Kentucky Giant,” freed blacks, frontier hucksters and even a few Choctaw Indians.

The experience left Dickens drained, and by spring he headed north to Canada. He visited Ontario, Quebec, Montreal and other sites while traveling along the St. Lawrence River, and left a fulsome tribute to the Great White North:

But Canada has held, and always will retain, a foremost place in my remembrance.  Few Englishmen are prepared to find it what it is.  Advancing quietly; old differences settling down, and being fast forgotten; public feeling and private enterprise alike in a sound and wholesome state; nothing of flush or fever in its system, but health and vigour throbbing in its steady pulse: it is full of hope and promise.  To me—who had been accustomed to think of it as something left behind in the strides of advancing society, as something neglected and forgotten, slumbering and wasting in its sleep—the demand for labour and the rates of wages; the busy quays of Montreal; the vessels taking in their cargoes, and discharging them; the amount of shipping in the different ports; the commerce, roads, and public works, all made to last; the respectability and character of the public journals; and the amount of rational comfort and happiness which honest industry may earn: were very great surprises.  The steamboats on the lakes, in their conveniences, cleanliness, and safety; in the gentlemanly character and bearing of their captains; and in the politeness and perfect comfort of their social regulations; are unsurpassed even by the famous Scotch vessels, deservedly so much esteemed at home.  The inns are usually bad; because the custom of boarding at hotels is not so general here as in the States, and the British officers, who form a large portion of the society of every town, live chiefly at the regimental messes: but in every other respect, the traveller in Canada will find as good provision for his comfort as in any place I know.

After a sojourn through upstate New York (including a journey to the Shaker colony outside Albany, which appalled Dickens, and a visit to the military academy at West Point, which impressed him), Dickens finally set out for home in the fall. He’d had his fill of the United States, writing actor William Macready (whose own trip to America climaxed in a nationalist riot) that he was a “lover of freedom, disappointed.” Soon after his return to England, he turned his diaries and letters into a book.

American Notes is, as the above shows, deeply critical of antebellum America (a vision he’d incorporate into his novel Martin Chuzzlewit, whose hero denounces the United States as a land of “dollars, demagogues and bar-rooms”). Dickens remarks repeatedly on the uncouthness of parts of American society: their eagerness to please, the competitiveness of its capitalist culture, the political divisions and the casual resort to violence he witnessed in the western states. Unsurprisingly, it was slavery which left the strongest negative impression in his mind. He savaged Southern slaveowners as “the miserable aristocracy spawned of a false republic” and remarked on the destructiveness and immorality of the institution:

Is it the interest of any man to steal, to game, to waste his health and mental faculties by drunkenness, to lie, forswear himself, indulge hatred, seek desperate revenge, or do murder?  No.  All these are roads to ruin.  And why, then, do men tread them? Because such inclinations are among the vicious qualities of mankind.  Blot out, ye friends of slavery, from the catalogue of human passions, brutal lust, cruelty, and the abuse of irresponsible power (of all earthly temptations the most difficult to be resisted), and when ye have done so, and not before, we will inquire whether it be the interest of a master to lash and maim the slaves, over whose lives and limbs he has an absolute control!

Nonetheless, Dickens found much to admire in the United States: the intelligence and philanthropic impulses of its educated classes, the hard work and thrift of its average citizens, the surprisingly beautiful architecture and Americans’ collective ambition, however unrealized, to be something better than they were. The result is a portrait that, while highly critical, is neither condescending nor dismissive, despite its reputation as such. It is, however, less admiring than de Tocqueville and fully aware of the weaknesses and contradictions of a society that, two decades later, would tear itself apart.

Dickens would visit the United States again in the twilight of his life, traveling through the country on a series of lectures in 1867. Though Americans, then as now carrying a sense of cultural insecurity towards Europe, had resented American Notes‘ scathing portrait of their society, they embraced Dickens with open arms; all animosities between the two were forgotten, aside from Dickens’ ongoing resentment over unauthorized American publications of his novels. He gave dramatic readings of his works across the country; his reading of A Christmas Carol in Boston, in particular, was credited with popularizing that work, and the celebration of Christmas in the United States.

If Dickens was disappointed that America “is not the republic of my imagination,” neither did he dismiss it; he gave an apologetic lecture in New York, which he insisted be included as a postscript to future versions of American Notes. While not retracting his criticisms, Dickens nonetheless felt compelled to bury the hatchet towards a society that had made significant leaps forward (not least in abolishing slavery) since his previous visit:

“So much of my voice has lately been heard in the land, that I might have been contented with troubling you no further from my present standing-point, were it not a duty with which I henceforth charge myself, not only here but on every suitable occasion, whatsoever and wheresoever, to express my high and grateful sense of my second reception in America, and to bear my honest testimony to the national generosity and magnanimity. Also, to declare how astounded I have been by the amazing changes I have seen around me on every side–changes moral, changes physical, changes in the amount of land subdued and peopled, changes in the rise of vast new cities, changes in the growth of older cities almost out of recognition, changes in the graces and amenities of life, changes in the Press, without whose advancement no advancement can take place anywhere. Nor am I, believe me, so arrogant as to suppose that in five-and-twenty years there have been no changes in me, and that I had nothing to learn and no extreme impressions to correct when I was here first. And this brings me to a point on which I have, ever since I landed in the United States last November, observed a strict silence, though sometimes tempted to break it, but in reference to which I will, with your good leave, take you into my confidence now. Even the Press, being human, may be sometimes mistaken or misinformed, and I rather think that I have in one or two rare instances observed its information to be not strictly accurate with reference to myself. Indeed, I have, now and again, been more surprised by printed news that I have read of myself, than by any printed news that I have ever read in my present state of existence. Thus, the vigour and perseverance with which I have for some months past been collecting materials for, and hammering away at, a new book on America has much astonished me; seeing that all that time my declaration has been perfectly well known to my publishers on both sides of the Atlantic, that no consideration on earth would induce me to write one. But what I have intended, what I have resolved upon (and this is the confidence I seek to place in you), is, on my return to England, in my own person, in my own Journal, to bear, for the behoof of my countrymen, such testimony to the gigantic changes in this country as I have hinted at to-night. Also, to record that wherever I have been, in the smallest places equally with the largest, I have been received with unsurpassable politeness, delicacy, sweet temper, hospitality, consideration, and with unsurpassable respect for the privacy daily enforced upon me by the nature of my avocation here and the state of my health. This testimony, so long as I live, and so long as my descendants have any legal right in my books, I shall cause to be republished, as an appendix to every copy of those two books of mine in which I have referred to America. And this I will do and cause to be done, not in mere love and thankfulness, but because I regard it as an act of plain justice and honour.”