Reviews by Evelyn C. Leeper

AMERICAN NOTES FOR GENERAL CIRCULATION by Charles Dickens:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/22/2005]

Charles Dickens's AMERICAN NOTES FOR GENERAL CIRCULATION (ISBN 0-14-043077-6) is about Dickens's 1842 trip to the United States, during which he visited prisons, workhouses, orphanages, and asylums, and wrote about them. Sometimes he found them models that England should emulate; other times he found them horrific. He says very little about society or social events. I'm sure she attended some, but his goal in describing his trip was more social reform than to write a 19th century "People" magazine. He spends far more time describing the clothing of the working class than of the cream of society, and points out the flaws he sees. For example, he notes "Some Southern republican that, who puts his blacks in uniform, and swells with Sultan pomp and power." And as the book goes on, he finds more to complain about, from the practice of chewing (and spitting) tobacco to the practice of slavery, which he finds abhorrent. Yet he too has his blind spots. He describes traveling through some areas where he was served by slaves, and also through women's prisons, yet later says, "Nor did I ever once, on any occasion, anywhere, during my rambles in America, see a woman exposed to the slightest act of rudeness, incivility, or even inattention" (page 192). What he seems to mean is no white woman, and for that matter, probably only those of the higher classes.

But I do love his description of the sleeping arrangements on one of the canal boats he took: "I found suspended on either side of the cabin three long tiers of hanging book-shelves, designed apparently for volumes of the small octavo size. Looking with greater attention at these contrivances (wondering to find such literary preparations in such a place), I descried on each shelf a sort of microscopic sheet and blanket; then I began dimly to comprehend that the passengers were the library, and that they were to be arranged, edge-wise, on these shelves, till morning" (page 193).

And Dickens, or rather his guide book, certainly disagrees with Attorneys General Edwin Meese and John Ashcroft when it says of the statue The Spirit of Justice in the Capitol, "the artist at first contemplated giving more of nudity, but he was warned that the public sentiment in this country would not admit of it, and in his caution he has gone, perhaps, into the opposite extreme" (page 165).

This book serves as a good way of seeing the social philosophy and attitudes informing Dickens's novels as well as an outsider's portrait of life in mid-19th century America. (Alexis de Tocqueville traveled a bit earlier, about 1831. He also came to inspect the prisons and workhouses, but wrote about considerably more.)

AMERICAN NOTES by Charles Dickens:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/21/2018]

AMERICAN NOTES by Charles Dickens (ISBN 978-0-140-43649-5) is his description of his 1842 trip to the United States. He concentrates mostly on prisons, orphanages, and institutions for the blind and the mentally ill, with additional comments on transportation and hotels. He also has a long chapter at the end about slavery, although it's worth mentioning that he never traveled further south than Richmond, in large part to avoid having to deal with slavery firsthand.