American Notes When Charles Dickens

American Notes When Charles Dickens arrived in the United States in 1842, he had already become an established author with such books as the Pickwick Paper, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. When he wrote American Notes as a result of this trip, his negative views on America were therefore all the more disturbing. Yet, looking back on this book over 150 years later, it is still possible to learn from his critiques of this early democratic country. Many of the concerns he had then continue to this day.

Charles Dickens, one of the most recognized authors, was born in England in 1812 and had a very psychologically disturbing childhood. Because his father could not pay his debts, Dickens' family had to stay in a debtors' prison while Dickens, himself, still a young boy of 12 was forced to work at Warrens Blacking Factory. Although his father finally saved him and Dickens was able to attend a day school in London, his negative experiences in the factory never left his memory and became a part of several of his books.

He became a freelance reporter and began writing short stories, struggling financially until the Pickwick Papers became a popular success in 1836 and established him as an author. By the time he decided to travel to the newly established United States, he was an established author. Thus, when he published American Notes after his trip in 1842, Americans were angered not only because of his critical portrayal of their country but because someone so recognized worldwide was writing such negative comments about them.

They felt betrayed because they gave him such a positive reception: "No foreign celebrity ever received such a welcome. From the moment he landed at Boston until he sailed for home five months later, his life was an endless succession of balls, dinners, and receptions of all kinds.In Boston the people simply went wild over him" (Rupert 27). When Dickens went to the United States at the age of 30, he considered himself more than a tourist or visitor.

He also saw himself as a critic of this early democracy, which he knew that England would one day follow. His book, therefore, became much more than a tourist guide to America. He was actually analyzing this new country looking for its strengths and weaknesses and also looking at his own ideas on democracy to see how they corresponded to this new nation. One of his major concerns was America's tolerance of slavery.

He had heard horrible stories in England about slave owners and now he was seeing this situation firsthand.

He states in Chapter XIV: Now, I appeal to every human mind, imbued with the commonest of common sense, and the commonest of common humanity; to all dispassionate, reasoning creatures, of any shade of opinion; and ask, with these revolting evidences of the state of society which exists in and about the slave districts of America before them, can they have a doubt of the real condition of the slave, or can they for a moment make a compromise between the institution or any of its flagrant, fearful features, and their own just consciences? Likewise, he may have called the Native Americans, "Red Men" and characterized them as less than human, yet he said they were due their freedom as anyone.

In Chapter VII, Dickens criticized the conditions of the American prisons. He asks the country not to be so quick to rely on prison labor, which drives noncriminal workers out of employment. His details on reform facilities ends in a diatribe of solitary confinement at the Philadelphia's Eastern Penitentiary, which confines prisoners alone in their cells for throughout their jailed years. He also chronicles the new immigrants and the life they can make in this new nation.

His involvement with the populace manifests itself noticeably in his concern for the immigrants and settlers. In American Notes, he describes two New York Irish laborers with their long-tailed blue coats and bright buttons, and says in Chapter VI, "It would be hard to keep your model republics going without the countrymen and countrywomen of those two laborers.

For who else would dig, and delve, and drudge, and do domestic work, and make canals and roads, and execute great lines of Internal Improvement?" The way that the Americans treat the slaves, Indians and immigrants is totally abhorrent to Dickens, but it is not the only aspect of America that he criticizes in American Notes.

He also highly disapproves of Americans' personality, cockiness, huge egos, failure to respect other people's privacy, horrible manners as gulping down their food, chewing and spitting tobacco, disrespect for individual integrity and being overbearing personalities. Overall, of great concern to Dickens is the way this new country was established and what it would become. He had come to America expecting perfection, and sees a country still attempting to work out its identity. He is afraid for its future and what it would become.

Selfishness, crassness, and hoggishness, he suggests, are America's real institutions, what governs business, politics, and all of human relationships. He is angry about the Americans' bad manners because they are inconsistent with the democratic principle, which should guarantee equal rights for all. On the other hand, he criticizes those individuals who have blind patriotism for their country and give no thought to any other views.

As Crew (43) notes, page after page of American Notes details the dangers of civil disorder in high places, unthinking acceptance of public brutality, lectures about culture without significant efforts to support a culture. Stated Dickens in his introduction: My readers have opportunities of judging for themselves whether the influences and tendencies which I distrusted in America, had, at that time, any existence but in my imagination.

They can examine for themselves whether there has been anything in the public career of that country since, at home or abroad, which suggests that those influences and tendencies really did exist. When literary advisory John Forster wrote.