American Notes (Paperback)

CHARLES DICKENS BORN I 8 I -DIED 1870 -- Editors Note Americans quickly became enthusiastic admirers of Dickenss works. It was one of the reasons which urged him to make his Jirst visit to the United States-the other and usual reason being the search for copy. He went, he saw, he criticised. It is an old story now how the Americans were chagrined by his criticisms, and how resentment softened and died away in the general appreciation of the man and his genius. That the temporary illfeeling was so soon forgotten is a tribute alike to the hosts and to the guest-who had no desire to cowt, by any adventitious means, the popular applause. The visit that resulted in American Notes was made in 1842 and the book was published the same year. Frankly written as are these Notes, it will be seen from the following Life that Dickens was much more critical and outspoken of Americans, their habits and institutions, in his letters to Forster. But when he visited America for the second and last time, he noted amazing changesMas he acknowledged in the 1868 postscrifit to the Notes. By then, reseliitment had given way to unsur nssaEle politeness, delicacy, sweet temper, hospitahty, etc., on the part of the criticised Americans. Since 1868 there have been many more amazing changes in the United States but there has been no change in the afection for Charles Dickens and his works. This edition is printed from the one carefully corrected by the author in 1867-68. AMERICAN NOTES BY CHARLES DICKENS - PREFACE 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 forthemselves 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. As they find the fact, they will judge me. If they discern any evidences of wrong-going, in any direction that I have indicated, they will acknowledge that I had reason in what I wrote. If they discern no such indications, they will consider me altogether mistaken-but not wilfully. Prejudiced, I am not, and never have been, otherwise than in favour of the United States. I have many friends in America, I feel a grateful interest in the country, I hope and believe it will successfully work out a problem of the highest importance to the whole human race. To represent me as viewing AMERICA with ill-nature, coldness, or animosity, is merely to do a very foolish thing which is always a very easy one. AMERICAN NOTES CHAPTER I GOING AWAY I SHALL never forget the one-fourth serious and three-fourths comical astonishment, with which, on the morning of the third of January eighteen-hundred-and-forty-two, I opened the door of, and put my head into, a state-room on board the Britannia steam-packet, twelve hundred tons burthen per register, bound for Halifax and Boston, and carrying Her Majestys mails. That this state-room had been specially engaged for Charles Dickens, Esquire, and Lady, was rendered sufficiently clear even to my scared intellect by a very small manuscript, announcing the fact, which was pinned on a very flat quilt, covering a very thin mattress, spread like a surgical plaster on a most inaccessible shelf...