American Notes for General Circulation by Charles Dickens (review)

Charles Dickens's travel book, American Notes remains largely unread today. But when it was first published in the fall of 1842 it was eagerly anticipated on both sides of the Atlantic. Furthermore, the book had a long shelf-life. As late as 1886, more than 45 years after its first publication, Helen Keller's mother read Dickens's account of Laura Bridgman, the deaf and blind girl whom Samuel Gridley Howe had taught to read and write at the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Massachusetts, which gave her a glimmer of hope that her daughter, too, could be educated. Kate Keller's engagement with American Notes is a testament to its enduring importance and social value, and, indeed, to the ability of this slim volume to effect social change.

This new edition, with an introduction by Diana Archibald, makes American Notes accessible for a new audience of students. When Dickens set sail for North America in January of 1842, he was only 29 but he was already a cultural phenomenon, the author of Sketch by Boz and five novels. Archibald restores not the bearded stern older man of the popular imagination, but a young man with silky hair and a penchant for showy dress. Indeed, he arrived in Boston in an enormous bearskin coat, which fans proceeded to pluck for souvenirs. It can be difficult to imagine a novelist having this kind of celebrity today, achieved largely through a bourgeoning newspaper and periodical press that made his American tour go viral long before the internet. Indeed, Dickens's literary celebrity made his travelogue eagerly anticipated in a culture where it was almost expected that British authors who crossed the Atlantic would print their musings on the new nation. His verdict on America would carry considerable weight.

Many people were disappointed; the famous author had scathing words for American institutions, particularly slavery and the genocide of indigenous peoples. Indeed, as Archibald points out, he found little to like outside of New England, and was especially horrified by slavery, which had been abolished in England and Scotland. Perhaps the major contribution of Archibald's edition is her insistence that Dickens, who was politically liberal, was not opposed to the ideals of the young Republic, but rather to how those ideals had played out. Critics expected that as a liberal Dickens would be a supporter of America; Archibald argues instead that Dickens's book aggravated conflict between Britain and America. Indeed, peace between the two nations remained tenuous in 1842. The War of 1812 had been fought just 30 years earlier, and on the same day that Dickens arrived in New York, a British diplomat, Lord Ashburton, had been sent to negotiate a dispute over the Canada–Maine border. Many might have hoped that Dickens's book would smooth Anglo-American relations rather than exacerbate them. Archibald makes the distinction between Dickens's support of American ideals in theory and his condemnation of how the young nation fell short of those ideas in practice.

The edition's carefully chosen illustrations, introduction and extensive footnotes provide a valuable context for today's student. the student. We learn about steam travel by boat, which was then new and hazardous, about the rash of American bank failures in 1837 to which the title ("notes for general circulation") alludes, and about the difficulties of emigration in the mid-nineteenth century. These historical themes are supplemented by contemporary illustrations of people and places ranging from the Lowell Mill factory girls to Tremont House in Boston to Niagara Falls. However, more information about the lack of international copyright laws is needed to situate Dickens and his work within a transatlantic nineteenth-century literary scene that found him immensely popular due to the wide availability of pirated editions of his work in America. Dickens's journey included stops in Toronto, Kingston, Montreal and Quebec. More context on what was then British North America, and how Dickens's journey...