Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-8bljj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-20T04:44:42.086Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

26 - The Victorians and America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2012

Ella Dzelzainis
Affiliation:
University of Newcastle
Sally Ledger
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, University of London
Holly Furneaux
Affiliation:
University of Leicester
Get access

Summary

Shortly before departing for the United States, Dickens wrote a letter to the New York magazine editor Lewis Gaylord Clark in which he voiced his eager anticipation of his trip: ‘I cannot describe to you the glow into which I rise, when I think of the wonders that await us, and all the interest I am sure I shall have in your mighty land’. Accompanied by his wife Catherine, Dickens set sail from Liverpool on 4 January 1842, reaching America on the 22nd. His six-month itinerary included the cities of Boston, New York, Washington, Cincinnati and Philadelphia; inspections of America's institutions – its prisons, asylums, homes for the blind, schools and the seats of government; and trips in search of nature, visiting the Prairie and Niagara Falls and witnessing American frontier life on the banks of the Mississippi as he travelled down the river by paddle steamer.

Within a mere eight weeks of his arrival, however, Dickens fired off a very different kind of letter to his actor friend Charles Macready in London. ‘This is not’, he famously declared, ‘the Republic I came to see. This is not the Republic of my Imagination.’ Commissioned in advance to write an account of his trip, on his return to England Dickens produced a travelogue, American Notes for General Circulation (1842), in which praise of certain institutions and customs of the fledgeling republic was outweighed by wide criticism.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×