DICKENS ON AMERICA AND THE AMERICANS
Michael Slater
Introduction
I
"America was the China of the nineteenth century - described,
analyzed, promoted an attacked in virtually every nation
struggling to come to terms with new social and political
forces. Sure of her destiny, she commanded international
attention. The Declation of Independence appealed to the
conscience of the world, the Revolution enlisted international
support, and the Constitution thrust an unknown political
personality into the society of nations. What had been a
somewhat obscure, occasionally romanticized backwater of
colonial exploitation became, virtually overnight, a pheno
menon to be investigated, a political and moral experiment
to be judged. Throughout the following century thousand of
foreign visitors - reporters, social critics, and artists
among them - took up the challenge".
The big difference between 19th century America and present-day China,
from the point of view of Mr. Pachter's illuminating comparison, lies in that
word 'thousands'. America was wide open to curious foreigners, whether they
came simply to observe or with some ulterior motive. Among the British visi
tors many, like the retired sailors, Captains Basil Hall and Frederick Marryat
of the formidable Miss Martineau, went primarily as tourists and wrote up
their experiences and observations for publication when they returned home.
The Captains were staunch Tories and their books were highly critical of the
new democracy; Miss Martineau, a proselytizing political economist
(Dickens later described her as 'grimly bent on the enlightement of
mankind'), who warmly espoused the cause of Abolition, saw the American
people rather as 'a great embryo poet: now moody, new wild, but bringing
out results of absolute good sense'. But, whatever the viewpoint adopted,
travel-books about her one-time colony sold like the hottest of cakes
in Britain and were even more eagerly read, in pirated editions, in America
itself. None of them caused a greater sensation, though, than Mrs. Trollope's
Domestic Life and Manners of the Americans (1832) which racily portrayed
the Americans as a set of gross, greedy boors, utterly lacking in culture
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