....when you visit this country again never make any allus
ions to the shop in your public addresses; this matter of international
copyright has a strongodor And lastly, never be ungrateful for
civilities which you know are honestly meant, however awkwardly
expressed
It is to be hoped that Dickens never saw a copy of this highly offensive
production but the venomous points it made were all certainly odiously familiar
to him and the clamour that arose about American Notes no doubt decided him
to retort fiercely on the Americans in Martin Chuzzlewit. 'I do perceive
a perplexingly divided and subdivided duty, in the matter of the book of
travels', he had written to Forster whilst still in America, 'Oh the
subliminated essence of comicality that I could distil, from the materials
I have
Very little indeed of this 'essence of comicality that he eventually
poured into Chuzzlewit gets into American Notes. In consequence it has
generally been pronounced a dull book and, certainly, any tone Dickensian
must prefer the much more personalised and impressionistic Pictures from Italy
with its 'inimitable' accounts of the bizarre pageantry of Holy Week in Rome,
the ludicrous Neapolitan puppet-show, and so on. Even the 'fine writting1
in Picturessuch as the verbal panorama of 'dream-like' Venice, is much
better than the description of Niagara, the only truly purple patch in the
NotesThat most insightful of all Dickens critics, G.K. Chesterton, puts
his finger on a notable difference between the two travel-books when he
writes of Dickens's feeling a sort of 'family responsibility' in inspecting
America whereas in*truly foreign Italy he could just relax and be a gossipping
tourist:
'Dickens is cross with America because he is worried about America;-
as if he were its father. He explores its industrial, legal and
educational arrangements like a mother looking at the housekeeping
of a married son; he makes suggestions with a certain acidity; he
takes a strange pleasure in being pessimistic. He advises them to
take note of how much better certain things are done in England'.
his'mother-in-law' tone is not characteristic of the whole of American
Notes, however. Chapter 3, 4 and 5, dealing with Boston and New England,
may be rather like in this vein but there is more of praise than Chesterton's
description suggests. Disapproval becomes marked in Dickens's account of
New York but something more than disapproval appears in his brief description
of the Tombs Prison there, 'a dismal-fronted pile of bastard Egyptian, like
an enchanter's palace in a melodrama'. Dickens's imagination, always strongly
stirred by prisons, begins to take over and is in full force in the next
chapter when he describes to system of solitary confinement practiced in the
Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia. He writes about the latter with just the
same powerful projection of himself into the prisoner's place as he had written
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