about the condemned cell in Newgate in Sketches by Boz or was to write about
the prison adjoining the Doge's Palace in Pictures from Italy. He imagines
a man brought, hooded, to the cell in which we will be isolated for years
from all mankind and what his feelings will be:
'At first the man is stunned. His confinement is a hideous
vision; and his old life a reality. He throws himself upon
his bed, and lies there abandoned to despair. By degree the
insupportable solitude and barrenness of the place rouses him
from this stupor, and when the trap is his grated door is opened,
he humbly begs and prays for work. 'Give me some work to do, or
I shall go raving mad
Dickens continues in this vein for ten more paragraphs, as though working out
a private nightmare (as, indeed, he was), before returning to Chesterton's
'mother-in-law' tone. It is some of the most powerful writing in American
Notes but it seems to me to transcend the matter of America altogether.
It is something that happened to Dickens in America but might have happened
anywhere, and indeed did so whenever he got near a prison, English, American
or European.
It certainly darkens the toneof the took, however. A certain horror underlies
all his subsequent descriptions. America begins to seem a series of prisons:
the 'unhealthy' poison of Washington where few would live who were not
'obliged to reside there'; the 'dismal swamp' of the Mississippi, Dickens's
Heart of Darkness, pictures as one huge Condemned Cell,' in whose baleful
shade the wanderers who are tempted higher, droop and die, and lay their bones
the stupefying 'open prison' of the Looking-glass Prairie, 'oppressive in its
barren monotony', where the traveller would feel 'little of that sense of
freedom and exhilaration which a Scottish health inspires, or even our
English downs awaken' but would 'often glance towards the distant and
frequently-receding line of the horizon, and wish it gained and passed';
and the 'gloomy-, silent commonwealth' in which the Shakers isolate themselves.
The few agreeable places such as Cincinnati, 'cheerful, thriving and animated'
or the 'beauty and freshness' of West Point are too briefly dealt with to
counteract the overwhelming impression of imprisonment.
Dickens's gloomy verdict on America in his Notes can be attributes partly
to him mauling at the hands of the American press, partly to what we now call
'culture shock', which did not hit him until New York and Tartly, I think,
to certain qualities on himself such as impatience and a passion for tidiness
and order. Whatever else America was, it was not tidy and, outside such long-
settled communtties as Boston, it was still very much in process of becoming
organised. Harry Stone writes:
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