'A song.of the hour, now in course of being sung and
whistled in every street, the other day reminded the writer of
these words that twenty years ago, a little book on the
United States, entitled American Notes, was published by 'a
Young Man,from the Country!, who had just seen and left it.
This Young Man from the Country feel into a deal of
trouble, by reason of having taken the liberty to believe that
he perceived in America downward popular tendencies for which
his young enthusiasm had been anything but prepared. It was in
vain for the Young Man to offer in extenuation of his belief
that no stranger could have set foot on those shores with a
feeling of livelier interest in the country, and stronger faith
in it, that he. Those were,the days when the Tories had made
their Ashburtori Treaty, ancj wqeR the Whigs and Radicals must
have no theory disturbed .All three parties waylaid and mauled
the Young Man from the Country 5 and showed that he knew nothing
about the country1.
Dickens then proceeds to quote at length his adverse judgement of Congress in
American Notes and his condemnation of American auspiciousness and worship
of 'smartness' ends:
'The foregoing was written in the year eighteen hondred
and forty-two. It rests with the reader to decide whether it
has received any confirmation, or assumed any colour of truth
in or about the year eighteen hundred and sixty-two'.
This article is one of the very few devoted to an American subject that
Dickens wrote after Chuzzlewit. But it would be a very incomplete account
of Dickens's dealings with America that omitted any description of the
treatment of American subjects in his weekly journals, Household Words and
Al 1 the Year Round. Harry Stone has amply documented the strict editorial
control that Dickens exercised over the first of these journals, which ran
from 1850 to 1859, when, following a quarrel with his publishers, he replaced
it by All the Year Round: 'With the inner circles (of contributors) he
rigidly controlled what was written and how it was written; with more
independent or casual contributors, he exercised control through rejection
or through thorough editing'. Public identification of Dickens's own views
with those expressed by his contributors was encouraged by the printing
of the legend "CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS" immediately below the magazine's
title on the first page of every issue and the anonymous presentation of all
contributions
About two dozen articles concerned with America appeared during the
nine years of Household Words's exixtence, not a very great number when
one considers that each weekly issue contained on average half-a-dozen items.
There was much public interest in California around 1850 as a result of the
'49 gold rush and we find five articles about life there in the early volumes
of the journal, including an account of a lynching and some enthusiastic letters
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