American Notes for General Circulation: Volume 1

Charles Dickens

Jan 1842 · Chapman and Hall

Ratings and reviews

I'm truly amazed by the reviews here that rave about this book, yet only give it 3 stars. Especially the reviewer who starts with "I only read half....". (How can you give a whole review about half a book?) In reading this book, I recommend saving the introductory matter for last and beginning with Dickens' narrative. Although he was a bestselling and well-known author at the time of his trip, he'd only published a handful of works and was only 29 at the time he embarked. He'd just lost his job as a journalist in 1839, so he probably didn't see himself solely as a writer of fiction in January 1842. I suspect, in visiting prisons, mental institutions, Congress, and making observations not only about slavery, but regarding Temperance, various religions and society, his idea was not only to write a travelogue, but to bring home materials for many other articles about America as well, to be sold to whatever periodicals would pay. I'm glad this wasn't a simple travelogue, because history would have lost out on a beautifully detailed view of the early American Republic. I found the most amazing parts of American Notes to be Dickens' depictions of traveling itself. Between crossing the North Atlantic in the middle of winter 50 years before the Titantic, stagecoaches constantly mired in mud, and the early days of steamboating, when the contraptions were more likely to explode than not, it's a wonder he survived the journey. The world might never have seen A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, or any of his other later works. I loved his humor in American Notes. His unabridged short stories have that kind of humor, but most, even A Christmas Carol, have had the humor edited out over the years. American Notes very much reminded me of Mark Twain's travel books. Twain almost certainly read Dickens and was influenced by him. But, of course, the best of American Notes is Dickens' writing--his descriptions, his characterizations, the way he puts words together.