American Notes
In 1842, the most famous writer in the English-speaking world arrived in America with an agenda: to report back on the strange, new civilization that had captured Britain's imagination. What he found shocked him. Charles Dickens came expecting progress and found promise, but also encountered a nation hypnotized by money, a press he considered corrupt, and the unspeakable horror of slavery in the South. Yet he was also moved by Boston's elegance, awestruck by Niagara Falls, and genuinely moved by the institutions he visited, from hospitals for the blind to model prisons. American Notes is travel writing stripped of hospitality - a sharp, often uncomfortable status report that made both Americans and Brits furious. Dickens praises what deserves praise and eviscerates what deserves evisceration, offering a portrait of 1840s America that is by turns admiring, horrified, bewildered, and prophetic. It remains essential reading not as a historical document but as a master observer's unblinking gaze at a young nation grappling with its own contradictions.
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“Cincinnati is a beautiful city; cheerful, thriving, and animated. I have not often seen a place that commends itself so favourably and pleasantly to a stranger at the first glance as this does.””
— Charles Dickens
“The inhabitants of Cincinnati are proud of their city as one of the most interesting in America: and with good reason.””
— Charles Dickens
“He was a great politician of course, and explained his opinions at some length to one of our company; but I only remember that he concluded with two sentiments, one of which was, Somebody for ever; and the other, Blast everybody else! which is by no means a bad abstract of the general creed in these matters.””
— Charles Dickens
“It would be well, there can be no doubt, for the American people as a whole, if they loved the Real less, and the Ideal somewhat more. It would be well, if there were greater encouragement to lightness of heart and gaiety, and a wider cultivation of what is beautiful, without being eminently and directly useful.””
— Charles Dickens
“All that is loathsome, drooping, or decayed is here.””
— Charles Dickens
“IT is nearly eight years since this book was first published. I present it, unaltered, in the Cheap Edition; and such of my opinions as it expresses, are quite unaltered too. My readers have opportunities of judging for themselves whether the influences and tendencies which I distrust in America, have any existence not in my imagination.””
— Charles Dickens
“Columbus. It is distant about a hundred and twenty miles from Cincinnati, but there is a macadamised road (rare blessing!) the whole way, and the rate of travelling upon it is six miles an hour.””
— Charles Dickens
“Then, such an oracle as she became in reference to the localities! and such facetiousness as was displayed by the married ladies! and such sympathy as was shown by the single ones! and such peals of laughter as the little woman herself (who would just as soon have cried) greeted every jest with!””
— Charles Dickens
“But the time will come; and when, in their changed ashes, the growth of centuries unborn has struck its roots, the restless men of distant ages will repair to these again unpeopled solitudes; and their fellows, in cities far away, that slumber now, perhaps, beneath the rolling sea, will read in language strange to any ears in being now, but very old to them, of primeval forests where the axe was never heard, and where the jungled ground was never trodden by a human foot.””
— Charles Dickens
