After regaling myself with Martin Chuzzlewit, I figured it would be as good a time as any to read my first Dickens non-fiction, seeing as it immediately preceded Martin and touches a similar subject: those wild, rebellious colonials.While certainly no sweeping national analysis a la De Tocqueville, Dickens's American Notes capture several enlightening and informational snapshots of what America was in the 1840s, from Boston to St. Louis, from partisan politics to deviations from the good Queen's English.
Dickens's interest in social reform and justice probably made him a boring travel companion. While his wife Catherine perhaps wanted to hit the beach, Dickens was excited to see prisons, workhouses, orphanages, reform schools, and institutes for the blind, deaf, and dumb. Indeed, that's about all we get of New England - how their prisons work, what good and bad there is in their design, how they are trying to educate and employ the poor, and so on. Some vignettes are moving and uplifting (the education of Laura Bridgman), others are terrifying (the solitary confinement prisons in New York and Pennsylvania, the list of personal advertisements describing the physical injuries of runaway slaves).
Of course, Dickens the humorist gets in a few good laughs, starting with his mock praise of the "spacious" steamliner accommodations on the trip over. The trials of travelling provide plenty of opportunities to make comic lemonade, while reminding me how awesome cars and airplanes are. The widespread habit of chewing tobacco also evokes Dickens's comic ire - no matter where he goes, he is bespattered with inadvertent spittle. Those uncouth Americans!
Arbitrary rating: 4 out of 5 wild, rebellious colonials
No comments:
Post a Comment