Dickens in America

Charitably, it is an uneven book. Uncharitably, it is a pointless ramble punctuated with some interesting things here and there. Dickens lands in Boston, heads south to Washington, then west to Cincinnati and the Great Plains, northeast by the Great Lakes into Canada, and then back down to Boston.

Without a doubt, the most curious feature of his journey is what he visits in each town in the first part of the trip. The whole first part of the book reads like a tour of…prisons. Yep. Roll into town and visit the prison (cf. Lady Malvern!). Dickens starts out liking American prisons. Boston has a great prison! Who knew? Boston is also home to a marvelous state hospital for the insane! Dickens loves these places. He devotes page after page to extolling their glories.

But, sadly, prison quality is not uniform. Philadelphia has an awful prison; truly awful. Everyone is in solitary confinement; never allowed to leave their cell; zero human interaction. Imagine being trapped in one place, never to leave, barely seeing another human being. Year after year after year for the rest of your life. Honestly, what were they thinking?

By the time Dickens gets to Washington, he is obviously getting really tired of his prison tour. (Truth be told, so are his readers.) Originally, Dickens had planned to go south from Washington, but he just can’t bring himself to do it. As he travels south, he is increasingly viscerally disgusted by slavery. The prisoners in Boston have it better than the slaves in the South.

So, he heads west instead, and book changes tone. Gone are the lengthy description of prisons. Insert sigh of relief. Now, we get a fairly lifeless travel narrative. Reinsert sigh of disappointment. Every now and then, you get a nice line:

Pittsburgh is like Birmingham in England; at least its townspeople say so. Setting aside the streets, the shops, the houses, wagons, factories, public buildings, and population, perhaps it may be. It certainly has a great quantity of smoke hanging about it, and is famous for its iron-works.

But, for the most part, the rest of the book is just a blur of anodyne descriptions of towns. The mood is captured perfectly when he takes a day trip out to see The Great Plains. He is underwhelmed.

It would be difficult to say why, or how—though it was possibly from having heard and read so much about it—but the effect on me was disappointment. Looking towards the setting sun, there lay, stretched out before my view, a vast expanse of level ground; unbroken, save by one thin line of trees, which scarcely amounted to a scratch upon the great blank; until it met the glowing sky, wherein it seemed to dip: mingling with its rich colours, and mellowing in its distant blue. There it lay, a tranquil sea or lake without water, if such a simile be admissible, with the day going down upon it: a few birds wheeling here and there: and solitude and silence reigning paramount around. But the grass was not yet high; there were bare black patches on the ground; and the few wild flowers that the eye could see, were poor and scanty. Great as the picture was, its very flatness and extent, which left nothing to the imagination, tamed it down and cramped its interest. I felt little of that sense of freedom and exhilaration which a Scottish heath inspires, or even our English downs awaken. It was lonely and wild, but oppressive in its barren monotony. I felt that in traversing the Prairies, I could never abandon myself to the scene, forgetful of all else; as I should do instinctively, were the heather underneath my feet, or an iron-bound coast beyond; but should often glance towards the distant and frequently-receding line of the horizon, and wish it gained and passed. It is not a scene to be forgotten, but it is scarcely one, I think (at all events, as I saw it), to remember with much pleasure, or to covet the looking-on again, in after-life.

It’s odd. Here we have Charles Dickens, that masterful creator of caricatures who come to life in vivid descriptions of English cities, and he cannot muster any energy to capture the American West or the people of the American West. He has just run out of steam.

After his travels, what does Dickens conclude about America? As he has made abundantly clear throughout the book, even devoting the penultimate chapter solely to the topic, he detests slavery. But even here there is nothing in the book that really conveys that disgust in a Dickensonian fashion. The fate of the isolated prisoners in Philadelphia is conveyed with more pathos than the plight of the slaves. Again, Dickens has missed an opportunity. There is no moment akin to Oliver Twist holding out his bowl and asking for more.

But, it isn’t just slavery that bothers Dickens about Americans. He has a list of other complaints. But, first the good news. Americans aren’t all bad!

They are, by nature, frank, brave, cordial, hospitable, and affectionate. Cultivation and refinement seem but to enhance their warmth of heart and ardent enthusiasm; and it is the possession of these latter qualities in a most remarkable degree, which renders an educated American one of the most endearing and most generous of friends.

He likes us! He really likes us! But, before we get too excited about Dickens being positive, he immediately starts explaining what is wrong with Americans. He starts with three character flaws. Americans suffer from universal distrust, a love of “smart” dealing, and an undue love of trade. But these are nothing compared to the worst problem; “the foul growth of America has a more tangled root than this.” (Yes, that is an actual quotation!)

What is the root of this foul growth, that thing which is the ultimate blemish on the entire nation? You will be excused for thinking the answer must be slavery. After all, Dickens did devote the previous chapter to that very problem. But, you would be wrong. Slavery is not the tangled root of the foul growth of America. There is something even more pernicious than slavery.

What is this thing? “But, the foul growth of America has a more tangled root than this; and it strikes its fibres, deep in its licentious Press.” Yep, the Press.

Schools may be erected, East, West, North, and South; pupils be taught, and masters reared, by scores upon scores of thousands; colleges may thrive, churches may be crammed, temperance may be diffused, and advancing knowledge in all other forms walk through the land with giant strides: but while the newspaper press of America is in, or near, its present abject state, high moral improvement in that country is hopeless. Year by year, it must and will go back; year by year, the tone of public feeling must sink lower down; year by year, the Congress and the Senate must become of less account before all decent men; and year by year, the memory of the Great Fathers of the Revolution must be outraged more and more, in the bad life of their degenerate child.

Some things never change…

There is at least one thing that is much better than in the mid-19^th century:

As Washington may be called the head-quarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva, the time is come when I must confess, without any disguise, that the prevalence of those two odious practices of chewing and expectorating began about this time to be anything but agreeable, and soon became most offensive and sickening. In all the public places of America, this filthy custom is recognised. In the courts of law, the judge has his spittoon, the crier his, the witness his, and the prisoner his; while the jurymen and spectators are provided for, as so many men who in the course of nature must desire to spit incessantly. In the hospitals, the students of medicine are requested, by notices upon the wall, to eject their tobacco juice into the boxes provided for that purpose, and not to discolour the stairs. In public buildings, visitors are implored, through the same agency, to squirt the essence of their quids, or ‘plugs,’ as I have heard them called by gentlemen learned in this kind of sweetmeat, into the national spittoons, and not about the bases of the marble columns. But in some parts, this custom is inseparably mixed up with every meal and morning call, and with all the transactions of social life. The stranger, who follows in the track I took myself, will find it in its full bloom and glory, luxuriant in all its alarming recklessness, at Washington. And let him not persuade himself (as I once did, to my shame) that previous tourists have exaggerated its extent. The thing itself is an exaggeration of nastiness, which cannot be outdone.

So, next time you are feeling bad about the world, just remember—at least there are no more spittoons!