eBooks - Literature - Classics - Charles Dickens - American Notes for General Circulation
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| The most comfortable of all the hotels of which I had any experience in the United States, and they were not a few, is Barnum's, in that city: where the English traveller will find curtains to his bed, for the first and probably the last time in America (this is a disinterested remark, for I never use them); and where he will be likely to have enough water for washing himself, which is not at all a common case. |
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| Dickens wrote this work after a five month visit to America in 1842. Wildly popular with the American public, Dickens received a hero's welcome and for the first two months of his visit wrote glowing reports in letters home. However, the American press reacted negatively and vociferously to Dickens' views on international copyright law, and Dickens suffered a change of heart about Americans and American culture in general, which American Notes reflects. The novel received extraordinary criticism in the United States, and at best, is considered cranky and superficial. Edgar Allen Poe, heretofore a great admirer of Dickens' work, retaliated by writing a parody called "English Notes" under the pseudonym Quarles Quickens. John Forster, Dickens' close friend and biographer, observed what many American critics concluded, that Dickens' views on copyright colored his experiences in America. |
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| Charles Dickens was the most famous of many travelers of his time who journeyed to America, curious about the revolutionary new civilization that had captured the English imagination. His frank, often humorous descriptions in his 1842 account cover everything from his uncomfortable sea voyage to an ecstatic narrative of his visit to Niagara Falls. Yet Dickens is also critical of American society, its preoccupation with money, and reliance on slavery, as well as the rude, unsavory manners of Americans and their corrupt press. Above all, American Notes is a lively chronicle of what was for Dickens an illuminating encounter with the New World. |
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eBooks - Titles - Authors - Literature - Classics - Charles Dickens - American Notes for General Circulation