One of the joys of our new age of eBooks, if you like books as physical objects as well as text, is that you can easily download a PDF copy of a century-old book that is considered “rare” from the Internet Archive and other digital libraries. ” in the trade (I’m thinking here of anything that could cost you more than $250 at a bookseller in New York or London) and enjoy it almost as if you were holding the physical copy in your hands, though unfortunately without the smell of leather or the feel of paper. But also, fortunately, without the risk of inadvertently damaging an object that the years have made fragile.
My favorite edition of Charles Dickens. american notes it is the John W. Lovell edition printed in New York on Vesey Street in 1883. I have read this version in an East Coast university library in the 1970s and more recently on one of my desks as a PDF, though I’ve also downloaded the Project Gutenberg edition (which you’ll find as the third item listed for “Dickens, Charles” in the Gutenberg catalog) and emailed it to my Kindle so I can read it more easily in bed. Of course, Amazon has an edition of this and every other Dickens work that can be downloaded directly from the Amazon catalogue, accessible via WiFi from your own Kindle.
Dickens’s reputation never peaked during his lifetime, but simply continued to grow until he was considered a kind of god of literature, a giant among writers. That reputation was already well established in England and America in 1842 when he made his first trip to the United States (he would return a quarter of a century later, in 1867). His lovely young wife, Catherine, whom he had married six years before, accompanied him. Catherine Thompson Hogarth Dickens was the charming daughter of an influential London publisher, George Hogarth, a fact that did not in any way harm her husband’s literary career.
Dickens was only thirty years old when he and Catherine boarded the new RMS Britannia on January 3, 1842, a 1,200-ton, 207-foot long, paddle ship bound for Boston and Halifax. Already under her literary belt were The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist (which young Queen Victoria lit candles late at night to read, so engrossed was she with this tale of poverty so close to her London palace), Nicholas Nickleby, antique curio shopand barnaby rudge.
Tea Britannia it moved like a snail by our standards today: it could produce about 750 horsepower from its two-cylinder coal-fired steam engine (about the power of two large American passenger cars), moving its 115 passengers and 80 crew at a top speed of 8.5 knots across the Atlantic. At that rate it took 12 days to cross the ocean; Dickens was sick all the time. He vowed never to travel the ocean by steam again, and in fact returned to England months later under sail. High technology was not his thing, at least when it comes to the sea, he was always very fond of railways.
One of the motivations for his American trip, beyond his overflowing curiosity about everything American (especially slavery, which he condemns in the last chapter of american notes), was his concern about American piracy of his works. The United States was then a nation, like China today, that did not have much respect for intellectual property rights. Dickens’s novels were widely pirated here, with no royalties paid to their author.
Claire Tomalin’s 2011 biography of Dickens tells us that the author spent four weeks in Manhattan to lecture American publishers and publishers on the value of international copyright conventions. Using his literary fame, he was able to persuade some two dozen American literary heavyweights, including Washington Irving, to draft a letter to Congress in support of such a measure, though he was less successful in persuading the press to join in. him. In those days, writers who achieved some level of fame were considered to have benefited sufficiently from his literary efforts. He was considered tacky even LEFT, expect a big payday too.
every time i read american notes It amazes me how timeless Dickens’s voice is, almost as if he were writing contemporaneously for Atlantic Monthly gold harper’s. This is so different from his novels, which have a 19th-century feel to them that reflects his love for the picaresque style of 18th-century British fiction that he tried to reinvent in his own time, a literary style that can lead an American reader, even to a dedicated one like me, a time to re-enter. The same was not true of his nonfiction (of which this is just one example: Dickens wrote while he was breathing, not as work, but as a way of being alive. It is unlikely that he would go a day without spending time with his dust-stained notebooks). ink. .).
Take a look at this fascinating description of a visit to Niagara Falls. Although there are some “hints” of grammar and punctuation that reveal its mid-19th century authorship, I am struck by how fresh this writing is.
These paragraphs are taken from Chapter 14 of Lovell’s edition:
“We reached the city of Erie at eight o’clock at night and stayed there an hour. Between five and six the next morning we reached Buffalo, where we had breakfast. And being too near Great Falls to wait patiently anywhere else Instead, he left by train the same morning at nine o’clock for Niagara.
“It was a miserable day: cold and raw, a damp mist falling, and the trees in that northern region quite bare and wintry. Every time the train stopped I heard the roar and constantly strained my eyes in the direction I knew. the falls must be, seeing the river rolling towards them, at all times expecting to behold the spray Within minutes of our stop, not before, I saw two great white clouds rising slowly and majestically from the depths of the earth. we got out and then, for the first time, I heard the mighty torrent of water and felt the ground shake under my feet.
“The bank is very steep and was slippery from rain and slush ice. How I got down I hardly know, but I soon reached the bottom and up, with two English officers who were crossing and had joined me, over some broken rocks.” rocks, deafened by noise, half blinded by dew, and wet to the bone. We were at the foot of the American falls. He could see a huge torrent of water rushing from a great height, but he had no idea. of form, or situation, or anything but vague immensity”.
Vague immensity indeed! Could anyone do this better in a modern travel guide?
Charles Dickens was the most popular novelist of his time and is quite possibly the best known British writer, even today. His works have always been available in print editions, and now also in timelessly preserved electronic copies that anyone can download free of charge.
However, I believe that his nonfiction work, especially american notes, his magnificent survey of a former British colony that he admired and regarded with a kind of critical love, have never achieved the popularity of Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Tiny Tim or Ebenezer Scrooge (was there ever anyone with that gift to name his creations?). That’s a shame, because they’re frankly easier for modern readers to absorb, and this particular book paints a fascinating picture of the United States on the brink of civil war.
Modern readers will find american notes accessible and readable in a way that will delight them. I hope this book will achieve another century of wide success. And I applaud the fact that anyone with internet access can read not only the e-text of the book, but can also download a PDF copy of an early edition, a bound text that most of us wouldn’t choose to spend several hundreds of dollars to own, and revel in the “feel” of typography and the organization of the printed page. It’s a book that’s so easy to enjoy: Charles Dickens wrote nonfiction that deserves to be admired as much as his novels.
