Claiming Truth: Dickens and American Notes (1996)

Abstract Dickens' insistence on the of American Notes began before publication and carried on through the preface to the cheap edition eight years later. He was understandably wary that he might be accused of falsity or slander by the American press. Modern readers understand this but may be tempted by the claims to consider the contingent nature of Dickens' can we identify or perhaps speculate upon as bearing upon him so as to alter and shape his text? In what directions was his seeing modified by particular pressures, by generic form, by his earlier travel writings, by what he could see and report upon? The energy and genius of its thirty-year-old author are of course the book's primary shapers. No of his can be plumbed or accounted for. ********** We recall from school days Bacon's essay Of Truth and especially its striking beginning: What is Truth; said jesting Pilate; And would not stay an answer. Victorians rarely jested about such matters, Charles Dickens among them. Questioned about something he had written, he was wont to insist that it was the truth. Today in dealing with large matters, we sense that the the whole and nothing but the truth rarely stops to be caught. Even our friends spot this whenever we generalize, and how our truths will look in another century we are blest in not knowing. Dickens made insistent claims that American Notes was true. He had written the travel book after his first visit to America in 1842 and expected rough handling. British travel writers on America had been called liars and slanderers, and he had discovered that American newspapers could engage in lying slanders themselves. Even so, Dickens' sweeping claims invite attention from us today. They are in part responsible the approaches of the four essayists here who first considered the book in talks before a meeting of the Modern Language Association. Reading independently, have also been struck by the contingent nature of the book and its claims of objectivity. Dickens saw, what he could see, and what conditioned his seeing--his truth, has become our mutual subject. American Notes was a new departure the youthful Boz, at thirty years of age a gloriously famous writer of fiction. It took many of its first American readers by surprise. Boz would have had some unfavorable impressions, but readers expected that his geniality and humor would gloss over them. Even today, when the rawness and crudity of early American life is no secret to anybody, the surprise lingers in American readers that Dickens would conclude so decidedly, I do not like the country. (1) From the beginning and as it went on, the story of Dickens' 1842 visit to America and the rapid writing of his account for General Circulation is a patchwork of anomalies. He had made an agreement for publication of such notes as might occur to him on the journey. (2) As he traveled he kept a detailed account, but he was less than candid about whether he intended to write a book, mostly saying nothing about it and three months into the visit telling an American friend he had not yet decided to write anything about America. (3) He had gone knowing that conflicting reports had been written about America and American democracy by earlier British travelers. He had read those by Harriet Martineau and Captain Marryat, and at least dipped into Fidler's, Mrs. Trollope's, and Captain Hall's. (4) Yet he set out with extravagantly high expectations of what he would find. Very quickly disabused of such illusions, he then all but flouted an American public famously thin-skinned whenever it was criticized. He made some efforts to balance his judgments but very little to mollify them. For an established writer to act in this way astounded Edgar Allan Poe. American Notes, he said, was one of the most suicidal productions, ever deliberately published by an author, who had the least reputation to lose. …