One of the joys of our new age of e-books, if you like books as physical objects as well as texts, is that you can easily download from the Internet Archive and other digital libraries a PDF copy of a century-old book that is considered “rare”. “in the trade (I’m thinking here of anything that could set you back more than $250 at a bookseller in New York or London) and enjoy it almost as if you had the physical copy in your hands, although, 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 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 in the “Dickens, Charles” list in the Gutenberg catalog) and emailed it to my Kindle so I can more easily read it in bed. Of course, Amazon has an edition of this and every other Dickens work that can be downloaded directly from the Amazon catalog, accessible over WiFi from your own Kindle.

Dickens’s reputation never peaked during his lifetime, but simply continued to grow until he was considered something of a god of literature, a giant among writers. That reputation was already well established in England and America by 1842 when he made his first trip to the United States (he would return a quarter-century later, in 1867). His lovely young wife, Catherine, whom he had married six years earlier, accompanied him. Catherine Thompson Hogarth Dickens was the charming daughter of an influential London publisher, George Hogarth, a fact that did nothing to 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 paddleboat, 207 feet long, 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 shopY 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 aboard. 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 swore never to travel the ocean by steam again and, in fact, returned to England months later by 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 lecturing 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 move, though he was less successful in persuading the press to join in. to the. In those days, writers who achieved some level of fame were considered to have benefited sufficiently from his literary efforts. He was considered in bad taste, even left, expect a big payday too.

every time i read American Notes I am struck by how timeless Dickens’s voice is, almost as if he were writing contemporaneously for Atlantic Monthly Prayed harpers. This is so different from his novels, which have a 19th-century feel that reflects his love of the picaresque style of 18th-century British fiction that he tried to reinvent in his own time, a literary style that can take an American reader, even to a dedicated one like me, a time to re-enter. The same was not true of his non-fiction (of which this is just one example: Dickens wrote while he breathed, not as a job, but as a way of being alive. It is unlikely that he would go a day without spending time with his notebooks stained with dirt. ink. .).

Take a look at this fascinating description of a visit to Niagara Falls. Although there are some “hints” in grammar and punctuation that reveal its mid-19th century authorship, I am amazed at how fresh this writing is.

These paragraphs are taken from Chapter 14 of the Lovell edition:

“We arrived in the city of Erie at eight o’clock at night and stayed there an hour. Between five and six o’clock the next morning we reached Buffalo, where we had breakfast. And being too close to the Great Falls to wait patiently at any other Instead, he left on the 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 where 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.Finally we got out and then, for the first time, I heard the mighty rush of water and felt the ground tremble under my feet.

“The bank is very steep and was slippery with rain and half-melted ice. I hardly know how I got down, but I soon reached the bottom and climbed up, with two English officers crossing and joining me, on 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 down 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 examination 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 such a gift for naming their creations?). It’s a shame, because they’re frankly easier for modern readers to absorb, and this book in particular paints a fascinating picture of the United States right 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 achieves another century of wide success. And I celebrate 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 one of the first editions, a bound text most of us wouldn’t choose to spend several hundreds of dollars to own, and revel in the “feel” of typography and organization of the printed page. It is a book that is so easy to enjoy: Charles Dickens wrote non-fiction that deserves to be as admired as his novels.