American Notes for General Circulation

In American Notes Dickens recorded his reactions to the most exciting social experiment of his day.

The New World had caught the English imagination, and its democratic promise had become such a hotly disputed issue that Dickens, who went to America in 1842, was only the most celebrated of many travellers curious to find out what was happening there.

Here he discusses everything from the comically uncomfortable sea voyage to American schools and prisons, character and table manners. On the whole he disliked what he saw, and wrote so frankly about it that American Notes was deplored by the New York Herald as 'the essence of balderdash...reduced to the last drop of silliness and inanity'. With hindsight, the Notes can be read as the account of a fascinating and traumatic adventure from which Dickens emerged, both emotionally and politically, a changed man.