Dickensblog

A dialogue on Dickens and slavery

On Sunday, November 22, the Cambridge Literary Festival will show online Dickens on Slavery, a short film featuring a dialogue about the chapter on slavery in American Notes. Click here to find out more and to buy a ticket! (Note that the time given, 12:30 p.m., would be 7:30 a.m. Eastern.)

Charles Dickens on slavery

As we know, slavery was one of the things that most offended Dickens when he first visited America. Washington Post writer Norman Leahy appeals to him while writing about the Confederate statues in Richmond, Va.: 

"Consider Charles Dickens, who visited Richmond in March 1842 as part of a tour of the United States and Canada. After a bumpy, soggy and occasionally harrowing coach ride to Fredericksburg, Dickens took the train to Richmond. It’s in this stretch of the journey he sees and feels the evil in the air:

"In this district, as in all others where slavery sits brooding (I have frequently heard this admitted, even by those who are its warmest advocates:) there is an air of ruin and decay abroad, which is inseparable from the system."

Read more here.

Dickens in America

Still playing a little bit of catch-up here! This thoughtful and comprehensive article from City Journal's Autumn 2018 issue deals with Dickens's complicated relationship with the United States. A sample:

To Dickens and British radicals, the United States was a land of hope and freedom—freedom especially from the dominance of class. In a celebrated Boston speech, Dickens confided to his audience that he had “dreamed by day and night for years, of setting foot upon this shore, breathing this pure air.” But after visiting the “prisons, the police offices, the watch-houses, the hospital, the workhouse,” he began harboring doubts about the prospects for the American experiment. . . .

The “Emperor of Cheerfulness,” as Boston publisher James T. Fields called Dickens, became thoroughly disillusioned after he saw other city institutions for the broken, the criminal, and the mad. 

Dickens in America

The Weekly Standard has a short piece on Dickens's first visit to America and the disillusionment it brought. Writer Danny Heitman does a nice job of showing of how both Dickens's cynicism and his romanticism came into play.

Dickens and tap dancing

Did you know Dickens wrote about tap? I didn't know it myself, not having read American Notes yet, but this article in the Downtown Express talks about it!

'Dickens in America' comes to DVD

A 2005 documentary, hosted by Miriam Margolyes, about Dickens's 1842 tour of the United States is now out on DVD. Details are here, and you can order it here.

Laura Bridgman, Helen Keller, and Charles Dickens

By David, guest blogger

In 1842, Charles Dickens and his wife, Kate, visited America. The inevitable travel book that ensued, American Notes, is infrequently read today but contains an inspiring passage that profoundly affected the life of a little deaf and blind girl named Helen Keller.

For when Dickens was in Boston, he and Kate visited the Perkins School for the Blind and met twelve-year-old Laura Bridgman, another deaf-blind girl. Laura had been admitted to Perkins four years earlier by the school's first director, Samuel Howe. Howe was a man of great vision and almost inexhaustible patience. Instead of expanding on the simple sign language that Laura already used, Howe decided to teach her English.

First Laura learned to associate objects with labels printed in raised block letters. Howe then cut up the labels into individual letters and had Laura reassemble the letters to form the words she had learned. According to Howe, it was at this point that Laura finally grasped the idea of language and communication. Laura then quickly learned the manual alphabet and was able to discard the clumsy blocks. After that she attended classes with the other students, accompanied by a teacher to fingerspell for her.

Dickens's account of Laura in American Notes is a combination of excerpts from Dr. Howe's journal along with his own charmed bemusement at meeting such a remarkable girl. Howe's own enthusiasm for his star pupil is manifest: “her countenance lighted up with a human expression: it was no longer a dog, or parrot: it was an immortal spirit, eagerly seizing upon a new link of union with other spirits!”

This is the account that Helen Keller's parents read in 1886 and that first gave them hope that Helen could be educated. They contacted the Perkins School, which dispatched Anne Sullivan to become Helen's instructor. The rest, as they say, is history. Helen went on to graduate from Radcliffe and become one of the towering figures of the twentieth century.  She succeeded on her own merits, but was helped along, no doubt, by the path that was previously blazed by Laura Bridgman and made known to the world by Charles Dickens.

Dickens in the 'New Yorker'

The New Yorker recently ran a major piece on solitary confinement in U.S. prisons. In a sidebar feature, they consulted the opinion of one Mr. Charles Dickens:

I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers; and in guessing at it myself, and in reasoning from what I have seen written upon their faces, and what to my certain knowledge they feel within, I am only the more convinced that there is a depth of terrible endurance in which none but the sufferers themselves can fathom, and which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow creature. I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body; and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore the more I denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.

Read more.