American Notes
Charles Dickens, Christopher Hitchens
Language: English
Pages: 223
ISBN: 2:00127237
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
American Notes is the fascinating travel journal of one of nineteenth-century America's most celebrated visitors: Charles Dickens. A lively chronicle of his five-month trip around the United States in 1842, the book records the author's adventures journeying by steamboat and stagecoach, as well as his impressions of everything from schools and prisons to table manners and slavery. More than a travelogue, it is also a serious discourse on the character and institutions of a young democracy. Dickens distrusted much of what he saw, and he wrote so frankly that the New York Herald dismissed the work as 'the essence of balderdash.' In retrospect, American Notes can be read as the account of a traumatic excursion from which Dickens emerged, both emotionally and politically, a changed man. With a new introduction by Christopher Hitchens.
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Reconcile us to the liveries and badges we are so fond of at home. Secondly, because the absence of these things presents each child to the visitor in his or her own proper character, with its individuality unimpaired; not lost in a dull, ugly, monotonous repetition of the same unmeaning garb: which is really an important consideration. The wisdom of encouraging a little harmless pride in personal appearance even among the blind, or the whimsical absurdity of considering charity and leather.
Home, and all the wide world over. Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays. Many of those pigs live here. Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright in lieu of going on all-fours? and why they talk instead of grunting? So far, nearly every house is a low tavern; and on the bar-room walls, are coloured prints of Washington, and.
You think?” “Well, I hope so: I’m sure I hope I may be.” “And time goes pretty quickly?” “Time is very long, gentlemen, within these four walls!” He gazed about him—Heaven only knows how wearily!—as he said these words; and in the act of doing so, fell into a strange stare as if he had forgotten something. A moment afterwards he sighed heavily, put on his spectacles, and went about his work again. In another cell, there was a German, sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for larceny, two of.
Twisted round their heads, are running to and fro on the hotel business; black waiters cross and recross with dishes in their hands; two great dogs are playing upon a mound of loose bricks in the centre of the little square; a pig is turning up his stomach to the sun, and grunting “that’s comfortable!” and neither the men, nor the women, nor the dogs, nor the pig, nor any created creature, takes the smallest notice of the triangle, which is tingling madly all the time. I walk to the front.
Simple ovens, outside, made of clay; and lodgings for the pigs nearly as good as many of the human quarters; broken windows, patched with worn-out hats, old clothes, old boards, fragments of blankets and paper; and home-made dressers standing in the open air without the door, whereon was ranged the household store, not hard to count, of earthen jars and pots. The eye was pained to see the stumps of great trees thickly strewn in every field of wheat, and seldom to lose the eternal swamp and dull.