In this holiday season as in many others, Americans will renew their affection for Charles Dickens, whose iconic 1843 novel A Christmas Carol is a Yuletide favorite among readers and fans of its many film adaptations.
But if America seems to love Dickens, it’s perhaps useful to remember that Dickens really didn’t care that much for America. Or so England’s most celebrated novelist decided a year before A Christmas Carol appeared, when he took an 1842 journey to the United States. His critique of the country continues to resonate today, since some of his complaints seem as fresh as this week’s headlines.
Dickens came prepared to like what he saw. As an enthusiast of political reform, he was drawn to the idea that America was empowering the common folk he lionized in his fiction. Dickens voyaged across the Atlantic, says biographer Claire Tomalin, “to test out the hope that a better society was being established there, free of monarchy, aristocracy and worn-out conventions.”
Shortly after his arrival, though, Dickens was disillusioned. “This is not the Republic I came to see,” he lamented. “This is not the Republic of my imagination.”
He saved some of his harshest words for Washington, D.C., which he depicted as a literal and moral swamp. “Few people would live in Washington, I take it, who were not obliged to reside there,” he concluded, “and the tides of emigration and speculation, those rapid and regardless currents, are little likely to flow at any time towards such dull and sluggish water.”
Dickens’s spirits weren’t lifted by his visit to Congress, where he found lawmakers rife with partisanship and incivility. His description of Capitol Hill’s hangers-on is inimitably Dickensian:
Dickens was no innocent about politics. He’d cut his teeth as a writer covering the British Parliament, and watching his own country’s elections, he said, had never tempted him “to damage my hat by throwing it up into the air in triumph.” Even so, he was incurably romantic, harboring the hope that humanity was capable of compassion and selflessness. Dickens sustained that optimism in the face of his own foibles, which included personal scandals and a sometimes blinding vanity.
If American Notes, Dickens’s account of his trip, showed people as they are, then A Christmas Carol, with its miser converted to a life of virtue, is Dickens’s vision of what we might be.
And even in commenting on American politics, Dickens was not immune to considering the bright side of things. He hopefully explained to his readers that Washington, so bucolic in its origins, was probably selected as the seat of government in part because it would be “remote from mobs: a consideration not to be slighted, even in America.”
On this point, if he visited today, the romantic Mr. Dickens might find another source of disappointment.
