A Pig upon the Town: Charles Dickens in New York

Abstract

Examines the New York chapter of American Notes; believes the entire book becomes more understandable once Dickens’ aims in representing America’s foremost city are understood. In New York, Dickens revisited the genre of the urban tableau that had won him his first fame in Sketches by Boz. Believes that by 1842 Dickens had become dissatisfied with the emotional and moral detachment of the urban flâneur and gave vent to his sense of outrage and shock whenever American conditions, behavior, and institutions disturbed him. The swine that Dickens found idling in the streets became for him an ironic portrait of the flâneur in America. The image represents at once not only the bestiality of American life and landscape, but also the muck-raking author who dares root about in his non-native soil.