Dickens in Eden: The Framing of America in American Notes

Abstract

Believes Dickens’ negative reaction to the United States stems from his inability to “order” the American wilderness according to British ideas of nature as domesticated space. Operating out of a Romantic notion in which landscape mirrors the souls of its inhabitants, Dickens associates the ugliness of the terrain with a commensurate immoral streak in the populace. Claims Dickens’ movements from a pleasantly-rendered Boston to a hideously-rendered Mississippi River region suggests an epic journey from moral Paradise to Hell. Believes that when he turns “northwest,” however, he leaves behind the easy moral parallels; his inability to come to terms with the Looking-Glass Prairie suggests the failure of the kind of artifice he has employed in earlier portions of his account. Concludes that, despite his insight into American morality, Dickens inadvertently demonstrates the inadequacies of simply imposing British cultural paradigms on North America because he views civilization as a product rather than process.