In Search of the ‘Great Human Family’: Tourism, Mass Culture, and the Knowable Community of Dickens’ American Notes

Abstract

Examines Dickens’ efforts to express a comprehensive vision of the United States as he gleaned it from his encounters with Americans, largely in public places. Explores the problems presented to travel writers in attempting to assert the boundaries between public and private spaces, viz. between the outside world and the self. Sees Dickens creating a substitute for what Raymond Williams has called the “knowable community” in the nineteenth century.