Chewing on slavery

American Notes, Charles Dickens's account of his trip to the United States between January and June 1842, still provokes strongly negative feelings more than a century and a half later. In a dismissal involving a familiar dig at travel writing, Laura C Berry pronounces that: ‘The “plot” of American Notes, and perhaps this must be accepted as simply endemic to travel accounts, is as rigid as a set of railroad tracks, and just about as tiring’ (Berry 1996, 213). Noting that Dickens's ‘monotonous’ text (212) has rarely been ‘treated at length’, Berry opines that: ‘The superficiality of Dickens's reading of America has defied any truly good reading of American Notes’ (213). Berry's argument, immersed in theories of the body, is that Dickens encounters in the United States a commingling of classes that discomforts him since the British context that generates and consumes the narrative is one of social tensions. Dickens's concern that ‘increased social circulation might be a necessary result of industrialism and its effects’ is focused — or projected — on the spitting he finds everywhere in the United States (Berry 1996, 212).