American Notes for General Circulation by Charles Dickens
Scanned and proofed by David Price
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

American Notes for General Circulation

PREFACE TO THE FIRST CHEAP EDITION OF "AMERICAN NOTES"

IT is nearly eight years since this book was first published.  I 
present it, unaltered, in the Cheap Edition; and such of my 
opinions as it expresses, are quite unaltered too.

My readers have opportunities of judging for themselves whether the 
influences and tendencies which I distrust in America, have any 
existence not in my imagination.  They can examine for themselves 
whether there has been anything in the public career of that 
country during these past eight years, or whether there is anything 
in its present position, at home or abroad, which suggests that 
those influences and tendencies really do exist.  As they find the 
fact, they will judge me.  If they discern any evidences of wrong-
going in any direction that I have indicated, they will acknowledge 
that I had reason in what I wrote.  If they discern no such thing, 
they will consider me altogether mistaken.

Prejudiced, I never have been otherwise than in favour of the 
United States.  No visitor can ever have set foot on those shores, 
with a stronger faith in the Republic than I had, when I landed in 
America.

I purposely abstain from extending these observations to any 
length.  I have nothing to defend, or to explain away.  The truth 
is the truth; and neither childish absurdities, nor unscrupulous 
contradictions, can make it otherwise.  The earth would still move 
round the sun, though the whole Catholic Church said No.

I have many friends in America, and feel a grateful interest in the 
country.  To represent me as viewing it with ill-nature, animosity, 
or partisanship, is merely to do a very foolish thing, which is 
always a very easy one; and which I have disregarded for eight 
years, and could disregard for eighty more.

LONDON, JUNE 22, 1850.

PREFACE TO THE "CHARLES DICKENS" EDITION OF "AMERICAN NOTES"

MY readers have opportunities of judging for themselves whether the 
influences and tendencies which I distrusted in America, had, at 
that time, any existence but in my imagination.  They can examine 
for themselves whether there has been anything in the public career 
of that country since, at home or abroad, which suggests that those 
influences and tendencies really did exist.  As they find the fact, 
they will judge me.  If they discern any evidences of wrong-going, 
in any direction that I have indicated, they will acknowledge that 
I had reason in what I wrote.  If they discern no such indications, 
they will consider me altogether mistaken - but not wilfully.

Prejudiced, I am not, and never have been, otherwise than in favour 
of the United States.  I have many friends in America, I feel a 
grateful interest in the country, I hope and believe it will 
successfully work out a problem of the highest importance to the 
whole human race.  To represent me as viewing AMERICA with ill-
nature, coldness, or animosity, is merely to do a very foolish 
thing:  which is always a very easy one.

CHAPTER I - GOING AWAY

I SHALL never forget the one-fourth serious and three-fourths 
comical astonishment, with which, on the morning of the third of 
January eighteen-hundred-and-forty-two, I opened the door of, and 
put my head into, a 'state-room' on board the Britannia steam-
packet, twelve hundred tons burthen per register, bound for Halifax 
and Boston, and carrying Her Majesty's mails.

That this state-room had been specially engaged for 'Charles 
Dickens, Esquire, and Lady,' was rendered sufficiently clear even 
to my scared intellect by a very small manuscript, announcing the 
fact, which was pinned on a very flat quilt, covering a very thin 
mattress, spread like a surgical plaster on a most inaccessible 
shelf.  But that this was the state-room concerning which Charles 
Dickens, Esquire, and Lady, had held daily and nightly conferences 
for at least four months preceding:  that this could by any 
possibility be that small snug chamber of the imagination, which 
Charles Dickens, Esquire, with the spirit of prophecy strong upon 
him, had always foretold would contain at least one little sofa, 
and which his lady, with a modest yet most magnificent sense of its 
limited dimensions, had from the first opined would not hold more 
than two enormous portmanteaus in some odd corner out of sight 
(portmanteaus which could now no more be got in at the door, not to 
say stowed away, than a giraffe could be persuaded or forced into a 
flower-pot):  that this utterly impracticable, thoroughly hopeless, 
and profoundly preposterous box, had the remotest reference to, or 
connection with, those chaste and pretty, not to say gorgeous 
little bowers, sketched by a masterly hand, in the highly varnished 
lithographic plan hanging up in the agent's counting-house in the 
city of London:  that this room of state, in short, could be 
anything but a pleasant fiction and cheerful jest of the captain's, 
invented and put in practice for the better relish and enjoyment of 
the real state-room presently to be disclosed:- these were truths 
which I really could not, for the moment, bring my mind at all to