Toward a New Transatlanticism: Dickens in the United States

Toward a New Transatlanticism: Dickens in the United States

In the first half of the nineteenth century, nearly two hundred British men and women toured the United States and then wrote books about their travels. Their books did much to set the terms for the period's articulation of national differences. Through their description of American manners, they established an array of still-familiar oppositions: American openness and British reserve, American energy and British leisure, American merchants and British gentlemen. But in describing the differences between the United States and Great Britain, they also threw into relief the many connections that continued to exist between the two nations. In particular, they illuminated a shared Anglo-American culture of social reform. Nineteenth-century reform has long been seen as taking place within the bounds of the nation, but it actually depended, I will show, on transatlantic imitations and exchanges. The Atlantic was crossed and recrossed by reformers paying visits to one another, going on lecture tours, and attending Anglo-American conventions against slavery and for temperance or world peace; it was also crossed by writings about reform, including pieces by corresponding societies; reform petitions and "Friendly Addresses"; as well as pamphlets, periodicals, and novels. In this context, it makes sense that a number of the British travelers who came to the United States did so to advocate certain reformist causes and that their travel books furthered this work.

The Anglo-American scope of social reform points to the need for a transatlanticism that is as attentive to the connections across national boundaries as to the differences between nations, as attentive to the concrete collaborations of individuals and groups as to the imaginings of nations as a whole. In this essay, I will elaborate such an approach by first placing this new transatlanticism in the context of earlier attempts to read American and British works alongside one another, and then by using it to reconsider the most famous of the

American tours, that which Charles Dickens made in eighteen forty-two and subsequently described in American Notes for General Circulation, eighteen forty-two. During this tour, Dickens lent his support to the reform campaigns for suffrage and against slavery. He also joined a number of American and British authors in campaigning for an international copyright law to regulate the transatlantic circulation of published writings. In this way, Dickens's tour participated in some Anglo-American networks, suffrage and anti-slavery reform, while attempting to regulate another, the literary marketplace. But his travel book shows that social reform and the literary marketplace cannot be separated so easily. Dickens's advocacy of reform in American Notes was made possible by the same acts of reprinting against which he was campaigning elsewhere. Without authorization and at times without attribution, American Notes reprints lengthy passages from Samuel Gridley Howe's reports on the Perkins Institute for the Blind and from Theodore Weld's American Slavery As It Is, eighteen thirty-nine. In reprinting these passages, Dickens contributed to a specifically Anglo-American public sphere, one in which nations were formed and reformed by the pressure of a public opinion that transcended national boundaries.

Toward a New Transatlanticism

Nineteenth-century novelists and critics took for granted what present-day scholars have only recently begun to acknowledge: that the literatures of Great Britain and the United States should not be read in isolation from one another. These novelists and critics could hardly do otherwise, given the scope of the nineteenth-century literary marketplace. In the absence of an international copyright law, books written and published in one nation were very often freely republished in another. To be sure, this transnational literary world was overlaid by both national prejudice and national self-assertion. National prejudice can be found in the common presumption of British preeminence. Voiced explicitly in Sidney Smith's notorious question, "In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?" the presumption was more commonly expressed through silence, in literary reviews that devoted little or no space to works by American or Canadian authors. As for national self-assertion, it can be found in the efforts made by American authors to create a distinctive literature. In the antebellum period, the authors associated with what would come to be called the American Renaissance sought to create such a literature by renouncing their cultural inheritance from Europe. "Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close," announces Ralph Waldo Emerson's "American Scholar" in eighteen thirty-seven, while the preface to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, eighteen fifty-five, opens with an image of European literature being carried, like a corpse, out the door. In the postbellum period, by contrast, a number of American authors sought to align themselves with continental literary movements in order to distinguish themselves from their nearer British rivals. The chief architect of this strategy was William Dean Howells, the period's most influential man of letters. Unusually cosmopolitan for a literary nationalist, Howells famously claimed, in an eighteen eighty-two review of Henry James, that the United States had superseded Britain in novel writing and that this new American preeminence was made possible in large part by the recent influence of the French. But these statements of American self-assertion, like the statements of British prejudice, were powerless to stop the transatlantic circulation of texts, which would not be regulated in any way until the eighteen ninety-one ratification of an international copyright law.

As a consequence, the nineteenth-century literary world took for granted the existence of what I will call "literature in English." This category is never fully articulated or defended, but it underwrites most contemporary reviews. From time to time, reviewers would remark on national differences, but their more usual practice was to discuss at least some American works interchangeably with British ones. This is true, for instance, of George Eliot's reviews during the eighteen fifties. In one, she notes in passing that American literature is characterized by "certain defects of taste" and "a sort of vague spiritualism and grandiloquence," but in many other reviews she reads British and American authors alongside one another without alluding to national difference at all, pairing Henry Wadsworth Longfellow with Robert Browning and Walt Whitman with Alfred Lord Tennyson. Thirty years later, critics continued to do much the same thing. Indeed, their reliance on the category of literature in English is the one way which critics as different as Walter Besant and Henry James agree. In their famous debate over the "art of fiction," Besant does not address nationality at all, referring as a matter of course to Oliver Wendell Holmes as well as Charles Reade, to Nathaniel Hawthorne as well as Eliot. And James, for his part, alludes to the category in a magisterial parenthesis that seeks neither to justify nor to defend: "In the English novel, by which of course I mean the American novel as well."

In the twentieth century, however, discussions of literature in English largely gave way to the study of literature nationally defined. American self-assertion would ultimately lead to the establishment of American literature as a separate field and American studies as a separate discipline, a change that reinforced the British indifference to all but the most distinguished American writers. To be sure, a few critics continued to read across national borders. For F. R. Leavis, the "great tradition" of what he calls the "English novel" includes Henry James and Joseph Conrad, as well as George Eliot and Jane Austen. And F. O. Matthiessen, in his field-defining study of the American Renaissance, emphasizes the connections between Herman Melville and William Shakespeare, Nathaniel Hawthorne and John Milton, Walt Whitman and Gerald Manley Hopkins. But such approaches became increasingly rare. For a host of reasons, institutional as well as intellectual, the study of British literature and the study of American literature proceeded along separate tracks for much of the twentieth century.

Only in the past two decades have literary scholars returned to the nineteenth-century practice of reading American and British works alongside one another. They do so at a moment when historians have themselves been rediscovering the significance of transatlantic ties. Indeed, in both fields the transatlantic has become a dominant paradigm. The historian David Armitage begins his already seminal essay, "Three Concepts of Atlantic History," by announcing that "we are all Atlanticists now." And Lawrence Buell, one of the founders of transatlantic literary studies, surveys the present state of the field in a two thousand and three review essay and determines that "these days... look like boom times for trans-Atlantic studies." And so, the critical scene is newly hospitable to those scholars who follow Matthiessen and Leavis-as well as Eliot, James, and Besant-in taking the English language as their boundary. Focusing on a transatlantic array of texts, these scholars are not primarily interested in accounting for or speculating about the transatlantic relation. On the contrary, the crossing of national boundaries is largely incidental to their arguments, whether about literary movements (Richard Gravil and Leon Chai), literary genre (George P. Landow), philosophical traditions (Susan Manning), or the interrelations of literary and social phenomena (Jonathan Arac).

Other scholars have taken the transatlantic relation itself as their object of study. Some focus on the whole Anglo-American world, which includes those Caribbean islands under British control and ports in Africa and Latin America as well as Great Britain, Ireland, Canada, and the United States. Others focus on the relations between two nations within that world, most commonly the United States and Great Britain. This difference in focus has tended to entail a difference in method. Those scholars who focus on the Anglo-American world have tended to excavate the material networks that constituted it, such as the slave trade (Paul Gilroy and Joseph Roach) and black newspapers in the United States, Europe, and Africa (Brent Edwards). Those scholars who focus on the relations between Great Britain and the United States have tended, by contrast, to focus on relations that are imagined, not material. For Robert Weisbuch, the relevant paradigm is Freudian, by way of Harold Bloom. He finds in nineteenth-century American literature a tendency to imitate and revise British writings that bears witness, he argues, to the literature's felt belatedness. For Buell, the relevant paradigms come from post-colonial theory. He finds in the condescension of British reviewers and the rebelliousness of American writers the first iteration of what would become a familiar relation between former colonizer and former colony. More recently, Paul Giles has taken a different approach, proposing that what he calls "the trans-Atlantic imaginary" is not structured in any stable way, but is rather a space of projection and free play into which any author, British or American, can enter at will.

The imagined relations between Great Britain and the United States were importantly shaped by the material networks that connected them; this, in my view, is what studies of relations between the United States and Britain can gain from studies of the Atlantic world. In what follows, I will be focusing on two of these networks, print culture and social reform, in order to throw into relief the many sub-national connections between persons and groups on both sides of the Atlantic-and the complexities of the power relations between the two nations. Critics who speculate about the transatlantic imaginary without attending to these material networks often emphasize British cultural authority (Weisbuch; Buell) or downplay the importance of cultural authority altogether (Giles). Between these two poles, however, there exists a range of other possibilities that acknowledge authority, but see it as dispersed, with influence flowing in many directions at once. In a literary marketplace created by unregulated reprinting, British authors were more celebrated and

British reviewers more influential, but American readers were more numerous and American publishing houses increasingly powerful. Something similar is true of reform. At times, one nation served as an example for reformers in the other nation to follow; at other times, reformers in both nations worked in tandem.

We can see this dynamic most clearly in the campaigns against slavery and for suffrage reform. The campaign against slavery began in the seventeen sixties when a group of Quakers from Philadelphia appealed to the British government to abolish slavery in the colonies, and it remained importantly Anglo-American until its end. Antislavery activists in one nation were routinely invited to be corresponding members of antislavery societies in another, and, in this way, activists on each side of the Atlantic were able to learn from the very different manifestations of slavery on the other. In the seventeen eighties and seventeen nineties, for instance, the lives of freed slaves in the United States, as described by members of the New York and Massachusetts antislavery societies, were held up by British activists to argue for the thoroughgoing emancipation of slaves in the British colonies. In the eighteen thirties, antislavery groups became even more tightly intertwined. The American Anti-Slavery League was founded one year after the British league of the same name, and, in eighteen thirty-three, William Lloyd Garrison traveled to London to meet the president of the British League, who in turn traveled to Boston the next year-with galvanizing effects on both nations. Nor did the eighteen thirty-three abolition of slavery in the British colonies put an end to these collaborations. On the contrary, British antislavery activists offered their American counterparts moral example, financial support, and practical advice. This support peaked in the early eighteen forties, at the moment when Dickens made his tour of the United States.

In the campaign for suffrage, the transatlantic connections were less institutional, but no less significant. The United States had long served as an inspiration for British radicals, most famously William Cobbett, and it continued to do so for the Chartists. "The Chartist movement was reared," the historian George Lillibridge has argued, "on the American destiny." Indeed, Chartist newspapers frequently evoked the United States as proof that universal manhood suffrage could be achieved. And for the more radical Chartists, the United States also exemplified the separation of church and state. In eighteen thirty-nine, when the first People's Charter was rejected by Parliament, a number of leading Chartists emigrated to the United States, which became a real refuge from, as well as an imagined alternative to, Great

Britain. Despite these defections, Chartism continued in Britain for nearly a decade more. A second Charter was presented to Parliament in May of eighteen forty-two, again coinciding with Dickens's visit to the United States.

These contemporary reform campaigns made possible a number of different relations between Great Britain and the United States. At times, writers from the two nations used reform to articulate the differences between them. Democracy had long been crucial to American self-understanding, while, as Christopher Brown has argued, the antislavery campaign enabled Britons to conceive of their nation as the moral alternative to its former colony. These processes are at work in the writings of British travelers describing American slaves- and American travelers describing British servants. When he attends a slave auction, Thomas Grattan expects the bidding to stop when he, an Englishman, arrives. Fanny Kemble expresses a similar presumption more forcefully, announcing, before she travels to the Southern states that "assuredly, I am going south prejudiced against slavery, for I am an Englishwoman, in whom the absence of such prejudice would be disgraceful." In much the same way, American travelers to Britain expressed shock at the existence of a permanent serving class, as Christopher Mulvey has shown.

At other times, however, the Anglo-American scope of these two reform movements enabled groups within one nation to appeal to the other for help. Some fugitive slaves found refuge in Britain, and some of the more radical Chartists considered petitioning the president of the United States to intervene on behalf of the British working class. And the antislavery movement produced factions within each nation that imagined transformation of both. As Elisa Tamarkin has shown, black antislavery activists aligned their own past with that of Britain, conjuring up an imaginary archaic England to claim, astonishingly enough, as their true mother country. And working-class British men identified their own future with the Republican Party in the United States, which was providing working men with land while seeking to free the slaves.