Between the Wars: Essays and Letters Book

I have mentioned my having been in some uncertainty and doubt, at first, relative to the sleeping arrangements on board this boat. I remained in the same vague state of mind until ten o'clock or thereabouts, when going below, I found suspended on either side of the cabin, three long tiers of hanging bookshelves, designed apparently for volumes of the small octavo size. Looking with greater attention at these contrivances (wondering to find such literary preparations in such a place), I descried on each shelf a sort of microscopic sheet and blanket; then I began dimly to comprehend that the passengers were the library, and they were to be arranged, edge-wise, on these shelves, till morning.

This vignette of travel on a canal boat between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania displays Dickens's customary whimsical sense of humor in his account of a six-month visit to the United States in 1842. The humor tends to focus, as here, on the mechanics and conditions of the travel itself, and on the quirks and foibles of his travelling companions and others he encounters. For example, he is astonished at the universal practice among American men of chewing tobacco and yet near-universal abstinence of using spittoons, to great humorous effect.

He focuses his journalistic eye for detail on more serious subjects throughout, as well. He attacks slavery as poisoning the moral life of Americans, black and white alike, and calls out the hypocrisy of Southerners' arguments that public opinion moderated slave owners' treatment of their slaves, by listing a catalog of broken bones, whip marks, amputations, gunshot wounds, burns, brands, and more, taken from descriptions in their own newspaper ads for the return of runaways. He toured many American prisons, workhouses, and institutions for people with disabilities and found them generally superior to those of England.

I enjoyed this book, both for its window into a time in American history with which I'm not very familiar and for its insights into Dickens's life.