Reviews for Sultan Stork, and Other Stories and Sketches

The average rating for Sultan Stork, and Other Stories and Sketches based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-01-15 00:00:00 Dave Switkowski Reread I reread this in anticipation of an upcoming reread of Martin Chuzzlewit. Dickens was a young man when he visited the U.S.A. the first time and much of American Notes is written in the spirit of a crusading journalist, which he was. He came to the U.S. loving the idea of it and ready to be wowed, but instead he couldn't stomach the signs of slavery he saw, starting in Baltimore, and turned around before he even made it to the Deep South. But he'd seen enough to excoriate the U.S., including the "public opinion" he was told would ameliorate the harsh treatment of the slaves: He quotes from newspaper accounts to show there's no evidence of that. The above leads to another topic still relevant in the U.S.: the use of gun (and knife) violence to settle even petty differences between angry men. He sets out several newspaper accounts he acquired during the time he was in America: a tip of an iceberg. Reading these today is sobering because one sees how prevalent and ingrained gun culture was, and thus is, in the U.S. But what comes before his accounts of these more major issues are ongoing complaints, everywhere he goes, rendered sarcastically and causing me to laugh aloud, of the spitting of tobacco, the ignoring of omnipresent spittoons, as if the men can't be bothered to use them even as the floor grows filthier. From my reading of Dickens's biographies, I seem to remember Americans were more upset over this depiction than they were of the above issues. After his second visit to America, some twenty-five years later, Dickens mellowed, saying there'd been changes in the country since his first visit, as well as in himself, enough to warrant a postscript in future editions saying so. He needn't have done so. Party politics still rule over (mental) health facilities. Legal disputes still stop (educational) progress. Young white criminals are still treated differently than their black counterparts. Native Americans are still treated dishonestly. The rich are still considered more "virtuous" than the poor. Immigrants are still exploited. Racists still threaten the white-allies of blacks with violence and death, same as slave owners did to abolitionists. Americans are notoriously thin-skinned when criticized by outsiders (or even insiders) and it's likely, in his "old age," Dickens wanted to keep his American friends and ensure his books would still sell in the U.S. I don't think Dickens walked back his comments about spitting, as he shouldn't have. Spitting in public still exists here. Don't get me started on the young man I saw at a Houston brewery a few years ago and what he was doing with his chewing tobacco. I wasn't laughing.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-10-19 00:00:00 Rendy Lubis 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.