Jill Lepore: evaluation

Transcript context

…What is it about the thought of Dickens that led him to under-appreciate our virtues, if indeed that’s what he was doing, and focus as much as he did, say, on the penal system here and other areas where very few people would defend America’s record? For you listeners who don’t know the backstory, Dickens in 1842, late 1841, he decides to go to the United States. Partly he needs to earn some money. He wants to earn some money and he’s got a nice book contract. People tend to pop over to America, spend a few months and go back and write a little travel note. Dickens thought this would be a natural for him, and Americans thought of Dickens as a kind of honorary American because he wrote about the lowly. This is after Oliver Twist, so 1838, and The Pickwick Papers have been hugely popular in the United States. He has this huge audience, he wants to meet his audience, and his audience is thrilled to meet him and honor him with their de facto citizenship. And Dickens thinks of himself as an honorary American in many ways. This is the land of democracy, and he’s a democratic writer. So he’s expecting it to be this incredible love fest, and the anticipation is huge. And yet, although he loves Boston — he lands first in Boston — and he quite loves Boston and is adored and finds it adorable. He becomes quite close with Longfellow and with Charles Sumner, really good friends with both of those guys. The trip really falls apart when he goes to New York. He finds that Americans are, to him, garish and coarse. In a way, what Dickens finds traveling through the United States is that he really is an Englishman. [laughs] And he’s angry because — there are a lot of answers one could give to your question, why does he decide he doesn’t like the Unites States so much? He would have said, in a kind of pious way, because he was sickened by slavery. And although that’s true — he was indeed sickened by slavery, and he’s supposed to go on a tour of the South and he doesn’t. He gets as far as Richmond, and he just turns around. In the end he escapes and goes to Canada, where he’s very happy in Canada. [laughs] But, more practically, he’s come partly because his work is generally pirated in the United States, and he goes to Washington to argue for copyright law, an international copyright law that would protect his work because he’s earning just pennies from the huge, vast, unprecedented sales of his work in the United States. And he finds that Americans are very — newspaper editors in particular — are quite contemptuous of him for having done this. Here he is, the poet of poverty, and he’s come here to make sure he’s paid for his work. The Americans find that to be ironic and to be hypocritical. And Dickens is like, “Well, I’m not working for free. I’m writing for a living here. You should be willing to pay me.” So it’s really as much that as anything else. But there is a kind of general cultural coarseness that he doesn’t like, and he’s exhausted. Clearly his relationship with his wife is failing. There are a lot of other factors. I taught a research seminar with undergraduates about Dickens a few years ago, and the end product was, the students made a podcast. ionship with his wife is failing. There are a lot of other factors. I taught a research seminar with undergraduates about Dickens a few years ago, and the end product was, the students made a podcast. They wrote a radio drama, using only primary sources describing Dickens’s trip from Dickens’s letters home and newspaper reporters’ reports of Dickens as he goes from town to town. And they did a fantastic job, but it was hilarious because he comes with such high hopes, and the whole thing just unravels. The further he gets into the United States, the more he hates it, and the more Americans decide that they hate him. I was going to write a book about it, and in the end I decided narratively it was too unsatisfying because you’re waiting for the redemptive moment and it just doesn’t come.…

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