Posted on 06/29/2020 11:11:15 PM PDT by Borges
Oh oh...
Yes, Dickens HATED the USA and was quite unimpressed by the people of this nation, even though he was given a gigantic reception here, treated like a great hero, and lauded mightily; all of which he lived for. OTOH...he hated that America didn't have the kind of class system that England had and that people were more open. He was a rather secretive man and only wanted his version of himself to be seen WHEN he decided to show his version of it.
There's more...but the above should explain his complete distaste for the USA a bit.
LOL...that pipe tobacco joke is so old, most people have NO idea what the “joke” is! And FYI...it was ( is? ) an American brand and had less than nothing at all to do with the UK nor Prince Albert, except for the name. ;^)
Dickens wasn’t a realist in the modern sense. He created his own universe and populated with more diverse types than any other writer since Shakespeare.
Is that WHY he used newspaper articles and Henry Mayhew's books ( LONDON'S UNDERWORLD and MAYHEW'S LONDON ) as basis for many characters, as well as his fictionalized own life for his novels?
You might just as well then claim that Dominick Dunne's books weren't "realistic".
What about Dickens' best friend, Wilkie Collins' works? Are you going to tell me that his characters weren't just as "diverse", if not more so?
Dickens was not a realist in the Literary sense of the word. Realism was Howells and Twain. I’ve read “The Woman in White” and “The Moonstone” both are wonderful but they are the only two Collins works still read with regularity.
I remember reading something quite a while back about why they used Prince Albert with that brand, but can’t recall. I’m sure it’s out there on the internet somewhere.
I can't imagine ever going back to the UK now, even though my best friend from college lives there. So I'm glad that we were able to travel, long ago, to places that have become so horrible now. The problem is...so have many places in this nation, become "NO GO ZONES" now too. And I can't see things change for the better any time soon...if ever.
Really? I’ll have to look it up.
How about you show how you’re not stupid, and expain what your post meant?
Just on Dickens’s dislike of the USA...the one feature of life in the US which recurs again and again in the accounts not only of Dickens, but of many other British visitors of the period (Trollope etc), and which seems to have darkened their general perception of the country, was the apparently near-universal habit of tobacco-wad spitting in public.
(And btw your following post about your reluctance to visit the UK...all I can say is that in 95%+ of the country you might be pleasantly surprised. ‘Don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers’...)
Sadly, it doesn't say why. Perhaps Reynolds just liked the guy.
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