Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and the Spirit of the American Place
Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and the Spirit of the American Place

Author(s): Francesca Orestano
Subject(s): Cultural history, Studies of Literature, Theory of Literature, British Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: travel writing; classics; Victorians; United States; Charles Dickens; Anthony Trollope
Summary/Abstract: A map of travel writing from antiquity to the Victorian age opens this reflection on the distinction between quest and travel, as two modes existing within the same genre, which yet can harbour a variety of discourses, ranging from letters to autobiography, from satire and fantasy to the scientific account and the Baedeker style. However, despite the many narrative masks adopted by travel writing, and the essential ambiguity its literary discourse may adopt, it can be argued that quest and travel can still be seen as bearing distinct features, inasmuch as the personality and the final aims of the traveller provide elements of response to the place visited that dispel the ambiguity of the genre. In the XIX century, history, culture, aesthetics and visual culture enhance the traveller’s response to the spirit of the place. Charles Dickens’s "American Notes" and Anthony Trollope’s "North America", respectively published in 1842 and 1862, while accounting for the writers’ experience in the United States, are remarkably dissimilar. My contention is that in Dickens’s case the travelogue takes the shape and nature of a quest: a journey that had started under the best auspices ended up in bitter disappointment as the writer did not compromise with local newspapers on his plea for international copyright; Dickens’s American experience is loaded with spectral images that make it nightmarish and, on the whole, unpleasant. For Trollope, who started with the best intentions to provide readers with plenty of information, the place proves ungraspable, unmanageable, despite pages of figures and tables of products, prices, values. In Trollope’s case, for different reasons, the spirit of the place instigates a kind of response that produces, instead of the best possible travel book, an unwieldy documentary account of the United States in 1862.

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