DICKENS IN 1842: COMING TO HIS SENSES ABOUT AMERICA

metz, nancy, aycock;

As recent work by historians and critical theorists reminds us, the senses have a history. Whether we judge sight or hearing to be the ‘superior’sense, how we differentiate sounds from noise, what power relationships we find inscribed in these distinctions, what kind of information we glean from the myriad sensory stimuli constantly available to our organs of perception – these matters take us deep into the culture and, in particular, open up new ways to understand the experience of modernity. In their relationship to the ambient sounds of their culture, no less than in the gaze they brought to bear upon the world, Victorian men and women forged their identities. We should not overlook this fact as we try to come to terms with Dickens’s experience of America. A particularly rich archive of letters, speeches, diaries, newspaper articles, and first-person accounts allows us to speak with some certainty about his attitudes on a range of subjects – slavery, international copyright, the penny press, and American penal and educational reform. But Dickens’s writings about his first American trip are nowhere more memorable or revealing than when he digresses from descriptions of events, issues, and controversies to give vivid expression to a more basic and visceral form of perception – to the testimonyof his eyes and ears.