American Notes for General Circulation Revised Edition

by Dickens, Charles; Ingham, Patricia

• ISBN13: 9780140436495
• ISBN10: 0140436499
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-07-01
• Publisher: Penguin Classics

Summary

The noted novelist presents his often very affectionate opinions on the United States.

Author Biography

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Landport, Portsea, England. He died in Kent on June 9, 1870. The second of eight children of a family continually plagued by debt, the young Dickens came to know not only hunger and privation,but also the horror of the infamous debtors’ prison and the evils of child labor. A turn of fortune in the shape of a legacy brought release from the nightmare of prison and “slave” factories and afforded Dickens the opportunity of two years’ formal schooling at Wellington House Academy. He worked as an attorney’s clerk and newspaper reporter until his Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1837) brought him the amazing and instant success that was to be his for the remainder of his life. In later years, the pressure of serial writing, editorial duties, lectures, and social commitments led to his separation from Catherine Hogarth after twenty-three years of marriage. It also hastened his death at the age of fifty-eight, when he was characteristically engaged in a multitude of work.

Patricia Ingham is senior research fellow and reader at St. Anne's College, Oxford. She is the general editor of Thomas Hardy's fiction in Penguin Classics and edited Gaskell's North and South for the series.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vi
A Dickens Chronology	vii
Introduction	xi
Further Reading	xxxii
A Note on the Text	xxxv
Map	xxxviii
American Notes	1	(274)
Appendix I: Dickens's Unpublished Introduction of 1842	275	(3)
Appendix II: Dickens's Preface of 1850	278	(2)
Appendix III: Dickens's Postscript of 1868	280	(2)
Notes	282