Dickens: America sucks

[Lettow77]

 His mistake was not coming to the South. there would've been less crowds and more englishness. And he could write about the plight of a plucky negro boy.

[Eddie Teach]

Yeah, no tobacco spitting yokels in Dixie.

[Lettow77]

 Those were likely Southerners he saw at work on the streets of DC, after all. Well, if he can't stand that, maybe its for the best that he return to his dreary rain-soaked island and write about poor children.

[Sheilbh]

His mistake was not coming to the South. there would've been less crowds and more englishness. And he could write about the plight of a plucky negro boy.

He considered it.  There were plans to visit Charleston, for example.  But he did go to a few Southern towns for example Richmond, Baltimore, St Louis.  But he was strongly opposed to slavery - he devotes an entire chapter to it in American Notes.

But he also though of not going to the South at all.  He liked the idea of being able to say that he accepted no mark of public respect where slavery was.  He thought the land from Richmond to Fredericksburg was desolate and had the 'air of ruin and decay' that inevitably happens 'where slavery sits brooding'. 

He also couldn't stand the system of lazy 'genteel' owners who 'could not bear a superior or brook an equal' and that 'recoils from honest service to an honest man but does not shrink from every trick, artifice and knavery in business'.  So precisely the sort of bullshit you're peddling.

Having said that, he thought the Northerners were hypocrites too 'In truth, it must be acknowledged, that the free Americans, the very abolitionists themselves, are stout supporters of a slave system in act, whatever they may be in theory. In the free states of America the negro is no less forced down out of his just position as a man than when he works under the planter's whip. Even in an English drawing-room, the American who meets by chance a guest with negro blood marked in his forehead, feels like a cat upon whose domain some strange dog has intruded, and is not easily restrained by the rules of English courtesy from spitting.  He also didn't think they'd have the fortitude to win the Civil War and that it had nothing really to do with slavery.

Edit:  He did write about one black child too who was riding in the black carriage of a train in the South and cried all the way.  Him and his mother had been separated from father and brother by a slave purchase.  Dickens was very harsh on the owner '"the champion of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness' who got out at each stop to check on his 'human cattle'.

In fairness though Dickens was a dreadful racist too.

[Razgovory]

His mistake was not coming to the South. there would've been less crowds and more englishness. And he could write about the plight of a plucky negro boy.

I thought you bought that league of the South stuff.

[Lettow77]

 What does the league of the South have to do with poor, plucky negro boys?

I knew about dickens in the South and what he had to say. What he mistakenly thought was "an air of ruin and decay" was just Yukkuri run rampant.

[Faeelin]

What a damn shame this moral chap never visited India.

[Sheilbh]

What a damn shame this moral chap never visited India.

As I say he was very racist.  He more or less called for genocide in response to the Indian mutiny.  Though in fairness I think his son was in the colonial service at the time so there's a bit of the concerned father.

What's really interesting is the differences between Dickens and Wilkie Collins on India in their pieces after the mutiny. 

Dickens is simply strident and deeply racist.  Collins is more interested and subtle in an Orientalist way.  You can also argue, pretty coherently, that in some ways The Moonstone's an anti-colonial novel.

I've not read it but I've heard good things about Jack Maggs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Maggs
Which, from what I gather, basically reworks Great Expectations, makes the Pip character a thinly veiled Dickens and is set in a 'realer' less suppressed Victorian world.  So there's homosexuality, child prostitutes, illicit abortions and it upends Dickens's rather complacent colonial attitudes.

I'm on a binge at the minute (I've just ordered Claire Tomalin's new biography) and I think I'll get that later.  I find Victorian pastiches really, weirdly enjoyable.

[Razgovory]

What does the league of the South have to do with poor, plucky negro boys?

I knew about dickens in the South and what he had to say. What he mistakenly thought was "an air of ruin and decay" was just Yukkuri run rampant.

As I understood their ideology, the South was primarily "Celtic" in nature as opposed to the "Germanic" Yankees.  The English are certainly a "Germanic" people.

[Lettow77]

 The South is both more english AND more celtic than the north.

But that "celtic vs germanic" stuff is quixotic racial nizzerdry and not to be taken seriously. the League of the South is too fragmented to actually have a coherent genesis of the conflict theory anyway- the best they can manage is all agreeing secession is delicious. The League of the South is a bunch of weird people, not an actual political party. It's a shame, as there are some intelligent professors and genuinely interesting types affiliated with it. (There are also pig disgusting amerifats who breathe through their mouths, but it can't be helped..)

quixotic racial nizzerdry 

[Razgovory]

How absurd.  And the funny thing is you go off idolizing the "Yankees of the East".  Find in them the qualities you refuse to see in your countrymen.  You are person who shall always be disappointed, Lettuce.

[Lettow77]

 That's a grim and weighty sentence. I don't FEEL very disappointed, though. It's a beautiful and transient life, with fluffy things in it.

[DGuller]

So much attention for a writer?  Didn't they have sports back then?

[Valmy]

So much attention for a writer?  Didn't they have sports back then?

No football, no basketball, no baseball...it just doesn't seem like America.

[DGuller]

So much attention for a writer?  Didn't they have sports back then?

No football, no basketball, no baseball...it just doesn't seem like America.

No wonder Dickens hated that America.