ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the tourist guidebook, which foregrounds issues of print circulation, the representation of space, and the education of readers, by triangulating it with two transatlantic novels: Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit and Herman Melville's Redburn. It also examines how Dickens and Melville used guidebooks as formal templates, symbolic objects, and sources when writing novels that meditate on the transatlantic circulation of persons and books, and the redrawn boundaries of English literature in the mid-nineteenth century. America is shown to be a bad copy, a point reiterated through Dickens's fight against plagiarism. Yet despite Dickens's condemnation, in American Notes, Dickens plagiarises American writers on slavery and the blind, his own textual fashioning undermining his construction of a literary tradition. Comparing Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener with Dickens's Bleak House, Robert Weisbuch has argued that Melville offers an unsettling discomfort and Dickens provides ultimately reassuring fictions.
