ABSTRACT
When Dickens discovered America in 1842, he was world famous, uni versally beloved, and profoundly unhappy with social conditions in the Old World. America had been haunting his dreams: did this demo cratic republic coincide with his utopian fantasies?1 Not long after ar riving, he began to realize that it did not and could not. In place of El Dorado, Dickens found a self-centered society that seemed militantly materialistic, many of its dollar-serving citizens not just brazen in their acquisitiveness but so unrefined and uncivil by British standards as to appear savage, without a trace or prospect of nobility.
