ABSTRACT
A specimen of popular American eloquence of the time, which might well have gone into Martin Chuzzlewit. The comment on the political implications of Dickens’s work is extravagant, but registers a part of his appeal for some readers. A more sensible American comment on ‘Boz and Democracy’ from this period was Walt Whitman’s (Brother Jonathan, 26 February 1842). As Forster commented, ‘The sources of Dickens’s popularity in England were in truth multiplied many-fold in America… [He] was almost universally regarded by them as a kind of embodied protest against what was believed to be worst in the institutions of England, depressing and overshadowing in a social sense, and adverse to purely intellectual influences’ (Life, 209). Some modern American critics of Dickens (it might be argued) generate a similar enthusiasm for—and misunderstanding of—him by seeing him as an embodied protest against the shortcomings of twentieth-century American life.
