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Thomas E. Ricks' daily take on national security.

‘Martin Chuzzlewit’: Dickens on a war reporter and other scurrilous Americans

I picked up the Dickens novel Martin Chuzzlewit recently because I wanted to see what he said about the United States that he saw while touring in the 1840s.

Bowie_knife_1
Bowie_knife_1

I picked up the Dickens novel Martin Chuzzlewit recently because I wanted to see what he said about the United States that he saw while touring in the 1840s.

I picked up the Dickens novel Martin Chuzzlewit recently because I wanted to see what he said about the United States that he saw while touring in the 1840s.

The hero, newly arrived in New York, encounters a war correspondent named “Jefferson Brick”: “a small young gentleman of very juvenile appearance, and unwholesomely pale in the face; partly, perhaps, from intense thought, but partly, there is now doubt, from the excessive use of tobacco, which he was at that moment chewing vigorously.”

Dickens was unimpressed by the United States, which he found to be a nation of “dollars, demagogues and bar-rooms.”

As for its people, all they seemed to care for could be summed up in one word, he wrote: “Dollars. All their cares, hopes, affections, virtues, and associations, seemed to be melted down into dollars.”

He also found Americans to be hypocritical about slavery, going on about liberty and freedom while buying and selling black people, “so fond of Liberty in this part of the globe that they buy her and sell her.”

And don’t get him started on the American love of violence. “Are pistols with revolving barrels, sword-sticks, bowie-knives, and such things, Institutions on which you pride yourselves? Are bloody duels, brutal combats, savage assaults, shooting down and stabbing in the streets, your Institutions!” I guess he was not an American exceptionalist.

Wikimedia Commons/Ark30inf

Thomas E. Ricks covered the U.S. military from 1991 to 2008 for the Wall Street Journal and then the Washington Post. He can be reached at ricksblogcomment@gmail.com. Twitter: @tomricks1

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