Charles Dickens’s American Audience

During the time when the American nation was emerging, the novels of a British author Charles Dickens contributed significantly to the making of American culture. The unique contribution of Charles Dickens's American Audience is the focus upon the testimony of Dickens's American readers as a unique 'reading community': how his fiction intersected with their real lives, how he impacted American publishing, literacy, and educational reform, and how Americans loved the theatricality that Dickens brought to their lives.

From 1837 to 1912, Charles Dickens was by far the most popular writer for American readers. Through several sources including statistics, literary biography, newspapers, memoirs, diaries, letters, and interviews, Robert McParland examines a historical time and an emerging national consciousness that defined the American identity before and after the Civil War. American voices present their views, tastes, emotional reactions and identifications, and deep attachment and love for Dickens's characters, stories, themes, and sensibilities as well as for the man himself. Bringing together contemporary reactions to Dickens and his works, this book paints a portrait of the American people and of American society and culture from 1837 to the turn of the twentieth century. It is in this view of nineteenth-century America_its people and their values, their reading habits and cultural views, the scenarios of their everyday lives even in the face of the drastic changes of the emerging nation_that Charles Dickens's American Audience makes its greatest impact.

Chapter 1 – Introduction: Seeking Charles Dickens's American Audience
Chapter 2 – Charles Dickens and the American Community
Chapter 3 – Dickens and American Publishers
Chapter 4 – Charles Dickens's First Visit to America, American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit
Chapter 5 – Dickens and Library Reading
Chapter 6 – Learning from Fiction and Reality
Chapter 7 – Dickens in a House Divided
Chapter 8 – Civil War Reading
Chapter 9 – Theatricality
Chapter 10 – The Public Readings and the American Reconstruction of Charles Dickens
Chapter 11 – The Afterlife of Charles Dickens