Charles Dickens: American Notes. New York: Peter Fenelon Collier, Publisher, n.d. Volume 27 of The Works of Charles Dickens.

Charles Dickens visited America twice, first in 1842, at the age of thirty, already well established as a novelist, and then in 1868, now world-renowned. The 1842 visit occurred only a couple of years after Tocqueville had published the second volume of his magisterial Democracy in America. Dickens wisely made no attempt to compete with it. Rather than offer a sweeping analysis of American civil society and politics framed by “a new political science for a world altogether new,” Dickens relied on his own considerable strengths as a novelist. He tells the story of his journey; he describes places and persons and customs, praising and blaming but seldom theorizing. In his earliest book, Sketches by Boz, he collected journalistic vignettes of his fellow Englishmen, making a portrait of the national character emerge from the particulars; the Notes does this for America. His book does not attempt to replace the Democracy, but it does supplement it. He gives you a sense of what America and Americans were like, on the ground and on the waters of America, how it felt to move around the country. Accompanied by his wife, he pays much more attention to the inconveniences of travel than Tocqueville does. If his impressions often center on conditions in prisons, schools, insane asylums, and factories, it is only because he never ceases to be Charles Dickens, the son of a man whose father spent time in debtors’ prison, the author of Oliver Twist, which he’d brought out only three years earlier.

Tocqueville remarks on the touchiness of Americans in those days regarding foreigners’ opinions of their country, and Dickens felt that too, both during his visit and after his book was published. He reserves his sharpest criticisms for slavery and American journalism—fair targets, both.  His animadversions on American manners (he is particularly exercised by the then-prevalent habit of chewing tobacco) are hard to gainsay. In the preface to the second edition, he protests, “Prejudiced I am not, and never have been, otherwise than in favor of the United States…. To represent me as viewing AMERICA with ill-nature, coldness, or animosity, is merely to do a very foolish thing, which is always a very easy one.” Just so.

From England, he boarded a mail ship for Halifax in January, when the northern Atlantic offers no mercy to travelers. “The laboring of the ship in the troubled sea” during a night storm “I shall never forget”; “it is impossible for the most vivid imagination to conceive.” But not for a great novelist to describe: “To say that [the ship] is flung down on her side in the waves, with her masts dipping into them, and that, springing up again, she rolls over on the other side, until a heavy sea strikes her with the noise of a hundred great guns, and hurls her back—that she stops, and staggers, and shivers, as though stunned, and then, with a violent throbbing at her heart, darts onward like a monster goaded into madness, to be beaten down, and battered, and crushed, and leaped on by the angry sea—that thunder, lightning, hail, and rain, and wind are all in fierce contention for the mastery—that every plank has its groan, every nail its shriek, and every drop of water in the great ocean its howling voice—is nothing. To say that all is grand, and all appalling and horrible in the last degree, is nothing. Words cannot express it. Thoughts cannot convey it. Only a dream can call it up again in all its fury, rage, and passion.”

Halifax was still a comfortingly English place, with Canada’s own smaller-scale parliament observing its new-year opening, complete with the royal governor’s speech. “The military band outside the building struck up ‘God Save the Queen’ with great vigor before his Excellency had quite finished; the people shouted, the ins rubbed their hands; the outs shook their heads; the Government party said there never was such a good speech; the opposition declared there never was such a bad one; the Speaker and members of the House of Assembly withdrew for the bar to say a good deal among themselves, and do a little; and, in short, everything went on, and promised to go on, just as it does at home upon the like occasions.” 

Dickens’s first American stop, Boston, impressed him from the start, as its Custom House men comported themselves with “the utmost courtesy,” in contrast with “the servile rapacity” of French officials and the “surly, boorish incivility” of their English counterparts, “discreditable to the nations that keep such ill-conditioned curs snarling about its gates.” As for Boston itself, “the city is a beautiful one,” its residents exhibiting “intellectual refinement and superiority” thanks to nearby Harvard College, whose professors “would shed a grace upon, and do honor to, any society in the world.” “Whatever the defects of American universities may be, they disseminate no prejudices; rear no bigots; dig up the buried ashes of no old superstitions; never interpose between the people and their improvement; exclude no man because of his religious opinions; above all, in their whole course of study and instruction, recognize a world, and a broad one too, lying beyond the college walls”—the world that Dickens, with no university degree, so tirelessly brought to his readers’ attention. Thanks largely to Harvard, in Boston “the almighty dollar sinks into something comparatively insignificant, amid a whole Pantheon of better gods.” 

He was especially impressed with Boston’s “public institutions and charities,” judging them “as nearly perfect as the most considerate wisdom, benevolence, and humanity can make them.” In his description of a home for the blind, he steps aside to offer an unforgettable description written by the resident physician of the meeting of a deaf-mute child, Laura Bridgman, with her mother, from whom she had been separated for several years. At an insane asylum, a poorhouse, a reform school Dickens remarks the good effects of gentle treatment: “In all of them the unfortunate or degenerate citizens of the State are carefully instructed in their duties both to God and man; are surrounded by all reasonable means of comfort and happiness that their condition will admit of; are appealed to as members of the great human family, however afflicted, indigent, or fallen; are ruled by the strong heart, and not by the strong (though immeasurably weaker) Hand.” It is as though John Locke’s recommendations for “the Young Gentleman” have been generalized to the care of the mentally ill, the poor, even the criminal. Has the rule of medical-scientific techniques done better, in the two centuries since?

A similar spirit informed the justice system. In this, democracy does well. “In every court ample and commodious provision is made for the accommodation of the citizens. This is the case all through America. In every Public Institution, the right of the people to attend, and to have an interest in the proceedings, is most fully and distinctly recognized,” and there is no “insolence of office of any kind.” It may be that America, “in her desire to shake off the absurdities and abuses” of the old wig-and-gown English system of law, may “have gone too far into the opposite extreme,” treating its judges too informally; one is reminded of Dickens’s younger contemporary, Walter Bagehot, who would write of the needed dignities of law courts. But Dickens also sees that such dignities, and even the law itself, are “powerless” against an “occasion of any great popular excitement”; “no men know [this] better than the judges of America.” It is better that the people learn legal procedures for themselves, by watching how court officials proceed. For maintaining order, popularly-supported law needs supplementation from the churches, and from the ladies who attend them so assiduously. This too can be overdone. “The peculiar province of the Pulpit in New England (always excepting the Unitarian ministry) would appear to be the denouncement of all innocent and rational amusements. The church, the chapel, and the lecture-room are the only means of excitement excepted; and to the church, the chapel, and the lecture-room the ladies resort in crowds.” The lecture-room was the pulpit of the “sect of philosophers known as Transcendentalists.” Wondering what they might be, “I was given to understand that whatever was unintelligible, would be certainly transcendental,” and that Transcendentalists follow “my friend Mr. Carlyle, or I should rather say,” they follow “a follower of his, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson.” Dickens is inclined to be generous with him, and with them. “This gentleman has written a volume of Essays, in which, among much that is dreamy and fanciful (if he will pardon me for saying so), there is much more that is true and manly, honest and bold,” exhibiting “a hearty disgust of Cant, and an aptitude to detect her in all the million varieties of her ever-lasting wardrobe.” “If I were a Bostonian, I think I would be a Transcendentalist,” and probably not a divine.

Dickens could hardly overlook New England industry—especially the railroads and factories. He availed himself of the one to visit the other, in nearby Lowell, Massachusetts. With “a great deal of jolting, a great deal of noise, a great deal of wall, not much window, a locomotive engine, a shriek, and a bell,” the racially segregated train made its way somewhat more slowly than its English counterparts—a point on which Americans proved sensitive, one of them hastening to tell the Englishman that America is “a go-ahead country, too.” On the train, democracy prevails as it does in the courts. “Everybody talks to you or to anybody else who hits his fancy,” and “any lady may travel alone, from one end of the United States to the other, and be certain of the most courteous and considerate treatment everywhere.” “Quiet people avoid the question of the Presidency, for there will be a new election in three years and a half, and party feeling runs very high; the great constitutional feature of this institution being, that directly the acrimony of the last election is over, the acrimony of the next one begins.” This is Tocqueville’s democracy, but up close and personal.

At the factories in Lowell (which had been founded only 21 years earlier), Dickens was impressed not only by the newness of everything but the neatly-dressed mill girls: “I would always encourage this kind of pride, as a worthy element of self-respect, in any person I employed.” Many boarding-houses had pianos in the common room and many of the women subscribed to circulating libraries; the town had “churches and chapels of various persuasions, in which the young women may observe that form of worship in which they have been educated.” There was a literary periodical featuring articles by the women. To readers who might object that such things are “above their station,” Dickens replies, “I would beg to ask what their station is.” They worked twelve hours a day, so there was little question that they were doing what they were hired to do. “For myself, I know no station in which, the occupation of today cheerfully done and the occupation tomorrow cheerfully looked to, any one of these pursuits is not most humanizing and laudable.” The stories published in the Lowell Offering “inculcate habits of self-denial and contentment, and teach good doctrines of enlarged benevolence,” exhibiting also “a strong feeling for the beauties of nature, as displayed in the solitudes the writers have left at home”; most of the women were farm girls who would return home in a few years, having supported themselves and perhaps helping their families in the meantime. The stories featured “very scant allusion to fine clothes, fine marriages, fine houses, or fine life.”

There was also a harder, Yankee-trader side to New England, mingled with religiosity. Sharp dealing was not only practiced but admired. At Hartford, Connecticut, where “too much of the old Puritan spirit persisted” in the form of Blue Laws, religious influence “has not tended, that I know, to make the people less hard in their bargains, or more equal in their dealings.” At New Haven, then called the City of Elms, Dickens toured poorhouses, a madhouse, a jail, and Yale College. 

New York was no Boston. Less social uplift, more business, as the ferry boats worked the harbor: “The city’s hum and buzz, the clinking of capstans, the ringing of bells, the barking of dogs, the clattering of wheels, tingled in the listening ear. All of which life and stir, coming across the stirring water, caught new life and animation from its free companionship; and, sympathizing with its buoyant spirits, glistened as it seemed in sport upon its surface, and hemmed the vessel round, and plashed the water high about her sides, and, floating her gallantly into dock, flew off again to welcome other comers, and speed before them to the busy port.” In New York, the prisons and mental hospitals were darker and harsher places than in they were in Boston, a fact Dickens blames on the political machines, which staffed those institutions with party hacks. But the city also welcomed a foreigner with warmth. “I never thought that going back to England, returning to all who are dear to me, and to pursuits that have insensibly grown to be part of my nature, I could have felt so much sorrow as I endured when I parted at last… with the friends who had accompanied me from this city.” 

While he “greatly liked” Philadelphia—a “handsome city, but distractingly regular” (“I would have given the world for a crooked street”)—Dickens was shocked by the practice of solitary confinement in a nearby prison. “I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers,” a punishment “which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow creature.” This “slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain [is] immeasurably worse than any torture of the body,” leaving the prisoners helplessly disoriented when finally released,” suffering, as one prison official said, “a complete derangement of the nervous system.” Solitary confinement “wears the mind into a morbid state, which renders it unfit for the rough contact and busy action of the world”; “those who have undergone this punishment MUST pass into society again morally unhealthy and diseased.” It is what Tocqueville called American individualism or isolation, carried to the point of scientific-sane insanity.

On the way to Washington, Dickens stopped at Baltimore, where he saw slaves for the first time, servants at his table in a restaurant. “The sensation of exacting any service from human creatures who are bought and sold, and being, for the time, a party as it were to their condition, is not an enviable one. The institution exists, perhaps, in its least repulsive and most mitigated form in such a town as this; but it is slavery; and though I was, with respect to it, an innocent man, its presence filled me with a sense of shame and self-reproach.” Later, he would be glad to revise his plan for traveling on to Charleston, South Carolina, not only in light of the great distance involved but in anticipation of “the pain of living in the constant contemplation of slavery.” He would see enough of it in Richmond, Virginia, where, “as in all other [places] where slavery sits brooding, there is an air of ruin and decay abroad, which is inseparable from the system,” wherein “biped beasts of burden slink past” with “gloom and dejection upon them all.” He saw a mother and children recently purchased, separated from the husband and father. “The children cried the whole way, and the mother was misery’s picture. The champion of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, who had bought them, rode in the same train; and, every time we stopped, got down to see that they were safe.” With education of slaves outlawed, “the darkness—not of skin, but mind—which meets the stranger’s eye at every turn; the brutalizing and blotting out of all fairer characters traced by Nature’s hand; immeasurably outdo [ones] worst belief.” 

Dickens found the democratic republic’s capital city profoundly unimpressive, even repellant. “It is sometimes called the City of Magnificent Distances, but it might with greater propriety be termed the City of Magnificent Intentions; for it is only on taking a bird’s-eye view of it from the top of the Capitol that one can at all comprehend the vast designs of its projector, an aspiring Frenchman. Spacious avenues that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere; streets, mile long, that only want houses, roads, and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to complete; and ornaments of great thoroughfares, which only lack great thoroughfares to ornament—are its leading features,” along with “an occasional tornado of wind and dust.” “Such as it is it is likely to remain,” having “no trade or commerce of its own,” “little or no population beyond the President and his establishment,” members of Congress, and government drudges, along with the necessary hotel-keepers and tradesmen. With swamps on all sides, “It is very unhealthy.”

As for Congress, the gag rule against criticism of slavery was then in full effect, and “an aged, gray-haired man” (it may have been John Quincy Adams, but Dickens almost never mentions an American name) had been censured for “having dared to assert the infamy of that traffic which has for its accursed merchandise men and women, and their unborn children”—this, in a chamber where the “Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America, which solemnly declares that All Men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with the Inalienable Rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” hangs on the wall, “gilded, framed, and glazed.” Looking over the men congregated on the floor of the House of Representatives, Dickens found the democracy contemptible. “Despicable trickery at elections; underhanded tamperings with public officers; cowardly attacks upon opponents, with scurrilous newspapers for shields, and hired pens for daggers; shameful trucklings to mercenary knaves, whose claim to be considered is, that every day and week they sow new crops of ruin with their venal types, which are the dragons teeth of yore, in everything but sharpness; aidings and abettings of every bad inclination in the  popular mind, and artful suppressions of all its good influences; such things as these, and, in a word, Dishonest Faction in its most depraved and unblushing form stared out from every corner of the crowded hall.” Here none of “the intelligence and refinement,” the “true honest patriotic heart of America” found no representation in the people’s representatives. Instead, “It is the game of these men, and of their profligate organs, to make the strife of politics so fierce and brutal, and so destructive of all self-respect in worthy men, that sensitive and delicate-minded persons shall be kept aloof”; “they who in other countries would, from their intelligence and station, most aspire to make the laws, do here recoil the furthest from that degradation.”

Instead of venturing further south, Dickens headed west for Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. There he examined several of the “treaties made from time to time with the poor Indians,” signed by men who could not read the documents they had signed. “Nor could I help bestowing many sorrowful thoughts upon the simple warriors whose hands and hearts were set there in all truth and honesty; and who only learned in course of time from white men how to break their faith, and quibble out of forms and bonds.” “I wondered, too, how many times the credulous Big Turtle, or trusting Little Hatchet, had put his mark to treaties which were falsely read to him; and had singed away, he knew not what, until it went and cast him loose upon the new possessors of the land, a savage indeed.” Later, on a steamboat from Louisville to Saint Louis, he met Pitchlynn, the Choctaw chief, who did in fact speak and read English (he especially admired the poetry of Sir Walter Scott, that chronicler of clan battles). Pitchlynn expected that his race “would soon be seen upon the earth no more,” “for what could a few poor Indians do against such well-skilled men of business as the whites.” He shared Dickens’s opinion of Congress, saying “it wanted dignity in an Indian’s eyes.” With only twenty thousand Choctaws remaining, their number declining, “a few of his brother chiefs had been obliged to become civilized, and to make themselves acquainted with what the whites knew, for it was their only chance of existence”; “unless they tried to assimilate themselves to their conquerors, they must be swept away before the strides of civilized society.” As for the English, he calmly and correctly remarked that they “used to be very fond of the Red Men when they wanted their help, but had not cared much for them since.” “He took his leave; as stately and complete a gentleman of nature’s making as ever I beheld; and moved among the people in the boat, another kind of being.” 

Steamboat travel brought out the worst of ordinary democratic moeurs. “In all modes of traveling, the American customs, with reference to the means of personal cleanliness and wholesome ablution, are extremely negligent and filthy; and I strongly incline to the belief that a considerable amount of illness is referable to this cause.” Meals were consumed in silence, with “no conversation, no laughter, no cheerfulness, no sociality, except in spitting; and that is done in silent fellowship round the stove, when the meal is over.” What is more, “the people are all alike,” with “no diversity of character,” traveling “on the same errands, say[ing] and do[ing] the same things in exactly the same manner, and follow[ing] in the same dull, cheerless round.” In the evening the passengers “amused themselves till the night was pretty far advanced, by alternately firing off pistols and singing hymns.” As for the Mississippi River, it was “an enormous ditch, sometimes two or three miles wide, running liquid mud, six miles an hour; its strong and frothy current choked and obstructed everywhere by huge logs and whole forest trees”—a “foul stream” with low banks, “the trees dwarfish, the marshes swarming with frogs, the wretched cabins few and far apart, their inmates hollow-cheeked and pale, the weather very hot, mosquitoes penetrating into every crack and crevice of the boat, mud and slim on everything, nothing pleasant in its aspect, but the harmless lightning which flickers every night upon the dark horizon.” The commercial importance of the Mississippi, and its surroundings, down to the richness of the farmland mud he despises, rates no attention. He found St. Louis to be another American work in progress, albeit with better prospects for elegance and beauty than Washington, but no more salubrious in its hot climate and surrounding undrained swamps. Generally, Dickens was unimpressed with the American landscape when flat, democratic—prairie land disappoints him, that “vast expanse of level ground,” “oppressive in its barren monotony” —thrilled when aristocratic, a thing of “gleaming depths” and “heavenly promise,” as Niagara Falls.

In Carondelet—a village later incorporated into St. Louis—he met his one frontiersman, an innkeeper, “a dry, tough, hard-faced old fellow” who had served in the militia during the War of 1812 “and had seen all kinds of service—except a battle.” “He had all his life been restless and locomotive, with an irresistible desire for change,” even then wishing he could “clean up his musket, and be off to Texas tomorrow morning.” “He was one of the very many descendants of Cain proper to this continent, who seemed destined from their birth to serve as pioneers in the great human army; who gladly go on from year to year extending its outposts, and leaving home after home behind them; and die at last, utterly regardless of their graves being left thousands of miles behind, by the wandering generation who succeed.” His wife had paid the cost, “having seen her children, one by one, die here of fever, in the full prime and beauty of their youth.” Dickens and his own wife had other plans, returning to England after a time in Canada. For them, “Home, and all that makes it dear; no tongue can tell, or pen of mine describe.”

Dickens concludes with essays on what he considers the worst American evils: slavery and the press. He identifies three classes of slavery apologists: “the more moderate and rational owners of human cattle who have come into the possession of them as so many coins in their trading capital, but who admit the frightful nature of the Institution in the abstract, and perceive the dangers to society with which it is fraught”—latter-day Jeffersons; those who “doggedly deny the horrors of the system, in the teeth of such a mass of evidence as never was brought to bear on any other subject,” men who would “gladly involve America in a war, civil or foreign, provided that it had for its sole end and object the assertion of their right to perpetuate slavery, and to whip and work and torture slaves, unquestioned by any human authority,” defining freedom to mean oppression, savagery, mercilessness, and cruelty toward their fellow human beings—the future Nathan Bedford Forrests; and finally, those who define republicanism as having no man above them, but no man beneath them entitled to rise up to equal them, men who consider voluntary servitude disgraceful, deducing that servants ought therefore be slaves—the “miserable aristocracy of a false republic.” Dickens rebuts these several pretentions, remarking that “Slavery is not one whit more endurable because some hearts are found which can partially resist its hardening influences.” To those who (like Senator Stephen Douglas) deny the cruelty of slavery, saying that public opinion prevents it, he replies “public opinion in the slave States is slavery, is it not?” Public opinion in those states “has delivered the slaves over to the gentle mercies of their masters,” making the laws that deny the slaves the “legislative protection” Americans had demanded from England in the 1770s. “Public opinion has knotted the lash, heated the branding-iron, loaded the rifle, and shielded the murderer. Public opinion threats the abolitionist with death, if venture to the South; and drags him with a rope about his middle, in broad unblushing noon, through the first city in the East.” “Shall we whimper over legends of the tortures practiced on each other by the Pagan Indians, and smile upon the cruelties of Christian men?” He should rather return America to “the forest and the Indian village” than see slavery endure; he would rather see a civil war, turning the knives with which “Liberty in America hews and hacks her slaves” to the “better use” of “turn[ing] them on each other.” America shows that democracy or popular sovereignty can be as, or more, tyrannical than monarchy or oligarchy.

The public opinion that rules democracy owes much of its coarseness to the press. Although Americans are “frank, brave, cordial, hospitable, and affectionate,” their virtues are sadly sapped and blighted in their growth among the mass”; “one great blemish in the popular mind of America, and the prolific parent of an innumerable brood of evils, is Universal Distrust,” which it mistakes for “superior shrewdness and independence.” Distrust brings political instability with it, as voters put people into office only to turn them out a couple of years later. America’s “licentious press” intensifies suspicion for the sake of its own commercial profits.

“Schools may be erected, East, West, North, and South; pupils be taught, and masters reared, by scores upon scores of thousands; colleges may thrive, churches may be crammed, temperance may be diffused, and advancing knowledge in all other forms walk through the land with giant strides; but while the newspaper press of America is in, or near, its present abject state, high moral improvement in that country is hopeless.” Every year, “the tone of public feeling must sink lower down,” Congress “must become of less account before all decent men,” and “the memory of the Great Fathers of the Revolution must be outraged more and more, in the bad life of their degenerate child.” Far from supporting the free exchange of opinions, “this monster of depravity” represses them. “When any man in that Free Country has freedom of opinion, and presumes to think for himself, and speak for himself, without humble reference to a censorship which, for its rampant ignorance and base dishonesty, he utterly loathes and despises in his heart; when those who most acutely feel its infamy, and the reproach it casts upon the nation, and who most denounce it to each other, dare to set their heels upon, and crush it openly, in the sight of all men; then I will believe that its influence is lessening, and men are returning to their manly senses.” Tocqueville had written that in a democratic civil society, pressure on the minds and hearts of the people comes not ‘from above,’ as under aristocracy, but from ‘around’ each person, from what would later be called ‘peer pressure’ from a peerage whose names include everyone in the telephone directory. For Dickens, the press has made itself the tool that enables the democracy to leverage that pressure.

What Tocqueville says about women on the American frontier—that they are sad, worn-out, but resolute—Dickens finds in all Americans. “They certainly not a humorous people”—no Shakespearean clowns or Dickensian eccentrics will be found there— and their “temperament always impressed me as being of a dull and gloomy character.” “I was quite oppressed by the prevailing seriousness and melancholy air of business; which was so general and unvarying, that, at every new town I came to, I seemed to meet the very same people whom I had left behind me at the last,” people stuck in “a dull, sullen persistence in coarse usages,” a people who had “rejected the graces of life as undeserving of attention.” Dickens’s America is not only a democracy but a commercial democracy, a land of joyless questing for joy, and it is no wonder that Dickens returned to England with relief. “The love of trade is a reason why the literature of America is to remain forever unprotected” (Dickens viewed the pirating of his own writings by American publishers with understandable indignation). “We are a trading people, and don’t care for poetry,” Americans say, while caring enough for the prose of English writers to violate copyright in order to consume it at a cheaper rate. In America, “healthful amusements, cheerful means of recreation, and wholesome fancies must fade before the stern utilitarian joys of trade.”

In the second edition of his book Dickens included a speech to none other than a national gathering of American journalists. By 1868, with the civil war that eradicated slavery over and American newspapers improved, he could extend an olive branch, “express[ing] my high and grateful sense of my second reception in America,” and “bear[ing] my honest testimony to the national generosity and magnanimity.” He acknowledged “the amazing changes I have seen around me on every side—changes moral, changes, physical, changes in the amount of land subdued and peopled, changes in the rise of vast new cities, changes in the growth of older cities almost out of recognition, changes in the graces and amenities of life, changes in the Press, without whose advancement no advancement can take place anywhere.” Publius or Tocqueville might contend that a republican regime had gradually refined and enlarged the public views, but Dickens characteristically offers no explanation and no speculation, leaving the matter at the level of observation. 

It might be added that today, some 180 years since Dickens arrived, the democratization wrought be the new journalistic media and the failure of American educators to understand, and therefore to teach, American republicanism have revived many of the malign practices Dickens condemned—paradoxically, often in the name of erasing the after-effects of the race-based slavery Dickens equally condemned.

Alan Taylor: Thomas Jefferson’s Education. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2019.

“This book examines Jefferson’s efforts to reform Virginia through education,” efforts that proved an education in themselves—preeminently an education in regime politics. Jefferson’s favored regime—a democratic republic for what he considered his country, Virginia, and for the United States, the American Union as a whole—faced two main threats: plantation slavery, which “subsidized education for masters but complicated attempts to school common whites” and “blocked literacy for black Virginians” almost entirely; a newly-strengthened federal government, which Jefferson regarded as a nucleus of monarchy so long as neither he nor his ally Madison were in the White House. As Jefferson wrote to his old rival, John Adams, he detested any conventional aristocracy, preferring a way of life whereby the “natural aristoi of virtue and talent” set the tone and governed the people who elected them. “Raked from the rubbish annually,” the natural aristoi should be provided with an education to fit them for political rule by the consent of said rubbish. Such men would be fitted to defend Virginia from encroachments by the federal power, vindicating self-government of Virginians in their state, their country, and in the smaller “ward republics” or local governing units wherein those men would gain the necessary practical experience to guide Virginians through the rough political waters Jefferson rightly foresaw.

In this, Jefferson faced a problem that proved insuperable in his lifetime. “The profits of slavery also underwrote the planter hedonism that so troubled Jefferson as antithetical to self-discipline and study.” Hedonists can’t rule themselves, much less their ward, their state, their nation. He hoped that the next generation of Virginians, given the proper course of college study, would follow his own example in “saving” themselves, through education, from what he called “the society of horse racers, card, players, [and] foxhunters.” Looking back from the vantage of old age, he professed, “I am astonished I did not turn off with some of them, & become as worthless to society as they were.” In his reform attempts, Jefferson did not, at least at first, reflect upon his own experience with the scientific rigor he admired, as a devotee of the Enlightenment. Jefferson and his classmates had equal educational opportunities, but they chose radically different ways of life. That being so, the mere provision of education could not have been the cause of Jefferson’s own way of life, a scientist would say. Why, then, did he not “turn off” with the others? Nearly 100 years later, a philosopher (thinking of himself) asserted that the exception to the rule can never be the rule. In essaying to make his own ‘exceptionalism’ the rule, the way of life, the regime of the plantation class, Jefferson overestimated the hearts and minds of the young scions, the conventional quasi-aristocrats who were not, and never could become, natural aristoi of either virtue or talent.

Jefferson enrolled in Virginia’s best college, William and Mary, in 1760. The six professors were Anglican clergymen imported from England, and the school was properly Anglican. “But the regimentation had scant impact on young Virginians used to having their way”; “most came for only a year or two to get a smattering of education, so almost all left without a degree rather than meet the high standards enforced by the Masters.” The Board of Visitors—what now would be called a board of trustees—sided mostly with the students against the faculty. As plantation owners who expected their sons to inherit the family business, the Visitors “wanted a practical education” for the students—surveying, agronomy—not the liberal education centering on “philosophy and ancient languages” the faculty would impart. Visitors and faculty charged one another with drunkenness and other vices; each blamed the other for student indiscretions. For his part, Jefferson found a mentor in the lone Deist on the faculty, professor of natural philosophy and mathematics William Small. The exception to the rule found an exception to the rule, who helped him to become even more exceptional.

As governor of Virginia during the Revolutionary War, Jefferson “tried to modernize and republicanize the College of William & Mary,” so that it might endow “the future guardians of the rights and liberties” of Virginia “with science and virtue.” Preoccupied by the war, the state legislature “balked at altering the charter and investing in the College.” The Board of Visitors proved more persuadable, eliminating the faculty positions in divinity and replacing them with “professorships in anatomy and medicine, modern languages, and law.” But with its funds from Britain cut off, the College nearly folded, and the Anglican Church, disestablished after the revolution, could offer no help. The rising evangelical sects (Presbyterians in particular) saw to it that the Church wouldn’t get re-established, refusing to support any state subsidies for churches generally, much less for Anglicans. With the passage of the Statute of Religious Freedom in 1786 and a return to Church establishment and church subsidies both foreclosed, higher education in Virginia was disrupted for a generation. Jefferson’s firm defense of church-state separation hobbled his plans for educational reform while also clearing the way for more radical reforms—or so it seemed.

The College of William & Mary desperately needed reform. Located in Williamsburg, the colonial capital, it suffered along with the rest of the city from the ravages of war, followed by economic decline when Virginians moved their capital to Richmond. The students dueled, caroused, and courted the daughters of the dozen remaining wealthy families. The quasi-aristocratic “honor culture” of the Southern gentry distinguished them from the detested Yankees—critics of slavery, mere tradesmen even if rich. “Mastering genteel manners carried more weight than learning from books,” as “parents worried that overly studious sons became sickly and asocial—too much like their professors,” a prospect nearly too horrible to contemplate. “Young gentlemen attended college to hone social skills and cultivate social networks.” This had become more important than ever, precisely because Virginia civil society had become a bit more democratic under the republican regime: mere birth was no longer assured prominence, but neither did mere learning. One student spoke for his generation in contending that “the greatest talents and learning can hardly succeed in this Republican Country”; in competing with others for fame, one needed a certain panache, the ability to stand out from the crowd.

By the early 1800s, as U. S. President Jefferson completed his final term in office, the college “reached a new low,” as students angry with the Bishop and the faculty for attempting “to suppress drunken parties and balls” vandalized the buildings and threatened the prelate, who called in the city militia for protection. Enrollment declined, then “stagnated at about fifty students,” in contrast to the enrollments of the principal Ivy League colleges, “each of which attracted at least 150 students.” Worse, the college suffered from a severe problem of what education professionals today call ‘student retention’: “From 1800 through 1805, the college granted degrees to only 3 students, during a period when more than 150 attended courses.” Bored, riotous Virginia students—along with their counterparts in colleges throughout the South—stayed in school long enough to make some useful social ‘contacts,’ and that was all. In his seminal Thoughts Concerning Education, John Locke had deplored schools for boys and young men, considering them places where a student will follow the examples of his peers not his teachers. Locke was right, at least when it came to the sons of the gentry classes. One student in South Carolina reported, “The student herds with the boys alone,” making “rapid advances in smoking, chewing, playing billiards, concocting sherry cobblers, gin slings, and mint juleps.” while developing an ethos of what another graduate called “a petulant arrogance, or supine, listless indifference”; “these premature men remain children for the rest of their lives,” “striplings” who “set up for legislators and statesmen.”

Seeing this, Jefferson sought to “rescue Virginia from the defiant generation spawned by honor culture, the unanticipated fruit of his revolution.” He had his own, similar, struggles in his own household. The husband of his oldest granddaughter “turned out a great sot, always frolicking and Carousing at the Taverns in the Neighbourhood” before returning home to beat his wife, as a family friend rather astringently observed. Jefferson himself knew that these beatings had caused the young woman to lose “eight of twelve pregnancies before or shortly after birth.” Grandfather Thomas, long a widower, himself was rumored to have a slave mistress. Although he “had hoped that the passage of time would favor [slave] emancipation as young liberals grew up to replace old conservatives among Virginia’s leaders,” and although “antislavery sentiment peaked during the revolution,” backsliding quickly commenced. At first, manumission increased from one percent of the slave population in 1782 to seven percent by 1800. Consequent fears of revolt among those still enslaved bridled the practice, as did an economic shift. Slaves harvested tobacco in Virginia, a crop that exhausts the soil; simultaneously, cotton farming “boomed in the Deep South, increasing the demand there for enslaved people bought from Virginia.” From 1790 to 1810, Marylanders and Virginians (who once owned more slaves than anyone in the United States) sold some 100,000 of their ‘property’ to South Carolina, Georgia, and other points in the rising Cotton Kingdom.

Against these practices, Jefferson successfully obtained a federal ban on slave importation, as stipulated in the United States Constitution. He also proposed plans for state purchase of slaves and their removal either to Africa or to Haiti. But the prohibition of the international slave trade only made the domestic slave trade more lucrative, and the colonization schemes never got off the ground. More, Jefferson shared with his fellow Virginians resistance to educating freedmen and slaves, understanding that “education could empower and liberate enslaved people to the detriment of their masters,” slaves being considered “too ignorant for freedom” but “too dangerous” to educate. Such policies, taken together, only reinforced the rule of plantation oligarchs and the way of life that made their sons ineducable and therefore un-republican. Virginians had understood what Montesquieu teaches: to survive, despotism must perpetuate ignorance in its subjects.

Jefferson did attempt to advance republicanism by educating whites. As governor, he proposed 126 bills that, taken together, would have “eradicated” any “ancient or future aristocracy,” laying “a foundation… for a government truly republican.” In education, this meant colleges that would educate future elected representatives of the people, young men from the plantation class “supplemented by a few charity students”; intermediary schools or academies would be animated by that republican spirit; next, local schools under the direction of the newly-republican upper class would teach the common man, in Jefferson’s words, “to read, to judge & to vote understandingly on what is passing”; finally, on the political side of things, his ‘ward republics’ would “bypass and weaken the county governments dominated by local oligarchies,” “train[ing] common men in participatory democracy to defend their interests.” Nearly twenty years later, “legislators passed a watered-down version of Jefferson’s system.” Many regions of Virginia simply lacked the population density needed to support local public schools and the slave system enabled the planters to defend their power, despite what one transplanted Vermonter called their “boasted liberty and Equality.” 

Jefferson’s inveterate secularism didn’t help his cause. Evangelical in zeal if not religion, he delighted in the educational theories of William Godwin, that champion of “the radical Enlightenment” who devoutly excluded religious instruction from his pedagogy. Transplanted to Virginia by young academy-level teachers, Godwin’s methods led, in the words of the future U. S. Army general Winfield Scott, to “too much… attempted within a limited time by republican short cuts to knowledge.” And by associating his brand of republicanism with secularism, rather in the manner of the French Enlighteners he admired, Jefferson alienated the very evangelical Christians who had opposed the gentry-Anglican education Jefferson himself intended to get rid of.

Also, Jefferson’s ‘top-down’ reforms, beginning with the colleges and percolating down through the academies and down to the grammar schools, ensured that few middle-class or poor students could get into the colleges. As one of his critics saw, the plantation gentry “will make colleges and endow them for the education of their own children,” children unprepared for serious learning both intellectually and morally. One faculty member at William & Mary found students who were not only “shameful Latinists” but “incapable of writing a sentence in English correctly.” 

Jefferson determined to begin anew—seeking, in his later years, to persuade the Virginia legislature to found a new university. The proposal advanced because “a dread of northern influence had become the key way to alarm Virginia’s legislators into funding a university”; as one stout Virginian put it, the further Virginia fell behind the Yankees in education, the more likely they would become “hewers of wood & drawers of water to pamper an insolent & ignorant northern aristocracy,” an aristocracy that moreover rested not on slaves but factory workers. The planters’ unease only deepened during the controversy over the extension of slavery into Missouri, ending in the 1820 Compromise. But not really ending: Jefferson himself expected that civil war would “burst on us as a tornado, sooner or later.” Not one to let a crisis go to waste, he redoubled his rhetoric in favor of a new university. Without one, he warned, Virginians will fall “into the ranks of our own negroes.” As Taylor writes, “By founding a University of Virginia, legislators sought to repatriate the money and minds of their students in the North.” 

They succeeded all too well, in Jefferson’s view. Exactly the same problems with Christian evangelicals and Southern gentry youth that hobbled pedagogy at William & Mary caused his project to stumble out of the gate. With respect to religion, “Jefferson expected Unitarianism ultimately to triumph, uniting at least all men in one true faith,” as men would quickly adopt even if, as Jefferson forecast, “female fanaticism might hold out a while longer.” Disbelieving the Pauline doctrine of original sin, Jefferson accepted Godwin’s counter-claims, writing that the “vicious and perverse” qualities of human nature could be turned “into qualities of virtue and social worth” if only we get educational and political institutions right. Indeed, with Godwin, he judged human nature to be perfectible “to a term which no one can fix and foresee.” He installed a professor of ethics instead of a professor of divinity, a library instead of a chapel. But in this he found a formidable critic in John Holt Rice, a serious Presbyterian minister in Richmond who detested Deism and Unitarianism, promoted Sunday schools, and advocated education for slaves. Rice wisely sought not to block the University’s formation but to turn it to Christian purposes. When Jefferson proposed English émigré Deist Thomas Cooper as the University’s first professor, Rice pounced, writing widely-read “scathing review” of Cooper’s published opinions on religion. On Jefferson’s advice, Cooper withdrew his name from consideration. Nonetheless, when it opened “the University held no prayers, offered no Sunday services, and lacked any courses on theology.” It central building the Rotunda, was “modeled on a pagan temple and reflect[ed] Enlightenment rationalism.” 

As for the students, “their way of life bred a great contradiction: young men without the self-discipline needed to defend the South” against “supposed northern cultural and political aggression.” Jefferson “feared student disorder as the greatest threat to the University,” citing the students “spirit of insubordination and self-will which seizes our youth so early in life as to defeat their education.” “Premature ideas of independence,” he continued, “too little repressed by parents, beget a spirit of insubordination, which is the great obstacle to science with us, and a principal cause of its decay since the revolution.” This decidedly anti-republican aspect of the Virginia regime proved too strong to be overborne by Jefferson’s innovative architectural design—what he called an “architectural village” with students and professors living in parallel rows in a scholarly and idealized version of his envisioned ward republics. Far from promoting “peace & quiet” on campus, as he had hoped, with professors doubling as kindly police officers in the neighborhood, student-teacher propinquity threatened the teachers. “The students were young southern gentlemen of the sort that made trouble at every college.” Ill-prepared academically—recall that Jefferson founded the University first, with grammar schools and academies to follow—and bred to rebelliousness morally, students beat up one hapless prof with sticks, bottles, and a brick. Not only did this thin out the ranks of the professors, it also drove out the more respectable students, the father of whom lamented, “the young men have acted in a manner unworthy of savages” in the putative citadel of Virginia civilization. Christian critics piled on, too, “interpret[ing] the troubles as the inevitable fruits of a godless and anarchic university,” indeed “a School in infidelity, a nursery of bad principles, designed in its origin to crush the Institutions of Religion in Virginia,” as one Presbyterian sternly, and not altogether inaccurately, put it.

Jefferson and the Board of Visitors intervened, the latter enacting a stricter set of rules, Jefferson launching a concurrent ‘charm offensive,’ with invitations to dine at nearby Monticello with the great man himself. But this was late in 1825, and Jefferson would die on Independence Day of the following year. University faculty and trustees greeted the news with decidedly mixed feelings, as they had by then given up on the weak administration “mandated by Jefferson,” ever suspicious of executive power, “who had dispensed with the position of president that prevailed at every other university.” The troubles continued, thanks to the ethos of Southern planters: “As with the old William & Mary, the new University attracted a volatile set of students,” with only 127 of the 3,247 attendees graduating in the years 1825 and 1842. Taylor holds up the ill-fated genius Edgar Allan Poe, who numbered among those students, as an extreme but illustrative example of that generation: “He admired Jefferson’s learning but despised as naïve his faith in democracy and Unitarianism,” eventually dying in an alcohol delirium at a Baltimore hospital. Things did improve somewhat after Jefferson died, as the Visitors enacted what amounted to sumptuary laws and tried to Christianized the school to some degree. They even hired William Holmes McGuffey, publisher of the McGuffey Readers, as professor of moral philosophy. 

But these reforms caused a student backlash. Some of the rowdies left, but the ones who remained sparked riots in the 1830s “far larger and more violent than the fabled outbursts of 1825.” In 1840, law professor John A. G. Davis was gunned down by a rioting student, who fled to the more congenial atmosphere of Texas. This seems to have sobered the students somewhat; they were persuaded to adopt an honor code, a device that engages the pride of spirited young men while putting it in the service of morality, for a change. More important, Southern gentry youth themselves were changing, as evangelical Christianity made inroads among the planters. “Christian temperance and self-discipline emerged among the students,” some thirty years after the founder’s death. Enrollments increased, “reach[ing] the numbers predicted by Jefferson,” but only “by embracing the religiosity that he had distrusted.” Even an Episcopalian minister exulted that Jefferson’s “plans are all defeated.” “The religion of Jesus triumphs over all his opposition” and “all his greatness has perished and is forgotten because he was an infidel.” Jeffersonian states’-rights sentiments endured and hardened, however. With slavery increasingly defended on Biblical grounds while Jefferson’s natural-rights doctrine gave way to ‘race science,’ the civil war Jefferson predicted broke out at last, now with a gentry class that did indeed have the discipline to fight the detested Yankees, and nearly to beat them.

Thomas Jefferson’s serious if flawed attempt to change the regime of Virginia, to conform its way of life to republican forms of government, exemplifies the difficulties attendant to any revolution, a lesson as old as Plato’s Republic, or, indeed, the Bible. Israelites were not the only stiff-necked people in the world. Most people are, and if the spirited love of ruling, along with the equally spirited resistance to being ruled, cannot be moderated by redirecting the human sense of honor toward good ends, the founding will fail.