Charles Dickens's American audience

Although Charles Dickens was one of the most popular British authors of the nineteenth century, on both sides of the Atlantic, the American readers of Dickens's novels have never been carefully examined. An investigation into the reception of his texts by American readers (that is, those who were not professional literary critics but who were reading Dickens's writings solely for personal pleasure or use) can give us valuable insights into the broader culture. Because Charles Dickens was so pivotal and popular an author, it is important to understand this fascination of nineteenth-century readers for the British author within the tensions of American nationalism.; This is a study of how Charles Dickens's American readers, 1837-1912, in their great diversity, may have coalesced into a community of readers around the sentiments, characters, images, and themes of this one significant author. The excellent recent work on common readers provides useful methodological models. We may ask, how far can we recover middle class and working class readers' responses and did these differ from each other? It is also useful to compare responses of males and females, blacks and whites, immigrants, and people of different classes and occupations. In addition, possible regional variations in the reading of Dickens are explored: reading in the American city, in rural areas of the Northeast, the South, and the West. This study concludes with the Dickens centenary because literary modernism complicated the question of reception.; This study explores how Dickens's sentiment, his "coincidences," his caricatures, his social panoramas, his humor and his melodrama interacted with the lives of his readers. Observing that the decoding of cultural texts is influenced by fields of discourse, this study suggests that elements of popular culture, from theater to other public amusements, predisposed reader reception to Dickens's fiction. The novel acted as both a vital "amusement of the people" and as a space for his readers to meet, as an extended family, or "imagined community." Dickens's novels may have thus acted as a home-like point of stability in a rapidly changing society. Thus, Dickens, a British author, effectively contributed to the emergence of the American nation.