Transcript
Michael Hoffman
Prof. Jaros
America From the Outside
12 November 2014
Lowell Excursion Response
This one day excursion to Lowell is significant to Dickens and he desires it to be significant to his readers too. The reason for this significance is quite unclear, however in this section, Dickens still is focused on the finer details and descriptions of what he observes around him. He talks about how a black man can never travel with a white man and describes the black car as “a great blundering clumsy chest, such as Gulliver put to sea in, from the kingdom of Brobdingnag”. Dickens takes great interest in the art of description and imagery. Dickens uses another imaginative description for the train engine, describing it as a “mad dragon”. Readers back in England should be satisfied with the level of descriptive detail that Dickens puts into his work.
Moving forward into Lowell, Dickens frequently points out how young looking and immature looking everything is. “Those indications of its youth which first attract the eye, give it a quaintness and oddity of character which, to a visitor from the old country, is amusing enough.” Upon arriving, Dickens’ is caught up with how new and even unstable everything is in comparison to such an old country like England. “In another, there was a large hotel, whose walls and colonnades were so crisp, and thin, and slight, that it had exactly the appearance of being built with cards”. “One would swear that every bakery, grocery, and bookbindery, and other kind of store, took its shutters down for the first time, and started business yesterday.” It can extremely difficult in this passage to derive Dickens’ personal feelings about what he sees around him when he is so set on giving descriptions.
An interesting part of this excursion comes from when Dickens mentions that people in England might be startled by how females are allowed to write about their work, play piano, and subscribe to a library. “The large class of readers, startled by these facts, will exclaim with one voice ‘how very preposterous!’ on my deferentially inquiring why, they will answer, ‘ these things are above their station’ in reply to that objection, I would beg to ask what their station is.” Dickens then goes on to state “I think that if we examine our own feelings, we shall find that the pianos, and the circulating libraries, and even the Lowell offering startle us by their novelty, and not by their bearing upon any abstract question of right or wrong”. He is taking a more progressive perspective of the issue, and from this perhaps he sees the Americans and the new world as more progressive than England. It is critical to take into account that Dickens claims to draw no absolute comparison between the Lowell industrial complex and English industrial complexes because there are circumstances that come with time that may not have arisen in Lowell.
