DICKENS IN AMERICA

I've started watching a fascinating 2005 BBC series called DICKENS IN AMERICA. (Moira borrowed it from the library so we'll have to see all twelve half-hour episodes in a week.  Myself, I've already seen four!) It's about British actress Miriam Margolyes, who's played Dickensian characters in stuff like the 1988 adaptation of LITTLE DORRIT, retracing the route Dickens took in his famous 1842 tour of the United States.

That tour, of course, was the subject of Dickens' book AMERICAN NOTES. (His criticisms of some things in the US caused resentment among Americans, but he reserved his real vitriol for his satirical novel MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT.) Not quite thirty, his early books had already made Boz famous as far away as the US:  when the new steamships arrived in America carrying the magazine serializing THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP, people onshore called out "Is Little Nell dead yet?" MM compares him to the Beatles arriving in the US in 1964.  His attitude toward the US is remarkably ambivalent:  he admired the idea of a republic free of Britain's class consciousness and open to new ways, but he didn't always admire the actual results.  British people today still feel some of that ambivalence.

In this series, MM goes through the same places as Dickens one at a time.  Dickens crossed the Atlantic on the Cunard steamer BRITANNIA, while MM takes the humongous QUEEN MARY 2 in the first episode. (The latter ship's captain pointed out that the earlier ship could have fit inside his craft's biggest dining hall.) In the next episodes she travels through Boston, New England and New York City.  Later on, she's going to follow him through Canada!

Some American should make a PBS documentary series following Mark Twain's route on the 1860s tour of the Old World that led to his book THE INNOCENTS ABROAD.