Major funding for Backstories provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

From Virginia Humanities, this is Backstory.

Welcome to Backstory, the show that explains the history behind the headlines. I'm Joanne Freeman.

If you're new to the podcast each week, along with my colleagues Brian Ballot, Nathan Connelly and Ed Ayers, we explore a different part of American history.

You know that feeling you get when your favorite Netflix show is about to come out? The excitement? The great expectation? Well, that's exactly how American readers felt in the fall of the 1842.

Now, of course, this excitement was not for a Netflix series. It was for a book, a travel narrative to be exact, written by the most famous writer in the English-speaking world. Charles Dickens.

It's safe to say American notes was one of the most eagerly anticipated books of the entire 19th century. Unfortunately for the Americans, they were sorely and angrily disappointed.

They felt betrayed. They felt that Dickens had violated the principles of hospitality by accepting these dinners and these suarez and then turning on America in a vicious way.

Jonathan Wells teaches history at the University of Michigan. Nancy Metz is professor of English at Virginia Tech.

And on today's episode, they're going to help me tell the story of Charles Dickens to Multruis, but ultimately triumphant relationship with America and American readers.

This month marks the 150th anniversary of Charles Dickens death. Both Nancy and John say it's hard to overestimate just how popular he was in the 19th century.

Charles Dickens was arguably the most important and the most popular novelist in Western civilization in the 19th century.

There are competing authors, of course, Harriet Beatrice Stowe sold a astronomical number of Uncle Tom's cabin and there were other novelist James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, was extremely popular.

But I think Dickens could quite rightly lay claim to the most popular novelist.

He had fame. He had a very wide readership, but he was a little anxious about his background certainly.

It's well known that he didn't come from a wealthy family and that he spent those years as a child pasting labels onto bottles of blacking.

And so he had this sort of this kind of pass that made him worry a little bit have a little bit of anxiety about his own class status and his method of publication serialization put him kind of in the company of some not so respectable writers.

And so the long period is really interesting for historians of the 19th century like me because this is a period in which we see the industrial revolution taking root in the northern United States in particular, but also in places like Liverpool and Manchester and Birmingham and it led to widespread poverty.

And I think that the economic inequality and unhealthy unsanitary and often filthy living conditions for Dickens, this was an aspect of modern life in the 1830s and 1840s that really warranted exploration.

And he's one of the first people to really to do that.

So I think for northern readers in the United States, there was some appreciation for his level of detail, his realistically drawn characters.

The fact that, you know, they could identify perhaps with the changes that Dickens was exploring in the British economy.

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