“The republic he had admired was a sham: its politics violent, its people tasteless, his readers cheap.”
I can’t have been the only one expecting this. Almost every time I read about a famous non-American person coming to visit, there is a point at which they go “oh hey, this place sucks!” Dickens was made into a villain by the people who once loved him, simply because he wanted the money he was owed by the publication companies. Instead, they make him out to be some money hungry jerk. The people involved instantly sided with their “fellow Americans”, aka the publishers, simply because Dickens was an outsider. All of the letters proclaiming him an honorary American, a democratic writer, etc meant nothing.
Yet now we love him again. What happened? When did we realize we had screwed up? I assume it was after his death, when it was too late to make amends. Charles Dickens, while not my favorite author, was an important one.
I was also expecting this since it happens all the time. We always see a person who probably wasn’t admired or loved in his or her lifetime, be loved by those who didn’t like them after their death. It is sort of like when a person becomes much more famous when he or she is dead. We most of the time tend to believe that when someone dies his or hers wrongdoings are forgiving. Even though Dickens did not do anything bad, he was still hated by many Americans when he decided to come to America and ask for money that belonged to him. I feel that he was wrongly judged and things should have been different.