The transatlantic novel in the nineteenth century

doi:10.1017/CCO9780511793370.013

11 - The transatlantic novel in the nineteenth century

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2012

Clare Pettitt

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Deirdre David

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Deirdre David: Affiliation:
Temple University, Philadelphia

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Summary

News of Charles Dickens’s sudden death on June 9, 1870, reached Bret Harte several weeks after the event while the American writer was staying in San Rafael, California. He immediately sent a dispatch across the bay to San Francisco to hold back for twenty-four hours the forthcoming publication of his Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine. “[I]n two or three hours” he composed “Dickens in Camp,” an elegy to the dead author which recalls or imagines (probably a bit of both) a group of tough gold miners at the California diggings in the mid nineteenth century, spellbound by a reading of Dickens’s novel The Old Curiosity Shop:

Till one arose, and from his pack’s scant treasure
A hoarded volume drew,
And cards were dropped from hands of listless leisure
To hear the tale anew;
[…]
The fir-trees, gathering closer in the shadows,
Listened in every spray,
While the whole camp, with “Nell” on English meadows,
Wandered and lost their way.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel , pp. 231 - 250

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9780511793370.013 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2012

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11 - The transatlantic novel in the nineteenth century

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