Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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I remember when in 1976 a BBC crew came to Egypt with Lawrence Durrell and retraced his life in Alexandria during World War II. I was at that time chairman of the State Information Service, and not only did I give the crew facilities to shoot the film, but I accompanied them for part of their time in the city. Prior to the BBC crew's visit to Cairo, they had gone to Greece which Durrell had left for Egypt and to which he would later return.

Following that programme, the BBC embarked on another similar project. It sent a crew to Europe to follow in the footsteps of Mark Twain and produced a programme called "Mediterranean Tales". Twain's travels wee published under the title of Innocents Abroad, and they covered a number of cities, including Cairo.

But the BBC's latest such venture was a retracing of Charles Dickens's visit to the United States in 1842. At that time Dickens was a young man of 29, and the result of that visit was a book almost unknown, with the title American Notes. The book is an account of his journey from Massachusetts to Virginia, from Washington, DC, to St Louis, and from Niagara to Montreal. Dickens was driven to undertake that journey by the passionate idealism of youth and his hunger for something other than the stuffy class-ridden society of London.

The BBC sent a crew in 2004, accompanied by a Bafta-winning actress who played Professor Sprout in Harry Potter's movies, to retrace the steps Dickens took 165 years ago. The crew travelled exactly as Dickens had done, by river, road and rail, visiting the same places and, according to Robert Dawson Scott in the Independent Review, "and occasionally even sleeping, if not in the same bed, certainly in the same inn." The result of the 4-month journey was a series called "Dickens in America".

Miriam Margolyes, the actress who joined the BBC crew, is known as a serious "Dickensophile", who had a one-woman show called "Dickens' Women". Commenting on the book "American Notes", she says "I think people forget what a wonderful journalist he was, because he started as a journalist and he never lost that gift of placing a person right in the scene."

Now we come to what Dickens really felt about the USA. He went looking for the Great Republic and had high hopes for that young country "that had rung the liberty bell, that had declared its independence and backed it with a new constitution." But he was disappointed -- as is plainly evident in his American Notes. In it he remarked "If the Americans don't embroil us in a war before long it will not be their fault. What with their swagger and bombast, their claim to indemnification, I have strong apprehensions."

And Dickens does not mince his words about his feeling about America. He further adds that "I am disappointed. This is not the republic I came to see. This is not the republic of my imagination. I infinitely prefer a liberal monarchy even with its sickening accompaniments of court circulars to such a government as this -- and even England, bad and faulty as the old land is, and miserable as millions of her people are, rises in the comparison." I would not condemn you to a year's residence on this side of the Atlantic for any money."

Robert Dawson Scott muses about whether Dickens "more than 150 years ago, could discern the shoots of what America would grow into." Is there anything about American Notes, besides the odd quotation wrenched out of context, that still resonates? Well, that is a question for each reader to answer.