3. Dickens found New England much to his liking
Dickens (who was traveling with his wife and her maid as companions), was pleased by what he saw in New England, including the rural towns he passed while traveling to Hartford. His stop there featured a visit to an insane asylum, about which he commented favorably over the humanity shown to its patients. He also observed the city jail, and remarked it was, “the best jail for untried offenders in the world”. He made similar observations regarding the state prison in the city. Nearly all he encountered in New England he compared favorably to similar institutions in Great Britain. He also made his first observations of American manners and national quirks.
When questioning a guard at the State prison in Harford, his query was at first answered with “Well, I don’t know”. Dickens wryly added in an aside, “Which, by the bye, is a national answer”. From Hartford, he stopped briefly at New Haven, where he inspected Yale College’s elm-shaded campus. In New Haven, he boarded a steamer named New York, bound for the city of that name. The city left a less favorable impression. “The beautiful metropolis of America is by no means so clean a city as Boston”, he wrote, describing areas of the city as equal to the notorious slums of London, “in respect of filth and wretchedness”. In his travels in New England, he mentioned not a single slum.