Charles Dickens, the American South, and the Transatlantic Debate over Slavery.

The complex relationship between Dickens and his readers in the American South was shaped by the novelist's views of slavery and capitalism. Neglected both by Dickens scholars as well as historians of the South, Dickens' views on slavery offer important insights into the transatlantic debate over bondage and free labour. In addition, the way in which Dickens was read by both black and white Americans and his popularity among southerners in particular virtually guaranteed he would figure prominently in domestic policy debates. While African-Americans employed Dickens to attack slavery, and criticized him when he failed to meet their antislavery expectations, white southerners rejected Dickens's criticism of slavery but embraced his depiction of the ill effects of industrial capitalism. In examining politics, literature and intellectual life between the 1830s and the 1860s, this essay joins two broad historiographies that rarely intersect: the economic and political history of slavery and the intellectual and literary culture in the Early Republic. In examining the interactions, both real and imagined, between Dickens and his southern readership, we join current historiographical debates over political economy with transatlantic literary history in ways that shed light on Dickens, the South and the debates on political economy that strained sectional harmony and led to the Civil War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]