Fiction, Essays, and Other Things

  America, the colony their countrymen lost, was a land of wonder for many English writers and, for those who could make it over the Atlantic, a visit was a rite of passage throughout the 19 th century into the early 1900s. At best, most left with conflicting views of the republic and their own takes have since been scrutinized as reflections of their own biases or a limited understanding of a nation forming. Perhaps the most shocking came from Charles Dickens after his 1842 trip which brought him from New York down the Eastern seaboard and then as far as Illinois. His trip from January to June produced American Notes for General Circulation (a likely jab at the US dollar), a travelogue detailing his journey ad his thoughts, and a strange passage in the middle of his Martin Chuzzlewit set in America. Dickens had long idealized the new world as stripped of the classism and control from royalty. He ended the last issue of his literary journal Master Humphrey’s Clock talking e...

  Before any evaluation of Puck of Pook’s Hill formulates it must be stated how uncharacteristic of Rudyard Kipling’s work it feels. True, as in a lot of Kipling’s work, the fantastical is a normal part of the natural world but it’s episodic compartmentalization of tales and random walk-ins by historic English personages makes for an odd literary hybrid; in part the whimsical “history of England” versions of which were composed before Kipling by Jane Austen and then Charles Dickens and part the dream-like fantasies of Lewis Carroll where the line between the real-world and wonderlands clearly exists but is so thin cross-overs are common. There is almost nothing in it that is distinctly Kipling. That Puck of Pook’s Hill feels more Carroll than Kipling would not necessarily be a cause for alarm had the book not been reminiscent of Carroll’s worst work, the dreadful two-parter Sylvie & Bruno , which Carroll inexplicably considered his best work. In both works a little boy and ...