Dickens's America
is all Yankee repression and southern stupor. He saw Boston, New York,
and Philadelphia through the keyhole of the prison cell and the madhouse.
The Tombs, in New York, served as a metaphor for the dark, unforgiving
world in which it was situated. And the geographical heart of the
country, though not a jail or an asylum, or a reeking warren like
the Five Points, was a river of death. Decades before Joseph Conrad
steamed his way upstream into the heart of imperial darkness, Dickens,
travelling from Cincinnati downstream to Cairo, Illinois...experienced
the Mississippi as a septic ooze, a turbid soup of animal and vegetable
muck. Cairo lay in the stinking belly of the beast: 'The hateful Mississippi
circling and eddying before it, and turning off upon its southern
course a slimy monster hideous to behold; a hotbed of disease, an
ugly sepulchre, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise: a place
without one single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it:
such is this dismal Cairo.