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We started in our usual way, with a search on "dickens and twain," and came across a page titled Dickens in America, part of David Perdue's Charles Dickens Page. There we learned that the popular British novelist made two trips to the United States, first on a six-month lecture tour in 1842, and again in 1867, after the Civil War. On this second trip, Dickens spent five months on the East Coast, and gave 76 performances of his work. Mark Twain attended a Dickens reading at New York's Steinway Hall in January 1868, and wrote
about it on February 5, 1868, as a correspondent for the Alta California, a San Francisco newspaper. In his article, Twain commended Dickens on his style and his stride, complained briefly about his enunciation, and then marveled, "Somehow this puissant god seemed to be only a man, after all. How the great do tumble from their high pedestals when we see them in common human flesh, and know that they eat pork and cabbage and act like other men." It seems fitting, somehow, that Twain (once described by Joyce Carol Oates as the American counterpart to Dickens) and the great British author should have met, but this seems to be the sole encounter between the two.
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