American Notes was the result of the author's five-month trip to America in 1842. Dickens's travelogue includes the glitter of Boston; a Broadway swarming with hogs; a gruesome penitentiary in Philadelphia; Cincinnati, Louisville, and St. Louis; railways and steamboats. Its publication was greeted with dismay: what Dickens described as "honest and true" was regarded in America as "a compound of egotism, coxcombry and cockneyism", the product of "the most coarse, vulgar, impudent and superficial" writer ever to visit the country. Pictures from Italy is a colorful account of a tour made in 1844. - Jacket flap.