Charles Dickens' Stormy Crossing: The Rhetorical Voyage from Letters to American Notes‪.‬

Abstract For his book American Notes, which recounts his travels in the United States in 1842, Charles Dickens used as source material his familiar letters home to such friends as John Forster. If one compares passages from American Notes with their source in the letters, and examines passages in the letters that do not appear in American Notes, it can be argued that in preparing American Notes Dickens' movement away from the facilitative elements of the letter genre is a principal reason for the book's less successful aspects.