In April 1842 Charles Dickens arrived in Lowell Massachusetts to view the wonder of the industrial world, a town built upon the enlightened treatment of workers.  160 years later U Mass at Lowell sponsored the above conference / festival.  This page is dedicated to that experience.

January 1842 found Charles Dickens coming to America for the first of his two visits.  (He, in fact, probably resembled the youthful portrait on the above left rather than the more familiar one on the right.  Remember he was a young man of 29. 

Dickens came to the US in what was then the cutting edge of technology--a steam powered ship.  The thing was that these vessels were built for speed especially the mail and were thus not intended for comfort, as Dickens found out:

From American Notes:

Chapter 1

I shall never forget the one-fourth serious and three-fourths comical astonishment, with which, on the morning of the third of January eighteen-hundred-and-forty-two, I opened the door of, and put my head into, a ‘state-room’ on board the Britannia steam-packet, twelve hundred tons burthen per register, bound for Halifax and Boston, and carrying Her Majesty’s mails (American Notes Bibliomania).

He, his wife, and their maid were wretched throughout the voyage so that as soon as he could he altered his reservations for the return trip on a more traditional sailing vessel.

Chapter 4

Before leaving Boston, I devoted one day to an excursion to Lowell. I assign a separate chapter to this visit; not because I am about to describe it at any great length, but because I remember it as a thing by itself, and am desirous that my readers should do the same (American Notes Bibliomania).

From Hard Times:

The Key Note

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage.

It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled.

It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam- engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.