About this season
Join actress and Dickens enthusiast Miriam Margolyes on a 10-part journey that follows the route of Charles Dickens tour of the United States and Canada in 1842. It was this trip upon which he based his travel book, American Notes - a comic, critical record of the country's morals, flaws and fashions.
Episodes (10)
1. The Passage Out
Aired 5 April 2005 • 30 min
Miriam Margolyes retraces the route of Charles Dickens' 19th century road-trip though America to find out what has changed in the USA since the great author's visit to the States - and what hasn't.
2. Boston
Aired 12 April 2005 • 30 min
After her transatlantic voyage she visits Boston's extraordinary School for the Blind - Helen Keller's alma mata.
3. New England
Aired 19 April 2005 • 30 min
The Yale University Glee Club serenades Miriam Margolyes as she continues retracing Charles Dickens 's 19th-century road trip through America.
4. New York
Aired 26 April 2005 • 30 min
Miriam Margolyes continues retracing Charles Dickens's trip through America and finds herself going out on a night patrol with officers of the NYPD. She also visits Roosevelt Island, makes an unexpected discovery at the New York Public Library and is incarcerated in the notorious "Tombs" prison.
5. Philadelphia
Aired 3 May 2005 • 30 min
In Philadelphia Miriam Margolyes finds a city obsessed with Charles Dickens. It still has the "solitary prison" he wrote about, a Dickens Society, a Dickens Drinking Club, his pet raven stuffed and mounted in the local library - and the only life-size statue of Dickens in the world.
6. Washington and Richmond
Aired 10 May 2005 • 30 min
Miriam Margolyes meets a pistol-toting Christian minister and prison inmates in Washington DC, "the headquarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva", according to Charles Dickens. There's also a tour of Virginia's tobacco factories.
7. Pittsburgh to Louisville
Aired 17 May 2005 • 30 min
Miriam Margolyes follows Dickens's trail inland 1,000 miles along the course of the Ohio River to Louisville, Kentucky, in the company of cowboys. Along the way she is taught how to improve her manners by an American etiquette instructor and attends the Kentucky derby.
8. The Midwest and St. Louis
Aired 24 May 2005 • 30 min
Having sailed down the Ohio River on a Mississippi steamboat, Miriam Margolyes arrives in St Louis. She attempts to teach at a high school, visits the inspiration for Martin Chuzzlewit and meets the United Houma Indian Nation on a sacred burial ground.
9. Canada
Aired 31 May 2005 • 30 min
Miriam Margolyes crosses the American/Canadian border to meet obsessive Victorian collectors and learns what it took to be a 19th-century lady's maid. Plus a visit to Niagara Falls.
10. The Journey Home
Aired 7 June 2005 • 30 min
Before regaling New York's Lincoln Center with anecdotes of her pan-American trip, Miriam Margolyes visits the Shaker community of Mount Lebanon and the army cadets of West Point Military Academy.