Dickens in Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh is like Birmingham in England….Setting aside the streets, the shops, the houses, wagons, factories, public buildings, and population, perhaps it may be. It certainly has a great quantity of smoke hanging about it, and is famous for its ironworks.

Dickens visited Pittsburgh on the Pennsylvania Canal in 1842…. Apparently he wasn’t impressed.

(From American notes: a journey, as quoted in Charles McCollester’s The Point of Pittsburgh)