Dickens felt transported by the sublimity of Niagara Falls when he visited it on his 1842 journey to the United States and Canada. In a letter to Forster (26 April 1842), he said of Horseshoe Falls (the Canadian side of Niagara) that "It would be hard for a man to stand nearer God than he does there" (Letters 3: 210). Dickens proceeds to effuse over the beauty and majesty of the falls in a passage that forms the chief part of his description of his experience in American Notes, although the letter actually offers the superior account: In this essay, I analyze Dickens's reaction to Niagara Falls in the context of other British travel narratives from the previous decade, and examine how Niagara speaks to Dickens of life after death (as he describes it above, the falls die and then rise again in ghostly mist). His profound experience at Niagara Falls shaped his treatment of climactic, transcendent moments in subsequent novels; in particular, from this point on Dickens repeatedly uses water imagery (especially seas, swamps and rivers) as symbols of death, rebirth, transformation and of being disturbed with "the joy of elevated thoughts," to use Wordsworth's phrase in "Tintern Abbey." But Dickens's reaction was more than just a typical Romantic experience, similar to those of other nineteenth-century British travelers; it was in part shaped by his overall disappointment in America and his relief to be on English ground again.
