Great Expectations<\/em> (1861). \u00a0He is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of Victorian England.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Dickens spent several hours on board the Amazon, quietly observing the Saints on the ship and interviewing George Q. Cannon, a member of the Twelve who was serving at the time as the president of the British Mission. \u00a0(Elder Cannon would go on to serve as a counselor in the First Presidency to Brigham Young, John Taylor, Wilford Woodruff, and Lorenzo Snow.)<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
A month or so after his visit to the Amazon<\/em>, Dickens published an account of it in an essay for the periodical All the Year Round<\/em> (4 July 1863), titled \u201cThe Uncommercial Traveller.\u201d\u00a0 In his essay, he remarked that virtually all of the emigrating Latter-day Saints were tradesmen and craftsmen and their families, people of the working class. \u00a0He was worried\u00a0about what these British converts to Mormonism might encounter when they actually arrived in Utah. \u00a0(He was surely familiar with the horror stories going around England at the time \u2013 which would continue for the next several generations \u2014 about the theocratic \u201cMormon kingdom\u201d in the remote North American west.) \u00a0But he was deeply impressed by what he had actually seen. \u00a0The emigration was thoroughly well-organized, calm, orderly.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI went on board their ship,\u201d he wrote, \u201cto bear testimony against them if they deserved it, as I fully believed they would; to my great astonishment they did not deserve it; and my predispositions and tendencies must not affect me as an honest witness. I went over the\u00a0Amazon<\/em>\u2019s\u00a0side feeling it impossible to deny that, so far, some remarkable influence had produced a remarkable result, which better known influences have often missed.\u201d Of the Saints\u00a0themselves, Dickens confessed\u00a0that, had he not known they were Mormons, he would have described them as, \u201cin their degree, the pick and flower of England.\u201d<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 In June 1863, the passenger ship\u00a0Amazon\u00a0set sail from London for America with nearly 900 Latter-day Saint emigrants aboard. \u00a0However, just before she weighed anchor, many Londoners\u2014including both government officials and clergymen\u2014came to take\u00a0a look at the Mormons, up close and at first hand, as well as at\u00a0their traveling arrangements. \u00a0One of these visitors\u00a0Charles […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a>