For Vanity Fair, on Dickens and his attempt at redemption after a career of insulting Americans. Money quote:
[F]rom a deep boiling layer of anxiety and rage that goes well beyond anything Dostoyevsky might or might not have been told about, we have the Dickens who wrote to his best female friend, Angela Burdett-Coutts, in 1857, telling her of his yearnings to “exterminate” the Indian rebels against British rule. We have the Dickens who joined his friends Thomas Carlyle and Ruskin against Darwin, T. H. Huxley, J. S. Mill, and the other Victorian humanitarians, to support Governor Eyre of Jamaica in his war of torture and execution and reprisal against the rebels of that country.
We have—this is in some ways the most depressing of all—Dickens’s surreptitious hatred for Americans, even as he was making his way from one scene of their immense hospitality to the next in the 1840s. Admittedly, he had a qualified beef with those Yankee publishers who wouldn’t part with royalties, but this hardly licences what he wrote in private to his friend the actor William Macready about America’s being “a low, coarse and mean nation” that was “driven by a herd of rascals Pah! I never knew what it was to feel disgust and contempt, ’till I travelled in America.” The Dickens mean streak is quite something when you strike it.
The use of that word "strike" is pure Hitch.
The Dish 