May – Sam’s notebook carries an entry to “see Dickens for a note on Cairo [Illinois]” [Gribben 187]. In LM Sam focused on the improvements in Cairo, no longer the place Dickens had described, a:

“…hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulcher, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise.”

The May issue of The Nineteenth Century carried an unflattering evaluation by Matthew Arnold in “A Word about America.” Arnold called Sam’s humor “Quinionian” and America “still, from an intellectual point of view, a very rude and primitive soil…” [Tenney 11].