Celebrated actress and Charles Dickens expert Miriam Margolyes boards the RMS Queen Mary 2 as she prepares to follow Dickens' path as he journeyed to the United States of America in 1842.
Miriam Margolyes continues retracing Charles Dickens's trip through America and finds herself going out on a night patrol with officers of the NYPD. She also visits Roosevelt Island, makes an unexpected discovery at the New York Public Library and is incarcerated in the notorious "Tombs" prison.
In Philadelphia Miriam Margolyes finds a city obsessed with Charles Dickens. It still has the "solitary prison" he wrote about, a Dickens Society, a Dickens Drinking Club, his pet raven stuffed and mounted in the local library - and the only life-size statue of Dickens in the world.
Miriam Margolyes meets a pistol-toting Christian minister and prison inmates in Washington DC, "the headquarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva", according to Charles Dickens. There's also a tour of Virginia's tobacco factories.
Miriam Margolyes follows Dickens's trail inland 1,000 miles along the course of the Ohio River to Louisville, Kentucky, in the company of cowboys. Along the way she is taught how to improve her manners by an American etiquette instructor and attends the Kentucky derby.
Having sailed down the Ohio River on a Mississippi steamboat, Miriam Margolyes arrives in St Louis. She attempts to teach at a high school, visits the inspiration for Martin Chuzzlewit and meets the United Houma Indian Nation on a sacred burial ground.
Miriam Margolyes crosses the American/Canadian border to meet obsessive Victorian collectors and learns what it took to be a 19th-century lady's maid. Plus a visit to Niagara Falls.
Before regaling New York's Lincoln Center with anecdotes of her pan-American trip, Miriam Margolyes visits the Shaker community of Mount Lebanon and the army cadets of West Point Military Academy.
