Imagine that you are visiting New York City in 1860s and you walk through Central Park. Suddenly, you hear and see some strange-looking animals. Write a personal narrative telling what happens.
Answers
On his first visit to America in 1842, Charles Dickens found plenty to ridicule—Americans’ obsession with money, their manners, their tobacco chewing. But the biggest target of Dickens’ humor was New Yorkers. Specifically, their pigs.
Stepping onto Broadway, New York’s biggest commercial thoroughfare, Dickens encountered “two portly sows” and “a select party of half-a-dozen gentlemen hogs” among the brightly dressed ladies and a bustle of coaches. Even more than this strange sight of pigs roaming the city’s streets, Dickens was captivated by the free and easy swine lifestyle—a “roving, gentlemanly, vagabond kind of life.” Scavenging curbside trash in droves, New York’s wandering pigs were on “equal, if not superior footing” with humans—a model of self-sufficiency.