SOURCE: Vegh, Beatriz. “A Former President of Argentina Attends a Reading by Dickens in New York, in 1868.” Dickens Quarterly 16, no. 4 (December 1999): 243-55.

In the following excerpt, Vegh examines Sarmiento's response to a reading by Dickens in the United States.

The first edition of Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870) by the explorer and scholar Richard F. Burton, a perceptive observer among British and European travelers in South America, bears the following inscription: “To His Excellency Don Domingo Faustino Sarmiento … by one who admires his honesty of purpose and the homage which he pays to progress.” Sarmiento (1811-1888) was then President of Argentina, and Burton's inscription celebrates what most of Sarmiento's contemporaries acknowledged and what his biographers would later record: a welcome and genuine pulse of civilization permeating his thought, his writings and his political achievements. The title of a recent book devoted to him, Sarmiento, Author of a...