This week Miriam Margolyes arrives in Boston Mass., which proved to be much to Dickens' liking, and she visits all the places he saw, including, most movingly, Boston's extraordinary Blind School - Helen Keller's alma mater.

A fascinating insight into Charles Dickens' love/hate relationship with North America and a personal and revealing portrait of modern day USA. In 1842, a 30 year-old Charles Dickens travelled to America to write a book about the new democracy, American Notes. One of the few travel books Dickens ever wrote, American Notes is a lasting record of his adventures, recording his 6 month journey through the newly-united States of America. In this documentary series that intersperses history, travelogue and interviews, BAFTA award-winning English actress Miriam Margolyes (the Harry Potter films, Romeo Juliet) follows in Dickens' American 1842 footsteps in an encounter with 21st century USA and some of its residents. With an eye for the comic, the critical and satirical, Dickens mercilessly records the new country's manners and morals, flaws and fashions. Writing about all of American life and society, money and manners, press, police, justice and prisons, the national character, corruption, greed, politics and religion, Dickens inspires Miriam Margolyes to follow him to find out just how much (and how little) has changed in America in the intervening years. Miriam's journey takes her from a transatlantic voyage on the magnificent Queen Mary 2 to federal prisons in four states, from city courtrooms to schools, churches and hospitals; from the tobacco plantations of the deep south to an expedition on one of the last of the great working Mississippi Paddle Steamers. She attends Dickens tea-parties in New England, visits the factories of Lowell, goes to US Army training camps, joins policemen on night patrol, tours Shaker Villages and meets dozens of Dickens enthusiasts throughout the Continent. She performs at New York's Lincoln Center, fires guns with pistol-packing Ministers in the South, takes lessons in etiquette from an American manners expert in the Midwest and is hypnotised, mesmerised and phrenologised by specialists in the field.