OSNews

What upset the Americans with their hero, whom they greeted as the most welcomed visitor since Lafayette (Forster, I, 186), was his stand in favor of International Copyright. Without it American publishers were paying no royalties on imported manuscripts. Few people of good will thought the policy equitable, but their objection was to Dickens' use of his platform as a guest artist to speak out on business and politics. When he did so, some accused him of petty self-serving, in spite of the fact that International Copyright would also serve the interests of American authors, then ignored or short-changed by publishers who could easily pirate foreign materials. In any event, Dickens was equally disturbed by his sponsors' undemocratic desire to muzzle him, to make him take the stance of an uncritical hero, as if democracy were a fait accompli on this side of the Atlantic. As the copyright issue inflated, it became for Dickens a symptom of a much more pervasive disease, name the American preoccupation with image-making.
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/pubd/dickens_usa.html