Charles Dickens in America

William Glyde Wilkins

• Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783849658731
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

In reading 'American Notes' and Dickens's letters from America, Mr. Wilkins was struck by two things: the almost bitter severity of his criticism of the American newspapers and his views on the subject of international copyright. To the end of satisfying himself of the justice of these opinions, he collected extracts from the press of almost every city visited by the distinguished novelist. But the task so specifically begun was soon seen to have a much broader significance. If Americans and Englishmen were interested through the 'American Notes' to get a glimpse of the United States, it is safe to say that they would be still more interested through the popular press of this country to obtain a glimpse of that familiar and beloved personality, Charles Dickens. The book allows those who saw and spoke with Mr. Dickens to speak for themselves, and is crowded with intimate and verbatim conversations.

 

 

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY

 

There can be no doubt in the minds of those who have read 'The Life of Charles Dickens', by his friend Forster, as to what was the prime object of the author's second visit to the United States in 1868. It was, to paraphrase Shakespeare, "to put money in his purse"; in fact, he frankly wrote Forster, who disapproved of the project, "Have no fear that anything will induce me to make the experiment if I do not see the most forcible reason for believing that what I could get by it, added to what I have got, would leave me with a sufficient future."

No fault can be found with him for this reason, as Dickens had a large family, his living expenses were heavy, and he desired to be able to leave his children provided for after his death.

Just what were the reasons which prompted his first visit in 1842 are not sb well known. There were to be no readings, and the journey was a tedious, uncomfortable and expensive one to make in those days. Some' have thought that the object of the trip was to procure the subject matter for his American Notes, published after his return. This, however, was not the principal reason, but was simply the means which he took to provide the necessary funds for his expenses, and, in fact, he had made arrangements with Chapman & Hall for the publication of the book before he left England. Others have thought that the object of the trip was to inaugurate a campaign for international copyright, but Forster has said that Dickens went to America with no intention of starting the question in any way, and Dickens himself has denied that this was the object. What was then the real object? This question is best answered by a quotation from a paper in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, by Dr. J. F. Snyder, entitled, "Charles Dickens in Illinois." Dr. Snyder writes —

"To see Cairo was really the main object of his journey to America. In 1837 one Darius B. Holbrook, a shrewd Boston Yankee, organized the Cairo City and Canal Company, a scheme as audaciously illusive as the John Laws Bubble in 1718; and going to Europe he plastered the walls everywhere with flaming lithographs of a grand city at the junction of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers — in fact, as mythical as the fabled Quivira of Coronado's search. In London was the banking house of John Wright & Co., the same that in 1839 confidenced the Illinois Fund Commissioners, Gov. Reynolds, Senator Young, General Rawlings and Colonel Oakley, into depositing with them $1,000,000 of Illinois Bonds, resulting in a loss to the State of half their value. Through John Wright & Company, Holbrook actually sold bonds of his Cairo Company to the amount of $2,000,000. Among his numerous victims was Mr. Dickens, who, it is asserted, invested in them a large part of his slender means."

It will be noticed that this occurred while Dickens was writing The Pickwick Papers, and Dickens may at that time have had in mind the trip to America and his American Notes, for, in chapter xliv, Tony Weller says to Sam, " Have a passage taken ready for 'Merrika . . . and then let him come back and write a book about the 'Merrikans as'll pay all his expenses and more, if he blows 'em up enough."

It may be that Dickens had forgotten the advice of Mr. Weller, and it may be only a coincidence that he took the advice and went to 'Merrika, and that he wrote, not one, but two books referring to that country, but he certainly did in these two books, in the opinion of many Americans, "blow 'em up enough."

Many of those whose feelings were personally hurt, and who thought he had not treated America and Americans fairly, were those who were members of self-appointed reception and entertainment committees, and whose vanity had prompted them to hope that when the author returned home and wrote his book especial mention would be made of them, and that the reception or banquet which they had helped to arrange in his honour would be the one affair which he might single out as the most important one of his trip. In this they were disappointed, for Dickens did not mention these affairs at all, as the American Notes consists almost entirely of descriptions and criticisms of such public institutions as blind asylums, prisons and slavery, with brief references to some of the cities visited.

Everyone who has read American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit knows what Dickens's opinions were of America, American newspapers and the American people in 1842, the year in which he first visited the United States. It seemed to the writer, in view of the revival of interest in the author and his writings, due to the fact that 1912 is the centenary of his birth, that it might be interesting to learn what were the views of the press and people of the United States in 1842 as to the author himself. With this idea in mind the writer has obtained extracts relating to Dickens from newspapers in various cities which he visited in that year. Some of these are editorials and others are evidently written by reporters or news-writers who could make their mark with some of the so-called yellow newspapers of the present day. As to the latter, as will be seen later, we can hardly blame Dickens for what he says in his American Notes regarding the American Press of that period. The only fault we can find with him is that he did not differentiate sufficiently between the good and the bad, and that with few exceptions he puts all the American newspapers in the class now called "yellow."

Perhaps one of the reasons Dickens had for disliking the American newspaper was that some of their descriptions of his personality and his attire offended his vanity. It is no great disparagement of him to say, what everyone now concedes, that Dickens was vain of his appearance and that he was fond of gay waistcoats, massive gold watch-chains, large scarf-pins and his wavy locks. It is an axiom that the more vain a man is, the less he wants to be told of his vanity.

While Dickens was not favourably impressed with the Press of the United States, he wrote in the highest terms of most of the hotels at which he stopped, as the following extracts from American Notes will show. Of the Richmond Hotel (The Exchange) he wrote, "A very large and elegant establishment, and we were as well entertained as travellers need desire to be; " of the hotel at Baltimore, "The most complete of all the hotels of which I have had any experience in the United States, and they were not a few, is Barnum's in that city, where the English traveller will find curtains to his bed for the first and last time in America; " of the Harrisburg Hotel (Buehler's), "We were soon established in a very snug hotel, which, though smaller and far less splendid than many we put up at, is raised above them all by having for its landlord the most obliging, considerate and gentlemanly person I have ever had to deal with; " of the Pittsburgh Hotel (Exchange), "A most excellent hotel, and we were most admirably served; " of the hotel at Louisville, " We slept at the Gait House, a splendid hotel, and we were as handsomely lodged as though we had been in Paris, rather than hundreds of miles beyond the Alleghanies; " of the Planter's House at St. Louis, "An excellent house, and the proprietors have most beautiful notions of providing the creature comforts."

A comparison of Dickens's letters to Forster, as given in the latter's Life of Charles Dickens, with his American Notes will show that Dickens's opinion of America and the American people seems to have undergone considerable modification between the time of writing his first letters and the book. The first letters generally are very much more moderate in tone than his later letters and the book, but whether the author really modified his opinions by reason of the opposition to an international copyright law by some of the American public, principally the publishers who had been reproducing his works, and his financial loss in Cairo (Eden) bonds, or whether he believed that criticisms rather than praise of the institutions of the United States would be more acceptable for English consumption or not, is a question. The writer can hardly believe that this great author would prostitute his pen in such a manner, and prefers to believe that the loss of the money he had invested in "Eden" had soured his pen.

As will be seen by the newspaper accounts of the dinners and receptions given in Dickens's honour, no foreigner, be he statesman, warrior or prince, was ever, up to that time, given such a hearty welcome, or such paeans of praise as this thirty-year-old author; in fact, some of the praise was so fulsome that it is a wonder it did not pall upon its recipient, used as he was to the adulations of his own countrymen. In a letter to his friend Mr. Thomas Mitten, dated January 31, he summed up in the following words exactly what his own ideas were of the welcome and treatment he had received up to that time —

"I can give you no conception of my welcome. There never was a King or Emperor upon the earth so cheered and followed by crowds, and entertained at splendid balls and dinners and waited upon by public bodies of all kinds. I have had one from the far West, a journey of two thousand miles! If I go out in a carriage, the crowd surrounds it and escorts me home; if I go to the theatre, the whole house (crowded to the roof) rises as one man, and the timbers ring again. You cannot imagine what it is. I have five public dinners on hand at this moment, and invitations from every town and village and city in the United States."

It is a wonder it did not completely turn his head, and it is not surprising that some of the newspapers and some of the people thought that perhaps they might be overdoing it.

In a chapter written for American Notes, entitled "Introductory and Necessary to be Read," and which, by the advice of Forster, was not printed in the book, Dickens wrote —

"Neither does it contain, nor have I intended that it should contain, any lengthened and minute account of my personal reception in the United States; not because I am, or ever was, insensible to that spontaneous effusion of affection and generosity of heart, in a most affectionate and generous-hearted people; but because I conceive that it would ill become me to flourish matter necessarily involving so much of my own praises in the eyes of my unhappy readers."

While Dickens did not give in American Notes his own opinions regarding his personal reception in the United States, he did express himself very freely in his letters to Forster, and it is interesting to compare his own account with those that are given in this book. These accounts are all by American writers of the time, most of them being by newspaper writers, and some of them taken from private diaries, which, when written, were not intended for publication, so that, taken together, they give a pretty good idea of the impressions made by Dickens on the Press and people of the United States. These accounts cover his personal doings and experiences in the United States for nearly every day, from the time he landed in Boston on Saturday, January 22, till he embarked at New York on Tuesday, June 7, after a journey lasting nearly five months, and covering, including the United States and Canada, about 5000 miles.

CHAPTER II. BOSTON

The first information given to the American public that Charles Dickens intended visiting the United States was through a letter dated September 28, 1841, which he wrote to Mr. L. Gaylord Clark, editor of the Knickerbocker Magazine, which information Mr. Clark gave to the newspapers. Dickens said in this letter —

"On the 4th of next January, if it please God, I am coming with my wife on a three or four months' visit to America. The British and North American packet will bring me, I hope, to Boston, and enable me, in the third week of the New Year, to set my foot upon the soil I have trodden in my daydreams many times, and whose sons (and daughters) I yearn to know and be among."

Dickens evidently wrote Mr. Clark a second letter, for in The Evening Post (New York), January 4, 1842, we find the following —

"Mr. Dickens. — This distinguished author, accompanied by his lady, leaves England this day for the United States. We learn from a letter received by the last steamer, from Mr. Dickens, by our old friend Mr. Clark, of the Knickerbocker, that it is his intention of passing six months in the United States. After spending a few days in Boston, he will visit New York, where he will tarry some days. 'My design is,' he writes, ' to spend but little time in those two cities, but to proceed to the south as far as Charleston. Our stay will be six months, during which time I must see as much as can be seen in such a space of the country and the people.'

"Mr. Dickens speaks of his visit with the utmost enthusiasm. 'You make me very proud and happy,' he writes, ' by anticipation in thinking of the number of friends I shall find, but I cannot describe to you the glow into which I rise, when I think of the wonders that await us and all the interest I am sure I shall have in your mighty land.' "

Dickens sailed from Liverpool on the Britannia on January 4, and arrived in Boston eighteen days later, his arrival being chronicled in one of the Boston papers as follows —

"Arrival of the ' Britannia.' — The steamer Britannia arrived in Boston on Saturday (Jan. 22nd) afternoon last, after a rather boisterous passage of eighteen days and a detention of ten hours by the fog. She brings intelligence eighteen days late, having Liverpool papers to the 4th instant and London to the evening of the 3rd.

"Among the passengers is Charles Dickens, Esq., the famous ' Boz ' of English literature; he is accompanied by his lady. Earl Mulgrave is also a passenger."

Dickens himself has told us through one of his letters to Forster how he was met on the steamer as she was moored to the wharf, not by newsboys but by editors, and that "there was one among them, though, who was really of use, a Doctor S., editor of the . . . He ran off here (two miles at least) and ordered rooms and dinner." The hotel where the rooms were ordered was the Tremont House, and is no longer standing. This hotel, which at the time of Dickens's arrival, and for many years after, was considered by Americans as one of the best hotels in the country, did not strike him as favourably as some of the other hotels which he visited later in other cities, although he wrote in American Notes, "The hotel is an excellent one." He expressed himself, however, regarding it more freely in a letter to Forster, in which he wrote —

"This hotel is a trifle smaller than Finsbury Square; and it is made so hot (I use the expression advisedly) by means of a furnace with pipes running through the passages, that we can hardly bear it. There are no curtains to the beds, or to the bedroom windows. I am sure there never are, hardly, all through America. The bedrooms are indeed very bare of furniture. Ours is hardly as large as your great room, and has a wardrobe in it of painted wood, not larger (I appeal to K.) than an English match-box. I slept in this room two nights, quite satisfied with the belief that it was a shower bath."

He also wrote in this letter —

"I have a secretary whom I take on w...

Table of contents

• CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY
• CHAPTER II. BOSTON
• CHAPTER III. THE BOSTON DINNER
• CHAPTER IV. WORCESTER — HARTFORD — NEW HAVEN
• CHAPTER V. NEW YORK
• CHAPTER VI. THE DINNER AT THE CITY HOTEL, NEW YORK
• CHAPTER VII. PHILADELPHIA
• CHAPTER VIII. WASHINGTON
• CHAPTER IX. RICHMOND, BALTIMORE AND HARRISBURG
• CHAPTER X. PITTSBURGH, CINCINNATI, LOUISVILLE AND CAIRO
• CHAPTER XI. ST. LOUIS AND THE PRAIRIE
• CHAPTER XII. THE RETURN TRIP — ST. LOUIS TO NEW YORK
• CHAPTER XIII. INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT
• CHAPTER XIV. THE PRESS DINNER AT DELMONICO'S
• APPENDIX.