"Prejudiced, I am not, and never have been, otherwise than in favour of the United States. I have many friends in America, I feel a grateful interest in the country, I hope and believe it will successfully work out a problem of the highest importance to the whole human race. To represent me as viewing AMERICA with ill-nature, coldness, or animosity, is merely to do a very foolish thing: which is always a very easy one."--Charles Dickens, from his original preface to "American Notes".
Charles Dickens was a month shy of his 30th birthday when he landed for the first time in the United States. He returned to America twenty-five years later in 1867 and 1868 to give a series of popular readings which were a great success. Between those two trips both commentators in the United States and Charles Dickens had a falling out of sorts. His books, however, remained popular with the reading public and it was Dickens the popular and tireless artist and speaker who triumphed over his critics.
Although hailed as the most popular novelist of the time while in America, Charles Dickens first trip to the United States (from January to June, 1842) was marred by controversy. Reading his travel and journalism book, "American Notes (for General Circulation)" today one finds it hard to find anything controversial or deliberately vindictive about it.
Dickens toured factories, prisons and asylums; took stagecoaches on rough terrain; travelled with his wife in canal and river boats and, at least on the eastern seaboard, experienced the rigors of early American railroads. Much of the humor and drama of his extensive journey comes out in the details he brings to these trips. Dickens preferred to ride on the tops of stage coaches, for instance, and frequently suffered all types of inclement weather and bad roads and the fear that his coachman was going to land him and his party in a ditch or the midst of a river ford. All of this was of course comparable but more primitive than he and his wife Catherine (Hogarth) Dickens were used to.
The things that got under Mr. Dickens' skin while visiting the young republic were things that have long since lost any motive for taking a contrary position upon. His first "mistake" was to call for Americans to recognize authors' copyrights, not exactly a radical idea today. He also had nothing good to say about the "peculiar instituton" of chattle slavery. What would one expect from a man who loathed cruelty and came from a nation where slavery had for decades been unsupported by law?
He shocked audiences of VIPs and the press in New York and Boston when he called for Congress to pass an International Copyright Law to protect both American and British authors from having their work pirated. He cited the poverty of fellow author Walter Scott as a good reason to support a common sense law. But the idea of "intellectual property"--which would have protected the works of popular American writers as well--was met with harsh attacks by the American newspapers. He tried to get other American authors like his friends Washington Irving and Henry Longfellow, to support him, but to no avail.
The strongest supporter for International Copyright was Senator and ofttimes presidential candidate Henry Clay of Kentucky, the man known as the "Great Compromiser" for his efforts to forestall a civil war in America. Clay tried hard, but failed in his own and Dickens' time. The international copyright law was not passed by Congress until 1891.
(Charles Dickens at about the time of his first and second trips to America,respectively.)
His third dislike was to find the habits of spitting tobacco to be disgusting. He took notice of this for a bit of humor when he visited Washington City to meet President John Tyler and attend sessions of Congress.
"Both Houses are handsomely carpeted; but the state to which these carpets are reduced by the universal disregard of the spittoon with which every honourable member is accommodated, and the extraordinary improvements on the pattern which are squirted and dabbled upon it in every direction, do not admit of being described. I will merely observe, that I strongly recommend all strangers not to look at the floor; and if they happen to drop anything, though it be their purse, not to pick it up with an ungloved hand on any account."
The fourth "bad move" was to notice and report that many Americans lacked reserve when meeting people of re-known. (He and his wife were mobbed by well-wishers, local big wigs and plain old "stalkers" at all the hotels in any city they stayed at.) His young American secretary, George Putnam, was hard-pressed to give him some private space and to keep up on the local invitations and the spontaneous "meet-and-greets" of mobs of well-wishes and badgering press hawks Dickens generally endured for hours on end in hotel lobbies, streets. He was even mobbed by ladies, Paul McCartney style, when just trying to get a haircut in Baltimore. Some females reportedly requested pieces of his hair on that occasion, hopefully after it was already cut!
Here I think we see the beginnings of the modern "cult of celebrity" in America. One might express surprise that Dickens didn't see the adulation coming, given reports of the popularity of "Boz" (his nickname) with, among other works, "The Pickwick Papers", "Oliver Twist" and "Nicholas Nickelby".
Perhaps he didn't read accounts of the old hero of the American Revolution General Lafayette's tour of America in the 1820s, which was quite a circus of adulation in its day.
Still, Dickens kept a great deal of this 19th Century American Beatlemania out of his "American Notes", preferring instead to confine his consternation to private letters to friends--like his close friend John Forster--back home. He also made no mention of the copyright controversy in the book. Much of it is focused instead on his day-to-day travels which stretched all the way from Washington and then down the Ohio River valley by steamboat to St. Louis and then further westward for a day's trip to see the vast prairies that led to the frontier lands.
Here is a part of his view of Cincinnati, Ohio: "Cincinnati is a beautiful city; cheerful, thriving, and animated. I have not often seen a place that commends itself so favourably and pleasantly to a stranger at the first glance as this does: with its clean houses of red and white, its well-paved roads, and footways bright tile. Nor does it become less prepossessing on a closer acquaintance. The streets are broad and airy, the shops extremely good, the private residences remarkable for their elegance and neatness."
This is a usual passage in the book; many positive reflections like this abound, along with some measured negatives about being in contact with grumpy people or that strange American propensity for settling domestic maters with firearms. Again, its hard to see what his contemporary American critics could be so upset about. This is far from a perfect view of America, nothing scholarly here except perhaps the final chapter which takes slavery to task through newspaper clippings and books Dickens used to prove his point that it was a cruel and wanton waste of humanity. But it is a travel book, not an encyclopedia!
Modern critic and historian Christopher Hitchens called "American Notes" 'Dickens worst book.' Better I think to recall an earlier intellectual critic, the American Edmund Wilson, who said "Dickens' picture of the United States in 1842, at a period of brave boastings and often squalid or meager realities, has a unique and permanent value"
To me, Hitchens is most unfair. Charles Dickens was trained first as a journalist and reading his book it is clear that he leaves the editorializing to a minimum. He was not one of those English travellers of a Tory persuasion who were in habit of coming to America to put down the republic mainly to, as John Whitley and Arnold Goldman in the Penguin Classics Introduction suggest, mainly to discourage the hundreds of thousands of skilled workers who are already leaving Britain every decade for America between 1815 and 1859. At the same time he is not given to overpraise American institutions as some radical writers had done as a way to bring reform to U.K. Parliamentary election scandals, poor workers' conditions, broader voting rights for male citizens, and other progressive struggles of the time.
When he meets Americans he likes, he is unstinting in praise. When some person or institution fails to meet his liberal-minded expectations, he is direct and sharp but not bigoted.
In 1867, against the advice of friends and his doctor due to ill-health, "The Inimitable" returned to the United States. The idealistic young man was now a seasoned and weathered man of 55, and not a young 55 even for those times. Hard work at his writing and public appearances at home had made any long travel difficult. He was also without the company of the young actress Ellen Tiernan, who had replaced Catherine in his affections. (The couple had divorced in 1859 after she had borne him ten children.)
The 1867-68 tour was a huge success. Dickens, according to a biographer Peter Ackroyd, received about $200,000 for his well-honed recitations of his written works. And, whatever the professional critics had to say about "American Notes" back in the 1840's, it had little if any effect on the public in post-Civil War America. Thousands came to see him during his more modest, travel-wise, tour of the East Coast. Many camped out in front of theaters for tickets to see the rock star of their time.
His success was complete by the time the tour closed in New York City; thousands of his regular readers saw him off on the ship back to England in the harbor. He waved his hat from the ship back to the harbor throng, getting the same hearty cheers he had received at the end of his performances in theaters and lecture halls.
Dickens left behind an edition to his "American Notes" after this second tour. It was a postscript to that book and his "Martin Chuzzlewit" novel (partly set in America) that records a deeper understanding of the United States and of himself, taken from a dinner in his honor in New York on the eve of his return to his homeland:
"`So much of my voice has lately been heard in the land, that I might have been contented with troubling you no further from my present standing-point, were it not a duty with which I henceforth charge myself, not only here but on every suitable occasion, whatsoever and wheresoever, to express my high and grateful sense of my second reception in America, and to bear my honest testimony to the national generosity and magnanimity. Also, to declare how astounded I have been by the amazing changes I have seen around me on every side, - changes moral, changes physical, changes in the amount of land subdued and peopled, changes in the rise of vast new cities, changes in the growth of older cities almost out of recognition, changes in the graces and amenities of life, changes in the Press, without whose advancement no advancement can take place anywhere. Nor am I, believe me, so arrogant as to suppose that in five and twenty years there have been no changes in me, and that I had nothing to learn and no extreme impressions to correct when I was here first."
