The last number of "Barnaby Rudge" appeared in November, 1841, and, on
the 4th of the following January Dickens sailed with his wife for a
six months' tour in the United States. What induced him to undertake
this journey, more formidable then, of course, than now?
Mainly, I think, that restless desire to see the world which is strong
in a great many men, and was specially strong in Dickens. Ride as he
might, and walk as he might, his abounding energies remained
unsatisfied. In 1837 there had been trips to Belgium, Broadstairs,
Brighton; in 1838 to Yorkshire, Broadstairs, North Wales, and a fairly
long stay at Twickenham; in 1839 a similar stay at Petersham--where,
as at Twickenham, frolic, gaiety and athletics had prevailed,--and
trips to Broadstairs and Devonshire; in 1840 trips again to Bath,
Birmingham, Shakespeare's country, Broadstairs, Devonshire; in 1841
more trips, and a very notable visit to Edinburgh, with which Little
Nell had a great deal to do. For Lord Jeffrey was enamoured of that
young lady, declaring to whomsoever would hear that there had been
"nothing so good ... since Cordelia;" and inoculating the citizens of
the northern capital with his enthusiasm, he had induced them to offer
to Dickens a right royal banquet, and the freedom of their city.
Accordingly to Edinburgh he repaired, and the dinner took place on the
26th of June, with three hundred of the chief notabilities for
entertainers, and a reception such as kings might have envied. Jeffrey
himself was ill and unable to take the chair, but Wilson, the leonine
"Christopher North," editor of _Blackwood_, and author of those
"Noctes Ambrosianæ" which were read so eagerly as they came out, and
which some of us find so difficult to read now--Wilson presided most
worthily. Of speechifying there was of course much, and compliments
abounded. But the banquet itself, the whole reception at Edinburgh was
the most magnificent of compliments. Never, I imagine, can such
efforts have been made to turn any young man's brain, as were made,
during this and the following year, to turn the head of Dickens, who
was still, be it remembered, under thirty. Nevertheless he came
unscathed through the ordeal. A kind of manly genuineness bore him
through. Amid all the adulation and excitement, the public and private
hospitalities, the semi-regal state appearance at the theatre, he
could write, and write truly, to his friend Forster: "The moral of
this is, that there is no place like home; and that I thank God most
heartily for having given me a quiet spirit and a heart that won't
hold many people. I sigh for Devonshire Terrace and Broadstairs, for
battledore and shuttlecock; I want to dine in a blouse with you and
Mac (Maclise).... On Sunday evening, the 17th July, I shall revisit
my household gods, please heaven. I wish the day were here."
Yes, except during the few years when he and his wife lived unhappily
together, he was greatly attached to his home, with its friendships
and simple pleasures; but yet, as I have said, a desire to see more of
the world, and to garner new experiences, was strong upon him. The two
conflicting influences often warred in his life, so that it almost
seemed sometimes as if he were being driven by relentless furies.
Those furies pointed now with stern fingers towards America, though
"how" he was "to get on" "for seven or eight months without" his
friends, he could not upon his "soul conceive;" though he dreaded "to
think of breaking up all" his "old happy habits for so long a time;"
though "Kate," remembering doubtless her four little children, wept
whenever the subject was "spoken of." Something made him feel that the
going was "a matter of imperative necessity." Washington Irving
beckoned from across the Atlantic, speaking, as Jeffrey had spoken
from Edinburgh, of Little Nell and her far-extended influence. There
was a great reception foreshadowed, and a new world to be seen, and a
book to be written about it. While as to the strongest of the home
ties--the children that brought the tears into Mrs. Dickens'
eyes,--the separation, after all, would not be eternal, and the good
Macready, tragic actor and true friend, would take charge of the
little folk while their parents were away. So Dickens, who had some
time before "begun counting the days between this and coming home
again," set sail, as I have said, for America on the 4th of January,
1842.
And a very rough experience he, and Mrs. Dickens, and Mrs. Dickens'
maid seem to have had during that January passage from Liverpool to
Halifax and Boston. Most of the time it blew horribly, and they were
direfully ill. Then a storm supervened, which swept away the
paddle-boxes and stove in the life-boats, and they seem to have been
in real peril. Next the ship struck on a mud-bank. But dangers and
discomforts must have been forgotten, at any rate to begin with, in
the glories of the reception that awaited the "inimitable,"--as
Dickens whimsically called himself in those days,--when he landed in
the New World. If he had been received with princely honours in
Edinburgh, he was treated now as an emperor in some triumphant
progress. Halifax sounded the first note of welcome, gave, as it were,
the preliminary trumpet flourish. From that town he writes: "I wish
you could have seen the crowds cheering the inimitable in the streets.
I wish you could have seen judges, law-officers, bishops, and
law-makers welcoming the inimitable. I wish you could have seen the
inimitable shown to a great elbow-chair by the Speaker's throne, and
sitting alone in the middle of the floor of the House of Commons, the
observed of all observers, listening with exemplary gravity to the
queerest speaking possible, and breaking, in spite of himself, into a
smile as he thought of this commencement to the thousand and one
stories in reserve for home." At Boston the enthusiasm had swelled to
even greater proportions. "How can I give you," he writes, "the
faintest notion of my reception here; of the crowds that pour in and
out the whole day; of the people that line the streets when I go out;
of the cheering when I went to the theatre; of the copies of verses,
letters of congratulation, welcomes of all kinds, balls, dinners,
assemblies without end?... There is to be a dinner in New York, ... to
which I have had an invitation with every known name in America
appended to it.... I have had deputations from the Far West, who have
come from more than two thousand miles' distance; from the lakes, the
rivers, the backwoods, the log-houses, the cities, factories,
villages, and towns. Authorities from nearly all the states have
written to me. I have heard from the universities, congress, senate,
and bodies, public and private, of every sort and kind." All was
indeed going happy as a marriage bell. Did I not rightly say that the
world was conspiring to spoil this young man of thirty, whose youth
had certainly not been passed in the splendour of opulence or power?
What wonder if in the dawn of his American experiences, and of such a
reception, everything assumed a roseate hue? Is it matter for surprise
if he found the women "very beautiful," the "general breeding neither
stiff nor forward," "the good nature universal"; if he expatiated, not
without a backward look at unprogressive Old England, on the
comparative comfort among the working classes, and the absence of
beggars in the streets? But, alas, that rosy dawn ended, as rosy dawns
sometimes will, in sleet and mist and very dirty weather. Before many
weeks, before many days had flown, Dickens was writing in a very
different spirit. On the 24th of February, in the midst of a perfect
ovation of balls and dinners, he writes "with reluctance,
disappointment, and sorrow," that "there is no country on the face of
the earth, where there is less freedom of opinion on any subject in
reference to which there is a broad difference of opinion, than in"
the United States. On the 22nd of March he writes again, to Macready,
who seems to have remonstrated with him on his growing discontent: "It
is of no use, I _am_ disappointed. This is not the republic I came to
see; this is not the republic of my imagination. I infinitely prefer a
liberal monarchy--even with its sickening accompaniment of Court
circulars--to such a government as this. The more I think of its youth
and strength, the poorer and more trifling in a thousand aspects it
appears in my eyes. In everything of which it has made a boast,
excepting its education of the people, and its care for poor children,
it sinks immeasurably below the level I had placed it upon, and
England, even England, bad and faulty as the old land is, and
miserable as millions of her people are, rises in the comparison....
Freedom of opinion; where is it? I see a press more mean and paltry
and silly and disgraceful than any country I ever knew.... In the
respects of not being left alone, and of being horribly disgusted by
tobacco chewing and tobacco spittle, I have suffered considerably."
Extracts like these could be multiplied to any extent, and the
question arises, why did such a change come over the spirit of
Dickens? Washington Irving, at the great New York dinner, had called
him "the guest of the nation." Why was the guest so quickly
dissatisfied with his host, and quarrelling with the character of his
entertainment? Sheer physical fatigue, I think, had a good deal to do
with it. Even at Boston, before he had begun to travel over the
unending railways, water-courses, and chaotic coach-roads of the great
Republic, that key-note had been sounded. "We are already," he had
written, "weary at times, past all expression." Few men can wander
with impunity out of their own professional sphere, and undertake
duties for which they have neither the training nor acquired tastes.
Dickens was a writer, not a king; and here he was expected to hold a
king's state, and live in a king's publicity, but without the formal
etiquette that hedge a king from intruders, and make his position
tolerable. He was hemmed in by curious eyes, mobbed in the streets,
stared at in his own private rooms, interviewed by the hour, shaken by
the hand till his arm must often have been ready to drop off, waylaid
at every turn with formal addresses. If he went to church the people
crowded into the adjacent pews, and the preacher preached at him. If
he got into a public conveyance, every one inside insisted on an
introduction, and the people outside--say before the train
started--would pull down the windows and comment freely on his nose
and eyes and personal appearance generally, some even touching him as
if to see if he were real. He was safe from intrusion nowhere--no, not
when he was washing and his wife in bed. Such attentions must have
been exhausting to a degree that can scarcely be imagined. But there
was more than mere physical weariness in his growing distaste for the
United States. Perfectly outspoken at all times, and eager for the
strife of tongues in any cause which he had at heart, it horrified him
to find that he was expected not to express himself freely on such
subjects as International Copyright, and that even in private, or
semi-private intercourse, slavery was a topic to be avoided. Then I
fear, too, that as he left cultured Boston behind, he was brought into
close and habitual contact with natives whom he did not appreciate.
Rightly or wrongly, he took a strong dislike for Brother Jonathan as
Brother Jonathan existed, in the rough, five and forty years ago. He
was angered by that young gentleman's brag, offended by the rough
familiarity of his manners, indignant at his determination by all
means to acquire dollars, incensed by his utter want of care for
literature and art, sickened by his tobacco-chewing and
expectorations. So when Dickens gets to "Niagara Falls, upon the
_English_ side," he puts ten dashes under the word English; and,
meeting two English officers, contrasts them in thought with the men
whom he has just left, and seems, by note of exclamation and italics,
to call upon the world to witness, "what _gentlemen_, what noblemen of
nature they seemed!"
And Brother Jonathan, how did _he_ regard his young guest? Well,
Jonathan, great as he was, and greater as he was destined to be, did
not possess the gift of prophecy, and could not of course foresee the
scathing satire of "American Notes" and "Martin Chuzzlewit." But
still, amid all his enthusiasm, I think there must have been a feeling
of uneasiness and disappointment. Part, as there is no doubt, of the
fervour with which he greeted Dickens, was due to his regarding
Dickens as the representative of democratic feeling in aristocratic
England, as the advocate of the poor and down-trodden against the
wealthy and the strong; "and"--thus argued Jonathan--"because we are
a democracy, therefore Dickens will admire and love us, and see how
immeasurably superior we are to the retrograde Britishers of his
native land." But unfortunately Dickens showed no signs of being
impressed in that particular way. On the contrary, as we have seen,
such comparison as he made in his own mind was infinitely to the
disadvantage of the United States. "We must be cracked up," says
Hannibal Chollop, in "Martin Chuzzlewit," speaking of his fellow
countrymen. And Dickens, even while fêted and honoured, would not
"crack up" the Americans. He lectured them almost with truculence on
their sins in the matter of copyright; he could scarcely be restrained
from testifying against slavery; he was not the man to say he liked
manners and customs which he loathed. Jonathan must have been very
doubtfully satisfied with his guest.
It is no part of my purpose to follow Dickens lingeringly, and step by
step, from the day when he landed at Halifax, to the 7th of June, when
he re-embarked at New York for England. From Boston he went to New
York, where the great dinner was given with Washington Irving in the
chair, and thence to Philadelphia and Washington,--which was still the
empty "city of magnificent distances," that Mr. Goldwin Smith declares
it has now ceased to be;--and thence again westward, and by Niagara
and Canada back to New York. And if any persons want to know what he
thought about these and other places, and the railway travelling, and
the coach travelling, and the steamboat travelling, and the prisons
and other public institutions--aye, and many other things besides,
they cannot do better than read the "American Notes for general
circulation," which he wrote and published within the year after his
return. Nor need such persons be deterred by the fact that Macaulay
thought meanly of the book; for Macaulay, with all his great gifts,
did not, as he himself knew full well, excel in purely literary
criticism. So when he pronounces, that "what is meant to be easy and
sprightly is vulgar and flippant," and "what is meant to be fine is a
great deal too fine for me, as the description of the Falls of
Niagara," one can venture to differ without too great a pang. The
book, though not assuredly one of Dickens' best, contains admirable
passages which none but he could have written, and the description of
Niagara is noticeably fine, the sublimity of the subject being
remembered, as a piece of impassioned prose. Whether satire so bitter
and unfriendly as that in which he indulged, both here and in "Martin
Chuzzlewit," was justifiable from what may be called an international
point of view, is another question. Publicists do not always remember
that a cut which would smart for a moment, and then be forgotten, if
aimed at a countryman, rankles and festers if administered to a
foreigner. And if this be true as regards the English publicist's
comment on the foreigner who does not understand our language, it is,
of course, true with tenfold force as regards the foreigner whose
language is our own. _He_ understands only too well the jibe and the
sneer, and the tone of superiority, more offensive perhaps than
either. Looked at in this way, it can, I think, but be accounted a
misfortune that the most popular of English writers penned two books
containing so much calculated to wound American feeling, as the
"Notes" and "Martin Chuzzlewit." Nor are signs entirely wanting that,
as the years went by, the mind of Dickens himself was haunted by some
such suspicion. A quarter of a century later, he visited the United
States a second time; and speaking at a public dinner given in his
honour by the journalists of New York, he took occasion to comment on
the enormous strides which the country had made in the interval, and
then said, "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." And he added that, in all future editions of the two
books just named, he would cause to be recorded, that, "wherever he
had been, in the smallest place equally with the largest, he had been
received with unsurpassable politeness, delicacy, sweet temper,
hospitality, consideration, and with unsurpassable respect for the
privacy daily enforced upon him by the nature of his avocation there"
(as a public reader), "and the state of his health."
And now, with three observations, I will conclude what I have to say
about the visit to America in 1842. The first is that the "Notes" are
entirely void of all vulgarity of reference to the private life of the
notable Americans whom Dickens had met. He seems to have known, more
or less intimately, the chief writers of the time--Washington Irving,
Channing, Dana, Bryant, Longfellow, Bancroft; but his intercourse with
them he held sacred, and he made no literary capital out of it.
Secondly, it is pleasant to note that there was, so far, no great
"incompatibility of temper" between him and his wife. He speaks of
her enthusiastically, in his correspondence, as a "most admirable
traveller," and expatiates on the good temper and equanimity with
which she had borne the fatigues and jars of a most trying journey.
And the third point to which I will call attention is the thoroughly
characteristic form of rest to which he had recourse in the midst of
all his toil and travel. Most men would have sought relaxation in
being quiet. He found it in vigorously getting up private theatricals
with the officers of the Coldstream Guards, at Montreal. Besides
acting in all the three pieces played, he also accepted the part of
stage manager; and "I am not," he says, "placarded as stage manager
for nothing. Everybody was told that they would have to submit to the
most iron despotism, and didn't I come Macready over them? Oh no, by
no means; certainly not. The pains I have taken with them, and the
perspiration I have expended, during the last ten days, exceed in
amount anything you can imagine." What bright vitality, and what a
singular charm of exuberant animal spirits!
And who was glad one evening--which would be about the last evening in
June, or the first of July--when a hackney coach rattled up to the
door of the house in Devonshire Terrace, and four little folk, two
girls and two boys, were hurried down, and kissed through the bars of
the gate, because their father was too eager to wait till it was
opened? Who were glad but the little folk aforementioned--I say
nothing of the joy of father and mother; for children as they were, a
sense of sorrowful loss had been theirs while their parents were away,
and greater strictness seems to have reigned in the good Macready's
household than in their own joyous home. It is Miss Dickens herself
who tells us this, and in whose memory has lingered that pretty scene
of the kiss through the bars in the summer gloaming. And she has much
to tell us too of her father's tenderness and care,--of his sympathy
with the children's terrors, so that, for instance, he would sit
beside the cot of one of the little girls who had been startled, and
hold her hand in his till she fell asleep; of his having them on his
knees, and singing to them the merriest of comic songs; of his
interest in all their small concerns; of the many pet names with which
he invested them.[17] Then, as they grew older, there were Twelfth
Night parties and magic lanterns. "Never such magic lanterns as those
shown by him," she says. "Never such conjuring as his." There was
dancing, too, and the little ones taught him his steps, which he
practised with much assiduity, once even jumping out of bed in terror,
lest he had forgotten the polka, and indulging in a solitary midnight
rehearsal. Then, as the children grew older still, there were private
theatricals. "He never," she says again, "was too busy to interest
himself in his children's occupations, lessons, amusements, and
general welfare." Clearly not one of those brilliant men, a numerous
race, who when away from their homes, in general society, sparkle and
scintillate, flash out their wit, and irradiate all with their humour,
but who, when at home, are dull as rusted steel. Among the many
tributes to his greatness, that of his own child has a place at once
touching and beautiful.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] Miss Dickens evidently bears proudly still her pet name of
"Mamie," and signs it to her book.