Charles Dickens (5 page)

Dickens was thrilled to get to America, and not only to terra firma. His popularity there, combined with his critique of English society, had convinced him that he and the citizens of the United States would feel an instant and abiding sense of kinship and would recognize themselves in each other. There was also an assumption on both sides that too much celebrity was not possible—the Americans had prepared to make the most of Dickens's visit, with balls and parties and receptions and every sort of opportunity to view the author. Dickens, used to fame of a familiar sort, public events interspersed with private time to work and spend with his family, was unprepared for what was expected of him (though it looks perfectly familiar to us). In Boston, Hartford, New Haven, New York, and Philadelphia, there were just too many occasions, too many expectations, and Dickens's mood soured. We can recognize it as a nightmare book tour, the author and his wife unprotected by publicists or any sort of previous experience. All the features of modern American celebrity leap forth, full grown—the public's sense that they have the right to gaze upon the Dickenses at will, the gossip in the press about their every characteristic, the sense the Dickenses have of being objectified and hounded and intruded upon, the resentment of the public at any sort of
behavior on the part of the author other than gratitude and good cheer, and, above all, the assumption that all fame, all the time, must be a good thing.

Dickens quickly offended his hosts. He had not reckoned with the New England conservatism and provincial snobbishness of those he met in Boston, who were eager to see his mode of dressing and speaking as evidence of ungentlemanly origins. He was short, he had big ears, he talked quickly—he was not the titan Americans expected. In addition, he mentioned several times his indignation that American newspapers and periodicals were in the habit of reprinting his works without paying for them, that this was, in fact, standard publishing procedure. Over this issue, he did something that every media-savvy man or woman knows, after fifty years of television, is exactly the wrong thing to do—he lost his temper. The response in the press was immediate and, to us, predictable. He was attacked, denigrated, ridiculed. Everyone, including Dickens, realized at once and completely that Dickens was an Englishman, with characteristic English ways of doing and perceiving things, and more important, that he was a man and not an ideal figure, not the amazing, soothing, genial, and visionary voice of the narrators of his books, coming into the home with every new number of each novel, taking his place at the fireside and in the reader's consciousness, but a specific male human being, not always lovable or wise or admirable. Thus the perennial disappointment of celebrity was played out at once, with the first great media celebrity. His works had made promises of a personal nature that the man himself was bound to renege upon, no matter how much energy and goodwill he possessed.

In addition, while the purpose of Dickens's trip, to the Americans, was to be looked at, for Dickens, it was to look—like other European travelers, he wanted to see what there was to see, and he had a particular interest in social institutions. He had criticized England for the piecemeal and often cruel ways in which the least fortunate members of society were cared for, so in America he was interested in orphanages, and schools, and prisons, and factories. He toured any number of them and, overall, was impressed, especially by the factory systems of such towns as Lowell, Massachusetts, where the working girls were regulated and given decent wages and places to live, as well as certain freedoms. He made friends, some of whom he corresponded with for the rest of his life. Notable among these was Cornelius Felton, a self-made scholar of humble origins, who taught Greek at Harvard and was not the sort of man Dickens could have come to know at an English university. He visited the South—Washington, Baltimore, and Richmond, Virginia—but was uncomfortable there with what he saw as the negative effects of slavery, both on the inhabitants and on the ambience of the city. He liked Cincinnati, did not like St. Louis, hated the southern Illinois reaches of the Mississippi River, disliked the roughness and danger of riverboat travel (though he pursued his walking regime with great energy when traveling by canal boat).

Catherine was a patient and submissive companion and in fact made a better impression upon the Americans than Dickens himself did. He complained about her once, that she could not get into or out of any conveyance without stumbling, but in general he recognized the sacrifices she was daily making to accompany him on a journey that she had never
wanted to take. They seemed to be well matched and happily married to those who witnessed them, and he seemed, in his letters to friends, to be pleased with her. They were equal in their hunger to hear from home and, as the end of the journey neared, to get home.

At Niagara Falls, for once, Dickens's expectations were more than fulfilled. He looked upon the “fall of bright green water” and “then, when I felt how near to my Creator I was standing, the first effect, and the enduring one—instant and lasting—of the tremendous spectacle was Peace. Peace of mind, tranquillity, calm recollections of the Dead, great thoughts of Eternal Rest and Happiness: nothing of gloom or terror. Niagara was at once stamped upon my heart, an Image of Beauty; to remain there, changeless and indelible, until its pulses cease to beat forever.” They remained on the Canadian side for ten days, vacationing, enjoying the falls from every angle, shunning company (the Canadian side was less inhabited), and renewing themselves. Thus refreshed, they went on to Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec, where they had a better time—in Montreal, in fact, both Charles and Catherine acted in a theatrical production of several short plays, something Dickens hadn't done in years and enjoyed very much (he was also a great success).

They were more than eager to get home. On the seventh of June, he writes, he “darted out of bed” at dawn to check the wind (they were sailing rather than steaming home), and on the first of July they arrived. Of their homecoming, Dickens writes, “The country, by the railroad, seemed, as we rattled through it, like a luxuriant garden. The beauty of the fields
(so small they looked!), the hedgerows, and the trees; the pretty cottages, the beds of flowers, the old churchyards, and antique houses, and every well-known object; the exquisite delights of that one journey crowding, in the short compass of a summer's day, the joy of many years. . . .”

If much of Dickens's life seems emblematically Victorian to us, of more than historical interest only in the light of his literary genius, this American trip, by contrast, seems uncannily modern. The new machinery of capitalistic publishing had carried his work far and wide, bringing a single man, a single voice, into a personal relationship with huge numbers of people whom he had never met, and yet who felt intimate with him, because the novel is, above all, an intense experience of prolonged intimacy with another consciousness. But both the author and the readers had misread the relationship. The readers had mistaken the work for the man; the man had mixed fame and money together without realizing that they were distinct compensations that did not necessarily overlap. The intimacy they felt through the work came from the natural power of the novel to cross the boundaries of appearance and reveal the inner life, emphasizing the inner life in a delightful and, in a sense, false contrast to social life. This was the first time, but it had all the qualities of the countless similar episodes to take place between then and now, whether the art form in question is novel writing or moviemaking or television broadcasting. And then, the couple's return is familiar, too, to anyone who has ever traveled from America to England—the loveliness, the tidiness, the gardenlike contrast to the rougher, vaster, less inhabited continent to the west.
Tastes differ. Many of us discover a deep attachment to the unpredictability of America—Dickens discovered an attachment to the very circumscriptions, of fields, of villages, of private life, of the England wherein he had never before quite consciously felt at home.

 

Dickens was eager to go to work. He commenced immediately upon
American Notes for General Circulation,
moved the family to Broadstairs for the rest of the summer, and adopted into the household as a permanent addition Georgina Hogarth, Catherine's fourteen-year-old sister, who had been helping Fred Dickens with the children while Charles and Catherine were away. Georgina reminded Dickens of Mary, and he became very fond of her over the next years, installing her as the children's general caretaker and governess.

American Notes
was written quickly, largely because Dickens could refer to all the letters he had written Forster from abroad. He originally wrote a strongly hostile introduction, which Forster persuaded him to drop. The volume was published in October, only three and a half months after his return. Reviews and sales in England were disappointing—he had not had as much to say of interest as his public expected. Reviews in America were angry, but sales were good. Unfortunately, owing to the very copyright questions that had been at issue while he was there, he earned nothing from them. Nevertheless, in contrast with the many other travel narratives of the time,
American Notes
does now seem “Dickensian.” While the style does not have the density and power of his best work, it is lively, witty, and intelligent, and the author discusses typical subjects for him—prisons and other public
institutions, odd characters and odd characteristics. Dickens was possessed of tremendous powers of observation, greater than those of any other writer.
American Notes
stands out from other books of its kind for these qualities of precise notice. He did not, however, have the same sort of distilled and profound understanding of American institutions and the American landscape that he had for England and, subsequently, for France and Italy. Nor did he have the love for the place and the leisure it would have taken to develop a vital relationship with the United States. That the journey was a tiresome disappointment in many ways is evident in the volume's lack of real power. It was only subsequently, in
Martin Chuzzlewit,
that Dickens managed to incorporate America into his inner world and give it his characteristic qualities and symbolic force.

It is clear that upon his return from America, Dickens's sense of what he wanted to do in his work enlarged considerably, along with his sense of social responsibility. As soon as
American Notes
saw publication, he was off to Cornwall to have a look at the tin mines, as he had had a look at schools for
Nicholas Nickleby
. The contrasts he found between the United States and England did not all redound to the credit of the English—many social institutions, especially in New England, did a better and more complete job of taking care of citizens, especially indigent ones, than their English counterparts. Ackroyd is worth quoting on the state of London in the 1840s—indeed, almost throughout Dickens's life:

Just to make the point, let me add, “Burial grounds in the city . . . were now overflowing . . . the bodies were piled high upon each other, sometimes breaking through the soil and emitting noxious gases which poisoned and killed those in the vicinity.” Ackroyd quotes one gravedigger: “I have been up to my knees in human flesh by jumping on the bodies so as to cram them into the least possible space at the bottom of the graves in which fresh bodies were afterwards placed.”

Dickens, of course, was as familiar with such sordid scenes as any other Victorian, given his habit of perambulating the streets by night and day and his readiness to go anywhere and everywhere. Perhaps the London of his day is more analogous to the Mexico City or the Calcutta of our day than to any city in Europe or North America. Certainly an impoverished population was pouring into London all through the 1840s—there was a net increase of population of 250,000, in a time when the average life span of a Londoner was twenty-seven and almost half of all deaths were of children under the age of ten. Rather as Harriet Beecher Stowe was criticized in America for exaggerating the abuses of slavery when actually she
tried to mitigate them in order to make reading about them palatable to her readers, Dickens saw and knew far more than he wrote of, simply because he always chose to appeal to rather than to confront his readers. His famous wish not to “bring a blush to the cheek of the young person” applied to the horror of social conditions as well as to sexual matters. Nevertheless, both as a social reformer and as a writer, the Dickens of late 1842 was more ambitious than the Dickens of 1841.

After completing
American Notes,
he was delayed for a bit casting about for the right name and title for his next serial. He tried Chuzzlewig, Sweezleden, Chuzzletoe, Sweezlebach, Sweezlewag. Chuzzlewit was it—the rightness of the name calling forth everything else, rather in the way Sir Laurence Olivier once said that putting on a false nose opened up everything else about a character for him. Dickens kept lists of names, noticed names in graveyards and newspapers. He was careful to name everything, including the periodicals he founded, before attempting anything further. That the names he chose were strange and evocative makes it all the more fascinating that many of the oddest ones, like “Flite” and “Guppy,” were actual names of individuals.