Charles Dickens: A Life (26 page)

The
Britannia
would take them to Boston, and from there they would progress to New York, Washington and Baltimore and into the South, then as far west as St Louis, north through Ohio, across Lake Erie to Buffalo and Niagara Falls, and into Canada, before returning to New York for the return voyage in June. In all, they would be travelling more than 2,000 miles, sometimes through rough country, by railway, coach, canal and riverboat. It was a bold project. What he did not foresee was the American response to his fame, and how, after the first enjoyably triumphant week, the celebrity tour would become an irritating and exhausting ordeal, and pleasure would give way to resentment.

In his determination to get away he had booked their crossing in midwinter. They were to leave on 4 January and the
Britannia
was expected to reach Boston in two weeks. Devonshire Terrace was let, and the children were moved the short distance to Osnaburgh Street, where three nurses and a governess were to look after them, and their uncle Fred would also keep a close eye on things; and each day they were to go to the Macreadys. Charley was about to be five, Mamie three, Katey two and baby Walter not yet one, all of them too young to understand that their parents were to be away for an unimaginably long period of half a year. Farewell embraces made, Dickens, Catherine and her maid Anne took the Liverpool train on 2 January, accompanied by Forster. They had arranged to spend two comfortable nights at the Adelphi Hotel, and a small group was assembling in Liverpool to make their goodbyes, including the sculptor Angus Fletcher and Fanny Burnett, Dickens’s sister, who came from Manchester. A preliminary visit of inspection to the
Britannia
dismayed Dickens when he saw the size of their stateroom. He complained that it was too small to admit their trunks, had bunk beds, and ‘When the door is open, you can’t turn round. When it’s shut you can’t put on a clean shirt, or take off a dirty one.’
⁵
Catherine took a more cheerful view, and remained on board while Dickens returned to the Adelphi for a farewell banquet of turtle, cold punch, hock, claret and champagne, after which the whole party escorted Dickens back to the ship, boarding it and ‘indiscriminately shaking hands all around’ before they left, as another passenger noted drily, only Dickens himself remaining composed.
⁶
Forster presented him with a pocket Shakespeare for his travels.

The Atlantic crossing turned out to be one of the worst the ship’s officers had ever known. There were gales and high seas for much of the time, and it took eighteen days. Dickens and Catherine were both ill for most of the first week. On the tenth day the smokestack had to be lashed with chains to stop it being blown over and setting fire to the decks. All the lifeboats were smashed by the bad weather. Catherine wrote afterwards to her sister-in-law Fanny, ‘I was nearly distracted with terror and don’t know what I should have done had it not been for the great kindness and composure of my dear Charles.’
⁷
She developed toothache and a swollen face, but gallantly joined in games of whist in which all the players had to keep their tricks in their pockets and found themselves flung from their seats and rolling out of the saloon doors as the ship bucketed and plunged. When they approached Halifax in Nova Scotia they ran aground, and had to wait for the rising tide to release them from the rocks. But once they had put in to the harbour Dickens went ashore for oysters and cheered up, and as the
Britannia
continued south he stood on deck in the clear, frosty air, looking out eagerly as the coast of America gradually came in sight.

Boston, their first American city, seen under snow and in crisp, cold sunshine, delighted him, a place as bright and clean as a new toy, with its painted signboards in the streets, green blinds at every window, elegant white wooden houses, prim, varnished churches and chapels, and handsome public buildings. There were no beggars, and the city was run on admirable principles, with state-funded welfare institutions. Most of those who guided and befriended him were Harvard graduates, men of intellectual refinement and taste. Cornelius Felton, Professor of Greek, was firmly of the opinion that Dickens rivalled Shakespeare in his powers of invention, invited the Dickenses to dinner at once and became a friend for life. William H. Prescott, the historian, author of
The Conquest of Mexico
, gave another dinner for them. The poet Longfellow called, took Dickens out walking and found him ‘a glorious fellow’. Charles Sumner, a young radical republican who went on to lead the anti-slavery movement in the Senate, showed him round the city. Some Bostonians had reservations about their famous visitor, finding him ‘low-bred’ or touched by ‘rowdyism’ – their word for vulgarity – with his coloured waistcoats and long hair, but then succumbed to his charm and acknowledged how clever he was – ‘the
cleverest
man I ever met’ wrote the author and politician Richard Dana, a respected Boston writer.
⁸

A delegation from the ‘Young Men of Boston’, a group formed the previous November when his visit was announced, arrived at his hotel to invite him to a celebratory dinner on 1 February.
⁹
At the dinner he was welcomed as Boz, who could not be a stranger, and replied that he had dreamt for years of ‘setting foot upon this shore, and breathing this pure air’. He laid great stress on his message as a writer who took for his subject ‘the rejected ones whom the world has too long forgotten, and too often misused’, and he said that letters from American readers about Nell, Oliver and Smike had encouraged him to come. After this he touched on the question of international copyright. This first time his remarks were politely ignored.
¹⁰

So far so good. He was able to spend a day visiting factories at nearby Lowell and was much impressed by what he saw, especially the well-educated girl mill-workers, and he wrote to Forster, ‘I have a book already.’
¹¹
He also visited the Asylum for the Blind, the House of Industry for the Indigent, the School for Neglected Boys, the Reformatory for Juvenile Offenders and the prison, or House of Correction for the State, and found them models of their kind. But it was not long before he and Catherine began to wilt under the requests for autographs and letters inviting them to visit every part of the country, the deputations, the cheering crowds that gathered when he went out in the afternoon, the ladies who tried to snip bits off his fur coat and asked for locks of his hair. They were obliged to shake hands with many hundreds of people. Painters wanted to paint him, sculptors to sculpt him. He found the hotel rooms ‘infernally hot’, and he missed his usual long walks and rides. ‘There never was a King or Emperor upon the Earth so cheered, and followed by crowds … and waited on by public bodies and deputations of all kinds.’
¹²
America was gripped by hysteria. ‘People
eat
him here,’ wrote one sober Bostonian to his father in Washington.
¹³
Dickens now sensibly took on a secretary, George Putnam, an aspiring painter of his own age, to help him deal with the situation, and he proved efficient and congenial enough to be kept on for the rest of the trip.

When they left Boston on 5 February the entire management of their hotel was in the lobby to see them off, and twenty-five men who just happened to be there also insisted on shaking their hands. Even so, Boston was more pleasure than pain, and it remained his favourite city. In Worcester, Springfield and Hartford they were again greeted with rapture, and at Hartford Dickens again raised the matter of international copyright. The dinner guests said nothing, but the local paper took the view that he should be pleased with his popularity and grateful for it too, and that it was mercenary to fuss about pirated copies. Much of the American press followed suit.

Catherine continued to have trouble with a swollen face, while managing to impress everyone with her straightforward and friendly disposition, but both were finding the demands of celebrity exhausting. They were obliged to spend two hours each day shaking hands with the hundreds who flocked to them wherever they were, determined not to miss their chance to meet the famous visitors. Dickens made up his mind to accept no more invitations after those already agreed for New York, although this was easier said than done. His good friend Felton came from Boston to travel with them by boat to New York, offering him just the sort of companionship he enjoyed. On the way he and Catherine were agreeably serenaded by the Yale students at New Haven, but also obliged to shake hands with another 500 strangers.

New York was preparing an extravaganza, a ‘Boz Ball’, for which 5,000 people had applied for tickets and 3,000 succeeded in obtaining them. It took place the day after their arrival, on the evening of 14 February, in the Park Theater, with its stage enlarged and turned into a ballroom decorated with medallions showing characters from Dickens’s novels, and lit with hundreds of gaslights. When all the guests were assembled, Dickens appeared on the arm of a general in full-dress uniform, as the band played ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’, followed by Catherine on the arm of the Mayor. They were cheered as they made a grand march twice round the ballroom. Actors then presented a series of tableaux from the novels, after which food was served. Dickens sent Maclise the Bill of Fare, which included 50,000 oysters, 10,000 sandwiches, 40 hams, 50 jellied turkeys, 12 Floating Swans, 350 quarts of jelly and blanc mange, and 300 quarts of ice cream. Then there was dancing: ‘Heaven knows how we did it, for there was no room. And we continued dancing until, being no longer able even to stand, we slipped away quietly,’ he told Forster. He was amused to read in a newspaper that he had never been in such society in England as he now enjoyed in New York.
¹⁴

Four days later came the New York Dickens Dinner, at which Washington Irving spoke in his praise, and Dickens announced that he would accept no more invitations to public dinners or receptions, but would travel privately from now on. He also raised once more the subject of international copyright, and although there was support for what he said in the New York
Tribune
, the rest of the press remained hostile. He complained that he got little encouragement from American writers, although he did persuade twenty-five of them, headed by Washington Irving, to sign a petition for him to take to Congress. During the weeks they stayed in New York they saw Irving almost daily and made many visits to the theatre; and Dickens was led happily into a great many oyster cellars by Felton, who had a passion for them. He also made his rounds of the Lunatic Asylum, prisons, almshouses, police stations and notorious rough districts, all carefully written up in his notes: but whereas he had admired the institutions in Boston, in New York he found most of them to be ill-managed, dismal or intolerable.
¹⁵
By 24 February he booked their return passage in June, by sailing ship this time, to avoid the horrors of their outward voyage on a steamer with its risk of fire. Both he and Catherine fell ill with sore throats and colds, and had to postpone their visit to Philadelphia, where he was to meet Edgar Allan Poe, who was a discerning admirer; Poe had sent him stories of his own, which impressed Dickens, and a favourable review of
The Old Curiosity Shop
.
¹⁶
He and Poe had two long conversations and parted on friendly terms; but Dickens was now ‘sick and sore at heart’ at the harsh treatment he was being given in the press over the copyright question, with accusations of ingratitude and greed.
¹⁷
From this point on he looked at America with an ever more disenchanted eye.

Delays in Atlantic mail ships meant that until now there had been no word of the children, but on 14 March there was at last news from Osnaburgh Street, joyously read: Charley was attempting to write and Walter was weaned. Catherine had endured the long silence with perfect stoicism, and throughout the American trip she was at her very best, not only uncomplaining but always cheerful, charming and a good companion to her husband. Being his ally among strangers, with no children, friends, family or work to distract him, clearly changed the balance between them. Still more important, the simple fact of not being pregnant allowed her to be herself and to enjoy herself. The freedom from pregnancy is so striking that it raises the question as to whether it was chance (in which case, a chance that was never repeated), or a temporary after-effect of the surgery Dickens had undergone, or even whether they had a pact during the trip that they would avoid the possibility of her becoming pregnant. The affectionate delicacy of self-imposed abstinence by her husband could have pleased her more than satisfying his sexual needs. And he saw her in a better light too. He told Mitton later that she had ‘proved herself an out and outer to travel’ and even when he mocked her to Forster for her propensity to fall over and bruise herself or scrape skin off her legs, he added, ‘she really has … made a
most admirable
traveller in every respect. She has never screamed or expressed alarm … has never given way to despondency or fatigue … has always accommodated herself, well and cheerfully, to everything; and has pleased me very much, and proved herself perfectly game.’
¹⁸
This is certainly one of the warmest testimonials Dickens ever wrote about Catherine. Even so, the tone is more what you might expect of a headmaster than a loving husband.

Neither of them had experienced anything like the way they were living now. For the first time since she had known him he was not under the pressure of one or several deadlines, forced regularly to his desk to produce a chapter or several chapters, to go through proofs, to deal with publishers and illustrators. He was not even thinking about a book. Nor did he have any of his friends to go out with, dining, walking, looking in on a club, drinking, theatre-going, taking night-time rambles through the streets, out till all hours. For the only time in their marriage Charles and Catherine were a couple facing the world with only the other to rely on, apart from the discreet services of maid and secretary. It may be that Catherine was able to be her best self only when the pressure of his all too distracting and absorbing work and masculine social life was removed and she felt she had a significant personal role in his life. She was twenty-seven that May, and she asked Fred Dickens to drink her health on her birthday, 19 May, in a letter written in April, signed ‘Your truly attached sister KATE’.
¹⁹
Her birthday is not one that gets celebrated, or mentioned, elsewhere.