Charles Dickens: A Life (27 page)

In Washington, Dickens had the bad luck to find a president who had not been elected but only taken over from the vice-presidency after the death of President Harrison a month into office in 1841. John Tyler was the tenth to hold the office, an undistinguished Virginian senator, now known as ‘His Accidency’ in political circles and backed by no party.
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He received Dickens in a private audience, commented on his youthful appearance, and Dickens thought of returning the compliment, ‘but he looked so jaded, that it stuck in my throat’.
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The President was fifty-one, Dickens made a note of his gentlemanly manners and found he had nothing of interest to say or ask, and when an invitation to dinner at the White House arrived a few days later, Dickens declined on the grounds that he was leaving Washington before the date proposed. It is hard to imagine a modern writer snubbing the President of the United States in this way.

He was not much more impressed by what he heard at the Senate and the House of Representatives, ‘no worse than ours, and no better’ – faint praise from him.
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But he sent a polite account to his Boston friend, Sumner, describing Senator Henry Clay as ‘a fine fellow, who has won my heart’, not surprisingly, over the international copyright question. Still, ‘I have seen no place, yet, that I like so well as Boston … We are now in the regions of slavery, spittoons, and senators – all three are evils in all countries.’
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He found the habit of spitting out gobs of chewed tobacco on the floor, common with American men, ‘the most sickening, beastly, and abominable custom that ever civilization saw’, and his descriptions of the results, seen everywhere on floors, stairs and carpets, are so vivid and disgusting that even reading them induces nausea.

There was worse. Going into slave-owning states so upset him for its blatant inhumanity that he decided to turn back after a short stay in Richmond, Virginia. From Baltimore he sent a great batch of letters to England on 22 March, to Maclise, Macready, Rogers, Talfourd, Fonblanque, Lady Holland, Lord Jeffrey, Mitton, brother Fred thanking him for his ‘affectionate care of our dear darlings’ and of course to Forster. It was at this point that he confessed, ‘I don’t like the country. I would not live here, on any consideration. It goes against the grain with me. It would with you. I think it impossible, utterly impossible, for any Englishman to live here, and be happy.’
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Forster received what was effectively a running journal, written every few days; he knew that Dickens intended to use his letters as a basis for the book he planned to write and so kept them carefully. They were full of description and detail, and also intimate and affectionate; for example he sometimes wondered what Forster was doing (‘perhaps you dine at the Crown-and-sceptre to-day, for it’s Easter Monday – who knows! I wish you drank punch, dear Forster …’). He assured him that he constantly carried the pocket Shakespeare his friend had given him, ‘an unspeakable source of delight that book is to me!’, and said how much he regretted their old quarrels: ‘Every little hasty word that has ever passed between us, rose up before me like a reproachful ghost … I seem to look back upon any miserable small interruption of our affectionate intercourse … with a sort of pity for myself as if I were another creature.’
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Towards the end of the trip he wrote, ‘I don’t seem to have been half affectionate enough, but there
are
thoughts, you know, that lie too deep for words.’
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Late March and April saw them travelling along the Pennsylvania Canal through the Allegheny Mountains. He had much to say about the ‘follies, vices, grievous disappointments’ of America.
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After a brief stop at Pittsburgh, a place of glass and gas works, foundries and heavy clouds of smoke, they spent five days in Cincinnati, ‘a very beautiful city: I think the prettiest place I have seen here, except Boston. It has risen out of the forest like an Arabian-night city; is well laid out; ornamented in the suburbs with pretty villas … has smooth turf-plots and well kept gardens.’ There were drawbacks, for instance a temperance festival in progress, naturally disapproved of by Dickens, and a party given by a judge who introduced him ‘to at least one hundred and fifty first-rate bores, separately and singly … I really think my face has acquired a fixed expression of sadness from the constant and unmitigated boring I endure.’
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Each day it was getting harder for him to find anything to admire or enjoy in America. At least in Pittsburgh Dickens had an ‘extraordinary success in magnetizing Kate’, first into hysterics and then sleep, proudly reported to both Macready and Forster, who were told he intended to continue to treat her.

They proceeded to St Louis along the Mississippi, ‘the beastliest river in the world’.
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In mid-April, Dickens made a dash into the prairie (‘I would say to every man who can’t see a prairie – go to Salisbury plain’) before they turned north again, hiring a private coach to take them from Cincinnati to Lake Erie. The only road was a ‘corduroy road’, made of logs, so rough that to the four of them inside the coach it felt like ‘going up a steep flight of stairs in an omnibus. Now the coach flung us in a heap on its floor, and now crushed our heads against its roof … Still, the day was beautiful, the air delicious, and we were
alone
: with no tobacco spittle, or eternal prosy conversation about dollars and politics … to bore us. We really enjoyed it …’
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They picnicked in the open air and slept in bug-infested log-houses. The scale of the journey they were making is astonishing, and their resilience admirable as they went on through wild terrain. Dickens complained, in one of his grand generalizations, that the country people in Ohio were ‘invariably morose, sullen, clownish, and repulsive … destitute of humour, vivacity, or the capacity of enjoyment’, and that ‘I have not heard a hearty laugh these six weeks, except my own.’ By contrast, he was moved by the plight of the native people, known to him as the Wyandot Indians, the last tribe remaining in Ohio, who were in the process of being persuaded to move west, away from their own territory, on to land provided for them by a ‘treaty’. He thought them ‘a fine people, but degraded and broken down’.
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And they reminded him of home, because they looked like the gypsies he had often seen at English race courses.

Arrived at Lake Erie, they took a steamship to Buffalo, where they found letters from home – ‘oh! who or what can say with how much pleasure and unspeakable delight!’
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Not only was there good news of the children, Forster had sent a letter signed by twelve British authors about international copyright, which Dickens had requested and which he immediately had copied by Putnam and forwarded to newspapers in Boston, New York and Washington. But although they were widely reprinted, and even found some support, they changed nothing, and international copyright was not sorted out until 1891, long after his death.

Canada lay ahead, but before that came Niagara Falls, where they stayed for ten days, until 4 May. Dickens responded to Niagara with intense emotion and was aroused to religious utterance: ‘It would be hard for a man to stand nearer to God than he does there.’ Dickens disliked and mocked displays of piety, but he maintained a reverential attitude towards the idea of God throughout his life. The sight of the great Falls led him to wish that Forster and Maclise had been with him to share ‘the sensations of this time’, and having mentioned God he was moved to think of death, and went on, ‘what would I give if the dear girl whose ashes lie in Kensal-green, had lived to come so far along with us – but she has been here many times, I doubt not, since her sweet face faded from my earthly sight.’
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Whether the Mary Hogarth who inhabited his imagination bore much relation to the real girl he had known, she remained a symbol he needed to hold on to, of the flawless and unattainable beloved. Did he actually believe her spirit wandered the world visiting selected beauty spots? It seems unlikely, any more than that he believed what he wrote by way of farewell to an American friend: ‘Who that has ever reflected on the enormous and vast amount of leave-taking there is in this Life, can ever have doubted the existence of another!’
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Precise and practical in doing good in his life, Dickens sometimes allowed himself to wander into feeble fancies when he approached spiritual matters.

In Canada they stopped briefly in Toronto – ‘the wild and rabid toryism … is … 
appalling
’ – and took steamboats down the St Lawrence River to Montreal and Quebec, passing great lumber rafts and noticing that the French population was characterized by red sashes on the boys and wide straw hats on the labouring women.
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In Montreal he and Catherine joined in theatricals with the local British regimental officers and their wives; he threw himself enthusiastically into stage managing and acting, and she acted her part in the farce ‘devilish well, I assure you’.
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All that remained was a last few days in New York, and a trip up the Hudson to see the Shakers, before they left America on 7 June. They were overjoyed at the prospect of getting home. After the miseries of the steamer on the way out, the
George Washington
, tall-masted and white-winged, carried them gallantly back to Liverpool in twenty-two days. Dickens entertained himself and fellow passengers by playing his accordion and organizing an all-male club whose members dined separately and dressed up as doctors, pretending to cure anyone who volunteered to be a patient.
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They reached Liverpool on 29 June, and were in London that night.

They went first to the children. Charley told his mother that the reunion made him ‘too glad’, and he became ill, falling into convulsions so alarming that two doctors, one of them Elliotson, had to be summoned to attend to him during the night. He recovered and was none the worse for it, and the whole family was back in Devonshire Terrace on the last day of June. They had acquired a new member: fifteen-year-old Georgina, another Hogarth sister, blue-eyed, pretty, bright and scarcely out of the schoolroom. She was to have no further education but would join in caring for the Dickens children, rewarded by sharing in the life of the household, with its many pleasures and holidays. She idolized her brother-in-law, while he was delighted to have ‘two pairs of petticoats’ to go about with and made her his pet. No one could have guessed in 1842 the part she would play sixteen years later in the domestic life of her sister and brother-in-law.

Emotional reunions with Macready and Forster followed, and Forster organized a dinner at Greenwich to celebrate Dickens’s return, for which he gathered twenty men. Edwin Landseer suggested they might have another welcoming dinner, ‘with this difference – we will take some Women with us’, but it did not materialize.
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Dickens was already at work on his account of his travels, using his own letters claimed back from friends. He wrote fast: Forster gave a reading of the chapter about the outward crossing at a dinner on 19 July. In the same month Dickens also published a circular addressed to ‘British Authors and Journals’ about the copyright situation, stating his resolution to enter into no further negotiations of any kind with American publishers as long as there was no international copyright agreement, and to forgo any profits, a decision he stuck to for ten years.
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Dickens was briefly distracted when he heard that a London newspaper, the
Courier
, was folding, and suggested to Lady Holland that some leading Liberal politicians might acquire the premises and plant, and set up a new paper. He offered to write literary and political articles, saying he had ‘perfect confidence that I could establish an organ for the party which would do good service’. It was a bold claim and a generous offer, but times were hard, the Liberal leaders did not share his confidence, and they were not prepared to put up any money.
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He gave proof of his political commitment in a long and powerful letter to the
Morning Chronicle
supporting Lord Ashley’s Mines and Collieries Bill, which sought to limit the employment of women and children underground.
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England was in recession, and these were the ‘Hungry Forties’, bad for publishers and writers; but for the moment he put aside these matters, obliged to concentrate on writing about his American experiences.

August and September were spent at Broadstairs. There were visits from Maclise and Forster, sunshine and a regatta, but Dickens kept writing, with only occasional interruptions for bathing or dancing at the Tivoli Gardens, where Emma Picken, now Mrs Christian, appeared and danced with his brother Fred. Dickens mentioned her in a letter to Mitton, ‘Emma Picken (as wos) and her husband are here, as you have heard.’ The next sentence has been scratched out, and he goes on to say that ‘Fred, I believe, has seen something of them.’
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His writing made good progress: by 16 September he had reached Niagara, and the book was being printed in October. Longfellow came to stay at Devonshire Terrace and Dickens entertained him with his specialities, taking him to Rochester, to visit London prisons, and to meet assorted tramps and thieves. The two men got on very well, and when
American Notes for General Circulation
was published on 19 October, Longfellow wrote an appreciative account of it to Sumner in Boston, saying it was ‘jovial and good natured, and at times very severe. You will read it with delight, and for the most part approbation.’
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Dickens and Forster went together to see Longfellow off at Bristol, and almost at once set off themselves, with Maclise and Stanfield, for Cornwall, where they hired an open carriage and took themselves to Land’s End and St Michael’s Mount, visited a tin mine, went to Truro, Bodmin and Tintagel, and marvelled at the height of the cliffs of north Cornwall. They all laughed a great deal, drank quantities of punch, enjoyed the ancient inns where they put up and judged the holiday a complete success.