CHAPTER VIII.

DICKENS'S VISIT TO AMERICA.

JONG before he fixed any date for his departure, Dickens had promised Washington

Irving, and many other correspondents in America, that he would come and see them. The progress of "Oliver Twist," "Nicholas Nickleby," and other works, however, delayed the event, and many of his English admirers did all that lay in their power to keep him at home. "Worked hard," says poor Haydon, the painter, in his Diary, under date December 10th; "Talfourd said he introduced Dickens to Lady Holland. She hated the Americans, and did not want Dickens to go.

"She said, 'Why cannot you go down to Bristol, and see some of the third or fourth-class people, and they'll do just as well?'"

And the genial Thomas Hood, in his article on "Barnaby Rudge," after lamenting the temporary loss of Dickens, thus excuses his absence :-" Availing himself of the pause for a little well-earned rest and recreation, the author, it appears, has sailed on a long projected trip to America; or, according to Mr. Weller, senior, has made away with hisself to an

new one.

other, though not a better, world,' though it's called a In fact he is, we hope, paddling prosperously across the Atlantic, whilst we are sitting downto criticise the characters he has left behind him in his 'Barnaby Rudge.'

To another journal Hood sent these lines :

TO C. DICKENS, ESQ.,

On his Departure for America.
"PSHAW! away with leaf and berry,
And the sober-sided cup!
Bring a goblet, and bright sherry,
And a bumper fill me up!
Though a pledge I had to shiver,
And the longest ever was,
Ere his vessel leaves our river,

I would drink a health to Boz!
Here's success to all his antics,

Since it pleases him to roam,
And to paddle o'er Atlantics,
After such a sale at home!
May he shun all rocks whatever,

And each shallow sand that lurks,

And his passage be as clever

As the best among his works!"

It was on the 3rd of January, 1842, that our author and his wife left England for the United States. They went to Liverpool, and crossed the Atlantic in the Britannia steam-packet, Captain Hewett. The result of this trip was the publication,

by Messrs. Chapman and Hall, in October of the same year, of "American Notes for General Circulation," in two volumes, with a frontispiece by Clarkson Stanfield, R.A.

The dedication was as follows:

"I DEDICATE THIS BOOK

TO THOSE FRIENDS OF MINE IN AMERICA,

WHO,

GIVING ME A WELCOME I MUST EVER GRATEFULLY AND PROUDLY REMEMBER,

LEFT MY JUDGMENT

FREE;

AND WHO, LOVING THEIR COUNTRY,

CAN BEAR THE TRUTH, WHEN IT IS TOLD GOOD HUMOUREDLY, AND IN A KIND SPIRIT."

The publication, however, gave great offence to our author's American readers, and, as he might have foreseen, he got abused and vilified most unmercifully. Judge Haliburton (“Sam Slick "), in one of his works, alluding to the fêtes and receptions given to Dickens, said that, on his homeward passage, he had suffered severely from sea-sickness, and all the kindness he had experienced had been cast overboard.

Whether Dickens had in his mind's eye the advice tendered by old Weller to Sam, when he proposed having a "pianner" to carry Mr. Pickwick from the Fleet Prison, is uncertain :

"There ain't no vurks in it," whispered his father. "It 'ull hold him easy, with his hat and shoes on, and breathe through the legs, vich is holler. Have a passage ready taken for 'Merriker. The 'Merrikin

gov'ment vill never give him up, ven they finds as he's got money to spend, Sammy. Let the gov'ner stop there till Mrs. Bardell's dead, or Mr. Dodson and Fogg's hung, which last ewent I think is the most likely to happen first, Sammy; and then let him come back and write a book about the 'Merrikins as 'll pay all his expenses and more, if he blows 'em up enough."

Emerson, in "The Conduct of Life" (in the Essay on "Behaviour "), writes :

"Charles Dickens self-sacrificingly undertook the reformation of our American manners in unspeakable particulars. I think the lesson was not quite lost; that it held bad manners up, so that the churls could see the deformity. Unhappily, the book has its own deformities. It ought not to need to print in a reading-room a caution to strangers not to speak loud; nor to persons who look over fine engravings, that they should be handled like cobwebs and butterflies' wings; nor to persons who look at marble statues, that they shall not smite them with their canes."

In publishing a new edition of "American Notes," in 1850, Dickens, in the preface, urged that "prejudiced I have never been, otherwise than in favour of the United States. To represent me as viewing it with ill-nature, animosity, or partisanship, is merely to do a very foolish thing, which is always a very casy one, and which I have disregarded for eight years, and could disregard for eighty more."

Whatever Transatlantic critics may have thought of the work, Lord Jeffrey, on the appearance of the first edition, wrote the author a letter, in which he says, "A thousand thanks for your charming book, and for all the pleasure, profit, and relief it has afforded me. You have been very tender to our sensitive friends beyond the sea, and really said nothing which will give any serious offence to any moderately rational patriot amongst them. The slavers, of course, will give you no quarter, and of course you did not expect they would.

Your account of the silent or solitary imprisonment system is as pathetic and as powerful a piece of writing as I have ever seen, and your sweet airy little snatch of the little woman taking her new babe home to her young husband,* and your manly and feeling appeal in behalf of the poor Irish, or rather the affectionate poor of all races and tongues, who are patient and tender to their children, under circumstances which would make half the exemplary parents among the rich monsters of selfishness and discontent, remind us that we have still among us the creator of Nelly and Smike, and the schoolmaster and his dying pupil, and must continue to win for you still more of that homage of the heart, that love and esteem of the just and the good, which, though it should never be disjoined from them, should, I

*See Chapter XII. "American Notes." A very finished and beautiful little incident, related in that natural and truthful manner in which Dickens excels all other writers.