Given that copies of each installment were often passed from hand to hand, and large audiences gathered regularly in pubs and coffeehouses to hear them read, the impact of Dickens’s work upon the world around him was even more profound, and far beyond anything that had come before. If publishers had been longing for a second coming of Sir Walter Scott, then with regular sales of novels exceeding five and ten times those of Ivanhoe, Dickens had more than filled the bill. His success led to a complete remaking of the expectations of the book trade, commentators have pointed out, as well as “a new, unheard of scale of remuneration for popular writers.”
And yet for all his success, Dickens was not infallible in his judgments. While he was still wrapping up installments of The Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens began work on a fifth novel, Barnaby Rudge, a historical tale built around the Gordon Riots of 1780, during which hundreds of anti-Papist protesters were shot in the London streets by government troops. Dickens had toyed with the story for several years, though he had never been able to make much headway. In 1838 he wrote to Forster of his frustration with the piece, calling it “a hideous nightmare,” which he could neither finish nor forget.
As it turned out, the latter course might have given him more peace. Though he finally threw himself into the project, publishing it between January and late November of 1841, the public’s response to Barnaby Rudge was dramatically disappointing. Sales plunged from 100,000 for issues of The Old Curiosity Shop to 70,000 for the initial issues of its successor, and to 30,000 by the end.
Though Dickens staunchly defended his work, telling Forster he was confident that “it comes out strong to the last word,” this downturn soon had him seriously considering an invitation issued by the American author Washington Irving. Irving, an ardent fan of Dickens’s work, had suggested that his British colleague undertake an American tour, insisting that the visit would be “such a triumph from one end of the States to the other, as was never known by any Nation.”
Dickens, a foe of conservative government and a champion of individual liberty, was well aware that the Gordon Riots had taken place during the same period as the American Revolution. Perhaps the anti-Tory sentiments of Barnaby Rudge might be better appreciated in the United States than they had been in his own country. Surely, Dickens thought, he would be well received in a country where crowds were said to have awaited the arrival of British packet ships bearing the latest installment of The Old Curiosity Shop, calling out to crew members, “Is Little Nell still alive?”
Furthermore, as a child of poverty, Dickens felt a great affinity for the underdog colonies and their great experiment in democracy. And besides, personal accounts by British authors touring the States had become something of a phenomenon in publishing, and he might be able to earn some extra income.
With such thoughts in mind, Dickens approached his publishers, Chapman and Hall, hoping to persuade them to advance the necessary funds for the trip. Not only would the publicity help sell the books he had already published, Dickens argued, but the experience would become the stuff of a forthcoming travel memoir of his own.
The publishers agreed, and on January 2, 1842, Dickens and his wife, Catherine, set sail aboard the 115-passenger Britannia, leaving behind their four children—including their youngest, only seven months old—in the care of Dickens’s brother Fred. Though Catherine dreaded the prospect of a risky and arduous North Atlantic journey of nearly three weeks (the first steamship crossing had taken place only four years previously), and though Dickens himself was taken aback by the quality of the shipboard accommodations (pillows “no thicker than crumpets” and a mattress that he said was beaten as flat as a muffin), they arrived in Boston on January 22, where there began an assault by reporters, editors, admirers, and curiosity seekers that would not abate for the four and a half months of their visit.
The initial crush in Boston was so great that Dickens was forced to hire a secretary and arrange a formal daily reception at which the British consul would introduce him. In New York City, more than 3,000 turned out at the Park Theater for the Boz Ball on February 14, where a huge portrait of Dickens crowned by an eagle gazed down upon a series of staged tableaux representing various scenes and characters from his works.
During his stay, Dickens met essentially all of the new nation’s most esteemed writers and thinkers, including his staunch admirer Washington Irving, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edgar Allan Poe, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greely, Henry Clay, James Russell Lowell, and Daniel Webster. In Washington, D.C., President John Tyler received him at the White House.
And yet, despite this unprecedented level of attention and acclaim, all did not go smoothly for Dickens in America. For one thing, some Americans found Dickens in person somewhat less impressive than the earth-bounding titan his success might have suggested. While accounts from his days as a junior law clerk describe a young man with a glowing pink complexion, “a fine forehead,” and “beautiful expressive eyes full of animation,” the American author Richard Henry Dana wrote to Bryant that the first sight of Dickens “may not wholly please you.” Others commented that although he stood five feet nine inches (well above average for a man of his time), he nonetheless came across as short and stout, with ears a bit too big, and unkempt hair that he fussed with a bit too much in public and over dinner.
There was also Dickens’s penchant for speaking in low, hurried tones, his accented speech somewhat thick and difficult for the American ear to apprehend. He also had a propensity for dressing in a way that trended beyond the artistic to the ostentatious, with too much jewelry on his fingers, wrists, and tie-keeps, and his colorful vests a bit too bright for local tastes. Thackeray had once described the couple at a society ball: “How splendid Mrs. Dickens was in pink satin and Mr. Dickens in geranium and ringlets.” One can only imagine how his appearance struck a rawboned American audience.
“Foppish,” one U.S. reporter described him, “of the flash order.”
All that might have been accepted as artistic eccentricity, were it not for Dickens’s inability to hold his tongue regarding a particular economic issue that pained him mightily. From his first public appearances in the United States onward, and though he was predictably complimentary regarding America’s public institutions and philosophies, he invariably brought his speeches around to the matter that seemed to consume him: he painted a vivid picture of Sir Walter Scott lying penniless on his deathbed, the victim of international publishers who had pirated the great author’s work without payment of any royalty. From that plaintive starting point, Dickens went on to call for a worldwide copyright agreement that would protect all authors’ rights—his own of course included.
Given that literary piracy was common business practice in the former colonies (as it remains today in some countries in Eastern Europe and the Far East where copyright is not recognized), it was not long before newspapers with ties to or empathy for American publishers were attacking Dickens in print, alleging that his tour was undertaken as a veiled campaign for an international copyright agreement. Dickens was outraged, and wrote to an American friend, Jonathan Chapman, “I have never in my life been so shocked and disgusted, or made so sick and sore at heart as I have been by the treatment I have received in reference to the International Copyright question. I merely say that I hope the day will come when Writers will be justly treated; and straightway there fall upon me scores of your newspapers…attacking me in such terms of vagabond scurrility as they would denounce no murderer with.”
The popular response to the copyright issue was not the only matter that diminished Dickens’s original idealization of the United States. Following stops in Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C., he planned a tour of the American South, including a stay in Charleston, South Carolina, but got no farther than Richmond, Virginia.
As Dickens explained later in American Notes, he had already begun to realize that his long-held fantasies concerning the United States were at consider
able odds with the reality he was experiencing. “When I came to consider the length of time which this journey would occupy, and the premature heat of the season, which even at Washington had been often very trying; and weighed, moreover, in my own mind, the pain of living in the constant contemplation of slavery…stripped of the disguises in which it would certainly be dressed,” he wrote, he decided to cancel his trip to the deep South.
Dickens had also been dismayed by what he considered an appalling lack of personal hygiene among his American brethren, and while some newsmen had expressed surprise at the “common” manner of the great visiting writer, Dickens for his part found Americans to be rubes, lacking in the most basic civilities.
British diplomats had remarked from the beginning upon the lack of formality in the American White House; Thomas Jefferson had been known to greet visiting heads of state while wearing slippers. During his own visit, Dickens was flabbergasted to find President Tyler’s reception room filled with lobbyists and congressmen jawing, smoking, and spitting as if they were idlers at a bar. Of the anteroom where he was taken while his arrival was announced, Dickens said it was “as unpromising and tiresome as any waiting-room in one of our public establishments, or any physician’s dining-room during his hours of consultation at home.”
There were fifteen or twenty others with him in the chamber, including a wiry old man from the West with a giant umbrella between his legs, “frowning steadily at the carpet, and twitching the hard lines about his mouth, as if he had made up his mind to fix the President on what he had to say, and wouldn’t bate him a grain.” Dickens ended this descriptive rhapsody with a portrait of another man who “did nothing but spit.” Of this pervasive habit he noted that “indeed, all these gentlemen were so very persevering and energetic in this latter particular, and bestowed their favours so abundantly upon the carpet, that I take it for granted the Presidential housemaids have high wages.”
Added to such disillusionments was the ever-mounting exhaustion both he and Catherine experienced at being constantly “on stage,” their appearance, their dress, their every gesture and chance remark subject to scrutiny and, often, vilification. In the end, Dickens would write to his actor friend and sometime business partner William Macready, “I am disappointed. This is not the Republic I came to see. This is not the Republic of my imagination.” On June 7, 1842, and following a month’s respite in Canada, Dickens and Catherine debarked for their homeland, grateful to be leaving the shores where the writer had once dreamed of finding “cities growing up, like palaces in fairy tales, among the wilds and forests of the west.”
3.
During his generally disappointing visit to the United States, Dickens wrote a number of lengthy letters to Macready and others, always intending them as the core of the book of “impressions” he planned to publish with Chapman and Hall upon his return. He quickly completed work on American Notes for General Circulation by October 1842, a volume that rather predictably focused on the national shortcomings he discovered there.
While his criticism of American table manners, its prison system (“rigid, strict, and hopeless…I believe it in its effects, to be cruel and wrong”), the institution of slavery, the rigors of travel both at sea and on the American frontier, and the hypocrisy, venality, and arrogance he found rampant might have been expected from Dickens, the indifference of his British readership to all this came as something of a surprise to him. Reviewers found little new in Dickens’s observations, the gist of which had found its way into print in many previous editions from British writers eager to share the rough-hewn “American experience.”
In contrast, the book sold rather well in the United States, though any pleasure that its author might have taken was tempered by the fact that it appeared there primarily in pirated versions and that the critical response was vituperative. The most heartening response to the book came from American abolitionists, who welcomed Dickens’s sentiments on the practice of slavery in their country.
Soon after the appearance of American Notes, Dickens began the publication of his sixth novel, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, in January 1843. In 1842 Dickens had obtained an advance of £2,000 from Chapman and Hall, to see him through his travels in the United States and a corresponding furlough from writing, in return for a new novel to be published in monthly installments. The terms of his contract also specified that in addition to his advance, he would also receive three-quarters of the net profits from sales of the new novel. But, quite possibly owing to the disappointing sales of Barnaby Rudge and the fact that Dickens was already £3,000 in debt to the house, the publishers had insisted on a clause that would allow them to deduct £50 from his monthly payment of £200 should sales of Martin Chuzzlewit fail to reach numbers necessary to pay down his debt.
Insertion of such a clause was a first for Dickens and surely less than a stirring vote of confidence, but if Dickens thought much of it at the time, he said nothing to Chapman and Hall. Indeed, he seemed supremely confident as he went about the writing of his new book, the subject of which he announced as “English life and manners,” and which centered on the machinations of a family assembled in a country house and jockeying for the fortune of Martin Chuzzlewit Sr.
Early on, Dickens wrote glowingly to John Forster, his friend and literary adviser, of his pleasure in seeing how his characters had “opened out.” The publishers were plagued by falling sales, but he was particularly happy with his decision to send his young protagonist, Chuzzlewit junior, off to tour America by the time he was writing the twelfth episode of the book. Though some critics saw this turn as a desperate attempt to revive the sluggish sales, Dickens took great pleasure in the opportunity to unleash one more salvo against the nation that had so disappointed him. “Martin has made them all stark raving mad across the water,” he crowed to Forster in August of 1843.
Among the things that rankled Americans (and cost him the friendship of his former booster Washington Irving) were observations like those of Martin’s friend Mark Tapley, who explains how he might draw the likeness of a much-exalted American symbol. Says Tapley to Martin, as they stand at the bow of their ship, watching the shore of the States disappear behind them:
“Why, I was a-thinking, sir…that if I was a painter and was called upon to paint the American Eagle, how should I do it?”
“Paint it as like an Eagle as you could, I suppose.”
“No,” said Mark. “That wouldn’t do for me, sir. I should want to draw it like a Bat, for its shortsightedness; like a Bantam, for its bragging; like a Magpie, for its honesty; like a Peacock, for its vanity, like a Ostrich, for its putting its head in the mud, and thinking nobody sees it.”
Still, if Dickens thought a fiction-based campaign against the United States would win him an increased readership in his homeland, he had once again miscalculated. Sales rose slightly for the later installments of the book, from 20,000 copies to 23,000, but that remained a far cry from the 50,000 per issue for Nicholas Nickleby and 100,000 for The Old Curiosity Shop. When publisher William Hall reminded Dickens of the clause in their contract allowing for a reduction in his salary based on slow sales, an already agitated Dickens exploded. He dashed off a letter to Forster in which he vowed never again to write for Chapman and Hall, and stated his intentions of striking an agreement with the firm of Bradbury and Evans, the printers of his books, who had demonstrated their generosity and loyalty—in the author’s mind, at least—by sending him a turkey each Christmas.
From the outside, Dickens’s response might seem petulant. There are few writers to this day even in countries with populations far larger than Victorian England who would not be thrilled with the prospect of 23,000 copies of anything they had written flying out the doors of bookshops over the course of a week or a month, and most of them would be willing to put up with the barbs of a few critics and the enmity of a public that lay an ocean away.
But the truth is—just as the bar is never lowered in the course of a vaulting comp
etition—few writers drop their expectations from book to book. A diminution of sales, interest, and public gestures of approval is tantamount to a lowering of self-worth. And certainly, for anyone who had ascended to the heights of literary Olympus, as Dickens had, the prospect of banishment to the foothills would be unbearable.
As his friend Forster often bristled when reminded of his origins as the son of a butcher, Dickens would never forget whence he had come. He was no child of privilege. There was no trust fund backing his endeavors. There was no family estate to which he might retire. He was, as is often said, only as good as his next book.
He might have passed off the disappointing response to Barnaby Rudge as his own fault, a miscalculation born of exhaustion. His sense that he needed a bit of time away from the grind of writing to gather his perspective was one reason he had conceived of his tour to the United States, after all. And perhaps he could attribute the failure of American Notes to the glut of similar books—however inferior—already in print. But, given the relative indifference to Martin Chuzzlewit, how could he help doubting his own judgment? Which is to say, his literary talent. Which is to say, his very sense of self.
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