Dickens
Page 15
With no sense of the economic reality or of American irritability on such matters, Dickens had one overriding feeling: A great injustice was being done. While he could argue, even elegantly, potential advantages to both parties, he was constitutionally incapable of subordinating his definition of justice to a temperate and larger perspective. Already sensitive to the slander that “every rotten-hearted pander who … struts it in the Editorial We” might inflict on public figures, still he was unprepared for the absolute freedom of American editorial comment on his personal and public life. Having had their national pride insulted, American journalists rarely hesitated to accuse him of cupidity, an “unmanly and ungenerous” accusation from which he recoiled painfully, partly because of his vulnerability. Of all living writers he stood to gain most by a copyright agreement. Though most of his English fellow-authors supported his lobbying, some, like Bulwer, as well as numbers of his new American friends, thought his speeches unseemly and his position awkward. With Forster’s assistance, he had rallied some of the best-known British writers to sign a procopyright collective letter, which he circulated in America as if it had been spontaneously generated rather than conceived and managed by himself. He quickly realized, though, that his initial hope that legislation would be passed soon was hopelessly naive. Increasingly stubborn, he defined himself as a gadfly of righteousness whose efforts would bear fruit in the distant future, if not in time for himself, then for the writers of the next generation.
Dickens also realized that his strength was being exhausted by his intense public schedule. The winter weather wore him down with flu, toothaches, overheating, overexposure, vexation, exhaustion, weariness of spirit, a steady grind of public occasions. He was “sick to death of the life I have been leading here—worn out in mind and body—and quite weary and distressed.” He could not, however, forgo expressing his position on an issue of principle. He was “iron upon this theme; and iron I will be, here and at home, by word of mouth and in writing, as long as I can articulate a syllable, or hold a pen.” But by the middle of February 1842 he had decided on no “more public entertainments or public recognitions of any kind.”8
PRIVATE ENTERTAINMENTS WERE ANOTHER MATTER. WITH A GIFT for friendship, Dickens found American friends after his own heart. In spite of these new relationships, his thoughts turned often to England, particularly to his friends and family. Mac-ready, with his wife, was looking after the four children. For both parents, but especially for Catherine, it had been wrenchingly painful to leave them behind. After some hesitation, Dickens had concluded that it would be both dangerous and inconvenient to bring them. Gradually, through mutual tears, he had persuaded a reluctant Catherine, torn between competing loyalties, that her companionship was essential to him. His restlessness made it easier for him than for her to leave children and friends, though he warmly participated in the ritual of setting out in great state on each stop in their American travels Maclise’s pencil drawing of three of the children. He deeply missed them, more pointedly as the weeks passed. He also particularly missed Forster, to whom he wrote long letters that they had agreed would form the basis of his travel book. “How I miss you … how seriously I have thought many, many times … of the terrible folly of ever quarrelling with a true friend.…”9
Catherine’s companionship did not compensate for such losses. Even more than he, she was susceptible to colds, sore throats, and fatigue. She had begun the voyage with a painful toothache. The crowds, the drafts, the dislocation, despite the help of her stoic Scottish-born servant, Anne Brown, kept her physically off-balance. She needed more rest than her frenetic husband, who tramped with his hosts from one end to another of each city they visited. Exerting herself to be a good sport and eminently presentable, she attended balls and dinners in Boston and New York, impressing their hosts with her quiet amiability and easygoing friendliness. She seemed a compliant, slightly overweight, “mild, rosy young woman—not beautiful, but amiable,” a “small woman” embarrassed by being the “lion’s mate.” Some snobbish Boston patricians emphasized that she was her husband’s social superior. Catherine, though, had for some time revealed a “propensity” for minor accidents. “She falls into, or out of, every coach or boat we enter,” her husband remarked. She “scrapes the skin off her legs; brings great sores and swellings on her feet; chips large fragments out of her ankle-bones; and makes herself blue with bruises.” In spite of this, on their difficult trip westward in March and April, she proved herself, to her husband’s surprise, “a most admirable traveller” and “perfectly game.”10
But Dickens’ new friends, not Catherine, served as a partial recompense for the temporary loss of Forster and Maclise. On the Britannia, he had become companionable with Lord Mulgrave, George Constantine Phipps, later the second Marquis of Normanby, a good-looking young aristocrat returning to his regiment in Canada. In Boston, he met a group of talented patrician writers and intellectuals, particularly Cornelius Felton, Charles Sumner, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Clever, portly, fair-haired, and genial, Felton was both a successful professor of Greek at Harvard and a bon vivant. If he had not previously, Felton soon “entertained a profound conviction that Dickens was the most original and inventive genius since Shakespeare” and that his judgment was at least half right. Traveling in February 1842 on the same boat to New York from New Haven, where Dickens had been serenaded at night beneath his hotel window by Yale students, they “drank all the porter on board, ate all the cold pork and cheese, and were very merry indeed.” He paid his “unaffected, hearty, genial, jolly” American friend the highest compliment: He is “quite an Englishman of the best sort.” In New York, they shared their mutual passion for oysters, whose reputation as an aphrodisiac Dickens had written about humorously in “The Misplaced Attachment of Mr. John Dounce,” originally called “Love and Oysters.” They strolled up Broadway together like urban sophisticates, unconcerned about being seen exploring the high and low life of a great city, “the grave Eliot Professor and the Swelling, theatrical Boz—the little man with the red waistcoat.”11
With Sumner, a strong spokesman against slavery, trained as a lawyer but now committed to a literary career, Dickens developed an immediate rapport. Sumner became his most adventuresome and tireless Boston host, who showed him the back alleys and tourist sights as well as Beacon Hill drawing rooms. The twenty-seven-year-old Dana cast a keen, initially cold eye on the dandyesque celebrity. The son of a distinguished, strongly Anglophile Boston family, at the beginning of a brilliant career as a lawyer and writer, he had recently published Two Years Before the Mast (1840). Forster had praised the book to Dickens, who, years later, pronounced it “about the best sea book in the English tongue.” “We have heard him called ‘the handsomest man in London’ &c,” Dana wrote. “He is of the middle height (under if anything) with a large expressive eye, regular nose, matted, curling, wet-looking black hair, a dissipated looking mouth with a vulgar draw to it, a muddy olive complexion, stubby fingers & a hand by no means patrician, a hearty, off-hand manner, far from well bred, & a rapid, dashing way of talking. He looks ‘wide awake’, ‘up to anything’, full of cleverness, with quick feelings & great ardour. You admire him, & there is a fascination about him which keeps your eyes on him, yet you cannot get over the impression that he is a low bred man.… Take the genius out of his face & there are a thousand young London shop-keepers … who look exactly like him.” Like many New Englanders, Dana thought Dickens vulgar, intellectually superficial, and morally suspect, even if only because of his flaming waistcoat in a society of men dressed in sober black. But, like many of his skeptical hosts, Dana marveled at his naturalness, geniality, and humor, as if he were a phenomenon of beneficent energy. “He is the cleverest man I ever met.… He impresses you … with the alertness of his various powers.” He soon came close to sharing his father’s view that Dickens’“whole countenance speaks life and action—the face seems to flicker with the heart’s and mind’s activity.” Like anothe
r sun, “You cannot tell how dead the faces near him seemed.… He is full of life.”12
Longfellow was among those who were happy to discover that there was more of the dandy in his manner and dress than of the New England puritan or patrician. To some Americans, he seemed vulgar, frivolous, and inappropriately young. Colorful and playful, even slightly risqué in his conversational remarks, he combined a lower-middle-class mentality with Cockney bad taste. But Longfellow, the first professor of modern languages at Harvard, a talented poet in quiet rebellion against the limitations of his Cambridge life, found attractive the very qualities his compatriots found distasteful, his “gay, free and easy character,” with a slight dash of irresponsibility and social charm. Visiting Dickens at his hotel with Sumner late in January, Longfellow accompanied his old and his new friend on one of their long walks. Dickens, who thought him a “noble” fellow, admiringly read Ballads and Other Poems, which had just come out. Early in February 1842, Longfellow played host to a large breakfast party at which Dickens was the guest of honor. Dickens responded to some gossip about the notorious Mrs. Caroline Norton, the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s beautiful granddaughter, having further damaged her reputation by assisting a young friend to elope, “I’m sure I should be very happy to help anybody run away.” Longfellow was soon to run away from some of the pressures of Boston to the comparative freedom of Europe, first to the water cure in Germany, then to a visit with Dickens in London, where he became briefly a minor member of the Dickens circle.
In New York, Dickens met David Colden and William Cullen Bryant, with the exception of Irving the man he “most wanted to see in America.” A wealthy, strongly Anglophile lawyer and philanthropist, whose father had been mayor of New York, Colden had become intimate with Macready in 1826 during the actor’s first American tour. Known for his generosity, he was eagerly responsive to Dickens. The older man took an active role in entertaining the novelist and in the practical arrangements for the Boz Ball and Dickens dinner. When he left New York, Colden graciously handled business arrangements and forwarded his mail. With a lovely wife, Frances, with whom Dickens, half humorously, fell “deeply in love,” Colden was “as good a fellow as ever lived.” The meeting with Bryant proved slightly dissatisfying, at least to Bryant. Of all American poets, Dickens had the highest opinion of Bryant, who had made an international reputation in 1817 with the publication of “Thanatopsis.” His support of Dickens’ position on international copyright, though mostly privately expressed, was in his favor also. But, when they breakfasted together in late February, Dickens thought him “sad … and very reserved.” Slightly put off, Bryant remarked that though he “liked [him] hugely … the number of dispatches that came and went made me almost think I was breakfasting with a minister of state.” In a sense, he was breakfasting with an unofficial ambassador so engulfed by letters and invitations that he had already hired a full-time secretary, George Washington Putnam. Putnam served him efficiently, and Dickens immensely enjoyed his singing, painting, Hamlet-like silences, general sentimentality, and comic absurdity. Twenty-eight years later, Putnam praised “the full beauty and purity of [Dickens’] nature” and Catherine’s attractiveness, her “high, full forehead, the brown hair gracefully arranged, the look of English healthfulness in the warm glow of color in her cheeks, the blue eyes with a tinge of violet, well-arched brows, a well-shaped nose, and a mouth small and of uncommon beauty,” with a sweetness and “calm quietness” of temperament.13
The long-anticipated embrace of Irving took place immediately after Dickens’ arrival in New York, in the middle of February. Irving greeted him with wide-open arms. The best-known American prose writer, he chaired the New York dinner in his honor, attended by 250 men and a small number of women, including Catherine, who were admitted to the balcony for the speeches. One of the few Americans who stood to gain by a copyright agreement, Irving, though more sophisticated than Dickens about the politics of the issue, toasted “International Copyright.” Another speaker praised “the gifted minds of England—Hers by birth; ours by adoption.” Copyright had some American champions. It was later extolled as “the only honest turnpike between the readers of two great nations.” Only a small portion of Dickens’ speech touched on that issue, much of it an extended paen to Irving, the “Knickerbocker” who had written the humorous A History of New York; The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.; Tales of a Traveller; and The Legends of the Alhambra. “Why, gentlemen, I don’t go upstairs to bed two nights out of seven, as I have a credible witness near at hand to testify [laughter],—I say, gentlemen, I do not go to bed two nights out of seven without taking Washington Irving under my arm upstairs to bed with me [uproarious laughter].” He found Irving, known for taking small naps at other people’s tables, “a great fellow,” and developed a strong affection for him, a delightful companion in the New York social whirl that went on until the beginning of March. Urged by Dickens, Irving later joined him briefly in Washington—though he was there primarily to receive his instructions before leaving as ambassador to Spain—and then in Baltimore. Irving “wept heartily at par-ting.”14 An international celebrity himself, Irving looked forward to their meeting again in England.
Determined to observe American manners and scenery, Dickens set out on a hectic voyage to see the wonders of the New World, first its main cities in addition to Boston and New York, then the South and the West. Early in March, he descended by train to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and then Washington. American manners seemed to him warmly courteous. “When an American gentleman is polished, he is a perfect gentleman,” and “the whole people,” who are especially courteous to women, “have most affectionate and generous impulses.” But warmth sometimes became presumption and imposition. American hygiene struck him as primitive, particularly the widespread habit of spitting a combination of saliva and tobacco juice, sometimes into spitoons, usually onto the closest available surface. On one train ride, “the flashes of saliva flew so perpetually and incessantly out of the windows all the way, that it looked as though they were ripping open featherbeds inside, and letting the wind dispose of the feathers.” Another time, he disgustedly wiped the “half dried flakes of spittle” from the large, caricaturishly American raccoon coat he wore against the winter chill. Fastidious, from a middle-class culture that stressed public decorum, and never able to forget the dirt of his blacking-factory days, he was repulsed: “I can bear anything but filth.” Used to fresh air and milder winters, he gasped and sweated in overheated interiors. The practice was rarely to open windows in the winter. The ubiquitous Franklin stove made the air chokingly uncomfortable in hotels. He could not get over the “bilious and trying” weather of the northeastern United States. “One day it is hot summer, without a breath of air; the next, twenty degrees below freezing, with a wind blowing that cuts your skin like steel.”15 The unexpected non-Englishness of the country gradually made him an increasingly cranky traveler.
In Philadelphia, he was manipulated into a public reception of the sort in which he had sworn not to participate. He stood, shaking hands and bowing, for hours. In Baltimore, he met Edgar Allan Poe, on Poe’s initiative, and had a long talk about literature. He glanced at Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, a gift from the proud author, who admired Dickens and had been influenced by “A Madman’s Manuscript” in Pickwick Papers. Poe had reviewed favorably his two most recent novels. The relationship was aborted, though, by Poe’s fury two years later at being slighted in an article on American poetry published by Forster but which he believed written or at least contributed to by Dickens, since the article paraphrased what he and Dickens had said about American writers during their two conversations in Baltimore.
In Washington, much of which British invaders had burned thirty years before, the celebrity-ambassador met the ruling elite, including Henry Clay, “one of the most agreeable and fascinating men I ever saw. He is tall and slim, with long, limp, grey hair—a good head—refined features—a bright eye—a good voice�
�and a manner more frank and captivating than I ever saw in any man.” John Quincy Adams, “a fine old fellow … with most surprising vigour, memory, readiness, and pluck,” now a formidable member of the House of Representatives, though not an admirer of his novels, also entertained the novelist. Like an imperious statesman himself, Dickens shocked the company by leaving the former president’s luncheon so early as to seem either impolite or arrogant. The beetle-browed Daniel Webster called. Dickens had met him in 1839, when Webster had impressed British society, including Carlyle, with his “Parliamentary intellect and silent-rage.”16
A private interview with the rather dull but “mild and gentlemanly” John Tyler, who had assumed office on the death of President William Henry Harrison, was pleasantly perfunctory. Struggling with British-American tensions and his stalemated relationship with an antagonistic Congress, the mild-mannered president must have been able to make little of Dickens’ visit and Dickens himself, though a few days later the novelist recognized that the president was embattled and unhappy. “He expressed great surprise at my being so young. I would have returned the compliment; but he looked so jaded, that it stuck in my throat like Macbeth’s amen.” Ignorant of Washington protocol, he declined a dinner invitation from Tyler, but successfully suggested lunch instead. After visits to Congress, where he lobbyied on behalf of international copyright and presented a petition from American authors at the head of which was Irving’s name, he concluded that most American politicians were very much “like our own members—some of them very bilious-looking, some very rough, some heartily good natured, and some very coarse.”17