by Fred Kaplan
HE HAD INTENDED TO GO AS FAR AS CHARLESTON. HAVING ALREADY begun to take into account his limitations of time and energy, among other reasons because he very much wanted to go to the Far West, he soon heeded warnings that the roads, the weather, and the accommodations in the South would be uncomfortable. Keenly interested in American social institutions, particularly hospitals and prisons, some of which he had visited in Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania, he had no doubt about his antagonism to slavery. He had not anticipated, though, that the South itself would seem to him a prison in which the very existence of slavery denied him his own freedom. So repulsed was he by what he saw of slavery in Virginia that the practical grounds on which he had canceled Charleston came to seem a blessing only afterward revealed. Its sights, stench, and distortions sent him reeling with disgust. The “accursed institution,” a blight on the land, seemed to bring, or at least to be accompanied by, gloom and decay, economic and spiritual distress. The distortion of logic, reason, ethics, and the Bible by defenders of slavery seemed not only self-serving but also self-destructive, as if “cruelty, and the abuse of irresponsible power … were one of the greatest blessings of mankind.” The “mere fact of living in a town” where slavery existed was “positive misery.” After a few days he left the South for Washington and Baltimore, where he and Irving sipped a huge mint julep “far into the night.” He felt his “heart … lightened.”18
From Baltimore, he journeyed into an America whose boundary of comfort was the eastern seaboard and whose boundary of civilization was just slightly beyond the Mississippi, “the renowned father of waters.” The railroad extended twelve miles west of Baltimore. After that, it was stagecoach and river travel only. On the seaboard, he had experienced the American experiment with democracy leavened by the high culture of the British inheritance. Traveling westward, he expected to see not so much the frontier but the wilderness, the exciting but comfortable European myth of the scenically sublime and exotic, a vast region of natural beauty suffused with transcendental power. With a taste for the picturesque as well as the sublime, he found the Susquehanna valley beautiful. At Harrisburg they boarded a canal boat to Pittsburgh, whose industrial smoke reminded him of Birmingham. From Pittsburgh, they took a steamboat, on which there was “no conversation, no laughter, no cheerfulness, no sociality, except in spitting.” They traveled down “this beautiful Ohio, its wooded heights all radiant in the sunlight,” to Cincinnati, “a very beautiful city … the prettiest place I have seen here, except Boston,” whose “suburbs … turf-plots and well kept gardens” probably reminded him of England.19
But his journey to St. Louis up the Mississippi, “the beastliest river in the world,” was distressing. The constant jarring efforts, especially at night, to avoid the steamboat’s colliding with floating logs, frightened him. Pressured into attending receptions at various cities en route, he felt that “the Queen and Prince Albert could not be more tired.” The farther he moved into unsettled, fragmentary communities, the more frightened he became. He had the sense of a society without supportive circles and communities of friends. In Cairo, Illinois, at the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi, later made famous by Mark Twain as the free city that Jim and Huck Finn never reached, he had found an epitome of ugliness that he afterward anathematized, “a dismal swamp, on which the half-built houses rot away … on ground so flat and low … a breeding place of fever, ague, and death … the hateful Mississippi circling and eddying before it … an ugly sepulchre, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise: a place without one single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it.” The edge, the frontier, the open spaces, seemed to him empty or, even worse, savage. Deserted and decaying settlements along the riverbanks quickly slipped back into the wildness of nature. The settlers soon reverted to instinctive barbarism. Civilization was more fragile, more superficial, than he had imagined. What stuck most in his mind about St. Louis was Bloody Island, the dueling ground. When he visited the Looking-Glass Prairie, slightly beyond the city and the western boundary of his travels, he was disappointed—“It would be difficult to say why, or how.… Looking towards the setting sun, there lay … a vast expanse of level ground; unbroken, save by one thin line of trees, which scarcely amounted to a scratch upon the great blank.…”20
Despite all the adulation he had received on his journey, he felt even his professional self-definition challenged by this near-wilderness. Without community and hierarchy, the artist could have neither subject nor position. American individualism, in the marketplace, in politics, and now on the frontier, seemed to him anticommunal, intolerably lonely, brazenly selfish, inherently materialistic, and threateningly brutal. Ultimately, it emptied life of its highest joys. Such open spaces were a “great blank,” a world of chaos, decay, and death, nature unredeemed by man and community. There could be no morality or God in such an unhierarchical society and in an empty continent. The frontiersmen, so different from the Yankees, seemed “heavy, dull, and ignorant,” their manners increasingly offensive as he moved westward into a world that was paradoxically larger in its empty spaces but narrower, more confined, in barges, boats, and stagecoaches. It was difficult to be either a gentleman or an artist in such a world. The frontier was community at its most inchoate, landscape unredeemed by either man or God, a world of “swamps, bogs, and morasses” whose limitations were embodied in the country’s commercialism, corrupt politics, and obsession with the inescapable issue of slavery. Despite all the similarities to English culture and corruption, he increasingly saw America as distinctive in its vices. Back in Ohio, on his way northward to British Canada by stagecoach, from Cincinnati to Columbus to Sandusky, he had a moment of relief as he passed through “a beautiful country, richly cultivated and luxuriant” that made him feel he “might be travelling just now in Kent.”21 As soon as he crossed the border, he felt, with immense relief, as if he were breathing native air.
“Weary of travelling,” he visited Toronto, Kingston, Quebec, Montreal, and Queenston. His pace was slower, more restful than in his hectic dash across thousands of miles of the United States. Graciously entertained by Lord Mulgrave in late May in Montreal, he transformed Canadian raw material into an English stage performance. Before an elite British-Canadian audience of almost six hundred people, he put on for charity a comedy, A Roland for an Oliver; a farce, John Poole’s Deaf as a Post; and an interlude, with a band, gas lighting, and borrowed stage props. Officers from the Montreal military garrison played various roles. Catherine acted in the farce. The major part in all three plays was performed by “Mr. Charles Dickens.” He was also the stage manager, and not “for nothing,” he told Forster, for “didn’t I come Macready over them …? Only think of Kate playing! and playing devilish well, I assure you!” The private was followed by a public performance, with professional actresses substituting for the amateurs in the interest of propriety. Unlike his sustained three-month appearance on the American public stage, he now had the satisfaction of being in control of the performance. Filled with self-congratulations—“I really do believe that I was very funny”—the great pains and perspiration that he expended through ten days of organizing and rehearsing were part of the pleasure of self-assertion, which was followed by the reward of applause.22 Canada allowed him to be himself again.
At the end of April 1842 he saw Niagara Falls, “this Great Place … the most wonderful and beautiful in the world.” At last he felt in the presence of the sublime. He viewed it initially from the American and then, more pleasurably, from “the English side,” where he rested for over a week. For the first time he saw in America what he had expected to see, felt what he had wanted to feel. It was the only natural scene whose beauty fulfilled his idealized vision of God and eternity in nature, providing a visual equivalent of the Romantic myth of transcendence. He felt he was in the presence of “Peaceful Eternity” and his “Creator.… What voices spoke from out the thundering water; what faces, faded from the earth, looked out upon me from its gleaming depths
; what Heavenly promise glistened in those angels’ tears, the drops of many hues, that showered around, and twined themselves about the gorgeous arches which the changing rainbows made!” The voice that spoke most clearly and sweetly to him from the thunderingly peaceful waters was Mary Hogarth’s, as if she were in his presence again, as if she, who was out of time, visited regularly, at this sublime place, the time that he was still within. Here the visible and the invisible were made manifest to one another.23
Even Niagara Falls, though, had its fallen element. Some tourists had written facetiously vulgar remarks into the guest book. With vigorous priggishness, he described these remarks as so disgusting that “my wrath is kindled, past all human powers of extinction.” It was “a disgrace and degradation to our nature,” “the vilest and the filthiest ribaldry that ever human hogs delighted in.” He would “force these Hogs to live for the rest of their lives on all Fours.… Their drink should be the stagnant ditch, and their food the rankest garbage; and every morning they should each receive as many stripes as there are letters in their detestable obscenities.” Six months later, his outraged feelings still exacerbated by what seemed to him a significant attack on his idealizations, he continued his tirade. “It is humiliating enough to know that there are among men brutes so obscene and worthless, that they can delight in laying their miserable profanations upon the very steps of Nature’s greatest altar.” They “disgrace … the English language in which they are written (though I hope few of these entries have been made by Englishmen).”24 His response was intensely self-protective, resonating with his own memories of defilement, aggressively raising his growing concern that human nature had more of the base in it than he had previously been willing to recognize.
He himself was delicately balanced between graffiti and the sublime. The American experience threatened that balance. It made the oppositions starker, the threat of imbalance clearer. On the one side, there was idealism, optimism, community, and friendship. On the other, there was pragmatism, pessimism, fragmentation, and isolation. The republic of his imagination turned out to be worse than England, partly because it had disappointed him, partly because his naivete had been exposed. His unwillingness to formulate the gap between the idealizations that fiction could convey and the messy, mixed realities of the American scene heightened his anger. On one level, it was a class matter. Eager to be a democrat and an egalitarian, he had discovered that he preferred a hierarchy based on birth and talent rather than on money and equality. He preferred to help the lower classes rather than to live in a society in which purported classlessness was a disguise for a class system based on wealth, in which bad manners and the tyranny of the majority made daily life ugly and suppressed free speech. Having struggled out of the blacking factory to be a gentleman of the sort that America did not encourage, he identified with the upper middle class’s assumption of aristocratic personal values and liberal middle-class politics. The class system, many of whose faults he vigorously criticized, still seemed to him the solid structure on which a civilization higher than the American had been constructed. Though he would not claim that his family was old and distinguished, he did not hesitate to use as his bookplate a coat of arms, a lion with a Maltese cross in its hands, which his father claimed was the family escutcheon originating in the sixteenth century. Ironically, he had a poor but ambitious carpenter with literary talent, John Overs, whom he assisted but also firmly patronized, carve the mold from which the bookplate was made.
As his date of departure approached, he could hardly restrain his eagerness. “Of course there is no place like England. There never was, and never will be.” He had previously allowed himself to express that sentiment mainly in formal terms, a “yearning after our English Customs and english manners, such as you cannot conceive.” The emphasis, though, had become increasingly personal, his desire to see his children and his friends again, his need to be liberated from the oppression of an alien world. At the end of May 1842, they left Montreal, traveling by steamboat, railroad, and stagecoach to New York, via the St. Lawrence River, Lake Champlain, Albany, and the Hudson. To avoid the social entanglements of New York, he immediately took “a short excursion up the Hudson,” visiting a Shaker community, West Point, and Albany, returning the day before sailing. “As the time draws nearer, we get FEVERED with anxiety for home.… Oh home—home—home—home—home—HOME!!!!!!!!!!!” “We shall soon meet,” he wrote to Forster, “and be happier and merrier than ever we were, in all our lives.”25 He hoped to surprise his friend, if he could, in his chambers at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and to burst in upon Macready and the children unexpectedly, to stand among his “household deities again” like a redeemed prodigal son and brother whose casual good-byes had not anticipated how much he would miss his beloved friends and home. Ironically, having come miserably on a British steamship, he returned happily and comfortably on an American sailing vessel that left New York on June 2, 1842. On shipboard, he played perpetually on an accordian that he had bought in March and on which every night he had played “Home Sweet Home” as they had traveled through America.
AMERICA HAD BROUGHT HIM SHARPLY TO THE CONCLUSION THAT there were no easy solutions to long-standing social problems. Radical changes in systems of government hardly guaranteed anything more than the perpetuation of old vices in new forms. British liberal monarchism had as much or as little promise in that regard as any other system. Mankind needed a reformation of heart before it could substantially reform the political and economic structures it had created. Justice and charity in the public world could only come from such virtues in the private individual. Much depended on how powerful were the voices calling for reformation, how responsive the ears and hearts that heard. As a novelist, he could move other hearts toward higher levels of compassion and idealism and “strike a blow” against identifiable evils. As a public voice, he could speak out strongly against social injustices and communal failures in forums other than his fiction. Persistent efforts to call attention to injustice and exploitation might in the long run do more to elevate the level of life in Britain than any revolution or experiment in radical democracy. Having gone to America thinking himself a radical, he returned recognizing that he was a left-of-center Whig.
In America, he had continued a practice of visiting prisons, workhouses, hospitals, and lunatic asylums begun when he had visited Newgate in late 1835. Dickens’ morbid enthusiasm for variations of misery and its institutional treatment spoke deeply of his fascination with alternative lives that he could imagine vividly and present dramatically in his fiction. The poor, the imprisoned, the physically and emotionally deprived, were the familiar other, what he had had the potential to be but had not become. They were alternative versions of himself. Despite his depiction of Oliver as an alter ego immune from conversion to sin, his attraction both to figures like Oliver and Bill Sikes, and to a large gallery of overt and covert criminals in his later novels suggests the depth of his identification with and his sense of having escaped from degradation. He combined a personal interest in the lives and personalities of social and physical deviants with the reformer’s enthusiasm for analyzing and improving social institutions.
One of the public issues, the silent system versus the solitary or separate system, that preoccupied his assessment of American prisons had decidedly personal resonances.26 The silent system demanded that prisoners work next to one another but not speak. The solitary system deprived them of the sight as well as the sound of one another. He found the solitary system thoroughly, frighteningly repugnant. At the Eastern Penitentiary near Philadelphia, its facade modeled on a medieval castle, he saw the solitary system in operation. On the one hand, it separated criminals from one another’s contaminating contact. On the other, it tortured long-term prisoners into mental anguish so severe that he felt he “never in [his] life was more affected by anything which was not strictly [his] own grief than by the “indescribable something” which he saw in such prisoners, “distantly resembling the attentive and
sorrowful expression you see in the blind—which is never to be forgotten.… This slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain” seemed to him “immeasureably worse than any torture of the body.” A prisoner in solitary confinement “is a man buried alive,” like Dr. Manette in A Tale of Two Cities, “to be dug out in the slow round of years; and in the mean time dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair.”27 Later in the year, writing American Notes, he expanded this description into a sustained quasifictional representation of what he imagined it felt like to be imprisoned alone, with a “phantom in the corner,” when “the world without, has come to be the vision, and this solitary life, the sad reality.”
One bright winter morning, visiting the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind in Boston, he was fascinated by the faces of the blind. As the guest of the director, Samuel Howe, a doctor, social reformer, and abolitionist who the next year married the remarkable Julia Ward, he was introduced to his most interesting case, the blind and deaf-mute Laura Bridgman. He admired Howe’s administration of the institute, particularly fascinated by his success, supposedly the first of its kind, in teaching the intelligent Bridgman to use her limited resources, such as her sense of touch, as language with which to communicate. It seemed a heartening example of what intelligent, compassionate attention to and administration of social misery could achieve. But it also fascinated him, to the extent that he quoted at length in American Notes from Howe’s descriptive pamphlet. Bridgman’s condition represented his own fear of enclosure, of being cut off not only from other people but from all communication, of the great blank that he had seen in the distance from the Looking-Glass Prairie, of the society that was deaf, mute, and blind, turned in upon itself, without art, without community, without language.