by Fred Kaplan
With all tickets sold at the highest price, he made his American debut on December 2, reading A Christmas Carol and the trial scene from Pickwick to an overflow audience of aggressively laudatory Bostonians, including many of his literary friends, most of whom found themselves happily attending every performance. To his “pleasure and amazement,” he found in his room, before leaving for the Tremont Temple, a lovely flower for his buttonhole that Mary Boyle in England had arranged to have delivered to him, as was her practice in London. He walked to the stage “as cool… as though I were reading at Chatham.” Everything was “brilliant beyond the most sanguine hopes,” the whole city “perfectly mad” with excitement. He wired to Wills, probably for Ellen’s eyes also, TREMENDOUS SUCCESS GREATEST ENTHUSIASM ALL WELL. They were making “a clear profit of £1200 per week,” and he and Dolby amused themselves with just how much the case in a nutshell had overstated their expenses and underestimated their profits.
The ticket speculators were a problem, though, their success threatening his credibility and his principles. The rumor that he was in collusion with them surfaced. The notion that anyone but he and those he designated were profiting from the readings infuriated him, and his populist desire that the ticket prices be low enough to allow average people to afford them was being frustrated. They devised various schemes to thwart the speculators, with little success. While he finished his first series of Boston readings, Dolby in New York vainly tried to quell riots, insurgencies, and well-organized professional entrepreneurs on lines that dwarfed those in Boston. By two o’clock in the afternoon of the first day, every ticket at Steinway Hall was sold. The amount taken was over sixteen thousand dollars (about £2,285) for the first four readings alone. Since the value of the tickets was so great, many respectable people resold theirs. Soon the professionals “were selling the best seats at enormous premiums” no matter what Dolby did.20 With up to fifty people at work for them on each ticket line, they went about their completely legal profiteering hardly discouraged and mostly triumphant.
Dickens’ triumphs were on the stage as well as at the box office. Too consummate an artist to leave anything to chance, he managed his performances punctiliously. Dolby applied equally professional standards to the business arrangements. At every theatre, he tested the acoustics in advance. While Dickens stood at his table, Dolby walked to all areas of the hall as they carried on a conversation in a low tone of voice. Neither illness nor depression nor fatigue nor anger at the speculators would keep him from performing. “No man had a right,” he insisted, “to break an engagement with the public, if he were able to get out of bed.” At the beginning, he was steady and steadily on his feet. Long walks and standing during performances gradually took their toll. The Boston success during the first week was overwhelming. In a glow of pleasure he graciously tolerated the newspapers’ familiarly referring to him as “Dickens” or even “Charlie,” and he balanced the “Bar Loungers, dram drinkers, drunkards, swaggerers,” and loafers who gathered every night in the lobby of his hotel with the “delightful domestic life—simple, self-respectful, cordial, and affectionate”—that he saw in Cambridge. In New York, at the beginning of December, he found the Westminster Hotel almost faultless, with excellent food, unobtrusive service, and a quiet private apartment with its own access to the street.
“One might be living in Paris,” he said about New York. The city had changed immensely. The ground at Irving Place on which his hotel now stood had been farmland in 1842. New York has “grown out of my knowledge, and is enormous. Everything in it looks as if the order of nature were reversed, and everything grew newer every day, instead of older.” In a “very smart carriage and pair … furred up to the moustache … and with an immense white, red, and yellow striped rug for a covering,” looking like he was of “Hungarian or Polish nationality,” he did not allow a severe cold spell to prevent him going to the theatre and sightseeing. One morning at 3 A.M., visiting the central police station, he could hardly pull his eyes away from “a horrible photograph-book of thieves’ portraits.” He soon exchanged the carriage for “a red sleigh covered with furs,” joining “ten thousand other sleighs” in the park, bells ringing, fine horses “tearing up 14 miles of snow an hour.” During the snowstorm a small fire broke out in the hotel. He enjoyed the spectacle of people turning out into the lobby, having put “the strangest things on!” and helping with the fire hoses. It was colorful and amusing, and to his surprise “everybody talked to everybody else.”21
At Steinway Hall, the New York audience delighted him with its sophistication. He doubted that he ever saw a better one except in Paris. Though he did not see any change for the better “in public life … great social improvements in respect of manners and forbearance have come to pass since I was here before.” New York had become a cosmopolitan city, its rough edges softened. There was “improvement in every direction.” The Tribune, The New York Herald, The New York Times, and William Cullen Bryant’s Evening Post all now seemed to him excellent newspapers, creating “generally a much more responsible and respectable tone than prevailed formerly.” Raucous yellow journalism had abated. Even the police seemed better than anyplace else. Both the city and Dickens had definitely changed, though, unlike New York, he did not have the power to reverse the order of nature. With his “success here beyond all precedent or description,” expecting “to make a very handsome sum of money,” he was in a superlative mood. Even the enormous cost of living, which “happily we can afford,” did not distress him.
One thing that had gotten worse, though, were the railways, which seemed “truly alarming.” Perhaps his sensitivity to railway travel since the Staplehurst experience influenced his response. Still, the cars were badly ventilated, the track rougher than in England, the unrenovated lines suffering from their heavy use during the war. He felt himself beaten about on the return trip to Boston on December 21, as outrageously mistreated as most of his luggage, which arrived in fragments. He had not been feeling well. During his last readings in New York he felt ill. After one performance he had been “laid upon a bed, in a very faint and shadey state,” to recover from some “low action of the heart, or whatever it is.” The next day he stayed in bed until the afternoon. In Boston, after a walk in the bright sunlight, he felt better. But he had caught a slight cold. Soon it was “a frightful cold.” When he was back in New York on December 26, he was “exceedingly depressed and miserable.” The next day he felt so unwell that he sent for a doctor, who raised the possibility that he might have “to stop reading for a while.”22
He rejected the medical advice. Dr. Fordyce Barker, “a very agreeable fellow,” had it explained to him that there were commitments that had to be met. “I must go on if it could be done.” It was not to be thought of as more than “a very heavy cold indeed, an irritated condition of the uvula, and a restlessly low state of the nervous system.”23 On Christmas Day, most of which had been spent on the train from Boston to New York, his spirits had been particularly depressed. The very genius of Christmas seemed low, semiextinguished, pursuing profit rather than charity, transported like Scrooge to scenes of his former life that were alien and cold. He felt painfully homesick. As advance man, Dolby constantly kept ahead of him on the road. The Fieldses were mostly now behind him in Boston. Greeted like a star, Dickens felt the isolation of someone without friends and family to talk to at a trying time. He forced himself to pretend, particularly in letters home, that his cold was getting better, that he was in high spirits. Snow, thaw, snow again, constant travel, sleepless nights, four readings a week, the excitement of unexpectedly high profits, the anxiety of planning the schedule and trying to keep tickets out of the hands of speculators all contributed to his being noticeably off-balance, slightly feverish.
By early January 1868 the pattern had established itself unalterably. “The work is hard, the climate is hard, the life is hard; but so far the gain is enormous. My cold steadily refuses to stir an inch. It distresses me greatly at times, though it is a
lways good enough to leave me for the needful two hours. I have tried allopathy, homoeopathy, cold things, warm things, sweet things, bitter things, stimulants, narcotics, all with the same result. Nothing will touch it.” He and his “American catarrh” were well matched. Nothing would shake him from his schedule other than a balance-sheet analysis of his commitments and profits. When it became clear in December that he could make his goal without going west, he had canceled the Chicago plans. In the latter part of the month, he had read, to his amusement and with great success, in Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn, the only building in the borough large enough to put a dent in the demand for tickets. Hearing him read on New Year’s Eve in New York, the young Mark Twain was very disappointed. There seemed “no heart or feeling in it,” all “glittering frostwork.”
In the harsh winter, which dried his hair and broke his nails, he went on to Philadelphia, then back to New York, then to Philadelphia again, then to Baltimore and Washington. Looking in the mirror, he saw that he was losing his hair “with great rapidity, and what I don’t lose is getting very grey.” At the end of most readings, he felt exhausted and faint. He kept his eyes, though, as steadily focused on his audiences and on outward scenes as his cold would allow, and “left off referring to the hateful subject, except in emphatic sniffs … convulsive wheezes, and resounding sneezes.”24 In Philadelphia at the middle of the month, giving his twenty-sixth reading of a projected eighty-four, he had the satisfaction of sending to his bank ten thousand pounds “in English gold,” for which he had exchanged his dollars despite the loss on rates and commissions. When he arrived in the capital on the first of February he had gotten through half his readings.
Washington also had changed for the better. Having been warned that it was widely “considered the dullest … most apathetic place in America,” he found his audiences superb. After a newspaper announcement of his impending birthday, his room became “a blooming garden.” Letters and presents poured in, his hosts observing the day as if he “were a little boy.” At night his audience stood and cheered until he returned to the stage. Though “in all probability I shall never see your faces again … I can assure you that yours have yielded me as much pleasure as I have given you.” That afternoon his cold had been so bad that, plastered with a mustard poultice and almost voiceless, he despaired of being able to read. Dolby assured a visitor that “you have no idea how he will change when he gets to the little table.” Five minutes into his performance, he was not even hoarse. Some of the faces were far from anonymous. President Andrew Johnson had a “whole row for his family every night.” Justices of the Supreme Court and members of the cabinet attended. Dickens had already met most of them, particularly Johnson, who insisted on entertaining him at the White House. A short, stout man “with a remarkable face,” not “imaginative but very powerful in its firmness … indicating courage, watchfulness,” his manner “suppressed, guarded, anxious,” the president impressed him. “Each of us looked at the other very hard.” He soon discovered some of the political reasons why Johnson, who was soon to be impeached, had “an air of chronic anxiety about him,” though he seemed “a man not to be turned or trifled with. A man … who must be killed to be got out of the way.”25
The deaths of presidents was much on his mind. At a dinner hosted by Charles Sumner, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, “a man … famous for his acquaintance with the minutest details” of Dickens’ books, told a remarkable story that fascinated him. Both Stanton and Sumner had attended the cabinet meeting on the afternoon of the day of Lincoln’s assassination and had been “the first two public men at the dying President’s bedside,” remaining “with him until he breathed his last.” At the cabinet meeting, “the President sat with an air of dignity … instead of lolling about in the most ungainly attitudes, as his invariable custom was.… ‘Have you received any information, sir, not yet disclosed to us?’ ‘No … but I have had a dream. And I have had the same dream three times.…’ ‘Might one ask the nature of the dream sir?’ … ‘Well,’ replied the President … ‘I am on a great broad rolling river—and I am in a boat—and I drift—and I drift!—but this is not business—’ suddenly raising his face and looking round the room.…”26
Unable to resist the gray area between foreshadowing and clairvoyance, particularly anticipations of death, from childhood on Dickens had been sensitized to nightmare, mystery, and the unexpected, and he had had that sensitivity reinforced by his own dreams, his own stories, and his adult experiences. Committed to the importance of the emotional current of dreams, he was convinced that the striking and unlikely coincidences that frequently occurred had psychological significance. Unexpected reversals in which people actively but unconsciously pursue their own deaths fascinated him. On the evening of Thackeray’s death an ordinary household object had transformed itself in his imagination into a symbol of death. The Lincoln story became a fixation, one that he told and retold, as if he were the Ancient Mariner, who sought release and relief by retelling the primal tale of himself. He so identified with it that every retelling seems to have been a rehearsal of his anxieties about his own death.
When Dickens went to Baltimore again, he felt that “the Ghost of Slavery” still “haunted the town.” Emancipation seemed a self-serving Northern trick, pretending that the black man was free when both prejudice and inferiority enslaved him still. He believed that blacks “will die out of this country fast,” for it is “absurd to suppose it possible that they can ever hold their own against a restless, shifty, striving, stronger race.” His cold was as bad as ever. From Baltimore, Dickens went to New York and then to Boston, with a side trip to give a reading in Providence. The pressure from speculators became even more damaging when Dickens discovered that one of his staff had engaged in a form of profiteering. Profits still were immense, much beyond initial expectations. It seemed increasingly likely, though, that the country’s preoccupation with impeachment proceedings would diminish his audiences. People talked about nothing else. Suddenly it seemed sensible to cancel some readings in the hope “that the public may be heartily tired of the President’s name by the 9th of March,” when he was scheduled to resume. He himself felt tired of his “wearying life, away from all I love.”27
In the cold February weather his health was no better. Annie Fields kept his room “always radiant with brilliant flowers.” Attempting to amuse, or at least to raise his low spirits, Dolby arranged with James Osgood, Fields’s junior associate, to test Dolby’s superiority as an Englishman against the American in a race dubbed the “Great International Walking Match,” partly in emulation of, partly a mark of respect for, Dickens’ passion for walking. The walking match did amuse him. He insisted on acting as Dolby’s trainer, taking him for eight-mile-long fast-paced trial runs through mud, snow, and sleet, and he composed a comic statement of the articles of agreement for the rules of the race, the prize to be “two hats a side and the glory of their respective countries.” He and Fields, the “Gad’s Hill Gasper” and “Massachusetts Jemmy,” paced off the thirteen-mile route to Newton Centre and back on February 28. The next day, “the worst day we have ever seen,” Dolby and Osgood, the “Man of Ross” and the “Boston Bantam,” slogged vigorously through “half-melted snow, running water, and sheets and blocks of ice” over the mostly deserted Boston streets. The air was freezing, the wind biting. “Our hair, beards, eyelashes, eyebrows, were frozen hard and hung with icicles.” Though the two were almost shoulder to shoulder until halfway through the course, Osgood astonished Dolby and Dickens by forging ahead “at a splitting pace and with extraordinary endurance, and won by half a mile.” They had not believed that Osgood, or any American, had it in him. Dolby felt crushed, as if he had let down his “Chief,” his team, and his country. Dickens goodhumoredly consoled him and readily forgave Annie Fields, who, claiming that she would have done it for whoever was in the lead, had come onto “the ground in a carriage” and put “bread soaked in brandy into the winning man’s m
outh as he steamed along.” To Dickens, who hosted a “splendid” postrace dinner at his hotel for the participants and all his Boston friends, “the whole thing was a great success, and everybody was delighted.”28
Soon he was on the road once more, this time to upstate New York, particularly Albany, Syracuse, Utica, Rochester, and Buffalo, mostly for the reading tour, partly to see Niagara Falls again. Syracuse seemed “a rather depressing feather in the eagle’s wing,” as if it had begun to be built yesterday. Rochester appeared dismally isolated in the snow. One could not expect much from Buffalo, he felt, since it overflowed with Irishmen, “all or most of whom are mad.” As he moved away from the seacoast cities, he noted that the usual sparkle of female beauty gave way to hard, blunt faces. The sparkle of Niagara Falls, where in mid-March he spent two days with Dolby, had hardly dimmed. His memory and imagination came alive again. In 1842, he had had a visionary experience there, the glow of Mary’s soul visible to him in the resonances of immortality that the magnificence of the falls evoked, as if through this sublime manifestation of nature the natural world could be momentarily transcended. Everything about the falls was still “made of rainbow. “ His response now was less vibrant, less mystical, though still very powerful. Not even “Turner’s finest water-colour drawings” are “so ethereal, so imaginative, so gorgeous in colour.… I seem to be lifted from the earth and to be looking into Heaven.” His feelings of some twenty-five years before returned, though now there was something more of a reflected than a primary glow.