Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 576
In Boston they could show him the asylum for the Blind where he saw Laura Bridgman, — deaf, dumb, and blind, — for whose mind thus shut from the world of the senses so much had been accomplished by intelligent and devoted teaching. Dickens was thrilled and impressed. In the book he presently wrote he devoted pages and pages, — still interesting reading, — to the marvellous way in which signals of thought and communication had been sent across the gulf of darkness that lay between Laura and the outside world.
He visited also with intense delight the State Hospital for the Insane; the reformatory where juvenile offenders were specially treated; the House of Correction (the state prison), ‘in which silence is strictly maintained but where the prisoners have the comfort and mental relief of seeing each other and working together.’ It all seemed away ahead of England. ‘In her sweeping reform and bright example to other countries on this head, America has shown great wisdom, great benevolence and exalted policy.’
‘Boz’ left Boston after a two weeks’ stay (Saturday, February 5, 1842) and held a sort of triumphal progress through the New England towns on his way to New York. At Worcester he was the guest of the state governor. At Hartford there was a big dinner at the City Hotel, where again he referred in his speech to international copyright, and a stop of over two days that allowed him to visit the Courts of Law, the Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, and the Insane Asylum, where he had much merry conversation with the inmates duly recorded in his book: and he saw there also the best jail for untried offenders in the world. Hartford was ‘a lovely place’, and New Haven which came next, ‘the city of elms, a fine town,’ in which he found that Yale College with its ‘rows of grand old elm trees’ had ‘an effect like that of an old cathedral yard in England.’ The American tour was still seen through the colours of the morning, though already in his letters Dickens was writing of ‘yearning for home’.
So he reached New York. It was time. The metropolitan press was already getting jealous of the favours shown to New England. The Tribune expressed the hope that he would spend two or three weeks in its city ‘if he is not beslavered and lionized into loathing us. We hope,’ it added, ‘to get a look at him, but begin to despair of it if he is to be disgusted with such liquorice doses as the Boston Transcript is giving him.’
But New York got its chance and proceeded to show that in the matter of public entertainment and adulation, in balls, banquets and receptions, and in prisons, jails, and other places of interest New England ‘had nothing on it’.
Mr. and Mrs. Dickens reached New York on the thirteenth of February and remained for three weeks, staying at the Carlton Hotel on Broadway. The welcome was second only, if second at all, to that accorded in New England. The Mayor of the city presided at a meeting of leading citizens to frame a vote of welcome. They resolved
That in the opinion of this meeting, it is proper and becoming in the citizens of New York to unite heartily in these demonstrations of respect and esteem which have been, and will be, everywhere in our land called forth by the visit of Mr. Dickens to America; not because of his talents alone, but in consideration of the noble use he has made of those talents, in indicating the rights and claims and feelings of humanity at large, without distinction of rank or circumstances.
If Dickens had been older and had had a less impulsive mind he would have felt from such words as these a sense of responsibility that would have restrained him from error. Towards his English readers and his English public he was always animated by exactly such a sense. He measured well what they would think, what they would tolerate and what was due to them. But he did not extend this to the States. He expected and received unbounded praise, unstinted hospitality, a national publicity. He was not prepared to pay the price in seemly reticence. The ambassador from England to America had had no training in diplomacy. His own Circumlocution Office could have given him a hint or two.
The New York meeting formed itself into a general committee of entertainment. There was no delay about it. A ‘Boz’ Ball was given the next night at the Park Theatre. There were decorations of garlands and trophies to typify the States of the Union and with designs from the writing of ‘Boz’. There was floor space for three thousand dancers. There was a huge programme of Grand Marches, Tableaux Vivants of scenes from Dickens’s books, Quadrilles and heaven knows what, ending with a Gallopade as number twenty-five. The drinks flowed as they could only flow in the ‘roaring forties’.
A local reporter wrote up the ‘Boz’ Ball with the superlatives of the period. ‘The agony is over: the “Boz” Ball, the greatest affair in modern times, the latest compliment ever paid to a little man, the fullest libation ever poured upon the altar of the muses, came off last evening in fine style. Everything answered the public expectations.’
What a homage to pour out upon one young man! What a scene! What merriment! What colossal fun! If Dickens had had the eyes to see America as he had to see England, what a host of characters, of oddities, of lovable scoundrels he would have found at the ‘Boz’ Ball. Dickens, who could gather amusement from a reptile like Squeers, fun from a vampire like Mrs. Gamp, and found a holy joy in a hypocrite like Pecksniff, could see in America nothing but crooks and snobs.
What a Dickens book could have been written about these Americans, seen through the same glasses as Mr. Pickwick, if Dickens had been able to do it.
One of the local reports gives a picture of him as he appeared: ‘The author of the Pickwick papers is a small bright and intelligent-looking young fellow, thirty years of age, somewhat of a dandy in his dress, with “rings and things in fine array”, brisk in his manner and of a lively conversation. If he does not get his head turned by all this, I shall wonder at it. Mrs. Dickens is a little plump English-looking woman, of an agreeable countenance and, I should think, a nice woman.’
The New Yorkers were able to satisfy Dickens’s curiosity in the matter of institutions, jails and such, even better than the staid New Englanders. They took him to the Tombs prison, the penitentiary, to the almshouse, to the lunatic asylum. ‘It is not all parties,’ he wrote home. ‘I go into the prisons, the police offices, the watch-houses, the hospitals, the workhouses. I was out half the night in New York with two of their most famous constables: started at midnight and went into every thieves’ house, murderous hovel, sailors’ dancing place and abode of villainy, both black and white, in the town.’
To these delights was added the compliment of a magnificent banquet at the City Hall. All the literati and distinguished men of the town, — their names eminent then but mostly forgotten now, — were at the board. Washington Irving, with whom Dickens had instituted a real friendship, was of the company: so was William Cullen Bryant, W. B. Astor, Hamilton Fish, and FitzGreene Halleck. There were endless toasts. Oratory flowed in a flood. Washington Irving, a silent man, tried to speak and broke down. Dickens spoke with that marvellous and radiant eloquence that was one of the ornaments of his genius.
He spoke, — but, — one reads in David Copperfield, a book at this time still to be written, how poor Mr. Dick, otherwise well balanced, could not keep King Charles’s head from coming into things. Dickens had acquired his King Charles’s head: and its name was International Copyright. It is not true that he came to America on purpose to agitate against the lack of copyright protection for British authors. Later on, when some one said this in England, Dickens wrote a letter to The Times and called the man, flat out, a liar.
But the thing had got in his mind. The utter injustice of stealing, without a cent of compensation, the product of a man’s creative gift: utter, absolute, robbery, — nothing else! So Dickens saw it, and so in a sense it was, except that it had grown up, like so many injustices, through no one’s particular contrivance. Dickens felt it as if the American nation, — an associated band of crooks, — had made a conspiracy to steal the property of British authors, including his own.
In a sense he was right: but oh! the inconceivable, atrocious bad taste of it! He could at least have waited. He could have gone home and written about it, or agitated about it. He had all the world as his audience at will. But he must needs use the very publicity of his welcome to give publicity to his complaint. The magnificent welcome, outdoing oriental profusion, unparalleled in the world’s history of letters, must itself be turned to his account. There he stood like a Tory Squire entertained by poachers and talking about the game laws. The odd psychology of it is that Dickens thought himself a noble fellow in doing it, and expected a noble response. It was meant as one great-hearted man addressing his generous fellows. When it went all wrong no one was more surprised than Dickens.
So in the City Hall banquet speech the rushing tide of his oratory rolled in King Charles’s head.
‘As I came here, and am here, without the least admixture of one hundredth part of one grain of base alloy, without one feeling of unworthy reference to self in any respect, I claim in reference to the past for the last time, my right in reason, in truth and in justice, to approach as I have done on two former occasions, a question of literary interest. I claim as one who has a right to speak and be heard.’
The words were mild enough, and again they passed for the time without hostile comment on the spot. In any case the guests were authors rather than booksellers, and their interests were identical with those of the speaker. There was a toast drunk for ‘international copyright, the only turnpike between the readers of two great nations.’
But meantime the copyright question and Dickens’s attack began to filter through the press to reach the publishers and the booksellers, and to call forth recrimination in return. In Dickens’s own mind, too, as the winter wore on, the subject reached the proportions of an obsession. It coloured all his view of America: it poisoned him.
‘Is it not a horrible thing’, — so he wrote home later on (but the thoughts were fermenting already), ‘that scoundrel booksellers should grow rich here from publishing books, the authors of which do not reap one farthing from their issue by scores of thousands; and that every vile, blackguard, and detestable newspaper, so filthy and bestial that no honest man would admit one into his house for a scullery door-mat, should be able to publish those same writings side by side, cheek by jowl, with the coarsest and most obscene companions with which they must become connected, in course of time, in people’s minds? Is it tolerable that besides being robbed and rifled an author should be forced to appear in any form, in any vulgar dress, in any atrocious company; that he should have no choice of his audience, no control over his own distorted text, and that he should be compelled to jostle out of the course the best men in this country who only ask to live by writing? I vow before high heaven that my blood so boils at these enormities, that when I speak about them I seem to grow twenty feet high, and to swell out in proportion. “Robbers that ye are,” I think to myself when I get upon my legs, “here goes!”’
After New York came Philadelphia, where Dickens spent two days. But already he was getting ‘fed up’ with public ovation. A notice appeared in the press before his arrival to say that ‘Mr. Dickens declines all dinners, parties, parades, shows and junketings’. But by mistake a newspaper published a notice after his arrival couched in the following style: ‘Mr. Dickens — this gentleman will, we understand, be gratified to shake hands with his friends between the hours of half-past ten and half-past eleven o’clock’. The result of this was a mob outside of the United States Hotel: the refusal of Dickens to see them: a protest from the landlord that refusal would precipitate a riot: compliance on Dickens’s part, and then for more than two hours an overwhelming procession of people shaking his hand. Dickens turned good-natured over it and took it all with smiles. This is the scene introduced in the ‘levee’ in Martin Chuzzlewit, calmly announced without asking his leave.
Much more congenial to ‘Boz’ was a visit to the Eastern Penitentiary, where he spent some time in a minute examination of the awful system of solitary confinement then in operation. It filled him with horror. In his American Notes he wrote:
On the haggard face of every man among these prisoners the same expression sat. I know not what to liken it to. It had something of that strained attention which we see upon the faces of the blind and deaf mingled with a kind of horror, as though they had all been secretly terrified. In every little chamber that I entered, and at every gate through which I looked, I seemed to see the same appalling countenance. It lives in my memory, with the fascination of a remarkable picture. Parade before my eyes a hundred men, with one among them newly released from this solitary suffering, and I would point him out.
From Philadelphia Dickens and his wife and secretary took the train for Washington. There was a stop for dinner at Baltimore and there, waited upon by slaves, he got his first actual sight of slavery, henceforth more than ever a horror to him. The thought of it aroused in him, as it always did before his tour and to his life’s end, a burning indignation. ‘Though I was with respect to it an innocent man’, he writes, ‘its presence filled me with a sense of shame and self-reproach.’ It seemed to him a ‘most hideous blot and foul disgrace’ upon the face of American civilization. It was not so much the fact of it as the idea of it that burned into his soul. Dickens could chronicle without a quiver of the pen the statement that the girls hired in the new cotton factories of Lowell worked twelve hours a day. But he could not bear the thought of the ‘slavery’ of the coloured waitresses of a Baltimore restaurant. It was the element of coercion, of the utter hopelessness of the individual against the deadweight of compulsion that filled him with a sense of stifled oppression like a man crushed under heavy weights. It was the same sympathetic suffering that he had just felt when he visited the silent corridors of that hideous prison of the Philadelphia of 1842 where ‘solitary confinement’ prevailed and silent prisoners faded to death by slow torture. As against this prison, so against American slavery Dickens cried out with all the intensity of passion. He did not stop to ask, he did not care to know, whether the plantation slave was happier than the factory hand of Lancashire, whether the slave himself felt the degradation of his chain or only the weight of it, — Dickens wanted nothing of such talk. He felt, as Longfellow felt or Channing, that the thing was utterly and hideously wrong in itself, and different from any form of want or suffering that might arise where at least the will is free. Like all the people of his day he valued individual freedom, if only freedom to die of starvation. Many of us still share his view.
His attitude towards slavery separated Dickens in thought and sympathy from the South. People who lived among slavery took it as they found it, — a sort of way of living and working. There were good owners and bad, kind and cruel: but cruelty to any real extent was the exception not the rule. A slave minded the whip as much and as little as did an Eton schoolboy. He measured it by the sting, not by the moral. People who owned slaves shuddered at the sight of an English factory, — its close mephitic air, its clattering machinery, the pale wan faces working at the looms in the gas-light, the hideous toll of the twelve and fourteen hours of work exacted from little children; the long lines of starving people clamouring for bread in the England of the ‘hungry forties’ and receiving as their answer the cold lead of the Waterloo musket. They contrasted this with the bright picture of the cornfield, bathed in wind and sun, the negroes singing at their work and the little pickaninnies clinging to the red gowns of their mothers. On such people of the South in the days of the forties descended a fury of anger when a pert Mrs. Trollope, or a prim old maid Harriet Martineau or a young Mr. Dickens, fresh from the miseries of the English factory and the London slum, should hold up their hands in pious horror over the cheerful darkey of the sunny South. They were no doubt wrong. To many of us one single family broken up and sold down the river outbalances the whole of Lancashire.
But where Dickens is wrong throughout, in his American Notes and in his personal letters and in Martin Chuzzlewit, is in his insisting on thinking of slavery as a peculiarly American institution. He should have remembered that slavery was a phenomenon not peculiar to America but belonging then to the whole world. He should have remembered that his own countrymen, from the days of the illustrious Hawkins, had taken a leading share in spreading it about the world. Slavery had died out in England centuries before because it did not pay, just as it died out in the northern states and in Canada. But wherever the English founded or conquered colonies they introduced or accepted slavery as the mainstay of colonial prosperity. In this shape British slavery lasted till within eight years of Dickens’s visit to America. Nor was it only and solely the tears of Wilberforce and the passion for liberty of the Benthams and the Mills which killed it; there was the added argument of economic value. Charles Dickens shared with all his race that peculiar and almost insulting insular smugness which deplores the sins of other nations, forgetting the recentness of their own conversion. Slavery once abolished, the Victorian contemporaries of Dickens invented a patriotic song (no doubt Charles Dickens often joined in the singing of it) in regard to the moral purity of the British flag.
‘That flag may float o’er a shot-torn wreck
But never shall float o’er a slave.’
The sentiment is noble. But it should have been sung with the zeal of new converts. The British flag at sea prior to 1808 had flown over more slaves than any other flag in the world.
