Charles Dickens's first visit to the New World

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 2003 by Gloria Deak

He was the darling of the media on both sides of the Atlantic, and who can wonder? While still in his twenties, Charles Dickens had conceived five novels teeming with new ideas and bulging with characters as colorful as they were original. Who had not heard of the irrepressible Samuel Pickwick, wandering chairman of the Pickwick Club; or of the gentle Oliver Twist, orphaned and frightened, who dared to ask for more? Or of suave Mr. Mantalini and strolling Miss Snevellicci in the wide Nicholas Nickleby circle? Who had not shed tears as they followed the serialized fate of Little Nell, begging her creator by mail not to let her die in the final segment? Such storied characters were as familiar to the minds and hearts of a multitude of readers as was the name of the author himself. And now, in January 1842, the twenty-nine-year-old Dickens was ready to board a steam packet, brave the winter terrors of the ocean, and meet his American readership. His good friend Washington Irving (Pl. XIV) had assured him he would receive a tumultuous welcome, and Dickens himself had for some time been brimming with curiosity about life in the brave new world.

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It was with great excitement, then, that Boz, as Dickens was popularly known, climbed the gangplank of the Britannia (see Pl. II) in the company of his wife and her maid. The ship carried seventy passengers, an impressive gaggle of various farm animals that were being exported, and Her Majesty's mails. Steamers were the newest travel sensation at the time, for the first successful transatlantic steam run from England to the United States had been made just four years earlier--in 1838. Still, a nineteenth-century crossing of any kind could be unsettling, as we learn from Dickens's spirited account of his 1842 trip, in which he gallantly coats with humor all that daily befell him. For one thing, he was seasick for most of the twenty days of the voyage; for another, he considered his stateroom to be of ludicrous proportions, even though it had been specially engaged for him and his wife (see Fig. 1). Was this "profoundly preposterous box," (1) he wondered, to be home for two and a half weeks? Surely, it was no more able to accommodate a couple with two large trunks, he declared, "than a giraffe could be persuaded or forced into a flower-pot. (2) Rolling seas caused his water jug to leap and plunge "like a lively dolphin," (3) while, during the entire crossing, he was forced to endure the domestic noises of the ship, such as

   the tumbling down stewards, the gambols,
   overhead, of loose casks and truant dozens of
   bottled porter, and the very remarkable and far
   from exhilarating sounds raised in their various
   state-rooms by the seventy passengers who were
   too ill to get up to breakfast. (4)

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Nonetheless, the traveler disembarked in Boston eager for the heady experiences of a country that, in his understanding, embraced all classes in its utopian politics and measured human achievement in terms of equality and energy rather than elegance and sophistication. He traveled extensively in North America over six months and, within a year of his return to England, published an account of all that he had experienced. His book, eagerly awaited on both sides of the Atlantic, was issued with the thoroughly flat title of American Notes for General Circulation. The English were delighted with his account. Not so his readers on this side of the Atlantic, for Boz's narration proved to be not altogether flattering to American society.

Boston was a city that Dickens genuinely admired (see Pl. I), and it probably set up expectations for him that were not fulfilled in other parts of the country. He responded joyfully to the environment of intellectual refinement provided by Harvard College, and commented that the public institutions and charities of the city were as nearly perfect "as the most considerate wisdom, benevolence, and humanity, can make them." (5) Because he was reform-minded and had once considered becoming a public servant concerned with education, or housing, or the treatment of criminals, he made a constant effort during his American tour to visit prisons and institutions devoted to the public good.

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His Boston visit prompted some passing remarks on the subject of transcendentalism, a philosophical concept then popular among New England's Brahmans, although a mystery to most of the population. He was given to understand that "whatever was unintelligible would be certainly transcendental" (6) and that an important doctrinal element was "a hearty disgust of Cant." (7) While not at all sure if he traderstood the basic tenets of this new philosophy, Dickens announced with aplomb that "if I were a Bostonian, I think I would be a Transcendentalist." (8)

From Boston, the novelist made an excursion to nearby Lowell, Massachusetts, which occasioned his first ride on an American train. Overheated and shabby, the train offered no shield--with its open arrangement of seats--from strangers who unabashedly struck up a conversation with him, unbidden and unwelcome. It thoroughly ruffled his English reserve. Lowell itself, however, proved to be a gratifying experience, with Dickens lauding the model conditions under which young women were employed in the factories (see Fig. 2). What left the greatest impression on him was The Lowell Offering, a literary periodical conceived and published by workers, "a repository of original articles written exclusively by females actively employed in the mills." (9)