The kind of fiction Wolfe had in mind was the great urban novel of the 19th century, especially realistic depictions of Victorian London by Charles Dickens (pictured here in 1842 by American painter Francis Alexander). Of course, when it came to America, Dickens had gotten there first. He had so much to get off his chest that it took him two books to do so: American Notes for General Circulation (1842) and, the following year, Martin Chuzzlewit.
(In the 1980s, I heard a college professor tell an audience at my local library that the one Dickens novel he assigned his students was the latter. It was not only Dickens’ longest work but, at the time anyway, his only novel not covered by Cliff Notes. I guess you could say the prof had a bit of a sadistic streak…)
Americans were outraged to find that this young author they had read so enthusiastically had leveled some of his most devastating criticism against their republic.
But Dickens, unlike many other Europeans, had not visited this country merely to confirm his prejudices. He initially had feelings of great regard for the United States and had been delighted at what he saw at his first stop, Boston.
But, as he continued what became a punishing six-month tour of the United States, Dickens’ idealism about the young country began to flag. He was exhausted by his clamorous fans and hosts, disgusted by many institutions, and resentful over the nation’s refusal to consider a subject he regarded as of the utmost personal importance: copyright laws that would help ensure a steady stream of income for his rapidly growing family.
I’m surprised that the subject of Dickens in America has been of so little interest to filmmakers. The only ones that come to mind are a 1995 Masterpiece Theatre mini-series adaptation of Martin Chuzzlewit, and a 1963 episode of Bonanza featuring Jonathan Harris (Dr. Smith of Lost in Space) as Dickens, incensed that a Virginia City paper was reprinting his work without permission.
Dickens came to America in January 1842 with his wife Catherine for several reasons:
* After a five-year burst of nonstop writing activity that produced The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, and Barnaby Rudge, his nerves badly needed a break.
* In the same way that more recent writers have seen articles as a means of financing their vacations, Dickens thought he’d be able to make money out of what he saw.
* American publishers, continuing a tradition that began with Benjamin Franklin the century before, were flagrantly violating the copyright of British authors such as William Wordsworth and Sir Walter Scott—and Dickens knew exactly how much he lost each time an American publisher stiffed him on royalties.
* Dickens thought he saw in the United States an alternative to the squalid conditions of his own country, and wanted to see if the young country matched “the republic of my imagination.”
The 29-year-old author was disappointed, in one degree or another, in all of these hopes.
Dickens could not have been more delighted with Boston. He came to the city in January 1842 at the most opportune time: five years before the Irish Potato Famine drove to its streets emigrants facing the most desperate poverty and the greatest urban squalor. He remembered that when he first glimpsed the city on a Sunday morning, “the air was so clear, the houses were so bright and gay…that every thoroughfare in the city looked exactly like a pantomime.” He was similarly enthralled by the intellectuals such Boston and Cambridge intellectuals as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William H. Prescott, Charles Sumner, and Richard Henry Dana, praising “the humanizing tastes and desires [they]...engendered.”
Bostonians were so excited to see him that they didn’t make a peep when he pleaded for international copyright protection—a subject that struck as much at the economic livelihoods of editors and printers in America as they did Dickens himself.
New Yorkers were beside themselves as they read how Boston had gone all-out for the author. Gothamites, not to be outdone, wanted to give him the biggest greeting given to a foreigner since the Marquis de Lafayette toured America nearly a half century after the start of the Revolutionary War.
And so, they hit on the gaudiest celebration of all, the “Boz Ball” (named after the pen name Dickens had adopted with his first published writing, eight years before). Appropriately enough, they proposed to show him their love with this ball on Valentine’s Day.
The soiree was held in the Park Theatre, which, with capacity seating of 3,000, was the largest arena in the city. Tickets, sold at $5 each, were snapped up almost immediately, and even though some lucky buyers tried to scalp them for as much as $40 apiece, nobody was willing to part with their chance to see the social event of the season.
The “Boz Ball” was an event like no other: “the greatest affair in modern times … the fullest libation upon the altar of the muses,” according to Gotham diarist Philip Hone. Only Donald Trump could have matched its spirit of excess:
· Carriage traffic stretched for a quarter mile from the theater;· The ballroom was decorated with characters from Dickens’ plays;
· Dickens entered the hall accompanied by a general in full-dress uniform, serenaded by the tune “See the Conquering Hero Comes”;
· Tableaux vivants throughout the night pantomimed scenes from Dickens’ novels;
· Guests, one female attendant wrote a friend, consumed “50 hams, 50 tongues, 28,000 stewed oysters, 10,000 pickled oysters, 4,000 candy kisses, and 6,000 candy mottoes. (Oysters, she allowed, might be in short supply following the event.)
· Somehow or other, amid the food, guests and tableaus, space was found—barely—for dancing.
In a letter to close friend and future biographer John Forster, Dickens could hardly stop including details of the night. But the managers of the Park Theatre, who ordinarily had to deal with less-than-capacity crowds for their handsome building, proposed to make more money with another ball at less than half the price.
As the night of the second gala approached, Dickens begged off because of a sore throat. Park Theatre management, fearing the wrath of paying customers, requested a doctor’s certificate. Nothing doing, Dickens responded. It may not have been entirely coincidental that, almost immediately afterward, he announced that he would accept no more invitations to public dinners or receptions.
But there was one more he had to make in the meantime: the “Dickens Dinner,” held four days after the Boz Ball. The banquet, held at the City Hotel, was hosted by Washington Irving, the most famous American author of the time. Lately Thomas’ 1967 history, Delmonico's: A Century of Splendor, observed that for years afterwards, this banquet was regarded as “a model of gastronomy.”
After this, the mood began to sour on both sides. Though Dickens succeeded in getting more than two dozen prominent writers (including Irving) to sign a petition to Congress concerning international copyright, American newspapers began to take sharp exception to his call for creative protection.
For his part, Dickens was growing metaphorically and physically sick and tired of the experience. He loved his visits to the theater, but not to the social institutions he had told his hosts he was also there to document: prisons, almshouses, police stations, a lunatic asylum, and the seedy parts of town. The Tombs, in particular, provoked his disgust (“a place, quite unsurpassed in all the vice, neglect, and devilry, of the worst old town in Europe”).
All this tramping around, in dismal midwinter weather, left Dickens and his wife with colds and sore throats. As they traveled south, their disposition didn’t improve at all. The justification of slaveowners for “the peculiar institution” especially angered him (“Blot out, ye friends of slavery, from the catalogue of human passions, brutal lust, cruelty, and the abuse of irresponsible power”).
Though sales of American Notes that fall were enormous in the United States, the book outraged many of those who had once hailed him. The response of the anonymous reviewer of The New Englander was typical:
“These Notes are barren of incident and anecdote, deficient in wit, and meagre even in respect to the most ordinary kind of information. They give no just conception of the physical aspect of the country of which they treat; much less do they introduce the reader to the homes and firesides of its inhabitants. Nor could any thing better have been expected, since Mr. Dickens merely skimmed over the country, seldom remaining longer in a place than to learn its name, to acquaint himself with the facilities of eating, drinking, and sleeping, afforded by its principal hotel, to note down a few particulars respecting its public buildings and institutions, and to inquire with a professional feeling concerning its alms-houses, its prisons, and its purlieus of low vice and wretchedness . . . . The perusal of [the book] has served chiefly to lower our estimate of the man, and to fill us with contempt for such a compound of egotism, coxcombry, and cockneyism.”
Edgar Allan Poe summed up the general feeling more succinctly: the book was “one of the most suicidal productions, ever deliberately published by its author, who had the least reputation to lose.”
A quarter century later, Dickens returned to the United States, still professing his high regard for this country. This time, the abolition of slavery had eliminated one source of one of his most fiery criticisms of the nation (though it would take two decades more, by which time Dickens was dead, before Congress finally passed international copyright legislation).
Nonetheless, something about this rambunctious country exhausted this writer who, with all his bursting energy, liked to call himself “The Inimitable.” On another visit to New York in December 1867, the writer who, T.S. Eliot wrote, created characters “of greater intensity than human beings” grew so tired after a marathon studio session that he vowed never to be photographed again.
The image taken at this time, therefore, is the last known photograph of the author that nearly everyone--including the city he had turned against--couldn't get enough of.
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