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13 February 2012Last updated at 22:28 ET

When Charles Dickens fell out withAmerica

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Features & Analysis

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Network problems

On his first visit to America in 1842, English novelist Charles

Dickens was greeted like a modern rock star. But the trip soon

urned sour, as Simon Watts reports.

On Valentine's Day, 1842, New York hosted one of the grandest events

the city had ever seen - a ball in honour of the English novelist Charles

Dickens.

Dickens was only 30, but works such as Oliver Twist and the Pickwick

Papers had already made him the most famous writer in the world.

The cream of New York society hired the grandest venue in the city - the

Park Theatre - and decorated it with wreaths and paintings in honour of

the illustrious visitor.

There was even a bust of Dickens hanging from one of the theatre

balconies, with an eagle appearing to soar over his head.

Dickens and his wife, Catherine, danced most of the night in the company

of around 3,000 guests.

"If I should live to grow old," the novelist told a dinner the following night,

"the scenes of this and other evenings will shine as brightly to my dull

eyes 50 years hence as now".

But a visit which had started so well quickly turned into a bitter dispute,

known as the "Quarrel with America".

Enthusiastic fans

As a committed social reformer, Dickens wanted to use his trip to find out

if American democracy was an improvement on class-ridden Victorian

England.

The novelist particularly enjoyed Boston, his first port of call.

Few photographs endure of Dickens in the era of his American visit. The

portraits date from 1860.

A forgotten hero of

orld War II

Neutralising Africa's'exploding lake'

The Falklands e gg

shortage

Counting down the

Cooper-Ali fight

I amdisappointed....This is not the

In today'sMagazine
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His hosts watched in amazement as he charged through the snowy

streets with delight, reading aloud the signs on the shops.

But little by little, the enthusiasm of his American fans began to

overwhelm him.

When Dickens's boat made a stopover in Cleveland, he awoke to find a

"party of gentlemen" staring through the cabin window as his wife lay in

bed.

"If I turn into the street, I am followed by a multitude," Dickens complained

in a letter.

"I can't drink a glass of water, without having 100 people looking down my

throat when I open my mouth to swallow."

'Fellow animals'

The novelist was particularly irritated by Americans who tried to make

money out of his fame.

In New York, the jewellers Tiffany's had made

copies of a Dickens bust and an enterprising

barber is said to have tried to sell locks of the

writer's hair.

Then, there were the table manners of the

Americans that Dickens was forced to share

meals with as he travelled around the country.

In his travel book, American Notes, Dickens

describes Mid-Westerners at dinner as "so

many fellow animals", who "strip social sacraments of everything but the

mere satisfaction of natural cravings".

"The longer Dickens rubbed shoulders with Americans, the more he

realised that the Americans were simply not English enough," says

Professor Jerome Meckier, author of Dickens: An Innocent Abroad.

republic of myimagination

Charles Dickens in a

letter to his friend,

illiam Macready

Find out more

Dickens in America by Simon Watts was

broadcast on the BBC World Service history

programme Witness

Listen to the programme

Browse the Witness archive

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"He began to find them overbearing, boastful, vulgar, uncivil, insensitive

and above all acquisitive."

"Tobacco-tinctured saliva"

Dickens had scheduled a whole week in Washington to see if American

politics lived up to his high hopes.

He visited the Capitol, met American politicians

and attend President John Tyler's morning

reception at the White House.

But by now Dickens was in such a foul mood

that his enduring memory of the city was the

tobacco-spitting he saw in the streets.

"Washington may be called the head-quarters

of tobacco-tinctured saliva," Dickens fumed in

American Notes. "The thing itself is an

exaggeration of nastiness, which cannot be

outdone."

As for the politicians, Dickens concluded that, like everyone else in

America, they were motivated by money, not ideals.

"I am disappointed," he wrote in a famous letter. "This is not the republic

of my imagination."

Washington, Dickens blasted in American Notes, was the home of:

"Despicable trickery at elections; under-handed tamperings with public

officers; and cowardly attacks upon opponents, with scurrilous

newspapers for shields, and hired pens for daggers".

Pirated editions

By this stage in the trip, Americans were as annoyed with Dickens as the

novelist was with them.

Martin Chuzzlewit was written after Charles Dickens

returned to England from his North American trip
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The issue was a very modern one - intellectual property.

In 1842, there were no international copyright

laws so Americans could read Dickens's works

for free in pirated editions.

Once Dickens saw how popular he was in the

US, he realised he could virtually double his

income if his American fans started paying a

going rate for his work.

"I am the greatest loser alive by the present

law," he complained in letters home.

Dickens raised the matter with his American

audiences as tactfully as he could.

At literary dinners, he argued that that a

copyright law would help American writers as

much as him, and he stressed that he would

"rather have the affectionate regard of my

fellowmen as I would have heaps and mines of

gold".

But the American press turned on Dickens,

accusing him of mixing pleasure and business.

"We are mortified and grieved that he should

have been guilty of such great indelicacy and

impropriety," said the New York Courier and

Enquirer, then the country's most popular

paper.

"The entire press of the Union was predisposed to be his eulogist, but he

urged those assembled (not just to) do honour to his genius, but to look

after his purse also."

Dickens's visit to America ended with both sides accusing each other of

Courier and Enquirer's furiousresponse to American Notes:

Mr Dickens is a young man who knows nothing of

his world, of society, or of government, but what he

picked up as a "flash reporter" and penny-a-liner

when connected with some of the most scurrilous of

he vile presses with which London abounds. No

person of ordinary intelligence can get up from the

perusal of these "notes" without feeling that the

great aim of the writer is produce the impression

among the English readers that he is really

somebody, and possesses all those niceties of

feeling and sensitiveness of contact with the vulgar

mass, so frequently assumed by the low-bred

scullion unexpectedly advanced from the kitchen to

he parlour...

Courier and Enquirer, 17 November 1842
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being vulgar money-grabbers.

'Traitor'

On his return to England, Dickens published two books about his

American trip.

As well as the scathing travel writing of American Notes, he satirised the

country viciously in a section of Martin Chuzzlewit, his next major novel.

To the American press, the books were a libel on their country.

"We are all described as a filthy, gormandizing race," raged an article in

the Courier and Enquirer, which was edited by James Watson Webb.

It described Dickens as a "low-bred scullion... who for more than half his

life has lived in the stews of London".

Many of the friends Dickens had made in America, such as the novelist,

Washington Irving, were also outraged and struggled to forgive him forridiculing their country in print.

"Americans felt they'd welcomed Dickens into their country as a hero,"

says Prof Meckier, "and now there was a sense he was a traitor."

'Silver sunshine'

For some Dickens scholars, the "Quarrel With America" marks a

significant shift in his work.

"Dickens had a traumatising experience in America," argues Prof Meckier.

"He became less radical, less optimistic, and he downgraded his view of

human nature."

Dickens expressed his darker world view in later

novels such as David Copperfield and Bleak

House.

But despite the "quarrel", these books sold as

Highlights of Charles Dickens's 1842itinerary

January 22: Arrived Boston
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7/9


well as his early works. And it was the novelist's

enduring popularity with American readers that

eventually ended the dispute.

Towards the end of his life, Dickens began

holding wildly popular public readings from

works such as A Christmas Carol.

He sent a scout to assess if the American public

would react as well as his fans in England, and

after getting favourable reports, he returned to

the US in 1867 and 1868.

Dickens needn't have worried about his

reception.

"To say that his audience followed him with

delight hardly expresses the interest with which

they hung upon his every word," wrote the

Boston Journal.

"It was not Dickens, but the creation of his

genius, that seemed to live and talk before the

spectators."

Almost all of Dickens's American critics were won over by his

performances, and the quarrel was declared to be over.

"Dickens' second coming was needed to disperse every cloud and every

doubt," said the New York Tribune, "and to place his name undimmed in

the silver sunshine of American admiration".

February 2: Visited mills at Lowel,

Massachusetts

February 13: Arrived New York by boat

February 14: Ball at Park Theatre

March 2: Vis ited Tombs Prison and Public

Department

March 6: Arrived Philadelphia

March 10: Visited Capitol and White HouseMarch 13: Dinner at the White House

March 29: Arrived Pittsburgh

April 4: Arrived Cincinnati

April 10: Arrived St Louis

April 26- May 3: Niagara Falls

May 4- 29: Visited Canada

June 7: Left New York for England

Source: Charles Dickens in America by William

Glyde Wilkins

More on This Story

A forgotten hero of World War II

In today's Magazine
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