December 22, 2018 • 24 mins
This episode revisits the story of Charles Dickens on tour, featuring previous hosts Sarah and Deblina. Dickens is best known for chronicling life in London, but he also wrote about the United States - and not in a flattering light. When touring the U.S. and Canada with his wife, Dickens found many American customs repugnant.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. This week, we have an episode coming
up on the show that's connected to Charles Dickens, and
we specifically mentioned that he went on a tour of
the United States. He also went to Canada. On that tour,
he was really treated like a celebrity. He did not
come home with a lot of money to show for
any of it. And so since that came up in
(00:23):
this forthcoming new episode, we thought we would share the
previous episode that we conveniently already had about that tour.
And this episode is from previous host Sarah and Deblina
and originally published back in March of Enjoy Welcome to
Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works
dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Fair
(00:52):
Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chuck Reboarding and lately we've been
on a bit of a literary event covering everybody from
the new to Us on Men, travel writer evleet Chellaby
too old British literature friends like the Bronte's or the Brownings.
But there's one name that keeps popping up, and that's
Charles Dickens. And of course he's a natural when you're
already thinking about the likes of the Brontes because he's
(01:15):
a contemporary. There both staples of any literature class. But
Dickens also fits in with Chellaby, albeit in a lesser
known kind of way. He was also a travel writer,
and of course Dickens is best known for dramatizing the
cruel life of London slums and finding comedy in Victorian hypocrisy.
(01:35):
I'm sure most of you have read some Dickens along
the way. He also wrote essays, and he covered parliamentary
news and produced travelogs, including a very memorable account of
his first trip to the United States and Canada. And
since two thousand twelve marks the two anniversary of dickens birth,
will be focusing on a few aspects of his life
(01:55):
over the next couple of weeks. But this seems like
a natural place to start for one, and dickens first
American tour came early in his career, right when he
achieved great fame but not yet great wealth. Second, it
shook him up, both in his beliefs and in his writing.
America was not all he had hoped, and that disillusionment
is believed to have greatly affected his later most famous works.
(02:19):
And finally it gives us a peek at something which
in the forties was really just beginning in earnest celebrity
culture with all the barber sells your hair trim means
creepiness that's involved with that, and we'll that will explain
that a little more like a little tantalizing clue for
what lies ahead. But first we're going to give you
a brief background on Charles Dickens and today, I think
(02:40):
most people know about dickens childhood at the boot blacking factory,
this really deeply scarring period during which his father was
in debtors prison and little Charles had to go to
work and retrospectively, of course, it's a critical experience for
the man who went on to create characters like Joe
and Oliver Twist or Tiny Tim. Even though I find
this interesting, his general public and even his own kids
(03:03):
didn't know about that factory work or his father's prison
time until after Dickens's death. What made that period really
horrifying was that Dickens had come out of a comfortable home.
He was born in February seventh, eighteen twelve, and he
grew up in Chatham, his father working for the Navy payoffice.
His earlier years were heavy on games, magic lantern shows
(03:24):
and performances of comic songs with his sister, sometimes even
at a nearby tavern. He was educated, and he had
a large library at his disposal, filled with titles like
The Arabian Nights, Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote. So it
was a very happy, comfortable childhood. But as his father's
fortune decline, the family moved to Camden Town, London, gave
(03:45):
up educations for the children, I think except for dickens
older sister, who still had music lessons, and rock Bottom
finally came in eighteen twenty four with debtrous prison and
factory work for by then twelve year old Charles. And
he later wrote of this, of this time, in the
shock of such a huge change in his circumstances, quote,
I felt my early hopes of growing up to be
(04:07):
a learned and distinguished man crushed in my breast. So
after a spell, you know, about nine or ten months
working in the factory, he had continued to work there, unfortunately,
after his father got out of debtors prison. But after
the family got back on its feet again, Dickens had
a little bit more schooling, and at age fifteen he
went to work, this time as a solicitor's clerk. It
(04:30):
wasn't the most interesting work, but at least it gave
him a little bit of legal background, which influenced some
of his later novels. By eight though, he started picking
up extra work as a freelance journalist, and by eighteen
thirty two he was taken on as a regular parliamentary reporter.
And Dickens certainly could have spent his whole career as
a journalist. He was popular, he was very good at it,
(04:52):
but he was really itching to write more than just
the news, and so he started publishing stories in eighteen
thirty three, and right under the name Bows, which was
kind of um version of his brother's childhood nickname. He
started contributing these street sketches to his paper in eighteen
thirty four. He had really been walking around London for
(05:13):
most of his life, so he knew all types of people,
He knew all neighborhoods, and he could paint them really
vividly in these newspaper sketches. And these popular vignettes caught
the attention of the booksellers Edward Chapman and William Hall,
who commissioned him to write text for a series of
illustrations done by a popular artist of the day. But
when the artist committed suicide shortly after the project started,
(05:35):
Dickens became the creative lead himself, shifting the focus to
the text portion of it. The result was the name
making Pickwick Papers, a smash hit that had a run
of forty thousand copies, and in his sudden success, Dickens
signed up for a multitude of projects and stepped up
as the editor of a new magazine. He'd also by
this point married Catherine Hogarth and started a family. His
(05:58):
hits came out one after another, serialized, of course, Oliver Twist,
Nicholas Nickleby the Old Curiosity Shop, and Barnaby Rudge, and
Dickens still has a reputation of being a shockingly prodigious writer,
some say maybe too much so, but even he was
getting worn down by doing so much work. So with
all of these post Pickwick promises wrapped up by the
(06:19):
early eighteen forties, he talked to his publishers and talked
them into giving him a lengthy sabbatical, paid in advance
on future work. But what was he going to do
with this really long vacation travel, of course, and Dickens
really only had one destination in mind. That was America,
Land of liberty, this nation unburdened by a bunch of
(06:40):
old world hang ups, or so Dickens hoped. He very
much hoped, as we're going to see later. He wanted
to see the Great Frontier. He wanted to see the
Democratic Experiment and Niagara Falls, all the things you can
kind of imagine somebody like Dickens wanting to to see
in person. But Dickens being Dickens, he also wanted to
see the fact drees and prisons and mad houses. Having
(07:02):
spent so much of his time investigating his own country's institutions,
he was really ready to see other examples around the world,
see what other people were up to. Katherine, of course,
wasn't too keen on leaving their four kids by this point,
eventually they had ten, but it was decided that they
would tour the United States in Canada for just six months,
(07:22):
still a pretty long time, but they would leave their
kids with the actor William McCready, who was a good
family friend, and to spice up the deal for the publishers,
who were of course paying in advance for this long sabbatical,
Dickens would still be working the whole time, and upon
his return he'd have a publishable notebook filled with all
of his travel impressions. Turned out to be a pretty
(07:44):
fateful decision. So January three, eighteen forty two, a twenty
nine year old Dickens left Liverpool in the steamship Britannia
with Catherine and her maid Anne Brown. It was about
the worst start you could possibly imagine, though they were seasick.
The cabin was so tiny and cramped the He joked
that their luggage had about as much of a chance
of fitting in the door as a giraffe had of
(08:05):
getting into a flower pot. And the weather was bad,
actually some of the worst weather that had been around
in years. It probably spent most of the trip thinking
that they were going to capsize, so not very fun.
They finally landed in Nova Scotia and then went right
on to Boston, which was the first stop of the trip,
and they got their January twenty two and really, at
first Dickens was in heaven. He supposedly would tear through
(08:28):
the Boston snow reading off shop signs. He just loved
everything he saw. But that elation didn't last very long,
and one problem was being Dickens, who was, of course
an incredibly famous and kind of surprisingly recognizable celebrity in
the United States. Though maybe it's not too surprising. Dickens
(08:57):
was known as an eccentric dresser, particularly in his youth.
One Massachusetts onlooker called him a genteel rowdy, so once
he got pointed out, maybe no, that's dickens um. As
little as half a century earlier, though, authors hadn't really
been very famous as individuals, at least at least not
in a stop and stare at them kind of way.
(09:18):
They were known mostly for their work, but with better
dissemination of news, more gossips spreading around, I mean, think
of our old very old by now Lord Byron episode,
these famous personalities, whether they were authors or actors or singers,
started to get as big as anything they were producing.
They started to become names and recognizable people. But for Dickens,
(09:41):
fame wasn't a very fun thing to acquire, no, I mean,
it involved fancy parties and meeting icons, but it also
involved a lot of the unpleasantness that we associate with
modern day celebrity culture which shocked Dickens and really disturbed him.
Crowds would follow him everywhere. He wrote, quote, if I
turned run into the street, I'm followed by a multitude.
(10:03):
And I can't drink a glass of water without having
one hundred people looking down my throat when I opened
my mouth to swallow. On a boat stop over near Cleveland,
he caught a quote party of gentlemen staring at his
sleeping wife through a cabin window. People on the docks
would actually rip handfuls of fur from his coat when
he came by. And then, I mean, if that's not
(10:24):
bad enough, there was this profit driven side of a
lot of the celebrity craze. To the Barbara we mentioned
who tried to sell his hair, Tiffany's and Company apparently
made copies of a Dickens bust and offered those up
for sale. I think this really bothered him, all of
this money making surrounding his name. And there's another aspect, though,
(10:45):
of this fame that really bothered Dickens, and that was
wherever he went, whether it was Boston, Philadelphia, St. Louis Washington,
d C. Richmond, New York City, Louisville, he met throngs
of American fans who had obviously read and enjoyed his books. Okay,
that's a good thing. Presumably they've all been buying those books,
which was true. The only problem was that, due to
(11:06):
a lack of international copyright laws, Dickens knew he hadn't
made any money off of these many fans, since US
publishers could rip off his work. So, on the one hand,
he's seeing these busts of himself that people are trying
to sell, he's knowing he's not making any money for
the actual books that have made him so famous in
the first place. So he started peppering his speeches with
(11:27):
dissatisfaction about the laws. But he wasn't oblivious. He didn't
try to center his argument on his own personal finances. Instead,
he chose to focus on the fact that all writers,
Americans included, would benefit from a change, and that at
the end of the day, he'd quote rather have the
affectionate regard of my fellow men as I would have
heaps of gold, heaps and minds of gold. So he
(11:50):
tried to catch it in terms like I'm just looking
out for all writers, and gradually though that sort of
spin on his argument changed and got a little more intense,
and while many average Americans would have agreed with him
that there needed to be some kind of copyright changes,
the press really pounced on this copyright obsession and declared
(12:10):
it an indelicate, an improper avenue of public discussion, something
that an honored guest shouldn't be going around talking to
everybody about. And it was really the first strike in
what became known as dickens Quarrel with America, because as
the press escalated things, so did Dickens. Okay, but before
we get into more particulars about what really is going
(12:31):
to sound like the ultimate failed vacation, it's worth noting
that there were some high points to this. There were
some good times. Sometimes being a celebrated author meant parties
as we mentioned, and mingling with fellow famous people. On
Valentine's Day two, for example, Dickens was the guest of
honor at one of the biggest parties to that date
in New York City's Park Theater, which was, according to
(12:53):
Simon Watson BBC magazine, decorated with wreaths, paintings, and a
bust of Dickens with an eagle boring over his head,
which sounds a little strange and I can't help but
wonder if that had anything to do with Dickens request
in his will that no monuments being made of him
seeing that eagle flying over his head. And yeah, like
(13:14):
you just mentioned, he also did get to meet a
lot of fellow writers. He met Edgar Allan, Poe, Washington,
Irving Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Harriet Beechristow, a lot of
folks who pop up in the podcast Alt Do. And
then he and Catherine had some fun too. I mean,
I know their later relationship is not characterized very well,
so we're going to talk about in another episode. But
(13:35):
during this time they seemed to have a pretty good time.
They acted in a play together. On the last leg
of their trip was which was a jaunt through Canada
that included a stop in Montreal. They really enjoyed that.
And then whenever he could, he broke away from all
of the hubbub, all of the fancier people who were
flocking around him to do what he liked to do most,
(13:56):
which was just wander tour all of these new towns
he was visiting. Yeah, he toured some of the worst neighborhoods.
In fact of New York City at the time that
was five points in the Bowery. He visited the mills
at Lowell, Massachusetts, and was impressed to find a model
industrial community, a place where the women workers only stayed
a few years. They lived in comfy boarding houses, and
(14:18):
they had access to things like lecture series, a house
run periodical, and pianos. So it was really different from
what he knew of similar situations in England. And I
think that's an important thing to consider when we get
to some of the later particulars in this episode that
he did see some he did compare some things in
the United States positively compared to what he saw in England.
(14:40):
He also toured prisons and insane asylums. It might seem
a little strange to us now to do that on
your vacation, but according to Natalie McKnight, a professor at
Boston University interviewed on the World, it wasn't that weird
for British writers to include investigative travel on their trips
to the US. There you go. Another major high point
for Dickens was a trip to the Perkins Institute, which
(15:02):
was well and is a School for the Blind in Massachusetts.
And I think it really speaks for dickins sincere interest
in social issues that the top items on his to
see in the United States list were Niagara Falls, as
we already mentioned, and then Laura Bridgeman, who was a
little girl who was deaf blind but had been educated
(15:23):
with language. And Bridgeman, who incidentally is believed to be
the first deaf blind person to be educated, had been
written about by Perkins director Dr Samuel Gridley. How and
uh he was the man who had also come up
with the system for teaching her language in the first place.
He had written this publication which proved pretty popular internationally,
(15:43):
and Dickens had heard of it. So Dickins was so
impressed by meeting Laura that he included quite a bit
of the meeting in his later published Notes on America.
And according to jan seymour Ford, who was a research
librarian at Perkins, schools for people with disabilities were really
just starting to, as she said, get traction during this time,
and dickens work helped spread the word a little bit
(16:06):
about what an institution like this could do for people
who had disabilities. Dickens work also led directly to the
education of none other than Helen Keller. Decades after Dickens visit,
Keller's parents read his American notes and came across the
(16:29):
story of Laura Bridgeman. They went to Perkins and were
connected with a graduate and teacher who was Anne Sullivan,
the miracle worker who taught Keller language. And this little
sub story here is just so interesting to me. It
makes me almost want to maybe do a future episode
on Helen Keller. But it wasn't, of course, all pleasant
trips like trips to Lottle trips to Perkins for Dickens.
(16:52):
He visited Washington, d C. In March and he met
President John Tyler. He toured the capital, but the trip
was kind of fine by the disregard for spittoons that
he witnessed in the nation's capital. He later wrote, Washington
maybe called the headquarters of tobacco tinctured saliva. The thing
itself is an exaggeration of nastiness which cannot be outdone.
(17:15):
And he went on to warn readers that if they
were gonna tour the capital, and I mean the capital building, um,
if in case they dropped anything, be careful not to
pick it up without a gloved hands because you were
probably gonna run into a bunch of tobaccos. But other
issues around the country involved what he saw as poor
(17:35):
table manners, overheated homes, arrogance, hypocrisy, and a tendency towards
violence that was illustrated by a gun fight between two
kids who were using real guns. So it kind of
ran the whole, from the whole ungloved hands to poor
table manners and went up from there. It's a verty.
(17:56):
It got more serious than that too. In Richmond he
saw slavery, which he was very outspoken against, and then
some of it was just disappointment. In St. Louis, for instance,
he was disappointed by a trip to see the looking
Glass Prairie, which is something he had really wanted to do,
go see the prairie. According to Professor Jerome Mechier, who's
the author of Dickens and Innocent Abroad, quote, the longer
(18:19):
Dickens rubbed shoulders with Americans, the more he realized that
the Americans were simply not English enough. And Dickens himself
wrote to his friend Greedy, he was taking care of
his kids. This is not the republic I came to see.
This is not the republic of my imagination, So those
are harsh words. But after he got home, Dickens did
(18:40):
one better. He started polishing up his travel journals and
he ended up publishing them as promised as American Notes
for general circulation. Then he stepped it up again. The
following year he started a new book called Martin Chuzzlewit,
and when the first issues weren't really selling that well,
he decided to pack off his hero to America and
(19:01):
included a lot of his own kind of experiences he
had seen in the Midwest. So both his travelogue and
his novel painted quite an unflattering picture of America. Seems
folks wouldn't have expected the man famous for tearing apart
hypocrisies of British life to be entirely kind, but in
fact they had new friends like Washington Irving were hurt,
(19:23):
even outraged. People in New York burned copies of Martin
Chuzzlewit papers denounced the American Notes. The trip very likely
changed Dickens to Some scholars see his work getting less
optimistic after his American journey, and I can kind of
see this from several different perspectives. One it does seem
like people overreacted quite a bit. The travel notes do
(19:45):
include kind of unfavorable comparisons to British things, you know,
where we were talking about the low um little factories
and how it's England that comes across as worse in
that situation. There's a lot of stuff like that. But um,
if people were overreacting a bit, well then maybe also
Dickens kind of had unrealistic expectations. If you go into
(20:08):
a trip and your expectations are that it will be
a land of innocent people where everything's perfect, you know,
kind of a utopia, it seemed he was expecting, you're
probably going to be a little bit disappointed, especially people
are ripping fur out of your code. That's true. So
it's not that any of this really affected dickens popularity
as an author in the US. More than twenty years later, Dickens,
(20:30):
who by this point had multiple households to support and
that's just a hint for the next podcast we're going
to come up with, he decided it might be time
to revisit America, and this time as a part of
his Smash lecture series, in which he'd act rather than
read portions of his own works from a special gas
lit lecturn, so after sending a reconnaissance scout on ahead,
(20:50):
he arrived in Boston in mid November of eighteen sixty seven.
During his northeastern tour, quite a few things happened. He
met Mark Twain or Mark Twain saw and of course
Mark Twain is also known for his his public readings,
which were apparently just as good as Dickens, and a
twelve year old girl chatted with him on a train,
(21:10):
telling him that she'd read all his books but skipped
the quote lengthy and dull parts, and she in fact
grew up to write Rebecca of Sunny Book Farm, so
a popular children's book there. And then Dr Samuel Gridley
how of Perkins, who we mentioned, contacted Dickens about publishing
The Old Curiosity Shop in Braille, and Dickens actually not
(21:32):
only gave his approval, he put up one thousand, seven
hundred dollars to have two hundred fifty copies printed, which
were in turn distributed to all of the blind schools
in America, something I thought was pretty cool. The lectures
themselves were a huge hit. I mean, of course, that
was why he was back in the United States in
the first place. He made nineteen thousand pounds, and many
(21:53):
folks couldn't remember the first tour, so there weren't any
hard feelings there. And even the press took dickens return
as a sign of goodwill. For instance, the New York
Tribune wrote, dickens second coming was needed to disperse every
cloud and every doubt, and to place his name undimmed
and the silver sunshine of American admiration. Kind of an
(22:14):
overblown welcome welcome back Dickens, and Dickens himself felt differently too.
In his farewell speech, he spoke of the quote gigantic
changes he'd seen in the country, changes, moral changes, physical
changes in the amount of land subdued and people, changes
in the rise of vast new cities, changes in the
growth of older cities almost out of recognition, changes in
(22:36):
the graces and amenities of life, changes in the press,
without whose advancement, no advancement can take place anywhere. And
he asked that the statement be added to every copy
of American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewitt, and it still is
there today. Kind of I take it back. You guys
have mids some improvement. Good job, um, So I think
it was really interesting to learn about an author so
(22:59):
associated with England, were really so associated with London in
a different context, see him out of his element a
little bit. That was what appealed to me about this story. Yeah,
I think in a way, it's actually quite a testament
to travel itself, that you can go abroad and it
opens your eyes and you just see things in a
different way. I mean, he obviously didn't work out so
(23:20):
well the first time because he had a bad experience.
He was disappointed, and like you said, that was probably
equal parts his fault and you know, the fault of
what they saw exactly if people spitting tobacco on the floor.
But when he came back the next time, it seemed
like he sort of had a different point of view well,
and he had definitely learned kind of a lesson about
(23:42):
maybe being careful when you're traveling to keep some of
your opinions. Although it's kind of nice to have that, honesty,
I'm glad looking back on it now. Thank you so
much for joining us on the Saturday. If you have
heard an email address or a Facebook you are l
(24:04):
or something similar over the course of today's episode. Since
it is from the archive that might be out of date,
now you can email us at history podcast at how
stuff works dot com, and you can find us all
over social media at missed in History. And you can
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(24:29):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how stuff works dot com
Happy Saturday, everybody. This week, we have an episode coming
up on the show that's connected to Charles Dickens, and
we specifically mentioned that he went on a tour of
the United States. He also went to Canada. On that tour,
he was really treated like a celebrity. He did not
come home with a lot of money to show for
any of it. And so since that came up in
(00:23):
this forthcoming new episode, we thought we would share the
previous episode that we conveniently already had about that tour.
And this episode is from previous host Sarah and Deblina
and originally published back in March of Enjoy Welcome to
Stuff You Missed in History Class from how Stuff Works
dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Fair
(00:52):
Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chuck Reboarding and lately we've been
on a bit of a literary event covering everybody from
the new to Us on Men, travel writer evleet Chellaby
too old British literature friends like the Bronte's or the Brownings.
But there's one name that keeps popping up, and that's
Charles Dickens. And of course he's a natural when you're
already thinking about the likes of the Brontes because he's
(01:15):
a contemporary. There both staples of any literature class. But
Dickens also fits in with Chellaby, albeit in a lesser
known kind of way. He was also a travel writer,
and of course Dickens is best known for dramatizing the
cruel life of London slums and finding comedy in Victorian hypocrisy.
(01:35):
I'm sure most of you have read some Dickens along
the way. He also wrote essays, and he covered parliamentary
news and produced travelogs, including a very memorable account of
his first trip to the United States and Canada. And
since two thousand twelve marks the two anniversary of dickens birth,
will be focusing on a few aspects of his life
(01:55):
over the next couple of weeks. But this seems like
a natural place to start for one, and dickens first
American tour came early in his career, right when he
achieved great fame but not yet great wealth. Second, it
shook him up, both in his beliefs and in his writing.
America was not all he had hoped, and that disillusionment
is believed to have greatly affected his later most famous works.
(02:19):
And finally it gives us a peek at something which
in the forties was really just beginning in earnest celebrity
culture with all the barber sells your hair trim means
creepiness that's involved with that, and we'll that will explain
that a little more like a little tantalizing clue for
what lies ahead. But first we're going to give you
a brief background on Charles Dickens and today, I think
(02:40):
most people know about dickens childhood at the boot blacking factory,
this really deeply scarring period during which his father was
in debtors prison and little Charles had to go to
work and retrospectively, of course, it's a critical experience for
the man who went on to create characters like Joe
and Oliver Twist or Tiny Tim. Even though I find
this interesting, his general public and even his own kids
(03:03):
didn't know about that factory work or his father's prison
time until after Dickens's death. What made that period really
horrifying was that Dickens had come out of a comfortable home.
He was born in February seventh, eighteen twelve, and he
grew up in Chatham, his father working for the Navy payoffice.
His earlier years were heavy on games, magic lantern shows
(03:24):
and performances of comic songs with his sister, sometimes even
at a nearby tavern. He was educated, and he had
a large library at his disposal, filled with titles like
The Arabian Nights, Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote. So it
was a very happy, comfortable childhood. But as his father's
fortune decline, the family moved to Camden Town, London, gave
(03:45):
up educations for the children, I think except for dickens
older sister, who still had music lessons, and rock Bottom
finally came in eighteen twenty four with debtrous prison and
factory work for by then twelve year old Charles. And
he later wrote of this, of this time, in the
shock of such a huge change in his circumstances, quote,
I felt my early hopes of growing up to be
(04:07):
a learned and distinguished man crushed in my breast. So
after a spell, you know, about nine or ten months
working in the factory, he had continued to work there, unfortunately,
after his father got out of debtors prison. But after
the family got back on its feet again, Dickens had
a little bit more schooling, and at age fifteen he
went to work, this time as a solicitor's clerk. It
(04:30):
wasn't the most interesting work, but at least it gave
him a little bit of legal background, which influenced some
of his later novels. By eight though, he started picking
up extra work as a freelance journalist, and by eighteen
thirty two he was taken on as a regular parliamentary reporter.
And Dickens certainly could have spent his whole career as
a journalist. He was popular, he was very good at it,
(04:52):
but he was really itching to write more than just
the news, and so he started publishing stories in eighteen
thirty three, and right under the name Bows, which was
kind of um version of his brother's childhood nickname. He
started contributing these street sketches to his paper in eighteen
thirty four. He had really been walking around London for
(05:13):
most of his life, so he knew all types of people,
He knew all neighborhoods, and he could paint them really
vividly in these newspaper sketches. And these popular vignettes caught
the attention of the booksellers Edward Chapman and William Hall,
who commissioned him to write text for a series of
illustrations done by a popular artist of the day. But
when the artist committed suicide shortly after the project started,
(05:35):
Dickens became the creative lead himself, shifting the focus to
the text portion of it. The result was the name
making Pickwick Papers, a smash hit that had a run
of forty thousand copies, and in his sudden success, Dickens
signed up for a multitude of projects and stepped up
as the editor of a new magazine. He'd also by
this point married Catherine Hogarth and started a family. His
(05:58):
hits came out one after another, serialized, of course, Oliver Twist,
Nicholas Nickleby the Old Curiosity Shop, and Barnaby Rudge, and
Dickens still has a reputation of being a shockingly prodigious writer,
some say maybe too much so, but even he was
getting worn down by doing so much work. So with
all of these post Pickwick promises wrapped up by the
(06:19):
early eighteen forties, he talked to his publishers and talked
them into giving him a lengthy sabbatical, paid in advance
on future work. But what was he going to do
with this really long vacation travel, of course, and Dickens
really only had one destination in mind. That was America,
Land of liberty, this nation unburdened by a bunch of
(06:40):
old world hang ups, or so Dickens hoped. He very
much hoped, as we're going to see later. He wanted
to see the Great Frontier. He wanted to see the
Democratic Experiment and Niagara Falls, all the things you can
kind of imagine somebody like Dickens wanting to to see
in person. But Dickens being Dickens, he also wanted to
see the fact drees and prisons and mad houses. Having
(07:02):
spent so much of his time investigating his own country's institutions,
he was really ready to see other examples around the world,
see what other people were up to. Katherine, of course,
wasn't too keen on leaving their four kids by this point,
eventually they had ten, but it was decided that they
would tour the United States in Canada for just six months,
(07:22):
still a pretty long time, but they would leave their
kids with the actor William McCready, who was a good
family friend, and to spice up the deal for the publishers,
who were of course paying in advance for this long sabbatical,
Dickens would still be working the whole time, and upon
his return he'd have a publishable notebook filled with all
of his travel impressions. Turned out to be a pretty
(07:44):
fateful decision. So January three, eighteen forty two, a twenty
nine year old Dickens left Liverpool in the steamship Britannia
with Catherine and her maid Anne Brown. It was about
the worst start you could possibly imagine, though they were seasick.
The cabin was so tiny and cramped the He joked
that their luggage had about as much of a chance
of fitting in the door as a giraffe had of
(08:05):
getting into a flower pot. And the weather was bad,
actually some of the worst weather that had been around
in years. It probably spent most of the trip thinking
that they were going to capsize, so not very fun.
They finally landed in Nova Scotia and then went right
on to Boston, which was the first stop of the trip,
and they got their January twenty two and really, at
first Dickens was in heaven. He supposedly would tear through
(08:28):
the Boston snow reading off shop signs. He just loved
everything he saw. But that elation didn't last very long,
and one problem was being Dickens, who was, of course
an incredibly famous and kind of surprisingly recognizable celebrity in
the United States. Though maybe it's not too surprising. Dickens
(08:57):
was known as an eccentric dresser, particularly in his youth.
One Massachusetts onlooker called him a genteel rowdy, so once
he got pointed out, maybe no, that's dickens um. As
little as half a century earlier, though, authors hadn't really
been very famous as individuals, at least at least not
in a stop and stare at them kind of way.
(09:18):
They were known mostly for their work, but with better
dissemination of news, more gossips spreading around, I mean, think
of our old very old by now Lord Byron episode,
these famous personalities, whether they were authors or actors or singers,
started to get as big as anything they were producing.
They started to become names and recognizable people. But for Dickens,
(09:41):
fame wasn't a very fun thing to acquire, no, I mean,
it involved fancy parties and meeting icons, but it also
involved a lot of the unpleasantness that we associate with
modern day celebrity culture which shocked Dickens and really disturbed him.
Crowds would follow him everywhere. He wrote, quote, if I
turned run into the street, I'm followed by a multitude.
(10:03):
And I can't drink a glass of water without having
one hundred people looking down my throat when I opened
my mouth to swallow. On a boat stop over near Cleveland,
he caught a quote party of gentlemen staring at his
sleeping wife through a cabin window. People on the docks
would actually rip handfuls of fur from his coat when
he came by. And then, I mean, if that's not
(10:24):
bad enough, there was this profit driven side of a
lot of the celebrity craze. To the Barbara we mentioned
who tried to sell his hair, Tiffany's and Company apparently
made copies of a Dickens bust and offered those up
for sale. I think this really bothered him, all of
this money making surrounding his name. And there's another aspect, though,
(10:45):
of this fame that really bothered Dickens, and that was
wherever he went, whether it was Boston, Philadelphia, St. Louis Washington,
d C. Richmond, New York City, Louisville, he met throngs
of American fans who had obviously read and enjoyed his books. Okay,
that's a good thing. Presumably they've all been buying those books,
which was true. The only problem was that, due to
(11:06):
a lack of international copyright laws, Dickens knew he hadn't
made any money off of these many fans, since US
publishers could rip off his work. So, on the one hand,
he's seeing these busts of himself that people are trying
to sell, he's knowing he's not making any money for
the actual books that have made him so famous in
the first place. So he started peppering his speeches with
(11:27):
dissatisfaction about the laws. But he wasn't oblivious. He didn't
try to center his argument on his own personal finances. Instead,
he chose to focus on the fact that all writers,
Americans included, would benefit from a change, and that at
the end of the day, he'd quote rather have the
affectionate regard of my fellow men as I would have
heaps of gold, heaps and minds of gold. So he
(11:50):
tried to catch it in terms like I'm just looking
out for all writers, and gradually though that sort of
spin on his argument changed and got a little more intense,
and while many average Americans would have agreed with him
that there needed to be some kind of copyright changes,
the press really pounced on this copyright obsession and declared
(12:10):
it an indelicate, an improper avenue of public discussion, something
that an honored guest shouldn't be going around talking to
everybody about. And it was really the first strike in
what became known as dickens Quarrel with America, because as
the press escalated things, so did Dickens. Okay, but before
we get into more particulars about what really is going
(12:31):
to sound like the ultimate failed vacation, it's worth noting
that there were some high points to this. There were
some good times. Sometimes being a celebrated author meant parties
as we mentioned, and mingling with fellow famous people. On
Valentine's Day two, for example, Dickens was the guest of
honor at one of the biggest parties to that date
in New York City's Park Theater, which was, according to
(12:53):
Simon Watson BBC magazine, decorated with wreaths, paintings, and a
bust of Dickens with an eagle boring over his head,
which sounds a little strange and I can't help but
wonder if that had anything to do with Dickens request
in his will that no monuments being made of him
seeing that eagle flying over his head. And yeah, like
(13:14):
you just mentioned, he also did get to meet a
lot of fellow writers. He met Edgar Allan, Poe, Washington,
Irving Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Harriet Beechristow, a lot of
folks who pop up in the podcast Alt Do. And
then he and Catherine had some fun too. I mean,
I know their later relationship is not characterized very well,
so we're going to talk about in another episode. But
(13:35):
during this time they seemed to have a pretty good time.
They acted in a play together. On the last leg
of their trip was which was a jaunt through Canada
that included a stop in Montreal. They really enjoyed that.
And then whenever he could, he broke away from all
of the hubbub, all of the fancier people who were
flocking around him to do what he liked to do most,
(13:56):
which was just wander tour all of these new towns
he was visiting. Yeah, he toured some of the worst neighborhoods.
In fact of New York City at the time that
was five points in the Bowery. He visited the mills
at Lowell, Massachusetts, and was impressed to find a model
industrial community, a place where the women workers only stayed
a few years. They lived in comfy boarding houses, and
(14:18):
they had access to things like lecture series, a house
run periodical, and pianos. So it was really different from
what he knew of similar situations in England. And I
think that's an important thing to consider when we get
to some of the later particulars in this episode that
he did see some he did compare some things in
the United States positively compared to what he saw in England.
(14:40):
He also toured prisons and insane asylums. It might seem
a little strange to us now to do that on
your vacation, but according to Natalie McKnight, a professor at
Boston University interviewed on the World, it wasn't that weird
for British writers to include investigative travel on their trips
to the US. There you go. Another major high point
for Dickens was a trip to the Perkins Institute, which
(15:02):
was well and is a School for the Blind in Massachusetts.
And I think it really speaks for dickins sincere interest
in social issues that the top items on his to
see in the United States list were Niagara Falls, as
we already mentioned, and then Laura Bridgeman, who was a
little girl who was deaf blind but had been educated
(15:23):
with language. And Bridgeman, who incidentally is believed to be
the first deaf blind person to be educated, had been
written about by Perkins director Dr Samuel Gridley. How and
uh he was the man who had also come up
with the system for teaching her language in the first place.
He had written this publication which proved pretty popular internationally,
(15:43):
and Dickens had heard of it. So Dickins was so
impressed by meeting Laura that he included quite a bit
of the meeting in his later published Notes on America.
And according to jan seymour Ford, who was a research
librarian at Perkins, schools for people with disabilities were really
just starting to, as she said, get traction during this time,
and dickens work helped spread the word a little bit
(16:06):
about what an institution like this could do for people
who had disabilities. Dickens work also led directly to the
education of none other than Helen Keller. Decades after Dickens visit,
Keller's parents read his American notes and came across the
(16:29):
story of Laura Bridgeman. They went to Perkins and were
connected with a graduate and teacher who was Anne Sullivan,
the miracle worker who taught Keller language. And this little
sub story here is just so interesting to me. It
makes me almost want to maybe do a future episode
on Helen Keller. But it wasn't, of course, all pleasant
trips like trips to Lottle trips to Perkins for Dickens.
(16:52):
He visited Washington, d C. In March and he met
President John Tyler. He toured the capital, but the trip
was kind of fine by the disregard for spittoons that
he witnessed in the nation's capital. He later wrote, Washington
maybe called the headquarters of tobacco tinctured saliva. The thing
itself is an exaggeration of nastiness which cannot be outdone.
(17:15):
And he went on to warn readers that if they
were gonna tour the capital, and I mean the capital building, um,
if in case they dropped anything, be careful not to
pick it up without a gloved hands because you were
probably gonna run into a bunch of tobaccos. But other
issues around the country involved what he saw as poor
(17:35):
table manners, overheated homes, arrogance, hypocrisy, and a tendency towards
violence that was illustrated by a gun fight between two
kids who were using real guns. So it kind of
ran the whole, from the whole ungloved hands to poor
table manners and went up from there. It's a verty.
(17:56):
It got more serious than that too. In Richmond he
saw slavery, which he was very outspoken against, and then
some of it was just disappointment. In St. Louis, for instance,
he was disappointed by a trip to see the looking
Glass Prairie, which is something he had really wanted to do,
go see the prairie. According to Professor Jerome Mechier, who's
the author of Dickens and Innocent Abroad, quote, the longer
(18:19):
Dickens rubbed shoulders with Americans, the more he realized that
the Americans were simply not English enough. And Dickens himself
wrote to his friend Greedy, he was taking care of
his kids. This is not the republic I came to see.
This is not the republic of my imagination, So those
are harsh words. But after he got home, Dickens did
(18:40):
one better. He started polishing up his travel journals and
he ended up publishing them as promised as American Notes
for general circulation. Then he stepped it up again. The
following year he started a new book called Martin Chuzzlewit,
and when the first issues weren't really selling that well,
he decided to pack off his hero to America and
(19:01):
included a lot of his own kind of experiences he
had seen in the Midwest. So both his travelogue and
his novel painted quite an unflattering picture of America. Seems
folks wouldn't have expected the man famous for tearing apart
hypocrisies of British life to be entirely kind, but in
fact they had new friends like Washington Irving were hurt,
(19:23):
even outraged. People in New York burned copies of Martin
Chuzzlewit papers denounced the American Notes. The trip very likely
changed Dickens to Some scholars see his work getting less
optimistic after his American journey, and I can kind of
see this from several different perspectives. One it does seem
like people overreacted quite a bit. The travel notes do
(19:45):
include kind of unfavorable comparisons to British things, you know,
where we were talking about the low um little factories
and how it's England that comes across as worse in
that situation. There's a lot of stuff like that. But um,
if people were overreacting a bit, well then maybe also
Dickens kind of had unrealistic expectations. If you go into
(20:08):
a trip and your expectations are that it will be
a land of innocent people where everything's perfect, you know,
kind of a utopia, it seemed he was expecting, you're
probably going to be a little bit disappointed, especially people
are ripping fur out of your code. That's true. So
it's not that any of this really affected dickens popularity
as an author in the US. More than twenty years later, Dickens,
(20:30):
who by this point had multiple households to support and
that's just a hint for the next podcast we're going
to come up with, he decided it might be time
to revisit America, and this time as a part of
his Smash lecture series, in which he'd act rather than
read portions of his own works from a special gas
lit lecturn, so after sending a reconnaissance scout on ahead,
(20:50):
he arrived in Boston in mid November of eighteen sixty seven.
During his northeastern tour, quite a few things happened. He
met Mark Twain or Mark Twain saw and of course
Mark Twain is also known for his his public readings,
which were apparently just as good as Dickens, and a
twelve year old girl chatted with him on a train,
(21:10):
telling him that she'd read all his books but skipped
the quote lengthy and dull parts, and she in fact
grew up to write Rebecca of Sunny Book Farm, so
a popular children's book there. And then Dr Samuel Gridley
how of Perkins, who we mentioned, contacted Dickens about publishing
The Old Curiosity Shop in Braille, and Dickens actually not
(21:32):
only gave his approval, he put up one thousand, seven
hundred dollars to have two hundred fifty copies printed, which
were in turn distributed to all of the blind schools
in America, something I thought was pretty cool. The lectures
themselves were a huge hit. I mean, of course, that
was why he was back in the United States in
the first place. He made nineteen thousand pounds, and many
(21:53):
folks couldn't remember the first tour, so there weren't any
hard feelings there. And even the press took dickens return
as a sign of goodwill. For instance, the New York
Tribune wrote, dickens second coming was needed to disperse every
cloud and every doubt, and to place his name undimmed
and the silver sunshine of American admiration. Kind of an
(22:14):
overblown welcome welcome back Dickens, and Dickens himself felt differently too.
In his farewell speech, he spoke of the quote gigantic
changes he'd seen in the country, changes, moral changes, physical
changes in the amount of land subdued and people, changes
in the rise of vast new cities, changes in the
growth of older cities almost out of recognition, changes in
(22:36):
the graces and amenities of life, changes in the press,
without whose advancement, no advancement can take place anywhere. And
he asked that the statement be added to every copy
of American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewitt, and it still is
there today. Kind of I take it back. You guys
have mids some improvement. Good job, um, So I think
it was really interesting to learn about an author so
(22:59):
associated with England, were really so associated with London in
a different context, see him out of his element a
little bit. That was what appealed to me about this story. Yeah,
I think in a way, it's actually quite a testament
to travel itself, that you can go abroad and it
opens your eyes and you just see things in a
different way. I mean, he obviously didn't work out so
(23:20):
well the first time because he had a bad experience.
He was disappointed, and like you said, that was probably
equal parts his fault and you know, the fault of
what they saw exactly if people spitting tobacco on the floor.
But when he came back the next time, it seemed
like he sort of had a different point of view well,
and he had definitely learned kind of a lesson about
(23:42):
maybe being careful when you're traveling to keep some of
your opinions. Although it's kind of nice to have that, honesty,
I'm glad looking back on it now. Thank you so
much for joining us on the Saturday. If you have
heard an email address or a Facebook you are l
(24:04):
or something similar over the course of today's episode. Since
it is from the archive that might be out of date,
now you can email us at history podcast at how
stuff works dot com, and you can find us all
over social media at missed in History. And you can
subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the
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