Writing in Reaction

Abstract

How much excitement was to be had from America appears involuntarily in Dickens’s letters. Stimulus flowed from politicians, abolitionists, church ministers, lawyers, penologists, temperance advocates, theatrical people, local dignitaries, and journalists. Going through the Letters (vol. 3) for the period: in England, Edward Everett, Unitarian and former Professor of Greek at Harvard (3n) gave names to Dickens of people he could call on; and in New England he met William Ellery Channing, leader of American Unitarianism (16n); Henry Dexter, sculptor (18n); George Bancroft, historian and transcendentalist (19n); W. H. Prescott (19n); R. H. Dana; Jared Sparks, historian at Harvard (24n); the poet and journalist N. P. Willis (25n); Francis Alexander, portrait painter (26n); Cornelius Felton, Professor of Greek at Harvard, who accompanied Dickens round New York; Longfellow, Andrews Norton, Benjamin Pierce, and George Ticknor (all Harvard, 39n), Washington Allston and Oliver Wendell Holmes (67n). At some stage, he met Elisha Bartlett, who lived in Kentucky, and wrote about Lowell and medical education (198n). In New York, he met William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, and two poets: Fitz-Greene Halleck (73n) and Charles Fenno Hoffmann (82n). He came across Cornelius Mathews and Evert Duyckinck, advocates for a native American literature.

Yesterday I read Dickens’ American Notes. It answers its end very well, which plainly was to make a readable book, nothing more. Truth is not his object for a single instant … The book makes but a poor apology for its author, who certainly appears in no dignified or enviable position. He is a gourmand, & a great lover of wines & brandies, & for his entertainment has a cockney taste for certain charities. He sentimentalizes on every prison & orphan asylum, until dinner time. But science, art, Nature and charity itself all fade before us at the great hour of Dinner.

—Emerson, Journals¹

You have given to every intelligent eye the power of looking down to the very bottom of Dickens’s mode of existing in this world; and I say have performed a feat which, except in Boswell, the unique, I know not where to parallel. So long as Dickens is interesting to his fellow-men, here will be seen, face to face, what Dickens’s mode of existing was; his steady practicality, withal; the singularly solid business talent he continually had; and deeper than all, fi one had the eye to see deep enough, dark, fateful silent elements, tragical to look upon, and hiding amid dazzling radiances as of the sun, the elements of death itself. Those two American Journies especially transcend in tragic interest to a thinking reader most things one has seen in writing.

—Carlyle to Forster, on reading his Life of Dickens.²