lnnocent Abroad Charles Dickens's American Engagements JEROME MECKIER THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY ISBN: 978-0-8131-5378-0 For my mother and father, and for my daughter, Alison This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface ix Abbreviations xiii 1. Dickens Discovers Dickens 1 2. The Newspaper Conspiracy of 1842 39 3. The Battle of the Travel Books 75 4. An Ironic Second Coming 133 5. Health and Money 183 6. Last Words 237 Notes 243 Index 264 "Don't be so dreadfully regardless of yourself. Don't go to America!" -Tom Pinch to Martin Chuzzlewit Preface Charles Dickens visited America-unsuccessfully-twice. In 1842, the overly expectant novelist discovered his fundamental Englishness, becoming more British and less equalitarian each day he spent in the United States. The new country, as yet rough hewn, did not just fall short of the ideal democratic republic; it also displeased by demanding unqualified praise, as if these United States had already implemented the perfect social contract. Such perfection, Dickens sadly perceived, was foreign to the nature of things. American Notes, his first travel book, and Martin Chuzzlewit, his sixth novel, reveal a major disappointment that adversely affected his worldview for the remainder of his career. The letdown in 1842 was ideological, not just monetary; the would-be utopist suffered a more serious blow than did the commerical novelist, despite the celebrated embroilment with an informal confederacy of American publishers de- termined to continue pirating his work. A quarter of a century later, Dickens failed to exercise shrewd management: he compounded several misjudgments prior to the start of the reading tour by proving insufficiently flexible during it when profits were threatened. Had the ticket speculators been thwarted, re- ceipts could easily have swelled into the bonanza that this venture is wrongly assumed to have been. Collectively, scalpers made more from Dickens's performances in 1867-68 than he did-an ironic reprise of the success American publishers enjoyed by reprinting his work with- out compensating him. Noel C. Peyrouton, founding editor of Dickens Studies and an au- thority on Dickens in America, once confided that he considered American Notes conclusive proof that Boz had been too British to un- derstand us. Thirteen years later, in 1980, I retrieved this remarkable insight as the basis for a Gallery Series lecture at the University of Ken- tucky's M.I. King Library. Revised for delivery to the Victorian As- sociation of the Five Colleges, a meeting held at the University of Mas- sachusetts in Amherst, it then became a paper in the Modern Language Review; that paper, revised again and enlarged, is now chapter 1. The second chapter began as a review essay (for Dickens Quarterly) of Sidney P. Moss's partisan book on Dickens's "quarrel" with America. This monograph was the culmination of an unfortunate revaluation pro- cess: the credulous reviving of allegations first lodged against the visit- ing novelist (and then against Martin Chuzzlewit) nearly a century and a half ago. Conspiratorial editors of America's newspapers, however, were more successful than either Moss or Alexander Welsh (in From Copyright to Copperfield) at putting Dickens undeservedly in the wrong, not just on the copyright question, but as the ungentlemanly party in that controversy, which I show to have been insidious. Revaluators of Dickens's first visit forget that it was the last of a marvelous cluster, each trip inspiring a famous travel book. Looking back at investigative tours by Basil Ha11 (1827-28), Mrs. Trollope (1828- 31), Alexis de Tocqueville (1831-32), and Harriet Martineau (1834-36), Dickens considered his 1842 trip climactic; it gave him an opportunity to utter cautionary words about the chimerical efficacy of fresh starts; that is, it alerted him to the unregenerative nature of the social process and the limited prospects for any substantial renovation of human na- ture. In both American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens focused on Tocqueville, Fanny Trollope, and especially Miss Martineau just as steadily as he looked at America: he challenged prior judgments that seemed too favorable and magnified reservations in what is depicted in chapter 3 as a revisional battle royal. Treating the overlapping themes of Love, Health, and Money, chapters 4 and 5 correct existing interpretations of Dickens's second visit; it should be presented as an ironic second coming that raised new problems instead of allowing him to settle old scores. Chapter 4 relies heavily on new information from the diaries of Annie Adams Fields, the thirty-three-year-old wife of Dickens's American publisher (the diaries are housed in the Massachusetts Historical Society). She was strongly drawn to the fifty-five-year-old novelist and he to her. Besides prefer- ring George Dolby's account of the Chief's health problems during the readings over those given by John Forster and Edgar Johnson, chapter 5 uses correspondence in the James T. Fields Collection at the Hun- tington Library and the account books of Ticknor and Fields (in Har- vard's Houghton Library) to revaluate business arrangements with the