see Cairo was really the main object of his journey to America. In 1837 one Darius B. Holbrook, a shrewd Boston Yankee, organized the Cairo City and Canal Company, a scheme as audaciously illusive as the John Laws Bubble in 1718; and going to Europe he plastered the walls everywhere with flaming lithographs of a grand city at the junction of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers — in fact, as mythical as the fabled Quivira of Coronado's search. In London was the banking house of John Wright & Co., the same that in 1839 confidenced the Illinois Fund Commissioners, Gov. Reynolds, Senator Young, General Rawlings and Colonel Oakley, into depositing with them $1,000,000 of Illinois Bonds, resulting in a loss to the State of half their value. Through John Wright & Company, Holbrook actually sold bonds of his Cairo Company to the amount of $2,000,000. Among his numerous victims was Mr. Dickens, who, it is asserted, invested in them a large part of his slender means."
It will be noticed that this occurred while Dickens was writing The Pickwick Papers, and Dickens may at that time have had in mind the trip to America and his American Notes, for, in chapter xliv, Tony Weller says to Sam, " Have a passage taken ready for 'Merrika . . . and then let him come back and write a book about the 'Merrikans as'll pay all his expenses and more, if he blows 'em up enough."
It may be that Dickens had forgotten the advice of Mr. Weller, and it may be only a coincidence that he took the advice and went to 'Merrika, and that he wrote, not one, but two books referring to that country, but he certainly did in these two books, in the opinion of many Americans, "blow 'em up enough."
Many of those whose feelings were personally hurt, and who thought he had not treated America and Americans fairly, were those who were members of self-appointed reception and entertainment committees, and whose vanity had prompted them to hope that when the author returned home and wrote his book especial mention would be made of them, and that the reception or banquet which they had helped to arrange in his honour would be the one affair which he might single out as the most important one of his trip. In this they were disappointed, for Dickens did not mention these affairs at all, as the American Notes consists almost entirely of descriptions and criticisms of such public institutions as blind asylums, prisons and slavery, with brief references to some of the cities visited.
Everyone who has read American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit knows what Dickens's opinions were of America, American newspapers and the American people in 1842, the year in which he first visited the United States. It seemed to the writer, in view of the revival of interest in the author and his writings, due to the fact that 1912 is the centenary of his birth, that it might be interesting to learn what were the views of the press and people of the United States in 1842 as to the author himself. With this idea in mind the writer has obtained extracts relating to Dickens from newspapers in various cities which he visited in that year. Some of these are editorials and others are evidently written by reporters or news-writers who could make their mark with some of the so-called yellow newspapers of the present day. As to the latter, as will be seen later, we can hardly blame Dickens for what he says in his American Notes regarding the American Press of that period. The only fault we can find with him is that he did not differentiate sufficiently between the good and the bad, and that with few exceptions he puts all the American newspapers in the class now called "yellow."
Perhaps one of the reasons Dickens had for disliking the American newspaper was that some of their descriptions of his personality and his attire offended his vanity. It is no great disparagement of him to say, what everyone now concedes, that Dickens was vain of his appearance and that he was fond of gay waistcoats, massive gold watch-chains, large scarf-pins and his wavy locks. It is an axiom that the more vain a man is, the less he wants to be told of his vanity.
While Dickens was not favourably impressed with the Press of the United States, he wrote in the highest terms of most of the hotels at which he stopped, as the following extracts from American Notes will show. Of the Richmond Hotel (The Exchange) he wrote, "A very large and elegant establishment, and we were as well entertained as travellers need desire to be; " of the hotel at Baltimore, "The most complete of all the hotels of which I have had any experience in the United States, and they were not a few, is Barnum's in that city, where the English traveller will find curtains to his bed for the first and last time in America; " of the Harrisburg Hotel (Buehler's), "We were soon established in a very snug hotel, which, though smaller and far less splendid than many we put up at, is raised above them all by having for its landlord the most obliging, considerate and gentlemanly person I have ever had to deal with; " of the Pittsburgh Hotel (Exchange), "A most excellent hotel, and we were most admirably served; " of the hotel at Louisville, " We slept at the Gait House, a splendid hotel, and we were as handsomely lodged as though we had been in Paris, rather than hundreds of miles beyond the Alleghanies; " of the Planter's House at St. Louis, "An excellent house, and the proprietors have most beautiful notions of providing the creature comforts."
A comparison of Dickens's letters to Forster, as given in the latter's Life of Charles Dickens, with his American Notes will show that Dickens's opinion of America and the American people seems to have undergone considerable modification between the time of writing his first letters and the book. The first letters generally are very much more moderate in tone than his later letters and the book, but whether the author really modified his opinions by reason of the opposition to an international copyright law by some of the American public, principally the publishers who had been reproducing his works, and his financial loss in Cairo (Eden) bonds, or whether he believed that criticisms rather than praise of the institutions of the United States would be more acceptable for English consumption or not, is a question. The writer can hardly believe that this great author would prostitute his pen in such a manner, and prefers to believe that the loss of the money he had invested in "Eden" had soured his pen.
As will be seen by the newspaper accounts of the dinners and receptions given in Dickens's honour, no foreigner, be he statesman, warrior or prince, was ever, up to that time, given such a hearty welcome, or such paeans of praise as this thirty-year-old author; in fact, some of the praise was so fulsome that it is a wonder it did not pall upon its recipient, used as he was to the adulations of his own countrymen. In a letter to his friend Mr. Thomas Mitten, dated January 31, he summed up in the following words exactly what his own ideas were of the welcome and treatment he had received up to that time —
"I can give you no conception of my welcome. There never was a King or Emperor upon the earth so cheered and followed by crowds, and entertained at splendid balls and dinners and waited upon by public bodies of all kinds. I have had one from the far West, a journey of two thousand miles! If I go out in a carriage, the crowd surrounds it and escorts me home; if I go to the theatre, the whole house (crowded to the roof) rises as one man, and the timbers ring again. You cannot imagine what it is. I have five public dinners on hand at this moment, and invitations from every town and village and city in the United States."
It is a wonder it did not completely turn his head, and it is not surprising that some of the newspapers and some of the people thought that perhaps they might be overdoing it.
In a chapter written for American Notes, entitled "Introductory and Necessary to be Read," and which, by the advice of Forster, was not printed in the book, Dickens wrote —
"Neither does it contain, nor have I intended that it should contain, any lengthened and minute account of my personal reception in the United States; not because I am, or ever was, insensible to that spontaneous effusion of affection and generosity of heart, in a most affectionate and generous-hearted people; but because I conceive that it would ill become me to flourish matter necessarily involving so much of my own praises in the eyes of my unhappy readers."
While Dickens did not give in American Notes his own opinions regarding his personal reception in the United States, he did express himself very freely in his letters to Forster, and it is interesting to compare his own account with those that are given in this book. These accounts are all by American writers of the time, most of them being by newspaper writers, and some of them taken from private diaries, which, when written, were not intended for publication, so that, taken together, they give a pretty good idea of the impressions made by Dickens on the Press and people of the United States. These accounts cover his personal doings and experiences in the United States for nearly every day, from the time he landed in Boston