Generally, however, Dickens made, in all sincerity, the kind of
noises Americans wanted, and expected, to hear from one who 'was almost
universally regarded by them as a kind of embodied protest against what was
believed to be worst in the institutions of England1.
Thanking a Tennessee postmaster for a fan letter in February 1841, for example,
he wrote, 'your expressions of affectionate remembrances and approval, sounding
from the green forests of the banks of the Mississippi, sink deeper in my
heart and gratify it more than all the honorary distinctions that all the
courts of Europe could confer'.
By the autumn of 1841 Dickens was nearing the end of writing Barnaby Rudge.
He had been writing non-stop for five years. Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller,
Oliver and Nancy, Smike and Crummies, Little Nell and Dick Swivel!er,
Dolly Varden and Barnaby Rudge, had all helped to tighten his grip
upon the heart-strings (and the funny-bones) of both his English and
his American public. Now he wanted a sabbatical. 'Haunted by visions of
America, niqht ar|d day', he proposed to Chapman and Hall, his publishers,
that he should 'run over' there early in the next year, and return, 'after
four or five months' with material for 'a One Volume book'. It was a travel-
book he had in mind, not a novel: 'I don't go with any idea of pressing the
Americans into my service', he told Macvey Napier, 'In my next fiction,
and in all others I hope, I shall stand staunchly by John (Bull)'.
Chapman and Hall, anticipating yet another golden egg, warmly welcomed the
plan, and his wife Catherine's tearful opposition to the idea of so long a
separation from home and children (for he wished her to accompany him) was soon
overcome. Undaunted even by that grandest of grandes dames, Lady Holland,
who asked him, 'Why cannot you go down to Bristol and see some of the third
and fourth class people there en they'll do just as well Dickens was
soon involved in frenetic preparations for departure on the steam-ship
Britannia, due to sail from Liverpool in January 4th. His American cor
respondents had excited him with visions of the spectacular reception he
would get: Washington Irving writes me that if I went, it would be such
a triumph from one end to the States to the other, as was never known in any
Nation'. He had already had a taste of this sort of things the previous
June when he had been feted in Edinburgh and given the Freedom of the City;
he would have been hardly human if he had not looked forward to a lavish
second helping across the water. But a genuine fascination with the country
itself, its political and social achievements and its physical grandeur, was
the real spur that pricked the sides of his intent: 'I cannot describe
to you', he wrote to Lewis Gaylord Clark, editor of the New York Knicker-
bocker Magazine,the glow into which I rise, when I think of the wonders
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