that await us, and all the interest I am sure I shall have in your mighty
land'
What American expectations of Dickens were is well indicated by a leading
article published during his visit in The United States Magazine and
Democratic Review for April 1842. Who, asks the writer,
'is this young stranger, about whose path we crowd with so warm
and eager a homage of our hearts - towards whom our souls thus
yearn so kindly, as to some dear friends or brother whom we
have long loved, though never seen - whom we are so anxious to
clasp hand to hand, and to meet in that silent sympathy which
passes between men like the transit of an electric spark when
their eyes meet - who is he
The answer (delivered at some length) is that he is not a soldier 'crowned with
all the crimsoned laurels of war', nor is he 'either aristocrate or millionaire':
'As to his purse, he has to fill it from time to time by
a draft on his wits, like the poorest scribbler of the
tribe; and as to rank, we are rejoiced that there is no
other nobility about him than the universal title of simple
and glorious manhood. He is neither Price nor Lord - but
there is neither Price nor Lord in Christendom to whom we
should have awarded the ovation of such a reception'.
What makes a hero for the Americans, continues the writer, is 'the accor
dance of the spirit pervading his writings with the democratic genius
now everywhere rapidly developing itself as the principle of that new
civilization, whose dawn is just brightening upon the world'. Wellington
and Peel are warned that they would be wise to lock Dickens up on his return
from a country 'where his popular tendencies are not likely to be weakened'
for his writings will 'hasten on the great crisis of the English Revolution
(speed the hour 1far more effectively than any of the open assaults of
Radicalism or Chartism' 'The great idea they all assert is that idea of
human equality, under the influence of the progress of which the regal
palaces and baronial castles of the whole world are crumbling and destined
to crumble to ruin'
America, it seems, expected a sort of young Messiah of democracy
whilst Dickens, for his part, expected to behold the Promised Land.
Mutual disillusion was inevitable and would certainly have come more
swiftly if the S.S. Britannia had sailed, like the Screw in Martin Chuzzlewit,
into New York rather than Boston-., For Anglophile Boston (soon to be
nick-named 'Boz-town' by the jealous New Yorkers) managed, more or less,
to live up even to Dickens's expectations and was duly celebrated in
American Notes. It was, Dickens said later, what he would have liked
the whole United States to be and, Forster significantly tells us,
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