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he was fond of comparing it to Edinburgh 'as Edinburgh was in the
days when several dear friends of his own still lived there1.
It was certainly an exhilirating arrival for Dickens, that January
Saturday evening in Boston habour. He was saluted from the shore by a
Press reception committee and when his wife 'called his attention to the
inadequacy of his travelling costume for the occasion' he replied, 'Never
mind that, dear, we are on the other side now'. The tiresome petty
formalities of England could be forgotten in the land of liberty. Dickens
and his party were escorted in triumph to their hotel and soon he emerged
again with a friend he had made in the voyage, the young Earl of Mulgrave,
for a joyous moonlight reconnaissance of the snow-covered streets of the
city. A young admirer, later to become one of Dickens's closest American
friends, James Fields, followed them and later recalled, 'Dickens kept up
one continual shout of uproarious laughter as he went rapidly forward,
reading the signs on the shops and observing the architecture of the new
country into which he had dropped as from the clouds'.
Dickens spent two packed weeks in Bostonfêted in theatres, at a
public ball, at private dinner and breakfast parties and in the streets
everywhere he went. He visited the State Capitol, the Court House, an
institute for the blind, a factory, a seamen's chapel and Harvard University.
He hired a secretary to help cope with the flood of correspondence which
poured into his hotel rooms, he had his portrait painted and his bust taken,
he received an endless stream of visitors, distinguished und undistinguished,
and he established warm friendships with a number of people, among them
Longfellow and a jovial, oyster-loving Professor of Greek at Harvard, C.F.Felton,
'not at all starry or stripey', who became one of his best loved American friends
The culmination was a great public dinner, given in his honour, by the
'Young Men of Boston' on February 1st. In his speech on that occasion
Dickens said he had 'dreamed by day and night, for years, of setting foot
upon this shore, and breathing this pure air'. Even if he had come there
as an unknown, he continued, he would 'have come with all my sympathies
clustering as richly about this land and people - with all my sense of
justice as keenly alive to their high claims on every man who loves God's
image
He was exhausted but triumphant. 'There never was a King or Emperor upon
the Earth, so cheered and followed by crowds, and entertained in Public
at splendid balls and dinners, and waited on by public bodies and deputations
of all kinds', he wrote to one of his English friends. All this clearly had
its inconvenient side as we learn from a letter written to the American
historian J.L. Motley by Mrs. Motley:
