But it is clear that his feelings about America underwent a great
change about this time. The Editors of the Pilgrim Edition of his letters
pin-point it to the three days (February 15th - 17th) when illness confined
him to his hotel room and he was 'able to read and reflect on reports and
editorials in the newspapers'. He found himself savagely attacked for
daring to advocate the cause of International Copyright in his speeches at
Boston and Hartford. Of course, the very newspapers that were attacking
him, such as the 'mammoth' New World, were the greatest profiteers from
the wholesale piracy of his works that was made possible by the absence
of any copyright agreement between England and America. Insult was heaped
on in jury. 'Some of the vagabonds', he wrote to Forster, 'take great
credit to themselves (grant us patience for having made me popular by
publishing my books in newspapers: as if there were no England, no Scotland,
no Germany, no place but America in the whole world'. He was further incen
sed by the accusation that his whole object in coming to the States was sim
ply and sordidly to campaign for International Copyright. With charater-
istic vehemence, he wrote on February 22nd to his friend Jonathan Chapman,
Mayor of Boston, 'I vow to Heaven that the scorn and indignation I have felt
under this unmanly and ungenerous treatment has been to me an amount of agony
such as I never experienved since my birth'. Even the traumatic blacking
factory of his childhood palled, it would seem, in the comparison.
Nor did the sneering, patronising tone of much of the newspaper comment
on his public behaviour do anything to assuage his wrath (one would like
to have Lady Holland's comment on the assertion thai 'Dickens was
never in such society in Enaland as he has seen In New Ynrk').
From this time dates Dickens's violent animosity towards the all t.nn
'free and independent' American press and his conviction that it
was a veritable cancer in the body politic of the young nation. The Press
proved itself as formidable an opponent as Spenser's Blatent Beast,
resorting as we shall see, to dosnright forgery as well as slanderous
misrepresentation and the battle continued merrily for many years after
Dickens's 1842 visit. Reconcilement did not come until 1868 when Dickens
agreed to attend a Press banquet in his honour in New York and chose this
platform to make his amends honorable to the American nation.
The horrific Tombs prison in New York and equally horrific lunatic asylum
on Long Island, the savage squalor of the 'Five Points', the roaming
pigs on fashionable Broadway, all combined to intensify Dickens's revulsion
of feeling about America. The thronging crowds of inquisitive sight
seers were no longer éxhilarating as they had been in Boston but wearisome
- 16 -
