a fit state to receive any inflammable influences'. No sooner had the first
copies - pirated ones naturally - of American Notes gone on sale in the
streets of New York than the outcry arose. The New York Herald pronounced
Dickens's mind to be 'coarse, vulgar, impudent and superficial' and his book
'the essence of balderdash, reduced to the last drop of silliness and inanity'
Another organ of egalitarian democracy so far forgot itself as to brand
Dickens 'a low-bred scullian unexpectedly advanced from the kitchen to the
parlor'. A counterblast soon appeared in Boston. Entitled English Notes,
intended for Very Extensive Circulation I it was written under the pseudonym
of 'Quarles Quickens, Esq.', which gives some idea of the quality of its wit.
English Notes is part parody and part counter-attack. In reply to Dickens's
strictures on American railways 'Quickens' writes:
'Now an English railway car is one of the most dirty, foolish
and unchristian conveyances that ever disgraced any civilized
age or country; instead of being large open and airy as are ours, it
is in fact but a long succession of Yankee stage coaches, (I mean
the first class) opening at the side, the interior space divided
by partitions with little cells, wherein when you have thrust your
self into its seclusion, you feel very much like a convict in one
of our State Prisons, only not half as comfortable'.
'Quickens' meets a middle-class Englishwoman who asks him what tribe he belongs
to as she assumes all Americans must be Red Indians; he is appalled by the
'half-clothed, half-fed and uneducated population' he observes in English city
streets, 'wallowing in the same mire that their fathers and grandfathers
wallowed in before them'. They are ground down by 'the Juggernaut of British
aristocracy' and Dickens's horrifying series of extracts from Southern news
papers in his chapter on slavery is counter-attacked by a series of extracts
from British papers about the desperate poverty of the lower classes and
British-sanctioned slavery in India. The most vindictive part of the book
is an open letter to 'Quickens', feigned to have been published in The Morning
Post, which brings together all those newspaper slanders and half-truths that
had so enraged Dickens during his time in the States:
Many circumstances connected with your visit seem to
favor the impression in some minds that its object was of a mercenary
character. A steam voyage across the Atlantic in mid-winter presents
but few attractions for even the most hearty and robust, to
say nothing of its perils 1 The face of this portion of our country
is known to wear a somewhat gloomy aspect in the seasons of winter
and spring
You set out on your voyage to this country with false impres
sions of the character of our institutions and the manners of our people.
The whole army of American tourists in England, themselves at your
elbow, and their books upon your shelves, had installed into you the
whole of that rancor and abuse which they had not dared but in part
to express in their works
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