IV
Eugene Didier, reviewing The Letters of Charles Dickens in The North
American Review for March 1880, wrote:
'We regret to say that nothing in his correspondence removes
from our mind the impression that Dickens's feeling towards
.American was something like Dean Swift's feeling for mankind
- he hated mankind, but loved a few men - Pope, Gray,
Bolingbroke, etc.: so Dickens disliked America but he liked
a few Americans - Irving, Longfellow, Fields, and 'one
Mr. Chi Ids', a newspaper proprietor
Allowing for a modification in favour of Boston, this impression is certainly
likely to be the one formed by anyone studying Dickens's correspondence
between the publication of Chuzzlewit and his second visit to the United
States in 1867/68. His letters to his American friends are quite as warm
and affections as letters to other friends and he will even go out of his
way to say agreeable things to them about their fellos-countrymen: he tells
Putnam in 1851, 'I see many Americans in London, and find them the old good-
humoured kind-hearted people'. But in his letters to English of European
friends his allusions to America are usually pretty caustic.
"Writing to Macreqdy in 1844 he refers to America as 'that low, coarse
and mean Nation perpetually playing skittles with different sets of
Idols'. And in the same year he declared to Mrs. Carlyle after she had met
an apparently very Chuzzlewittian American General: 'it is impossible,
following them in their own direction to caricature that people. I lay down
my pen in despair sometimes when I read what I have done, and find how it
halts behind my own recollection'.
An agreeable sojourn in republican Switzerland moves him to make some com
parisons unfavourable to America (the Swiss were often called 'the Americans
of the Continent' but this, Dickens believed, was' the greatest injustice1
to them). 'They are a genuine people, these Swiss', he wrote to Forster.
'There is better metal in them than in all the stars and stipes of all the
1 81
fustian banners of the so called, and falsely called, U-nited States'.
To his Swiss friend, de la Rue, he writes, 'I don't know the American
Gentleman - God forgive me for putting two such words together - whose
name you mention1, and goes on to joke about the way in which so many
American pretend to be intimately acquainted with him.
To Miss Coutts he writes in 1850 (about a beneficiary of her charity,
administered to him by Dickens): 'Mr. Devlin is now going to America and
(although I find it difficult to understand how that can do anybody good)
we have descried hopefulness in giving him the rest (of your bounty)';
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