and to Frederick Lehmann, travelling to America in 1862, he writes,
'Heaven speed you in that distracted land of troublesome vagabonds'.
References to America and Americans in his miscellaneous writings are
not generally very friendly, either. In his burlesque teetotal version
of Cinderalla (in 'Frauds on the Fairies', published in Household Words
in 1853 as a protest against his former artistic collaborator Cruikshank's
attempts to moralise traditional fairy tales), Cinderella's grandmother
instructs her to fetch that1virtuously democratic vegetable' an American
pumpkin - American because in some parts of that 'independent country,
there are prohibitory laws against the sale of alcoholic dranks in any form.
Also: because America produced (among many great pumpkins) the glory of her sex,
14),
Mrs. Colonel Bloomer, None but an American pumpkin will do, my child'
Later, in an Uncommercial Traveler essay, 'Poor Mercantile Jack', he describes
an American sailor seen in Liverpool: 'Loafing Jack of the Stars'"and
Stripes, rather an unpromising customer, with his long nose, lank cheek,
high cheek-bones, and nothing soft about him but his cabbage-leaf hat'.
Even his pleasant reminiscences about American inns are not quite innocent
of mockery but here at least he does allow that he himself should take
some of the blame for his quarrel with America. Publicly, of course, he
always asserted that he was prejudiced in America's favour rather than other
wise, as in his 1850 preface to the Cheap Edition of American Notes.
To an admirer in Tennessee who wrote to him in 1859 to suggest that some
sort of retraction of apology to the American people would be much welcomed
he replied:
I cannot take the course you recommend to me simply because
I really have nothing to explain away. What I have written
of the more ludicrous and dangerous tendencies that I observed
in America, I have written quite honestly, and in no unkinder
spirit than I have written of innumerable things at home. I
have, as any rational man must have, a great interest in America;
and I have many dear friends who are the born and bred children
of the United States'.
He then quotes from the new preface to American Notes, characterising the
assertion that he is anti-American as a 'very foolish thing' and concludes,
'I have no belief whatever in the durability of foolish, things among a great
and sensible people, and I confidently trust myself in the long run to their
151
good homour and sagacity'.
But when, a few years later, the 'great and sensible people' found themselves
embroiled in a fierce civil war Dickens could not resist crowing a little.
In March 1862 he published in his journal, All the Year Round, a piece entitled
'The Young Man from the Country'. The article opens:
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