from a female English emigrant. 'We have been so happy since we came to this
part of the world', she reports, but she also says, 'should we make much money
we intend going to New Zealand, as we like that, much, for cheap living'.
There is also a sprinkling of articles, over the years, about frontier life
(gambling saloons in Arkansas, fighting the Indians in Tennessee or Minnesota,
etc.) and about the establishment of new settlements, e.g. 'Germans in Texas'
(25 April 1857) in which Dickens must have been pleased to recognize the
appearance of his Chuzzlewit Americans. A young German emigrant delights in
his political liberty but deplores the dearth of social amenities that he finds:
'These American gentlemen, here in Texas, they do not
know any pleasure. When they come together sometimes,
what do they do They can only sit all round the fire
and speet Why, then they drink some whiskey; or may be
they play cards, or they make a great row. They have
no pleasure as in Germany'.
Still more Chuzzlewittian are the Americans observed by Sherman Hill, a
cultivated young Bostonian as he travels from St. Louis to St. Paul,
Minnesota, across the monotonous horror of the prairie ('a desert with none
of the charms of the desert') and by steam-boat on the Mississippi where he
is trapped as Dickens was by a terrible Yankee bore who 'would buttonhole
the nearest man and read him asleep with extracts from is diary'. 'The Western
people', says Hill
'appear to do nothing for the love of doing it. They do not enjoy
life. They have no choice or relish of food apparently, but feel
themselves with what is nearest, as if they thought eating a
thing to be done, and done quickly'.
Having gobbled their meal in ten minutes, they 'may be seen picking their
teeth with their forks, or squirting tobacco-juice, their appetites fully
satisfied'. It is not surprising, as Anne Lonrli points out, that Dickens
should have been moved to send Hill an enthusiastic letter about this particular
article which might seem a sort of postscript to Chuzzlewit.
The American topic that recurs most frequently in Household Words, is,
of course, slavery. Dickens published several articles, including one by
Harriet Martineau, dwelling on the horrors of slavery and the slave-trade.
To one entitled 'North American Slavery' (18 September 1852) by one of his staff
writers, Henry Morley, he himself added some lavish praise of Harriet Beecher
Stowe's 'noble work', Uncle Tom's- Cabin. Conceding that Mrs. Stowe's negroes
must be 'rare specimens of slaves', he yet declares 'the details of the slave
system among which they live have been carefully collected, and are represented,
bright or black, fairly and with all due variety, so that they may be generally
accepted as remarkable pictures of the every day truth'. In August 1866 he
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