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nervousness about the wilder and more reckless aspects of this.
One writer, describing (20 April 1861) an agricultural exhibition in Virqinia,
which included some bear-baiting, observes:
'No nervous man (nervousness is not fear) should go to
America; for a life is thought nothing of in the country
that all Europe helps to people. Thousands go to see
Blondin break his neck at Niagara When two
engines are racing to a fire, the two companies will pull
out revolvers and fight for precedency. Duelling is
common. Racing steamers will refuse to stop and pick up
a black hand that has fallen overboard. As far these
railway crossings, a car driver has been known to put
his horses at full speed, and bet five dollars he would
get over before 1 the darned engine', at the risk of an
immortal and irretrieveable smash'.
This kind of excitement is at its most intense, of course, in the dozen
or so articles dealing with frontier life in the Far West, in Texas or
in Arkansas. Dickens's readers are here regaled with anecdotes of lynchings,
bowie-knives, gouging-matches, and vigilantes, all of which must have been
highly gratifying to the Victorian appetite for stories if sensational violence,
preferably true ones.
The Mormons of Utah offer a different kind of sensation, the scandal of
their institutionalised polygamy, and three articles on them appeared over
the eleven years. Their social and economic achievements could not be denied
('No beggars are seen in these long straight dusty green-lined streets
- scarcely even a tipsy man, The people are quiet and civil but the
All The Year Round writers are less sympathetic to the 'monstrous system'
of Mormonism than Hannay was in Household Words: 'despite all the advances
of education and of science, men remain more inclined to follow impulse than
reason, and more willing to accept an absurdity offered to them than to think
for themselves'
Just as Dickens himself had sported with American English in his Notes
and Chuzzlewit so his contributors in All The Year Round continued to divert
his readers with what seemed to them the oddities of American speech, some
times even commenting on the very same phrases as he himself had done:
'To enjoy yourself is to have a good timeThis phrase,
which I peculiarly dislike from a kind of silly quaintness
there is in it, was in every one's mouth (in Boston). 'To be
raisedis to be brought up, or reared. 'To judge' is to think
or to imagineIn some of the newspapers the rule of
writing appears to be never to use a short word when you can
find a long one. Thus you must not say to give, but to 'donate'
