'I do not eat more than half a pound of solid food in the whole four-and-twinty
hours, if so much'. The winter was, Forster records, exceptionally severe,
'even for America', and the railroad travelling was hard. 'It is a bad country
to be unwell and travelling in', Dickens wrote to his daughter, Mary:
'You are one of, say. a hundred people in a heated car with a great stove in it,
all the little windows being closed; and the bumping and banging about are indes
cribable,the atmosphere detestable, and ordinary motion all but intolerable'.
During the last months of Dickens's visit such physical miseries were greatly
intensified by the recurrence of a very painful foot affliction which had
last attacked him the previous summer on the sofa all last night in
tortures
It was a nightly miracle that, under circumstances like these, the 'British Lion'
was able to roar so superbly whenever he found himself behind the familiar
velvet-covered reading-desk and illumined by those 'garish lights'.
The stupendous enthusiasm of his audiences was a potent drug that banished
even 'the true American' (Dickens's name for his catarrh) so long as he was
on stage. Few, seeing him like that could credit Dolby's accounts of his
'Chief's" frequent near-prostration off-stage. Fortunately, Dickens was
cared for not only by Dolby, whom he described as being 'as tender as a
woman and as watchful as a doctor', but also by his adoring Boston friends,
the publisher Hames Fields and his wife, Kate. Their home afforded Dickens
a highly congenial place of retreat, rest and recuperation.
He had planned an itinerary which would take in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh,
St. Louis and Chicago but gave up these cities when it became obvious that
the tour was proving a hugely profitable venture without them. Moreover, the
additional strain on Dickens's health of such enormous journeys could well
have been disastrous. 'Good heavens, sir', a Philadelphian gentleman remon
strated with him, 'if you don't read in Chicago the people will go into fits 1 1
Dickens mildly replied that he would prefer that the Chicagoans should go into
fits than that he himself should, but the Philadelphian 'didn't seem to see it
at all'. On the other hand, Dickens rejected the suggestion that he should
read every week in New York. In order to whip up enthusiasm for his planned
Farewell Readings in that city and in Boston it would necessary, he thought,
having regard to the American character, to put the readings out of the New
Yorkers' and Bostonians' reach for a time:
'It is one of the popular peculiarities which I most particularly
notice, that they must not have a thing too easily. Nothing in
this country lasts long; and a thing is prized the more, the less
easy it is made the best thing I can do is not to give either
city as much reading as it wants now, but to be independent of
both while both are most enthusiastic'.
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