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The first six weeks of the tour were, in fact, devoted entirely to Boston and
New York, with Boston, of course, being the first city of all to hear the
readings. 'Mr. Dickens', Dolby tells us, 'always regarded Boston as his American
home, inasmuch as all his literary friends lived there, and he felt it to be
only due to them that he should make that his starting-place
Weeks seven and eight were devoted to Philadelphia and Brooklyn (where, to his
great amusement, he found himself reading in a church, 'appearing out of the
vestry in canonical form' and weeks nine, ten and eleven to Baltimore,
Washington and Philadelphia again. Then followed an excursion into New England,
a return to Boston, where he also took a week's breather, a hard journey to
various towns in upstate New York, New England again, then Portland, Maine,
and so back to Boston and, finally, New York again.
Dickens was prudently anxious not to give the Americans any new cause for
offence. He had instructed his sub-editor, Wills, that no reference, however
slight, was to be made to America in any article whatever appearing in
All The Year Round during his tour and the following anecdote, related in
one of his letters home, suggests that the members of his team were under
instructions to be careful what they said about America: his dresser, Scott,
grumbling about having been turned away from a theatre, said, 'its a beastly
country 1 whereupon 'Majesty' interposed, 'Scott, don't you express your
opinions about the country' and the irate dresser subsided apologetically
(though still murmuring about 'beasts in railway cars (spitting) tobacco over
your boots'). Certainly, Dickens had no intention of gnawing again at that
old bone of contention, International Copyright, and declined an invitation to
address a Boston meeting on the subject.
But the smoother relations between Dickens and his American public on the
trip were not simply the result of commercial prudence on the novelist's
part. He does genuinely seem, as it apparent from the last few extracts in this
anthology, to have felt that vast improvements, social as well as technological,
201
had take place. At a dinner-party at the Fields' when he was questioned
about America he was heard to say 'that it was very much grown up, indeed
he should not know oftentimes that he was not in England, things want on so
much the same and with very few exceptions (hardly worth mentioning) he was
let alone precisely as he would have been there'. The assumption behind this,
that America demonstrated its maturity as a nation by becoming ever more like
England, might have been acceptable to his Bostonian friends but it was as well,
perhaps, that Dickens did not pursue this particular line in his Farewell Speech
in New York.
Outside Boston, the differentness of America asserted itself again as it had in
1842. The greater riskiness of daily life, for example: his hotel in New York
