caught fire but 'fires in this country are quite a matter of course',
he told his sister-in-law. Along with this higher degree of risk went a
tremendous national resilience: Portland, Maine, had been burnt to the ground
three years previously 'yet' he wrote 'such is the astonishing energy of
the people that the large hall in which I am to read tonight (its predecessor
was burnt) would compare very favourably with the Free Trade Hall at Manchester'.
Chuzzlewittian America had not utterly vanished, of course, and his dresser's
salvia-bespattered boots were not the only signs of this. In Baltimore Dickens
noticed the cynical political manipulation if the newly-enfranchised blacks
and the corruption if Irish-American-dominated local government in New York
was, he believed, 'stupendous'. The newspapers still reflected the national
vanity in a 'wonderfully quizzical' fashion: 'They seem to take it ill that
I don't stagger on to the platform overpowered by the spectacle before me,
and the national greatness'. But, overall, he had no doubt that there had been
'great changes' for the better and he was happy to bear testimony to these in his
speech at the New York Farewell banquet in his honour. This turned into a veri
table love-feast after Dickens had pronounced his eloquent tribute to America
and one of the speakers, a Cincinnati journalist, replying to the toast of
'the Western Press', even quoted good-humouredly from the American scenes
in Chuzzlewit and praised American Notes as 'an exceedingly clever, good-
natured and true book'. Not all the American press was ready to forgive
Dickens, however, as can be seen from the very hostile cartoons
in these Dickens is depicted as grabbing as mqny dollars as
he can whilst remaining utterly contemptuous of his hosts. And to this day
it is a part of 'the Dickens legend' that he hated America. His much modified
opinions of 1868 are forgotten and only his 1842 ones remembered.
The truth is, 1 think, that Dickens was a natural American and therefore
had just the same love/hate relationship with it was he had with the country
of his birth. In his touchy pride, his ruthless energy, his belief in the
rewards of industry, his rejection of the past and his faith in the future,
Dickens was very much an American. Had he not been so American in his
idealism in 1842; moreoever, he would never have been so bitterly bewildered
and disappointed by the imperfections he found obtruding themselves in him
as he travelled around the country. With a much deeper truth than the late
President Kennedy claiming to be a Berliner, Dickens might have said,
'I am an American'. This anthology documents his lifelong fascination with the
country and could well have carried the sub-title, 'Notes of a Non-native Son'.
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