Notes:
1. M. Pachter and F. Wein (Eds.):
Abroad in America: Visitors to the New Nation 1776-1914 (Addison-
Wesley Publishing Co. in association with the National Portrait
Galery, Smithsonian Institution, 1976), P. XIII.
2. Her name became a term to reproach to be shouted at anyone committing a
social solecism.
3. In chapter 45 Tony Weller hastily outlines to Sam an ingenious plan for
smuggling Mr. Pickwick out of Prison in a hollow piano. He goes on:
'Have a passage ready taken for 'Merriker. The 'Merrikin gov'ment will
never give him up, ven they find us he's got money to spend, Sammy.
Let the guvonor stop there till Mrs. Bardell's dead, or Mr. Dodson
and Fogg's hung and then let him come back and write a book about
the 'Merrikins as'11 pay all his expenses, if he blows 'em up enough'.
4. C.E. Lester, The Glory and Shame of England (1841), vol. 2, p.5. This book
should have helped to comfort Americans still smarting from Mrs.Trol lope:
'When I stepped on my native soil again', Lester writes in his 'Dedication'
(to Washington Irving), 'my eyes had been so wearied with the sight of
oppression and suffering, that I felt from my heart I could embrace every
green hill-top of our own fee land - I thanked God I was an American'.
5. Dickens's New England skipper, Captain Jorgan, in his 1860 Christmas Story,
A Message from the Sea, is made to say, 'I was raised on question-asking
ground, where the babies as soon as ever they come into the world, inquire
of their mothers, 'Neow, how old may you be, and wa'at air you a goin' to name
me - which is a fact1
6. There is, according to this eulogist, 'one striking defect' in Dickens's
work, however, the 'atrocious exaggeration of his bad characters'. Nell 'needs
no such foil to the sweet radiance of her halo' as the monstrous Qui!p.
Noah Claypole and his oysters seem to distress the writer even more.
'But' he sighs, 'Mr. Dickens is 'a privileged character', and we suppose
we must put up with his eccentricities
7. The Boston Transcript ironically enquired why the managers of The Park
Theatre did not 'engage Mr. Dickens for a few evenings to show hinself on the
stage! and the Boston Post called the Ball a ridiculous burlesque -
converting an act of courtesy to a private gentleman into a raree show1.
Quoted by Paul B. Davies in 'Dickens and the American Press, 1842',
Dickens Studies, vol. 4 (1968) p. 75.
8. The Pilgrim Editors quote an English emigrant as saying that the Americans
were 'writing 'under the anticipated malediction of Boz' (Pilgrim, vol. 3,
p. XII). Quoted by R.B. Heilman in his 'The New World in Charles Dickens's
Wri ti ngs
The Trollopian, vol 1 (1946) p. 30
Pilgrim, vol3, p. 258 f.
For a full text of the forgery see Pilgrim, vol. 3 pp. 625-27.
Forster, p.283. -
9. Forster, p.284. Dickens agreed to suppress this Introduction only on con
dition that Forster should see that it was published 'when a more fitting
time should come'. It was accordingly printed in Forster's Life of Dickens
(pp. 284-86).
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