Peter Ackroyd | Dickens | Brave New World (1990)

[Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, Sinclair-Stevens, 1990 p343-371] “…. Dickens kept up one continual shout of uproarious laughter as he went rapidly forward, reading the signs on the shops, and observing the ‘architecture’ of the new country into which he had dropped as if from the clouds.” And indeed he might have come from some other world, so familiar and yet so strange was this new country to him: it is a curious fact, confirmed by other English visitors, that America at first seemed too bright, too vivid, and almost artificial in its size. Dickens could do nothing but run around the streets and laugh. He said later that “… every thoroughfare in the city looked exactly like a scene in a pantomime”

…. The young man following him in this first uproarious progress remembers how Dickens pulled the bell-handles of the doors as he went past, and he pulled them with such vigour that one actually came off in his hand.” In his American Notes he described these very knobs “so marvelously bright and twinkling”; he could not resist touching them because they seemed to him too bright, unreal, mere props in a wonderful scenic illusion, the colours and shapes of this new world uncannily echoing the exaggerated and colourful backdrops in the London theatres. And then, when he came to the old South Church of Boston, “Dicken’s screamed”. One would give almost anything to have heard that scream – the scream of undiluted pleasure and freedom, of sudden astonishment at the fact that he was actually living and breathing in a world so much like that of the stage on which he always longed to be. He was in a play, and it was also real; nothing could have suited Dicken’s needs more than that. It was like inhabiting one of his own fictions.” [343] …. [348] 
[T]he young Englishman was not always the novelist of American’s imagination. “The very first sight of him may not wholly please you,” Dana writes to William Cullen Bryant, and the President’s daughter observed after meeting him that he was “rather thickset, and wears entirely too much jewellery, very English in his appearance and not the best English …” Someone else noted his “unkempt hair” …. They noticed his shortness, his quick expressive eyes, the lines around his mouth, the large ears, the odd fact that when he spoke his facial muscles slightly drew up the left side of his upper lip …. “… a dissipated looking mouth with a vulgar draw to it, a muddy olive complexion, stubby fingers … a hearty, off-hand manner, far from well-bred, and a rapid, dashing way of talking.” One of these hearty remarks caused something of a scandal, in fact; when at the house of a learned judge Dickens entered an argument about the relative beauty of two ladies he said, “Well, I don’t know, Mrs Norton perhaps is the most beautiful; but the duchess, to my mind, is the more kissable ….” [348] 

[349] …. There was particular comment upon his vivid waistcoats, his jewellery and generally bright “get-up”. “His whole appearance is foppish” one newspaper reported, “and partakes of the flash order.” In other words he was not at all American; ….” [349] …. [353] [H]e was actually being lampooned in public. Certain newspapers, for example, began to speculate … that he was not a gentleman but merely the “son of a Haberdasher”. [354] “I tremble for a radical coming here,” [Dickens] wrote “unless he is a radical on principle, by reason and reflection  … I fear that if he were anything else he would return home a Tory ….” 

He had expected in America to find the conflicts of English life resolved, but in fact the “free press” and the representatives of the people were as dishonest and as hypocritical as anything he had found in his own country. Perhaps even more so:” [354] …. [368] And what he seems to have noticed among them, too, was their hypocrisy and their cant – in that respect his reaction against them was part of his general reaction against America itself …. since there was no other aspect of human beaviour that struck him more forcibly in all these months of traveling. Cant everywhere. Cant in the newspapers. Cant from the self-styled leaders of public opinion. Cant from the businessmen. And did he no, having at first identified himself with this new world, sense a certain amount of hypocrisy within himself? [368] …. 

 [369] What had he found in that country? Everywhere business and money, money and business, …. More enlightened penal and social policies, certainly, but no humour. No laughter [369]. …. [370] He had arrived in America with the determination to attach himself to what he saw as the liberal and progressive aspects of this new world, but it was not long before he saw how mistaken he was; how a new tyranny, that of “public opinion” fostered by a rancid press, had simply usurped older forms of authoritarianism.” [370]