Charles Dickens | American Notes | New York, The Five Points (1842)

[Charles Dickens, American Notes, (1842)]   ".... [106] Mount up these other stair with no less caution (there are traps and pitfalls here, for those who are not so well escorted as ourselves) into the housetop; where the bare beams and rafters meet overhead, and calm night looks down through the crevices in the roof. Open the door of one of these cramped hutches full of sleeping negroes. Pah! They have a charcoal fire within; there is a smell of singeing clothes, or flesh, so close they gather round the brazier; and vapours issue forth that blind and suffocate. From every corner, as you glance about you in these dark retreats, some figure crawls half-awakened, as if the judgement-hour were near at hand, and every obscene grave were giving up its dead. Where dogs would howl to lie, women and men, and boys slink off to sleep, forcing the dislodged rates to move away in quest of better lodgings.
Here too are lanes and alleys, paved with mud knee-deep, underground chambers, where they dance and game; the walls bedecked with rough designs of ships, and forts, and flags, and American eagles out of number; ruined houses, open to the street, whence, through wide gaps in the walls, other ruins loom upon the eye, as though the world of vice and misery had nothing else to show: hideous tenements which take their name from robbery and murder: all that is loathsome, drooping, and decayed is here. [106] ....

…. [108] What! Do you thrust your common offenders against the police discipline of the town, into such holes as these? Do men and women, against whom no crime is proved, lie here all night in perfect darkness, surrounded by the noisome vapours which encircle that flagging lamp you light us with, and breathing this filthy and offensive stench!  Why, such indecent and disgusting dungeons as these cells, would bring disgrace upon the most despotic empire in the world! Look at them, man – you, who see them every night, and keep the keys. Do you see them every night, and keep the keys. Do you see what they are? Do you know how drains are made below the streets, and wherein these human sewers differ, except in being always stagnant? Well, he don’t know. He has had five-an-twenty young women locked up in this very cell at one time, and you’d hardly realize what handsome faces there were among ’em. In God’s name! Shut the door upon the wretched creature who is in it now, and put its screen before a place, quite unsurpassed in all the vice, neglect, and devilry, of the world old town in Europe. Are people really left all night, untried in those black sties? –Every night.

The watch is set at seven in the evening. The magistrate opens his court at five in the morning. That is the earliest hour at which the first prisoner can be released; and if an  officer appear against him, he is not [109] taken out till nine o’clock or ten.  –But if any one among them die in the interval, as one man did, not long ago? Then he is half-eaten by the rats in an hour’s time; as that man was; and there an end." [109]

Sir Arthur Sullivan | America in '79 | Attitudes to Artists

[Arthur Lawrence, Sir Arthur Sullivan Life Story, Letters and Reminiscences, Herbert S. Stone & Company, 1899, reprinted Kessinger Publishing 2009, quotes from Sir Arthur’s correspondence c1899] “I found America in ‘79 very much what England probably was sixty years ago. Away from the more intellectual centres one would have described the disposition and attitude of mind of the American people as being ‘provincial.’ I am speaking of America twenty years ago, and of course that nation has made great strides since that time. It was a significant and unpleasant fact that all artists were looked at askance. 

 An artist had no social position at all in New York, and I think this especially applied to the musician. It is hardly worth while mentioning it now, perhaps, as American views on the subject have changed so completely, but as an instance of what I mean, I remember that, on one occasion, having accepted an invitation to dine one night at one of the best houses in New York, there was one vacant chair. It should have been occupied by a woman who was noted for her good looks and her good social position.

 I afterwards discovered that her husband had prevailed upon her not to dine with us, as there was a distinguished Professor of Music with us. He thought it was so curious that she should be asked to sit down to the same table with a musician! If I remember rightly, he was a prosperous watchmaker in Broadway. Music in America in ’79 was in a very backward state in many important respects. When I went over there in ’85 a great change had taken place, and everywhere much greater consideration was shown to music – and to musicians.”[152f]

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]