Not Quite Dead (25 page)

In public, Dickens began to speak openly of his views on poverty, slavery, and especially on copyrights—the three subjects his colleagues in London had specifically warned him against. Especially, he was to avoid the last, which would only cause bad feelings and make him appear pushy and mercenary.

As a matter of fact, whether or not they found Charles Dickens up to their standards, a significant number of Americans had read his books. The windows and stalls of bookshops groaned under the weight of his titles; tobacconists featured boxes of Little Nell Cigars and Pickwick Snuff; he had even seen pillows with his portrait embroidered on the surface, so that the owner had the honor of sitting on Charles Dickens’s face.

And for all this he had not been paid one bloody red cent!

The injustice of it made his blood boil. He felt like a musician required to play concerts in return for a percentage of receipts—concerts for which the audience, however affluent, would never be required to pay. For a man who had worked in a blacking factory as a child to buy his father out of debtor’s prison, it was a bitter pill to swallow, day after day.

After a long evening and several glasses of champagne at a public dinner in Hartford, he gave an impromptu speech on the forbidden topic. He reminded his audience how Walter Scott had died in penury at sixty-one, despite there being thousands of devoted readers across the ocean who would, given the opportunity, gladly have paid
him a small fee. He reminded Americans that just because two nations had historic differences, it did not mean that their citizens must abandon a sense of fair play.

The applause he received was decidedly tepid, and the press the next day decidedly hostile.

You must drop that, Boz
, cautioned the Morning Post,
or you will be dished. It smells of the shop rank
.

The shop rank! A common retailer! Splendid, how they managed to hone in on the circumstance of one’s upbringing!

The theme of his humble origin was taken further in later editions—no longer presented as a badge of honor but as a bad smell. Suddenly it seemed as though he had come to America with no purpose but to wring an unearned profit out of hardworking Americans.

At a minimum, went the current line, Dickens had shown singular ingratitude for his warm acceptance in the Land of the Free.
Biting the Hand That Applauds Him
went the lead in one report. Over the following days, the words
dollar-hungry
magically welded itself to his name. Some writers went so far as to refer to him not as the author but as
the son of a haberdasher
. (Had they done proper research they could have taken it one step further, for in truth he was the son of a
failed
haberdasher.)

A resume that had once endeared Dickens to democrats as a “selfmade man” had entirely changed its significance, and had become a source of his discredit.

Most galling of all to a proud writer, in every account, every description, every reference to his person or work, the writing itself was ill-researched, ill-observed, ill-put, and unoriginal. Even in the weeklies, which gave a chap a few days to think about what he should write, the articles scanned like letters of blackmail, in which an anonymous criminal pastes strips of received text on the page, not to subject his own handwriting to scrutiny.

In England, it was scarcely unusual for one writer to insult another. At bottom, every writer is in competition with every other, living and dead, for a place in the memory of Man. Nonetheless, in London it was understood that if one writer were to disparage another, he owed it to his victim and the profession itself that the assassination be well put.

Most frustrating was the inability to mount a creditable response.
In England, Dickens would have cut his critics to shreds in a single letter to the
Times
. In America, where myriad publications littered the newsstands like leaves in fall, he would have had to devote his life to writing rebuttals.

Disapproval of his views on copyrights spread even to respected American authors—who had everything to gain themselves, for they would no longer be required to publish books for nothing in order to compete with the British. Nevertheless, despite having chanted his praises in speech and print, even Washington Irving and Oliver Holmes joined the malignant chorus. Suddenly his books, once thought guided by the hand of God, had been exposed as cheap swami tricks, done for a fast dollar.

How disillusioning, to feel the undertow of class hatred in this bright, noisy, extravagant democracy. How mortifying, to feel the dead hand of pedigree pulling one down, even here.

With this understanding, one sleepless night in New York, Dickens’s fevered attention turned to slavery in America. The existence of the institution as a part of daily life became for Dickens like the hunchback in the room, whose deformity must never be mentioned; having no outlet for discussion, the deformity grew in the mind to a staggering size.

Only an idiot would suggest that England possessed an iota of moral superiority. Hypocrisy was Dickens’s specialty; he had made a career exposing and mocking it. In the case of slavery, he was well aware how England’s much vaunted crusade had destroyed colonial economies and served the interests of the East India Company.

His response to American slavery was not so much political as sensory—a revulsion at the physical atmosphere it produced. That one person could
own
another affected the subtext of human intercourse; it changed the air one breathed.

In America, the principle of ownership of human beings had become integral to trade, and as trade goes, so does the mind and heart. The institution became part of the human vernacular, as America became a society consisting of the owners, the owned, and citizens in-between—the majority, or what one might call the
somewhat
owned. A man’s tailor was not quite as owned as his slave and his wife, but he was more owned than the man who ran his cattle.

In this atmosphere, Dickens had begun to suspect why Americans
so resented him: having taken on the assumption that as they owned his books, they owned the author. Hence, what was for Dickens a visit to a foreign land was, to his American readers, a homecoming.

Having come home, Dickens’s duty was to appear as his readers had pictured him in their minds, and to behave in the way that they thought an eminent author should behave. In introducing the copyrights issue, he had spurned their sense of ownership by denying that he had already been bought and paid for.

In his mind, Dickens was far from home; indeed, it had been the entire point of the journey from the beginning. Worry had always made him ill, and his latest bout of ill-health in London he attributed to worry over Catherine, who had become more despondent after each pregnancy. As a result, the house on Doughty Street had become more a hospital ward than a home. Life with his poor wife was no longer an occasion of happy excitement but a well of dismal foreboding, which aggravated his own morbid tendencies, his shortness of temper, and every other quality he disliked in himself.

Always prone to nervous exhaustion, shortly before embarking for America he had suffered a bilious attack and nervous prostration that put him in bed in that hospital of a house for three weeks.

Now he felt something else coming on—an illness of some kind.
Not a fever
,
surely
.

“Mr. Putnam,” he shouted to his secretary in the opposite seat, for it was impossible to be heard otherwise. “I need to remain in seclusion for at least three days. I think I am getting a cold.” Already he looked forward to recovering his thoughts, writing letters, finding himself again—no public dinners, no assemblies, no extended discussions about his taste in waistcoats.

His assistant shook his head slowly and certainly, as though Dickens had suggested that they jump off the moving train. “Sir, I reckon that will be a hard row to hoe,” he said.

“I’m baffled by these ruralisms of yours. Do you mean that a man may not become sick in America?”

“No, sir,” answered Putnam, with the accent on
sir
. “You are free to get as sick as you can get.”

“Then why is it, as you term it, a difficult row to sow?”

“The actual saying goes …” Putnam started, then thought better of it. “Well, to start with, you have your artists waiting for you, sir.”

“Artists? In the plural?”

“Two of them, seemingly. A Mr. Alexander, who plans to paint your portrait, and a Mr. Dexter, who will sculpt your bust.”

“When in heaven did I agree to this madness?”

“It seems they wrote you in London, sir. And received a reply to the effect that you greatly looked forward to it.”

“Damnation. I wanted the voyage so badly that I agreed to anything. What a fool I was, to commit to what I could not envisage.”

“Everyone who comes to America does that, sir.”

“I suppose. Or who joins a war.”

“Or who heads out West. Did you know, sir, that
out West
is a term sometimes used in place of
dead
?
“

“You don’t say! Extraordinary!” Dickens was surprised to discover that at some point in the previous exchange he had extracted his notebook and had written two hundred words.

The train lurched to a stop with such suddenness that he feared for his teeth. He was immediately lifted to his feet and propelled down the aisle and onto the platform, to behold many more pairs of boots and shoes, and the glow of a great many cigars, and the sound of spit slapping the ground. Eventually by slow degrees the steam from the engine cleared, and heads and shoulders emerged, and reac-quainted themselves with the boots.

S
EEN THROUGH THE
window of the moving carriage, Philadelphia was a clean and handsome city, alarmingly regular, with not a crooked street in sight. Observing the posture and the manner of pedestrians who passed up and down the walkways on either side, Dickens thought he could feel the collar of his coat begin to stiffen, and wondered if he should buy a new hat, for lack of a wide, Quakery brim.

Dickens cleared his throat and noted that his cold, or fever, or whatever it was, had begun to ease. This came as a relief, for you never know with a cold—it might take you
out West
. He laughed to himself at the picture this put in his mind, and wrote it down in his notebook.

The Georgian entrance to the United States Hotel, as seemed to be the rule, positively teemed with expectant citizens. They poured
from the front doors into the street on his arrival, obstructing traffic and slowing the carriage to a standstill. Dickens pulled down the window and put his head outside for a better view of the building opposite the hotel, a white marble replica of the Parthenon, magnificent and ghastly at the same time, for it seemed utterly bereft of life.

“Good heavens, Mr. Putnam, is that a tomb?”

“In a sense I guess that is so, sir. It was once the Bank of the United States—do you see the letters over the columns? I expect you know the sad tale.”

“Ah yes, the Bank of the United States. I suppose one might call it the Tomb of Investment.”

“That is a fair way to put it, sir. The Catacomb of Worldly Hopes, you might say …”

The two continued in this light vein, the author’s pencil scratching away on his lap, until the carriage came to a halt, the door of their carriage swung open, and Dickens was plopped like a raisin into a pudding of humanity, and paddled along by outstretched palms.

Inside the hotel, Putnam appeared at the grand staircase to meet him. He had somehow found the time to go to his room and change into a purple vest and an even brighter cravat. As before, his athletic frame contradicted the effect, as did his serious, watchful expression.

“Mr. Dickens, sir, I am afeared that the garden I mentioned is rockier than previously guessed. Do you recollect your correspondence with a councilman by the name of Wendel Grisse?”

“Not a word of it.”

“Claims he asked if it would be all right to invite a few friends. ‘To shake hands with the great man’ was the way he put it.”

“Thanks to your description, Putnam, I remember it even less than I did before.”

“Well, anyway, you agreed to it, sir. And Mr. Grisse seems to have a passel of friends. His entire district, as a matter of plain fact. He put a notice to that effect in the
Gazette.”

“He expects me to hold a levee? That is out of the question, and that is my last word on the subject.”

“I will pass that on, sir,” said Putnam, and disappeared behind a moving curtain of serge and tweed.

* * *

N
EXT MORNING, NESTLED
in blissful solitude, Dickens opened his eyes to the music of the doorbell. It pinged gently as though tapped with a spoon. Pleasant enough for the first five pings, but by the fifteenth it lost its charm.

His rooms in the United States Hotel were comfortable, even luxurious: a parlor, a bedroom, a bathroom, and a room for the serving maid, which would remain unoccupied by reason of decency. However, the position would be filled on a live-out basis, in fact he had asked to see a selection of applicants later that day.

Dickens put on his morning coat and leather slippers, stopped in the parlor to fetch a cigar, and swung open the front door, expecting Putnam, or tea, or possibly a rasher of bacon, looking forward to the new day, and some time to himself.

On the other side of the door he found neither Putnam nor tea nor bacon, but a harried-looking gentleman with a high, shiny yellow forehead that might have been polished with a dry cloth.

“Mr. Dickens, sir,” announced the gentleman. “On behalf of the United States Hotel I bid you good morning and welcome.”

“That is all very fine,” Dickens replied, “but who are
you
?
“

“I am the manager of the hotel. And I declare that it’s been a spell since we received such a public man as your own self.”

“So it would seem,” said Dickens, who grew instantly tired despite his night’s rest.