I can’t drink a glass of water without having a hundred people looking down my throat.” On a tour of the Great Lakes he woke to a crowd gawking through his steamboat cabin window while his wife slept and he washed. I take my seat in a railroad car, and the very conductor won’t leave me alone.
“I go to church for quiet, and there is a violent rush to the neighborhood of the pew I sit in. “I am so enclosed and hemmed about with people, that I am exhausted from want of air,” Dickens complained to Forster. Apart from the country’s great writers, he found Americans malodorous, ill-mannered and invading his privacy. His love affair with an idealized America was short-lived and hard-felt. came off at the Park Theatre, New York, on Monday evening last.” But in a prescient endnote, the reporter predicted, “Such was the tom-foolery of silly-minded Americans, and such the ridiculous homage paid to a foreigner, who will in all probability return home and write a book abusing the whole nation for the excesses of a few consummate blockheads.” The Spirit of the Times wrote of it: “This most extraordinary, fashionable, brilliant, unique, grotesque, enchanting, bewitching, confounding, eye-dazzling, heart-delighting, superb, foolish and ridiculous fete. “If I should live to grow old,” Dickens said, “the scenes of this and other evenings will shine as brightly to my dull eyes 50 years hence as now.” A sketch made of Dickens during his visit to America.
and outshine them.” Their great Boz Ball boasted flags, flowers, festoons, wreaths, a huge portrait of the author with a bald eagle overhead, chandeliers hung by gilded ropes, 22 tableaux from the great author’s works, and 3,000 guests, who consumed 50 hams, 50 tongues, 38,000 stewed and pickled oysters, and 4,000 candy kisses.
#BAD MANNERS MAKE FOR BAD GUESTS. HOW TO#
He wrote his best friend, John Forster, that he didn’t know how to describe “the crowds that pour in and out the whole day of the people that line the streets when I go out of the cheering when I went to the theatre of the copies of verse, letters of congratulations, welcomes of all kinds, balls, dinners, assemblies without end?” When Bostonians renamed their city “Boz-town,” New Yorkers determined to “outdollar. Though not quite 30, Dickens was a literary rock star, the most famous writer in the world, who landed like a conquering hero in a country swept up in an extreme “Boz-o-mania”-the hype of his tour then unprecedented in American history. He had set at last upon the shores of “the Republic of my imagination.”Īmerica returned his ardor. Biographer Peter Ackroyd reports that he flew up the steps of the Tremont House Hotel, sprang into the hall, and greeted a curious throng with a bright “Here we are!” He took to the streets that twinkling midnight in his shaggy fur coat, galloping over frozen snow, shouting out the names on shop signs, pulling bell-handles of doors as he passed-giddy with laughter-and even screamed with (one imagines) astonishment and delight at the sight of the old South Church. Charles Dickens’ unfettered joy at first arriving in Boston Harbor in 1842 reads like Ebenezer Scrooge’s awakening on Christmas morning.
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