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AMERICAN NOTES FOR GENERAL CIRCULATION
AMERICAN NOTES FOR GENERAL CIRCULATION CHARLES DICKENS PREFACE TO THE FIRST CHEAP EDITION OF "AMERICAN NOTES"
IT is nearly eight years since this book was first published. I
present it unaltered in the Cheap Edition; and such of my
opinions as it expresses are quite unaltered too.
My readers have opportunities of judging for themselves whether the
influences and tendencies which I distrust in America have any
existence not in my imagination. They can examine for themselves
whether there has been anything in the public career of that
country during these past eight years or whether there is anything
in its present position at home or abroad which suggests that
those influences and tendencies really do exist. As they find the
fact they will judge me. If they discern any evidences of wrong-
going in any direction that I have indicated they will acknowledge
that I had reason in what I wrote. If they discern no such thing
they will consider me altogether mistaken.
Prejudiced I never have been otherwise than in favour of the
United States. No visitor can ever have set foot on those shores
with a stronger faith in the Republic than I had when I landed in
America.
I purposely abstain from extending these observations to any
length. I have nothing to defend or to explain away. The truth
is the truth; and neither childish absurdities nor unscrupulous
contradictions can make it otherwise. The earth would still move
round the sun though the whole Catholic Church said No.
I have many friends in America and feel a grateful interest in the
country. To represent me as viewing it with ill-nature animosity
or partisanship is merely to do a very foolish thing which is
always a very easy one; and which I have disregarded for eight
years and could disregard for eighty more.
LONDON JUNE 22 1850.
PREFACE TO THE "CHARLES DICKENS" EDITION OF "AMERICAN NOTES"
MY readers have opportunities of judging for themselves whether the
influences and tendencies which I distrusted in America had at
that time any existence but in my imagination. They can examine
for themselves whether there has been anything in the public career
of that country since at home or abroad which suggests that those
influences and tendencies really did exist. As they find the fact
they will judge me. If they discern any evidences of wrong-going
in any direction that I have indicated they will acknowledge that
I had reason in what I wrote. If they discern no such indications
they will consider me altogether mistaken - but not wilfully.
Prejudiced I am not and never have been otherwise than in favour
of the United States. I have many friends in America I feel a
grateful interest in the country I hope and believe it will
successfully work out a problem of the highest importance to the
whole human race. To represent me as viewing AMERICA with ill-
nature coldness or animosity is merely to do a very foolish
thing: which is always a very easy one.
CHAPTER I - GOING AWAY
I SHALL never forget the one-fourth serious and three-fourths
comical astonishment with which on the morning of the third of
January eighteen-hundred-and-forty-two I opened the door of and
put my head into a 'state-room' on board the Britannia steam-
packet twelve hundred tons burthen per register bound for Halifax
and Boston and carrying Her Majesty's mails.
That this state-room had been specially engaged for 'Charles
Dickens Esquire and Lady' was rendered sufficiently clear even
to my scared intellect by a very small manuscript announcing the
fact which was pinned on a very flat quilt covering a very thin
mattress spread like a surgical plaster on a most inaccessible
shelf. But that this was the state-room concerning which Charles
Dickens Esquire and Lady had held daily and nightly conferences
for at least four months preceding: that this could by any
possibility be that small snug chamber of the imagination which
Charles Dickens Esquire with the spirit of prophecy strong upon
him had always foretold would contain at least one little sofa
and which his lady with a modest yet most magnificent sense of its
limited dimensions had from the first opined would not hold more
than two enormous portmanteaus in some odd corner out of sight
(portmanteaus which could now no more be got in at the door not to
say stowed away than a giraffe could be persuaded or forced into a
flower-pot): that this utterly impracticable thoroughly hopeless
and profoundly preposterous box had the remotest reference to or
connection with those chaste and pretty not to say gorgeous
little bowers sketched by a masterly hand in the highly varnished
lithographic plan hanging up in the agent's counting-house in the
city of London: that this room of state in short could be
anything but a pleasant fiction and cheerful jest of the captain's
invented and put in practice for the better relish and enjoyment of
the real state-room presently to be disclosed:- these were truths
which I really could not for the moment bring my mind at all to
bear upon or comprehend. And I sat down upon a kind of horsehair
slab or perch of which there were two within; and looked without
any expression of countenance whatever at some friends who had
come on board with us and who were crushing their faces into all
manner of shapes by endeavouring to squeeze them through the small
doorway.
We had experienced a pretty smart shock before coming below which
but that we were the most sanguine people living might have
prepared us for the worst. The imaginative artist to whom I have
already made allusion has depicted in the same great work a
chamber of almost interminable perspective furnished as Mr.
Robins would say in a style of more than Eastern splendour and
filled (but not inconveniently so) with groups of ladies and
gentlemen in the very highest state of enjoyment and vivacity.
Before descending into the bowels of the ship we had passed from
the deck into a long narrow apartment not unlike a gigantic hearse
with windows in the sides; having at the upper end a melancholy
stove at which three or four chilly stewards were warming their
hands; while on either side extending down its whole dreary
length was a long long table over each of which a rack fixed to
the low roof and stuck full of drinking-glasses and cruet-stands
hinted dismally at rolling seas and heavy weather. I had not at
that time seen the ideal presentment of this chamber which has
since gratified me so much but I observed that one of our friends
who had made the arrangements for our voyage turned pale on
entering retreated on the friend behind him. smote his forehead
involuntarily and said below his breath 'Impossible! it cannot
be!' or words to that effect. He recovered himself however by a
great effort and after a preparatory cough or two cried with a
ghastly smile which is still before me looking at the same time
round the walls 'Ha! the breakfast-room steward - eh?' We all
foresaw what the answer must be: we knew the agony he suffered.
He had often spoken of THE SALOON; had taken in and lived upon the
pictorial idea; had usually given us to understand at home that
to form a just conception of it it would be necessary to multiply
the size and furniture of an ordinary drawing-room by seven and
then fall short of the reality. When the man in reply avowed the
truth; the blunt remorseless naked truth; 'This is the saloon
sir' - he actually reeled beneath the blow.
In persons who were so soon to part and interpose between their
else daily communication the formidable barrier of many thousand
miles of stormy space and who were for that reason anxious to cast
no other cloud not even the passing shadow of a moment's
disappointment or discomfiture upon the short interval of happy
companionship that yet remained to them - in persons so situated
the natural transition from these first surprises was obviously
into peals of hearty laughter and I can report that I for one
being still seated upon the slab or perch before mentioned roared
outright until the vessel rang again. Thus in less than two
minutes after coming upon it for the first time we all by common
consent agreed that this state-room was the pleasantest and most
facetious and capital contrivance possible; and that to have had it
one inch larger would have been quite a disagreeable and
deplorable state of things. And with this; and with showing how -
by very nearly closing the door and twining in and out like
serpents and by counting the little washing slab as standing-room
- we could manage to insinuate four people into it all at one
time; and entreating each other to observe how very airy it was (in
dock) and how there was a beautiful port-hole which could be kept
open all day (weather permitting) and how there was quite a large
bull's-eye just over the looking-glass which would render shaving a
perfectly easy and delightful process (when the ship didn't roll
too much); we arrived at last at the unanimous conclusion that it
was rather spacious than otherwise: though I do verily believe
that deducting the two berths one above the other than which
nothing smaller for sleeping in was ever made except coffins it
was no bigger than one of those hackney cabriolets which have the
door behind and shoot their fares out like sacks of coals upon
the pavement.
Having settled this point to the perfect satisfaction of all
parties concerned and unconcerned we sat down round the fire in
the ladies' cabin - just to try the effect. It was rather dark
certainly; but somebody said 'of course it would be light at
sea' a proposition to which we all assented; echoing 'of course
of course;' though it would be exceedingly difficult to say why we
thought so. I remember too when we had discovered and exhausted
another topic of consolation in the circumstance of this ladies'
cabin adjoining our state-room and the consequently immense
feasibility of sitting there at all times and seasons and had
fallen into a momentary silence leaning our faces on our hands and
looking at the fire one of our party said with the solemn air of
a man who had made a discovery 'What a relish mulled claret will
have down here!' which appeared to strike us all most forcibly; as
though there were something spicy and high-flavoured in cabins
which essentially improved that composition and rendered it quite
incapable of perfection anywhere else.
There was a stewardess too actively engaged in producing clean
sheets and table-cloths from the very entrails of the sofas and
from unexpected lockers of such artful mechanism that it made
one's head ache to see them opened one after another and rendered
it quite a distracting circumstance to follow her proceedings and
to find that every nook and corner and individual piece of
furniture was something else besides what it pretended to be and
was a mere trap and deception and place of secret stowage whose
ostensible purpose was its least useful one.
God bless that stewardess for her piously fraudulent account of
January voyages! God bless her for her clear recollection of the
companion passage of last year when nobody was ill and everybody
dancing from morning to night and it was 'a run' of twelve days
and a piece of the purest frolic and delight and jollity! All
happiness be with her for her bright face and her pleasant Scotch
tongue which had sounds of old Home in it for my fellow-traveller;
and for her predictions of fair winds and fine weather (all wrong
or I shouldn't be half so fond of her); and for the ten thousand
small fragments of genuine womanly tact by which without piecing
them elaborately together and patching them up into shape and form
and case and pointed application she nevertheless did plainly show
that all young mothers on one side of the Atlantic were near and
close at hand to their little children left upon the other; and
that what seemed to the uninitiated a serious journey was to
those who were in the secret a mere frolic to be sung about and
whistled at! Light be her heart and gay her merry eyes for
years!
The state-room had grown pretty fast; but by this time it had
expanded into something quite bulky and almost boasted a bay-
window to view the sea from. So we went upon deck again in high
spirits; and there everything was in such a state of bustle and
active preparation that the blood quickened its pace and whirled
through one's veins on that clear frosty morning with involuntary
mirthfulness. For every gallant ship was riding slowly up and
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