April 26, 2010
Dickens leaves the United States, gratefully (1842)
Charles Dickens, with much relief, boards a train with his wife, Catharine, in Buffalo, N.Y., and leaves the United States. Although feted everywhere he went, Dickens grew weary of the journey, the “rancid press” that dogged his every move, and most of all, of the Americans, who at first were “friendly, frank, kind and warm-hearted,” but also self-righteous, humorless and insecure, needing “a constant appetite for praise.” It didn’t help that his speeches urging the abolition of slavery and the establishment of international copyright law were not well-received.
All that was swept away when he boarded the ferry and saw Niagara Falls: “Great Heaven, on what a fall of bright-green water! — that it came upon me in its full might and majesty. Then, when I felt how near to my Creator I was standing, the first effect, and the enduring one — instant and longing — of the tremendous spectacle, was Peace. Peace of Mind, tranquility, calm recollections of the Dead, great thoughts of Eternal Rest and Happiness; nothing of gloom or terror. Niagara was at once stamped upon my heart, an Image of Beauty; to remain there, changeless and indelible, until its pulses cease to beat, for ever.”
They would spend ten days on the Canadian side, and it would have been idyllic but for one incident so troubling Dickens recorded it in his memoir, ”American Notes”
:“On Table Rock, there is a cottage belonging to a Guide, where little relics of the place are sold, and where visitors register their names in a book kept for the purpose. On the wall of the room in which a great many of these volumes are preserved, the following request is posted: 'Visitors will please not copy nor extract the remarks and poetical effusions from the registers and albums kept here.'
“But for this intimation, I should have let them lie upon the tables on which they were strewn with careful negligence, like books in a drawing room: being quite satisfied with the stupendous silliness of certain stanzas with an anti climax at the end of each, which were framed and hung up on the wall. Curious, however, after reading this announcement, to see what kind of morsels were so carefully preserved, I turned a few leaves, and found them scrawled all over with the vilest and the filthiest ribaldry that ever human hogs delighted in.
“It is humiliating enough to know that there are among men brutes so obscene and worthless, that they can delight in laying their miserable profanations upon the very steps of Nature's greatest altar. But that these should be hoarded up for the delight of their fellow swine, and kept in a public place where any eyes may see them, is a disgrace to the English language in which they are written (though I hope few of these entries have been made by Englishmen), and a reproach to the English side, on which they are preserved.”
Born: John James Audobon, naturalist, author, Les Cayes, Santo Domingo (now Haiti), 1785; Frederick Law Olmsted, architect, author, Hartford, Conn., 1822; Artemus Ward (ps. Charles Farrar Browne), essayist, humorist, Waterford, Maine, 1834; Anita Loos, novelist, screenwriter, Sissons, Calif., 1893; Bernard Malamud, novelist, short-story writer, Brooklyn, New York, 1914; Bruce Jay Friedman, humorist, playwright, screenwriter, Bronx, New York, 1930.
Died: Daniel Defoe, novelist, journalist, London, 1731; Gypsy Rose Lee, stripper, mystery novelist, Los Angeles, 1970; A(lfred) B(ertram) Guthrie, novelist, Choteau, Mont., 1991; Hubert Selby Jr., novelist, screenwriter, Los Angeles, 2004.
Quote for the Day: “The people I’m furious with are the Women’s Liberationists. They keep getting up on soapboxes and proclaiming women are brighter than men. That’s true, but it should be kept quiet or it ruins the whole racket.” — Anita Loos, who was born today in 1893
Also from “Writers 365”:
- Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning: “I see your face as the face of an angel”
- A Meeting of Two Minds (1845)
- The Brontes Query A Publisher (1846)
- Melville Climbs A Mountain And Catches A Whale (1850)
- Charles Dickens Gets Serious (1850)
- The Scarlet Letter scandal (1850)
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