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Off to Niagara Falls
Charles Dickens' First American Tour.

By Richard Pindell


	Niagara Falls was the last stop on Dickens' tour of America.

On the night of January 22, 1842, a young Englishman ran through the snowy Boston streets to the Old South Church, where he let out of a whoop of exultation. Charles Dickens had discovered America.

America's discovery of Dickens had come a little earlier. Tens of thousands in this country had wept over the dying of Little Nell in The Old Curiousity Shop, published in 1841. Four years earlier they had thrilled to the evil hijinks of Oliver Twist's crime lord Fagin and the shenanigans of "the Artful Dodger," an urchin pickpocket.

To his readers and those who had only heard of him, a glimpse of Dickens was a major event. When he passed along the streets of Boston, resplendent in a fur greatcoat, hundreds jammed the sidewalks and cheered. He and his wife, Kate, were immediately overwhelmed with invitations to parties, balls and banquets. The greatcoat began to go bald as adoring ladies plucked its fur for souvenirs. The novelist's arrival here would prove, next to his second American trip, the most successful British invasion of our shores, even bigger than that of the Beatles 122 years later.

Dickens landed here as much a pilgrim as a tourist. Like a number of Englishmen, he had a romantic image of America. The old Kentucky frontier and its deer-skinned riflemen had lit up his imagination. The Republic's "great experiment" in popular rule attracted his idealism, curiosity and envy.

Though America's reputation had helped to lure him, he had business here as well: "I would beg leave to whisper in your ear two words: International Copyright," he told an American audience. Without an international copyright law, foreign publishers could sell Dickens' works without paying him a penny. None had more brazenly pirated him than the printers in America, and Dickens was angered by the profits made at his expense. The desperately poor characters of his novels were whittled from the heartwood of his own experience. His father, a good, hard-working man, had lavish tastes and a lean pocketbook, which kept his large family changing addresses to stay ahead of creditors. At age 12 Dickens was sent to work in a blacking warehouse in London. Here, for 12 hours a day and six shillings a week, he handled pots of the viscous stuff used to blacken stoves and boots, and his sizeable fortune could never wash away the stain of those days.

'He ain't been doing nothin',' answered another stall woman. 'He writes books.'

Dickens liked Boston with its gilt signs, tidy cobblestone streets and houses that managed to be at once modest and impressive. Its inhabitants won him with their open-faced friendliness. "If you ask the way to a place of some common waterside man, who doesn't know you from Adam," he reported, "why he turns and goes with you." Such guide service may have proved particularly helpful, given Dickens' occasional problems with the Boston accent, which, as he said, fell a bit harsh on his ears. At a dinner, Massachusetts Governor John Davis solicitously asked him, "Does the Boston pronunciation sound hash to you?" The Englander stared at the New Englander uncomprehendingly. Twice the governor repeated his question—in vain. Finally a bystander came to Dickens' rescue with a translation.

While in America, Dickens paid special attention to his perennial topic—the common people. He toured the textile mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, and approved of its immaculate streets and cottage-like houses for the mill workers. In New York, his next stop, a descent into the city's underlife was disquieting. At "the Tombs," the city prison, he learned from the night watchman that on a typical night 20 or more young prostitutes—"beautiful ones too," said the man—were locked up in a space no bigger than the wine cellar in the writer's London townhouse. One cell held a boy who had seen his father kill his mother. For this twice-unfortunate witness months had dragged by without a trial. Dickens, whose father had languished for almost a year in a debtors' prison, was outraged.

From New York Dickens took a train to Philadelphia. Unhappily he and Kate sat in the car behind the smoking car, from which "flashes of saliva flew so perpetually and incessantly out of the windows it looked as though they were ripping open feather-beds inside." America was a nation of spitters in 1842. "In the courts of law," observed Dickens, "the judge has his spittoon on the bench, the counsel have theirs, the witness has his, the prisoner his.... The jury are accommodated at the rate of three men to a spittoon."

In Philadelphia a local politician dragooned Dickens into appearing at a "levee" or public reception. For two hours he had his arm shaken nearly off, he complained to a friend. All this attention disposed him to react with wry good humor to a Baltimorean who declared total ignorance of his fame. Dickens was sitting on a train en route to Washington when it made a refreshment stop in a marketplace in Baltimore. The usual cry had gone up heralding the train: "Dickens is aboard."

"What's it all about?" asked one of the stall women in the market.

"Why," said a man, "it's Dickens. They've got him here!"

"Well, what has he been doing?" asked she.

"He ain't been doing nothin'," answered another stall woman. "He writes books."

"Oh!" sniffed the woman. "Is that all? What do they make such a row about that for, I'd like to know!"