As to daily news, there is no dearth of that commodity. This
passenger is reported to have lost fourteen pounds at Vingt-et-un
in the saloon yesterday; and that passenger drinks his bottle of
champagne every day, and how he does it (being only a clerk),
nobody knows. The head engineer has distinctly said that there
never was such times – meaning weather – and four good hands are
ill, and have given in, dead beat. Several berths are full of
water, and all the cabins are leaky. The ship’s cook, secretly
swigging damaged whiskey, has been found drunk; and has been played
upon by the fire-engine until quite sober. All the stewards have
fallen down-stairs at various dinner-times, and go about with
plasters in various places. The baker is ill, and so is the
pastry-cook. A new man, horribly indisposed, has been required to
fill the place of the latter officer; and has been propped and
jammed up with empty casks in a little house upon deck, and
commanded to roll out pie-crust, which he protests (being highly
bilious) it is death to him to look at. News! A dozen murders on
shore would lack the interest of these slight incidents at sea.
Dickens, making a rough passage to America in 1842. The propped-up pastry cook I’m sure was so, almost as if they were expecting the writer whose books are full of such stretchers. I’m enjoying American Notes partly for these bits, for the sudden flash of that wild imagination.
But mostly, Dickens here is the journalist and Victorian ‘improver’, and too well informed about how much at home needed improving to patronise the New World. In Boston, he diligently tours prisons, asylums and orphanages. In an institution for the blind he comes across Laura Bridgman, blind, deaf and dumb, who was taught to read and write by the extraordinary Dr Robert Howe. She was, says Wikipedia,’ the first deaf-blind American child to gain a significant education in the English language’. Dickens gives us Howe’s own touching description of their work.
It’s not all blue-book, however. When he goes to hear a famous preacher address a congregation of sailors the novelist wakes up and begins to take notes.
‘Who are these – who are they – who are these fellows? where do
they come from? Where are they going to? – Come from! What’s the
answer?’ – leaning out of the pulpit, and pointing downward with
his right hand: ‘From below!’ – starting back again, and looking
at the sailors before him: ‘From below, my brethren. From under
the hatches of sin, battened down above you by the evil one.
That’s where you came from!’ – a walk up and down the pulpit: ‘and
where are you going’ – stopping abruptly: ‘where are you going?
Aloft!’ – very softly, and pointing upward: ‘Aloft!’ – louder:
‘aloft!’ – louder still: ‘That’s where you are going – with a fair
wind, – all taut and trim, steering direct for Heaven in its glory,
where there are no storms or foul weather, and where the wicked
cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.’
Did he take notes? Perhaps the years of Hansard reporting refined an already wonderful memory. Writing does that.
The book is not short of time’s ironies:
In all the public establishments of America, the utmost courtesy
prevails. Most of our Departments are susceptible of considerable
improvement in this respect, but the Custom-house above all others
would do well to take example from the United States.
So far I’m enjoying this a lot more than the last book-length account I read by a visitor to the US. This was Bernard-Henri Lévy’s American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville. I read it as it came out in The Atlantic with disbelief (that someone had paid big money for this crap) and envy (of the expense account). It was fatal to the book even to think about Toqueville, let alone to re-open Democracy in America. Garrison Keillor’s review in the NYT seemed to me dead-on, substance as well as tone – the patroniser patronised into the ground. But intellectuals in America lined up to piss on Keillor. Their burden was that the NYT had given this Important Book to a middlebrow writer. The newly-Americanised Christopher Hitchens called him ‘a vulgar jerk’. OK. My book on America will be called The US: 400 Years of the Cultural Cringe.
