Ohio History Journal

CHARLES DICKENS IN OHIO*

by ALFRED R. FERGUSON

Assistant Professor of English, Ohio Wesleyan University

Soon after his arrival in the United States in January 1842,

Dickens wrote to an English friend: "There is a great deal afloat

here in the way of subjects for description. I keep my eyes open

pretty wide, and hope to have done so to some purpose by the

time I come home."¹ That he kept his eyes open is evidenced by

his vivid letters to Forster,² his friend and biographer, and by

the volume of American Notes³ drawn from a combination of these

letters and his imagination. Yet the report of what Dickens saw in

the United States aroused a storm of criticism.⁴ Most of the critics

complained on grounds of national pride; a few were dis-

appointed by the lack of thorough understanding in the report.

Emerson, for instance, after reading the American Notes, called

Dickens' picture of American manners too narrow and super-

ficial to be adequate.⁵ Philip Hone, a New York diarist contem-

porary with Dickens, thought the judgments of the Notes sound

but commented that the "sketches are slightly drawn from hasty

observation, and it is evident that his [Dickens'] volatile wing

has not rested long enough in one place to enable him to under-

stand its localities or discourse wisely upon its characteristics."⁶

 

* This article was originally delivered as a paper at the annual meeting of

the Ohio College Association at Columbus, April 8-9, 1949.

1 To Thomas Mitton, January 31, 1842, in Georgina Hogarth and Mamie

Dickens, eds., The Letters of Charles Dickens (3 vols., London, 1880-82), I, 59,

referred to hereafter as Letters.

2 See John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens (3 vols., Philadelphia, 1872-

74).

3 American Notes for General Circulation, first published in London in 1842.

All references to this work are to Volume I of the Nonesuch Dickens, ed. by Arthur

Waugh, Hugh Walpole, Walter Dexter, and Thomas Hatton (23 vols., Bloomsbury

[London], 1938).

4 See for examples of the protest such contemporary parodies of the American

Notes as Current American Notes by "Buz!" (London, [1842?]) and [Harry

Wood], Change for American Notes (n.p., 1843).

5 Entry in his journal for November 25, 1842, in Bliss Perry, ed., The Heart

of Emerson's Journals (Boston, 1926).

6 Allan Nevins, ed., The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828-1851 (2 vols., New York,

1927), II, 633.

14

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Charles Dickens in Ohio                   15

All these charges against Dickens' hasty observations are justi-

fiable, yet this record of America is comparatively free from

malice or loose generalities and remains, as Allan Nevins has

remarked, "the best of all works of American travel, from a

literary point of view."7

To Ohioans Dickens' tour has a special interest, for after

being entertained lavishly in the East for two months, after a

rapid survey of the civilization of the Atlantic seaboard, Dickens

turned westward into what he called "the oddest and most char-

acteristic part of this most queer country."⁸ Even in writing of

the elaborate attentions he received early in his stay, Dickens

had noted with satisfaction the interest shown in him by people

of the frontier:

I can give you no conception [he wrote to Thomas Mitton] of my

welcome here. There was never a king or emperor upon the earth so

cheered and followed by crowds, and entertained in public at splendid

balls and dinners and waited on by public bodies and deputations of

all kinds. I have had one from the Far West [actually St. Louis]--a

journey of two thousand miles.9

The very elaborateness of his entertainment in the East had in-

creased his curiosity about the West. As some wise Americans

feared, the adulation showered upon him in the eastern cities was

stifling. Philip Hone confided to his diary, "There is danger of

overdoing the matter and making our well-meant hospitalities

oppressive."10

By March the West loomed before Dickens as a great ad-

venture and an escape from too cordial civilities. He wrote earn-

estly to his friend Professor Felton in Cambridge, "I want to see

the West."11 To Forster he had confided a brave plan of leaving

the beaten track, making up a personal caravan and cutting

 

7  Allan Nevins, comp. and ed., American Social History As Recorded by

American Travellers (New York, 1923), 123.

8 Letter to Thomas Mitton, March 22, 1842, in Letters, I, 67.

9 January 31, 1842, in Letters, I, 59.

1O Entry for January 27, 1842, in Nevins, Diary of Philip Hone, II, 582, See

also the similar comment in a New Haven paper quoted in William Glyde Wilkins,

comp. and ed., Charles Dickens in America (London, 1911), 103.

11 March 14, 1842, in James T. Fields, Yesterdays with Authors (Boston,

1884), 132.

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16    Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly

"through the wilds of Kentucky and Tennessee, across the Alle-

ghany Mountains, and so until we should strike the lakes....

without some such dash I can never be a free agent, or see any-

thing worth the telling."¹² Fortunately for Dickens' comfort,

Henry Clay dissuaded him from his rashness, urging him rather

to follow the more normal routes to Pittsburgh and then take a

river boat down the Ohio and Mississippi to St. Louis. From

there he could cut across the prairies to Chicago or return to the

Ohio and drive north to Canada and the lakes.¹³

After many changes of route, Dickens began his western

tour on March 23.14 His party, composed of himself, his wife

Kate, her maid, and his young Bostonian secretary George W.

Putnam, traveled from Baltimore through York, Harrisburg, and

Pittsburgh by rail, stagecoach, and canal. At Pittsburgh, some-

what fearful of explosions, they boarded the river boat Messenger

and sailed down the Ohio, stopping at Cincinnati and Louisville,

and passing at the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi, Cairo,

the abysmal Eden so harshly satirized later in Martin Chuzzlewit.

This western tour took Dickens as far as St. Louis and a glimpse of

the prairies, which like some other American marvels he found

less amazing than their report.15 Informed of the difficulties of

prairie travel, he abandoned the projected visit to Chicago. Instead

he retraced his steps to Cincinnati in order to cross Ohio to the

easier route of the Great Lakes. Counting his two-day stay in

Cincinnati (April 4-6) on the way west and his tour across the

state (April 19 till noon April 25), Dickens was in Ohio only

eight days, too brief a period to qualify him as a serious observer;

but the record of his observations provides us with an accurate

surface picture of the state in its early youth.

The picture is not especially sympathetic, but personal

circumstances relating to the visit make Dickens' sharper crit-

icisms understandable. When he stepped ashore on the crowded

wharves of Cincinnati on April 4, Dickens was not mentally or

 

12 Letter of February 24, 1842, in Forster, Life of Charles Dickens, I, 325

13 Fields, op. cit., 132.

14 For Dickens' itinerary in America, see Wilkins, Dickens in America,

Appendix I, 303-307.

15 See Forster, op. cit., I, 394.

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Charles Dickens in Ohio                 17

physically in any condition to view his surroundings tenderly.

He had been traveling incessantly since January; he had been

vexed by the reception of his plea for an international copyright, a

subject dear to his heart and pocketbook; he had been tormented

by continuous invasion of personal privacy and by the stings of

yellow journalism. In his tour he had been condemned to bruises

in jolting stagecoaches, to impertinent questions about his clothes,

to a constant bath in tobacco juice. In his excursion on the Ameri-

can rivers he had been annoyed by superannuated soldiers like the

"weazen-faced warrior" General G.; he had suffered, he said,

terribly from the interminable ramblings of a metaphysical New

England poet who had snuffled and buzzed around him like a

"gigantic bee."16 Even before beginning his western tour he had

discovered that America was not the ideal land he had imagined it

to be. He had dreamed of a free nation "mewing its mighty

youth." His rapid travels had not convinced him of the reality

of his dream. In fact, he had written in dismay from Baltimore:

"I am disappointed. This is not the republic I came to see; this

is not the republic of my imagination.... It sinks immeasurably

below the level I had placed it upon."¹⁷ If, because of these

circumstances he saw Ohio through a slightly atrabilious eye, his

report remained still more objective and less caustic than the

portraits of the Middle West painted by Marryat or Mrs. Trollope.

He was, for example, on this first sight of Cincinnati, im-

mediately charmed by the beauty of the city itself which rose

from the woods like an enchanted spot from the Arabian Nights,

"the prettiest place," he remarked, "I have seen here, except

Boston."¹⁸ The streets were neat and colorful with the banners of

a temperance convention flying and a procession of twenty thou-

sand ardent advocates of water passing beneath his windows.19

Almost before he was settled in the hotel and before he could issue

a "not at home," two pleasant judges called upon him to arrange

 

16 Letter to Felton, April 29, 1842, in Fields, Yesterdays with Authors, 135.

The experience with General G. is also reported, at length, in Forster, op. cit., I,

372, 375.

17 To W. C. Macready, March 22, 1842, in Letters, I, 61.

18 Forster, op. cit., I, 383. See also American Notes, 160-161.

19 Ibid. See also American Notes, 161.

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18    Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly

for him to meet the citizens the following day. One of his callers,

Judge Timothy Walker, was so much like Felton of Harvard that

Dickens so violated his expressed principles as to accept an invita-

tion to a ball on April 5.20 His new friends arranged an immediate

sightseeing tour, introduced him into the classrooms of the free-

school system, and escorted him into a courtroom to hear a case

tried.²¹ On his second day in the city Dickens met the public from

11:30 until 1:0022 and then attended Judge Walker's ball in the

evening. In the American Notes he said kindly that the society

which he found in Cincinnati was "intelligent, courteous, and

agreeable."²³ As was his custom he was more frank in his letter

to Forster, where he complained that he had been forced to talk

personally during the evening to more than one hundred and fifty

bores.²⁴ To judge by the record of the occasion left by one im-

pressionable female guest, his bitterness sounds justifiable. The

young lady, coming late to the ball, sought out her idol, hung at

his elbow, described his attire in minute detail, sniffed at the

struggle among some of the women guests for the flower in his

lapel, and closed her account with the sigh, "I felt that his throne

was shaken, though it could never be destroyed."²⁵

Two weeks intervened between Dickens' first impressions of

Cincinnati and his second visit on his way back from St. Louis.

This time he lingered for only a day, arriving on the 19th, going

at once to rest in his former hotel, the Broadway, and catching

the public stage for Columbus on Wednesday morning, April 20.

The party left early in the morning on a comparatively good,

macadamized road, fit for rapid travel at six miles an hour. Even

so the trip lasted for twenty-three hours, made painful for all the

travelers, except Dickens who sat in his favorite seat on the box,

by the incessant spray of tobacco juice that drifted over them from

a careless spitter in a forward seat.²⁶ The coach ran straight

 

20 See Fields, Yesterdays with Authors, 135.

21 American Notes, 163.

22 Letter to Forster, April 4, 1842, op. cit., I, 379.

23 163.

24 Letter of April 15, 1842, op. cit., I, 383-384.

25 Forster, op. cit., I, 384-385.

26 See George W. Putnam, "Four Months in America with Charles Dickens,"

Atlantic Monthly, XXVI (1870), 595.

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Charles Dickens in Ohio                 19

through with no stops save to change horses and to permit passen-

gers four dismal meals en route.

Swift as this stage of the journey was, around it have grown

up some of the many apocryphal legends of Dickens in Ohio. An

inn in Lebanon, one of the posting-stops outside Cincinnati, dis-

plays a marker commemorating Dickens' stop there; and one of

the popular magazines some years ago carried fancied reminis-

cences concerning this brief visit.²⁷

Actually no evidence is available, for in the letters, which,

as Forster points out, contain the only accurate "personal narra-

tive of his famous visit to America,^"28 Dickens dismisses the trip

in a few sentences. Nor do the reminiscences of his secretary,

Putnam, add much detail save for a few notes on the accidents of

the journey. To be sure, Dickens expanded the report of the trip

to Columbus when he wrote out his American Notes.²⁹ There he

filled out the picture in detail, describing the countryside, the

coachman, the loungers at the stops, and inserting a supposedly

typical dialogue between "Brown Hat" and "Straw Hat" to

demonstrate the absurdity of much American conversation. But

one must beware of accepting this detail, for, as Robert Price

has pointed out,30 the American Notes are frequently a compila-

tion of many incidents selected and composed with the aid of an

artistic imagination. The published version obviously contains at

times a generalized comment inserted fancifully into a specific

frame. The whole conversational skit, for example, is included in

a letter to Forster on May 3, 1842,31 as a dialogue typifying

general American speech habits. There is, moreover, in the letters,

no account of specific stops on the journey; the coachman and the

loungers are obviously types rather than individuals. In some

extreme cases of artistic license, the specific description of one

 

27 See F. J. Riley, "The Town That Poisoned Dickens," Esquire, XII (1939),

72, 267-270.

28 Op. cit., I, 359.

29 See pp. 187-192.

30 "Boz Reports on Ohio," Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly,

LI (1942), 195-202.

31 Op. cit., I, 410.

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20    Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly

person as given in the letters is transferred in the Notes to a

totally different figure.³²

The first stage of the journey across Ohio brought the trav-

elers to Columbus early in the morning of April 21. They seem

to have seen little of Columbus, for they went at once to their

rooms in the Neil House and slept throughout the day.³³ Though

Columbus contained a prison and an insane asylum, for once

Dickens was too weary to investigate conditions there. After

dinner, he revived sufficiently to agree to a half hour introduction

to the society of the city,³⁴ a custom which, as he had earlier

complained, was forced upon him in nearly every town through

which he passed. Describing this unfortunate obligation in gen-

eral terms, he wrote:

In every town where we stay, though it be only for a day, we hold

a regular levee or drawing room where I shake hands on the average

with five or six hundred people. . . . Think of two hours of this every

day, and the people coming in by hundreds, all fresh and piping hot,

and full of questions, when we are literally exhausted and can hardly

stand.³⁵

Save for the brevity of his ordeal and the unusually prim      de-

meanor of the citizens, the Columbus levee seems to have followed

the pattern. As Dickens described the event humorously to

Forster:

The people poured in as they always do; each gentleman with a

lady on each arm, exactly like the Chorus to God Save the Queen. I

wish you could see them, that you might know what a splendid com-

parison this is. They wear their clothes exactly as the chorus people

do; and stand . . . just as the company would, on the first night of the

season . . .receive any facetiousness on my part as if it were a stage

direction . . . and have rather more difficulty in 'getting off.'³⁶

Though Dickens was mildly sarcastic over the society of

Cincinnati and Columbus, he praised the appearance of both

32 See the figure of the mayor of Cleveland in Forster, op. cit., I, 403, trans-

ferred in part to the captain of the Constitution. American Notes, 197.

33 See Forster, op. cit., I, 397-398.

34 Ibid., I, 398.

35 To Thomas Mitton, March 22, 1842, in Letters, I, 66.

³⁶ Op. cit., I, 398.

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Charles Dickens in Ohio               21

cities,37 and in both cities he was spared that invasion of privacy

which was the basis of his most bitter criticism of America. In

spite of his general complaint that he could not drop a letter in

the streets without having his loss reported in the press,³⁸ the

newspapers in Ohio treated him mildly. The Cincinnati Gazette,

for example, carried only four items dealing with Dickens. No

account was given of his levee or the ball he attended in the city.

On April 5 the paper announced his arrival and hotel; on the 6th

a note appeared concerning the publication in Liverpool papers

of the accounts of the Dickens dinner in Boston; on the 18th the

paper listed his arrival in St. Louis; and on April 20 the follow-

ing two lines were printed: "Mr. Dickens arrived in town yester-

day from St. Louis, and took lodgings at the Broadway Hotel. He

leaves today for New York, via Columbus."

The Elevator, a Cincinnati weekly, reported his arrival and

departure for St. Louis, adding only that "a public dinner and

ball were tendered him, which he declined." (April 9, 1842.)

The Daily Chronicle (April 4, 1842) and the Daily Republican

(April 5, 1842) noted his arrival in the city, the latter adding the

comment: "We understand that they will be at home to-day from

11 o'clock until 3 o'clock." The Daily Enquirer followed his

itinerary more closely, reporting his arrival in Harrisburg (April

1), noticing his landing in Cincinnati (April 4), and including in

the issue of April 20 a brief sketch of his plans.

The Columbus papers were equally devoid of any obnoxious

personal news. Of the three papers which I have examined, none

makes any extensive comment on the visitor. None, in fact, even

prints a mention of the levee which he held in Columbus. The

Old School Republican and Ohio State Gazette was perhaps too

busy blackguarding its political rivals to print more than two

brief remarks on Dickens. On January 25 the paper carried a

reprint from the New York Courier concerning Dickens' desire

to make a western tour; on April 22 the editor learned of

Dickens' arrival just in time to catch his press with a brief note:

"We learned at the moment our paper goes to press, that Mr.

37 See American Notes, 160, 192.

38 See Forster, op. cit., I, 317, 386.

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22   Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly

Dickens and Lady arrived at the Neil House, in the morning stage

from Cincinnati. He will probably remain in the City two or

three days." The daily Ohio State Journal on April 8 copied a

note from Cincinnati on Dickens' presence but made news neither

of the author's arrival nor his departure from Columbus. The

weekly Ohio State Journal printed only a brief item for April 21,

summing up Dickens' plans: "Mr. and Mrs. Charles Dickens

arrived in this city, to-day, and are at the Neil House. They leave

to-morrow, we understand, for Sandusky City, Buffalo and New

York. They have been in St. Louis." Dickens might well have

complained at the anti-British jingoistic tone of the Ohio papers,

but until he reached Cleveland he had no reason for any vexation

over yellow journalism.

Not wishing to delay his journey in Columbus, Dickens

hired an extra, or special, stage to carry his party to Tiffin, the

junction point of the Mad River and Lake Erie Railroad leading

into Sandusky. With a huge lunch packed by the Neil House

and with a company agent on the box to procure horses, the party

left Columbus at 7 A.M., Friday, April 22.³⁹ Their route, the

Columbus and Sandusky Turnpike, was a clay road filled over

in the worst spots with corduroy and admissibly by contemporary

reports almost impassable.⁴⁰ So poor indeed was the road that

the charter of its operating company was revoked by the state

legislature a year after Dickens passed over it. All the available

sources agree on the misery of the ride, which was so bad that,

according to Putnam, Mrs. Dickens was finally bound by hand-

kerchiefs to the side of the coach to save her from serious damage

during the perpetual careening.41 Yet since the stage was private

and free from both tobacco juice and inane conversation, the

travelers treated their rough trip as a picnic jaunt. They dined

in the afternoon in an open-air glade, giving away their plates

and remaining food to a poor settler. The post stops, too dirty

and drab to serve as inns, were full of eager loungers gathered

to gawk at the unscheduled stage.

39 See Forster, op. cit., I, 398.

40 See William T. Martin, History of Franklin County (Columbus, 1858),

70 et seq.

41 Putnam, loc. cit.

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Charles Dickens in Ohio                 23

Late in the evening, terrified by thick woods and a fierce

storm of lightning, they arrived at Upper Sandusky, a primitive

post-stop at the edge of the Wyandot Indian Reservation. They

had endured more than sixteen hours and sixty-odd miles of

horrible road, only to find that their lodging place was a bug-

infested log tavern totally lacking in locks or bolts for its doors.

Since Dickens was carrying 250 pounds in gold, he was under-

standably disturbed at the thought of sleeping without protection.

All he could do, however, was to pile his luggage in front of the

crazily-hanging doors.⁴² Even so, he was perhaps more content

than his wife and poor Putnam, who were tortured by vermin, the

latter so much that he crept out of the tavern to sleep uneasily,

surrounded by gaunt, snuffling pigs, in the coach. In the morning

at breakfast Dickens talked cheerfully to the Indian agent of the

Wyandot Reservation, who told sadly of the enforced removal of

the depleted tribe to strange lands in the West.⁴³ With protesting

joints the party climbed into the coach again on Saturday morning,

drove over even worse roads to Tiffin, where they dined, were

driven triumphantly all about town on the way to the station, and

caught a train which brought them into Sandusky by evening.

There, surfeited by overland travel, they waited for a steamer to

carry them by lake to Buffalo.

Sandusky, marshy and quiet, seemed an uninteresting spot

to Dickens, but he was amused by the easy manners of his inn-

keeper. The landlord was a New Englander who stood on no

ceremony, spat vastly in the fireplace, walked around the house

with his hat on, but yet struck his guest as an "obliging fellow,"⁴⁴

cheerful, and anxious to please. The rest of the loungers in San-

dusky were less impressive. In perhaps his only really venomous

comment on the citizens of Ohio, Dickens remarked that the in-

habitants of the little lake town seemed "invariably morose, sullen,

clownish, and repulsive."⁴⁵

42 See Foster, op. cit., I, 398.

43 Ibid., I, 401.

44 Forster, op. cit., I, 402. According to Hewson L. Peeke, this landlord was

Colonel R. E. Colt of the Wayne Hotel. "Charles Dickens in Ohio in 1842," Ohio

State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly, XXVIII (1919), 80.

45 Forster, op. cit., I, 401.

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24    Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly

On the afternoon of the 24th, the party caught the steamboat

Constitution, sailed uncomfortably across the choppy lake to

Cleveland, and lay there overnight. Even before he arrived in

the city Dickens was annoyed by Cleveland, for in Sandusky he

had picked up a Plain Dealer that waved the American flag wildly

at John Bull.⁴⁶ His temper was not soothed in the morning at

Cleveland when curious spectators drawn by the rumor of Boz

peered through his porthole while he washed and his wife lay

abed.⁴⁷ Though he walked ashore with Putnam for a brief stroll,

he refused to hold any commerce with the city during his stay

there. When the mayor, Dr. Joshua Mills, came aboard to greet

the distinguished visitor and request a levee, Dickens sent out

Putnam with a decided refusal. As Dickens wrote later with a

return of humor, the mayor took his rebuff coolly, took out his

jackknife, and retired to the nearby wharf to whittle a large stick

into a small peg while he stared enigmatically at the closed door

of the cabin.⁴⁸ For the first time in his tour of Ohio Dickens was

driven to overt discourtesy. But then, for the first time in Ohio,

at Cleveland, the newspapers handled him with rough semi-jocular

insolence.  The Plain Dealer, violently democratic and anti-

British, described his visit in these words:

The Dickens was to pay here on Monday morning, when Boz was

announced to be among us, "taking notes" we suppose. He came in on

the Steamboat Constitution from Sandusky, took a hasty stroll through

the streets accompanied by a Boston friend, and returned to his State-

room on board, and shut himself up from the vulgar gaze. His lady,

however, showed her plump round English face to as many as wished

to look, which quite compensated the gaping crowd, as she and her

husband are one, according to the English law.⁴⁹

The Evening Herald gave a similar report, though its scorn was

directed at those who came to gaze at the British Lion. Though

the paper had faithfully recorded Dickens' movements from Pitts-

burgh through St. Louis and back again (April 2, 8, 19, 23),

the editor displayed an independent western spirit. On April 8

 

46 See American Notes, 197-198; Forster, op. cit., I, 403.

47 Ibid.

48 See American Notes, 197, 198; Forster, op. cit., I, 403.

49 April 27, 1842.

• 11
 

Charles Dickens in Ohio                 25

he wrote: "Mr. Dickens and Lady arrived in Cincinnati on the

4th. We are glad to see no sort of Boz-fooleries were manifested

in the Queen City on the occasion." On the day of the visit to

Cleveland the Herald printed about the same comment as that in

the Plain Dealer, ending the comment on Boz with the sentence,

"The gentlemen and loafers gathered about the dock got a sight

of 'the Dickens'--that was all."50

Had Dickens read these two papers he might have written

his report of the end of the Ohio tour more violently than he did.

As it was, his comment on his travels was a half-amused prophecy

of the kind of treatment he had in mind for the epic of his west-

ward journey when he came at last to write up his notes; there

legend would mix with fact, memory would breed with fancy, for

as he remarked,

the places we have lodged in, the roads we have gone over, the company

we have been among, the tobacco-spittle we have wallowed in, the strange

customs we have complied with, the packing-cases in which we have

travelled, the woods, swamps, rivers, prairies, lakes and mountains we

have crossed, are all subjects for legends and tales at home.51

 

50 April 25, 1842.

51 Letter to Henry Austin, May 1, 1842, in Letters, I, 71-72.

• 12