American History Hit - Charles Dickens in America

Episode Date: January 12, 2023

One of the most famous writers ever to have lived, Charles Dickens travelled twice to the US, in 1842 and 1867. This made him one of the first transatlantic celebrities. Don goes to Dickens' house in London to see some items he took with him. He also speaks to Dickens' great great great granddaughter, Lucinda Hawksley, to hear what Dickens got up to in America and what he made of the place. Produced and mixed by Benjie Guy. Assistant Producer: Sophie Gee. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. Hi and welcome to American History Yet, I'm Don Wildman. These days, we all know the famed 19th century writer Charles Dickens from the great novels he wrote.

Aller a Twist, Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Nicholas Nickleby, and many others, including, of course, a Christmas Carol. His was an unparalleled literary career, concerned with themes of social justice and class identity, as he probed the private realms of elite aristocracy and those less privileged, often finding the noblest human traits in the denizens of the streets and tenements of East London. Like all iconic writers, though, Dickens became the works he authored. He was virtually replaced by his own characters. So for those unfamiliar with Charles Huffman Dickens, The Man, a useful lens through which to understand him are the travels he once made to the United States,

which he wrote about. They were big stories in the day. And to learn about those journeys, I traveled myself, but in the opposite direction. So I am walking on Dowdy Street in London, not too far from the British Museum, just up the street from London's West End, right in the smack in the middle of things here, along a street with these beautiful townhouses to 48 Doughty Street, which happens to be the former home of the legendary writer Charles Dickens. This is the Charles Dickens Museum. I have always wanted to see this place, and they have it set up, apparently, as if he just moved out. Let's go inside and check it out.

And I'm lucky to be meeting the director of the museum. Cindy Shudorou, how are you doing, Cindy? Hello, I'm very well thank you. Welcome. Delighted to have you here. Thank you very much. Meeting in the uppermost room of what a five-story building? It is.

And we're in the attic, which was the nursery, where the children. When they moved in here into Doughty Street, they had one child, the first of what would be ten children, Charles Dickens Jr. And he was only a matter of weeks old when they moved in. And they had two further children here, Mary and Katie. I did not know that. Charles Dick is that 10 children? Yes, well his wife actually did the hard lifting on that.

That's true. Always the case. This portrait that's over the fireplace here in this nursery, these are the children. Or at least four of them. The first four, and this very charming portrait of the children by Daniel McLeese, who was a great friend of the Dickens family, very well-known Victorian artist. And he made this for them to take with them on their first visit to America in 1842. Catherine was desperately sad at the prospect of leaving her children behind. They would be away for about six months.

But she was finally convinced to go when she was given this gift of a portrait. And also in this portrait, you'll see there's a bird that's Grip, the Raven. Grip was a family pet. The children didn't really take to him. He pecked them a lot. Yeah, I would imagine. And Grip also became a character in one of Dickens's novels, Barnaby, Rudge. Books he completed here, Nicholas, Nickleby, Pickwick Papers.

So he finished Pickwick Papers here. He started the serialization of that when they moved in. He was about halfway through. And then it was Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and he started work on Barnaby Rudge. So when they set up in this house, he's an unknown writer. This is the beginning of his career. Yes, absolutely. He was writing under his pen name still, Boz. He was beginning the serialization of Pickwick Papers, which became increasingly popular as it was rolled. out. But also, it was really Oliver Twist, his second novel that captured wide-ranging public

imagination and interest, but also abroad. He became a household name in America, in fact, was the first place that he became very well known after his name traveled out of London. He just was this international superstar in the way that we would know celebrity life today. The other way in which his work was conveyed to a very wide audience, through his own dramatic readings of his work. And one of the items you're going to look at in a moment is his reading desk, which he took with him to America in 1867, 68. You're taking me a little tour of the house, right?

I am. Let's poke around. So, in this case here is what's known as a reading desk. It's a podium of sorts. In his early dramatic readings that he gave first in the UK and then later in America, he used whatever podium was available at the venues. However, he wasn't just standing there reciting his work. He was performing it. He was a very, very fine amateur actor, and he wanted the audience to be able to see what he was doing. He designed this desk himself and had a local tradesman create it. I'm looking at a four-foot-tall, kind of a podium stand, a very fancy one,

covered in what was a much more brilliant red valuer, I guess, in those days. It still is there, but with fringe around the edges. This is what he would stand at as he is performing in places in New York or anywhere else. What are the keyholes over here for? Ah, so it has a little extension, and you can see in that painting there, there's a little extension that goes off the side where he'd have a glass of water and so on, so that he could keep going to... Just latch it right on there.

Yeah. Just straight into the side. And it was also cleverly designed for touring, because you take that shelf off the side and be able to pack it up more efficiently. As much as we understand press tours and so forth today, was he doing that? Was he actually selling books while he was doing this or promoting herself? Well, this was later in life. So he really started to do his reading tours for commercial gain in the 1850s.

He did some readings to raise money for good causes as early as the 1840s. But he saw that there was a lucrative opportunity there. Usually using the most popular novels or extracts from them. In the 1850s, he made more money from... those performances than he did from purchases of his fiction. Which is how he really was known in America, aside from the writing, of course. He was really known personally by these tours that people would, in droves they went to see to see Dickens.

And in huge venues, venues that could see 10,000 people. So you can imagine in the days before amplification, he's having to protect his voice. So part of having a very dramatic performance style was partly to convey meaning as well as projecting his voice. That was Cindy Shagrew, direct. director of the Dickens Museum in London showing me around. For more in Dickens' time in America, I spoke to author, broadcaster, and historian Lucinda Hawksley, who also happens to be a relative of the great man himself. Welcome Lucinda to American History yet. Thank you very much. It's lovely to be

here. Let's get this out of the way right away. You are the triple great-granddaughter of Charles and Catherine Dickens, his wife. I am. That's right, yes. I can only imagine what Christmases were like at your house. I do love Christmas. I am. very much the kind of, you know, the Christmas person who everybody talks to about Christmas. You had to have memorized the whole book. Pretty much by now. I've read it so many times. I can imagine your little Christmas plays when your children and acting out your great-grandfather's work of genius. You can come into the story of Charles Dickens anywhere. I mean, the man was and is

an icon, but one of the things that surprises most Americans is that he really was interested in the United States. I mean, most of what he's known. for is writing about the English, you know, of course. And yet he was fascinated by the United States. Why is that? Dickens was always intrigued by traveling. So when he was a child, he fell in love with the Arabian Knights, and he always wanted to travel around the world.

And he had a great fascination, longing to go to America. So when he was about to turn 30, he and his wife, Catherine, traveled to the States for the first time. And that was at the beginning of 1842. he actually had his 30th birthday while he was in the States. What had he written by this time? First of all, his short stories that are now known as sketches by Boz. And then Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, the old curiosity shop,

which was the thing that really grabbed people's imagination. And the reason that he decided he was going to go to the States, because he heard that when the ships arrived at New York Harbor bringing the latest installment of his book, because like all of his major novels, the Oc Curiosity Shop did not come out is one novel initially it came out in installments

and so what Dickens heard was that people were waiting at New York Harbour to hear what had happened and calling out what happened to Little Nell and so when he heard about this he decided that he would take the advice of his friend the actor William Charles McCready who had himself already done a tour of the US

and said they will love you, you should go and he and Catherine set forth on an amazing journey from Liverpool in England all the way over to the States. And he spent six months with Catherine travelling around the USA and Canada. He was very, very famous through the books serialised in magazines.

Is that fair to say? Yes. So the books were always serialised and he was writing them as they were being serialised. He hadn't finished them and then edit them in chapters. He was literally writing every week, every month. He had a new deadline. And then when the books had been completed in the magazines, they would be published as complete novels.

That was different from his Christmas books. His Christmas novellas all came out as small books. So when he gets to Boston, and this is the year 1842, he's just coming off of what novel at this point? He'd just finished writing The Old Curiosity Shop, and his next novel would be Martin Chuzzlewit, which was partially inspired by his travels around the US. Although people in America were not very happy about Martin Chuzzlewit,

because they felt that didn't show America in the best light. And I can tell you that about 10 years ago, I was in Chicago giving a talk. And some people from Cairo, Illinois, came. And they still haven't forgiven Dickens for Martin Chuzzlewit, which was in 1843. So, yeah, long shadows. You know, I haven't read it. No way. No, I'm kidding.

Oh, is it boycotted by Americans? No, I'm kidding. 1842, this is Antebellum America, slavery in the South, all kinds of children. changes happening. What would a man like Dickens think of America at that time, speaking generally, of course? He wanted to come here because he was interested in the issues as much as the people. Yes, well, he wanted to go because he felt that America was very egalitarian. It was a land where everybody was equal. And he was a little bit disappointed in that. He actually wrote, this is not the Republic of my imagination. And of course, the biggest problem for Dickens,

arriving in America in 1842, was slavery. Now, we're not. We're not a republic of my imagination. Now, We had had slavery in the British Isles, of course, and it had been outlawed some years earlier. But even when Dickens was a child, he wouldn't have seen the kind of scenes that he saw in America because the vast majority of British-owned slaves were in overseas territories. They weren't walking on the streets of Britain. And Dickens had grown up in a very anti-slavery world at a time when people in the UK had been fiercely campaigning against slavery. So to get to America and be shown it, it was described to him as our domestic institution. Now, he was appalled by that, and he tried very hard initially not to get drawn.

And then he snapped on one day when somebody came around and said, what do you think of our domestic institution? And he told them precisely what he thought. This man was infuriated and thought Dickens had been really rude. We know about all this, because Dickens hired a travelling secretary. When he got to the States, he was astonished by how many letters he'd have to right and just how much work he was still having to do. And he spoke to a man, an artist called Francis Alexander, who was actually painting Dickens' portrait, and said, do you know of any young

man who could come with me as my travelling secretary? And Francis Alexander actually had a pupil, a young man with the wonderful name of George Washington Putnam. And Putnam was a fervent abolitionist. So he and Charles Dickens enjoyed sharing their kind of frustration about slavery. And Putnam and wrote a book some years later about his time with Charles Dickens. So we know about these incidents. And this was really the biggest problem for Charles and Catherine. They had planned originally to go further south in the US, but they got as far as Richmond in Virginia and witnessed two slave owners haggling over a family and kind of ripping the family apart, one of them having the father and the other, having the mother and children. And they were so upset by this

that they decided they weren't going to travel in the south. And they were. went back up north and changed their route. This is an epic story and a very important one. And it's a really interesting lens, not only to look at Dickens, but also to look at the United States, for that matter. The travel, the journey he initially makes, is in 1842, as I say. But it lasts six months from January to June of 1842. It starts in Halifax, in Nova Scotia, in British Canada of that time.

And then he sails, they sell south to Boston, which is what you described as being, you know, the welcome of any major. celebrity. You know, people were thrilled to be on the docks to see this guy they'd read about and were reading about at the time. They go south all the way to Richmond, as you say, and then west all the way to Kentucky and Illinois. But anyway, they see a huge amount of a big swath of America, both North and South, and his writings become compiled eventually into this social criticism, really, called American Notes, which is published later on in that year. And that's what becomes quite controversial and a bit of an affront to the American sensibility. How dare this

man? Because they expected him to love them. Why would they expect that? I think they just thought that they'd given him wonderful hospitality, which they did. And indeed, he acknowledged that in American notes. They obviously thought he wouldn't offer any criticism at all. And Dickens, as we know, he was a great wit. He loved to observe people. He always, all his characters and his novels, He's a great observer of human nature and particularly of human failings. And that's something that comes across a great deal. And people were shocked that he didn't just write a glowing account of America. There's actually a lot of wonderful things in there.

He was extremely complementary about many things in America, but he wasn't entirely complementary. One of the saddest things for him was that he didn't realize that people would be so shocked in the States by him being honest. and one of the people that he'd been thrilled to meet was an author who he had liked for a very long time and this was Washington Irving. Dickens was a great fan of Irving's work, Irving was older than he was and Dickens had read his works when he was growing up and he had written to Washington Irving

and had had a wonderful reception had been told, yes, please come and meet me. And they'd become good friends. And Dickens was very upset that Washington Irving pretty much dropped him after the publication of American notes. However, he made another great, friend, Longfellow. And he and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow remained friends for life. Longfellow absolutely got what Dickens was writing about, what he was critical about, and it didn't

affect their friendship. And that right to the end of their life, they were corresponding. Longfellow came over to the UK a couple of times and stayed with the Dickens family. So that was a friendship that endured. It's like a novel itself. I mean, and with a happy ending to come, I might add. But in the meantime, Americans really, we're coming out of the era of good feelings at this point. We're deep antebellum. We're on this side of this gigantic river. We're about to cross, called the Civil War eventually. But at this point, things are pretty settled down. This is the land of the common man, as opposed to what Americans knew of Europe, an aristocracy run place and all the rest. Everything that we had rebelled against many years before had worked out okay for us. We were

succeeding and how appropriate that these English people should be coming over to see what a great thing we'd accomplished. The experiment had worked, was working. They did not expect to have him criticize things unique to American life that needed to be pointed out. That was the affront that I'm talking about. Let's talk about some episodes along the way. What was it like for him to get to New York, which in those days would have been a big deal already? He found New York really intriguing. He was a bit shocked that it wasn't completely kind of fully formed city yet as London that he was used to. I mean, he was astonished to see hogs walking down Broadway. He thought that women in New York were the best dressed women he'd seen. He absolutely loved the fashion.

Victorian England, and of course, England had recently become Victorian just a few years earlier when Queen Victoria exceeded to the throne. And fashion had become very sombre, particularly for men. And Dickens was always seen as a little bit of vulgar because he liked his bright waistcoat and bright colours. And he thought that that was wonderful. He was quite shocked by some of the attitudes and manners, particularly the same in Washington, people spitting on the streets, chewing tobacco and spitting. That was something he found very difficult. He loved certain things about New York. He loved the fact that you could go out at night. He loved the food, but he also found the poverty really shocking. Although perhaps not that much difference

from London, I think he just thought that because America was in his view before he there a much more egalitarian society, he was quite shocked by how much poverty there was. And he went to the tombs, the famous prison, and was horrified by the treatment of prisoners. And particularly by the colour segregation, that really shocked him. And he was told, you know, the worst cells. And he was told, oh, but we don't put white people in there. And that was horrifying to him, which is interesting when you consider that a Victorian, you know, people might consider would be automatically racist compared to modern day.

But that he was really horrified by. Now, we know Dickens' history. We know that his father was an imprisoned debtor and that as a child, he lived by himself in a lodging house while his father and mother and the younger children all lived in the debtor's prison, and he would go and visit them. So for him, prisons were always places of great misery and sadness, and he would always ask in a prison to see the debtors.

Now, almost nobody knew about that part of his childhood. His great friend John Forster, who would later become his first biographer after Dickens's death, his wife, Catherine. We know that they both knew. And of course, people who'd been aware of his father and mother when Charles Dickens was a child, but this was something that was kept completely secret. So for him, going to a prison was a really heartbreaking experience. He also in Philadelphia went to the Eastern Penitentiary. and people in the States were really proud of this prison.

They thought it was a wonderful thing, and Dickens found it incredibly sad. And that was another thing that he criticised, the kind of inhumanity of it. So whenever he went round the States, he found these huge differences between the things he admired, such as the factories, the conditions of workers,

the way that women were treated with far more equality. And yet there was also the other side, the prisons and the things he found more different. I'll be back with more from Lucinda Hawksley after this short break. He had, I imagine, hoped to find a place where his solutions to problems he grew up with were being enacted, right? The social ills had been cured. Of course, there was no means to know that unless you came here to see for yourself. And that's really the story of American notes.

How much of his later works grew out of this experience? Do you think it did anyway, the Oliver Twist and so forth? Well, we know that Martin Chuzzlewick was very affected by his time in the States because he has Martin and Mark travel together to America and to be very disappointed in many ways and to nearly die becoming so ill. But his later work was affected mostly by his knowledge of the American market. So when he was writing, for example, his Christmas stories, he was aware that they would be popular in the States. And just to say that his English publisher wasn't really convinced that a story about Christmas would be a good idea. They thought it was very uncommercial and a bit weird. They were proved extremely wrong, very, very fast.

But in writing a Christmas Carol in 1843, which is the year after Dickens returned from the States, he was also being influenced by the earlier work of Washington Irving, who'd written a story in 1822, The Keeping of Christmas at Bracebridge Hall. So that was definitely affected by his trip to the States. And his journalism would be, which was something people perhaps aren't aware that Dickens remained a journalist right up to the end of his life. He didn't stop writing journalism once he became famous as a novelist, but his journalism was very much aware of what was happening in the States.

Once Dickens had visited a place, he really kept up with what was happening politically. It was the same a couple of years later when he took his family to live in Italy for a year. He remained fervently interested in Italian politics forever more, and it was the same with America. When he went back to the States, it was a quarter of a century and a civil war later. and he returned to discover, you know, that many of the things he'd criticized had gone, and to travel around as an even more incredibly famous author.

His first trip to America is really for this learning experience, this sort of witnessing what he suspected was the great solution to all those issues he'd raised in his literature. The second trip is for a whole different purpose, much more of a money-making thing. And in that regard, you can really view Charles Dickens and some of his contemporaries, authors as the early model for this celebrity author, the ones that sort of figure out how to crack a market and work it very, very profitably. He does that through speaking tours that come later on. But before I get to that, and we will talk about that, I want to ask the question that all

English majors everywhere want me to ask. As an insider, you know, inside track on the family stories, you have the knowledge that others lack. How did your great, great, great-grandfather come up with these stories. Where was the inspiration coming from? I think much of the inspiration of Dickens's works came from the fact that he never forgot what it was like to be an impoverished child. He always remembered his

childhood and that comes forward in every single one of his books, the experience of being poor, whether that's as an adult or a child. And he was such a great observer of human nature. Now we know from the way he brought up his own children that he wanted his children to

have an understanding of real life However, he didn't tell them about the deprivations of his childhood. And I wonder if when they were adults, and quite over-entitled, as one can understand, as the child of somebody incredibly famous and pretty wealthy, he wasn't as wealthy as people might have imagined. He didn't ever become mega-rich. But, you know, they expected that he would pay off their debts and those kind of things. Perhaps he regretted that he'd never told them the truth about his childhood and where they kind of really came from. but he always knew what it was like to be in each of the social classes

and in the 19th century in Britain the social class into which you were born and usually stayed was all important well Charles Dickens was the opposite from that he was kind of living the American dream he'd been born into the working class and then absolutely descended his parents descended pretty much into what was under the criminal classes by ending up in prison albeit as debtors not as having stolen anything or whatever and he then ended up in the kind of middle class through his writing and then hanging out with Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria,

and knowing all the kind of rich and famous. So Dickens was a much more kind of American way of seeing the 19th century, the way he transcended through the classes, and yet knew what it was like in each of those experiences, far more than most authors of his time. Did he view coming to the States on this trip as any kind of money-making venture? Not the first time. That was the second time.

The first time, I think, it was his kind of version of the Grand Tour, which was what wealthy young men did in Britain. They went off to Rome, to Greece. They saw all the ancient world. And Dickens had never been able to do that. Well, for him, he wanted to go to the new world, and he wanted to see the things that the other new world travelers, such as Francis Trollope, such as William Charles McCready,

other people whom he admired. You know, they were doing these things. And he wanted to be a part of that too. There was an issue, though, about copyright. He was interested in the issue of how a writer continued to make money off of what he writes. This has become a major issue all over the world, really, but particularly from Europe to America, which was this big market that was ever expanding. The idea that a writer gets royalties from their working is a modern sensibility.

That was not the case when he was in his career at first, anyway. So international copyright was a major deal. International copyright was a major deal. And when Dickens realized that he was able to go to the States, when he'd organized the trip, he took with him a petition signed by many of the top writers in Britain at the time. This was a huge issue, and it was an issue for American writers as well. There was no international copyright law.

And in fact, that wasn't actually enshrined until after Dickens' death, although he is still credited today as being one of the main movers behind creation. this international copyright law. The problem was that Dickens and other British authors, their works were being pirated. They were being taken to the states and transcribed and printed and then sold by publishers without the authors being given any royalties. Now, the reason that American authors had a problem with this was it meant that American authors who were quite rightly being paid royalties by their publishers, it was more expensive to produce works by American because of that. So they were losing out as well. So they were just,

as keen for an international copyright law to come into place because a work by Charles Dickens could sell in America for far less than a work by an American author because the publisher could just say, hey, I can just cream the profit off this. I don't have to pay anything to one of those greedy authors who expects me to pay them for using their work. I mean, how outrageous. Why aren't they just honoured to be doing this done for them? And so Charles Dickens went out there to campaign against it. And one of the things that, you know, he really felt when he came back was that, you know, he hadn't managed to achieve that. And he used the speech he gave on the night of his 30th birthday,

which was in Hartford, Connecticut. He used that to talk about the need for an international copyright law. Now, this was something that really angered local journalists, local newspapers, and papers around America got very cross about this. This was the first time that people started to turn against Dickens. They thought this was very arrogant, what was he doing, coming to the states and telling people off. He should just be grateful to be there.

and so lots of journalists were very cross when they reported on this speech. This was not the reception that Dickens had expected. He had expected that journalists, you know, fellow writers, would actually agree with this. He knew that many American authors longed for this to happen. So this response surprised him. And it also got his backup and made him decide that he was, you know, whatever people said, he was still going to criticize. He wasn't going to be shut down.

He went to Washington, D.C. He meets with the president. I mean, this is how big this guy is. He's in President John Tyler's White House. Yes, and he also met the former President Adams. I mean, it was incredible. You know, he just got the chance to meet these people. And he appreciated that.

He absolutely loved it. He was full of admiration for many of the people he met, although he was also a little bit disappointed because he felt that Washington was a little bit like Westminster, that it wasn't the place that he'd thought, as he said, it wasn't the Republic of Myles. imagination. He thought he was going to get there and find this was a place where politics was sorted and it was wonderful. And all the people loved their politicians. And then he got to America

and thought, oh, not much different from the UK. Yeah. Isn't it interesting, though, that, I mean, there's no comparison between 1842 and now in so many ways. But we still think of each other as different. You know, we still think there's some sort of idealization going on over there, you know, whatever that is. Lucinda, he meets all sorts of notables over here. But one in particular interests me, Edgar Allan Poe, the writer, seeing these two men standing in a room, an incredible idea. Well, actually, Poe wrote to Dickens, and he said, you know, I'm an author and I'd like to come and meet you, and he'd written a great review of Barnaby Rudge. And he went to Dickens' his hotel. Dickens invited him to come and meet him, and they talked. And Edgar Allan Poe said,

what about the raven in Barnaby Rudge? I'm so intrigued. Where did he come from? How did you make him up? And Dickens said, well, he's my real raven. I have a raven called Grip. He does everything that Barnaby's Raven does. And they had a long conversation, and Poe really wanted a British publisher, and Dickens tried very hard to find him one. But then, of course, Poe produces his great work, The Raven. So I love the fact that Poe's The Raven

is based on a real-life raven owned by Charles Dickens, which had also been immortalized in Barnaby Rush. I never knew that. So he comes back for a second trip. This is an entirely different time in his life and in the world. I mean, we're now in 1867. Talk about a change in life here in America. We've just had the Civil War end two years before.

But his intentions are completely different. He's no longer coming here as a wide-eyed hopeful. He's no longer 30 years old either. This is much more of a commercial venture for him. He is, in the end, an actor, and he's going to put this to good use. Yes, well, he really wanted to be an actor when he was younger. And had he not been ill on the day that he had, an audition for a Covent Garden Theatre Company.

The world might have been very different in terms of literature because we might not have had those novels. He might have written plays and performed in them. And his surviving plays, in my opinion, are not as good as his novel. So I'm extremely glad that he was ill on that day. But in 1858, he had separated from his wife, Catherine. They'd had a legal separation, not a divorce, but a very public legal separation. Although nobody in America was allowed to know this,

he had fallen in love with a young actress, a woman called Ellen Taylor. And she was the same age as his younger daughter, Katie. This, of course, caused huge dissensions at home. So not only had America changed hugely, but Charles Dickens and his life had changed massively. So he came back to the States the second time, not the gorgeous young 30-year-old with the young pretty wife, but a grizzled older man looking much, much older than his 55 years. And he came on his own. He wanted to bring his girlfriend, Ellen Turner, with him, but was persuaded by his manager that that wasn't going to happen. He was pretty much told that America was even more puritanical than Britain

and that nobody would believe him when he passed her off as his goddaughter, which had been his intention. Anyway, he came without her. He then realized that that was correct and he wrote to her to say not to come. But he was quite miserable because of that. He missed his children. He missed his lover. And he found life in 1867 in America tough.

Now, Dickens himself came out with his man. manager, George Dolby, because he had started on this new career, following the end of his marriage, where he was doing public readings. He was performing, as you say, he was acting. He was doing the career he'd always wanted to do, but in the States, he wasn't actually that happy. He gave everybody in America the most wonderful Christmas. He had sold out reading tours, and he laughed at one point. He said that his manager, George Dolby, was the most hated man in America, simply because he could not get 4,000 people. into a space designed for 2000.

People were desperate to come to his readings and probably those who went to see him had no idea how depressed he was. I think George Dolby really probably deserved some kind of medal for traveling with him for those five months around the States from the winter of 1867 to 68 with Dickens in a terrible mood

being kind of probably grumpy most of the time but he'd get onto stage and he would give everybody this wonderful experience and he'd get a high after these performances. So he famously would kind of write back to his daughters and his sister-in-law and his sons and he'd be really gloomy and then he'd come off stage and finish the letter to say,

oh, I had the most amazing time and the audience was wonderful. But he did it because he wanted to make money. International copyright had not happened and he wanted to make a large amount of money, which he did. And there was a cartoon in one of the newspapers, I'm not sure which one in the States,

a cartoon of him and George Dolby, his manager, with a kind of table covered in dollars. And George Dolby is saying to him something like, oh, you've earned $300,000. And he says, only $300,000. I thought I'd sting those Americans for far more. Now, that's me paraphrasing. That wasn't the exact wording.

But it was something like that. There's a wonderful story which is believed to be true that at the very end of their trip, in April of 1868, they were on the boat as it was pulling out of the harbour. And whatever the IRS men were called at that time had arrived chasing Dolby, not Dickens, Dolby was the manager. They were chasing him for payment of taxes. And Dickens and Dolby had agreed there was no way they were going to pay taxes. Because

he hadn't earned any money over the last 25 years from America. He was owed a massive amount of royalties. And allegedly they stood on the ship and waved goodbye at the IRS men as the ship left the harbor. And I just love that idea of the two of them gleeful at the fact that they'd left America with all this booty, they'd got all this money, and none of it was going into the pockets of the taxmen. There you go. He got his royalties one way or the other. That was what the second trip was about. He was getting those royalties by hook or by crook.

It was quarter of century since his previous visit. Had Americans forgotten his ill will? I think many of them had forgiven him. They definitely welcomed him with open arms. I mean, he'd been welcomed on his first trip, but on his second trip, they absolutely adored him. I can't speak for people in Cairo, Illinois. They were probably still boycotting his talks.

But he was loved. Absolutely loved. And I think by 1867 America had opened up a bit more. He famously shocked everyone in Boston at a dinner party in 1842 because they'd been discussing, the men had been discussing two women. Who was the prettier of the two women? And Dickens made the comment that, well, one of them might be prettier than the other, but the other one was definitely more kissable. And a young woman who'd been there, she wrote many years later that it was as if a bomb had dropped on the dining table. this horror of this man describing a woman as kissable, which was an absolute outrage. I think by 1867, perhaps people in America had chilled out a bit more.

Maybe Dickens didn't make so many outrageous comments, but they absolutely adored him. I mean, even on his first trip, he remembered walking down the street with people following him with scissors, wanting to cut off locks of his hair. He had this gorgeous long hair when he was a young 30-year-old. And I think by the 1860s, it's been compared to when the Beatles visited the States. Dickens was absolutely lionized. I visited the Charles Dickens House, the museum in London just recently, and there is a bust of the man on the second floor.

He is very handsome. I mean, he's got a beautiful face. Americans mostly know him from his later years. That's the image that most of us carry on our minds, that older man with the whiskers. Yes, he was a very handsome young man, pre-beard. As a young man, he modeled himself on his great hero, Lord Byron. And in fact, if anybody wants to see what he looked like, if you look on the internet and you type the words Dickens and Lost Portrait, what will come up is this glorious image created of him by a Scottish portrait painter, a woman called Margaret Gillies, in 1843, exactly the time he was writing a Christmas carol.

And this was the year after he came back from the States. A very handsome young man. And this is what I think he would like to be remembered by. It's called the Lost Portrait because it was lost for almost 100. It was only rediscovered in 2018, and it's now owned by the Charles Dickens Museum in London, which I'm very glad you visited, Don, and I would urge anybody coming to the UK, please do visit. It's a wonderful museum. Yes, you're a great, great, great granddaughter visiting the home. And it feels like a family home. That's what I love about it.

I walk in and I feel, oh, family home, even though I've obviously never lived there. It does have that wonderful atmosphere. I've always wondered, Lucinda, about any relationship or at least similarity between the career of Mark Twain. and Charles Dickens. Did they know about each other? Did they know each other? Mark Twain definitely knew about Dickens, but I don't know that Dickens would have known about Mark Twain because he was a lot younger, and Dickens actually died in 1870 at the age of 58, just a couple of years after returning from the States. But we know that Mark Twain knew about Dickens, and he went along to one of Dickens' public readings in America, and he wrote a very

unfavorable review. And it's actually quite funny to read, because it's definitely got a scent of sour grapes about it. And the thing he seems most to have taken exception to was Dickens's English accent, which he found extremely annoying. And that just really makes me laugh because I don't know how Mark Twain expected him to speak. But yeah, so then of course later himself, Twain becomes hugely famous, just as Charles Dickens had become. But I don't think Dickens would have been aware of who he was, I'm afraid. Yeah, but Twain very famously did his own stage shows, which you can't help but wonder if he was inspired by the man himself by coming to see Dickens at a younger age. Maybe he was. Maybe he thought that's what I'd like to do.

Yeah. These writers back in those days, these journalist writers such as Dickens, Krebakur, all of these takes on early America are really fascinating to read and highly readable because they were being written by people who wanted to sort of characterize America as they saw it. It was such an interesting, still forming nation in these brilliant minds who were seeing it from far away. This is important stuff American notes as they must read, along with the rest of Charles Dickens's great works. But Charles Dickens isn't the only of this family to read. Lucinda Hawksley, you have written Dickens in Travel, Dickens and Christmas, among many others. I invite all our listeners to look you up and read you side by side with your great, great,

great, great grandfather. Thank you so much, Lucinda. Really nice to have you. Thank you very much. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time.