American Notes
Dickens, Charles
About the electronic version
American Notes
Dickens, Charles
Creation of machine-readable version: John Lance Griffith, University of Virginia English Department.
Creation of digital images: David Seaman, University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center.
Conversion to TEI.2-conformant markup: David Seaman, University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center.
University of Virginia Library.
Charlottesville, Va.
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/modeng/modeng0.browse.html
1996
About the print version
American Notes and Pictures From Italy
Charles Dickens
Chapman and Hall 1874
Note: Electronic version includes only American Notes, pp. 1-298, and not the companion Pictures from Italy, pp.301-506.
Prepared for the University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center.
Spell-check and verification made against printed text using WordPerfect spell checker.
Revisions to the electronic version
etext@virginia.edu. Commercial use prohibited; all usage governed by our Conditions of Use:
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Emigrants
PREFACE
MY readers have opportunities of judging for themselves whether the influences and tendencies which I distrusted in
America had any existence but in my imagination. They can examine for themselves whether there has been anything in the
public career of that country since, at home or abroad, which suggests that those influences and tendencies really did exist. As
they find the fact, they will judge me. If they discern any evidences of wrong-going, in any direction that I have indicated, they
will acknowledge that I had reason in what I wrote. If they discern no such thing, they will consider me altogether mistaken -but not wilfully.
Prejudiced I am not, and never have been, otherwise than in favour of the United States. I have many friends in America, I
feel a grateful interest in the country, I hope and believe it will successfully work out a problem of the highest importance to the
whole human race. To represent me as viewing AMERICA with ill-nature, coldness, or animosity, is merely to do a very
foolish thing, which is always a very easy one.
CONTENTS: AMERICAN NOTES
CHAP. PAGE
I. GOING AWAY. 1
II. THE PASSAGE OUT. 11
III. BOSTON. 28
IV. AN AMERICAN RAILROAD. LOWELL AND ITS FACTORY SYSTEM. 71
V. WORCESTER. THE CONNECTICUT RIVER. HARTFORD. NEW HAVEN TO NEW YORK. 81
VI. NEW YORK. 91
VII. PHILADELPHIA, AND ITS SOLITARY PRISON. 112
VIII. WASHINGTON. THE LEGISLATURE. AND THE PRESIDENT'S HOUSE. 130
IX. A NIGHT STEAMER ON THE POTOMAC RIVER. VIRGINIA ROAD AND A BLACK DRIVER. RICHMOND.
BALTIMORE. THE HARRISBURG MAIL, AND A GLIMPSE OF THE CITY. A CANAL BOAT. 149
X. SOME FURTHER ACCOUNT OF THE CANAL BOAT, ITS DOMESTIC ECONOMY, AND ITS PASSENGERS.
JOURNEY TO PITTSBURG ACROSS THE ALLEGHANY MOUNTAINS. PITTSBURG. 169
XI. FROM PITTSBURG TO CINCINNATI IN A WESTERN STEAMBOAT. CINCINNATI. 182
XII. FROM CINCINNATI TO LOUISVILLE IN ANOTHER WESTERN STEAMBOAT; AND FROM LOUISVILLE TO
ST. LOUIS IN ANOTHER. ST. LOUIS 193
XIII. A JAUNT TO THE LOOKING-GLASS PRAIRIE AND BACK. 206
XIV. RETURN TO CINCINNATI. A STAGE-COACH RIDE FROM THAT CITY TO COLUMBUS, AND THENCE TO
SANDUSKY. SO, BY LAKE ERIE, TO THE FALLS OF NIAGARA. 216
XV. IN CANADA: TORONTO; KINGSTON; MONTREAL; QUEBEC; ST. JOHN'S. IN THE UNITED STATES
AGAIN: LEBANON; THE SHAKER VILLAGE; AND WEST POINT. 235
XVI. THE PASSAGE HOME. 256
XVII. SLAVERY. 266
XVIII. CONCLUDING REMARKS. 285
POSTSCRIPT. 296
Page 1
Chapter 1
CHAPTER I.
GOING AWAY.
I SHALL never forget the one-fourth serious and three-fourths comical astonishment with which, on the morning of the third
of January, eighteen-hundred-and-forty-two, I opened the door of, and put my head into, a "state-room" on board the
Britannia steam-packet, twelve hundred tons burden per register, bound for Halifax and Boston, and carrying her Majesty's
mails.
That this state-room had been specially engaged for "Charles Dickens, Esquire, and Lady, "was rendered sufficiently clear
even to my scared intellect by a very small manuscript, announcing the fact, which was pinned on a very flat quilt, covering a
very thin mattress, spread like a surgical plaster on a most inaccessible shelf. But that this was the state-room concerning which
Charles Dickens, Esquire, and Lady, had held daily and nightly conferences for at least four months preceding: that this could
by any possibility be that small snug chamber of the imagination, which Charles Dickens, Esquire, with the spirit of prophecy
strung upon him, had always foretold would contain at least one little sofa, and which his lady, with a modest yet most
magnificent sense of its limited dimensions, had from the first opined would not hold more than two enormous portmanteaus in
some odd corner out of sight (portmanteaus which could now no more be got in at the door, not to say stowed away, than a
Page 2
giraffe could be persuaded or forced into a flower-pot): that this utterly impracticable, thoroughly hopeless, and profoundly
preposterous box had the remotest reference to, or connection with, those chaste and pretty, not to say gorgeous little bowers,
sketched by a masterly hand, in the highly varnished lithographic plan hanging up in the agent's counting-house in the city of
London: that this room of state, in short, could be any thing but a pleasant fiction and cheerful jest of the captain' s, invented
and put in practice for the better relish and enjoyment of the real state-room presently to be disclosed: -- these were truths
which I really could not, for the moment, bring my mind at all to bear upon or comprehend. And I sat down upon a kind of
horsehair slab, or perch, of which there were two within; and looked, without any expression of countenance whatever, at
some friends who had come on board with us, and who were crushing their faces into all manner of shapes by endeavouring to
squeeze them through the small doorway.
We had experienced a pretty smart shock before coming below, which, but that we were the most sanguine people living,
might have prepared us for the worst. The imaginative artist to whom I have already made allusion has depicted, in the same
great work, a chamber of almost interminable perspective, furnished, as Mr. Robins would say, in a style of more than Eastern
splendour, and filled (but not inconveniently so) with groups of ladies and gentlemen, in the very highest state of enjoyment and
vivacity. Before descending into the bowels of the ship, we had passed from the deck into a long narrow apartment, not unlike
a gigantic hearse with windows in the sides; having at the upper end a melancholy stove, at which three or four chilly stewards
were warming their hands; while on either side, extending down its whole dreary length, was a long, long table, over each of
which a rack, fixed to the low roof, and stuck full of drinking-glasses and cruet-stands, hinted dismally at rolling seas and heavy
weather. I had not at that time seen the ideal presentment of this chamber which has
Page 3
since gratified me so much, but I observed that one of our friends, who had made the arrangements for our voyage, turned pale
on entering, retreated on the friend behind him, smote his forehead involuntarily, and said below his breath, "Impossible! it
cannot be!" or words to that effect. He recovered himself, however, by a great effort, and, after a preparatory cough or two,
cried, with a ghastly smile which is still before me, looking at the same time round the walls, "Ha! the breakfast-room, steward,
eh?" We all foresaw what the answer must be: we knew the agony he suffered. He had often spoken of the saloon; had taken
in and lived upon the pictorial idea; had usually given us to understand, at home, that to form a just conception of it, it would be
necessary to multiply the size and furniture of an ordinary drawing-room by seven, and then fall short of the reality. When the
man in reply avowed tho truth: the blunt, remorseless, naked truth: "This is the saloon, sir" -- he actually reeled beneath the
blow.
In persons who were so soon to part, and interpose between their else daily communication the formidable barrier of many
thousand miles of stormy space, and who were for that reason anxious to cast no other cloud, not even the passing shadow of
a moment's disappointment or discomfiture, upon the short interval of happy companionship that yet remained to them -- in
persons so situated, the natural transition from these first surprises was obviously into peals of hearty laughter; and I can report
that I, for one, being still seated upon the slab or perch before mentioned, roared outright until the vessel rang again. Thus, in
less than two minutes after coming upon it for the first time, we all by common consent agreed that this state-room was the
pleasantest and most facetious and capital contrivance possible, and that to have had it ...
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