As an outsider to American culture, Dickens had a special lens with which he viewed the people he met during his first visit to the United States during the winter and spring months of 1842. The trip itself was fraught with all the ups and downs one would expect of a transatlantic voyage undertaken by a celebrity in the early stages of fame. He was at first excited by the prospect of visiting a country with political systems to which he felt England could aspire, but his idolization gradually faded as he witnessed first-hand the incongruities which left just as many disenfranchised people as he had found in London. Peter Ackroyd concludes his chapter on Dickens’s first American trip with the understanding that there is much speculation that his commentary on American life actually divulged his own secrets about himself. Most notably, his aversion to American’s “self-righteousness…insecurities and constant appetite for praise” may have indicated his own hidden awareness of these characteristics within himself (371). Following these speculations, Ackroyd surmises: “Dickens’s American journey had also been a journey towards himself” (317).
Dickens made many friends on his visit, most particularly in the Northern states. After his trip was concluded, many more Americans claimed that they too had formed ties with Dickens, including Edgar Allan Poe, but whether or not these stories are only a result of the allure of fame is difficult to tell. Dickens seems to have been most impressed by “‘self-made’ men, liberal, courteous, magnanimous” (Ackroyd 356). However, meetings with people he believed fell into this category were infrequent; all too often in American Notes he comments on his feelings of estrangement from Americans, or he sentimentalizes the lives of those he saw in prisons, institutions or slums, such as Five Points in New York City. He describes his visit to the crime-infested neighborhood of Five Points, a tour for which he was given two police escorts to accompany him:
Ascend these pitch-dark stairs, heedful of a false footing on the trembling boards, and grope your way with me into this wolfish den, where neither ray of light nor breath of air, appears to come. A negro lad, startled from his sleep by the officer’s voice--he knows it well--but comforted by his assurance that he has not come on business, officiously bestirs himself to light a candle. The match flickers for a moment, and shows great mounds of dusky rags upon the ground; then dies away and leaves a denser darkness than before, if there can be degrees of such extremes…Then the mounds of rags are seen to be astir, and rise slowly up, and the floor is covered with heaps of negro women, waking from their sleep: their white teeth chattering, and their bright eyes glistening and winking on all sides with surprise and fear, like the countless repetition of one astonished face in some strange mirror (79).
Here Dickens deftly exploits the black Americans he has met in the slums of Five Points, but he does so in order to move his readers to a sympathetic reaction. The racial descriptors are most certainly uncomfortable, but the idea of the black American face as a “countless repetition” of the same face staring into a “strange mirror” is a fascinating concept which utilizes Freudian theories of the uncanny, ideas which still lay decades in the future. All of black America has become one person, a being who looks out at Dickens through a fun house mirror, and Dickens views this person as his opposite or shadow self.
Early in his literary career, Dickens appears to have developed a stage persona with which to interact with his readership. He sympathizes with the plight of the poor and uneducated, but to the modern reader, he also seems unable to relate to them in terms outside of stereotypes. I would argue that this estrangement has more to do with Dickens’s own personality, much as Ackroyd states about the author’s observations in Notes. Dickens creates a distance between himself and those outside the middle class in order to put a safe physical and emotional separation between himself and such poverty. Ackroyd’s theory poses an interesting conclusion about Dickens’s first American trip: perhaps by critiquing the Americans he met, people whom he felt were uncouth, undereducated and overly pretentious, he also was putting himself to the same tests.
Dickens and Conrad exhibit congruencies by displaying created spaces of separation between themselves and their audiences. These spaces can be viewed most clearly in the writers’ respective travelogues; Dickens’s distance is evident in his overly sentimental treatment of the English poor, as well as in American Notes, where he portrays the vastly different culture of America. Wendy Lesser writes that Conrad’s spaces of separation have to do with his “outsider status in London [which] is reflected in the distant tone of his writing” (185). A Polish immigrant to London, Conrad did not learn to speak English fully until he reached his 20s. In 1897, Conrad was interviewed by the Cardiff publication the Western Mail and is quoted as saying that Dickens “‘had left his mark, not because he is a caricaturist (as many people say), but because of his extreme simplicity, and his vividness of expression…I fancy that Dickens will never cease to be one of the masters…he did not give a new form to English, but he used it as it had never been used before, and his very defects help to make up his greatness’” (Conrad qtd. in Western Mail). Conrad read Dickens widely, and he was ultimately moulded by Dickens’s use of language and descriptions of various populations. Again, this shared language demonstrates what my PhD thesis aims to expose: the intertextuality of Dickens as well as the broader reach of his works. This shall be understood more fully by an examination of his travelogue experiences and the literary effect they had upon Conrad.
To return to American Notes, Dickens’s impressions of the American south: the landscape, the Southerner him/herself and the culture, are fleeting. He only travelled as far south as Richmond, Virginia, and he did not tarry long. The length of the visit was partly due to his tight schedule but also to his distaste for seeing slavery first-hand. Furthermore, his traveller’s insurance did not cover him in the deeper southern states.[1] Despite these issues, he did have time enough to visit a public library, a tobacco manufactory and a plantation, where he had his first sighting of an enslaved black American, an encounter he found deeply disturbing. He requested of his guide on the tobacco manufactory to be allowed to visit the slaves in their cabins and see them at their meals, but he was quietly denied this opportunity without explanation.[2] The most striking facet of Dickens’s tour of Virginia would seem to be the author’s ability to discern the incongruous nature of the South itself, something that even today remains hidden beneath the surface. He wrote that there is a perceived sense of “decay and gloom” which overhangs Richmond:
...there are pretty villas and cheerful houses in its streets, and Nature smiles upon the country round; but jostling its handsome residences, like slavery itself going hand in hand with many lofty virtues, are deplorable tenements, fences unrepaired, walls crumbling into ruinous heaps. Hinting gloomily at things below the surface, these, and many other tokens of the same description, force themselves upon the notice, and are remembered with depressing influence, when livelier features are forgotten (122).
Dickens requested to meet with the black slaves working the tobacco plantation in Richmond, but then did not fully see them. He reduced them to satire, focusing acutely on their colloquialisms, mannerisms and culture. Placing the black American on a comically stereotypical level, Dickens objectified him/her to gollywog status.
He does this equally in Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) only two years after his first trip to the United States. Of particular note is the scene in which Martin is introduced to the freed slave Cicero, who takes charge of Martin’s and Mark’s luggage. Martin asks Mark Tapley who the “‘gentleman’” is, and Mark explains “confidentially” that Cicero is a “‘man of colour’” (287). Martin, irritated by the obvious description, replies, “‘you think it necessary to tell me that, when his face is the blackest that ever was seen?’” (287). Mark further expounds upon Cicero’s presence: “‘I engaged him for a very reasonable charge…to sit along with me and make me jolly; and I am jolly; and if I was rich enough to contract with him to wait upon me once a day, to be looked at, I’d never be anything else’” (288, author’s italics). Mark chooses to employ Cicero as his luggage carrier because his appearance is laughable to Mark; when Cicero takes off his jacket and exposes scars of physical abuses given to him by his previous owners, Mark tells Martin that Cicero’s appearance “‘took away [his] appetite,’” further detailing how viewing Cicero (and other black Americans) is a voyeuristic experience for Mark (288). Dickens’s description of Cicero is meant to be humorous, but instead it is troubling, as is the corresponding illustration by Hablot Browne.
Mark narrates that Cicero, having gained his freedom, is “‘saving up to treat himself, afore he dies, to one small purchase; it’s nothing to speak of; only his own daughter; that’s all!’” (288). Mark realizes that the purchase of a human being is no mere trifle, thus the use of his exclamation mark, even though it seems to him an anomaly that a black man would have the same desire as a white one in wishing to secure the freedom of his family. Cicero is described as a harlequin and has no real verbal dialogue in the novel; he is present only for Mark’s amusement. Paired with the description of him given by Mark to Martin in hushed tones: “‘[Cicero is like] one of them as there’s picters [sic] of in the shops,’” combines to create a caricature of a subhuman, one whose only purpose is to act as a mere showpiece.
However, I do not feel this is meant to come across to Dickens’s readers in a malicious manner. Dickens felt a pull to write on the plight of slaves and ended American Notes with a whole chapter devoted to runaway slave advertisements. Instead, I propose that Dickens’s literary treatment of black Americans was generated by his viewpoint as an outsider to American culture. He was most appalled by the lack of education among blacks and made the point that this was not the fault of the black American himself, but the fault of the South as a whole, which had a responsibility to educate all of its people, regardless of skin color.[3] This, along with the decidedly foreign (to Dickens) black vernacular and the distance at which black Americans (free or not) were kept from white Americans, insured that Dickens was unable to form a meaningful connection with any blacks he met. Ultimately, this resulted in his attempt to depict them in Notes and Chuzzlewit as simple-minded objects of satire.
In 1842 the United States exported $2,971 in cotton (most of this supply would have been grown in slave states) and was a major supplier of most of the western world’s raw cotton.[4] To put this dollar amount into perspective, nearly twenty years later, James Henry Hammond, a South Carolinian politician (and cotton plantation owner) was fully convinced of the world power that was “King Cotton.” To the U.S. Senate in 1858 Hammond said, “‘Without firing a gun…we could bring the whole world to our feet…What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years?...England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her, save the South…Cotton is King!’” (Hammond qtd. in Doyle 107). Politicians like Hammond did not foresee that the British government would declare neutrality in the American Civil War, with most of Europe following suit. They did not predict that Britain would shift away from American cotton to suppliers in Egypt and India. Until 1861, the South was a huge contributor to the global economy, but when Dickens observed the hidden “decay and gloom” which overhung the South he visited at the height of cotton’s reign as “King,” he did not seem to perceive that all of the States in the Union, as well as all western nations, were equally overshadowed by this same “gloom,” since all shared the fruits of slavery’s labor (122). When Dickens speaks in Notes of the ills of slavery, it comes across as inauthentic, since he singles out the South as the only antagonist in the instigation of the system. He is keen to point the finger without realizing the full financial responsibility the rest of the western world had undertaken on behalf of the institution of slavery.
However, not to be too hard on the travel writer, one can see that witnessing the slave/master relationship (or even the slavery sympathiser) first hand was more than likely very jarring to Dickens, who had already defined his morals in his previous texts. Particularly in Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, he had displayed his sensitivity to the treatments of others, most notably to those of the lower classes, people locked into a position from which they could be controlled with ease by those in power.
The connection between Conrad’s treatment of Africans and Dickens’s treatment of black Americans will become clearer in an examination of the language these authors use to describe such people; Chapter IX of Notes finds Dickens travelling on a steamer along the Potomac River south towards Virginia. As he goes into the gentlemen’s sleeping cabin, Dickens nearly “slip[s] on the shining face of a black steward, who [lay] rolled in a blanket on the floor” (115). His choice of phrasing ultimately gives away his own confusion about how to view black Americans: no one would describe the face of a black man as “shining” unless he were playing upon the imagery of stereotyped blackface minstrel show performers popular at that time. Despite the fact that Dickens has stepped upon the steward, the latter nonetheless “jumps up, grins, half in pain and half in hospitality” and leads Dickens to his berth (115). The next black man Dickens meets does not fair any better in literary treatment. The steamboat lands at Potomac Creek, and Dickens describes the horse-drawn coaches awaiting the travellers. Some of the drivers are black and some are white. There are four horses to each coach, and due to the noise that accompanies the unloading of the steamer, the horses are frightened. Dickens details how the drivers all move to comfort their horses, at the same time impelling them to stay under control, and he divides the drivers’ reactions by their race: “the black drivers are chattering to [the horses] like so many monkeys; and the white ones whooping like so many drovers” (116). The white drivers are allowed to maintain human characteristics and are classified as “drovers,” a term referring to Australian cattle hands, while the black drivers are made into animals, specifically, monkeys. The unsettling aspect here is the dehumanisation which the black American drivers undergo at Dickens’s hand, but perhaps also there is a hint of a Conradian theme: the white man’s jealousy at the intimate relationship between Africans and nature. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) did not come about until sixty years after American Notes, but it is interesting to observe this possibly shared notion of the white European’s confusion with and latent envy of the African, which Conrad expounds upon so succinctly in Heart.
Marlow’s description of his time on the Congo River, and his search for the lost ivory trader Kurtz, is what drives Conrad’s novella. As Marlow sees and interacts with more Africans, he finds them alien. He is only able to comprehend them as a part of the wild nature he views, and he appears to display a sort of envy of this symbiotic relationship. Upon finally meeting Kurtz, Marlow realizes how the European ivory trader has interpreted his own meeting with the Congo and this same accompanying envy. Kurtz has faced his personal jealousy of Africans head-on by choosing to merge with the culture itself. Of course the trader has placed his own self-aggrandizement at the core of this amalgamation, but the extent to which he has sought to become part of the African civilization he has entered is fascinating.
In his novella, Conrad fictionalizes his own real-life travels to Africa, and Dickens’s Notes are likewise a first-hand account of the earlier writer’s time in a foreign land, but the ways in which both authors interact (via their texts) with unknown types of people are strikingly similar. For Dickens, the end result of this jealous mystification reveals that, to him, the black Americans he meets are not individuals, but rather a collective mass of unknown wild creatures. In his mind, they all form a part of the untamed, unfathomed, savage America into which he has ventured. During 1854, Dickens detailed some of his thoughts on the concept of “the savage” in Household Words: “We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel” (“The Lost Arctic Voyages” 362). The article’s subject was the doomed Franklin expedition in 1845, an attempt to find the Northwest Passage. The participants were lost and were rumored to have resorted to cannibalism. This dreadful tale and the inferred sharing of latent “savage” tendencies by all humans in dire circumstances drove Dickens to write his piece in Household Words. To him, it appeared that race and savagery always held an interlocking correlation. The author’s concept of race can only be framed by the “other’s” relationship to the white European, and this same notion demonstrates both Dickens’s and Conrad’s use of the idea of the Jungian shadow self.[5]
Other black Americans Dickens meets on his journey are subjected to descriptors such as: “he is a negro--very black indeed…faintly shadowing forth a kind of insane imitation of an English coachman!” (117). Grace Moore writes that this scene displays Dickens’s “fundamental inability to envisage the slave as a man and brother” (56). Moore notes that Dickens’s description renders the man “grotesque,” and that the author’s “ridiculing” of the coachman is truly indicative of the threat that Dickens felt at the black man’s donning of a white man’s clothing (56). Another instance of the black man being portrayed as “grotesque” in Notes occurs when Dickens sees a black man sitting on a fence. This man is described as a “harlequin, rolling his eyes…and grinning from ear to ear” (119). Dickens again utilizes this terminology in 1868 in a letter to Forster describing how ludicrous it would be to give black Americans voting rights: “‘The mechanical absurdity of giving these people votes, at any rate at present, would glare out of every roll of their eyes, chuckle in their mouths, and bump in their heads’” (Dickens qtd. in Moore 56). Moore writes that Dickens was suggesting “that the enfranchisement of the newly emancipated slaves was merely an electioneering gambit,” and that his choice of language is therefore trying to expose this political scheme, but she rightly adds, “Dickens’s description of the chuckling, eye-rolling black man with bumps on his head resorts to every racial stereotype in existence and constitutes yet another attempt to undermine through nervous humor the threat that has been posed” (56).
Conrad utilizes Romantic language when he first describes Africans in Heart of Darkness: “You could see from afar the white of their eye-balls glistening. They shouted, sang; their bodies streamed with perspiration; they had faces like grotesque masks--these chaps; but they had bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an intense energy of movement, that was as natural and true as the surf along their coast” (15–16). In his text, he defines the African as an entity that is innately related to the natural world. This is exciting to Marlow, but at the same time, it is also frightening. The Africans he encounters are at once like him, but not: they are shadows of the white westerner. When he first reaches the Congo and sees the Africans who have been charged to work on a railway, Marlow concludes: “They passed me within six inches…with that complete, deathlike indifference of unhappy savages…they were…nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom” (18–19, my italics). A gap of sixty years made almost no difference in the descriptors used by Dickens and Conrad. Both authors portray blacks as outsiders to humanity, the opposite of the white man, and this notion is underscored by their use of the term “shadow.” It is likely much of this conception is based on Frederick Marryat’s travelogue. Marryat was an acquaintance of Dickens’s, and also someone with whose writing, Conrad was very familiar.
What is clear from reading American Notes (most especially from his chapter on slavery) is that while Dickens felt that slavery was morally wrong, he also fell victim to white Western ideology. Africans (and the descendants of Africans) were seen as beings so intrinsically foreign that they were impossible to understand or to portray. Priti Joshi writes that Dickens’s personal views on race are difficult to extract from his fictional works, but that his “journalism provides more detailed material [such as Notes]” (298). Joshi discusses the incongruous feelings which Dickens fostered on the subject. He felt slavery was a “‘most hideous blot and foul disgrace’…but when American slaves were emancipated, he thought giving them the vote an ‘absurdity’” (298). To be sure, Dickens was not alone in his discordant ideas. Joshi closes with the hypothesis that for many nineteenth century whites, “Africans could only be objects of humanitarian intervention, never equals” (298). They are either satirized and made to be an aspect of nature, or they were relegated to the shadows, an impossible mystery with which the white Westerner lives, but yet of whom he maintains a primal fear.
Works Cited
Primary Sources:
Conrad, Joseph. The Heart of Darkness. Everyman, 1995.
Dickens, Charles. American Notes for General Circulation. The Colonial Press Incorporated, 1936.
--. Martin Chuzzlewit. The Colonial Press Incorporated. 1936.
--. “The Lost Arctic Voyagers.” Household Words, vol. 10, no 245, 1854, pp. 361–365. Dickens Journals Online, doi: www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-x/page-361.html. Accessed 23 January 2017.
Secondary Sources:
Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. HarperCollins, 1990.
“A New Novellist [sic] on Dickens.” Interview with Joseph Conrad. Western Mail (Cardiff, Wales), 1 January 1897: Issue 8615, British Library Newspapers, Part I: 1800-1900, Gale Document Number: Y3205252797.
Doyle, Don H. "Slavery or Independence." The US South and Europe, edited by Cornelis A. van Minnen and Manfred Berg, The University Press of Kentucky, 2013. pp. 105-124.
Joshi, Priti. "Race." Charles Dickens in Context, edited by Sally Ledger and Holly Furneaux, Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 292–300.
Lesser, Wendy. “From Dickens to Conrad: A Sentimental Journey.” ELH, vol. 52, no. 1, 1985, pp. 185–208. JSTOR, doi: www.jstor.org/stable/2872833. Accessed March 2017.
Moore, Grace. Dickens and Empire: Discourses of Class, Race and Colonialism in the Works of Charles Dickens. Ashgate Publishing, 2004.
Najder, Zdzislaw. Conrad Under Familial Eyes. edited by Halina Carroll-Najder, Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Footnotes:
[1] Dickens in America. Executive Producer Colin Cameron, performance by Miriam Margoyles, BBC, 2005.
[2] ibid and American Notes: “‘I said several times that I should like to see them at their meal; but as the gentleman to whom I mentioned this desire appeared to be suddenly deaf, I did not pursue the request” (121).
[3] Dickens does not seem acquainted with the illegality of teaching a slave to read or write, nor of the subsequent ramifications this lack of education would have upon freed black Americans.
[4] “Statistics of Iron and Cotton 1830-1860.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 2, no. 3, 1888, pp. 379–384. JSTOR, doi: www.jstor.org/stable/1879423. Accessed 23 January 2017.
[5] I do wonder if Dickens knew about the Donner Party, 1846-1867, which crossed the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The expedition was not successful and it is reported that some resorted to cannibalism in order to survive. Those on the expedition were white American settlers, of European decent, similarly to those on the Franklin expedition.