Speeches: Literary and Social

FEBRUARY 1842

[At dinner given to Mr. Dickens by the young men of Boston. The
company consisted of about two hundred, among whom were George
Bancroft, Washington Allston, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. The toast
of "Health, happiness, and a hearty welcome to Charles Dickens,"
having been proposed by the chairman, Mr. Quincy, and received with
great applause, Mr. Dickens responded with the following address:]

Gentlemen,--If you had given this splendid entertainment to anyone
else in the whole wide world--if I were to-night to exult in the
triumph of my dearest friend--if I stood here upon my defence, to
repel any unjust attack--to appeal as a stranger to your generosity
and kindness as the freest people on the earth--I could, putting
some restraint upon myself, stand among you as self-possessed and
unmoved as I should be alone in my own room in England. But when I
have the echoes of your cordial greeting ringing in my ears; when I
see your kind faces beaming a welcome so warm and earnest as never
man had--I feel, it is my nature, so vanquished and subdued, that I
have hardly fortitude enough to thank you. If your President,
instead of pouring forth that delightful mixture of humour and
pathos which you have just heard, had been but a caustic, ill-
natured man--if he had only been a dull one--if I could only have
doubted or distrusted him or you, I should have had my wits at my
fingers' ends, and, using them, could have held you at arm's-
length. But you have given me no such opportunity; you take
advantage of me in the tenderest point; you give me no chance of
playing at company, or holding you at a distance, but flock about
me like a host of brothers, and make this place like home. Indeed,
gentlemen, indeed, if it be natural and allowable for each of us,
on his own hearth, to express his thoughts in the most homely
fashion, and to appear in his plainest garb, I have a fair claim
upon you to let me do so to-night, for you have made my home an
Aladdin's Palace. You fold so tenderly within your breasts that
common household lamp in which my feeble fire is all enshrined, and
at which my flickering torch is lighted up, that straight my
household gods take wing, and are transported there. And whereas
it is written of that fairy structure that it never moved without
two shocks--one when it rose, and one when it settled down--I can
say of mine that, however sharp a tug it took to pluck it from its
native ground, it struck at once an easy, and a deep and lasting
root into this soil; and loved it as its own. I can say more of
it, and say with truth, that long before it moved, or had a chance
of moving, its master--perhaps from some secret sympathy between
its timbers, and a certain stately tree that has its being
hereabout, and spreads its broad branches far and wide--dreamed by
day and night, for years, of setting foot upon this shore, and
breathing this pure air. And, trust me, gentlemen, that, if I had
wandered here, unknowing and unknown, I would--if I know my own
heart--have come with all my sympathies clustering as richly about
this land and people--with all my sense of justice as keenly alive
to their high claims on every man who loves God's image--with all
my energies as fully bent on judging for myself, and speaking out,
and telling in my sphere the truth, as I do now, when you rain down
your welcomes on my head.

Our President has alluded to those writings which have been my
occupation for some years past; and you have received his allusions
in a manner which assures me--if I needed any such assurance--that
we are old friends in the spirit, and have been in close communion
for a long time.

It is not easy for a man to speak of his own books. I daresay that
few persons have been more interested in mine than I, and if it be
a general principle in nature that a lover's love is blind, and
that a mother's love is blind, I believe it may be said of an
author's attachment to the creatures of his own imagination, that
it is a perfect model of constancy and devotion, and is the
blindest of all. But the objects and purposes I have had in view
are very plain and simple, and may be easily told. I have always
had, and always shall have, an earnest and true desire to
contribute, as far as in me lies, to the common stock of healthful
cheerfulness and enjoyment. I have always had, and always shall
have, an invincible repugnance to that mole-eyed philosophy which
loves the darkness, and winks and scowls in the light. I believe
that Virtue shows quite as well in rags and patches, as she does in
purple and fine linen. I believe that she and every beautiful
object in external nature, claims some sympathy in the breast of
the poorest man who breaks his scanty loaf of daily bread. I
believe that she goes barefoot as well as shod. I believe that she
dwells rather oftener in alleys and by-ways than she does in courts
and palaces, and that it is good, and pleasant, and profitable to
track her out, and follow her. I believe that to lay one's hand
upon some of those rejected ones whom the world has too long
forgotten, and too often misused, and to say to the proudest and
most thoughtless--"These creatures have the same elements and
capacities of goodness as yourselves, they are moulded in the same
form, and made of the same clay; and though ten times worse than
you, may, in having retained anything of their original nature
amidst the trials and distresses of their condition, be really ten
times better;" I believe that to do this is to pursue a worthy and
not useless vocation. Gentlemen, that you think so too, your
fervent greeting sufficiently assures me. That this feeling is
alive in the Old World as well as in the New, no man should know
better than I--I, who have found such wide and ready sympathy in my
own dear land. That in expressing it, we are but treading in the
steps of those great master-spirits who have gone before, we know
by reference to all the bright examples in our literature, from
Shakespeare downward.

There is one other point connected with the labours (if I may call
them so) that you hold in such generous esteem, to which I cannot
help adverting. I cannot help expressing the delight, the more
than happiness it was to me to find so strong an interest awakened
on this side of the water, in favour of that little heroine of
mine, to whom your president has made allusion, who died in her
youth. I had letters about that child, in England, from the
dwellers in log-houses among the morasses, and swamps, and densest
forests, and deep solitudes of the far west. Many a sturdy hand,
hard with the axe and spade, and browned by the summer's sun, has
taken up the pen, and written to me a little history of domestic
joy or sorrow, always coupled, I am proud to say, with something of
interest in that little tale, or some comfort or happiness derived
from it, and my correspondent has always addressed me, not as a
writer of books for sale, resident some four or five thousand miles
away, but as a friend to whom he might freely impart the joys and
sorrows of his own fireside. Many a mother--I could reckon them
now by dozens, not by units--has done the like, and has told me how
she lost such a child at such a time, and where she lay buried, and
how good she was, and how, in this or that respect, she resembles
Nell. I do assure you that no circumstance of my life has given me
one hundredth part of the gratification I have derived from this
source. I was wavering at the time whether or not to wind up my
Clock, {3} and come and see this country, and this decided me. I
felt as if it were a positive duty, as if I were bound to pack up
my clothes, and come and see my friends; and even now I have such
an odd sensation in connexion with these things, that you have no
chance of spoiling me. I feel as though we were agreeing--as
indeed we are, if we substitute for fictitious characters the
classes from which they are drawn--about third parties, in whom we
had a common interest. At every new act of kindness on your part,
I say to myself "That's for Oliver; I should not wonder if that was
meant for Smike; I have no doubt that is intended for Nell;" and so
I become a much happier, certainly, but a more sober and retiring
man than ever I was before.

Gentlemen, talking of my friends in America, brings me back,
naturally and of course, to you. Coming back to you, and being
thereby reminded of the pleasure we have in store in hearing the
gentlemen who sit about me, I arrive by the easiest, though not by
the shortest course in the world, at the end of what I have to say.
But before I sit down, there is one topic on which I am desirous to
lay particular stress. It has, or should have, a strong interest
for us all, since to its literature every country must look for one
great means of refining and improving its people, and one great
source of national pride and honour. You have in America great
writers--great writers--who will live in all time, and are as
familiar to our lips as household words. Deriving (as they all do
in a greater or less degree, in their several walks) their
inspiration from the stupendous country that gave them birth, they
diffuse a better knowledge of it, and a higher love for it, all
over the civilized world. I take leave to say, in the presence of
some of those gentleman, that I hope the time is not far distant
when they, in America, will receive of right some substantial
profit and return in England from their labours; and when we, in
England, shall receive some substantial profit and return in
America for ours. Pray do not misunderstand me. Securing to
myself from day to day the means of an honourable subsistence, I
would rather have the affectionate regard of my fellow men, than I
would have heaps and mines of gold. But the two things do not seem
to me incompatible. They cannot be, for nothing good is
incompatible with justice; there must be an international
arrangement in this respect: England has done her part, and I am
confident that the time is not far distant when America will do
hers. It becomes the character of a great country; FIRSTLY,
because it is justice; SECONDLY, because without it you never can
have, and keep, a literature of your own.

Gentlemen, I thank you with feelings of gratitude, such as are not
often awakened, and can never be expressed. As I understand it to
be the pleasant custom here to finish with a toast, I would beg to
give you: AMERICA AND ENGLAND, and may they never have any
division but the Atlantic between them.