Dickens, Charles – American Notes for General Circulation

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 steampacket,

twelve hundred tons burthen 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 strong 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 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

anything 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

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Dickens, Charles – American Notes for General Circulation

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

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