Dickens, Charles – American Notes for General Circulation
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