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
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Dickens, Charles – Speeches, Literary & Social
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.
SPEECH: FEBRUARY 7, 1842.
GENTLEMEN, – To say that I thank you for the earnest manner in
which you have drunk the toast just now so eloquently proposed to
you – to say that I give you back your kind wishes and good
feelings with more than compound interest; and that I feel how dumb
and powerless the best acknowledgments would be beside such genial
hospitality as yours, is nothing. To say that in this winter
season, flowers have sprung up in every footstep’s length of the
path which has brought me here; that no country ever smiled more
pleasantly than yours has smiled on me, and that I have rarely
looked upon a brighter summer prospect than that which lies before
me now, is nothing.
But it is something to be no stranger in a strange place – to feel,
sitting at a board for the first time, the ease and affection of an