THE LIFE
OF
CHARLES DICKENS.
CHAPTER I.
AMERICAN NOTES.
1842.
Return from America—Longfellow in England—Thirty Years Ago—At Broadstairs—Preparing Notes—Fancy for the Opening of Chuzzlewit—Reading Tennyson—Theatricals at Margate—A New Protégé—Proposed Dedication—Sea-bathing and Authorship—Emigrants in Canada—Coming to the End—Rejected Motto for Notes—Return to London—Cheerless Visit—The Mingled Yarn—Scene at a Funeral—The Suppressed Introductory Chapter to the Notes, now first printed—Jeffrey's Opinion of the Notes—Dickens's Experience of America in 1868.
The reality did not fall short of the anticipation of home. His return was the occasion of unbounded enjoyment; and what he had planned before sailing as the way we should meet, received literal fulfilment. By the sound of his cheery voice I first knew that he was come; and from my house we went together to Maclise, also "without a moment's warning." A Greenwich dinner in which several friends (Talfourd, Milnes, Procter, Maclise, Stanfield, Marryat, Barham, Hood, and Cruikshank among them) took part, and other immediate greetings, followed; but the most special celebration was reserved for autumn, when, by way of challenge to what he had seen while abroad, a home-journey was arranged with Stanfield, Maclise, and myself for his companions, into such of the most striking scenes of a picturesque English county as the majority of us might not before have visited: Cornwall being ultimately chosen.