s home, with its friendships
and simple pleasures; but yet, as I have said, a desire to see more of
the world, and to garner new experiences, was strong upon him. The two
conflicting influences often warred in his life, so that it almost
seemed sometimes as if he were being driven by relentless furies.
Those furies pointed now with stern fingers towards America, though
"how" he was "to get on" "for seven or eight months without" his
friends, he could not upon his "soul conceive;" though he dreaded "to
think of breaking up all" his "old happy habits for so long a time;"
though "Kate," remembering doubtless her four little children, wept
whenever the subject was "spoken of." Something made him feel that the
going was "a matter of imperative necessity." Washington Irving
beckoned from across the Atlantic, speaking, as Jeffrey had spoken
from Edinburgh, of Little Nell and her far-extended influence. There
was a great reception foreshadowed, and a new world to be seen, and a
book to be written about it. While as to the strongest of the home
ties--the children that brought the tears into Mrs. Dickens'
eyes,--the separation, after all, would not be eternal, and the good
Macready, tragic actor and true friend, would take charge of the
little folk while their parents were away. So Dickens, who had some
time before "begun counting the days between this and coming home
again," set sail, as I have said, for America on the 4th of January,
1842.
And a very rough experience he, and Mrs. Dickens, and Mrs. Dickens'
maid seem to have had during that January passage from Liverpool to
Halifax and Boston. Most of the time it blew horribly, and they were
direfully ill. Then a storm supervened, which swept away the
paddle-boxes and stove in the life-boats, and they seem to have been
in real peril. Next the ship struck on a mud-bank. But dangers and
discomforts must have been forgotten, at any rate to begin with, in
the glories of the reception that awaited the "inimitable,"--as
Dickens whimsically called himself in those days,--when he landed in
the New World. If he had been received with princely honours in
Edinburgh, he was treated now as an emperor in some triumphant
progress. Halifax sounded the first note of welcome, gave, as it were,
the preliminary trumpet flourish. From that town he writes: "I wish
you could have seen the crowds cheering the inimitable in the streets.
I wish you could have seen judges, law-officers, bishops, and
la
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