Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- GOING AWAY, AND THE PASSAGE OUT
- CHAPTER THE FIRST GOING AWAY
- CHAPTER THE SECOND THE PASSAGE OUT
- CHAPTER THE THIRD BOSTON
- CHAPTER THE FOURTH AN AMERICAN RAILROAD. LOWELL AND ITS FACTORY SYSTEM
- CHAPTER THE FIFTH WORCESTER. THE CONNECTICUT RIVER. HARTFORD. NEW HAVEN. NEW HAVEN TO NEW YORK
- CHAPTER THE SIXTH NEW YORK
- CHAPTER THE SEVENTH PHILADELPHIA, AND ITS SOLITARY PRISON
- CHAPTER THE EIGHTH WASHINGTON. THE LEGISLATURE, AND THE PRESIDENT'S HOUSE
CHAPTER THE FIRST - GOING AWAY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 August 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- GOING AWAY, AND THE PASSAGE OUT
- CHAPTER THE FIRST GOING AWAY
- CHAPTER THE SECOND THE PASSAGE OUT
- CHAPTER THE THIRD BOSTON
- CHAPTER THE FOURTH AN AMERICAN RAILROAD. LOWELL AND ITS FACTORY SYSTEM
- CHAPTER THE FIFTH WORCESTER. THE CONNECTICUT RIVER. HARTFORD. NEW HAVEN. NEW HAVEN TO NEW YORK
- CHAPTER THE SIXTH NEW YORK
- CHAPTER THE SEVENTH PHILADELPHIA, AND ITS SOLITARY PRISON
- CHAPTER THE EIGHTH WASHINGTON. THE LEGISLATURE, AND THE PRESIDENT'S HOUSE
Summary
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 steam-packet, twelve hundred tons burden 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.
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- Chapter
- Information
- American Notes for General Circulation , pp. 1 - 19Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009