‘The London Cries: A Tinker and his Wife’ by Paul Sandby (?1730-1809). Dickens told the young men of Boston, who had gathered in Tremond Row to salute the popular English author, that his purpose in writing was to find Virtue in lowly places. In his experience, Virtue and Vice were to be found at every level of society, not just among the polished elite. It was that outlook that led to him to admire the social mobility unleashed by America’s free market economy, and to scold British politicians for treating the public like a Great Baby.
Part 1 of 2
THE objects and purposes I have had in view are very plain and simple, and may be easily told. I have always had, and always shall have, an earnest and true desire to contribute, as far as in me lies, to the common stock of healthful cheerfulness and enjoyment.
I have always had, and always shall have, an invincible repugnance to that mole-eyed philosophy which loves the darkness, and winks and scowls in the light. I believe that Virtue shows quite as well in rags and patches, as she does in purple and fine linen. I believe that she and every beautiful object in external nature, claims some sympathy in the breast of the poorest man who breaks his scanty loaf of daily bread. I believe that she goes barefoot as well as shod. I believe that she dwells rather oftener in alleys and by-ways than she does in courts and palaces, and that it is good, and pleasant, and profitable to track her out, and follow her.
Part Two
A scene from Charles Dickens’s ‘The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club,’ painted by English artist Harold Copping (1863-1932). At the dinner in Boston, hosted at Papanti’s glittering ballroom in Tremont Row, Dickens read from this, his first novel, which had been published by Chapman & Hall in monthly installments between March 1836 and November 1837. Musical items included ‘Washington’s March’ and ‘God Save the King’ — some fifty-nine years after the end of The American Revolutionary War.
I BELIEVE that to lay one’s hand upon some of those rejected ones whom the world has too long forgotten, and too often misused, and to say to the proudest and most thoughtless — “These creatures have the same elements and capacities of goodness as yourselves, they are moulded in the same form, and made of the same clay; and though ten times worse than you, may, in having retained anything of their original nature amidst the trials and distresses of their condition, be really ten times better;” I believe that to do this is to pursue a worthy and not useless vocation.
Gentlemen, that you think so too, your fervent greeting sufficiently assures me. That this feeling is alive in the Old World as well as in the New, no man should know better than I — I, who have found such wide and ready sympathy in my own dear land. That in expressing it, we are but treading in the steps of those great master-spirits who have gone before, we know by reference to all the bright examples in our literature, from Shakespeare downward.
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