CANAL DISCOVERY: Charles Dickens’ NY travelogue

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Doug Farley is the director of the Erie Canal Discovery Center and his column runs every Saturday. The Discovery Center is closed for the season and will reopen May 1.

March 1, 2011

The Lockport Union-Sun %26 Journal Tue Mar 01, 2011, 09:03 PM EST

— The British had a great deal of interest in America and its early Yankee culture, and that interest certainly extended to stories about the Erie Canal.

Many brave Brits who traveled to the United States returned home with plenty of tabloid fodder to bedazzle the 19th century citizenry. One author of note was Charles Dickens, who experienced our canals first-hand and returned home to London in 1842 and published his travelogue. The following excerpt is from Dickens’ essay, “American Notes for General Circulation.”

“Between 5 and 6 in the morning we got up, and some of us went on deck to give them an opportunity at taking the shelves down; while others, the morning being very cold, crowded around the rusty stove, cherishing the newly kindled fire.

“The washing conditions were primitive. There was a tin ladle chained to the deck, with which every gentleman who thought it necessary to cleanse himself, fished the dirty water out of the canal and poured it into a tin basin, secured in like manner. And, a public comb and brush was hanging up before a little looking glass in the bar, in the immediate vicinity of the bread and cheese and biscuits.

“In the early morning, the odors of the breakfast food mingled with those of gin, whiskey, brandy and rum from the bar, with a decided seasoning of stale tobacco. Nor was the atmosphere quite free from zephyr whisperings of the 30 beds that had just been cleaned away, and of which we were further and more pressingly reminded by the occasional appearance on the table-cloth of a kind of game not mentioned on the Bill of Fare.

“And yet despite those oddities — and even they had, for me at least, a humor of their own — there was much in this mode of traveling that I heartily enjoyed at the time, and look back upon with great pleasure. Even the running up, bare-necked, at 5 o’clock in the morning, from the tainted cabin to the dirty deck, scooping up the icy water, plunging one’s head into it and drawing it out, all fresh and glowing with the cold, was a good thing. The fast, brisk walk upon the towing path, between that time and breakfast, when every vein and artery seemed to tingle with health; the exquisite beauty of the opening day, when light came glancing off from everything; the gliding on at night so noiselessly, past frowning hills sullen with dark trees and sometimes angry in one red, burning spot high up, where unseen men lay crouching around a fire; the shining out of the bright stars undisturbed by any noise of wheels or steam or any other sound than limpid rippling of the water as the boat went on; all these were pure delights.”

Charles Dickens’ experience in North America from January to June 1842 became the basis for much of his later writing, which took the form of a “progress report” on the status of Britain’s former colonies. Although he gave the American canals a fairly good grade, he issued a blistering attack of our country’s continued use of slavery and all of its accompanying evils.

Doug Farley is the director of the Erie Canal Discovery Center and his column runs every Saturday. The Discovery Center is closed for the season and will reopen May 1.

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Canal Discovery w/ Doug Farley

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