28 KNOWING DICKENS
of your newspapers; imputing motives to me, the very suggestion of
which turns my blood to gall; and attacking me in such terms of vaga-
bond scurrility as they would denounce no murderer with.This treatment, he continued, “has been to me an amount of agony such as
I have never experienced since my birth” (3.76–77).
The notion that he could be seen to have “motives” at all—and motives
that he could not acknowledge—seems to have been especially galling to
Dickens; he could render himself only as a person of utterly pure feelings set
upon by a lynch mob. Later that year, when Chapman learned that Dickens
was planning to publish American Notes, he finally replied, expressing anxiety
about how the book would fare in the United States. Dickens’s response was
of course defiant: he swore that “I have never, for an instant, suffered myself
to be betrayed into a hasty or unfair expression, or one I shall, at any time,
regret” (3.346). His response and his general attitude toward the democracy
he had idealized were deeply colored by the notion that in America, opinions
could not be freely expressed on any controversial subject (3.81). “Democ-
racy” became a national fraud. Only Boston, the city he had visited before
the fatal turn, was exempted.
I am interested here not in the rights and wrongs of Dickens versus the
United States, but in the nature of his immediate response. (American Notes
is a more acute and mixed account than its general reputation would sug-
gest.) He had been welcomed with open arms and then betrayed where
he presumed to trust—that was the shock he was destined by nature and
circumstance to feel, even to invent if necessary. The betrayal was to see his
motives and feelings differently than he saw them himself—in this case, to
accuse him of self-interest when he understood himself to champion the
cause of literature. To be read behind his back, so to speak, was an intolerable
kind of humiliation.
His own way of putting it was quite different: “I have a strong spice of
the Devil in me; and when I am assailed, as I think falsely or unjustly, my red
hot anger carries me through it bravely, until I have forgotten all about it,”
he wrote of the American episode in 1843 (3.493). This little fiction—for
Dickens did not forget—stars anger playing the role of a protective hero,
with forgetting coming in at the end to erase the evidence on both sides. In
the following year, he claimed to have lost interest in the copyright ques-
tion altogether; the subject “only dwelt [in my mind] when I viewed the
influences that make up an American government, through the mist of my
hopes and fancies. When that cleared away, I ceased to have any interest in
the question” (4.60). What offers itself as self-knowledge—he has effected