Did Charles Dickens visit Cape Girardeau?

Now that we've reached the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Dickens, it's been hard to escape the hype for the 19th Century novelist. Columnists have been gushing praise during his anniversary celebration, saying he is "arguably the greatest master of storytelling and writer of dialogue in the English language" or simply "one of the greatest writers of all time."

Dickens was surrounded by hype in his own day, an early example of an international celebrity. A commentator for NPR joked, "In addition to being famous for being famous, like some Real Housewife of the Nineteenth Century, didn't Dickens write a few novels?"

One British writer reacted to the Dickens celebration by announcing, "By two o'clock on New Year's Day in this Dickens bicentennial year, I already found myself wishing that either he or I had never been born."

It's clear that Dickens brings out strong reactions, both positive and negative, from his readers. That was particularly true when Dickens first visited America, including our own neck of the woods, in 1842.

As a budding novelist at age 30, Dickens was already a popular figure on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, he may have been better known in the United States than England. Thanks to a lack of international copyright law, his books were widely copied by the American press without compensation. This hurt him financially, but also helped propel him to greater fame.

During his tour of the country, American opinion started to turn sour when Dickens starting lecturing about the need for stronger copyright laws. This angered the American press, who enjoyed using "free" content from overseas as filler material. Newspapers accused him of being greedy.

Following his tour of America during the first half of 1842, Dickens returned to London and immediately wrote a travelogue of his journey, American Notes for General Circulation.

It wasn't pretty. The book was a diatribe, sometimes exaggerated, against what he had experienced traveling across America. He had toured this part of the country by steamboat in April, going down the Ohio River to Cairo and going up the Mississippi River as far as St. Louis.

Dickens wrote that St. Louis "bids fair in a few years to improve considerably: though it is not likely ever to vie, in point of elegance or beauty, with Cincinnati." That's actually high praise compared to what the author wrote about Cairo.

He clearly despised the town. If you took a thesaurus and tried to use every word synonymous with "miserable", you might write something similar to how Dickens described his first impressions of Cairo:

Nor was the scenery, as we approached the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, at all inspiriting in its influence. The trees were stunted in their growth; the banks were low and flat; the settlements and log cabins fewer in number: their inhabitants more wan and wretched than any we had encountered yet. No songs of birds were in the air, no pleasant scents, no moving lights and shadows from swift passing clouds. Hour after hour, the changeless glare of the hot, unwinking sky, shone upon the same monotonous objects. Hour after hour, the river rolled along, as wearily and slowly as the time itself.

At length, upon the morning of the third day, we arrived at a spot so much more desolate than any we had yet beheld, that the forlornest places we had passed, were, in comparison with it, full of interest. At the junction of the two rivers, on ground so flat and low and marshy, that at certain seasons of the year it is inundated to the house-tops, lies a breeding-place of fever, ague, and death; vaunted in England as a mine of Golden Hope, and speculated in, on the faith of monstrous representations, to many people's ruin. A dismal swamp, on which the half-built houses rot away: cleared here and there for the space of a few yards; and teeming, then, with rank unwholesome vegetation, in whose baleful shade the wretched wanderers who are tempted hither, droop, and die, and lay their bones; the hateful Mississippi circling and eddying before it, and turning off upon its southern course a slimy monster hideous to behold; a hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulchre, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise: a place without one single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it: such is this dismal Cairo.

That was just the beginning. As a British urbanite, he was obviously not prepared for the rough journey up the Mississippi River. He continued:

But what words shall describe the Mississippi, great father of rivers, who (praise be to Heaven) has no young children like him! An enormous ditch, sometimes two or three miles wide, running liquid mud, six miles an hour: its strong and frothy current choked and obstructed everywhere by huge logs and whole forest trees: now twining themselves together in great rafts, from the interstices of which a sedgy, lazy foam works up, to float upon the water's top; now rolling past like monstrous bodies, their tangled roots showing like matted hair; now glancing singly by like giant leeches; and now writhing round and round in the vortex of some small whirlpool, like wounded snakes. The banks low, the trees dwarfish, the marshes swarming with frogs, the wretched cabins few and far apart, their inmates hollow-cheeked and pale, the weather very hot, mosquitoes penetrating into every crack and crevice of the boat, mud and slime on everything: nothing pleasant in its aspect, but the harmless lightning which flickers every night upon the dark horizon.

He couldn't help resist commenting about the quality of the river water.

We drank the muddy water of this river while we were upon it. It is considered wholesome by the natives, and is something more opaque than gruel. I have seen water like it at the Filter-shops, but nowhere else.

On his return journey back to Louisville, he took another swipe at Cairo.

In good time next morning, however, we came again in sight of the detestable morass called Cairo; and stopping there to take in wood, lay alongside a barge, whose starting timbers scarcely held together. It was moored to the bank, and on its side was painted "Coffee House;" that being, I suppose, the floating paradise to which the people fly for shelter when they lose their houses for a month or two beneath the hideous waters of the Mississippi. But looking southward from this point, we had the satisfaction of seeing that intolerable river dragging its slimy length and ugly freight abruptly off towards New Orleans; and passing a yellow line which stretched across the current, were again upon the clear Ohio, never, I trust, to see the Mississippi more, saving in troubled dreams and nightmares. Leaving it for the company of its sparkling neighbour, was like the transition from pain to ease, or the awakening from a horrible vision to cheerful realities.

Believe it or not, he still wasn't finished with Cairo. In his next novel, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, a portion of the story takes place in a fictional town in America satirically called "Eden." That place, naturally, was based on Cairo, and his description was less than favorable.

This struck a nerve among Midwesterners. Former Illinois lieutenant governor William Kinney of Belleville, another town that Dickens mercilessly ripped in American Notes, wrote a series of rebuttals for the Belleville Advocate newspaper. This was turned into a 64-page "pamphlet" by publisher Robert K. Fleming with the title Notes for American consumption. In his will, Kinney left $100 for Fleming as consideration for his help on the anti-Dickens project.

Over the years, Dickens' fame continued to grow as he wrote more books. He discovered that giving readings of his stories to packed audiences could be a very lucrative source of income to support his large dysfunctional family. In 1868, he embarked on a second trip to America to extend his reading tour. It was a huge success.

Dickens, hoping to make amends for his earlier remarks against the United States, arranged for an appendix to be added to future editions of American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit in which he admitted that he was a bit harsh following his first tour of America. He said, "Nor am I, believe me, so arrogant as to suppose that in five-and-twenty years there have been no changes in me, and that I had nothing to learn and no extreme impressions to correct when I was here first."

His reading tour was initially planned to come as far west as St. Louis, but his failing health forced him to stay in the Northeast. Even at that, the grueling series of performances took a toll, probably contributing to his death in 1870 at his home, Gads Hill Place near Rochester, England.

Gad's Hill, a town in Wayne County, Missouri, was founded two years later and apparently named for Dickens' home. It appears, therefore, that not all Midwesterners still held a grudge against him.

That wasn't necessarily the case at Cairo, though. Even as late as 1910, at least one Cairoan was still seething about Dickens. In his book A history of the city of Cairo, Illinois, author John M. Lansden devoted two chapters in response: one about Dickens in particular, and a second quoting excerpts from other travelogues that were more positive toward Cairo.

Lansden argued that Dickens had unfairly targeted Cairo because of his own personal beefs against America. Dickens "was here but an hour or two," Lansden pointed out. "His account of what he saw here was colored much more be his feelings than his vision."

Dickens was no doubt aware that some of his countrymen had lost their shirts investing in American real estate ventures, including Cairo. "Dickens kept along with the times too closely to be ignorant of these facts when he reached Cairo," Lansden explained. "The American publishers were, he said, growing rich on the sale of his books and he getting nothing, and the sight of Cairo only brought to mind the fact that many other Englishmen had fared badly in this country. He was in such temper of mind that nothing was needed to stimulate to unfriendly and unjust criticism."

Lansden lamented that Cairo's reputation never fully recovered from Dickens' "unjust" attacks. "It is not admitting too much to say that our city should have made more progress in getting a good or better name," he wrote.

Even though Dickens proclaimed that Cairo was a "grave uncheered by any gleam of promise", the city did prosper into the the first half of the 20th Century. Cairo rivaled Cape Girardeau -- for a time. Of course, if Dickens were to witness modern-day Cairo, he'd say something like "I told you so!" (but in much stronger words with an overabundance of commas and colons).

Rumors have long swirled that Dickens visited Cape Girardeau and stayed at the St. Charles Hotel. When the historic hotel was being demolished in 1967, the Southeast Missourian ran a story about the history of the building, noting that Dickens "was said to have spent a night at the hotel during a lecture tour." A tour guide produced last year by the Cape Girardeau Historic Preservation Commission also mentions that Dickens may have stayed at the hotel.

This doesn't appear to be true. Dickens doesn't mention Cape Girardeau in his book, and that's probably just as well. I can't imagine what kind of bile he might have spewed in regard to our fair city. He did pass Cape twice by steamboat, but based on his schedule it appears that he went up and down this part of the river at night. When describing the trip from Cairo to St. Louis, he makes it quite clear that he spent the night on board -- and what a night it was:

For two days we toiled up this foul stream, striking constantly against the floating timber, or stopping to avoid those more dangerous obstacles, the snags, or sawyers, which are the hidden trunks of trees that have their roots below the tide. When the nights are very dark, the look-out stationed in the head of the boat, knows by the ripple of the water if any great impediment be near at hand, and rings a bell beside him, which is the signal for the engine to be stopped: but always in the night this bell has work to do, and after every ring, there comes a blow which renders it no easy matter to remain in bed.

As a result, I think we can put this myth to bed.