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Title-page Vignette
A. B. Frost
Engraver: E. Dalziel
1878
Wood engraving
7.2 cm high by 4 cm wide on page 19.9 cm by 12.7 cm
Chapter VI, "New York," in Dickens's American Notes for General Circulation in the Household Edition, on the engraved title-page.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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Hark! to the clinking sound of hammers breaking lumps of ice, and to the cool gurgling of the pounded bits, as, in the process of mixing, they are poured from glass to glass! No amusements? What are these suckers of cigars and swallowers of strong drinks, whose hats and legs we see in every possible variety of twist, doing, but amusing themselves? What are the fifty newspapers, which those precocious urchins are bawling down the street, and which are kept filed within, what are they but amusements? Not vapid, waterish amusements, but good strong stuff; dealing in round abuse and blackguard names; pulling off the roofs of private houses, as the Halting Devil did in Spain; pimping and pandering for all degrees of vicious taste, and gorging with coined lies the most voracious maw; imputing to every man in public life the coarsest and the vilest motives; scaring away from the stabbed and prostrate body-politic, every Samaritan of clear conscience and good deeds; and setting on, with yell and whistle and the clapping of foul hands, the vilest vermin and worst birds of prey. — No amusements! [Chapter VI, "New York," page 277]
The New York City press and Dickens did not enjoy an entirely amicable relationship as the visiting English celebrity regarded newspaper reporters as too personally intrusive and too inclined to violate his privacy. For their part, American journalists regarded Dickens's defence of British copyright as entirely self-serving. The title-page vignette also establishes the fact that Americans were very much given to the consumption of tobacco products, chewing tobacco, cigarettes, and cigars rather than pipes.
Whereas the American city in which Dickens felt most at home, Boston, Massachusetts, had just five daily newspapers during the 1840s, New York City in 1842 had seven dailies: the Commercial Advertiser, the Emancipator, the Evening Post, the Flash, the Log Cabin, the Mercury, the New York Semi-Weekly Express. The New York equivalent of Bell's Life in London, the recently founded weekly Brother Jonathan (1842-62) initially eulogized Dickens, but later assailed his position on copyright by publishing a forged letter, purportedly written by Dickens, about his impressions of America. The paper now most closely associated with NYC, the New York Times, did not begin publication until 1851.
These associations are reflective of Dickens's rage at the plagiarism of American printers, their violation of British copyright, and in particular the "Forged Letter" (to which Martin alludes directly in conversation with the Colonel Diver in Martin Chuzzlewit) that the New York Evening Tattler published in part on the second or third of August, 1842. A week later the whole text of the letter was given in an editorial entitled "Boz's Opinion of Us" (see Letters 3: 625-627). Diver is one of those journalists whom Dickens castigates for publishing "under the black flag" [330/331] (Letters 3: 407) and may well be modeled upon the editor of the New York Herald, James Gordon Bennett (1795-1872), a journalist noted for his having boats meet incoming trans-Atlantic shipping for commercial news, as well as for his scurrilous personal attacks and sensationalist style. How much of the controversy Frost understood almost forty years after the First American Tour remains unclear, but he tantalizes the informed reader with the Colonel Diver-like figure on the title-page.
Although cigarette-smoking was well established as a sanitary replacement for tobacco-chewing (and expectorating) by the late 1870s, Dickens in all likelihood saw very few (if any) smokers on his first American reading tour; he would therefore have noted a marked shift in American tobacco consumption during his second tour (1867), when Americans of all classes embraced cigarette-smoking. Frost's illustration probably shows a New Yorker smoking a small cigar rather than a cigarette. Despite the implications of A. B. Frost's elegant title-page for American Notes for General Circulation in the British Household Edition (188), Americans consumed tobacco chiefly in cigars, in pipes, in snuff, and particularly in the form of chewable tobacco until after the American Civil War. In fact, even cigar-smoking was not in vogue when Dickens first visited the United States; only after the 1846 war with Mexico did America become a nation of cigar rather than pipe smokers.
However, Victorian society did not uniformly embrace cigarette-smoking as socially acceptable, despite the proliferation of ornate smoking-rooms in he houses of the aristocracy and smoking-cars on railways in the latter part of the nineteenth century. In the United States, in contrast, cigarette-smoking was almost part of the national identity, although (as in Europe) only "fast" women smoked. Cigarette-smoking became popular after the Crimean War, and the Prince of Wales became an avid smoker, doubtless rendering the habit more respectable. After the American Civil War, ash-trays must gradually have come to displace the old, obnoxious spittoons of previous generations of tobacco-chewing Americans, and surely Dickens would have noticed the change in the manner of tobacco consumption on his second American Reading Tour in 1867.
The Spanish and French mania for cigarette-smoking came to American shores during the war between the North and the South — and just in time. As liberated slaves left the tobacco plantations of the former Confederacy, tobacco farmers would have fallen on hard times with a much reduced labour force, were it not for the popularity of cigarettes. Whereas the rolling of cigars and the chopping of tobacco leaves for pipes were both labour-intensive, Albert Pease of Dayton, Ohio, advanced cigarette production considerably with his machine for processing the lighter tobacco leaves into cigarette tobacco. As the machine came into general use in the 1870s, the price of cigarettes fell, so that American males began to consume cigarettes in ever-increasing numbers. Up until the 1880s, cigarettes were still made by hand and were high in price. Overseas, European demand for the minced tobacco necessary to make cigarettes led to a boom in the American tobacco industry in the las two decades of the nineteenth century as widespread use of Pease's machine made high volumes of the product possible.
In the form of the mass-produced cigarette, U.S. tobacco became the virtual international symbol of American modernity. Indeed, students of the industry have argued that the advent of machine-made cigarettes in the 1880s helped inaugurate in the United States the modern era of mass consumer products, mass advertising and promotion, and the professionally managed modern corporation. ["Tobacco Industry"]
Dickens, Charles. Chapter VI, "New York." American Notes. Illustrated by A. B. Frost; engraved by Edward G. Dalziel. London: Chapman and Hall, 1880. Pp. 263-80.
"Early American Newspapers, 1840-1849." Readex: A Division of Newsbank, 2008. Online version available from Readex.com. Web. 7 April 2019.
Kent, Christopher. "Smoking and Tobacco." Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia. Ed. Sally Mitchell. New York: Garland, 1988. P. 727.
"Tobacco Industry." Dictionary of American History. The Gale Group: 2003. Encyclopedia.com.
Last modified 7 April 2019
