Charles Dickens in Ohio

This year the world celebrates the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birth in 1812. As one of the most beloved authors of all time, his works have endured and continue to entertain and enlighten generation after generation. While reading one of his works recently, I was delighted to learn that he had visited the Buckeye state.

In 1842 having already achieved fame in England and America with works such as Oliver Twist, The Pickwick Papers, and Nicholas Nickleby, he sailed from London with his wife Catherine and her maid to tour North America. While their journey took them as far south as Richmond VA, west to St Louis and north to Toronto, of particular interest to Ohio residents are the impressions Dickens gave after he crisscrossed the state from the Ohio River to Lake Erie. He wrote of his journey after returning to England in his travelogue American Notes.

Arriving in Cincinnati by riverboat from St Louis, Dickens expressed a “desire to travel through the interior of the state and to ‘strike the lakes’ at Sandusky”. After spending the night in Cincinnati the party started out on the 120 mile ride to Columbus. Riding in a horse drawn mail coach that “rattled through the streets of Cincinnati gaily” on a macadam road they soon reached the city limits and moved into a “beautiful country, richly cultivated, and luxuriant in its promise of an abundant harvest. Sometimes we pass a field where the strong bristling stalks of Indian corn look like a crop of walking-sticks, and sometimes an enclosure where the green wheat is springing up among a labyrinth of stumps”.

Stopping to change coaches at a tavern along the route in Lebanon, the group takes dinner there. This establishment was known as The Bradley Hotel and is still operating today as The Golden Lamb. When Dickens asks for a glass of brandy he is informed that this is a Temperance hotel prompting him to later write “perhaps the plainest course for persons of such tender consciences would be a total abstinence from tavern keeping”.

They continue on and reach Columbus early the next morning. “A clean and pretty town”, remarks Dickens, “and of course is going to be much larger as it is the seat of the State legislature of Ohio”.

From here they take a somewhat more primitive route that leads to Sandusky. Dickens comments that they were all in good humor when they set out and “it was well for us that we were, for the road we went over that day, was certainly enough to have shaken tempers that were not resolutely set at Fair, down to some inches below Stormy. At one time we were all flung together in a heap at the bottom of the coach, and at another we were crushing our heads against the roof”.

As night descends upon them, they continue on their way. The darkness causes many illusions and tree stumps are seen by Dickens as “a Grecian urn erected in the center of a lonely field; now there is a woman weeping at a tomb; now a student poring over a book; now a horse, a dog, a cannon”.

That night they stop in the town of Upper Sandusky, “an Indian village”, he remarks. He speaks with a government official who negotiates treaties with the Indians. Dickens is enlightened as to their “strong attachment to the familiar scenes of their infancy, and in particular to the burial places of their kindred; and of their great reluctance to leave them”. As America continued to expand, the Indian reservations were being pushed further and further west. During the time of Dickens’ visit the Wyandot tribe was being relocated to “somewhere west of the Mississippi”.

The following morning they leave the town and arrive that evening in Sandusky where they stay at “a comfortable little hotel on the brink of Lake Erie”. While waiting for a boat to take them to Cleveland and on to Buffalo, Dickens describes the town “which was sluggish and uninteresting enough, something like the back of an English watering-place, out of season”.

The steamboat arrives and they board for the cruise to Cleveland. The boat is large and with high-pressure engines that leave Dickens to feel he “had lodgings on the first floor of a powder-mill”.

Reaching Cleveland, they spend the night where he happens to read a local paper that is highly critical of the treaty being worked out between Great Britain and the United States. The writer of the article seems to express a decidedly anti-British attitude. Before leaving Cleveland, Dickens tours the city and “finds it a pretty town and had the satisfaction of beholding the newspaper office where this wit works. I have no doubt he is a prodigious man in his way, and held in high repute by a select circle”.

That afternoon the group boards the steamboat and continues on to Buffalo and Niagara Falls bringing an end to his time spent in Ohio. Although the trip he undertook could be made in a few hours today, their somewhat longer and more challenging undertaking gives us a charming glimpse of early life in Ohio through the brilliance of Charles Dickens.    (875 words)