Postscript

Martin Chuzzlewit

by Charles Dickens

At a public dinner given to me on Saturday the 18th of April,
1868, in the City of New York, by two hundred representatives of the
press of the United States of America, I made the following
observations, among others:--

"So much of my voice has lately been heard in the land, that I
might have been contented with troubling you no further from my
present standing-point, were it not a duty with which I henceforth
charge myself, not only here but on every suitable occasion,
whatsoever and wheresoever, to express my high and grateful sense of
my second reception in America, and to bear my honest testimony to
the national generosity and magnanimity. Also, to declare how
astounded I have been by the amazing changes I have seen around me on
every side--changes moral, changes physical, changes in the amount of
land subdued and peopled, changes in the rise of vast new cities,
changes in the growth of older cities almost out of recognition,
changes in the graces and amenities of life, changes in the press,
without whose advancement no advancement can take place anywhere.
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. And this brings me to a point on which I have, ever
since I landed in the United States last November, observed a strict
silence, though sometimes tempted to break it, but in reference to
which I will, with your good leave, take you into my confidence now.
Even the press, being human, may be sometimes mistaken or
misinformed, and I rather think that I have in one or two rare
instances observed its information to be not strictly accurate with
reference to myself. Indeed, I have, now and again, been more
surprised by printed news that I have read of myself, than by any
printed news that I have ever read in my present state of existence.
Thus, the vigour and perseverance with which I have for some months
past been collecting materials for, and hammering away at, a new book
on America has much astonished me; seeing that all that time my
declaration has been perfectly well known to my publishers on both
sides of the Atlantic, that no consideration on earth would induce me
to write one. But what I have intended, what I have resolved upon
(and this is the confidence I seek to place in you), is, on my return
to England, in my own person, in my own journal, to bear, for the
behoof of my countrymen, such testimony to the gigantic changes in
this country as I have hinted at to-night. Also, to record that
wherever I have been, in the smallest places equally with the
largest, I have been received with unsurpassable politeness,
delicacy, sweet temper, hospitality, consideration, and with
unsurpassable respect for the privacy daily enforced upon me by the
nature of my avocation here and the state of my health. This
testimony, so long as I live, and so long as my descendants have any
legal right in my books, I shall cause to be republished, as an
appendix to every copy of those two books of mine in which I have
referred to America. and this I will do and cause to be done, not in
mere love and thankfulness, but because I regard it as an act of
plain justice and honour."

I said these words with the greatest earnestness that I could
lay upon them, and I repeat them in print here with equal
earnestness. So long as this book shall last, I hope that they will
form a part of it, and will be fairly read as inseparable from my
experiences and impressions of America.

Charles Dickens.

May, 1868.