File:Charles Dickens. From a portrait by Francis Alexander.jpg

Identifier: memoriesofhostes02howe (find matches)
Title: Memories of a hostess : a chronicle of eminent friendships, drawn chiefly from the diaries of Mrs. James T. Fields
Year: 1922 (1920s)
Authors: Howe, M. A. De Wolfe (Mark Antony De Wolfe), 1864-1960 Roy J. Friedman Mark Twain Collection (Library of Congress) DLC Fields, Annie, 1834-1915
Subjects: Fields, Annie, 1834-1915 Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 Women -- Massachusetts Boston Diaries Friendship -- Massachusetts Boston Authors, American -- 19th century Biography Actors -- United States Biography Boston (Mass.) -- Intellectual life
Publisher: Boston : Atlantic Monthly Press
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: Sloan Foundation

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Dickens wrote to Fields: Here I foreverrenounce Mr.* as having anything whatever to do withour communication, and as being a mere preposterousinterloper. From such beginnings grew the intimacywhich caused Dickens, when he drew up the humorousterms of a walking-match between Dolby, his manager,and Osgood, Fieldss partner, while the Boston readingsof 1868 were in progress, to define Fields as Massa-chusetts Jemmy and himself as the Gads HillGasper by virtue of his surprising performances(without the least variation) on that true national in-strument, the American catarrh. The visits of Dickens to America, first in 1842, thenin the winter of 1867-68, have been the subject of abun-dant chronicle. For the first of them there is the directrecord of his American Notes, besides those indirectreflections in Martin Chuzzlewit, which wrought aneffect described by Carlyle in the characteristic sayingthat all Yankee-doodledom blazed up like one uni-versal soda bottle. Many memorials of the second
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CHARLES DICKEX.s From a portrait by Francis Alexander, for many years in the Fields house, and now inthe Boston Mu.^-eum of Fine Arts WITH DICKENS IN AMERICA 137 visit are preserved in Fieldss Yesterdays withAuthors, and in John Forsters Life both visits areof course recorded. There is, besides, one source of intimate record ofDickens in America which hitherto has remained almostuntouched.^ This is found in the diaries of Mrs. Fields,filled, as the preceding pages have shown, not merelywith her own sympathetic observations, but with manythings reported to her by her husband. To him it waslargely due that Dickens crossed the Atlantic near theend of 1867. Landing in Boston, and soon beginninghis extraordinarily popular readings, he found in theCharles Street house of the Fieldses a second home.Steadily refusing all invitations to go out during theweeks he was reading, wrote Fields in his Yesterdayswith Authors, he went only into one other house be-sides the Parker, habitually, during hi

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