Essay on dickin’s journey to niagra Essay

daimon matte up transported by the sublimity of Niagara f every(prenominal) when he visited it on his 1842 journey to the United States and Canada. In a letter to Forster (26 April 1842), he s concern of Horseshoe go (the Canadian side of Niagara) that It would be hard for a piece to stand neargonr God than he does there (Letters 3 210). deuce proceeds to effuse over the dish antenna and majesty of the go in a channelizeage that forms the chief give away of his commentary of his experience in the Statesn notes, although the letter actually offers the first-class explanation There was a bright rainbow at my feet and from that I looked up to majuscule HeavenTo what a fall of bright green pee The broad, deep, mighty stream awaits to scare in the act of falling and, from its boundless grave arises that tremendous locomote of spray and mist which is never laid, and has been tenacious this place with the same dread heavyityperhaps from the creation of the homo (Letter s 3 210-11).In this essay, I analyze daimons reception to Niagara Falls in the context of other British travel narratives from the introductory decade, and examine how Niagara speaks to monster of life after demise (as he describes it preceding(prenominal), the locomote die and and so rise again in ghostly mist). His pro be experience at Niagara Falls shaped his treatment of climactic, prodigious moments in subsequent novels in graphic symbolicular, from this point on Dickens repeatedly uses weewee moving picturery (especially seas, swamps and rivers) as symbols of death, rebirth, transformation and of being disturbed with the joy of noble thoughts, to use Wordsworths phrase in Tintern Abbey. only when Dickenss reaction was more than just a typical Romantic experience, convertible to those of other nineteenth-century British travelers it was in part shaped by his boilersuit disappointment in the States and his relief to be on gift ground again.Niagara Falls fulfills several definitions of the tremendous. Philosophers since Longinus brace used the term heroic to refer to experiences that go beyond the everyday, that inspire awe, that involve a experience of grandeur, that elevate ones thoughts and feels and that exceed the capacity of human descriptive powers. Longinus, of course, used the term in reference to rhetoric, but later philosophers found many of the same qualities in sublimescenes of nature. Edmund Burke in his philosophic Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) emphasized the role of affright in the sublime, for wholly the presence of fear, he felt, could account for the complete sweep over of all other thoughts and sensations in experiencing sublime scenes in nature.Alexander Gerard in An Essay on Taste (1759) stressed the importance of physical splendor in the experience of the sublime When a large object is presented, the mental capacity expands itself to the extent of that object, and i s filled with one grand sensation, which totally possessing it, composes it into a solemn sedateness and strikes it with deep silent wonder and admiration (11). Similarly, the Romantics, and specially Wordsworth, felt that natural scenes that impress the viewer with their immensity and particularly their power, much(prenominal) as mountains or waterwaterfall, create sublime sensations that feed the soul and the poetic imagery both at the moment and in the future by the aid of imagination and memory.Niagara Falls embodies all the qualities traditionally associated with the sublimeits immensity, power, and beauty embarrass viewers, reminding them, particularly in nineteenth-century accounts, of the presence of other awe-inspiring forces such as death and God.Niagara Falls, oddly enough, fits even the scientific definition of sublime, which is to cause to pass from solid to the vapor state by heating and againcondense to solid form. Not by heating but by motion and pressure the fal ls turn water into vapor, the ever present mist that surrounds them, and the vapor eventually returns again to the falls, a turn that led Dickens to use death/resurrection imagery in the description quoted in a higher place (i.e. The broad, deep, mighty stream calculates to die in the act of falling and, from its unfathomable grave arises that tremendous ghost of spray and mist which is never laid).It is the never-ending presence of great volumes of spray that leads to the ever-present rainbows in descriptions and paintings of the falls, such as Frederic Churchs famous 1857 painting, Niagara. The rainbows naturally heighten the spiritual cause of the falls as they are the perfect image of a bridge between kingdom and heaven and are the symbol of Gods covenant with man in the flood story in Genesis. They are also a striking conjunction of energy (light) and matter (water particles) and assuch are a powerful metaphor for the presence of the divine on earth.It is the rainbows that seem to move Dickens the close to on his second visit to Niagara in 1868, a quarter of a century after his first visit, a trip come forth he took purely for pleasure. As he wrote to Forster on bound 16, 1868 The majestic valley below the Falls, so seen through the vast demoralise of spray, was do of rainbow. The high banks, the riven rocks, the forests, the bridge, the buildings, the air, the sky, were all made of rainbow. Nothing in food turners finest water-colour drawings, done in his greatest day, is so ethereal, so imaginative, so gorgeous in colour, as what I then beheld. I seemed to be lifted from the earth and to be looking into Heaven.What I once tell to you, as I witnessed the scene five and twenty years ago, all came back at this most affecting and sublime sight (Letters 12 75).Dickens was sure as shooting not the only position tourist to be awed by Niagara Falls. In fact, his visit there, and even his obscure effusions virtually it, could be considered custom ary and necessary elements of any narrative of travels through America and Canada. As Amanda Claybaugh states in The Novel of Purpose Literature and Social amend in the Anglo-Ameri preempt World, the conventional itinerary included the main natural sites (the Mississippi River, the prairies of the West, and above all else, Niagara Falls) (71-2).In Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), Frances Trollope refers to all the chief elements of the sublime in her description of Niagara Falls, repeatedly expressing that they defy description and that in masking them wonder, terror, and delight overwhelmed her (337). I wept with a strange mixture of pleasure and of pain, she writes, and certainly was, for some time, too violently affected. to be capable of oft pleasure but when this emotion of the sense experiences subsided my enjoyment was very great indeed. She notes the mystical effect of the falls as well It has to me something beyond its vastness, over which a shadowy mystery h angs, which neither the eye nor even the imagination can penetrate (337).Harriet Martineau visited the falls in 1834 and, like Trollope and Dickens, associated them with the mystical to offer an melodic theme of Niagara by writing of hues and dimensions is much like representing the kingdom ofHeaven by images of jasper and topazes (96). On her second visit to the falls months later, Martineau descended the stairs behind the falls and wrote From the moment that I perceived that we were actually behind the cataract, and not in a mere cloud of spray, the enjoyment was intense. I not only saw the watery curtain before me like tempest-driven snow, but by momentary glances could see the crystal roof of this most wonderful of dispositions palaces (104).Perhaps the oddest narrative of a British visit to Niagara Falls comes from Captain Frederick Marryat, who wrote ab verboten his 1837 trip to the falls in his diary in America, published in 1839 As I stood on the brink above the falls, co ntinuing for a considerable time to watch the great potty of water tumbling, dancing, capering, and rushing wildly along I could not stand by wishing that I too had been made of such stuff as would endure enabled me to have joined it with it to have rushed innocuously down the precipice to have rolled uninjured into the deep unfathomable gulf below (111).The extended he stood there the more the urge to jump into the falls move up in him until he had to pull himself away, an experience that testifies to the terror that Burke argued was infixed in the sublime, a terror that Trollope experienced but Dickens denied feeling in viewing the falls. As it turns out, Marryat might have done himself a favor to jump, for as Jules Zanger, the editor of his diary, asserts, of all the literary lions who have made their progress through America the most tactless and blundering was Captain Frederick Marryat.Zanger points out that Marryat began his journey as an honored guest, but before he think his trip, he had been threatened by a lynch mob, had watched his books burned in public bonfires, and had seen himself hung in effigy twice by angry crowds (9).He had a habit, it seems, of regularly saying the wrong thing, a habit that at generation carries over into his travel narrative, as in a bizarre race where he wishes he could transport Niagara Falls to Italy and pour them down move up Vesuvius and thereby create the largest steamboiler that ever entered into the imagination of man (111). Later, Marryat counters the oddness of this image with the more conventional statement that the voice of Niagara was thevoice of the Almighty, and that a Presbyterian government minister he heard nearby should have preached on its message sooner of on the uninspiring and hackneyed subject of temperance (112).These were the American journeys and narratives most in the British public eye when Dickens embarked on his trip to North America. In this context, his ecstatic description of the falls may seem rather ordinary. Romanticism was still the dominant cultural influence at the time, so one was expected to have Romantic effusions about iconic Romantic scenes. (1) But while the journey to the falls may have become customary, and the experiences of the sublime similar in most narratives, yet the effect was still profound for Dickens, as one can see particularly in the garner where he goes beyond the vague, mystical language a great deal associated with the sublime and makes specific personal connections with the falls.As I have pointed out above, the falls made Dickens think almost immediately of the cycle of death and resurrection with the falls descending into the abyss and rising again in spray. But even more specifically they reminded him of his beloved sister-in-law Mary who had died unawares seven years earlier. As he wrote to Forster from Niagara, what would I give if the sound girl whose ashes lie in Kensal-green, had lived to come so far along wit h us. But then he takes back the wish because he decides that she essential have been here many times, I doubt not, since her sweet face faded from my earthly sight (Letters 3 211).His associating the falls with Marys death and her continuing spiritual presence on earth allows Dickens to make the falls his own, at least in part. They become conjugate to a personal family tragedy and offer a consolation for her loss.But Dickens makes another personal connection with the falls. In letters create verbally from Niagara, he repeatedly adds to the date the phrase Niagara Falls (Upon the English Side) with English underscored with as many as ten dashes. He only does this in letters to his English friends, of courseincluding Forster, Mitton and Beard, as if to express a sense of relief. After Dickenss well-known disappointments with Americanshis exasperation with their greed, their spitting, their lack of love for privacy and copyright laws, not to mention their slaverytopics covered ri chly in American Notes and in lettersbeing among English on English turf moldiness have been a welcome experience. pen to Forster on 26 April 1842, Dickens mentions that there were two English officers with them as they first approached the falls, and he exclaims ah What winningmen, what noblemen of nature they seemed, implying that he had not seen much of their mixed bag in the States (Letters 3 210). In emphasizing the English side of the falls, Dickens once again seems to imagine a personal connection to something that transcends the personal. He tries to come to terms with the sublimity of the falls, reduce them at least in part to his level, make them part of himself, part of his family story, part of his Englishness.In this way he can own his experience of the falls, anchor it mentally and emotionally and then use it later in his fiction, as he indeed does. His account of the falls in American Notes lacks some of the interest of his descriptions in letters precisely because he leaves out the personal connections he makes in correspondence, no doubt deeming them inappropriate for the public narrative.Having made these personal associations between the falls and the death and spiritual presence of Mary and between the sublime and the English, it is not surprising, then, that Dickens would work the falls and other powerful images of water into his portrayals of death, transformations, and transcendent moments in his subsequent novels. In order to gauge the change we must first look at the imagery Dickens used for such moments in his earlier novels.In the novels Dickens published before visit Niagara in 1842, he frequently gestured toward transcendence in death scenes and in concluding chapters, but the imagery he used tends to center on sunny little communities, flowers and other greenery, angels, and churches. Consider Mr. Pickwicks cheery homespun community at the end of his talenot transcendent, perhaps, but in the bond between Pickwick and Sam which nothing but death allow sever certainly leaning to the legendary (ch. 57). Or consider the gentle light that Rose Maylie sheds as she stands with Oliver by Agness tomb in Oliver Twist (both characters are suffused with light in Cruikshanks last instance).Nicholas Nickleby ends with a summery community of Nicklebys and friends with their children strewing flowers on Smikes grave smiler nicely captures the feeling of summer and sunshine inhis final illustration (Figure 1). As Dickens describes the scene The grass was green above the departed boys grave, and trodden by feet so small and light, that not a daisy drooped its head beneath their pressure. Through all the spring and summer-time, garlands of fresh flowers wreathed by infant hands rested upon the stone, and when the children came to change them lest they should wither and be idyllic to him no longer, their eyes filled with tears, and they spoke low and softly of their poor dead cousin (ch. 64).Barr, Alan P. Mourning Becom es David Loss and the Victorian Restoration of raw Copperfield. Dickens Quarterly 24 (June 2007) 63-77.Berard, Jane. Dickens and Landscape Discourse. New York rotating shaft Lang, 2007. Claybaugh, Amanda. The Novel of Purpose Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World. Ithaca Cornell UP, 2007.Dickens, Charles. The Pilgrim form of the Letters of Charles Dickens. Vols. 3, 12. Ed. Madeline House, et al. Oxford Clarendon, 1974-2002.Gerard, Alexander. An Essay on Taste. Intro. Walter J. Hipple. 3rd ed. 1780. Gainesville U of Florida P, 1963.Marryat, Captain Frederck. Diary in America. Ed. by Jules Zanger. Bloomington Indiana UP, 1960.Martineau, Harriet. Retrospect of Western Travel. Vol. 1. 1838. New York Johnson, 1968.Metz, Nancy Aycock. The partner to Martin Chuzzlewit. Robertsbridge Helm Information, 2001.Page, Norman. Ed. and Intro. The Old Curiosity Shop. NY Penguin, 2000.Poole, Adrian. Ed. and Intro. Our Mutual Friend. NY Penguin, 1997.Slater, Michael. Ed. Dickens Journalism. Dent reproducible Edition. Vol. 2. London J. M. Dent, 1997.Trollope, Frances. Domestic Manners of the Americans. London Routledge, 1927.NATALIE MCKNIGHT(Boston University)NOTES(1) Jane Berard sees Dickenss description of the falls simply as customary, but pays scant attention to his descriptions in letters (51).(2) Recent examples include Michelle Allens Cleansing the City hearty Geographies in Victorian London, Athens, OH U of Ohio P, 2007 Leon Litvacks Images of the River in Our Mutual Friend, Dickens Quarterly 20.1 (2003) 34-55 and Pamela Gilberts Medical Mapping The Thames, the Body, and Our Mutual Friend, in Filth, Dirt, Disgust and Modern Life, ed. by William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson, Minneapolis U of Minnesota P, 2005, 78-102.(3) Transmutation of Species, AYR (9 border 1861), 519-21. Dickens was aware of other theories related to evolution as well, and refers to the Monboddo school of thought of the human race having once been monkeys in the first chapter o f Martin Chuzzlewit (Metz 37-9) and to Robert Chamberss Vestiges (1844) in a review of Robert Hunts Poetry of intelligence published in The Examiner in 1848 (Slater 2 129-34). In addition, habitation Words included F. T. Bucklands Old Bones, (24 Sept. 1853) and Henry Morleys Our phantom Ship on an Antediluvian Cruise (16 Aug. 1851). See also Natalie McKnight, Dickens and Darwin A Rhetoric of Pets, The Dickensian 102 (2006), 131-43. COPYRIGHT 2009 Dickens Society of AmericaNo portion of this article can be reproduced without the express pen permission from the copyright holder. Copyright 2009 Gale, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.Please bookmark with affectionate media, your votes are noticed and appreciated