ABSTRACT
Among the treasures to be found in the collections of the Charles Dickens Museum are several presentation copies of Dickens’s books. These include the inscribed copy of American Notes that Dickens entrusted to Longfellow to carry across the Atlantic to give to George William Putnam (1812-1896) who had acted as his secretary on his 1842 American tour. The inscription reads: ‘Charles Dickens. To his faithful friend and fellow-traveller G. W. Putnam. Nineteenth Oc O tober 1842’. Like most of the other presentation copies held by the Museum, this one came to it through the munificence of the great Dickens collector Comte Alain de Suzannet. With it Suzannet kept a curious letter written by Putnam many years later to Benjamin P. Cheney, one of the early directors of Wells Fargo and also of the firm that became American Express.1By this date (1885) Cheney, who had amassed a considerable fortune, was helping Putnam to bring before the public a certain kind of fire escape that he had invented.2 Cheney had evidently asked Putnam for a Dickens letter and Putnam was now sending it to him (the letter, the original of which seems to have been lost, is the one Dickens sent to Putnam on 4 March 1842 and is printed in the Pilgrim Edition from a transcript made by Suzannet’s friend Walter Dexter, then editor of The Dickensian). Most of Putnam’s letter to Cheney, which is dated 28 October 1885, relates to his model fire escape but the last paragraph contains the following astonishing outburst:
This description seems a very remarkable contrast to the unqualified reverence for Dickens Putnam showed in the reminiscences about their association that he published in The Atlantic Monthly just after Dickens’s death. In these he claimed to have seen in Dickens’s mode of being ‘the daily and hourly exhibition of the finest and noblest feelings of the human heart’ and towards the end of his second article he wrote: ‘Only those whose opportunities brought them in close contact with Charles Dickens can know the full beauty and purity of his nature, and how intensely he loathed all that was coarse and low.’3 He had, in fact, seen his former employer only once since 1842 and that was during Dickens’s American Reading Tour of 1867/68 when, on 3 December, he called on him at the Parker House Hotel in Boston. Dickens wrote to his son Charles Junior that it was ‘quite affecting’ to see Putnam’s ‘delight in meeting his old master again’ and that he had ‘laughed and cried together’ when he heard about Anne Brown’s having got married (she was Catherine’s maid and had accompanied the Dickenses and Putnam on their arduous journey) and also about Dickens’s being now a grandfather.4
