"The Angry Passenger" by Charles Dickens, 1842
"This may suit you, this may, but it don’t suit me. This may be all very well with Down Easters, and men of Boston raising, but it won’t suit my figure nohow."
On his tour of the United States in 1842, described in his book American Notes, Charles Dickens travels by canal boat to Pittsburgh.
The canal extends to the foot of the mountain, and there, of course, it stops, the passengers being conveyed across it by land carriage, and taken on afterwards by another canal boat, the counterpart of the first, which awaits them on the other side. There are two canal lines of passage-boats: one is called The Express, and one (a cheaper one) The Pioneer. The Pioneer gets first to the mountain and waits for the Express people to come up, both sets of passengers being conveyed across it at the same time.
We were the Express company, but when we had crossed the mountain, and had come to the second boat, the proprietors took it into their heads to draft all the Pioneers into it likewise, so that we were five-and-forty at least, and the accession of passengers was not at all of that kind which improved the prospect of sleeping at night. Our people grumbled at this, as people do in such cases, but suffered the boat to be towed off with the whole freight aboard nevertheless, and away we went down the canal. At home I should have protested lustily, but being a foreigner here I held my peace.
Not so this passenger. He cleft a path among the people on deck (we were nearly all on deck), and without addressing anybody whomsoever, soliloquised as follows:
“This may suit you, this may, but it don’t suit me. This may be all very well with Down Easters, and men of Boston raising, but it won’t suit my figure nohow; and no two ways about that; and so I tell you. Now! I’m from the brown forests of Mississippi, I am, and when the sun shines on me, it does shine—a little. It don’t glimmer where I live, the sun don’t. No. I’m a brown forester, I am. I an’t a Johnny Cake. There are no smooth skins where I live. We’re rough men there. Rather. If Down Easters and men of Boston raising like this, I’m glad of it, but I’m none of that raising nor of that breed. No. This company wants a little fixing, it does. I’m the wrong sort of man for ’em, I am. They won’t like me, they won’t. This is piling of it up, a little too mountainous, this is.” At the end of every one of these short sentences he turned upon his heel and walked the other way, checking himself abruptly when he had finished another short sentence, and turning back again.
It is impossible for me to say what terrific meaning was hidden in the words of this brown forester, but I know that the other passengers looked on in a sort of admiring horror, and that presently the boat was put back to the wharf, and as many of the Pioneers as could be coaxed or bullied into going away were got rid of.
When we started again, some of the boldest spirits on board, made bold to say to the obvious occasion of this improvement in our prospects, “Much obliged to you, sir,” whereunto the brown forester (waving his hand, and still walking up and down as before) replied, “No you an’t. You’re none o’ my raising. You may act for yourselves, you may. I have pinted out the way. Down Easters and Johnny Cakes can follow if they please. I an’t a Johnny Cake, I an’t. I am from the brown forests of the Mississippi, I am”—and so on, as before.
He was unanimously voted one of the tables for his bed at night—there is a great contest for the tables—in consideration for his public services; and he had the warmest corner by the stove throughout the rest of the journey. But I never could find out that he did anything except sit there; nor did I hear him speak again until, in the midst of the bustle and turmoil of getting the luggage ashore in the dark at Pittsburg, I stumbled over him as he sat smoking a cigar on the cabin steps, and heard him muttering to himself, with a short laugh of defiance, “I an’t a Johnny Cake—I an’t. I’m from the brown forests of the Mississippi, I am, damme!”
I am inclined to argue from this that he had never left off saying so; but I could not make an affidavit of that part of the story, if required to do so by my Queen and Country.
From American Notes by Charles Dickens, 1842, available on Amazon*
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Image: “James River and Kanawha Canal, Richmond, Virginia” by J.R. Hamilton, Harper’s Weekly, October 14, 1865, public domain.