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writing to gather his perspective was one reason he had conceived of his tour to the United States, after all. And perhaps he could attribute the failure of American Notes to the glut of similar books—however inferior—already in print. But, given the relative indifference to Martin Chuzzlewit, how could he help doubting his own judgment? Which is to say, his literary talent. Which is to say, his very sense of self.

4.
    W hen Charles Dickens made his way to Manchester to make his appearance before the Athenaeum, it is safe to say that he was wearing a sign of his cares on his brow. A French journalist who interviewed him during this time described him as having “long, brown, rather untidy hair…over the forehead of an unhealthy pallor.” However, the reporter also noted, “The bright, restless eyes testify to an unusual sagacity and quick intelligence.”
    While a willingness to put a shoulder to the wheel to help improve the Athenaeum’s fortunes was in keeping with Dickens’s nature, he had come to Manchester (a place that Sir Charles Napier had described as “the entrance to Hell realized”) primarily at the urging of his sister Frances, eighteen months his senior. Fanny, as she was known to her brother, had married a pious Evangelical named Henry Burnett, and the couple had lived in the Manchester suburb of Ardwick for some time. Dickens and Fanny had always been close, though given his distrust of organized religion in general and of restrictive, small-minded sects in particular, he was not so sure about her choice of a husband. Still, Dickens, weary of the ceaseless crush caused by his celebrity, had chosen to stay with his sister and her husband instead of taking a room at a local hotel.
    It is highly unlikely that he would even have considered the invitation to Manchester if it had not been for his sister’s involvement in the city’s welfare. In recent months the writer had more than done his part for the greater good.
    As biographer Peter Ackroyd notes, Dickens had delivered speeches at the Printers’ Pension Society in London, the Hospital for Consumption and Diseases of the Chest, the Charitable Society for the Deaf and Dumb, the Literary Fund, and for the Sanitorium. He had also agreed to arrange a testimonial dinner for his friend Macready—who was leaving a post at the Drury Lane Theater—to head up the formation of a Guild of Authors, to chair a committee formed to act on behalf of international copyright for authors, and to direct the relief effort for the surviving children of an actor named Edward Elton, who had recently drowned.
    Given such a full slate, it is little surprise that Dickens had tired a bit of the endless round of parties and social occasions to which he was called (including the ball at which Thackeray had conceived his sniping portrait of Dickens and his wife, Catherine). Proof of Dickens’s deteriorating mood in this regard is evident in his notes on a dinner on behalf of the Charterhouse Square Infirmary, where he characterizes his fellow guests as “sleek, slobbering, bow-paunched, overfed, apoplectic, snorting cattle.”
    Then, too, there had come news from Catherine that she was again pregnant, with their fifth child in only seven years. Biographers have generally surmised that Dickens settled for Catherine Hogarth when he married her in 1833, after the love of his young life, Maria Beadnell, a banker’s daughter, had rejected him. But the relationship of Dickens and Catherine, if not passionate, had always been a fond and respectful one. The fact, then, that he called her “a Donkey” after she divulged to him that she was once more with child, suggests that Dickens was teetering on the edge of a very steep precipice indeed.
    He had even gone so far as to suggest that they might think of moving their family, including Catherine’s sister Georgina, who was now living with them, to some new home on the Continent, where they might live more frugally and Dickens