my friends: it’s been exactly 2 million years since i last used my high dpi gaming mouse to click my tumblr post button. i’m sorry about this! i have no excuse. nothing has really changed in my life—i just got distracted by (then obsessed with) lanyard culture and then i accidentally ate a few of those capsules that grow into little sponge animals when you drop them in water.
in addition to conveying a sponge rhino through my bowels AND inventing some pretty dope basket weave knots, i’ve written some things that i’d like to share with you. the following short piece is about the intersection of my second and third favourite pleasures: literature and food. if either of these stimuli make your top ten list as well, you may enjoy it…
How big a deal was Charles Dickens in 1842? This is the question I asked a professor friend of mine to get some perspective on the two epic, though wildly different New York dinner parties held in Dickens’ honor in 1842 and then 25 years later in 1867. “He was the biggest deal. If he visited your city, the press would scribble about it for days, even weeks afterwards.” replied my friend.
"He was a Kim Kardashian?"
"When Dickens first came to New York in 1842, he was only 29 yet he’d already published several bestsellers including The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby. He was a prolific wunderkind that everyone, everywhere was going bonkers over.”
"Another consideration is that New York was a place to be in the mid 19th century but it wasn’t the place to be. To get there back then, to get anywhere, it took a long time. Dickens only visited the U.S. twice for a reason.”
"So…like if Justin Timberlake went to Kolkata."
"Sure. Charles Dickens visiting New York in 1842 is like Justin Timberlake visiting Kolkata in 2015. But to keep the metaphor tight, Justin Timberlake will have do the song-and-dance equivalent of writing A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations and ten other literary blockbusters by 2040 to be anything near what Dickens’ return trip to America was like in 1867.”
This is the tale of two dinners. Each was lavish beyond measure. Each included the crustiest of America’s upper crust. Each honored Charles Dickens, the Justin Timberlake of the Victorian era. Both meals were paragons of haute cuisine—yet the dinners themselves were poles apart. Comparing the two reveals a fundamental shift in American dining, indeed a fundamental shift in America itself.
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