by rail to Worcester. The next morning another train carried him to
Springfield. The next stop was Hartford, a distance of only twenty-five
miles. But at that time of the year, Dickens records, the roads were so
bad that the journey would probably have occupied ten or twelve hours.
So progress was accomplished by means of the waters of the Connecticut
River, in a boat that the Englishman described as so many feet short,
and so many feet narrow, with a cabin apparently for a certain
celebrated dwarf of the period, yet somehow containing the ubiquitous
American rocking chair. Going from Hartford to New Haven consumed three
hours of train travel; and, rising early after a night's rest, Dickens
went on board the Sound packet bound for New York. That was the first
American steamboat of any size that he had seen, and he wrote that, to
an Englishman, it was less like a steamboat than a huge floating bath,
and that its cabin, to his unaccustomed eyes, seemed about as long as
the Burlington Arcade. From the deck of this packet he first viewed
Hell's Gate, the Hog's Back, the Frying Pan, and other notorious
localities attractive to readers of the Diedrich Knickerbocker History.
When, later, Dickens left New York for Philadelphia, he wrote of the
journey as being made by railroad and two ferries, and occupying between
five and six hours.

The ten years that separated the first visit of Dickens and the first
visit of Thackeray had wrought many changes. Thackeray, too, came to New
York from Boston, but in his case it was the matter of one unbroken
train journey, in the course of which he reread the "Shabby Genteel
Story" of a dozen years before. Dickens's transatlantic trip had
consumed nineteen days. The "Canada," which carried Thackeray, made the
crossing in thirteen. In New York Thackeray stayed at the Clarendon
Hotel, on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Eighteenth Street; but his
favourite haunt in the city was the third home of the Century, in