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to quarrel with me for carrying the same usage abroad. I am happy to
believe that my confidence in that great nation was not misplaced.

When this book was first published, I was given to understand, by some
authorities, that the Watertoast Association and eloquence were beyond
all bounds of belief. Therefore I record the fact that all that portion
of Martin Chuzzlewit's experiences is a literal paraphrase of some
reports of public proceedings in the United States (especially of the
proceedings of a certain Brandywine Association), which were printed in
the Times Newspaper in June and July, 1843--at about the time when I was
engaged in writing those parts of the book; and which remain on the file
of the Times Newspaper, of course.

In all my writings, I hope I have taken every available opportunity of
showing the want of sanitary improvements in the neglected dwellings
of the poor. Mrs Sarah Gamp was, four-and-twenty years ago, a fair
representation of the hired attendant on the poor in sickness. The
hospitals of London were, in many respects, noble Institutions; in
others, very defective. I think it not the least among the instances
of their mismanagement, that Mrs Betsey Prig was a fair specimen of
a Hospital Nurse; and that the Hospitals, with their means and funds,
should have left it to private humanity and enterprise, to enter on
an attempt to improve that class of persons--since, greatly improved
through the agency of good women.




POSTSCRIPT

At a Public Dinner given to me on Saturday the 18th of April, 1868, in
the city of New York, by two hundred representatives of the Press of
the United States of America, I made the following observations, among
others:--

"So much of my voice has lately been heard in the land, that I might
have been contented with troubling you no further from my present
standing-point, were it not a duty with which I henceforth charge
myself, not only here but on every suitable occasion, whatsoever
and wheresoever, to express my high and grateful sense of my second
reception in America, and to bear my honest testimony to the national
generosity and magnanimity. Also, to declare how astounded I have been
by the amazing changes I have seen around me on every side--changes
moral, changes physical, changes in the amount of land subdued and
peopled, changes in the rise of vast new cities, changes in the growth
of older cities almost out of recognition, changes in the graces and
amenities of life, changes in the Press, without whose advancement no
advancement can take place anywhere. Nor am I, believe me, so arrogant
as to suppose that in five-and-twenty years there have been no changes
in me, and that I had nothing to learn and no extreme impressions to
correct when I was here first. And this brings me to a point on which I
have, ever since I landed in the United States last November, observed
a strict silence, though sometimes tempted to break it, but in reference
to which I will, with your good leave, take you into my confidence now.

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