Charles Dickens in “American Notes” on evening amusements and the press

Is there no amusement here? Why, yes. There, across the road, is the lecture-room, from which sheaves of light pour out, and then three times a week, or more often, there are evening services for the ladies. For the young gentlemen there are the counting-house, the store and the bar; the last, as you may satisfy yourself by glancing in at these windows, is pretty well crowded. Crack! The blow of a mallet breaking the ice, and the refreshing rustle of the broken fragments as they are tossed from glass to glass in the mixing of the cocktails. No amusement? And what, in your opinion, are these cigar-suckers and strong-drink swallowers doing, whose hats and feet assume the most various and unexpected positions, if not amusing themselves? And the fifty newspapers, whose headlines are bawled the length of the street by these prematurely grown-up urchins, and which are diligently filed by the inhabitants, is that not amusement? And no insipid, watery amusement either: you are served strong, wholesome fare. Here they do not shrink from slander or insult; they unroof private houses, like the Lame Devil in Spain; * they play the pander and pander to the growth of vicious inclinations of every kind, and stuff the most insatiable of bellies with hastily concocted lies; they trace the conduct of every public man to the basest and most loathsome motives; from the motionless, wounded body of politics they scare away every Samaritan who approaches it with a clear conscience and good intentions; with shouts and whistles, to a thunder of applause, thousands of dirty hands send out upon the stage the most arrant reptiles and the foulest beasts of prey. And you say there is no amusement!

Charles Dickens, American Notes, 1843