Charles Dickens on Entertainment and Newspapers in “American Notes” of 1843

Is there no amusement here? Why, yes. Over the way, there is the lecture-room, from which shafts of light pour out, and then, three times a week or more, there are evening services for the ladies. For the young gentlemen there are the counting-house, the store and the bar; the last of these, as you may satisfy yourself by glancing in at these windows, is tolerably full. Crack! The stroke of the hammer that breaks the ice, and the refreshing rustle of the crushed fragments as they are tossed from glass to glass in the mixing of cocktails. No amusement? And what, pray, do you suppose these suckers of cigars and swallowers of strong liquors, whose hats and feet assume the most varied and unexpected positions, are doing, 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 with strong, wholesome fare. Here neither slander nor insult is disdained; the roofs are stripped from private houses, like the Lame Devil in Spain; * there is pandering and encouragement of depraved inclinations of every kind, and the most insatiable of bellies is stuffed with hastily concocted lies; the acts of every public man are explained by the basest and vilest motives; from the motionless, wounded body of politics every Samaritan who approaches it with a clear conscience and good intentions is frightened away; with shouts and whistles, amid a thunder of applause, a thousand dirty hands let loose 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