Famous Visitors to Hudson

Earlier this summer, a marker was dedicated at Henry Hudson Riverfront Park commemorating the visit to Hudson made by the Marquis de La Fayette on September 17, 1824, during his grand tour of America that marked the country's fiftieth anniversary.

Left to right: Virginia Martin, Regent of the Hendrick Hudson Chapter of the DAR; Patrice Powley Birner, past New York State Regent of the DAR; Julien Icher of Follow the Frenchmen and The Lafayette Trail; Mayor Kamal Johnson   

Over the years, Gossips has written about various luminaries who have visited or passed through Hudson, among them Henry James, who spent several hours in Hudson with Edith and Teddy Wharton while waiting for their motorcar to be repaired, and ten of the forty-six U.S. presidents, who visited Hudson for various reasons before, during, or after their terms in office. Recently, a reader told me that Charles Dickens also passed through Hudson.

From January to June 1842, Dickens, then 30 years old, traveled in America with his wife, Catherine, and her maid, Anne Brown, and critiqued the experience in his travelogue, American Notes. They arrived in Boston on January 22, and sailed back to England from New York on June 7. In New York, five days before their ship was scheduled to depart, Dickens "had a great desire to see 'the Shaker Village,' which is peopled by a religious sect from whom it takes its name," and so they embarked on their last journey in America. They "went up the North River again, as far as the town of Hudson." (The North River being what the Hudson was called at the time.) In Hudson, they hired a carriage to take them to New Lebanon, which Dickens called simply Lebanon. After spending the night in a hotel, which Dickens described as "inexpressibly comfortless to me," and touring the Shaker Village, they returned to Hudson and "took the steamboat down the North River towards New York." 

Sketch of Dickens in 1842 during this first American tour

Despite his interest in visiting the Shaker Village, he left there "with a hearty dislike of the old Shakers, and a hearty pity for the young ones." He elaborated:  

. . . I cannot, I confess, incline towards the Shakers; view them with much favour, or extend towards them any very lenient construction. I so abhor, and from my soul detest that bad spirit, no matter by what class or sect it may be entertained, which would strip life of its healthful graces, rob youth of its innocent pleasures, pluck from maturity and age their pleasant ornaments, and make existence but a narrow path towards the grave: that odious spirit which, if it could have had full scope and sway upon the earth, must have blasted and made barren the imaginations of the greatest men, and left them, in their power of raising up enduring images before their fellow-creatures yet unborn, no better than the beasts. . . . 

On the way to New York, Dickens and his wife stopped at West Point, where they "remained that night, and all next day, and next night too," staying at what Dickens described as "a most excellent hotel for strangers, though it has the two drawbacks of being a total abstinence house (wines and spirits being forbidden to the students), and of serving the public meals at rather uncomfortable hours: to wit, breakfast at seven, dinner at one, and supper at sunset."

Dickens' final impression of North America was more favorable than the one he had of the Shaker Village: 

The beauty and freshness of this calm retreat, in the very dawn and greenness of summer—it was then the beginning of June—were exquisite indeed. Leaving it upon the sixth, and returning to New York, to embark for England on the succeeding day, I was glad to think that among the last memorable beauties which had glided past us, and softened in the bright perspective, were those whose pictures, traced by no common hand, are fresh in most men’s minds; not easily to grow old, or fade beneath the dust of Time: the Kaatskill Mountains, Sleepy Hollow, and the Tappaan Zee. 

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