阅读短文，从短文后各题所给的A、B、C、D四个选项中，选出最佳选项。
Charles Dickens' joy at
first arriving in Boston Harbor in 1842 reads like Ebenezer Scrooge's awakening
on Christmas morning. Biographer Peter Ackroyd reports that he flew up the
steps of the Tremont House Hotel, sprang into the hall and greeted a curious
crowd with a bright "Here we are!" He took to the streets that
twinkling midnight in his shaggy fur coat, shouting out the names on shop
signs, pulling bell-handles of doors as he passed—excited with laughter—and
even screamed with (one imagines) astonishment and delight at the sight of the
old South Church. He had set at last upon the shores of "the Republic of
my imagination."
Though not quite 30,
Dickens was a literary rock star, the most famous writer in the world, who
landed like a conquering hero in a country swept up in an extreme
"Boz-o-mania". He wrote to his best friend, John Forster, that he
didn't know how to describe "the crowds that pour in and out the whole
day; of the people that line the streets when I went out; of the cheering when
I went to the theatre; letters of congratulations, welcomes of all kinds,
balls, dinners, assemblies without end." When Bostonians renamed their
city "Boz-town", New Yorkers determined to "outdollar…and
outshine them". Their great Boz Ball boasted flags, flowers, a huge portrait
of the author with a bald eagle overhead, 22 tableaux (场景) from the great author's works. "If I should live to grow
old," Dickens said, "the scenes of this and other evenings will shine
as brightly to my dull eyes 50 years hence as now." ①
The Spirit of the Times wrote of it: "This
most extraordinary, fashionable, brilliant, unique, eye-dazzling,
heart-delighting, superb, foolish and ridiculous celebration…came off at the
Park Theatre, New York, on Monday evening." But, the reporter predicted,
"Such were silly-minded Americans, and such the ridiculous respect paid to
a foreigner, who will probably return home and write a book abusing the whole
nation for the excesses of a few fools." ②
In fact, Dickens wrote two.
③ Apart from the country's great writers, he found Americans
ill-mannered and invading his privacy. "I am so surrounded by people that
I am exhausted from want of air." Dickens complained to Forster. "I
go to church for quiet, and there is a violent rush to the neighborhood of the
bench I sit in. I take my seat in a railroad car, and the very conductor won't
leave me alone. I can't drink a glass of water without having a hundred people
looking down my throat."
④ He disliked Americans' table manners and the tobacco spit
everywhere he looked—on even the sidewalks of the nation's capital, where he
found party politics corrupting everything, its leaders "the lice (虱子) of God's creation," and "despicable (卑鄙的) trickery at elections."
Even worse, everyone
wanted a piece of the action, from Tiffany's selling unauthorized copies of his
bust (半身像) , to a barber selling locks of his hair. "I never knew what
it was to feel disgust and contempt (蔑视)," Dickens said,
"till I traveled in America." When he departed in June, he left
behind all notions of an Arcadian realm he now regarded as "a vast
counting house" full of nothing but "cheaters and bores." (See: A Christmas Carol.)
Americans had soured on
him, too. Dickens never missed an opportunity to accuse American publishers of
openly pirating his novels to sell for mere pennies, with no recompense to the
author at all. The press took offense. Within a month of his arrival, Dickens
were laughed at for his "foppish" clothing and effeminate hair,
described as "no gentleman," "a contemptible Cockney (伦敦佬)."
