Snubbing the queen

It is hard to imagine a modern writer snubbing the President of the United States in this way.

Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life

The above line from Claire Tomalin's 2011 biography of Charles Dickens seems laughable just a few years later in the age of Donald Trump, when writers and artists of all sorts, professional athletes and people of all walks of life regularly snub the president of the United States. Even members of Congress threaten to boycott the State of the Union address. The old days of honoring the office even if you don't like the person holding that office seem to be over, although I'm not sure this trend didn't begin earlier, perhaps with George W. Bush or even Richard Nixon. Republican presidents haven't been honored as much as Democratic presidents for some now, it seems to me. Never mind that the voters keep electing them.

Queen Victoria and Charles Dickens

The president Dickens snubbed was John Tyler, who invited the great English writer to the White House for dinner while he stopped in Washington during his tour of the United States in 1842. Dickens decided "he had nothing of interest to say or ask" and so declined the invitation. Even then Dickens's reputation was greater than that of Tyler's, so perhaps the author felt he was in a position to snub a mere president.

Yet a decade later Dickens snubbed Queen Victoria not once but twice when she asked to meet with him, "a considerable breach of etiquette," Tomalin writes, for in Great Britain a monarch's request is considered a command. Amazingly, Victoria did not seem to take offense at the refusal but had her secretary send the writer a letter of congratulations for something he had written. True, Dickens never became Sir Charles Dickens, although knighthood does not seem to have been bestowed then as often as it is today, when almost any British subject who excels at almost anything is likely to be made a knight.

Years later, near the end of his life, Dickens did finally meet with Victoria at Buckingham Palace, properly standing during the long interview when the queen sat. Perhaps he was bumbled by that time by age and illness. He was, after all, just a writer. She was the queen of England.