“…Your letter was only just put into my hands upon waking from my berth in the steamer on my passage southward down the Potomac…If you have an opportunity, I should like you to tell Mr. Dickens how much I envy some of my friends in this country their priority in making his acquaintance. I hope he has been made to know 'what oysters are.' I have been very much interested and entertained at Washington and am now on my way as far south as I can get. I hope that Washington Irving accepts his appointment [as US ambassador to Spain] which I think a very gracefully appropriate one….Remember me most kindly to your Ladies, the quiet tea was not the least alluring part of your programme and by the way, my single personal grievance with your great nation is that they never give any tea at their houses…”

     Morpeth, who had just left political office in the British Cabinet as Chief Secretary for Ireland, visited the entire east coast of the United States, travelling for four months, being hosted at the White House by President Tyler and meeting with former President Van Buren, Judge James Kent, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, William Ellery Channing, Henry Clay, and many writers and philosophers, including

     Washington Irving – who had first arranged Dickens’ trip to America and has just been named by Tyler American Ambassador to Spain.

    Unlike Dickens, who cut his American visit short after four months, then returned home to write a critical narrative of the trip, Morpeth was so taken with the country that he remained in the United States for nearly a year, touring the north, south and Midwest, riding unaccompanied and without ceremony by stage coach rather than railroad - and sitting up front beside the driver when he was allowed. He even insisted on visiting southern plantations, talking with both planters and their slaves, which angered one Dixie newspaper that criticized his apparent sympathy for “thick-lipped ignorant niggers.”

It was some years before Morpeth made the personal acquaintance of Dickens, who, in 1848, would humbly ask the influential Peer to help him get a government sinecure. That never came to pass, primarily because the job Dickens coveted was reserved for a lawyer; nonetheless, they became good friends, Dickens visiting Morpeth’s country estates several times in the 1850s before the peer reentered the Government as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.