Sometimes we think of the English novelist Charles Dickens as being friendly to the Mormons, or at least having some respect for Mormons. Dickens visited the Mormon emigrant ship Amazon in 1863, and published an account of that visit in his magazine The Uncommerical Traveler, speaking somewhat favorably of the Mormons’ cleanliness and literacy and organization aboard the outbound ship — but he also betrays his continuing disdain for Mormon belief and the travelers’ unenviable future.

What is in store for the poor people on the shores of the Great Salt Lake, what happy delusions they are laboring under now, on what miserable blindness their eyes may be opened then, I do not pretend to say. But I went on board their ship to bear testimony against them if they deserved it, as I fully believed they would; to my great astonishment they did not deserve it; and my predispositions and tendencies must not affect me as an honest witness. I went over the Amazon’s side feeling it impossible to deny that, so far, some remarkable influence had produced a remarkable result, which better known influences have often missed.

That day with the Mormons did not change his underlying negative view of Mormonism. On May 18, 1869, six years after his visit to the emigrants, he wrote to an Australian friend, George William Rusden, referring to the anticipated completion of the Transcontinental Railroad across the United States. For no particular reason that I can see – before this paragraph he hadn’t been discussing either the railroad or Mormonism – he wrote:

The first shriek of the first engine that traverses the San Francisco Railroad from end to end will be a death-warning to the disciples of Jo Smith. The moment the Mormon bubble gets touched by neighbors it will break. Similarly the red man’s course is very nearly run. A scalped stoker is the outward and visible sign of his utter extermination. Not Quakers enough to reach from here to Jerusalem will save him by the term of a single year.

When Dickens’ letters, including this letter to Rusden, were published in 1881, this comment quickly came to the notice of Latter-day Saints. One of the Salt Lake papers reprinted the paragraph, with this editorial comment:

It would have been a sad disappointment to Charley had he lived to this time. That first engine has shrieked itself to death, and dozens of others have been shrieking for twelve years, and the Mormons and Indians have—well, they have raised another generation of Mormons and Indians since the shrieking begun.

Hey, Charley, we’re still here in 2015. Native Americans, too.