In the last decade of his life, the great novelist Charles Dickens forged a new career for himself as an enormously successful performer, reading extracts from his novels and stories to thousands of people. This website is a (very) short introduction to the subject.
Dickens On Tour
Charles Dickens was already a successful journalist and distinguished novelist by the time he started giving professional Public Readings from his works in the late 1850s. During the final twelve years of his life he undertook extensive tours of Britain and America, performing alone on stage to audiences of thousands at a time. He received glowing reviews in the press, and was treated as a celebrity wherever he went.
He travelled with a simple stage-set comprising a small reading-desk and a screen to go across the back of the stage which acted as a sound-board to help the projection of his voice. A lighting-rig was also carried from venue to venue, its gas-fittings designed to hang from a horizontal bar twelve feet above the front of the stage. The exhausting itineraries Dickens set himself — his 1868-9 tour of Britain, for example, lasted more than six months, and included seventy-two readings and fifty-four changes of venue — meant that a team of assistants was essential. Usually this team consisted of three people: a manager who organised theatre bookings, made travel arrangements, dealt with ticket agents, and so on; a valet who looked after Dickens's clothing and assisted him in dressing for a performance; and a technician who was responsible for the assembly of the lighting-rig and the preparation of each venue.
The readings took about two hours each, with Dickens reciting largely from memory, and were met with rapturous applause from his audiences. As he read aloud from A Christmas Carol, perhaps, or Oliver Twist, he would assume the various roles, imitating the accents and physical appearances of characters such as Scrooge, Bill Sykes, Mrs Gamp, and Wackford Squeers, creating a dramatic performance that was much more than just a reading from a book.
What the Papers Said
"Hear Dickens and die; you will never live to hear anything of its kind so good."
(Scotsman)
"We have rarely witnessed or shared an evening of such genuine enjoyment."
(Times)
"Never through the force of mere reading was a vast concourse held so completely in the grasp of one man."
(Times)
"Mr Dickens is a delightful interpreter of the production of his own genius."
(Exeter Post)
"The facility with which Mr Dickens suited his voice to the various characters in his selection was most striking."
(Cheltenham Examiner)
"Never did we see or hear a man throw himself so entirely into the spirit of a book."
(Bristol Times)
"One feels it can honestly be said that Mr Dickens is the greatest reader of the greatest writer of the age."
(Freeman's Journal)
Miscellaneous
- Further reading:
- Charles Dickens And His Performing Selves, Malcolm Andrews (Oxford University Press, 2006)
- Sikes and Nancy, And Other Public Readings, ed. Phillip Collins (Oxford University Press, 1983)
- The Charles Dickens Show, Raymond Fitzsimons (Geoffrey Bles Ltd, 1970)
- Some webpages:
- Dickens on stage, at www.charlesdickenspage.com
- The public readings, at www.dickensmuseum.com
- An audiobook:
- The Mystery of Charles Dickens (BBC cassette) by Peter Ackroyd, read by Simon Callow
(includes performances of extracts from the readings)