by A. N. Wilson
‘I am incapable of rest. Much better to die, doing.’ And he wrote to Forster from Gad’s Hill:
What do you think of my paying for this place, by reviving that old idea of some Readings from my books. The domestic unhappiness remains so strong upon me that I can’t write, and (waking) can’t rest, one minute. I have never known a moment’s rest or content, since the last night of The Frozen Deep. I do suppose there never was a man so seized and rended by one Spirit. In this condition, though nothing can alter or soften it, I have a turning notion that the mere physical effort and change of the Readings would be good, as another means of bearing it.9
Strong as his desire always was to make money, and desperate as he was to escape the hell into which marital collapse had plunged him – the fact that Dickens had caused the marriage collapse making it no less hellish – there is surely more going on, in this desire to do the readings, than mere restlessness. We would find it puzzling if Tolstoy (who scarcely ever spoke in public in his life) had given public readings of his novels; in a similar way, we think that Balzac being a one-man fiction factory, consuming endless cups of black coffee as the books poured from his pen, was sufficient; Balzac reading aloud would not have added anything to our understanding of his achievement, whereas Dickens performing from the podium… is different. In the case of Dickens on the road, enacting his characters, there is an aptness. In the case of all the other writers of the nineteenth century that I can think of, a reading aloud of the novels would simply be that – a reading aloud of the novels, and interesting as it would be to hear, say, Flaubert or Fontane reading, we would get just as much out of the experience if we read the book quietly to ourselves, or heard it on a ‘talking book’, read by an actor.
The Dickens readings were something in a different universe of experience. Actors ever since have tried to reconstruct the readings, but, if we attend their attempts, they only remind us of what we are missing, which is Dickens, not just reading from a text, but being these characters. And not just being the characters. He was being Dickens being the characters. You can’t reproduce that. Though a minority of those who went to see and hear him came away disappointed, feeling that what they had heard was not ‘their’ Pickwick or Fagin or Scrooge, the majority were not merely ‘enchanted’ – the Nabokov word is inescapable, and the readings had something about them of a revivalist rally or a case of mass hypnotism – but also demonic. ‘Much better to die, doing.’ Dickens’s family certainly felt, by the end, that the readings were killing him, and Edmund Wilson was only the most eloquent, but by no means the only, person who, contemplating that quite phenomenal roadshow – Dickens touring Britain and America for the readings – thought Dickens was releasing, without entirely controlling, dark forces inside him and his genius that were only implicit on the page, and which would eventually destroy him.
Dickens’s career happened during the century when the population of Britain did not merely expand. It changed irrevocably. When he was born, it was primarily a rural population. By the time he was embarking on his public reading tours, it was largely urban. By 1841 nearly half the male labour force worked in industry. ‘We cannot revert to rural felicity, to green fields, to rough and manly ignorant squires, to independent yeomanry, to ill supported and superstitious serf-like hinds,’ said a Birmingham manufacturer in 1869.10
Although the birthrate, rather mysteriously, peaked and even began to fall by the end of Dickens’s life, the population continued to grow, since mortality rates started to fall from the 1860s onwards, housing minimally improved, and the spending power of the working classes increased. (Of course by the standards of the twenty-first century, poverty was still severe, many were malnourished and lived with poor or non-existent kitchens or lavatories.)11
There was, for the first time in history, an audience for popular entertainment to be numbered in the millions. Whereas the greatest contemporary novelists – the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, Thackeray in the 1840s onwards – could hope to be read by audiences of thousands, Dickens’s reach was far broader and, with the beginning of the reading tours, in the last decade of his life, he was expanding his public all the time. The sixpenny ticket-holders probably included the semi-literate, if not the actually illiterate, as well as those who had been devotedly reading him in cheap serial form since the 1830s. He was pursuing, and achieving, a level of human popularity that was without parallel. There is nothing to compare it with – certainly nothing that pre-dates him – though the many accounts of the crowds who flocked to hear him, and of their ecstatic response to his voice, look forward to the twentieth-century reception of film stars and rock idols.
The public readings grew out of the Charitable Works, which were discussed in the last chapter. The first of them was given in Birmingham Town Hall two days after Christmas in 1853, when he read A Christmas Carol and The Cricket on the Hearth to raise funds for an adult educational establishment in the city. He stipulated that of the 2,500 seats in the hall, most should be reserved for the working classes, who paid sixpence for their tickets. He raised between £400 and £500. The response had been extraordinary. Kate and her sister Georgina had come with her husband to witness it.
Thereafter Dickens was deluged with invitations from all over Britain, to repeat the phenomenon. It was, in the early days, usually A Christmas Carol that audiences wanted. Subsequent readings were given in provincial towns and cities, usually for educational charities. At several venues in London, at Sherborne, at Reading, audience numbers were climbing towards the thousands; at Bradford, in Yorkshire, he had audiences of 3,700. He pledged in a speech in Sheffield – after reading the Carol – ‘that to the earnestness of my aim and desire to do right by my readers, and to leave our imaginative and popular literature more closely associated than I found it at once with the private homes and public rights of the English people, I shall ever be faithful – to my death – in the principles which have won your approval’.12
No one had ever seen anything like this in the nineteenth century. A generation would pass in Britain before politicians (following Gladstone’s example in the Midlothian Campaigns) went on the road to meet the crowds. (Incidentally, Gladstone was obviously influenced in his decision to go on what we call the ‘campaign trail’ in part by revivalist preachers, but also by the example of Dickens.) Dickens had drawn forth, and charmed, that new phenomenon, the great public. Over the next five years he gave a dozen or more charity readings, nearly always of the Carol, nearly always at Christmas time. It was in 1858 that he decided to turn professional.13
Dickens’s mimetic and histrionic gifts had been noted ever since boyhood. His father had made him perform turns. He learned to win his father’s love not by obedience, but by playing the clown, singing songs and doing funny voices. Applause became a positive need, fed during youth and early manhood by theatricals.
As a boy at Wellington House Academy, his fellow schoolboys had noted his skill at mimicry and his adoption of false personae: they remembered him lurking round Drummond Street pretending to be a beggar, in order to con money out of old ladies, before running off down the street, convulsed with laughter.14 There had been the early attempts to become a professional actor – though, interestingly, the dramatic performances, something rather more elaborate than is usually associated with the amateur, had ceased, never to be repeated, after The Frozen Deep. In his theatrical productions – the lavish Every Man in His Humour and Merry Wives, as in The Frozen Deep itself – Dickens had, of course, been acting roles. In the readings he was acting not merely the ‘characters’ of Boots, Mrs Gamp and others; he was acting Charles Dickens. ‘I have long held the opinion and have long acted on the opinion, that in these times whatever brings a public man and his public face to face, on terms of mutual confidence and respect, is a good thing.’15
We stare, like the children’s eyes in Yeats’s poem ‘Among School Children’, ‘in momentary wonder on/A sixty-year-old smiling public man’. Like his own children during the Christmas
game, when they had no idea of the significance of ‘Warren’s Blacking’, so suddenly brought into a memory game, we are not, as he claimed (and nor were his audiences), brought into ‘mutual confidence’ with Dickens. That is an illusion, a subterfuge. On the contrary, we confront mask after mask and have no idea of who the ‘public man’ really was. Perhaps the spruce, whiskery little figure pacing the lawn at Gad’s, and murdering Nancy, all on his own, had no idea, either.
For whatever reason, after Nelly had entered his life, and after The Frozen Deep, the readings became a psychological necessity. The very things about the paid readings that John Forster found infra dig were those elements that drew Dickens – they were ‘common’, vulgar, they made him like an actor. He was cleverly joining the Ternans’ world while not joining it, for the readings were not held in theatres, had no props – beyond the reading desk and the book itself, which he scarcely needed because he performed the Boots or the Trial or the murder so often that he had them by heart. He was also doing something that was probably necessary, for him, in any relationship: he was competitively demonstrating that he could beat the Ternans at their own game. While Nelly was appearing in William Bayle Bernard’s play The Tide of Time at the Haymarket and, in spring 1859, in John Palgrave Simpson’s The World and the Stage, Dickens was packing in the crowds at St Martin’s Hall.16 We can have no doubt that, if Nelly at this point in her career had become a star, and were the audiences for Dickens’s readings small, it would have been the end both of the readings and of the relationship.
While he was finishing A Tale of Two Cities in 1859 he did a two-week provincial tour – Cambridge, Peterborough, Bradford, Nottingham, Oxford, Birmingham, Cheltenham, ‘a new place every night’. At Oxford, the Prince of Wales came to hear him and the vice-chancellor of the university had asked him to stay the night, but Dickens refused – he had to rush on to the next town as soon as the reading was done.
These exhausting public readings formed part of the pattern of Dickens’s existence until three months before he died.
In his last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, the ungainly workhouse boy Sloppy assists Betty Higden by turning her mangle, and helps out at her Minding-School (that is, a crèche for the babies and children of working mothers). Moreover, Sloppy reads to her the exciting crime reports in the newspapers. ‘“I do love a newspaper. You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.”’ [OMF I 16] An early typescript draft of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was titled ‘HE DO THE POLICE IN DIFFERENT VOICES’ and although he was persuaded not to use the quotation, it was central to his idea for the poem. In The Three Voices of Poetry (1953), Eliot again reverted to ‘voices’ in Dickens: ‘You may remember that Mrs Cluppins, in the trial of the case of Bardell v. Pickwick, testified that “the voices was very loud, sir, and forced themselves upon my ear”. “Well, Mrs Cluppins,” said Sergeant Buzfuz, “you were not listening, but you heard the voices.”’17 The modernist/ symbolist use of ‘voices’, different ‘characters’ speaking alongside the authorial voice, and sometimes drowning it out, is central to the achievement of The Waste Land, as in the work of Eliot’s friend and mentor Ezra Pound, especially Personae. Eliot, too, like Dickens, was a devotee of music hall and ‘popular’ entertainment.
Sloppy, reading aloud from the newspapers for a semi-literate audience, was far from unique in the mid- to late-nineteenthcentury urban world. During the Crimean War the dispatches sent back to The Times by the pioneering war reporter William Howard Russell were read aloud in the market square of Hanley – one of the Pottery towns later incorporated into Stoke-on-Trent – by Samuel Taylor. This developed into his ‘Literary and Musical Entertainments for the People’, which he performed in the Town Hall. Those attending were charged a penny for admission. Between October 1857 and April 1858, nine Staffordshire towns were offered penny readings, with probably 60,000–70,000 attending. Penny readings became popular throughout the industrial towns of the British Midlands and the North. Joseph Chamberlain used to read Dickens aloud at Literary and Mechanics’ Institutes in Birmingham, of which he was the radical mayor.18 Dickens, whose serialized fiction, from the beginning, had been on sale on station bookstalls alongside cheap journalism and penny dreadfuls, could see, as John Forster could not, how appropriate it was that he should pitch to huge live audiences. His first professional reading was of The Cricket on the Hearth, at St Martin’s Hall on 29 April 1858. Nearly nine years later, he recalled in a letter to Robert Lytton on 17 April 1867:
When I first entered on this interpretation of myself… I was sustained by the hope that I could drop into some hearts, some new expression of the meaning of my books, that would touch them in a new way. To this hour, that purpose is so strong… that after hundreds of nights, I come with a feeling of perfect freshness to that little red table, and laugh and cry with my hearers, as if I had never stood there before.19
The little red table was the reading table that he had designed himself, and which may be seen to this day at the Dickens Museum in Doughty Street. Before the table was made, Dickens accepted the pulpit lecterns that the various halls provided for his charitable readings. He gave exact instructions for the size and height of the desk. At first it was covered in greenish-grey material, with a fringe. On another small table stood a carafe of water and a tumbler. At a certain point of the 1860s, for some reason, he changed the colour of the table, which was covered with crimson velvet. Part of the routine was that he laid his gloves and his handkerchief on this little table before he began to read. It has been observed that the little table is still in remarkably good nick, given that it was taken across the Atlantic and hauled on and off trains. One reason for this is that it was usually covered with baize. Behind Dickens was a chocolate-coloured screen. This had a visual function – Dickens in his evening dress and the green or red table both stood out vividly against it. Also, it was meant to be an acoustic aid. Varied as Dickens’s histrionic gifts were, his voice was not especially loud, and in performances that lasted two hours (with a ten-minute interval) great demand was laid on that voice.
At every venue, Dickens and his manager would inspect the stage and set up the props. If the stage was unsuitable – as, for example, it was in Shrewsbury in 1858 – Dickens would insist on alterations. On that occasion Dickens had worked out that he would be difficult to see, so his manager Arthur Smith set to work making a platform out of dining tables. They would then test the sound, and if the acoustics were really bad, they would, even at the last minute, ask for a change of venue. Then the lighting had to be set up. ‘My servant has a screen of my own to be placed behind me, and assist the voice; also my own gas-fittings.’20 The gas fittings consisted of a high batten, suspended twelve feet above the platform and in front of the desk, supported by two vertical battens at either end, fixed with copper-wire guys. The battens had gas jets, one halfway up each vertical pipe and screened by green shades, and a row of gas jets along the top. Sometimes a metal reflector was used, placed just above the top rail. The lights would be low, and then, just before Dickens came onstage, they were turned up to full glare. On one occasion there was a gas leak, and during a reading in Belfast someone accidentally stood on a gas feeder-tube and extinguished all the lights.
Then there were the props – the book itself, the gloves and a paper-knife, which Dickens sometimes brandished. During a performance of Mrs Gamp in 1863, when the old lady is described as sitting close to the fender and sliding her nose backwards and forwards along its brass top, Dickens rubbed his own nose along the paper-knife.
The first manager engaged by Dickens for these carefully managed shows was the impresario Arthur Smith, described by Dickens as ‘the best man of business I know’. ‘Arthur is something between a Home Secretary and a furniture-dealer in Rathbone Place,’ Dickens wrote. ‘He is either always corresponding in the genteelest manner, or dragging rout-seats about without his coat.’21 Smith’s practical skills were balanced by
the good agent’s ability to set the client at ease. Audiences would notice how Dickens shook, and how his legs trembled during performances. His nerves were stretched, and he absolutely could not do this roadshow without an efficient manager. Unfortunately, Smith fell ill in the summer of 1861 and died on 1 October. Dickens took on his assistant, Thomas Headland, and ‘it is the simple fact that he has no notion of the requirements of such work as this’.22 The tours stopped. Dickens gave a short series of readings in London between March and June 1862, and he repeated this season the following year. But with the inefficient Headland, he could not risk going further afield, particularly since, by now, his own health was failing. And these were years when, for at least some of the time, Nelly was in France – it has been persuasively supposed – having a child, or children.
This enabled that very great novel, Our Mutual Friend, to be written, and completed, between 1864 and 1865. That was the traumatic year of the Staplehurst train crash. And Dickens was also completing his second collection of occasional pieces entitled The Uncommercial Traveller.
It would have been logistically impossible, during that very busy time, to have resumed the readings, even had a suitable manager been available. Then, early in 1866, Dickens decided to resume them. He entered into negotiations with the agents Chappell in New Bond Street. They offered him £1,500 for a course of thirty readings in London and the provinces – £50 per reading – and undertook all the practical responsibilities for the tour and all the expenses of hotels, travel, etc. Dickens considered this would leave him enough time to continue as the editor of All the Year Round. The manager appointed to look after Dickens could not have been better chosen: it was George Dolby, whose book about the tours in the last years of the novelist’s life is one of the best things ever written about Dickens.
