By the schedule of speaking engagements written on its flyleaf in the author’s hand, it is known that the extant prompt-copy of A Christmas Carol was used by Dickens in his readings by 1859; it may well have been used in his first charity reading in December 1853, although no proof of this exists; and it was undoubtedly used through his last professional readings in 1870. Dickens made his Carol prompt-copy by pasting the smaller pages from the 1849 twelfth edition, printed by Bradbury & Evans, onto a bound volume of larger sheets, but such a cut-and-paste method wasn’t the only way he made his prompt-copies; sometimes the author had small special printings made that contained his annotations.
In the first seven months of his career as a professional reader, Dickens gave a series of lectures in London and toured the provinces, Ireland, and Scotland, delivering scores of readings. The admission to watch a Charles Dickens reading varied, but some indication may be obtained from the broadside of his December 29, 1858, reading of Little Dombey and The Trial from “Pickwick” at the Chatham Lecture Hall. The terms of admission for the evening performance are given as: “To the Gallery Stalls, 3s. Body of the Hall, Reserved Seats, 2s. Unreserved, 1s.” (The abbreviation “s.” denoted shillings, a monetary unit in use at the time.)
Traveling from city to city on his reading tours and delivering emotion-filled performances was no doubt strenuous. Dickens would go out on the road for a few weeks or a few months at a time, sometimes lecturing several times in a single week. Drawing enormous crowds virtually wherever he went, the engagements were lucrative and the money too tempting for him to give up or even slow down. After resting less than two weeks after his first London season, he embarked on his first provincial tour. Dickens traveled with a small entourage comprising a manager, who handled the business arrangements for the tours, and a few stagehands.
While Dickens energetically pursued his career as a professional reader, he had by no means forsaken his profession as a writer. In 1850 Dickens had started a weekly periodical, Household Words, and put in it installments of such works as Hard Times. In the periodical’s successor, All the Year Round, Dickens included installments of his 1859 French Revolution romance, A Tale of Two Cities, which he thought would have wide commercial appeal. And for eight months beginning in December 1860, the author published in All the Year Round weekly installments of Great Expectations, his novel about the need for people to set themselves free from the past in order to build the future. His literary output was prodigious, and delivering public readings did not seem in any way to hamper his genius.
It seemed that writing fiction had almost always been part of Dickens’s aspirations. In 1831 Dickens became a reporter in Parliament, but he was soon to begin more creative literary pursuits. He wrote articles for newspapers and magazines, many of which were compiled in Sketches by Boz in 1836. Due to the success of Boz, in the same year he began writing The Pickwick Papers, stories that were published monthly, as well as adapting a Boz sketch for the stage. His remarkable literary career followed. Many of his novels were published in serial form and provided a critical look at social ills. So popular was Dickens, first nicknamed “Boz” and later “The Inimitable,” that lines from some of his books—such as “It was the best of times and the worst of times”—would become embedded in popular culture.
After his manager, Arthur Smith, became ill in mid-1861 (he died a few months later), Dickens retained Smith’s associate, Thomas Headland, to handle his bookings, but Dickens wasn’t happy with the way Headlands conducted the business aspects of his readings and did not renew the contract. From March through June 1863, Dickens delivered a series of readings in London, his last for a few years. Dickens soon began work on a new novel, Our Mutual Friend, which was published in installments over a year and a half beginning in May 1864. During the first six months of 1865, a debilitating illness and an injury from a train accident took their toll on Dickens, now approaching his mid-fifties. But the author relished the adventure and excitement of traveling and performing before the public, and so, in early 1866, he signed with the efficiently run firm of Chappell to book his future reading tours.
Dickens developed a repertoire that eventually reached about sixteen pieces. Not all the items that Dickens prepared went over successfully, and those that did not he scrapped from his programs. Dickens even sometimes rehearsed pieces that he never actually read, such as Mrs. Lirriper’s Lodgings, Great Expectations, and The Haunted Man. As he embarked on a tour under his new theatrical manager, Dickens prepared new items including Doctor Marigold. Among the items he performed through the years as a professional reader included Sikes and Nancy (a dramatic episode from Oliver Twist), Nicholas Nickleby, Boots at the Holly-Tree Inn, Mr. Bob Sawyer’s Party, The Poor Traveller, and Mrs. Gamp.
This illustration of Dickens giving his last public reading ran in the Illustrated London News on March 19, 1870, four days after the acclaimed novelist read A Christmas Carol and the trial scene from Pickwick Papers at St. James's Hall in London.
Invitations to do public readings came from foreign countries with offers of extravagant fees. Dickens found that even language wasn’t an obstacle; in France many audience members didn’t understand English but seemed to relish his performances nonetheless.
Over the years invitations came to Dickens to speak in America, some for quite substantial amounts of money. He fielded these offers cautiously, especially in light of U.S. political turmoil in the 1850s and 1860s. In 1867 he finally sent his business manager to appraise firsthand his prospects for drawing crowds and making money in America. Dickens had actually visited America before, in 1842, during a trip that also included Canada. This journey had a political tone: he spoke out against slavery and an inadequate American copyright statute that resulted in many of his stories being illegally reproduced in the States.
With his manager reporting that he would be very well received in America, Dickens decided to go ahead and tour the country, despite the physical hardships he would have to endure. A farewell dinner was held in his honor in London on November 2, 1867, at which the attendees, who included many prominent people in the arts, saluted him emotionally, and a week later Dickens set sail for America. On November 19 he arrived in Boston, where almost two weeks later he delivered his first reading. Dickens’s reading tour took him to some seventeen cities in the East, including New York City, Washington, Buffalo, Rochester, Providence, and New Haven. The presence of Dickens in America excited many—his fame was so great now that even the ill feelings inflamed by his earlier visit were forgotten—and people turned out in droves not just to hear him read but to catch a glimpse of the world’s most popular novelist. Dickens’s last reading in the States took place on April 20, 1868.
Dickens wanted to retire from touring but felt the financial benefits from one last reading series would help secure his future. On October 6, 1868, the author commenced what was billed as his “Final Farewell Series of Readings.” His tour took him to numerous cities in England, as well as to Scotland. His readings encompassed many audience favorites, including, of course, the Carol.
As he commenced this series, Dickens was not just tired but afflicted with a variety of debilitating medical conditions. By February he literally could not stand on his feet, and his dates in Glasgow and Edinburgh had to be canceled. But he recuperated and continued his readings, despite serious physical impairments. In mid-April 1869 he lost all sensation in his left side while in Preston, and he notified his doctor, who rushed to see him from London. Dickens’s physician insisted the author return with him to London for further diagnosis; there doctors advised Dickens to cancel his readings for the next several months, which the author did reluctantly.
Within a few months Dickens had recovered sufficiently to obtain his physician’s permission to resume his readings. His theatrical managers had been so devoted to him that he felt compelled to read as a way of making up to them the engagements he had had to cancel. His doctor limited his engagements to London, and in July 1869
an announcement was made that the author would “resume and conclude his interrupted series of Farewell Readings.”
At St. James’s Hall on January 11, Dickens delivered the first of a handful of farewell readings; the last took place there on March 15. Dickens’s poor physical condition was well known at this time, and the public sadly realized that they might be seeing the celebrated novelist onstage for the last time.
For his last reading, he chose the two selections that constituted his most popular program, A Christmas Carol and The Trial from “Pickwick.” While not as vigorous as in past years, as always he rendered an excellent performance (a critic would note that he read his Carol “with marvellous pathos, and in the reading discriminates the characters with wonderful tact and evidently well-practised ability”). Dickens lamented that after many years—and by some estimates more than 450 performances—this would be his final reading, and he closed the evening with these words:
Ladies and Gentlemen,—It would be worse than idle, for it would be hypocritical and unfeeling, if I were to disguise that I close this episode of my life with feelings of very considerable pain. For some fifteen years, in this hall and in many kindred places, I have had the honour of presenting my own cherished ideas before you for recognition, and, in closely observing your reception of them, have enjoyed an amount of artistic delight and instruction which perhaps it is given to few men to know. In this task, and in every other I have undertaken as a faithful servant of the public, always imbued with a sense of duty to them, and always striving to do his best, I have been uniformly cheered by the readiest response, the most generous sympathy, and the most stimulating support. Nevertheless, I have thought it well at the full floodtide of your favour to retire upon those older associations between us which date from much further back than these, and henceforth to devote myself exclusively to the art that first brought us together. Ladies and Gentlemen, in but two short weeks from this time I hope that you may enter, in your own homes, on a new series of readings at which my assistance will be indispensable; but from these garish lights I vanish now for evermore, with one heartfelt, grateful, respectful, and affectionate farewell.
Those were Dickens’s last words onstage, though there might have been hope for more one day. The novelist was only fifty-eight and still vigorously embraced life, loving the interaction of his public readings, even if he over-exerted himself to the point where it impaired his health.
Still, the end came unexpectedly soon. On June 9, 1870, almost three months after his final reading, Charles Dickens passed away. Having grown up in need, he never seemed able to shake that insecurity, and the compulsion to work himself to the bone to ensure himself an income no doubt hastened his demise.
Though he was a very public person, people came to realize that they knew surprisingly little about the private Charles Dickens. A Christmas Carol, one of his favorite works to recite onstage—and certainly the most popular of his readings with the public—is a heartwarming and hopeful tale about the redemption of the human spirit and gives us a glimpse into the soul of this very private person. By the end of the story Scrooge has changed his stingy ways; performing many acts of kindness, he comes to understand the true spirit of Christmas. Carol concludes with Tiny Tim crying out the now-famous words, “God Bless Us, Every One!” The prompt-copy of this perennial classic reminds us that the earthly manifestation of divine blessing, for Dickens, lay in the sharing of one’s heart with others.
LOCATION: New York Public Library (Berg Collection), New York City.
Footnote
*Meaning “beneath one’s dignity.”
THE FIRST AMERICAN FLAG
RAISED IN JAPAN
DATE: 1853.
WHAT IT IS: The U.S. flag displayed by Commodore Matthew Perry’s seamen on the first official American diplomatic visit to Japan.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The flag measures 41 inches by 64 inches and has 13 red and white stripes and 31 stars. It is made of wool bunting and has a canvas hoist.
On a summer day in 1853, the arrival of a squadron of foreign vessels in the heretofore inviolate waters of the Land of the Rising Sun signaled a fateful turn of events for that closed nation. With entry forbidden to outsiders for centuries, Japan had maintained an isolation policy that had kept it firmly entrenched in a feudalistic state. The repercussions of this unwelcome intrusion could not have been foreseen by the denizens of the island nation, but as the foreigners marched ashore, determined and resolute, carrying with them a thirty-one-star American flag that symbolized the unprecedented visitation, their arrival heralded a drastic change in policy that would extricate Japan from its dark ages and launch the country onto a path of monumental technological and commercial growth in the emerging industrial world.
To Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry’s disappointment, a squadron of only four vessels was available to leave the southwest Okinawa Islands port and coaling station of Naha for Japan on July 2, 1853. With the importance of the great mission ahead, a show of a dozen warships would have been more impressive, and perhaps even necessary, but the vessels that would have rounded out the fleet had not yet arrived. As impediments had already delayed the expedition too many times, the smaller force would have to do. The abbreviated fleet consisted of two steamships, the Mississippi and the Susquehanna (the flagship), and two sailing ships, the Plymouth and the Saratoga.
The commodore’s mission was a diplomatic one, but how the island dwellers would perceive it was difficult to predict, making the venture inherently perilous. Japan fiercely enforced its isolation; outsiders who tried to penetrate the country’s borders were subject to attack.
In 1637, following its massacre of thousands of Japanese converts to Christianity, the Japanese government had feared that its islands would be invaded by new missionaries from Europe. The ruling shoguns ordered all missionaries to leave the country and banned foreigners from entering. While hunting whales and other sea life in Japanese waters, or in traveling from California to China, American sailors had been fired on by the Japanese. Indeed, Japan was so hostile to outsiders that seamen shipwrecked on its shores were known to have been slaughtered.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the American government determined to remedy this danger to its mariners and in the process establish relations with the mysterious island nation. To carry out this objective, the government chose the country’s most able seaman, Matthew Calbraith Perry, younger brother of the famed War of 1812 hero Oliver Hazard Perry. Matthew Perry’s mandate was to employ persuasion if possible but force if necessary. Approximately eight months after his selection, during which time he studied his mission and determined that it could be accomplished only by a show of force, meeting the Japanese on their own assumed level of superiority, Perry departed from Norfolk, Virginia, on November 24, 1852, and sailed by way of the south Atlantic around the Cape of Good Hope. Perry carried letters signed by President Millard Fillmore, as well as a document (U.S. Naval Academy Museum, Annapolis, Maryland) affixed with the Great Seal of the United States and signed by President Fillmore that authorized to Matthew Perry “Five Full Powers in Blank.”*
Unsure of how the Japanese would greet them, but knowing the islanders’ enmity toward outsiders and history of fighting off any attempts to establish relations, the Americans spent their voyage to Japan filled with heavy anticipation. The crews regularly mustered, practiced military exercises, and prepared their weapons in the event they should be engaged in battle.
On the 8th of July, the American vessels were sighted by several fishing junks as the small fleet cruised up the coast of one of the Japanese islands. Alarmed by the arrival of strangers, some of the junks immediately turned back to shore. As the ships proceeded toward Uraga (located near the modern city of Yokohama), Japanese fishermen on boats and others along the shore watched in amazement as the steamers—belching out smoke—moved against the wind and tide with sails furled. It was clearly the first time the Japanese had seen a large vessel other than a sailing ship.
The commodore wanted to show the Japanese from the outset that their visitors were firm and resolute, strong and serious. Other foreigners before him had failed to negotiate with the Japanese, and Perry was determined not to repeat the mistake of misunderstanding the Japanese psyche. Aware of the Japanese people’s conviction of their inherent superiority, Perry knew he had to meet them on their own level and hold himself in the most dignified manner to earn their respect. Relations would be cordial but formal, and no one but authorities of the appropriate rank would be admitted on board the American vessels. Armed confrontation was the last resort and diplomacy the first.
The American squadron passed Cape Sagami and entered the Uraga Channel, with the Sagami Peninsula to the west and Awa Province to the east. The waters were filled with fishing boats, which scurried out of the path of the oncoming flotilla and then at an ample distance paused to allow their occupants to contemplate the alien fleet.
In the late afternoon the four American ships anchored in designated positions in Yedo Bay near the city of Uraga as guns from native forts boomed and guard boats filled with soldiers approached. The Japanese tried repeatedly to climb aboard the visiting vessels, casting towlines and mounting chains, but they were repelled by the American sailors who brandished firearms, cutlasses, and pikes.
Jumbo's Hide, Elvis's Ride, and the Tooth of Buddha Page 21
