We Came to Hear Dickens A Dramatic Reconstruction

NAN MILLER is Professor Emerita of English at Meredith College. Her essay “Postmodern Moonshine in English 101” appeared in the summer 2006 issue of Academic Questions.

December 2, 2007 marked the 140^th anniversary of a phenomenon that occurred in Boston in 1867—when a select audience heard Charles Dickens’ first public reading in America. What had begun as Dickens’ mission to reach a nonreading public in England and America quickly became his other career, a career that spanned seventeen years and catapulted the novelist from stardom to superstardom on both sides of the Atlantic.

Yet one who sets out to revive interest in what eyewitnesses once called a “marvel” or “miracle” will make two surprising discoveries. One, scant attention has been paid to the only endeavor that displayed Dickens’ genius as novelist, reformer, and performer. Two, the drama behind the scenes of the Dickens’ readings is just as intriguing as the readings themselves. An insider’s play-by-play account of Dickens’ 1842 American tour appeared in The Atlantic Monthly shortly after Dickens’ death in 1870, but to get an accurate picture of what went on during the 1867 tour, one must stitch together bits and pieces from many different sources.

So I have invented a narrator who can provide a play-by-play account of the ’67 tour. I have made her Dickens’ newly appointed American secretary and have placed her both behind the scenes and in the audience for Dickens’ debut American reading of A Christmas Carol. My narrator is the sister of George Putnam, the Boston artist’s apprentice who really did serve as Dickens’ secretary and traveling companion during his 1842 American tour and really did write a tell-all account for The Atlantic Monthly in 1870. Putnam’s imaginary sister would have met Dickens in 1842 and, a quarter of a century later, can observe the changes in this great man, as well as the impact the readings were having on audiences all over the Northeast. It is through her eyes that you see Dickens prepare for, then perform the Carol at Boston’s Tremont Temple on December 2, through her eyes that you see the trouble they face as they travel to New York and beyond.

Dickens’ first, last, and favorite reading was of A Christmas Carol, and the following account makes clear the reasons the Carol is still—to use Dickens’ own term—a literary “sledgehammer.” That he performed it in Boston’s first integrated church is surely a coincidence, but Dickens would be pleased to be inextricably linked to Tremont Temple, whose stated purpose is still to “stand against all those forces that cause pain, loneliness, and alienation.” What follows is a compilation of critical assessments and eyewitness accounts of the December 2^nd reading. Only the narrator is fiction.

What I am about to say is no unkind cut for our Boston clergy. Until recently I would have called their power to move us preeminent and unmatched. On December 2, 1867, however, I heard a “sermon” as affecting as any composed by a clergyman or delivered in church. For I was among the two thousand disciples who assembled in Tremont Temple to hear Charles Dickens’ first public reading in America, and I shall oblige his publisher by describing this event. To hear Dickens read A Christmas Carol is to understand why his best-loved work has been dubbed our “secular scripture” by his followers and a literary “sledge-hammer” by the author himself. Mere words cannot hope to recreate this marvel, but having no other tools about me, I shall try to choose words wisely.

Other accounts of this evening’s performance have sighted Messrs. Holmes, Longfellow, and Lowell in the audience, so you may wonder why I, not one of our literary luminaries, have been asked to write this narrative. While these gentlemen’s ties to Mr. Dickens are well known, my own access to the novelist during his 1867-68 tour was greater, and it is not vanity alone that prompts me to explain. Had my brother George Putnam not served as the author’s secretary during his 1842 American tour, I would never have met the novelist those many years ago. Had my brother been free to resume his post during this second tour, I would not have been asked to replace him, as assistant and later as nurse for the ailing Mr. Dickens. I initially agreed to serve through the opening week of his Boston readings—five months later I said goodbye to my dear master, who sailed for England on April 22. Such are my qualifications to give you more than an eyewitness account of this indelible date and what happened thereafter.

That I was present at all on December second is a Christmas miracle, one that required the intervention of the master himself. Despite his three-decade standing as best selling author in America, no one, not Dickens or his manager, certainly not my brother or I could have foreseen the furor occasioned by the notice that Charles Dickens the novelist would appear in public to read from his work. Imagine waiting eleven hours in a ticket line a half-mile long, a scene unparalleled in our city’s distinguished history. Imagine being turned away—empty handed—at the pay-box, then hurrying to the Parker House to beg tickets from the unwitting, absentee star of this street-side drama. Now imagine the star, eager to oblige, yet (to paraphrase Nicholas Nickleby) still in a state of astonishment to find himself so famous. Laurels do not rest easily on the brow of the modest Mr. Dickens, and herein lies the very mark of this man’s greatness.

Our reunion with the novelist and my offer of employment took place on November 25, exactly one week before his first scheduled appearance. What happened next surprised me, for I had thought a public reading required little more than a hall, reader, and book. We had, of course, heard of Dickens’ splendid success in this new genre but guessed it owed more to the genius of the writer than to any skill or preparation of the reader. On the first day of my employment, however, I learned otherwise. While Mr. Dolby, Dickens’ English manager, struggled to control the ticket-buying mania, I helped the “Chief” prepare for his reading—a process elaborate, amazing, and exact.

The first step in the process that became so familiar was always the same. I accompanied Mr. Dickens to the site, this one Tremont Temple, and served as a one-woman audience, moving forward and back, upstairs and down, while he tested the acoustics of this cavernous hall. It would do! But the seating must be rearranged! The maroon screen positioned! The gas lighting assembled! And all must be carried out under the watchful eye of Mr. Dickens himself. I shall delay my description of this Dickens invention till the entrance of the star on his opening night.

The transformation of Dickens the writer to Dickens the reader was no less amazing. His passion for theatre and longtime success as amateur actor had made this transformation easy—or so I thought. My temptation is to preserve this illusion, but my directive is “nothing extenuate,” so I shall tell you all. When he arrived in Boston, Dickens had read from his works nearly five hundred times and, according to Mr. Dolby, approached each reading as though it alone would define his career. But few present on December second suspected the work that had gone into this one performance. Dickens had read the Carol many times, had relished its triumphant success, had made it his centerpiece; still, he would never have walked on stage that evening had he not rehearsed and revised all twenty-three parts—daily. Over and over he practiced, sharpening each character’s inflection, expression, and gestures, sometimes in front of a mirror, sometimes at Tremont Temple. He despaired that hundreds of frustrated admirers, unable to buy tickets, would not hear him read. He would not disappoint the two thousand who could.

My own part in the preliminary drama can best be described as “bailiff,” for I was to let no one intrude upon this strict preparation. There must be no echo of Dickens’ ’42 visit to America, no stalking or mobbing, no snatching at his coat or hair for keepsakes, no commanding his presence at endless engagements. In short, such trespassing must not reoccur, and, miraculously, it did not. I take no credit for this unexpected display of Yankee restraint—a rarity, as you well know. A simple statement from our guest had been enough to deter new advances. “I am come here to read,” he said, “and must concentrate all my powers on it until it is done.” Few were admitted into the Charles Dickens sanctum, leaving him free to concentrate his powers, making light work of my position as bailiff.

Of the flurry of invitations delivered each morning, Dickens accepted but two, dinner at the home of James Fields, his publisher, and Thanksgiving dinner at the home of Mr. Longfellow. Otherwise, the world’s most genial man isolated himself from all but his staff—until December second, that is, when Mr. Dolby alone was allowed to enter the sanctum. The day’s ritual preceding an evening’s performance could be entrusted only to the veteran Mr. Dolby, so trained in this ritual he would need no reminding. Promptly at seven that morning, Dickens had his tumbler of cream and rum in bed; at noon, a cobbler and biscuit; at three, a pint of champagne; at five minutes to eight, an egg beaten into a glass of sherry. Only then did I hand him the prompt copy of A Christmas Carol, my only charge. Only then did he signal the gasman, “I am ready to begin.”

Just thinking about “five minutes to eight” makes my pulse quicken, for this is the moment the gas jets are lit. Suddenly, from a twelve-foot high frame overhead, comes a flood of light so brilliant it transforms a meager set—desk, maroon carpet and matching backdrop screen—into a dramatic stage. The audience, united in suspense, perhaps doubting its very presence at such an event, falls silent. Now it seems certain. The great Charles Dickens is about to appear. Backstage, just before we parted, the object of so much awe turned to me and said, “The hour is almost come when I to sulphurous and tormenting gas must render up myself.” The jest said, “I am calm—I dread only the heat.” But he trembled at the edge of this new arena.

Scarcely was I in my seat when he made his entrance—not the man I had left just moments before, but the Inimitable Charles Dickens, best loved novelist, now performer and star. Unannounced, book in hand, he strides to the desk, bows, and stands silent, waiting for the clapping, cheering, and stamping to subside. Minutes pass, he bows twice more, then finally states his intent: “Ladies and gentlemen, tonight I have the honor of reading from A Christmas Carol.” If the audience expected a drum roll, a Titan, a flourish, they were disappointed—but not for long. What they were about to see was a thrilling, haunting enactment of this beloved tale.

I confess. I sat there, savoring the secret that I alone knew what would happen next, fighting hard the urge to display my foreknowledge. After all, had I not been present at each rehearsal for this evening’s performance? Had I not seen exactly how the Carol was cut in half to fit a ninety-minute reading? This fancying myself so special survived the famous opening, “Marley was dead, to begin with,” and, indeed, survived the first several paragraphs, read in a husky monotone and mimed, no doubt, by two thousand disciples. This was no departure from Dickens’ usual strategy to subdue his energy while he warmed his voice. Imagine, then, my astonishment when suddenly this reading became something unlike anything I, the insider, had seen before. The real performance had always begun with his introduction of Scrooge, but in rehearsal I had seen what I would call an impersonation of this “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!” What I saw now was a man who so thoroughly became Scrooge, who so perfectly embodied the frozen features, pointed nose, and grating voice, that I too sent up a little gasp of wonder.

Then came another shock. The prompt copy I had handled with a reverence befitting the Magna Carta was snapped shut and never opened again, thus removing the one barrier between performer and audience. No one has disputed the claim that at this moment a “magnetic current” set in, yet no one can quite name the source of such unearthly power. Some say Dickens’ presence alone could conjure a spell. Here at last was our favorite author, performing from memory our favorite tale, breathing life into the very characters we had so long imagined. Some say it was the sheer range of a talent that let him become Scrooge, become Bob Cratchit, become Tiny Tim, and the score of others we hailed, one by one, with unbridled delight. Some cite the ingenious set, the socalled “gorgeous spectacle,” where this master of stagecraft, framed in a blaze of light, could wrap meaning in a mere twitch or shiver, a raised eyebrow or hand—and where he could transform a simple desk into a stage upon which the Fezziwigs danced or a table upon which a Christmas goose was presented.

Much also has been made of the Dickens gaze and the Dickens laugh, I think, because one knows at once that both come from the man, not from the craft. Years ago I had seen his gaze fix many a company, and now it fixed us in a bond of sympathy so real, so palpable, that we were in his thrall before the first words were uttered. My friend says Dickens’ eyes can “penetrate to the boots,” but I say his laugh can penetrate even deeper.

I first heard this laugh in 1842 and was delighted to see it written into the Carol the following year. The narrator’s claim that he knows no man “more blessed in a laugh than Scrooge’s nephew” was cut from the reading, for we could see for ourselves that this very man was standing before us. Also missing was the description of a reformed Scrooge’s “splendid laugh…most illustrious laugh” because, again, we had watched Scrooge become the “father of a long, long line of brilliant laughs.” Not omitted, however, is the narrator’s conclusion that “there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.” These are the touchstone for Scrooge’s recovered virtue, the most oft cited reason for the Dickens appeal—first as novelist and now as performer whose antics made us, again and again, “burst into a fresh roar of laughter.” Some were “so inexpressibly tickled” that they got out of their seats and stamped! In short, when Dickens acted out Fred Scrooge’s response to humor, he so perfectly mirrored our own.

But he did much more than amuse us. Early in 1843, when Dickens promised to write a literary sledgehammer by the end of the year, he did not mean that this new work would fell us with humor. Remember that reform, not humor, is the primary impulse behind the fiction. Remember that by 1843, he had already attacked the workhouses in Oliver Twist and the brutal Yorkshire schools in Nicholas Nickleby. In A Christmas Carol he denounces child labor and indifference to poverty in a tale Dickens guaranteed would strike with “twenty thousand times the force” a pamphlet might have struck. One can hardly miss the point: ruthless, disfiguring Greed is the root of all such suffering, and Ebenezer Scrooge is the best model ever of the cash-nexus culture Dickens aims to convert. Like so many, I had let Scrooge make this point with my own family every Christmas Eve for the past twenty-four years. With each new reading of the Carol, we were struck by what we perceived as its power to convert—now I admit—others. For we thought of ourselves as longtime keepers of the Carol philosophy, and we harbored no businessman who would dare slight a child.

So I came to this reading eager to observe its effect upon others, never dreaming I would be asked to describe its effect upon me. I simply did not know that the addition of an audience would so change Dickens’ performance and the impression it made. The change in Dickens was perhaps like that of any actor playing before an adoring audience, but the change in the audience was unlike anything I had felt before. Much of this effect is the result of Dickens’ uncanny gift of direct address. He did not tell us, as the Carol’s narrator tells the reader, “I am standing in the spirit at your elbow,” for we could sense this closeness, could each say to ourselves, “He is speaking to me.” Only Dickens can create an atmosphere of such intimacy and fellowship—even among strangers in a cavernous hall. One can know every syllable of the Carol and not know quite what it means till he sees it performed by the author himself. Leaving Tremont Temple, I overheard a gentleman exclaim, “I never knew how to read a book before!” This gentleman, I thought, had spoken for us all.

What we had all missed before this performance sounds so simple. Until that evening I had read the Carol only as the story of Scrooge making his way back to the Cratchit virtues. Even the full stage productions, and there have been many, elicited much the same response: renewed hope that all Scrooges would change and all Cratchits would prosper. I was entertained and touched by the progress of both but had no real part in their drama, for I was neither so rich as a Scrooge nor so poor as a Cratchit. I was, in fact, removed from all but their message, which I had resolved to keep and not just at Christmas.

The Dickens enactment elicited such a different response, beginning, I say, with his treatment of Scrooge. At the end of Stave One, when the miser tries but can’t quite say “Humbug!” to Marley’s departing ghost, even a novice knows that Ebenezer Scrooge will grow a heart. And longtime devotees are set to coach this process, but coach only, mind you. Then, early in Stave Two, when Mr. Dickens calls forth the young Scrooge, that “solitary child, neglected by his friends,” that “lonely boy…reading near a feeble fire,” suddenly, all of us do have a part in his drama. Somehow, this Scrooge becomes Everyman (and woman) whose compassion is revived by recalling his own past suffering. I need not pose suffering as the tie that binds, nor say what happened to the tears we had been saving for Tiny Tim to make my point. If the purpose of any sermon is to unite us in brotherhood and reflection, to make us feel keenly for ourselves and others, then here was a sermon as affecting as any composed by a clergyman or delivered in church. It was Swift who said that satire is the mirror in which we see everyone’s reflection but our own. The same might be said of selfishness— until that evening.

To Dickens, there is no self-interest so pernicious as that which injures a child. And to me, there is no author quite so forceful in his indictment of it. We know Oliver, David, and Pip, but Tiny Tim is the best-known victim of an ethos that acquits one of an inconvenient compassion. I shall touch lightly upon the Tiny Tim scenes, for our response to such pathos is easily guessed. From the moment he utters his feeble “Hurrah!” in praise of the Christmas goose, we are teary. His imagined death, however, brings forth such sobbing that Dickens is obliged to pause while we compose ourselves. In the performance Dickens does not take us into the room where Bob Cratchit kisses “the little face” one last time, so we are spared this grief. But his cry “My little, little child! My little child!” will echo for a long, long time. I cannot say exactly why Dickens abandons his Bob Cratchit voice to deliver this lament. Some think the lapse is unintentional. I disagree, for in using the full force of his own extraordinary voice, Dickens makes Tiny Tim every child who is ignored by a covetous culture. No more, for many of us carry with us the image of this dear little child. We are, to use the Longfellow coinage, “Dickenized,” which is to say we shall do more to end his suffering. Here, surely, is the lodestar of that unearthly power.

I would not allow this peek into my heart had I not heard others express much the same sentiment. Not everyone, however, was so moved. In their appraisal of our rapt response, some wondered had we been intoxicated by gas fumes or mesmerized by a master of trickery. And some suspected that Mr. Dickens was simply an opportunist who would trade on his fame. Still others withstood the Dickens effect to serve a very old cause. Remember that Boston’s Puritan Fathers were so dismayed by the “mass” in Christmas and by its origin in pagan festivals that they outlawed the celebration of Christmas altogether. Though two centuries have passed since this edict was repealed, I learned that some still shun Christmas for what they see as its calamitous mingling of pope and pagan. These few worry that with the Carol Dickens reinstates the Lord of Misrule or the celebration of Christmas as an orgy of excess. And to them, an urban, secular conversion is just not possible, especially one that allows a Scrooge to hold on to his money. I am guessing they are the ones also nettled by the Dickens endorsement of the infamous Darwin. To all these dissenters, I say Humbug!

One such critic, however, could not be so easily dismissed. Dickens’ opening night success was all the more remarkable when you consider that a shrill antagonist had tried hard to forestall it. Had this episode not ended happily, I would be flush with anger as I recount it. Before I explain, I must remind you of the controversy swirling around Mr. Dickens during his ’42 tour. When he dared suggest that we pass copyright laws so that writers could profit from their labors, he was branded a scoundrel. Later that year, when American Notes exposed his contempt for our slavery, our manners, and our passion for money, remember that the American press fired back. Chief among his accusers was James Bennett, editor and publisher of the New York Herald, who called the novelist “coarse, vulgar, impudent, and superficial.” Though most Americans have forgiven or forgotten Mr. Dickens’ assessment of our country, the passing of a quarter century has not calmed the dogged Mr. Bennett. When he learned of the planned reading tour, which was to have begun in New York, he reprinted American Notes in a free supplement to the Herald and sneered that an apology should precede “the second coming of Dickens.” Though Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune and William Cullen Bryant of the Post predicted a New York triumph, the cautious Mr. Dolby moved Dickens’ opening night venue from New York to Boston. And finally, Mr. Bennett was hushed by the reviews of Dickens’ Boston triumph.

Exactly one week later, Dickens’ enthusiastic New York reception laid to rest, once and for all, the Bennett invective. In New York, however, our little entourage was plagued by two new problems, neither of which Mr. Dolby could solve. He had outwitted a New York editor but proved no match for the New York speculators, who would turn Dickens’ appearance into a money-making venture—for themselves. Hundreds of speculators were in the raucous queue that formed outside Steinway Hall the night before tickets went on sale, a queue that swelled to five thousand the following morning. Because speculators typically wore caps, for a time, Dolby would sell only to those wearing hats. Within minutes, this wily bunch had disguised themselves with hats snatched off the heads of passersby; within hours they had sold their tickets at ten times the cost. Those unwilling to wait in line printed counterfeit tickets, so Dolby was obliged to mark all proper tickets with an additional stamp. I was sorry for Mr. Dolby’s troubles, but found an odd logic at work in this unruly sideshow. On the one hand was Dickens, determined to price tickets within the reach of our ordinary citizens. On the other were the ordinary citizens, just as determined to resell those tickets for a sizable profit. It was mainly the rich, then, who could afford this price, the rich who would watch Scrooge discover the perils of wealth. (I concealed my amusement by this auspicious irony.)

For his attempts to control ticket sales, Mr. Dolby was lampooned by our press as the “pudding-headed Dolby” and would forever after be known as P. H. Dolby to our mischievous boss. Our other problem, however, was no laughing matter. Within a week of our arrival in New York, Mr. Dickens became alarmingly ill, with seventy-three readings yet to perform. If you have followed the accounts of his five-month odyssey between New York and Boston, Washington and Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New England, you know that our papers covered this illness in stunning detail. But no one knew what Dickens suffered, for he never missed a reading and almost never missed his daily eight-mile walk! What he dismissed as his “American catarrh!” was, in fact, no ordinary cold.

By night Mr. Dolby kept watch over the sleepless Mr. Dickens. By day I summoned doctors, applied mustard poultices, and measured out doses of sweet potions, bitter potions, stimulants, and narcotics—all to no avail. I went about this business contracted with worry because he ate almost nothing, contracted with fear when he was scheduled to perform. No friend, doctor, or staff member could persuade the determined Mr. Dickens to cancel a reading. In response to our repeated urging, in a voice barely audible, he insisted, over and over, “No man has a right to break an engagement with the public if he were able to be out of bed.” And, I admit, for good reason, for no drug worked half so well as an adoring audience. When he performed, usually within minutes, both his voice and powers were restored. But many and many a time I saw him make his exit, then collapse backstage, unable to move for a full thirty minutes. No one, I think, guessed what infirmity Dickens had just surmounted. The critic who called Dickens “something more than a human being” knew not the whole truth of what he had written.

Lest you think my proximity to fame has made me giddy, has made me deify where no god existed, I shall expose one tiny flaw in the matchless Mr. Dickens—his utter disregard for genteel fashion. Perhaps you recall that his sartorial choices were a subject of scorn during his ’42 American tour. Because our own gentlemen favor black satin waistcoats, Mr. Dickens’ bright green coats and garish cravats were considered “startling” or “vulgar” by our press (I am smiling as I remember those clownish costumes). No such criticism would dog this second tour, but his now modest dress owes more to Mr. Dolby’s vigilance than to Mr. Dickens’ improved sense of fashion. It was Dolby who selected the dark suits and white cravats, Dolby who allowed a boutonniere as Dickens’ only flourish. On this issue and this issue alone, Dickens, perhaps wisely, placed himself under Mr. Dolby’s governance, and the style that had so aptly reflected the real Charles Dickens—resplendent, irrepressible— was no more. Dolby has made the Inimitable appear imitable, that is, until he performs his works. After a minute or two, as he unfurls his powers, it becomes quite clear that this is no mere gentleman come to read from a book.

As this tour ended, I dreaded saying goodbye to the dearest of men but hoped that salt air during his journey, then home would restore Dickens’ health. I have closed the brightest chapter of my own life, and, like Scrooge, have “thought and thought it over and over.” I shall never again meet such a man—I pray such spellbinding power never falls into the hands of a madman! Charles Dickens is gone, but his Carol and its message, I predict, shall stay, as our secular scripture, as the centerpiece for all our Christmases. The disciple who came closest to explaining the Dickens magic was the one who brought his entire family a great distance to hear Dickens read A Christmas Carol. As they entered the hall, breathless, having braved a blinding snowstorm to get there, I overheard their astonished friend say he would not have made such a journey to hear the Apostle Paul. “No, neither would we,” was the reply. “But we came to hear Dickens.”

Afterward

To compile this chronicle, I reviewed every critical assessment available but am especially indebted to the following scholars, whose insights into the writing and performing of the Carol proved most useful.

Philip Collins’ essay titled “Dickens’ Public Readings: The Performer and the Novelist” (Studies in the Novel, Summer, 1969) quotes patrons

who actually saw Dickens perform in England and America. Not everyone approved “this method of turning one’s reputation into cash.”

Collins’ “Dickens’ Public Readings: The Kit and the Team” (Dickensian, 1978) provides the best description of the portable stage set Dickens

designed for his performances.

Paul Davis’ 1990 work The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge traces the Carol’s metamorphosis from potboiler to best-loved Christmas

classic and traces Dickens’ own transformation from novelist/reformer to spellbinding performer.

Volume Two of Edgar Johnson’s 1952 biography, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, provides an excellent overview of the 1867

American tour—the planning, execution, and aftermath.

Kate Field’s “The Welcome in Boston” gives her own eyewitness account of Dickens’ Tremont Temple performance. Her essay can be found in

Pen Photographs of Charles Dickens’ Readings: Taken from Life, compiled by Carolyn J. Moss in 1998.

Fifteen years after Dickens’ death in 1870, George Dolby published Charles Dickens as I Knew Him: The Story of the Reading

Tours in Great Britain and America.

Fredrick Trautmann’s “Philadelphia Bowled Clean Over: Public Readings by Charles Dickens” was published by The Pennsylvania

Magazine of History and Biography in 1974.

Other helpful assessments of the Dickens readings can be found in the following titles:

Helen Small’s “A Pulse of 124: Charles Dickens and a Pathology of the Mid- Victorian Reading,” which can be found in the 1996 collection

titled The Practice and Representation of Reading in England.

Jerome Meckier’s “Charles Dickens, George Dolby, and New York in 1867-68,” which appeared in the Winter, 2002 issue of

ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews.

Robert Giddings’ 1983 collection titled The Changing World of Charles Dickens.

Catherine Waters’ Dickens and the Politics of the Family, which was published in 1997.

Because interest in Dickens’ career as novelist has all but eclipsed interest in his career as performer, even a diehard devotee might not know that it was Charles Dickens— not the Beatles—who was the first Brit to take America by storm. Those lucky enough to have witnessed the Dickens phenomenon saw firsthand why A Christmas Carol came to be known as our “secular scripture.” I think they would agree that keeping alive the image of Dickens performing his best-known work is a good idea.