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Passage Illustrated: The Emotional Impact of Dickens's Public Readings

Belfast he liked quite as much as Dublin in another way. "A fine place with a rough people; everything looking prosperous; the railway ride from Dublin quite amazing in the order, neatness, and cleanness of all you see; every cottage looking as if it had been whitewashed the day before; and many with charming gardens, prettily kept with bright flowers." The success, too, was quite as great. "Enormous audiences. We turn away half the town. I think them a better audience on the whole than Dublin; and the personal affection is something overwhelming. I wish you and the dear girls" (he is writing to his sister-in-law) "could have seen the people look at me in the street; or heard them ask me, as I hurried to the hotel after the reading last night, to 'do me the honour to shake hands Misther Dickens and God bless you sir; not ounly for the light you've been to me this night, but for the light you've been in mee house sir (and God love your face!) this many a year!'" He had never seen men "go in to cry so undisguisedly," as they did at the Belfast Dombey reading; and as to the Boots and Mrs. Gamp it was just one roar with me and them. For they made me laugh so, that sometimes I could not compose my face to go on." His greatest trial in this way however was a little later at Harrogate — "the queerest place, with the strangest people in it, leading the oddest lives of dancing, newspaper-reading, and tables d'hôte" — where he noticed, at the same reading, embodiments respectively of the tears and laughter to which he has moved his fellow creatures so largely. "There was one gentleman at the Little Dombey yesterday morning" (he is still writing to his sister-in-law) "who exhibited — or rather concealed—the profoundest grief. After crying a good deal without hiding it, he covered his face with both his hands, and laid it down on the back of the seat before him, and really shook with emotion. He was not in mourning, but I supposed him to have lost some child in old time. . . . There was a remarkably good fellow too, of thirty or so, who found something so very ludicrous in Toots that he could not compose himself at all, but laughed until he sat wiping his eyes with his handkerchief; and whenever he felt Toots coming again, he began to laugh and wipe his eyes afresh; and when Toots came once more, he gave a kind of cry, as if it were too much for him. It was uncommonly droll, and made me laugh heartily." [Book VIII, Chap. iv, "First Paid Readings. 1858-1859," pp. 336-337]

Commentary: A Scene Representative of Audience Responses in Ireland, England, and Scotland

Dickens's readings in Ireland proved highly successful, both aesthetically and financially. In Dublin audiences were offering to pay £5 for a stall in the theatre, and auditors listened enwrapped, with their chins on the edge of the platform. His popularity continued in Belfast, where "We turn away half the town" (336). The people of Belfast, passing him in street, looked at "Misther Dickens" with great personal affection. The Barnard illustration shows how male members of the audiences he drew in Ireland and back in England would "go in and cry so undisguisedly" (337) for everything from Toots and Mrs. Gamp to Dombey. He reported to Forster that, in light of such emotion, he often found it difficult to compose his own face and go on with the reading.

Among the selections which he specifically mentions were excerpts from Dombey and Son ("Toots" is the Head Boy at Dr. Blimber's Academy), "The Seven Poor Travellers" (from the 1854 Christmas Number of Household Words), and several of The Christmas Books from the 1840s:

The subjects of his readings during this first circuit were the Carol, the Chimes, the Trial in Pickwick, the chapters containing Paul Dombey, Boots at the Holly Tree Inn [the HW Christmas Number for 1855], the Poor Traveller (Captain Doubledick), and Mrs. Gamp: to which he continued to restrict himself through the supplementary nights that closed in the autumn of 1859. Of these the most successful in their uniform effect upon his audiences were undoubtedly the Carol, the Pickwick scene, Mrs. Gamp, and the Dombey — the quickness, variety, and completeness of his assumption of character, having greatest scope in these. Here, I think, more than in the pathos or graver level passages, his strength lay; but this is entitled to no weight other than as an individual opinion, and his audiences gave him many reasons for thinking differently. [338]

Dickens performed over 470 public readings throughout Great Britain and North America (both Eastern Canada and the United States) between 1853 and 1870, the year of his death. The first of these well-attended readings, in Birmingham, however, was not a commercial enterprise, but rather was done in aid of charity. The public readings done for Dickens's own profit began in London in 1858. Undoubtedly, whether for profit or for charity they bolstered his reputation as a one-man showcase for many of the reading public's favourite characters — and fed his ego.

Bibliography

Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens: A Biography. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990.

Barnard, Fred, et al. Scenes and Characters from the Works of Charles Dickens; being eight hundred and sixty-six drawings by Fred Barnard, Hablot K. Browne (Phiz), J. Mahoney [and others] printed from the original woodblocks engraved for "The Household Edition." London: Chapman & Hall, 1908. P. 579.

[The copy of the book from which these pictures were scanned is in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.]

Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. London: Chapman & Hall, 1872 and 1874. 3 vols.

Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. 22 vols. London: Chapman & Hall, 1879. Vol. XXII.

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