Chapter III: Part 3

It was shortly after this that the notion was first entertained by the Novelist of entering upon that Reading Tour in America, which has since become so widely celebrated. Overtures had been made to him repeatedly from the opposite shores of the Atlantic, with a view to induce him to give a course of Readings in the United States. Speculators would gladly, no doubt, have availed themselves of so golden an opportunity for turning to account his immense reputation. There were those, however, at home here, who doubted as to the advisability of the author entering, under any conceivable circumstances, upon an undertaking obviously involving in its successful accomplishment an enormous amount of physical labour and excitement. Added to this, the project was inseparable in any case--however favourable might be the manner of its ultimate arrangement--from a profound sense of responsibility all through the period that would have to be set apart for its realisation. It was among the more remarkable characteristics of Charles Dickens that, while he was endowed with a brilliant imagination, and with a genius in many ways incomparable, he was at the same time gifted with the clearest and soundest judgment, being, in point of fact, what is called a thoroughly good man of business. Often as he had shewn this to be the case during the previous phases of his career, he never demonstrated the truth of it so undeniably as in the instance of this proposed Reading Tour in the United States. Determined to understand at once whether the scheme, commended by some, denounced by others, was in itself, to begin with, feasable, and after that advisable, he despatched Mr. Dolby to America for the purpose of surveying the proposed scene of operations. Immediately on his emissary's return, Dickens drew up a few pithy sentences, headed by him, “The Case in a Nutshell.” His decision was what those more immediately about him had for some time anticipated. He made up his mind to go, and to go quite independently. The Messrs. Chappell, it should be remarked at once, had no part whatever in the enterprise. The Author-Reader accepted for himself the sole responsibility of the undertaking. As a matter of course, he retained Mr. Dolby as his business manager, despatching him again across the Atlantic, when everything had been arranged between them, to the end that all should be in readiness by the time of his own arrival.

Within the brief interval which then elapsed, Between the business manager's return to, and the Author-Reader's departure for, America, that well-remembered Farewell Banquet was given to Charles Dickens, which was not unworthy of signalising his popularity and his reputation. He himself, upon the occasion, spoke of it as that “proud night,” recognising clearly enough, as he could hardly fail to do, in the gathering around him, there in Freemasons' Hall, on the evening of the 2nd of November, 1867, one of the most striking incidents in a career that had been almost all sunshine, both from within and from without, from the date of its commencement. It was there, in the midst of what he himself referred to, at the time, as that “brilliant representative company,” while acknowledging the presence around him of so many of his brother artists, “not only in literature, but also in the fine arts,” he availed himself of the opportunity to relate very briefly the story of his setting out once more for America. “Since I was there before,” he said, “a vast, entirely new generation has arisen in the United States. Since I was there before, most of the best known of my books have been written and published. The new generation and the books have come together and have kept together, until at last numbers of those who have so widely and constantly read me, naturally desiring a little variety in the relations between us, have expressed a strong wish that I should read myself. This wish at last conveyed to me, through public channels and business channels, has gradually become enforced by an immense accumulation of letters from individuals and associations of individuals, all expressing in the same hearty, homely, cordial, unaffected way a kind of personal interest in me; I had almost said a kind of personal affection for me, which I am sure you will agree with me, it would be dull insensibility on my part not to prize.” Hence, as he explained, his setting forth on that day week upon his second visit to America, with a view among other purposes, according to his own happy phrase, to use his best endeavours “to lay down a third cable of intercommunication and alliance between the old world and the new.” The illustrious chairman who presided over that Farewell Banquet, Lord Lytton, had previously remarked, speaking in his capacity as a politician, “I should say that no time could be more happily chosen for his visit;” adding, “because our American kinsfolk have conceived, rightly or wrongfully, that they have some cause of complaint against ourselves, and out of all England we could not have selected an envoy more calculated to allay irritation and to propitiate good will.” As one whose cordial genius was, in truth, a bond of sympathy between the two great kindred nationalities, Charles Dickens indeed went forth in one sense at that time, it might almost have been said, in a semi-ambassadorial character, not between the rulers, but between the peoples. The incident of his visit to America could in no respect be considered a private event, but, from first to last, was regarded, and reasonably regarded, as a public and almost as an international occurrence. “Happy is the man,” said Lord Lytton, on that 2nd of November, when proposing the toast of the evening in words of eloquence worthy of himself and of his theme, “Happy is the man who makes clear his title deeds to the royalty of genius, while he yet lives to enjoy the gratitude and reverence of those whom he has subjected to his sway. Though it is by conquest that he achieves his throne, he at least is a conqueror whom the conquered bless, and the more despotically he enthralls the dearer he becomes to the hearts of men.” Observing, in conclusion, as to this portion of his argument, “Seldom, I say, has that kind of royalty been quietly conceded to any man of genius until his tomb becomes his throne, and yet there is not one of us now present who thinks it strange that it is granted without a murmur to the guest whom we receive to-night.” As if in practical recognition of the prerogative thus gracefully referred to by his brother-author, a royal saloon carriage on Friday, the 8th of November, conveyed Charles Dickens from London to Liverpool. On the following morning he took his departure on board the _Cuba_ for the United States, arriving at Boston on Tuesday, the 19th, when the laconic message “Safe and well,” was flashed home by submarine telegraph.

The Readings projected in America were intended to number up as many as eighty altogether. They actually numbered up exactly Seventy-Six. They were inaugurated by the first of the Boston Readings on Monday, the 2nd of December, 1867. Extending over an interval of less than five months, they closed in Steinway Hall on Monday, the 20th April, 1868, with the last of the New York Readings. From beginning to end, the enthusiasm awakened by these Readings was entirely unparalleled. Simply to ensure a chance of purchasing the tickets of admission, a queue of applicants a quarter of a mile long would pass a whole winter's night patiently waiting in sleet and snow, out in the streets, to be in readiness for the opening of the office-doors when the sale of tickets should have commenced. Blankets and in several instances mattresses were brought with them by some of the more provident of these nocturnal wayfarers, many of whom of course were notoriously middle-men who simply speculated, with immense profit to themselves, in selling again at enormously advanced prices the tickets which were invariably dispensed by the business manager at the fixed charges originally announced.

As curiously illustrative of the first outburst of this enthusiasm even before the Novelist's arrival--on the very eve of that arrival, as it happened--mention may here be made of the simple facts in regard to the sale of tickets on Monday, the 18th of November. During the whole of that day, from the first thing in the morning to the last thing at night, Mr. Dolby sat there at his desk in the Messrs. Ticknor and Fields' bookstore, literally doing nothing but sell tickets as fast as he could distribute them and take the money. For thirteen hours together, without taking bite or sup, without ever once for a passing moment quitting the office-stool on which he was perched--fortunately for him behind a strong barricade--he answered the rush of applicants that steadily pressed one another onwards to the pigeon-hole, each drifting by exhausted when his claims were satisfied. The indefatigable manager took in moneys paid down within those thirteen consecutive hours as many as twelve thousand dollars.

During the five months of his stay in America, four Readings a week were given by the Novelist to audiences as numerous as the largest building in each town of a suitable character could by any contrivance be made to contain. The average number of those present upon each of these occasions may be reasonably estimated as at the very least 1500 individuals. Remembering that there were altogether seventy-six Readings, this would show at once that upwards of one hundred thousand souls (114,000) listened to the voice of the great Author reading, what they had so often before read themselves, and raising their own voices in return to greet his ears with their ringing acclamations. At a moderate estimate, again, just as we have seen that each Reading represented 1500 as the average number of the audience, that audience represented, in its turn, in cash, at the lowest computation, nett proceeds amounting to fully $3000. At Rochester, for example, in the State of New York, was the smallest house anywhere met with in the whole course of these American Readings, and even that yielded $2500, the largest house in the tour, on the other hand, netting as much as $6000 and upwards. Multiplying, therefore, the reasonably-mentioned average of $3000 by seventy-six, as the aggregate number of the Readings, we arrive at the astounding result that in this tour of less than five months the Author-Reader netted altogether the enormous sum of $228,000. Supposing gold to have been then at par, that lump sum would have represented in our English currency what if spoken of even in a whisper would, according to Hood's famous witticism, have represented something like “the roar of a Forty Thousand Pounder!” Even as it was, then, gold being at 39 1/2 per cent, premium, with 1/4 per cent, more deducted on commission--virtually a drop of nearly 40 per cent, altogether!--the result was the winning of a fortune in what, but for the fatigue involved in it, might have been regarded as simply a holiday excursion.

The fatigue here referred to, however, must have been something very considerable. Its influence was felt all the more, no doubt, by reason of the Novelist having had to contend during upwards of four hard winter months, as he himself laughingly remarked just before his return homewards, with “what he had sometimes been quite admiringly assured, was a true American catarrh!” Nevertheless, even with its depressing and exhausting influence upon him, he not only contrived to carry out the project upon which he had adventured, triumphantly to its appointed close, but even upon one of the most inclement days of an unusually inclement season, namely, on Saturday, the 29th of February, 1868, he actually took part as one of the umpires in the good-humoured frolic of a twelve-mile walking match, up hill and down dale, through the snow, on the Milldam road, between Boston and Newton, doing every inch of the way, heel and toe, as though he had been himself one of the competitors. The first six miles having been accomplished by the successful competitor in one hour and twenty-three minutes, and the return six in one hour and twenty-five minutes, the Novelist--although, with his light, springy step, he had observantly gone the whole distance himself, as we have seen, in his capacity as umpire,--presided blithely, in celebration of this winter day's frolic, at a sumptuous little banquet, given by him at the Parker House, a banquet that Lucullus would hardly have disdained. Having appeared before his last audience in America on the 20th of April, 1868, at New York, the Author-Reader addressed through them to all his other auditors in the United States, after that final Reading was over, a few genial and generous utterances of farewell. Among other things, he said to them,--“The relations which have been set up between us, while they have involved for me something more than mere devotion to a task, have been sustained by you with the readiest sympathy and the kindest acknowledgment. Those relations must now be broken for ever. Be assured, however, that you will not pass from my mind. I shall often realise you as I see you now, equally by my winter fire, and in the green English summer weather. I shall never recall you as a mere audience, but rather as a host of personal friends,--and ever with the greatest gratitude, tenderness, and consideration.” Two days before that last of all these American Readings, he had been entertained at a public banquet in New York, on the 18th of April, at Delmonico's. Two days after the final American Reading and address of farewell, he took his departure from New York on board the _Russia_, on Wednesday, the 22nd of April, arriving on Friday, the 1st of May, at Liverpool.

Scarcely a month had elapsed after his return homewards, when the prospective and definitive close of the great author's career as a public Reader was formally announced. Again the Messrs. Chappell, of New Bond Street, appeared between the Novelist and the public as intermediaries. They intimated through their advertisement, that “knowing it to be the determination of Mr. Dickens finally to retire from public Readings, soon after his return from America, they (as having been honoured with his confidence on former occasions) made proposals to him, while he was still in the United States achieving his recent brilliant successes there, for a final farewell series of Readings in this country.” They added that “their proposals were at once accepted in a manner highly gratifying to them;” and that the series, which would commence in the ensuing autumn, would comprehend, besides London, several of the chief towns and cities of England, Ireland, and Scotland. Looking back to this preliminary advertisement now, there is a melancholy significance in the emphasis with which it was observed--“It is scarcely necessary to add that any announcement made in connection with these Farewell Readings will be strictly adhered to and considered final; and that on no consideration whatever will Mr. Dickens be induced to appoint an extra night in any place in which he shall have been announced to read for the last time.” According to promise, in the autumn, these well-remembered Farewell Readings commenced. They were intended to run on to the number of one hundred altogether. Beginning within the first week of October, they were not to end until the third week of the ensuing May. As it happened, Seventy-Four Readings were given in place of the full hundred. On Tuesday, the 6th of October, 1868, the series was commenced. On Thursday, the 22nd of April, 1869, its abrupt termination was announced, by a telegram from Preston, that caused a pang of grief and anxiety to the vast multitude of those to whom the very name of Charles Dickens had, for more than thirty years, been endeared. The intimation conveyed through that telegram was the fact of his sudden and alarming illness. Already, in the two preceding months, though the public generally had taken no notice of the circumstance, three of the Readings had, for various reasons, been unavoidably given up--one at Hull, fixed for the 12th of March, and previously one at Glasgow, fixed for the 18th, and another at Edinburgh, fixed for the 19th of February. Otherwise than in those three instances, the sequence of Readings marked on the elaborate programme had been most faithfully adhered to; the Reader, indeed, only succumbing at last under the nervous exhaustion caused by his own indomitable perseverance.

It is, now, matter of all but absolute certainty that his immense energies, his elastic temperament, and his splendid constitution had all of them, long before this, been cruelly overtaxed and overweighted. Unsuspected by any of us at the time, he had, there can be little doubt of it, received the deadliest shock to his whole system as far back as on the 9th of June, 1865, in that terrible railway accident at Staplehurst, on the fifth anniversary of which fatal day, by a strange coincidence, he breathed his last. His intense vitality deceived himself and everybody else, however, until it was all too late. The extravagant toil he was going through for months together--whirling hither and thither in express trains, for the purpose of making one exciting public appearance after another, each of them a little world of animated impersonations--he accomplished with such unfailing and unflagging vivacity, with such an easy step, such an alert carriage, with such an animated voice and glittering eye, that for a long while at least we were under the illusion. Hurrying about England, Ireland, and Scotland as he was during almost the whole of the last quarter of 1868 and during the whole of the first quarter of 1869--dividing his time not only between Liverpool and Manchester, Edinburgh and Glasgow, Dublin and Belfast, with continual returns to his central reading-platform in the great Hall near Piccadilly, but visiting afterwards as well nearly all the great manufacturing towns and nearly all the fashionable watering-places--the wonder is now not so much that he gave in at last to the exorbitant strain, but that he did not give in much sooner.

A single incident will suffice to show the pace at which he was going before the overwrought system gave the first sign of its _being_ overwrought. On the evening of Thursday, the 11th of March, 1869, an immense audience crowded the Festival Concert Room at York, the people there having only that one opportunity of attending a Farewell Reading. As they entered the room, each person received a printed slip of paper, on which was read, “The audience are respectfully informed that carriages have been ordered tonight at half-past nine. Without altering his Reading in the least, Mr. Dickens will shorten his usual pauses between the Parts, in order that he may leave York by train a few minutes after that time. He has been summoned,” it was added, “to London, in connection with a late sad occurrence within the general knowledge, but a more particular reference to which would be out of place here.” His attendance, in point of fact, was suddenly required at the funeral of a dear friend of his in the metropolis. To the funeral he had to go. From the poignantly irksome duty of the Reading he could not escape. Giving the latter even as proposed, he would barely have time to catch the up express, so as to arrive in town by the aid of rapid night travelling, and be true to the melancholy rendezvous at the scene of his friend's obsequies. The Readings that night were three, and they were given in rapid succession, the Reader, after the first and second, instead of withdrawing, as usual, for ten minutes' rest into his retiring room at the back of the platform, merely stepping for an instant or two behind the screen at the side of the platform, putting his lips to some iced champagne, and stepping back at once to the reading-desk. The selected Readings were these--“Boots at the Holly-Tree Inn,” the murder scene of “Sikes and Nancy,” and the grotesque monologue of “Mrs. Gamp.” The Archbishop and the other principal people of York were there conspicuously noticeable in the stalls, eagerly listening and keenly observant, evidently in rapt attention throughout the evening, but more especially during the powerfully acted tragic incident from “Oliver Twist.” The Reading, as a whole, was more than ordinarily successful--parts of it were exceptionally impressive. Directly it was over, the Reader, having had a _coupé_ previously secured for his accommodation in the express, was just barely enabled, at a rush, to catch the train an instant or so before its starting. Then only, after it had started, could he give a thought to his dress, changing his clothes and snatching a morsel of supper in the railway carriage as he whirled on towards London. The occasion referred to serves, at any rate, to illustrate the wear and tear to which the Author had rendered himself, through these Readings, more or less continually liable.

The jeopardy in which it placed his life at last was alarmingly indicated by the peremptory order of his medical adviser, Mr. Frank Beard, of Welbeck Street--immediately on his arrival in Preston on the 22nd of April, in answer to a telegram summoning him thither upon the instant from London--that the Readings must be stopped then and thenceforth. When this happened, a fortnight had not elapsed after the grand Banquet given in honour of Charles Dickens at St. George's Hall, in Liverpool. As the guest of the evening, he had, there and then, been “cheered to the echo” by seven hundred enthusiastic admirers of his presided over by the Mayor of Liverpool. That was on Saturday, the 10th of April, during a fortnight's blissful rest in the whirling round of the Readings. Immediately that fortnight was over, the whirling round began again its momentarily interrupted gyrations. Three days in succession there was a Reading at Leeds--on Thursday, the 15th, Friday, the 16th, and Saturday, the 17th of April. On Monday, the 19th, there was a Reading at Blackburn; on Tuesday, the 20th, another at Bolton; on Wednesday, the 21st, another at Southport. Then came the morning of the 22nd, on the evening of which Thursday he was to have read at Preston. By the then Dickens's medical adviser had arrived from London, the audience had already begun assembling. Thereupon, not only was that particular Reading prohibited, but, by the same wise mandate, all thought of resuming the course, or even a portion of it, afterwards, was as peremptorily interdicted. In one sense, it is only matter for wistful regret, now, that that judicious interdict was so far removed, three-quarters of a year afterwards, that the twelve Final Readings of Farewell which were given at the St. James' Hall in the spring of 1870, beginning on Tuesday, the 11th of January, and ending on Tuesday, the 15th of March, were' assented to as in any way reasonable.

That even these involved an enormous strain upon the system, was proved to absolute demonstration by the statistics jotted down with the utmost precision during the Readings, as to the fluctuations of the Reader's pulse immediately before and immediately after each of his appearances upon the platform, mostly two, but often three, appearances in a single evening. The acceleration of his pulse has, to our knowledge, upon some of these occasions been something extraordinary. Upon the occasion of his last and grandest Reading of the Murder, for example, as he stepped upon the platform, resolved, apparently, upon outdoing himself, he remarked, in a half-whisper to the present writer, just before advancing from the cover of the screen to the familiar reading-desk, “I shall tear myself to pieces.” He certainly never acted with more impassioned earnestness--though never once, for a single instant, however, overstepping the boundaries of nature. His pulse just before had been tested, as usual, keenly and carefully, by his most sedulous and sympathetic medical attendant. It was counted by him just as keenly and carefully directly afterwards--the rise then apparent being something startling, almost alarming, as it seemed to us under the circumstances.

Those twelve Farewell Readings are all the more to be regretted now when we come to look back at them, on our recalling to remembrance the fact that then, for the first time since he assumed to himself the position of a Public Reader professionally, Dickens consented to give a series of Readings at the very period when he was producing one of his imaginative works in monthly instalments. He appeared to give himself no rest whatever, when repose, at any rate for a while, was most urgently required. He seemed to have become his own taskmaster precisely at the time when he ought to have taken the repose he had long previously earned, by ministering so largely and laboriously to the world's enjoyment.

Summing up in a few words what has already been related in detail, one passing sentence may here recall to recollection the fact, that in addition to the various works produced by the Novelist during the last three lustres of his energetic life as a man of letters, he had personally, within that busy interval of fifteen years, given in round numbers at a moderate computation some 500 of these Public Readings--423 in a strictly professional capacity, the rest, prior to 1858, purely out of motives of generosity, in his character as a practical philanthropist. In doing this he had addressed as many as five hundred enormous audiences, whose rapt attention he had always secured, and who had one and all of them, without exception, welcomed his coming and going with enthusiasm. During this period he had travelled over many thousands of miles, by railway and steam-packet. In a single tour, that of the winter of 1867 and 1868, in America, he had appeared before upwards of 100,000 persons, earning, at the same time, over 200,000 dollars within an interval of very little more than four months altogether.

Later on, the circumstances surrounding the immediate close of this portion of the popular author's life, as a Public Reader of his own works, will be described when mention is made of his final appearance in St. James's Hall, on the night of his Farewell Reading. Before any particular reference is made, however, to that last evening, it may be advisable, as tending to make this record more complete, that there should now be briefly passed in review, one after another, those minor stories, and fragments of the larger stories, the simple recounting of which by his own lips yielded so much artistic delight to a great multitude of his contemporaries. Whatever may thus be remarked in regard to these Readings will be written at least from a vivid personal recollection; the writer, throughout, speaking, as before observed, from his intimate knowledge of the whole of this protracted episode in the life of the Novelist.

Whatever aid to the memory besides might have been thought desirable, he has had ready to hand all through, in the marked copies of the very books from which the author read upon these occasions, or from which, at the least, he had the appearance of reading. For, especially towards the last, Charles Dickens hardly ever glanced, even momentarily, at the printed pages, simply turning the leaves mechanically as they lay open before him on the picturesque little reading-desk. Besides the Sixteen Readings actually given, there were Four others which were so far meditated that they were printed separately as “Readings,” though the reading copies of them that have been preserved, were never otherwise prepared by their author-compiler for representation. One of these the writer remembers suggesting to the Novelist, as a characteristic companion or contrast to Dr. Marigold,--meaning “Mrs. Lirriper.” Another, strange to say,--about the least likely of all his stories one would have thought to have been thus selected,--was “The Haunted Man.” A third was “The Prisoner of the Bastile,” which would, for certain, have been one of Dickens's most powerful delineations. The fourth, if only in remembrance of the Old Bailey attorney, Mr. Jaggers, of the convict Magwitch, and of Joe the blacksmith, the majority would probably have been disposed to regret almost more than Mrs. Lirriper. Though the lodging-house keeper would have been welcome, too, for her own sake, as who will not agree in saying, if merely out of a remembrance of the “trembling lip” put up towards her face, speaking of which the good motherly old soul exclaims, “and I dearly kissed it;” or, bearing in mind, another while, her preposterous reminiscence of the “impertinent little cock-sparrow of a monkey whistling with dirty shoes on the clean steps, and playing the harp on the area railings with a hoop-stick.” Actually given or only meditated, the whole of these twenty Readings--meaning the entire collection of the identical marked copies used by the Novelist himself on both sides of the Atlantic--have, for the verification of this retrospect, been placed for the time being in the writer's possession. Selecting from among them those merely which are familiar to the public, from their having been actually produced, he here proposes cursorily to glance one by one through the well-known series of Sixteen.

THE CHRISTMAS CAROL.

It can hardly be any matter for wonder that the “Christmas Carol” was, among all the Readings, the author's own especial favourite! That it was so, he showed from first to last unmistakeably. He began with it in 1853, and ended with it in 1870, upon the latter occasion appending to the long since abbreviated narrative, that other incomparable evidence of his powers as a humorist, “The Trial from Pickwick.” Whoever went for the first time to see and hear Charles Dickens read one or other of his writings, did well in selecting a night when he was going to relate his immortal ghost story of Christmas. In compliance with the well-known wish of the Novelist, the audience, as a rule, contrived to assemble and to have actually taken their places several minutes before the time fixed for the Reader's appearance upon the platform. Occasionally it happened, nevertheless, that a stray couple or so would be still drifting in, here and there, among the serried ranks of the stalls, when, book in hand, with a light step, a smile on his face, and a flower in his button-hole, the author had already rapidly advanced and taken his place before his quaintly constructed but graceful little reading-desk. Then it was, perhaps, at those very times, that a stranger to the whole scene regarded himself almost as under a personal obligation to these vexatious stragglers. For, until every one of them had quietly settled down, there stood the Novelist, cheerfully, patiently, glancing to the right and to the left, taking the bearings of his night's company, as one might say, with an air of the most perfect ease and self-possession. Whosoever, consequently, was in attendance there for the first time, had an opportunity, during any such momentary pause, of familiarising himself with the appearance of the famous writer, with whose books he had probably been intimately acquainted for years upon years previously, but whom until then he had never had the chance of beholding face to face.

Everyone, even to the illiterate wayfarers in the public streets, had, to a certain extent, long since come to know what manner of man Charles Dickens was by means of his widely-scattered photographs. But, there, better than any photograph, was the man himself,--the master of all English humorists, the most popular author during his own lifetime that ever existed; one whose stories for thirty years together had been read with tears and with laughter, and whose books had won for him personal affection, as well as fame and fortune. Anyone seeing him at those moments for the first time, would unquestionably think--How like he was to a very few indeed, how utterly unlike the vast majority of his countless cartes-de-visites! To the last there was the bright, animated, alert carriage of the head--phrenologically a noble head--physiognomically a noble countenance. Encountering him within a very few weeks of his death, Mr. Arthur Locker has said, “I was especially struck with the brilliancy and vivacity of his eyes:” adding, “there seemed as much life and animation in them as in twenty ordinary pairs of eyes.” Another keen observer, Mr. Arthur Helps, has in the same spirit exclaimed, “What portrait can do justice to the frankness, kindness, and power of his eyes?” None certainly that ever was painted by the pencil of the sunbeam, or by the brush of a Royal Academician. Fully to realise the capacity for indicating emotion latent in them, and informing his whole frame--his hands for example, in their every movement, being wonderfully expressive--those who attended these Readings soon came to know, that you had but to listen to his variable and profoundly sympathetic voice, and to watch the play of his handsome features.

The different original characters introduced in his stories, when he read them, he did not simply describe, he impersonated: otherwise to put it, for whomsoever he spoke, he spoke in character. Thus, when everything was quiet in the crowded assembly, and when the ringing applause that always welcomed his appearance, but which he never by any chance acknowledged, had subsided--when he began: “A Christmas Carol, in four staves. Stave one, Marley's Ghost. Marley was dead to begin with.” Having remarked, yet further, that “there was no doubt whatever about that,” the register of his burial being signed by this functionary, that and the other--when he added, “_Scrooge_ signed it; and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change for anything he chose to put his hand to”--Scrooge in the flesh was, through the very manner of the utterance of his name, brought vividly and upon the instant before the observant listener. “Oh! but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, was Scrooge!” _That_ we knew instinctively, without there being any need whatever for our hearing one syllable of the description of him, admirably given in the book, but suppressed in the Reading, judiciously suppressed enough, because, for that matter, we saw and heard it without any necessity for its being explained. As one might say--quoting here a single morsel from the animated description of Scrooge, that was actually illustrated by Scrooge's impersonator--it all “spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice!” And it was thus, not merely with regard to the leading personages of the little acted drama, as, turn by turn, they were introduced; precisely the same artistic care was applied by the impersonating realist to the very least among the minor characters, filling in, so to speak, little incidental gaps in the background. A great fat man with a monstrous chin, for example, was introduced just momentarily in the briefest street-dialogue, towards the close of this very Reading, who had only to open his lips once or twice for an instant, yet whose individuality was in that instant or two so thoroughly realised, that he lives ever since then in the hearers' remembrance. When, in reply to some one's inquiry, as to what was the cause of Scrooge's (presumed) death?--this great fat man with the monstrous chin answered, with a yawn, in two words, “God knows!”--he was before us there, as real as life, as selfish, and as substantial. So was it also with the grey-haired rascal, Joe, of the rag-and-bottle shop; with Topper, when he pronounced himself, as a bachelor, to be “a wretched outcast;” with the Schoolmaster, when he “glared on Master Scrooge with ferocious condescension, and threw him into a dreadful state of mind by shaking hands with him,” all of whom were indicated by the merest touch or two, and yet each of whom was a living and breathing and speaking verisimilitude.

There was produced, to begin with, however, a sense of exhilaration in the very manner with which Dickens commenced the Reading of one of his stories, and which was always especially noticeable in the instance of this particular ghost story of his about Christmas. The opening sentences were always given in those cheery, comfortable tones, indicative of a double relish on the part of a narrator--to wit, his own enjoyment of the tale he is going to relate, and his anticipation of the enjoyment of it by those who are giving him their attention. Occasionally, at any rate during the last few years, his voice was husky just at the commencement, but as he warmed to his work, with him at all times a genuine labour of love, everything of that kind disappeared almost at the first turn of the leaf. The genial inflections of the voice, curiously rising, in those first moments of the Reading, at the end of every sentence, there was simply no resisting. Had there been a wedding guest present, he would hardly have repined in not being able to obey the summons of the loud bassoon. The narrator had his will with one and all. However large and however miscellaneous the audience, from the front of the stalls to the back of the gallery, every one listened to the familiar words that fell from his lips, from the beginning to the end, with unflagging attention. There could be small room for marvel at this, however, in the instance of the “Carol,” on first reading which, Thackeray spoke of its author as that “delightful genius!” The _Edinburgh_ editor, Lord Jeffrey, at the very same time, namely, towards the close of 1843, on the morrow of the little book's original publication, avowing, in no less glowing terms, that he had been nothing less than charmed by the exquisite apologue: “chiefly,” as he declared, “for the genuine goodness which breathes all through it, and is the true inspiring angel by which its genius has been awakened.” Never since he had first--and that but a very few years previously--taken pen in hand as a story-teller, had this “delightful genius” sat down in a happier vein for writing anything, than when he did so for the purpose of recounting how Scrooge was converted, by a series of ghostly apparitions, from the error of his utterly selfish way in life, until then, as a tough-skinned, ingrained curmudgeon.

Characters and incidents, brought before us anew in the Reading, were all so cordially welcomed,--the former being such old friends, the latter so familiarly within our knowledge! Insomuch that many passages were, almost word for word, remembered by those who, nevertheless, listened as if curious to learn what might follow, yet who could readily, any one of them, have prompted the Reader, that is the Author himself, supposing by some rare chance he had happened, just for one moment, to be at fault. It is curious to observe, on turning over the leaves of the marked copy of this Reading, the sententious little marginal notes for his own guidance, jotted down by the hand of this wonderful master of elocutionary effect. “Narrative” is written on the side of p. 5 where Scrooge's office, on Christmas Eve, is described, just before mention is made of the Clerk's dismal little cell seeming to be “a sort of tank,” and of his fire being so small that it looked like “one coal,” and of his trying at last to warm himself by the candle, “in which effort, not being a man of strong imagination, he failed.” Again, “Cheerful” is penned on the side of p. 6, where Scrooge's Nephew comes in at a burst with “A Merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!”

After Scrooge's inhuman retort of “Bah! humbug!” not a word was added of the descriptive sentence immediately following. Admirable though every word of it is, however, one could hardly regret its suppression. Is it asked why? Well then, for this simple reason--the force of which will be admitted by anyone who ever had the happiness of grasping Charles Dickens's hand in friendship--that his description of Scrooge's Nephew was, quite unconsciously but most accurately, in every word of it, a literal description of himself, just as he looked upon any day in the blithest of all seasons, after a brisk walk in the wintry streets or on the snowy high road. “He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this Nephew of Scrooge's, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.” The Novelist himself was depicted there to a nicety. No need, therefore, was there for even one syllable of this in the Reading. Scrooge's Nephew was visibly before us, without a word being uttered.

To our thinking, it has always seemed as if the one chink through which Scrooge's sympathies are got at and his heart-strings are eventually touched, is discernable in his keen sense of humour from the very outset. It is precisely through this that there seems hope, from the very beginning, of his proving to be made of “penetrable stuff.” When, after his monstrous “Out upon merry Christmas!” he goes on to say, “If I had my will every idiot who goes about with 'merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly in his heart: he should!” one almost feels as if he were laughing in his sleeve from the very commencement. Instance, as yet more strikingly to the point in respect to what we are here maintaining, the wonderfully comic effect of the bantering remarks addressed by him to the Ghost of Jacob Marley all through their confabulation, even when the spectre's voice, as we are told, was disturbing the very marrow in his bones. True, it is there stated that, all through that portentous dialogue, he was only trying to be smart “as a means of distracting his own attention.” But the jests themselves are too delicious, one would say, for mere make-believes. Besides which, hear his laugh at the end of the book! Hardly that of one really so long out of practice--“a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh, the father of a long, long line of brilliant laughs!” A laugh, one might suppose, as contagious as that of his own Nephew when he was “so inexpressibly tickled that he was obliged to get up off the sofa and stamp!” Speaking of which our author writes so delectably, “If you should happen by any unlikely chance to know a man more blest in a laugh than Scrooge's Nephew, all I can say is, I should like to know him too. Introduce him to me, and I'll cultivate his acquaintance.” At which challenge one might almost have been tempted anticipatively to say at a venture--Scrooge! Good-humoured argument apart, however, what creatures were those who, one by one--sometimes, it almost seemed, two or three of them together--appeared and disappeared upon the platform, at the Reader's own good-will and pleasure!

After Scrooge's “Good afternoon!”--delivered with irresistibly ludicrous iteration--we caught something more than a distant glimpse of the Clerk in the tank, when--on Scrooge's surly interrogation, if he will want all day to-morrow?--the Reader replied in the thinnest and meekest of frightened voices, “If quite convenient, sir!” It brought into full view instantaneously, and for the first time, the little Clerk whom one followed in imagination with interest a minute afterwards on his “going down a slide at the end of a lane of boys twenty times in honour of Christmas, and then, with the long ends of his white comforter dangling below his waist (for he boasted no greatcoat) running home as hard as he could pelt to play at blind man's buff.” Instantly, upon the heels of this, we find noted on the margin, p. 18, “Tone to mystery.” The spectral illusion of the knocker on Scrooge's house-door, looking for all the world not like a knocker, but like Marley's face, “with a dismal light about it like a bad lobster in a dark cellar,” prepared the way marvellously for what followed. Numberless little tid-bits of description that anybody else would have struck out with reluctance, as, for instance, that of Scrooge looking cautiously behind the street door when he entered, “as if he half expected to be terrified with the sight of Marley's pigtail sticking out into the hall,” were unhesitatingly erased by the Reader, as, from his point of view, not necessarily to the purpose. Then, after the goblin incident of the disused bell slowly oscillating until it and all the other bells in the house rang loudly for a while--afterwards becoming in turn just as suddenly hushed--we got to the clanking approach, from the sub-basement of the old building, of the noise that at length came on through the heavy door of Scrooge's apartment! “And”--as the Reader said with startling effect, while his voice rose to a hurried outcry as he uttered the closing exclamation--“upon its coming in, the dying flame leaped up, as though it cried, '_I know him! Marley's Ghost!_'” The apparition, although the description of it was nearly stenographically abbreviated in the Reading, appeared to be, in a very few words, no less startlingly realised. “Same face, usual waistcoat, tights, boots,” even to the spectral illusion being so transparent that Scrooge (his own marrow, then, we may presume, becoming sensitized) looking through his waistcoat “could see the two back buttons on the coat behind”--with the incorrigible old joker's cynical reflection to himself that “he had often heard Marley spoken of as having no bowels, but had never believed it until then.” The grotesque humour of his interview with the spectre seemed scarcely to have been realised, in fact, until their colloquy was actually listened to in the Reading.

Scrooge's entreaty addressed to the Ghost, when the latter demanded a hearing, “Don't be flowery, Jacob, pray!” was only less laughable, for example, than the expression of the old dreamer's visage when Marley informed him that he had often sat beside him invisibly! Promised a chance and hope in the fixture--a chance and hope of his dead partner's procuring--Scrooge's “Thank 'ee!”--full of doubt--was a fitting prelude to his acknowledgment of the favour when explained. “You will be haunted,” quoth the Ghost, “by three Spirits.” The other faltering, “I--I think I'd rather not:” and then quietly hinting afterwards, “Couldn't I take 'em all at once, and have it over, Jacob?”

As for the revelations made to Ebenezer Scrooge by those three memorable Spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, who can ever hope to relate them and impersonate them as they were related and impersonated by the Author himself of this peerless ghost-story! Fezziwig, for example, with his calves shining like moons, who, after going through all the intricacies of the country dance, bow, corkscrew, thread-the-needle, and back again to your place, cut--“cut so deftly that he appeared to wink with his legs, and came upon his feet again without a stagger!” The very Fiddler, who “went up to the lofty desk and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty stomach-aches!” Master Peter Cratchit, again, arrayed in his father's shirt collars, who, rejoicing to find himself so gallantly attired, at one moment “yearned to show his linen in the fashionable parks,” and at another, hearing his sister Martha talk of some lord who “was much about as tall as Peter, pulled up his collars so high that you couldn't have seen him if you had been there.” As for the pathetic portions of the narrative, it is especially observable in regard to those, that they were anything rather than made too much of. There, more particularly, the elisions were ruthless. Looking through the marked copy, it really would appear that only a very few indeed of the salient points were left in regard to the life and death of Tiny Tim. Bob's visit to the death-bed was entirely unmentioned. Even the words “Spirit of Tiny Tim, thy childish essence was from God!” were never uttered. Two utterances there _were_, however, the one breathing an exquisite tenderness, the other indicative of a long-suppressed but passionate outburst of grief, that thrilled to the hearts of all who heard them, and still, we doubt not, haunt their recollection. The one--where the mother, laying her mourning needlework upon the table, put her hand up to her face. “'The colour hurts my eyes,' she said. The colour? Ah! poor Tiny Tim!” The other, where the father, while describing the little creature's grave, breaks down in a sudden agony of tears. “It would have done you good to see how green a place it is. But you'll see it often. I promised him that I would walk there on a Sunday--_My little, little child! My little child!_” It was a touch of nature that made the Reader and his world of hearers, upon the instant, kin. The tearful outcry brimmed to the eyes of those present a thousand visible echoes. “He broke down all at once. He couldn't help it,” said the Reader, adding in subdued accents the simple words, “If he could have helped it, he and his child would have been further apart perhaps than they were.” With that ended all reference to the home-grief at Bob Cratchit's. Everything else in relation to the loss of Tiny Tim was foregone unhesitatingly.

The descriptive passages were cut out by wholesale. While the Christmas dinner at Scrooge's Clerk's, and the Christmas party at Scrooge's Nephew's, were left in almost in their entirety, the street-scenes and shop-window displays were obliterated altogether. Nothing at all was said about the “great round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen lolling at the doors and tumbling into the streets in their apoplectic opulence.” Nothing about the ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish friars, and “winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe.” Nothing about the canisters of tea and coffee “rattled up and down like juggling tricks,” or about the candied fruits, “so caked and spotted with molten sugar as to make the coldest lookers-on feel faint, and subsequently bilious.”

Nay, we were denied even a momentary glimpse, on the snow-crusted pavement at nightfall, of that group of handsome girls, all hooded and fur-booted, and all chattering at once, tripping lightly off to some near neighbour's house, “where, woe upon the single man who saw them enter--artful witches, well they knew it--in a glow!” Topper was there, however, and the plump sister in the lace tucker, and the game of Yes-and-No, the solution to which was, “It's your uncle Scro-o-o-o-oge!” Happiest of all these non-omissions, as one may call them, there was that charming picture of Scrooge's niece by marriage, which--as brightly, exquisitely articulated by the lips of her imaginer--was like the loveliest girl-portrait ever painted by Greuze. “She was very pretty, exceedingly pretty. With a dimpled, surprised-looking, capital face; a ripe little mouth, that seemed made to be kissed--as no doubt it was; all kinds of good little dots about her chin, that melted into one another when she laughed; and the sunniest pair of eyes you ever saw in any little creature's head. Altogether she was what you would have called provoking, you know; but satisfactory, too. Oh, perfectly satisfactory.” The grave face and twinkling eyes with which this cordial acquiescence in the conclusion arrived at was expressed were irresistibly exhilarating. Just in the same way there was a sort of parenthetical smack of the lips in the self-communing of Scrooge when, at the very close of the story, after hesitating awhile at his Nephew's door as to whether he should knock, he made a dash and did it. “Is your master at home, my dear?” said Scrooge. “_Nice girl! very._” Then, as to the cordiality of his reception by his Nephew, what could by possibility have expressed it better than the look, voice, manner of the Reader. “'Will you let me in, Fred?' _Let him in! It is a mercy he didn't shake his arm off._” The turkey that “never could have stood upon its legs, that bird,” but must have “snapped 'em short off in a minute, like sticks of sealing-wax!”--the remarkable boy who was just about its size, and who, when told to go and buy it, cried out “Walk-ER!”--Bob Cratchit's trying to overtake nine o'clock with his pen on his arriving nearly twenty minutes afterwards; his trembling and getting a little nearer the ruler when regenerated Scrooge talks about raising his salary, prior to calling him Bob, and, with a clap on the back, wishing him a merry Christmas!--brought, hilariously, the whole radiant Reading of this wonderful story to its conclusion. It was a feast of humour and a flow of fun, better than all the yule-tide fare that ever was provided--fuller of good things than any Christmas pudding of plums and candied fruit-peel--more warming to the cockles of one's heart, whatever those may be, than the mellowest wassail-bowl ever brimmed to over-flowing. No wonder those two friends of Thackeray, who have been already mentioned, and who were both of them women, said of the Author of the “Carol,” by way of criticism, “God bless him!” This being exclaimed by them, as will be remembered, simply after reading it to themselves. If only they had heard him read it!

THE TRIAL FROM PICKWICK.