Dickens as a reader

One of the reasons that there were three years between Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend, and then another five before The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was that Dickens was devoting much of his time to his highly lucrative (and draining) reading tours. Most biographers put at least some of the blame for Dickens's early death on the grueling pace and physical demands of his reading tours. By all accounts, however, they were brilliant performances--sentimental and overblown by today's taste, perhaps, but gripping and effective, carrying away audience after audience.

In his account of Dickens's reading career, Charles Dickens as a Reader (1872), Dickens's friend Charles Kent, who wrote his book at the suggestion of Dickens and had access to the author's marked-up performance manuscripts, reminds us at the opening that not every writer is even a competent reader. He illustrates that with a story of Dr. Johnson and Virgil Thomson:

According to the grimly humorous old Doctor, "He [Thomson] was once reading to Doddington, who, being himself a reader eminently elegant, was so much provoked by his odd utterance, that he snatcehd the paper from his hand, and told him that he did not understand his own verses!"

Kent's book is admiring to a fault, but it's still of interest to any dedicated Dickensian. What's perhaps most interesting is the realization Kent comes to when he looks at the marked-up manuscript for Dickens's reading of the scene from David Copperfield where Emily runs off:

The wonder still is to us, now that we are recalling to mind the salient peculiarities of this Reading, as we do so, turning over leaf by leaf the marked copy of it, from which the Novelist read; the very wonder, we repeat, still is to us how, in that exquisite scene, the very words that have always moved us most in the novel were struck out in the delivery, are rigidly scored through here with blue inkmarks in the reading copy, by the hand of the Reader-Novelist. Those words, we mean which occur, where Ham, having on his arrival, made a movement as if Em'ly were outside, asked Mas'r Davy to "come out a minute," only for him, on his doing so, to find that Em'ly was not there, and that Ham was deadly pale. "Ham! what's the matter?" was gasped out in the Reading. But--not what follows, immediately on that, in the original narrative: "'Mas'r Davy!' Oh, for his broken heart, how dreadfully he wept!"

Kent goes on to give a number of specific examples of lines Dickens cut but whose emotional sense he managed to convey by tone or expression. Frustratingly, he doesn't give any further details of how Dickens achieved his effects in this case, which perhaps would have been difficult to determine outside the actual moment. But the complicated choices of what to omit are a reminder of what Kent notes elsewhere in the book: that Dickens, ever the craftsman, devoted copious attention to assembling his reading manuscripts.

It was not by any means that, having written a story years previously, he had, in his new capacity as a reciter, merley to select two or three chapters from it, and read them off with an air of animation. Virtually, the fragmentary portions thus taken from his later works were re-written by him, with countless elisions and eliminations after having been selected. Reprinted in their new shape, each as "A Reading," they were then touched and retouched by their author, pen in hand, until, at the end of a long succession of revisions, the pages came to be cobwebbed over with a wonderfully intricate network of blots and lines in the way of correction or of obliteration.

Oh, to have seen him in action!

"I have contented my selfe of late with laughing when ever I heard it mention'd," or, Writers encounter their readers

In the course of describing Dickens's self-confidence as a performer in his Charles Dickens as a Reader (1872), Charles Kent passes along the following anecdote:

[T]he present writer recalls to recollection very clearly the fact of Dickens saying to him one day,--saying it with the most whimsical air by-the-bye, but very earnestly,--"Once, and but once only in my life, I was--frightened!" The occasion he referred to was simply this, as he immediately went on to explain, that somewhere about the middle of the serial publication of David Copperfield, happening to be out of writing-paper, he sallied forth one morning to get a fresh supply at the stationer's. He was living then in his favourite haunt, at Fort House, in Broadstairs. As he was about to enter the stationer's shop, with the intention of buying the needful writing-paper, for the purpose of returning home with it, and at once setting to work upon his next number, not one word of which was yet written, he stood aside for a moment at the threshold to allow a lady to pass in before him. He then went on to relate--with a vivid sense still upon him of mingled enjoyment and dismay in the mere recollection--how the next instant he had overheard this strange lady asking the person behind the counter for the new green number. When it was handed to her, "Oh, this," said she, "I have read. I want the next one." The next one she was thereupon told would be out by the end of the month. "Listening to this, unrecognised," he added, in conclusion, knowing the purpose for which I was there, and remembering that no one word of the number she was asking for was yet written, for the first and only time in my life, I felt--frightened!"

Is it just me, or do you hear shades of William Shatner in the punctuation of that last line?

It reminded me of one of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's letters, written from Venice to her daughter on October 10, 1753, wherein she tells of being praised at social gatherings for her writing:

I confess I have often been complemented (since I have been in Italy) on the Books I have given the Public. I us'd to deny it with some Warmth, but finding I persuaded no body, I have of late contented my selfe with laughing when ever I heard it mention'd, knowing the character of a learned Woman is far from being ridiculous in this Country, the greatest Familys being proud of having produce'd female Writers, and a Milanese Lady being now proffessor of Matheatics in the University of Bologna.

As she was wont to do ("This subject is apt to run away with me," she warns.) Montagu follows that thought until it developed into a broadside against the hidebound, sexist literary establishment she'd left behind in England:

It appears to me the strongest proofe of a clear understanding in Longinus (in every light acknowledg'd one of the greatest Men amongst the Ancients) when I find him so far superior to vulgar Prejudices as to chuse his two Examples of fine Writeing from a Jew (at that time the most despis'd people upon Earth) and a Woman. Our modern Wits would be so far from quoteing, they would scarce own they had read the Works of such contemptible Creatures, tho perhaps they would condescend to steal from them at the same time they declar'd they were below their notice.

Though I bow to few in my admiration for Dickens, I can't help but wistfully imagine how much richer, how much more convincing his work would have been had he found room in it for a heroine as intelligent and fiery as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

"He had in an extraordinary degree the dramatic element in his character," or, Dickens as a performer

I'm very excited about a book I picked up today (which, by the way, in the Dodo Press edition I got, is easily the best-looking out-of-copyright print-on-demand book I've seen yet), Charles Kent's Dickens as a Reader (1872). It's a posthumous account, by a friend of Dickens, of the dramatic readings that consumed so much of Dickens's time, creativity, and energy in the final decade and more of his life, making use of Dickens's own notes and plans and describing the readings as seen

both from before and behind the scenes, from the front of the house as well as from within the shelter of the screen upon the platform.

I've only had a moment to flip through the book thus far, but this passage amused me enough to seem worth sharing:

So real are the characters described by Charles Dickens in his life-like fictions, and so exactly do the incidents he relates as having befallen them resemble actual occurrences, that we recall to recollection at this moment the delight with which the late accomplished lady Napier once related an exact case in point, appealing, as she did so, to her husband, the author of the "Peninsular War," to corroborate the accuracy of her retrospect! Telling how she perfectly well remembered, when the fourth green number of "Nicholas Nickleby" was just out, one of her home group, who had a moment before caught sight of the picture of the flogging in a shop-window, rushed in with the startling announcement--as though he were bringing with him the news of some great victory--"What do you think? Nicholas has thrashed Squeers!" As the Novelist read this chapter, or rather the condensation of this chapter, it was for all the world like assisting in person at that sacred and refreshing rite!

"Sacred and refreshing" sounds like the way Wodehouse might describe a miscreant receiving half a dozen of the best, doesn't it? Though if anyone ever had it coming, it was surely Squeers . . .

The remembrance as described makes me wonder what the bookshop window looked like: do you think the bookseller created or commissioned his own poster or stand-up of the scene, or did he just prop open a copy of the book to Phiz's illustration, reproduced above? It also reminds me of the oft-repeated tale that, during the publication of The Old Curiosity Shop, American readers greeted transatlantic passengers just off the boat with the urgent question, "Is Little Nell dead?" Caleb Crain, reliable haunter of libraries, looked into that tale a while back; you should click through to find out what he learned, and you'll get Oscar Wilde's wonderfully mordant take on Nell as a bonus.

{One last, unrelated note: I promise I won't do this often, but I think you might enjoy the post I wrote earlier tonight for the the blog of the Quarterly Conversation, the Constant Conversation. It's got Greeks, chutzpah, and Boswell--what more could an I've Been Reading Lately reader want?}