DATE: 1849.
WHAT IT IS: The novelist’s specially prepared copy of his famous novel that he used for reading in public, containing alterations of the text, stage directions, and other annotations.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: It is a bound volume in which the 166 pages cut from a copy of the twelfth edition of the novel are affixed to larger cream-colored sheets. In the wide margins and on the inlaid pages are alterations, comments, directions, and editorial symbols made by the author in ink and pencil. The text contains many crossed-out passages; examples of stage directions include “cheerful narrative,” “tone to mystery,” “tone down to pathos,” “up to cheerfulness,” “stern pathos,” and “tone to Tiny Tim.” The cover measures 6½ inches wide by 8⁷/₈ inches long by 1 inch deep. The pages are 5½ inches wide by 8½ inches long; the inlaid pages measure 3¼ inches wide by 5¾ inches long. The book has marbled paper-covered boards and a red morocco leather spine that is stamped in gilt.
At eight o’clock on the evening of March 15, 1870, a bearded gentleman dressed in formal attire with a red geranium sprouting from his lapel walked onto the stage of St. James’s Hall in London. He carried with him the prompt-copies of the two works he was to perform that night, A Christmas Carol and The Trial from “Pickwick,” but having recited them scores of times before, he would during the course of the night turn their pages only perfunctorily, without needing to refer to them. Having captivated audiences on both sides of the Atlantic with his public readings over the years, this was to be the very last of his Farewell Readings series. Charles Dickens, the century’s most famous and popular novelist, was ill and exhausted, his public readings having exacted a serious toll on his health, and he resolved that after this last show he would devote his full energies to completing his novel-in-progress, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
Dickens set down his prompt-copies on his wooden reading table at the center of the stage, which had a little shelf on which rested a flask of water. His main reading piece of the evening was the Carol, and he was ready to bring the story to life, with all its animated, colorful characters. He drew a deep breath as his adoring audience waited, aware that Dickens (“The Inimitable,” as he was nicknamed) was an ill if not dying man.
Charles Dickens had embarked on a secondary profession of delivering public readings of his works almost inadvertently after the publication of his second Christmas book, The Chimes, in 1844. For reasons of frugality, Dickens, along with his family, had been living in Italy since the summer of that year, but he had corresponded with his friend John Forster about celebrating the book’s publication by doing a reading for their close friends. Forster agreed to host such a gathering, and Dickens returned to London, where on December 3 he delivered a reading of Chimes—his first reading of any of his works—to about a half-dozen people. It was a cozy little affair that would through time take on an aura of legendary proportions. As Dickens read his holiday story, he brought some of the men seated around him to tears, an effect the author would have on audience members throughout his lecture career, and one he would delight in.
Thereafter, it became Dickens’s practice to stage readings of portions of a new or in-progress literary endeavor. It was a couple of readings to a circle of friends in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1846 that gave Dickens the idea that there was money to be made in what he had previously been doing for free. Dickens at the time had been preoccupied with the impending publication of his Dombey and Son, and on September 12 he held a soiree in which he read the novel’s first chapter. It was such a success that shortly after Dickens gave another reading to the same group. So enthused was the author by the reception that he wrote a letter to Forster in which he expressed his satisfaction at making audiences laugh and declared that “in these days of lecturings and readings, a great deal of money might possibly be made (if it were not infra dig*) by one’s having Readings of one’s own books.”
Some friends would advise the illustrious author that it was in fact beneath his dignity to read for profit, but the idea nonetheless held a powerful appeal for Dickens. That Dickens was naturally suited to appear onstage before an audience was consistent with his restless character. As a young man he had an avid interest in theater and over the years had written and acted in plays, and he sometimes even performed duties as a stage manager for various productions.
It wasn’t until eight years later, however, that Dickens actually delivered his first public reading—and it was not for profit but for charity. A writer whose works commented penetratingly on the social ills of his day, Dickens decided that his readings would be for the benefit of particular causes. Perhaps Dickens’s compassion for the unfortunate developed partly as a response to his own youthful poverty.
Born on February 7, 1812, in Landport, Charles John Huffam Dickens was the second of eight children. His father, John, was a government clerk who was locked up in the Marshalsea, a debtors’ prison, and when Charles was ten his mother had opened a school that failed to attract students. Charles was forced to go out and earn money himself, and he went to work in a factory where he mounted labels on blacking pots. This was a painful part of young Charles’s life, “an evil hour for me,” he called it, that no doubt provided inspiration for such themes as cruelty to children and inhumanity to the poor that he would bring out later in his stories. It was the plight of uneducated male laborers that first drew Dickens’s philanthropic attention, however, and for the benefit of the Birmingham and Midland Institute, a free educational institution, on December 27, 1853, he gave his first charity reading. For some three hours Dickens riveted the audience’s attention at the Birmingham Town Hall with his animated storytelling of his beloved Carol. By this time his book was on its way to becoming a classic. Dickens had begun to write A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas in early October 1843 and had completed the novella by the end of November. He submitted his original manuscript (The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City) to his publisher, Chapman & Hall, and it was published on December 17, 1843. The title page was printed in two colors, and the book contained illustrations by John Leech.
A page from Charles Dicken's prompt-copy of A Christmas Carol. Dickens marked the pages of his prompt-copy to edit the story and help him bring it to life when he recited it to audiences.
One can imagine the Victorian audience enthralled as the author acted out his tale of a miser being taken on eye-opening excursions by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, which lead him to discover the true spirit of Christmas. Onstage Dickens infused life into his Carol characters: Ebenezer Scrooge, Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim, the ghost of Jacob Marley, Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig, and others. A review from the Portland Transcript of February 4, 1868, gives a vivid picture:
His power of facial expression is wonderful; it is as much what he does as what he says that constitutes the charm of his performance. He gives a distinct voice to each character, and to an extraordinary extent assumes the personality of each. At one moment he is savage old Scrooge, at the next, his jolly nephew, and in the twinkling of an eye little timid, lisping Bob Cratchit appears. All this is effected by the play of features as well as the varying tones of voice. It is the comical or the savage twist of the mouth—the former to the right, the latter to the left—the elongation of the face, the roll or twinkle of the eyes, and above all the wonderful lift of the eyebrows, that produce such surprising and delightful effects. And then he not only personates his characters, he performs their actions. This he does by means of wonderfully flexible fingers, which he converts at pleasure into a company of dancers, and makes to act and speak in a hundred ways. He rubs and pats his hands, he flourishes all his fingers, he shakes them, he points them, he makes them equal to a whole stage company in the performance of parts. But then the man is also there. Dickens, the author, comes in at intervals to enjoy his own fun; you see him in the twinkle of an eye and the curve of the mouth. When the audience laughs he beams all over with radiant appreciation of the fun.
Dickens’s fame as a reader instantly spread, and he was soon besieged by invitations to recite his works. Under the mistaken impression that he had turned professional, many of those requesting a performance offered to pay him. Over the next few years offers poured in from all over Great Britain—and elsewhere—so many, in fact, that Dickens couldn’t even begin to consider all of them. He resisted the temptation, albeit with reluctance, to read professionally because of the belief that it would compromise his higher calling as a writer, and he continued to speak for the benefit of charities. Dickens customarily drew large audiences of between two and four thousand people at a single reading. A Christmas Carol was an audience-pleasing favorite and a staple of his repertoire.
As time passed, however, his own emotional and financial difficulties caused the novelist seriously to consider making a career out of reading for profit. By 1857 his marriage was dissolving, and he would find that he had a deep need to be around people; the tremendous outpouring of admiration and affection bestowed on him at readings lifted some of his despondency. In 1857 Dickens had also moved into a new home, Gad’s Hill, and doubtless this had drained his resources while elevating his lifestyle. Just before he separated from his wife Dickens remarked, “I must do something, or I shall wear my heart away.” The allure of being surrounded by ardent admirers, as well as of the potential financial gain, was obviously too great to pass up.
On April 29, 1858, Dickens made his professional debut as a reader at London’s St. Martin’s Hall. For his performance he chose not his vastly popular Christmas Carol, as he had originally planned (the spring was the customary “season” for public readings in London at the time), but another Yuletide tale, The Cricket on the Hearth. Only a few weeks later, however, Dickens installed Carol in his professional repertoire.
Dickens prepared special annotated copies of the works he read in public in which he wrote performance instructions and cut out passages. Though his dependence on these prompt-copies would wane through the years, he would nevertheless continue to carry them onstage. Dickens was a diligent rehearser and had memorized his better-received works like Carol, but he kept his prompt-copy near in case of a lapse.
Over time Dickens shortened A Christmas Carol in half-hour increments until he had it down to under ninety minutes, in order to fit another item into his program to entertain audiences for about two hours. But the Carol’s reading time was always approximate, as Dickens never gave the same performance twice, including more or less text depending on his own mood and the audience reaction, and sometimes improvising on his own printed words. Dickens was by no means a mechanical reciter and improvised lines and mannerisms to try to amuse his audience. If any new material received a very positive response, Dickens would be apt to include it in future readings.
By the schedule of speaking engagements written on its flyleaf in the author’s hand, it is known that the extant prompt-copy of A Christmas Carol was used by Dickens in his readings by 1859; it may well have been used in his first charity reading in December 1853, although no proof of this exists; and it was undoubtedly used through his last professional readings in 1870. Dickens made his Carol prompt-copy by pasting the smaller pages from the 1849 twelfth edition, printed by Bradbury & Evans, onto a bound volume of larger sheets, but such a cut-and-paste method wasn’t the only way he made his prompt-copies; sometimes the author had small special printings made that contained his annotations.
In the first seven months of his career as a professional reader, Dickens gave a series of lectures in London and toured the provinces, Ireland, and Scotland, delivering scores of readings. The admission to watch a Charles Dickens reading varied, but some indication may be obtained from the broadside of his December 29, 1858, reading of Little Dombey and The Trial from “Pickwick” at the Chatham Lecture Hall. The terms of admission for the evening performance are given as: “To the Gallery Stalls, 3s. Body of the Hall, Reserved Seats, 2s. Unreserved, 1s.” (The abbreviation “s.” denoted shillings, a monetary unit in use at the time.)
Traveling from city to city on his reading tours and delivering emotion-filled performances was no doubt strenuous. Dickens would go out on the road for a few weeks or a few months at a time, sometimes lecturing several times in a single week. Drawing enormous crowds virtually wherever he went, the engagements were lucrative and the money too tempting for him to give up or even slow down. After resting less than two weeks after his first London season, he embarked on his first provincial tour. Dickens traveled with a small entourage comprising a manager, who handled the business arrangements for the tours, and a few stagehands.
While Dickens energetically pursued his career as a professional reader, he had by no means forsaken his profession as a writer. In 1850 Dickens had started a weekly periodical, Household Words, and put in it installments of such works as Hard Times. In the periodical’s successor, All the Year Round, Dickens included installments of his 1859 French Revolution romance, A Tale of Two Cities, which he thought would have wide commercial appeal. And for eight months beginning in December 1860, the author published in All the Year Round weekly installments of Great Expectations, his novel about the need for people to set themselves free from the past in order to build the future. His literary output was prodigious, and delivering public readings did not seem in any way to hamper his genius.
It seemed that writing fiction had almost always been part of Dickens’s aspirations. In 1831 Dickens became a reporter in Parliament, but he was soon to begin more creative literary pursuits. He wrote articles for newspapers and magazines, many of which were compiled in Sketches by Boz in 1836. Due to the success of Boz, in the same year he began writing The Pickwick Papers, stories that were published monthly, as well as adapting a Boz sketch for the stage. His remarkable literary career followed. Many of his novels were published in serial form and provided a critical look at social ills. So popular was Dickens, first nicknamed “Boz” and later “The Inimitable,” that lines from some of his books—such as “It was the best of times and the worst of times”—would become embedded in popular culture.
After his manager, Arthur Smith, became ill in mid-1861 (he died a few months later), Dickens retained Smith’s associate, Thomas Headland, to handle his bookings, but Dickens wasn’t happy with the way Headlands conducted the business aspects of his readings and did not renew the contract. From March through June 1863, Dickens delivered a series of readings in London, his last for a few years. Dickens soon began work on a new novel, Our Mutual Friend, which was published in installments over a year and a half beginning in May 1864. During the first six months of 1865, a debilitating illness and an injury from a train accident took their toll on Dickens, now approaching his mid-fifties. But the author relished the adventure and excitement of traveling and performing before the public, and so, in early 1866, he signed with the efficiently run firm of Chappell to book his future reading tours.
Dickens developed a repertoire that eventually reached about sixteen pieces. Not all the items that Dickens prepared went over successfully, and those that did not he scrapped from his programs. Dickens even sometimes rehearsed pieces that he never actually read, such as Mrs. Lirriper’s Lodgings, Great Expectations, and The Haunted Man. As he embarked on a tour under his new theatrical manager, Dickens prepared new items including Doctor Marigold. Among the items he performed through the years as a professional reader included Sikes and Nancy (a dramatic episode from Oliver Twist), Nicholas Nickleby, Boots at the Holly-Tree Inn, Mr. Bob Sawyer’s Party, The Poor Traveller, and Mrs. Gamp.
This illustration of Dickens giving his last public reading ran in the Illustrated London News on March 19, 1870, four days after the acclaimed novelist read A Christmas Carol and the trial scene from Pickwick Papers at St. James's Hall in London.
Invitations to do public readings came from foreign countries with offers of extravagant fees. Dickens found that even language wasn’t an obstacle; in France many audience members didn’t understand English but seemed to relish his performances nonetheless.
Over the years invitations came to Dickens to speak in America, some for quite substantial amounts of money. He fielded these offers cautiously, especially in light of U.S. political turmoil in the 1850s and 1860s. In 1867 he finally sent his business manager to appraise firsthand his prospects for drawing crowds and making money in America. Dickens had actually visited America before, in 1842, during a trip that also included Canada. This journey had a political tone: he spoke out against slavery and an inadequate American copyright statute that resulted in many of his stories being illegally reproduced in the States.
With his manager reporting that he would be very well received in America, Dickens decided to go ahead and tour the country, despite the physical hardships he would have to endure. A farewell dinner was held in his honor in London on November 2, 1867, at which the attendees, who included many prominent people in the arts, saluted him emotionally, and a week later Dickens set sail for America. On November 19 he arrived in Boston, where almost two weeks later he delivered his first reading. Dickens’s reading tour took him to some seventeen cities in the East, including New York City, Washington, Buffalo, Rochester, Providence, and New Haven. The presence of Dickens in America excited many—his fame was so great now that even the ill feelings inflamed by his earlier visit were forgotten—and people turned out in droves not just to hear him read but to catch a glimpse of the world’s most popular novelist. Dickens’s last reading in the States took place on April 20, 1868.
Dickens wanted to retire from touring but felt the financial benefits from one last reading series would help secure his future. On October 6, 1868, the author commenced what was billed as his “Final Farewell Series of Readings.” His tour took him to numerous cities in England, as well as to Scotland. His readings encompassed many audience favorites, including, of course, the Carol.
As he commenced this series, Dickens was not just tired but afflicted with a variety of debilitating medical conditions. By February he literally could not stand on his feet, and his dates in Glasgow and Edinburgh had to be canceled. But he recuperated and continued his readings, despite serious physical impairments. In mid-April 1869 he lost all sensation in his left side while in Preston, and he notified his doctor, who rushed to see him from London. Dickens’s physician insisted the author return with him to London for further diagnosis; there doctors advised Dickens to cancel his readings for the next several months, which the author did reluctantly.
Within a few months Dickens had recovered sufficiently to obtain his physician’s permission to resume his readings. His theatrical managers had been so devoted to him that he felt compelled to read as a way of making up to them the engagements he had had to cancel. His doctor limited his engagements to London, and in July 1869 an announcement was made that the author would “resume and conclude his interrupted series of Farewell Readings.”
At St. James’s Hall on January 11, Dickens delivered the first of a handful of farewell readings; the last took place there on March 15. Dickens’s poor physical condition was well known at this time, and the public sadly realized that they might be seeing the celebrated novelist onstage for the last time.
For his last reading, he chose the two selections that constituted his most popular program, A Christmas Carol and The Trial from “Pickwick.” While not as vigorous as in past years, as always he rendered an excellent performance (a critic would note that he read his Carol “with marvellous pathos, and in the reading discriminates the characters with wonderful tact and evidently well-practised ability”). Dickens lamented that after many years—and by some estimates more than 450 performances—this would be his final reading, and he closed the evening with these words:
Ladies and Gentlemen,—It would be worse than idle, for it would be hypocritical and unfeeling, if I were to disguise that I close this episode of my life with feelings of very considerable pain. For some fifteen years, in this hall and in many kindred places, I have had the honour of presenting my own cherished ideas before you for recognition, and, in closely observing your reception of them, have enjoyed an amount of artistic delight and instruction which perhaps it is given to few men to know. In this task, and in every other I have undertaken as a faithful servant of the public, always imbued with a sense of duty to them, and always striving to do his best, I have been uniformly cheered by the readiest response, the most generous sympathy, and the most stimulating support. Nevertheless, I have thought it well at the full floodtide of your favour to retire upon those older associations between us which date from much further back than these, and henceforth to devote myself exclusively to the art that first brought us together. Ladies and Gentlemen, in but two short weeks from this time I hope that you may enter, in your own homes, on a new series of readings at which my assistance will be indispensable; but from these garish lights I vanish now for evermore, with one heartfelt, grateful, respectful, and affectionate farewell.
Those were Dickens’s last words onstage, though there might have been hope for more one day. The novelist was only fifty-eight and still vigorously embraced life, loving the interaction of his public readings, even if he over-exerted himself to the point where it impaired his health.
Still, the end came unexpectedly soon. On June 9, 1870, almost three months after his final reading, Charles Dickens passed away. Having grown up in need, he never seemed able to shake that insecurity, and the compulsion to work himself to the bone to ensure himself an income no doubt hastened his demise.
Though he was a very public person, people came to realize that they knew surprisingly little about the private Charles Dickens. A Christmas Carol, one of his favorite works to recite onstage—and certainly the most popular of his readings with the public—is a heartwarming and hopeful tale about the redemption of the human spirit and gives us a glimpse into the soul of this very private person. By the end of the story Scrooge has changed his stingy ways; performing many acts of kindness, he comes to understand the true spirit of Christmas. Carol concludes with Tiny Tim crying out the now-famous words, “God Bless Us, Every One!” The prompt-copy of this perennial classic reminds us that the earthly manifestation of divine blessing, for Dickens, lay in the sharing of one’s heart with others.
LOCATION: New York Public Library (Berg Collection), New York City.
*Meaning “beneath one’s dignity.”