One of the ‘big things’ in 2012 will assuredly be the bi-centenary of the birth of Charles John Huffam Dickens on 7 February 1812. Already two TV series are in the making and there will be more programmes on TV and Radio. It is a good time to be assessing your view of this great English writer and, perhaps, to read more of his works. This blog’s view is that one minute spent reading Dickens is worth more than an hour reading anyone else.
Those men who sidle up to you as you stand in front of a West End theatre and offer tickets at inflated prices: we call them ‘ticket touts’. In the USA today they are called ‘scalpers’. Charles Dickens, almost respectfully, called them ‘Speculators’ and in his comments he seems implicitly to acknowledge that for all the irritation these men caused him and his promoters, they also stoked up the ticket-buying frenzy that so characterised his successful tour of the USA in 1876/68.
It is hard to imagine how anyone could get wildly excited about the prospect of paying to see a man reading out loud from books. It doesn’t sound like the kind of show that is likely to generate great enthusiasm amongst audiences of today. Yet, on 19 November 1867 when Charles Dickens arrived in Boston, USA, there was to begin a most astonishing show business phenomenon, a series of performances that ended with the writer’s return to London in May of the following year some £20,000 richer - and with his official promoter plus several illegitimate American entrepreneurs doing pretty well out of it too.
Dickens did more than merely read out loud from his books. After the first three major tours of the British Isles, the first of which had started in 1858, his readings became performances that were finely honed to give maximum dramatic effect. He stood at his special lectern within a large frame that carried within it gaslights that illuminated him brilliantly while giving a chiaroscuro effect of bright highlights and deep shadows to his face. His voice, capable of a wide range of tones and accents, had a projection that enabled him to keep enthralled audiences of up to 2,500.
So effective was his reading, particularly while recounting the frightening Sikes and Nancy episodes from Oliver Twist, added towards the end of his life, that women would pass out in a dead faint and have to be carried out – often over the heads of the audiences - for fresh air. For this American tour he had memorised his material and so gave himself complete freedom to create his magic worlds before the fascinated gaze of his vast audiences.
Such was his fame that almost as he arrived in Boston the ticket touts (he called them ‘speculators) were ready to take advantage of the opportunity his presence presented. He wrote to his business associate, friend and biographer, John Forster:
We cannot beat the speculators in our tickets. We sell no more than six to any one person for the course of four readings; but these speculators, who sell at greatly increased prices and make large profits, will employ any number of men to buy. One of the chief of them – now living in this hotel, in order that he may move as we move! – can put 50 people in any place we go to ; and thus he gets 300 tickets into his own hands.
In January 1868, after commuting by rail from Boston to New York for six weeks, giving many performances in both cities, and in which time he had performed in front of 35,000 New Yorkers alone, the ‘speculators’ were beginning to cause serious problems. On 3 January he wrote:
We try to withhold the best seats from the speculators, but the unaccountable thing is that the great mass of the public buy of them (prefer it) and the rest of the public are injured if we have not got those very seats to sell them. We now have a travelling staff of six men, in spite of which Dolby (the American tour promoter) who is leaving me today to sell tickets in Philadelphia tomorrow morning, will no doubt get into a tempest of difficulties … The speculators buying the front seats the public won’t have the back seats; return their tickets; write and print volumes on the subject and deter others from coming.
Consolation came in the £3000 he sent back to England on 11 December 1867 and the £10,000 that followed it on 5 January 1868.
A little later he started performances in Brooklyn then, as he described it, a kind of sleeping place for New York where he performed in a chapel. He wrote, We let the seats pew by pew! The pulpit is taken down for my screen and gas! And I appear out of the vestry in canonical form! He showed remarkable vivacity for a man who was already suffering severe manifestations of the illness that would kill him within two and a half years.
The speculators continued their depredations; he wrote:
The sale of tickets there was an amazing scene. The noble army of speculators are now furnished (this is literally true, and I am quite serious) each man with a straw mattress, a little bag of bread and meat, two blankets, and a bottle of whisky. With this outfit they lie down in line on the pavement the whole of the night before the tickets are sold, generally taking up their position at about 10. It being severely cold at Brooklyn, they made an immense bonfire in the street – a narrow street of wooden houses – which the police turned out to extinguish. A general fight then took place from which the people farthest off in the line rushed bleeding when they saw any chance of ousting others nearer the door, put their mattresses in the spots so gained, and held on by the iron rails. At 8 in the morning Dolby appeared with the tickets in a portmanteau. He was immediately saluted with a roar of Halloa! Dolby! So Charley has let you have the carriage, has he, Dolby? How is he, Dolby? Don’t drop the tickets, Dolby!
Dickens finished the tour exhausted but favourable weather in the Atlantic enabled him to recuperate on the way home. When the accounts were complete Dickens saw that he had made £20,000 from the tour. Dolby had taken £2,888. How much the ‘speculators’ made no-one will ever know.
Our assumptions, judging by the above, are that Dickens’s performances were outstandingly good. Yet, the 32 year old Mark Twain, reviewing a performance in the Steinway Hall, New York in January 1868, thought otherwise. What follows is taken from David Perdue’s website on Charles Dickens.
I only heard him read once. It was in New York, last week. I had a seat about the middle of Steinway Hall, and that was rather further away from the speaker than was pleasant or profitable.
Promptly at 8 P.M., unannounced, and without waiting for any stamping or clapping of hands to call him out, a tall, "spry," (if I may say it,) thin-legged old gentleman, gotten up regardless of expense, especially as to shirt-front and diamonds, with a bright red flower in his button-hole, gray beard and moustache, bald head, and with side hair brushed fiercely and tempestuously forward, as if its owner were sweeping down before a gale of wind, the very Dickens came! He did not emerge upon the stage -- that is rather too deliberate a word -- he strode. He strode -- in the most English way and exhibiting the most English general style and appearance -- straight across the broad stage, heedless of everything, unconscious of everybody, turning neither to the right nor the left -- but striding eagerly straight ahead, as if he had seen a girl he knew turn the next corner. He brought up handsomely in the centre and faced the opera glasses. His pictures are hardly handsome, and he, like everybody else, is less handsome than his pictures. That fashion he has of brushing his hair and goatee so resolutely forward gives him a comical Scotch-terrier look about the face, which is rather heightened than otherwise by his portentous dignity and gravity. But that queer old head took on a sort of beauty, bye and bye, and a fascinating interest, as I thought of the wonderful mechanism within it, the complex but exquisitely adjusted machinery that could create men and women, and put the breath of life into them and alter all their ways and actions, elevate them, degrade them, murder them, marry them, conduct them through good and evil, through joy and sorrow, on their long march from the cradle to the grave, and never lose its godship over them, never make a mistake! I almost imagined I could see the wheels and pulleys work. This was Dickens -- Dickens. There was no question about that, and yet it was not right easy to realize it. Somehow this puissant god seemed to be only a man, after all. How the great do tumble from their high pedestals when we see them in common human flesh, and know that they eat pork and cabbage and act like other men.
Mr. Dickens had a table to put his book on, and on it he had also a tumbler, a fancy decanter and a small bouquet. Behind him he had a huge red screen -- a bulkhead -- a sounding-board, I took it to be -- and overhead in front was suspended a long board with reflecting lights attached to it, which threw down a glory upon the gentleman, after the fashion in use in the picture-galleries for bringing out the best effects of great paintings. Style! -- There is style about Dickens, and style about all his surroundings.
He read David Copperfield. He is a bad reader, in one sense -- because he does not enunciate his words sharply and distinctly -- he does not cut the syllables cleanly, and therefore many and many of them fell dead before they reached our part of the house. [I say "our" because I am proud to observe that there was a beautiful young lady with me -- a highly respectable young white woman.] I was a good deal disappointed in Mr. Dickens' reading -- I will go further and say, a great deal disappointed. The Herald and Tribune critics must have been carried away by their imaginations when they wrote their extravagant praises of it. Mr. Dickens' reading is rather monotonous, as a general thing; his voice is husky; his pathos is only the beautiful pathos of his language -- there is no heart, no feeling in it -- it is glittering frostwork; his rich humor cannot fail to tickle an audience into ecstasies save when he reads to himself. And what a bright, intelligent audience he had! He ought to have made them laugh, or cry, or shout, at his own good will or pleasure -- but he did not. They were very much tamer than they should have been.
He pronounced Steerforth "St'yaw-futh." This will suggest to you that he is a little Englishy in his speech. One does not notice it much, however. I took two or three notes on a card; by reference to them I find that Pegotty's anger when he learned the circumstance of Little Emly's disappearance, was "excellent acting -- full of spirit;" also, that Pegotty's account of his search for Emly was "bad;" and that Mrs. Micawber's inspired suggestions as to the negotiation of her husband's bills, was "good;" (I mean, of course, that the reading was;) and that Dora the child-wife, and the storm at Yarmouth, where Steerforth perished, were not as good as they might have been. Every passage Mr. D. read, with the exception of those I have noted, was rendered with a degree of ability far below what his reading reputation led us to expect. I have given "first impressions." Possibly if I could hear Mr. Dickens read a few more times I might find a different style of impressions taking possession of me. But not knowing anything about that, I cannot testify.
No doubt, the £20,000 provided Dickens with some consolation.
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