| The Mystery
of Ackroyd and Callow By Robert Giddings Reprinted with permission of the author ‘The Mystery of Charles Dickens’, by Peter Ackroyd, BBC Radio 4, BBC-4 Television, starring Simon Callow, together with a few words about ‘Dickens’, BBC-2’s three part dramatized documentary television series written and presented by Peter Ackroyd. “Those who produce the material follow, often grumblingly, innumerable requirements, rules of thumb, set patterns, and mechanisms of control which by necessity reduce to a minimum the range of any kind of artistic self-expression. The fact that most products of mass media are not produced by one individual but by collective collaboration…. is only one contributing factor to this generally prevailing condition. To study television shows in terms of the psychology of the authors would be tantamount to studying Ford cars in terms of the psychoanalysis of the late Mr Ford”. Theodor Adorno: ‘How to Look at Television’ in The Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television, Volume 8, number 3, 1954. Contents:
1.Spring Offensive 2002: Operation Boz (top) The Victorians’ sense of their cultural past was based on foundations laid by Sir Walter Scott, subsequently developed by such chroniclers as Thomas Babington Macaulay, (The History of England, four volumes, 1848-1855); James Anthony Froude (The History of England from the Fall of Cardinal Wolsey to the Spanish Armada, twelve volumes, 1856-1870)[1] and John Richard Green (A History of the English People, four volumes 1878-80). Macaulay crystallized and popularised the Whig version of British history that survived in pretty good shape well into the middle of the twentieth century[2]. This tradition was continued in the last century by Sir Winston Churchill[3] and Sir Arthur Bryant[4]. This kind of popular (if not populist) history book seems quietly to have faded away. Its place is now taken by the mass media – and television in particular – which produces an active breed of celebrity opinion leaders. As I write the news is circulating of the one million pound deal between the BBC and TV-friendly historian Simon Schama. [5] We already have a History Channel on satellite and cable TV, but UK History will commence transmission in October 2002. This is part of the British UK TV family, which includes UK Gold, UK Drama, UK Horizons, UK Food and UK Style. It’s a commercial joint enterprise involving the BBC and Flextech Television, a division of Telewest Communications. The new venture’s publicity deploys the ubiquitous Simon Schama. The UK threatens to be submerged by the weight of its own past. The BBC, as befits its status as a free standing publicly funded independent corporation, has proved particularly fruitful in creating pundits -– those authoritative experts from the Corporation’s faculty -- inescabables such as Alistair Cooke, Raj Persaud, Melvin Bragg, David Starkey, Richard Holmes, Mark Lawson and Simon Schama -- who regularly pontificate in those incontrovertible media tones. BBC Foreign Affairs Editor John Simpson’s confident announcement of his single-handed liberation of Kabul was wholly in keeping with this flipside of the Reithian Legacy. In the spring of 2002 the BBC launched a new multi-media phenomenon, and gave us the Definitive Dickens Man, Peter Ackroyd. The UK experienced something of a Dickens Blitzkrieg, which seemed to have been masterminded by Peter Ackroyd. It was a simultaneously co-ordinated assault on several fronts –– stage, radio, TV, the web, audiocassette, videocassette and general merchandize. I cannot recall such a campaign focused on a single writer before Operation Ackroyd/Dickens. The campaign and its implications are well worth pondering. From this blitz he will emerge an invincible Super Power, a sole and unassailable Dickensian Authority. The assault of Operation Boz came in two parts. First there was the one-man stage show, The Mystery of Charles Dickens, scripted by Peter Ackroyd, starring Simon Callow. This was adapted for radio and transmitted on BBC Radio Four and subsequently released on audiocassette. The stage version was then televised on BBC-4, the Corporation’s new arts and culture channel, in April 2002. This was then followed in May by a three part television drama-documentary series, Dickens, on BBC-2, hosted by Peter Ackroyd. The BBC published Ackroyd’s accompanying book, Dickens: Public Life and Private Passion. And, oh, I nearly forgot, there’s a BBC website devoted to this campaign.The reviewers’ favourable critical reception of Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Dickens in 1990 established his place in modern Dickens studies. But it hardly prepared us for this Dickens Crusade. This whole enterprise shows the extent of the Corporation’s metamorphosis from Reithian elitism to full engagement in the populist market, and cannot be viewed in isolation from the global market economy and Post Modern, Blairite Britain of which it is so characteristic a product. This exciting package and it antecedents deserves examining.2.The One Man Show Tradition (top)The one-man show has a lengthy and on the whole respected history, stretching back, I suggest, to the bardic tradition, represented in the storytellers of Britain and Gaul. Both Caesar (Conquest of Gaul VI:iii) and Lucan (Pharsalia I:449) give accounts of their performance and function as chroniclers, teachers and cultural priests. As far as modern show business is concerned, the tradition begins to revive in Regency salons, assembly rooms and lecture halls and continues through Victorian and Edwardian music hall to the legitimate theatre. It finds its modern counterpart in today’s festival events for cultural tourists and today’s media performances with their accompanying video, audio and educational merchandize. In the beginning the one-man show involved a literary celebrity -– Coleridge, Hazlitt, Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Mark Twain --publicly off-loading their thoughts on literary or cultural matters. The glimpses one gets from the reports of others makes one long to have seen them. These seemed to have been of a species now defunct -- literary men of highly creative imagination who could deliver the goods in the public arena. One would like to think that radio and television would have offered similar opportunities to modern sages, but this has happened in only a few cases. A few remaining exponents of the tradition may still be seen touring various literary festivals. The original performing sages were at one and the same time, poets (well, writers anyway) and performers. They gave a good show and they managed in themselves to combine culture and show business, the Bard as well as Barnum. After reading Hazlitt’s description of Coleridge, who wouldn’t love to have seen him? “The round faced man in black entered, and dissipated all doubts on the subject, by beginning to talk. He did not cease while he stayed; nor has he since, that I know of…..” Hazlitt opined in Lectures on English Poets 1818 that Coleridge’s genius seemed to have angelic wings, and fed on manna: “He talked on forever; and you wished him to talk on for ever. His thoughts did not seem to come with labour and effort; but as if borne on the gusts of genius, and as if the wings of his imagination lifted him off his feet. His voice rolled on the ear like the pealing organ, and its sound alone was the music of thought…” Some of them may have appeared before audiences as evangelists to spread the word, to share what they had seen or understood, to share their adventures among the literary masterpieces. Others were prompted by the urge to perform their own works in public. Mark Twain wrote to Andrew Land in 1890: “I have never tried even in one single little instance, to help cultivate the cultivated classes. I was not equipped for it, either by native gifts or training. And I never had any ambition in that direction, but always hunted for bigger gain – the masses. I have seldom deliberately tried to instruct them, but have done my best to entertain them”. With Dickens, however, we seem to reach the greatest exponent of the literary one-man showman. 3.Literary One-Man Shows (top) Dickens was the first celebrated man of letters to come before the public as a performer or interpreter of his own work. But the image of Dickens himself as a one-man performer made an extraordinary impact. Dickens had proved himself to be, in Thomas Carlyle’s phrase: “a whole tragic comic heroic theatre visible, performing under one hat”. Dickens’s performance was so magnificent that it was bound to provoke imitators, and they were not long in coming. The prototype was to produce considerable progeny. An important point about Dickens’s place in our culture helps explain the impact of his one-man readings and those of who followed in his wake. Dickens' fiction rapidly became part of traditional British popular culture. Dickens’s academic reputation was not really settled and resolved in British academic literary orthodoxy until Leavis's recantation in the late 1960's, but as far as the people were concerned, they took Boz into their hearts. He was inescapably associated with the British Christmas and his characters peopled popular culture. Men and women who had never dutifully read the novels would have no difficulty in recognizing Pickwick, Micawber, Oliver, Fagin, Uriah Heep, Squeers. If the sage was correct, and a classic was something everybody knew and nobody read, then Dickens's novels had been classics for generations. It is worth noting that within months of Martin Chuzzlewit's serialization Robert Peel was being caricatured as Mr. Pecksmith (who had immediately become the personification of hypocrisy) and the campaign in the press to satirize the hideous inadequacy of nursing support during the Crimean War starred Sarah Gamp. Further evidence of the enduring currency of these figures in our popular culture is the fact that "Characters from Boz" was a very popular series of Wills' cigarette cards during the Great War. Whoever followed Dickens could float on a tide of warm and affectionate approbation. Bransby Williams (Bransby Williams Pharez (1870-1961) was born the year Dickens died. He was the earliest one-man Dickens of major importance He became a star of the British music hall, but began his career on the legitimate stage. In 1896 he appeared at Shoreditch Music-Hall in an act, which featured imitations of the great actors of the day – Henry Irving, Beerbohm Tree and Charles Wyndham. At the height of his career he was a top line act, second only to Dan Leno (for whom he brilliantly deputized at the Tivoli). He was the great original one-man Dickens performer, pioneering the use of a repertoire of Dickens characters, performed using a replica of the novelist’s reading desk. He was in great demand and sometimes did several shows at different theatres, notoriously changing costume in the cab while in transit. In the main he drew on Pickwick Papers, Dombey and Son, A Tale of Two Cities and The Signalman. Grandfather Smallweed and Grandfather Trent were particularly admired, the latter causing audiences to shed tears. [6]He appeared on stage all over Britain, broadcast on radio and television, visited USA and made gramophone recordings. His career and the manner in which he finally discovered the rich vein to be exploited in Dickens's characters are very revealing. The various accounts which survive (including his autobiography published in 1954) suggest that early in his working life he was an all-purpose actor and mimic, making a living very largely from work with a provincial stock company, doing musical monologues, imitations of famous actors and characters from Shakespeare and Dickens. It is a fact that these characters were immediately recognized by his audiences, who clearly relished his impersonations. This tells us a great deal about Dickens enduring place in British culture. The fact is that Dickens had entered popular consciousness, and remained there, long, long before radio, film and television allegedly rendered the fictions accessible to a mass audience. Dickens’s national iconic status is recognized to the extent of his featuring on our Ten-Pound notes, but he’s been part of our currency for decades. A recent poll in The Guardian caused that national newspaper to assert that “nobody reads Dickens nowadays”. This would seem to confirm the truth of the adage that a classic is something everybody knows and nobody reads. In USA the opening up of travel and communication by the railroad network and development of ocean going shipping system encouraged the emergence of the traveling one-man lecture or performing tour. Mark Twain toured the world from the mid 1890s and recounted his adventures in Following the Equator 1897. Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) triumphantly toured performing his own works -– notably The Congo -– using that mixture of recitation and chant that he called “the higher vaudeville”. After the death of Bransby Williams, probably the most celebrated one-man showman was the British actor Charles Laughton, who in 1949 began giving brilliant performances of excerpts from the bible, Shakespeare, Dickens and in due course, Jack Kerouac. (Laughton, we shall see, was to prove an inspiration to Simon Callow). The torch of Bransby Williams was taken up by Emlyn Williams (1905-1987),the Welsh actor and playwright with an international reputation. He was a performer of vast range, including roles in Shaw, Shakespeare, Rattigan[7] before he began giving solo readings of Dickens at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith in 1951, and subsequently transferred to the Criterion Theatre, Piccadilly and the Duchess Theatre, off the Aldwych. He toured the world performing these readings, appearing to great acclaim in Boston and New York. Emlyn Williams set his mark on the Dickens act by appearing on stage as Dickens, bearded and in costume and using the essential prop of the replica of Dickens’s reading desk.[8] This poses an interesting and continuing problem in performance –- that of a solo performer in the role of Charles Dickens, performing Dickens the novelist, performing characters and scenes from Dickens’s fiction. His programme featured excerpts from The Pickwick Papers, Dombey and Son, A Tale of Two Cities, Our Mutual Friend and The Signalman. He also performed on radio and television. [9] The vatic, incantatory, romantic and moodily mystical mode of Dylan Thomas (1914-53) was ideal as performance art and the poet himself established a notable reputation as a one-man show. He died during a poetry reading tour in New York. In 1955 Thomas gave rise to another celebrated one-man show, A Boy Growing Up, in which fellow Welshman Emlyn Williams read excerpts from Thomas’s poetry. An interesting line of political biographical performance was developed by James Whitmore’s one-man Harry Truman show, “Give ‘Em Hell, Harry! “He also did an acclaimed Will Rogers show. Hal Holbrook was a great success on stage as Mark Twain, which became memorable as a celebrated television special. Shakespeare inevitably lent himself well to the solo performer. Sir John Gielgud’s performance of George Ryland’s anthology, Ages of Man, which he first performed at the Queen’s Theatre in 1959, was probably the most famous. He subsequently took this to the Edinburgh Festival, Dublin and toured the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Warsaw, Leningrad, Moscow, and Scandinavian countries. The celebrated Irish actor Micheal MacLiammoir[10] (1899-1978), founder of the Galway Theatre and the Dublin Gate Theatre and a vastly experienced actor, designer and dramatist[11], scored a major success in 1960 with his one-man Oscar Wilde show, called –- wait for it -- The Importance of Being Oscar (ho, ho). He followed this in 1963 in with his successful one-man show, I Must be Talking to My Friends. In 1965 he starred in another solo entertainment,Talking About Yeats. Another distinguished Irish actor, Max Adrian (1903-73), with considerable experience in classical roles at the Old Vic and with John Gielgud’s company at the Haymarket, Stratford and the Royal Shakespeare Company as well as in musical shows (Candide, New York) toured his one-man show on George Bernard Shaw in 1966 and on Gilbert and Sullivan 1969. In 1969 Roy Dotrice starred as John Aubrey in the one-man play Brief Lives at the Criterion theatre, London. This ran for four hundred performances and achieved the world record for the longest running solo performance. He subsequently toured England, Canada, USA, followed by a Broadway season, a world tour giving over 1,700 performances and an Australian tour in the mid Seventies. [12] He also did a well-received solo stage show as Abraham Lincoln in 1980 (London 1981). The Scottish actor John Cairney (born 1930) scored a success as Robert Louis Stevenson in The Reluctant Advocate, but then staged his immensely successful one-man Robert Burns show and starred in a television version, The Robert Burns Story 1969. Recordings of his readings and of Burns songs continue to be widely available. His identification with Robert Burns became so complete that Cairney is recorded as having said that he felt Burns had taken over his career. Miriam Margolyes performed Dickens’s Women at the Duke of York’s Theatre in 1991. This was broadcast on BBC Radio Four and subsequently released on audiocassette. It’s an interesting development in the solo reading performance, as Dickens’s Women was in effect a lecture on Dickens and women, and Dickens’s women in fiction, illustrated with performances of the evidence. A noted feature of her performance, which made the whole thing come to life and help the feminist thesis go down pleasantly, was her splendid rapport with the audience. This mixture of entertainment and polemic has proved influential. Fiona Shaw performed T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land, which was a triumph at literary festivals at Dublin and Brussels in 1995. One of the finest solo performers we have is Tom Conti, who famously took over from Peter O’Toole in Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell and is currently on tour in the one man show based on the life of John Barrymoore, One Helluva Life, which was written by William Luce. Even such a selective summary as this gives a good idea of the vigorous tradition of the literary solo performer, which has endured well into the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, it’s clear in scanning the tradition, that Dickens crops up repeatedly in offering the challenge in one-man showmanship. English academic, Professor Philip Collins earned an excellent reputation reading Boz in public.[13] In the USA, Kirk Witmer earned a solid reputation touring as Mr. Dickens, concentrating on performances in schools and colleges, mainly featuring a dramatic one-man performance of A Christmas Carol. Charles Dickens’s great- great-grandson, Gerald Charles Dickens does a show entitled “Mr Dickens is Coming!”. [14]He offers two one-man shows, more or less based on Dickens’s original readings. His appearance at the Landmark Center, St Paul, Minnesota, was part of the twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of Department 56, the St Paul-based company whose products include Victorian and Dickensian collectibles. He stood on a simply furnished stage, among the tea tables where the visitors have high tea before the show. He is not in role as Charles Dickens, but talks about Dickens’s life and writings and illustrates this with excerpts from the fiction. Apparently his audiences frequently ask him where Dickens lies in the 21st Century, and he answers: “Somewhere between Marlene Dietrich and Princess Diana”.[15] 4.Simon Callow in Peter Ackroyd’s ‘The Mystery of Charles Dickens’ (top) Simon Callow has seemingly been waiting in the wings some while to recreate Dickens’s public readings. He said in a speech at the end of this show at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, in October 2001, that he owed much to Micheal MacLiammoir, who had been the inspiration for his impersonation of Dickens. He had once worked briefly as the great Irishman’s dresser “and the experience changed his life”. It was MacLiammoir’s performance in The Importance of Being Oscar, which had inspired him to impersonate Dickens and he felt compelled to pay homage to the inspiration Micheal MacLiammoir had given him.[16] Callow first appeared as Dickens doing public readings on television on BBC-2 in December 1996. The BBC, possibly feeling the need today to proclaim its dedication to public broadcasting, seldom hesitates to trumpet its cultural hegemony. The Corporation did not hold back on this occasion, claiming on air that their Christmas television series of Dickens readings given in costume by Simon Callow was an "authentic recreation" of Charles Dickens's public readings. This is highly questionable. True, Callow looked the part, bearded and wearing the kind of clothes Dickens wore for the readings. We were assured that the corrected texts, as edited by Dickens for his readings, were used. The famous desk had been recreated. But these were all trimmings. The whole thing, replete with audience rigged out in Victorian oddments, resembled something between elaborate family charades and an edition of the BBC Television show ‘The Good Old Days’ [17]. But Simon Callow’s performance did not ring true. The voices were insufficiently differentiated and the delivery lacked convincing impersonation and commitment. One was always conscious that here was a clever actor, trying hard to sound like Dickens’s character. The magic, the fire, the contagious vivacity that all who witnessed Dickens read and whose testimony survives, was just not there. The Sikes and Nancy murder would have caused no one to faint, and his rendition of Pickwick scarce raised a laugh. Yet the evidence of contemporary audiences is that Dickens produced laughter, tears, shrieks, screams and hysterics. These televised readings did not fulfill his Dickensian ambitions. The urge to follow MacLiammoir continued to fire him on: “I did a show called ‘The Importance of Being Oscar’, about Oscar Wilde, which was written by a great Irish actor called Micheal MacLiammoir. He invented this idea of telling the life story of a great writer through becoming his characters and becoming him” he says in BBC publicity material: “It was such a pleasure and I thought we must find another writer…..the criterion was that the person was not only a wonderful writer but that his life should have been deeply interesting. When you look at English writers, Dickens is about the only person who fulfils these criteria. I thought ‘Who could possibly write this?’ Ackroyd came immediately to mind. I knew him a little bit socially, and I knew he was interested in writing for the theatre….” [18] The “acclaimed” show, The Mystery of Charles Dickens, made its name on stage, on tour as well as in London’s West End, before it was given its radio production on BBC Radio Four in April 2002 and later televised on the new BBC Culture and Media Channel, BBC-4. Simon Callow’s impersonation of nigh on fifty Dickens characters became a wonder of the age, and he is now touring the world with it. It has appeared at the Belasco Theater, New York. It’s already out on video and audio cassette, (with a ready education market). And it’s a hugely enjoyable and successful show. But it leaves some nagging thoughts behind. Unlike previous one man Dickens shows, this is not a performance anthology. It’s a scripted biography illustrated with excerpts of the fiction. And it has a case to argue. As he actually explains during his act, this genre, performed biography, was invented by his idol, the Irish actor, Micheal MacLiammoir. It works very hard to earn its “Mystery” – mainly with psychological explorations of the author’s life. Nevertheless, the real mystery is the obvious one -– the dazzling genius which moves millions. The basic assumption of the Ackroyd script is that the answer lies in Dickens’s psychology, including his sexual psychology. I have long found this avenue of enquiry fatuous. The dynamics of his family life, the horrors of Warren’s Blacking, lust for his young sister-in-law, love affair with a young actress and all that, may well explain the mess Dickens was in -- but this proffered farrago of psychobabble sheds little useful light on the enduring mystery -– why his fiction makes such an impact on us. Our admiration for the Iliad or the Odyssey would hardly be increased should the poet’s biography be discovered, would it? Does any of this heady cocktail of Freud and Edmund Wilson help us understand Dickens’s literary genius? The obsessions of this script may well tell us more about Ackroyd than it tells us about Dickens, but that’s another story. Dickens’s life and work is too vast a subject, with far too much material to be crammed into one show, however well condensed. But there were a few curious emphases and omissions. This reading of the biographical evidence offered little comment on the novelist’s relations with his mother, or his first love, Maria Beadnell. The script was rather unfair to Dickens’s father. There are serious distortions -- John Dickens was not released from the Marshalsea simply because he inherited a small legacy. He made an arrangement with his creditors and was released under the Insolvent Debtors Act. Charles was soon after removed from Warren’s and sent to school. This had not pleased Dickens’s mother. Aware how short they would be with Charles's wages gone, she was anxious things should be patched up and that Charles go back to Warren's shop. John Dickens wouldn't hear of it. John Dickens began to work as a reporter. He’d retired on a modest pension and begun a second career as a journalist. He learned shorthand and soon became a parliamentary reporter for the British Press and later worked for the Mirror of Parliament. In the meantime, Charles had left school and worked as a clerk in the law firm of Ellis and Blackmore, Gray’s Inn. Charles must have been encouraged by his father’s example, for he, too, learned Gurney’s shorthand, and soon obtained employment as a parliamentary reporter on the Mirror of Parliament. It seems to me that Dickens's father deserves a bit more credit for furthering his son's eventual career as a writer. His example must have encouraged Charles to go into journalism. Parliamentary reporting not only gave him personal insight into the behaviour at the Mother of Parliaments, but also required him to travel extensively in following election campaigns –- experiences he obvious drew upon when writing Pickwick Papers. In the script, however, the impression is certainly given that the main inspiration for Pickwick had been the experience of the Marshalsea Prison. (These curious biographical distortions are later rehearsed in Ackroyd’s equally acclaimed BBC-2 television series, Dickens and Dickens: Public Life and Private Passion, the BBC book published to accompany the series). Despite his off-the-peg psychology, Peter Ackroyd is mysteriously reluctant to undertake serious examination of Dickens's sex life. But Dickens had an adventurous and varied sex life from adolescence, during his infatuation with Maria Beadnell. When he moved from Tavistock Place to Gad's Hill in September 1860 he burned nearly all the letters from his friends. We’ll never know what evidence these letters contained, but from the hints which remain in what has survived, as well as some odd comments of his behaviour noted by others, a fair amount may be inferred. It seems Dickens had an adventurous and varied sex life that involved more than just going to the music halls, the theatres and spending convivial evenings with friends. He writes knowingly of the demi-monde in his fiction, and young females fall to preying males.[19] The earlier novels --Nicholas Nickleby, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield -- show that he’s familiar with the ways of the wicked world. He knows all about the customs and usages of the traffic in which young seamstresses supplemented their income, and when, where and how they could be picked up. Dickens is usually portrayed as an advocate of family values, loving marriage partnerships, sound morals, but all the evidence suggests that his days as a young man about town suggests far more than going to places of public entertainment. In a letter of 1841 to Daniel Maclise, he attempts to entice him on a trip to Margate. As a bait he offers the fact that: "...there are conveniences of all kinds at Margate (do you take me?) and I know where they live". Much evidence has surfaced in various biographical work that -- like Thackeray, and Wilkie Collins and the rest of them -- Dickens was a consistent sexual adventurer. John Forster, understandably, suppressed much. Dickens probably thought he’d covered his tracks in the Tavistock Place bonfire. His letters from Macready, Ainsworth, Forster, Maclise, Lytton, and many others, went up in smoke. (He asked his friends to destroy his letters to them, but fortunately not all of them obliged). His young children remembered having "roasted onions in the ashes of the great". Dickens himself said that he wished "every letter I had ever written was on that pile" but many of his letters survived, and some of them offer interesting evidence. Forster must have felt very sensitively as to Dickens’s relationship with Wilkie Collins, for he cut all references to Wilkie Collins in his Life of Dickens, and the omission may be significant -- Collins lived a vigorous sex life. He was personally rather proud of the fact that he’d been seduced in Italy at the age of thirteen -- by a married woman three times his age. This story he recounted with relish to Dickens. Collins and Dickens were frequent visitors to Paris after they became friends in the early 1850s. Here they savoured what Dickens called the "diableries" together. Dickens himself admitted to perpetual trips to France at this time. It was so easy to cross the Channel from this part of southern England. He spoke French well, although his accent was not perfect, he was voluble. Dickens had been fascinated by France and French life since his thirties, and often made the trip with bachelor friends. As he wrote to his Swiss friend, William de Cerjat, in October 1864: "....my being on the Dover line, and my being very fond of France, occasion me to cross the channel perpetually.....away I go by the mail-train, and turn up in Paris or anywhere else that suits my humour, next morning. So I come back as fresh as a daisy". These trips to France always did his neuralgia a power of good, he claimed. His accounts of these trips seldom seem convincing. It’s possible that he may have been visiting Ellen Ternan, or passing the time in other ways. In any case he described them as solitary, "tours of observation" or "visiting a sick friend" or going for "a quiet tour" or to "evaporate for a fortnight" or even "a Mysterious Disappearance". After Dickens had left his wife for the young actress, Ellen Ternan, Wilkie Collins frequently twitted him about his being "as chaste as Diana" while on reading tours, which pleasantries he denied. A few months after the novelist he’d burned the evidence he began writing Great Expectations, a masterpiece about guilt, memory and buried secrets. In The Mystery of Charles Dickens Peter Ackroyd mysteriously plays down Dickens's obsessive love for Ellen Ternan. She seemed to fill the gap left by the disappointing reunion with Maria Beadnell. (Though these matters get a fuller airing in his later Dickens documentary series for BBC-2). His treatment of Catherine Dickens was more vile than portrayed here. The animosity was quite startling. His alienation from Catherine certainly encouraged him to embark on public reading tours of his works. His treatment of Catherine alienated several of his literary friends. Kate Storey, who knew Dickens's daughter, recorded her recollections of her father's behaviour at this time: "My father was like a madman when my mother left home. This affair brought out all that was worst -- all that was weakest -- in him. He didn't care a damn what happened to any of us. Nothing could surpass the misery and unhappiness of our home". There was far more to the Ellen Ternan affair than The Mystery of Charles Dickens suggested. Ackroyd mysteriously asserts that there was no evidence that Charles and Ellen physically consummated their love. Witnesses recorded that Ellen Ternan accompanied him to Paris and they returned together. There has been some surmise that Ellen was actually living in France and that the novelist went to visit her. It has even been suggested that she secretly gave birth to his child. His son Charles said, "There was a child, but it died". (There is evidence of a second child born in 1867, which lived only a week). Ellen returned with him to England in June and was on the train to London with him at the terrible Staplehurst railway accident -- very well dealt with in the script. Dickens and Ellen continued their relationship. He took various addresses with her in Peckham and Slough. As the indefatigable Claire Tomalin convincingly suggests the novelist died in compromising circumstances in Nelly's company and his body secretly removed to Gad's Hill. But as a tour de force this is a tremendously exciting show. The range of material – from Sketches to last works is impressive. Callow’s command and range are indeed breath taking, if too readily barnstorming. Nevertheless, this is a far more exciting and committed performance than his previous venture in reading Dickens on BBC television 1999. However, the range of the selected material goes well beyond what Dickens himself ever actually performed in his own readings. From Nicholas Nickleby we get Vincent Crummles. We get the death of Little Nell from The Old Curiosity Shop -- and clunkingly, we get that cheap jibe from the immortal Oscar about having a heart of stone etc. The remarks about Ignorance and Want from A Christmas Carol which Dickens himself carefully excluded from his own readings are worked in. He does not do the storm with the death of Ham and Steeforth -– a Dickens tour de force. But we get a long section of Bleak House about the fog, which Dickens himself never featured. He uses Great Expectations as evidence of Dickens’s failed marriage to Catherine and additionally used a good sample of miscellaneous “characters”. We get Podsnappery from Our Mutual Friend, which Dickens never did at his readings, and we get the Sikes/Nancy murdrer. Callow works hard at the pathos and melodrama, but his comic characters just fail to ignite that irrepressible laughter. His mimicry and deployment of verbal mannerism are inexhaustible. Mrs Gamp was particularly memorable. It’s all hugely enjoyable – but the mystery of Charles Dickens remains. It’s only to expected, in Britain at the moment, with our craze for “authentic” performances of Baroque music, the Globe Theatre, the “Shakespeare Experience”, Civil War battle re-enactments and British television’s filling its schedules with documentary history programmes (replete with childish costumed recreations), that so much is claimed for the “authenticity” of this Simon Callow Dickens one-man show. Some developments in the one-man show are worth pondering to shed light on Peter Ackroyd’s The Mystery of Charles Dickens as performed by Simon Callow. Fortunately, quite a lot is known about Dickens’s readings. 5. “Authenticity” and Dickens’s Public Reading Tours (top) The celebrated reading tours, which Dickens embarked on towards the end of career, had a long gestation. It’s clear to me that he was mainly influence by his admiration for the great Charles Mathews (1776-1835), the greatest one-man show of the day. In his youth, Dickens spent his evenings at Vauxhall Gardens or various theatres. Mathews was among his favourite performers, who had been one of the best comic actors of the day, excelling in classic roles by Sheridan, Colman, Macklin and Shakespeare. It seems that Mathews grew tired of the limited roles offered to his talents in conventional dramas, and -– additionally handicapped by lameness -– developed his own idiosyncratic solo act. He came on stage as himself, not in a role, and narrated some spiel, which was constructed to involve travel and encounters with numerous different characters. This offered considerable opportunities to display his wide-ranging talents in recitations, songs, impersonations and mimicry. He used limited props and quick costume changes to appear as a dazzling array of varying personality types, all clearly labeled by verbal mannerisms. (This method of character becomes basic in Dickens’s fiction). His range of mimicry and caricature manifested itself early in his career. In 1817 he had appeared in The Actor of All Work, that George Colman wrote especially for him. Here a country manager interviews various actors for roles in his company. This gave Mathews the opportunity to play numerous characters. The results were astounding. Other sketches -- The Trip to Paris, Mr. Mathews and his Youthful Days, The Trip to America -- followed. Dickens was fascinated by Mathews's ability to assume one character after another, altering voice, stance, gesture, totally and wholly within a split second. He told John Forster: "I went to the theatre every night, with a very few exceptions, for at least three years....and going where there was the best acting; and always to see Mathews wherever he played".[20] The impact of Charles Mathews on Dickens was considerable, affecting the very nature of his fiction and undoubtedly influencing the way the novelist performed his works in the public readings. Critics have acknowledged the Mathews influence on the writing. Robert Garis opined: “The first impression, and a continuing one, in Dickens’s prose is of a voice manipulating language with pleasure and pride in its own skill…there is the constant and overt intention to dazzle us with verbal devices, leading us to applaud…..a self-exhibiting master of language…Dickens is a performing artist, displaying his verbal skills in familiar modes and in a theatre created by the insistent and self-delighting rhetoric of his voice”.[21] Dickens wanted to entertain the masses, of course, but he also to make as much money as possible. All the evidence strongly suggests he bountifully succeeded in both endeavours. John Forster recorded in his biography of Dickens: “…. in these days of lecturings and readings, a great deal of money might possibly be made (if it were not infraga dig) by having Readings of one’s own books. It would be an odd thing. I think it would take immensely”[22]. Charles Dickens was a natural actor. Schoolfellows attest his willingness to play the fool in class.[23] Evidence from his family confirm that creating characters, acting them out, perfecting expressions and voices, sometimes in front of a mirror, were often preliminary to written creation. From the beginning there was a very strong connection between the oral and the literary in his art. There is a good case for arguing that in embarking on his career as a reader of his own work was really not a change of career, but an extension, a development, of his art as a communicator. If you look back at the fiction, even in the earliest works, you can see that it is all really there. The actor Martin Jarvis, an admired performer of several Dickens’s roles -- Pip, Nicholas Nickleby, Uriah Heep –- described in the television documentary that all an actor required to recreate the tone and voice of the character was there on the page. The text gave you the stage directions and dialogue spoke itself. Using Uriah Heep as an example, he pointed out that Dickens actually wrote that Heep could not smile, only widen his mouth and extend the strong lines either side of his mouth. He then demonstrated that if you pulled your face into the expression that Dickens accords to Uriah Heep, the nasal, sneering, whine of Heep’s voice comes naturally. Professor Philip Collins, drawing on his experience of reading Dickens to audiences, commented that he empirically found evidence of this rhetorical quality in Dickens’s writing during his preparation for his public readings: “As a performer, I certainly became aware of felicities in rhythm, accuracy of pointing, which are, for anyone with a modicum of platform skill much easier to demonstrate in performance than to describe analytically”[24] Dickens’s eldest daughter Mary (“Mamie”) recorded in My Father as I Knew Him 1900 that the novelist told George Henry Lewes: “every word said by my characters was distinctly heard by me”. She has left this celebrated account of her observations of Dickens while he was writing. She was recovering from an illness and was resting in the room where he was working: “One of these mornings I was lying on the sofa endeavouring to keep perfectly quiet while my father wrote busily and rapidly at his desk, when he suddenly jumped up from his chair and rushed to a mirror which hung near, and in which I could see the reflection of some extraordinary facial contortions which he as making. He returned rapidly to his desk, wrote furiously for a few moments, and then went again to the mirror …. the facial pantomime was resumed, and then turning toward, but evidently not seeing me, he began talking in rapidly in a low voice…..he had not only lost sight of his surroundings, but had actually become in action, as in imagination, the creature of his pen”. [25] George Woolley, who was working as a gardener at Gad’s Hill while Dickens was composing Edwin Drood, confirmed Dickens’s lifelong method of writing. While about his tasks he could hear the novelist at work in the wooden chalet he used as his study. Woolley could hear Dickens clearly declaiming: “I wondered what it was at first, and then I found out it was Mr. Dickens composing his writing out loud”. As an infatuated adolescent, Dickens had determined to become an actor to impress his first ladylove, Maria Beadnell. To this end, he worked up several of Mathews’s routines (as well as other well-known roles), which he declaimed when he was out on his walks. He also took a series of lessons with Robert Keeley.[26] The theatrical and performing element is fundamental in Dickens’s art and – I believe -- was present from its very origins. When Dickens thought he was ready for the plunge, he wrote to Mathews and asked for an audition, describing himself as a natural mimic with "a strong perception of character and oddity". He was invited to audition before Mathews and Charles Kemble (one of the greatest actors of the day, with a range as wide as Garrick's).[27] However, on the day, Dickens had a very bad cold. He wrote to say he was unable to come but would make another appointment. It’s frequently said that with this cold potentially a very great actor was lost to the Victorian stage. He never lost his love of the theatre and acting, and became an impressive amateur actor and eventually a mesmerizing performer of his own works. It was in 1843 that Charles Dickens treated John Forster and friends to a reading of A Christmas Carol. A year later he treated them to The Chimes. This time the audience included William Charles Macready, the great Victorian tragedian. In January 1853 Dickens suggested he raised money for the Birmingham and Midland Literary and Scientific Institution with a public reading of A Christmas Carol: “It would take about two hours, with a pause of ten minutes half way through. There would be some novelty in the thing as I have never done it in public, though I have in private and (if I may say so) with a great effect on the hearers”. [28] He knew he could do it, and relished the excitement of feeling his power over an audience. He told his wife soon after The Chimes reading: “If you had seen Macready last night – undisguisedly sobbing and crying on the sofa as I read – you would have felt (as I did) what a thing it is to have power”. [29] The projected charity public reading of A Christmas Carol took place on 27 December 1853 before an audience of two thousand. He gave a few more charity readings and his fame as a spirited and entertaining public reader of his own works soon spread. Within a couple of years we find him writing to Forster from Folkstone: “…I am going to read for them here on the 5th of next month, and have answered in the last fortnight thirty applications to do the like all over England, Ireland and Scotland”. [30] He was now forty-six with a quarter of a century’s experience as a writer behind him. Although his reputation was now firmly established and the bread was returning on the waters -- by the mid 1850s he could anticipate an advance of some £6,000 on a new novel and he would be paid £1,000 for a short story – his expenses were considerable. If he embarked on professionally reading his work he would no longer have the irritation and stress of dealing with publishers. I don’t think he ever forgot or forgave the publishing industry in general and Chapman and Hall in particular for the disappointment of his earnings from A Christmas Carol – six thousand copies of the first edition had been sold on the day of publication. He’d been hard pressed for money and gleefully anticipated at least £1,000. But the first six thousand copies showed a profit of only £230. He had not the least doubt that Chapman and Hall had run the expenses up (plates, engraving, colouring, printing) purposely to increase the sum to be taken against the author’s payment. [31] Dickens realized that reading to public audiences would cut out the publishing middleman. And in 1858 he began professional reading tours of his own work. Although part of the embryonic one-man show tradition I have attempted to outline, what made Dickens’s performances special was that for the first time a famous writer, and public figure – one might almost say, a celebrity -- was appearing in public as a performer of his own works – and in the main, reading to a public that was familiar with his fiction. He was soon to learn that exhausting though these tours were, reading was a sure fire way of earning considerable sums. Dickens was to make an international reputation and a vast fortune as the greatest one-man show of the age. These readings, as any who witnessed would testify, were a vent for his deep and powerful feelings and passions, of his vast range from comedy to pathos. He gave several tours of British cities and the USA. The final reading took place in March 1870, only months before he died. The final series of readings included an item worked up from the murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist. He told John Forster: "I have made a short reading of the murder in 'Oliver Twist'. I cannot make up my mind, however, whether to do it or not. I have no doubt that I could petrify an audience by carrying out the notion I have of the way of rendering it. But whether the impression would not be so horrible as to keep them away another time, is what I cannot satisfy myself upon. What do you think?" [32] Forster was not impressed. He thought that it was too grisly for a public reading. Dickens's manager, George Dolby[33], was very taken with the idea, but thought that it would tax the novelist's health and energies too much. (It may well have shortened his life). It was decided to try it first on a small, select audience in London. On 17 November 1868 it was presented to a specially invited audience of about a hundred at the St James's Hall. They saw Sikes round on Nancy, they saw him rain blows down on her helpless body, they saw her bloodstained face upturned begging for mercy. They were overwhelmed. A physician among the audience told him: "My dear Dickens, you may rely upon it that if only one woman cries out when you murder the girl, there will be a contagion of hysteria all over this place". A well-known critic said that he thought the murder was the most amazing thing he had seen but that he had an almost irrepressible impulse to scream and if anyone had cried out, he, too would have followed. He began his twelve farewell readings at St James's Hall, London, on 11 January 1870. The Sikes and Nancy reading had now been worked up to a tremendous tour de force. Edmund Yates saw him read at St James' s Hall on 27 February 1870 and wrote this account in Tinsley's Magazine: "Gradually warming with excitement he flung aside his book and acted the scene of the murder, shrieked the terrified pleadings of the girl, growled the brutal savagery of the murderer, brought looks, tones, gestures simultaneously into play to illustrate his meaning, and there was not one of those who had known him best or who believed in him most, but was astonished at the power and versatility of his genius...It is here of course that the excitement of the audience is wrought up to its highest pitch, and that the acme of the actor's art is reached. The raised hands, the bent-back head, are good; but shut your eyes and the illusion is more complete. Then the cries for mercy, the 'Bill! dear Bill! for dear God's sake!' uttered in tones which the agony of fear prevails over the earnestness of the prayer, the dead, dull voice as hope departs, are intensely real. When the pleading ceases, you open your eyes in relief, in time to see the impersonation of the murderer seizing a heavy club and striking his victim to the ground". His final reading on 15 March 1870 was attended by over two thousand and thirty people, and three times that number were turned away at the doors of the hall. As he strode on the platform at 8 o'clock exactly, the entire audience rose as one and cheered him to the echo. His last reading was a triumph. He had chosen to end his career with excerpts from Carol and Pickwick. An eyewitness attests that ill though he might have been, at this last performance he was at the peak of abilities: "Not a point was lost. Every good thing told to the echo,that is through the echoing laughter. Scrooge, Fezziwig, the Fiddler, Topper, every one of the Cratchits, everybody in 'The Carol'.... were all welcomed in turn, as became them, with better than acclamations. It was the same exactly with 'The Trial from Pickwick' -- Justice Stareleigh, Serjeant Buzfuz, Mr Winkle, Mrs. Cluppins, Sam Weller, one after another appearing for a brief interval, and then disappearing forever, each of them a delightfully humorous -- one of them in particular, the Judge -- a simply incomparable impersonation". (Charles Kent: Charles Dickens as a Reader 1872) At the end of the reading the applause was deafening, everyone stood. He returned to the platform and suddenly a great silence fell. He said: "....It would be worse than idle -- for it would be hypocritical and unfeeling -- if I were to disguise that I close this episode in 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 your recognition; and, in closely observing your reception of them, have enjoyed an amount of artistic delight and instruction which, perhaps, is given to few men to know...." He told them that he had always been grateful for the warm support of his public, but it was best to retire at the full flood tide of their favour. But, referring to the serialization of Drood, he reminded them: "....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 forever more, with a heartfelt, grateful, respectful, and affectionate farewell". He left the stage to tumultuous applause. Tears poured down his face. At the end he was able to realize a lifelong ambition, to be a great performer. But he was also revealing what was basic in his method of composition -- acting his characters out in front of an audience as he was wont to do in front of a mirror at home, when he created them. Dickens characters are said to be caricatures: this is not quite right -- they are dramatic creations who find themselves in narrative prose fiction, larger than life, but no less true. These readings had their reward -- it has been estimated that in total he made some £45,000 from his reading career. The Sikes and Nancy reading was always successful, and audiences astounded. But the reward was achieved at personal cost. The impact on his health of the Sikes and Nancy murder is well documented. 6.Charles Dickens, Solo-Performer (top)Two aspects of Dickens’s performances as a reader of his own works need to be explored here. One concerns the actual repertoire, what did he select to read? And secondly, what was he actually like as a solo performer? We shall then be able to assess to what extent The Mystery of Charles Dickens might be accepted as an authentic recreation of is celebrated original. We have considerable evidence from which to build up a very reliable impression of Dickens’s readings, including good textual source material of the texts he used, eyewitness accounts of his performances and the evidence of friends and intimates. Professor Philip Collins assesses this evidence in the Introduction to his edition of Sikes and Nancy and Other Public Readings 1983,[34] to which this discussion is obviously indebted. Nearly all the novelist’s prompt copies have survived, with his own annotations and stage directions (“very strong”, “cheerful narrative” “tender” etc).[35] We have two fairly detailed personal accounts of Dickens as a performer of his own work, by Kate Field and Charles Kent.[36]W.M.Wright, a reporter, attended many of Dickens’s readings in America, with a volume of the texts of Dickens’s readings on his knee.[37] As he followed the performances, he wrote comments on gestures, vocal effects, mannerisms etc. in the margins. This is fascinating and important eyewitness evidence.[38] Rowland Hill, a Bedford journalist, has left his detailed account of Dickens’s performed readings of A Christmas Carol.[39] Various memoirs and biographies – of Charles Dickens junior, E.L.Blanchard, Percy Fitzgerald, Rudolph Chambers Lehmann -- contain fascinating insights into Dickens’s art as public performer of his own fiction[40]. Dickens’s manager for the tours, George Dolby, left a book full of interesting and useful details. [41] Several twentieth century scholars, notably Philip Collins, Walter Dexter and Raymund Fitzsimons, have used the evidence to some effect in assessing the novelist’s achievement as a reader.[42] David Ponting, who toured with his own acclaimed solo performance as Dylan Thomas in the 1970s, writing from his experience as a professional performer, shed some light on Dickens’s art in an essay published in 1983. [43] Thanks mainly to the indefatigable Professor Philip Collins, we have fairly detailed information as to the selection of excerpts the novelist elected to use, and the manner in which he adapted them as well as his annotations by way of stage directions.[44] Dickens used few properties for his readings. He used a portable stage rig which included desk, carpeting and –- very important this -– specially designed gas lighting. He had a specially designed reading desk, with a carafe of water and a glass. Obviously, Dickens appeared as himself. But this needs to be qualified. By the time he began these readings, he was one of the most famous men in the country, more often than not, recognized wherever he went. It’s scarcely stretching the point to say he was a “celebrity” in the modern sense of the term, but certainly a prototype of what we recognize by that term today. He was, then, a familiar figure. But over and above that, in the main, his audience would be familiar with his work. No introductions to any excerpts were needed. This state of affairs can no longer be taken for granted. It is attested that when Dickens mentioned a character – such as Sam Weller – just before beginning an excerpt, his audiences would burst into spontaneous applause, as if Sam himself were to appear in person before them. The style of his performances has been meticulously observed, and all witnesses attest to his natural and unhistrionic manner. He was not camp, affected or self-conscious. No Vincent Crummles he! On the contrary. Professor Collins notes that compared to the standard platform orators of the day, Dickens was restrained, dignified and natural performer. [45] A newspaper reporter in New York in 1867 noted: ”He carefully avoids making his dramatic faculty too prominent. He does not, except on very rare occasions, act thoroughly ‘out’; he suggests, and suggests very forcefully; but leaves to his hearers to supply what he does not feel it necessary to delineate…This is just what the very best reading – that is, reading and not acting – ought to be”.[46] Unlike most professional actors, he did not ignore his audience. He was consciously and deliberately aware of them and of their participation in making the event what it was -- personally joining in and sharing their laughter, fear or emotions. Many of the comments he made to Forster have been preserved in the biography. At Dover the audience wouldn’t let him go, but sat applauding like mad. He found a most delicate audience at Canterbury. At Dover:” the people in the stalls set the example of laughing, in the most curiously unreserved way; they laughed with such really cordial enjoyment, when Squeers read the boys’ letters that the contagion extended to me. For one couldn’t hear them without laughing too…” [47] He reported that the audiences at Newcastle were very fine, and very earnest: “…while they can laugh till they shake the roof, they have a very unusual sympathy with what is pathetic or passionate”. [48] Time and again, he notes how readily his audiences responded to the range he offered -– from the comedy of the trial Bardell versus Pickwick, and Bob Sawyer’s Party, to the pathos of Little Paul Dombey’s death and the sublime climax of the deaths of Ham and Steerforth in the storm sequence in David Copperfield and the terror in the murder of Nancy from Oliver Twist. With years of amateur theatricals at his disposal, Dickens performed as a character actor, assuming the shape, expression, mannerisms as well as voice of these various identities. The magnetic effect on his audience stands out, which he held almost as if enchanted. This is well evidenced from the very beginning of his public reading career. Another aspect of his "unworldly" psychologically supercharged or "otherworldly" qualities, I believe, is to be located in the apparently hypnotic effects of his public readings. Two things in particular stand out in Dickens's performances -- his strange, uncannily compulsive power over the audience wherever he read. They would laugh, cry, roll about in the aisles, hold their breath, scream with fright, literally at his bidding. And then there is his strange ability to assume character, to become in public view, in the space of a split second, another person -- he was Bill Sikes, Justice Stareleigh, Paul Dombey, Scrooge. And the audience believed they saw the very character, not Dickens "pretending" to be Scrooge, but that Scrooge stood before them. He himself was conscious of this power, commenting after a Christmas reading in 1853: "They lost nothing, misinterpreted nothing, followed everything closely, laughed and cried with the most delightful earnestness, and animated me to that extent that I felt as if we were all bodily going up into the clouds together". Everybody who went to these public readings noticed the extraordinary fixating qualities of his eyes. Some comments of Americans who witnessed his performances are preserved. They say his eyes were like "like exclamation points" which "mingled kindness and sharpness" with "a look of keen intelligence about the strong brow and eye -- the look of a man who has seen much and is wide awake to see more"; eyes "unlike anything before in our experience; there are no living eyes like them". [49] A certain Miss Cockran, who was determined not to be moved or "taken in" by Dickens's performances, found that in person he was absolutely irresistible: "He is a wonderful magician", she said. For some, however, the magic did not always work. Mark Twain attended one of his readings at the Steinway Hall in New York in April 1868. As always with the immortal Twain, he is very careful not to be “taken in” by anything or anybody (particularly by Europeans), and the observation is sharp, critical and misses nothing. Consequently, the details of this account are invaluable. Dickens was a “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”…. And the “fashion he has of brushing his hair and goatee so resolutely forward gives him as comical Scotch-terrier look about the face, which is rather heightened than otherwise by his portentous dignity and gravity”. Nevertheless, Twain pays full credit to the wonderful machinery of the mind that could “create men and women, and put the breath of life into them and alter all their ways and actions, elevate 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…” Twain provides useful details as to the stage apparatus: “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 large 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 picture-galleries for bringing out the best effects of great paintings. Style! There is a style about Dickens, and style about all his surroundings”. At the time that Twain saw him read, Dickens was tired and not in bad health, so some allowances must be made. But in Twain’s opinion, Dickens was 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…” He was a great deal disappointed in the readings, which he found rather monotonous and Dickens’s voice husky. He seems particularly to lament the mechanical, unfeeling manner of novelist’s performance. The pathos, he found, was “only the beautiful pathos of the language – there is no heart, no feeling in it – it is glittering frostwork; his rich humour 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 much tamer than they should have been”. Twain made a few comments as to pronunciation and general acting. I guess Dickens’s accent was slightly strange to him. He notes that Dickens pronounced Steerforth “St’yaw-futh” – which e found “a little Englishy”. But on the whole he does not comment much on the accent. The acting varied. Peggotty’s anger at learning of the disappearance of Em’ly was “excellent – full of spirit” but that his account of the search for her was “bad” and Mrs. Micawber’s inspired suggestions as to the negotiation of her husband’s bills was good and “Dora the child-wife, and the storm at Yarmouth, where Steerforth perished, were not as good as they might have been ”. His summing up is ungenerous -– every passage he read, with just the few exceptions already mentioned, “was rendered with a degree of ability far below what his reading reputation led us to expect”.[50] Twain’s comments must be understood in the light of the way Twain looked at the world and in particular his feelings as a an American -– and a Southwesterner -– in reaction to Dickens’s comments about America and Americans in Martin Chuzzlewit and American Notes. Twain’s comments on Dickens’s reading are very much in the manner of his comments on Europe and Europeans in Innocents Abroad.[51] Bearing in mind that very often his audience was to be numbered in thousands his abilities at communicating with vast numbers of people were considerable, even if Twain qualified his praise considerably. Forster believed that humour was Dickens’s leading quality, his highest faculty as a novelist, and that this quality was abundantly represented in his public readings. From this brief summary it is clear that Simon Callow’s realization in The Mystery of Charles Dickens bears little resemblance at all to the novelist’s performances. 7.What Did Dickens Read to the Public? (top) The texts Dickens selected to read in public were taken in the main from the early works, those published before David Copperfield 1849-50. The only exceptions were a few items from the later Christmas Stories published in All the Year Round, such as Boots at the Holly-Tree Inn and Doctor Marigold. This was very much in accord with contemporary taste. His earlier fiction was then held in higher regard than the later post Copperfield novels. Modern critical and academic influence has reversed this. The fashion now is to regard the early work as of interest mainly in terms of the long apprenticeship necessarily served in order more fully to realize his potential “greatness” as a novelist -- with Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend representing his greatest achievement. Dickens public readings certainly had their origins in his early attempts in reading A Christmas Carol and The Chimes to a small circle of friends. The repertoire he toured with contained such fiction as well as two excerpts from Pickwick Papers and one episode each from Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son and David Copperfield. Additionally, it should be noted, he tended to concentrate here on pathos and comedy, not on social comment. Significantly, in his public readings from A Christmas Carol he omitted the visions of Ignorance and Want. It is clear from the evidence that in cutting, editing, rewriting the material he used for his readings, and from the detailed accounts we have of his actual performances, that he continued to be creatively involved in his compositions right to the end. There was no final, definitive text of any of the excerpts Dickens selected for his various public readings. They were in a constant state of on-going revision. Whatever claims are made about the “authenticity” of the Simon Callow show, the material he “reads” bears but slight resemblance to what Dickens actually read. The first readings he gave, the Charity Readings in the mid 1850s, were taken from Christmas Books, A Christmas Carol and The Cricket on the Hearth. For his first paid public readings he added The Chimes to this selection. He cut and edited the texts to suit his purpose throughout the reading tours. His early readings of A Christmas Carol took three hours –- later this was severely cut as to be accommodated with other reading texts. In selecting texts it’s obvious that he was very much guided by the need for excerpts which needed no “curtain raising” introductions, and which had good closing lines. Eventually he settled for a selection including: Bardell versus Pickwick and Bob Sawyer’s Party from Pickwick Papers The Yorkshire School from Nicholas Nickleby A Christmas Carol Mrs. Gamp from Martin Chuzzlewit Little Paul |