by Carlo DeVito
But in the end, the hurt little boy, except for a few insightful releases such as the one made to Forster, stayed safely locked in Charles Dickens’ heart. The little boy who walked about London, afraid, hungry, hurt, alone, and insecure, it turned out, had forever stayed in the little garret on Bayham Street.
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The Last Reading
“No one can imagine their own death, even when they know it is coming,” wrote literary historian Claire Tomalin of Dickens in 1870, when he was fifty-eight years old. “Dickens rejected and defied his illness with a spirit that would not flinch or budge. At the same time he sensed danger and set about putting order into his affairs—family matters, money, copyrights. His days were now packed with business meetings, readings, public and private . . . there were speeches to deliver, dinners and receptions . . . social obligations to insistent friends, to politicians and even to royalty. . . .”
As he had done throughout the rest of his speaking career, the book he performed most often was A Christmas Carol.
Without question, he had become a professional speaker. He usually included all the Christmas books in his vast repertoire, as well as selections from Dombey and Son, Nicholas Nickleby, The Pickwick Papers, Martin Chuzzlewit, and David Copperfield.
Dickens biographer Edgar Johnson wrote, “It was more than a reading; it was an extraordinary exhibition of acting . . . without a single prop or bit of costume, by changes of voice, by gesture, by vocal expression, Dickens peopled his stage with a throng of characters.”
“What creatures were those who, one by one— sometimes, it almost seemed, two or three of them together—appeared and disappeared upon the platform, at the Reader’s own good-will and pleasure!” remembered Charles Kent. On the other hand, as Kent explained, Dickens abbreviated the text for his readings. “The descriptive passages were cut out by wholesale. While the Christmas dinner at Scrooge’s Clerk’s, and the Christmas party at Scrooge’s Nephew’s, were left in almost in their entirety, the street-scenes and shop-window displays were obliterated altogether.”
“He tightened the narrative, wrote stage directions to himself in the margins, and tried to infuse as much humor as possible, leaving out passages of social criticism as inappropriate for evenings of entertainment,” wrote Dickens historian David Perdue. “Thomas Carlyle, author and friend of Dickens, after attending one of the readings, remarked that Dickens was like an entire theater company . . . under one hat.
“Dickens’ six-man entourage for these reading tours included his manager (Albert Smith, later George Dolby), a valet, a gas man, and a couple of others doing clerical work and odd jobs. The unique stage equipment included a reading desk, carpet, gas lights, and screens behind to help project his voice forward.”
After many discussions and many concerns, Dickens had agreed to take on a reading tour of America, from December 1867 to April 1868, which earned him £19,000—a huge sum. But the grueling pace of the schedule and the demands of the performances (and the attenuated social gatherings before and after) sapped his already dwindling strength and worsened his health considerably.
It was a young Mark Twain, who sat in the audience in January 1858, still a correspondent for the San Francisco Alta California, who filed a dispatch for that newspaper.
“I only heard him read once,” Twain wrote. “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.
“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.
“Henry Wadsworth Longfellow attended the Boston readings with his family that same year. He and Dickens remained friends from his first visit, and remained so. Longfellow’s daughter, Annie Allegra, attended the readings with her father and later recalled ‘How the audience loved best of all the Christmas Carol’ and how they laughed as Dickens fairly smacked his lips as there came the ‘smell like an eating house and a pastry cook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that,’ as Mrs. Cratchit bore in the Christmas pudding and how they nearly wept as Tiny Tim cried ‘God bless us every one!’ ” wrote Twain.
After his tour of America, Dickens pressed himself and, despite declining health, began a farewell tour of Britain in October 1868. Again, the tour was very lucrative and at the same time increased his popularity.
Dickens in performance.
In fact, his readings had caused a major sensation when he decided to work in a reading of the death of Nancy at the hands of Bill Sikes, from Oliver Twist. Sensational stories of women fainting filled the box-office receipts. At some readings, police were required to control the attending mobs.
According to Perdue, “This tour included a new addition, a very passionate and dramatic performance of the murder of Nancy from Oliver Twist. Many believe that [Dickens was affected by] the energy expended in this performance, which he insisted on including even as his health worsened. . . .”
The following year, on April 20, 1869, Dickens had to cut a provincial tour short after collapsing and showing symptoms of a mild stroke. When he had regained sufficient strength, he arranged, with medical approval, for a series of readings to partially make up to Chappell & Co. (the tour sponsors) what they had lost due to his illness. Twelve final performances were scheduled, running from January 11, 1870, to his last public reading at 8 p.m. on March 15, 1870.
This final reading was at St. James Hall in London that opened on March 25, 1858. It was designed by architect and artist Owen Jones who had also decorated the interior of the Crystal Palace. It was situated between the quadrant of Regent Street and Piccadilly, and Vine Street and George Court. There was a frontage on Regent Street, and another in Piccadilly. Taking the orchestra into account, the main hall had seating for slightly over 2,000 people. The immense hall was decorated in the Florentine style, with features imitating the great Moorish Palace of the Alhambra. The Piccadilly facade was given a Gothic design. Sir George Henschel recalled its “dear old, uncomfortable, long, narrow, green-upholstered benches (made of pale-green horse-hair) with the numbers of the seats tied over the straight backs with bright pink tape, like office files.” From a year after its opening, and for almost half a century thereafter, the St. James Hall was London’s principal concert hall.
St. James Hall.
Dickens had given, by some estimates, 444 readings around the world and had earned the then astonishing sum of £93,000. And it was no accident that the last readings he had given during the American tour were those of A Christmas Carol as well. “Dickens’ public readings were by far the most successful one-man show of the nineteenth century. . . . In the twelve years of the Readings Dickens had barnstormed across Britain and America being greeted by idolatrous audiences wherever he appeared, but the
Final Farewell Reading was the crowning triumph,” wrote Victorian chronicler Raymund Fitzsimons.
“It was an occasion of high emotion for reader and public,” wrote Tomalin. “Crowds were turned away at the door as an audience of 2,000 gathered inside, many paying only a shilling for a seat, and when he came on to the platform they rose to their feet to cheer him.”
In December 1869, compounding his foot problem, Dickens’ left hand was sporadically painful. And by midto late-January 1870 he had started wearing a sling, and all throughout February his hand was in constant pain.
Charles Dickens late in life.
Friends, such as London columnist Edmund Yates, could not understand how a man who had lent such time and support to science and education could mislead himself so badly about his condition. “Never did [a] man wishing to deceive himself carry out his object so thoroughly as Dickens. . . . What would he have thought, what would he have said, of any other man who could only read half the letters of the names over the shop-doors, who ‘found himself extremely giddy and extremely uncertain of the sense of touch, both in the left leg and the left hand and arm,’ and who ascribed those symptoms ‘to the effect of medicine’? With what caustic touches would he have described a man who, suffering under all those symptoms, and under many others equally significant, harassed, worn out, yet travels and reads and works until he falls dead on the roadside!”
Dickens’ doctor, Frank Beard, attributed many of Dickens’ maladies, especially his foot, to gout. Yet Dickens pressed on. Beard was so worried for Dickens’ health that he insisted Dickens’ son Charles be in the front row just in case his father collapsed or seized up, telling Charles, “I have had some steps put up the side of the platform. You must be there every night, and if you see your father falter in the least, you must run up and catch him and bring him off with me, or, by Heaven, he’ll die before them all.”
On many nights during that final run of readings, Dickens had to be helped back to his dressing room during the intermission, as his heart raced and his body failed. He would rest, prostrate, throughout the full allotted time.
Despite all this constant and rightful worry, Dickens went about his business. But even he knew it was the end of an era.
“The time had now come for him to prepare himself for his final reading, his last appearance before the public. Two days before, he gave a dinner for all those connected with the business side of the reading tours, and then, on March 15, he prepared for his final reading. He was suffering from a bad throat,” wrote Peter Ackroyd.
At 8 p.m. Dickens ascended the stage.
“The largest audience ever assembled in that immense building, the largest, as already intimated, that ever can be assembled there for purely Reading purposes, namely, when the orchestra and the upper end of the two side-galleries have necessarily to be barred or curtained off from the auditorium, were collected together there under the radiant pendants of the glittering ceiling, every available nook and corner, and all the ordinary gangways of the Great Hall being completely occupied,” remembered Charles Kent.
There were friends and family in the front row. Included in the throng was his little six-year-old granddaughter Mary Angela Dickens, whom he adoringly called “Mekitty,” there to hear her grandfather perform for the first time. She was frightened by the man who stood on stage, whom she called “Venerables” (all his grandchildren called him that), as he spoke in “unknown voices” and made scary faces.
There were huge crowds outside the two entrances to the theater on Regent Street and Piccadilly. He began the reading punctually at 8 p.m. by walking onto the stage with the book in hand. He seemed much agitated, as much by his other maladies as by his throat.
The crowd roared to life, cheering and rising to their feet. So great was the noise that Dickens stood there, behind his desk, smiling, unable to start until the loud ovation had subsided.
George Dolby, the stage manager, remembered Dickens’ “spare figure . . . faultlessly attired in evening dress, the gas-light streaming down upon him, illuminating every feature of his familiar flushed face. . . .”
After a brief greeting, he began, “Marley was dead. . . .”
“The different original characters introduced in his stories, when he read them, he did not simply describe, he impersonated: otherwise to put it, for whomsoever he spoke, he spoke in character,” remembered Charles Kent.
Dickens biographer Claire Tomalin described Dolby as “a big man, full of energy, optimism and know-how, and talkative, with a stammer he bravely disregarded. He was thirty-five, just married, a theatre manager out of work and keen to take on the running of Dickens’ . . . reading tour. He was sent by Chappell, the music publishers who were setting up the tour, and he won Dickens’ confidence at once, and quickly became a friend. . . . They laughed and joked together like boys, and enjoyed the small rituals of travel.”
Dolby wrote about Dickens’ performances, “The scenes in which appeared Tiny Tim (a special favorite with him) affected him and his audience alike, and it not infrequently happened that he was interrupted by loud sobs from the female portion of his audience (and occasionally, too, from men) who, perhaps, had experienced the inexpressible grief of losing a child. So artistically was this reading arranged, and so rapid was the transition from grave to gay, that his hearers had scarcely time to dry their eyes after weeping before they were enjoying the fun of Scrooge’s discovery of Christmas Day, and his conversation from his window with the boy in the court below. All these points told with wonderful effect, the irresistible manner of the reader enhancing a thousand times the subtle magic with which the Carol is written.”
“[T]he old delicacy was now again delightfully manifest, and a subdued tone, as well in the humorous as the serious portions, gave something to all the reading as of a quiet sadness of farewell. The charm of this was at its height when he shut the volume . . . and spoke in his own person,” Forster recalled. “He said that for fifteen years he had been reading his own books to audiences whose sensitive and kindly recognition of them had given him instruction and enjoyment in his art such as few men could have had; but that he nevertheless thought it well now to retire upon older associations, and in future to devote himself exclusively to the calling which had first made him known.”
There were a few mistakes: Dickens could not seem to pronounce Pickwick, saying instead Pickswick, Pecknicks, or Pickwicks. He finished the reading to great fanfare, and as he turned to exit the stage, the crowd called him back again, and again, begging for a final word.
“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 in my life with feelings of very considerable pain,” Dickens began. “For some fifteen years in this hall, and in many kindred places, I have had the honor 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 it is given to few men to know. In this task and in every other I have ever undertaken as a faithful servant of the public, always imbued with the 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 flood-tide of your favor, to retire upon those older associations between us, which date from much further back than these, thenceforth to devote myself exclusively to the art that first brought us together.”
He hesitated.
“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,” Dickens spoke haltingly yet with raw emotion, “but from these garish lights I vanish now for evermore, with a heartfelt, grateful, respectful, affectionate farewell.”
“The manly, cordial voice only faltered once at the very last,” wrote Charles Kent. “The mournful modulation of it in the utter
ance of the words, ‘From these garish lights I vanish now for evermore,’ lingers to this moment like a haunting melody in our remembrance.”
“When he ceased to speak,” wrote Henry Fielding Dickens, sixty years later, “a kind of sigh seemed to come from the audience, followed almost at once by such a storm of cheering as I have never seen equaled in my life. He was deeply touched that night, but infinitely sad and broken.”
Tears streamed down Dickens’ face as the applause continued without let up. Mekitty recalled years later how upset she was: “I count among the most distressful moments of my childish existence, the moment when ‘Venerables’ cried. There is an element of distress in my last picture, but there is a smile in it too. And I am always glad I have it—that I have that one impression of my grandfather in connection with the public that loved him, and loves him still.”
He tried something like a smile. He left, but the crowd insisted on another bow. He came back out and blew a giant kiss to the audience and left again for the final time.
“The brief hush of silence as he moved from the platform; and the prolonged tumult of sound that followed suddenly, stayed him, and again for another moment brought him back; will not be forgotten by any present,” concluded Forster.
Charles Dickens died on June 9, 1870. His funeral card read: “From these garish lights I vanish now for evermore.”
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A Christmas Wish