Charles Dickens and His Performing Selves: Dickens and the Public Readings

Contemporary Review, Summer, 2007

Charles Dickens and His Performing Selves: Dickens and the Public Readings. Malcolm Andrews. Oxford University Press. [pounds sterling]40.00. xiv 331 pages. ISBN 0-19-927069-4. Dickens' rank as a mega-star was as much due to his readings as to his fiction and journalism. Indeed, one must remember Dickens the showman before one can get a full understanding of Dickens the writer.

All Victorian novelists assumed many readers would read aloud to others; Dickens' assumed his prose would not be so much read as performed and he performed them better than anyone else. This intriguing study seeks to 'grasp some sense of their [the performances'] drama through excavations and one or two tentative dramatic reconstructions'. It is based on surviving accounts, and on Dickens' reasons for taking up these 'readings' late in his career. Prof. Andrews gives us a superb account which does much to help our understanding of the phenomenon that was Charles Dickens. (T.A.L.)