Charles Dickens and His Performing Selves: Dickens and the Public Readings
Charles Dickens had three professional careers: novelist, journalist, and public reader. That third career has seldom been given the serious attention it deserved. For the last twelve years of his life he toured Britain and America giving two-hour readings from his work to audiences of over two thousand. These readings were highly dramatic performances in which Dickens's great gift for mimicry enabled him to represent the looks and voices of his characters, to the point where audiences forgot they were watching Charles Dickens. His novels came alive on the platform: at the end of a reading, it seemed to many that a whole society had broken up rather than that a solitary recitalist had concluded. This book tries to recreate, in greater detail than ever before, the sense of how those readings were performed and how they were received, how Dickens devised his stage set and tailored his books to make them into performance scripts, how he conducted his reading tours all around the country and developed a quite extraordinary rapport with his listeners. No single study of this late career of Dickens has drawn to such an extent on contemporary witnesses to the readings as well as tried to assess in depth the significance of what Dickens called this new expression of the meaning of my books'.
1119381931
About the Author:
Malcolm Andrews is Professor of Victorian and Visual Studies, School of English, University of Kent
Charles Dickens and His Performing Selves: Dickens and the Public Readings
Charles Dickens had three professional careers: novelist, journalist, and public reader. That third career has seldom been given the serious attention it deserved. For the last twelve years of his life he toured Britain and America giving two-hour readings from his work to audiences of over two thousand. These readings were highly dramatic performances in which Dickens's great gift for mimicry enabled him to represent the looks and voices of his characters, to the point where audiences forgot they were watching Charles Dickens. His novels came alive on the platform: at the end of a reading, it seemed to many that a whole society had broken up rather than that a solitary recitalist had concluded. This book tries to recreate, in greater detail than ever before, the sense of how those readings were performed and how they were received, how Dickens devised his stage set and tailored his books to make them into performance scripts, how he conducted his reading tours all around the country and developed a quite extraordinary rapport with his listeners. No single study of this late career of Dickens has drawn to such an extent on contemporary witnesses to the readings as well as tried to assess in depth the significance of what Dickens called this new expression of the meaning of my books'.
About the Author:
Malcolm Andrews is Professor of Victorian and Visual Studies, School of English, University of Kent
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Charles Dickens and His Performing Selves: Dickens and the Public Readings
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780199236206 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Oxford University Press, USA |
| Publication date: | 02/09/2008 |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Product dimensions: | 8.40(w) x 5.40(h) x 0.80(d) |
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