DICKENS AND PERFORMANCE

Dickens as Captain Bobadil in Every Man In His Humour

Charles Dickens and Performance

During the late 1820s and early 1830s, as Dickens was trying to find his professional footing as a journalist, he discovered his passion for theatre. For several years he went nearly every day, joining acting clubs and aspiring to a theatrical career that never materialized. Dickens's attachment to theatre, however, deeply influenced his writing career and his later celebrity as a public performer of his novels. His early novels, especially Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop, and A Christmas Carol are all steeped in melodrama, and Oliver Twist and Carol, especially, have been adapted on stage and screen so many times that they have become dramas as much as novels.

"I believe I have a strong perception of character and oddity, and a natural power of reproducing in my own person what I have observed in others," Dickens told the stage manager at Covent Garden Theatre before an audition in 1832 (an audition he ended up skipping because of a cold).

Dickens as Playwright and Actor

In the midst of his ever-increasing authorial fame, Dickens never forgot his dream of being in the theatre. Over the course of his life he wrote or co-wrote seven plays: The Strange Gentleman, The Village Coquettes, Is She His Wife? or, Something Singular, The Lamplighter, Mr Nightingale’s Diary, The Frozen Deep, and No Thoroughfare.

As a playwright, however, Dickens had limited success. He made overture after desperate overture to his friend, the actor and producer William Macready: “Believe me that I only feel gratified and flattered by your inquiry after the farce, and that if I had as much time as I have inclination, I woud write on and on, farce and farce and comedy after comedy, until I wrote you something that would run” (1838).

But Macready never took the bait, nothing would please him, and Dickens tried to hide his growing discouragement: “Believe me that I have no other feeling of disappointment connected with this matter but that arising from the not having been able to be of some use to you. And trust me that if the opportunity should ever arrive, my arodour will only be increased—not damped—by the result of the experiment” (1838).

Certainly this disappointment must have been soothed somewhat by his growing success as an author. But his "ardour" for the stage did seem "undamped," and his dream persisted. To his good friend he wrote: "I walk up and down the street at the back of the theatre every night, and peep in at the green-room window, thinking of the time when “Dick-ens” will be called for by excited hundreds...to accept the congratulations of the audience and indulge them with the sight of the man who had got five hundred pounds in money, and it's impossible to say how much in laurels. Then I shall come forward and bow, once, twice, thrice - roars of approbation. Barvyo! brarvo! Hooray! hoorar! hooroar!.." (1848). Dickens signs this letter, "The Congreve of the 19th Century (which I mean to be called in the Sunday papers)."

The most well-known of Dickens's plays isn't even really his: The Frozen Deep, a terrible melodrama about a doomed arctic exploration, is a play originally written by Dickens's friend and fellow novelist Wilkie Collins, but substantially revised by Dickens. Performed in London across several months in 1857 with Dickens in the lead role, the play was lauded at the time for its "emotional intensity." But rather than catapulting Dickens into a new life as a playwright and actor, the primary consequence of Dickens's work on this play is that it introduced him to the 18-yr-old actress Ellen Ternan, with whom he commenced a secret affair that continued until his death in 1870.

Scene from The Frozen Deep, 1857

Here is a slice from Dickens's The Strange Gentlemen:

OBEN. Ah, Mr. Vendale, you look as if there was something the matter.

VENDALE. Yes, you come at a bad time, I am threatened with the loss of five hundred pounds

OBEN. Five hundred pounds (aside) Ah!

VENDALE. (At safe in wall, R.) Your own house is one of the parties in the affair.

OBEN. Indeed! (aside) The forged receipt. (aloud) Tell me how it has happened. (aside) I wonder where he has got the receipt? If he only takes it out of his safe--

VENDALE. Ah! (takes paper out of safe) Here is the forged receipt.

OBEN. (Up L., aside) He is alone. I am stronger than him. (about to cross to R.)

Enter JOEY, R.

JOEY. Did you call, Master George?

VENDALE. No! Joey, don't disturb me.

JOEY. I'lI keep the door open this time.

OBEN. (aside) Force is hopeless! I must try fraud!

Of Coquettes, Dickens wrote to the poet R.H. Horne, “...let the opera sink into its native obscurity. I did it in a fit of d______ble good nature, long ago, for Hullah [the composer], who wrote some very pretty music to it. I just down down for everybody what everybody at the St. James Theatre wanted to say best, and I have been sincerely repentant every since.”

As for The Strange Gentlemen, Dickens was later so embarrassed by it that he “devoutly wished it to be forgotten.” It was revived at the Charing Cross Theatre soon after Dickens death, but Dickens’s family asked that it be withdrawn, which it subsequently was.

Dickens's Public Readings

From 1853 until his death in 1870, Dickens regularly toured Britain and the US to perform dramatic public readings from his novels. He drew huge crowds to watch him read Carol, a section of Oliver Twist called "Sikes and Nancy," the death of Little Nell from Old Curiosity Shop, and several other popular excerpts. His early death at age 58 has been attributed in part to the physical exhaustion wrought by these demanding tours.

Across these 17 years, Dickens performed his public reading of Carol at least 127 times, working throughout this whole period from the same prompt copy of the novella that he used to abridge, edit, and re-imagine the novel into a dramatic performance. He turned to Carol and his other Christmas books (The Chimes (1844) and The Cricket on the Hearth (1845)) more often than any other texts for his public readings, both because they were easy to abridge to fit into a 2-hr performance and because many of Dickens's early readings were Charity Readings that took place around Christmas time. But they were also full of precisely the sentiment that Dickens relied on to create connection with and evoke feeling in his audiences. Although some critics griped at such "sentimental melodrama," scornfully calling it "precisely the pathos of the Adelphi Theatre," others suggested that Dickens's performances of Carol "avoid all imputation of maudlin sentimentality" as they "elicit the tears of his audience."

For Dickens, the relationship these public readings created between himself and his readership mattered more than anything, especially in the late 1850s as his marriage collapsed and he worried that his reputation was unraveling. As he wrote to his dear friend John Forster in 1858, lamenting that his marriage was "despairingly over," "Will you then try to think of this reading project (as I do) ... solely with a view to its effect on that particular relation (personally affectionate and like no other man's) which subsists between me and the public?"

Building and sustaining this public love became one of Dickens's primary aims in the last decade of his life, and these performances enabled him to experience the emotion and adulation of his fans in real time. The American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote that at Dickens's public readings one could "feel the universality of [Dickens's] fame," so immense that it was nearly impossible to "take in the whole truth" of it. Physically taxing though the reading tours were, they combined performance, sentiment, and affectionate connection between writer and audience, and so they were Dickens's joy. A mid-20th-century critic sums it up perfectly: "This was the true theatre for Dickens, the only one in which he could project his best character of all--himself; and for this theatre he was one of the greatest playwrights we have ever known."

(If you’re interested in Dickens and performance in his public readings, this is an excellent illustrated lecture)

Charles Dickens giving a reading in 1861 (photograph by Freddie and Young)

First page of Dickens's hand-annotated prompt copy of A Christmas Carol (New York Public Library)

Neil Gaiman, as Charles Dickens, reads A Christmas Carol from Dickens’s own annotated reading copy at the NY Public Library, 2013 (reading itself starts at 11:48): https://soundcloud.com/nypl/neil-gaiman-reads-a-christmas-carol#t=11:48)

The Pickwick Club, Moscow Art Theatre 1835

Poster for the first Carol adaptation, 1844

Scenes from A Christmas Carol at the Adelphi Theater, February 1844 (Illustrated London News, 17 Feb 1844)

Adapting Carol

That Dickens innately understood the mechanics of theatricality is evident in the scores of dramatic adaptations that have been made of his stories and novels, especially A Christmas Carol, which is one of the most adapted narratives of all time and includes countless plays, films, and television shows. Dramatists of Dickens's own time preyed on Dickensian techniques and characterizations as fast as Dickens could produce work; sometimes crediting the master, sometimes not, sometimes with his blessing, but more often produced without his permission and without a penny of compensation from the box office, all of which was quasi-legal under the dubious copyright laws of the era.

By February of 1844, merely three months after the publication of A Christmas Carol, eight theatrical adaptations of Carol were already running concurrently in London (only one with Dickens's blessing), and by April of that year adaptations were onstage at the Bristol Old Vic and theatres in several other English cities. One of the most popular sets of slides ever created for the magic lantern--a popular, pre-cinematic projection machine that allowed for spectacular shows of moving images--was of A Christmas Carol, and allowed the story to be accompanied by exciting visuals. A 1901 silent film version of Carol called Scrooge, or Marley's Ghost, is one of the first known film adaptations of a Dickens novel, meant to capitalize on the vast popularity of theatrical Carol adaptations throughout the nineteenth century.

As beloved as A Christmas Carol has become through its countless dramatic adaptations, each generation of adaptors has had to take on interesting challenges in giving the novella a life in performance. The story calls upon a complex web of Victorian-English cultural symbolism and religious iconography that does not transpose easily to newer sensibilities. Consider just the fantastic iconography surrounding the Spirit of Christmas’s torch, and the emaciated, demonic children, Want and Ignorance, that hide under his robes. How much of this can survive transposition, and how much of the story can live if these things are simply removed? The text was the child of another culture, another time, another set of expectations and values; but the play must be real and immediate, yet lose none of the flavor, and more importantly none of truth, of the original.

This problem has been approached by different adaptors in different ways. Scrooged, the 1980s film starring Bill Murray, solves the problem mainly by ignoring most of the cultural disparities and jumbling up the ones that provide startling images - shoving the demonic children into the robes of the wrong Spirit, for instance. The faithful Muppet version, however, tries the "gloss" approach, executing the images largely as Dickens wrote them, hoping the viewer will just accept them without question.

There is another dilemma of craft that arises from disparity between the structure of a short story and that of a play. A narrative can take on wild and exciting forms, unfettered by the restraints imposed upon a drama. Specifically, a narrative can defy time and space, enhance the minutest detail, and listen to a character's innermost thoughts. Theatre also has these powers, but a playwright usually has to employ the required theatrical devices with consummate skill to avoid subverting the drama and causing the audience to exit the theatre scratching their heads and thinking "next year we'll take the kids to The Nutcracker." As it is, fewer and fewer Americans even attend the theatre each year, and those that do, maintain a rigid set of expectations for the stage. As Tom Stoppard put it: "The audience knows what to expect, and that is all they are prepared to believe in."

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