Flashback, April 1869: Stroke Halts Crowd-Pleasing Dickens Reading Tour

Only a writer of prodigious energy could have created 2,000 distinct characters in 15 novels and hundreds of short stories, and only someone deeply immersed in the theater could have consistently left audiences begging for more even as he delighted them. 

But, after a decade of mounting physical afflictions, even Charles Dickens discovered in late April 1869 that he had limits. His doctor told him that, following a mild stroke, he should cease the dramatic public readings that had fattened his wallet and heightened interest in his work. 

And so, in the northern industrial town of Preston on what was to have been the 74^th out of 100 readings on what was billed as his “farewell tour,” Dickens wearily but temporarily yielded to urgent medical advice and his own body’s even more unmistakable warnings.

In Dickens' Fur Coat and Charlotte's Unanswered Letters: The Rows and Romances of England's Great Victorian Novelists, literary historian Daniel Pool conveys why Dickens had made such a big splash with these readings: 

“Nowadays readings, even by a world-famous author, might not seem all that sexy, but in an era where there was no television, no radio, no movies, and no evening entertainment, readings could be a big deal, especially because middle-class people did not go to the theater as a rule. This was partly because the theater had been taken over by the lower classes and crude melodrama and partly because Evangelicalism disapproved of theater.”

As an actor himself, biographer Simon Callow, in a 2014 essay on the British Library Website, brought acute insight to how “Dickens’s novels, more than any that had preceded them, were uniquely suited to being performed out loud: they were almost like scripts, in the pungency and speakability of the dialogue, and in the vividness of the narrator’s voice.”

Dickens had begun lecturing on a pro-bono basis in 1853, but he didn’t think about making money off his readings for another three years, when he conceived of it as a way to pay for his dream house: Gad’s Hill in Chatham.

The sums Dickens made from his tours did more than serve as an ancillary source of income. They actually paid even better than his bestselling fiction. He needed the money not only to pay for his current family obligations (not just 10 children, but—unknown to his adoring public—a home for his twentysomething mistress, the former actress Ellen Ternan), and to ease the wounds that had fostered inside his spirit since his poverty-stricken childhood.

In one sense, it worked to perfection: not just through rapturous audiences (thousands were turned away at some readings), but in a way that boosted his “brand” in a way no contemporary—and perhaps no writer to follow—could approach.

There were those who worried about Dickens’ use of this expedient—notably longtime friend (and eventual biographer) John Forster, who argued unsuccessfully that these readings would lower the dignity of writing as a profession, after it had taken so long to achieve status. 

But Forster’s initial misgivings turned to alarm a decade later, as Dickens’ health problems multiplied.

America beckoned in December 1867, a quarter-century after a tour of the antebellum republic had left the novelist with not only a bad taste in the mouth but with enough material to fill a travel account and his longest novel, Martin Chuzzlewit. But in the post-Civil War era, the young nation was prepared to let bygones be bygones and pay Dickens handsomely. 

Even before this tour, the cost to Dickens was steep: “pains in foot, hand, heart and left eye, nervous seizures, sleeplessness, and… depression at the end of each tour,” according to Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens: A Life. The five-month trek through vast stretches of the country by train, in the coldest time of the year, made matters even worse. 

Yet no sooner had Dickens resolved to ease up than he had determined to hit the circuit gain. It’s hard not to see elements of addiction in this—the junkie’s exhaustion and regret over a failing body, followed by temptation and an exhilarating rush while engaging in the risky behavior. 

What particularly distressed Forster in late 1868, once he learned of Dickens’ plans for a provincial “farewell tour,” was the nature of the passages his friend had chosen. The novelist had long disdained merely reading the passages he had once readied for print. Instead now, for public consumption, he cut some sections, moved others, and memorized still more so that he could perform rather than read.

The more Dickens performed, the easier it became for him to figure out what audiences wanted—and high on that list was the malicious criminal Bill Sykes’ murder of his lover Nancy in Oliver Twist. In the decade since Dickens had taken to his public performances, English readers, spurred on by protege Wilkie Collins, had snapped up “sensation” thrillers filled with crime, drugs, and other nefarious doings. The reading of Nancy’s murder would sate a huge appetite for these elements.

The scene also involved gesticulating, shouting, crying, with Dickens assuming radically contrasting voices. In Clifton, a suburb of Bristol, about a dozen women fainted at one of his typically dramatic performances of the blood-curdling crime. 

Dickens’ delight took in the audience’s reaction to his performance of the murder is almost palpable in an early April letter to his friend, the American publisher James Fields: 

“I begin to doubt and fear on the subject of your having a horror of me after seeing the murder. I don't think a hand moved while I was doing it last night, or an eye looked away. And there was a fixed expression of horror of me, all over the theatre, which could not have been surpassed if I had been going to be hanged to that red velvet table. It is quite a new sensation to be execrated with that unanimity; and I hope it will remain so!”

Yet the impact on him of all this strenuous effort was startling. Even before he began a performance, he needed, per doctor’s orders, steps placed next to the platform and his son Charley nearby to catch him in case he fell. The most telling sign of his medical deterioration: a pulse rate that leaped from 72 on a non-show day to 124 after the performance. 

In the picturesque town of Chester, Dickens experienced a particularly bad night. “My weakness and deadness are all on the left side,” he wrote his sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth, “and if I don’t look at anything I try to touch with my left hand, I don’t know where it is.” The family physician and a consulting doctor examined him and gave the bad news: He had suffered a mild stroke and needed to cease touring.

Dickens did so, starting work on the type of novel Collins might have written, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. But the lure of money and adoring audiences—and, perhaps, guilt that he had disappointed fans who had not gotten to see him the last time—led him to give several last readings in early 1870, climaxing with one at St. James Hall in London in March.

Instead of Oliver Twist, the passages this time came from A Christmas Carol and the book that had made his reputation, The Pickwick Papers. His tour manager thought he had never read better. Before leaving, his self-promoting instinct came inevitably to the fore as he urged the audience to seek out the next installment of Drood. 

But his last words to the crowd—spoken less than three months before Dickens would finally succumb to a brain hemorrhage—already had the quality of a performer taking his parting career bow: "from these garish lights I vanish now forever more, with a heartfelt, grateful, affectionate farewell.”