![]() ![]() ![]() The Eagle predicted that, when Dickens made his way to New York City, “the great novelist will meet with a no less cordial but more sensible reception,” and would find the venues “none too large for the audiences his readings will draw.” Dickens spent that December “basically ping-ponging between New York and Boston,” Vega says. When he landed in Boston for a series of readings in fall 1867, the city was “in exstacies,” with 8,000 tickets sold, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported. The author received a warm reception in America, too. Attendees attempted to pack in even tighter, Dickens continued, asking for “chairs anywhere, in doorways, on my platform, in any sort of hole or corner.” “ Enthusiastic crowds have filled the halls to the roof each night, and hundreds have been turned away,” Dickens wrote to his friend John Forster about readings in Dublin in March 1867. Large crowds turned out for Dickens’s December 1867 readings in New York City. ![]() ![]() Writers of the period commonly traveled to give lectures, but “reading from your own work was new, and his degree of literary celebrity took it into the stratosphere,” says Carolyn Vega, curator at the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. He devised different voices and styles for each character, so Tiny Tim sounded nothing like Ebenezer Scrooge. Dickens intuited that his devoted public would get a kick out of listening to him read from the already beloved text, and he spent decades taking his A Christmas Carol act on the road. ![]()
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