Reading Dickens aloud as Dickens did

Be careful what you say to publishers.

Our friends at The New York Public Library made the fortuitous mistake a few months ago of mentioning a treasure in their archives: the only known copy of A Christmas Carol that Charles Dickens had made for himself to hold when he performed on stage. It is known as the prompt copy.

We didn’t even know then what a prompt copy was (an annotated reading copy for the stage), or that Dickens had performed his books (big time, including a major U.S. tour in 1867). But that was all we needed to hear to know that publishing Mr. Dickens’s prompt copy was in order.

Common sense and several colleagues told us it would take to least another year to go through all the steps before we could publish such a prize. We cast all such sound advice aside.

 After all, Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in just a few short, fevered weeks—much as Robert Louis Stevenson did his Jekyll and Hyde. Surely Levenger Press could publish The Prompt Copy of A Christmas Carol for our customers, in time for Christmas 2009. After all, this is a year that cries out for some Tiny Tim-style cheer. And so we have.

One of The New York Public Library staff members who made it possible was Isaac Gewirtz. Isaac is the curator of the Library’s Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, which houses the Dickens treasures. He told me how Dickens had his prompt copy made so that he could cross out sections and write in the margins, including stage cues to himself.

Then Isaac showed me the book and offered to let me hold it. Out of reverence, I declined. But I took this picture of Isaac cradling this one-and-only book in his curatorial hands.

Isaac, who holds a Ph.D. in Renaissance History from Columbia University, wrote the marvelous introduction for our book. After we read it, we wanted still more. So we interviewed him with some questions we thought our customers might ask, too. Here are excerpts of our conversation.

Why is Dickens’s work as a performer so little known among readers, even many of his fans?

If much of the general public is not aware of his performances, it’s probably because they weren’t taught about it in school. For quite some time now (judging from the students I encounter), high schools have not taught history with much enthusiasm, much less tried to acquaint students with the historical context in which authors lived and wrote. Recent film adaptations of A Christmas Carol have had commercial success, as have Broadway productions. But, not surprisingly, television commercials for the films don’t talk about Dickens’s performances, and I don’t know if the promoters of the theater performances include statements about them in their playbills.  It might make no difference if they did. Most people, naturally, are more interested in how a work speaks to them than in how it spoke to previous generations.

One reason that Dickens’s performances might be ignored by those who could tell us about them is that they know we like to put each other in boxes, even (maybe especially) the famous. A writer is a writer, a musician a musician, etc., though literary history is filled with instances of great writers who also pursued other arts or sciences at a very high level. In regard to Dickens especially we should break this habit, since his performances teach us a great deal about his attitude toward his writings.

His performing was radical for its day, as you note. What would be the present-day equivalent?

It wasn’t his manner of performing that was radical, it was the fact of it. Dickens “became” his characters, people said, but so did other good actors of his day. In truth, we would probably find his and their style too histrionic.

Authors did not perform their works before the general public. I don’t know if we can conceive of a present-day equivalent simply because the breaking of boundaries is now an expected feature of the artistic persona. Dickens did not perform in order to shock, but to make money, though the adulation he received on these occasions became addictive, and no doubt helped motivate him as well.

Do you read aloud from the prompt copy?

I often use the prompt book in presentations to elementary, high school, undergraduate, and graduate classes, as well as to non-academic visitors to the Berg. I occasionally read passages aloud to show how Dickens changed the original text, although I wouldn’t call those readings performances.

Are there excised portions you wished he'd left in?

This is impossible to say, since he would sometimes read excised passages. The complicated sentences that he rewrote for performance probably remained in their simpler form, but I wouldn’t second-guess his judgment about what needed to be rewritten for the stage. He knew how to seduce an audience.

What is the major difference between performing and reading A Christmas Carol?

When we read any novel or short-story, our imagination is intimately manipulated by the images of the characters we meet; the scenes they walk through, whether in streets or fields; the rhythms of descriptive passages and of dialogue; and the tension and release of plot development and character revelation.

With a writer like Dickens, the narrative voice also becomes a character—perhaps the most important—in our imaginative consciousness. This means that if the work is to be performed for an audience that already knows it, the performer needs to speak in a voice that each audience member can accept as the one that they heard in their heads and have come to trust and love.

The dialogue of A Christmas Carol is probably less challenging for the performer; hearing Scrooge or Crachit speak in a voice somewhat different from the one we imagined is not an affront. But Dickens’s voice is that of an old friend. This means that the performer has somehow to embody the wisdom and compassion of our friend’s narrative voice so that we accept the new one as our own.

An audiobook recording of A Christmas Carol, which is already a short book, still takes about three hours. Dickens, through successive edits in his prompt copy and more than 100 public performances, cut his gem down to 85 minutes, including a five-minute intermission. This may make the prompt copy the most authorized of all book abridgements in history.

And it makes the resulting script, which we print in the book immediately following the facsimile, about as perfect a piece as we know to read aloud to others. Modern performers can read knowing they are in the hands of a master, and carrying on a great tradition in storytelling.

Please do let me know what your experiences are like if you perform A Christmas Carol—whether to one listener, or a thousand.

Also—is there a living author whom you’d like to see perform his or her work? Tell me about it. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments).

Comments

[Ada Roellke]

What a clever idea! I'll bet your sister would love to have this book.
Mom

[littlepitcher]

Back in Dickens' day, books were expensive, TV and radio nonexistent. Many of Dickens' books were issued in periodicals as serials, the same way Stephen King issued "The Green Mile".
Neighbors would gather in a private home or public building while the local schoolteacher or another person skilled in elocution would read the chapters aloud. Refreshments might be served, or the locale for the reading would be rotated among volunteers. Dickens and Twain readings formed a large part of the social and literary lives of small town residents of the 1800's.

[Kathy]

Robin Williams