Charles Dickens as a Reader

A great writer may fail to bring his own words to life: James Thomson’s listener was so provoked by his reading that he snatched the page away. Charles Dickens, Charles Kent argues, possessed the rare gift that could turn reading into performance.

Writing while Dickens’s contemporaries still remembered the sound of his voice and the glance of his eye, Kent examines the novelist not at his desk but before an audience. He traces the dramatic instinct that showed itself in Dickens’s home theatricals and later public readings, where voice, expression and gesture could make beloved characters seem present. What made Dickens succeed where so many celebrated authors faltered—and how did he bring his imagined people to life in the room?

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