The Public Readings

"Dickens had a long career as a public reader of his works: he was performing intermittently for over sixteen years, and (as his friend John Forster wrote) 'the world knew him in later life' by these Readings 'as much as by his books.' But, in the recent spate of books about him, little serious attention has been paid to this phase of his work. Now, at last, the texts of all 21 of his Readings are made available, half of them for the first time. They are printed from Dickens's own copies, almost all of which contain his textual emendations, underlinings, performance-signs, and marginal stage-directions. The edition sets out to establish an authentic text of these items, as finally revised by Dickens, and also to indicate how he devised and performed them. Evidence for this is drawn both from his own annotated copies, and from many contemporary accounts in newspapers, memoirs, letters, and studies, some of them hitherto unpublished." -- Book jacket.