Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World. Simon Callow

to the plays the very young Dickens had written, adds:

      having himself unsuccessfully tried the drama, there is some excuse for his petulance towards its professors; but it is somewhat illiberal and ungrateful that, being indebted to the stage for so many of his best characters – Sam Weller from Beasley’s Boarding House, for instance – he should deny it a few in return.

      Beasley and his boarding house have disappeared from view, so it is impossible to know what debt the immortal Sam owed them for his existence, but in general terms Moncrieff was not wrong: Dickens owed a great deal to current theatrical conceptions in his creation of character. But he transformed those prototypes out of all recognition, giving them – as in the case of Sam Weller – immortality in exchange for the shallow, cardboard lives they had known before. In any event, despite Moncrieff’s hope that Dickens would indulge ‘in a little more generosity of feeling towards his humbler brethren of the quill’, there was no reply. Pirate adaptation was, after all, a very minor corner of his ever-expanding kingdom of art.

      He was increasingly stepping outside of the parameters of his art. Not content with fearlessly addressing, in his novels, the injustices of the day – especially those perpetrated against the young – he was starting to speak on the burning issues of his time in his own person. More and more, he sought the most direct possible contact with his readers, whom he took to be no less than the entire population of the British Isles; to them were soon added the rest of the English-speaking peoples. Not much later, his readership would encompass all of Europe, and beyond. Translation into German and French started in 1838: the same year some episodes of Pickwick were rendered into Russian. He was immediately embraced by that huge constituency as a uniquely vivid spokesman for the disadvantaged. His first public speech, to the Literary Fund Anniversary Dinner, did not concern itself with the woes of suffering mankind, however, but with the inequities of his own profession, on whose behalf he now publicly took up cudgels. Throughout his life as a writer, he strove to increase both the financial rewards and the status of his fellow professionals: self-respect was one of the cornerstones of his view of life, and he felt keenly the factors that militated against it. He campaigned tirelessly against the disadvantages under which writers laboured; he also felt deep compassion for those who, like Walter Scott, had fallen on hard times. His speech to the Fund was gracious and modest (‘the flattering encouragement he had received from his literary brethren had nerved him to future exertions, smoothed his path to the station he had gained, and animated his endeavour not to do other than justice to their kind praise’).

      Like every speech he ever made in his life, it was extempore, with no reference to notes. He very soon acquired the reputation of being the best public speaker of his time. He had taken pains to master the art, approaching it with scientific precision. On the morning of a day on which he was giving a speech, he once told Wilkie Collins, he would take a long walk during which he would establish the various headings to be dealt with. Then, in his mind’s eye, he would arrange them as on a cart wheel, with himself as the hub and each heading a spoke. As he dealt with a subject, the relevant imaginary spoke would drop out. When there were no more spokes, the speech was at an end. Close observers of Dickens noticed that while he was speaking he would make a quick action of the finger at the end of each topic, as if he were knocking the spoke away. When he listened to the speakers that preceded him, he could be seen following their words with an almost imperceptible action, as if he were taking them down in shorthand.