Author: Jessica Leigh Hester / Source: Atlas Obscura
Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, published in 1843, swiftly entered the holiday-season canon—the sort of story readers return to year after year, wherever there’s a crackling fire, a dusting of snow, and a mug of eggnog at hand.
But when Dickens gave public readings from the text, the story changed a bit from one performance to another. His marked-up stage copy of the book, on view at the New York Public Library, gives readers a peek into the writer’s mind as he reworked his spirited prose.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. He devised different voices and styles for each character, so Tiny Tim sounded nothing like Ebenezer Scrooge. 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.
People turned out in droves. “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. 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.
”The author received a warm reception in America, too. 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 Eagle predicted that, when Dickens made his way to…
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