Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World, Simon Callow, 2012

His audiences would sob uncontrollably, laugh with abandon, and sometimes gawk in rapt wonder and all this after fighting for admission like rock star fans, lining up by the thousands long before daybreak.  Charles Dickens was not only the most celebrated writer and social activist of his era; he was a supreme actor, public reader, storyteller, and showman.  The iconic A Christmas Carolwas performed hundreds of times, along with memorable scenes from his novels and stories.  He wrote, co-wrote and acted in dramas and comedies and readings attended by the elite and poor and even the royalty and artists of Europe.  Queen Elizabeth told him of her adulation dating from her teenage years reading Oliver Twistand later, she was moved deeply by his acting in The Frozen Deep, a three-hankie melodrama.  In America, a late in life reading tour was mobbed, and Dickens was feted and nearly worshipped, and, at long last, forgiven for his snarky criticism from his first American tour in American Notes and in episodes in Martin Chuzzlewit.

Simon Callow, familiar to many as the actor who played Gareth in Four Weddings and a Funeral, wrote this biography which is focused on Dickens on the stage.  The furious life and frantic personality of Dickens was portrayed as a dominating presence in the theater that seemed to be the real center of Dickens’ life.  Actors and critics loved his performances, and many of his astounding characters, with names right out of morality plays, were portrayed, amended, and brought to life by Dickens himself.  Dickens, who put his entire outsized personality into his stage presence, believed in the power of performance and even dabbled in Mesmerism and magic and mysterious events like the portrayal of a self-combustion in Bleak House.  Like Mark Twain after him, he was equally loved for performance as for writing and even now, Dickens’ work is the stuff of hundreds of movies, plays, musicals, readings, by amateurs and professionals alike, including Simon Callow, who looks for all the world like Dickens himself.