onfusion in the carefully
prepared plans for one of the London series, again, had been caused by
an unexpected difficulty, at the last moment, in securing the great
Hall in Piccadilly, that having been previously engaged on the required
evenings for a series of musical entertainments. Hence the selection
for that season of the Hanover Square Rooms, which, at any rate for the
West-end public, could not but be preferable to that earliest scene
of the London Readings, St. Martin's Hall, Long Acre. Apart from
every other consideration, however, the Novelist's remembrance of the
confusions and disarrangements which had been incidental to his last
provincial tour, and to the last series of his London Readings, rather
disinclined him to hasten the date of his re-appearance in his character
as a public Reader. As it happened, besides, after the summer of 1863,
nearly two years elapsed, between the May of 1864 and the November
of 1865, during which he was in a manner precluded from seriously
entertaining any such project by the circumstance that the green numbers
of "Our Mutual Friend" were, all that while, in course of publication.
Even when that last of his longer serial stories had been completed, it
is doubtful whether he would have cared to take upon himself anew the
irksome stress and responsibility inseparable from one of those doubly
laborious undertakings--a lengthened series of Readings in London,
coupled with, or rather interwoven with, another extended tour through
the provinces.

As it fortunately happened, however, very soon after the completion
of "Our Mutual Friend," Charles Dickens had held out to him a double
inducement to undertake once more the duties devolving upon him in his
capacity as a Reader. The toil inseparable from the Readings themselves,
as well as the fatigue resulting inevitably from so much rapid
travelling hither and thither by railway during the period set apart for
their delivery, would still be his. But at the least, according to the
proposition now made to him, the Reader would be relieved from further
care as to the general supervision, and at any rate, from all sense
of responsibility in the revived project as a purely financial or
speculative undertaking. The Messrs. Chappell, of New Bond Street,
a firm skilled in the organizing of public entertainments of various
kinds, chiefly if not exclusively until then, entertainments of a
musical character, offered, in fact, in 1866 to assume to t