Murder in Oliver
Twist." The occasion, in point of fact, was a sort of experimental
rehearsal of the last and most daring of all these vividly dramatic
Readings by the popular Novelist.

Conscious himself that there was a certain amount of audacity in
his adventuring thus upon a delineation so really startling in its
character, he was not unnaturally desirous of testing its fitness for
representation before the public, first of all in the presence of
those who were probably the best qualified to pronounce a perfectly
dispassionate opinion. It certainly appeared somewhat dubious at the
first, that question as to the suitability for portrayal before mixed
assemblages, of one of the most powerfully tragic incidents ever
depicted by him in the whole range of his voluminous contributions
to imaginative literature. The passages selected to this end from his
famous story of Oliver Twist were those relating more particularly to
the Murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes. A ghastlier atrocity than that murder
could hardly be imagined. In the book itself, as will be remembered, the
crime is painted as with a brush dipped in blood rather than pigment.
The infamous deed is there described in language worthy of one of the
greatest realists in fictitious narrative. Henri de Balzac, even in
his more sanguinary imaginings, never showed a completer mastery of the
horrible.

Remembering all this, and feeling perfectly assured at the same time,
that the scene then about to be depicted by the Author in person, would
most certainly lose nothing of its terror in the representation, the
acknowledgment may here be made by the writer of these pages, that, on
entering the Hall that evening, he was in considerable doubt as to what
might be the result of the experiment. Compared with the size of the
enormous building, the group of those assembled appeared to be the
merest handful of an audience clustered together towards the front
immediately below the platform of the orchestra. Standing at the back
of this group, the writer recalls to mind, in regard to that evening,
a circumstance plainly enough indicating how fully his own unexpressed
uncertainty was akin to that of the Author-Reader himself. The
circumstance, namely, that Charles Dickens, immediately on entering the
hall, before taking his place at his reading-desk upon the platform,
came round, and after exchanging a few words with him, uttered this
earnest Aside,--"I want you to watch this particu