tion, filling up a space in the crowded tableaux, always in the
background--were then at last brought to the fore in the course of these
Readings, and suddenly and for the first time assumed to themselves a
distinct importance and individuality. Take, for instance, the nameless
lodging-housekeeper's slavey, who assists at Bob Sawyer's party, and
who is described in the original work as "a dirty, slipshod girl, in
black cotton stockings, who might have passed for the neglected daughter
of a superannuated dustman in very reduced circumstances." No one had
ever realised the crass stupidity of that remarkable young person--dense
and impenetrable as a London fog--until her first introduction in these
Readings, with "Please, Mister Sawyer, Missis Raddle wants to speak
to _you!_"--the dull, dead-level of her voice ending in the last
monosyllable with a series of inflections almost amounting to a
chromatic passage. Mr. Justice Stareleigh, again!--nobody had ever
conceived the world of humorous suggestiveness underlying all the words
put into his mouth until the author's utterance of them came to the
readers of Pickwick with the surprise of a revelation. Jack Hopkins
in like manner--nobody, one might say, had ever dreamt of as he was in
Dickens's inimitably droll impersonation of him, until the lights and
shades of the finished picture were first of all brought out by the
Reading. Jack Hopkins!--with the short, sharp, quick articulation,
rather stiff in the neck, with a dryly comic look just under the
eyelids, with a scarcely expressible relish of his own for every detail
of that wonderful story of his about the "neckluss," an absolute and
implicit reliance upon Mr. Pickwick's gullibility, and an inborn and
ineradicable passion for chorusing.

As with the characters, so with the descriptions. One was life itself,
the other was not simply word-painting, but realisation. There was the
Great Storm at Yarmouth, for example, at the close of David Copperfield.
Listening to that Reading, the very portents of the coming tempest came
before us!--the flying clouds in wild and murky confusion, the moon
apparently plunging headlong among them, "as if, in a dread disturbance
of the laws of nature, she had lost her way and were frightened," the
wind rising "with an extraordinary great sound," the sweeping gusts of
rain coming before it "like showers of steel," and at last, down upon
the shore and by the surf among the turmoil of the blinding w