play
by Sheridan Knowles.

When Christie died I was in Ireland, and on my return to London I
discovered that the whole collection had been sold to a butterman as
waste-paper at a farthing per pound. There was one literary relic,
however, of inestimable value; it consisted of an unpublished chapter
in _Our Mutual Friend_, in which the golden dustman was killed by Silas
Wegg. Dickens excised this chapter, had the type broken up, and all the
proofs, with the exception of this unique survival, were destroyed. I
am not ashamed to confess that when I got back to London and learned the
fate which had befallen my old friend's collection, I had a bitter
cry over it, which lasted me a good two hours. Christie was a very
accomplished man, and was on terms of friendly correspondence with most
writers of his time.

I think that first and last I heard Charles Dickens in everything he
read in public. What an amazing artist he was in this direction can be
realised only by those who heard him. A great actor is always a
legend. In these days he may leave something behind him by means of the
phonograph and science may yet contrive such an exhibition of facial
display and gesture as will enable those who come after us to appreciate
his greatness, but in a few years at the utmost, the last man who sat
spellbound under the magic of the Dickens personality will have vanished
from the face of the earth and nothing but a record will be left.

He depended, as I remember, in a most extraordinary degree upon the
temper of his audience. I have heard him read downright flatly and badly
to an unresponsive house, and I have seen him vivified and quickened to
the most extraordinary display of genius by an audience of the opposite
kind. The first occasion on which he ever read for his own profit was in
the old Broad Street Music Hall at Birmingham, which for many years now
has been known as the Prince of Wales' Theatre. There is so little that
is subtle about his work as a writer that it was surprising to find
what an illumination he sometimes cast over passages in his work.
For example, in his reading of the _Christmas Carol_, there was one
astonishing little episode where the ghost of Jacob Marley first
appears to Scrooge. "The dying fire leapt up as if it cried: I know
him--Marley's ghost." The unexpected wild vehemence and weirdness of it
were striking in the extreme. He peopled a whole stage sometimes in his
best hours, and his Sykes and Fagin,