"An Evening with Charles Dickens" on the Nineteenth-Century Lecture Circuit

Abstract:Amongst recent critical interest in the study of Dickens's afterlives, one aspect of his posthumous "remediation" that has received relatively little attention is the work of those contemporaries who capitalized upon his celebrity on the lecture circuit after his death. This essay examines the platform performances of the American journalist, Kate Field, as they were reported in the pages of the nineteenth-century newspaper press. Field had attended virtually all of Dickens's public readings in Boston and New York, covering the tour for the New York Tribune in a series of extended reviews that became the basis for the lecture she developed following his death in 1870. Delivered many times in the United States and Britain, her lecture forms a revealing case study in the nineteenth-century mediation of celebrity.