see [page 23]
Mr. Frith’s painting was exhibited in the Royal Academy in the spring of 1860, and afterwards included in the Forster Collection at South Kensington, where it now finds a worthy resting-place. Dickens wrote of this picture in a letter from Tavistock House, dated May 31st, 1859: “It has received every conceivable pains at Frith’s hands, and ought, on his account, to be good. It is a little too much (to my thinking) as if my next-door neighbour were my deadly foe, uninsured, and had just received tidings of his house being afire; otherwise very good.”
Charles Dickens giving a Reading, 1861
see [page 24]
Dickens gave his paid public Readings successively, with brief intervals, at four several periods—viz., in 1858-9, in 1861-3, in 1866-7, and in 1868-70.
“I must say [he wrote] that the intelligence and warmth of the audience are an immense sustainment, and one that always sets me up. Sometimes, before I go down to read (especially when it is in the day) I am so oppressed by having to do it that I feel perfectly unequal to the task. But the people lift me out of this directly, and I find that I have quite forgotten everything but them and the book, in a quarter of an hour.”
Charles Dickens in 1861. From a photograph by J. Watkins
see [page 37]
A full-face likeness of the novelist by Watkins has attained deservedly a large degree of popularity. The best remembered copy is a beautiful lithographic drawing by R. J. Lane which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1864. It is said to have been an especial favourite with Charles Lever.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR.