Dickens Unplugged

For years, Mark, my producer, had been saying to me that I should write a show about Charles Dickens. But, having been raised in California, I considered myself more of a ‘Mark Twain man’. I decided to test the waters by rereading David Copperfield. Within two chapters I was hooked.  David Copperfield was followed by A Christmas Carol, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, Pickwick Papers, and several biographies of Dickens’ life (which was actually even more colourful than his fiction).  Even as I write this, I’ve got Hard Times waiting on my bookshelf - and I’m halfway through Our Mutual Friend. In short, it would be fair to say that I’ve become a complete Charles Dickens devotee.

Dickens’ relationship with America goes back as far as there’s been a Dickens (and almost as far back as there’s been an America). Dickens himself travelled twice to the New World.  The first trip was somewhat unsatisfactory.  Dickens ruffled a few feathers with his comments about copyright law and slavery.  But on his second visit, late in his life, Dickens was greeted with a loving fervour similar to the reception John, Paul, George, and Ringo received 100 years later.

Bret Harte, the famous American writer of Westerns in the 19th century, wrote a poem called Dickens in Camp. It’s about a bunch of cowboys, at night on the lonesome prairie, gathered around the fire to listen to the youngest of them read the latest edition of The Old Curiosity Shop:

And then, while round them shadows gathered faster,
And as the firelight fell,
He read aloud the book wherein the Master
Had writ of "Little Nell."

Perhaps 'twas boyish fancy,--for the reader
Was youngest of them all,--
But, as he read, from clustering pine and cedar
A silence seemed to fall;

The fir-trees, gathering closer in the shadows,
Listened in every spray,
While the whole camp, with "Nell" on English meadows,
Wandered and lost their way.

Excerpt from DICKENS IN CAMP by Bret Harte

That image of a bunch of cowboys transported by the works of Charles Dickens is what this show is all about. I like to think that Dickens Unplugged is just another chapter in an ongoing transatlantic love affair.

Adam Long