Reading Aloud in Dickens’ Novels

Reading Aloud and Dickens’ Victorian England

Reading aloud has a long history. In their introduction to A History of Reading in the West, Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier state (1999:40): “In the ancient world, in the Middle Ages and as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the sort of reading implicit in many texts was oralized (as was their actual reading). The ‘readers’ of those texts were listeners attentive to a reading voice. The text, addressed to the ear as much as to the eye, played on forms and formulas that adapted writing to the demands of oral performance.” Though Dickens’ nineteenth century is a time period outside those discussed by Cavallo and Chartier, ample evidence shows that reading aloud continued into the Victorian period. For example, the habit of performing a literary text orally in a Victorian family is well documented. In Daily Life in Victorian England, Sally Mitchell presents us with a seemingly prototypical family scene (1996:234): “reading aloud was customary during an evening at home. . . . One person sat next to the only good lamp and read from a serialized novel or some other publication that would be interesting to both youngsters and adults.”

Reading aloud was also a common phenomenon in the public domain in Victorian England. Dickens, with his publishers Chapman and Hall, successfully distributed literary reading materials to people from different social strata by reducing the price of novels through serialization. In Victorian Novels in Serial, Jerry Don Vann gives sole credit to Dickens’ Pickwick Papers for broadening the Victorian readership (1985:2): it “greatly enlarged the reading audience, who . . . could not manage the price of a published volume but could afford the monthly installments.” Serialization and the lower price of reading materials admitted a larger readership. Some of the new readers would have assembled and read a shared copy of the most recent issue in open spaces. Since the literacy level of this crowd was still low before school attendance was made compulsory in 1870 by the Education Act, many people from lower classes would listen to recitals of texts instead of reading print themselves. Dickens’ readers who were from such social backgrounds might have read his work in this manner. Jeremy Hawthorn (1985:17) points out that “there have been cases of illiterate people gathering to hear novels read—part of Dickens’s audience was of this sort.”

Two types of readers were involved in reading scenarios like these: one who read aloud, and one who, though illiterate, was able to read with the ears rather than the eyes. Thus, as Cavallo and Chartier comment (1999:4), “the text, addressed to the ear as much as to the eye, played on forms and formulas that adapted writing to the demands of oral performance.” Despite Walter Benjamin’s lament in his essay “The Storyteller” that “the reader of a novel . . . is isolated” (1969:100) and Ian Watt’s (1957:200–01) thesis about the relation between the rise of individualism and novel-reading, the readers-aloud and the listener-readers were not reading solitarily and “jealously,” to use Benjamin’s term. Instead, they enjoyed a more communal experience.

Reading Aloud and Dickens’ Writing

The writing style of Dickens’ large body of work was influenced by the Victorian practice of reading aloud, an activity of the period that the writer himself indulged in both privately and publicly. Dickens was aware of the way his works were “orally consumed.” As Alan Shelston (1970:78) notes, he was “conscious that his installments were read, as they appeared, at family gatherings”; Donald Perkins also perceives that “the novels of Dickens are peculiarly fitted to be read aloud . . . . Dickens himself ultimately recognized this” (1982:25). In fact, during his farewell reading tour Dickens advertised his forthcoming new story, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, so that the listeners to his readings could “enter upon a new series of readings, in their own homes, at which his assistance would be indispensable” (Dexter 1932:253).

My argument is that in response to the pervasive family and social activity of reading aloud in the Victorian age, Dickens composed his novels...