CHARLES DICKENS AND HIS MANAGER GEORGE DOLBY

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1509, 31 January 1901, Page 13

CHARLES DICKENS AND HIS MANAGER GEORGE DOLBY

“Thirty years since Dickens died! It surely cannot be!” exclaimed a friend of ours the other day. Yet this is so; and now Doiby, too, has also passed, into the unknown. George Dolby, it will be remembered, accompanied Dickens as his manager in the famous American reading tour—a running which certainly cut the second turf in the early grave of the great novelist. The first sod was cut at Staplehurst on the 9th of June, 186-5, where he encountered the serious railway accident which, although he escaped apparently unhurt, gave him such a nerve shock that his friends averred he never fully recovered from it. Writing to a gentleman some time afterwards in reference to the accident, he said : —“This is not all in my own hand, as I am too much shaken to write; not by the 'beating or dragging of the carriages, but by the work afterwards getting out the dying and dead', which wa3 terrible.” His escape was marvellous, the carriage in which he travelled’ being the only one saved from the wreck. The accident took place on a bridge tnat spanned a stream, and this particular carriage was caught on the broken parapet of the bridge; and while hanging in this critical position, Dickens and two lady passengers who shared the compartment made their escape on a narrow wooden plank from the dangling carriage to a place of safety. This is graphically described by Dickens in a letter to a friend as follows: —“I was in the only carriage that did not go over into the stream. It was caught on the turn, by some of the ruin of the bridge, and hung suspended and balanced in an apparently impossible way. Looking down, I saw the bridge gone, and nothing below me, but the line of rail. 5 '

Strange, to say, Charles Dickens d.ed on the anniversary of the accident, live years later—June 9th, Dickens literally “let fall the pen” the day bet ore his death; he was busy at work upon a portion of “Edwin Drood,” a serial tale which was to have been completed in twelve parts, six only of which had been woven when the weaver had to drop the mystic shuttle. He was also engaged in his usual correspondence just before the fatal seizure. One letter written on. that day was strangely prophetic. “To-mor-row,” he wrote, “is a bad day for me to make a call. But X hope! I may be ready for you at three o’clock. If I can’t be, why, then I shan’t be.” In his comparatively short life, what a feast of entertainment Dickens gave to the world! He commenced to write at the age o ftwenty-two, and died at tne very early age of fifty-eight, so that in the space of thirty-six years the amount of work he accomplished could scarcely have been equalled, far less excelled, by anyone. Dickens certainly exhausted his strength in his public readings, and chiefly in his American “run.” During the latter he was suffering nearly the whole time from a severe cold, which the

“Yanks’ 5 called the real “American catarrh.”'. Dickens remarks of it—The people here call it so, and seem to take a national pride in it.” Dolby was Acting Manager, arranging the meetings, selling tickets, and seeing the audiences seated.

Pleasing these American crowds poor Dolby found a very difficult task. fi_ere was such a rush of people to hear sickens that the scenes presented at the * doors of the various meeting-places n U a to be seen to he believed. Speculators seated, or rather laid, themselves ac the hall doors hours before the specified; time for selling tickets. Dickens, describinb one of these scenes in Brooklyn, says : —“The sale of tickets there was an amazing scene. The noble army of speculators are now furnished (this is literally true, and I am quite serious’ each man, with a straw mattress, a little bag of bread and meat, two blankets, and a bottle of whisky. With this outfit they • lio down in line on. the pavement the whole night before the tickets are sold, generally taking up their position at about ten. It being severely cold in Brooklyn, they made an immense bonfire in the street—a narrow street of wooden houses—which the police turned out to extinguish. A general fight then took place, out of which the people farthest off in the line rushed 1 bleeding when mey saw a chance of displacing others near the door, and put their mattresses uown in those places, and then held on by tne» iron rails. At eight in the morning Dolby appeared with the tickets in fiis portmanteau. He was immediately saluted with a roar of —“Hulloa, Dolby!” “SoCharley has let you have the carriage, has he, Dolby?' ‘Hew is he, Dolby?’ ‘Look alive, Dolby!’ ‘Don’t drop the tickets, Dolby!’ etc., etc., etc., in the midst of which he proceeded to business, and concluded as usual in giving universal dissatisfaction. 5 '

The reason why Dolby gave dissatisfaction to the American crowds, Dickens explained, was because he sometimes sold four thousand tickets for a "place which could accumulate only two thousand people ; and also because he sometimes disposed of the whole of the first seat tickets to speculators, which led to much higher prices having to be paid for these by the public. As evincing the extraordinary interest taken in these readings, Dickens, in one of his letters from JNew York, says : —“Speculators went up and down at the door of the place where the readings were to take place, offering twenty dollars for anybody’s place. —e money was in no case accepted. One man sold two tickets for the second, third and fourth nights, for one ticket for the first night fifty dollars (about seven pounds ten shillings) and a ‘brandv cocktail, which is an iced bitter drink.” Dolby usually appeared after tfie sale of the tickets with a huge bundle like a sofa cushion, under his arm, which was composed of paper money.

Dickens could not undersatnd the American journalists. Some of them used the familiarity of styling liim “Charley.” yet when he met the writers, he found them ‘models of modesty and propriety.’* “No paper comes out without a leaner on Dolby,” avers Dickens in one of His letters, “who, of course, reads them all, and never can understand why I don’t.” Near the close of the campaign Dickens got quite knocked up, and in writing home to his sister-in-law paid Mr George Dolby a well-deserved meed of praise. “Dolby,” he wrote, “is as tender as a woman, and as watchful as a doctor. He never leaves me during the reading now, but sits at the side of the platform, ana keeps his eye upon me all the time.' - Dolby did not spare himself in the cause of Charles Dickens, and now he also has gone to his rest, after surviving his “chief’ (as ho always styled Dickens) for thirty years, years of sunshine and shadow, and the shadow rested heavily on poor Dolby at the last. He had £BOoO to his credit when he came back with Dickens from America, and yet he has died in a workhouse! —E. G. H.-, in “Ihe People’s Friend.”