Charles Dickens had three professional careers: novelist, journalist and public Reader. That third career has seldom been given the serious attention it deserved. For the last 12 years of his life he toured Britain and America giving 2-hour readings from his work to audiences of over two thousand. These readings were highly dramatic performances in which Dickens's great gift for mimicry enabled him to represent the looks and voices of his characters, to the point where audiences forgot they were watching Charles Dickens. His novels came alive on the platform: at the end of a reading, it...

How does Dickens make his readers laugh? What is the distinctive character of Dickensian humor? These are the questions explored in this book on a topic that has been strangely neglected in critical studies over the last half century. Dickens's friend and biographer John Forster declared that " Dickens's] leading quality was Humor."' At the end of Dickens's career he was acclaimed as "the greatest English Humorist since Shakespeare's time." In 1971 the critic Philip Collins surveyed recent decades of Dickens criticism and asked "from how many discussions of Dickens in the learned journals...