ABSTRACT
Dickens’s work was never far distant from the idea o f performance. He was a lifelong amateur actor and, as is well known, in his later years a great public reader. His earliest writings were for the stage. He conceived novels themselves as a species o f performance art in which the characters were actors. As he put it in a well-known passage, ‘every good actor plays direct to every good author, and every writer of fiction, though he may not adopt the dramatic form, writes in effect for the stage’. In the early novels in particular the stage analogies are inescapable. Pickwick was modelled on the comic monologues o f Charles Mathews, the leading comedian of his youth. The capering, grimacing Quilp, (Dickens’s anarchic ego, some critic suggest) was a figure taken from pantomime; Ralph Nickleby, the wicked uncle, corresponds to the villains o f melodrama. Little Dorrit, the most restrained and complex of Dickens’s novels, is not less melodramatic than its predecesors, whether in the play of mystery, the build-up o f guilt, or the dialectic o f good and evil.1
