As the years went on Dickens wrote more and more books.  He started a magazine too, first called Household Words and later All the Year Round.  In this, some of his own works came out as well as the works of other writers.  It added greatly to his popularity and not a little to his wealth.  And as he became rich and famous, his boyish dream came true.  He bought the house of Gad’s Hill which had seemed so splendid and so far off in his childish eyes, and went to live there with his big family of growing boys and girls.

It was about this time, too, that Dickens found a new way of entertaining the world.  He not only wrote books but he himself read them to great audiences.  All his life Dickens had loved acting.  Indeed he very nearly became an actor before he found out his great powers of writing.  He many times took part in private theatricals, one of his favorite parts, you will like to know, being Captain Bobadil, in Jonson’s Every Man in his Humor.  And now all the actor in him delighted in the reading of his own works, so although many of his friends were very much against these readings, he went on with them.  And wherever he read in England, Scotland, Ireland, and America, crowds flocked to hear him.  Dickens swayed his audiences at will.  He made them laugh, and cry, and whether they cried they cheered and applauded him.  It was a triumph and an evidence of his power in which Dickens delighted and which he could not forego, although his friends thought it was beneath his dignity as an author.

But the strain and excitement were too much.  These readings broke down Dickens’s health and wore him out.  He was at last forced to give them up, but it was already too late.  A few months later he died suddenly one evening in June 1870 in his house at Gad’s Hill.  He was buried in Westminster, and although the funeral was very quiet and simple as he himself had wished, for two days after a constant stream of mourners came to place flowers upon his grave.

I have not given you a list of Dicken’s books because they are to be found in nearly every household.  You will soon be able to read them and learn to know the characters whose names have become household words.

Dickens was the novelist of the poor, the shabby genteel, and the lower middle class.  It has been said many times that in all his novels he never drew for us a single gentleman, and that is very nearly true.  But we need little regret that, for he has left us a rich array of characters we might never otherwise have known, such as perhaps no other man could have pictured for us.

BOOKS TO READ

Stories from Dickens, by J. W. M’Spadden.  The Children’s Dickens.

Chapter LXXXV TENNYSON—­THE POET OF FRIENDSHIP