\section{Drama and death}

Melodrama was the medium in which Dickens could come to terms with his audience through the contemporary theatre, as was farce and Shakespearian tragedy. It is no accidental part of his success that the novelist was constantly absorbed in some aspect of the theatre. Undoubtedly, he learned, not in a very conscious manner it is true, much from Shakespeare; with whom Dickens had this in common, that he was professionally committed to literature at the most obvious level, that he held something for all in an heterogeneous audience and that he worked towards large symbolic structures that could be `taken' as specific and mythical simultaneously. Thus, the boast that Dickens is a second Shakespeare is not just a wild hyperbole of evaluation; it is a quite exact parallel, descriptive rather than adulatory. Ben Jonson was his real love however; Jonson's grasp of the caricature of the humourous declares itself omnipresently in the pre-1850 Dickens. The novelist himself acted Ben Jonson, and composed, directed and acted farces (and romantic comedy) of his own composition and questionable merit. He was in fact fascinated by the theatre, the feel of a live audience, the arranged unreality in which illusion is created and lived, through grease-paint and foot-light. This throws much light on the personality of the novelist who in ``real'' life was irritable, rather ruthless, domineering and gloomy. Given any sort of an audience however he breathed and expanded in a radiance of mimicry, high spirits and almost hysterical hilarity. It serves also to explain why, when he was secure (at least, outwardly; for he never lost the deep compulsion with its roots in his childhood trauma which drove him to bolster himself more and more with a drive towards money-making financially and socially), and hence had lost something of his old sensitive intimacy with his readers, he was driven, so naturally, to the device of public readings. Through these he was enabled, during the last years of his life when composition had become agonizingly arduous, to achieve once again, in a new form, the exhilarating sense of the artist's power to control an audience, with the additional advantage of being able to see with his own eyes the physical effect. His readings were nearly all from the earlier novels and the Christmas stories---a striking example of their folk appeal. He read to audiences that ranged from the mechanics of Manchester to the leaders of fashionable society. Not the readings themselves, but the fascination Dickens found in them, lends them the effect of a last, portentously fascinating disease. We have on record Dickens's pulse-rate, and it soared alarmingly whenever he read. With his audience he acted out the hidden conflicts and compulsions of the age. The murder of Nancy in \textit{Oliver Twist} became a favourite piece, and Dickens noted, with morbid satisfaction, the number of women who fainted during performances. He was forbidden to give any more performances by his doctors but he pressed on with a kind of intense frenzy. When he did heed the warnings it was too late, the damage was done, and he died exhausted and paralysed. In a sense his audience, or rather his lover's passion for it, destroyed him; but not before his artist's passion had, beneath the guise of the performer, moulded it and recreated it, and, in the process, the imaginative landscape of Nineteenth Century England.