Sotheby's Talks: Simon Callow and Kate Mosse on Charles Dickens

T his July, the legendary actor and Charles Dickens biographer Simon Callow joins renowned novelist Kate Mosse, and Sotheby's Head of Books and Manuscripts (Europe) David Goldthorpe, to explore Charles Dickens's theatrical and oratorical skills, as part of Sotheby's Talks: Book Week, a global series of panel discussions bringing literary history to life.

In the Books, Manuscripts and Music from Medieval to Modern auction in London, on 18 July, Sotheby's will present Dickens's autographed manuscript chapter outline, cut down from his semi-autobiographical novel, 'David Copperfield', pared down by the author to adapt the story into a reading of under two hours.

Dickens, that passionate amateur thespian and ultra-vivid orator, was known for his animated live readings. Audiences flocked to see him in Britain and abroad, compelled not only by his stories, but his performances, such as the ones he gave for 'David Copperfield'. This particular adaptation came to be Dickens's favourite public reading, despite being an especially demanding performance. In his edit, Dickens stripped back all extraneous material and focused on the action, with contemporaneous accounts from audiences capturing the extraordinary climactic narrative moments, such as the fatal storm at Yarmouth.

As part of the Sotheby's Talks: Book Week series, on 11 July, actor Simon Callow and novelist Kate Mosse will explore the themes found in 'David Copperfield', as well as delightfully digress towards all manner of Dickensia, in a talk that sees an actor and author paying homage to the man who alchemised the very best characteristics of both.

In this conversation, Sotheby's editor Arsalan Mohammad and Books Specialist Fenella Theis meet Mosse and Callow to discuss Dickens, theatre, the business of reading live and why Dickens still inspires and excites the imagination.

Arsalan Mohammad: Simon, what was it that initially drew you to Dickens? What caused the fascination that he has held for you, over the years?
Simon Callow: I fell in love with his books at quite an early age. I’d actually seen 'A Christmas Carol' when I was a little boy and it had scared the hell out of me. But then, I had chicken pox, and my dear old French grandmother came to look after me. I was fretting, as you do with chicken pox. She produced a copy of 'Pickwick Papers' - and I never scratched again after that! I was just completely in love with this Britain that Dickens had put on the page, these extraordinary larger than life figures, the crooked lawyers, scheming landladies and so on. Then once I leaped forward a bit, I went into Rep and one of the pieces I did was A Christmas Carol. Initially, I was playing Bob Cratchit, but then when the actor playing Scrooge fell ill, I took over that part.

So, that was the moment when you got inside his work, so to speak?
Simon Callow: Well, I’d been quietly reading the novels all this time, but the thing that transformed my experience was when I was asked by the BBC to do An Audience with Charles Dickens, which reconstructed the public readings. I had really known nothing about them before then, and they were just such a phenomenon. There is no other writer that I can think of who commanded the kind of audiences that Dickens did. There’d be two or three thousand people at his events, and he’d be giving these astonishing performances. The greatest actors of the day just said, thank God you’re not a professional actor, otherwise we would all be out of business!

And Dickens had been on the stage himself too, as a young man.
Simon Callow: Yes, he was an amateur player himself. He had an amateur company, who he drove fiercely and got the standard incredibly high - even Queen Victoria was a huge fan of his amateur acting. The basic premise of my book [Charles Dickens And The Great Theatre Of The World ] is that Dickens, as a writer, was essentially theatrical - his characters were naturally heightened in language and in physical life. Dickens’s contemporaries like George Eliot and even Thackeray, were rather sniffy about his lack of psychological depth. But what they seemed not to notice was, that he had given rise to immortal archetypes, which is a different approach altogether to writing. And his analysis of society was similarly on an epic scale, rather than a careful analysis of what was wrong. He characterised the failings of society in such a way that they would be unforgettable, rather than analytically precise.

Arsalan Mohammad: Kate, the hyper-language, the heightened characters - were these things that resonated with you from an early age?
Kate Mosse: No, not at all! I actually took a long time to fall in love with Dickens, partly because when I was very young, I was told that Miss Haversham - the epitome of the failed woman, who had been jilted, this old creature, with cobwebs all over her - was probably about forty. I remember being outraged by this! But then I fell in love with Dickens through his ghost stories, because I think he was quite an extraordinary writer of the supernatural. Obviously A Christmas Carol, which, as Simon says, changed everything for him, but also I would say, in stories like ‘The Signalman’, which is the most incredible ghost story.

I think the thing about Dickens that is so extraordinary, is that he continues to be a commentator of the world. The most recent winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Barbara Kingsolver, in her book, ‘Demon Copperhead’, retells ‘David Copperfield’, but set in the opioid crisis in America now. It follows the line of ‘David Copperfield’ precisely and this pertains to what we’re going to be talking about at Sotheby's on 11 July when we discuss this beautiful lot that is up for auction.

The reason that Barbara wrote the novel, is that she visited Dickens’s house and saw a manuscript on the desk and she put her hand towards it. And it was that sense of writers speaking to other writers, the idea that despite the context changing, history changing and what we expect changing, when it comes to the big emotions of life, our hearts are the same.

So, while all these things are very beguiling, the thing that finally made me read and fall in love with Dickens when I was old enough to understand more of it, was that he really wrote brilliant women. There are not that many great writers who can do everything. But his characters, his female characters are extraordinary because they feel like real women, not idealised Victorian ladies. Dickens put actual women, with all their flaws, on the page.

Simon Callow: The only thing he’s not great on is sex.

Kate Mosse: No, but you can’t have everything.

Simon Callow: Yes, but when people say, is Dickens a greater writer than Shakespeare, Dickens would have balked entirely at the idea - he idealised Shakespeare. But one of the reasons that Shakespeare was so wonderfully complete is that he seemed to embrace every aspect of human beings and there was a definite area where Dickens just didn’t really want to go. So, one small omission, but I wanted to point out that many of his ideal women spent most of their time weeping. It was an adorable thing to Dickens, a lovely sight, a woman weeping, what can be better!

Kate Mosse: Yes, that’s true. My favourite weeper in fiction, Simon, is the great adventure hero Rider Haggard’s, Alan Quartermain. When you re-read those novels, Quartermain spends at least half the time crying, saying I can’t do this, it’s all a disaster. So, he’s a wonderful anti-hero as well.

Fenella Theis: Speaking about Dickens’s emotional capacity, that segues neatly into ‘David Copperfield’, as a semi-autobiographical novel. This manuscript adds another layer to that, because this is him telling his story out loud. But he has priorities - keeping it exciting for the audience, making it a dramatic performance, rather than a novel. How do you think his autobiographical side feeds into this?
Simon Callow: One of the great things that this document will show is how entirely practical he was, because he absolutely knew that if he was reading for an audience, he had to make it different from the audience reading the book themselves. He would have thought, what do I need to do? He would cut ruthlessly. As he went on reading, he saw more and more opportunities to edit and to cut and to crystallize ideas. I mean he cut, for example 'A Christmas Carol', which was the first public reading he did. The first time he read it, he read the whole thing, it was three and a half hours, and it was so successful that he repeated it the next day.

Fenella Theis: Do you wish, Kate, that you could do that sometimes with your books, cut and edit when you give readings, change the endings, and switch things around, do you ever get that?
Kate Mosse: Funnily enough, I have done that. When we were reissuing my first trilogy, the ‘Languedoc Trilogy’ which is ‘Labyrinth’, ‘Sepulchre’, and ‘Citadel’, I said to my editors, I would like to edit ‘Sepulchre’ and ‘Citadel’, particularly ‘Citadel’. I was writing ‘Citadel’ while I was caring for my beloved dad, who was dying and all the grief was on the page and it shouldn’t have been there, the novel was too long, and all these things.

So, I decided that I was going to just rework it. This year, I’ve done for the first time, a one woman show based on one of my non-fiction books. And I am exactly the same, I cut things out that don’t work when you read them out loud, or that are too claggy for the audience to hear or have too many names, those kinds of things, Or equally, just when you’re reading, you have that sense of the momentum lagging, that you need to just move further forward, that the narrative line isn’t going to land quite as well.

I am quite ruthless with my own work as well, I have a reading copy of all my books which is not the same [as the published version] and sometimes readers say, you didn’t read this or that and I said, no I’ve cut those three paragraphs out because they don’t work when you read them out loud. It’s interesting, a few of us novelists, now, are starting to take to the boards. I’m a writer, I talk a lot about writing, but doing my one woman show, Warrior Queens, was me seeing if I could do a Dickens really, not in any way at the same level of course. But to see if I could stand on a stage for two hours, before and after an interval with props and stuff and hold an audience. I mean it’s a very compelling thing because of course most people didn’t read until relatively recently, a few hundred years, people did listen to stories. So, I think in a way, we’re coming back to the Dickens way of doing it, and being touched.