The vicissitudes of Dickens’s visits to the United States are tracked in detail in Tomalin’s biography, suggesting a curious admixture of innocent authorly vanity, a shrewd desire to make as much money as possible, and what comes to seem to the reader a malignant, ever-metastasizing desire for self- destruction. Dickens’s delight in his large and uncritical audiences shifts by degrees to an addiction to public performing; like Mark Twain, he quickly came to see that public performance paid more than writing, and was much easier, at least in the short run. Dickens’s need for the immediate gratification of public performing is both tonic and masochistic; consumed by vanity, the celebrated writer is consuming his very self.
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