On December 2, 1867 Charles Dickens gave the first reading of his
American tour. Like all but a few over the five months, the evening
was a sell-out, some having slept out overnight to beat a ticket line
almost a half-mile long. This first-night audience included all the
great and triple-named of the New England literary elite -- Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes,
James Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton -- though not all were
impressed. Emerson complained that the performance was too polished
for his taste, as Twain would say later that the New Year's Eve
reading he attended was but "glittering frostwork ...

Harold