Dear Camy, Hello, Mark Dawidziak here, armed with more detail than you probably wish. As a member of both the Mark Twain Circle and the Dickens Fellowship, I've long been fascinated by the many parallels between the two authors. These points of comparison are the subject of a paper that I've delivered (from slightly different perspectives) at both an annual Fellowship gathering and at the last State of Mark Twain Studies gathering in Elmira. Much of what follows is lifted from that paper, but, hey, I'm stealing from myself. It should answer your question. Yes, for one night, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain were in the same building at the same time. Twain went to hear Dickens' 1867 reading at New York's Steinway Hall on New Year's Eve. Olivia Langdon had made the trip to New York City from Elmira with her family. Samuel Clemens was introduced to her by Charles Langdon, his friend from the 1867 Quaker City tour of Europe and the Holy Land./ /Twain met Livy and her parents at the St. Nicholas Hotel on December 27. Four days later, he accompanied the family to Steinway Hall. "The circumstances of the evening Sam Clemens spent with his future wife were appropriate," Twain biographer Justin Kaplan wrote in /Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain. /"This was the valedictory reading tour of a towering literary personality, a hero of the mass audience which would soon elevate the newcomer, Mark Twain, also a great public reader as well as an actor manqué, to an analogous height." "It is a curious coincidence," wrote Twain biographer Edward Wagenknecht, "that the two most successful writers of the nineteenth century -- the one beginning his career just as the other was ending it -- should, on that occasion, have been sheltered under the same roof." Dickens was suffering from a cold at the time, and exhaustion. He was driving himself hard, and his doctor soon forced him to give up the strain of the public reading tours. It is widely believed that overwork (including the reading tours) contributed mightily to Dickens death in 1870. Certainly, he looked much older than his 58 years at the time of his death. Twain left behind two accounts of the December 31^st reading by Dickens. The first was for San Francisco's /Alta California /newspaper, and it took issue with the "extravagant praises" bestowed on Dickens by such New York newspapers as the /Herald /and /Tribune. /Twain said that Dickens' voice seemed husky, and he criticized the monotony of his reading. He called the performance "glittering frostwork, with no heart." "Promptly at 8 p.m.," Twain wrote for the /Alta, /"a tall, 'spry' (if I may say it), thin-legged old gentleman, gotten up regardless of expense, especially as to shirt-front and diamonds, with a bright red flower in his buttonhole, gray beard and mustache, bald head with side hair and beard brushed fiercely and tempestuously forward, as if its owner were sweeping down before a gale of wind, the very Dickens came!" He strode to his famous reading desk "in the most English way and exhibiting the most English general style and appearance. . . heedless of everything. . . as if he had seen a girl he knew turn the next corner." Indeed, the early tone of the review seems quite reverent: "But that queer old head took on a sort of beauty bye and bye, and a fascinating interest, as I thought of the wonderful mechanism within it, the complex but exquisitely adjusted machinery that could create men and women, and put the breath of life into them and alter all their ways and actions, elevate them, degrade them, murder them, marry them, conduct them through good and evil, through joy and sorrow, on their long march from the cradle to the grave, and never lose its godship over them, never make a mistake." From here, though, the tone changes, as Twain professes himself disappointed in the readings from /David Copperfield. /"He professed to be disturbed, too, by the reader's seeming inability to enliven his pathetic passages with genuine emotion," Howard Baetzhold wrote, "a fault which made the 'beautiful pathos of his language' seem mere 'glittering frostwork.' More specifically, he found Dickens 'a little Englishy in his speech"; the rendition of Peggoty's search for 'Em'ly' was 'bad'; and the episodes featuring 'Dora the child-wife,' and the storm at Yarmouth in which Steerforth drowned, 'not as good as they might have been.' He did like 'Mrs. Micawber's inspired suggestions as to the negotiations of her husband's bills,' but concluded that the whole performance was far interior to what Dickens' reputation had led him to expect." This was his reaction in early 1868. Almost forty years later, he gave a very different account of the evening. This was how Twain described it in an October 1907 dictation for his autobiography: "I heard him once during that season; it was in Steinway Hall, in December, and it made the fortune of my life -- not in dollars, I am not thinking of dollars; it made the real fortune of my life in that it made the happiness of my life; on that day I called at the St. Nicholas Hotel to see my Quaker City Excursion shipmate, Charley Langdon, and was introduced to a sweet and timid and lovely young girl, his sister. The family went to the Dickens reading and I accompanied them. It was forty years ago; from that day to this the sister has never been out of my mind or heart. "Mr. Dickens read scenes from his printed books. From my distance he was a small and slender figure, rather fancifully dressed, and striking and picturesque in appearance. He wore a black velvet coat with a large and glaring red flower in the buttonhole. He stood under a red upholstered shed behind whose slant was a row of strong lights -- just such an arrangement as artists use to concentrate a strong light upon a great picture. Dickens's audience sat in a pleasant twilight, while he performed in the powerful light cast upon him from the concealed lamps. He read with great force and animation, in the lively passages, and read with stirring effect. It will be understood that he did not merely read but also acted. His reading of the storm scene in which Steerforth lost his life was so vivid and so full of energetic action that his house was carried off its feet, so to speak." Great force and animation? Stirring? Vivid? Energetic? They are the words found in a rave review. Why two accounts so at odds with each other? It is my guess, and only a guess, that the second description is the true one -- the one of his heart. The first account was that of a young writer looking at the old literary lion he soon would replace in the hearts of the mass audience. He was about to write his first major book and about to embark on his first major lecture tour. There is, in the 1868 review, the sense of the young writer measuring himself against a giant. How do you measure up more easily? Knock him down to size a bit. "A number of factors were at work here," Baetzhold writes perceptively. "Anxiety to impress his Western readers doubtless contributed to the jibes at the New York critics. Those critics, by the way, had also mentioned the huskiness of Dickens' voice, the result of a current cold, but they had invariably noted that the distraction quickly disappeared as the performance proceeded." Baetzhold also argues that Twain's "role of brash humorist" also contributed to the "flippancy" of the review, as well as "the traditional condescension of the American" toward the English and their "Englishy" ways. Twain would prove equally flippant in describing European customs and culture in /The Innocents Abroad./ This seems logical. It also seems logical that, by 1907, Twain was completely secure in his place as an American author embraced by England. He no longer had anything to prove as a writer or a platform performer. "The only man of letters after Dickens whose ultimate place in the hearts and minds of the vast public was commensurate with the Englisman's was attentive enough to note and remember details of platform technique," wrote Delancey Ferguson, who, like Wagenknecht, was a pre-1945 Twain biographer to note some parallels with Dickens. He could stand shoulder to shoulder to Dickens in every respect. "More important, Clemens no longer felt the necessity either to impress his readers with an appeal to American and Western superiority or to 'be funny,' " wrote Baetzhold. "Hence, the 1907 account may well represent a truer picture of his reaction to the performance than does the contemporary one." Howard, by the way, devoted 14 pages to Twain and Dickens in his landmark 1970 book, /Mark Twain & John Bull: The British Connection. / The second account also seems more accurate in details. Dickens is described as tall in the 1868 review, which takes more than a stretch of the imagination. He becomes "small and slender" in the 1907 dictation. In this one difference between the two accounts, we may have the long and the short of it, if you will -- Twain recalling the evening more clearly almost forty years later than just several days later. Perhaps, too, Twain's perception was altered by some awareness of just how much he had in common with Dickens. And they did have a great deal in common. The preceding is drawn from the last part of the paper "Mark Twain and Charles Dickens: Separated At Birth?" The first part details the dozens upon dozens of personal professional parallels. Hope some of this helps. Best, Mark