In this podcast, Professor Jon Mee answers questions from Luke Hamer, Assistant Press Officer, about Dickens' later career. After the breakdown of his marriage, Dickens toured the country with a series of theatrical readings of his works in an exhausting schedule that may have contributed to his detereorating health and, ultimately, his death.

He began a farewell reading tour in 1869 - it was meant to be the last one, because his doctors warned him that he was wearing himself out. Indeed he cancelled that tour before it was finished because he seemed to have a semi-paralytic stroke. But then he couldn't quite let it go - it's typical of Dickens' writing and his being that he couldn't let things go - and he came back to do a closing season in London in 1870. On the final night he did A Christmas Carol and the famous trial scene from Pickwick Papers and told the audience that he would 'vanish'. He wasn't explicitly predicting his death, just saying they wouldn't see any more of him as a reader - but, actually, within 12 weeks he'd died.

Professor Jon Mee