On this day in 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 ... FULL STORY »
