The Story of Little Dombey and Other Performance Fictions (1850s & 60s)

It is widely known that Charles Dickens gave public readings of his works, and that those readings were enormously popular. Far less well known are the stories themselves; these were not, as is the modern fashion, taken verbatim from the published novels. Instead, Dickens trimmed, reworded, and re-shaped material from the novels to create stories that would be self-contained artistic entities. These concise performance fictions, shaped in every way to be accessible to a broad audience, are in many ways an ideal introduction to Dickens’s work for the modern reader.