Selling Tickets for the Reading at New York
This reproduction of a drawing shows New Yorkers queuing up for tickets, a familiar sight in any city Dickens was to read in. The demand for seats had been immense from the very beginning of Dickens's stage career. Even so, the frenzy over the New York sale was quite beyond belief. His manager George Dolby recalls Mr. Dickens's desire and principle of giving the public a fair chance in all matters, but certainly forty-five out of the first fifty men in the line were speculators' (modern "ticket touts") representatives, recognizable by their caps. His Chief, as Dolby calls Dickens, instructed that four tickets only for each Reading would be sold to each person, and those only to people in hats, but the speculators were equal to the occasion, for in the lapse of a few moments they had collected all the hats they could from waiters and others in the neighbouring restaurant and buy means of changing a hat for a cap at the entrance door to the ticket-office, the speculators contrived to get into their possession the greater portion of the first seven or eight rows of seats in the hall. Many were turned away as the line of purchasers exceeded half a mile in length. The second sale was even worse, with people standing outside all night in temperatures several degrees below zero. New York speculators even managed to buy some three hundred tickets for Readings in Boston, which they then sold at highly inflated prices. Under such circumstances it is hardly surprising to see a man in the centre of the drawing waving his tickets joyfully - few of Dickens's ordinary fans had the opportunity to see him perform cheaply.