Pen Photographs of Charles Dickens's Readings. Taken from life by
Kate Field, an American. (Trilioner ; Osgood, Boston, U.S.).—The most amusing part of this volume is the description of the queue which formed itself when tickets for Dickens's first reading were to be pur- chased in Boston. It seems a literal fact that persons began to assemble at half-past seven o'clock in the previous evening, and that before midnight there were hundreds in line. The doors of the ticket office (which was Messrs. Ticknor and Field's shop) were not to be opened till' 8.30 a.m. The "Pen Photographs" themselves are a series of most enthusiastic panegyrics, better deserved probably in this case than panegyrics usually are, but yet almost ludicrous in their intensity. We wonder whether the Americans are going to make that sort of appro- priation of Dickens which the Germans have made of Shakespeare.
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