Stage frights

Was Charles Dickens the first pop star? That is the comparison drawn in a new exhibition at the Charles Dickens Museum that commemorates the first of his public readings, 150 years ago. His gruelling tour itineraries read like Madonna's or Eminem's. People sometimes fainted at his shows. His performances even saw the rise of that modern phenomenon, the "speculator" or ticket tout. (The ones in New York City escaped detection by borrowing respectable-looking hats from the waiters in nearby restaurants.)

As well as being our greatest novelist, Dickens developed a new, composite art form in his stage performances, acting out specially adapted passages from his own works and varying his expressions and speech patterns, so that it seemed as if he were becoming possessed by the characters he created. His reading tours won him huge popular acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. And in all probability they contributed to his premature death, from a stroke, in 1870.

Why did Dickens take his show on the road? His first public readings were for charity, beginning with two performances of A Christmas Carol , before a crowd of 2,000 working-class people in Birmingham. Soon, though, the offers of payment were coming in, and Dickens, always with an eye for the business opportunity, was tempted. His close friend John Forster warned that such a "public exhibition for money" might be demeaning, and this was enough to dissuade Dickens for a while - respectability was an issue with him. But the lure of public performance proved too much, and the author turned professional in 1858. As he told Forster, most people thought he was being paid for his readings anyway.

Dickens took a large Gladstone bag with him on his tours - a contemporary cartoon shows it stuffed with money. His American readings alone, from December 1867 to April 1868, earned him over £19,000, a colossal sum at the time; it was certainly more than he was earning from his published works. But if money was a motivation - he said he needed it for repairs to Gad's Hill Place, the Kent pile he had just bought - it was far from the only one. Dickens was fascinated by the stage: he had seriously considered becoming an actor as a young man, and had a small theatre fitted up at his house in Tavistock Square. He also clearly relished the chance of coming face to face with his readers, to whom he spoke so personally in the prefaces to his novels.

What Dickens's public got for their money was something of a spectacle. Like a Victorian magician, Dickens performed against simple but striking stage architecture, with a vivid maroon backdrop and a red reading stand that he had designed himself, with "a fringe around the little desk for the book". On top of the stand, Dickens kept the reading copies that he made of his texts - special versions of the Christmas books and passages from his novels, pasted into volumes with extra-wide margins, to allow for his scribbled alterations and stage directions to himself. Continually changing while in repertoire, these adaptations developed into new, free-standing versions of the old favourites. (The reading text of A Christmas Carol has just been reprinted, for the first time in nearly a century.)

Many people found Dickens's performances hypnotic; the author is known to have experimented with mesmerism. One audience member describes a particularly popular rendition, of the murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist: "Warming with excitement, he flung aside his book and acted the scene of the murder, shrieked the terrified pleadings of the girl, growled the brutal savagery of the murderer... Then the cries for mercy: 'Bill! dear Bill! for dear God's sake!'... When the pleading ceases, you open your eyes in relief, in time to see the impersonation of the murderer seizing a heavy club, and striking his victim to the ground."

Up to this point Dickens had been following a text that reads (with prompts in his own hand, marked here in italics): "Laying his hand upon the lock (action) , he reached his own door - he opened it softly (xx Murder coming xx) ".

Not everyone fell under his spell so easily. Mark Twain was disappointed by the performance that he saw: Dickens, he said, was "a little Englishy" in his speech, pronouncing Steerforth as "St'yaw-futh". But even he was taken with the sight of such a celebrity, fascinated to have in front of him the famous head, that "wonderful mechanism" that had governed the directions of so many literary characters. "I almost imagined I could see the wheels and pulleys work."

For all the extraordinary effect that they had, the story of Dickens's public readings does not have a happy ending. By the late 1860s, the author's family and friends were becoming concerned that the tours were taking too great a toll, particularly after the Sikes and Nancy scene was added to the bill. "The finest thing I ever heard," Dickens's son Charley told him, "but don't do it." As with most other things in his life, Dickens pursued his readings with a compulsive energy that allowed him little time to rest. And in 1865 he had been involved in a serious train crash at Staplehurst (his was the only carriage that did not fall into a ravine), which meant that this particular form of transport, on which he relied so heavily while on tour, was nothing but trauma to him.

Dickens's friend and doctor, Francis Carr Beard, finally called time on the public performances. His medical notes, featured in the exhibition, show that Dickens's heart rate was raised dramatically each time he read, particularly when his text was Sikes and Nancy. His final readings, like the others, were a huge success, but he ended them like Prospero: "From these garish lights I vanish now for evermore." Within three months he was dead.

· These Garish Lights: Charles Dickens's Public Readings is at the Charles Dickens Museum, London WC1, until May 30. Details: 020-7405 2127.