Charles Dickens had sailed from Liverpool aboard the Cunard liner Cuba for his second visit to the United States and arrived in Boston, Massachusetts on November 19, 1867. He began a series of scores of live readings in New York, Baltimore, Washington and Philadelphia with the first in Boston, on December 2, reading "The Trial, from the Pickwick Papers." When the second series in Boston went on sale on this day, hundreds of patrons were reported to have queued overnight with five hundred in line when the box office opened. After almost five months in which he earned around $19,000, although at the cost of his health, Dickens sailed for home on April 23, 1868. (By John Osborne)
Michael Slater, Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 575.
John Fofster, The Life of Charles Dickens (London: Chapman and Hall, 1870) II: 229-236.
