The First Rock Star

On this day in 1867 Charles Dickens began his first American tour:

This first-night audience included all the great and triple-named of the New England literary elite -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton -- though not all were impressed. Emerson complained that the performance was too polished for his taste, as Twain would say later that the New Year's Eve reading he attended was but "glittering frostwork." But this was the minority view, and from two used to getting the lecture-hall praise and dollars that now went to Dickens -- some $140,000 profit for this tour, and an estimated two million dollars in today's money for Dickens's last two years of readings at home and abroad.

"But Xmastime", you say in the voice of Craig “Ironhead” Heyward from those soap commercials (RIP), “didn't you call Dickens the 6th Beatle years ago?" 

 Sigh. Yes, faithful reader. Yes, I did.

"'She loves you yeah, yeah yeah'...genius, indeed."