e going to stay in each place
at least a month. If I were to measure my deserts by people's
remembrance of me, I should be a prodigy of intolerability. Have
recovered my Italian, which I had all but forgotten, and am one entire
and perfect chrysolite of idleness."

From this trip, of which the incidents have an interest independent of
my ordinary narrative, Dickens was home again in the middle of December
1853, and kept his promise to his Birmingham friends by reading in their
Town Hall his _Christmas Carol_ on the 27th,[174] and his _Cricket on
the Hearth_ on the 29th. The enthusiasm was great, and he consented to
read his _Carol_ a second time, on Friday the 30th, if seats were
reserved for working men at prices within their means. The result was an
addition of between four and five hundred pounds to the funds for
establishment of the new Institute; and a prettily worked flower-basket
in silver, presented to Mrs. Dickens, commemorated these first public
readings "to nearly six thousand people," and the design they had
generously helped. Other applications then followed to such extent that
limits to compliance had to be put; and a letter of the 16th of May 1854
is one of many that express both the difficulty in which he found
himself, and his much desired expedient for solving it. "The objection
you suggest to paid public lecturing does not strike me at all. It is
worth consideration, but I do not think there is anything in it. On the
contrary, if the lecturing would have any motive power at all (like my
poor father this, in the sound!) I believe it would tend the other way.
In the Colchester matter I had already received a letter from a
Colchester magnate; to whom I had honestly replied that I stood pledged
to Christmas readings at Bradford[175] and at Reading, and could in no
kind of reason do more in the public way." The promise to the people of
Reading was for Talfourd's sake; the other was given after the
Birmingham nights, when an institute in Bradford asked similar help, and
offered a fee of fifty pounds. At first this was entertained; but was
abandoned, with some reluctance, upon the argument that to become
publicly a reader must alter without improving his position publicly as
a writer, and that it was a change to be justified only when the higher
calling should have failed of the old success. Thus yielding for the
time, he nevertheless soon found the question rising again with the same
importunity; his own po