as the time arrived
for the new Readings, the change was a not unwelcome one.

The first portion of this second series was planned by Mr. Arthur Smith,
but he only superintended the six readings in London which opened it.
These were the first at St. James's Hall (St. Martin's Hall having been
burnt since the last readings there) and were given in March and April
1861. "We are all well here and flourishing," he wrote to me from
Gadshill on the 28th of April. "On the 18th I finished the readings as I
purposed. We had between seventy and eighty pounds _in the stalls_,
which, at four shillings apiece, is something quite unprecedented in
these times. . . . The result of the six was, that, after paying a large
staff of men and all other charges, and Arthur Smith's ten per cent. on
the receipts, and replacing everything destroyed in the fire at St.
Martin's Hall (including all our tickets, country-baggage, cheque-boxes,
books, and a quantity of gas-fittings and what not), I got upwards of
L500. A very great result. We certainly might have gone on through the
season, but I am heartily glad to be concentrated on my story."

It had been part of his plan that the Provincial Readings should not
begin until a certain interval after the close of his story of _Great
Expectations_. They were delayed accordingly until the 28th of October,
from which date, when they opened at Norwich, they went on with the
Christmas intervals to be presently named to the 30th of January 1862,
when they closed at Chester. Kept within England and Scotland, they took
in the border town of Berwick, and, besides the Scotch cities, comprised
the contrasts and varieties of Norwich and Lancaster, Bury St. Edmunds
and Cheltenham, Carlisle and Hastings, Plymouth and Birmingham,
Canterbury and Torquay, Preston and Ipswich, Manchester and Brighton,
Colchester and Dover, Newcastle and Chester. They were followed by ten
readings at the St. James's Hall, between the 13th of March and the 27th
of June 1862; and by four at Paris in January 1863, given at the Embassy
in aid of the British Charitable Fund. The second series had thus in the
number of the readings nearly equalled the first, when it closed at
London in June 1863 with thirteen readings in the Hanover Square Rooms;
and it is exclusively the subject of such illustrations or references as
this chapter will supply.

On _Great Expectations_ closing in June 1861, Bulwer Lytton, at
Dickens's earnest wish, took his