Well before he became an author and Boz, Dickens, young, impecunious, and fiercely ambitious, managed to get himself that rare chance, a Covent Garden audition. He had been preparing sedulously for this opening, and capable judges thought he had a decent chance to be hired as a comedian. But when the day of the audition arrived, he bunked. He said he was ill. And he never rescheduled. Almost everything that follows in this book emerges from thinking about that no show.

I don't think this audition is the missing clue to reading Dickens, just as I don't think Citizen Kane is serious about Rosebud. The hidden clue lost in the early life seems to me just Welles's and Mankiewicz's tour de force satire about the over-easy Freudianism swamping pre-war Hollywood. And that's just as it should be. All I'm saying, to start, is that from the start Dickens was in not quite equal parts thrilled (less) and (more) frightened by the stage.