Later Years
At family Christmas gatherings at his home at 8 Mulberry Walk in London he performed imitations of his father giving his famous "Readings", during which he would wear a geranium, his father's favorite flower, and lean on the same velvet-covered reading stand used by Charles Dickens during his reading tours. He had listened to his father many times, and older members of his audience said Henry Dickens's performances were amazingly like those given by his father. To celebrate his eightieth birthday in 1929 he went through the whole of A Christmas Carol without a hitch, his false teeth loosening at the melodramatic sections: 'I know him - Marley's ghosht!'.
From October 1914 he performed the recitals of his father's works in support of the Red Cross Society. These included excerpts from David Copperfield, A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, and The Cricket on the Hearth. Through his efforts he raised £1,200 for the Society. He was a Life President of the Dickens Fellowship.
Read more about this topic: Henry Fielding Dickens
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“The expansive nature of truth comes to our succor, elastic, not to be surrounded. Man helps himself by larger generalizations. The lesson of life is practically to generalize; to believe what the years and the centuries say against the hours; to resist the usurpation of particulars; to penetrate to their catholic sense.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If we focus exclusively on teaching our children to read, write, spell, and count in their first years of life, we turn our homes into extensions of school and turn bringing up a child into an exercise in curriculum development. We should be parents first and teachers of academic skills second.”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)