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                <text>&lt;h4&gt;This collection brings together Dickens’s collected and uncollected speeches, making an under-explored body of work searchable for the first time.&amp;nbsp;&lt;/h4&gt;&#13;
Dickens made more than a hundred speeches between 1837 and 1870 at events ranging from charitable dinners and award ceremonies to banquets in his honour or brief words of thanks before a public reading. In these speeches, the author touched on topics including his own life and professional development as well as other subjects such as politics, education, literature, public health and the development of the railway.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Efforts to collect Dickens’s speeches prior to 1960 were incomplete at best, and misleading and fragmentary at worst. John Camden Hotten’s collection of speeches, begun without the author’s consent (although he never responded to Hotten’s letters, Dickens did begin efforts to block their publication) and published together with a hastily-compiled biography shortly after the author’s death, remained the primary collected version of the speeches until the Nonesuch Dickens of 1938-39 (a limited print run). Finally, K. J. Fielding brought all known speeches together in 1960, correcting shoddy transcriptions by Hotten using contemporary newspaper accounts, and nearly doubling the total number of speeches attributed to Dickens (&lt;em&gt;The Speeches of Charles Dickens&lt;/em&gt; [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960]): Hotten had only featured the text of 56 speeches, the Nonesuch edition of the speeches provided an additional nine, and Fielding presented more than a hundred. Since this monumental work, a handful have also appeared in &lt;em&gt;The Dickensian&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href="#fn1" id="ref1"&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; there are certainly more to be found, as the volume of digitised newspapers and periodicals increases, and corrections to be made to existing transcriptions. No effort to collect the speeches has been made since Fielding; this collection thus represents the most complete body of Dickens's speeches ever assembled.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Dickens did not write his speeches beforehand, nor did he speak from notes. George Dolby recounted his imaginative process in 1884:&lt;br /&gt;&#13;
&lt;blockquote&gt;[S]upposing the speech was to be delivered in the evening, his habit was to take a long walk in the morning, during which he would decide on the various heads to be dealt with. These being arranged in their proper order, he would in his 'mind's eye,' liken the whole subject to the tire of a cart wheel &lt;span&gt;–&lt;/span&gt; he being the hub. From the hub to the tire he would run as many spokes as there were subjects to be treated, and during the progress of the speech he would deal with each spoke separately, elaborating them as he went round the wheel; and when all the spokes dropped out one by one, and nothing but the tire and space remained […] his speech was at an end. (&lt;em&gt;Charles Dickens as I Knew Him: The Story of the Reading Tours in Great Britain and America&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 273-74)&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#13;
However, on important occasions, Dickens might personally correct transcriptions of speeches for major London newspapers like &lt;em&gt;The Times&lt;/em&gt;. As such, these newspaper accounts are as accurate a source as we can hope to have for what Dickens said (or meant to say).&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Our Transcription field will only include words attributed directly to Dickens rather than third-person reports or paraphrases of his speeches. Where only such reports exist, we will provide the text in the 'Summary' field. Ngram search and other text analysis tools will be applied to what are given as Dickens's words only, to avoid skewing the results, but of course we are reliant on the quality of the reporting: we recommend analysing topics, themes, quotations and concepts rather than granular detail such as prepositions, punctuation, capitalisation and the intricacies of grammar, as different newspaper accounts can vary on these points.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Please &lt;a href="https://dickenssearch.com/contact"&gt;contact us&lt;/a&gt; with any errors, corrections, suggestions, or to contribute other uncollected speeches by Dickens.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;sup id="fn1"&gt;1. These are Philip Collins, 'Some Uncollected Speeches by Dickens', &lt;em&gt;The Dickensian &lt;/em&gt;73.382 (1977): pp. 89-99; David A. Roos, 'Dickens at the Royal Academy of Arts: A New Speech and Two Eulogies', &lt;em&gt;The Dickensian &lt;/em&gt;73.382 (1977): pp. 100-107; and William F. Long, 'Dickens and the Coming of Rail to Deal: An Uncollected Speech and its Context', &lt;em&gt;The Dickensian&lt;/em&gt; 85.418 (1989): pp. 66-80. &lt;a href="#ref1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text."&gt;↩&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;</text>
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                <text>Emily Middleton; Ellie-Louise Crampton; Maisie Howard; Adam Woods</text>
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            <text>&lt;a href="https://dickenssearch.com/teibp/dist/content/1862-05-03_Speech_Royal_Academy_Dinner.xml" target="_blank" rel="noopener"&gt;Royal Academy Dinner (3 May 1862).&lt;/a&gt;</text>
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        <description>Hidden from users and search. All items in a collection need to have the same data in the same format in order to show up in Ngram (either YYYY, YYYYMMDD, or YYYYMMDD). No combinations will work. For journalism, letters and poetry, if there is no month or day, default to the first of the month or January. So a poem with a date of March 1843 would be 18430301. A poem published in 1856 with no month or date information would be 18560101.</description>
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            <text>It is one of the privileges of literature to speak from the walls of this room rather than from the floor, and to find expression here in the great works of painting and sculpture rather than in spoken words. From these walls, even in our own times, Shakespeare, Moliere, Le Sage, Cervantes, Goldsmith, Sterne, Fielding, Smollett, Defoe, a host of illustrious writers has been so eloquent in the masterpieces of members of this Academy that one poor writer of fiction left to his own lips may well find nothing to say in this otherwise difficult task assigned to him. However, he finds consolation in this that his own art is inseparable from the art of his entertainers, that the great magic circle of the arts is impossible to be broken, and that here at least 'his foot is on his native heath', even though his name is not by any means Macgregor. In the name of many distinguished gentlemen, present and absent, foreign and native, I have to thank you for your remembrance of the sister art, though I beg to say on behalf of those whom I represent that we cannot by any means hold that the present President of the Royal Academy is at all disinterested in this proposal to do honour to literature, seeing that he himself is so near akin to it. We scarcely ever open any book with a higher interest and pleasure than we open this great annual volume, of which the leaves are now spread before this company; and we certainly never open a book to which we find so graceful and appropriate a preface as that which is always delivered from the red chair which you, Sir Charles, occupy. If I might have changed the figure, supposing noble lords and right hon gentlemen to have remained, I might even in conclusion have gone so far as to say that I think we receive the annual budget of the President of the Royal Academy with almost as much interest as we receive the annual budget of the Chancellor of the Exchequer; having in addition the pleasant consideration that it is not attended with those terrific consequences which we cannot by any strength of imagination separate from the latter production.</text>
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              <text>Royal Academy Banquet 1862</text>
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              <text>Speech given at the Royal Academy Banquet (3 May 1862).</text>
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              <text>Dickens, Charles</text>
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              <text>'Banquet at the Royal Academy.' &lt;em&gt;The Times&amp;nbsp;&lt;/em&gt;(5 May 1862): p. 5.</text>
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              <text>&lt;span&gt;Dickens, Charles. 'Royal Academy Dinner' (3 May 1862). &lt;em&gt;Dickens Search.&lt;/em&gt; Eds. Emily Middleton and Lydia Craig. Accessed [date]. &lt;/span&gt;&lt;a href="https://dickenssearch.com/admin/speeches/1862-05-03_Speech_Royal-Academy-Banquet"&gt;https://dickenssearch.com/admin/speeches/1862-05-03_Speech_Royal-Academy-Banquet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;span&gt;.&lt;/span&gt;</text>
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              <text>It is one of the privileges of literature to speak from the walls of this room rather than from the floor, and to find expression here in the great works of painting and sculpture rather than in spoken words. From these walls, even in our own times, Shakespeare, Moliere, Le Sage, Cervantes, Goldsmith, Sterne, Fielding, Smollett, Defoe, a host of illustrious writers has been so eloquent in the masterpieces of members of this Academy that one poor writer of fiction left to his own lips may well find nothing to say in this  otherwise difficult task assigned to him. However, he finds consolation in this that his own art is inseparable from the art of his entertainers, that the great magic circle of the arts is impossible to be broken, and that here at least 'his foot is on his native heath', even though his name is not by any means Macgregor. In the name of many distinguished gentlemen, present and absent, foreign and native, I have to thank you for your remembrance of the sister art, though I beg to say on behalf of those whom I represent that we cannot by any means hold that the present President of the Royal Academy is at all disinterested in this proposal to do honour to literature, seeing that he himself is so near akin to it. We scarcely ever open any book with a higher interest and pleasure than we open this great annual volume, of which the leaves are now spread before this company; and we certainly never open a book to which we find so graceful and appropriate a preface as that which is always delivered from the red chair which you, Sir Charles, occupy. If I might have changed the figure, supposing noble lords and right hon gentlemen to have remained, I might even in conclusion have gone so far as to say that I think we receive the annual budget of the President of the Royal Academy with almost as much interest as we receive the annual budget of the Chancellor of the Exchequer; having in addition the pleasant consideration that it is not attended with those terrific consequences which we cannot by any strength of imagination separate from the latter production.</text>
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