LIVERPOOL, APRIL 10, 1869.
[The following speech was delivered by Mr.Dickens at a Banquet held in his honour at St.George's Hall, Liverpool, after his health had been proposed by Lord Dufferin.]
MR.MAYOR, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, although I have been so well accustomed of late to the sound of my own voice in this neighbourhood as to hear it with perfect composure, the occasion is, believe me, very, very different in respect of those overwhelming voices of yours.As Professor Wilson once confided to me in Edinburgh that I had not the least idea, from hearing him in public, what a magnificent speaker he found himself to be when he was quite alone - so you can form no conception, from the specimen before you, of the eloquence with which I shall thank you again and again in some of the innermost moments of my future life.Often and often, then, God willing, my memory will recall this brilliant scene, and will re-illuminate this banquet-hall.I, faithful to this place in its present aspect, will observe it exactly as it stands - not one man's seat empty, not one woman's fair face absent, while life and memory abide by me.
Mr.Mayor, Lord Dufferin in his speech so affecting to me, so eloquently uttered, and so rapturously received, made a graceful and gracious allusion to the immediate occasion of my present visit to your noble city.It is no homage to Liverpool, based upon a moment's untrustworthy enthusiasm, but it is the solid fact built upon the rock of experience that when I first made up my mind, after considerable deliberation, systematically to meet my readers in large numbers, face to face, and to try to express myself to them through the breath of life, Liverpool stood foremost among the great places out of London to which I looked with eager confidence and pleasure.And why was this? Not merely because of the reputation of its citizens for generous estimation of the arts; not merely because I had unworthily filled the chair of its great self-educational institution long ago; not merely because the place had been a home to me since the well-remembered day when its blessed roofs and steeples dipped into the Mersey behind me on the occasion of my first sailing away to see my generous friends across the Atlantic twenty-seven years ago.Not for one of those considerations, but because it had been my happiness to have a public opportunity of testing the spirit of its people.I had asked Liverpool for help towards the worthy preservation of Shakespeare's house.On another occasion I had ventured to address Liverpool in the names of Leigh Hunt and Sheridan Knowles.On still another occasion I had addressed it in the cause of the brotherhood and sisterhood of letters and the kindred arts, and on each and all the response had been unsurpassably spontaneous, open-handed, and munificent.