Picture the scene: Bradford in December 1854. The surrounding hills are clouded with smoke from busy factories. City Hall has not yet been designed and built by the architectural partnership of Lockwood and Mawson.

But the lovely yellow Yorkshire sandstone of their first major public building, St George’s Hall, still glows on sunny days. On this particular December day, the hall seems to be glowing for another reason, the world’s favourite novelist, Charles Dickens, is coming to read there.

The 42-year-old Dickens had been famous for nearly 20 years. When he arrived in Bradford, the author of Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby was stupendously famous.

For two nights’ work on December 27 and 28 he was offered £100, a vast sum in those days when a couple of pennies could buy the equivalent of a pie and a pint.

Dickens wrote of this experience: “The hall is enormous and they expect to seat 3,700 people tonight. Notwithstanding which, it seems to me a tolerably easy place – except that the width of the platform is so very great to the eye at first.”

The former Parliamentary reporter was never one to let the facts spoil a good story. The audience was probably closer to 2,500.

By “easy place” Dickens meant the acoustics were good enough to allow him to project his actor’s voice from the stage to the back of the stalls without damaging his vocal chords. There were no microphones, no amplifiers, no big screens.

The first night was more of a civic event with bearded members of the Town Council and doubtless their wives present. Among them were the town’s first Mayor, Robert Milligan, Colonel Pollard and industrialist H W Ripley. The Bradford Observer described the audience as “very large and respectable” and included “many of the gentry of this and neighbouring towns”.

Admission ranged from two shillings – more than the average mill hand in Bradford’s cobbled streets could afford – to three pennies. The second night, nearly 3,000 people crammed into St George’s to surrender to the frock-coated Dickens’ highly-demonstrative performance.

The organisers had set out chairs on the stage, behind Dickens, for 60 people. He said he “instantly overthrew” the arrangements, “to the great terror and amazement of the bystanders, who enquired in a dismal manner, ‘Where is the mayor to go, then?’ I said they might go anywhere – but they must not come near me.”

But which book did he read from? Was it Bleak House or was it A Christmas Carol? Some say the former. In December 1962, an article in the T&A had a different view of the matter.

“Not surprisingly, the book he read in Bradford was A Christmas Carol, and although in the end he did not accept the offered £100, the idea of reading for profit was firmly fixed in his mind.”

However, an article published ten years earlier in November 1952, written by J C Handby, dates Dickens’s readings back to 1844.

“His first private reading was to a party of friends at the home of John Forster on December 2, 1844. It was such a success that it had to be repeated for other friends...Then, in December 1853, he gave a public reading at Birmingham Town Hall in aid of a new institute.

“The success was so great that he was inundated with requests for his readings in aid of various charitable institutions... But there was one request that was different from the others. It came from Bradford and it offered a substantial fee for his services...”

The request came from the Bradford Temperance Educational Institute, a branch of the Bradford Long Pledged Tee-Total Association, which put on evening classes at Southgate Hall. The first temperance hall in England was built in Bradford, Handby adds.

Dickens did not accept a fee and insisted on paying all his own expenses. He made his money with his pen, only actors earned a living with their tongue.

Dickens loved acting and was reportedly good at it, his enunciation being clear, distinct and beautiful; but in the mid-1850s, authors had more social standing. Not until Henry Irving was knighted in 1895 did that attitude begin to change.

Here’s an intriguing thought. Did Bradford’s most notable novelist of the time, Charlotte Bronte, come down from Howarth to attend either of the two Dickens readings at St George’s Hall?

Probably not. The recently-married author of Jane Eyre and Vilette was pregnant and seriously ill from a chill she had caught while out walking on the moors.

She was to die the following March, not yet 40.