Today, we can scarcely conceive of people reacting to a reading in the manner described above. Why? Because we have grown up in the age of television and movies and these have supplanted words. A person of Dickens's time had the ability to listen to words and translate them into vivid images in her mind. Hence, a young lady is powerfully affected by the words relating the eventual death of Tiny Tim because of his untreated illness that she collapses in tears. We have lost this ability to translate words into images because our visual media do it for us without words. No effort is required on the part of the viewer.

What is lost is our imagination. Yes, we could film a sad scene of Bob Crachit lamenting at some future Christmas the perfectly dreadful absence of innocent little Tim but, as sad as we might make the scene, it could never compare to the degree of sadness invoked by our imaginations.

Not only were words of fiction regarded with such fascination but any words were. The Lincoln-Douglas debates were a huge source of fascination for people of that period. That is why the debates are still remembered. Presidential debates of today are a joke. Little sound bytes neatly trimmed off to one-hour segments so as not to pre-empt Idol or Heroes. Nice and short to keep viewer attention span.

When the debate is over, the commentators remark how good a candidate looked, how regal they acted, how they said something rather than what they said, as though they were competing for Oscars instead of the highest public office not only in the land but the entire world. Contrast this with the first Lincoln-Douglas debate which was an all-day affair that required audiences to show up since they could not be televised into people's homes. And show up they did. As with Dickens's readings, entire families attended, the women carried picnic baskets full of food, hawkers sold wares outside and the press had a field day.

What was especially notable was that not only were Lincoln and Douglas not competing for president, neither was even competing for any office.   Neither was running for anything, they were simply debating the slavery issue because it was important! Nor did people talk while ignoring the speaker or doze—quite the contrary—they were glued to their seats hanging on his every word. Every few minutes loud applause broke out. In one case, Lincoln said that his opponent had taken 3 and a half hours to lay out his argument and that Lincoln would require at least that much time to rebut Mr. Douglas. Being late in the day, Mr. Lincoln proposed, everyone should go home and have a nice, filling meal before returning in an hour to the auditorium to hear his rebuttal of Douglas—and they did.

The main form of public discourse in the 18th and 19th centuries was the spoken and printed word. This requires that the people of that period have a large vocabulary and so must learn to read early and must read often. We may think it quaint when we see depictions of one-room schoolhouses but my father grew up poor in Kentucky and West Virginia in the 1920s and attended a one-room schoolhouse and he retired an automotive engineer. With paper and pencil he designed conveyor belt systems that guys with autocad training could only dream about.

The one-room class worked well because the teacher didn't stand there lecturing to all the bored students. The class broke into groups of students with each group having a student from each grade. The older students taught the younger ones. The teacher was there to keep order and make sure tasks were getting done. The children learned better this way than by being lectured to by an adult. Classrooms in Japan, for example, are also structured this way.