"A paroxysm of sneezing."
In this letter to his American publisher James T. Fields, dated Boston, February 27, 1868, Dickens, who has been suffering from a terrible cold, tells his friend that it would be "madness" for him to go out after that night's reading. "Dolby will tell you," he writes, "that I have been terrifying him nearly out of his wits by setting in for a paroxysm of sneezing, since dinner." And, he continues, Dolby has been charged "with a little note to Longfellow explaining." Nonetheless, even though he was feeling so poorly, the reading went off splendidly that evening. As Dickens would write: "They took to it so tremendously ... that I was stopped every five minutes. One poor young girl in mourning burst into a passion of grief about Tiny Tim, and was taken out."

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