Interesting. I am a teensy bit comforted to hear this. 
Especially from one as erudite as thou art, Madam.
Until my eyes began to go wonky on me, I read novels out loud to my wife. Over the course of 30 odd years, I must have read more than three thousand novels to her. Many more than that if you include the novels I read repeatedly to my children (Lewis, Tolkien, etc.).
The point: this habit of reading out loud was a feed-me-machine. It took some doing to discover authors and oeuvre in sufficient quantity to feed the machine.
This led, inevitably, to “classic” authors as possibilities. Alas. We got as far back into English literature as the Victorians, beginning with Anthony Trollope, whom we chose at first because of the very un-Victorian homophonous “flavor” of his surname. And, though Trollope was huge fun at times, he was about as far back as we (or I, since I was the reader could get).
Why? Well, just pick up a Dickens novel, open it at random, and begin to read it out loud. Cold. No practicing. Just let 'her rip.
I’d wager you don’t get more than half a paragraph before you stumble. Dickens is not written in order to be read aloud. For that matter, when his characters speak (and he ostensibly reports their sentences to the reader), their supposedly spoken English is nigh to impossible to reproduce in the mouth of an audible reader.
It didn’t take much of that for me to lay Dickens aside forever. Even when I could get through a paragraph without tripping over some stylish fetish he deployed, my listeners were asea during a storm as they tried to parse what they heard. Blech.