CHARLES DICKENS was greeted like a modern-day rock star when he toured the United States in 1867-8: not only did he perform his work to excitable crowds and earn a fortune in the process, but according to a contemporary diarist he was also stalked by an obsessive fan.

For a brief period Jane Bigelow, a 39-year-old socialite from Baltimore, regarded the novelist as her personal property, threatening other women who expressed interest in him. She even knocked out an elderly widow who dared to call on Dickens at his hotel and harassed others who used their connections to meet him.

The stalker’s identity is revealed in the diary of Annie Fields, a Boston society hostess and the wife of Dickens’s publisher, who attended some of the novelist’s shows.

Her account of the “Bigelow terror” forms the basis for several scenes in The Last Dickens, a bestselling novel by Matthew Pearl, a New York historian who found it in archives.

“Charles Dickens’s 76-date tour was a British invasion, like the Beatles in the 1960s,” said Pearl. “He was the first modern mass media celebrity.”

Dickens acted out parts of works such as The Pickwick Papers in America, where his novels were routinely pirated because copyright laws did not apply to foreign authors. He attracted 114,000 people to his readings and earned about $150,000, equivalent to $26m (£18m) today.

“He employed a lighting man to make sure he looked like his famous photograph on stage and left petals from his buttonhole on stage so young women could scramble to pick them up,” said Pearl.

His stalker, the wife of John Bigelow, a former American ambassador to Paris, was known for her erratic behav-iour which had held back her husband’s diplomatic career, Pearl said. Jane Bigelow once shocked courtiers when she met the Prince of Wales - later Edward VII - and breached protocol by jovially slapping him on the back.

Dickens, then 55, met the couple in Boston at the start of his tour and Jane Bigelow was entranced by his stage presence and restless mind. The novelist, who had separated from his wife Catherine, 53, and left his 28-year-old mistress, the actress Ellen Ternan, in Britain, was unnerved by Bigelow and his tour manager tried to keep her away from him.

That did not stop her following him around the country. Fields recorded in her diary that “Mrs Bigg brought matters to a crisis” towards the end of the tour when Dickens checked into the Westminster hotel in New York. A “little widow” named Mrs Hertz asked the hotel manager to introduce her to Dickens in his sitting room, wrote Fields. When Hertz left, Bigelow punched her with both fists and shouted at her for “daring” to enter the writer’s room alone. She was described by the diarist as “an incubus”.

“How queer it is,” Dickens said in a letter to a friend, “that I should be perpetually having things happen to me that nobody else in the world can be made to believe.”

According to newspaper reports at the time, Dickens had to place security guards outside his door to fend off fans who ripped clumps of fur from his overcoat and took impressions of his boot prints.

America is again in the grip of “Dickens-mania”. A second novel based on his final years - Drood by Dan Simmons - is also climbing the bestseller lists and a Disney animated version of A Christmas Carol, with Jim Carrey and Colin Firth, is on the way. Despite the recession, a first edition of that book would now fetch $40,000.

“We Americans did not know much about Dickens the man, but now we’re finding out he was a very modern character and this stuff about his stalker just brings it home,” said Steve Gertz, a rare book dealer in Los Angeles.

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