Posted by noa on December 20, 2003, at 15:37:08
Just saw a 'docudrama' on Dickens's life on public TV. An interesting guy. Rather manic, I think. Author, actor, performance artist, journalist.
I am now interested in reading some of Dickens's non-fiction--his reportage of the social conditions of his time.
They quoted a statistic that said that in one year (was it 1849 maybe?), half of the funerals in London were for children under the age of ten!
Another thing that interested me was that Dickens's wife suffered terrible depression, primarily post-partum, although she seemed always to be postpartum with 12 pregnancies!The portrayal also made Dickens himself out to be what I would consider rather manic, and perhaps somewhat OCD, too. And there were periods of agitation and what may have been depression, although they didn't say any of this. At one point he burned all of his personal papers, so there'd be no trace of his extramarital affair. But he burned ALL of his papers, including those that weren't even remotely connected to hints of the affair.
If Dickens had lived during the internet age, I think he definitely would have had a hard time, because he seemed at once a very public person but who also was fiercely secretive. It would have become very difficult to maintain his privacy and be so public a figure in the age of electronic communications, but I tend to think he would have been drawn to the internet.
Oh, and there was also a matter of intellectual rights that enraged him--apparently, his works were pirated in America because they weren't protected here by copyright laws. When he discovered this on a trip to NY, he was furious. I just found this fascinating, what with all the issues of intellectual property that are current now.
poster:noa
thread:291953
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/books/20030426/msgs/291953.html