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Agatha Christie
Agatha, Mary, Clarissa, Miller was born on September 15th 1890, and was christened at All Saints Church, Bamfylde Rd, Torre on October 20th 1890. Her father made a donation to the church so that Agatha could be a founder member.
Agatha spent her childhood days happily with her sister and brother, looked after by a nanny at the family home 'Ashfield'. Ashfield, a Victorian mansion with its large garden, and croquet lawn, was the centre of her life for nearly 50 years.
While young Agatha's favorite pastimes included swimming, horse riding, dancing, reading, and roller-skating. She regularly used to go to the Princess Pier, where she would skate up and down its length.
Very near to the Pier are the Princess Gardens, so named after The Princess Louise, one of Queen Victoria's children who had made a visit to Torquay in 1890. Prior to this the land had been marshland. Today the gardens are laid out formally, with flowerbeds and lawns, fountains and paths. This was the setting for a Scene in The ABC Murders, featuring Hercule Poirot.
Next to the Princess Gardens stands the beautiful Georgian building The Pavilion, which was a prominent social venue as far as music and concerts were concerned. Agatha regularly attended concerts there. In fact in January 1913 she went to the Pavilion with a young man, which she had met a few months earlier, to hear music by Wagner. The young man being Archie Christie. After the concert they went back to 'Ashfield', and Archie proposed to Agatha. They married Christmas 1914. The Grand Hotel was the splendid location of their honeymoon for just one night with her first husband. He had come home on leave from his duties as a Flight Commander in France and had five days before he was due to return to France.
Agatha was a good swimmer and used to like bathing at Beacon Cove, this was the beach where, although usually quite safe, she nearly drowned. Apparently there were unusual sea conditions that day. She was rescued by a grumpy old man who used to be at hand in a boat should anyone need to be rescued. Beacon Cove in Victorian times, used to be known as the Ladies Bathing Cove, where Ladies should have had privacy when bathing. However the "gentlemen" of the Torbay Yacht Club, on numerous occasions it is rumored, spent their time looking through opera glasses to watch the ladies on the beach, hoping for a glimpse or two of what they shouldn't see.
Going on up the hill from Beacon Quay one can find the Imperial Hotel, which was the setting for Agatha Christie's thriller Peril at End House, Sleeping Murder, The Body in the Library, and Sleeping Murder. Agatha visited the Imperial Hotel socially for Dinner, Dances and Tea Dances. Nowadays Non-residents are welcomed to the hotel to take afternoon tea, coffee or an aperitif on the terrace, just as Miss Marple would have done while solving the mysteries.
In 1914 when the war broke out Torquay Town Hall was commandeered into being a Red Cross hospital. Agatha who had taken her First Aid and Nursing exams had passed and became a nurse tending the casualties who were being brought back home injured from France.
In 1915 Agatha suffered a severe bout of the flu and was unable to work as a nurse for nearly a month. When she was well and returned she found that a new department had opened, The Dispensary. This is where she worked for the next two years and gained all her knowledge about poisons, which she was able to use with authority in her novels. While working in the Dispensary, which at times was not very busy at all, Agatha started to write her first detective story with the encouragement of her sister, and in 1921 The Mysterious Affair at Styles was published, featuring Hercule Poirot. Agatha Christie wrote more than 30 novels featuring Poirot. Amongst the most popular were " The Murder of Roger Ackroyd ","The Murder on the Orient Express" and "Death on the Nile".
In 1927 Archie Christie asked for a divorce, having fallen in love with another woman. Agatha already upset by the death of her mother, disappeared. The whole of England became wrapped up in the case of the missing writer. After 11 days she eventually turned up, claiming she had amnesia when having to explain to the police her disappearance.
Agatha Christie had an interest in archaeology and whilst taking a break in the Near East she visited an archaeological dig in Ur, where she met the young archaeologist Max Mallowan and later married him in 1930. Agatha accompanied him on many of his expeditions to the Middle East, which became the setting for many of her novels. She created Miss Marple in 1930.
In 1938 Agatha moved to Greenway House with her second husband. It is a beautiful Georgian House on the River Dart. It was requisitioned in WWII by the US Navy but Agatha and her family returned there again in 1945, and until she died in 1976.
Agatha was awarded the high honor of becoming Dame of the British Empire in 1971.
11 DAYS DISAPPEARANCE
She was the queen of crime fiction; the mistress of mystery writing whose tales of murder, deceit and intrigue habitually topped the best seller lists and entertained generations of avid readers. Her two famous creations, the intuitive, mustachioed Hercule Poirot and the shrewd spinster Miss Marple, are household names across the globe. Agatha Christie, it seems, has always been with us. Except for 11 days in 1926, when all of a sudden she vanished into thin air.
That year Christie had published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd to widespread acclaim. She was living in Sunningdale, Berkshire with her husband Archibald Christie, a dashing officer in the Royal Flying Corps. Her handsome war hero, however, was quite openly having an affair with another woman. Agatha became nervous and depressed.
On the evening of Friday 3 December 1926 the writer announced she was going for a drive. The next day her car was found abandoned a few miles down the road with some of her clothes and identification papers scattered across the back seat. Within hours the news was all over the papers. Amid suspicion of suicide or foul play, police dredged a lake. Archibald Christie's telephone lines were tapped and 15,000 volunteers scoured the surrounding countryside.
Eventually, a full 11 days later, Christie was located at a hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire, befuddled and amnesic. With her picture splashed across the daily newspapers, fellow guests had recognized her and alerted the police. Whether she had truly lost her memory or whether this was merely an elaborate publicity stunt was never established. Christie did not mention the episode in her autobiography. She died in 1976 and the puzzle went unsolved.
So where, you may be wondering, does Pera Palas, the famous hotel in Istanbul, come into the equation? It is a legitimate question. Agatha Christie's association with Pera Palas is well-documented -she stayed at the hotel regularly and even wrote Murder on the Orient Express there- but Istanbul is thousands of miles away from Berkshire. For decades, no one had the slightest inkling that the answer to the Christie affair might lie on the banks of the Bosporus.
Until, that was, Hollywood stepped in. In 1979 Warner Bros saw a box-office hit in Christie's mysterious disappearing act and turned it into a movie, starring Vanessa Redgrave as the missing author and Dustin Hoffman as the intrepid American reporter hot on her tail. Because there was so little evidence to build the plot around, Warner Bros took the unusual step of hiring the celebrity Hollywood medium Tara Rand to contact with Christie's spirit and get to the bottom of the mystery. From the unearthly quarters of the other world came an eerie message: 'The key to my disappearance lies at Pera Palas.' The ghost of Christie had spoken - or so Rand claimed. The medium explained that she had seen a vision of Agatha Christie at the Istanbul hotel, hiding the key to a secret diary under the floorboards of room 411.
Within days swarms of camera crews, photographers and reporters traveled to Istanbul from all over the world to witness the unraveling of the mystery. On March 7 1979 they squeezed into room 411 of Pera Palas. A telephone connection had been established between the hotel and Los Angeles, and Rand was issuing instructions. The information she gave seemed authentic. Sure enough, the floorboards were loose precisely in the spot the clairvoyant indicated. Beneath them was found an old rusty key, some 8 centimeters long.
This was all great news for Pera Palas, of course. Not only did the affair provide welcome publicity, it also offered a possibility of some unexpected revenue for a hotel in need of a major revamp. Director Hakan Süzer took possession of the key and staged a press conference, announcing that he would be only too happy to hand the key over to Warner Bros - in exchange for a healthy sum of $2 million.
Over in California, Warner Bros hesitated, before turning once again to Tara Rand who duly went into another of her trances and summoned the ghost of Agatha Christie. 'Only when Mrs. Rand has the key in her hand will this mystery be solved,' the spirit warned.
Without further ado, Warner Bros dispatched Rand to Istanbul to get hold of the key and solve the enigma once and for all. The American press scrapped to be the first to break the news. This was the kind of story that would not come along twice. The New York Times offered $75,000 to gain exclusivity.
And then came the anti-climax. On 30 June 1979, just as the US media was preparing for the denouement of this great twentieth century mystery, the Pera Palas staff went on strike. It would last a whole year. Amid the commotion, the affair of the key was put on the back burner. Public enthusiasm quickly deflated and the press went home. Warner Bros did release their movie Agatha later that year, but minus the Pera Palas connection.
The fabled key ended up gathering dust in the vault of an Istanbul bank, where it remains to this day. In 1986, a second one was discovered under the floorboards of room 511, directly above 411. Another twist in the tale? Perhaps we will never know. Only one thing is certain: even the great Hercule Poirot would have struggled with this case.
TRIVIA:
Where did Agatha Christie once claim to have done most of the plotting for her famous mystery novels? While sitting in a bathtub, munching on apples.
Agatha Christie was once asked how she felt about being married to Max Mallowan (her second husband), a distinguished archaeologist who made his name excavating in Mesopotamia. "An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have," she replied. "The older she gets, the more interested he is in her!"
In 1977, a young Arab girl was flown to England in a semiconscious state and admitted to a London hospital. The doctors were baffled by her condition, which continued to deteriorate over the next five days. On the sixth day, the child began to lose her hair. The nurse watching over her was suddenly struck by the similarity of her symptoms to those of a series of murder victims in Agatha Christie's The Pale Horse, which she was reading at the time. The fictional characters had been killed by thallium poisoning...
Subsequent tests on the Arab girl revealed that she had high levels of thallium in her urine. Three weeks later, the child was fit enough to return home, and the case was written up in the British Journal of Hospital Medicine, with a note of thanks to the observant nurse and the late Dame Agatha Christie.
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Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the legendary detective Sherlock Holmes, was born in Edinburgh in 1859. After a rigorous Jesuit education he trained to become a doctor at Edinburgh University. Eventually he set up in medical practice in Southsea and during the quiet spells between patients he turned his hand to writing. He died in 1930.
Sir Arthur often told self-deprecating stories about himself. Having stepped into a taxi in Paris one evening, he was surprised to hear the driver address him: "Where can I take you, Mr. Doyle?" He asked the driver whether they had ever met. "No sir," the man replied. "I have never seen you before." Had he been recognized from a photograph? No. The puzzled Doyle then asked what had led him to the conclusion that he was in fact Sir Conan Doyle.
"This morning's paper had a story about you being on vacation in Marseilles," the driver explained. "This is the taxi-stand where people who return from Marseilles always come. Your skin color tells me you have been on vacation. The ink-spot on your right index finger suggests to me that you are a writer. Your clothing is very English, not French. Adding up all those pieces of information, I deduce that you are Sir Arthur Conan Doyle."
"This is truly amazing!" Doyle enthused. "You are the real-life counterpart of my fictional creation, Sherlock Holmes!"
"There is one other thing," the driver admitted. "What is that?" Doyle asked. "Your name," the driver replied, "is on the front of your suitcase."
Dr. Joseph Bell (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's medical school mentor and the inspiration behind Sherlock Holmes) customarily subjected each new class to a curious test: holding a jar of liquid, he would explain that it contained a potent drug with a very bitter taste. "We might easily analyze this chemically," he would say, "but I want you to test it by smell and taste and, as I don't ask anything of my students which I wouldn't be willing to do myself, I will taste it before passing it around." The students would watch uncomfortably as Bell dipped a finger into the liquid, put his hand to his lips, and sucked it. With a grimace, he would then pass the jar around the class for each student to follow his example. The experiment over, Dr. Bell would make an announcement:
"Gentlemen (female students had not yet been admitted) I am deeply grieved to find that not one of you has developed this power of perception, which I so often speak about. For, if you had watched me closely, you would have found that, while I placed my forefinger in the bitter medicine, it was the middle finger which found its way into my mouth!" (In some variants of this story, the liquid in the jar is revealed to be urine.)
Bell first impressed 18-year-old Arthur Conan Doyle by correctly deducing that a patient was a left-handed cobbler: "Notice," he explained, "the worn places in the corduroy breeches, where a cobbler rests his lap stone."
Arthur Conan Doyle was obsessed with the occult from an early age. He attended his first séance at the age of 20 and dedicated the last decade of his life to the study of spiritualism (even opening a psychic bookshop in London). He frequently attempted to commune with the dead. One day Doyle was asked by a friend to visit a fellow author who had fallen ill. "I'll call in tomorrow," Doyle remarked. "Tomorrow could be too late," the friend warned. "He may not survive the night." "In that case," Doyle replied, "I'll speak to him next week."
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once remarked that the turning point in a writer's career comes not when he sends out his first manuscripts but when he is first commissioned to write.
Doyle's first commission? Translating an article from German for a journal called The Gas and Water Gazette. The article's title? "Testing Gas Pipes for Leakage."
During a rehearsal for one of his plays one day, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle began joking with a certain novice actor named Charlie - who suggested that the two should pool their incomes, and split them, for the rest of their lives. Doyle's reply? "I don't think so... Mr. Chaplin."
Mystery writer Rex Stout, an ardent fan of Arthur Conan Doyle and his legendary fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, once joined a group of fellow enthusiasts called the Baker Street Irregulars. Stout once proposed an interesting theory about one of Doyle's central characters: that Dr. Watson... was a woman!
The phrase "Elementary, my dear Watson" was never uttered by Sherlock Holmes in any of Doyle's stories. Like Holmes' curved calabash pipe (introduced by actor William Gillette who needed a pipe, which he could hold in his teeth as he spoke his lines) and deerstalker hat - it was a creation of the film adaptations.
According to the 'curse of Conan Doyle,' those connected with the creator of Sherlock Holmes are unusually predisposed to unexpected death, breakdown or unpleasant conflict. In April 2004, Richard Lancelyn Green, the former chairman of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, was found garroted in his bed surrounded by cuddly toys and a bottle of gin.
In 1917, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, an ardent believer in the occult, announced that fairies really did exist. His proof? Photographs taken by 16-year-old Elsie Wright and her ten-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths from the village of Cottingley, Bradford. "The pictures," Michael Farquhar once reported, "showed the girls by a wooded stream, with winged sprites and gnomes who danced and pranced and tooted on pipes." With Doyle's endorsement, fairies promptly became a national obsession.
In 1983, it was revealed that Doyle had fallen for a simple deception. The girls, by then old women, admitted that they had posed with paper cutouts, supported by hatpins.
Arthur Conan Doyle wrote almost constantly: on trains, in cabs, while posing for photographs... even while carrying on a conversation at a party.
He wrote his first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet in 1887 - in three weeks.
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Bram Stoker
Writer of one of the world's most famous horror novels, Abraham Stoker was born to the loosely defined socio-cultural group known as the Anglo-Irish. A Protestant Dubliner, he was the son of a civil servant, and he was expected to follow in his father's footsteps. As a child, Abraham Stoker was a sickly child often on the point of death. By his own account, he never stood upright without aid until he was seven years old. But he grew into a physically robust youth, excelling in athletics during his college years. At Trinity College, he studied mathematics and became president of the Philosophical Society and the Historical Society.
In the years between 1870 and 1877, he was a civil servant at Dublin Castle. He maintained ties to Trinity College, returning there frequently to speak on a wide range of topics for the Philosophical Society. He was deeply interested in the Romantic poets, and during these years he established a correspondence with Walt Whitman. The two men exchanged letters until Whitman's death. Stoker also became an enthusiastic theatergoer and an ardent admirer and friend of Henry Irving, writing dramatic criticism and glowing reviews of Irving's work for the local papers. Many have argued that Henry Irving was an important model for the character of Count Dracula, and that the novel was a kind of unconscious revenge against the man to whom Stoker gave so much. During these years, Stoker's position in the Historical Society at Trinity put him in contact with Dublin's elite. He became a regular guest of Sir William and Lady Wilde, the parents of Oscar Wilde, and was drawn into Lady Wilde's literary and artistic circle of friends. He competed with Oscar Wilde for the hand of Florence Balcombe, a beautiful young woman who was the daughter of a lieutenant colonel. Florence chose Bram, and the two were married in 1878, the same year he left for London and a new job as the business manager of Henry Irving's Lyceum Theatre. That same year, he wrote The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland, drawn from his experience as a civil servant. Stoker continued to work faithfully and tirelessly for Henry Irving until the actor's death in 1906.
The many years with Henry Irving were full of hard work and sacrifice, as Stoker frequently put his work before his family. His only child, Noel, was born in 1879. Noel later felt that Stoker's work for Irving wore out the devoted younger man. There was constant touring and promotional work to be done throughout the British Isles and as far away as North America. It was during these years that Stoker wrote his greatest novel, Dracula (1897). In 1905, Irving collapsed and died while on tour in Sheffield. Stoker was so profoundly affected by the death of his friend and hero that he suffered a stroke. After Irving's death, Stoker continued to write fiction and do newspaper work until his own death in 1912.
Bram Stoker wrote numerous novels, short stories, essays, and lectures, but Dracula is by far his most famous work. His other works have not aged well, but the story of Count Dracula continues to sell steadily even to this day. Stoker coined the term "undead," and his interpretation of vampire folklore has powerfully shaped depictions of the legendary monsters ever since.
TRIVIA:
One evening Bram Stoker indulged in a late supper of crabmeat. That night, he dreamed of vampires in distant lands. The following day, he started work on Dracula (1897)
ABOUT DRACULA.
The first edition of Dracula was published in June 1897. As late as May of that year, Stoker was still using his original working title for the novel, The Un-Dead. "Undead," a word now commonly used in horror novels and movies, was a term invented by Stoker. Dracula was his most famous novel, instantly a bestseller and perhaps the most famous horror novel ever. It has been made and re-made in film adaptations, been reprinted numerous times, and has continued to sell copies for a hundred years.
Although earlier novels about vampires had been published in England, Stoker's depiction of the vampire has had perhaps the strongest hold on the popular imagination. Stories of vampires or vampire-like creatures exist in all cultures: from China to India to the Incan Empire; variations of the vampire have populated diverse peoples' nightmares and folklore.
Stoker researched Eastern European legends, which offer widely varied tales about supernatural monsters. In Eastern European lore, there is not one kind of vampire but many, and "vampire" is not so distinct a category from "demon" or even "witch" as it has become in modern horror movies. Stoker chose freely from among the legends about various Eastern European demons, some of them bloodsucking, and came up with a suitable interpretation of the vampire for his novel.
He also studied Eastern European history. In the prince of Wallachia, Vlad Tepes, or Dracula ("Son of Dracula"), Bram Stoker found inspiration for his tale of an undead nobleman. Vlad Tepes ("Vlad the Impaler") was a fifteenth Christian nobleman who fought against the Turks. He was a defender of his country and his religion, winning the Pope's praise for his campaigns against the Moslems. The times were full of fear for Christendom. Constantinople, the Rome of the East, had just fallen to the ever-expanding Turks. Vlad was also legendary for his cruelty, to Moslem and Christian enemies alike. He was famous for his love of impaling his victims, a method of execution in which it often took days for the condemned to die. After one battle, thousands of Turkish soldiers were impaled at Vlad's command. After Vlad's death, legends about him continued to multiply. Stoker drew on Vlad's legend for the creation of the vampire Dracula.
Stoker was deeply concerned with sexual morality. Although his novel is full of racy subtext, possibly far more subtext than the author intended, his own views regarding sex and morality were in many ways quite conservative. He favored censoring novels for their sexual content. He considered racy literature dangerous for the ways that it nurtured man's darker sexual tendencies. Although Dracula has many scenes that seem to revel in sexual language and sensual description, these pleasures are sublimated to a Victorian and Christian sense of morality. Sexual energy, in Stoker's view, has great potential for evil, but part of the novel's trick is that Stoker is allowed to have his cake and eat it, too. In writing a novel that implicitly conflates sin with sexuality in a moralizing way, Stoker is also given free reign to write incredibly lurid and sensual scenes. The themes of Christian redemption and the triumph of purity carry the day, but the sexually loaded scenes, that of the three female vampires closing in seductively on a powerless but desiring Jonathan Harker, for example, tend to linger longest in the reader's mind.
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Charles Dickens
Early and Formative Years
In spite of humble beginnings, little education, and the sometimes-critical literary reviewers, Charles Dickens was loved by his public, and amassed wealth, prestige, and a large legacy of published works. He was one of the few writers to enjoy both popular acceptance and financial success while still alive. The drive for this success had its roots in his childhood.
Charles John Huffam Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England on Friday, February 7, 1812. He was the second of eight children born to John and Elizabeth Dickens. His father, John, was the son of illiterate servants. John Dickens managed to escape a similar fate when the family his parents worked for got him a job in a navy pay office. John continued his upward climb by keeping his own lowly background a secret and courting Elizabeth Barrow, the daughter of a wealthy senior clerk who worked there. The marriage succeeded, but John's hopes for further advancement fizzled when his father-in-law was accused of embezzlement and fled the country. The loss of this financial opportunity did not slow the spending habits of John and Elizabeth, who liked the upper-class lifestyle. This problem would be their downfall as time went on.
During Charles Dickens' early years, his family moved a great deal due to his father's job and spending habits. He recalled later that the best time of his childhood was their five years in Chatham, where they moved when Dickens was five, and where life was stable and happy. Dickens loved the area, learned to read, and was sent to school.
However his father's financial problems required a move to smaller quarters in London when Dickens was ten. Their four-room home was cramped, creditors called frequently trying to collect payments, and Dickens' parents alternated between the stress of survival and the gaiety of continuing to party. Dickens wanted to return to school but was instead sent to work at the age of twelve to help support the family.
For twelve hours a day, six days a week, Charles Dickens pasted labels to bottles of shoe polish at the rat-infested, dilapidated Warren's Blacking factory. He was ridiculed and harassed by the older, bigger workers and shamed by the stigma of working in such filthy, low-class surroundings. Intellectually frustrated, resentful of his older sister (who was studying at the Royal Academy of Music), and hurt by his parents' lack of interest in his education, Dickens despaired.
When his father was arrested for nonpayment of a debt, Dickens' mother and younger siblings moved into prison with his father, leaving the twelve-year-old alone on the outside to continue working. His older sister remained at the music academy. Lonely, scared, and abandoned, Dickens lived in a run-down neighborhood close to the prison so that he could visit his family. It was a firsthand experience of poverty and prison life and a reinforcement of the considerable insecurity and emotional abandonment that marked his childhood.
A small inheritance a few months later allowed his family to leave prison. Dickens was finally allowed to attend school over his mother's objections--she did not want to lose his income. School was short-lived though: At fifteen, Dickens had to return to work. Dickens never got over the time he spent at Warren's and his fierce sense of betrayal and rage at his mother's callousness stayed with him for life. Recalling that time, he said: “I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back [to Warren's Blacking]."
Education
In the strictest sense, Dickens' formal education was limited. His mother taught him to read when he was a young boy, and his early education was of a self-taught nature. By the age of ten, he had devoured novels such as Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, and Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote. At nine, he experimented with writing a play for his family and called it Misnar, the Sultan of India.
In 1821, Dickens attended the Giles Academy in Chatham for about one year. Later, when he was twelve, he attended the Wellington House Academy in London. At fifteen, family problems required him to return to work, and so his last “schooling" was again, self-taught. He purchased a reading ticket to the British Museum at eighteen and immersed himself in its large library. He also taught himself shorthand.
Jobs
For seven years after Dickens left Wellington House, he lived at home and worked at various jobs. He spent the first two years as a law clerk. After learning shorthand he spent four years as a legal reporter, then as a shorthand reporter in Parliament. In 1834 he joined the staff of the Morning Chronicle as a news reporter covering elections, Parliament, and other political events. Dickens also spent some of his time involved in the theater, and he also began to write for publication. His adulthood was marked by a feverish work pace and a desire to achieve.
Love and Family
At eighteen Dickens met Maria Beadnell, the daughter of a rich banker. She was two years older, beautiful--he fell totally in love. He wrote to her: “I never have loved and I never can love any human creature breathing but yourself." Though the relationship went well for a while, she lost interest in him after returning from finishing school in Paris. Dickens' friend and biographer, John Forster, was at first surprised that Dickens was so affected by this relationship, a pain that continued even years later. But Forster realized that this was fueled by a deep sense of social inferiority. Dickens was determined to succeed beyond everyone's wildest dreams and show them how wrong they were about him. Interestingly enough, he met Maria again years later. Eagerly looking forward to his meeting with her, and expecting the desirable vision of his youth, he was crushed when a middle-aged woman resembling his wife showed up. As his sister-in-law happily put it, Maria “had become very fat!"
In 1834, Dickens met Catherine Hogarth, the oldest daughter of the Morning Chronicle's editor, George Hogarth. Hogarth had favorably reviewed Dickens' work, Sketches by Boz, and the two men had become friends. Charles and Catherine were engaged in 1935 and married in 1936. It was a strange courtship: While the two held each other in affection and Catherine share his interest in a family, the courtship lacked the passion of his relationship with Beadnell. Dickens often broke dates with Catherine to meet work deadlines and sent her reprimanding letters if she protested.
As time went on their differences grew more apparent. Catherine was not outgoing or socially poised, and she avoided the public and social events her husband attended. In addition, Catherine's younger sister, Mary, had come to live with them shortly after their marriage. Dickens was very attached to Mary and when she died suddenly in 1838 at the age of seventeen, he was devastated. His enduring grief over her death incurred his wife's jealousy. Mary, adored by Charles Dickens, would show up again and again as a character in his works.
In time, another seventeen-year-old would steal his heart. Middle-aged, hard working, and disillusioned with his marriage, Dickens met Ellen Ternan, an actress in one of his plays. She was everything his wife was not: lovely, young, and slim. Catherine, with ten pregnancies, had grown stout, and at forty-three could not compete with the younger woman. It did not take long for the marriage to dissolve, resulting in something of a scandal at the time. Catherine, rejected by her husband, left the family home. The children rarely saw her because they stayed with Dickens, and she died in 1879, nine years after he divorced her. Dickens spent the rest of his life maintaining a secret relationship with Ternan.
In 1842, Dickens and his wife traveled through America. He found himself crushed with admirers to the point of feeling oppressed by his fame. In addition, the attitudes and vanity of some of the Americans disturbed him, especially with regard to slavery, and he was frustrated by the lack of copyright protection in the States--many of his works were being published there without any payment to him. When he returned home, Dickens wrote American Notes. While polite, Dickens' feelings about America were nevertheless obvious. American critics were, as you may expect, hostile.
Also during this time, Dickens burned most of his letters and papers: In his success, he did not want anyone to make his life more interesting than his novels. By destroying his notes, he effectively took his insights regarding his works to the grave, leaving the interpretations of his stories up to his literary critics and readers.
Charles Dickens and Mesmerism
In 1849 John Leech, a friend of Charles Dickens, was injured. The accident left Leech with concussion-like symptoms that wouldn't disappear despite all the work of his doctors. Leech was in a great deal of pain and unable to rest. Dickens heard of the incident and rushed to his friend's aid. Within a few days Leech's condition had significantly improved. What could Dickens do that the doctors couldn't? Dickens helped his friend via the use of mesmerism.
Mesmerism was developed by Franz Anton Mesmer. It used hypnotic trances to heal people. In 1838 Dickens attended several lectures on the subject including some by John Elliotson. Elliotson was the professor of clinical medicine who introduced the stethoscope to England. He also had campaigned against corrupt medical practices. Despite his many accomplishments Elliotson was forced to resign his teaching position in 1839 because of a scandal regarding mesmerism.
Despite the controversy Dickens was a believer in mesmerism.
Elliotson taught Dickens the technique and it quickly became apparent that Dickens was skilled in this area. Initially he mesmerized family and friends just for fun or to help with minor illnesses. However in late 1844 he took on a more serious case, that of Madame de la Rue.
Augusta de la Rue suffered from extreme anxiety. It was so profound that it caused noticeable facial tics or spasms. Dickens was eager to help and during the next few months he treated her frequently. The treatments were effective. After a month Madame de la Rue showed much improvement. She was able to sleep and night and visibly looked more relaxed.
Once the physical symptoms of Madame de la Rue eased Dickens became interested in their underlying causes. The sessions began to focus more on Madame de la Rue's dreams, hallucinations and thoughts. She spoke of being pursued by a "phantom". Their sessions became almost like those of a therapist and a patient.
How exactly did mesmerism work? Perhaps it acted as a tranquilizer and promoted rest. At this point it's hard to say. However the health of Leech and de la Rue did seem to improve after being treated by Dickens.
Bonfire at Gad's Hill Place
In September of 1860, behind his home at Gad's Hill Place, Charles Dickens tried to cover his tracks. He gathered "the accumulated letters and papers of twenty years" and set them ablaze in his backyard.
What moved him to such drastic action? There seem to be two factors in his life that drove him to make a bonfire of his correspondence.
The first is fear of the press. He was concerned that his personal letters would be published and details of his life would become public knowledge. What did he have to hide?
In 1858 he had a very public separation from his wife, but it was not widely known that he had a mistress. Ellen Ternan, his mistress, was an actress who was much younger than Dickens. If his relationship with Ellen were public knowledge it would have created a scandal.
In 1843 he'd written about workhouses and prisons in A Christmas Carol. However very few people knew that Dickens's father had been sent to Marshalsea prison for failure to pay a debt and that Charles Dickens, then only twelve years old, was sent to work in a shoe-polish factory. Dickens was deeply scarred by these incidents and rarely spoke of them.
A second inspiration for the bonfire at Gad's Hill Place could have been that Dickens was at a turning point in his life. The destruction of his private papers might have been his way of coming to terms with his past.
In 1860 he was still coming to terms with the separation from his wife and his relationship with Ellen. Also in July of that year his favorite daughter, Katie, married and left Gad's Hill Place. Ten days after the wedding Dickens's brother, Alfred, died. Additionally Dickens's mother had become senile and needed constant care. All of these items could have motivated Dickens, at least on a subconscious level, to try to free himself from the demons of his past.
Whatever his motivations we can only imagine the things we might have learned about the era, Dickens's life and the lives of famous Victorians. Burned on that day were letters from authors like Wilkie Collins, George Eliot and William Makepeace Thackeray.
Dickens's two youngest sons, Henry and Plorn, carried out baskets and baskets of letters to feed into the fire. His daughter Mamie begged him to reconsider and save some of the letters. However Dickens was determined that the task be completed. As they were finishing it began to rain. Dickens said, " . . . I suspect my correspondence of having overcast the face of the Heavens."
TRIVIA:
While visiting Charles Dickens and his family in England, Hans Christian Andersen so overstayed his welcome that Dickens wrote a note on a card - which he placed above a mirror in the guest room. "Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks," it read, "which seemed to the family like AGES."["A bony bore," one of Dickens' daughters later recalled, "who stayed on and on."][Dickens himself was not immune to criticism: "We do not believe in the permanence of his reputation," the Saturday Review declared in 1858. "Our children will wonder what their ancestors could have meant by putting Dickens at the head of the novelists of his day."]
Before moving into Tavistock House, Charles Dickens installed a secret door to his study, designed to look like part of a book case, complete with faux shelves and the spines of books emblazoned with fictitious titles - the invention of which Dickens greatly enjoyed. These ranged from the three volume Five Minutes in China and the nine volume Cat's Lives through Noah's Arkitecture and Shelley's Oysters to such puns as A Carpenter's Bench of Bishops and The Gunpowder Magazine. Among the most cynical additions? The Wisdom of Our Ancestors, a multi-volume series covering ignorance, superstition, the block, the stake, the rack, dirt, and disease - and a companion volume, The Virtues of Our Ancestors, which was so narrow that the title had to be printed sideways!
Dickens (famed for such characters as Pip and Gradgrind) had a fondness for nicknames and insisted that his grandchildren call him "Wennerables." He also referred to himself as "The Sparkler of Albion" - a reference to his belief that he was the brightest spark in English literature since Shakespeare. (Albion is an ancient name for Great Britain.) "Boz," his favorite pen name, came about from the mispronunciation of a younger brother, whom Dickens had dubbed "Moses" (the name of one of the sons in Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield). The young boy pronounced it "Bozes," which was soon shortened to "Boz."
When The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) was first published (in serial form), the novel was welcomed by a vast audience in both Britain and the United States, and interest in the fate of the heroine, Little Nell, grew intense.
In New York, six thousand people crowded the wharf at which a ship carrying the magazine with the final installment was scheduled to dock. As it approached, many people in the crowd, growing impatient, cried out to the sailors: "Does Little Nell die!?"
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Charlotte Bronte
At age twenty, Charlotte Brontë sent a sample of her poetry to England's Poet Laureate, Robert Southey. His comments urged her to abandon all literary pursuits: “Literature cannot be the business of a woman" life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation." His response indicates the political difficulties women faced as they tried to enter the literary arena in Victorian England; domestic responsibilities were expected to require all their energy, leaving no time for creative pursuits. Despite a lack of support from the outside world, Charlotte Brontë found sufficient internal motivation and enthusiasm from her sisters to become a successful writer and balance her familial and creative needs.
Born at Thornton, Yorkshire on April 21, 1816, Charlotte was the third child of Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell. In 1820, her father received a curate post in Haworth, a remote town on the Yorkshire moors, where Charlotte spent most of her life. In 1821, Mrs. Brontë died from what was thought to be cancer. Primarily their unpleasant, maiden aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, who provided them with little supervision, raised Charlotte and her four sisters, Maria, Elizabeth, Emily and Anne, and their brother, Branwell. Not only were the children free to roam the moors, but their father allowed them to read whatever interested them: Shakespeare, The Arabian Nights, Pilgrim's Progress, and the poems of Byron were some of their favorites.
When a school for the daughters of poor clergymen opened at Cowan Bridge in 1824, Mr. Brontë decided to send his oldest four daughters there to receive a formal education. Most biographers argue that Charlotte's description of Lowood School in Jane Eyre accurately reflects the dismal conditions at this school. Charlotte's two oldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died in 1824 of tuberculosis they contracted due to the poor management of the school. Following this tragedy, Patrick Brontë withdrew Charlotte and Emily from Cowan Bridge.
Grieving over their sisters deaths and searching for a way to alleviate their loneliness, the remaining four siblings began writing a series of stories, The Glass-Town, stimulated by a set of toy soldiers their father had given them. In these early writings, the children collaboratively created a complete imaginary world, a fictional West African empire they called Angria. Charlotte explained their interest in writing this way: “We were wholly dependent on ourselves and each other, on books and study, for the enjoyments and occupations of life. The highest stimulus, as well as the liveliest pleasure we had know from childhood upwards, lay in attempts at literary composition." Through her early twenties, Charlotte routinely revised and expanded pieces of the Angria story, developing several key characters and settings. While this writing helped Charlotte improve her literary style, the Angria adventures are fantastical, melodramatic, and repetitive, contrasting with Charlotte's more realistic adult fiction.
After her father had a dangerous lung disorder, he decided once again that his daughters should receive an education so they would be assured of an income if he died. In 1831, Charlotte entered the Misses Wooler's school at Roe Head. Shy and solitary, Charlotte was not happy at school, but she still managed to win several academic awards and to make two lifelong friends: Mary Taylor and Ellen Nussey. Although she was offered a teaching job at Roe Head, Charlotte declined the position, choosing to return to Haworth instead. Perhaps bored with the solitary life at Haworth and looking for an active occupation in the world, Charlotte returned to Roe Head in 1835 as a governess. For her, governessing was akin to “slavery," because she felt temperamentally unsuited for it, and finally, following a near mental breakdown in 1838, she was forced to resign her position.
Unfortunately, governessing was the only real employment opportunity middle-class women had in Victorian England. Because the family needed the money, Charlotte suffered through two more unhappy governess positions, feeling like an unappreciated servant in wealthy families' homes; she didn't enjoy living in other people's houses because it caused “estrangement from one's real character."
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Edgar Rice Burroughs
Tarzan was born in the jungles of Africa, but his creator first saw the light of day amidst more tranquil surroundings.
Edgar Rice Burroughs was born in Chicago on September 1st, 1875. His father, George Tyler Burroughs, was a Civil War veteran and now a successful businessman. Major Burroughs and his wife Mary had five other boys besides Edgar, but two of the children died in infancy, leaving Edgar the youngest of the family.
"Eddie" attended several schools during his formative years, often being shuttled from one to another due to the outbreak of various diseases. At this time it was standard to learn Greek and Latin in addition to English composition, and Burroughs would often lament his erratic schooling, which resulted in his (or so he said) learning little English while taking the same Greek and Latin courses over and over again. Despite his claims to the contrary, this early exposure to Classical literature and mythology would serve Burroughs well in his future writing career.
An influenza epidemic hit Chicago in 1891, hundreds died, and Edgar's worried parents wondered how they could protect their fifteen-year-old son. A few years earlier two of Edgar's brothers, George and Harry, had started a cattle ranch out west in Idaho. This seemed like a logical safe haven, so George and Mary packed Edgar onto an Idaho-bound train.
Ed took to the frontier life like a duck to water. He rode the range, herded cattle, busted a bucking bronco, and got to know a few thieves, murderers and bad men. Idaho at this time was still a pretty rough-and-tumble place; a range war was brewing between cattle ranchers and sheep men, the law was fairly lax, and there were even shootouts at the local saloon. Young Ed loved the half year he spent in Idaho ~ then his parents found out about these sordid events of frontier life and sent Ed off to the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.
But Ed wound up being a bit too rough-and-tumble himself for the faculty at Andover, so the Major shipped his son off to the Michigan Military Academy at Orchard Lake. Here Ed's frontier skills stood him in good stead; he became an excellent trick rider and crack shot, and even did fairly well in his studies. Not that he was an angel during his stay at MMI (he tried deserting during his first year, among other escapades) but Burroughs had apparently found an atmosphere conducive to his spirit.
Burroughs graduated from the Michigan Military Academy in 1895 but, not really knowing what to do with his life, accepted the Academy's offer of an instructorship. (He had tried for an appointment to the West Point Military Academy but failed the entrance exam.) Hankering to see some action, Ed quit his position with the Academy early the next year and signed up with the U.S. Army as a buck private in the hopes of eventually becoming an officer. Being a natural horseman Ed got his wish and was assigned to the Seventh United States Cavalry (General Custer's old regiment) stationed at Fort Grant, Arizona Territory.
Burroughs would define this as a time where he "chased Apaches, but never caught up with them." The best he succeeded in catching was dysentery. The work was far from glamorous, mainly digging ditches and repairing the rickety fort. Burroughs went out on patrols but the few Apache renegades still roaming free proved quite elusive. To compound matters, during a routine medical exam the post doctor determined that Burroughs had a heart murmur ~ and thus ineligible to be promoted to the officer class. With an army career now out of the question, Ed received his discharge in early 1897.
Ed made another go of it in Idaho, punching cows for his brothers and others, even running a dry goods store for a time. This rather freeform life couldn't last forever, so in 1899 it was back to Chicago and work at his father's American Battery Company. With a steady paycheck he decided to marry his childhood sweetheart, Emma Centennia Hulbert, in 1900. But a regular routine apparently wasn't what Ed wanted, so in 1904 he and Emma struck out again for Idaho.
The next several years would be a frustrating search by Ed for his place in life. His brothers George and Harry had given up cattle ranching for gold dredging, but this program fizzled shortly after Ed arrived. He got a job as a railway policeman in Salt Lake City but gave up after awhile and took Emma back to Chicago. Among his many short-lived jobs were door-to-door salesman, an accountant, the manager for the clerical department of Sears, Roebuck & Company, peddler for a quack alcoholism cure and, finally, a pencil sharpener wholesaler. By this point (1911) Burroughs had two children (Joan and Hulbert), was flat broke, and was left with only one way out of this cycle: he could dream.
So the story goes, Edgar Rice Burroughs was sitting in his rented office and waiting for his crack pencil sharpener salesmen to report in, supposedly their pockets bulging with orders. Besides waiting, one of Burroughs' duties was to verify the placement of advertisements for his sharpeners in various magazines. These were all-fiction "pulp" magazines, a prime source of escapist reading material for the rapidly expanding middle class. Verifying the pencil sharpener ads didn't exactly take much time. The pencil sharpener salesmen never showed up, so Burroughs spent his idle time reading those pulp magazines. And an idea was born.
After reading several thousand words of breathless pulp fiction Burroughs determined ~ or so he claimed ~ that "if people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines that I could write stories just as rotten. As a matter of fact, although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines." This may be nothing more than a legend Burroughs liked to tell to show how he came into his own as a writer. He had actually written stories before this time, mostly fairy tales and poems he created for his children, nieces and nephews. The most elaborate of these stories, Minidoka, 937th Earl of One Mile Series M, has been printed by Dark Horse Comics.
But in 1911, Burroughs decided to write a full-blown novel, and the tale he wrote was as far removed from the life of a pencil sharpener wholesaler as one could possibly imagine. This flight of fancy, entitled "Dejah Thoris, Martian Princess," was so exotic that Burroughs was worried that editors might think he was a little touched in the head. So he submitted the story under a pseudonym, Normal Bean, a joke indicating that his head was indeed screwed on the right way.
In submitting his manuscript to All-Story magazine he found luck the first time out: editor Thomas Metcalf liked the tale and offered Burroughs 400 dollars, an extravagant sum. The story, renamed "Under the Moons of Mars," was serialized from February to July of 1912. Burroughs wound up being renamed as well: his pseudonym was changed to Norman Bean. (When this story appeared in book form it received its final title, A Princess of Mars; both Normal and Norman were abandoned in favor of the author's real name.) By the time of the last installment of "Under the Moons of Mars" Burroughs had completed his third novel. Metcalf rejected the second one, “The Outlaw of Torn," but the third novel was a little trifle called "Tarzan of the Apes." Burroughs was now a bona fide full-time writer.
Tarzan of the Apes" appeared in the October 1912 issue of All-Story magazine. Burroughs received 700 dollars for the tale ~ and his career was off and running. Burroughs quickly discovered (probably to his secret delight, and certainly to the delight of countless readers) that he had many more tales to tell. There would be the inevitable Tarzan and Mars sequels but Burroughs' imagination needed even more worlds in which to roam, and so in the next few years he would try his hand at almost every type of story imaginable. Burroughs created the fabulous prehistoric inner world of Pellucidar (starting with At the Earth's Core), wrote other cave man fantasies (The Eternal Savage and The Land That Time Forgot), tales of courtly intrigue (The Mad King), a horror story (The Monster Men), novels of social realism (The Girl From Hollywood), Robinson Crusoe-type adventures (The Cave Girl), and one story that combined all of the above (The Mucker). Later still he would write westerns (The War Chief and others) and created yet another series, this one set on the planet Venus (starting with Pirates of Venus). But Tarzan would earn Burroughs his greatest success.
A second son and third child of the Burroughses, John Coleman, was born in 1913, and the following year saw a birth of a different sort: Tarzan of the Apes was published as a book. This novel is still in print today. The first Tarzan movie appeared in 1918, with Elmo Lincoln in the title role, which only helped to make Tarzan and Burroughs even more popular. Eventually Burroughs would put out a total of 26 Tarzan books, and left a fragment of another that was only discovered long after his death. Most of Burroughs' other stories would also appear in book form, and are available in libraries and bookstores worldwide.
By 1916 Burroughs felt that he had earned a vacation, and so he packed up Emma and the children (and their dog Tarzan) and set out on a cross-country camping trip. At this time there was no such thing as an interstate highway system ~ actually, there were very few roads at all. Heading out with a touring car, a truck and a trailer the party set off for Maine but eventually wound up in Southern California. Eventually the expedition made the return trip to Chicago, but the California bug had bitten Burroughs. In 1919, thanks to the success of Tarzan, Burroughs was able to purchase a large ranch north of Los Angeles. He named it Tarzana.
As the Lord of Tarzana, Burroughs had seemingly found the good life. Tarzan had provided him with a comfortable living, his books were selling worldwide (even in the Soviet Union, where such tales were not well regarded by the Communist government), and the nearby community of Hollywood was busy cranking out Tarzan movies. (Tinsel Town even provided Burroughs with a son-in-law: Jim Pierce, who starred in "Tarzan and the Golden Lion," married Joan Burroughs in 1928.) The citizens of the community that had sprung up around the Tarzana ranch paid the ultimate compliment: they voted to adopt the name "Tarzana" when their town was incorporated in 1928.
Burroughs liked to think of himself as a hardheaded businessman and concluded that he could make an even better living if he founded his own company. And so in 1923 Burroughs became an employee of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. This was an unusual step for an author to take, although it is now quite common. Burroughs would even start publishing his own books, beginning in 1931 with Tarzan the Invincible. The last book to appear under the Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. imprint was I Am a Barbarian in 1967.
The year 1932 was ushered in with a scream, as MGM released the first sound Tarzan movie, "Tarzan the Ape Man" with the now legendary Johnny Weissmuller. Hollywood did not show a great deal of fidelity to Burroughs' original story this time around, but the movie's success meant that the Tarzan books were selling better than ever. But financial success was overshadowed by the problems in Burroughs' personal life, as he and Emma divorced in 1934. He married Florence Dearholt the following year and in 1940, with war raging in Europe, the couple decided to head further west to Hawaii.
Even though he was entering the last decade of his life Burroughs continued to be physically active, and still wrote stories for the pulp magazines and his own company. Hulbert Burroughs came out to Hawaii to visit his father in late 1941, and on the morning of December 7th, as the two played tennis, the Japanese bombed nearby Pearl Harbor. Thus began the last adventure of Edgar Rice Burroughs' life.
Edgar Rice Burroughs was too old to see active service in World War II ~ he was 66 at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack ~ but as an established writer he served the war effort by becoming a war correspondent. He was the oldest war correspondent to serve in the Pacific theater, flying from island to island (even bumping into his son Hulbert, who was serving as a war photographer), reporting on troop activities, even going out on bombing runs with the 7th Air Force. Burroughs came through this period of life unscathed, although he would send Tarzan out on a more danger-filled mission in Tarzan and the "Foreign Legion" (1944).
With the war's end Burroughs returned to California and settled into a small home near Tarzana. He and Florence had divorced in 1942, so Ed devoted his final years to his children. He died on March 19, 1950. His writings and characters had entertained three generations of readers and moviegoers.
TRIVIA:
As Burroughs wrote out his tale, with a fountain pen in longhand, he was only interested in thrilling his All-Story pulp magazine readers. The story came easily from his pen, but Burroughs didn't like the name he had thought up for his jungle hero: Zantar. Doesn't sound quite right; scratch it out. Next up: Tublat-Zan. Ugh. Even worse. The third time proved the charm, as Burroughs wrote TARZAN!
The success of Tarzan's first appearance was little short of astounding. Letters of praise flooded the All-Story offices, and the publisher dutifully passed them along to Burroughs. In a magazine that specialized in fast-paced action and adventure, "Tarzan of the Apes" stood out. This story of the orphaned English lord, raised by apes in the depths of the African jungle, who grows up to eventually become king of his ape tribe, who falls in love with the beautiful - and conveniently marooned - Jane Porter of Baltimore, who learns the ways of civilization and follows Jane to America (only to lose her in the end), struck a cord with readers. They loved the story - but hated the ending! How could Tarzan not win Jane? Ah, but that would be another story ...
And more Tarzan stories Burroughs would definitely write. The adventures Tarzan had, and the many strange lands he traveled to, would boggle the mind of those who only knew Tarzan from the movies. Tarzan would discover Opar, the lost outpost of Atlantis ~ a hidden valley where the Roman Empire still held sway ~ Pal-ul-don, a land where dinosaurs and prehistoric men still survived ~ the City of Gold, whose inhabitants hunted men with lions ~ and Pellucidar, a land of eternal day at the center of the earth.
But what about Jane? Readers in 1912 wanted to know. Even as praise for "Tarzan of the Apes" continued to pour in, Burroughs was working on a sequel. If anything was a surefire success, this was it! The future seemed rosy, and Burroughs cheerfully mailed off "The Return of Tarzan" to Metcalf in January 1913 - who rejected it! Burroughs was crushed. How could the sequel to something as successful as "Tarzan of the Apes" possibly be rejected? Burroughs signaled that this was the end of his fledgling writing career. All of the later Tarzan adventures, all the movies, all the comics and toys, were a hair's-breadth away from never existing. Metcalf's reply was succinct: "For the love of Mike! Don't get discouraged!"
Burroughs took those words to heart - he sold "The Return of Tarzan" to a rival magazine!
Tarzan was now a big hit with the readers of two magazines, and virtually all future Tarzan stories would first appear in the pulps, but the ape-man would never have become the world-wide phenomenon he is today if he had remained in the pulp jungle. Edgar Rice Burroughs knew this as well - or at least, he figured that Tarzan could help him support his family better if the stories were published as books. So Burroughs sent off copies of the All-Story Tarzan to over a dozen publishers, along with fan letters to show that people loved the story.
Naturally, every publisher rejected Tarzan. Burroughs received such responses as "we think it deserved all the success you say it had as a Magazine story" or "we are grateful for the privilege of seeing this story," but ultimately no publisher seemed interested. But one person who did express an interest was Albert Payson Terhune, editor of the New York newspaper Evening World. He wanted to serialize Tarzan of the Apes, and soon newspapers across the country wanted to as well. Now thousands more were thrilling to the exploits of Tarzan (as well as the other stories Burroughs was writing). And suddenly the book publishers became interested.
In 1962 a Los Angeles librarian tried to banish the Tarzan books from the shelves, claiming, because Tarzan and Jane weren't married, that the books were immoral. As the blessed event actually did occur (at the end of Return of Tarzan) the poor woman's knowledge of Tarzan had only come from the old Johnny Weissmuller movies, which did give the impression that he and Jane were not living in a state of wedded bliss. Many die-hard fans rose to Tarzan's defense (citing chapter and verse), newspaper editorials were written, and a few publishers began to wonder if there was something still worthwhile about Tarzan.
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Emily Bronte
The fifth of six children, Emily Jane Brontë was born on July 30, 1818. She was brought up in the stone parsonage at Haworth, Yorkshire. She died on December 19, 1848 after a brief but harrowing illness and was buried in the church where her father was curate from 1820 until his death in 1861.
As a child Emily was described as "a pretty little thing." She was the tallest of the sisters and had dark hair and gray eyes. Her love of Haworth and the moorland about it was all consuming. In November of 1824, Emily, with two of her sisters, attended the Clergy Daughter's School at Casterton. Conditions there were very bad. As a result Maria and Elizabeth died, and Charlotte became very ill. The children remained there until June of 1825. With the exception of three months at Roe Head in 1835, Emily had no further formal schooling. Her sister, Charlotte, was teaching there at the time, but the younger Emily was homesick and growing ill; therefore, she was sent home. The education of Emily and Anne was left mainly to Charlotte. A six-month period of teaching near Halifax, Yorkshire, in 1837-38, and an eight-month stay in Brussels at the Pensionnat Heger, in 1842-43, were Emily's only absences from her beloved Haworth and its wild and lonely moors. She loved the moors, because she was fond of nature and animals, especially of Keeper, her pet bulldog, who mourned for months after her death.
During her early years, Emily, like her sisters, had done a good deal of writing. Poems of the three sisters appeared under pseudonyms in 1846 when Emily was twenty-eight years old. Only Emily's poems, hinting at mystical experiences, had any intrinsic merit. Later her mysticism returned fitfully and dimly, and she called it "rapturous pain" and "divinest anguish." Emily turned her attention away from poetry and tried her hand at fiction writing. In 1847, at the age of twenty-nine, she published Wuthering Heights under the pseudonym of Ellis Bell. The book went almost unnoticed; and those who read it were shocked by the violent behavior of the characters it described. This unique novel has served as a battleground for critics for over a century. Somerset Maugham considers it among the ten greatest novels in the English language.
In 1848, Emily attended the funeral of her dissipated brother, Branwell. Soon after the funeral, Emily became ill and eventually developed tuberculosis. With great fortitude she continued her round of duties, rising at seven and retiring at ten. On December 18, 1848 she attended to her duties for the last time, for she died the next day.
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H.G. Wells
H.G. (Herbert George) Wells was born in Bromley, England on September 21, 1866. His family was not well off. His father worked as a shopkeeper and cricket player and his mother was a housekeeper. Wells was the couple's fourth and last son. At age eight a broken leg accelerated his interest in reading.
When his father was no longer able to make enough to support the family, Wells became a draper's assistant at age 13. However, he was able to attend the Normal School of Science on a scholarship, where he met Thomas Huxley. Wells went on to teach biology until 1893.
“The Time Machine” was published in 1895 and quickly became a favorite among readers. This was the first of a series of yearly successes that included “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” “The Invisible Man,” and “The War of the Worlds.” This early writing cemented his reputation as the father of science fiction (though sometimes he shares this title with Jules Verne, whom he was compared to throughout his life), but Wells also wrote history and social commentary and was involved in politics for much of his life. As he aged, his writing became more realistic and pessimistic. .
Wells was married twice, the second time to one of his students. He also had a ten year affair with Rebecca West, whom he met after she reviewed his book “Marriage.”
On August 13, 1946, Wells died in London, after living through two world wars and seeing Orson Welles’ broadcast of “The War of the Worlds” strike panic in listeners. Many of his books remain in print and are popular even today. Additionally, many of his novels have been dramatized as movies, including The War of the Worlds, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and The Time Machine. The stories of The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine have been made into movies at least twice each, demonstrating the continued popularity and fascination with the novels
Many of the minor themes in this book relate to Wells' own time. The Victorian Age in Britain lasted for most of the 1800s through the early 1900s. It was a period of great empire and industrialization, but along with that came hardships, particularly for the working-class. Working conditions were poor and occupational hazards were a part of life. Wells also drew on his background in science. Natural selection and the conflict with religion were emerging as strong issues.
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Hermann Hesse
Few twentieth-century writers have so touched the youth of various generations as Hermann Hesse - first in Germany between the wars, then in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States and England. His novels - Steppenwolf, Demian, Siddhartha, The Glass Bead Game - have sold in millions, capturing and shaping the counterculture's infatuation with the East and mysticism, youth's absorption in the passions of adolescent crisis, and the search for a spiritual release in a materialistic world.
Yet beneath the reputation of this adored cult writer, Hesse's life itself reveals the extraordinary quest for meaning by an artist in a fragmented and strife torn world. His life is even more notable and illustrative of the crises of our age than the fiction he wrote. Hesse's eighty-five years (1877-1962) spanned an entire era in German history; living his life in pursuit of certain themes, resulting in his ability to attract generations of the young, which made him a social phenomenon, able to reflect both the issues of his time and the timeless issues of youth.
Hesse was the first major writer to be psychoanalyzed, and this experience became a near-mythic odyssey into the turmoil of his inner life, a journey that illustrates the acute contradictions in the role of the modern artist. With Hesse, the struggle for a sense of self led him to write relentlessly about even the most mundane experiences of his life, as if, at every moment, they were unformed materials waiting to be fashioned into a work of art; as if a failure to fashion them constantly through his voluminous correspondence, diaries and poems might lead to the very dissolution of his life.
Hermann Hesse was born in Claw in the Black Forest in the German state of Wüttenberg on July 2, 1877. His father, Johannes Hesse, was born in Weissenstein, Estonia, and retained Russian citizenship. His mother, Marie Gundert, was born to Pietist missionaries in Talatscheri, India. In 1880, Hesse's family moved to Basle, a city located on the border of Germany, France, and Switzerland. They resided there until 1886, during which time Hesse's father taught at the Basler Mission.
Understanding Pietism, the religion of Hesse's family, is important in order to understand Hesse himself. Both his upbringing and his religious foundation had an impact on his writing later on. Pietism began as a German Lutheran religious movement. Pietists emphasize Christian living. In other words, Pietists are not satisfied simply reading the Bible; instead, they believe the Bible should be experienced. All the Pietist morals, goals, and values are taken directly from biblical scripture, and Pietists must incorporate the biblical principles into their lives. In addition, Pietists resist church practices that emphasize tradition and repetition, rather than spontaneous experience.
Hesse's family expected him to become a Pietist minister, so the Hesse family returned to Claw in 1886. Hesse attended boarding school in Wüttenberg and a grammar school in Göppingen to study and prepare for the Wüttenberg State Examination. Hesse passed the exam and entered the seminary at the Protestant Monastery at Maulbronn. According to Hesse in his 1946 presentation speech for the Nobel Prize, he was a "good learner," but not a "very manageable boy." He went on to say, "It was only with difficulty that I [fit] into the framework of a Pietist education that aimed at subduing and breaking the individual personality."
Hesse left the seminary in 1892 and began working at a variety of odd jobs, including an apprenticeship to a mechanic and positions in several book and antique shops. During this period, Hesse began publishing poetry, articles, and reviews, but he did not gain recognition until the publication of Peter Camenzind in 1904. He married Maria Bernoulli that same year.
Hesse visited India in 1911, and his trip initiated his study of Eastern religions. Hesse was further influenced by Chinese philosophy as well as his own experiences with psychoanalysis. Hesse moved to Switzerland in 1912, and the stress of his wife's growing mental instability, along with his son's illness, compelled Hesse to continue psychoanalysis treatments.
During World War I, Hesse was labeled a traitor as a result of his antiwar sentiments, anti-propaganda behavior, and pacifist attitude. Hesse separated from his wife in 1919 and moved to the Casa Camuzzi in Montagnola. Hesse and his first wife divorced in 1923. In 1924, Hesse married his second wife, Ruth Wenger.
In 1926, Hesse was elected to the department of creative writing of the Prussian Academy of the Arts. He resigned his position in 1931, stating that he wanted nothing to do with the inevitable propaganda that would come out of the academy during a second war. Hesse and his second wife divorced in 1927. He married his third wife, Ninon Dolbin, in 1931.
Hesse died of a cerebral hemorrhage on August 9, 1962.
Hesse Quotations:
All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.
Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.
Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.
I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.
It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is.
Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin.
Those who cannot think or take responsibility for themselves need, and clamor for, a leader.
When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.
You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, single power, a single salvation... and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else.
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Jane Austen
Jane Austen’s life resembles her novels—at first glance they seem to be composed of a series of quiet, unexceptional events. Such an impression is supported by the comment of her brother, Henry, who wrote after her death that her life was “not by any means a life of event.” Similarly, her nephew James added in a biography published fifty years later that “Of events her life was singularly barren: few changes and no great crisis ever broke the smooth current of its course.” However, just as readers find that the complexity of Austen’s novel lies in its characters and style, those studying Austen herself discover that the events of her life are secondary to her compelling personality, quick wit, and highly developed powers of observation..
The fact that Austen’s life lacked the drama that other authors may have experienced in no way detracted from her skill as a writer. In actuality, Austen’s lack of “extraordinary” experiences, as well as of a spouse and children, probably made her writing possible by freeing her time to work on her books. Additionally, because her books were published anonymously, Austen never achieved personal recognition for her works outside of her sphere of family and friends. Such anonymity suited her, for, as literary critic Richard Blythe notes, “literature, not the literary life, was always her intention.”
Formative Years
Born on December 16, 1775, Jane Austen was the seventh of eight children born to George and Cassandra Austen. The family lived in Steventon, a small Hampshire town in south-central England, where her father was a minister. The Austens were a loving, spirited family that read novels together from the local circulating library and put on home theatricals. It was for the family circle that Austen first wrote high-spirited satires—some of which later became novels after numerous and careful rewritings.
Out of her seven siblings, Austen was closest to her only sister, Cassandra. From 1783 to 1785, the two girls attended schools in Oxford and Southampton and the Abbey School at Reading. When the Austens could no longer afford the tuition, Jane and Cassandra returned home to read extensively and learn from their family how to speak French and Italian and play the piano. Most accounts agree that the Austen daughters were pretty and enjoyed the slightly limited but interesting round of country parties described in Austen’s novels..
When Austen was twenty, she met Tom Lefroy, a young Irishman visiting his uncle in Hampshire. Seeing that the two young people were on the verge of an engagement, Lefroy’s family sent him home rather than letting him attach himself to someone as poor as a clergyman’s daughter. Austen’s second brush with marriage occurred at age twenty-seven, when the wealthy Harris Bigg-Wither proposed and Austen accepted. The next morning, however, Austen changed her mind, giving up the wealth and security inherent in such a match because she did not love him. Although Austen never married, the emphasis of courtship and marriage in her novels demonstrates the impact that these experiences had on her and her interest in love and marriage.
Early Novels
From 1796-1798, Austen wrote her first three novels—Northanger Abbey (originally titled Susan), Sense and Sensibility (originally titled Elinor and Marianne), and Pride and Prejudice (originally titled First Impressions)—but none was published until later. Northanger Abbey, which was published posthumously in 1818, satirizes the Gothic novels that were popular at the time by presenting a heroine whose overactive imagination and love of Gothic novels lead her to see mysteries where none exist when she stays at Northanger Abbey. In Sense and Sensibility, published in 1811, Austen examines the contrast between two sisters who represent reason (sense) and emotion (sensibility) as they deal with being forced to live on a meager amount of money after their father dies. The threat of a father’s death causing a reduced income also overshadows two sisters in Pride and Prejudice, which was published in 1813. In Pride and Prejudice, however, that threat of genteel poverty is still just a threat rather than a reality, and Austen focuses instead on how pride and first impressions can lead to prejudice
In her early writing, Austen began to define the limits of her fictional world. From the first, there was a steady emphasis on character as she consciously restricted her subject matter to a sphere made up of a few families of relatives with their friends and acquaintances. She deliberately limited what she wrote about, and her work gains intensity and beauty from its narrow focus. In her books, there is little connection between this upper-middle class world and the strata above or below it, or consciousness of events external to it. It is, in fact, the world in which typical middle-class country people lived in early nineteenth-century Britain. The family is at the core of this setting and thus the maneuverings that lead to marriage are all-important, because matrimony supplies stability, along with social and economic continuity.
In 1800, Austen’s father decided to retire and move the family to Bath, a sea resort. Moving from the home she loved was difficult for Jane, especially because the family lived in several different places until 1809, when Mr. Austen died. During that period of nine years, Austen did not write. After her father’s death, Austen and her mother and sister moved to Chawton, a country town where Austen’s brother lent the family a house he owned. There, Austen was able to pursue her work again, and she wrote Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion.
Published in 1814, Mansfield Park tells the story of Fanny Price, a girl from a poor family who is raised by her wealthy aunt and uncle at Mansfield Park. The book focuses on morality and the struggle between conscience and societal pressures and is considered by some critics to be the “first modern novel.” In Emma, published in 1816, Austen introduces Emma Woodhouse, the “handsome, clever, and rich” heroine who fancies herself a matchmaker. Her efforts at bringing people together, however, result in teaching her humility and her own discovery of love. Critics praise Emma Woodhouse as being Austen’ most complex character, while readers find that they either love or hate Emma’s story. Austen’s final completed novel, Persuasion, was published posthumously in 1818. It deals with the broken engagement of Anne Elliott and Captain Wentworth and their second chance at love eight years later. Critics comment on the book’s “autumnal feel” and note that Anne Elliott is not only Austen’s oldest heroine, but also the one with the least self-confidence.
Death and Legacy
Austen lived the last eight years of her life in Chawton. Her personal life continued to be limited to family and close friends, and she prized herself on being a warm and loving aunt as much as being a successful novelist. A sudden illness, possibly Addison’s disease, made her stop work on the novel Sandition, and she died in 1817.
After her death, during the nineteenth-century romantic period, Austen was often looked upon with begrudging admiration, as her elevation of intelligence over feeling contradicted the romantic temperament. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, Austen’s reputation rose considerably. In America, Austen was little known before 1900, but by mid-century she was receiving more critical attention there than in England. In the last decades of the twentieth century, Austen and her works received considerable attention from the general public: Most of her novels were adapted into films, modern novelists wrote sequels to Pride and Prejudice and endings to Sandition, and a mystery series was even developed with Jane Austen herself as the heroine.
What would Jane Austen think if she knew that, almost two centuries after her death, she is one of the hottest authors around? She has thousands of Web sites dedicated to her, a bunch of groupies known as "Jane-ites" and five of her novels were made into movies in the last five years - a record any Hollywood writer would envy. Ironically, though she's the first writer most people think of when they hear the term "Victorian Literature," the fact that she lived from 1775 to 1817 means that she is technically not a Victorian writer.
The Victorian Era got its name from Britain's Queen Victoria, who ruled from 1837 until her death in 1901. Though the name immediately conjures images of repressed women in high-waisted gowns sitting in lavishly decorated parlors, it was actually an era rich in social, political and artistic innovation. Feminism, socialism, Freudianism and Darwinism all took form during the Victorian Era.
TRIVIA:
"I boast of being the only man in London," New Statesman editor Kingsley Martin declared one day after the Blitz, "who has been bombed off a lavatory seat while reading Jane Austen. She went into the bath; I went through the door."
Twain was no great fan of Jane Austen's work. "The omission of Jane Austen's books alone," he once declared, "would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it." Edgar Allan Poe's work was not universally admired. "To me, Poe's prose is unreadable - like Jane Austen's," Mark Twain once declared. "No, there is a difference: I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's."
Emma Thompson (who both wrote the Academy Award-winning screenplay adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility and played Elinor Dashwood in the film) endorsed Ang Lee to direct it after seeing Eat Drink Man Woman.
"It very much connected to Jane Austen," she recalled. "It was sisters with a difficult father talking to each other. At one point, the eldest sister says to the younger, 'What do you know of my heart?' I gasped. It's actually the same line in 'Sense and Sensibility.' Exactly the same line."
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J. M. Barrie 
Scottish journalist, playwright, and children's book writer, Barrie became world famous with his play and story about PETER PAN (1904), the boy who lived in Never Land, had a war with Captain Hook, and would not grow up. The first name of Peter Pan was almost certainly taken from Peter Llewellyn Davies (1897-1960), one of the several Davies brothers that Barrie knew.
"When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies." (From Peter Pan)
James Matthew Barrie was born in the Lowland village of Kirriemuir, in Forfarshire (now Angus). His father, David Barrie was a handloom weaver, and mother, Margaret Ogilvy, the daughter of a stonemason. They had ten children, Barrie was the ninth. Jamie, as he was called, heard tales of pirates from his mother, who read her children R.L. Stevenson's adventure stories in the evenings. When Barrie was seven, his brother David died in a skating accident. David had been the mother's favorite child, and she fell into depression. Barrie tried to gain her affection by dressing up in the dead boy's clothes. The obsessive relationship that grew between mother and son was to mark the whole of his life. After her death Barrie published in 1896 an adoring biography of his mother.
At the age of 13, Barrie left his home village. At school he became interested in theatre and devoured works by such authors as Jules Verne, Mayne Reid, and James Fenimore Cooper. Barrie observed his classmates like an outsider; they were tall, interested in girls, while he remained small and apparently he never had a girl friend. Barrie studied at Dumfries Academy at the University of Edinburgh, receiving his M.A. in 1882. After working as a journalist for the Nottingham Journal, he moved in 1885 with empty pockets to London as a freelance writer. He sold his writings, mostly humorous, to fashionable magazines, such as The Pall Mall Gazette. In his mystery novel, BETTER DEAD (1888), Barrie made jokes of well-known people. Barrie knew such great figures of literature as G.B. Shaw, who did not like his pipe smoking, and H.G. Wells, and could surprise them with his remarks. Once he said to Wells: "It is all very well to be able to write books, but can you waggle your ears?" When a friend noticed that he ordered Brussels sprouts every day, he explained: "I cannot resists ordering them. The words are so lovely to say." With his friends, Jerome K. Jerome, Arthur Conan Doyle, P.G. Wodehouse and others, Barrie founded a cricket club, called Allahakbarries. Doyle was the only member who could actually play cricket. During World War I Barrie made a western film with his literary friends, starring Shaw, William Archer, G.K. Chesterton, etc.
In 1888 Barie gained his first fame with AULD LICHT IDYLLS, sketches of Scottish life. Critics praised its originality. His melodramatic novel, THE LITTLE MINISTER (1891), became a huge success, and was filmed later three times. After its dramatization Barrie wrote mostly for the theater. In 1894 he married Mary Ansell, who had appeared in his play WALKER, LONDON. According to Janet Dunbar's biography (1970), Barrie was impotent. "Boys can't love", was Barrie's explanation to her.
The Little Minister was a popular stage production in 1897 both in England and in the Unites States, where Barrie began his collaboration with the impresario Charles Frohman and his star Maude Adams. Two of Barrie's best plays, QUALITY STREET, about two sisters who start a school "for genteel children", and THE ADMIRABLE CRICHTON, in which a butler saves a family after a shipwreck, were produced in London in 1902, and also later filmed. In the same year, Peter Pan appeared by name in Barrie's adult novel THE LITTLE WHITE BIRD. It was a first-person narrative about a wealthy bachelor clubman's attachment to a little boy, David. Taking this boy for walks in Kensington Gardens, the narrator tells him of Peter Pan, who can be found in the Gardens at night. Peter Pan was produced for the stage in 1904 but the play had to wait several years for a definitive printed version and it did not appear as a narrative story until 1911. The book was titled PETER AND WENDY. In the novel's epilogue Peter visits a grown-up Wendy.
"Every time a child says 'I don't believe in fairies' there is a little fairy somewhere that falls down dead." (From Peter Pan)
Peter Pan evolved gradually from the stories that Barrie told to Sylvia Llewelyn Davies's five young sons. She was the daughter of the novelist George du Maurier, and a motherly figure, with whom Barrie formed a long friendship. Arthur, her husband, was not happy about Barrie's invasion of the family. In 1909 Mary Barrie began an affair with the writer Gilbert Cannan and Barrie's marriage ended. When Sylvia Llwelyn Davies and her husband died, Barrie was the unofficial guardian of their sons, but in reality he was perhaps more a sixth child than an adoptive father. George, one of the sons, died in World War I, Michael drowned himself with his boy friend in Oxford. Michael's death was a deep blow to Barrie. Peter, who became a publisher, committed suicide in 1960.
Peter Pan was first performed at the Duke of York's Theatre, London, in 1904. The fantastic world of Peter Pan had previously been presented in Barrie's The Little White Bird (1902). Barrie himself was considered by Freudians a suitable target for analysis. Peter Pan has also been seen as an Oedipal tale. Barrie himself had stopped growing when he reached five feet in height; he suffered from migraines and rarely smiled. Wendy, Peter's girl friend, borrowed her name from Barrie - it was his nickname. W.E. Henley's daughter Margaret called Barrie Friendly-Wendy. The portrait of Wendy owes much to Barrie's mother, and orphaned "little mother" who had to raise her younger brother.
Barrie wrote two more fantasy plays. DEAR BRUTUS (1917) described a group of people who enter a magic wood where they are transformed into the people they might have become had they made different choices. MARY ROSE (1920) was a story of a mother, who is searching for her lost child. Eventually she becomes a ghost. WHAT EVERY WOMAN KNOWS (1908) portrayed a determined woman, Maggie, whose husband eventually realizes that he owes his success to her. In 1913 Barrie became a baronet and in 1922 he received the Order of Merit. Barrie's penthouse at Adelphi Terrace was visited by ministers, duchesses, movie stars, such as Charlie Chaplin, and a number of admirers, whom he occasionally helped with money or advise. Even at his old age, Barrie could play enthusiastically Captain Hook and Peter Pan with the son of his secretary, Lady Cynthia Asquith. Barrie was elected lord rector of St. Andrew's University and in 1930 chancellor of Edinburgh University. Barrie died on June 3, 1937.
TRIVIA:
Vegetarian Surprise?
Peter Pan author James Barrie was once seated beside George Bernard Shaw at a dinner party. Shaw, a vegetarian, had requested a special dish of greens and dressing - to which Barrie pointed while turning to Shaw. "Tell me," he whispered, "have you eaten that or are you going to?"
Barrie valued his privacy and was known to react violently when it was invaded. One day, a reporter materialized on his doorstep and, seeing Barrie at the door, said brightly, "Sir James Barrie, I presume?" "You do," Barrie replied, slammed the door, and disappeared.
On her fifth birthday Princess Margaret entertained Peter Pan author James Barrie (then a guest at Glamis). "Is that your own?" he asked, indicating a gift on her plate. "It's yours and mine," she replied, a response which so delighted Barrie that he incorporated it into The Boy David and promised to pay her a penny per show.
By the time the play was staged two years later, Barrie had forgotten his debt. The king, however, had not, and sent a message to the playwright warning him that failure to pay Margaret her royalties would prompt a call from the royal solicitors.
A contrite Barrie drew up a mock solemn agreement on parchment. Sadly, he died before the sack of pennies could be delivered. [Barrie's executors discharged the debt. Of course the parchment itself, the last thing that Barrie ever wrote, was worth significantly more than the royalties.]
A wealthy American woman tried to get in touch with [Peter Pan creator] Sir James Barrie but he eluded her. In desperation she went to H. G. Wells and asked him for a letter of introduction. 'It would be more than my life is worth,' said Wells. 'But I'll tell you what. Go and sit on his doorstep and make a noise like a crying child. That will fetch him down.' The woman, it is reported, followed the joking instructions of Wells, and the trick worked."
An admirer of A. E. Housman, Barrie had long looked forward to meeting him. One evening, Barrie found himself seated next to the poet at a dinner in Cambridge, but neither found much to say. Returning to London, Barrie wrote a note to Housman: "Dear Professor Houseman, I am sorry about last night, when I sat next to you and did not say a word. You must have thought I was a very rude man: I am really a very shy man. Sincerely yours, J. M. Barrie."
Housman in turn replied: "Dear Sir James Barrie, I am sorry about last night, when I sat next to you and did not say a word. You must have thought I was a very rude man: I am really a very shy man. Sincerely yours, A. E. Housman. P.S. And now you've made it worse for you have spelt my name wrong."
On his first visit to London's exclusive Athenaeum Club, Peter Pan creator Sir James Barrie approached an octogenarian biologist and asked for directions to the dining room. To Barrie's astonishment, the man burst into tears. He had been a member for fifty years, he explained, and no one had ever spoken to him before.
I understudied Sir George Alexander in The Admirable Crichton in 1914," Hesketh Pearson recalled. "At the first rehearsal I looked in vain for Sir James Barrie, the author. A little man wearing an overcoat, bowler hat and muffler came up to borrow a match. I asked him if Barrie came to rehearsals. The little man said he did, and added that he himself helped Barrie to write the plays. 'Well if you help Barrie to write the plays why doesn't your name appear on the program?' I asked with a laugh. 'It does,' he said, 'Ssh, not a word to a soul.'
"He waddled off. A little later I discovered that he had taken my box of matches with him. And later still I learnt that he was Sir James Barrie."
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Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad grew up in the Polish Ukraine, a large, fertile plain between Poland and Russia. It was a divided nation, with four languages, four religions, and a number of different classes. A fraction of the Polish-speaking inhabitants, including Conrad's family, belonged to the szlachta, a hereditary class below the aristocracy, which combined qualities of gentry and nobility. They had the political power, despite their impoverished state. Conrad's father, Apollo Korzeniowski, belonged to this class. He studied for six years at St. Petersburg University, which he left before even earning a degree. Apparently, he was physically unattractive and unpleasant. Conrad's mother, Eva Bobrowska, was thirteen years younger than Apollo and the only surviving daughter in a family of six sons. The couple met in 1847. She was drawn to his poetic temperament and passionate patriotism; he admired her lively imagination and warm heart. Although Eva's family disapproved of the courtship, they eventually realized that their daughter would remain unmarried if she could not have the man she loved. The union took place in 1856. Instead of devoting himself to the management of his wife's agricultural estates, Apollo pursued literary and political activities that brought in little money. He wrote a variety of plays and social satires. Although his works were little known, they would have tremendous influence on his son.
A year into the marriage, Eva became pregnant with Joseph, who was born in 1857. "Conrad" was actually a middle part of his name. The Crimean War had just ended, and hopes were high for Polish independence. The author moved around quite a bit as a child, and never formed close friendships in Poland. Music was one of his earliest memories, and the image of his mother at the piano was a lasting one. Family happiness was then shattered as Apollo was arrested on suspicions of involvement with revolutionary activities. From then on, the family was thrown into exile and unsettled. Eva gradually developed tuberculosis, and died in 1865. The seven-year-old Conrad, who witnessed her decline, was absolutely devastated. He also developed health problems (migraines, lung inflammation) that persisted throughout his life. Unfortunately, Apollo fell into a decline, frustrated with his lack of success in stirring up revolution. He was also taken by tuberculosis in 1869. At age eleven, Joseph was an orphan.
The young boy became the ward of his uncle, who loved him dearly and essentially replaced Apollo. Thus began the Cracow years, which ended when Conrad left Poland in 1874. It was a complex decision, resulting from what he saw as the intolerably oppressive atmosphere of the Russian garrison. He spent the next few years in France, mastering his second language and the fundamentals of seamanship. The author made acquaintances in many circles, but it was his so-called "bohemian" friends who introduced him to drama, opera and theatre. In the meantime, he was strengthening his maritime contacts, and soon enough he became an observer on pilot boats. The workers he met on the ship, and all the experiences they thrust upon him, laid the groundwork for much of the vivid detail in his novels. By 1878, Joseph had made his way to England with the intention of becoming an officer of the British ships. Twenty years at sea followed this decision. Conrad would take voyages for a long period, and would then receive a rest time on shore. This was a cyclic pair of events. When he was not at sea, writing letters or in journals, Joseph was exploring other means of making money. Unlike his father, who practically abhorred money, Conrad was obsessed by it, and always on the lookout for business opportunities.
Once the author had worked his way up to a ship Master, he made a series of eastern voyages for the next three years. He suffered a severe back injury from which he never completely recovered. Conrad remained in the English port of Mauritius for two months. While there he unsuccessfully courted two women. Frustrated, he left and journeyed to England for a good long while. It was here, in the summer of 1889, that Conrad began the crucial transition from sailor to writer by starting his first novel, Almayer's Folly. Interestingly enough, he chose to write in English, his third language. This deliberate decision showed a commitment to England. A journey to the Congo in 1890 was Joseph's real inspiration to write Heart of Darkness. His outrage and condemnation of colonialism were well documented in the journal he kept during his visit. He returned to England, and soon after had to deal with the death of his beloved guardian-uncle. The money left to the author gave him the financial security to settle into writing as an occupation. All the time Conrad became closer and closer to Marguerite, an older family friend who was his closest confidant. For six years he constantly tried to establish intimacy, but was eventually discouraged by the age difference and the disparity in wealth and social position.
1894 was a landmark year for Conrad. His first novel was published, he met Edward Garnett, who would become a lifelong friend, and he met Jessie George, his future wife. The two-year courtship between the 37-year-old Conrad and the 21-year-old Jessie was somewhat discontinuous. Conrad pursued other women in the first year of their relationship, but since they all rejected his advances, his attention was strongly focused on Jessie by the autumn of 1895. Garnett disapproved of the match, as Jessie was miles below Joseph in education and intellectual culture. However, the wedding took place in March of 1896. Their father did not warmly welcome the children who followed the union; an absent-minded sort, he expressed surprise each time Jessie delivered a baby. His days were consumed with writing, trying to find the right word in every sentence. His struggle was no doubt accentuated by the gaps in his knowledge of the English language. Conrad had a true genius for companionship, and his circle of friends included talented authors such as Stephen Crane and Henry James.
Always writing, the future years brought him back to Poland, and finally, to America, where he remained until a heart attack took him in 1924, at the age of sixty-seven.
Trivia:
When Conrad was very young, his mother voluntarily became a political prisoner so the family could accompany Joseph's father in exile. It took three months to make the trip (by coach) from Poland to Siberia.
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Lewis Carroll
Born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, Lewis Carroll grew up as the third of eleven children who were so artistically inclined as to produce magazines of word games and acrostics. He went to Rugby school and later became a lecturer in Mathematics at Oxford University between 1855 and 1881, having studied as an undergraduate at its prestigious Christ Church College. He wrote a number of books for children, most famously Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), written for Alice Liddell (the daughter of the head of Christ Church). Both this and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1872), are extremely popular to this day. They portray an extraordinary dream-inspired but internally logical world, devoid of the moral guidance inescapable in the other children's literature of the nineteenth century.
Besides mathematics and children's stories, Carroll was also a keen photography enthusiast. His particular penchant for photographing young girls is now viewed with some amount of probably quite unfounded suspicion. Also, he was an unbelievably fussy man who wrote no less than forty-eight letters of complaint to the steward at Christ Church while he taught there about everything from odors in rooms to the choice of meat for dinner. Nonetheless, his books are still popular amongst adults and children alike and have been translated into many languages - including Latin!
TRIVIA:
Queen Victoria was so impressed by Alice in Wonderland that she had a letter sent to Carroll stating that Her Majesty would be delighted to read any other works by the same hand. Sure enough, she soon received a gift from the author: A copy of his Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry!
[Sadly, Carroll denied that this episode ever took place.]
The "Alice" stories began with a boat trip up the Thames by Carroll, the Reverend Robinson Duckworth, and Liddell's three daughters. As Duckworth later recalled, Dodgson rowed as Alice Liddel steered: "The story was actually composed over my shoulder... I remember turning round and saying 'Dodgson, is this an extempore romance of yours?' and he replied, 'Yes, I'm inventing as we go along.'" The date? Friday, July 4th, 1862, "as memorable a day in the history of literature," W. H. Auden once averred, "As it is in American history."
Lewis Carroll once arrived at what he thought was a children's party and entered the parlor on his hands and knees, trying to affect the attitude of a bear. Unfortunately, having misread the address, Carroll quickly found himself in the midst of a gathering of feminist reformers.
"The embarrassed Carroll suddenly rose to his feet," his nephew later recalled, "and, without attempting any explanation, fled from the house with a celerity considerably more equine than ursine."
Carroll usually wrote while standing up.
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Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Mark Twain was born on November 30, 1835 in the small river town of Florida, Missouri, just 200 miles away from Indian Territory. The sixth child of John Marshall Clemens and Jane Lampton, Twain grew up amid small-town life in Florida until the age of four, when his family relocated to Hannibal in hopes of an improved living situation.
Twain, by lineage, was a Southerner with both his parents' families originating in Virginia. But the slaveholding community of Hannibal provided a mix between rugged frontier life and the Southern tradition, a lifestyle that influenced Twain's later writings including the Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Few black slaves actually resided in Hannibal; in no way could the small farms on the delta be compared to the normal Southern plantation. Typically, blacks were mostly held as household servants, but they were still under the obligations of slavery.
Growing up in the unusual river town of 2000 inhabitants, Twain was a mischievous boy, the prototype of his own character, Tom Sawyer. Though he was plagued by poor health at an early age, by the age of nine he learned to smoke and headed a small band of pranksters, and most of all, he detested school.
His formal schooling ended after the age of 12, when his father passed away in the month of March. First learning as an apprentice in a printer's shop then working under his brother, Orion, at the Hannibal Journal, Twain quickly became saturated in the newspaper trade. Rising to sub-editor, Twain indulged in the frontier humor that flourished in journalism at the time: tall tales, satirical pranks, and jokes.
But over the next few years, Twain was unable to save wages and became restless, deciding to leave Hannibal in June of 1853 to take a job in St. Louis. But instead of settling in St. Louis, Twain proceeded to travel back and forth between New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and Iowa as a journalist. But after his wanderings, Twain ultimately switched professions after realizing an old boyhood dream of becoming a river pilot.
Under the apprenticeship of Horace Bixby, pilot of the Paul Jones, Mark Twain became a licensed river pilot at the age of 24. Earning a high salary navigating the river waters, Twain delighted in his position, traveling from city to city and never settling. But in 1861, Twain's piloting days ended with the onset of the Civil War.
Back in Hannibal, Twain learned of military companies being organized to help Governor Jackson and signed up to be a Confederate soldier. But soon after, he deserted the military and along with thousands of men avoiding the draft, moved west. On his way to Nevada twelve years after the Gold Rush, Twain's primary intentions were to travel and strike it rich mining for silver and gold. But after being unsuccessful and with resources diminishing, Twain once again picked up his pen and began to write.
Joining the staff of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, Twain became an established reporter/humorist and in 1863 adopted the pseudonym Mark Twain, derived from the river pilot term describing safe navigating conditions. In 1869 came the publishing of Twain's first book of travel letters entitled the Innocents Abroad, which was met with critical reception and is seen as discouraging Twain from the literary life. The years that followed consisted of various articles, lecture circuits, and relocations between San Francisco, New York, and Missouri. But the years were highlighted with his first introduction to Olivia Langdon, whom he married on February 2, 1870. In November of the same year, their first son, Langdon Clemens, was prematurely born.
The Clemens family was soon moving into debt. But when over 67,000 copies of Innocents Abroad sold within its first year, the American Publishing Company asked for another book. And at Olivia's persuasions, the couple moved to the domicile town of Hartford, Connecticut, where Twain penned Roughing It, a documentation of the post-Gold Rush mining epoch published in 1872.
With the birth of their first daughter, Susan Olivia, in March of the same year, the Clemens family appeared prosperous. But soon thereafter, the death of Langdon (as a result of Diphtheria) and the only mild success of Roughing It added to their hardships. Twain, himself, harnessed the blame for his son's death.
After traveling to Europe and lecturing once again, a turning point in Twain's career was marked by the publishing of The Gilded Age, a novel written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner about the 1800s era of corruption and exploitation at the expense of the public welfare. Published in 1873, The Gilded Age was Twain's first extended work of fiction and mapped him in the literary world as an author rather than journalist.
After the success of The Gilded Age, Twain began a period of concentrated writing. In 1880, his third daughter, Jean, was born. By the time Twain reached the age of fifty, he was already considered a successful writer and businessman. His popularity skyrocketed with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Prince and the Pauper (1882), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). By then, he was considered among the greatest character writers in the literary community.
Twain died on April 21, 1910, having survived his children Langdon, Susan and Jean as well as his wife, Olivia. In his lifetime, he became a distinguished member of the literati, honored by Yale, the University of Missouri, and Oxford with literary degrees. With his death also came a publishing onslaught of volumes of letters, articles, and fables, including: The Letters of Quintas Curtius Snodgrass (1946); Simon Wheeler, Detective (1963); The Works of Mark Twain: What is Man? And Other Philosophical Writings (1973); Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals (1975-79). Perhaps more than any other classic American writer, Mark Twain is seen not only as an author, but also as a personality that defined an era.
TRIVIA:
Like Hemingway, Mark Twain loved to boast of his hunting and fishing exploits. Returning to New York by train one day after a three week fishing trip deep in the heart of Maine (long after the state's fishing season had closed), Twain retired to the lounge car in search of a suitable stranger to whom he might relate his fishing adventures.
Having struck up a friendly conversation with a prospective admirer, Twain soon found to his dismay that his boasts of a great catch elicited a grim reaction. Still Twain pressed on... "By the way, who are you, sir?" he finally inquired. "I'm the state game warden," the stranger growled. "Who are you?" Twain nearly swallowed his cigar. "Well, to be perfectly truthful, warden," he answered, thinking of his catch, iced down in the baggage car, "I'm the biggest damn liar in the whole United States!"
Mark Twain once attended a meeting at which one of the speakers was raising money. Deeming the cause to be a worthy one, Twain decided to donate $100. As the speaker droned on, however, he decided to cut his contribution in half.
With no end in sight, Twain cut his intended offer again, to $10. At last, the speaker finished and the collection basket was passed around...
Twain's contribution? When the basket finally reached him, he removed a dollar and passed it along!
An editor once admonished his cub reporter, Mark Twain, never to state as fact anything to which he could not personally attest. Twain complied, composing this classic account of a certain (not so certain) gala social event: "A woman giving the name of Mrs. James Jones, who is reported to be one of the society leaders of the city, is said to have given what purported to be a party yesterday to a number of alleged ladies. The hostess claims to be the wife of a reputed attorney."
Twain wrote under several pen names - including Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, Sergeant Fathom and W. Apaminondas Adrastus Blab - before switching to the name with which he gained international fame: Mark Twain.
One night a group of Mark Twain's friends in New York, having recognized the date as that of his birth, decided to send him a suitable greeting. Unfortunately, the globetrotting traveler was away and no one knew where he might be reached. After some deliberation, a letter was simply sent off with the address: "Mark Twain, God Knows Where." Several weeks later a letter arrived from Twain: "He did."
Mark Twain was once impressed by the tale of an industrious young man who had been offered a job after he was observed collecting pins which had been dropped on a sidewalk outside a company's offices.
Some time later, Twain, intent on working for a certain firm, was seen ostentatiously collecting pins (which he himself had earlier dropped) on the sidewalk facing its windows. Sure enough, having collected several pins, Twain was interrupted by a clerk from the firm. "The boss asked me to tell you to move along," the man explained. "Your idiotic behavior is distracting people working in the office."
Among Twain's patented inventions: an automatically self-adjusting vest strap and a self-pasting scrapbook.
In 1866, Mark Twain spent four months in the Hawaiian Islands (then known as the Sandwich Islands). "Upon disembarking," he later reported, "I observed a bevy of nude native young ladies bathing in the sea." Twain's response? He "sat down on their clothes - to keep them from being stolen."
Twain later staged a series of Sandwich Islands lectures, whose promotional posters (designed by Twain himself) announced: "The doors open at 7. The trouble begins at 8."
Mark Twain's wife was not enamored of her husband's cruder domestic compositions. One morning, having cut himself while shaving, Twain cursed to high heaven and |
