Amal El-Mohtar: oh hey did y'all know that in 1858 when Charles Dickens was 45 he tried to have his wife institutionalized by falsely claiming she was insane & didn't love the ten children she had borne him, all so he could bang an 18 year old actress in his employ & this is has only really emerged since 2019

oh hey did y'all know that in 1858 when Charles Dickens was 45 he tried to have his wife institutionalized by falsely claiming she was insane & didn't love the ten children she had borne him, all so he could bang an 18 year old actress in his employ & this is has only really emerged since 2019

Letters reveal Charles Dickens tried to place his wife in an asylumwww.york.ac.uk Analysis of previously unseen letters has shed new light on Charles Dickens’s troubled relationship with his wife Catherine – revealing at one point he attempted to have her committed to a mental asyl...

Research! it's amazing!

really hoping this doesn't prompt a bunch of "yeah & his writing sucks too" replies, I love a lot of Dickens works, but this specific information is v new to me & also v useful in a project, but wow truly incredible how many extraordinarily shitty multitudes one man can contain

I’m always a little troubled by the “oh, it turns out this person is terrible” “well, actually their work was always bad, then” discourse. I get the urge to distance, but it feels dishonest.

it's not just dishonest; it's reinforcing a narrative that someone's moral character is linked to the quality of their art. And that's a story that has repeatedly been used to excuse shitbag humans, as if their behavior is the price we* pay for their genius. *other people with less power

Siddhant Adlakha made a great point along these lines a few days ago, in that if you spend your life tethering morality and artistry, you will eventually find yourself on the side of defending someone whose art really impacted you.

Bill Cosby's comedy is to this day still the language of my and my father's relationship to parenting. My uncle gave me his records, I once had them substantially memorized. Its a bummer having to understand how much of that was an act, and how much of that was a lie, but also how much was true

Most of the premodern artists I love would have seen me as a heathen savage. Who gives a shit, I'm alive and they're dead, my feelings are more important than theirs.

Kinda how I feel about Roger Waters being a tankie. (Yes, I know he's also been kind of dick in general, too)

this is how I feel about Flannery O'Connor, tbh.

I think this is much easier with dead, especially long-dead artists. It’s harder to draw lines when the artist whose art you are separating still benefits from your consumption of the art.

In practical terms there is some truth to it though. If you enjoyed someone's work then you discover their shittiness it has a real, tangible impact on the enjoyment of that work and so arguably of lower quality.

* and so arguably it is of lower quality Useless human operating a device over here

There are also beliefs and values that you can tell an author holds through their work. If they are a shit person, it often shines through in their writing.

yeah, this narrative sucks so badly, as much as it can be difficult to disentangle oneself from it. I've had to hold both the fact that someone is ridiculously talented and their shitbag behavior at the same time, and it drives me up the wall to see others use their talent as an excuse.

If I learn that someone is a shitbag IRL, yeah, I'll stop buying their books. But I saw in HS that Dickens was misogynist. Great Expec & David Copp. had women who were either evil, crazy, doormats, or infantile. Exceptions were few. But this isn't a new discussion. www.jstor.org/stable/44372...

DICKENS' MRS. LIRRIPER AND THE EVOLUTION OF A FEMININE STEREOTYPE on JSTOR www.jstor.org Deborah A. Thomas, DICKENS' MRS. LIRRIPER AND THE EVOLUTION OF A FEMININE STEREOTYPE, Dickens Studies Annual, Vol. 6 (1977), pp. 154-166, 196-198

Women weren’t allowed to retain property after marriage in the UK until 1882. Society denigrated them. I’m not sure it’s always fair to ask someone to be far ahead of their time. Dickens was an ass, but he no longer profits when I buy his books and that is different from a modern current writer.

Sorry but it is 100% fair to ask someone of any era not to try to have their wife and the mother of their children imprisoned in an asylum so he could step out on her with a teenage girl

Hmm - I agree that suddenly deciding Dickens had bad work would be bizarre and also understand Annalee's point (I'd argue with neither!), but I do think there are lots of cases where we grant a writer good intent on how things are meant until we learn who they were. Cosby, Eddings, JKR come to mind.

I think there is a difference between "knowing what I know now, I can no longer enjoy their work" and "they were never good, actually", i.e., trying to make one's (valid!) subjective reaction into some sort of objective truth.

I mean, I did enjoy reading Eddings and the first three, four HP books back in the day. (I thought the last three HP books comparatively weak, and MZB - well, that's complicated.) I'm not planning on rereading them now, but I'm also not going to deny the reality of that initial enjoyment.

Right! I'm poking at a third version, which is there are cases where I see harmful elements that I initially hoped / thought were meant differently? I wouldn't enjoy Rita Skeeter now because the *character* changes for me seeing its design more clearly. Anyway, no comments on Dickens though. : )

Oh God no, what do I not know about Eddings??

Short version: committed child abuse, went to prison for it for a year, well before writing the books.

Sometimes it legitimately colors what you’ve seen/read/heard with the new knowledge. But a lot of times it’s like “oh I love this work, too bad what’s-his-face was such an asshole.” I just like to keep it in mind.

If we wrote off the works of every brilliant creator because they had character flaws - massive or not, there’d be no art left.

I don't actually think that's true, and there's definitely a myth of Artists Are Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know that favors horrible artists over non-horrible.

You may be right. I hope you’re right. My point though is that literally every human has their good and bad sides. Right now we kinda live in a culture that has a tendency to fixate on the bad, and then use that to invalidate all the good. Hooray for the internets, y’know?

There is a lot of daylight between "character flaw" and domestic abuser, or raging bigot. so it's very weird to frame a discussion of this as a threat to "art". no one is trying to take away the books written by the wife beating guy anyway? so wtf are you getting at here.

There is a lot of daylight, and I 100% agree with you. What I’m getting at is that there is a huge amount of daylight between a creator and their work too. I mean, I can’t stand to look at Cards books anymore because of who he is now, same for the Potterverse. And that depresses the hell out of me.

Nobody is encouraging anybody to do that. But also yes there would. There are a LOT of writers who don't abuse their wives, or, while we're at it, encourage the genocide of India. What Dickens had going on was not "character flaws" That implies he had character to flaw. You can read him tho.

But both can be true in some cases, though. Lovecraft comes to mind.

I did my PhD in Dickens as an editor: the asylum stuff hadn’t come out but I knew he had treated Catherine appallingly.

I love some of the books but there's no doubt he had a truly appalling and sickening attitude to women, even by the very poor standards of white Englishmen of his time and status.

One of the most satisfying threads I read on Twitter was about how Hans Christian Andersen (who had an odd fixation on Dickens) managed to engineer a lengthy stay at his family home and absolutely funked shit up for him.

Oh yes, that was quite spectacular! “Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks—which seemed to the family AGES!” I get the impression that Andersen was also a rather difficult person to be around (like Dickens) but in a rather different way

What did HC do to him? Like crazed fan stalking?

Yes, he had very definite problems.

Honestly at this point I am always just waiting to find out how shitty a man artist/writer/etc man really was vs expecting different which is sort of sad

same.

It’s kinda exhausting on a soul level

truly!

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