Saturday, September 5, 2009

Charles Dickens: Love the Writer, not the Man

Just finished a very interesting new novel, Girl in a Blue Dress, based on the marriage of Charles Dickens and Catherine Hogarth. Afterwards, I had to go look up the "facts" about it. Here's an example.

I am one of the legion of fans of Dickens, the author, but after hearing about how he treated his wife, I find it hard to understand how he could be so empathetic to so many unfortunates in his novels and in real life - except in his own family. There seems to be a streak of hardness in his character that has forever changed the way I think of him. Sigh.

1 comment:

What do you think?