One of the great gifts I've had from Substack is to read the inner lives of so many writers I admire and understand that, regardless of levels of recognition, we are all leading similarly vulnerable lives. There's no escaping. Sometimes that feels awful. Sometimes it's truly liberating. I enjoyed this, thank you.
Reading this, I’m reminded of Dickens’ profound unhappiness when he toured the United States in 1842. He’d visited the Northeast and been impressed so far, hoping he’d get to see one of the best and most vibrant experiments in democracy, and it was the first time he and his wife Catherine had felt genuine connection in their relationship in a long while. Then he visited Washington, and he was disillusioned by it, with Congressmen on both sides of the aisle calling each other money-grubbers and President Tyler acting meekly around him. Dickens had been nursing a slight anxiety around overpacked crowds with every public appearance, compounded by rough travel periods and issues with publishers who’d violated his copyrights, and when he visited the South, he was outraged by both the unhygienic tobacco spitting and the prevalence of slavery. He headed for the free states of the Midwest and Toronto before leaving the continent disillusioned, his marriage ending on the rocks about a decade later. But he was at the top of his literary fame in America then.
Incidentally he was no better when he visited America the second time in 1867, as although he’d achieved even greater fame worldwide, he was still plagued by the death of two of his children, his illness, the winter conditions, and his new lover Annie having stayed behind in England. Not long after, he would conduct a farewell tour of his homeland.
(I might note that Dickens has presaged enough about America as a whole, now the top superpower of the world, but still grappling with the legacy of slavery and poor work-life balance all around.)
me too, but I am lazy… I just finished Maggie O’Farrell’s newest, Land. bowled over by it but can’t articulate more than deep, dense, rich, vivid, detailed story of post-famine Ireland. what a talent!
The Hans Christian Anderson statue in Central Park is one of my favorites. I hope he wasn’t as sad as Dickens all the time.
I think Dickens would have approved of Swift’s name too - first name is an homage to James Taylor (really!), last name is a wink at how she was submitting demos by age 11.
Your reply inspired some googling - there are 141 statues around the 843 acres. The Parks commissioner calls Central Park “the world’s largest outdoor art museum.”
Another reminder of how ridiculously lucky we are to be here!
What always strikes me most about Dickens's personal life is neither his genius nor misery. It's what happened to Catherine. Ten births over twenty-two years, and her reward was to be characterized by her own husband as unstable and unfit, so that he could secure a legal separation. She, on the other hand, kept his old love letters and asked her daughter to show them to the world one day.
Meanwhile her younger sister, Georgina, moved into the house, stayed on as Dickens' housekeeper and confidante after the marriage collapsed, helped raise Catherine's own children, and was later named an executor of his will. Catherine was replaced inside her own home, by her own family, and erased out of the life she had built.
I'm looking forward to reading the Prose book, definitely, but maybe someone should write Catherine's story too!
I think someone has bit I can't reference Title or Author. Count Leo Tolstoy was a great writer with insight into humanity but he shared with Dickens a denial of his part in procreating children. Yet he must have known. Natasha in War and Peace is a portrait of his wife when young but she too grew fat and had to run a household,see meals put on the table etc,so boring. Both Dickens and Tolstoy wrote comments in letters to friends to the effect that their wives kept having babies. It was very inconsiderate of them adding to the mens burden and they just didnt seem to care about keeping their youthful teen slimness which was very remiss of them . It was this malevolent thing women just did!
Thanks Allison. And I just realized that I write Katherine instead of Catherine. I was thrown off by Dickens referring to her as Kate but I should have checked. And more importantly, yes, Catherine got the worst of Dickens!
A film called the Invisible Woman, directed by and starring Ralph Finnes, is about Dickens’ relationship with Ternan. I haven’t seen it, but your comment reminded me I’ve always meant to. It looks like it can be rented on a few streaming services (Prime) for $5 USD.
I love this post David! (And especially the title from my all-time favorite musical). I always think of Dickens as the first real celebrity, with a tour schedule, people waiting for him outside his hotel, and mass hysteria over his latest release (and he and Taylor are both known for being extremely prolific).
One difference is Dickens’ extremely unhappy and unsupported childhood, as you’ve mentioned. It seems that Taylor has a very supportive family, which makes a huge difference in self-esteem and ability to form genuine relationships in adulthood.
I do wonder for her though - what could possibly come next? Maybe she doesn’t see it that way. It does seem she’s gearing up for an Oscar nom for the Toy Story song. But I wonder if she will have an “Alexander wept as he had no more worlds to conquer” moment.
Thanks Audrey. That's a good distinction about family support. The "Alexander wept" moment is a great reference and takes me back to the song. Also the dismay of Caesar in realizing he was far behind Alexander in his "career."
David this is an amazing essay. I had no idea of Dicken’s background, that he had so many children, acted in plays, or that he died relatively young. The sentence/statement: “Great talent is more a gift to the public than it is to the artist” is proven over and over again throughout history. I too, wonder if Swift will be able to shift into a more balanced life in her marriage and family - or if they even have children. I suspect they will. I also wonder if her creativity will “suffer” at all now that she is happily partnered. It seems a lot of her material derived from bad relationships. A lot of creatives are inspired by their pain. Sadly.
Thanks for the comment, Peggy. I had a dim sense that Taylor Swift's lyrics were mostly about the pain of various relationships. I wonder if that's even more prevalent in music than in books. Almost all of country music!
This was fascinating--I recognized the lyrics immediately (also one of my favorite songs/favorite plays). At first, I wasn't quite sure where you might be going with the essay, and the tie-in to the book was both unexpected and terrific. Wondering if the novelist dealt with the fact that when Dickens tired of his "fat wife" he had her committed? (A fact I think is true--and one I've never quite gotten over.) Anyway, fantastic post.
Thanks Diana. For Dickens, the novel goes back in time but not forward beyond the five weeks stay of Anderson. I did not know that about Dickens. So terribly cruel.
Taylor Swift has something essential at the center of her art that Charles Dickens never had: Joie de Vivre. It’s irresistible and can’t be bought, though everyone tries. It fills stadiums. And she pours it out generously.
Ann, thanks for the comment and the distinction between the two. Dickens had enormous curiosity about the range of people and while some of his characters are joyous, many of them are dark and evil.
"The requirements to stay at the top are too intense and the seduction of being at the top is so strong that your life and your ambition become the same." Excellent!
Dickens and Andersen both seemed more comfortable dealing with their fictional worlds than the real one because the real one had treated both of them extremely badly.
Love this comparison and book review. Dickens burned most of his correspondences which would have been even more revealing of his character. I’m writing a historical fiction novel and Dickens is a supporting character. He corresponded with my main character and I found the letters between them. After Dickens’ death his daughter, Mary exchanged letters with my main character as well. Dickens’ descendent has a podcast. Does Prose offer fact/fiction footnotes? Her book sounds fascinating.
I'm reading this in Caribbean style heat but on a British beach,that's not something we often get to say! I'm at Blue Anchor Bay in beautiful West Somerset. The air is furnace hot but a delicious cooling breeze is coming off the blue,the azure sea. Today this is not the brown and chilly Bristol channel,it's well maybe St Kitts or St Lucia. This is a pebble beach and it's not so frequented as other beaches here and it's very quiet today which suits my mood. It's a long wide bay and sea and sky merge in blueness today. I don't know any of Taylor Swifts work but as no one is forced to buy her work her success must be based on reality not hype. I think you are lucky to have a balanced personality. I think to have a burning overwhelming desire to achieve something,whatever it may be,well the good part is that it can so absorb and drive the person be he Napoleon Hitler,Alexander, Van Gogh,Madonna,Ginger Rogers,or Elon Musk (aargh!) that they have no time to feel sad or tired or all those things. The downside is,when you "get there" (and even me in my miniscule way have experienced this!),you find out there is no "there" there. The hollow crown indeed. But I don't think it's like that for Taylor Swift. I think she's very sensible and grounded. I suspect she can read a balance sheet!
Excellent article, David. I appreciate your juxtaposition to Dickens and Swift. An apt comparison and astute observations.
Thanks Deborah.
One of the great gifts I've had from Substack is to read the inner lives of so many writers I admire and understand that, regardless of levels of recognition, we are all leading similarly vulnerable lives. There's no escaping. Sometimes that feels awful. Sometimes it's truly liberating. I enjoyed this, thank you.
Thanks Eliza.
Reading this, I’m reminded of Dickens’ profound unhappiness when he toured the United States in 1842. He’d visited the Northeast and been impressed so far, hoping he’d get to see one of the best and most vibrant experiments in democracy, and it was the first time he and his wife Catherine had felt genuine connection in their relationship in a long while. Then he visited Washington, and he was disillusioned by it, with Congressmen on both sides of the aisle calling each other money-grubbers and President Tyler acting meekly around him. Dickens had been nursing a slight anxiety around overpacked crowds with every public appearance, compounded by rough travel periods and issues with publishers who’d violated his copyrights, and when he visited the South, he was outraged by both the unhygienic tobacco spitting and the prevalence of slavery. He headed for the free states of the Midwest and Toronto before leaving the continent disillusioned, his marriage ending on the rocks about a decade later. But he was at the top of his literary fame in America then.
Incidentally he was no better when he visited America the second time in 1867, as although he’d achieved even greater fame worldwide, he was still plagued by the death of two of his children, his illness, the winter conditions, and his new lover Annie having stayed behind in England. Not long after, he would conduct a farewell tour of his homeland.
(I might note that Dickens has presaged enough about America as a whole, now the top superpower of the world, but still grappling with the legacy of slavery and poor work-life balance all around.)
I've got a DVD of a tv series In which Miriam Margolyes tracks Dickens stateside journey. The first one.
Thanks Jarrod for that additional information.
David, I love your book reviews disguised as perceptive commentary. Just ordered Five Weeks to read next!
Thanks Debbie. Always searching fro books or articles that can make me think.
me too, but I am lazy… I just finished Maggie O’Farrell’s newest, Land. bowled over by it but can’t articulate more than deep, dense, rich, vivid, detailed story of post-famine Ireland. what a talent!
The Hans Christian Anderson statue in Central Park is one of my favorites. I hope he wasn’t as sad as Dickens all the time.
I think Dickens would have approved of Swift’s name too - first name is an homage to James Taylor (really!), last name is a wink at how she was submitting demos by age 11.
Thanks Kate. Almost 60 years ago I played on and near that statue. Although I remember preferring the Lewis Carroll. Swift is definitely apt!
Your reply inspired some googling - there are 141 statues around the 843 acres. The Parks commissioner calls Central Park “the world’s largest outdoor art museum.”
Another reminder of how ridiculously lucky we are to be here!
Fascinating on Dickens, thanks, David.
What always strikes me most about Dickens's personal life is neither his genius nor misery. It's what happened to Catherine. Ten births over twenty-two years, and her reward was to be characterized by her own husband as unstable and unfit, so that he could secure a legal separation. She, on the other hand, kept his old love letters and asked her daughter to show them to the world one day.
Meanwhile her younger sister, Georgina, moved into the house, stayed on as Dickens' housekeeper and confidante after the marriage collapsed, helped raise Catherine's own children, and was later named an executor of his will. Catherine was replaced inside her own home, by her own family, and erased out of the life she had built.
I'm looking forward to reading the Prose book, definitely, but maybe someone should write Catherine's story too!
I was thinking the same thing!
I think someone has bit I can't reference Title or Author. Count Leo Tolstoy was a great writer with insight into humanity but he shared with Dickens a denial of his part in procreating children. Yet he must have known. Natasha in War and Peace is a portrait of his wife when young but she too grew fat and had to run a household,see meals put on the table etc,so boring. Both Dickens and Tolstoy wrote comments in letters to friends to the effect that their wives kept having babies. It was very inconsiderate of them adding to the mens burden and they just didnt seem to care about keeping their youthful teen slimness which was very remiss of them . It was this malevolent thing women just did!
Makes me think of Jean Jacques Rousseau having many children, basically abandoning them, and then writing a treatise of childhood education. 🙄😅
Elon, too!
Very much Elon vibes!
It is insane for husbands to complain about their wives having children!
Thanks Allison. And I just realized that I write Katherine instead of Catherine. I was thrown off by Dickens referring to her as Kate but I should have checked. And more importantly, yes, Catherine got the worst of Dickens!
A film called the Invisible Woman, directed by and starring Ralph Finnes, is about Dickens’ relationship with Ternan. I haven’t seen it, but your comment reminded me I’ve always meant to. It looks like it can be rented on a few streaming services (Prime) for $5 USD.
Thanks! I’ll check that out.
I love this post David! (And especially the title from my all-time favorite musical). I always think of Dickens as the first real celebrity, with a tour schedule, people waiting for him outside his hotel, and mass hysteria over his latest release (and he and Taylor are both known for being extremely prolific).
One difference is Dickens’ extremely unhappy and unsupported childhood, as you’ve mentioned. It seems that Taylor has a very supportive family, which makes a huge difference in self-esteem and ability to form genuine relationships in adulthood.
I do wonder for her though - what could possibly come next? Maybe she doesn’t see it that way. It does seem she’s gearing up for an Oscar nom for the Toy Story song. But I wonder if she will have an “Alexander wept as he had no more worlds to conquer” moment.
Thanks Audrey. That's a good distinction about family support. The "Alexander wept" moment is a great reference and takes me back to the song. Also the dismay of Caesar in realizing he was far behind Alexander in his "career."
David this is an amazing essay. I had no idea of Dicken’s background, that he had so many children, acted in plays, or that he died relatively young. The sentence/statement: “Great talent is more a gift to the public than it is to the artist” is proven over and over again throughout history. I too, wonder if Swift will be able to shift into a more balanced life in her marriage and family - or if they even have children. I suspect they will. I also wonder if her creativity will “suffer” at all now that she is happily partnered. It seems a lot of her material derived from bad relationships. A lot of creatives are inspired by their pain. Sadly.
Thanks for the comment, Peggy. I had a dim sense that Taylor Swift's lyrics were mostly about the pain of various relationships. I wonder if that's even more prevalent in music than in books. Almost all of country music!
This was fascinating--I recognized the lyrics immediately (also one of my favorite songs/favorite plays). At first, I wasn't quite sure where you might be going with the essay, and the tie-in to the book was both unexpected and terrific. Wondering if the novelist dealt with the fact that when Dickens tired of his "fat wife" he had her committed? (A fact I think is true--and one I've never quite gotten over.) Anyway, fantastic post.
Thanks Diana. For Dickens, the novel goes back in time but not forward beyond the five weeks stay of Anderson. I did not know that about Dickens. So terribly cruel.
Taylor Swift has something essential at the center of her art that Charles Dickens never had: Joie de Vivre. It’s irresistible and can’t be bought, though everyone tries. It fills stadiums. And she pours it out generously.
Ann, thanks for the comment and the distinction between the two. Dickens had enormous curiosity about the range of people and while some of his characters are joyous, many of them are dark and evil.
"The requirements to stay at the top are too intense and the seduction of being at the top is so strong that your life and your ambition become the same." Excellent!
Thanks Sam.
Very enjoyable article!
Dickens and Andersen both seemed more comfortable dealing with their fictional worlds than the real one because the real one had treated both of them extremely badly.
Love this comparison and book review. Dickens burned most of his correspondences which would have been even more revealing of his character. I’m writing a historical fiction novel and Dickens is a supporting character. He corresponded with my main character and I found the letters between them. After Dickens’ death his daughter, Mary exchanged letters with my main character as well. Dickens’ descendent has a podcast. Does Prose offer fact/fiction footnotes? Her book sounds fascinating.
Thanks Carissa. Prose does not have footnotes. Given what you're writing, you probably would really enjoy the book.
I'm reading this in Caribbean style heat but on a British beach,that's not something we often get to say! I'm at Blue Anchor Bay in beautiful West Somerset. The air is furnace hot but a delicious cooling breeze is coming off the blue,the azure sea. Today this is not the brown and chilly Bristol channel,it's well maybe St Kitts or St Lucia. This is a pebble beach and it's not so frequented as other beaches here and it's very quiet today which suits my mood. It's a long wide bay and sea and sky merge in blueness today. I don't know any of Taylor Swifts work but as no one is forced to buy her work her success must be based on reality not hype. I think you are lucky to have a balanced personality. I think to have a burning overwhelming desire to achieve something,whatever it may be,well the good part is that it can so absorb and drive the person be he Napoleon Hitler,Alexander, Van Gogh,Madonna,Ginger Rogers,or Elon Musk (aargh!) that they have no time to feel sad or tired or all those things. The downside is,when you "get there" (and even me in my miniscule way have experienced this!),you find out there is no "there" there. The hollow crown indeed. But I don't think it's like that for Taylor Swift. I think she's very sensible and grounded. I suspect she can read a balance sheet!
Thanks Jane. Taylor Swift seems to know what she wants. And she also seems to be very adept at business.
Like Dolly Parton - " I ain't dumb and I ain't blonde.....it's called SHOW - BUSINESS"!