OBSERVATIONS

Northern Advocate, 28 May 1938, Page 11

OBSERVATIONS

By “THE MAN ON THE LOOK-OUT”

j£T is a common experience to read in a foreword to a work of fiction that all the characters in the book are imaginary, and have no reference to any living person. Such a statement is made to safeguard the author from prosecution by an individual who might consider himself to have been libelled by the character affixed to any of the people rpade to appear within the compass of the story.

J>UT, to return to the warning forewords relied upon for. protection by novelists, it may be said that in all generations, writers have attempted to hide the fact that }he characters which figure in their novels are copies rather than creations, while others have given historic application of characters that have never existed in fact.

J WAS very much interested to read

a few days ago an article in which the writer asked the question whether certain of the famous individuals in literature really ever did live. It is a shock to find, for instance, that there never was a Robin Hood, but that/there were really two babes in the wood. It took five hundred years of writings for and against to prove that the outlaw of Sherwood Forest was really only a figment of imagination, but it took much less time to immortalise the two children in the fifteenth century, kidnapped by their uncle, a Norman squire, who wanted the reversion of the estates to which they were the heirs. The crime was confessed by “the good robber” twenty years later.

B UT is such a disclaimer on the part of an author any guarantee that living people have not been used as models for ostensibly fictitious characters? I am afraid it is not.

•\yHILE it is true that some authors have invented characters such as have never been found in real life, such instances are rare. In the great majority of cases, authors have put into the web of their stories people whom they have studied, and with whose peculiarities or virtues they believe they have made themselves acquainted.

QF course, it is quite possible that an, author merely uses a'living person! as the base upon which to build the kind of character he believes his model to be. '

M OST people know that Dick Whittington, who died in 1423, really was four times Mayor of London. The cat is more nebulous; it probably derives from the Ketch, the ship with which Whittington traded to Morocco and made his fortune.

It is unquestionable that some authors, in their desire to effect reform or achieve a desired end, have immortalised living people, the immortalisation being of a species, hi some cases, which would give no pleasure to the prototypes.

original little Jack Horner was a kitchen boy whom the Abbot of Glastonbury sent to placate King Henry VIII. with the deeds of an estate at Mells, in Somersetshire. For safety’s sake, he hid the papers in a pie for Jack to carry to London; On the way, Horner got hungry ai.d thrust his thumb under the crust, »vkh the idea of sucking it, and out came the title deeds.

QUARLES Dickens, it is well known, relied upon his powers of observation and description rather than creative genius when preparing the marvellously lifelike portrait galleries which constitute his many famous bocks.

The fidelity with which living characters are reproduced constitute the greatest tribute to the genius of Dickens. Genius, we have been told, is the art of taking infinite pains.

I years after, when Glastonbury Abbey was disestablished and its lands distributed, the Manor of Mells was found in possession of the Horner family.

There was a Dr. Faustus, prototype of Marlowe’s Faustus and Goethe’s Faust, in Germany at the beginning of the sixteenth century. He used to travel around the place with performing horses and dogs, and one of the dogs was supposed to be the devil in earthly form. The only definite recorded facts about him are that he was born at Knittlingen, studied magic at Cracow, and was alive in 1507. He called himself Master Georgius Faustus. Junior.

The real d’Artagnan took his mother's family name. His own was de Batz and lie was very much what Dumas pictured him. He came to Paris, aged 17, in 1640, with an introduction to M. de Trojsvilles, Captain of the King’s Musketeers (the de Treville of “The Three and there he fell in with a fellow Gascon called Porthau (Porthos). Through him he met Athos and Aramis, both real characters, and in their company he overcame four of Cardinal Richelieu’s swordsmen. This got him an introduction to King Louis XIII., and opened the way to a brilliant career.

He ended up a Marshal of France, and was killed at the Siege of Maastricht in 1674. Of the real Othello not even, the name survives. There was a Moorish captain in the Venetian service in Cyprus who fought the Turks at the end of the fifteenth century, but his name has not been preserved. The death of his wife—her name was Desdemona—in mysterious circumstances led to an inquiry in Venice, but if any other details were preserved to suggest the facts in Shakespeare’s play they have got lost in the last four hundred years.

J HAVE referred to only a few of those of whom it may be fairly asked: Did they really ever live? Of course, it does not matter very much today whether they did or whether they did not. It is another matter when, as in the case of a certain ungrateful popular author, a philanthropic friend was sacrificed in order to make a best-seller.