REAL PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN PORTRAYED IN FICTION.

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 184, 5 August 1931, Page 6

REAL PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN PORTRAYED IN FICTION.

To-day’s Signed Article

Disadvantages in being Picked as Real Life Hero or Heroine. By Rudolph de Cordova. The recent withdrawal of Mrs Elinor Mordaunt’s new novel before the date of publication because, it was whispered, its leading character was not merely inspired, but was a portrait of that distinguished dramatist and novelist Mr Somerset Maugham, was a sensation in the literary world. Mr Maugham himself has done the same thing which Mrs Mor daunt has been prevented from doing, for in his novel “ Cakes and Ale ” the chief character has been generally identified with Thomas Hardy, while it is alleged that Mr Hugh Walpole, another distinguished author, was the unconscious sitter to Mr Maugham for another portrait in the same book.

JT IS WORTH NOTE in passing that Mr Maugham is, apparently, fond of intro-ducing-real people into his novels, for his famous book, “ The Moon and Sixpence,” follows closely in many of its incidents the life of the well-known impressionist painter, Gauguin. This tendency on the part of writers to introduce real people of their acquaintance in their novels is not new. Indeed, it goes to the earliest days of novel writing. Richardson, who has been called the “ Father of the Novel,” started the fashion, for the hero of his masterpiece, “ Sir Charles Grandison,” was admitted by the author to be a portrait of the second Earl of Dartmouth, who was nicknamed the “ Psalm Singer,” and to whom Cowper referred as one “ who wears a coronet and prays,” a fact evidently out of the common at that time. The Earl was a great friend of George 111. who, in a letter written in 1752, remarked: “ How very dear he always will be to my heart.” Henry Fielding. That other great novelist. Henry Fielding, as Lady Mary Wortley Montague states, “ has given a true picture of himself and his first wife in the characters of Mr and Mrs Booth, some compliments to his own figure excepted; and I am persuaded several of the incidents he mentions are real matters of fact... .Amelia, the loving, gentle, true-hearted woman, the ‘ perfect woman.’ whose memory he idolised, had her nose broken through the overturning of the carriage in which she was riding, and even this defect was copied from his wife.” In “ Tom Jones,” which ranks among the three most perfect plots ever planned, according to Coleridge, appears one of the most perfect characters literature has ever produced. This is Squire Allworthy, who was drawn from that Ralph Allen, immortalised by Pope in the famous couplet: “ Let humble Allen, with awkward shame Do good by stealth and blush to find fame.” Charles Dickens. As with Fielding, so with Dickens, who has been regarded as Fielding’s literary descendant. The real people he drew from would be sufficient to fill a whole volume. The most striking figure in his gallery of real life was undoubtedly “ David Copperfield,” for he was Dickens himself and the initials are the author’s own reversed. His father, as everyone knows, he used for Mr Micawber. How accurately Dickens painted his portraits is demonstrated by a story related by that distinguished writer and editor, the late Edmund Yates, with regard to the character of Mr Stryver in “ A Tale of Two Cities.” He was drawn from a noisy barrister named Edwin James whom Yates described as “ a fat, florid man with a large hard face....with chambers in the Temple and rooms in Pall Mall.” In relating the incident, Yates wrote; — “ I had many consultations with him, but found it difficult to keep him to the subject of my case; he liked talking, but always diverted the case into other channels. One day I took Dickens—who had never seen Edwin James —to one of these consultations. James laid himself out to be specially agreeable; Dickens was quietly observant. About four months after appeared the early numbers of ‘A Tale of Two Cities/ in which a prominent part was played by a Mr Stryver.

After reading the description I said to Dickens, ‘ Stryver is a good likeness/ He smiled. ‘ Not bad, I think,’ he said, ‘ especially after only one sitting.’ ” Lord Beaconsfield. Lord Beaconsfield, who drew the late Baroness Burdett-Coutts as Lady Noufchatel in “ Endynuon,” the novel for which he was paid £IO.OOO before publication, was another literary photographer. Witness this incident in “ Lothair.” “ Lady Corisande ” was drawn from Lady Olivia Montague, the sister of the Duke of Manchester who married Lord Tankerville. They were playing billiards when he proposed and she gave him no answer. At last she said, “We must go back to the drawing-room, they will think we are too long away.” “ But what may I think, what may I say ?” he asked in agitation. “ Say that we played a game and that you won,” she answered. Now compare the scene in the novel. “ Dearest, I think we ought to return,” says Lady Corisande to Lothair. And Lothair says to the Duchess, “ I have been in Corisande’s garden and she has given me a rose.” Add to this the naming of one of Lady Tankerville’s daughters “ Corisande.” long before Lothair was written and it is obvious whence Disraeli derived his incident. Original Sherlock Holmes.

As everyone knows, Sherlock Holmes, whose name is one of the few to have been established in modern days as the typical deductive detective, was drawn from Dr Bell, of Edinburgh, under whom Sir Arthur Conan Doyle studied as a young man. Even obscure people have been the cause of by no means obscure personages in literature. An example of this is the heroine of that famous novel and play, “ Mrs Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.” Her original was Mrs Mary Bass, of Louisville, Kentucky, who, in spite of herself and because of the book and the comedy found her home turned into a sort of literary shrine by the people who arrived in scores to look at her. One day, a woman wearing.a new bonnet banged at the front door, and when refused admittance -went to the back door and pounded on it until, goaded to desperation, Mrs Bass opened her window and poured a can of dirty water over the unwelcome visitor. She was summoned on a charge of assault and at the police court in the course of her evidence she gave a vivid description of what she had had to put up with. She said: “People come by droves, walk round the yard, open the doors. When they rouse me and I come down to the door to see what they want, I look upon not a single face I know. They stand and look at each other in a foolish way. After a while one of ’em says, 4 Well, we read the book/ ‘ Well/ I says, 4 then if that's all. you can git/ and I makes ’em git.” The case of assault against the prototype of Mrs Wiggs was dismissed, whereupon she remarked: 44 Now, maybe, I’ll be able to spend my old age in peace, and maybe my trees’ll grow out where all them memorals has been pulled off, and maybe my yard won’t be full of strange people evert* Sunday, and I can move downstairs in my own house once in a while.” So there are disadvantages after all in the popularity to be obtained by being recognised as the real life hero or heroine of a successful book. (Anglo-American N.S.—Copyright.)