Juicy stuff is my realm… I heard this year is the anniversary of Dickens. Imagine even the newly-wed Britain’s royal couple (Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge) paid him a visit at Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, London… Talk about morbid tastes and sadomasochism… Well, I do love digging up dirty things, so I got my hands into the muck.
At first, Dickens seemed an ordinary, boring little genius: he left school at 12, wandered around London on his own, started working at a shoe polish factory, nothing surprising considering this was the reign of Queen Victoria and the Industrial Revolution. But then things started to warm up: his father was imprisoned into a debtors’ prison, something I would highly recommend to be re-introduced so as to lock up certain Portuguese politicians, if you know what I mean… Having debts was something that ran in the family, a genetic trait of some kind, passed on to his children, who all suffered from the same contagious disease… Now the spicy facts pop up: at one time, Dickens began using his sister-in-law, Georgina, and Ellen Ternan, as actresses in his performances, with whom he established sexual affairs! One of them, Ellen was only 18 when they started banging and Dickens 45! Ah, he did acknowledge the pleasure of a fresh flower on his hands or rather her virginity…
Now he is also said to have been obsessive-compulsive, looking in the mirror and combing his hair several hundred times a day! So much vanity can only be explained by his desire to appeal to his young companions…
He is believed to have had a secret door in his study, designed to look like a bookcase with real books and everything, where perhaps he practised hypnotism on his wife, children and even friends! Poor guinea pigs… maybe this was why his wife suffered from hypochondria…
Last but not least, he is also thought to have suffered from epilepsy, a condition he so kindly attributed to some of his characters – Edward Leeford, a maid and a headmaster – and to have believed in spontaneous human combustion, making Krook, in “Bleak House”, die from it.
Fascinating figure, wouldn’t you say?
Angelica Holmes
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