Jewish CARD GAME Judaica HEBREW Israel SHAKESPEAR Andersen DICKENS Hugo BIALIK

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Seller: Top-Rated Seller judaica-bookstore ✉️ (2,803) 100%, Location: TEL AVIV, IL, Ships to: WORLDWIDE, Item: 276079506033 Jewish CARD GAME Judaica HEBREW Israel SHAKESPEAR Andersen DICKENS Hugo BIALIK.   DESCRIPTIONHere for sale is a RARE illustrated CHILDREN CARD GAME , Being a COMPLETE  , FULL with its ORIGINAL Illustrated BOX and all 24 cards and INSTRUCTIONS. The Cultural & Historical  Jewish - Judaica CARD GAME is named "SOFRIM VESFARIM" ( WRITERS and their BOOKS ) . The card game , Consists of  24 ILLUSTRATED cards which represent SIX world acclaimed writers : CHARLES DICKENS , VICTOR HUGO , WILLIAM SHAKESPEAR , HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN and Jewish Israeli BIALIK and AGNON.  Each of these 6 writers is represented by FOUR of his IKONIC PIECES on a CARD.   The CARD GAME was designed , created and published in ISRAEL in the 1960's up to the 1970's . Size around 2.5" x 5" x 0.75". The PACK consists of ALL 24 cards + INSTRUCTIONS card . The CARDS and the BOX are in a VERY GOOD CONDITION . Cards practicaly unused.  ( Pls look at scan for accurate AS IS images ) .Will be sent in a special protective rigid sealed package . AUTHENTICITYThis ILLUSTRATED card game PACK is fully guaranteed ORIGINAL ca 1960's - 1970's edition  , It is NOT a reproduction or a recently made reprint or an immitation , It holds a life long GUARANTEE for its AUTHENTICITY and ORIGINALITY.

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Charles John Huffam Dickens FRSA (/ˈdɪkɪnz/; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era.[1] His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are still widely read today.[2][3] Born in Portsmouth, Dickens left school to work in a factory when his father was incarcerated in a debtors' prison. Despite his lack of formal education, he edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed readings extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education, and other social reforms. Dickens's literary success began with the 1836 serial publication of The Pickwick Papers. Within a few years he had become an international literary celebrity, famous for his humour, satire, and keen observation of character and society. His novels, most published in monthly or weekly instalments, pioneered the serial publication of narrative fiction, which became the dominant Victorian mode for novel publication.[4][5] Cliffhanger endings in his serial publications kept readers in suspense.[6] The installment format allowed Dickens to evaluate his audience's reaction, and he often modified his plot and character development based on such feedback.[5] For example, when his wife's chiropodist expressed distress at the way Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield seemed to reflect her disabilities, Dickens improved the character with positive features.[7] His plots were carefully constructed, and he often wove elements from topical events into his narratives.[8] Masses of the illiterate poor chipped in ha'pennies to have each new monthly episode read to them, opening up and inspiring a new class of readers.[9] His 1843 novella A Christmas Carol remains especially popular and continues to inspire adaptations in every artistic genre. Oliver Twist and Great Expectations are also frequently adapted and, like many of his novels, evoke images of early Victorian London. His 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities (set in London and Paris) is his best-known work of historical fiction. The most famous celebrity of his era, he undertook, in response to public demand, a series of public reading tours in the later part of his career.[10] Dickens has been praised by many of his fellow writers—from Leo Tolstoy to George Orwell, G. K. Chesterton, and Tom Wolfe—for his realism, comedy, prose style, unique characterisations, and social criticism. However, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf complained of a lack of psychological depth, loose writing, and a vein of sentimentalism. The term Dickensian is used to describe something that is reminiscent of Dickens and his writings, such as poor social conditions or comically repulsive characters.[11] Contents 1 Early years 2 Journalism and early novels 3 First visit to the United States 4 Philanthropy 5 Religious views 6 Middle years 7 Last years 8 Second visit to the United States 9 Farewell readings 10 Death 11 Literary style 11.1 Characters 11.2 Autobiographical elements 11.3 Episodic writing 11.4 Social commentary 11.5 Literary techniques 12 Reputation 13 Influence and legacy 14 Notable works 15 See also 16 References 17 Further reading 18 External links 18.1 Works 18.2 Organisations and portals 18.3 Museums 18.4 Other Early years Charles Dickens's birthplace, 393 Commercial Road, Portsmouth 2 Ordnance Terrace, Chatham, Dickens's home 1817 – May 1821[12] Charles John Huffam Dickens was born on 7 February 1812, at 1 Mile End Terrace (now 393 Commercial Road), Landport in Portsea Island (Portsmouth), the second of eight children of Elizabeth Dickens (née Barrow; 1789–1863) and John Dickens (1785–1851). His father was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office and was temporarily stationed in the district. He asked Christopher Huffam,[13] rigger to His Majesty's Navy, gentleman, and head of an established firm, to act as godfather to Charles. Huffam is thought to be the inspiration for Paul Dombey, the owner of a shipping company in Dickens's novel Dombey and Son (1848).[13] In January 1815, John Dickens was called back to London, and the family moved to Norfolk Street, Fitzrovia.[14] When Charles was four, they relocated to Sheerness, and thence to Chatham, Kent, where he spent his formative years until the age of 11. His early life seems to have been idyllic, though he thought himself a "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy".[15] Charles spent time outdoors, but also read voraciously, including the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding, as well as Robinson Crusoe and Gil Blas. He read and reread The Arabian Nights and the Collected Farces of Elizabeth Inchbald.[16] He retained poignant memories of childhood, helped by an excellent memory of people and events, which he used in his writing.[17] His father's brief work as a clerk in the Navy Pay Office afforded him a few years of private education, first at a dame school, and then at a school run by William Giles, a dissenter, in Chatham.[18] Illustration by Fred Bernard of Dickens at work in a shoe-blacking factory after his father had been sent to the Marshalsea, published in the 1892 edition of Forster's Life of Dickens[19] This period came to an end in June 1822, when John Dickens was recalled to Navy Pay Office headquarters at Somerset House, and the family (except for Charles, who stayed behind to finish his final term of work) moved to Camden Town in London.[20] The family had left Kent amidst rapidly mounting debts, and, living beyond his means,[21] John Dickens was forced by his creditors into the Marshalsea debtors' prison in Southwark, London in 1824. His wife and youngest children joined him there, as was the practice at the time. Charles, then 12 years old, boarded with Elizabeth Roylance, a family friend, at 112 College Place, Camden Town.[22] Roylance was "a reduced [impoverished] old lady, long known to our family", whom Dickens later immortalised, "with a few alterations and embellishments", as "Mrs Pipchin" in Dombey and Son. Later, he lived in a back-attic in the house of an agent for the Insolvent Court, Archibald Russell, "a fat, good-natured, kind old gentleman... with a quiet old wife" and lame son, in Lant Street in Southwark.[23] They provided the inspiration for the Garlands in The Old Curiosity Shop.[24] On Sundays—with his sister Frances, free from her studies at the Royal Academy of Music—he spent the day at the Marshalsea.[25] Dickens later used the prison as a setting in Little Dorrit. To pay for his board and to help his family, Dickens was forced to leave school and work ten-hour days at Warren's Blacking Warehouse, on Hungerford Stairs, near the present Charing Cross railway station, where he earned six shillings a week pasting labels on pots of boot blacking. The strenuous and often harsh working conditions made a lasting impression on Dickens and later influenced his fiction and essays, becoming the foundation of his interest in the reform of socio-economic and labour conditions, the rigours of which he believed were unfairly borne by the poor. He later wrote that he wondered "how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age".[26] As he recalled to John Forster (from The Life of Charles Dickens): The blacking-warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the way, at old Hungerford Stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again. The counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges and the river. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work. My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking; first with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a string; and then to clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary's shop. When a certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label, and then go on again with more pots. Two or three other boys were kept at similar duty down-stairs on similar wages. One of them came up, in a ragged apron and a paper cap, on the first Monday morning, to show me the trick of using the string and tying the knot. His name was Bob Fagin; and I took the liberty of using his name, long afterwards, in Oliver Twist.[26] When the warehouse was moved to Chandos Street in the smart, busy district of Covent Garden the boys worked in a room in which the window gave onto the street and little audiences gathered and watched them at work—in Dickens biographer Simon Callow's estimation, the public display was "a new refinement added to his misery".[27] The Marshalsea around 1897, after it had closed. Dickens based several of his characters on the experience of seeing his father in the debtors' prison, most notably Amy Dorrit from Little Dorrit. A few months after his imprisonment, John Dickens's mother, Elizabeth Dickens, died and bequeathed him £450. On the expectation of this legacy, Dickens was released from prison. Under the Insolvent Debtors Act, Dickens arranged for payment of his creditors, and he and his family left Marshalsea,[28] for the home of Mrs Roylance. Charles's mother, Elizabeth Dickens, did not immediately support his removal from the boot-blacking warehouse. This influenced Dickens's view that a father should rule the family, and a mother find her proper sphere inside the home: "I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back". His mother's failure to request his return was a factor in his dissatisfied attitude towards women.[29] Righteous indignation stemming from his own situation and the conditions under which working-class people lived became major themes of his works, and it was this unhappy period in his youth to which he alluded in his favourite, and most autobiographical, novel, David Copperfield:[30] "I had no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no assistance, no support, of any kind, from anyone, that I can call to mind, as I hope to go to heaven!"[31] Dickens was eventually sent to the Wellington House Academy in Camden Town, where he remained until March 1827, having spent about two years there. He did not consider it to be a good school: "Much of the haphazard, desultory teaching, poor discipline punctuated by the headmaster's sadistic brutality, the seedy ushers and general run-down atmosphere, are embodied in Mr Creakle's Establishment in David Copperfield."[31] Dickens worked at the law office of Ellis and Blackmore, attorneys, of Holborn Court, Gray's Inn, as a junior clerk from May 1827 to November 1828. He was a gifted mimic and impersonated those around him: clients, lawyers, and clerks. He went to theatres obsessively—he claimed that for at least three years he went to the theatre every single day. His favourite actor was Charles Mathews, and Dickens learnt his monopolylogues, (farces in which Mathews played every character), by heart.[32] Then, having learned Gurney's system of shorthand in his spare time, he left to become a freelance reporter. A distant relative, Thomas Charlton, was a freelance reporter at Doctors' Commons, and Dickens was able to share his box there to report the legal proceedings for nearly four years.[33][34] This education was to inform works such as Nicholas Nickleby, Dombey and Son, and especially Bleak House—whose vivid portrayal of the machinations and bureaucracy of the legal system did much to enlighten the general public and served as a vehicle for dissemination of Dickens's own views regarding, particularly, the heavy burden on the poor who were forced by circumstances to "go to law". In 1830, Dickens met his first love, Maria Beadnell, thought to have been the model for the character Dora in David Copperfield. Maria's parents disapproved of the courtship and ended the relationship by sending her to school in Paris.[35] Journalism and early novels In 1832, at age 20, Dickens was energetic and increasingly self-confident.[36] He enjoyed mimicry and popular entertainment, lacked a clear, specific sense of what he wanted to become, and yet knew he wanted fame. Drawn to the theatre—he became an early member of the Garrick[37]—he landed an acting audition at Covent Garden, where the manager George Bartley and the actor Charles Kemble were to see him. Dickens prepared meticulously and decided to imitate the comedian Charles Mathews, but ultimately he missed the audition because of a cold. Before another opportunity arose, he had set out on his career as a writer.[38] In 1833, he submitted his first story, "A Dinner at Poplar Walk", to the London periodical Monthly Magazine.[39] William Barrow, a brother of his mother, offered him a job on The Mirror of Parliament and he worked in the House of Commons for the first time early in 1832. He rented rooms at Furnival's Inn and worked as a political journalist, reporting on Parliamentary debates, and he travelled across Britain to cover election campaigns for the Morning Chronicle. His journalism, in the form of sketches in periodicals, formed his first collection of pieces, published in 1836: Sketches by Boz—Boz being a family nickname he employed as a pseudonym for some years.[40][41] Dickens apparently adopted it from the nickname "Moses", which he had given to his youngest brother Augustus Dickens, after a character in Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield. When pronounced by anyone with a head cold, "Moses" became "Boses"—later shortened to Boz.[41][42] Dickens's own name was considered "queer" by a contemporary critic, who wrote in 1849: "Mr Dickens, as if in revenge for his own queer name, does bestow still queerer ones upon his fictitious creations." He contributed to and edited journals throughout his literary career.[39] In January 1835, the Morning Chronicle launched an evening edition, under the editorship of the Chronicle's music critic, George Hogarth. Hogarth invited Dickens to contribute Street Sketches and Dickens became a regular visitor to his Fulham house, excited by Hogarth's friendship with a hero of his, Walter Scott, and enjoying the company of Hogarth's three daughters—Georgina, Mary, and nineteen-year-old Catherine.[43] Catherine Hogarth Dickens by Samuel Lawrence (1838) Dickens made rapid progress both professionally and socially. He began a friendship with William Harrison Ainsworth, the author of the highwayman novel Rookwood (1834), whose bachelor salon in Harrow Road had become the meeting place for a set that included Daniel Maclise, Benjamin Disraeli, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and George Cruikshank. All these became his friends and collaborators, with the exception of Disraeli, and he met his first publisher, John Macrone, at the house.[44] The success of Sketches by Boz led to a proposal from publishers Chapman and Hall for Dickens to supply text to match Robert Seymour's engraved illustrations in a monthly letterpress. Seymour committed suicide after the second instalment, and Dickens, who wanted to write a connected series of sketches, hired "Phiz" to provide the engravings (which were reduced from four to two per instalment) for the story. The resulting story became The Pickwick Papers, and though the first few episodes were not successful, the introduction of the Cockney character Sam Weller in the fourth episode (the first to be illustrated by Phiz) marked a sharp climb in its popularity.[45] The final instalment sold 40,000 copies.[39] In November 1836, Dickens accepted the position of editor of Bentley's Miscellany, a position he held for three years, until he fell out with the owner.[46] In 1836 as he finished the last instalments of The Pickwick Papers, he began writing the beginning instalments of Oliver Twist—writing as many as 90 pages a month—while continuing work on Bentley's and also writing four plays, the production of which he oversaw. Oliver Twist, published in 1838, became one of Dickens's better known stories, and was the first Victorian novel with a child protagonist.[47] Young Charles Dickens by Daniel Maclise, 1839 On 2 April 1836, after a one-year engagement, and between episodes two and three of The Pickwick Papers, Dickens married Catherine Thomson Hogarth (1816–1879), the daughter of George Hogarth, editor of the Evening Chronicle.[48] They were married in St. Luke's Church,[49] Chelsea, London. After a brief honeymoon in Chalk in Kent, the couple returned to lodgings at Furnival's Inn.[50] The first of their ten children, Charley, was born in January 1837, and a few months later the family set up home in Bloomsbury at 48 Doughty Street, London, (on which Charles had a three-year lease at £80 a year) from 25 March 1837 until December 1839.[48][51] Dickens's younger brother Frederick and Catherine's 17-year-old sister Mary Hogarth moved in with them. Dickens became very attached to Mary, and she died in his arms after a brief illness in 1837. Unusually for Dickens, as a consequence of his shock, he stopped working, and he and Kate stayed at a little farm on Hampstead Heath for a fortnight. Dickens idealised Mary—the character he fashioned after her, Rose Maylie, he found he could not now kill, as he had planned, in his fiction,[52] and, according to Ackroyd, he drew on memories of her for his later descriptions of Little Nell and Florence Dombey.[53] His grief was so great that he was unable to meet the deadline for the June instalment of Pickwick Papers and had to cancel the Oliver Twist instalment that month as well.[47] The time in Hampstead was the occasion for a growing bond between Dickens and John Forster to develop and Forster soon became his unofficial business manager, and the first to read his work.[54] Barnaby Rudge was Dickens's first popular failure—but the character of Dolly Varden, "pretty, witty, sexy, became central to numerous theatrical adaptations"[55] His success as a novelist continued. The young Queen Victoria read both Oliver Twist and Pickwick, staying up until midnight to discuss them.[56] Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41) and, finally, his first historical novel, Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty, as part of the Master Humphrey's Clock series (1840–41), were all published in monthly instalments before being made into books.[57] In the midst of all his activity during this period, there was discontent with his publishers and John Macrone was bought off, while Richard Bentley signed over all his rights in Oliver Twist. Other signs of a certain restlessness and discontent emerged—in Broadstairs he flirted with Eleanor Picken, the young fiancée of his solicitor's best friend, and one night grabbed her and ran with her down to the sea. He declared they were both to drown there in the "sad sea waves". She finally got free but afterwards kept her distance. In June 1841 he precipitously set out on a two-month tour of Scotland and then, in September 1841, telegraphed Forster that he had decided to go to America.[58] Master Humphrey's Clock was shut down, though Dickens was still keen on the idea of the weekly magazine, a form he liked, a liking that had begun with his childhood reading of the eighteenth-century magazines Tatler and The Spectator. Dickens was perturbed by the return to power of the Tories, whom Dickens described as "people whom, politically, I despise and abhor."[59] He had been tempted to stand for the Liberals in Reading, but decided against it due to financial straits.[59] He wrote three anti-Tory verse satires ("The Fine Old English Gentleman", "The Quack Doctor's Proclamation", and "Subjects for Painters") which were published in The Examiner.[60] First visit to the United States On 22 January 1842, Dickens and his wife arrived in Boston, Massachusetts aboard the RMS Britannia during their first trip to the United States and Canada.[61] At this time Georgina Hogarth, another sister of Catherine, joined the Dickens household, now living at Devonshire Terrace, Marylebone, to care for the young family they had left behind.[62] She remained with them as housekeeper, organiser, adviser, and friend until Dickens's death in 1870.[63] Dickens modelled the character of Agnes Wickfield after Georgina and Mary.[64] Sketch of Dickens in 1842 during his first American tour. Sketch of Dickens's sister Fanny, bottom left He described his impressions in a travelogue, American Notes for General Circulation. In Notes, Dickens includes a powerful condemnation of slavery which he had attacked as early as The Pickwick Papers, correlating the emancipation of the poor in England with the abolition of slavery abroad[65] citing newspaper accounts of runaway slaves disfigured by their masters. In spite of the abolitionist sentiments gleaned from his trip to America, some modern commentators have pointed out inconsistencies in Dickens's views on racial inequality. For instance, he has been criticized for his subsequent acquiescence in Governor Eyre's harsh crackdown during the 1860s Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica and his failure to join other British progressives in condemning it.[66] From Richmond, Virginia, Dickens returned to Washington, D.C., and started a trek westward to St. Louis, Missouri. While there, he expressed a desire to see an American prairie before returning east. A group of 13 men then set out with Dickens to visit Looking Glass Prairie, a trip 30 miles into Illinois. During his American visit, Dickens spent a month in New York City, giving lectures, raising the question of international copyright laws and the pirating of his work in America.[67][68] He persuaded a group of twenty-five writers, headed by Washington Irving, to sign a petition for him to take to Congress, but the press were generally hostile to this, saying that he should be grateful for his popularity and that it was mercenary to complain about his work being pirated.[69] The popularity he gained caused a shift in his self-perception according to critic Kate Flint, who writes that he "found himself a cultural commodity, and its circulation had passed out his control", causing him to become interested in and delve into themes of public and personal personas in the next novels.[70] She writes that he assumed a role of "influential commentator", publicly and in his fiction, evident in his next few books.[70] His trip to the U.S. ended with a trip to Canada: Niagara Falls, Toronto, Kingston and Montreal where he appeared on stage in light comedies.[71] Dickens portrait by Margaret Gillies, 1843. Painted during the period when he was writing A Christmas Carol, it was in the Royal Academy of Arts' 1844 summer exhibition. After viewing it there, Elizabeth Barrett Browning said that it showed Dickens with "the dust and mud of humanity about him, notwithstanding those eagle eyes".[72] Soon after his return to England, Dickens began work on the first of his Christmas stories, A Christmas Carol, written in 1843, which was followed by The Chimes in 1844 and The Cricket on the Hearth in 1845. Of these, A Christmas Carol was most popular and, tapping into an old tradition, did much to promote a renewed enthusiasm for the joys of Christmas in Britain and America.[73] The seeds for the story became planted in Dickens's mind during a trip to Manchester to witness the conditions of the manufacturing workers there. This, along with scenes he had recently witnessed at the Field Lane Ragged School, caused Dickens to resolve to "strike a sledge hammer blow" for the poor. As the idea for the story took shape and the writing began in earnest, Dickens became engrossed in the book. He later wrote that as the tale unfolded he "wept and laughed, and wept again" as he "walked about the black streets of London fifteen or twenty miles many a night when all sober folks had gone to bed."[74] After living briefly in Italy (1844), Dickens travelled to Switzerland (1846), where he began work on Dombey and Son (1846–48). This and David Copperfield (1849–50) mark a significant artistic break in Dickens's career as his novels became more serious in theme and more carefully planned than his early works. At about this time, he was made aware of a large embezzlement at the firm where his brother, Augustus, worked (John Chapman & Co.). It had been carried out by Thomas Powell, a clerk, who was on friendly terms with Dickens and who had acted as mentor to Augustus when he started work. Powell was also an author and poet and knew many of the famous writers of the day. After further fraudulent activities, Powell fled to New York and published a book called The Living Authors of England with a chapter on Charles Dickens, who was not amused by what Powell had written. One item that seemed to have annoyed him was the assertion that he had based the character of Paul Dombey (Dombey and Son) on Thomas Chapman, one of the principal partners at John Chapman & Co. Dickens immediately sent a letter to Lewis Gaylord Clark, editor of the New York literary magazine The Knickerbocker, saying that Powell was a forger and thief. Clark published the letter in the New-York Tribune, and several other papers picked up on the story. Powell began proceedings to sue these publications, and Clark was arrested. Dickens, realising that he had acted in haste, contacted John Chapman & Co. to seek written confirmation of Powell's guilt. Dickens did receive a reply confirming Powell's embezzlement, but once the directors realised this information might have to be produced in court, they refused to make further disclosures. Owing to the difficulties of providing evidence in America to support his accusations, Dickens eventually made a private settlement with Powell out of court.[75] Philanthropy Angela Burdett Coutts, heir to the Coutts banking fortune, approached Dickens in May 1846 about setting up a home for the redemption of fallen women of the working class. Coutts envisioned a home that would replace the punitive regimes of existing institutions with a reformative environment conducive to education and proficiency in domestic household chores. After initially resisting, Dickens eventually founded the home, named "Urania Cottage", in the Lime Grove section of Shepherds Bush, which he managed for ten years,[76] setting the house rules, reviewing the accounts and interviewing prospective residents.[77] Emigration and marriage were central to Dickens's agenda for the women on leaving Urania Cottage, from which it is estimated that about 100 women graduated between 1847 and 1859.[78] Religious views Daguerreotype portrait of Charles Dickens by Antoine Claudet, 1852 As a young man Dickens expressed a distaste for certain aspects of organised religion. In 1836, in a pamphlet titled Sunday Under Three Heads, he defended the people's right to pleasure, opposing a plan to prohibit games on Sundays. "Look into your churches- diminished congregations and scanty attendance. People have grown sullen and obstinate, and are becoming disgusted with the faith which condemns them to such a day as this, once in every seven. They display their feeling by staying away [from church]. Turn into the streets [on a Sunday] and mark the rigid gloom that reigns over everything around."[79][80] Dickens honoured the figure of Christ.[81] Dickens is regarded as a professing Christian.[82] His son, Henry Fielding Dickens, described Dickens as someone who "possessed deep religious convictions". In the early 1840s, Dickens had shown an interest in Unitarian Christianity, and Robert Browning remarked that “Mr Dickens is an enlightened Unitarian.”[83] Professor Gary Colledge has written that he "never strayed from his attachment to popular lay Anglicanism".[84] Dickens authored a work called The Life of Our Lord (1846), which is a book about the life of Jesus Christ, written with the purpose of sharing his faith with his children and family.[85][86] Dickens disapproved of Roman Catholicism and 19th-century evangelicalism, seeing both as extremes of Christianity and likely to limit personal expression, and was critical of what he saw as the hypocrisy of religious institutions and philosophies like spiritualism, all of which he considered deviations from the true spirit of Christianity, as shown in the book he wrote for his family in 1846.[87][88] While Dickens advocated equal rights for Catholics in England, he strongly disliked how individual civil liberties were often threatened in countries where Catholicism predominated and referred to the Catholic Church as "that curse upon the world."[87] Dickens also rejected the Evangelical conviction that the Bible was the infallible word of God. His ideas on Biblical interpretation were similar to the Liberal Anglican Arthur Penrhyn Stanley's doctrine of "progressive revelation."[87] Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky referred to Dickens as "that great Christian writer".[89][90] Middle years David reaches Canterbury, from David Copperfield. The character incorporates many elements of Dickens's own life. Artwork by Frank Reynolds. In December 1845, Dickens took up the editorship of the London-based Daily News, a liberal paper through which Dickens hoped to advocate, in his own words, "the Principles of Progress and Improvement, of Education and Civil and Religious Liberty and Equal Legislation."[91] Among the other contributors Dickens chose to write for the paper were the radical economist Thomas Hodgskin and social reformer Douglas William Jerrold, who frequently attacked the Corn Laws.[91][92] Dickens lasted only ten weeks on the job before resigning due to a combination of exhaustion and frustration with one of the paper's co-owners.[91] The Francophile Dickens often holidayed in France, and in a speech delivered in Paris in 1846 in French called the French "the first people in the universe".[93] During his visit to Paris, Dickens met the French literati Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Eugène Scribe, Théophile Gautier, François-René de Chateaubriand and Eugène Sue.[93] In early 1849, Dickens started to write David Copperfield. It was published between 1849 and 1850. In Dickens’ biography, Life of Charles Dickens (1872), John Forster wrote of David Copperfield, “underneath the fiction lay something of the author’s life.”[94] It was Dickens's personal favourite among his own novels, as he wrote in the author's preface to the 1867 edition of the novel.[95] In late November 1851, Dickens moved into Tavistock House where he wrote Bleak House (1852–53), Hard Times (1854), and Little Dorrit (1856).[96] It was here that he indulged in the amateur theatricals described in Forster's Life.[97] During this period he worked closely with the novelist and playwright Wilkie Collins. In 1856, his income from writing allowed him to buy Gad's Hill Place in Higham, Kent. As a child, Dickens had walked past the house and dreamed of living in it. The area was also the scene of some of the events of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1, and this literary connection pleased him.[98] Ellen Ternan, 1858 During this time Dickens was also the publisher, editor, and a major contributor to the journals Household Words (1850–1859) and All the Year Round (1858–1870).[99] In 1855, when Dickens's good friend and Liberal MP Austen Henry Layard formed an Administrative Reform Association to demand significant reforms of Parliament, Dickens joined and volunteered his resources in support of Layard's cause.[100] With the exception of Lord John Russell, who was the only leading politician in whom Dickens had any faith and to whom he later dedicated A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens believed that the political aristocracy and their incompetence were the death of England.[101][102] When he and Layard were accused of fomenting class conflict, Dickens replied that the classes were already in opposition and the fault was with the aristocratic class. Dickens used his pulpit in Household Words to champion the Reform Association.[101] He also commented on foreign affairs, declaring his support for Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini, helping raise funds for their campaigns, and stating that "a united Italy would be of vast importance to the peace of the world, and would be a rock in Louis Napoleon's way," and that "I feel for Italy almost as if I were an Italian born."[103][104][105] In 1857, Dickens hired professional actresses for the play The Frozen Deep, written by him and his protégé, Wilkie Collins. Dickens fell in love with one of the actresses, Ellen Ternan, and this passion was to last the rest of his life.[106] Dickens was 45 and Ternan 18 when he made the decision, which went strongly against Victorian convention, to separate from his wife, Catherine, in 1858—divorce was still unthinkable for someone as famous as he was. When Catherine left, never to see her husband again, she took with her one child, leaving the other children to be raised by her sister Georgina who chose to stay at Gad's Hill.[63] During this period, whilst pondering a project to give public readings for his own profit, Dickens was approached through a charitable appeal by Great Ormond Street Hospital, to help it survive its first major financial crisis. His 'Drooping Buds' essay in Household Words earlier on 3 April 1852 was considered by the hospital's founders to have been the catalyst for the hospital's success.[107] Dickens, whose philanthropy was well-known, was asked by his friend, the hospital's founder Charles West, to preside over the appeal, and he threw himself into the task, heart and soul.[108] Dickens's public readings secured sufficient funds for an endowment to put the hospital on a sound financial footing—one reading on 9 February 1858 alone raised £3,000.[109][110][111] Dickens at his desk, 1858 After separating from Catherine,[112] Dickens undertook a series of hugely popular and remunerative reading tours which, together with his journalism, were to absorb most of his creative energies for the next decade, in which he was to write only two more novels.[113] His first reading tour, lasting from April 1858 to February 1859, consisted of 129 appearances in 49 different towns throughout England, Scotland and Ireland.[114] Dickens's continued fascination with the theatrical world was written into the theatre scenes in Nicholas Nickleby, but more importantly he found an outlet in public readings. In 1866, he undertook a series of public readings in England and Scotland, with more the following year in England and Ireland.[115] Dickens was a regular patron at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese pub in London. He included the venue in A Tale of Two Cities. Other works soon followed, including A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1861), which were resounding successes. Set in London and Paris, A Tale of Two Cities is his best-known work of historical fiction, and includes the famous opening sentence which begins with.. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..". It is regularly cited as one of the best-selling novels of all time.[116][117] Themes in Great Expectations include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil.[118] In early September 1860, in a field behind Gad's Hill, Dickens made a bonfire of most of his correspondence—only those letters on business matters were spared. Since Ellen Ternan also destroyed all of his letters to her,[119] the extent of the affair between the two remains speculative.[120] In the 1930s, Thomas Wright recounted that Ternan had unburdened herself to a Canon Benham, and gave currency to rumours they had been lovers.[121] That the two had a son who died in infancy was alleged by Dickens's daughter, Kate Perugini, whom Gladys Storey had interviewed before her death in 1929. Storey published her account in Dickens and Daughter,[122][123] but no contemporary evidence exists. On his death, Dickens settled an annuity on Ternan which made her a financially independent woman. Claire Tomalin's book, The Invisible Woman, argues that Ternan lived with Dickens secretly for the last 13 years of his life. The book was subsequently turned into a play, Little Nell, by Simon Gray, and a 2013 film. In the same period, Dickens furthered his interest in the paranormal, becoming one of the early members of The Ghost Club.[124] In June 1862, he was offered £10,000 for a reading tour of Australia.[125] He was enthusiastic, and even planned a travel book, The Uncommercial Traveller Upside Down, but ultimately decided against the tour.[126] Two of his sons, Alfred D'Orsay Tennyson Dickens and Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, migrated to Australia, Edward becoming a member of the Parliament of New South Wales as Member for Wilcannia between 1889 and 1894.[127][128] Last years After the Staplehurst rail crash On 9 June 1865, while returning from Paris with Ellen Ternan, Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst rail crash. The train's first seven carriages plunged off a cast iron bridge that was under repair. The only first-class carriage to remain on the track was the one in which Dickens was travelling. Before rescuers arrived, Dickens tended and comforted the wounded and the dying with a flask of brandy and a hat refreshed with water, and saved some lives. Before leaving, he remembered the unfinished manuscript for Our Mutual Friend, and he returned to his carriage to retrieve it.[129] Dickens later used the experience of the crash as material for his short ghost story, "The Signal-Man", in which the central character has a premonition of his own death in a rail crash. He also based the story on several previous rail accidents, such as the Clayton Tunnel rail crash of 1861. Dickens managed to avoid an appearance at the inquest to avoid disclosing that he had been travelling with Ternan and her mother, which would have caused a scandal.[130] After the crash Dickens was nervous when travelling by train, and would use alternative means when available.[131] In 1868 he wrote, “I have sudden vague rushes of terror, even when riding in a hansom cab, which are perfectly unreasonable but quite insurmountable." Dickens's son, Henry, recalled, "I have seen him sometimes in a railway carriage when there was a slight jolt. When this happened he was almost in a state of panic and gripped the seat with both hands."[131] Second visit to the United States Crowd of spectators buying tickets for a Dickens reading at Steinway Hall, New York City in 1867 While he contemplated a second visit to the United States, the outbreak of the Civil War in America in 1861 delayed his plans. On 9 November 1867, over two years after the war, Dickens set sail from Liverpool for his second American reading tour. Landing in Boston, he devoted the rest of the month to a round of dinners with such notables as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and his American publisher, James Thomas Fields. In early December, the readings began. He performed 76 readings, netting £19,000, from December 1867 to April 1868.[132] Dickens shuttled between Boston and New York, where he gave 22 readings at Steinway Hall. Although he had started to suffer from what he called the "true American catarrh", he kept to a schedule that would have challenged a much younger man, even managing to squeeze in some sleighing in Central Park.[133] During his travels, he saw a change in the people and the circumstances of America. His final appearance was at a banquet the American Press held in his honour at Delmonico's on 18 April, when he promised never to denounce America again. By the end of the tour Dickens could hardly manage solid food, subsisting on champagne and eggs beaten in sherry. On 23 April he boarded the Cunard liner Russia to return to Britain,[134] barely escaping a federal tax lien against the proceeds of his lecture tour.[135] Farewell readings Poster promoting a reading by Dickens in Nottingham dated 4 February 1869, two months before he suffered a mild stroke Between 1868 and 1869, Dickens gave a series of "farewell readings" in England, Scotland, and Ireland, beginning on 6 October. He managed, of a contracted 100 readings, to deliver 75 in the provinces, with a further 12 in London.[132] As he pressed on he was affected by giddiness and fits of paralysis. He suffered a stroke on 18 April 1869 in Chester.[136] He collapsed on 22 April 1869, at Preston in Lancashire, and on doctor's advice, the tour was cancelled.[137] After further provincial readings were cancelled, he began work on his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. It was fashionable in the 1860s to 'do the slums' and, in company, Dickens visited opium dens in Shadwell, where he witnessed an elderly addict known as "Laskar Sal", who formed the model for the "Opium Sal" subsequently featured in his mystery novel, Edwin Drood.[138] After Dickens had regained sufficient strength, he arranged, with medical approval, for a final series of readings to partially make up to his sponsors what they had lost due to his illness. There were 12 performances, running between 11 January and 15 March 1870, the last at 8:00 pm at St. James's Hall in London. Although in grave health by this time, he read A Christmas Carol and The Trial from Pickwick. On 2 May, he made his last public appearance at a Royal Academy Banquet in the presence of the Prince and Princess of Wales, paying a special tribute on the death of his friend, the illustrator Daniel Maclise.[139] Death Samuel Luke Fildes—The Empty Chair. Fildes was illustrating Edwin Drood at the time of Charles Dickens's death. The engraving shows Dickens's empty chair in his study at Gads Hill Place. It appeared in the Christmas 1870 edition of The Graphic and thousands of prints of it were sold.[140] A 1905 transcribed copy of the death certificate of Charles Dickens. On 8 June 1870, Dickens suffered another stroke at his home after a full day's work on Edwin Drood. He never regained consciousness, and the next day, he died at Gads Hill Place. Biographer Claire Tomalin has suggested Dickens was actually in Peckham when he suffered the stroke, and his mistress Ellen Ternan and her maids had him taken back to Gad's Hill so the public would not know the truth about their relationship.[141] Contrary to his wish to be buried at Rochester Cathedral "in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner",[142] he was laid to rest in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. A printed epitaph circulated at the time of the funeral reads: To the Memory of Charles Dickens (England's most popular author) who died at his residence, Higham, near Rochester, Kent, 9 June 1870, aged 58 years. He was a sympathiser with the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world.[143] His last words were: "On the ground", in response to his sister-in-law Georgina's request that he lie down.[144][nb 1] On Sunday, 19 June 1870, five days after Dickens was buried in the Abbey, Dean Arthur Penrhyn Stanley delivered a memorial elegy, lauding "the genial and loving humorist whom we now mourn", for showing by his own example "that even in dealing with the darkest scenes and the most degraded characters, genius could still be clean, and mirth could be innocent". Pointing to the fresh flowers that adorned the novelist's grave, Stanley assured those present that "the spot would thenceforth be a sacred one with both the New World and the Old, as that of the representative of literature, not of this island only, but of all who speak our English tongue."[145] In his will, drafted more than a year before his death, Dickens left the care of his £80,000 estate to his longtime colleague John Forster and his "best and truest friend" Georgina Hogarth who, along with Dickens's two sons, also received a tax-free sum of £8,000 (about £800,000 in present terms). Although Dickens and his wife had been separated for several years at the time of his death, he provided her with an annual income of £600 and made her similar allowances in his will. He also bequeathed £19 19s to each servant in his employment at the time of his death.[146] Literary style Dickens's approach to the novel is influenced by various things, including the picaresque novel tradition,[147] melodrama,[148] and the novel of sensibility.[149] According to Ackroyd, other than these, perhaps the most important literary influence on him was derived from the fables of The Arabian Nights.[150] Satire and irony are central to the picaresque novel.[151] Comedy is also an aspect of the British picaresque novel tradition of Laurence Sterne, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett. Fielding's Tom Jones was a major influence on the nineteenth novel including Dickens, who read it in his youth,[152] and named a son Henry Fielding Dickens in his honour.[153][154] Melodrama is typically sensational and designed to appeal strongly to the emotions. Dickens's Dream by Robert William Buss, portraying Dickens at his desk at Gads Hill Place surrounded by many of his characters His writing style is marked by a profuse linguistic creativity.[155] Satire, flourishing in his gift for caricature, is his forte. An early reviewer compared him to Hogarth for his keen practical sense of the ludicrous side of life, though his acclaimed mastery of varieties of class idiom may in fact mirror the conventions of contemporary popular theatre.[156] Dickens worked intensively on developing arresting names for his characters that would reverberate with associations for his readers, and assist the development of motifs in the storyline, giving what one critic calls an "allegorical impetus" to the novels' meanings.[155] To cite one of numerous examples, the name Mr Murdstone in David Copperfield conjures up twin allusions to "murder" and stony coldness.[157] His literary style is also a mixture of fantasy and realism. His satires of British aristocratic snobbery—he calls one character the "Noble Refrigerator"—are often popular. Comparing orphans to stocks and shares, people to tug boats, or dinner-party guests to furniture are just some of Dickens's acclaimed flights of fancy. The author worked closely with his illustrators, supplying them with a summary of the work at the outset and thus ensuring that his characters and settings were exactly how he envisioned them. He briefed the illustrator on plans for each month's instalment so that work could begin before he wrote them. Marcus Stone, illustrator of Our Mutual Friend, recalled that the author was always "ready to describe down to the minutest details the personal characteristics, and ... life-history of the creations of his fancy".[158] Characters The Old Curiosity Shop in Holborn, London which inspired The Old Curiosity Shop. Many of Dickens' works do not just use London as a backdrop but are about the city and its character. Dickens's biographer Claire Tomalin regards him as the greatest creator of character in English fiction after Shakespeare.[159] Dickensian characters are amongst the most memorable in English literature, especially so because of their typically whimsical names. The likes of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Jacob Marley and Bob Cratchit (A Christmas Carol), Oliver Twist, The Artful Dodger, Fagin and Bill Sikes (Oliver Twist), Pip, Miss Havisham and Abel Magwitch (Great Expectations), Sydney Carton, Charles Darnay and Madame Defarge (A Tale of Two Cities), David Copperfield, Uriah Heep and Mr Micawber (David Copperfield), Daniel Quilp (The Old Curiosity Shop), Samuel Pickwick and Sam Weller (The Pickwick Papers), and Wackford Squeers (Nicholas Nickleby) are so well known as to be part and parcel of popular culture, and in some cases have passed into ordinary language: a scrooge, for example, is a miser – or someone who dislikes Christmas festivity.[160] The Artful Dodger from Oliver Twist His characters were often so memorable that they took on a life of their own outside his books. "Gamp" became a slang expression for an umbrella from the character Mrs Gamp, and "Pickwickian", "Pecksniffian", and "Gradgrind" all entered dictionaries due to Dickens's original portraits of such characters who were, respectively, quixotic, hypocritical, and vapidly factual. Many were drawn from real life: Mrs Nickleby is based on his mother, though she didn't recognise herself in the portrait,[161] just as Mr Micawber is constructed from aspects of his father's 'rhetorical exuberance':[162] Harold Skimpole in Bleak House is based on James Henry Leigh Hunt: his wife's dwarfish chiropodist recognised herself in Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield.[163][164] Perhaps Dickens's impressions on his meeting with Hans Christian Andersen informed the delineation of Uriah Heep (a term synonymous with sycophant).[165] Virginia Woolf maintained that "we remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens" as he produces "characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet extraordinarily revealing remarks".[166] T. S. Eliot wrote that Dickens “excelled in character; in the creation of characters of greater intensity than human beings.”[167] One "character" vividly drawn throughout his novels is London itself.[168] Dickens described London as a magic lantern, inspiring the places and people in many of his novels.[169] From the coaching inns on the outskirts of the city to the lower reaches of the Thames, all aspects of the capital – Dickens' London – are described over the course of his body of work.[169] Autobiographical elements An original illustration by Phiz from the novel David Copperfield, which is widely regarded as Dickens's most autobiographical work Authors frequently draw their portraits of characters from people they have known in real life. David Copperfield is regarded by many as a veiled autobiography of Dickens. The scenes of interminable court cases and legal arguments in Bleak House reflect Dickens's experiences as a law clerk and court reporter, and in particular his direct experience of the law's procedural delay during 1844 when he sued publishers in Chancery for breach of copyright.[170] Dickens's father was sent to prison for debt, and this became a common theme in many of his books, with the detailed depiction of life in the Marshalsea prison in Little Dorrit resulting from Dickens's own experiences of the institution.[171] Lucy Stroughill, a childhood sweetheart, may have affected several of Dickens's portraits of girls such as Little Em'ly in David Copperfield and Lucie Manette in A Tale of Two Cities.[172][nb 2] Dickens may have drawn on his childhood experiences, but he was also ashamed of them and would not reveal that this was where he gathered his realistic accounts of squalor. Very few knew the details of his early life until six years after his death, when John Forster published a biography on which Dickens had collaborated. Though Skimpole brutally sends up Leigh Hunt, some critics have detected in his portrait features of Dickens's own character, which he sought to exorcise by self-parody.[173] Episodic writing Advertisement for Great Expectations, serialised in the weekly literary magazine All the Year Round from December 1860 to August 1861 A pioneer of serialised fiction, most of Dickens's major novels were first written in monthly or weekly instalments in journals such as Master Humphrey's Clock and Household Words, later reprinted in book form.[5][4] These instalments made the stories affordable and accessible, and the series of regular cliffhangers made each new episode widely anticipated.[6] When The Old Curiosity Shop was being serialised, American fans waited at the docks in New York harbor, shouting out to the crew of an incoming British ship, "Is little Nell dead?"[174] Dickens's talent was to incorporate this episodic writing style but still end up with a coherent novel at the end. "Charles Dickens as he appears when reading." Wood engraving from Harper's Weekly, 7 December 1867 Another important impact of Dickens's episodic writing style resulted from his exposure to the opinions of his readers and friends. His friend Forster had a significant hand in reviewing his drafts, an influence that went beyond matters of punctuation. He toned down melodramatic and sensationalist exaggerations, cut long passages (such as the episode of Quilp's drowning in The Old Curiosity Shop), and made suggestions about plot and character. It was he who suggested that Charley Bates should be redeemed in Oliver Twist. Dickens had not thought of killing Little Nell, and it was Forster who advised him to entertain this possibility as necessary to his conception of the heroine.[175] Dickens's serialisation of his novels was criticised by other authors. In Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson's novel The Wrecker, there is a comment by Captain Nares, investigating an abandoned ship: "See! They were writing up the log," said Nares, pointing to the ink-bottle. "Caught napping, as usual. I wonder if there ever was a captain yet that lost a ship with his log-book up to date? He generally has about a month to fill up on a clean break, like Charles Dickens and his serial novels."[176] Social commentary Nurse Sarah Gamp (left) from Martin Chuzzlewit became a stereotype of untrained and incompetent nurses of the early Victorian era, before the reforms of Florence Nightingale Dickens's novels were, among other things, works of social commentary. He was a fierce critic of the poverty and social stratification of Victorian society. In a New York address, he expressed his belief that "Virtue shows quite as well in rags and patches as she does in purple and fine linen".[177] Dickens's second novel, Oliver Twist (1839), shocked readers with its images of poverty and crime: it challenged middle class polemics about criminals, making impossible any pretence to ignorance about what poverty entailed.[178][179] At a time when Britain was the major economic and political power of the world, Dickens highlighted the life of the forgotten poor and disadvantaged within society. Through his journalism he campaigned on specific issues—such as sanitation and the workhouse—but his fiction probably demonstrated its greatest prowess in changing public opinion in regard to class inequalities. He often depicted the exploitation and oppression of the poor and condemned the public officials and institutions that not only allowed such abuses to exist, but flourished as a result. His most strident indictment of this condition is in Hard Times (1854), Dickens's only novel-length treatment of the industrial working class. In this work, he uses vitriol and satire to illustrate how this marginalised social stratum was termed "Hands" by the factory owners; that is, not really "people" but rather only appendages of the machines they operated. His writings inspired others, in particular journalists and political figures, to address such problems of class oppression. For example, the prison scenes in The Pickwick Papers are claimed to have been influential in having the Fleet Prison shut down. Karl Marx asserted that Dickens "issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together".[180] George Bernard Shaw even remarked that Great Expectations was more seditious than Marx's Das Kapital.[180] The exceptional popularity of Dickens's novels, even those with socially oppositional themes (Bleak House, 1853; Little Dorrit, 1857; Our Mutual Friend, 1865), not only underscored his ability to create compelling storylines and unforgettable characters, but also ensured that the Victorian public confronted issues of social justice that had commonly been ignored. It has been argued that his technique of flooding his narratives with an 'unruly superfluity of material' that, in the gradual dénouement, yields up an unsuspected order, influenced the organisation of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.[181] Literary techniques Bleak House (pictured in the 1920s) in Broadstairs, Kent, where Dickens wrote some of his novels Dickens is often described as using idealised characters and highly sentimental scenes to contrast with his caricatures and the ugly social truths he reveals. The story of Nell Trent in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) was received as extraordinarily moving by contemporary readers but viewed as ludicrously sentimental by Oscar Wilde. "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell", he said in a famous remark, "without dissolving into tears...of laughter."[182][183] G. K. Chesterton stated, "It is not the death of little Nell, but the life of little Nell, that I object to", arguing that the maudlin effect of his description of her life owed much to the gregarious nature of Dickens's grief, his "despotic" use of people's feelings to move them to tears in works like this.[184] The question as to whether Dickens belongs to the tradition of the sentimental novel is debatable. Valerie Purton, in her book Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition, sees him continuing aspects of this tradition, and argues that his "sentimental scenes and characters [are] as crucial to the overall power of the novels as his darker or comic figures and scenes", and that "Dombey and Son is [ ... ] Dickens's greatest triumph in the sentimentalist tradition".[185] The Encyclopædia Britannica online comments that, despite "patches of emotional excess", such as the reported death of Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol (1843), "Dickens cannot really be termed a sentimental novelist".[186] In Oliver Twist Dickens provides readers with an idealised portrait of a boy so inherently and unrealistically good that his values are never subverted by either brutal orphanages or coerced involvement in a gang of young pickpockets. While later novels also centre on idealised characters (Esther Summerson in Bleak House and Amy Dorrit in Little Dorrit), this idealism serves only to highlight Dickens's goal of poignant social commentary. Dickens's fiction, reflecting what he believed to be true of his own life, makes frequent use of coincidence, either for comic effect or to emphasise the idea of providence.[187] For example, Oliver Twist turns out to be the lost nephew of the upper-class family that rescues him from the dangers of the pickpocket group. Such coincidences are a staple of 18th-century picaresque novels, such as Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, which Dickens enjoyed reading as a youth.[188] Reputation Dickens' portrait (top left), in between Shakespeare and Tennyson, on a stained glass window at the Ottawa Public Library, Ottawa, Canada Dickens was the most popular novelist of his time,[189] and remains one of the best-known and most-read of English authors. His works have never gone out of print,[190] and have been adapted continually for the screen since the invention of cinema,[191] with at least 200 motion pictures and TV adaptations based on Dickens's works documented.[192] Many of his works were adapted for the stage during his own lifetime, and as early as 1913, a silent film of The Pickwick Papers was made.[193] Dickens created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest British novelist of the Victorian era.[1] His literary reputation, however began to decline with the publication of Bleak House in 1852–53. Philip Collins calls Bleak House ‘a crucial item in the history of Dickens's reputation. Reviewers and literary figures during the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s, saw a "drear decline" in Dickens, from a writer of "bright sunny comedy ... to dark and serious social" commentary.[194] The Spectator called Bleak House "a heavy book to read through at once ... dull and wearisome as a serial"; Richard Simpson, in The Rambler, characterized Hard Times as ‘this dreary framework’; Fraser's Magazine thought Little Dorrit ‘decidedly the worst of his novels’.[195] All the same, despite these "increasing reservations amongst reviewers and the chattering classes, ‘the public never deserted its favourite’". Dickens's popular reputation remained unchanged, sales continued to rise, and Household Words and later All the Year Round were highly successful.[195] “Dickens's vocal impersonations of his own characters gave this truth a theatrical form: the public reading tour. No other Victorian could match him for celebrity, earnings, and sheer vocal artistry. The Victorians craved the author's multiple voices: between 1853 and his death in 1870, Dickens performed about 470 times.” —Peter Garratt in The Guardian on Dickens’ fame and the demand for his public readings.[10] Later in his career, Dickens’ fame and the demand for his public readings were unparalleled. In 1868 The Times wrote, "Amid all the variety of 'readings', those of Mr Charles Dickens stand alone.”[10] A Dickens biographer, Edgar Johnson, wrote in the 1950s: "It was [always] more than a reading; it was an extraordinary exhibition of acting that seized upon its auditors with a mesmeric possession."[10] Comparing his reception at public readings to those of a contemporary pop star, The Guardian states, “People sometimes fainted at his shows. His performances even saw the rise of that modern phenomenon, the "speculator" or ticket tout (scalpers) – the ones in New York City escaped detection by borrowing respectable-looking hats from the waiters in nearby restaurants.”[196] Among fellow writers, there was a range of opinions on Dickens. Poet laureate, William Wordsworth (1770–1850), thought him a "very talkative, vulgar young person", adding he had not read a line of his work, while novelist George Meredith (1828–1909), found Dickens "intellectually lacking".[197] In 1888 Leslie Stephen commented in the Dictionary of National Biography that "if literary fame could be safely measured by popularity with the half-educated, Dickens must claim the highest position among English novelists".[198] Anthony Trollope's Autobiography famously declared Thackeray, not Dickens, to be the greatest novelist of the age. However, both Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky were admirers. Dostoyevsky commented: "We understand Dickens in Russia, I am convinced, almost as well as the English, perhaps even with all the nuances. It may well be that we love him no less than his compatriots do. And yet how original is Dickens, and how very English!"[199] Tolstoy referred to David Copperfield as his favourite book, and he later adopted the novel as “a model for his own autobiographical reflections.”[200] French writer Jules Verne called Dickens his favourite writer, writing his novels "stand alone, dwarfing all others by their amazing power and felicity of expression."[201] Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh was inspired by Dickens's novels in several of his paintings like Vincent's Chair and in an 1889 letter to his sister stated that reading Dickens, especially A Christmas Carol, was one of the things that was keeping him from committing suicide.[202] Oscar Wilde generally disparaged his depiction of character, while admiring his gift for caricature.[203] Henry James denied him a premier position, calling him "the greatest of superficial novelists": Dickens failed to endow his characters with psychological depth and the novels, "loose baggy monsters",[204] betrayed a "cavalier organisation".[205] Joseph Conrad described his own childhood in bleak Dickensian terms, and noted he had “an intense and unreasoning affection” for Bleak House, dating back to his boyhood. The novel influenced his own gloomy portrait of London in The Secret Agent (1907).[200] Virginia Woolf had a love-hate relationship with his works, finding his novels "mesmerizing" while reproving him for his sentimentalism and a commonplace style.[206] Around 1940–41 the attitude of the literary critics began to warm towards Dickens, led by George Orwell, Inside the Whale and Other Essays. March 1940, Edmund Wilson, The Wound and the Bow, 1941, and Humphry House, Dickens and his World.[207] But even in 1948, F. R. Leavis, in The Great Tradition, asserted that “the adult mind doesn't as a rule find in Dickens a challenge to an unusual and sustained seriousness”; Dickens was indeed a great genius, “but the genius was that of a great entertainer,”[208] though he later changed his opinion with Dickens the Novelist (1970) (with Q. D. (Queenie) Leavis): "Our purpose", they wrote, "is to enforce as unanswerably as possible the conviction that Dickens was one of the greatest of creative writers".[209] In 1944, Soviet film director and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein wrote an essay on Dickens influence on cinema, such as cross-cutting—where two stories run alongside each other, as seen in novels such as Oliver Twist.[210] In the 1950s, "a substantial reassessment and re-editing of the works began, and critics found his finest artistry and greatest depth to be in the later novels: Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Great Expectations—and (less unanimously) in Hard Times and Our Mutual Friend".[211] Dickens was a favourite author of Roald Dahl’s; the best-selling children’s author would include three of Dickens’ novels among those read by the title character in his 1988 novel Matilda.[212] An avid reader of Dickens, in 2005, Paul McCartney named Nicholas Nickleby his favourite novel. On Dickens he states, “I like the world that he takes me to. I like his words; I like the language”, adding, “A lot of my stuff – it's kind of Dickensian.”[213] Screenwriter Jonathan Nolan’s screenplay for The Dark Knight Rises (2012) was inspired by A Tale of Two Cities, with Nolan calling the depiction of Paris in the novel “one of the most harrowing portraits of a relatable, recognisable civilisation that completely folded to pieces”.[214] On 7 February 2012, the 200th anniversary of Dickens's birth, Philip Womack wrote in The Telegraph: "Today there is no escaping Charles Dickens. Not that there has ever been much chance of that before. He has a deep, peculiar hold upon us".[215] Influence and legacy Dickens and Little Nell statue in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Dickens' grave in Westminster Abbey in 2012 Museums and festivals celebrating Dickens's life and works exist in many places with which Dickens was associated. These include the Charles Dickens Museum in London, the historic home where he wrote Oliver Twist, The Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby; and the Charles Dickens Birthplace Museum in Portsmouth, the house in which he was born. The original manuscripts of many of his novels, as well as printers' proofs, first editions, and illustrations from the collection of Dickens's friend John Forster are held at the Victoria and Albert Museum.[216] Dickens's will stipulated that no memorial be erected in his honour; nonetheless, a life-size bronze statue of Dickens entitled Dickens and Little Nell, cast in 1891 by Francis Edwin Elwell, stands in Clark Park in the Spruce Hill neighbourhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Another life-size statue of Dickens is located at Centennial Park, Sydney, Australia.[217] In 1960 a bass relief sculpture of Dickens, notably featuring characters from his books, was commissioned from sculptor Estcourt J Clack to adorn the office building built on the site of his former home at 1 Devonshire Terrace, London.[218][219] In 2014, a life-size statue was unveiled near his birthplace in Portsmouth on the 202nd anniversary of his birth; this was supported by the author's great-great grandsons, Ian and Gerald Dickens.[220][221] A Christmas Carol is most probably his best-known story, with frequent new adaptations. It is also the most-filmed of Dickens's stories, with many versions dating from the early years of cinema.[222] According to the historian Ronald Hutton, the current state of the observance of Christmas is largely the result of a mid-Victorian revival of the holiday spearheaded by A Christmas Carol. Dickens catalysed the emerging Christmas as a family-centred festival of generosity, in contrast to the dwindling community-based and church-centred observations, as new middle-class expectations arose.[223] Its archetypal figures (Scrooge, Tiny Tim, the Christmas ghosts) entered into Western cultural consciousness. A prominent phrase from the tale, "Merry Christmas", was popularised following the appearance of the story.[224] The term Scrooge became a synonym for miser, and his dismissive exclamation 'Bah! Humbug!' likewise gained currency as an idiom.[225] Novelist William Makepeace Thackeray called the book "a national benefit, and to every man and woman who reads it a personal kindness".[222] Dickens was commemorated on the Series E £10 note issued by the Bank of England that circulated between 1992 and 2003. His portrait appeared on the reverse of the note accompanied by a scene from The Pickwick Papers. The Charles Dickens School is a high school in Broadstairs, Kent. A theme park, Dickens World, standing in part on the site of the former naval dockyard where Dickens's father once worked in the Navy Pay Office, opened in Chatham in 2007. To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens in 2012, the Museum of London held the UK's first major exhibition on the author in 40 years.[226] In 2002, Dickens was number 41 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons.[227] American literary critic Harold Bloom placed Dickens among the greatest Western Writers of all time.[228] In the UK survey The Big Read, carried out by the BBC in 2003, five of Dickens's books were named in the Top 100.[229] Dickens and his publications have appeared on a number of postage stamps including: UK (1970, 1993, 2011 and 2012), Soviet Union (1962), Antigua, Barbuda, Botswana, Cameroon, Dubai, Fujairah, St Christopher, Nevis and Anguilla, St Helena, St Lucia and Turks and Caicos Islands (1970), St Vincent (1987), Nevis (2007), Alderney, Gibraltar, Jersey and Pitcairn Islands (2012), Austria (2013), Mozambique (2014).[230] In November 2018 it was reported that a previously lost portrait of a 31-year-old Dickens, by Margaret Gillies, had been found in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Gillies was an early supporter of women's suffrage and had painted the portrait in late 1843 when Dickens, aged 31, wrote A Christmas Carol. It was exhibited, to acclaim, at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1844.[72] Notable works Main article: Charles Dickens bibliography Dickens published well over a dozen major novels and novellas, a large number of short stories, including a number of Christmas-themed stories, a handful of plays, and several non-fiction books. Dickens's novels were initially serialised in weekly and monthly magazines, then reprinted in standard book formats. The Pickwick Papers (The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club; monthly serial, April 1836 to November 1837)[231] Oliver Twist (The Adventures of Oliver Twist; monthly serial in Bentley's Miscellany, February 1837 to April 1839) Nicholas Nickleby (The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby; monthly serial, April 1838 to October 1839) The Old Curiosity Shop (weekly serial in Master Humphrey's Clock, April 1840 to November 1841) Barnaby Rudge (Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty; weekly serial in Master Humphrey's Clock, February to November 1841) A Christmas Carol (A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost-story of Christmas; 1843) Martin Chuzzlewit (The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit; monthly serial, January 1843 to July 1844) The Chimes (The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In; 1844) The Cricket on the Hearth (The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home; 1845) Dombey and Son (Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son: Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation; monthly serial, October 1846 to April 1848) The Haunted Man (The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain: A Fancy for Christmas-time; 1848) David Copperfield (The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery [Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account]; monthly serial, May 1849 to November 1850) Bleak House (monthly serial, March 1852 to September 1853) Hard Times (Hard Times: For These Times; weekly serial in Household Words, 1 April 1854, to 12 August 1854) Little Dorrit (monthly serial, December 1855 to June 1857) A Tale of Two Cities (weekly serial in All the Year Round, 30 April 1859, to 26 November 1859) Great Expectations (weekly serial in All the Year Round, 1 December 1860 to 3 August 1861) Our Mutual Friend (monthly serial, May 1864 to November 1865) The Signal-Man (1866), first published as part of the Mugby Junction collection in the 1866 Christmas edition of All the Year Round. Edwin Drood (The Mystery of Edwin Drood; monthly serial, April 1870 to September 1870), left unfinished due to Dickens's death  ****Victor Marie Hugo (French: [viktɔʁ maʁi yɡo] (listen); 7 Ventôse year X (26 February 1802) – 22 May 1885) was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. During a literary career that spanned more than sixty years, he wrote abundantly in an exceptional variety of genres: lyrics, satires, epics, philosophical poems, epigrams, novels, history, critical essays, political speeches, funeral orations, diaries, letters public and private, and dramas in verse and prose. Hugo is considered to be one of the greatest and best-known French writers. Outside France, his most famous works are the novels Les Misérables, 1862, and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (French: Notre-Dame de Paris), 1831. In France, Hugo is renowned for his poetry collections, such as Les Contemplations (The Contemplations) and La Légende des siècles (The Legend of the Ages). Hugo was at the forefront of the Romantic literary movement with his play Cromwell and drama Hernani. Many of his works have inspired music, both during his lifetime and after his death, including the musicals Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris. He produced more than 4,000 drawings in his lifetime, and campaigned for social causes such as the abolition of capital punishment. Though a committed royalist when he was young, Hugo's views changed as the decades passed, and he became a passionate supporter of republicanism; his work touches upon most of the political and social issues and the artistic trends of his time. He is buried in the Panthéon in Paris. His legacy has been honoured in many ways, including his portrait being placed on French currency. Contents 1 Personal life 2 Writings 3 Political life and exile 4 Religious views 5 Victor Hugo and music 6 Declining years and death 7 Drawings 8 Victor Hugo and women 8.1 Wife 8.2 Mistresses 8.2.1 Juliette Drouet 8.2.2 Léonie d’Aunet 8.3 Casual affairs 9 Gallery 10 Memorials 11 Religious veneration 12 Works 12.1 Published during Hugo's lifetime 12.2 Published posthumously 13 References 14 Further reading 15 External links 15.1 Online works Personal life[edit] Victor-Marie Hugo was born on 26 February 1802 in Besançon in the eastern region of Franche-Comté. The youngest of three sons of Joseph Léopold Sigisbert Hugo (1774–1828) a general in the Napoleonic army, and Sophie Trébuchet (1772–1821); his brothers were Abel Joseph Hugo (1798–1855) and Eugène Hugo (1800–1837). Léopold Hugo wrote to his son that he had been conceived on one of the highest peaks in the Vosges Mountains, on a journey from Lunéville to Besançon. "This elevated origin", he went on, "seems to have had effects on you so that your muse is now continually sublime."[1] Hugo believed himself to have been conceived on 24 June 1801, which is the origin of Jean Valjean's prisoner number 24601.[2] Léopold Hugo was a freethinking republican who considered Napoleon a hero; by contrast, Sophie Hugo was a Catholic Royalist who was intimately involved with her possible lover Géneral Victor Lahorie,[3] Victor Hugo’s godfather, who was executed in 1812 for plotting against Napoléon. Hugo's childhood was a period of national political turmoil. Napoléon was proclaimed Emperor of the French two years after Hugo's birth, and the Bourbon Monarchy was restored before his 13th birthday. The opposing political and religious views of Hugo's parents reflected the forces that would battle for supremacy in France throughout his life: Hugo's father was a high-ranking officer in Napoléon's army until he failed in Spain (one of the reasons why his name is not present on the Arc de Triomphe). Because Hugo's father was an officer, the family moved frequently from posting to posting, as far as Italy and Spain. Hugo learned much from these travels. On a childhood family trip to Naples, Hugo saw the vast Alpine passes and the snowy peaks, the magnificently blue Mediterranean, and Rome during its festivities.[4] Though he was only five years old at the time, he remembered the six-month-long trip vividly. They stayed in Naples for a few months and then headed back to Paris. Joseph Hugo with two of his brothers and his son Abél   Hugo's maternal grandmother, Renée-Louise Trébuchet   Hugo's maternal grandfather, Jean-François Trébuchet At the beginning of her marriage, Hugo's mother Sophie followed her husband to posts in Italy (where Léopold served as governor of Avellino) and Spain (where he took charge of three Spanish provinces). Weary of the constant moving required by military life and at odds with her husband's lack of Catholic beliefs, Sophie separated temporarily from Léopold in 1803 and settled in Paris with her children. Thereafter she dominated Hugo's education and upbringing. As a result, Hugo's early work in poetry and fiction reflect her passionate devotion to both king and faith. It was only later, during the events leading up to France's 1848 Revolution, that he began to rebel against his Catholic Royalist education and instead acted as a champion to Republicanism and Freethought. Young Victor fell in love and secretly became engaged, against his mother's wishes, to his childhood friend Adèle Foucher (1803–1868). Because of his close relationship with his mother, Hugo waited until after her death (in 1821) to marry Adèle a year later. Adèle and Victor Hugo had their first child, Léopold, in 1823, but the boy died in infancy. On 28 August 1824, the couple's second child, Léopoldine was born, followed by Charles on 4 November 1826, François-Victor on 28 October 1828, and Adèle on 28 July 1830. Illustration by Luc-Olivier Merson for Notre-Dame de Paris (1881), showing the recently restored galerie des chimères Hugo's eldest and favourite daughter, Léopoldïne, died aged 19 in 1843, shortly after her marriage to Charles Vacquerie. On 4 September, she drowned in the Seine at Villequier when a boat overturned. Her young husband died trying to save her. The death left her father devastated; Hugo was travelling at the time, in the south of France, when he first learned about Léopoldine's death from a newspaper that he read in a café.[5] He describes his shock and grief in his famous poem "À Villequier": Hélas ! vers le passé tournant un œil d'envie, Sans que rien ici-bas puisse m'en consoler, Je regarde toujours ce moment de ma vie Où je l'ai vue ouvrir son aile et s'envoler! Je verrai cet instant jusqu'à ce que je meure, L'instant, pleurs superflus ! Où je criai : L'enfant que j'avais tout à l'heure, Quoi donc ! je ne l'ai plus ! Alas! turning an envious eye towards the past, inconsolable by anything on earth, I keep looking at that moment of my life when I saw her open her wings and fly away! I will see that instant until I die, that instant—too much for tears! when I cried out: "The child that I had just now— Oh! I don't have her any more!" He wrote many poems afterwards about his daughter's life and death, and at least one biographer claims he never completely recovered from it. His most famous poem is arguably "Demain, dès l'aube" (Tomorrow, at Dawn), in which he describes visiting her grave. Victor Hugo in 1829, lithograph by Achille Devéria in the collection of the National Gallery of Art Hugo decided to live in exile after Napoleon III's coup d'état at the end of 1851. After leaving France, Hugo lived in Brussels briefly in 1851, and then moved to the Channel Islands, first to Jersey (1852–1855) and then to the smaller island of Guernsey in 1855, where he stayed until Napoleon III's fall from power in 1870. Although Napoleon III proclaimed a general amnesty in 1859, under which Hugo could have safely returned to France, the author stayed in exile, only returning when Napoleon III was forced from power as a result of the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. After the Siege of Paris from 1870 to 1871, Hugo lived again in Guernsey from 1872 to 1873, and then finally returned to France for the remainder of his life. In 1871, after the death of his son Charles, Hugo took custody of his grandchildren Jeanne and Georges-Victor. Writings[edit] Victor Hugo in 1853 Hugo published his first novel the year following his marriage (Han d'Islande, 1823), and his second three years later (Bug-Jargal, 1826). Between 1829 and 1840, he published five more volumes of poetry (Les Orientales, 1829; Les Feuilles d'automne, 1831; Les Chants du crépuscule, 1835; Les Voix intérieures, 1837; and Les Rayons et les Ombres, 1840), cementing his reputation as one of the greatest elegiac and lyric poets of his time. Like many young writers of his generation, Hugo was profoundly influenced by François-René de Chateaubriand, the famous figure in the literary movement of Romanticism and France's pre-eminent literary figure during the early 19th century. In his youth, Hugo resolved to be "Chateaubriand or nothing", and his life would come to parallel that of his predecessor in many ways. Like Chateaubriand, Hugo furthered the cause of Romanticism, became involved in politics (though mostly as a champion of Republicanism), and was forced into exile due to his political stances. The precocious passion and eloquence of Hugo's early work brought success and fame at an early age. His first collection of poetry (Odes et poésies diverses) was published in 1822 when he was only 20 years old and earned him a royal pension from Louis XVIII. Though the poems were admired for their spontaneous fervour and fluency, the collection that followed four years later in 1826 (Odes et Ballades) revealed Hugo to be a great poet, a natural master of lyric and creative song. Victor Hugo's first mature work of fiction was first published in February 1829 by Charles Gosselin without the author's name and reflected the acute social conscience that would infuse his later work. Le Dernier jour d'un condamné (The Last Day of a Condemned Man) would have a profound influence on later writers such as Albert Camus, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Claude Gueux, a documentary short story about a real-life murderer who had been executed in France, appeared in 1834 and was later considered by Hugo himself to be a precursor to his great work on social injustice, Les Misérables. Hugo became the figurehead of the Romantic literary movement with the plays Cromwell (1827) and Hernani (1830).[6] Hernani announced the arrival of French romanticism: performed at the Comédie-Française, it was greeted with several nights of rioting as romantics and traditionalists clashed over the play's deliberate disregard for neo-classical rules. Hugo's popularity as a playwright grew with subsequent plays, such as Marion Delorme (1831), The King Amuses Himself (1832), and Ruy Blas (1838).[7] Hugo's novel Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) was published in 1831 and quickly translated into other languages across Europe. One of the effects of the novel was to shame the City of Paris into restoring the much-neglected Cathedral of Notre Dame, which was attracting thousands of tourists who had read the popular novel. The book also inspired a renewed appreciation for pre-Renaissance buildings, which thereafter began to be actively preserved. Portrait of "Cosette" by Émile Bayard, from the original edition of Les Misérables (1862) Hugo began planning a major novel about social misery and injustice as early as the 1830s, but a full 17 years were needed for Les Misérables to be realised and finally published in 1862. Hugo had used the departure of prisoners for the Bagne of Toulon in one of his early stories, "Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné" He went to Toulon to visit the Bagne in 1839 and took extensive notes, though he did not start writing the book until 1845. On one of the pages of his notes about the prison, he wrote in large block letters a possible name for his hero: " JEAN TRÉJEAN". When the book was finally written, Tréjean became Jean Valjean.[8] Hugo was acutely aware of the quality of the novel, as evidenced in a letter he wrote to his publisher, Albert Lacroix, on 23 March 1862, "My conviction is that this book is going to be one of the peaks, if not the crowning point of my work."[9] So publication of Les Misérables went to the highest bidder. The Belgian publishing house Lacroix and Verboeckhoven undertook a marketing campaign unusual for the time, issuing press releases about the work a full six months before the launch. It also initially published only the first part of the novel ("Fantine"), which was launched simultaneously in major cities. Instalments of the book sold out within hours and had enormous impact on French society. The critical establishment was generally hostile to the novel; Taine found it insincere, Barbey d'Aurevilly complained of its vulgarity, Gustave Flaubert found within it "neither truth nor greatness", the Goncourt brothers lambasted its artificiality, and Baudelaire – despite giving favourable reviews in newspapers – castigated it in private as "repulsive and inept". Les Misérables proved popular enough with the masses that the issues it highlighted were soon on the agenda of the National Assembly of France. Today, the novel remains his most well-known work. It is popular worldwide and has been adapted for cinema, television, and stage shows. An apocryphal tale[10] about the shortest correspondence in history is said to have been between Hugo and his publisher Hurst and Blackett in 1862. Hugo was on vacation when Les Misérables was published. He queried the reaction to the work by sending a single-character telegram to his publisher, asking ?. The publisher replied with a single ! to indicate its success.[11] Hugo turned away from social/political issues in his next novel, Les Travailleurs de la Mer (Toilers of the Sea), published in 1866. The book was well received, perhaps due to the previous success of Les Misérables. Dedicated to the channel island of Guernsey, where he spent 15 years of exile, Hugo tells of a man who attempts to win the approval of his beloved's father by rescuing his ship, intentionally marooned by its captain who hopes to escape with a treasure of money it is transporting, through an exhausting battle of human engineering against the force of the sea and a battle against an almost mythical beast of the sea, a giant squid. Superficially an adventure, one of Hugo's biographers calls it a "metaphor for the 19th century–technical progress, creative genius and hard work overcoming the immanent evil of the material world."[12] The word used in Guernsey to refer to squid (pieuvre, also sometimes applied to octopus) was to enter the French language as a result of its use in the book. Hugo returned to political and social issues in his next novel, L'Homme Qui Rit (The Man Who Laughs), which was published in 1869 and painted a critical picture of the aristocracy. The novel was not as successful as his previous efforts, and Hugo himself began to comment on the growing distance between himself and literary contemporaries such as Flaubert and Émile Zola, whose realist and naturalist novels were now exceeding the popularity of his own work. His last novel, Quatre-vingt-treize (Ninety-Three), published in 1874, dealt with a subject that Hugo had previously avoided: the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. Though Hugo's popularity was on the decline at the time of its publication, many now consider Ninety-Three to be a work on par with Hugo's better-known novels. Political life and exile[edit] Part of a series on Liberalism History [show] Ideas [show] Schools of thought [show] People [show] Organizations [show] Regional variants [show] Related topics [show]  Liberalism portal  Politics portal vte Among the Rocks on Jersey (1853–1855) After three unsuccessful attempts, Hugo was finally elected to the Académie française in 1841, solidifying his position in the world of French arts and letters. A group of French academicians, particularly Étienne de Jouy, were fighting against the "romantic evolution" and had managed to delay Victor Hugo's election.[13] Thereafter, he became increasingly involved in French politics. He was ennobled and elevated to the peerage by King Louis-Philippe in 1845 and entered the Higher Chamber as a pair de France, where he spoke against the death penalty and social injustice, and in favour of freedom of the press and self-government for Poland. In 1848, Hugo was elected to the National Assembly of the Second Republic as a conservative. In 1849, he broke with the conservatives when he gave a noted speech calling for the end of misery and poverty. Other speeches called for universal suffrage and free education for all children. Hugo's advocacy to abolish the death penalty was renowned internationally. These parliamentary speeches are published in Œuvres complètes: actes et paroles I : avant l'exil, 1841–1851. Scroll down to the Assemblée Constituante 1848 heading and subsequent pages.[14] When Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III) seized complete power in 1851, establishing an anti-parliamentary constitution, Hugo openly declared him a traitor to France. He relocated to Brussels, then Jersey, from which he was expelled for supporting a Jersey newspaper that had criticised Queen Victoria and finally settled with his family at Hauteville House in Saint Peter Port, Guernsey, where he would live in exile from October 1855 until 1870. While in exile, Hugo published his famous political pamphlets against Napoleon III, Napoléon le Petit and Histoire d'un crime. The pamphlets were banned in France but nonetheless had a strong impact there. He also composed or published some of his best work during his period in Guernsey, including Les Misérables, and three widely praised collections of poetry (Les Châtiments, 1853; Les Contemplations, 1856; and La Légende des siècles, 1859). Like most of his contemporaries, Victor Hugo held colonialist views towards Africans. In a speech delivered on 18 May 1879, he declared that the Mediterranean Sea formed a natural divide between " ultimate civilisation and […] utter barbarism," adding "God offers Africa to Europe. Take it," to civilise its indigenous inhabitants. This might partly explain why in spite of his deep interest and involvement in political matters he remained strangely silent on the Algerian issue. He knew about the atrocities committed by the French Army during the French conquest of Algeria as evidenced by his diary[15] but he never denounced them publicly. A modern reader may also feel puzzled, to say the least, at the meaning of these lines from the conclusion to Le Rhin, chapter 17,[16] published in 1842, twelve years after French troops landed near Algiers. What France lacks in Algiers is a little barbarity. The Turks [...] knew how to cut heads better than we do. The first thing that strikes savages is not reason but strength. What France lacks, England has it; Russia too. — Victor Hugo, Le Rhin However, in Les Misérables, Hugo says the following about the conquering of Algeria:[17] Algeria too harshly conquered, and, as in the case of India by the English, with more barbarism than civilization. — Victor Hugo, Les Misérables Before being exiled he never denounced slavery, and no trace of its abolition is to be found in the 27 April 1848 entry of his detailed diary. On the other hand, Victor Hugo fought a lifelong battle for the abolition of the death penalty as a novelist, diarist, and member of Parliament. The Last Day of a Condemned Man published in 1829 analyses the pangs of a man awaiting execution; several entries of Things Seen (Choses vues), the diary he kept between 1830 and 1885, convey his firm condemnation of what he regarded as a barbaric sentence;[18] on 15 September 1848, seven months after the Revolution of 1848, he delivered a speech before the Assembly and concluded, "You have overthrown the throne. […] Now overthrow the scaffold."[19] His influence was credited in the removal of the death penalty from the constitutions of Geneva, Portugal, and Colombia.[20] He had also pleaded for Benito Juárez to spare the recently captured emperor Maximilian I of Mexico but to no avail. His complete archives (published by Pauvert) show also that he wrote a letter asking the United States government, for the sake of their own reputation in the future, to spare John Brown's life, but the letter arrived after Brown was executed. Although Napoleon III granted an amnesty to all political exiles in 1859, Hugo declined, as it meant he would have to curtail his criticisms of the government. It was only after Napoleon III fell from power and the Third Republic was proclaimed that Hugo finally returned to his homeland in 1870, where he was promptly elected to the National Assembly and the Senate. Communards defending a barricade on the Rue de Rivoli He was in Paris during the siege by the Prussian Army in 1870, famously eating animals given to him by the Paris Zoo. As the siege continued, and food became ever more scarce, he wrote in his diary that he was reduced to "eating the unknown".[21] During the Paris Commune – the revolutionary government that took power on 18 March 1871 and was toppled on 28 May – Victor Hugo was harshly critical of the atrocities committed on both sides. On 9 April, he wrote in his diary, "In short, this Commune is as idiotic as the National Assembly is ferocious. From both sides, folly."[22] Yet he made a point of offering his support to members of the Commune subjected to brutal repression. He had been in Brussels since 22 March 1871 when in the 27 May issue of the Belgian newspaper l’Indépendance Victor Hugo denounced the government's refusal to grant political asylum to the Communards threatened with imprisonment, banishment or execution.[23] This caused so much uproar that in the evening a mob of fifty to sixty men attempted to force their way into the writer's house shouting " Death to Victor Hugo! Hang him! Death to the scoundrel!"[24] Victor Hugo, who said "A war between Europeans is a civil war",[25] was an enthusiastic advocate for the creation of the United States of Europe. He expounded his views on the subject in a speech he delivered during the International Peace Congress which took place in Paris in 1849. The Congress, of which Hugo was the President, proved to be an international success, attracting such famous philosophers as Frederic Bastiat, Charles Gilpin, Richard Cobden, and Henry Richard. The conference helped establish Hugo as a prominent public speaker and sparked his international fame, and promoted the idea of the "United States of Europe".[26] On 14 July 1870 he planted the "oak of the United States of Europe" in the garden of Hauteville House where he stayed during his exile on Guernsey from 1856 to 1870. The massacres of Balkan Christians by the Turks in 1876 inspired him to write Pour la Serbie (For Serbia) in his sons' newspaper Le Rappell. This speech is today considered as one of the founding acts of the European ideaI.[27] Because of his concern for the rights of artists and copyright, he was a founding member of the Association Littéraire et Artistique Internationale, which led to the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. However, in Pauvert's published archives, he states strongly that "any work of art has two authors: the people who confusingly feel something, a creator who translates these feelings, and the people again who consecrate his vision of that feeling. When one of the authors dies, the rights should totally be granted back to the other, the people". He was one of the earlier supporters of the concept of domaine public payant, under which a nominal fee would be charged for copying or performing works in the public domain, and this would go into a common fund dedicated to helping artists, especially young people. Religious views[edit] Marble bust of Victor Hugo by Auguste Rodin Hugo's religious views changed radically over the course of his life. In his youth and under the influence of his mother, he identified as a Catholic and professed respect for Church hierarchy and authority. From there he became a non-practising Catholic and increasingly expressed anti-Catholic and anti-clerical views. He frequented spiritism during his exile (where he participated also in many séances conducted by Madame Delphine de Girardin)[28][29] and in later years settled into a rationalist deism similar to that espoused by Voltaire. A census-taker asked Hugo in 1872 if he was a Catholic, and he replied, "No. A Freethinker".[30] After 1872, Hugo never lost his antipathy towards the Catholic Church. He felt the Church was indifferent to the plight of the working class under the oppression of the monarchy. Perhaps he also was upset by the frequency with which his work appeared on the Church's list of banned books. Hugo counted 740 attacks on Les Misérables in the Catholic press.[31] When Hugo's sons Charles and François-Victor died, he insisted that they be buried without a crucifix or priest. In his will, he made the same stipulation about his own death and funeral.[32] Yet he believed in life after death and prayed every single morning and night, convinced as he wrote in The Man Who Laughs that "Thanksgiving has wings and flies to its right destination. Your prayer knows its way better than you do".[33] Hugo's rationalism can be found in poems such as Torquemada (1869, about religious fanaticism), The Pope (1878, anti-clerical), Religions and Religion (1880, denying the usefulness of churches) and, published posthumously, The End of Satan and God (1886 and 1891 respectively, in which he represents Christianity as a griffin and rationalism as an angel). Vincent van Gogh ascribed the saying "Religions pass away, but God remains", actually by Jules Michelet, to Hugo.[34] Victor Hugo and music[edit] Photogravure of Victor Hugo, 1883 Although Hugo's many talents did not include exceptional musical ability, he nevertheless had a great impact on the music world through the inspiration that his works provided for composers of the 19th and 20th century. Hugo himself particularly enjoyed the music of Gluck and Weber. In Les Misérables, he calls the huntsman's chorus in Weber's Euryanthe, "perhaps the most beautiful piece of music ever composed".[35] He also greatly admired Beethoven, and rather unusually for his time, he also appreciated works by composers from earlier centuries such as Palestrina and Monteverdi.[36] Two famous musicians of the 19th century were friends of Hugo: Hector Berlioz and Franz Liszt. The latter played Beethoven in Hugo's home, and Hugo joked in a letter to a friend that, thanks to Liszt's piano lessons, he learned how to play a favourite song on the piano – with only one finger. Hugo also worked with composer Louise Bertin, writing the libretto for her 1836 opera La Esmeralda, which was based on the character in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.[36] Although for various reasons the opera closed soon after its fifth performance and is little known today, it has enjoyed a modern revival, both in a piano/song concert version by Liszt at the Festival international Victor Hugo et Égaux 2007[37] and in a full orchestral version presented in July 2008 at Le Festival de Radio France et Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon.[38] On the other hand, he had low esteem for Richard Wagner, whom he described as "a man of talent coupled with imbecility.[39]" Well over one thousand musical compositions have been inspired by Hugo's works from the 19th century until the present day. In particular, Hugo's plays, in which he rejected the rules of classical theatre in favour of romantic drama, attracted the interest of many composers who adapted them into operas. More than one hundred operas are based on Hugo's works and among them are Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia (1833), Verdi's Rigoletto (1851) and Ernani (1844), and Ponchielli's La Gioconda (1876).[40] Hugo's novels, as well as his plays, have been a great source of inspiration for musicians, stirring them to create not only opera and ballet but musical theatre such as Notre-Dame de Paris and the ever-popular Les Misérables, London West End's longest running musical. Additionally, Hugo's beautiful poems have attracted an exceptional amount of interest from musicians, and numerous melodies have been based on his poetry by composers such as Berlioz, Bizet, Fauré, Franck, Lalo, Liszt, Massenet, Saint-Saëns, Rachmaninoff, and Wagner.[40] Today, Hugo's work continues to stimulate musicians to create new compositions. For example, Hugo's novel against capital punishment, The Last Day of a Condemned Man, was adapted into an opera by David Alagna, with a libretto by Frédérico Alagna and premièred by their brother, tenor Roberto Alagna, in 2007.[41] In Guernsey, every two years, the Victor Hugo International Music Festival attracts a wide range of musicians and the premiere of songs specially commissioned from such composers as Guillaume Connesson, Richard Dubugnon, Olivier Kaspar, and Thierry Escaich and based on Hugo's poetry. Remarkably, not only Hugo's literary production has been the source of inspiration for musical works, but also his political writings have received attention from musicians and have been adapted to music. For instance, in 2009, Italian composer Matteo Sommacal was commissioned by Festival "Bagliori d'autore" and wrote a piece for speaker and chamber ensemble entitled Actes et paroles, with a text elaborated by Chiara Piola Caselli after Victor Hugo's last political speech addressed to the Assemblée législative, "Sur la Revision de la Constitution" (18 July 1851),[42] and premiered in Rome on 19 November 2009, in the auditorium of the Institut français, Centre Saint-Louis, French Embassy to the Holy See, by Piccola Accademia degli Specchi featuring the composer Matthias Kadar.[43] Declining years and death[edit] Juliette Drouet Hugo on his deathbed, 1885 Catafalque below the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, 1 June 1885 Tomb of Victor Hugo at the Panthéon When Hugo returned to Paris in 1870, the country hailed him as a national hero. He was confident that he would be offered the dictatorship, as shown by the notes he kept at the time: "Dictatorship is a crime. This is a crime I am going to commit", but he felt he had to assume that responsibility.[44] Despite his popularity, Hugo lost his bid for re-election to the National Assembly in 1872. Throughout his life Hugo kept believing in unstoppable humanistic progress. In his last public address on 3 August 1879 he prophesied in an over-optimistic way, "In the twentieth century war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, hatred will be dead, frontier boundaries will be dead, dogmas will be dead; man will live."[45] Within a brief period, he suffered a mild stroke, his daughter Adèle was interned in an insane asylum, and his two sons died. (Adèle's biography inspired the movie The Story of Adele H.) His wife Adèle had died in 1868. His faithful mistress, Juliette Drouet, died in 1883, only two years before his own death. Despite his personal loss, Hugo remained committed to the cause of political change. On 30 January 1876, he was elected to the newly created Senate. This last phase of his political career was considered a failure. Hugo was a maverick and achieved little in the Senate. Hugo suffered a mild stroke on 27 June 1878.[46][47] To honour the fact that he was entering his 80th year, one of the greatest tributes to a living writer was held. The celebrations began on 25 June 1881, when Hugo was presented with a Sèvres vase, the traditional gift for sovereigns. On 27 June, one of the largest parades in French history was held. Marchers stretched from the Avenue d'Eylau, where the author was living, down the Champs-Élysées, and all the way to the centre of Paris. The paraders marched for six hours past Hugo as he sat at the window at his house. Every inch and detail of the event was for Hugo; the official guides even wore cornflowers as an allusion to Fantine's song in Les Misérables. On 28 June, the city of Paris changed the name of the Avenue d'Eylau to Avenue Victor-Hugo.[48] Letters addressed to the author were from then on labelled "To Mister Victor Hugo, In his avenue, Paris". Two days before dying, he left a note with these last words: "To love is to act". On 20 May 1885, le Petit Journal published the official medical bulletin on Hugo's health condition. "The illustrious patient" was fully conscious and aware that there was no hope for him. They also reported from a reliable source that at one point in the night he had whispered the following Alexandrin, "En moi c’est le combat du jour et de la nuit" – "In me, this is the battle between day and night".[49] Le Matin published a slightly different version, "Here is the battle between day and night." Hugo's death from pneumonia on 22 May 1885, at the age of 83, generated intense national mourning. He was not only revered as a towering figure in literature, he was a statesman who shaped the Third Republic and democracy in France. All his life he remained a defender of liberty, equality and fraternity as well as an adamant champion of French culture. In 1877, aged 75, he wrote, "I am not one of these sweet-tempered old men. I am still exasperated and violent. I shout and I feel indignant and I cry. Woe to anyone who harms France! I do declare I will die a fanatic patriot.[50]" Although he had requested a pauper's funeral he was awarded a state funeral by decree of President Jules Grévy. More than two million people joined his funeral procession in Paris from the Arc de Triomphe to the Panthéon, where he was buried. He shares a crypt within the Panthéon with Alexandre Dumas and Émile Zola. Most large French towns and cities have a street or square named after him. Hugo left five sentences as his last will, to be officially published: Je donne cinquante mille francs aux pauvres. Je veux être enterré dans leur corbillard. Je refuse l'oraison de toutes les Églises. Je demande une prière à toutes les âmes. Je crois en Dieu. "I leave 50,000 francs to the poor. I wish to be buried in their hearse. I refuse [funeral] orations from all Churches. I ask all souls for a prayer. I believe in God." Drawings[edit] Hugo produced more than 4,000 drawings. Originally pursued as a casual hobby, drawing became more important to Hugo shortly before his exile when he made the decision to stop writing to devote himself to politics. Drawing became his exclusive creative outlet between 1848 and 1851. Hugo worked only on paper, and on a small scale; usually in dark brown or black pen-and-ink wash, sometimes with touches of white, and rarely with colour. The surviving drawings are surprisingly accomplished and "modern" in their style and execution, foreshadowing the experimental techniques of Surrealism and Abstract expressionism. He would not hesitate to use his children's stencils, ink blots, puddles and stains, lace impressions, "pliage" or folding (e.g. Rorschach blots), "grattage" or rubbing, often using the charcoal from matchsticks or his fingers instead of pen or brush. Sometimes he would even toss in coffee or soot to get the effects he wanted. It is reported that Hugo often drew with his left hand or without looking at the page, or during Spiritist séances, to access his unconscious mind, a concept only later popularised by Sigmund Freud. Hugo kept his artwork out of the public eye, fearing it would overshadow his literary work. However, he enjoyed sharing his drawings with his family and friends, often in the form of ornately handmade calling cards, many of which were given as gifts to visitors when he was in political exile. Some of his work was shown to, and appreciated by, contemporary artists such as van Gogh and Delacroix; the latter expressed the opinion that if Hugo had decided to become a painter instead of a writer, he would have outshone the artists of their century. Victor Hugo and women[edit] Wife[edit] Hugo married Adèle Foucher in October 1822. Despite their respective affairs, they lived together for nearly 46 years until she died in August 1868. Hugo, who was still banished from France, was unable to attend her funeral in Villequier where their daughter Léopoldine was buried. From 1830 to 1837 Adèle had an affair with Charles-Augustin Sainte Beuve, a reviewer and writer.[51] Mistresses[edit] Juliette Drouet[edit] From February 1833 until her death in 1883, Juliette Drouet devoted her whole life to Victor Hugo, who never married her even after his wife died in 1868. He took her on his numerous trips and she followed him in exile on Guernsey. There Hugo rented a house for her near Hauteville House, his family home. She wrote some 20,000 letters in which she expressed her passion or vented her jealousy on her womanizing lover.[52] On 25 September 1870 during the Siege of Paris (19 September 1870 – 28 January 1871) Hugo feared the worst. He left his children a note reading as follows : "J.D. She saved my life in December 1851. For me she underwent exile. Never has her soul forsaken mine. Let those who have loved me love her. Let those who have loved me respect her. She is my widow." V.H[53] Léonie d’Aunet[edit] For more than seven years, Léonie d’Aunet, who was a married woman, was involved in a love relationship with Hugo. Both were caught in adultery on 5 July 1845. Hugo, who had been a Member of the Chamber of Peers since April, avoided condemnation whereas his mistress had to spend two months in prison and six in a convent. Many years after their separation, Hugo made a point of supporting her financially.[54] Casual affairs[edit] Hugo gave free rein to his sensuality until a few weeks before his death. He sought a wide variety of women of all ages, be they courtesans, actresses, prostitutes, admirers, servants or revolutionaries like Louise Michel for sexual activity. Both a graphomaniac and erotomaniac, he systematically reported his casual affairs using his own code, as Samuel Pepys did, to make sure they would remain secret. For instance, he resorted to Latin abbreviations (osc. for kisses) or to Spanish (Misma. Mismas cosas : The same. Same things). Homophones are frequent : Seins (Breasts) becomes Saint; Poële (Stove) actually refers to Poils (Pubic hair). Analogy also enabled him to conceal the real meaning: A woman's Suisses (Swiss) are her breasts – due to the fact that Switzerland is renowned for its milk. After a rendezvous with a young woman named Laetitia he would write Joie (Happiness) in his diary. If he added t.n. (toute nue) he meant she stripped naked in front of him. The initials S.B. discovered in November 1875 may refer to Sarah Bernhardt.[55] Gallery[edit] Victor Hugo's drawings Crépuscule ("Twilight"), Jersey, 1853–1855.   Ville avec le pont de Tumbledown, ("Town with Tumbledown Bridge"), 1847.   Pieuvre avec les initiales V.H., ("Octopus with the initials V.H."), 1866.   Le Rocher de l'Ermitage dans un paysage imaginaire ("Ermitage Rock in an imaginary landscape")   Le phare ("The Lighthouse")   Gavroche a onze ans, ("Gavroche at eleven years old"). Memorials[edit] The banknote of 5 New Francs 1959 of the French national bank Banque de France honouring Victor Hugo, with a view of his burial place the Panthéon in Paris, and the Place des Vosges in Paris where he used to live. Avenue Victor-Hugo in Paris. The people of Guernsey erected a statue by sculptor Jean Boucher in Candie Gardens (Saint Peter Port) to commemorate his stay in the islands. The City of Paris has preserved his residences Hauteville House, Guernsey, and 6, Place des Vosges, Paris, as museums. The house where he stayed in Vianden, Luxembourg, in 1871 has also become a commemorative museum. Hugo is venerated as a saint in the Vietnamese religion of Cao Đài, in the front hall of the Holy See in Tây Ninh.[56][57] The Avenue Victor-Hugo in the 16th arrondissement of Paris bears Hugo's name and links the Place de l'Étoile to the vicinity of the Bois de Boulogne by way of the Place Victor-Hugo. This square is served by a Paris Métro stop also named in his honour. In the town of Béziers there is a main street, a school, hospital and several cafés named after Hugo, and a number of streets and avenues throughout France are named after him. The school Lycée Victor Hugo was founded in his town of birth, Besançon in France. Avenue Victor-Hugo, located in Shawinigan, Quebec, was named to honour him. A street in San Francisco, Hugo Street, is named for him.[58] In the city of Avellino, Italy, Victor Hugo lived briefly stayed in what is now known as Il Palazzo Culturale when reuniting with his father, Leopold Sigisbert Hugo, in 1808. Hugo would later write about his brief stay here, quoting "C'était un palais de marbre..." ("It was a palace of marble"). Statue of Victor Hugo in Rome, Italy. It is across from the Museo Carlo Bilotti on Viale Fiorello La Guardia. There is a statue of Hugo across from the Museo Carlo Bilotti in Rome, Italy. Victor Hugo is the namesake of the city of Hugoton, Kansas.[59] In Havana, Cuba, there is a park named after him. A bust of Hugo stands near the entrance of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing. A mosaic commemorating Hugo is located on the ceiling of the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. The London and North Western Railway named a 'Prince of Wales' Class 4-6-0 No 1134 after Hugo. British Railways perpetuated this memorial, naming Class 92 Electric Unit 92001 after him. Religious veneration[edit] Thanks to his contribution to mankind, his virtues, and belief in God, he is venerated as a saint in Cao Đài, a new religion established in Vietnam in 1926. According to religious records, he was assigned by God to lead the foreign mission as part of God's Divine hierarchy. He represented mankind, along with the major Saints Sun Yat-sen and Trạng Trình Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm, to sign a religious pact with God, promising to lead mankind to "Love and Justice" ("Amour et Justice"). Here is an excerpt of his teaching about heaven: In all heavens, beauty reigns, Its beings possess much of divinity. Peace and harmony rule these realms, Their beings know not the word 'war'.[60] Works[edit] Victor Hugo cabinet card by London Stereoscopic Company 1952 Soviet Union postage stamp. Ceiling mosaic, Library of Congress Published during Hugo's lifetime[edit] Cromwell preface only (1819) Odes et poésies diverses (1822) Odes (1823) Han d'Islande (1823), (Hans of Iceland) Nouvelles Odes (1824) Bug-Jargal (1826) Odes et Ballades (1826), (Odes and Ballads) Cromwell (1827) Les Orientales (1829), (Orientalia) Le Dernier jour d'un condamné (1829), (The Last Day of a Condemned Man) Hernani (1830) Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) Marion de Lorme (1831) Les Feuilles d'automne (1831), (Autumn Leaves) Le roi s'amuse (1832) Lucrezia Borgia (1833) Marie Tudor (1833) Littérature et philosophie mêlées (1834), (A Blend of Literature and Philosophy) Claude Gueux (1834) Angelo, Tyrant of Padua (1835) Les Chants du crépuscule (1835), (Songs of the Half Light) La Esmeralda (only libretto of an opera written by Victor Hugo himself) (1836) Les Voix intérieures (1837) Ruy Blas (1838) Les Rayons et les Ombres (1840) Le Rhin (1842) Les Burgraves (1843) Napoléon le Petit (1852), (Napoleon the Little) Les Châtiments (1853) Les Contemplations (1856), (The Contemplations) Les TRYNE (1856) La Légende des siècles (1859), (The Legend of the Ages) Les Misérables (1862) William Shakespeare (1864) Les Chansons des rues et des bois (1865), (Songs of Street and Wood) Les Travailleurs de la Mer (1866), (Toilers of the Sea) La voix de Guernsey (1867) L'Homme qui rit (1869), (The Man Who Laughs) L'Année terrible (1872) Quatrevingt-treize (Ninety-Three) (1874) Mes Fils (1874) Actes et paroles – Avant l'exil (1875) Actes et paroles – Pendant l'exil (1875), (Deeds and Words) Actes et paroles – Depuis l'exil (1876) La Légende des Siècles 2e série (1877) L'Art d'être grand-père (1877), (The Art of Being a Grandfather) Histoire d'un crime 1re partie (1877), (History of a Crime) Histoire d'un crime 2e partie (1878) Le Pape (1878) La Pitié suprême (1879) Religions et religion (1880), (Religions and Religion) L'Âne (1880) Les Quatres vents de l'esprit (1881), (The Four Winds of the Spirit) Torquemada (1882) La Légende des siècles Tome III (1883) L'Archipel de la Manche (1883) Poems of Victor Hugo Published posthumously[edit] Théâtre en liberté (1886) La Fin de Satan (1886) Choses vues (1887) Toute la lyre (1888), (The Whole Lyre) Amy Robsart (1889) Les Jumeaux (1889) Actes et Paroles – Depuis l'exil, 1876–1885 (1889) Alpes et Pyrénées (1890), (Alps and Pyrenees) Dieu (1891) France et Belgique (1892) Toute la lyre – dernière série (1893) Les fromages (1895) Correspondences – Tome I (1896) Correspondences – Tome II (1898) Les années funestes (1898) Choses vues – nouvelle série (1900) Post-scriptum de ma vie (1901) Dernière Gerbe (1902) Mille francs de récompense (1934) Océan. Tas de pierres (1942) L'Intervention (1951) Conversations with Eternity (1998) *****William Shakespeare (bapt. 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616)[a] was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's greatest dramatist.[2][3][4] He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard").[5][b] His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays,[c] 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.[7] Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. At age 49 (around 1613), he appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive; this has stimulated considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, his sexuality, his religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others.[8][9][10] Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613.[11][12][d] His early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. Until about 1608, he wrote mainly tragedies, among them Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, all considered to be among the finest works in the English language.[2][3][4] In the last phase of his life, he wrote tragicomedies (also known as romances) and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of Shakespeare's plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy in his lifetime. However, in 1623, two fellow actors and friends of Shakespeare's, John Heminges and Henry Condell, published a more definitive text known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's dramatic works that included all but two of his plays.[13] The volume was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Jonson presciently hails Shakespeare in a now-famous quote as "not of an age, but for all time".[13] Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, Shakespeare's works have been continually adapted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain popular and are studied, performed, and reinterpreted through various cultural and political contexts around the world. Contents 1 Life 1.1 Early life 1.2 London and theatrical career 1.3 Later years and death 2 Plays 2.1 Performances 2.2 Textual sources 3 Poems 3.1 Sonnets 4 Style 5 Influence 6 Critical reputation 7 Works 7.1 Classification of the plays 8 Speculation about Shakespeare 8.1 Authorship 8.2 Religion 8.3 Sexuality 8.4 Portraiture 9 See also 10 Notes and references 10.1 Notes 10.2 References 11 Sources 12 External links Life Main article: Life of William Shakespeare Early life William Shakespeare was the son of John Shakespeare, an alderman and a successful glover (glove-maker) originally from Snitterfield, and Mary Arden, the daughter of an affluent landowning farmer.[14] He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he was baptised on 26 April 1564. His date of birth is unknown, but is traditionally observed on 23 April, Saint George's Day.[15] This date, which can be traced to a mistake made by an 18th-century scholar, has proved appealing to biographers because Shakespeare died on the same date in 1616.[16][17] He was the third of eight children, and the eldest surviving son.[18] John Shakespeare's house, believed to be Shakespeare's birthplace, in Stratford-upon-Avon Although no attendance records for the period survive, most biographers agree that Shakespeare was probably educated at the King's New School in Stratford,[19][20][21] a free school chartered in 1553,[22] about a quarter-mile (400 m) from his home. Grammar schools varied in quality during the Elizabethan era, but grammar school curricula were largely similar: the basic Latin text was standardised by royal decree,[23][24] and the school would have provided an intensive education in grammar based upon Latin classical authors.[25] At the age of 18, Shakespeare married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway. The consistory court of the Diocese of Worcester issued a marriage licence on 27 November 1582. The next day, two of Hathaway's neighbours posted bonds guaranteeing that no lawful claims impeded the marriage.[26] The ceremony may have been arranged in some haste since the Worcester chancellor allowed the marriage banns to be read once instead of the usual three times,[27][28] and six months after the marriage Anne gave birth to a daughter, Susanna, baptised 26 May 1583.[29] Twins, son Hamnet and daughter Judith, followed almost two years later and were baptised 2 February 1585.[30] Hamnet died of unknown causes at the age of 11 and was buried 11 August 1596.[31] Shakespeare's coat of arms, as it appears on the rough draft of the application to grant a coat-of-arms to John Shakespeare. It features a spear as a pun on the family name.[e] After the birth of the twins, Shakespeare left few historical traces until he is mentioned as part of the London theatre scene in 1592. The exception is the appearance of his name in the "complaints bill" of a law case before the Queen's Bench court at Westminster dated Michaelmas Term 1588 and 9 October 1589.[32] Scholars refer to the years between 1585 and 1592 as Shakespeare's "lost years".[33] Biographers attempting to account for this period have reported many apocryphal stories. Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare's first biographer, recounted a Stratford legend that Shakespeare fled the town for London to escape prosecution for deer poaching in the estate of local squire Thomas Lucy. Shakespeare is also supposed to have taken his revenge on Lucy by writing a scurrilous ballad about him.[34][35] Another 18th-century story has Shakespeare starting his theatrical career minding the horses of theatre patrons in London.[36] John Aubrey reported that Shakespeare had been a country schoolmaster.[37] Some 20th-century scholars have suggested that Shakespeare may have been employed as a schoolmaster by Alexander Hoghton of Lancashire, a Catholic landowner who named a certain "William Shakeshafte" in his will.[38][39] Little evidence substantiates such stories other than hearsay collected after his death, and Shakeshafte was a common name in the Lancashire area.[40][41] London and theatrical career It is not known definitively when Shakespeare began writing, but contemporary allusions and records of performances show that several of his plays were on the London stage by 1592.[42] By then, he was sufficiently known in London to be attacked in print by the playwright Robert Greene in his Groats-Worth of Wit: ... there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger's heart wrapped in a Player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.[43] Scholars differ on the exact meaning of Greene's words,[43][44] but most agree that Greene was accusing Shakespeare of reaching above his rank in trying to match such university-educated writers as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, and Greene himself (the so-called "University Wits").[45] The italicised phrase parodying the line "Oh, tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" from Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 3, along with the pun "Shake-scene", clearly identify Shakespeare as Greene's target. As used here, Johannes Factotum ("Jack of all trades") refers to a second-rate tinkerer with the work of others, rather than the more common "universal genius".[43][46] Greene's attack is the earliest surviving mention of Shakespeare's work in the theatre. Biographers suggest that his career may have begun any time from the mid-1580s to just before Greene's remarks.[47][48][49] After 1594, Shakespeare's plays were performed only by the Lord Chamberlain's Men, a company owned by a group of players, including Shakespeare, that soon became the leading playing company in London.[50] After the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, the company was awarded a royal patent by the new King James I, and changed its name to the King's Men.[51] "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts ..." —As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7, 139–142[52] In 1599, a partnership of members of the company built their own theatre on the south bank of the River Thames, which they named the Globe. In 1608, the partnership also took over the Blackfriars indoor theatre. Extant records of Shakespeare's property purchases and investments indicate that his association with the company made him a wealthy man,[53] and in 1597, he bought the second-largest house in Stratford, New Place, and in 1605, invested in a share of the parish tithes in Stratford.[54] Some of Shakespeare's plays were published in quarto editions, beginning in 1594, and by 1598, his name had become a selling point and began to appear on the title pages.[55][56][57] Shakespeare continued to act in his own and other plays after his success as a playwright. The 1616 edition of Ben Jonson's Works names him on the cast lists for Every Man in His Humour (1598) and Sejanus His Fall (1603).[58] The absence of his name from the 1605 cast list for Jonson's Volpone is taken by some scholars as a sign that his acting career was nearing its end.[47] The First Folio of 1623, however, lists Shakespeare as one of "the Principal Actors in all these Plays", some of which were first staged after Volpone, although we cannot know for certain which roles he played.[59] In 1610, John Davies of Hereford wrote that "good Will" played "kingly" roles.[60] In 1709, Rowe passed down a tradition that Shakespeare played the ghost of Hamlet's father.[35] Later traditions maintain that he also played Adam in As You Like It, and the Chorus in Henry V,[61][62] though scholars doubt the sources of that information.[63] Throughout his career, Shakespeare divided his time between London and Stratford. In 1596, the year before he bought New Place as his family home in Stratford, Shakespeare was living in the parish of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, north of the River Thames.[64][65] He moved across the river to Southwark by 1599, the same year his company constructed the Globe Theatre there.[64][66] By 1604, he had moved north of the river again, to an area north of St Paul's Cathedral with many fine houses. There, he rented rooms from a French Huguenot named Christopher Mountjoy, a maker of ladies' wigs and other headgear.[67][68] Later years and death Shakespeare's funerary monument in Stratford-upon-Avon Rowe was the first biographer to record the tradition, repeated by Johnson, that Shakespeare retired to Stratford "some years before his death".[69][70] He was still working as an actor in London in 1608; in an answer to the sharers' petition in 1635, Cuthbert Burbage stated that after purchasing the lease of the Blackfriars Theatre in 1608 from Henry Evans, the King's Men "placed men players" there, "which were Heminges, Condell, Shakespeare, etc.".[71] However, it is perhaps relevant that the bubonic plague raged in London throughout 1609.[72][73] The London public playhouses were repeatedly closed during extended outbreaks of the plague (a total of over 60 months closure between May 1603 and February 1610),[74] which meant there was often no acting work. Retirement from all work was uncommon at that time.[75] Shakespeare continued to visit London during the years 1611–1614.[69] In 1612, he was called as a witness in Bellott v. Mountjoy, a court case concerning the marriage settlement of Mountjoy's daughter, Mary.[76][77] In March 1613, he bought a gatehouse in the former Blackfriars priory;[78] and from November 1614, he was in London for several weeks with his son-in-law, John Hall.[79] After 1610, Shakespeare wrote fewer plays, and none are attributed to him after 1613.[80] His last three plays were collaborations, probably with John Fletcher,[81] who succeeded him as the house playwright of the King's Men.[82] Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616, at the age of 52.[f] He died within a month of signing his will, a document which he begins by describing himself as being in "perfect health". No extant contemporary source explains how or why he died. Half a century later, John Ward, the vicar of Stratford, wrote in his notebook: "Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and, it seems, drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted",[83][84] not an impossible scenario since Shakespeare knew Jonson and Drayton. Of the tributes from fellow authors, one refers to his relatively sudden death: "We wondered, Shakespeare, that thou went'st so soon / From the world's stage to the grave's tiring room."[85][g] Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, where Shakespeare was baptised and is buried He was survived by his wife and two daughters. Susanna had married a physician, John Hall, in 1607,[86] and Judith had married Thomas Quiney, a vintner, two months before Shakespeare's death.[87] Shakespeare signed his last will and testament on 25 March 1616; the following day, his new son-in-law, Thomas Quiney was found guilty of fathering an illegitimate son by Margaret Wheeler, who had died during childbirth. Thomas was ordered by the church court to do public penance, which would have caused much shame and embarrassment for the Shakespeare family.[87] Shakespeare bequeathed the bulk of his large estate to his elder daughter Susanna[88] under stipulations that she pass it down intact to "the first son of her body".[89] The Quineys had three children, all of whom died without marrying.[90][91] The Halls had one child, Elizabeth, who married twice but died without children in 1670, ending Shakespeare's direct line.[92][93] Shakespeare's will scarcely mentions his wife, Anne, who was probably entitled to one-third of his estate automatically.[h] He did make a point, however, of leaving her "my second best bed", a bequest that has led to much speculation.[95][96][97] Some scholars see the bequest as an insult to Anne, whereas others believe that the second-best bed would have been the matrimonial bed and therefore rich in significance.[98] Shakespeare's grave, next to those of Anne Shakespeare, his wife, and Thomas Nash, the husband of his granddaughter Shakespeare was buried in the chancel of the Holy Trinity Church two days after his death.[99][100] The epitaph carved into the stone slab covering his grave includes a curse against moving his bones, which was carefully avoided during restoration of the church in 2008:[101] Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare, To digg the dvst encloased heare. Bleste be yͤ man yͭ spares thes stones, And cvrst be he yͭ moves my bones.[102][i] (Modern spelling: Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear, / To dig the dust enclosed here. / Blessed be the man that spares these stones, / And cursed be he that moves my bones.) Some time before 1623, a funerary monument was erected in his memory on the north wall, with a half-effigy of him in the act of writing. Its plaque compares him to Nestor, Socrates, and Virgil.[103] In 1623, in conjunction with the publication of the First Folio, the Droeshout engraving was published.[104] Shakespeare has been commemorated in many statues and memorials around the world, including funeral monuments in Southwark Cathedral and Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.[105][106] Plays Main articles: Shakespeare's plays and William Shakespeare's collaborations Procession of Characters from Shakespeare's Plays by an unknown 19th-century artist Most playwrights of the period typically collaborated with others at some point, and critics agree that Shakespeare did the same, mostly early and late in his career.[107] The first recorded works of Shakespeare are Richard III and the three parts of Henry VI, written in the early 1590s during a vogue for historical drama. Shakespeare's plays are difficult to date precisely, however,[108][109] and studies of the texts suggest that Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona may also belong to Shakespeare's earliest period.[110][108] His first histories, which draw heavily on the 1587 edition of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland,[111] dramatise the destructive results of weak or corrupt rule and have been interpreted as a justification for the origins of the Tudor dynasty.[112] The early plays were influenced by the works of other Elizabethan dramatists, especially Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, by the traditions of medieval drama, and by the plays of Seneca.[113][114][115] The Comedy of Errors was also based on classical models, but no source for The Taming of the Shrew has been found, though it is related to a separate play of the same name and may have derived from a folk story.[116][117] Like The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which two friends appear to approve of rape,[118][119][120] the Shrew's story of the taming of a woman's independent spirit by a man sometimes troubles modern critics, directors, and audiences.[121] Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing. By William Blake, c. 1786. Tate Britain. Shakespeare's early classical and Italianate comedies, containing tight double plots and precise comic sequences, give way in the mid-1590s to the romantic atmosphere of his most acclaimed comedies.[122] A Midsummer Night's Dream is a witty mixture of romance, fairy magic, and comic lowlife scenes.[123] Shakespeare's next comedy, the equally romantic Merchant of Venice, contains a portrayal of the vengeful Jewish moneylender Shylock, which reflects Elizabethan views but may appear derogatory to modern audiences.[124][125] The wit and wordplay of Much Ado About Nothing,[126] the charming rural setting of As You Like It, and the lively merrymaking of Twelfth Night complete Shakespeare's sequence of great comedies.[127] After the lyrical Richard II, written almost entirely in verse, Shakespeare introduced prose comedy into the histories of the late 1590s, Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. His characters become more complex and tender as he switches deftly between comic and serious scenes, prose and poetry, and achieves the narrative variety of his mature work.[128][129][130] This period begins and ends with two tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, the famous romantic tragedy of sexually charged adolescence, love, and death;[131][132] and Julius Caesar—based on Sir Thomas North's 1579 translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives—which introduced a new kind of drama.[133][134] According to Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro, in Julius Caesar, "the various strands of politics, character, inwardness, contemporary events, even Shakespeare's own reflections on the act of writing, began to infuse each other".[135] Hamlet, Horatio, Marcellus, and the Ghost of Hamlet's Father. Henry Fuseli, 1780–1785. Kunsthaus Zürich. In the early 17th century, Shakespeare wrote the so-called "problem plays" Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and All's Well That Ends Well and a number of his best known tragedies.[136][137] Many critics believe that Shakespeare's greatest tragedies represent the peak of his art. The titular hero of one of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies, Hamlet, has probably been discussed more than any other Shakespearean character, especially for his famous soliloquy which begins "To be or not to be; that is the question".[138] Unlike the introverted Hamlet, whose fatal flaw is hesitation, the heroes of the tragedies that followed, Othello and King Lear, are undone by hasty errors of judgement.[139] The plots of Shakespeare's tragedies often hinge on such fatal errors or flaws, which overturn order and destroy the hero and those he loves.[140] In Othello, the villain Iago stokes Othello's sexual jealousy to the point where he murders the innocent wife who loves him.[141][142] In King Lear, the old king commits the tragic error of giving up his powers, initiating the events which lead to the torture and blinding of the Earl of Gloucester and the murder of Lear's youngest daughter Cordelia. According to the critic Frank Kermode, "the play...offers neither its good characters nor its audience any relief from its cruelty".[143][144][145] In Macbeth, the shortest and most compressed of Shakespeare's tragedies,[146] uncontrollable ambition incites Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth, to murder the rightful king and usurp the throne until their own guilt destroys them in turn.[147] In this play, Shakespeare adds a supernatural element to the tragic structure. His last major tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, contain some of Shakespeare's finest poetry and were considered his most successful tragedies by the poet and critic T.S. Eliot.[148][149][150] In his final period, Shakespeare turned to romance or tragicomedy and completed three more major plays: Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest, as well as the collaboration, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Less bleak than the tragedies, these four plays are graver in tone than the comedies of the 1590s, but they end with reconciliation and the forgiveness of potentially tragic errors.[151] Some commentators have seen this change in mood as evidence of a more serene view of life on Shakespeare's part, but it may merely reflect the theatrical fashion of the day.[152][153][154] Shakespeare collaborated on two further surviving plays, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, probably with John Fletcher.[155] Performances Main article: Shakespeare in performance It is not clear for which companies Shakespeare wrote his early plays. The title page of the 1594 edition of Titus Andronicus reveals that the play had been acted by three different troupes.[156] After the plagues of 1592–93, Shakespeare's plays were performed by his own company at The Theatre and the Curtain in Shoreditch, north of the Thames.[157] Londoners flocked there to see the first part of Henry IV, Leonard Digges recording, "Let but Falstaff come, Hal, Poins, the rest ... and you scarce shall have a room".[158] When the company found themselves in dispute with their landlord, they pulled The Theatre down and used the timbers to construct the Globe Theatre, the first playhouse built by actors for actors, on the south bank of the Thames at Southwark.[159][160] The Globe opened in autumn 1599, with Julius Caesar one of the first plays staged. Most of Shakespeare's greatest post-1599 plays were written for the Globe, including Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear.[159][161][162] The reconstructed Globe Theatre on the south bank of the River Thames in London After the Lord Chamberlain's Men were renamed the King's Men in 1603, they entered a special relationship with the new King James. Although the performance records are patchy, the King's Men performed seven of Shakespeare's plays at court between 1 November 1604, and 31 October 1605, including two performances of The Merchant of Venice.[62] After 1608, they performed at the indoor Blackfriars Theatre during the winter and the Globe during the summer.[163] The indoor setting, combined with the Jacobean fashion for lavishly staged masques, allowed Shakespeare to introduce more elaborate stage devices. In Cymbeline, for example, Jupiter descends "in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle: he throws a thunderbolt. The ghosts fall on their knees."[164][165] The actors in Shakespeare's company included the famous Richard Burbage, William Kempe, Henry Condell and John Heminges. Burbage played the leading role in the first performances of many of Shakespeare's plays, including Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear.[166] The popular comic actor Will Kempe played the servant Peter in Romeo and Juliet and Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, among other characters.[167][168] He was replaced around 1600 by Robert Armin, who played roles such as Touchstone in As You Like It and the fool in King Lear.[169] In 1613, Sir Henry Wotton recorded that Henry VIII "was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and ceremony".[170] On 29 June, however, a cannon set fire to the thatch of the Globe and burned the theatre to the ground, an event which pinpoints the date of a Shakespeare play with rare precision.[170] Textual sources Title page of the First Folio, 1623. Copper engraving of Shakespeare by Martin Droeshout. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare's friends from the King's Men, published the First Folio, a collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. It contained 36 texts, including 18 printed for the first time.[171] Many of the plays had already appeared in quarto versions—flimsy books made from sheets of paper folded twice to make four leaves.[172] No evidence suggests that Shakespeare approved these editions, which the First Folio describes as "stol'n and surreptitious copies".[173] Nor did Shakespeare plan or expect his works to survive in any form at all; those works likely would have faded into oblivion but for his friends' spontaneous idea, after his death, to create and publish the First Folio.[174] Alfred Pollard termed some of the pre-1623 versions as "bad quartos" because of their adapted, paraphrased or garbled texts, which may in places have been reconstructed from memory.[172][173][175] Where several versions of a play survive, each differs from the other. The differences may stem from copying or printing errors, from notes by actors or audience members, or from Shakespeare's own papers.[176][177] In some cases, for example, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, and Othello, Shakespeare could have revised the texts between the quarto and folio editions. In the case of King Lear, however, while most modern editions do conflate them, the 1623 folio version is so different from the 1608 quarto that the Oxford Shakespeare prints them both, arguing that they cannot be conflated without confusion.[178] Poems In 1593 and 1594, when the theatres were closed because of plague, Shakespeare published two narrative poems on sexual themes, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. He dedicated them to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. In Venus and Adonis, an innocent Adonis rejects the sexual advances of Venus; while in The Rape of Lucrece, the virtuous wife Lucrece is raped by the lustful Tarquin.[179] Influenced by Ovid's Metamorphoses,[180] the poems show the guilt and moral confusion that result from uncontrolled lust.[181] Both proved popular and were often reprinted during Shakespeare's lifetime. A third narrative poem, A Lover's Complaint, in which a young woman laments her seduction by a persuasive suitor, was printed in the first edition of the Sonnets in 1609. Most scholars now accept that Shakespeare wrote A Lover's Complaint. Critics consider that its fine qualities are marred by leaden effects.[182][183][184] The Phoenix and the Turtle, printed in Robert Chester's 1601 Love's Martyr, mourns the deaths of the legendary phoenix and his lover, the faithful turtle dove. In 1599, two early drafts of sonnets 138 and 144 appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim, published under Shakespeare's name but without his permission.[182][184][185] Sonnets Main article: Shakespeare's sonnets Title page from 1609 edition of Shake-Speares Sonnets Published in 1609, the Sonnets were the last of Shakespeare's non-dramatic works to be printed. Scholars are not certain when each of the 154 sonnets was composed, but evidence suggests that Shakespeare wrote sonnets throughout his career for a private readership.[186][187] Even before the two unauthorised sonnets appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, Francis Meres had referred in 1598 to Shakespeare's "sugred Sonnets among his private friends".[188] Few analysts believe that the published collection follows Shakespeare's intended sequence.[189] He seems to have planned two contrasting series: one about uncontrollable lust for a married woman of dark complexion (the "dark lady"), and one about conflicted love for a fair young man (the "fair youth"). It remains unclear if these figures represent real individuals, or if the authorial "I" who addresses them represents Shakespeare himself, though Wordsworth believed that with the sonnets "Shakespeare unlocked his heart".[188][187] "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate ..." —Lines from Shakespeare's Sonnet 18.[190] The 1609 edition was dedicated to a "Mr. W.H.", credited as "the only begetter" of the poems. It is not known whether this was written by Shakespeare himself or by the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, whose initials appear at the foot of the dedication page; nor is it known who Mr. W.H. was, despite numerous theories, or whether Shakespeare even authorised the publication.[191] Critics praise the Sonnets as a profound meditation on the nature of love, sexual passion, procreation, death, and time.[192] Style Main article: Shakespeare's style Shakespeare's first plays were written in the conventional style of the day. He wrote them in a stylised language that does not always spring naturally from the needs of the characters or the drama.[193] The poetry depends on extended, sometimes elaborate metaphors and conceits, and the language is often rhetorical—written for actors to declaim rather than speak. The grand speeches in Titus Andronicus, in the view of some critics, often hold up the action, for example; and the verse in The Two Gentlemen of Verona has been described as stilted.[194][195] Pity by William Blake, 1795, Tate Britain, is an illustration of two similes in Macbeth: "And pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, hors'd Upon the sightless couriers of the air."[196] However, Shakespeare soon began to adapt the traditional styles to his own purposes. The opening soliloquy of Richard III has its roots in the self-declaration of Vice in medieval drama. At the same time, Richard's vivid self-awareness looks forward to the soliloquies of Shakespeare's mature plays.[197][198] No single play marks a change from the traditional to the freer style. Shakespeare combined the two throughout his career, with Romeo and Juliet perhaps the best example of the mixing of the styles.[199] By the time of Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, and A Midsummer Night's Dream in the mid-1590s, Shakespeare had begun to write a more natural poetry. He increasingly tuned his metaphors and images to the needs of the drama itself. Shakespeare's standard poetic form was blank verse, composed in iambic pentameter. In practice, this meant that his verse was usually unrhymed and consisted of ten syllables to a line, spoken with a stress on every second syllable. The blank verse of his early plays is quite different from that of his later ones. It is often beautiful, but its sentences tend to start, pause, and finish at the end of lines, with the risk of monotony.[200] Once Shakespeare mastered traditional blank verse, he began to interrupt and vary its flow. This technique releases the new power and flexibility of the poetry in plays such as Julius Caesar and Hamlet. Shakespeare uses it, for example, to convey the turmoil in Hamlet's mind:[201] Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly— And prais'd be rashness for it—let us know Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well ... — Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2, 4–8[201] After Hamlet, Shakespeare varied his poetic style further, particularly in the more emotional passages of the late tragedies. The literary critic A. C. Bradley described this style as "more concentrated, rapid, varied, and, in construction, less regular, not seldom twisted or elliptical".[202] In the last phase of his career, Shakespeare adopted many techniques to achieve these effects. These included run-on lines, irregular pauses and stops, and extreme variations in sentence structure and length.[203] In Macbeth, for example, the language darts from one unrelated metaphor or simile to another: "was the hope drunk/ Wherein you dressed yourself?" (1.7.35–38); "... pity, like a naked new-born babe/ Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, hors'd/ Upon the sightless couriers of the air ..." (1.7.21–25). The listener is challenged to complete the sense.[203] The late romances, with their shifts in time and surprising turns of plot, inspired a last poetic style in which long and short sentences are set against one another, clauses are piled up, subject and object are reversed, and words are omitted, creating an effect of spontaneity.[204] Shakespeare combined poetic genius with a practical sense of the theatre.[205] Like all playwrights of the time, he dramatised stories from sources such as Plutarch and Holinshed.[206] He reshaped each plot to create several centres of interest and to show as many sides of a narrative to the audience as possible. This strength of design ensures that a Shakespeare play can survive translation, cutting and wide interpretation without loss to its core drama.[207] As Shakespeare's mastery grew, he gave his characters clearer and more varied motivations and distinctive patterns of speech. He preserved aspects of his earlier style in the later plays, however. In Shakespeare's late romances, he deliberately returned to a more artificial style, which emphasised the illusion of theatre.[208][209] Influence Main article: Shakespeare's influence Macbeth Consulting the Vision of the Armed Head. By Henry Fuseli, 1793–1794. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington. Shakespeare's work has made a lasting impression on later theatre and literature. In particular, he expanded the dramatic potential of characterisation, plot, language, and genre.[210] Until Romeo and Juliet, for example, romance had not been viewed as a worthy topic for tragedy.[211] Soliloquies had been used mainly to convey information about characters or events, but Shakespeare used them to explore characters' minds.[212] His work heavily influenced later poetry. The Romantic poets attempted to revive Shakespearean verse drama, though with little success. Critic George Steiner described all English verse dramas from Coleridge to Tennyson as "feeble variations on Shakespearean themes."[213] Shakespeare influenced novelists such as Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, and Charles Dickens. The American novelist Herman Melville's soliloquies owe much to Shakespeare; his Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick is a classic tragic hero, inspired by King Lear.[214] Scholars have identified 20,000 pieces of music linked to Shakespeare's works. These include three operas by Giuseppe Verdi, Macbeth, Otello and Falstaff, whose critical standing compares with that of the source plays.[215] Shakespeare has also inspired many painters, including the Romantics and the Pre-Raphaelites. The Swiss Romantic artist Henry Fuseli, a friend of William Blake, even translated Macbeth into German.[216] The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud drew on Shakespearean psychology, in particular, that of Hamlet, for his theories of human nature.[217] In Shakespeare's day, English grammar, spelling, and pronunciation were less standardised than they are now,[218] and his use of language helped shape modern English.[219] Samuel Johnson quoted him more often than any other author in his A Dictionary of the English Language, the first serious work of its type.[220] Expressions such as "with bated breath" (Merchant of Venice) and "a foregone conclusion" (Othello) have found their way into everyday English speech.[221][222] Shakespeare's influence extends far beyond his native England and the English language. His reception in Germany was particularly significant; as early as the 18th century Shakespeare was widely translated and popularised in Germany, and gradually became a "classic of the German Weimar era;" Christoph Martin Wieland was the first to produce complete translations of Shakespeare's plays in any language.[223][224] Critical reputation Main articles: Shakespeare's reputation and Timeline of Shakespeare criticism "He was not of an age, but for all time." —Ben Jonson[225] Shakespeare was not revered in his lifetime, but he received a large amount of praise.[226][227] In 1598, the cleric and author Francis Meres singled him out from a group of English writers as "the most excellent" in both comedy and tragedy.[228][229] The authors of the Parnassus plays at St John's College, Cambridge, numbered him with Chaucer, Gower, and Spenser.[230] In the First Folio, Ben Jonson called Shakespeare the "Soul of the age, the applause, delight, the wonder of our stage", although he had remarked elsewhere that "Shakespeare wanted art".[225] Between the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the end of the 17th century, classical ideas were in vogue. As a result, critics of the time mostly rated Shakespeare below John Fletcher and Ben Jonson.[231] Thomas Rymer, for example, condemned Shakespeare for mixing the comic with the tragic. Nevertheless, poet and critic John Dryden rated Shakespeare highly, saying of Jonson, "I admire him, but I love Shakespeare".[232] For several decades, Rymer's view held sway; but during the 18th century, critics began to respond to Shakespeare on his own terms and acclaim what they termed his natural genius. A series of scholarly editions of his work, notably those of Samuel Johnson in 1765 and Edmond Malone in 1790, added to his growing reputation.[233][234] By 1800, he was firmly enshrined as the national poet.[235] In the 18th and 19th centuries, his reputation also spread abroad. Among those who championed him were the writers Voltaire, Goethe, Stendhal, and Victor Hugo.[236][j] A recently garlanded statue of William Shakespeare in Lincoln Park, Chicago, typical of many created in the 19th and early 20th centuries During the Romantic era, Shakespeare was praised by the poet and literary philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the critic August Wilhelm Schlegel translated his plays in the spirit of German Romanticism.[238] In the 19th century, critical admiration for Shakespeare's genius often bordered on adulation.[239] "This King Shakespeare," the essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1840, "does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying signs; indestructible".[240] The Victorians produced his plays as lavish spectacles on a grand scale.[241] The playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw mocked the cult of Shakespeare worship as "bardolatry", claiming that the new naturalism of Ibsen's plays had made Shakespeare obsolete.[242] The modernist revolution in the arts during the early 20th century, far from discarding Shakespeare, eagerly enlisted his work in the service of the avant-garde. The Expressionists in Germany and the Futurists in Moscow mounted productions of his plays. Marxist playwright and director Bertolt Brecht devised an epic theatre under the influence of Shakespeare. The poet and critic T.S. Eliot argued against Shaw that Shakespeare's "primitiveness" in fact made him truly modern.[243] Eliot, along with G. Wilson Knight and the school of New Criticism, led a movement towards a closer reading of Shakespeare's imagery. In the 1950s, a wave of new critical approaches replaced modernism and paved the way for "post-modern" studies of Shakespeare.[244] By the 1980s, Shakespeare studies were open to movements such as structuralism, feminism, New Historicism, African-American studies, and queer studies.[245][246] Comparing Shakespeare's accomplishments to those of leading figures in philosophy and theology, Harold Bloom wrote: "Shakespeare was larger than Plato and than St. Augustine. He encloses us because we see with his fundamental perceptions."[247] Works Further information: Shakespeare bibliography and Chronology of Shakespeare's plays Classification of the plays The Plays of William Shakespeare. By Sir John Gilbert, 1849. Shakespeare's works include the 36 plays printed in the First Folio of 1623, listed according to their folio classification as comedies, histories, and tragedies.[248] Two plays not included in the First Folio, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Pericles, Prince of Tyre, are now accepted as part of the canon, with today's scholars agreeing that Shakespeare made major contributions to the writing of both.[249][250] No Shakespearean poems were included in the First Folio. In the late 19th century, Edward Dowden classified four of the late comedies as romances, and though many scholars prefer to call them tragicomedies, Dowden's term is often used.[251][252] In 1896, Frederick S. Boas coined the term "problem plays" to describe four plays: All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida, and Hamlet.[253] "Dramas as singular in theme and temper cannot be strictly called comedies or tragedies", he wrote. "We may, therefore, borrow a convenient phrase from the theatre of today and class them together as Shakespeare's problem plays."[254] The term, much debated and sometimes applied to other plays, remains in use, though Hamlet is definitively classed as a tragedy.[255][256][257] Speculation about Shakespeare Authorship Main article: Shakespeare authorship question Around 230 years after Shakespeare's death, doubts began to be expressed about the authorship of the works attributed to him.[258] Proposed alternative candidates include Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.[259] Several "group theories" have also been proposed.[260] Only a small minority of academics believe there is reason to question the traditional attribution,[261] but interest in the subject, particularly the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship, continues into the 21st century.[262][263][264] Religion Main article: Religious views of William Shakespeare Shakespeare conformed to the official state religion,[k] but his private views on religion have been the subject of debate. Shakespeare's will uses a Protestant formula, and he was a confirmed member of the Church of England, where he was married, his children were baptised, and where he is buried. Some scholars claim that members of Shakespeare's family were Catholics, at a time when practising Catholicism in England was against the law.[266] Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, certainly came from a pious Catholic family. The strongest evidence might be a Catholic statement of faith signed by his father, John Shakespeare, found in 1757 in the rafters of his former house in Henley Street. However, the document is now lost and scholars differ as to its authenticity.[267][268] In 1591, the authorities reported that John Shakespeare had missed church "for fear of process for debt", a common Catholic excuse.[269][270][271] In 1606, the name of William's daughter Susanna appears on a list of those who failed to attend Easter communion in Stratford.[269][270][271] Other authors argue that there is a lack of evidence about Shakespeare's religious beliefs. Scholars find evidence both for and against Shakespeare's Catholicism, Protestantism, or lack of belief in his plays, but the truth may be impossible to prove.[272][273] Sexuality Main article: Sexuality of William Shakespeare Few details of Shakespeare's sexuality are known. At 18, he married 26-year-old Anne Hathaway, who was pregnant. Susanna, the first of their three children, was born six months later on 26 May 1583. Over the centuries, some readers have posited that Shakespeare's sonnets are autobiographical,[274] and point to them as evidence of his love for a young man. Others read the same passages as the expression of intense friendship rather than romantic love.[275][276][277] The 26 so-called "Dark Lady" sonnets, addressed to a married woman, are taken as evidence of heterosexual liaisons.[278] Portraiture Main article: Portraits of Shakespeare No written contemporary description of Shakespeare's physical appearance survives, and no evidence suggests that he ever commissioned a portrait, so the Droeshout engraving, which Ben Jonson approved of as a good likeness,[279] and his Stratford monument provide perhaps the best evidence of his appearance. From the 18th century, the desire for authentic Shakespeare portraits fuelled claims that various surviving pictures depicted Shakespeare. That demand also led to the production of several fake portraits, as well as misattributions, repaintings, and relabelling of portraits of other people.[280] **** Hans Christian Andersen (/ˈændərsən/, Danish: [ˈhænˀs ˈkʰʁestjæn ˈɑnɐsn̩] (listen); 2 April 1805 – 4 August 1875), in Denmark usually called H.C. Andersen, was a Danish author. Although a prolific writer of plays, travelogues, novels, and poems, he is best remembered for his fairy tales. Andersen's popularity is not limited to children; his stories express themes that transcend age and nationality.[citation needed] Andersen's fairy tales, consisting of 156 stories across nine volumes[1] and translated into more than 125 languages,[2] have become culturally embedded in the West's collective consciousness, readily accessible to children, but presenting lessons of virtue and resilience in the face of adversity for mature readers as well.[3] His most famous fairy tales include "The Emperor's New Clothes," "The Little Mermaid," "The Nightingale," "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", "The Red Shoes", "The Princess and the Pea," "The Snow Queen," "The Ugly Duckling," "The Little Match Girl," and "Thumbelina." His stories have inspired ballets, plays, and animated and live-action films.[4] One of Copenhagen's widest and busiest boulevards, skirting Copenhagen City Hall Square at the corner of which Andersen's larger-than-life bronze statue sits, is named "H.C. Andersens Boulevard."[5] Contents 1 Early life 2 Career 2.1 Early work 2.2 Fairy tales and poetry 2.3 Travelogues 3 Personal life 3.1 Kierkegaard 3.2 Meetings with Dickens 3.3 Love life 4 Death 5 Legacy and cultural influence 5.1 Archives, collections and museums 5.2 Art, entertainment and media 5.2.1 Audio recordings 5.2.2 Films 5.2.3 Literature 5.2.4 Mobile app 5.2.5 Monuments and sculptures 5.2.6 Music 5.2.7 Radio 5.2.8 Stage productions 5.2.9 Television 5.2.10 Webseries 5.2.11 Video Games 5.3 Awards 5.4 Events and holidays 5.5 Places named after Andersen 5.6 Postage stamps 5.7 Theme parks 5.8 Cultural references 6 Language 7 Selected works 8 See also 9 References 10 Bibliography 11 External links Early life[edit] "It doesn't matter about being born in a duckyard, as long as you are hatched from a swan's egg" "The Ugly Duckling" Hans Christian Andersen was born in Odense, Denmark on 2 April 1805. He was an only child. His father, also named Hans, considered himself related to nobility (his paternal grandmother had told his father that their family had belonged to a higher social class,[6] but investigations have disproved these stories).[6][7] A persistent speculation suggests that Andersen was an illegitimate son of King Christian VIII, but this notion has been challenged.[6] Andersen's father, who had received an elementary school education, introduced his son to literature, reading to him the Arabian Nights.[8] Andersen's mother, Anne Marie Andersdatter, was an illiterate washerwoman. Following her husband's death in 1816, she remarried in 1818.[8] Andersen was sent to a local school for poor children where he received a basic education and had to support himself, working as an apprentice to a weaver and, later, to a tailor. At fourteen, he moved to Copenhagen to seek employment as an actor. Having an excellent soprano voice, he was accepted into the Royal Danish Theatre, but his voice soon changed. A colleague at the theatre told him that he considered Andersen a poet. Taking the suggestion seriously, Andersen began to focus on writing. Andersen's childhood home in Odense Jonas Collin, director of the Royal Danish Theatre, held great affection for Andersen and sent him to a grammar school in Slagelse, persuading King Frederick VI to pay part of the youth's education.[9] Andersen had by then published his first story, "The Ghost at Palnatoke's Grave" (1822). Though not a stellar pupil, he also attended school at Elsinore until 1827.[10] He later said his years in school were the darkest and most bitter of his life. At one school, he lived at his schoolmaster's home, where he was abused, being told that it was "to improve his character". He later said the faculty had discouraged him from writing, driving him into a depression.[11] Career[edit] Paper chimney sweep cut by Andersen Early work[edit] A very early fairy tale by Andersen, "The Tallow Candle" (Danish: Tællelyset), was discovered in a Danish archive in October 2012. The story, written in the 1820s, was about a candle that did not feel appreciated. It was written while Andersen was still in school and dedicated to a benefactor in whose family's possession it remained until it turned up among other family papers in a local archive.[12] In 1829, Andersen enjoyed considerable success with the short story "A Journey on Foot from Holmen's Canal to the East Point of Amager". Its protagonist meets characters ranging from Saint Peter to a talking cat. Andersen followed this success with a theatrical piece, Love on St. Nicholas Church Tower, and a short volume of poems. Although he made little progress writing and publishing immediately thereafter, in 1833 he received a small travel grant from the king, thus enabling him to set out on the first of many journeys through Europe. At Jura, near Le Locle, Switzerland, Andersen wrote the story "Agnete and the Merman". He spent an evening in the Italian seaside village of Sestri Levante the same year, inspiring the title of "The Bay of Fables".[13] In October 1834, he arrived in Rome. Andersen's travels in Italy were to be reflected in his first novel, a fictionalized autobiography titled The Improvisatore (Improvisatoren), published in 1835 to instant acclaim.[14][15] Fairy tales and poetry[edit] Andersen's initial attempts at writing fairy tales were revisions of stories that he heard as a child. Initially his original fairy tales were not met with recognition, due partly to the difficulty of translating them. In 1835, Andersen published the first two installments of his Fairy Tales (Danish: Eventyr; lit. "fantastic tales"). More stories, completing the first volume, were published in 1837. The collection comprises nine tales, including "The Tinderbox", "The Princess and the Pea", "Thumbelina", "The Little Mermaid" and "The Emperor's New Clothes". The quality of these stories was not immediately recognized, and they sold poorly. At the same time, Andersen enjoyed more success with two novels, O.T. (1836) and Only a Fiddler (1837);[16] the latter work was reviewed by a young Søren Kierkegaard.[17] Much of his work was influenced by the Bible as when he was growing up Christianity was very important in the Danish culture.[18] Painting of Andersen, 1836, by Christian Albrecht Jensen After a visit to Sweden in 1837, Andersen became inspired by Scandinavism and committed himself to writing a poem that would convey the relatedness of Swedes, Danes and Norwegians.[19] In July 1839, during a visit to the island of Funen, Andersen wrote the text of his poem Jeg er en Skandinav ("I am a Scandinavian")[19] to capture "the beauty of the Nordic spirit, the way the three sister nations have gradually grown together" as part of a Scandinavian national anthem.[19] Composer Otto Lindblad set the poem to music, and the composition was published in January 1840. Its popularity peaked in 1845, after which it was seldom sung.[19] Andersen returned to the fairy tale genre in 1838 with another collection, Fairy Tales Told for Children. New Collection. First Booklet (Eventyr, fortalte for Børn. Ny Samling), which consists of "The Daisy", "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", and "The Wild Swans". He went on to publish "New Fairy Tales (1844). First Volume. First Collection", which contained "The Nightingale" and "The Ugly Duckling". After that came "New Fairy Tales (1845). First Volume. Second Collection" in which was found "The Snow Queen". "The Little Match Girl" appeared in December 1845 in the "Dansk Folkekalender (1846)" and also in "New Fairy Tales (1848). Second Volume. Second Collection". 1845 saw a breakthrough for Andersen with the publication of four translations of his fairy tales. "The Little Mermaid" appeared in the periodical Bentley's Miscellany, followed by a second volume, Wonderful Stories for Children. Two other volumes enthusiastically received were A Danish Story Book and Danish Fairy Tales and Legends. A review that appeared in the London journal The Athenæum (February 1846) said of Wonderful Stories, "This is a book full of life and fancy; a book for grandfathers no less than grandchildren, not a word of which will be skipped by those who have it once in hand."[3] Andersen would continue to write fairy tales and published them in installments until 1872.[20] Travelogues[edit] In 1851, he published to wide acclaim In Sweden, a volume of travel sketches. A keen traveller, Andersen published several other long travelogues: Shadow Pictures of a Journey to the Harz, Swiss Saxony, etc. etc. in the Summer of 1831, A Poet's Bazaar, In Spain and A Visit to Portugal in 1866. (The last describes his visit with his Portuguese friends Jorge and Jose O'Neill, who were his fellows in the mid-1820s while living in Copenhagen.) In his travelogues, Andersen took heed of some of the contemporary conventions about travel writing, but always developed the genre to suit his own purposes. Each of his travelogues combines documentary and descriptive accounts of the sights he saw with more philosophical passages on topics such as being an author, immortality, and the nature of fiction in the literary travel report. Some of the travelogues, such as In Sweden, even contain fairy-tales. In the 1840s, Andersen's attention returned to the stage, but with little success. He had better fortune with the publication of the Picture-Book without Pictures (1840). A second series of fairy tales began in 1838 and a third in 1845. Andersen was now celebrated throughout Europe, although his native Denmark still showed some resistance to his pretensions. Between 1845 and 1864, H. C. Andersen lived at Nyhavn 67, Copenhagen, where a memorial plaque now stands.[21] Personal life[edit] Kierkegaard[edit] In ‘Andersen as a Novelist’, Kierkegaard remarks that Andersen is characterized as, “...a possibility of a personality, wrapped up in such a web of arbitrary moods and moving through an elegiac duo-decimal scale [i.e., a chromatic scale. Proceeding by semitones, and therefore including sharps as well as flats, such a scale is associated more with lament or elegy than is an ordinary diatonic scale] of almost echoless, dying tones just as easily roused as subdued, who, in order to become a personality, needs a strong life-development.” Meetings with Dickens[edit] In June 1847, Andersen paid his first visit to England and enjoyed a triumphal social success during the summer. The Countess of Blessington invited him to her parties where intellectual people could meet, and it was at one such party that he met Charles Dickens for the first time. They shook hands and walked to the veranda, about which Andersen wrote in his diary: "We had come to the veranda, I was so happy to see and speak to England's now-living writer whom I love the most."[22] The two authors respected each other's work and shared something important in common as writers: depictions of the poor and the underclass, who often had difficult lives affected both by the Industrial Revolution and by abject poverty. In the Victorian era there was a growing sympathy for children and an idealisation of the innocence of childhood. Ten years later, Andersen visited England again, primarily to meet Dickens. He extended a brief visit to Dickens' home at Gads Hill Place into a five-week stay, to the distress of Dickens' family. After Andersen was told to leave, Dickens gradually stopped all correspondence between them, to the great disappointment and confusion of Andersen, who had quite enjoyed the visit and never understood why his letters went unanswered.[22] Love life[edit] Hanfstaengl portrait of Andersen dated July 1860 In Andersen's early life, his private journal records his refusal to have sexual relations.[23][24] Andersen often fell in love with unattainable women, and many of his stories are interpreted as references.[25] At one point, he wrote in his diary: "Almighty God, thee only have I; thou steerest my fate, I must give myself up to thee! Give me a livelihood! Give me a bride! My blood wants love, as my heart does!"[26] A girl named Riborg Voigt was the unrequited love of Andersen's youth. A small pouch containing a long letter from Voigt was found on Andersen's chest when he died, several decades after he first fell in love with her, and after he presumably fell in love with others. Other disappointments in love included Sophie Ørsted, the daughter of the physicist Hans Christian Ørsted, and Louise Collin, the youngest daughter of his benefactor Jonas Collin. One of his stories, "The Nightingale", was written as an expression of his passion for Jenny Lind and became the inspiration for her nickname, the "Swedish Nightingale".[27] Andersen was often shy around women and had extreme difficulty in proposing to Lind. When Lind was boarding a train to go to an opera concert, Andersen gave Lind a letter of proposal. Her feelings towards him were not the same; she saw him as a brother, writing to him in 1844: "farewell ... God bless and protect my brother is the sincere wish of his affectionate sister, Jenny".[28] Andersen certainly experienced same-sex attraction as well: he wrote to Edvard Collin:[29] "I languish for you as for a pretty Calabrian wench ... my sentiments for you are those of a woman. The femininity of my nature and our friendship must remain a mystery."[30] Collin, who preferred women, wrote in his own memoir: "I found myself unable to respond to this love, and this caused the author much suffering." Likewise, the infatuations of the author for the Danish dancer Harald Scharff[31] and Carl Alexander, the young hereditary duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach,[32] did not result in any relationships. According to Anne Klara Bom and Anya Aarenstrup from the H. C. Andersen Centre of University of Southern Denmark, "To conclude, it is correct to point to the very ambivalent (and also very traumatic) elements in Andersen's emotional life concerning the sexual sphere, but it is decidedly just as wrong to describe him as homosexual and maintain that he had physical relationships with men. He did not. Indeed, that would have been entirely contrary to his moral and religious ideas, aspects that are quite outside the field of vision of Wullschlager and her like."[33] Death[edit] Andersen at Rolighed: Israel Melchior (c. 1867) Andersen's new gravestone at Assistens Cemetery in the Nørrebro district of Copenhagen. In early 1872, Andersen fell out of his bed and was severely hurt; he never fully recovered from the resultant injuries. Soon afterward, he started to show signs of liver cancer.[34] He died on 4 August 1875, in a house called Rolighed (literally: calmness), near Copenhagen, the home of his close friends, the banker Moritz Melchior and his wife.[34] Shortly before his death, Andersen had consulted a composer about the music for his funeral, saying: "Most of the people who will walk after me will be children, so make the beat keep time with little steps."[34] His body was interred in the Assistens Kirkegård in the Nørrebro area of Copenhagen, in the family plot of the Collins. However, in 1914 the stone was moved to another cemetery (today known as "Frederiksbergs ældre kirkegaard"), where younger Collin family members were buried. For a period, his, Edvard Collin's and Henriette Collin's graves were unmarked. A second stone has been erected, marking H.C. Andersen's grave, now without any mention of the Collin couple, but all three still share the same plot.[35] At the time of his death, Andersen was internationally revered, and the Danish Government paid him an annual stipend as a "national treasure".[36] Legacy and cultural influence[edit] Postage stamp, Denmark, 1935 Postage stamp, Kazakhstan, 2005 Archives, collections and museums[edit] The Hans Christian Andersen Museum or H.C. Andersens Odense, is a set of museums/buildings dedicated to the famous author Hans Christian Andersen in Odense, Denmark, some of which, at various times in history, have functioned as the main Odense-based museum on the author. The Hans Christian Andersen Museum in Solvang, California, a city founded by Danes, is devoted to presenting the author's life and works. Displays include models of Andersen's childhood home and of "The Princess and the Pea". The museum also contains hundreds of volumes of Andersen's works, including many illustrated first editions and correspondence with Danish composer Asger Hamerik.[37] The Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division was bequeathed an extensive collection of Andersen materials by the Danish-American actor Jean Hersholt.[38] Of particular note is an original scrapbook Andersen prepared for the young Jonas Drewsen.[39] Art, entertainment and media[edit] Audio recordings[edit] Noteworthy recordings in English include: Tales of Hans Christian Andersen (Caedmon Records TC-1073, 1958), read by Michael Redgrave The Snow Queen (Caedmon Records TC-1229, 1958), read by Cathleen Nesbitt Tales of Hans Christian Andersen (Caedmon Records TC-1109, 1959), read by Boris Karloff; Karloff also narrated Hans Christian Andersen: The Little Match Girl and Other Fairy Tales (Caedmon Records TC-1117, 1960) Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales (Golden Records LP-74, 1962), read by Danny Kaye; re-issued on CD in 2008 as part of Danny Kaye Re-Tells Grimm's and Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales (Golden Records 826663-11082) Victor Borge presents His Own Enchanting Version of Hans Christian Andersen (Decca Records DL7-34406, 1966) The Little Mermaid (Caedmon Records TC-1230, 1967), read by Cathleen Nesbitt Hans Christian Andersen: His Poems and the Story of His Life (Caedmon Records TC-1366, 1972), read by Siobhan McKenna Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Stories (Pye Records PKL-5520, 1978), performed by Dame Edith Evans and Sir John Betjeman The Steadfast Tin Soldier (Windham Hill Records WH-0702, 1987), read by Jeremy Irons The Emperor and the Nightingale (Windham Hill Records WH-0706, 1987), read by Glenn Close The Ugly Duckling (Windham Hill Records WH-0705, 1987), read by Cher The Emperor's New Clothes (Windham Hill Records WH-0719, 1990), read by John Gielgud The Snow Queen (Delos DE-6004, 1991), read by Natalia Makarova The Snow Queen (Lightyear 75108-2, 1991), read by Sigourney Weaver The Emperor's New Clothes: An All-Star Retelling of the Classic Fairy Tale (Starbright Foundation, 1998) NOTE: this was an audio CD included with the printed book; the cast included Liam Neeson, John Lithgow, Melissa Mathison, Harrison Ford, Nathan Lane, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Robin Williams, Carrie Fisher, Penny Marshall, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Melissa Joan Hart, Jay Leno, Jason Alexander, Rosie O'Donnell, Calvin Klein, Dan Aykroyd, Steven Spielberg, Jeff Goldblum, Joan Rivers, Madonna, Fran Drescher, Angela Lansbury and General Norman Schwarzkopf. Tale Spinners for Children released seven LP's of dramatizations of Andersen stories: "The Ugly Duckling" (UAC 11008) "The Tinder Box" (which was included with "The Pied Piper") (UAC 11017) "The Emperor's New Clothes" (which was included with "Hop O' My Thumb") (UAC 11021) "Thumbelina" (UAC 11038) "The Little Mermaid" (UAC 11042) "The Snow Queen" (UAC 11061) "The Red Shoes" (UAC 11063) Films[edit] La petite marchande d'allumettes (1928; in English: The Little Match Girl), film by Jean Renoir[40] based on "The Little Match Girl" The Ugly Duckling (1931), an animated short film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation, based on The Ugly Duckling. Andersen was played by Joachim Gottschalk in the German film The Swedish Nightingale (1941), which portrays his relationship with the singer Jenny Lind. The Red Shoes (1948) British drama film written, directed, and produced by the team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger based on "The Red Shoes". Hans Christian Andersen (1952), an American musical film starring Danny Kaye that, though inspired by Andersen's life and literary legacy, was meant to be neither historically nor biographically accurate; it begins by saying, "This is not the story of his life, but a fairy tale about this great spinner of fairy tales" Carevo novo ruho (The emperor's new clothes), a 1961 Croatian film, directed by Ante Babaja.[41] The Rankin/Bass Productions-produced fantasy film, The Daydreamer (1966), depicts the young Hans Christian Andersen imaginatively conceiving the stories he would later write. The World of Hans Christian Andersen (1968), a Japanese anime fantasy film from Toei Doga, based on the works of Danish author Hans Christian Andersen The Little Mermaid (1989), an animated film based on The Little Mermaid created and produced at Walt Disney Feature Animation in Burbank, CA Thumbelina (1994), an animated film based on the "Thumbelina" created and produced at Sullivan Bluth Studios Dublin, Ireland The Little Matchgirl (2006), an animated short film by the Walt Disney Animation Studios directed by Roger Allers and produced by Don Hahn Hans Christian Andersen: My Life as a Fairy Tale (2003), a British made-for-television film directed by Philip Saville, a fictionalised account of Andersen's early successes, with his fairy stories intertwined with events in his own life.[42] One segment in Fantasia 2000 is based on The Steadfast Tin Soldier, against Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 2, Movement #1: "Allegro". Frozen (2013), a 3D computer-animated film produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios, was initially intended to be based on The Snow Queen, though numerous changes were made until the end result bore almost no resemblance to the original story. Literature[edit] Andersen's stories laid the groundwork for other children's classics, such as The Wind in the Willows (1908) by Kenneth Grahame and Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) by A. A. Milne. The technique of making inanimate objects, such as toys, come to life ("Little Ida's Flowers") would later also be used by Lewis Carroll and Beatrix Potter.[citation needed] "Match Girl", a short story by Anne Bishop (published in Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears)[43] "The Chrysanthemum Robe", a short story by Kara Dalkey (based on "The Emperor's New Clothes" and published in The Armless Maiden)[44] The Nightingale by Kara Dalkey, lyrical adult fantasy novel set in the courts of old Japan[45] The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf by Kathryn Davis, a contemporary novel about fairy tales and opera[46] "Sparks", a short story by Gregory Frost (based on "The Tinder Box", published in Black Swan, White Raven)[47] "The Pangs of Love", a short story by Jane Gardam (based on "The Little Mermaid", published in Close Company: Stories of Mothers and Daughters)[48] "The Last Poems About the Snow Queen", a poem cycle by Sandra Gilbert (published in Blood Pressure).[49] The Snow Queen by Eileen Kernaghan, a gentle Young Adult fantasy novel that brings out the tale's subtle pagan and shamanic elements[50][citation needed] The Wild Swans by Peg Kerr, a novel that brings Andersen's fairy tale to colonial and modern America[51] "Steadfast", a short story by Nancy Kress (based on "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", published in Black Swan, White Raven)[52] "In the Witch's Garden" (October 2002), a short story by Naomi Kritzer (based on "The Snow Queen", published in Realms of Fantasy magazine)[citation needed] Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier, a romantic fantasy novel, set in early Medieval Ireland (thematically linked to "The Six Swans")[53] "The Snow Queen", a short story by Patricia A. McKillip (published in Snow White, Blood Red)[54] "You, Little Match Girl", a short story by Joyce Carol Oates (published in Black Heart, Ivory Bones)[55] "The Real Princess", a short story by Susan Palwick (based on "The Princess and the Pea", published in Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears)[56] "The Naked King" ("Голый Король (Goliy Korol)" 1937), "The Shadow" ("Тень (Ten)" 1940), and "The Snow Queen" ("Снежная Королева (Sniezhenaya Koroleva)" 1948) by Eugene Schwartz, reworked and adapted to the contemporary reality plays by one of Russia's playwrights. Schwartz's versions of The Shadow and The Snow Queen were later made into movies (1971 and 1967, respectively).[57][58] "The Sea Hag", a short story by Melissa Lee Shaw (based on "The Little Mermaid", published in Silver Birch, Blood Moon)[59] The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge, an award-winning novel that reworks "The Snow Queen"'s themes into epic science fiction[60] "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", a short story by Joan D. Vinge (published in Women of Wonder)[citation needed] "Swim Thru Fire", a comic by Sophia Foster-Dimino and Annie Mok, based partially on "The Little Mermaid". Mobile app[edit] GivingTales – the storytelling app for children was created in aid of UNICEF in 2015. Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales are read by Roger Moore, Stephen Fry, Ewan McGregor, Joan Collins and Joanna Lumley.[61] Monuments and sculptures[edit] Statue in Central Park, New York commemorating Andersen and The Ugly Duckling   Andersen statue at the Rosenborg Castle Gardens, Copenhagen   Statue in Odense being led out to the harbour during a public exhibition   Odense statue half-submerged in the water   Statue in Solvang, California, a city built by Danish immigrants.   Statue in Bratislava, Slovakia   Portrait bust in Sydney unveiled by the Crown Prince and Princess of Denmark in 2005 Hans Christian Andersen (1880), even before his death, steps had already been taken to erect, in Andersen's honour, a large statue by sculptor August Saabye, which can now be seen in the Rosenborg Castle Gardens in Copenhagen.[4] Hans Christian Andersen (1896) by the Danish sculptor Johannes Gelert, at Lincoln Park in Chicago, on Stockton Drive near Webster Avenue[62] Hans Christian Andersen (1956), a statue by sculptor Georg J. Lober and designer Otto Frederick Langman, at Central Park Lake in New York City, opposite East 74th Street (40.7744306°N, 73.9677972°W) Hans Christian Andersen (2005) Plaza de la Marina in Malaga, Spain Music[edit] Hans Christian Andersen (album), a 1994 album by Franciscus Henri The Song is a Fairytale (Sangen er et Eventyr), a song cycle based on fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen, composed by Frederik Magle Radio[edit] The Wild Swans (BBC Radio 4, 1980), an adaptation of Andersen's story by John Peacock directed by Jane Morgan, with Angela Pleasance.[63] The Snow Queen (BBC Radio 4, 1994), an adaptation of Andersen's story by Bertie Doherty, directed by Janet Whitaker and featuring Diana Rigg (in the title role) and Dirk Bogarde as the Narrator.[64] Hans Christian Andersen (BBC Radio 4, 2005), a two-part radio play by Hattie Naylor dramatizing Andersen's life.[65] The Beautiful Ugly (BBC Radio 4, 2012), a radio play by Lavinia Murray directed by Pauline Harris, imagining a day in the life of Andersen as a child, combining fact with fantasy.[66] The Red Shoes (BBC Radio 4, 2017), an adaptation of Andersen's story by Frances Byrnes and directed by Eoin O'Callaghan.[67] Dance 'Til You Bleed: The World According to Hans Christian Andersen (BBC Radio 3, 2019): a dramatization by Lucy Catherine of five Andersen stories directed by Gemma Jenkins.[68] Each story was introduced by author Joanne Harris and starred Toby Jones as Andersen, who also acted as narrator. Stage productions[edit] Sam the Lovesick Snowman at the Center for Puppetry Arts: a contemporary puppet show by Jon Ludwig inspired by The Snow Man.[69] Striking Twelve, a modern musical take on "The Little Match Girl", created and performed by GrooveLily.[70] The musical comedy Once Upon a Mattress is based on Andersen' work 'The Princess and the Pea'.[71] Television[edit] The Snow Queen (1955), a British TV mini-series starring April Olrich The Emperor's New Clothes (1967) starring The Prince Street Players Andersen Monogatari (1971), an animated anthology of Andersen's works The Little Match Girl (1974) starring Lynsey Baxter Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre (1982–87), an live-action anthology series which originally aired on Showtime; stories by Andersen which were dramatized included "The Nightingale", "The Little Mermaid", "The Princess and the Pea", "Thumbelina", "The Emperor's New Clothes" and "The Snow Queen". Hans Christian Andersen: My Life as a Fairytale (2003), a semi-biographical television miniseries that fictionalizes the young life of Danish author Hans Christian Andersen and includes fairy tales as short interludes, intertwined into the events of the young author's life. The Little Match Girl (1986) starring Michael Hordern, Twiggy, Roger Daltrey and Natalie Morse as The Match Girl The Little Match Girl (1990), an animated film starring F. Murray Abraham In the "Metal Fish" episode of the Disney TV series The Little Mermaid, Andersen is a vital character whose inspiration for writing his tale is shown to have been granted by an encounter with the show's protagonists. Snow Queen (2002) starring Bridget Fonda The Fairytaler (2004), a Danish animated television series based on the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen. Young Andersen (2005), a biographical television miniseries that tells of the formative boarding school years of the fairy tale writer. Webseries[edit] Classic Alice (2014), a YouTube webseries, had a five-episode arc based on "The Butterfly" Video Games[edit] Andersen appears in the mobile game Fate/Grand Order as a Caster class servant. In the London chapter, set in 1888, he is summoned by the Demonic Fog surrounding London. He allies himself with the player in order to find more information about the Holy Grail War. Andersen appears in Fate/Extra CCC as Caster, Kiara's servant. Awards[edit] Hans Christian Andersen Awards, prizes awarded annually by the International Board on Books for Young People to an author and illustrator whose complete works have made lasting contributions to children's literature.[72] Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award, a Danish literary award established in 2010 Events and holidays[edit] Andersen's birthday, 2 April, is celebrated as International Children's Book Day.[73] The year 2005, designated "Andersen Year" in Denmark,[74] was the bicentenary of Andersen's birth, and his life and work was celebrated around the world. In Denmark, a well-attended "once in a lifetime" show was staged in Copenhagen's Parken Stadium during "Andersen Year" to celebrate the writer and his stories.[74] The annual H.C. Andersen Marathon, established in 2000, is held in Odense, Denmark Places named after Andersen[edit] Hans Christian Andersen Airport, small airport servicing the Danish city of Odense Instituto Hans Christian Andersen, Chilean high school located in San Fernando, Colchagua Province, Chile Hans Christian Andersen Park, Solvang, California CEIP Hans Christian Andersen, Primary Education School in Malaga, Spain. Postage stamps[edit] Andersen's legacy includes the postage stamps of Denmark and of Kazakhstan depicted above, depicting Andersen's profile. Theme parks[edit] In Japan, the city of Funabashi has a children's theme park named after Andersen.[75] Funabashi is a sister city to Odense, the city of Andersen's birth. In China, a US$32 million theme park based on Andersen's tales and life was expected to open in Shanghai's Yangpu District in 2017.[76] Construction on the project began in 2005.[77] Cultural references[edit] In Gilbert and Sullivan's Savoy Opera Iolanthe, the Lord Chancellor mocks the Fairy Queen with a reference to Andersen, thereby implying that her claims are fictional:[78] It seems that she's a fairy From Andersen's library, And I took her for The proprietor Of a Ladies' Seminary! In Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music, the middle-aged Frederik contemplates reading erotic literature to his young, virginal bride in order to seduce her, but concludes: "Her taste is much blander / I'm sorry to say / But is Hans Christian Ander- / Sen ever risqué?" Language[edit] Titles like "The Ugly Duckling" and "The Emperor's New Clothes" have become idiomatic in several languages. Selected works[edit] Further information: Hans Christian Andersen bibliography Andersen's fairy tales include: The Angel (1843) The Bell The Emperor's New Clothes (1837) The Fir-Tree (1844) The Galoshes of Fortune (1838) The Happy Family The Ice-Maiden (1863) It's Quite True! Later Tales, published during 1867 & 1868 (1869) The Little Match Girl (1845) The Little Mermaid (1837) Little Tuck The Most Incredible Thing (1870) The Nightingale (1843) The Old House The Philosopher's Stone (1859) The Princess and the Pea (1835) The Red Shoes (1845) Sandman (1841) The Shadow (1847) The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep (1845) The Snow Queen (1844) The Steadfast Tin Soldier (1838) The Story of a Mother (1847) The Swineherd (1841) Thumbelina (1835) The Tinderbox (1835) The Ugly Duckling (1843) The Wild Swans (1838) ***Hayim Nahman Bialik (Hebrew: חיים נחמן ביאליק; January 9, 1873 – July 4, 1934), also Chaim or Haim, was a Jewish poet who wrote primarily in Hebrew but also in Yiddish. Bialik was one of the pioneers of modern Hebrew poetry. He was part of the vanguard of Jewish thinkers who gave voice to the breath of new life in Jewish life.[1] Although he died before Israel became a state, Bialik ultimately came to be recognized as Israel's national poet. Contents 1 Biography 2 Literary career 3 Move to Germany 4 Move to Tel Aviv 5 Works and influence 6 Death 7 References 8 Selected bibliography in English 9 External links Biography[edit] Hayyim Nahman and his wife Manya in 1925 Bialik was born in Ivnitsa [uk], Volhynian Governorate in the Russian Empire to Itzik-Yosef Bialik, a scholar and businessman from Zhitomir, and his wife, Dinah-Priveh.[2] He had older brother Sheftel (born in 1862) and sister Chenya-Ides (born in 1871), as well as a younger sister Blyuma (born in 1875).[3] When Bialik was still a child, his father died. In his poems, Bialik romanticized the misery of his childhood, describing seven orphans left behind—though modern biographers believe there were fewer children, including grown step-siblings who did not need to be supported. Be that as it may, from the age 7 onwards Bialik was raised in Zhitomir by his Orthodox grandfather, Yankl-Moishe Bialik. In Zhitomir he received a traditional Jewish religious education, but also explored European literature. At the age of 15, inspired by an article he read, he convinced his grandfather to send him to the Volozhin Yeshiva in Lithuania, to study at a famous Talmudic academy under Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin, where he hoped he could continue his Jewish schooling while expanding his education to European literature as well. Attracted to the Jewish Enlightenment movement (Haskala), Bialik gradually drifted away from yeshiva life. There is a story in the biography of Rabbi Chaim Solevetchik that cites an anonymous student reputed to be him. The story goes that Rabbi Chaim, after expelling Bialik from the yeshiva for being involved in the Haskala movement, personally escorted his former student out. When asked "Why?" the rabbi replied that he spent the time convincing Bialik not to use his writing talents against the yeshiva world. Poems such as HaMatmid ("The Talmud student") written in 1898, reflect Bialik's great ambivalence toward that way of life: on the one hand admiration for the dedication and devotion of the yeshiva students to their studies, on the other hand a disdain for the narrowness of their world. At 18 he left for Odessa, the center of modern Jewish culture in the southern Russian Empire, drawn by such luminaries as Mendele Mocher Sforim and Ahad Ha'am. In Odessa, Bialik studied Russian and German language and literature and dreamed of enrolling in the Modern Orthodox Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin. Alone and penniless, he made his living teaching Hebrew. The 1892 publication of his first poem, El Hatzipor "To the Bird", which expresses a longing for Zion, in a booklet edited by Yehoshua Ravnitzky (1859-1944) (a future collaborator), eased Bialik's way into Jewish literary circles in Odessa. He joined the Hovevei Zion movement and befriended Ahad Ha'am, who had a great influence on his Zionist outlook. In 1892 Bialik heard news that the Volozhin Yeshiva had closed and returned home to Zhitomir to prevent his grandfather from discovering that he had discontinued his religious education. He arrived to find both his grandfather and his older brother close to death. Following their deaths, Bialik married Manya Averbuch[4] in 1893. For a time he served as a bookkeeper in his father-in-law's lumber business in Korostyshiv, near Kiev. But when this proved unsuccessful, he moved in 1897 to Sosnowiec, a small town in Zaglebie, southern Poland, which was then part of the Russian Empire, near the border with Prussia and Austria. In Sosnowiec, Bialik worked as a Hebrew teacher and tried to earn extra income as a coal merchant, but the provincial life depressed him. He was finally able to return to Odessa in 1900, having secured a teaching job. Bialik's first visit to the US was to Hartford, CT, where he stayed with Cousin Raymond Bialeck and his family. His closest living relatives in the US include Hal Bialeck, Alison Bialeck and Richard Bialeck. He is the uncle of actress Mayim Bialik's great-great-grandfather.[5] Literary career[edit] A young Bialik For the next two decades, Bialik taught and continued his activities in Zionist and literary circles, as his literary fame continued to rise. This is considered Bialik's "golden period". In 1901 his first collection of poetry was published in Warsaw, and was greeted with much critical acclaim, to the point that he was hailed "the poet of national renaissance." Bialik relocated to Warsaw briefly in 1904 as literary editor of the weekly magazine HaShiloah founded by Ahad Ha'am, a position he served for six years. In 1903 Bialik was sent by the Jewish Historical Commission in Odessa to interview survivors of the Kishinev pogroms and prepare a report. In response to his findings Bialik wrote his epic poem In the City of Slaughter, a powerful statement of anguish at the situation of the Jews. Bialik's condemnation of passivity against anti-Semitic violence is said to have influenced the founding Jewish self-defense groups in the Russian Empire, and eventually the Haganah in Palestine. Bialik visited Palestine in 1909. It was during this 1903 visit to Odessa that Bialik first met Ira Jan[6], the painter whom he secretly loved, as revealed by Prof. Ziva Shamir in her book "A Track of Her Own".[7] In the early 20th century, together with Ravnitzky, Simcha Ben Zion and Elhanan Levinsky, Bialik founded a Hebrew publishing house, Moriah, which issued Hebrew classics and school texts. He translated into Hebrew various European works, such as Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Schiller's Wilhelm Tell, Cervantes' Don Quixote, and Heine's poems; and from Yiddish S. Ansky's The Dybbuk. Throughout the years 1899–1915, Bialik published about 20 of his Yiddish poems in different Yiddish periodicals in the Russian Empire. These poems are often considered to be among the best achievements of modern Yiddish poetry of that period. In collaboration with Ravnitzky, Bialik published Sefer HaAggadah (1908–1911, The Book of Legends), a three-volume edition of the folk tales and proverbs scattered through the Talmud. For the book they selected hundreds of texts and arranged them thematically. The Book of Legends was immediately recognized as a masterwork and has been reprinted numerous times. Bialik also edited the poems of the medieval poet and philosopher Ibn Gabirol. He began a modern commentary on the Mishnah, but only completed Zeraim, the first of the six Orders (in the 1950s, the Bialik Institute published a commentary on the entire Mishnah by Hanoch Albeck, which is currently out of print). He also added several commentaries on the Talmud. In 1919 in Odessa, he was also able to found the Dvir publishing house, which would later become famous.[8][9] This publishing house, now based in Israel, still exists, but is now known as Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir after Dvir was purchased by the Zmora-Bitan publishing house in 1986, which later merged with Kinneret. Bialik lived in Odessa until 1921, when the Moriah publishing house was closed by Communist authorities, as a result of mounting paranoia following the Bolshevik Revolution. With the intervention of Maxim Gorki, a group of Hebrew writers were given permission by the Soviet government to leave the country. While in Odessa he had befriended the soprano Isa Kremer whom he had a profound influence on. It was through his influence that she became an exponent of Yiddish music on the concert stage; notably becoming the first woman to concertize that music. Move to Germany[edit] Bialik then moved, via Poland and Turkey, to Berlin, where together with his friends Ravnitzky and Shmaryahu Levin he re-established the Dvir publishing house. Bialik published in Dvir the first Hebrew language scientific journal with teachers of the rabbinical college Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums contributing. In Berlin Bialik joined a community of Jewish authors and publishers such as Samuel Joseph Agnon (sponsored by the owner of Schocken Department Stores, Salman Schocken, who later founded his own publishing house), Simon Dubnow, Israel Isidor Elyashev (Ba'al-Machshoves), Uri Zvi Greenberg, Jakob Klatzkin (founded Eschkol publishing house in Berlin), Moshe Kulbak, Jakob-Wolf Latzki-Bertoldi (founded Klal publishing house in Berlin in 1921), Simon Rawidowicz (co-founder of Klal), Salman Schneur, Nochum Shtif (Ba'al-Dimion), Shaul Tchernichovsky, elsewhere in Germany Shoshana Persitz with Omanuth publishing house in Bad Homburg v.d.H. and Martin Buber. They met in the Hebrew Club Beith haWa'ad ha'Ivri בית הועד העברי in Berlin's Scheunenviertel, or in Café Monopol, which had a Hebrew-speaking corner, as Eliezer Ben-Yehuda's son Itamar Ben-Avi recalled, and in Café des Westens (both in Berlin's more elegant western boroughs). The still-Soviet theatre HaBimah toured through Germany, much-acclaimed by Albert Einstein, Alfred Kerr and Max Reinhardt. Bialik succeeded Saul Israel Hurwitz after his death on 8 August 1922 as Hebrew chief editor at Klal publishing house, which published 80 titles in 1922.[10] On January 1923 Bialik's 50th birthday was celebrated in the old concert hall of the Berlin Philharmonic bringing together everybody who was anybody.[11] In the years of Inflation Berlin had become a centre of Yiddish and Hebrew and other foreign language publishing and printing, because books could be produced at ever falling real expenses and sold to a great extent for stable foreign currency. Many Hebrew and Yiddish titles were also translated into German. Once the old inflationary currency (Mark) was replaced by the new stable Rentenmark and Reichsmark this period ended and many publishing houses closed or relocated elsewhere, as did many prominent publishers and authors. Move to Tel Aviv[edit] Beit Bialik mid 1920s Bialik building Tel Aviv 2015 In 1924, Bialik relocated with his publishing house Dvir to Tel Aviv, devoting himself to cultural activities and public affairs. Bialik was immediately recognized as a celebrated literary figure. He delivered the address that marked the opening (in 1925) of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and was a member of its board of governors.[citation needed] In 1927 he became head of the Hebrew Writers Union, a position he retained for the remainder of his life. In 1933 his 60th birthday was celebrated with festivities nationwide[clarification needed], and all the schoolchildren of Tel Aviv were taken to meet him and pay their respects to him. Works and influence[edit] Bialik wrote several different modes of poetry. He is perhaps most famous for his long, nationalistic poems, which call for a reawakening of the Jewish people. Bialik had his own awakening even before writing those poems, arising out of the anger and shame he felt at the Jewish response to pogroms. In his poem "Massa Nemirov", for example, Bialik excoriated the Jews of Kishinev who had allowed their persecutors to wreak their will without raising a finger to defend themselves.[12] Israeli postal stamp, 1959 However no less effective are his passionate love poems, his personal verse, or his nature poems. Last but not least, Bialik's songs for children are a staple of Israeli nursery life. From 1908 onwards, he wrote mostly prose. By writing his works in Hebrew, Bialik contributed significantly to the revival of the Hebrew language, which before his days existed primarily as an ancient, scholarly tongue. His influence is felt deeply in all modern Hebrew literature. The generation of Hebrew language poets who followed in Bialik's footsteps, including Jacob Steinberg and Jacob Fichman, are called "the Bialik generation". To this day, Bialik is recognized as Israel's national poet. Bialik House, his former home at 22 Bialik Street in Tel Aviv, has been converted into a museum, and functions as a center for literary events. The municipality of Tel Aviv awards the Bialik Prize in his honor. Kiryat Bialik, a suburb of Haifa, and Givat Hen, a moshav bordering the city of Raanana, are named after him. He is the only person to have two streets named after him in the same Israeli city – Bialik Street and Hen Boulevard in Tel Aviv. There is also Bialik Hebrew Day School in Toronto, ON, Canada;[13] Bialik High School in Montreal, QC, Canada; and a cross-communal Jewish Zionist school in Melbourne called Bialik College. In Caracas, Venezuela, the largest Jewish community school is named Herzl-Bialik. Also in Rosario, Argentina the only Jewish school is named after him. Bialik's poems have been translated into at least 30 languages, and set to music as popular songs. These poems, and the songs based on them, have become an essential part of the education and culture of modern Israel. Bialik wrote most of his poems using "Ashkenazi" pronunciation, while modern Israeli Hebrew uses the Sephardi pronunciation. Consequently, Bialik's poems are rarely recited in the meter in which they were written. Death[edit] Bialik died in Vienna, Austria, on July 4, 1934, following a failed prostate operation.[14] He was buried in Tel Aviv; a large mourning procession followed from his home on the street named after him, to his final resting place.[citation needed] **** Shmuel Yosef Agnon (Hebrew: שמואל יוסף עגנון) (July 17, 1888 – February 17, 1970)[1] was a Nobel Prize laureate writer and was one of the central figures of modern Hebrew fiction. In Hebrew, he is known by the acronym Shai Agnon (ש"י עגנון). In English, his works are published under the name S. Y. Agnon. Agnon was born in Polish Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and later immigrated to Mandatory Palestine, and died in Jerusalem, Israel. His works deal with the conflict between the traditional Jewish life and language and the modern world. They also attempt to recapture the fading traditions of the European shtetl (village). In a wider context, he also contributed to broadening the characteristic conception of the narrator's role in literature. Agnon had a distinctive linguistic style mixing modern and rabbinic Hebrew.[2] Agnon shared the Nobel Prize with the poet Nelly Sachs in 1966. Contents 1 Biography 2 Literary themes and influences 3 Language 4 Awards and critical acclaim 5 Death and legacy 6 Beit Agnon 7 Published works 7.1 Novels and novellas 7.2 Short stories 7.3 English translations 7.4 Anthologies 7.5 Posthumous publications 8 See also 9 References 10 Bibliography 11 External links Biography[edit] This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (October 2018) Buczacz, Agnon's hometown Shmuel Yosef Halevi Czaczkes (later Agnon) was born in Buczacz (Polish spelling, pronounced Buchach) or Butschatsch (German spelling), Polish Galicia (then within the Austro-Hungarian Empire), now Buchach, Ukraine. Officially, his date of birth on the Hebrew calendar was 18 Av 5648 (July 26), but he always said his birthday was on the Jewish fast day of Tisha B'Av, the Ninth of Av. His father, Shalom Mordechai Halevy, was ordained as a rabbi, but worked in the fur trade, and had many connections among the Hasidim, His mother's side had ties to the Mitnagdim. He did not attend school and was schooled by his parents.[3] In addition to studying Jewish texts, Agnon studied writings of the Haskalah, and was also tutored in German. At the age of eight, he began to write in Hebrew and Yiddish, At the age of 15, he published his first poem – a Yiddish poem about the Kabbalist Joseph della Reina. He continued to write poems and stories in Hebrew and Yiddish, which were published in Galicia. In 1908, he moved to Jaffa in Ottoman Palestine. The first story he published there was "Agunot" ("Forsaken Wives"), which appeared that same year in the journal Ha`omer. He used the pen name "Agnon," derived from the title of the story, which he adopted as his official surname in 1924. In 1910, "Forsaken Wives" was translated into German. In 1912, at the urging of Yosef Haim Brenner, he published a novella, "Vehaya Ha'akov Lemishor" ("The Crooked Shall Be Made Straight"). In 1913, Agnon moved to Germany, where he met Esther Marx (1889-1973). They married in 1920 and had two children. In Germany he lived in Berlin and Bad Homburg vor der Höhe (1921–24). Salman Schocken, a businessman and later also publisher, became his literary patron and freed him from financial worries. From 1931 on, his work was published by Schocken Books, and his short stories appeared regularly in the newspaper Haaretz, also owned by the Schocken family. In Germany, he continued to write short stories and collaborated with Martin Buber on an anthology of Hasidic stories. Many of his early books appeared in Buber's Jüdischer Verlag (Berlin). The mostly assimilated, secular German Jews, Buber and Franz Rosenzweig among them, considered Agnon to be a legitimate relic, being a religious man, familiar with Jewish scripture. Gershom Scholem called him "the Jews' Jew".[4] In 1924, a fire broke out in his home, destroying his manuscripts and rare book collection. This traumatic event crops up occasionally in his stories. Later that year, Agnon returned to Palestine and settled with his family in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Talpiot. In 1929, his library was destroyed again during anti-Jewish riots.[5] When his novel Hachnasat Kalla ("The Bridal Canopy") appeared in 1931 to great critical acclaim, Agnon's place in Hebrew literature was assured.[6] In 1935, he published "Sippur Pashut" ("A Simple Story"), a novella set in Buchach at the end of the 19th century. Another novel, "Tmol Shilshom" ("Only Yesterday"), set in Eretz Yisrael (Israel) of the early 20th century, appeared in 1945. Literary themes and influences[edit] Agnon's study Agnon's writing has been the subject of extensive academic research. Many leading scholars of Hebrew literature have published books and papers on his work, among them Baruch Kurzweil, Dov Sadan, Nitza Ben-Dov, Dan Miron, Dan Laor and Alan Mintz. Agnon writes about Jewish life, but with his own unique perspective and special touch. In his Nobel acceptance speech, Agnon claimed "Some see in my books the influences of authors whose names, in my ignorance, I have not even heard, while others see the influences of poets whose names I have heard but whose writings I have not read." He went on to detail that his primary influences were the stories of the Bible.[7] Agnon acknowledged that he was also influenced by German literature and culture, and European literature in general, which he read in German translation. A collection of essays on this subject, edited in part by Hillel Weiss, with contributions from Israeli and German scholars, was published in 2010: Agnon and Germany: The Presence of the German World in the Writings of S.Y. Agnon. The budding Hebrew literature also influenced his works, notably that of his friend, Yosef Haim Brenner. In Germany, Agnon also spent time with the Hebraists Hayim Nahman Bialik and Ahad Ha'am. The communities he passed through in his life are reflected in his works: Galicia: in the books "The Bridal Canopy", "A City and the Fullness Thereof", "A Simple Story" and "A Guest for the Night". Germany: in the stories "Fernheim", "Thus Far" and "Between Two Cities". Jaffa: in the stories "Oath of Allegiance", "Tmol Shilshom" and "The Dune". Jerusalem: "Tehilla", "Tmol Shilshom", "Ido ve-Inam" and "Shira". Nitza Ben-Dov writes about Agnon's use of allusiveness, free-association and imaginative dream-sequences, and discusses how seemingly inconsequential events and thoughts determine the lives of his characters.[8] Some of Agnon's works, such as The Bridal Canopy, And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight, and The Doctor's Divorce, have been adapted for theatre. A play based on Agnon's letters to his wife, "Esterlein Yakirati", was performed at the Khan Theater in Jerusalem. Language[edit] Agnon's writing often used words and phrases that differed from what would become established modern Hebrew. His distinct language is based on traditional Jewish sources, such as the Torah and the Prophets, Midrashic literature, the Mishnah, and other Rabbinic literature. Some examples include: bet kahava for modern bet kafe (coffee house / café) batei yadayim (lit. "hand-houses") for modern kfafot (gloves) yatzta (יצתה) rather than the modern conjugation yatz'a (יצאה) ("she went out") rotev (רוטב) meaning soup in place of modern marak (מרק) Bar-Ilan University has made a computerized concordance of his works in order to study his language. Awards and critical acclaim[edit] Agnon (left), receiving the Nobel Prize, 1966 Agnon was twice awarded the Bialik Prize for literature (1934[9] and 1950[9][10]). He was also twice awarded the Israel Prize, for literature (1954[11] and 1958[12]). In 1966, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his profoundly characteristic narrative art with motifs from the life of the Jewish people".[13] The prize was shared with German Jewish author Nelly Sachs. In his speech at the award ceremony, Agnon introduced himself in Hebrew: "As a result of the historic catastrophe in which Titus of Rome destroyed Jerusalem and Israel was exiled from its land, I was born in one of the cities of the Exile. But always I regarded myself as one who was born in Jerusalem".[14] In later years, Agnon's fame was such that when he complained to the municipality that traffic noise near his home was disturbing his work, the city closed the street to cars and posted a sign that read: "No entry to all vehicles, writer at work!"[15] Death and legacy[edit] Shmuel Yosef Agnon Memorial in Bad Homburg, Germany First day cover for Ukrainian commemorative stamp Agnon featured on the fifty-shekel bill, second series Exposition in Bouchach museum Agnon died in Jerusalem on February 17, 1970. His daughter, Emuna Yaron, has continued to publish his work posthumously. Agnon's archive was transferred by the family to the National Library in Jerusalem. His home in Talpiot, built in 1931 in the Bauhaus style, was turned into a museum, Beit Agnon.[16] The study where he wrote many of his works was preserved intact.[17] Agnon's image, with a list of his works and his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, appeared on the fifty-shekel bill, second series, in circulation from 1985 to 2014. The main street in Jerusalem's Givat Oranim neighborhood is called Sderot Shai Agnon, and a synagogue in Talpiot, a few blocks from his home, is named after him. Agnon is also memorialized in Buchach, now in Ukraine, where he was born. There is an extensive (relative to the size of the museum) exhibition in the Historical Museum in Buchach and, just a few yards away, a bust of Agnon is mounted on a pedestal in a plaza across the street from the house where he lived. The house itself is preserved and marked as the home where Agnon lived from birth till the age of (approximately) 19; the street that runs in front of the house is named "Agnon Street" (in Ukrainian). Agnotherapy is a method developed in Israel to help elderly people express their feelings.[18] Beit Agnon[edit] After Agnon's death, the former mayor of Jerusalem Mordechai Ish-Shalom initiated the opening of his home to the public. In the early 1980s, the kitchen and family dining room were turned into a lecture and conference hall, and literary and cultural evenings were held there. In 2005, the Agnon House Association in Jerusalem renovated the building, which reopened in January 2009. The house was designed by the German-Jewish architect Fritz Korenberg, who was also his neighbor.[5] Published works[edit] Novels and novellas[edit] The Bridal Canopy (1931), translated from Hakhnāsat kallāh. An epic describing Galician Judaism at the start of the 19th century. The story of a poor but devout Galician Jew, Reb Yudel, who wanders the countryside with his companion, Nuta, during the early 19th century, in search of bridegrooms for his three daughters. In the Heart of the Seas, a story of a journey to the land of Israel (1933), translated from Bi-levav yamim. A short novel about a group of ten men who travel from Eastern Europe to Jerusalem. A Simple Story (1935), translated from Sipur pashut. A short novel about a young man, his search for a bride, and the lessons of marriage. A Guest for the Night (1938), translated from Ore'ah Noteh Lalun. A novel about the decline of eastern European Jewry. The narrator visits his old hometown and discovers that great changes have occurred since World War I. Betrothed (1943), translated from Shevuat Emunim. A short novel. Only Yesterday (1945), translated from Temol shilshom. An epic novel set in the Second Aliyah period. It follows the story of the narrator from Galicia to Jaffa to Jerusalem. Sometimes translated as Those Were The Days. Edo and Enam (1950). A short novel. To This Day (1952), translated from ʿAd henah. A tale of a young writer stranded in Berlin during World War I. Shira (1971). A novel set in Jerusalem in the 1930s and 1940s. Manfred Herbst, a middle-aged professor suffering from boredom, spends his days prowling the streets searching for Shira, the beguiling nurse he met when his wife was giving birth to their third child. Against the background of 1930s Jerusalem, Herbst wages war against the encroachment of age. Short stories[edit] Of Such and Of Such, a collection of stories, including "And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight", "Forsaken Wives", and "Belevav Yamim" ("In the Heart of the Seas") from 1933. At the Handles of the Lock (1923), a collection of love stories, including "Bidmay Yameha" ("In the Prime of Her Life"), "A Simple Story", and "The Dune". Near and Apparent, a collection of stories, including "The Two Sages Who Were In Our City", "Between Two Cities", "The Lady and the Peddler", the collection "The Book of Deeds", the satire "Chapters of the National Manual", and "Introduction to the Kaddish: After the Funerals of Those Murdered in the Land of Israel". Thus Far, a collection of stories, including "Thus Far", "Prayer", "Oath of Allegiance", "The Garment", "Fernheim", and "Ido ve-Inam" (Edo and Enam). The Fire and the Wood, a collection of stories including Hasidic tales, a semi-fictional account of Agnon's family history and other stories. Tale of the Goat English translations[edit] " Forever (Ad Olam)", Translated and commentary by Yehuda Salu, CreateSpace, 2014. A Simple Story", revised edition, translated by Hillel Halkin, The Toby Press, 2014. Shira", revised edition of SY Agnon's final novel, The Toby Press, 2014 Two Tales: Betrothed & Edo and Enam, contains two short novellas. Twenty-One Stories, a collection of translated stories from "The Book of Deeds" and elsewhere. Israeli Stories, ed. Joel Blocker. Contains the stories "Tehilah" (1950) and "Forevermore" (1954). New Writing in Israel, ed. Ezra Spicehandler and Curtis Arnson. Contains the story "Wartime in Leipzig", an excerpt from "In Mr. Lublin's Store". A Dwelling Place of My People, contains 16 short stories about the Hassidim of Poland, from the Hebrew Volume "These and Those" (1932). Jaffa, belle of the seas: Selections from the works of S.Y. Agnon Tehilah, Israel Argosy, trans. by Walter Lever, Jerusalem Post Press, Jerusalem, 1956 Anthologies[edit] Days of Awe (1938), a book of customs, interpretations, and legends for the Jewish days of mercy and forgiveness: Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and the days between. Present at Sinai: The Giving of the Law (1959), an anthology for the festival of Shavuot. Posthumous publications[edit] Ir Umeloah ("A City and the Fullness Thereof") (1973), a collection of stories and legends about Buczacz, Agnon's hometown. In Mr. Lublin's Shop (1974), set in Germany of the First World War. Within the Wall (1975), a collection of four stories. From Myself to Myself (1976), a collection of essays and speeches. Introductions (1977), stories. Book, Writer and Story (1978), stories about writers and books from the Jewish sources. The Beams of Our House (1979), two stories, the first about a Jewish family in Galicia, the second about the history of Agnon's family. Esterlein Yakirati ("Dear Esther: Letters 1924–1931" (1983), letters from Agnon to his wife. A Shroud of Stories (1985). The Correspondence between S.Y. Agnon and S. Schocken (1991), letters between Agnon and his publisher. Agnon's Alef Bet Poems (1998), a children's guide to the Hebrew Alphabet. A Book That Was Lost: Thirty Five Stories (2008) In 1977 the Hebrew University published Yiddish Works, a collection of stories and poems that Agnon wrote in Yiddish during 1903–1906. ***  ebay 4898 /178

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