Who wrote the books of Dumas, Shakespeare and Dickens?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Writing books for famous but lazy authors is a fairly well-known phenomenon and did not appear yesterday. Blacks of literature (as they were politically incorrectly called some three decades ago) creaked with goose feathers back in the fabulous times of great literature - even then the hired writing work was quite developed for itself. And removing a volume of a seasoned classic from the shelf, can you be sure that this is not the fruit of inspiration of an unknown author?

According to the Spanish weekly XL Semanal, nothing human was alien to the greats of the past: such masters of the artistic word as Alexander Dumas - father, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, in the mild expression of the publication, "are not one hundred percent authors of their creations."

The invisible army of Alexandre Dumas

The father of the Three Musketeers, Count of Monte Cristo, Countess de Monsoreau and other books that have been read for many generations, was not entirely clean on his hand in his work, as his contemporary Charles Jean-Baptiste Jacot, a French journalist, said. writer and main ill-wisher of Alexandre Dumas, the elder. Jacot, often published under the pseudonym Eugene de Mirecourt, generally specialized in exposing literary slavery, which, he said, flourished in the middle and late 19th century. Dumas the Father (1802-1870), apparently, was for Mirecourt the most delicious object of criticism. The famous writer did not favor his opponent either, considering him a "master of artistic slander and a virtuoso of slander."

Alexander Dumas - senior

“Dumas surrounded himself with a whole staff of talented slaves, capable of skillfully working with words and creating literary masterpieces. To advance themselves into popular and famous writers, they lacked two things: money and position in society. This was exactly what the eldest of the two Aleksandrov used, forcing geniuses penniless to work for him,”writes XL Semanal. On the litkonveyor of Dumas-father, day and night (to be exact, 12-14 hours a day) 63 “blacks from writing” creaked with their feathers, realizing plots and episodes invented by the master, writing out dialogues that he could only read, pretend, that he edited them, and send someone to take the manuscript to the publisher."

Most of the writers who worked for the Alexandre Dumas brand remained anonymous, but a few still went out to the public with their creations. The most famous is considered Auguste Macke (1813-1888), who worked "for a teacher" for ten years, helping to write a trilogy about D'Artagnan and his friends, as well as about the Count of Monte Cristo. At the end of a decade of fruitful cooperation, the literary black man rebelled against the enslaver and sued him. Macke demanded that his name also appear on the cover of the above works and that Dumas pay a fair amount of remuneration to the assistant. As a result of consideration of the dispute, both the plaintiff and the defendant lost. The court, co-authored by Auguste Mack, refused, but awarded some monetary compensation in his favor. After that, the creative tandem broke up, and its participants lost a second time: the star of Dumas the elder began to roll, and Macke, with his original works alone and without a loud name, did not achieve fame.

Auguste Macket

They say that in literary French circles they liked to gossip about the fact that Dumas at one time built a whole hierarchical structure in which the creators of the skeleton of works, builders of "meat" on it, assistants were located at different stages … There was even such an anecdote: "At the cemetery to Dumas -Father, who has just buried one of his inner circle litrabs, a man comes up and says: "Well, now it's time to get to work, monsieur!" - "And you, damn it, who?" - asks the surprised writer. The man, sighing in frustration, replies: "So I thought that you did not know me: I am the Negro of that Negro whom you just took on the last journey."

William Shakespeare

Literary critic Calvin Hoffman, in his work "The Man Who Was Shakespeare" (1564-1593). Author of the tragedies Tamburlaine the Great and The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus. Crypto-Catholic, homosexual and spy. The set of these three qualities easily explains why Marlowe's life was so short. However, she could have broken off faster, if he did not use his acting talent for the sake of his own survival. Christopher Marlowe was once suspected of participating in a conspiracy against Queen Elizabeth. He was threatened with the death penalty, but, according to Hoffman, he managed to get ahead of fate and outwit the executioners, arranging his own sudden death.

William Shakespeare

As Hoffman writes, “in one of Deptford's taverns, in the presence of three witnesses, Marlowe started a fight, during which he allegedly inadvertently handled a knife and allegedly stuck it in his eye. Then he fell to the floor, twitched for a while in a pool of blood and fell silent. The accomplices took the body to the cemetery and buried … the body of someone else. Marlowe secretly left England and from abroad contacted his acquaintance William Shakespeare (1564-1616), to whom he began to transfer his works and which he had to sign with his name.

The version is quite plausible, says Hoffman, who discovered that the first known fruits of Shakespeare's work appeared only after the death (official, at least) of Marlowe. Hoffman, examining the work of Shakespeare, finds in him a large number of inclusions of poetic blocks, written by Christopher Marlowe, "in an incomprehensible way migrated into the works of another author." The researcher also draws attention to Shakespeare's addiction to white verse, introduced into literary use in England by Christopher Marlowe.

Harry Houdini and Howard Phillips Lovecraft

In 1923, American journalist Jacob Clark Hennenberg, a great lover of horror literature and descriptions of "weird fantastic incidents in real life", founded Weird Tales magazine. From the very first issue, Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937), the great master of horror, mysticism, body horror, and fantasy, began to write articles for this publication. Howard published there, for example, the story The Call of Cthulhu (1926), which influenced the subsequent development of the fantasy genre. But at the first stage of work in "Strange Stories" Lovecraft was an almost unknown writer who gave out a lot of high-quality texts for a small fee (usually half a cent per word). He did not refuse editing, and at times - and rewriting works for other authors who later grew into celebrities (for example, Robert Bloch and Clark Ashton Smith).

Harry Houdini

In 1924 J. S. Henneberger recruited the illusionist, magician, philanthropist and actor Harry Houdini (1874–1926), with whom he launched a crusade against spiritualism and the paranormal. Houdini began to publish his own column, in which he answered questions of this kind to the readers of the magazine. This was not enough for Henneberger: he wanted Houdini to write some stories himself in order to attract more attention to the publication. The magician honestly admitted that he did not notice his literary talents. Henneberger then turned to Lovecraft, who wrote a story called Buried with the Pharaohs. The story was published in two issues and was presented as the author's story of Houdini about the experiments that he conducted while developing his tricks.

The illusionist liked the text created by Lovecraft and published under his name so much that he immediately ordered the writer to write a novel. Of course, Harry Houdini should have been its author. Lovecraft agreed to work as a literary man, but managed to do only three chapters of the future book "Cancer of Superstition" when Houdini died unexpectedly. Lovecraft finished the work, but this novel appears in the archives now as his work, written by order of Harry Houdini.

How Charles Dickens wrote a novel after his death

Perhaps there is no more mysterious episode in the history of literary serfdom than the one that happened with the participation of Charles Dickens (1802-1870), who even after his death (in a very peculiar way) worked on what was to become his fifteenth and most ambitious novel "The Mystery of Edwin Drood".

In 1872, the printer Thomas Power James of Brattleboro, Vermont, announced that he had been instructed by him to complete an unfinished novel by the deceased during a seance with the spirit of Dickens. James said that "the spirit of Dickens promised to convey to him the general mood for the novel and announced his readiness to appear every time the publisher as soon as the need arises." The sessions began on Christmas Eve in the year of the writer's death (1870) and lasted for several weeks. Night after night, James went into a trance and, presumably possessed by the spirit of Dickens, wrote page after page. The handwriting that James wrote was very different from his own. But, it’s true, it didn’t look like Dickensian either.

"The Secrets of Edwin Drood". Edition of 1870

In October 1873 T. P. James published a sequel to The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which became an instant bestseller in the United States. After which he never took up the pen again, although he received countless offers to "write more."

The rejections have led literary critics to question the veracity of the story behind Dickens's posthumous novel, performed by James, but after a few decades, this version has an unexpected defender - none other than the great detective writer Arthur Conan Doyle. The author of Sherlock Holmes, after experiencing a series of unpleasant incidents, became an ardent supporter of the existence of the paranormal. For example, in 1921 he published a whole book proving the existence of fairies in nature ("The Phenomenon of Fairies") and until the end of his life he believed in the famous hoax with fairies from Cottingley.

Doyle himself once claimed that during a seance he entered into communion with the spirit of Joseph Conrad, who invited Arthur to complete the novel The Waiting, which Joseph had not completed due to sudden death. But Doyle, he said, behaved more modestly than in a similar situation, T. P. James, and did not accept the invitation.