# Mistakes in classic literature
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227
**Category:** Cafe Society
**Created:** [May 8, 2004, 9:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227 "2004-05-08T21:43:29Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@rowrrbazzle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rowrrbazzle)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2004, 2:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/21 "2004-05-09T02:48:49Z")
Martin Gardner wrote an article titled “Literary Science Blunders” in the Jan/Feb 1995 issue of _Skeptical Inquirer_. It’s reprinted in his collection “Weird Water and Fuzzy Logic”.
He mentions another error in _Julius Caesar_ that Isaac Asimov pointed out. Caesar says, “But I am constant as the northern star”. In Caesar’s time, Polaris was farther from the north celestial pole because of precession of the Earth’s axis and wasn’t described like this.
In _Lord of the Flies_, Golding describes a thin crescent Moon that rises just after sunset. Only a nearly full moon can rise then. Also, because Piggy was nearsighted, his glasses would spread out the sun’s rays, not concentrate them, and thus couldn’t be used to start a fire by themselves. However, one of Gardner’s correspondents pointed out that if you fill the concave side of such a lens with a little water, it can then be used as a focusing lens.
There are numerous errors in the Sherlock Holmes stories. In “The Speckled Band”, a snake is trained by a whistle and drinks milk. Snakes are deaf and don’t drink milk. Asimov wrote a short article about some of Doyle’s errors in the area of chemistry.
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### Author:  [@The\_Controvert](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Controvert)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2004, 3:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/22 "2004-05-09T03:11:40Z")
> [@Revtim](#):
>
> fills his pockets with food.
Actually, it is a little known fact that Robinson Crusoe was, in fact, a kangaroo.
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### Author:  [@Peter\_Morris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peter_Morris)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2004, 3:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/23 "2004-05-09T03:19:49Z")
Talking of Shakespeare, the scene where Hamlet meets the ghost of his father starts at midnight, there’s a few minutes of dialog, and ends as dawn is breaking.
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### Author:  [@China\_Guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/China_Guy)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2004, 3:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/24 "2004-05-09T03:42:49Z")
Kipling’s Kim has the Lama speaking Chinese prayers. Tibetan buddhist monks and lama’s don’t learn Buddhist texts and scriptures in Chinese, they learn them in sanskrit or tibetan translations. I love the book and it always makes me cringe when Kipling makes this mistake…
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### Author:  [@Krisfer\_the\_Cat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Krisfer_the_Cat)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2004, 4:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/25 "2004-05-09T04:30:25Z")
Anne Rice is the Queen of shitty history but she takes the cake in Queen of the Damned. When Maharet tells her story about the beginning of vampirism she has it start at a time before the 1rst dynasty in Egypt. But when she goes home in the story, before becoming immortal, she visits NINEVAH! But Ninevah was a flowering city in the Assyrian period roughly 700BC… some almost 2000 years after the founding of dynastic Egypt.
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### Author:  [@Krisfer\_the\_Cat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Krisfer_the_Cat)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2004, 4:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/26 "2004-05-09T04:31:59Z")
:smack:
Look at me… I missed the “classic literature” part…
:smack:
I’ll just go to bed now…
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### Author:  [@Innanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Innanna)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2004, 7:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/27 "2004-05-09T07:40:09Z")
Well if Ivahoe counts as a classic (:dubious:), then there is the fact that one of the characters rises from the dead with no explanation. You’d think after they had his funeral, someone would have been a little surprised to see him 100 pages later, but they aren’t.\*
And I think that Moby Dick has someone coming back from the dead as well, but I refuse to read it, so I can’t say for sure.
\*It has been a while since I read this, so I may have a detail wrong. Please don’t yell. 🙂
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### Author:  [@Innanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Innanna)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2004, 7:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/28 "2004-05-09T07:41:21Z")
Well, that was an ugly thing. Read a :dubious: in there where the first smiley is, por favor.
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### Author:  [@Lamia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamia)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2004, 8:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/29 "2004-05-09T08:00:29Z")
I don’t have a copy of _Crime and Punishment_ at hand so I may mangle the details, but there was a timeline hiccup during a scene in which Raskolnikov visits the police station. IIRC, the book says he spent a few hours there, but when he leaves it’s much later in the day than it should be. Or much earlier. Actually, I only noticed at all because there was a footnote in the edition I was reading pointing out Dostoevsky’s mistake.
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### Author:  [@Tenebras](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tenebras)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2004, 8:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/30 "2004-05-09T08:23:47Z")
In _Dracula_, Van Helsing’s accent is present or not, apparently depending on Mr. Stoker’s mood while writing it.
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### Author:  [@Snooooopy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snooooopy)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2004, 9:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/31 "2004-05-09T09:56:42Z")
> [@rowrrbazzle](#):
>
> In _Lord of the Flies_ … because Piggy was nearsighted, his glasses would spread out the sun’s rays, not concentrate them, and thus couldn’t be used to start a fire by themselves. However, one of Gardner’s correspondents pointed out that if you fill the concave side of such a lens with a little water, it can then be used as a focusing lens.
Given that they were a bunch of dumbass kids, we can forgive them for not realizing this!
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### Author:  [@Lamia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamia)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2004, 10:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/32 "2004-05-09T10:52:03Z")
> [@Tenebras](#):
>
> In _Dracula_, Van Helsing’s accent is present or not, apparently depending on Mr. Stoker’s mood while writing it.
I don’t know that I’d consider this a mistake, since one of the central conceits of _Dracula_ is that it’s made up of the collected letters, diaries, and recordings of the main characters. I always found it implausible that the other characters would bother writing down Van Helsing’s accent at all (or, in Dr. Seward’s case, imitating it), but it would be even less plausible if they all consistently rendered Van Helsing’s every line in dialect.
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### Author:  [@betenoir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/betenoir)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2004, 12:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/33 "2004-05-09T12:50:39Z")
> [@peter morris](#):
>
> Talking of Shakespeare, the scene where Hamlet meets the ghost of his father starts at midnight, there’s a few minutes of dialog, and ends as dawn is breaking.
So the other day I was in the shower thinking about Hamlet’s soliloque…as one does 😃 …and I got the part about “that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns”, and thought…er…didn’t someone do just that in the first act :dubious:
Kind of undermines the whole thrust of the speech, dunnit 😉 ?
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### Author:  [@Estilicon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Estilicon)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2004, 1:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/34 "2004-05-09T13:16:39Z")
> [@Innanna](#):
>
> Well if Ivahoe counts as a classic (:dubious:), then there is the fact that one of the characters rises from the dead with no explanation. You’d think after they had his funeral, someone would have been a little surprised to see him 100 pages later, but they aren’t.\*
> \*It has been a while since I read this, so I may have a detail wrong. Please don’t yell. 🙂
Ok heretic, liste carefully, \*\*Ivanhoe is a classic. \*\*, no explanation needed, it’s an article of faith.
That character, Athelstane, had received a terrible blow in hsi head. He was left unconscious and, considering it was the dark ages, his companions thought he couldn’t have survived it. The priest who were in charge of his burial realized he was alive but as they would profit from his death they decide to finish the work.
Incidentally Athelstane resurrection is so funny that it’s worth the price of the book.
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### Author:  [@Innanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Innanna)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2004, 2:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/35 "2004-05-09T14:29:49Z")
> [@Estilicon](#):
>
> Ok heretic, liste carefully, \*\*Ivanhoe is a classic. \*\*, no explanation needed, it’s an article of faith.
I thought that because it was enjoyable it might not be a classic. 🙂 Glad to know I was wrong. And my HS English teacher reccomended it just for the resurrection of Athelstane (and thank you for the character’s name. Knew it started with an A, but I couldn’t remember anything else).
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### Author:  [@YWalker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/YWalker)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2004, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/36 "2004-05-09T15:01:27Z")
In Lord of the Flies\*\*, the kids steal Piggy’s glasses and use them to start the fire.
Well, Piggy was nearsighted. That would mean that his glasses would be concave in shape, and would scatter the incident sunlight. You need a convex lens (like a magnifying glass) in order to concentrate the sun’s rays in order to start a fire. They really to have brought along a middle-aged guy with reading glasses to make this work…
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### Author:  [@hawthorne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hawthorne)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2004, 3:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/37 "2004-05-09T15:27:15Z")
> [@peter morris](#):
>
> Talking of Shakespeare, the scene where Hamlet meets the ghost of his father starts at midnight, there’s a few minutes of dialog, and ends as dawn is breaking.
Well, it is set in Denmark. Perhaps it’s high summer (although it is “bitter cold”).
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### Author:  [@Revtim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Revtim)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2004, 3:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/38 "2004-05-09T15:32:46Z")
Since Robinson Crusoe was stripping to swim, I assume it was so his clothes wouldn’t get wet. It would have been kind of pointless to leave some on, I think. I’m still leaning towards mistake.
But, I wonder if this Victorian “sort-of” nakedness is actually why he made the mistake. In DeFoe’s head, nakedness didn’t necessarily preclude pockets.
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### Author:  [@NoCoolUserName](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NoCoolUserName)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2004, 3:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/39 "2004-05-09T15:56:30Z")
> [@rowrrbazzle](#):
>
> There are numerous errors in the Sherlock Holmes stories. In “The Speckled Band”, a snake is trained by a whistle and drinks milk. Snakes are deaf and don’t drink milk. Asimov wrote a short article about some of Doyle’s errors in the area of chemistry.
And a snake cannot climb a rope.
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### Author:  [@MLS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MLS)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2004, 5:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/40 "2004-05-09T17:28:43Z")
> [@peter morris](#):
>
> A Christmas Carol.
>
> So, Scrooge hates Christmas. The ghosts decide to show him the error of his ways.
>
> First they take him back to his chuildhood and show him that he had to work at Christmas while all the other children were having fun.
>
> Then they show him a few years later, the only woman he ever loved ran out on him at Christmas.
>
> Then, they bring him to the present, and show him Bob Cratchett and his family starving to death at Christmas.
>
> Then they take him into the future and show him Tiny Tim dying at Christmas, and himself dead and unmourned.
>
> All of this teaches him that Christmas is really a happy and jolly time after all.
>
> Does this make sense to anyone?
First – He wasn’t working, he was left at boarding school. But his beloved sister came to take him home.
You left out the time in between when they all had such a great time at Fezziwigs.
Then, the woman he loved did not run out on him. He had become corrupted by money and greed, and broke up with her.
Then, they show the Cratchetts having a loving Christmas despite their poverty. Ditto with the nephew and friends.
However: It has been suggested that the Cratchetts were really not all that bad off, for the times. They had several healthy children and only one who was sickly. Not a bad ratio then. Most of all, Mr. C was able to support them all, allowing Mrs. C to be a stay-at-home mom.
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