# 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:** 5
### Author:  [@flodnak](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/flodnak)
#### Post date: [May 14, 2004, 7:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/81 "2004-05-14T07:37:26Z")
The whole chronology of Pearl Buck’s _The Good Earth_ is quite screwy. Wang Lung and O-lan are married at the time when the first peaches appear, but their first child is born sometime before the harvest that same year. There’s one possible explanation for that, of course, but you’d think even naive Wang Lung would be suspicious :dubious: The first three children sure seem to be born within a three year time span, and the twins perhaps two years later, but they apparently age at different rates; the oldest sons are behaving like adolescents while the twins are still portrayed as quite small children.
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### Author:  [@Aholibah](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aholibah)
#### Post date: [May 14, 2004, 4:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/82 "2004-05-14T16:02:26Z")
> [@peter morris](#):
>
> Now, here’s one from another mystery novel, _The Nine Taylors_ By Dorothy Sayers. (This was a set book in my Eng Lit class when I was 16) During a class discussion of the plot I pointed this out… brief pause while they thought about it then they all went ‘y-e-a-h’. Nobody could answer this point
>
> If Thoday didn’t know that the bells would kill Deacon, then what was the parrot talking about?
Give me a break.
Thoday worried that Deacon was going to die of exposure or thirst. It never occurred to him that the peal would kill Deacon.
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### Author:  [@Annie-Xmas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Annie-Xmas)
#### Post date: [May 15, 2004, 1:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/83 "2004-05-15T13:37:21Z")
Robert Lewis Stevenson’s “Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde” starts out at 3:00 a.m. in February. Mr. Hyde knocks down a child and a crowd gathers.
Why all these people were out on the street at 3:00 a.m. in February is never explained.
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### Author:  [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)
#### Post date: [May 15, 2004, 3:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/84 "2004-05-15T15:56:25Z")
> [@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.
I’ve never thought of that as a mistake. It’s common in northern European mythology that when the living interact with ghosts/faërie/little people that time does not run smoothly. When the living break off contact with the other side, they may find that what seemed to them to take a long time actually took no time at all in this realm, or that what seemed only a short time of interaction actually took several hours. Shakes may just have been following this traditional view.
Think of it as a precursor to general relativity.
🙂
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### Author:  [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)
#### Post date: [May 15, 2004, 10:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/85 "2004-05-15T22:34:29Z")
> [@Maeglin](#):
>
> I don’t believe that at all. It’s one thing to trot out a _causa metri_ argument, but for a true master and perfectionist like Keats? Nah. The most convincing explanation I ever heard for this apparent blunder was that it in fact was intentional. Keats was frequently accused of being far too undereducated and low class to be a poet. The irony of Keats reading Homer (in _English_, not in Greek like his colleague poets) and misattributing the discovery of the Pacific is just sublime.
Sorry, this makes even less sense to me. Keats was pretending to be ignorant in order to be ironical?
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### Author:  [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)
#### Post date: [May 16, 2004, 12:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/86 "2004-05-16T00:39:38Z")
Does opera count? Puccini had Manon Lescaut and her lover exiled to the “deserts of Louisiana”.
But for true weirdness, try Verdi’s _Un Ballo in Maschera_, about the assassination of the King of Sweden, after political pressure forced him to reset it in colonial Massachusetts. Riccardo, “Governor of Boston”, is warned of the plot by Ulrica the fortuneteller, but fails to escape the dagger of Ankerberg. His last official act is to pardon his killer as he lays dying.
Please, let’s not get into all the pulp SF about humans colonizing Venus that was written before we knew it was eight hundred degrees down there.
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### Author:  [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)
#### Post date: [May 16, 2004, 6:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/87 "2004-05-16T06:11:27Z")
> [@ElvisL1ves](#):
>
> Does opera count? Puccini had Manon Lescaut and her lover exiled to the “deserts of Louisiana”.
Ah, but “desert” doesn’t necessarily mean a dry sandy area.
From the [American Heritage Dictionary](http://www.bartleby.com/61/78/D0157800.html):
> [@](#):
>
> **desert**
>
> 1. A barren or desolate area, especially: a. A dry, often sandy region of little rainfall, extreme temperatures, and sparse vegetation. b. A region of permanent cold that is largely or entirely devoid of life. c. An apparently lifeless area of water.
>
> 2. An empty or forsaken place; a wasteland: a cultural desert.
>
> **3. Archaic A wild, uncultivated, and uninhabited region.**
Puccini may have had meaning # 3 in mind, given the time Manon was set in.
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### Author:  [@Horatio\_Hellpop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Horatio_Hellpop)
#### Post date: [May 16, 2004, 1:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/88 "2004-05-16T13:05:53Z")
> [@ElvisL1ves](#):
>
> Does opera count? Puccini had Manon Lescaut and her lover exiled to the “deserts of Louisiana”.
I’m not familiar with this opera, but Louisiana can refer to all of France’s holdings that eventually got sold as the Louisiana Purchase, and this includes lots of scrubby badlands and deserts including those in Utah, Wyoming and the Dakotas.
With one or two exceptions, every state in the union has some desert land. I don’t believe Louisiana is one of the exceptions.
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### Author:  [@Thirty-Nine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thirty-Nine)
#### Post date: [May 16, 2004, 1:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/89 "2004-05-16T13:23:32Z")
Frankenstein really is loaded with errors. Another classic occurs when Shelly has the doctor sail into the sea off the **Shetland Islands** to dump the remains of his work. He is unable to return to land, and after much panicking and falling asleep, he wakes up in **Ireland**. Apparently he drifted the 1000km journey, and all to no avail, because the Irish immediately arrest him when he lands.
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### Author:  [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)
#### Post date: [May 16, 2004, 2:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/90 "2004-05-16T14:39:36Z")
Well, we \*are \* examining an English translation of an Italian libretto adapted from a French novel, so errors can creep in. The relevant Puccini text in Manon’s death scene is:
Grieux:
_E nulla! Nulla!
**Arinda landa** …
non un filo d’acqua…
O immoto cielo! O Dio,
a cui fanciullo anch’io
levai la mia preghiera,
un soccorso,
un soccorso!_
Manon replies, in part
_Sola, perduta,
abbandonata…
in **landa desolata**!
Orror! Intorno a me
s’oscura il ciel…
Ahimè, son sola!
E nel **profondo
deserto** io cado,
strazio crudel,
ah! sola abbandonata,
io, la deserta donna!
Ah! Non voglio morir!
No! Non voglio morir!_
Funny, I thought the only places the French colonized in the original Louisiana territory were along or near rivers. But opera and romances follow their own logic, don’t they?
Anyone who wants to read Abbe Prevost’s novel _l’Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut_, upon which the opera is based, for the original French phrasing is welcome to. Get back to us on that, will you?
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### Author:  [@Horatio\_Hellpop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Horatio_Hellpop)
#### Post date: [May 17, 2004, 5:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/91 "2004-05-17T17:51:56Z")
Abbe Prevost died in 1763, when Louisiana was still huge and encompassed much of what we know as the American Midwest (including the badlands and deserts of the upper Missouri River, which at least some enterprising Frenchmen checked out). But if he ever referred to “the rolling mesas of Bed-Stuy,” we’d have him nailed!
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### Author:  [@DocCathode](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DocCathode)
#### Post date: [May 17, 2004, 6:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/92 "2004-05-17T18:01:49Z")
> [@ElvisL1ves](#):
>
> Please, let’s not get into all the pulp SF about humans colonizing Venus that was written before we knew it was eight hundred degrees down there.
You can have my diamond-powered-brigantine-specially-modified-to-traverse-the-luminiferous-ether-of-interplanetary-space-and-to-withstand-the-torrid-climate-of-the-Venusian-swamps when you pry the tiller from my cold dead hands.
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### Author:  [@Sauron](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sauron)
#### Post date: [May 17, 2004, 6:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/93 "2004-05-17T18:36:11Z")
> [@DocCathode](#):
>
> RE Frankenstein-
> IIRC, Frankenstein never names the creature.
I’m fairly certain Frankenstein names his creation Adam.
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### Author:  [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)
#### Post date: [May 17, 2004, 7:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/94 "2004-05-17T19:13:53Z")
> [@](#):
>
> Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth” has a lot of research on dinosaurs. Shame it’s all wrong. But hey, if scientists of the time thought an icthyosaurus was part shark, part alligator, and had to turn upside down to eat, well…
> Who was he to argue with scientists?
I think it’s pretty clear that he was just _describing_ it that way. If you’ll recall the passage, the three spelunkers get glimpses of the parts before they see that it’s just one creature. An icthyosaur _does_ kinda look like that. At the time, they still hadn’t had that lucky accident where a glass of water spilled onto one of those slate samples containing icthyosaur skeletons revealed the carbonized the remains of the skin. So they didn’t know the icthyosaur had a dorsal fin, or that it had a fish-like tail (The tail of the skeleton goes into the lower “fluke”, but gives no indication of being part of a fishy tail, so they used to think it had a reptilian tail, and that it “broke” on floating dead specimens, creating that odd jog in the tail.) I don’t know why they thought it had to turn over to eat.
I’m sure that Verne didn’t really think a plesiosaur had a turtle’s shell, either.
By the way, Shelley _never_ says that Frankenstein created his creature by stitching together dead bodies. Victor is silent about exactly how he created his creature (whom he does _not_ name.)
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### Author:  [@Revtim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Revtim)
#### Post date: [May 17, 2004, 11:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/95 "2004-05-17T23:19:32Z")
Yeah, looks like he wasn’t named, or at least not named Adam. I searched the Project Gutenberg ‘Frankenstein’ for “Adam” and only got references to the biblical Adam.
Here’s the text btw: [http://www.gutenberg.net/etext93/frank14.txt](http://www.gutenberg.net/etext93/frank14.txt)
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### Author:  [@Biffy\_the\_Elephant\_Shrew](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Biffy_the_Elephant_Shrew)
#### Post date: [February 10, 2006, 7:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/96 "2006-02-10T19:16:33Z")
> [@Colibri](#):
>
> It’s because Cortez, with two syllables, fits the meter of the verse, while poor Balboa, with three, does not.
Nah. “Or like Balboa” would have scanned just fine in place of “Or like stout Cortez.”
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### Author:  [@DiggitCamara](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DiggitCamara)
#### Post date: [February 10, 2006, 10:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/97 "2006-02-10T22:39:33Z")
> [@YWalker](#):
>
> 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…
or… they could turn them around…
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### Author:  [@DiggitCamara](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DiggitCamara)
#### Post date: [February 10, 2006, 10:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/98 "2006-02-10T22:52:52Z")
> [@Northern Piper](#):
>
> Ah, but “desert” doesn’t necessarily mean a dry sandy area.
>
> From the [American Heritage Dictionary](http://www.bartleby.com/61/78/D0157800.html):Puccini may have had meaning # 3 in mind, given the time Manon was set in.
Did Puccini write the lyrics of his operas? 😕
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### Author:  [@DiggitCamara](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DiggitCamara)
#### Post date: [February 10, 2006, 10:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/99 "2006-02-10T22:52:18Z")
> [@Northern Piper](#):
>
> Ah, but “desert” doesn’t necessarily mean a dry sandy area.
>
> From the [American Heritage Dictionary](http://www.bartleby.com/61/78/D0157800.html):Puccini may have had meaning # 3 in mind, given the time Manon was set in.
Did Puccini write the lyrics of his operas?
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### Author:  [@DiggitCamara](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DiggitCamara)
#### Post date: [February 10, 2006, 11:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mistakes-in-classic-literature/244227/100 "2006-02-10T23:02:48Z")
> [@Krokodil](#):
>
> I’m not familiar with this opera, but Louisiana can refer to all of France’s holdings that eventually got sold as the Louisiana Purchase, and this includes lots of scrubby badlands and deserts including those in Utah, Wyoming and the Dakotas.
>
> With one or two exceptions, every state in the union has some desert land. I don’t believe Louisiana is one of the exceptions.
Luigi Illica and Domenico Oliva, librettists. Which probably discounts opera from classic literature; usually the music is terrific, however the librettos are barely coherent.
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