I wonder if it wasn’t more a case of Dickens not wanting to make things look quite as desperate as real life, in a Christmas story at least? Maybe not, I’m no Dickens scholar.
Um. Aren’t there lots of inaccuracies in Poe’s story… I think it was the Murders at the Rue Morgue… I mean, I don’t want to give away who’s doing the killings, but I’m pretty sure they don’t generally behave like that. I believe the story mentions a lot of abuse, training, etc, but still, it sounds to me like an ignorant world’s perception of… um… said murderer’s “type”.
Another Shakespearean error pointed out by Asimov (and used to buttress his claim that Bill wrote his own stuff:
Shakespeare made several references to stars moving in their own spheres. However, in the cosmology of the time, while the planets moved, each in its own sphere, the stars were all suspended within a single sphere. (It was the separate spheres that allowed the planets to have separate motions from each other and from the stars, while the stars all moved together.)
Isaac claims that such an elementary error in 16th century astronomy would have been unthinkable in a learned man such as Bacon or de Vere, but was quite possible in a rube from the country that picked up his knowledge without a formal education.
Not that I recall. I shall try to avoid spoiling anything- One character is near death, then remembers he has important business back home, decides not to die, and gets much better. Another character does die, but his corpse does something important later.
Re Shakespeare
IIRC A Midsummer Nights Dream makes reference to ‘birds scattering at the guns’ report’ and to nuns (some folks claim that this is a reference to the virgin priestesses of Vesta/Hestia).
There are plenty of historical inaccuracies in Henry V, but it's most likely that these are deliberate and were done for added effect.
Gulliver’s Travels has some mistakes. Some are obviously intentional (When working on the etymology of Laputa, Gulliver comes up with a few but ignores the obvious Spanish La Puta, The Whore). Others may be actual mistakes on Swift’s part.
I can’t think of any OTTOMH but there are numerous poems which confuse Hermes Trismigestus, the Greek name of the Egyptian deity Thoth, with the Greek Hermes.
In Frankenstein (First Edition; never did read the more popular Third Edition), Captain Walton (Narrator of the framing sequence) was trying to sail to the North Pole. Not sure how the Polar Ice Caps were percieved by the general public at the time, but I always thought he should have been looking for a Northwest Passage instead.
Shakespeare chose drama over accuracy, and he also had to make sure he didn’t piss off Queen Elizabeth or King James by insulting one of their ancestors or anything of the sort. The big ‘error’ that I’ve heard is that it’s in dispute whether Richard III is really responsible for the killing of the princes in the Tower of London. But hey, it’s the same with historical movies today.
Oh, and I always forget which play it’s in - The Winter’s Tale, I think - but Shakespeare makes kind of a silly error in having a character talk about taking a boat to some location in Italy that’s actually landlocked. :smack:
John Sutherland, who is professor of English literature at UCL, has published a whole series of entertaining books of short essays around the arch premise that apparent inconsistencies or lacunae in classic works of fiction are actually clever (or unconcious) hints by the writers as to what’s actually going on. Often slightly silly, but sometimes genuinely illuminating.
See Is Heathcliff a Murderer?, Can Jane Eyre be Happy?, Where was Rebecca Shot? (on more recent works), Henry V, War Criminal? and Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet?, most published in the Oxford Classics series.
I’m not sure about this one,it’s just something I’ve heard, but Shakespeare’s play about Othello the Moor is a goof - it was based on an earlier story about a white man whose iname was Moore, or something similar.
To revisit Dr. Watson…in A Study in Scarlet, Watson was said to have been shot in the shoulder, while serving in Afganistan. In The Sign of Four, his injury had moved to his leg.
Oh, I have Henry V, War Criminal? It’s terribly entertaining – although some of the things he sees as problems I don’t think are actually that problematic.
As far as inaccuracies in the history plays go, there are several categories: some things are liberties taken for dramatic purposes, some are changes made to avoid getting into political trouble (which didn’t stop a few of the plays from getting fairly substantially censored; check out the highly interesting early performance history of Richard II), and some are inaccuracies inherited from the source material, mostly Holinshed’s Chronicles (and Hall’s, in the case of the Henry VI plays).
And this isn’t so much an error exactly but I’ve always found Shakespeare’s use of “double-time” rather intriguing – the most famous example is Othello, where it seems on the one hand as though a long time has passed, but based on the dialogue the actual timeframe of the play is about two days or so, and Desdemona has hardly had time to have slept with anyone, including her husband according to some interpreters of the play…
According to a Martin Gardner “Mathematical Games” column, two- and three-cent coins were still in circulation in 1906. Bronze two-cent and silver three-cent coins were last minted in 1873. Nickel three-cent coins were last minted in 1889. (see http://www.usmint.gov/faqs/circulating_coins/index.cfm?flash=no&action=faq_circulating_coin) So the $.27 could reasonably be a dime, a nickel, and four three-cent coins.
Hmm, it could be that Hamlet is not discussing whether there is an afterlife (as the ghost of his father is proof of that), but the nature of heaven and hell. Since the ghost seems stuck in the world of the living and unable to go on, he hasn’t returned from the shore of that undiscovered country. Heaven and hell remain a mystery.
Of course, this doesn’t jibe with ‘To sleep, perchance to dream’.
Well, given what Walton says, the polar ice caps wouldn’t have been percieved at all, since he was trying to be the first to reach the North Pole. I imagine that had he not turned back he would’ve found he couldn’t sail the whole way. Also, if he was trying to find a Northwest Passage he would not have encountered Victor and the story would not have been told, so that would’ve sucked.
