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'I am grateful, and wish to show it': Charles Dickens and Fake News
Ist Teil von
Dickens quarterly, 2020-09, Vol.37 (3), p.223-237
Ort / Verlag
Oxford: Johns Hopkins University Press
Erscheinungsjahr
2020
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Literature Online (LION)
Beschreibungen/Notizen
This article records how Dickens's celebrity and the print culture of the time caused a trivial item of disinformation about him to achieve brief but widespread currency. In 1868 newspapers carried transcripts of a letter signed "CHARLES DICKENS" which indicated that the writer had determined to donate the proceeds of his next public reading to the Printers' Almshouse charity. Despite a speedy denial in the press by the promoters of the readings, the letter circulated widely in the British, American, New Zealand and Australian press. Several contemporary newspapers commended Dickens's generosity and the aptness of its form, given the importance to his career of the work of printers. The letter is included as genuine in the 2002 Pilgrim Edition of his collected letters. Dickens's attitude towards other inaccurate press stories about him is discussed and the motive for the Printers' charity deception considered in the context of two similar contemporary items of fake news.