And John Lennon physically assaulted his first wife, and almost beat a man to death for suggesting he was gay. In terms of global reach, recognition, and influence, no one but the Beatles and Elvis can compare. Nearly a decade after his death, there are weeks when half the acts on the Billboard chart sound like they’re doing MJ imitations. Thriller continues today to be the best-selling album of all time around the world, and estimates of between 66 million and 100 million copies sold don’t account for the unimaginable numbers of cassette-taped and file-traded versions in people’s collections, from Boston to Botswana. None of which makes what nearly befell Catherine Dickens less awful.įor all the emotions and issues that will come up as HBO broadcasts the harrowing Leaving Neverland documentary about Michael Jackson’s alleged child sexual abuse this weekend, it’s a stubborn, inconvenient fact that Jackson was to modern popular music and dance what Dickens was to the Victorian novel-a parallel you’ll find strange only if you don’t care for modern pop music. Dickens remains too central to literary culture, while the people he hurt (he was also a crap father) are way back in the 19 th-century London fog.
Scholars took decades to come around to the truth about his long-running dalliance with the actress, but once they did, few communities chose to shut down their annual productions of A Christmas Carol.
Disgusting as the tale is, it’s hard to believe it will do more than glancing damage to Dickens’ standing. Dickens only failed in his efforts because the humanitarian-minded doctor friend he approached turned him down. It wasn’t an uncommon cruelty for men in Victorian England to commit against perfectly sound-minded partners. I’m talking about the research that came out last week showing that when Charles Dickens was dumping his wife of a quarter century, the mother of his 10 children, in order to pursue his affair with an 18-year-old actress, he tried to have his spouse shut away in a mental asylum. It was an ugly rumor that circulated for years, but fans of the great artist were in denial until evidence emerged that seemed impossible to refute.