Record Number: 5317
Reading Experience:
Evidence:
'Charlie Chaplin was a classic autodidact, always struggling to make up for a dismally inadequate education, groping haphazardly for what he called "intellectual manna"... Chaplin could be found in his dressing room studying a Latin-English dictionary, Robert Ingersoll's secularist propaganda, Emerson's "Self- Reliance" ("I felt I had been handed a golden birthright"), Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Whitman, Twain, Hazlitt, all five volumes of Plutarch's Lives, Plato, Locke, Kant, Freud's "Psychoneurosis", Lafcadio Hearn's "Life and Literature", and Henri Bergson - his essay on laughter, of course... Chaplin also spent forty years reading (if not finishing) the three volumes of "The World as Will and Idea" by Schopenhauer, whose musings on suicide are echoed in Monsieur Verdoux'.
Century:1900-1945
Date:unknown
Country:n/a
Timen/a
Place:other location: in dressing room on film set
Type of Experience(Reader):
silent aloud unknown
solitary in company unknown
single serial unknown
(Listener):
solitary in company unknown
single serial unknown
Reader / Listener / Reading Group:
Reader: Age:Adult (18-100+)
Gender:Male
Date of Birth:16 Apr 1889
Socio-Economic Group:Professional / academic / merchant / farmer
Occupation:actor
Religion:n/a
Country of Origin:England
Country of Experience:n/a
Listeners present if any:e.g family, servants, friends
n/a
Additional Comments:
n/a
Text Being Read:
Author: Title:Lives
Genre:Classics, Biography
Form of Text:Print: Book
Publication Detailsn/a
Provenanceunknown
Source Information:
Record ID:5317
Source:Jonathan Rose
Editor:n/a
Title:The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes
Place of Publication:New Haven
Date of Publication:2001
Vol:n/a
Page:378
Additional Comments:
n/a
Citation:
Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, (New Haven, 2001), p. 378, http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK/record_details.php?id=5317, accessed: 10 November 2024
Additional Comments:
See Charles Chaplin, 'My Autobiography' (New York, 1968), and David Robinson, 'Chaplin: His Life and Art' (London, 1985).