This week’s musings about the idea of a Victorian internet – in tandem with the fictional website run by a spookily Gary-McKinnon-looking Sherlock Holmes in the current TV series Sherlock (I hope it’s current – or has it finished or something?) reminds me of a discussion we had on this blog quite some time ago. To wit: if there had been such a thing back in the Olden Days, which writers would have had a blog?
Elementary, my dear Watson:
Conan Doyle YES (but it would have been about fairies)
Charles Lamb YES
Oscar Wilde YES
Dr Johnson NO
Virginia Woolf CERTAINLY NOT
Katharine Mansfield YES but she wouldn’t have kept it up properly
GB Shaw YES
Wordsworth YES, of his poem drafts
etc…
Gwaan. Who else?
Advertisement
Emily Dickinson – most definitely YES. But with privacy settings so high no-one could get in.
Bill Shakespeare – NO – he’d be too busy actually, y’know, doing stuff.
Catullus – YES – for all his pals to gossip at. “Did you see what Catti wrote about Lesbia today?”
Dante – YES – and it would be very scary, stalkerish and have bad Microsoft Paint portraits of Beatrice.
Robert Browning – YES – but it would have got him into trouble (cf. Pete Townsend).
Pablo Neruda – NO – but in the 1940s he might have written a guest post for Bloggers for Stalinism.
RS Thomas – yer ‘avin’ a laff, ain’t ya?
Rimbaud – *sigh*, of course…
This is verging on addictive….
Bertrand Russell would have blogged,
Jessica Mitford’s blog would have the best Links List,
Agatha Christie’s The Butler Blogged It, would have links to pharmaceuticals and Sheffield steel and gunsmiths, and Country Life magazine, home staff employment agencies.
Charles Dickens would have Little Bloggit and his sidebar would be full of ads for child welfare organisations and for Barnardos Homes donations.
Dorothy M Sayers blog would have sidebar links to good bookshops, and colleges.
Blog Back In Anger for J. Osborne perhaps?
I think Yes for the following:
Louisa May Alcott – perhaps using a pseudonym
Anthony Trollope
Leo Tolstoy – all of it political
Old Possum: No.
Pound: Yes (unless he suspected Usura of having a hand in it).
Auden: Absolutely not.
Joyce: Oh yes: Finnagain.com
Beckett: Au contraire.
On first reading this post I thought immediately of Aphra Behn. She could have bypassed her nasty, judgmental critics and appealed directly to her public, possibly avoiding her reversal of fortune. And I think it would have been a fun read.
Then I realized that she lived a “few” years before the Victorian era.
Then I remembered all those anonymous Victorian writers we read in school. Oh, I think a Victorian internet would have been a rich and lively thing.
pepys
Conan Doyle would have kept stopping his blog and then starting again. Due to popular demand, like.
Homer — yes, except isn’t it actually a group blog or possibly even a forum?
Dunbar — yes, “The Uncommone Menstrall”.
Oh, excellent all! Ann has taken it a step further, I see, with attention to sidebar content – wonderful – Jessica Mitford, yes.
David, I think you’re spot on with most of yours, Catullus, what a laff… Rimbaud… but you’re right, those Elizabethans were just too busy.
Hi Tristan! I think Pepys’ blog would have had to be anonymous. Some dirty name.
& Jonny, yep.
I’ll also add Chaucer – the temptation to give amusing accounts of daily doings might have been his undoing, a lesson to us all – and Whitman.
oh drat … Victorian writers – apologies for inattention and I now suggest:.
William Morris would have an elaborate background to his Rhyming & Designing blog, advertising for Liberty House in his sidebar and links to the Rossetti’s blogs.