ARTICLE - Dickens and Lennon

ARTICLE - Dickens and Lennon

Dickens and John Lennon.

What could these two different people have in common if anything?
Read the following and then make up your mind!

CHARLES DICKENS
Letter, 1842

I have come at last, and it is time I did, to my life here, and intentions for the future. I can do nothing that I want to do, go nowhere where I want to go, and see nothing that I want to see. If I turn into the street, I am followed by a multitude. If I stay at home, the house becomes, with callers, like a fair. If I visit a public institution with only one friend, the directors come down incontinently, waylay me in the yard, and address me in a long speech. I go to a party in the evening and am so enclosed and hemmed about by people, stand where I will, that I am exhausted for want of air. I dine out and have to talk about everything, to everybody. I go to church for quiet, and there is a violent rush to the neighborhood of the pew I sit in, and the clergyman preaches at me. I take my seat in a railroad car, and the very conductor won’t leave me alone. I get out at a station and can’t drink a glass of water without having a hundred people looking down my throat when I open my mouth to swallow. Conceive what all this is! Then by every post, letters on letters arrive, all about nothing, and all demanding an immediate answer. This man is offended because I won’t live in his house, and that man is thoroughly disgusted because I won’t go out more than four times in one evening. I have no rest or peace and am in a perpetual worry.

JOHN LENNON
Lennon Remembers, 1970

The bigger we got, the more unreality we had to face, the more we were expected to do, until when you didn’t shake hands with the mayor’s wife, she starts abusing you and screaming or saying, “How dare they?” There’s one story where we were asleep after a session, somewhere in America, and this mayor’s wife comes and says, “Get ’em up! I want to meet them.” And our publicist Derek said, “I’m not going to wake them up.” And she starts saying, “You get them up, I’ll tell the press!” It was always that, they were always threatening what they would tell the press about us, the bad publicity if we didn’t see their bloody daughter with braces on her teeth. And we had these people thrust on us. And that was the most humiliating experience for me. Like sitting with the governor of the Bahamas because we were making Help! and being insulted by these fuckin’ jumped-up middle-class bitches and bastards who would be commenting on our work and our manners. I couldn’t take it. It hurt me so; I would go insane, swearing at them and whatever. It was awful. All that business was awful. It was a fuckin’ humiliation. One has to completely humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were, and that’s what I resent. I did it, but I didn’t know, I didn’t foresee that, it just happened bit by bit till this complete craziness is surrounding you. And you’re doing exactly what you don’t want to do with people you can’t stand—the people you hated when you were ten.

From http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/conversations/charles-dickens-john-lennon.php

 

 What are both Dickens and Lennon talking about?

What ideas do they share?

What do you think then that they had in common?