Thread by @HeerJeet

1. This is spot on. For centuries novelists -- running from Sterne and Austen to Dickens to Bellow, Roth &
Roupenian have had a monopoly power on parodying their family, lovers & friends. Now people have more power to strike back!

https://twitter.com/SamAdlerBell/status/1413342298025435145

2. The 19th century version of the Cat Person scandal involved Dickens and a little person, Mrs. Seymour Hill, whose dwarfishness he mocked as "Miss Mowcher" in the serialized version of David Cooperfield (where he also implied she was a pimp).

3. Mrs. Seymour Hill read David Cooperfield in serialization & objected to the cruel jokes about her appearance and the suggestion in the novel that she procured young women for aristocrats.

4. Hill to Dickens, 1849: "you shew up personal deformities with insinuations that by the purest of my sex may be construed to the worst of purposes." Amazingly, Dickens took the criticism to heart & changed the characterization of Miss Mowcher in later chapters.

5. Dickens of course was a popular entertainer & unusually responsive to reader complaints (he also, in answer to Jewish readers who complained, toned down the anti-Semitism a little in Oliver Twist & later created, as redress, positive Jewish characters).

6. The thing is a roman a clef is more like a caricature than it is polemic. You can answer a polemic -- how do you respond to mimicry exaggerated likeness?

7. A Saul Bellow story is instructive. The critic Hilton Kramer was big Saul Bellow booster until Bellow put him as a character in Humboldt's Gift. The likeness was, in many ways, unfair, but also (if you know what a stuffed shirt Kramer was) hilarious.

8. Jospeh Epstein, who had been friends with both Bellow & Kramer but broke with Bellow, tried to respond to Humboldt's Gift with a story about the affair, but the odd things is that in the story the Kramer character seems much worse than the Bellow!