Literary anecdotes
The word anecdote, which dates from the XVII century (1686), is frequently defined as "a short account of a particular incident or event of an interesting or amusing nature, often biographical". Accordingly, everybody has more than one anecdote to tell. Interestingly enough, however, they seem not to be amusing except to friends, or relatives, and are quite often told just to have fun.
Nevertheless, it is not the same with those anecdotes about well-known people. In fact, more and more books offering different accounts of anecdotes have been published throughout the centuries Some of them are really funny, others aren't, but all are, in my opinion, very entertaining and you may learn quite a lot from them.
Here you are a minute selection of the above-mentioned anecdotes taken from
Hendrickson, Robert. The Wordsworth Book of Literary Anecdotes (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1997 [1st ed. New York: Facts on File, Inc., 1990)
Charles Dickens (1812-1870) Probably no fictional death in history affected readers more in its day than the death of Little Nell (Trent) in Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop. For just one more example, the Irish revolutionary and Member of Parliament Daniel O'Connell is said to have been reading Dickens's book in a railway carriage. Whe he read the passage where the child died, he burst into tears and groaned, "He should not have killed her!" and threw the book out the train window. (op. cit., p. 85)
Sir John Fielding (1722-1780) Sir John Fielding, the younger stepbrother of English novelist Henry Fielding, was a writer himself, publishing several works on criminal justice that gave him an honored place in the history of modern jurisprudence. But Sir John was much more famous in his own time as a justice of the peace or police magistrate, a position he gained on his brother's death, after serving as Henry Fielding's appointed assistant. Sir John, blinded by an accident at age 19, was one of the few literally blind justices who administered over the ages. Known as "the Blind Beak", he was said to be able to recognize some 3,000 thieves by their voices alone. (op. cit., p. 101)
George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair; 1903-1950) Writing to his publisher about his celebrated novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Orwell advised: "It isn't a book I would gamble on for a big sale". From shortly after he died of the tuberculosis until the year 1984, when it became a bestseller again, his book, which added "Big Brother" and many other words to the language, sold well over ten million copies. (op. cit., p. 200)
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) It was in Shakespeare's Othello on December 8, 1660, that the first woman appeared on the English stage. Prince Rupert's mistress Margaret Hughes played Desdemona that night at a new theater in Clare Market, London. Before that boys had always played women's parts and they kept doing so up until 1706. (op. cit., p. 235)
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) Shaw was standing alone in a corner at a cocktail party. "Are you enjoying yourself, Mr. Shaw?" his hostess anxiously asked him. "Certainly", he replied. "There is nothing else here to enjoy". (op. cit., p. 242)
