Record Number: 5335

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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

Time

n/a

Place:

other location: in dressing room on film set

Type of Experience
(Reader):
 

silent aloud unknown
solitary in company unknown
single serial unknown

Type of Experience
(Listener):
 

solitary in company unknown
single serial unknown

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Reader / Listener / Reading Group:

Reader:

Charles Spencer Chaplin

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

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Text Being Read:

Author:

Henri Bergson

Title:

Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic

Genre:

Essays / Criticism, Philosophy

Form of Text:

Print: Book

Publication Details

n/a

Provenance

unknown

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Source Information:

Record ID:

5335

Source:

Print

Author:

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=5335, accessed: 22 November 2024

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Additional Comments:

See Charles Chaplin, 'My Autobiography' (New York, 1968), and David Robinson, 'Chaplin: His Life and Art' (London, 1985).