two geniuses addicted to work, scarred by poverty and trained by fame

“What do you think of Charles Dickens and the Prince, 19th century British writer and 20th century American musician?” asks Nick Hornby (UK, 1957), anticipating the question of readers about to seek out his new idea: Dickens and the Prince: a very special type of genius (Anagram, 2026).

The quick answer would be: nothing and everything, but a melodic author High loyalty (1995) ingeniously depicts the lives of the two artists, whom he affectionately calls “Mi gente”, to demonstrate that they have more in common than meets the eye.

“Dickens never realized that he had grabbed Prince, and no one would have thought that Prince would read anything like Dickens,” admits the British author and writer, who sticks to the shared coincidence.

Neither of them reached 60, both lived to be 58, although “those extraordinary creative minds must last a thousand years,” Hornby points out. Marked by poverty, Dickens and Prince were perhaps artists aware of the suspicion (paranoid and certain) of what the world was stealing from them.

They make a lot of money but get a lot of cheap bills. And neither of the two, unredeemed women, knew that their marriage would work. But above all we were both addicted to work, so many prolific people that they didn’t have time to be perfectionists.

Dickens publicó 15 novelas, entre ellas Oliver Twist, Grandes esperanzas y David Copperfield, sin contar con los cuentos, textos periodísticos y obras de teatro. El autor escribía sus novelas sobre la marcha, “para hoy y no para mañana”, dice Hornby.

“Hay cierta humildad en seguir sacando libros como churros, es la marca del escritor que se ve a sí mismo como un entretenedor, con un deber para con su público y como el sostén económico de una joven familia que no paraba de crecer”.

Por su parte, Prince, de cuya muerte se cumplen 10 años este abril, no podía dejar de escribir, de grabar y de tocar. El resultado de esa feroz inspiración fueron 39 álbumes, el último, HITnRUN Phase Two (2015), publicado solo un año antes de morir. 

Hornby compares his carreras family when they were both in their twenties. “Many Purple rain as Oliver Twist there were great successes from the time he appeared, but there were no passengers, they both left permanent cultural referents“.

In addition to the cultural durability and youth of its creators, notes the British writer, there is something more than Oliver Twist (1837–1839) y Purple rain (1984) together: Both owe a lot to cinema.

In the 1980s, Prince took his position on the crest of the hand to force the graphics to rotate a movie made of your average. “Prince kindly Purple rain with the idea of ​​a film in mind,” says Hornby. Then an album was born “with pomp, given that the writer couldn’t do it really well”. It lasted three years later, with Sign the Times (1987), when the singer’s talent reached its peak.

No embargo, no film The album is unlikely to turn into this phenomenon. “Todos we were on ver Purple rain and then we buy the album. Or we bought an album and went to see a movie. It’s an extraordinary synergy,” says Hornby.

Y, in a similar way, without the musical Oliver! (1960) by Lionel Bart and the great success of its film adaptation directed by Carol Reed (1968), it is possible that Oliver Twist but it was not transformed into Dickens’s most famous and representative work.

Along with the three, they produced Prince and Dickens one day, one because of his creative incontinence and the other because he feared that the wind instruments of his creativity would heat up too quickly.

Both, weighing 0.1% that most ganabs in the field, lived convinced that they were stuffing themselves and, unlike many colleagues, decided to plant expensively.

They earn a lot of money, but at the same time they are burdened with a huge economic burden and constant irritation of the system. In Prince, that fury came from him stage late for Hornby to classify “embarrassing”: a war against Warner and showbiz’s mania for making more money than their artist.

Throughout the 1990s, he released albums non-stop while the world looked the other way, while also discovering many of his companions who the only serious money was in concertswhich the albums serve to promote the tour and not the next one. Tras coquetear with bankruptcy at the end of the twentieth, ended by derotand to the system, but at the cost of a big battle.

Dickens, for his part, began to be impressed by the cases after he published his first book. There were theatrical adaptations of his stories all over the country, there were popular pirate editions and blurbs to his name, especially since the public knew these versions before the novels ended up being entertainment.

All of this, paradoxically, helped her create a gigantic readership, just as Prince’s sobriety cemented her aura of pop myth. Hornby suggests, If Dickens knows the internet now, he’d lose some of the courage he neededAnd he also points out that both singers and writers can talk about death, “it’s not hard to imagine that they warmed to the idea of ​​people showing up when things are going well”.

They both grew up among young people He suffers from many traumas that fame can no longer complicate. As Hornby points out, it’s hard to say it was a tougher childhood, especially since Prince was always very reserved about his life before the end, but he came through in the particular place he lived.

Meanwhile, Dickens worked as a child in a betting factory to help his family overcome poverty while his father was imprisoned by the gods. As an adult, you have to work in front of a large family with six children.

Within two decades of his marriage to Catherine Thompson Hogarth, he separated after falling in love with the young actress Ellen “Nelly” Ternan, whom he met when she was a celebrity. Women, to whom Hornby devotes a chapter of the essay, were the weakness of both.

There were many lovers, wives, wives and protectors. For the prince sex and the creative process leave handand for the sake of his co-star Arnold Stiefel, he asked her to stop “getting crazy with chicken”.

But regardless of the sexual level, it seems that the most dreamy and pleasant side of the musician always needs a female figure for rededora. She was fascinated by female voices such as Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush or Sinead O’Connor, who gave her the most famous song. Nothing compares to 2 U.

Beginning with these parallel lives, the British writer pergeña a fun and playful ideawith an obvious desire to join the two artists who have shaped, inspired and forced him to think about his own work, but which here and there is a strong reflection of creativity and contemporary culture.