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@@nathanfleeson1594 thanks, Nathan! Yep it made me see the poem in a new way reciting it in situ... It's such an important poem for Tolkien's approach and philosophy it's easy to forget it came from a specific time and place. Hope to show you Addison's Walk in person one day and maybe we'll have our own profound conversation (I can't promise I'll write a poem about it, though!)

Thanks, Lindsey! I don't script these videos much in advance (I really should, but I'm not that organised!) so a lot of what I say comes to me on the day / on location... glad that line worked for you!

Thank so much! I appreciate the support

Thanks, Nathan! Yes, it was a happy and safe place for her so a natural place to go to when she was ill. Sad that it didn't actually help but at least she died in a place she loved. At some point I might return to Scarborough and talk more about Anne's life there, not just her death. I'm beginning to think we focus too much on famous people's deaths and not enough on their lives!

I think you’re right, we do have a greater fascination with their deaths. Perhaps an interest in how they face that moment. It would be nice to know more about Anne’s life there as well.

Thanks very much for visiting and the lovely comment! I will have another video up next Friday and then have a break for a bit (new videos take a long time for me to film and edit) but then more a bit later in the year.

Absolutely -- tuberculosis is such a horrible disease and we're lucky to have proper treatments for it, now. Poor Keats suffered terribly. And it struck Anne down cruelly. Kafka also had it (for about 7 years). I'm reading Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar at the moment and a character in that gets it! And yet it's something we generally don't think about anymore. Interesting comment about it being the price for genius. That was broadly how Kafka thought of his illness -- that it was the overflow of his feelings. "When the heart and soul can no longer bear the burden, the lungs take over half of it, and then the burden is more or less evenly distributed," he wrote in a letter. Whereas I think Anne just feels her illness was unfair, sad, and rotten luck. Which of course it was.

George Orwell I believe also died of TB

@@Justagirlok101 Interesting -- I did not know that. Amazing how many people it affected and now we don't think about it much at all (treatments are vastly better, today). You may be interested in an article Prof. Adam Roberts wrote about William Morris's death where he speculates about a possible TB diagnosis: medium.com/adams-notebook/what-killed-william-morris-cf48b6666b4b

@@GabrielSchenk yes I believe he was writing 1984 on the remote Scottish island of Jura and he took very sick and had to hike to the road so he could be taken to hospital and died not long after. Thank you for this article looks interesting!

Thanks! And absolutely; the Reverend Patrick Brontë suffered from such enormous loss. The bit where Anne says she doesn't want to die partly for her and her family member's sake, and how they buried her in Scarborough to make it easier for her father, was very moving. And this letter where Rev. Brontë describes the grief but uses it to draw closer to God (as Anne herself did): "tender sorrow was my daily portion; that oppressive grief sometimes lay heavy on me and that there were seasons when an affectionate, agonizing something sickened my whole frame [...] And when my dear wife was dead and buried and gone, and when I missed her at every corner, and when her memory was hourly revived by the innocent yet distressing prattle of my children, I do assure, my dear sir, from what I felt, I was happy at the recollection that to sorrow, not as those without hope, was no sin; that our Lord himself had wept over his departed friend, and that he had promised us grace and strength sufficient for such a day.'"

Me too... I've been to a lot author graves and Anne's is one of the ones with a lot of offerings. It's not possible to do that for the other Brontë's as they are buried inside Haworth church, so maybe Anne gets all the attention that would otherwise have been distributed between herself and her sisters.

Thanks so much! And yes, that's right. He wrote to his friend Max Brod and asked him to burn everything. He also asked his last lover, Dora, to burn some of his work and notebooks which she did in front of him (but actually held some back in secret. However, these were unfortunately seized by the Nazis later on, and went missing). Brod rejected Kafka's wishes for two reasons: 1) Kafka had already asked him and he had already refused, so Brod reasoned that Kafka KNEW he wasn't going to do it and therefore wasn't really asking him to do it when he made the request a second time in his Last Will, and 2) the work was just too good to burn (it included, among other things, Kafka's three unpublished novels which otherwise would have been entirely lost). It's still unclear to me how serious Kafka was in the request, and to what extent it was his depression and anxiety speaking. Dora wrote: "Time and again he said: 'Well, I wonder if I've escaped the ghosts?' This was the name with which he summarized everything that had tormented him before he came to Berlin. He was as though possessed by this idea; it was a kind of sullen obstinacy. He wanted to burn everything he had written in order to free his soul from these "ghosts". I respected his wish, and when he lay ill, I burnt things of his before his eyes. What he really wanted to write was to come afterwards, only after he had gained his "liberty". Literature for him was something sacred, absolute, incorruptible, something great and pure." It sounds to me as if he just wanted to be free of his work and requesting its destruction when he was dying (and he was ill for about 7 years) was a way of letting go. But it's a difficult one to assess and respond to. Similar thing happened to Terry Pratchett (he requested that all the drafts on his hard-drive be destroyed, which they were!)

Thanks! Really appreciate the nice comment and you stumbling on this channel. I'm exactly the same re: Kafka. I had read The Metamorphosis years ago but recently supervised a Master's student working on Kafka and that led me to read much more of his work and Nicholas Murray's biography. Sometimes people just talk about Kafka as "weird" and "unsettling" but he's much more deeper and more varied than that. One day I'd like to go back to Czechia and do a video exploring his writing of "The Castle." I might also do a video about Kafka in Oxford (where I'm based). There's a lot going on here at the moment, for the 100th anniversary, including an exhibition of his manuscripts in the Bodleian (most of his manuscripts are held in Oxford). Thanks again for visiting and commenting!

Thanks, David! Glad I could show you a different side to Prague... and of course there's many other sides to see! I do love it there.

Thanks so much! My videos are about authors but there's definitely a lot of overlap with philosophy as well... Kafka is a great example of that.

Kafka is definitely worth getting to know! Glad you liked the video. I'm afraid I can't remember what the dish I ate at Cafe Louvre was called, but it was very good.

Thanks so much, Nathan! Yeah, that narrative decision mystified me for a long time. Before I read Dracula, I assumed that the whole thing was set at Whitby because so much is made of the connection (mostly by the Whitby Tourism Board). Even after I read it I remembered the Whitby section as being much larger and more important than it was, and it was only after re-reading it that I really saw how small that Whitby section is. You could imagine an editor saying, "cut Whitby so we get to the action in London faster" but I think the novel would have lost a lot in atmosphere and imagery if he had done that. It's Stoker's "Tom Bombadil." It was only by thinking about Whitby in Dracula whilst actually in Whitby that I could understand why Stoker had included it... it's too good a setting to miss out on! Another angle would be to think of Stoker as Lyceum theatre manager and the three primary settings (Transylvania, Whitby, and London) as three acts / three scene changes. Although we go back to Transylvania at the end so Stoker has more freedom in a novel than a stage play. But it may have been in his head to think, "a story needs different locations" especially considering how lavish the sets and costumes were at the Lyceum...!

Thanks, Brian! And thanks for watching :)

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