 |
| The inventor of Scrooge became the richest writer on the planet. |
One of the fundamental courtesies of all good writing—so
obvious that it is never stated in any of the how-to
manuals—is to get your important
facts right. Obviously everyone makes minor mistakes from time to time, but
facts which are central to the argument being put must be right. That is basic.
So I was surprised to read a glaring error in today’s Financial
Times, a paper I regard highly for its informational value—a term which includes accuracy. The article was an extremely interesting one about the
attitude to money of novelists in the past, from Dostoeyvsky to Dickens.
George
Eliot, we learn, was offered an advance for Romola of “£10,000 – about £6 million
in our money”. Cool! Or “cool” until we read that in Jane Austen’s time—she was
not interested in money because she did not need to earn it to live, unlike
Dickens, Eliot and the others—the sum of £20,000 was “£1 million in our money”.
This would mean that in about 1810 the pound was worth one twelfth of what it was worth in the mid-nineteenth century. That is deflation on the
grand scale. But the fact is that there was only a slight weakening in prices
(due to the fact that the economy was growing faster than the money
supply—because the pound was pegged to gold).
So when the author of the piece says Dickens left £100,000
at his death, we do not know if this was £60 million in “our money” (on the
George Eliot computation) or a mere £3 million (on the Jane Austen one). Since
the Financial Times is a paper about money if it about anything, this is
a serious mistake. It is a discourtesy to the reader since it assumes that we
are too inattentive, or innumerate, to notice such glaring discrepancies in a
relatively short piece.
If “manners maketh man” then perhaps it could be said, at
least in the journalistic world, that “accuracy maketh authors”.
No comments:
Post a Comment