Tuesday, May 26, is another boiling hot day in London. I will say, it is a good thing that we ventured to Westminster Abbey early, so we did not bake in the line we stood outside in for 20 minutes. Contrary to the rest of today, which was soooo hot, the poets did not mind the heat as their plaques were inside with their bodies buried elsewhere. My lady, Ms. Jane Austen, and my boys William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens were chilling in the 68 to 70 degree cooling, how lucky they are! Enough about their luck, here is what they really did and what earned them a spot in the famous Abbey.
Jane Austen is best known for her work about women’s lives. She wrote the famous Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma. She made her characters feel real and wrote about the pushback and inspiration that women can and should feel in a time when women were dependent on their husbands and had unrealistic expectations imposed on them. During my tour of the Abbey today, I was most excited to find her memorial, only to discover that she had a plaque next to many statues of men on the walls. How ironic is it that she, in her death, which was July 18, 1817, in Winchester, is still facing the issues that she once jokingly wrote about?
Moving on to the men, one of whom had a giant statue right next to Jane’s tiny plaque, is William Shakespeare. We love him, and if you claim not to have heard of him, you’re lying! A man who needs no introduction, it’s William, who is most famous for his plays Romeo and Juliet, as well as Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Macbeth. He is an English icon who died on April 23, 1616, in Stratford-upon-Avon, which we will visit soon.
Last man of the hour, it’s you guessed it, Charles Dickens. A man who raised social problems such as child labor, working conditions, and class inequality, now that’s a man! He wrote A Christmas Carol, and I will forever be indebted to him for creating the idea for one of my favorite Disney movies ever. He also wrote other things, but I think I covered the most important one, in my opinion. He died on June 9, 1870, and is actually buried in Westminster Abbey! So even today, he gets to enjoy the cooler temperatures while the rest of London almost gets heat strokes.
As Taylor Swift once coined, “The Tortured Poet’s Department” (TTPD), Austen, Shakespeare, and Dickens get to sit forever known with plaques, statues, and burial grounds, in their own version of TTPD, the “Tortured Poet’s Corner” (TTPC).
Theatre in London U of A 