Posted on August 7th, 2005 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Untruths, Quotes.
I'm fascinated by misattributions, and I think I'd like to make a web page of them. There are a few particular names for whom quotes are always suspect, because clever lines will be attributed to them regardless of evidence: check twice before believing a given line was uttered by Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, or Dorothy Parker.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
Commonly attributed to Voltaire. But there's no evidence of the quote before the twentieth century; you can check Bartlett's 9th and 10th editions (from 1901 and 1919) online, for example, and not find the quote -- though of course there's plenty of Voltaire, including a quote ("God is always on the side of the big battalions") that is from a letter than Norbert Guterman said contained the "defend to the death" quote; Richard Shenkman says the quote is nowhere in the letter (and I don't read French).
It's a fact that Voltaire was never quoted on the "defend to the death" quote, at any rate, until years after it had been said by Beatrice Hall (under the pseudonym S.G. Tallentyre) in 1907. She did say that it was something Voltaire might have said; ever since then it's been credited to Voltaire.
Gregory Feeley adds:
I too collect misattributions. There are as many interesting-but-little-known ones as there are interesting-and-well-known ones, such as those discussed here. Briefly, two:
"Madame Bovary, c'est moi." Universally treated as a genuine Flaubert quote, it first appeared in a 1907 treatise written by someone who had never known Flaubert. He gave no citation, and the quote runs counter to everything Flaubert ever said, in letter or conversation, regarding his fictional character.
"Close your eyes and think of England." I noticed many years ago that no reference work of familiar quotations includes this, and that while the line is very widely quoted as something said by Victorian mothers to their soon-to-be-married daughters, I never saw it in any Victorian work. It sounded, in fact, less an authentic Victorian remark than a smug twentieth-century characterization of Victorianism (we still like to imagine that Victorian women had a horror of sexuality, even married, which is quite untrue.)
Eventually I came across what is probably its first appearance: an Edwardian (or slightly later) diary, written by a woman who was speaking about her own experience, and rather archly. It was never said by mothers to their daughters.
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