Art & Creativity Quote by Simon Callow

There is a particular kind of cultural laziness Simon Callow is skewering here: the habit of turning a real writer into a reusable costume. When he says scripts treat the subject as an "all-purpose Victorian literary character", he’s not just complaining about bad research. He’s calling out a prefab archetype - the gaslit study, the mournful genius, the aphorisms on demand - a character built from vibes rather than biography. It’s Victorian-ness as a prop, not a person.

Callow’s phrasing does a lot of work. "Get sent a lot of scripts" signals a weary pattern, the industry as a machine that keeps producing the same cardboard cutout. "Really understand little, if anything" sharpens the indictment: it’s not that writers miss a detail; they miss the man. The bluntness is actorly, too. Callow has spent a career inhabiting people from the inside, where specificity is everything. A role that exists only as a generic "literary" marker is an insult to the craft, not just to history.

The subtext is also about how prestige gets manufactured. Victorian authors function as cultural shorthand for seriousness, class, and refinement; drop one into a script and you borrow gravitas. Callow is pushing back against that cheat code. He’s asking for the messy, inconvenient particulars of a life and a body of work - the stuff that resists easy dialogue and makes a character worth playing.