I was dumbfounded to see Gustave Flaubert added to one of those lists of famous dyslexics which are so readily publicised these days. Flaubert, born in , was one of the six children of a Rouen surgeon of whom three survived. Gustave was the middle child of these three. His much elder brother Achille was the favourite son. Later, after the premature deaths of her husband, eldest son and daughter, Gustave becomes the focus of all her neuroses.
He was a long term thumb sucker and felt himself isolated in the family. His mother was his first teacher. He stumbled over his words, balked at learning the alphabet and his father despaired at such laziness.
A lover of stories Don Quijote became a favourite , Flaubert attached himself to young friends with similar enthusiasms. By the age of nine he was determined to become a writer. That year he wrote to his friend Ernest Chevalier asking him to share their writing experiments.
I will write comedies and you can write of your dreams. The spelling was imperfect but no different from the average schoolboy. At that point he had not yet started school. The following year he became a boarder in this strictly traditional establishment where he found the rigidity of the system galling.
His impatience to get on with things reminds us of Yeats and the young Thomas Edison, two more alleged dyslexics. Letters written to Ernest Chevalier at the age of eleven and twelve demonstrate a fluency and style which would be rare nowadays.
