Elon Musk’s Bleak House-Cleaning

Near the beginning of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, a novel I am reading for the first time, we meet Mrs. Jellyby—a Victorian era philanthropist obsessed with bringing education, colonizers, and the coffee trade to a remote region of Africa, Borrioboola-Gha. She spends her waking hours either conversing with others about her cause or dictating letters, memos, and policy statements to a drably attired and much put-upon scribe, who, we quickly learn, is her eldest daughter.