MISCELLAn Y
Alfred D’orsay Tennyson Dickens, henry
Fielding Dickens, Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Dickens, Walter Landor Dickens, and Sydney
Smith haldimand Dickens were among the
names of Charles Dickens’ sons. Among the
brothers of Walter Whitman were george
Washington Whitman, Andrew Jackson
Whitman, and Thomas Jefferson Whitman.
Philocles, the nephew of Aeschylus, received the
prize for tragedy at the dramatic festival the year
that Sophocles presented Oedipus Rex. none of
his one hundred or so plays is extant.
William and henry James’ younger brothers,
robertson and garth Wilkinson, were both
wounded during the Civil War—they enlisted
in the second and first black regiments at the
ages of seventeen and sixteen, respectively.
When the fifth sibling, Alice, who suffered
from various psychological ailments during her
life, died in 1892, henry cabled William the
news. William responded, “I telegraphed you
this a.m. to make sure the death was not merely
apparent, because her neurotic temperament
and chronically reduced vitality are just the field
for trance tricks to play themselves upon.”
“Branwell—Emily—Anne are gone like
dreams—gone as Maria and Elizabeth went
twenty years ago. one by one I have watched
them fall asleep on my arm—and closed their
glazed eyes—I have seen them buried one by
one—and—thus far—god has upheld me,”
Charlotte Brontë at the age of thirty-three
wrote on June 13, 1849.
The third-century greek biographer Diogenes
Laërtius stated that one of the favorite sayings
of Antisthenes was, “The fellowship of brothers
of one mind was stronger than any fortified
city.” Laërtius also recalled an anecdote about
Socrates—when asked by a young man if he
should marry or not, the philosopher replied,
“Whichever you do, you will regret it.”
Shortly after her ex-husband Louis Calhern
married Julia hoyt, the novelist and actress
Ilka Chase found a set of visiting cards with
the name “Mrs. Louis Calhern” on them. “They
were the best cards—thin, flexible parchment,
highly embossed,” Chase recalled, “and it
seemed a pity to waste them, and so I mailed
the box to my successor. But aware of Lou’s
mercurial marital habits, I wrote on the top one,
‘Dear Julia, I hope these reach you in time.’ I
received no acknowledgment.”
When the seventh-century Japanese prince
Shōtoku was having his tomb built, he told
the laborers, “Cut here, trim there—I wish for
no descendants.”
Although the Oxford English Dictionary lists the
etymology of “hooligan” as unascertained, one
of the three speculations is that it derives from
a popular music-hall song of the 1890s about a
rowdy Irish family that went by that last name.
“have you been eating candy?” President
John F. Kennedy asked his daughter Caroline
before a dinner during the Cuban Missile
Crisis. She did not reply. he inquired again
and was ignored. “Caroline,” the commander
in chief said, “answer me. have you been
eating candy—yes, no, or maybe?”
The Book of the General Laws and Liberties
Concerning the Inhabitants of Massachusetts,
passed in 1647 and published the following
year, contained capital law number fourteen,
stating that a “stubborn or rebellious son”
could be put to death.
