St. Cecilia’s Day
Jack London died on this date in 1916.
Daily Readings
- Dryden’s Song for St. Cecelia Day
- George Eliot’s (ndp, Marian Evans Cross) O May I Join the Choir Invisible
- London’s Jan the Unrepentant
This is interesting in a bread crumb sort of way. First, I had to go to the actual Pocket University volume and page to discover who wrote “O May I Join.” Then search for “Marian Evans Cross O May I…” and discover she’s George Eliot. Next up, what is St. Cecilia’s Day? For this I turn to my Anniversaries and Holidays: A Calendar of Days and How to Observe Them. Oddly, because this is a quite thorough book, there’s nothing about Cecilia.
[Insert pause while you hum a few bars.]
But! My eye catches George Eliot’s name. She died on this date in 1880. And for those who love rabbit holes, her entry includes reference to a 1924 work by Mudge and Sears titled George Eliot Dictionary which
Includes information regarding the names of characters and places, historical and fictitious, which appeared in the works of George Eliot.
Anniversaries and Holidays: A Calendar of Days and How to Observe Them. Mary Emogene Hazeltine. American Library Association, Chicago. 1928.
You piqued my interest and I looked up the Mudge and Sears Dictionary. They were dedicated! They toured all of the scenes of her novels, stories and poems. It is actually quite an extraordinary piece of work.
*They also have an earlier work the Thackeray Dictionary .
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.75708/page/n11/mode/2up
That’s impressive. I have a number of author biographies by Stanley J. Kunitz, e.g., British Authors of the Nineteenth Century, that run to 600+ pages. And I always find some little tidbit that isn’t recorded anyplace else. People knew how to do research back in the day.