Thomas Chatterton born on this date in 1752.
Charles Graham Halpine born in 1829.
Daily Readings
- Chatterton’s Minstrel’s Song
- Halpine’s Irish Astronomy
- Davis’s The First Piano in a Mining Camp
- Dunne’s On Gold Seeking
From that infallible source:
Thomas Chatterton (20 November 1752 – 24 August 1770) was an English poet whose precocious talents ended in suicide at age 17. He was an influence on Romantic artists of the period such as Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Although fatherless and raised in poverty, Chatterton was an exceptionally studious child, publishing mature work by the age of 11. He was able to pass off his work as that of an imaginary 15th-century poet called Thomas Rowley, chiefly because few people at the time were familiar with medieval poetry, though he was denounced by Horace Walpole.
At 17, he sought outlets for his political writings in London, having impressed the Lord Mayor, William Beckford, and the radical leader John Wilkes, but his earnings were not enough to keep him, and he poisoned himself in despair. His unusual life and death attracted much interest among the romantic poets, and Alfred de Vigny wrote a play about him that is still performed today. The oil painting The Death of Chatterton by Pre-Raphaelite artist Henry Wallis has enjoyed lasting fame.
Thomas_Chatterton
Charles Graham Halpine (Ireland, 1829 – 1868) was a soldier in the American Civil War, and later a poet writing under the pen name, Miles O’Reilly. He used his war experiences “in a humorous vein…. He was a facile versifier with a keen sense of straight-faced burlesque” (Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature, 1962).
Sam P. Davis (1850-1918) was a journalist, politician, and historian. As a humorist, he was associated with the Sage Brush School.
Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936) wrote Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War, a collection of his nationally syndicated Mr. Dooley sketches.
Speaking with the thick verbiage and accent of an Irish immigrant from County Roscommon, the fictional Mr. Dooley expounded upon political and social issues of the day from his South Side Chicago Irish pub. Dunne’s sly humor and political acumen won the support of President Theodore Roosevelt, a frequent target of Mr. Dooley’s barbs. Dunne’s sketches became so popular and such a litmus test of public opinion that they were read each week at White House cabinet meetings
Finley Peter Dunne
From one of two Pocket University volumes on American Wit and Humor…
| Mr. Dooley on Gold-Seeking by Finley Peter Dunne |
“Well, sir,” said Mr. Hennessy, “that Alaska’s th’ gr-reat place. I thought ’twas nawthin’ but an iceberg with a few seals roostin’ on it, an’ wan or two hundherd Ohio politicians that can’t be killed on account iv th’ threaty iv Pawrs. But here they tell me ’tis fairly smothered in goold. A man stubs his toe on th’ ground, an’ lifts th’ top off iv a goold mine. Ye go to bed at night, an’ wake up with goold fillin’ in ye’er teeth.” “Yes,” said Mr. Dooley, “Clancy’s son was in here this mornin’, an’ he says a frind iv his wint to sleep out in th’ open wan night, an’ whin he got up his pants assayed four ounces iv goold to th’ pound, an’ his whiskers panned out as much as thirty dollars net.” “If I was a young man an’ not tied down here,” said Mr. Hennessy, “I’d go there: I wud so.” “I wud not,” said Mr. Dooley. “Whin I was a young man in th’ ol’ counthry, we heerd th’ same story about all America. We used to set be th’ tur-rf fire o’ nights, kickin’ our bare legs on th’ flure an’ wishin’ we was in New York, where all ye had to do was to hold ye’er hat an’ th’ goold guineas’d dhrop into it. An’ whin I got to be a man, I come over here with a ham and a bag iv oatmeal, as sure that I’d return in a year with money enough to dhrive me own ca-ar as I was that me name was Martin Dooley. An’ that was a cinch. |
