I am feeling very well and enjoying life as well as an old man can, but this eternal 'Ben Bolt' business makes me so infernally weary at times that existence becomes a burden. The other night, at a meeting of a medical association at my home in Newark, some one proposed that all hands join in singing 'Ben Bolt,' whereupon I made a rush for the door, and came very near forgetting the proprieties by straightway leaving home. However, I recovered my equilibrium and rejoined my friends. I don't think that General Sherman ever grew half so tired of 'Marching Through Georgia' as I have of that creation of mine, and it will be a blessed relief to me when the public shall conclude to let it rest.
Shortly after being published, "Ben Bolt" vaulted to nationwide popularity, single-handedly establishing Thomas Dunn English's literary reputation and remaining relevant as a classic American song throughout the nineteenth century. It swiftly became the subject of both tribute and parody, with many sets of variant lyrics. [8] [9] "Ben Bolt" circulated widely in unauthorized broadside format and was selected by Rufus Wilmot Griswold for his anthology The Poets and Poetry of America . [10] The ballad was a particular favorite of Abraham Lincoln during his lifetime. [11] [12] [13]
"Ben Bolt" was first adapted into a two act play by the actor and playwright John Beer Johnstone. Johnstone's Ben Bolt premiered at the Surrey Theatre in London on March 28, 1854 in a production by the company of Richard Shepherd and William Creswick with Shepherd in the title role. [14] It was performed widely on stages internationally during the 19th century. An excerpt from Johnstone's play was published in Frank Leslie's The New York Journal in February 1857. [15] It was later published by Samuel French, Inc. in 1899. [16]
In 1894 George du Maurier published his novel Trilby , which uses the song "Ben Bolt" as a plot point. The title character Trilby O'Ferrall is portrayed as incapable of skillful singing when she delivers a tone-deaf version of "Ben Bolt" near the novel's beginning. Later, the failure of Svengali's hypnotic powers is revealed when Trilby is once again incapable of singing "Ben Bolt" with any degree of skill. The success of the novel and the subsequent Trilbyana craze promoted interest in the songs of Trilby. In his old age, Thomas Dunn English contributed a manuscript copy of "Ben Bolt" to an 1895 Trilby-themed charity auction for the benefit of the New York Kindergarten Association. [17]
As a widely known song of the nineteenth century, "Ben Bolt" was popularly used as a cultural reference in books set during that era, whether published in the nineteenth century or decades later. It is quoted in the novel Dr. Sevier by George Washington Cable and by Laura Ingalls Wilder in By the Shores of Silver Lake . [18] [19] Leopold Bloom contemplated Ben Bolt along with other stories about long-lost loves in James Joyce's Ulysses . [20]
James Thurber illustrated "Ben Bolt" as part of a poetry illustration series for The New Yorker . [21]
The song is referenced in the P. G. Wodehouse novels Uncle Fred in the Springtime , when Mr Pott quotes the opening verse to Lord Ickenham, [22] and Full Moon where we are told that "trembling—like Ben Bolt's Alice—with fear at her frown" was a common reaction to Lady Hermione Wedge. [23]
Robert W. Service wrote the poem "Afternoon Tea" in which the narrator, a veteran of World War I, relates an anecdote of his wartime experiences and repeatedly notes humming "Ben Bolt" during the charge. [24]
The song is also cited in the 1881 novel The Sins of the Cities of the Plain , the alleged memoirs of male prostitute Jack Saul and one of the first works of homosexual pornographic literature published in English. In it, one of the characters is said to play and sing a parody of "Ben Bolt" as it had appeared in "The Pearl", a pornographic monthly magazine issued in London during the mid-Victorian period by William Lazenby.
Popular vocalists have also recorded covers of "Ben Bolt," from Geraldine Farrar and John McCormack to Joe Dolan and Johnny McEvoy.
"Jabberwocky" is a nonsense poem written by Lewis Carroll about the killing of a creature named "the Jabberwock". It was included in his 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass, the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). The book tells of Alice's adventures within the back-to-front world of the Looking-Glass world.
"Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" is an English lullaby. The lyrics are from an early-19th-century English poem written by Jane Taylor, "The Star". The poem, which is in couplet form, was first published in 1806 in Rhymes for the Nursery, a collection of poems by Taylor and her sister Ann. It is now sung to the tune of the French melody "Ah! vous dirai-je, maman", which was first published in 1761 and later arranged by several composers, including Mozart with Twelve Variations on "Ah vous dirai-je, Maman". The English lyrics have five stanzas, although only the first is widely known.
A villanelle, also known as villanesque, is a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third lines of the first tercet repeated alternately at the end of each subsequent stanza until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines. The villanelle is an example of a fixed verse form. The word derives from Latin, then Italian, and is related to the initial subject of the form being the pastoral.
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, was an English writer and one of the most widely read humorists of the 20th century. His creations include the feather-brained Bertie Wooster and his sagacious valet, Jeeves; the immaculate and loquacious Psmith; Lord Emsworth and the Blandings Castle set; the Oldest Member, with stories about golf; and Mr. Mulliner, with tall tales on subjects ranging from bibulous bishops to megalomaniac movie moguls.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1895.
"Dover Beach" is a lyric poem by the English poet Matthew Arnold. It was first published in 1867 in the collection New Poems; however, surviving notes indicate its composition may have begun as early as 1849. The most likely date is 1851.
Ernest Christopher Dowson was an English poet, novelist, and short-story writer who is often associated with the Decadent movement.
Tweedledum and Tweedledee are characters in an English nursery rhyme and in Lewis Carroll's 1871 book Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Their names may have originally come from an epigram written by poet John Byrom. The nursery rhyme has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 19800. The names have since become synonymous in western popular culture slang for any two people whose appearances and actions are identical.
Trilby is a sensation novel by George du Maurier and one of the most popular novels of its time. Published serially in Harper's New Monthly Magazine from January to August 1894, it was published in book form on 8 September 1894 and sold 200,000 copies in the United States alone. Trilby is set in the 1850s in an idyllic bohemian Paris. Though Trilby features the stories of two English artists and a Scottish artist, one of the most memorable characters is Svengali, a rogue, masterful musician and hypnotist.
"To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest With the Plough, November, 1785" is a Scots-language poem written by Robert Burns in 1785. It was included in the Kilmarnock Edition and all of the poet's later editions, such as the Edinburgh Edition. According to legend, Burns was ploughing in the fields at his Mossgiel Farm and accidentally destroyed a mouse's nest, which it needed to survive the winter. Burns's brother, Gilbert, claimed that the poet composed the poem while still holding his plough.
A verse novel is a type of narrative poetry in which a novel-length narrative is told through the medium of poetry rather than prose. Either simple or complex stanzaic verse-forms may be used, but there is usually a large cast, multiple voices, dialogue, narration, description, and action in a novelistic manner.
The Mating Season is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the United Kingdom on 9 September 1949 by Herbert Jenkins, London, and in the United States on November 29, 1949, by Didier & Co., New York.
"Eldorado" is a poem written by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in April 1849.
Alice Dunbar Nelson was an American poet, journalist, and political activist. Among the first generation of African Americans born free in the Southern United States after the end of the American Civil War, she was one of the prominent African Americans involved in the artistic flourishing of the Harlem Renaissance. Her first husband was the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. After his death, she married physician Henry Arthur Callis and later was married to Robert J. Nelson, a poet and civil rights activist. She achieved prominence as a poet, author of short stories and dramas, newspaper columnist, women's rights activist, and editor of two anthologies.
Thomas Dunn English was an American Democratic Party politician from New Jersey who represented the state's 6th congressional district in the House of Representatives from 1891 to 1895. He was also a published author and songwriter, who had a bitter feud with Edgar Allan Poe. Along with Waitman T. Barbe and Danske Dandridge, English was considered a major West Virginia poet of the mid 19th century.
English literature is literature written in the English language from the English-speaking world. The English language has developed over more than 1,400 years. The earliest forms of English, a set of Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the fifth century, are called Old English. Beowulf is the most famous work in Old English. Despite being set in Scandinavia, it has achieved national epic status in England. However, following the Norman conquest of England in 1066, the written form of the Anglo-Saxon language became less common. Under the influence of the new aristocracy, French became the standard language of courts, parliament, and polite society. The English spoken after the Normans came is known as Middle English. This form of English lasted until the 1470s, when the Chancery Standard, a London-based form of English, became widespread. Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400), author of The Canterbury Tales, was a significant figure developing the legitimacy of vernacular Middle English at a time when the dominant literary languages in England were still French and Latin. The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1439 also helped to standardise the language, as did the King James Bible (1611), and the Great Vowel Shift.
"The Queen of Hearts" is an English poem and nursery rhyme based on the characters found on playing cards, written by an anonymous author, originally published with three lesser-known stanzas, "The King of Spades", "The King of Clubs", and "The Diamond King", in the British publication The European Magazine, vol. 1, no. 4, in April 1782. However, Iona and Peter Opie have argued that there is evidence to suggest that these other stanzas were later additions to an older poem.
Svengali is a 1954 British drama film directed and written by Noel Langley and starring Hildegard Knef, Donald Wolfit and Terence Morgan. It was based on the 1894 novel Trilby by George du Maurier. Svengali hypnotises an artist's model into becoming a great opera singer, but she struggles to escape from his powers. It was distributed in the United States by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Trilbyana or Trilby-Mania was the fashion for things based on the story Trilby by George du Maurier. This was especially popular during the 1890s. The works included burlesques, cartoons, movies, parodies, plays, sketches and tableaux.
Trilby; or, The Fairy of Argyll is an 1822 literary fairy tale novella by French author Charles Nodier (1780–1844). In it, a Scottish household spirit falls in love with the married woman of the house, who at first has him banished, then misses him, and eventually returns his love, both of them dying at the end. It was a popular work of the Romantic movement, published in multiple editions and translations. It also gave birth to adaptations as multiple ballets, including La Sylphide, and Trilby, and the opera The Mountain Sylph, some of which only retained the basic idea of love between a fairy and a Scottish peasant, but otherwise greatly diverged from the original plot.
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: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)Quite a number of stories there were on that particular Alice Ben Bolt topic, Enoch Arden and Rip van Winkle and does anybody hereabouts remember Caoc O'Leary, a favourite and most trying declamation piece by the way of poor John Casey and a bit of perfect poetry in its own small way.