“In a Pickwickian sense” refers to the joking use of insulting words or epithets.
The phrase comes from Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1836-37).
Samuel Pickwick exchanges barbs in just such a friendly way with Mr. Blotton in Chapter One.
The title of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars refers to the banner of the Irish Citizens Army, of which O’Casey was once a member. The play concerns members of the army before and during the Easter Rising in 1916.
Wilkins Micawber, the schemer in David Copperfield (1861), is said to be based on Charles Dickens’s own father. Wilkins Micawber, the schemer in David Copperfield (1861), is said to be based on Charles Dickens’s own father.
The series of seven children’s books by C. S. Lewis started in 1950 with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and continued with Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, The Magician’s Nephew, The Horse and His Boy, and The Last Battle.
Odysseus descends into the underworld in Book XI of XXIV of Homer’s Odyssey .
C. S. Lewis married Joy Davidman in 1956. She died of cancer in 1960, three years before Lewis’s own death in 1963. Their story is told in Lewis’s A Grief Observed (1961).
In October 1849, the forty-year-old writer Edgar Allan Poe was found lying unconscious near a polling place in Baltimore. According to some reports, he had been fed liquor and dragged to various polling places to vote repeatedly. He was taken to a hospital where he remained semicomatose for three days. On October 7, 1849, at…