1809

 

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES is born.   

In History of American Literature, Reuben Post Halleck notes that Holmes “was reared in a cultured atmosphere. In middle age Holmes wrote, ‘I like books – I was born and bred among them, and have the easy feeling, when I get into their presence, that a stable boy has among horses.’” (30/258)

 

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WASHINGTON IRVING is engaged to Matilda Hoffman, 18, who dies. He lives another fifty years but never marries. Halleck notes that he carried her Bible with him whenever he traveled. (30/115)

 

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December 28: The New York Evening Post announces that a work has been found by Mr. Diedrich Knickerbocker. In one scene, we meet Wouter Van Twiller, Governor of New Amsterdam: 

The person of this illustrious old gentleman was formed and proportioned as though it had been moulded by the hands of some cunning Dutch statuary, as a model of majesty and lordly grandeur. He was exactly five feet six inches in height, and six feet five inches in circumference. His head was a perfect sphere....

 

His habits were as regular as his person. He daily took his four stated meals, appropriating exactly an hour to each; he smoked and doubted eight hours, and he slept the remaining twelve of the four-and-twenty. (118)

 

Irving traveled to Britain in 1815, where his mother was born. He wrote The Sketch Book there, and did not return to this country for seventeen years.  

NOTE TO TEACHERS: My students were sometimes interested in how sports teams got nicknames – such as the New York Knicks, the Boston Celtics, and the Denver Nuggets. Boston had that Irish influx in the 1840s and 50s, and Denver had a gold rush in 1859. Also: the Philadelphia 76ers, Detroit Pistons, Dallas Mavericks, San Antonio Spurs, and Portland Trail Blazers have names with historical implications, to name just NBA franchises.