Washington Irving’s ‘American’ Christmas

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tray C. B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Over the years, we've talked about various influences on Christmas as a holiday, particularly in the US and the UK. So we've talked about Charles Dickens, a Christmas Carol, the poem, a visit from St. Nicholas, Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer, Joel Roberts, point set namesake of the point Stia, Nora Ads tradition of tracking Santa's progress on Christmas Eve, and then most recently, our episode on how the Nutcracker Ballet became a Christmas Times staple. Another Christmas influence might come to mind more in connection with Halloween, because it's Washington Irving, author of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which became part of Disney's The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr Toad in nineteen forty nine and absolutely truly terrified me when I was a child. We will talk about Irving's work and his Christmas influence today, including his influence of Charles Dickens. Washington Irving did most of his Christmas related writing pretty early in his career, but we're gonna save the most detailed discussion of it for the last third of the episode after our second sponsor break. Also, if you listen to this show with anybody who's going to be just truly eagerly awaiting Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, that part of the episode might be something to just say for later, like, maybe listen to it yourself first before foisting it on any young years. Sounds like a great plan always. Washington Irving was born on April third, three in New York City. That is the same year that the Treaty of Paris formally ended the Revolutionary War, so he was growing up as the United States was establishing itself as an independent nation. Washington Irving was named after George Washington, and he also attended George Washington's inauguration in New York City just after he turned six. Irving was the youngest of William and Sarah Irving's eleven children, nine of whom survived to adulthood. Both of them had emigrated to North America. Sarah had come from Cornwall, England, and William from the Orkney Islands. Scotland. William was a church deacon as well as being a hardware dealer and a merchant. In seventeen, when he was fourteen, Washington's parents sent him to Tarrytown on the Hudson River, not far from Sleepy Hollow, to try to protect him from a devastating outbreak of yellow fever in New York City. He fell in love with the area, wandering around and exploring and learning the folklore and heritage of its residents, many of whom were Dutch immigrants and their descendants. The young Washington Irving seems to have been really doated on as the baby of the family. His father insisted that all of his young brothers go to college, but Washington was described as kind of a dreamer and lax when it came to his studies, so rather than attending college like his brothers, he started a law apprenticeship at the age of fifteen. First he was a thought law office of Henry Masterson and then with former New York Attorney General Josiah Ogden Hoffman. Irving was chronically ill, and in eighteen o four he went to Europe with the hope of improving his health. He stayed there until eighteen oh six. Then when he got back to the US, he was admitted to the New York Bar reportedly, though just barely. He just barely got past that exam. After he returned to the US, Irving started a satirical periodical with his brother William and their friend James Kirk Paulding. Paul Ding also went on to become a writer in his own right and later served as a Secretary of the Navy under Martin van Buren. They called their periodical Selma Gundi or The whim Whams and Opinions of Launcelot langstaff Esquay. It published about twenty issues in eighteen o seven and eighteen o eight. This periodical has been described as the mad magazine of its day, and it lampooned a number of targets, but a lot of its focus was on the political and social life of New York City. The use of Gotham as a nickname for New York City was coined in its pages. This picked up the name from the story The Wise Men of Gotham, in which the villagers of Gotham Nottinghamshire, fame incompetence in order to get out of a visit from King John, so this nickname of Gotham not meant to be flattering. Don't tell batman um. In eighteen o eight, Irving became engaged to Matilda Hoffman, daughter of his law mentor Josiah Ogden Hoffman, and about a year later he gave up any pretense of practicing law. In eighteen o nine, Irving published a fictional history of the Dutch colonization of New York called A History of New York Work from the Beginning of the World to the end of the Dutch Dynasty. This was narrated by and written under the pen name of Diedrich Knickerbocker. That's one of many pseudonyms that Irving used for different purposes during his career, and one of the many names that he also seems to have picked up from somebody that he knew. Thanks to this book, Knickerbocker became a nickname for New Yorkers of Dutch ancestry, and then a nickname for New Yorkers more generally. The New York Knicks, if you're not aware, is short for the Knickerbockers. Knickerbockers are also baggy trousers that usually stopped just below the knee and are gathered and fastened there with a button or a buckle. This seems to trace back to Irving's work as well, and two illustrations in the book that featured Dutch Men in baggy knee breaches. A History of New York was another satire. It parodied Samuel L. Mitchell's The Picture of New York or The Travelers Guide through the Commercial Metropolis of the United States. But while it was fictional and comedic, it still drew from real people and places that Irving had known while living in New York's Hudson Valley. Irving led up to the publication of this book with something of a pr hoax. He posted a series of notices about a missing historian named Diedrich Knickerbocker, establishing the name and reputation of this fictitious person before the book hit the stands. The same year that A History of New York was published, Irving's fiance, Matilda, died of tuberculosis that happened in April eighteen o nine, and she really seems to have been the love of his life, and Irving's writing about her is full of loss. He later wrote in his journal quote she died in the flower of her youth and of mind. But she has lived for me ever since. In all womankind, I see her in their eyes, and it is the remembrance of her that has given a tender interest in my eyes to everything that bears the name of woman. At another point, he wrote, vote for years, I could not talk on the subject of this hopeless regret. I could not even mention her name. But her image was continually before me, and I dreamt of her incessantly. It doesn't seem like Irving wrote a lot over the next few years. He moved to Washington, D C. In eighteen eleven to work as a lobbyist protecting the interests of his family's merchant business. During the War of eighteen twelve, after Britain invaded Washington, D c. And set fire to the Capitol and the White House and other major buildings, Irving enlisted in the army. He served as an aide de camp to Governor Daniel Tompkins until the war ended in February of eighteen fifteen. After the war was over, Irving went back to Europe. His family had an import export business called P and E. Irving the war had been really hard on most of these types of businesses, but Irving's brothers had also made a series of missteps in their efforts to recover. After the war was over, Irving went to London to try to help them save the business, some thing he really felt was just hopeless from the start. In the end he was right. The business could not be saved, and bankruptcy proceedings started in eighteen eighteen Washington. Irving had been something of a silent partner in this business. He had been earning an income from it without being expected to really do any work, but this bankruptcy meant that income was gone. Poet and novelist Sir Walter Scott, who had become one of Irving's friends and colleagues, encouraged him to try to make a living as a writer, and we will talk more about that after a sponsor break. While living in Europe Washington, Irving wrote the Sketch Book of Jeffrey crayon gent This was largely a series of sketches of English life based on what he had experienced while living there, and it also contained three short stories, Rip van Winkle, the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and Specter Bridegroom. Although the sketch book was published under the pseudonym of Jeffrey Crayon. Both Rip van Winkle, about a man who goes off to the mountains to escape his stereotypically shrewish wife and sleeps for twenty years, and the legend of Sleepy Hollow, about superstitious school teacher Ichabod Crane and his flight from the Headless Horsemen, are attributed to Diedrich Niggerbocker. The two stories are set in Dutch communities in New York, but both are rooted in German folklore. The sketch book also contained five essays about Christmas in England, and we'll talk a little bit more about that later. Although many of the other pieces describe Irving's experiences in England, two of them are focused on indigenous communities in North America, their Traits of Indian Character, and Philip of poconok It. The first is a general discussion of North America's indigenous peoples, especially in New England, and the second is the narrative of King Philip's War, which took place in the sixteen seventies and which we have covered on the show before. In terms of Irving's racial attitudes, both of these writings are just a tangle traits of Indian character. For example, starts off by saying that quote it has been the lot of the unfortunate Aborigines of America in the early periods of colonization to be doubly wronged by the white men. They have been dispossessed of their hereditary possessions by mercenary and frequently wanton warfare, and their characters have been produced by bigoted and interested writers. The colonists often treated them like beasts of the forest, and the author has endeavored to justify him in his outrages. The former found it easier to exterminate than to civilize, the latter, to vilify than to discriminate. The appellations of savage and pagan were deemed sufficient to sanction the hostilities of both, and thus the poor wanderers of the forest were persecuted and defamed, not because they were guilty, but because they were ignorant. Irving's criticisms of Europeans treatment of indigenous people in North America, particularly during the colonial period, are very pointed and often perceptive and astute, but then threaded through that are racist language and stereotypes. Both reflecting the language that was commonly used at the time and reflecting Irving's own paternalistic attitudes. Sometimes it is almost whiplash inducing to read. Like I was trying to find a quote to read as an example, and I was like, man, I just don't even want to repeat this insulting part on the show for the sake of illustration. Irving's descriptions of the state of things as he was writing are also obliviously optimistic at best. While he acknowledges that the same prejudices against indigenous people's all still exist, he frames the federal government's relationship to them is basically fine. Now here's a quote. American government too has wisely and humanely exerted itself to inculcate a friendly and forbearing spirit towards them, and to protect them from fraud and injustice. That's whiplashy in and of itself. So Philip of Poconoca is similarly striking. Irving's treatment of Medicom, who English colonists called King Philip, has been described as groundbreaking and even radical, because it was way way more sympathetic to Medicom and to the Wampanog Confederacy than the historical sources that he would have been using for his research. His approach was probably influenced by the idea of the noble savage, which had come to prominence among Europeans in the eighteenth century and beyond. But his treatment of medicom seems to really go beyond that and into a more nuanced view of the war than would really be expected, with a lot more empathy towards the Wampanog and more acknowledgement of all the context that was involved. And we should also take a moment here to say that Irving's writing really too People of African descent is similarly tangled. When Irving was growing up, New York City was at the heart of the largest slaveholding region of the North, and it had an established community of free black people as well. The Dutch communities that Irving was so fond of in the Hudson Valley were also home to both enslaved and free black people, who were known as the Black Dutch, which is one of several meanings that term has carried. Irving clearly thought their folklore and traditions were as worthy of documentation as those of white people, and he wrote about holidays like Pinkster, which was celebrated by the black community and grew out of Dutch celebrations surrounding Pentecost, But at the same time, Irving wrote about black people in a negatively stereotyped and sometimes even fetishizing way. Irving had essays from the sketch book printed in the US at about the same time as the whole collection was coming out in the UK to try to protect himself and his profits from plagiarists. Its contents were printed on both sides of the Atlantic between eighteen nineteen and eighteen twenty three. Was generally well received, especially the short stories, with later critics describing Irving as the first American short story writer. It also sold well enough that he was able to support himself. In eighteen twenty two, Irving was paid one thousand guineas to write a sequel, Bracebridge Hall or the Humorists, a medley also under the Jeoffrey Crayons pseudonym. Then Tales of a Traveler followed in eighteen twenty four. Tales of a Traveler contains another story attributed to Knickerbocker, and that is The Devil and Tom Walker. Critics mostly panned Tales of a traveler, and Irving seems to have stopped writing for a while. He remained in Europe, though, and Alexander Hill Everett, the U S. Minister to Spain, invited him to Madrid. Spain had just released archival documents on its colonization of the Americas, and Everett wanted Irving to translate them for American use. Irving may have started out following that instruction, but soon he was using these documents not to translate them, but to do research on his own work. The result was a History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, which was published in This was a fictionalized biography of Columbus, sometimes described as a romantic biography. This work is extremely favorable in its embellish treatment of Columbus, making him almost a mythic figure. The book also put forth the fiction that one of the reasons for columbus voyage was to prove that the world was not flat, an idea that has persisted until today, even though people around the world have known the planet was roughly spherical for literally thousands of years. Other work related to Spain followed the Columbus biography, including a chronicle of the conquest of Granada from the manuscripts of Fray Antonio Agapita, that being yet another pseudonym. The This work is described as having a quote comically biased narrator. Irving had to leave Spain in eighteen twenty nine after he was appointed secretary to the American Legation in London. He worked at the American Embassy in London until eighteen thirty two, and then finally returned to the United States. Irving had become famous while he was away, and he returned to find that New York City had grown tremendously in his absence. In the fall of eighteen thirty two, Irving joined Henry Levitt Ellsworth on an expedition to what's now Missouri, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. President Andrew Jackson had tasked Ellsworth with inspecting land that was going to be used for the forced relocation of indigenous peoples under the Indian Removal Act of eighteen thirty This relocation later became known as the Trail of Tears, and it forced tens of thousands of Indigenous people to leave their homes and moved west, including citizens of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole Creek, and Cherokee Nations and others. Irving was invited to accompany this expedition, and he saw it as quote an opportunity of seeing the remnants of those great Indian tribes which are now about to disappear as independent nations or to be amalgamated under some new form of government. While on this expedition, Irving visited Stalk leader black Hawk, who at the time was imprisoned for his role in the black Hawk War, which had taken place earlier in eighteen thirty two. In a letter to a sister, Irving said of this meeting, quote, I find it extremely difficult, even when so near the seat of action, to get at the right story of these feuds between the White and the Red man, and my sympathies go strongly with the latter. At the same time, though, Irving does not seem particularly critical of Jackson's removal policy, and that was something that directly led to the deaths of thousands of people, loss of ancestral homelands, and the total upheaval of families and social structures. Irving wrote several books drawn from this experience, including Tour on the Prairies, which came out in eighteen thirty five, Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains in eighteen thirty six, and Adventures in the Far West in eighteen thirty seven. As these books were published, Irving was living at Sunnyside, which was a farm not far from Terrytown that he bought in eighteen thirty five, and he probably would have been content to live out the rest of his days there. But in eighteen forty two, President John Tyler appointed Irving as Minister to Spain. He had been recommended by Daniel Webster, then Secretary of State, who was a fan of Irving's writing and also knew of his earlier time and experiences in Spain. This is the precarious time for Spain and for the United States relations with it. Queen Isabella the Second was only twelve and there were multiple factions wrestling for control of the Spanish government. Meanwhile, the United States was in the process of annexing Texas, which would ultimately lead it to war with Mexico, and that was something that the United States really wanted Spain to stay out of, meaning they wanted Irving to make sure that Spain just stayed stayed put. Unsurprisingly Washington, Irving found this position extremely stressful and it aggravated various chronic health conditions. But he held out until James K. Polk took office, and then he resigned when it just didn't seem like Polk was going to name a replacement anytime soon. Irving was back at home in Sunnyside. In he published The Life of Mohammed and Mohammed and his Successors in eighteen fifty These were books that he had started working on while living in Spain. This has been described as the first sympathetic biography of the prophet Mohammed to be published in North America. I haven't personally read it. I did read articles about it by Muslim people, and that was the description was that they found a treatment of Mohammed to be generally sympathetic and that that was groundbreaking given the time. Irving spent most of his last years working on a biography of George Washington that was published in five volumes between eighteen fifty five and eighteen fifty nine. This is both a favorable treatment of Washington and one that humanized him, focusing primarily on his military career and his personal life. Irving experienced a series of illnesses as he was finishing this biography, his his health has described as declining throughout the whole process. He died on November eighteen fifty nine at the age of seventy six, after having had a heart attack in his bedroom at Sunnyside. Washington Irving is considered to be the first American man of letters. His work also helped establish American literature as worthwhile in its own right, rather than simply being a minor offshoot of British literature. Because some of his work has preserved Dutch oral traditions in the Hudson Valley region, he has also been described as the first folklorist in the US. His home in Terrytown still stands today, and it is a National Historic Landmark. After a sponsor break, we will get into Washington Irving's contributions to the Christmas holiday, including his connections to Jolly Old St. Nick, especially around November and December. Christmas can seem so ubiquitous in the United States that it feels almost like it must have always been this way. But when Washington Irving was growing up, Christmas really wasn't established as a holiday, especially not as a holiday that involved lots of feasting and merriment and presents and songs. Puritans in New England outlawed Christmas in sixteen fifty nine, and that followed a series of laws that had been passed in England starting in the sixteen forties. These laws in England had designated the Christmas season as a time for fasting and humiliation that effectively outlawed Christmas celebrations in England until the restoration of Charles the Second in sixteen sixty. By the time Irving was born, laws outlining Christmas in the British colonies had been repealed, but many denominations and sects still viewed it with a lot of suspicion. In many places, Christmas was a day for hard work and penitence, not for revelry. This led to strife between denominations that opposed Christmas and those like Anglicans, who were more likely to celebrate it. Dutch colonists in the Hudson River Valley had brought the tradition of center class or St. Nicholas, who brought presents to good children on St. Nicholas Day or December six. Irving mentioned St. Nicholas more than forty times in his History of New York, This includes attributing Dutch colonists decision to settle on Manhattan to St. Nicholas. Irving relates the tale in which Olaf and Cortland has a dream in which quote St. Nick List came riding over the tops of the trees and that self same wagon, wherein he brings his yearly presence to children. In this dream, St. Nicholas smokes a pipe, with the smoke from his pipe, assuming quote a variety of marvelous forms. Those forms include palaces, domes, and spires, and then quote, when St. Nicholas had smoked his pipe, he twisted it in his hat band, and laying his finger beside his nose, gave the astonished Van Cortland a very significant look. Then, mounting his wagon, he returned over the tree tops and disappeared. The History of New York came out in eighteen o nine, but this passage seems to have been added in an eighteen twelve edition. It may have been an inspiration for the poem A Visit from St. Nicholas, which is the poem that begins tow was the Night before Christmas and all through the house. That poem was first published in eighteen twenty three. This poem is often attributed to Clement Clark Moore, who was ends with Washington Irving, which really makes it seem like the poem's pipe in the Flying Sleigh and St Nick laying a finger aside his nose, that might all have been inspired by Washington Irving. However, there is a competing claim that Major Henry Livingston Jr. Is the person who wrote this poem and that that happened all the way back in eighteen o eight. And if that's the case, obviously Washington Irving could not have been the person who inspired it because it was already written when his book came out. We talked about this authorship dispute in our Christmas Triple Feature, and that is going to be our Saturday Classic on December. So, as we said earlier, Washington irving sketchbook contained five essays based on a Christmas he spent in England. They are titled Christmas the Stage Coach, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and the Christmas Dinner. So Christmas celebrations returned to England far more speedily than they did in North America, and Christmas contains some general observations about the holl in England. Here's a sample quote of all the old festivals. However, that of Christmas awakens the strongest and most heartfelt associations. There is a tone of solemn and sacred feeling that blends with our conviviality and lifts the spirit to a state of hallowed and elevated enjoyment. The services of the church about this season are extremely tender and inspiring. They dwell and the beautiful story of the origin of our faith and the pastoral scenes that accompanied its announcement. They gradually increase in fervor and pathos during the season of advent, until they break forth in full jubilee on the morning that brought peace and goodwill to men. I do not know a grander effect of music on the moral feelings than to hear the full choir and the appealing organ performing a Christmas anthem in a cathedral and filling every part of the vast pile with triumphant harmony. He also repeatedly stresses the idea that this is a time to be happy and merry. He talks about being a stranger, no friends around him. Quote, Yet I feel the influence of the season beaming into my soul from the happy looks of those around me. He goes on to say, quote, he who can turn churlishly away from contemplating the felicity of his fellow beings, and can sit down, darkling and repining in his loneliness when all around is joyful, may have his moments of strong excitement and selfish gratification, but he wants the genial and social sympathies which constitute the charm of a merry Christmas. In the stage Coach, Irving describes traveling by coach on a tour of Yorkshire on the day before Christmas and seeing other passengers, all bound for holiday visits with laden with hampers full of delicious foods. He winds up at an end that's quote decorated here and there with a Christmas green. He runs into a friend who invites him to stay for a few days, staying with friends being better than having Christmas dinner alone at an inn. So for Christmas Eve, Irving winds up at the brace Bridges estate. He hears lots of merriment coming from the servants quarters. They are playing lots of games, some of which sound familiar today and some which do not. Quote here, we're kept up the old games of hoodman, blind shoe, the wild mare, hot cockles, steal the white loaf, bob apple and snapdragon. The Yule clog and Christmas candle were regularly burnt, and the mistletoe with its white berries hung up to the imminent peril of all the pretty housemaids. A footnote explains that young men get to kiss young women under the mistletoe, removing a berry from the sprig each time, and when the berries are gone, quote, the privilege ceases. Irving describes the Yule clog, which is an enormous log burned during the holiday, with a bit of its saved to light the next year's log, as well as a range of superstitions associated with it. He also talks about Christmas candles being wreathed in greens, and lots of singing and dancing in general gaiety. His Christmas Day account begins with the household's children going door to door through the house singing a Christmas carol to wake everyone up. Then there are family prayers, followed by another carol, and then a church service later in the day and distribution of beef, bread and ale to the poor. On arrival at the church Irving writes, quote, on reaching the church board, we found the parson rebuking the gray headed sexton for having used mistletoe among the greens with which the church was decorated. It was he observed an unholy plant, profaned by having been used by the druids and their mystic ceremonies, And though it might be innocently employed in the festive ornamenting of halls and kitchens, yet it had been deemed by the fathers of the church as unhallowed and totally unfit for sacred purposes. In Christmas dinner, Irving is at first perplexed when a pig's head is brought out on a platter, until his host explains that it's meant to represent a boar's head, something that had traditionally been served at Christmas in earlier years, including at the Oxford College that he had attended. The families Christmas dinner also includes turkey, pheasant pie, and a wastle bowl. After dinner, the family gathers for the telling of Christmas ghost stories and a quote Christmas mummery or masking. This has another footnote quote maskings or mummories were favorite sports at Christmas and old times, and the wardrobes at halls and manor houses were often laid under contribution to furnished dresses and fantastic disguising. I strongly suspect Master Simons who have taken the idea of his from Ben Johnson's Mask of Christmas to someone living in the US today, where Christmas can feel like a giant commercial juggernaut. None of this really sounds all that dramatic, more like a quaint, old fashioned Blish Christmas. But again, the holiday really wasn't established in much of the US at that point. Irving's writing about it comes across as somewhat nostalgic, emphasizing that he thinks these kinds of traditions should be preserved. Then, as we said earlier, the Sketchbook was really popular, so Irving's fond descriptions of this English holiday spread across his reading audience in the US, and it also had an impact on another writer whose work has been credited with influencing the way Christmas has thought about and celebrated, and that is Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens was kind of a Washington Irving super fan. The Sketch Book was published when he was about eight, and he read it over and over. It is likely that Dickens named his own sketches by Boss after irving sketchbook, and the sketchbook influenced Dickens eighteen thirty five a Christmas Dinner, as well as Christmas scenes in Pickwick Papers in eighteen thirty six. Irving wrote to Dickens in eighteen forty one complimenting him on his work, and dickens reply is effusive. Here is a sample quote. I have been so accustomed to associate you with my pleasantest and happiest thoughts, and with my leisure hours, that I rush at once into full confidence with you, and fall, as it were, naturally, and by the very laws of gravity, into your open arms. Questions come thronging to my pen, as to the lips of people who meet after long hoping to do so. I don't know what to say first, or what to leave unsaid, and am constantly disposed to break off and tell you again how glad I am this moment has arrived. I don't know if Charles Dickens meant this to sound a little suggestive. It's very romantic. It is extremely romantic. Irving and Dickens exchanged flattering letters back and forth until meeting during Dickens's tour of the US in eighteen forty two. In eighteen forty three, Dickens published a Christmas Carol, again influenced by Irving and whose influence on Christmas time we have previously discussed on the show. Their friendship might not have lasted beyond that tour, though if they corresponded after Irving left for that appointment as Minister to Spain. Those letters have not survived. And there's also a second hand report that Irving had found Dickens to be quote outrageously vulgar. Regardless, Christmas became more of an established and public holiday in the US over the course of the nineteenth century, and it became a federal holiday in the US on June seventy. And that's a bit about Washington Irving and his influence on the Christmas season, on the season of holiday cheer and greenery. And I feel like, um, he to have an aneurysm if he walked into like a big box store and saw like the assault of Christmas everything, which I'm not complaining about, by the way, but to him it would feel that way. I bet so Go's a male I do. I have listener mail from Caitlin. Caitlin says, Hi, Holly and Tracy, I belong to the camp of oh More Nursery Rhymes. Uh. This was obviously written after our six Impossible episodes Nursery Rhymes Part two. I had three connected thoughts from the most recent edition. First, I love the idea that the long Mother Hubbard was the author, building off an existing skeleton. Second, little kids are creepy and morbid and love songs about me, him and murder. Anytime I sing anything remotely violent with my preschool class, their eyes light up and they miime along with lee. Little bunny Foo Foo getting bopped on the head as a particular favorite. Third, and this ties together with one and two. When I was in third or fourth grade, we did a unit on poetry and Red Shell Silverstein. Our teacher challenged us to add averse to his poem Sick, figuring that the rhyming couplets and subject matter of not wanting to go to school would be a hit. And the poem Little Peggy and Mackay lists all her eggs and pains and ailments and insists she's too sick. For school until being told it's Saturday, at which point she scampers off to play. I definitely remember this poem from my chart. Caitlin goes on to say I loved this assignment. I was a weird and morbid kid who loved learning about illnesses and medical procedures and strange diseases. And I added several more verses subjecting peggy ants who plague, rickets, broken toes, and smallpox with illustrations to match. I have no idea what my teacher thought, but boy, howdy would I love to go back in time and ask this is say no wonder a poem about animal vampireism and murder has been such a historic faith. Thank y'all for all the work you do bringing episodes to our ears. Caitlin, thank you Caitlin for this email. First an update, I did visit my parents over Thanksgiving. I asked my mom if she remembered what this book was that had something that she read to me, followed by who killed cock Rob? And she did not remember. Um and I did dig through some dusty spaces of their house, as well as some dusty spaces of my house where things have been transported from their house. Obviously I have not successfully found this cock Robin book. However, after we recorded that episode and did q A on it, I started thinking about Grimm's fairy Tales and how many of them are incredibly violent, and I was like, are people gonna think I don't I've never heard about Grim's fairy tales? Are we gonna get like a lot of Grimm's fairy I have? I have complete collections of Grimm's fairy Tales, and I have the Junior per Tree t shirt that I wear. That's a story that involves cannibalism. Um So anyway, yes, uh, there's a lot of weird, violent, morbid stuff and a lot of kids literature rum but bringing up Shell Silverstein in this email, I wanted to read it just so I can talk about Shell Silverstein's other book, Uncle Shelby's a b Z book, Yes, my favorite, which I just showed to Holly. I pulled it off of my off of my shelf downstairs. This contains material that was originally published in Playboy, and wow, it's um it's a It's a book that I really love. I was trying to figure out if there was some little snippet for it. I will read I is for ink, just because I turned to randomly. I love this one. I is for inc. Inc is black and wet, inc is fun. What can you do with ink? What rhymes with ink? And then it says d r dash dash dash um. This one is also has has qus for quarantine. Isn't this a big word? Do you know what this word means? It means come in kids free ice cream? Uh So, anyway, I just I think my favorite is B is for baby. Oh yeah, where it's like I'm gonna misquote it, but it's like the baby is pig, the baby is little, and mommy loves the baby more than she loves you, and it's so dark and wondrous. That's the gist of it. Um. Anyway, if if you if the only shell Silverstein, you've ever experienced our things like where the sidewalk ins and um and the giving tree. They had to when they reprinted this book, they had to put a little thing on the front noting that it was for adults only, Yes, because people were confused. Anyway, Thank you so much, Caitlin for sharing this with us and for making me remember that I have this copy of Dr Shelby saby Z book on the shell and giving me the opportunity to update everyone on No. I still am not sure what that Who Killed cock Robin book was for my childhood. The mysteries continue. If you have ideas, feel free to send them in if you'd like to send us an email. We're at History Podcast at i heeart radio dot com and we're all over social media at miss in History, so you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and you can subscribe to the show on the I heart radio app anywhere else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. 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