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Miscellany

Miscellany Family

“What theological objections could the pope himself raise to a birth-control method that simply permitted parents to choose a son in preference to a daughter? After all, God did,” reasoned Clare Boothe Luce, a playwright and U.S. congresswoman, in an article published in the Washington Star in 1978, promoting the use of a hypothetical “man-child pill” that would control population growth by ensuring the birth of a boy.

Miscellany Family

When the seventh-century Japanese prince Shōtoku was having his tomb built, he told the laborers, “Cut here, trim there—I wish for no descendants.”

Miscellany Family

It is said that Alexander the Great once found Diogenes the Cynic examining a pile of human bones. “What are you looking for?” the ruler inquired. “I am searching for the bones of your father,” replied the philosopher, “but I cannot distinguish them from those of his slaves.” On another occasion a woman came to see Diogenes, complaining that her son was poorly behaved, and asked what she could do about it. Diogenes answered by slapping the woman in the face.

Miscellany Family

Alfred D’Orsay Tennyson Dickens, Henry Fielding Dickens, Edward Bulwer-Lytton Dickens, Walter Landor Dickens, and Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens were among the names of Charles Dickens’ sons. Among the brothers of Walter Whitman were George Washington Whitman, Andrew Jackson Whitman, and Thomas Jefferson Whitman.

Miscellany Family

At a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1860, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce asked T.H. Huxley, who came to be known as “Darwin’s Bulldog,” if it was on his grandmother’s or his grandfather’s side that he was descended from a monkey. To which Huxley reportedly replied, “I should feel it no shame to have risen from such an origin; but I should feel it a shame to have sprung from one who prostituted the gifts of culture and eloquence to the service of prejudice and of falsehood.”

Miscellany Family

“Branwell—Emily—Anne are gone like dreams—gone as Maria and Elizabeth went twenty years ago. One by one I have watched them fall asleep on my arm—and closed their glazed eyes—I have seen them buried one by one—and—thus far—God has upheld me,” Charlotte Brontë at the age of thirty-three wrote on June 13, 1849.

Miscellany Family

William and Henry James’ younger brothers, Robertson and Garth Wilkinson, were both wounded during the Civil War—they enlisted in the second and first black regiments at the ages of seventeen and sixteen, respectively. When the fifth sibling, Alice, who suffered from various psychological ailments during her life, died in 1892, Henry cabled William the news. William responded, “I telegraphed you this am to make sure the death was not merely apparent, because her neurotic temperament and chronically reduced vitality are just the field for trance tricks to play themselves upon.”

Miscellany Family

Yemen’s parliament passed a law setting the minimum age for marriage at seventeen in 2009, having been spurred by the national attention given to the story of ten-year-old Nujood Ali, who was granted a divorce from a thirty-year-old man. The child-marriage legislation passed in parliament but was put on hold by conservative members, citing potential inconsistencies with Sharia law.

Miscellany Family

The Book of the General Laws and Liberties Concerning the Inhabitants of Massachusetts, passed in 1647 and published the following year, contained capital law number fourteen, stating that a “stubborn or rebellious son” could be put to death.

Miscellany Family

Shortly after her ex-husband Louis Calhern married Julia Hoyt, the novelist and actress Ilka Chase found a set of visiting cards with the name “Mrs. Louis Calhern” on them. “They were the best cards—thin, flexible parchment, highly embossed,” Chase recalled, “and it seemed a pity to waste them, and so I mailed the box to my successor. But aware of Lou’s mercurial marital habits, I wrote on the top one, ‘Dear Julia, I hope these reach you in time.’ I received no acknowledgment.”

Miscellany Family

Philocles, the nephew of Aeschylus, received the prize for tragedy at the dramatic festival the year that Sophocles presented Oedipus Rex. None of his one hundred or so plays is extant.

Miscellany Family

Although the Oxford English Dictionary lists the etymology of “hooligan” as unascertained, one of the three speculations is that it derives from a popular music-hall song of the 1890s about a rowdy Irish family that went by that last name.

Miscellany Family

While aboard a ship on which a fire broke out, Ivan Turgenev as a boy in 1838 is purported to have shouted in alarm, “Save me, save me, I am my mother’s only son.”

Miscellany Family

In her account of tenth-century Kyoto court life, The Pillow Book, Sei Shōnagon was fond of making lists. “Things later regretted: an adopted child who turns out to have an ugly face”; “Things it’s frustrating and embarrassing to witness: someone insists on telling you about some horrid little child, carried away with her own infatuation with the creature, imitating its voice as she gushes about the cute and winning things it says”; “Moving things: a child dressed in mourning for a parent.”

Miscellany Family

The third-century Greek biographer Diogenes Laërtius stated that one of the favorite sayings of Antisthenes was, “The fellowship of brothers of one mind was stronger than any fortified city.” Laërtius also recalled an anecdote about Socrates—when asked by a young man if he should marry or not, the philosopher replied, “Whichever you do, you will regret it.”