Tuesday Trivia

1. This little book was the first and most famous of a series of five that included The Chimes (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846), and The Haunted Man (1848).
2. What book was the best-seller of the year in America in 1794?
3. Which author entered the University of Montpellier to study for a doctorate in medicine, but was expelled because he had previously been an apothecary?
4. Who was the inspiration for the popular sixteenth-century nursery rhyme Little Miss Muffet?
5. Which author stood trial in Mexico in 1951 for shooting his wife?

Last Week's Answers


What famous opening line of one of America’s most famous poems was actually intended to parody the clichéd opening of a fairy tale?

“Once upon a midnight dreary …” Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven

Which nineteenth-century British novelist’s pet was quite possibly the inspiration for the eponymous fowl in a nineteenth-century American poet’s most famous work?

Charles Dickens’s pet raven, Grip, may have been the inspiration for Poe’s The Raven.

Which British Poet Laureate is credited with coining the term “autobiography” in an 1809 article for the _Quarterly Review_?

Robert Southey


To whom did Charles Dickens offer to reveal the ending of his (unfinished final) novel, _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_? (Hint: she said “No, thank you,” and Dickens died, so no one knows how the novel was supposed to end!)

Queen Victoria.