TRIVIA BITS

The vengeful Madame Defarge worked the names of her enemies into her knitting in what classic novel?

A) “Dracula”

B) “Middlemarch”

C) “A Tale of Two Cities”

D) “The Woman in White”

John Tyler, 10th president of the United States, was the first vice president to succeed to the presidency upon the death of the sitting president. It happened suddenly, after ninth president William Henry Harrison died of pneumonia on Apr. 4, 1841, just one month into his term. No one expected Tyler to become the president of the United States. (People nicknamed him “His Accidency.”) He served one term, then retired to Virginia and ended his career as a member of the Confederate House of Representatives.

Charles Dickens started work on “A Christmas Carol,” his famous tale about Ebenezer Scrooge, in October 1843, finished writing it in six weeks and had it published in time for Christmas. The only original copy of his handwritten manuscript is in the collection of the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City, which displays it every year at Christmastime. It shows his changes and edits, crossing out text with curly-cue lines and replacing it with shorter, more vivid description.

Before 1861, when the federal government took over the job of printing paper currency, banks issued it themselves and the designs of the notes varied widely. Take the Santa Claus banknotes that banks from Maine to Wisconsin issued around Christmastime in the first half of the 19th century. Along with the official language that marked them as currency, they bore illustrations of Saint Nick, sometimes adapted from Currier and Ives engravings. They’re no longer legal tender, but they’ve been known to fetch a fine price among collectors.

Every year since 1900, the Audubon Society has conducted a Christmas Bird Count with birders and “citizen scientists” making a tally in their local areas of the species they spot and how many of each they see. It’s the longest-running wildlife census on Earth. The first Christmas Bird Count was done by 27 volunteers across North America, spotting 89 species and a total of nearly 18,500 individual birds. In 2015, nearly 60,000 volunteers in the United States alone counted 646 species and more than 54.5 million individual birds.

Answer: Madame Defarge was the famous vengeful knitter in Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities.”