Whitsunday

In literature

• 1485: Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur has the Knights of the Round Table witness a divine vision of the Holy Grail on a Whitsunday, prompting their quest to find its true location.
• 1607: Thomas Middleton refers to "the Whitsun holy-days" in Michaelmas Term (IV.i.73).
• 1611: In Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, Perdita imagines that she plays "as I have seen them do / In Whitsun pastorals" (IV.iv.133-34).
• 1617: James I's Declaration of Sports encouraged "Whitsun ales", among other things, as soon as church was over on a Sunday.
• 1633: George Herbert wrote a poem called "Whitsunday", first published in The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations.
• 1759-67: Laurence Sterne's novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman contains several allusions to Whitsuntide.
• 1785: Samuel Johnson records in his Prayers and Meditations that "Between Easter and Whitsun-tide [1773 . . . he] attempted to learn the Low Dutch language." James Boswell reproduces the remark in his Life of Samuel Johnson (1791).
• 1787: The Whitsun Donative was an anonymous satirical pamphlet inspired by Sterne's Tristram Shandy.
• 1844: Whitsun is central to religious life in Swiss author Jeremias Gotthelf's novel Money and Spirit.
• 1849: Charlotte Brontë's novel Shirley contains an episode set against a Whitsun-tide procession in which Anglican parishioners are confronted by dissenters.
• 1853: Charles Dickens sets a scene in the life of King Edward I on "one Friday in Whitsun week" in A Child's History of England.
• 1853: Christina Rossetti wrote a poem called "Whitsun Eve", published posthumously in 1896.
• 1861: George Eliot mentioned Whitsun in her novel Silas Marner.
• 1875: Charles Dickens's posthumous collection The Uncommercial Traveller includes (in Chapter 21) a reflection on "one day in the Whitsun week last past".
• 1875: In Anthony Trollope's book The Way We Live Now many of the aristocrats leave London and travel to their country estates, or those of their acquaintances, for the week of Whitsuntide.
• 1896: H. G. Wells refers to Whitsun in "The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham", later included in The Country of the Blind and Other Stories.
• 1897: In H. G. Wells's The Invisible Man, important events take place around Whit Monday and subsequent days.
• 1911: The short story "The Wrong Shape" in G. K. Chesterton's The Innocence of Father Brown takes place in Whitsuntide.
• 1916: James Joyce's novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man contains reference (in Chapter 2) to a Whitsuntide play at Stephen Dedalus's school, Belvedere College.
• 1922: James Joyce's novel Ulysses contains four references to Whit Monday. Leopold Bloom is stung by a bee on Whitmonday, 23 May 1904.
• 1932: Agatha Christie's short story "Ingots of Gold" references Whitsuntide and Whit Monday as clues in solving the crime.
• 1936: In Gladys Mitchell's Mrs Bradley detective novel Dead Men's Morris (Michael Joseph, 1936, reprinted 1986) the story of the murders of an Oxfordshire solicitor and his rival, a landowner, begins on Christmas Eve, and reaches its climax with a Morris dance performance on Whit-Monday.
• 1938: In Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, Hale is murdered on Whitsun, kicking off events in the novel.
• 1943: Kathleen Raine's poem "Whitsuntide 1942" provides the title for her first poetry collection, Stone and Flower, by referencing 'the world / of stone and flower that compels my thought... what nerve have I, beloved Lord, what sense / to know the holy presence of my God?'
• 1950: The autobiographical novel A Voice Through a Cloud by Denton Welch concerns the author's near-fatal bike accident and its aftermath, which occurred on a Whitsun holiday.
• 1957: Enid Blyton's Five Go to Billycock Hill is a novel in the Famous Five series of children's books set during a camping holiday at Whitsun.
• 1961: Sylvia Plath wrote a poem called "Whitsun", published posthumously in 1971.
• 1964: The Whitsun Weddings is a poem and the title of a collection by Philip Larkin.
• 1965: "Whitsunday in Kirchstetten" is a poem by W. H. Auden, from his collection About the House.
• 1973: Thomas Pynchon refers to Whitsun in his novel Gravity's Rainbow (section 2, 20).
• 2010: In Washington: A Life, a 2010 biography by Ron Chernow, George Washington is said to have included a drinking allowance in an employment contract with one of his gardeners, allowing "two dollars at Whitsuntide to be drunk four days and four nights" (p. 135).
• 2011: Several episodes in author Jeff Wheeler's Muirwood Trilogy revolve around Whitsunday and its significance and impact on Muirwood's inhabitants.
• 2022: Whitsun is mentioned in Gillian McAllister's Wrong Place Wrong Time.