The Secret Victorianist's Christmas Quiz

 To celebrate the festive season, I’ve put together a tricky nineteenth-century literature question for each of the twelve days of Christmas…

1. On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me a partridge in a pear tree, but what kind of tree (‘which graspest at the stones/That name the under-lying dead’) does Tennyson apostrophise in the second canto of In Memoriam A.H.H.?

2. On the second day of Christmas my true love gave to me two turtle doves, but which creature introduces Alice to a mock turtle in Lewis Carroll’s 1865 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?    

3. On the third day of Christmas my true love gave to me three French hens, but how much did the Bronte Society pay this year for a single-sided French devoir on the subject of ‘L’Amour Filial’ penned by Charlotte in the 1840s?

4. On the fourth day of Christmas my true love gave to me four colly birds, but who plans to release her birds on ‘the day of judgement’ in Charles Dickens’s 1853 Bleak House?

5. On the fifth day of Christmas my true love gave to me five gold rings, but who wrote the narrative poem The Ring and the Book in 1868-9?

6. On the sixth day of Christmas my true love gave to me six geese a-laying, but who, in George Eliot’s Middlemarch does Lydgate believe to display the ‘innate submissiveness of the goose’?

7. On the seventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me seven swans a-swimming, but who wrote fairytale The Wild Swans in 1838?

8. On the eighth day of Christmas my true love gave to me eight maids-a-milking, but can you name any of Tess’ fellow milkmaids in Thomas Hardy’s 1891 Tess of the d’Urbevilles?

9. On the ninth day of Christmas my true love gave to me nine ladies dancing, but which debutante is heartbroken when Vronsky chooses to dance with Anna at a ball in the first part of Leo Tolstoy’s 1877 Anna Karenina?

10. On the tenth day of Christmas my true love gave to me ten lords a-leaping, but which lord believed ladies should never be seen eating or drinking ‘unless it were lobster salad and champagne’?

11. On the eleventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me eleven pipers piping, but which Jane Austen heroine was played by Billie Piper in a 2007 adaptation?

12. On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love gave to me twelve drummers drumming, but which war inspired Thomas Hardy’s 1899 poem ‘Drummer Hodge’?

Answers

1: Yew; 2: Gryphon; 3: £50,000; 4: Miss Flite; 5: Robert Browning; 6:Rosamund Vincy; 7: Hans Christian Anderson; 8: Izz, Retty, Marian; 9: Ekaterina Alexandrovna Shcherbatskaya (Kitty); 10: Lord Byron; 11: Fanny Price; 12: Anglo-Boer War

Let me know how you did in the comment section below, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

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