Christmas Eve

1822 - Matthew Arnold, poet and critic, is born in Laleham, Middlesex. 1863 - William Makepeace Thackeray, 52, dies of a cerebral hemorrhage at his newly completed home in Palace Gardens, Bayswater. 1881 - Embarking for his celebrated American lecture tour, Oscar Wilde boards the Arizona, whose captain later swears: "I wish I had had that man lashed to the bowsprit on the windward side." 1912 - D.H. Lawrence writes a friend: "I always say, my motto is 'Art for my sake'." 1933 - In his diary Harold Nicolson describes his marriage to the novelist and poet Vita Sackville-West: "had I been a passionate man...we should now have separated, I living in Montevideo as H.M. Minister and she breeding Samoyeds in the Gobi desert."

--A Book of Days for the Literary Year