Three Sundays in a Week
Three Sundays in a Week is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe . It was first published by him in 1841 in the Saturday Evening Post . She inspired Jules Verne to write his novel Journey around the earth in 80 days .
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The first-person narrator Robert grows orphaned in England with his great-uncle Rumgudgeon, a sullen and cruel eccentric of not inconsiderable wealth. His greatest treasure, of course, is his daughter Kate. She is only 15 years old, has ingenuity (shrewdness), and 21 year old Robert wants her and she wants to marry him. For this he needs the consent of the quirky and not well-meaning old man. Robert takes heart and asks him to. Rumgudgeon, who has recently started studying physics , tells Robert that he can marry Kate (and collect her dowry ) as soon as three Sundays fall into a week, which means that he seems to postpone the wedding to St. Never's Day . Now, as luck would have it, Kate has two acquaintances, Captains Pratt and Smitherton, who have both just returned from a year-long circumnavigation. Pratt drove around Cape Horn to the west (i.e. following the sun), Smitherton around the Cape of Good Hope to the east ( i.e. towards the sun). When Robert invites the two men for a round of whist the next day , it turns out that Pratt (who has lost a day) believes that the next day is Sunday, while for Robert, Kate and Rumgudgeon the day of the conversation is Sunday, and for Captain Smitherton, Sunday has already passed (he won a day). All three are right - St. Never's Day has come, three Sundays fell into a week - and Robert can bring his Kate home (including dowry).
Autobiographical references
The disdain of his great-uncle for fiction and his inclined grand-nephew is reflected in the rejection that Poe and his literary interests experienced from his foster father John Allan. How the daughter of a great-uncle can be six years younger than his great-nephew remains unclear. Virginia Clemm was 13 when Poe married her, but he was already 30, and Virginia was his aunt's daughter, not a great-aunt. The constellation that the hero is faced with a hated old man also appears in William Wilson and in The Treacherous Heart . The connection of the small (marriage license) with the large (the rotation of the earth) points to Poe's increasing cosmological interests, which come to an end in his work Heureka .
Literary allusions
- Casimir Pierre Périer : À quoi un poète est-il bon? (What is a poet good for?)
- Poeta nascitur, non fit (you are born, not made to be a poet), Latin expression, author unknown
- Doctor Double L. Dee : Probably the author of a physics book used by Poe called Louis Lardner
- He thought, with Horsley, that "the people have nothing to do with the laws but to obey them." Samuel Horsley, (1733–1806), English theologian
- until five immeasurable summers had “dragged their slow length along,” alluding to the opening lines of William Wordsworth 's poem "Lines Composed a few Miles above Tintern Abbey": "Five years have passed; five summers, with the length / Of five long winters ! "
- assurément ce n'était pas sa foible / faible (that was certainly not his weak point), quoted by Poe, author not identified, faible as a noun is otherwise masculine.
- Marie-Antoine Carême was a famous French chef, Louis Eustache Ude wrote a cookbook that is still being published today.
German editions
- Edgar Allan Poe: Works, edited by Kuno Schuhmann and Hans Dieter Müller, Walter-Verlag, Zurich 1966, newly published by Haffmans Verlag, Zurich 1994. Translated by Hans Wollschläger under the title Three Sundays in a Week
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ On Horsley cf. in the English Wikipedia
- ↑ Louis Eustache Ude in "Practically Edible, The Web's Biggest Food Encyclopaedia" ( Memento of the original from March 17, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
