'It was a very droll time that we had at the White House...'

 Born on this day in 1811 was Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the prohibitionist bestseller Uncle Tom's Cabin. She was born, I was interested to see, in Litchfield, Connecticut, a small town that wisely changed its name from Bantam township, adopting the name of the great Mercian cathedral city, but inserting, for reasons unknown, an extraneous 't'. 
  Following the sensational success of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and in the second year of the Civil War, Mrs Stowe and family visited President Lincoln at the White House. Alas, it seems he did not greet her with the famous words, 'So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.' However, her daughter recalled, intriguingly, that 'It was a very droll time that we had at the White House, I assure you ... it was all very funny – and we were ready to explode with laughter all the while.' Mrs Stowe herself told her husband in a letter: 'I had a real funny interview with the President.' It seems Presidents were cut from a different cloth in those days. 
  As a boy, I made a rash attempt to read Uncle Tom's Cabin. I don't think I even reached the end of chapter one, and all I remember is a single image, of a man holding a glass of some kind of wine up to the light and admiring a bee's wing floating in it. This struck me as very odd, and the image stayed with me for years – until I realised that what was being described was not the wing of a bee but a flake of the translucent 'crust' of port or old red wine, a sign of long ageing in the bottle. Composed of potassium bitartrate (cream of tartar), it's called 'beeswing' because of its resemblance to the delicate veined wing of a small flying insect. This adds a new, appropriately alcoholic, level of meaning to Betjeman's description of Wilde's 'bees-winged eyes' in his poem, 'The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel', one of the best he ever wrote – 

He sipped at a weak hock and seltzer
As he gazed at the London skies
Through the Nottingham lace of the curtains
Or was it his bees-winged eyes?

To the right and before him Pont Street
Did tower in her new-built red,
As hard as the morning gaslight
That shone on his unmade bed.

“I want some more hock in my seltzer,
And Robbie, please give me your hand —
Is this the end or beginning?
How can I understand?

“So you’ve brought me the latest Yellow Book:
And Buchan has got in it now:
Approval of what is approved of
Is as false as a well-kept vow.

“More hock, Robbie — where is the seltzer?
Dear boy, pull again at the bell!
They are all little better than cretins,
Though this is the Cadogan Hotel.

“One astrakhan coat is at Willis’s —
Another one’s at the Savoy:
Do fetch my morocco portmanteau,
And bring them on later, dear boy.”

A thump, and a murmur of voices —
(”Oh why must they make such a din?”)
As the door of the bedroom swung open
And TWO PLAIN CLOTHES POLICEMEN came in:

“Mr. Woilde, we 'ave come for tew take yew
Where felons and criminals dwell:
We must ask yew tew leave with us quoietly
For this is the Cadogan Hotel.”

He rose, and he put down The Yellow Book.
He staggered — and, terrible-eyed,
He brushed past the plants on the staircase
And was helped to a hansom outside.