The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #34859 Message #4217075
Posted By: GUEST,Levana Taylor
11-Feb-25 - 03:42 PM
Thread Name: Origins: Hang on the Bell, Nellie
Subject: RE: Origins: Hang on the Bell, Nellie
One more appearance of the story of the bell, and the one doubtless most familiar to younger audiences thanks to a certain musical: in one of Eliot's cat poems (written in the 1930s), old Gus the Theater Cat is listing the various roles he's played and includes "When the curfew rang, I swung on the bell." Is this a reference to The Heart of Maryland, the 1895 play mentioned in Hickerson's notes, indicating that the play was still notorious and mocked 3 decades later? And Beatrice Kay parodied it again in the 1940s -- that's remarkable longevity. Anyway, the line of memory is broken now; I'm sure this line in Gus's song goes right past 99.9% of the audience of Cats.