Ben Bolt

[1] While he was then an active participant in the New York City literary scene and lived much of his life in New Jersey, English is popularly believed to have written the poem while visiting Tazewell, Virginia on a hunting trip, as claimed by regional folklorists.

In the original manuscript, the stanza begins as follows: And don’t you remember the school, Ben Bolt, With the master so cruel and grim, And the shaded nook in the running brook Where the children went to swim?

Thomas Dunn English, writing to Harper's Bazaar, commented: "I must protest against this change, because the school-masters of between sixty and seventy years since were, to my memory, 'cruel and grim'; they were neither kind nor true.

I don't think that General Sherman ever grew half so tired of 'Marching Through Georgia' as I have of that creation of mine, and it will be a blessed relief to me when the public shall conclude to let it rest.Shortly after being published, "Ben Bolt" vaulted to nationwide popularity, single-handedly establishing Thomas Dunn English's literary reputation and remaining relevant as a classic American song throughout the nineteenth century.

In his old age, Thomas Dunn English contributed a manuscript copy of "Ben Bolt" to an 1895 Trilby-themed charity auction for the benefit of the New York Kindergarten Association.

[21] The song is referenced in the P. G. Wodehouse novels Uncle Fred in the Springtime, when Mr Pott quotes the opening verse to Lord Ickenham,[22] and Full Moon where we are told that "trembling—like Ben Bolt's Alice—with fear at her frown" was a common reaction to Lady Hermione Wedge.

[23] Robert W. Service wrote the poem "Afternoon Tea" in which the narrator, a veteran of World War I, relates an anecdote of his wartime experiences and repeatedly notes humming "Ben Bolt" during the charge.

[24] The song is also cited in the 1881 novel The Sins of the Cities of the Plain, the alleged memoirs of male prostitute Jack Saul and one of the first works of homosexual pornographic literature published in English.

In it, one of the characters is said to play and sing a parody of "Ben Bolt" as it had appeared in "The Pearl", a pornographic monthly magazine issued in London during the mid-Victorian period by William Lazenby.