Let’s start at the beginning. The first federal holiday honoring an individual–the father of the country and first U.S. president, George Washington–was enacted by Congress in 1879. It gave federal employees in the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., the day off on Washington’s birthday, February 22. In 1885, the holiday was extended to all federal employees, including postal employees. Businesses highly dependent on the mail followed suit, closing on February 22 as well.

                George Washington           (Oil painting on canvas (1796) by Gilbert Stuart; The Granger Collection))

                Abraham Lincoln                  (Portrait of Abraham Lincoln (1908), oil on canvas by Douglas Volk (Granger Collection))

A Buffalo, New York, druggist named Julius Francis made it his life’s mission to honor Abraham Lincoln, the martyred 16th president who had led the nation through the Civil War (1861-1865). Francis repeatedly petitioned Congress to establish a national holiday on Lincoln’s birthday–February 12. He also organized the first known observance of the day, which took place in Buffalo in 1874. Congress never established Lincoln’s birthday as a national holiday. However, several northern states, including Lincoln’s home state of Illinois, did enact legislation giving school children a holiday on February 12. The observance was usually reinforced by special lessons on Lincoln’s achievements and place in history.

Celebrations surrounding February 12 and February 22 remained unchanged until 1971. About this time, Congress moved around some federal holidays, including Washington’s Birthday, to create three-day weekends. Instead of celebrating the holiday on Washington’s actual birthday, the holiday was shifted to the third Monday in February. At the same time, Illinois’ congressional delegation proposed honoring Lincoln by calling the holiday “presidents’ day.” However, representatives from Virginia blocked the move “to protect the prerogatives of ‘The Father of Our Country’.” The passage of 106 years had failed to soften the attitude of some toward “the great emancipator.”

Led by Illinois, some states did adopt the term “Presidents’ Day” for the third Monday in February. Although people of certain age seem to recall that President Richard Nixon issued a proclamation turning Washington’s Birthday into a holiday honoring all presidents–including himself–this never happened. His proclamation clearly referred only to Washington.

So, the third Monday of February is, officially, Washington’s Birthday.

Feb. 7, 2012

The great English novelist Charles Dickens was born on this day, February 7, in 1812. The 200th anniversary of the birth of the author of A Christmas Carol and so many other classics is being celebrated worldwide. The first global celebrity author, Charles Dickens chronicled the modern industrial city and its painful inequalities. His biographer Claire Tomalin notes, “You only have to look around our society and everything he wrote about in the 1840′s is still relevant. The great gulf between the rich and poor, corrupt financiers, corrupt Members of Parliament . . . You name it, he said it.”

At a service at Westminster Abbey in London, Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, laid a wreath at the author’s grave in the Poets’ Corner.  Attended by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and a number of Dickens’s descendants, the service included a reading from Great Expectations by the American actress Gillian Anderson. Anderson had played Miss Havisham in a recent BBC adaptation of the novel. Actor Ralph Fiennes read from Bleak House, the story of a lawsuit that consumes whole generations of a single family.

Charles Dickens, the most famous English writer of his time, enchanted audiences with dramatic readings from his novels. The Dickens Fellowship, London

At a simultaneous event in Portsmouth, England, where Dickens was born, Dickens biographer Simon Callow read from David Copperfield, the coming-of-age story of an orphan whose travails are not dissimilar to Dickens’s own. Also at St Mary’s Church in Portsmouth, actress Sheila Hancock read from Oliver Twist, the story of another orphan who falls into the clutches of the villainous Bill Sikes and Fagin.

Elsewhere around the world, Dickens’s fans staged 24-hour “readathons” in 66 countries from Albania to Zimbabwe. This international event began in Australia with a reading of Dombey and Son. It will end in the United Arab Emirates with an excerpt from The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens’s last work, left unfinished when he died in 1870 at age 58.

Additional World Book articles

• A Tale of Two Cities
• Hard Times
• Nicholas Nickleby
• United Kingdom (The Victorian Age (1840′s-about 1900)