LitFlash: The Dog Days of Summer
Ah, these late August days. Inspired by a bright star, the evocative phrase 'dog days' can be found across literature, from the Romans to the Renaissance to the Victorians and beyond
This week we focus on one memorable invocation of this phrase. In his 1843 novella A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens described the miserly, mean-spirited Ebenezer Scrooge as ‘carr[ying] his own low temperature always about with him’ to the point where ‘he iced his office in the dog-days’.
Dickens reached for a metaphor readers would know, and that would instantly convey Scrooge’s character—a man so cold and unfeeling that even on the hottest days of the year his presence gave off a deep chill.
But dogs are not to blame for those dry, hot, late-August days… The expression comes from the coincidence that in late August the constellation Orion (the hunter, with his belt of three stars) is followed by an extremely bright star named Sirius that suggests a faithful hound—and that Sirius shines brightest exactly at the period when the Northern hemisphere experiences oppressive heat.
Although there is no causal link between these two phenomena, already in Roman times authors found the coincidence irresistible as a potent metaphor to describe a late-summer heat so powerful that it was said to drive dogs and women mad, spread deadly drought or extreme floods, induce lethargy and fever, and generally make people (and dogs) very, very uncomfortable.
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