Significant Cultural or Contemporary Impacts
- One of his best known poems was an exhortation "Against Idleness and Mischief" in Divine Songs for Children, a poem which was famously parodied by Lewis Carroll in his book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, in the poem "How Doth the Little Crocodile", which is now better known than the original. In the 1850 novel David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, school master Dr. Strong quotes from Watts' "Against Idleness and Mischief": "Satan finds some mischief still, for idle hands to do."
- In the 1884 comic opera called Princess Ida, there is a punning reference to Watts in Act I. At Princess Ida's women's university no males of any kind are allowed, and the Princess's father, King Gama, relates that "She'll scarcely suffer Dr. Watts' 'hymns'".
- Isaac Watts is commemorated in the Church of England, the Calendar of Saints of the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America on 25 November and in the Episcopal Church (USA) on 26 November.
Read more about this topic: Isaac Watts
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