When I started writing this site, back in the mists of time when dinosaurs ruled the earth, it was often difficult to find sites to link to which dealt with the subjects of McGonagall poems. Pick any battle, place or Victorian celebrity – who would bother to build a web page about that? The answer, in the early noughties, was all too often “nobody.”
Well, that was then and this is now. We now have Wikipedia to give us a page of (mostly true) information about any subject under the sun, including many of the subjects of William’s poetic gems. As an indication of the factual nature of William’s oeuvre, almost exactly 60% of the gems can be tied to a Wikipedia article.
So, I have added a new section to poem pages linking to the wikipedia article(s) most closely associated with the poem in question. This is not intended to take the place of the background notes I add to some poems (and, one day, will have added to all of them), but acts as a useful supplement and/or stand in.
