text: 1785: Samuel Johnson records in his Prayers and Meditations that "Between Easter and Whitsun-tide [1773 . . . he] attempted to learn the Low Dutch language." James Boswell reproduces the remark in his Life of Samuel Johnson (1791).
  1787: The Whitsun Donative was an anonymous satirical pamphlet inspired by Sterne's Tristram Shandy.
  1844: Whitsun is central to religious life in Swiss author Jeremias Gotthelf's novel Money and Spirit.
  1849: Charlotte Brontë's novel Shirley contains an episode set against a Whitsun-tide procession in which Anglican parishioners are confronted by dissenters.
  1853: Charles Dickens sets a scene in the life of King Edward I on "one Friday in Whitsun week" in A Child's History of England.
  1853: Christina Rossetti wrote a poem called "Whitsun Eve", published posthumously in 1896.
  1861: George Eliot mentioned Whitsun in her novel Silas Marner.
  1875: Charles Dickens's posthumous collection The Uncommercial Traveller includes (in Chapter 21) a reflection on "one day in the Whitsun week last past".
  1875: In Anthony Trollope's book The Way We Live Now many of the aristocrats leave London and travel to their country estates, or those of their acquaintances, for the week of Whitsuntide.
  1896: H. G. Wells refers to Whitsun in "The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham", later included in The Country of the Blind and Other Stories.