Reading the introduction to the January 1843 edition of The Pioneer, it doesn’t take long to see that the editors Lowell and Carter appreciate a good allusion to get the point across—but one of the more peculiar allusions of the piece, and one that will likely be lost on modern readers, is of opinions coming to the editors’ “feast of letters in the same yellow domino.” The statement is puzzling on a number of levels: What is a yellow domino? Why a feast? What does any of it have to do with periodical culture?

For those playing along at home, I can tell you that a Google search will be of no help in regard to the first question, though you may learn a lot about the children’s game, the pizza place, and what appears to be a variety of the psychoactive MDMA of the same name (the internet can be a dark place, folks). But a more thorough search of the American Periodicals database reveals a likelier subject for Lowell and Carter’s allusion: the wedding feast of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. An 1825 edition of The Saturday Evening Post was the first of several periodicals to feature an anonymous story about the feast titled “The Yellow Domino.” The story describes how the fancy guests of the masquerade and wedding feast became increasingly uneasy, as a man wearing a yellow domino kept wordlessly floating into the room, taking an obscene amount of food from the buffet, leaving, and then coming back for more. They later discovered that the bottomless-pit of a guest was not one man, but the entire Swiss Guard coming in one-at-a-time and then trading costumes! With this in mind, it became much easier to figure out that “domino” in this case refers to “a kind of loose cloak, app. of Venetian origin, chiefly worn at masquerades, with a small mask covering the upper part of the face, by persons not personating a character” (“Domino”, Oxford English Dictionary).

Thus the editors’ allusion suddenly makes much more sense. They could’ve just said “the opinions are obnoxious and indistinguishable”—but what would be the fun in that? Check out “Introduction” in the 1843 edition of The Pioneer for more exciting and obscure allusions.