Flitch of bacon custom a succession of women in an attempt to find the right one. The description of the ceremony in the book is partly based on the art of David Ogborne, an eyewitness to the last ceremony in 1751. "The Flitch of Bacon" public house, of which the protagonist of Ainsworth's novel is the publican, still exists in Little Dunmow. "The Flitch of Bacon" is a comic opera from 1779 by William Shield and Sir Henry Bate Dudley. "Made in Heaven" is a 1952 film starring David Tomlinson and Petula Clark about a married couple attempting to win the Dunmow flitch. "Dunmow
What Is a Nation? and continues to be invoked. Political historian Karl Deutsch, in a quote sometimes mistakenly attributed to Renan, said that a nation is "a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbours". Benedict Anderson's 1983 work Imagined Communities, which states that a nation is an "imagined political community", argues that Renan contradicts himself when he says French people must have forgotten the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, yet does not explain what it is. In other words, Renan assumes that all his readers will remember the very massacre he says they have forgotten.