Antedating of Friday the Thirteenth (1869, 1880)

[Baker, John]

Barry Popik has taken the popular understanding of Friday the 13th as a day of ill-boding back to 1898.  It seems to go back at least to the early 1880s, where I saw several examples.  Here's the earliest, from 1880, plus a passage from 1869 that seems to show the superstition in its formative period.  Might the 1880 passage also be an antedating of the black cat superstition?
 
45 Appletons' Journal 256 (Mar. 1880) (Making of America):  Everybody knows the state of mind which, as superstitious folk hold, precedes some great calamity.  The victim is foolishly, childishly, recklessly confident and happy; he disregards those warnings which used to play so large a part in the lives of our ancestors:  magpies, black-cats, crows, hares, run across his path unheeded; screech-owls hoot and he hears them not; brindled cats mew and he only laughs; knives are crossed, salt is spilled, dreams are told before breakfast, and he recks not; the visions of the night have brought him squalling babies, and he forgets them; he stumbles at the threshold and thinks nothing of it; the day is Friday, the thirteenth, and he regards it not; every kind of miraculous warning is lavished upon that man, and he goes on to his doom, laughing and careless.
 
Sutherland Edwards, The Life of Rossini 340 (1869) (Google Books full text):  He [sc. Rossini] was surrounded to the last by admiring and affectionate friends; and if it be true that, like so many other Italians, he regarded Friday as an unlucky day, and thirteen as an unlucky number, it is remarkable that on Friday, the 13th of November, he died.
 
 
John Baker
 

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